The answer to your concern is embodied in the following quote:
"If I have seen farther than others, it is because I stand upon the shoulders of giants".
Copyright is not, and was never intended to be a cultural black hole whereby all that enters must therefore be no longer available to build upon.
The framers of the Constitution, building upon parts of English common law, rightly decided that a balance MUST be struck between the rights of the author to profit from their work, and the benefit to society from the availability of those works. There are legitimate discussions over what those time frames might be, but those limitations must exist, in some form or another.
The reason for this is the concept of the domain of ideas. The benefit to society is not so much that society has access to the actual words, etc., in a work, but the expression and elaboration upon the ideas presented. The expiry of copyright does not grant carte blanche to the exact expression of the ideas copyrighted. To exactly copy a work is plagiarism, whether the work is in the public domain or not. But draconian copyright extensions and badly formed laws restricting free and legal access do far more harm than good, ultimately, even to the authors it claims to protect.
Sorry, but there is no reason sufficient to override due process.
To bring your 'child pornography' example into alignment with the current discussion, it would be as if you were accused of having child pornography available on your site and were shut down, without even any proof that you actually are hosting it.
The problem is not the whether to determine that the act in question is illegal, the problem is to determine that the course of action taken isn't taken without reasonable evidence that the person in question really is the party providing the illegal items.
Sorry, but a job is, in essence, a contract, and loyalty is a two way street.
When you are hired (and paid) to do a job, the compensation you receive is for the job done, not to make you feel loyalty to the company.
If it's okay for a company to lay off employees, etc. in order to protect their future (and bottom line), it is equally okay for an employee to look out for his/her own interests, as well. To argue otherwise is disingenous.
If the company has a bad business plan, or bad management, all the employee loyalty in the world isn't going to make all that much difference, and said company probably should fail.
And ultimately, you cannot be responsible for anyone but you. If leaving a company causes problems for other employees, it should be something you consider, but it should not get in the way of what is best for you.
The whole point is that with DeCSS, you don't need any equipment. Once you decode the DVD and have it on your computer, all you have to do is convert it to DivX or 3ivx and you're ready to distribute it on Gnutella, Freenet, or whatever program you use.
This is still missing the point. While it is true that DeCSS allows such behaviour, the possibility of that behaviour is not sufficient reason, in and of itself, to make it wrong (or illegal).
The abilities you mention are possible without DeCSS, as well.
Piracy is piracy, and should be dealt with, but dealt with directly, and not by blaming the tool. The primary legal test of a tool is that it has a legitimate utility apart from illegal use. DeCSS *does* meet this criteria.
Even though the digital realm makes copying and distribution easier, it is not sufficient justification for the trampling of the rights of the users. IP can (and IMHO, will) be protectable in the digital age, but that requires that we address the correct issues. It is not necessary to remove first sale, fair use, and other rights to protect IP.
Just as with every other technical advance through history (from the printing press and so on), adaptations have had to be made. None of those adaptations have bankrupted the IP holders, and neither will these current changes. The fact is that the *only* way for IP holders to profit in the current environment is to adapt and embrace the new technology, not to attempt to suppress it. If they try to suppress it, someone else will come in that uses it, and the current businesses will fall by the wayside, sooner or later.
Also, it is not necessary to unduly overdo IP laws. We don't need the DMCA, and we don't need UCITA (at least in its present form). IP can be sufficiently protected through application of the laws that existed before these travesties (or at most, by reasonable extensions to those laws), and this can be done without diminishing the proper rights of the users as well.
Just like piracy, go after the pirate, don't blame the tool.
You are right that there is nothing wrong with intellectual property, either in principle, or in use, and there are times that the force of law can and should be used to protect it.
However,we are well into the process where the laws and protections for IP are being lobbied far beyond any necessary value, either to IP or to the public in general.
Patents and copyrights are being pushed far beyond what they were ever intended for. Little needs to be said here about the foolishness of many of the patents being awarded these days, and copyrights are supposed to fade into the public domain after a reasonable period, not be carried into perpetuity.
Also, IP laws were not intended to trump the basic rights of use. Such necessary rights as first sale, fair use, and the right to reverse-engineer not only should (and must) be allowed, but they also are an integral part of the value of IP.
Laws such as the DMCA, with its restrictions on fair use and reverse engineering, and the proposed UCITA, which actually seeks to shackle the first amendment (making illegal any negative comments about software does just that), among other poorly thought out 'protections', will, in the long run, do more harm to IP, and respect for IP, than any number of violators could ever do.
The article on the Fool does not bash the concept of IP, it merely states that those worried about protecting IP can do a much better job of it if they embrace and use modern technology, rather than trying to suppress it.
Be careful with the allegations of communism, as well. In all the communistic societies, such rights as I have listed above (and many others) are suppressed, not provided as a given. And the ongoing dialogue is definitely about rights. The holders of IP have the right to the protection of their property, but the users of IP also have the right to use that property without undue restriction. IP protection is important, but we should not sacrifice the rights of the users to allay the unfounded fears of those who can't (or won't) grow with the rest of us.
There's no reason we can't do both at the same time.
Searching for the possibility of life on Europa has many more potential benefits than simply the discovery of other life forms.
Looking at the other life forms on earth is a very good goal, and can teach us much, but in the end, we're still investigating life on earth, and are therefore limited to the results of that environment.
Look at it this way: Assume we've catalogued all life forms on earth (non trivial, I know). Maybe we find one or more life forms that are radically different at the biological level than the life forms we know now. In that case, we have distinct morphological biologies that can be compared and contrasted, and we learn more than if we only find life similar to known life. And if we find only life that is similar to known life, we still only have a data set of one.
Now, assume that by some chance, we find life on Europa (of any sort). If this life is different from any we find on Earth (no matter how many different types there may be), then we have yet another distinct biology to study, providing even more insight into the mechanism of life.
But suppose that by chance we find life on Europa that is very similar in content to life on Earth. In this case we learn something that we simply CANNOT learn by limiting our study only to life on Earth, no matter how many different types of life we find.
We learn either that the mechanisms of life formation are very similar on at least two different worlds, providing substantive data to further studies of abiogenesis and other evolutionary theories. Or we learn that there may be a common source for life on at least two different worlds. Data from two worlds won't necessarily allow us to choose one or the other view with certainty, but it is invaluable knowledge nonetheless.
Science is not merely about confirming the results of experiments and hypotheses, but attempting to do so using as many different mechanisms as possible (or at least feasible). If two (or more) different experiments investigating the same hypothesis produce equivalent results, then that hypothesis is further strengthened.
No matter how many forms of life we find on Earth alone, we are limited in what we can postulate from those results. Finding life on two or more different worlds increases the data set and allows us to strengthen (or modify) our hypotheses in a much more meaningful manner.
There are at least two very good reasons why we don't need our lawmakers to try to pass such badly thought out laws.
First, for all of the behaviours you indicate, there are already laws on the books to deal with them. A child molester (etc.) is breaking existing laws, regardless of the mechanism they use to commit their crime. Instead of trying to circumvent the Constitution, our lawmakers should be advocating the enforcement of existing laws, and they should also be actively engaged in removing laws that serve no legitimate purpose (for example the DMCA and laws against consensual adult activities), and which also use up resources better used to combat real crimes.
Second, as a parent, do you *really* want the government to have that much of a say in how you raise your children? NO amount of legislation will protect children if the parents fall down on the job. From the sound of it, you do a decent job of monitoring your children's activities (on and off of the web), and that works infinitely better than ANY possible amount of government intervention and laws.
I have to give this pretty good marks, all in all.
Not much to add to the review, I've had good results with it, though. I like some of the features in photopaint, even though I'm still a big Gimp fan, I think photopaint is a good complement to it. Draw is good, also. I don't do a great deal with vector illustrations, though, so I didn't wring it out like it did photopaint.
As for running under wine, I've seen no significant performance issues. Some of the screen updates, etc., could be quicker, but I've found nothing that affects the usability of it.
For comparison purposes, I'm running it on a 400M celeron with 256M ram, and Mandrake 7.1
Wine does seem to be a bit finicky about XFree 4.0 though, but I haven't pursued this enough to find out what's really the issue.
Well, here we are again, yet another round of the perils of technology.
So, what do we do about it?
Stop it? That's not going to happen, no matter how hard we try.
Regulate it? Good Luck. Try getting every other country on Earth to agree with you, or to follow those proposed regulations. Whoops, sorry, kids, guess that one's a wash also.
Oh, I know, we'll hype up all of the potential negative effects of new technology and scare the crap out of the average citizen, who will then clamor for one of the above useless 'remedies'.
Guess what? It won't work, not one single bit of it. You simply cannot put the genie back in the bottle, and all the wishful thinking in the world is only going to make you complacent, hoping uselessly that we're 'doing something' about the problem.
Can technology be harmful? Absolutely. But you want to know what is even more harmful? The attitude that we're going to make it less harmful by ignoring it, regulating it (and hoping no-one else decides to play in that pool), or giving in to our worst fears, thereby letting it become them.
Simply put, only the advance of technology (and our knowledge of it) is going to help us cope with the advance of technology. To give into fear (whatever foundation it may have) is only going to realize those fears.
Here's an article from Reason that does a good job of countering Bill Joy's views.
While I'm not denigrating the value of a good ergonomic keyboard, for me, at least, the answer lies in the fact that the malady is called REPETITIVE strain injury.
I've been using a standard keyboard (including manual typewriters in the dim and distant past) on a daily basis (5-14 hours a day) for about 24 years, and have no stress injuries at all.
I attribute this to the variation in wrist motions that I get from having other activities for my wrists (and the rest of me). I engage in regular physical exercise, including a variety of martial arts weapons, most of which include a large variety of wrist motions and exercises, and I also play the piano (not as well as I would like, but regularly). I fully believe that this variation in activity has done much more for my lack of wrist injury than any ergonomic keyboard could do in and of itself.
In the US, at least, corporations have legal status as an individual entity, and are treated as an individual with regards to most legal issues. Although I am not familiar with all the legal subleties involved, it is my understanding that a corporation, at least, can be treated as an individual concerning the GPL.
There might be some issues with non corporations, but my knowledge of their legal status is slight.
Reverse engineering copy protection schemes for the sake of "compatibility" needs to be stopped. This loophole will always be able to be exploited because there always is some platform mainstream media will always leave out. This means that all schemes will be cracked, and with this loophole the crack could be legal. A new law is necessary. Copy protection schemes are necessary in order for artists and companies to protect their work in the age of high speed internet connections.
This argument is seriously missing the point. You might as well argue that people should be prevented from driving to work because of the chance that someone will get drunk, drive, and kill someone.
Basically, you want to punish all of the law-abiding citizens who are LEGALLY working towards compatibility for no other reason than to attempt to prevent a few from breaking the law.
The fact that you clearly miss is that there are already laws in place to address piracy. Just as you don't punish every driver to stop the drunk, you also don't punish the law abiding that reverse-engineer to stop the pirate.
The pirate is already breaking the law, and won't give a shit that he might have to break another one (your argument for outlawing reverse engineering), in order to further his goals. Your suggestion would only hurt those who actually OBEY the law, thus further engendering a greater amount of disrespect for the law.
Your suggestion is no different than those who support claptrap like the CDA. In both cases, there already exist laws on the books to effectively address the criminal behaviour in question, and it is unnecessary (and IMHO, criminal) to punish or otherwise curtail the rights of people who engage in legal behaviour.
If you are truly worried about piracy, address the piracy, don't go after the messenger.
Although this may lean a bit more toward the cognitive sciences, do you have any thoughts about the physics related to consciousness?
I am curious about this issue for a few reasons:
Since the role of the conscious observer is a cornerstone of the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum physics, what possible mechanism for consciousness do you think could provide some explanation for this role?
Also, as we approach the point where computers could have at least the physical complexity of the human brain, do you think that level of complexity alone is sufficient to create awareness?
Where IIS is execeling is servers that are actually used by many (read: generate a substancial profit) choose IIS.
I'm not sure that's entirely true. Apache is used by sites such as Amazon, Etoys, and the like, and it would be hard to argue that these sites are marginal, or don't generate substantial profits.
One of the biggest conditions applied to liability issues in any product is intended use. You can't, for example, sue a knife manufacturer because you got stabbed by one, whether you did it, or someone else did.
That being said, what is the intended use of a general purpose operating system (as opposed to specific systems, such as life support systems)? No-one that I have seen will argue, for example, that Windows 98 is secure, or is even intended to be secure. Linux and NT are quite a bit more secure, and it is usually these that are placed in an environment where security is an intended goal.
However, a knife (or car, etc), are devices with a well defined, specific purpose, and the same cannot be said of operating systems, by and large. The intended purpose of any particular OS installation is entirely dependent on what it is trying to do, eg. be a webserver, transaction database, etc. Since it is quite possible for a badly behaved application to compromise even a very good operating system, you are then faced with choosing who to hold responsible for any failure, the OS vendor, or the app vendor (if they differ).
Admittedly, the better the OS, the less likely is the above scenario, but the only really secure system is a secure SYSTEM, in other words, if any part of the system is insecure, the entire system can be considered to be insecure, by extension.
Assuming that we allow the establishment of responsibility on the part of the vendor for security issues, one of the telling parameters that is involved is that of forseeability, or was the compromise that occured one that could have been reasonably forseen, and guarded against before the fact. And we haven't even addressed the issue of bugs.
Due diligence doesn't mean that the product must be perfect, it means that the manufacturer is required to make a reasonable effort to prevent, and / or correct, any issue that might arise. To use the Melissa virus as an example, it is not necessarily MS's fault that such an exploit can be made in the first place, but they could be reasonable held accountable if they failed to address this issue after the fact. I would also say that the same applies to Open Source products as well. It is disingenuous to apply a double standard, if MS can be held accountable, so can Open Source, and vice versa.
Notwithstanding the fact that both MS's EULA, and the GPL both contain warranty disclaimers, it is also true that such disclaimers are not protection against negligence or failure to exercise due diligence.
The above diatribe aside, when it comes down to the crunch, it is my belief that the architects/administrators of the system should be responsible for security issues on their system. And this is where OSS really works best, it places in the architects hands the ability to fully scrutinize the particulars of the system they create, and provides them with the greatest amount of control over the operation of the system. If the system architect chooses a closed system, they still must be responsible, since they CHOSE the system they provide.
The big problem is the issue of geographical boundaries. A brick and mortar business operates and does business primarily within the community in which it exists, and is subject to the tax laws of that location. In most cases, if you personally visit a business, you'll pay the taxes appropriate to that location, while if you mail order, often there are no taxes unless you live in that location.
On the internet, commerce has the mail order dynamics, multiplied. The big question is, who are the taxes paid to? The state that contains the business, or the state that the purchaser lives in?
This NC issue is essentially saying that you pay them for any purchase made over the net, regardless of the location of the business. This is not done with mail order, and probably shouldn't be done over the net. If internet commerce must be taxed, it should probably use the tax system that is used for mail order, since the business mechanisms are similar.
Not that we shouldn't still make use of technological solutions where practical, but technology isn't really going to make a dent in the real threats to privacy, i.e. the end points of the chain.
Encrypting the transmission media (for example) won't do much good if the other end of the transmission has no scruples about the distribution of the information that they receive.
Unfortunately, privacy isn't about technology, but about respect. By and large, technological solutions aren't much more than stopgap measures, and will ultimately fail, unless we address the fact that to have privacy, others need to respect that privacy (and we need to respect the privacy of others, as well).
I tend to be loathe to suggest any kind of government intervention, but in some cases, only the force of law will address the worst of the issues.
By all means, we should use all technical means at our disposal to help protect our rights to privacy, such as encryption, some kind of provable authentication that doesn't require your life history to prove your identity, etc., but without a proper social framework that provides for privacy, and meaningful penalties for those that violate it, technology will be of only limited use.
"It may very well be that non-evil non-christians are reborn to try things again, while evil christians AND evil non-christians are thrown into the lake for eternity and non-evil christians go to heaven"
Problem is that this viewpoint, by definition, automatically excludes non-christians from the blanket of your belief.
I fully respect your choice of belief, as well as the choices of others. But the fact remains (just to use an example) that believers in Judaism, Islam and Christianity all worship the SAME God, and have just as much a revealed expression of that belief. It is disingenous to claim that any single one of these beliefs is the only right belief to the exclusion of the others. The belief that God is playing favorites for a subgroup of all of his followers is questionable at best, and the height of arrogance at worst.
I believe that God is concerned with how you live, not what you believe. A just, honorable, and loving God would do exactly that, and any God that punishes or otherwise discriminates solely because of some arbitrary belief system is not a God I have any desire to follow.
Since the box runs Windows and Dos, Solaris would have to be the x86 version.
I also wonder what the base system would be, especially memory and cpu, since I'm running x86 Solaris on a 433 Mhz Celeron w 128M ram, and it's still pretty much a dog. A virtually indestructable dog, but a dog nonetheless.
I do like Solaris, but the x86 version could use some optimizations for the platform. A roughly equivalent sparc system runs Solaris considerably faster.
I have to wonder what's in the base system. What kind of video, memory, drives, etc. Are these any better than a standard x86 PC? If not, I can almost certainly build an equivalent system for quite a bit less.
Gravitons do exist, even if only as a theoretical construct in the realm of quantum gravity, which is the attempt to unify the theory of relativity with quantum mechanics, by trying to explain the behaviour of the universe at planck lenghts (1 x 10 to the -35th power).
A mechanism called perturbative quantum field theory has been successfully used to express and explain electrodynamics. Perturbative quantum field theory is essentially the sum of many method, summing all (or as many as possible) potential pathways which are renormalized after the subtraction of infinities from the corresponding Feynman diagrams. In the realm of quantum gravity, this same approach is being used by some physicists, and one of the theoretical constructs used to aid in this expression are gravitons, described as zero order approximations to quantized gravitational waves in flat space-time. There are already a set of expected characteristics of these particles, such that they are spin two massless particles.
It might not be immediately obvious what, if any, connection a neutrino observatory could have in regard to gravitons, but I would argue that the attempt to understand both the sources and behaviours of neutrinos, especially at high energies, would translate to a potential ability to examine events at the planck length, which to do so in an accelerator would require an accelerator 10 to the 15th times more powerful than any currently existing.
Here's a site with links to most of the other research involving neutrinos.
http://www.phys.washington.edu/~superk/links.htm l
Funny you should mention that :)
on
KDE 1.1.2 is out
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· Score: 1
In the last few weeks, I've been playing with the 2.1 version of Debian. I actually like the install, even though it requires a few more brain cells than Redhat's does. It does a lot of what I think all the installs should do, which is to allow/require the user to configure many of the apps and daemons. Although it requires a bit more work up front, it makes you get it out of the way right at first, rather than having a daemon installed and then leaving up to you to see to it sometime later, in which case it might not get done.
There was also a brief dislocation as I had to get used to a slightly different directory structure, and some app locations, a good argument for the Linux standard base, I guess:^).
Right now, Redhat 6 is still my main system, but I'm really starting to like Debian, and once I get just a bit more comfortable with it, I'll probably switch over for good.
I prefer the source releases myself
on
KDE 1.1.2 is out
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· Score: 3
Even though I'm currently using the Redhat dist, I still prefer to install the majority of my software from the sources. I like the additional control I get, and to be honest, I'm not all that thrilled with Redhat's package manager (Even though the update feature usually works, I find myself uninstalling the old RPM's first anyway, or I tend to get undefined behaviour, and I don't have these problems when I compile).
Compiling lets me provide further optimization for my platform (using PGCC, for example), and with apps like KDE and Gnome, every little bit helps to keep them running as fast as possible.
On another note, Kdevelop (a quite cool IDE) isn't included in 1.1.2 (although it had been considered), since the Kdevelop folks don't think it's quite ready. While a few might be disappointed by this, it is an example of one of the core OSS philosophies, that if it isn't ready, it won't be included, and IMHO, that's a very good thing. For those who want to try it (and don't know where to find it) http://www.kdevelop.org.
I am currently using the 1.1 beta, and it is very good, only a few rough edges. It will be an outstanding addition to KDE when the developers think it's ready.
Hugo Alexander Koch filed a patent in the Netherlands on a rotor based cipher machine. He assigned these patent rights in 1927 to Arthur Scherbius who invented and had been marketing the Enigma machine since about 1923.
Slashdot Mirror
The answer to your concern is embodied in the following quote:
"If I have seen farther than others, it is because I stand upon the shoulders of giants".
Copyright is not, and was never intended to be a cultural black hole whereby all that enters must therefore be no longer available to build upon.
The framers of the Constitution, building upon parts of English common law, rightly decided that a balance MUST be struck between the rights of the author to profit from their work, and the benefit to society from the availability of those works. There are legitimate discussions over what those time frames might be, but those limitations must exist, in some form or another.
The reason for this is the concept of the domain of ideas. The benefit to society is not so much that society has access to the actual words, etc., in a work, but the expression and elaboration upon the ideas presented. The expiry of copyright does not grant carte blanche to the exact expression of the ideas copyrighted. To exactly copy a work is plagiarism, whether the work is in the public domain or not. But draconian copyright extensions and badly formed laws restricting free and legal access do far more harm than good, ultimately, even to the authors it claims to protect.
Sorry, but there is no reason sufficient to override due process.
To bring your 'child pornography' example into alignment with the current discussion, it would be as if you were accused of having child pornography available on your site and were shut down, without even any proof that you actually are hosting it.
The problem is not the whether to determine that the act in question is illegal, the problem is to determine that the course of action taken isn't taken without reasonable evidence that the person in question really is the party providing the illegal items.
Sorry, but a job is, in essence, a contract, and loyalty is a two way street.
When you are hired (and paid) to do a job, the compensation you receive is for the job done, not to make you feel loyalty to the company.
If it's okay for a company to lay off employees, etc. in order to protect their future (and bottom line), it is equally okay for an employee to look out for his/her own interests, as well. To argue otherwise is disingenous.
If the company has a bad business plan, or bad management, all the employee loyalty in the world isn't going to make all that much difference, and said company probably should fail.
And ultimately, you cannot be responsible for anyone but you. If leaving a company causes problems for other employees, it should be something you consider, but it should not get in the way of what is best for you.
The whole point is that with DeCSS, you don't need any equipment. Once you decode the DVD and have it on your computer, all you have to do is convert it to DivX or 3ivx and you're ready to distribute it on Gnutella, Freenet, or whatever program you use.
This is still missing the point. While it is true that DeCSS allows such behaviour, the possibility of that behaviour is not sufficient reason, in and of itself, to make it wrong (or illegal).
The abilities you mention are possible without DeCSS, as well.
Piracy is piracy, and should be dealt with, but dealt with directly, and not by blaming the tool. The primary legal test of a tool is that it has a legitimate utility apart from illegal use. DeCSS *does* meet this criteria.
Even though the digital realm makes copying and distribution easier, it is not sufficient justification for the trampling of the rights of the users. IP can (and IMHO, will) be protectable in the digital age, but that requires that we address the correct issues. It is not necessary to remove first sale, fair use, and other rights to protect IP.
Just as with every other technical advance through history (from the printing press and so on), adaptations have had to be made. None of those adaptations have bankrupted the IP holders, and neither will these current changes. The fact is that the *only* way for IP holders to profit in the current environment is to adapt and embrace the new technology, not to attempt to suppress it. If they try to suppress it, someone else will come in that uses it, and the current businesses will fall by the wayside, sooner or later.
Also, it is not necessary to unduly overdo IP laws. We don't need the DMCA, and we don't need UCITA (at least in its present form). IP can be sufficiently protected through application of the laws that existed before these travesties (or at most, by reasonable extensions to those laws), and this can be done without diminishing the proper rights of the users as well.
Just like piracy, go after the pirate, don't blame the tool.
Uhh, no.
You are right that there is nothing wrong with intellectual property, either in principle, or in use, and there are times that the force of law can and should be used to protect it.
However,we are well into the process where the laws and protections for IP are being lobbied far beyond any necessary value, either to IP or to the public in general.
Patents and copyrights are being pushed far beyond what they were ever intended for. Little needs to be said here about the foolishness of many of the patents being awarded these days, and copyrights are supposed to fade into the public domain after a reasonable period, not be carried into perpetuity.
Also, IP laws were not intended to trump the basic rights of use. Such necessary rights as first sale, fair use, and the right to reverse-engineer not only should (and must) be allowed, but they also are an integral part of the value of IP.
Laws such as the DMCA, with its restrictions on fair use and reverse engineering, and the proposed UCITA, which actually seeks to shackle the first amendment (making illegal any negative comments about software does just that), among other poorly thought out 'protections', will, in the long run, do more harm to IP, and respect for IP, than any number of violators could ever do.
The article on the Fool does not bash the concept of IP, it merely states that those worried about protecting IP can do a much better job of it if they embrace and use modern technology, rather than trying to suppress it.
Be careful with the allegations of communism, as well. In all the communistic societies, such rights as I have listed above (and many others) are suppressed, not provided as a given. And the ongoing dialogue is definitely about rights. The holders of IP have the right to the protection of their property, but the users of IP also have the right to use that property without undue restriction. IP protection is important, but we should not sacrifice the rights of the users to allay the unfounded fears of those who can't (or won't) grow with the rest of us.
There's no reason we can't do both at the same time.
Searching for the possibility of life on Europa has many more potential benefits than simply the discovery of other life forms.
Looking at the other life forms on earth is a very good goal, and can teach us much, but in the end, we're still investigating life on earth, and are therefore limited to the results of that environment.
Look at it this way: Assume we've catalogued all life forms on earth (non trivial, I know). Maybe we find one or more life forms that are radically different at the biological level than the life forms we know now. In that case, we have distinct morphological biologies that can be compared and contrasted, and we learn more than if we only find life similar to known life. And if we find only life that is similar to known life, we still only have a data set of one.
Now, assume that by some chance, we find life on Europa (of any sort). If this life is different from any we find on Earth (no matter how many different types there may be), then we have yet another distinct biology to study, providing even more insight into the mechanism of life.
But suppose that by chance we find life on Europa that is very similar in content to life on Earth. In this case we learn something that we simply CANNOT learn by limiting our study only to life on Earth, no matter how many different types of life we find.
We learn either that the mechanisms of life formation are very similar on at least two different worlds, providing substantive data to further studies of abiogenesis and other evolutionary theories. Or we learn that there may be a common source for life on at least two different worlds. Data from two worlds won't necessarily allow us to choose one or the other view with certainty, but it is invaluable knowledge nonetheless.
Science is not merely about confirming the results of experiments and hypotheses, but attempting to do so using as many different mechanisms as possible (or at least feasible). If two (or more) different experiments investigating the same hypothesis produce equivalent results, then that hypothesis is further strengthened.
No matter how many forms of life we find on Earth alone, we are limited in what we can postulate from those results. Finding life on two or more different worlds increases the data set and allows us to strengthen (or modify) our hypotheses in a much more meaningful manner.
There are at least two very good reasons why we don't need our lawmakers to try to pass such badly thought out laws.
First, for all of the behaviours you indicate, there are already laws on the books to deal with them. A child molester (etc.) is breaking existing laws, regardless of the mechanism they use to commit their crime. Instead of trying to circumvent the Constitution, our lawmakers should be advocating the enforcement of existing laws, and they should also be actively engaged in removing laws that serve no legitimate purpose (for example the DMCA and laws against consensual adult activities), and which also use up resources better used to combat real crimes.
Second, as a parent, do you *really* want the government to have that much of a say in how you raise your children? NO amount of legislation will protect children if the parents fall down on the job. From the sound of it, you do a decent job of monitoring your children's activities (on and off of the web), and that works infinitely better than ANY possible amount of government intervention and laws.
I have to give this pretty good marks, all in all.
Not much to add to the review, I've had good results with it, though. I like some of the features in photopaint, even though I'm still a big Gimp fan, I think photopaint is a good complement to it. Draw is good, also. I don't do a great deal with vector illustrations, though, so I didn't wring it out like it did photopaint.
As for running under wine, I've seen no significant performance issues. Some of the screen updates, etc., could be quicker, but I've found nothing that affects the usability of it.
For comparison purposes, I'm running it on a 400M celeron with 256M ram, and Mandrake 7.1
Wine does seem to be a bit finicky about XFree 4.0 though, but I haven't pursued this enough to find out what's really the issue.
Well, here we are again, yet another round of the perils of technology.
So, what do we do about it?
Stop it? That's not going to happen, no matter how hard we try.
Regulate it? Good Luck. Try getting every other country on Earth to agree with you, or to follow those proposed regulations. Whoops, sorry, kids, guess that one's a wash also.
Oh, I know, we'll hype up all of the potential negative effects of new technology and scare the crap out of the average citizen, who will then clamor for one of the above useless 'remedies'.
Guess what? It won't work, not one single bit of it. You simply cannot put the genie back in the bottle, and all the wishful thinking in the world is only going to make you complacent, hoping uselessly that we're 'doing something' about the problem.
Can technology be harmful? Absolutely. But you want to know what is even more harmful? The attitude that we're going to make it less harmful by ignoring it, regulating it (and hoping no-one else decides to play in that pool), or giving in to our worst fears, thereby letting it become them.
Simply put, only the advance of technology (and our knowledge of it) is going to help us cope with the advance of technology. To give into fear (whatever foundation it may have) is only going to realize those fears.
Here's an article from Reason that does a good job of countering Bill Joy's views.
While I'm not denigrating the value of a good ergonomic keyboard, for me, at least, the answer lies in the fact that the malady is called REPETITIVE strain injury.
I've been using a standard keyboard (including manual typewriters in the dim and distant past) on a daily basis (5-14 hours a day) for about 24 years, and have no stress injuries at all.
I attribute this to the variation in wrist motions that I get from having other activities for my wrists (and the rest of me). I engage in regular physical exercise, including a variety of martial arts weapons, most of which include a large variety of wrist motions and exercises, and I also play the piano (not as well as I would like, but regularly). I fully believe that this variation in activity has done much more for my lack of wrist injury than any ergonomic keyboard could do in and of itself.
In the US, at least, corporations have legal status as an individual entity, and are treated as an individual with regards to most legal issues. Although I am not familiar with all the legal subleties involved, it is my understanding that a corporation, at least, can be treated as an individual concerning the GPL.
There might be some issues with non corporations, but my knowledge of their legal status is slight.
Reverse engineering copy protection schemes for the sake of "compatibility" needs to be stopped. This loophole will always be able to be exploited because there always is some platform mainstream media will always leave out. This means that all schemes will be cracked, and with this loophole the crack could be legal. A new law is necessary. Copy protection schemes are necessary in order for artists and companies to protect their work in the age of high speed internet connections.
This argument is seriously missing the point. You might as well argue that people should be prevented from driving to work because of the chance that someone will get drunk, drive, and kill someone.
Basically, you want to punish all of the law-abiding citizens who are LEGALLY working towards compatibility for no other reason than to attempt to prevent a few from breaking the law.
The fact that you clearly miss is that there are already laws in place to address piracy. Just as you don't punish every driver to stop the drunk, you also don't punish the law abiding that reverse-engineer to stop the pirate.
The pirate is already breaking the law, and won't give a shit that he might have to break another one (your argument for outlawing reverse engineering), in order to further his goals. Your suggestion would only hurt those who actually OBEY the law, thus further engendering a greater amount of disrespect for the law.
Your suggestion is no different than those who support claptrap like the CDA. In both cases, there already exist laws on the books to effectively address the criminal behaviour in question, and it is unnecessary (and IMHO, criminal) to punish or otherwise curtail the rights of people who engage in legal behaviour.
If you are truly worried about piracy, address the piracy, don't go after the messenger.
Although this may lean a bit more toward the cognitive sciences, do you have any thoughts about the physics related to consciousness?
I am curious about this issue for a few reasons:
Since the role of the conscious observer is a cornerstone of the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum physics, what possible mechanism for consciousness do you think could provide some explanation for this role?
Also, as we approach the point where computers could have at least the physical complexity of the human brain, do you think that level of complexity alone is sufficient to create awareness?
Where IIS is execeling is servers that are actually used by many (read: generate a substancial profit) choose IIS.
I'm not sure that's entirely true. Apache is used by sites such as Amazon, Etoys, and the like, and it would be hard to argue that these sites are marginal, or don't generate substantial profits.
One of the biggest conditions applied to liability issues in any product is intended use. You can't, for example, sue a knife manufacturer because you got stabbed by one, whether you did it, or someone else did.
That being said, what is the intended use of a general purpose operating system (as opposed to specific systems, such as life support systems)? No-one that I have seen will argue, for example, that Windows 98 is secure, or is even intended to be secure. Linux and NT are quite a bit more secure, and it is usually these that are placed in an environment where security is an intended goal.
However, a knife (or car, etc), are devices with a well defined, specific purpose, and the same cannot be said of operating systems, by and large. The intended purpose of any particular OS installation is entirely dependent on what it is trying to do, eg. be a webserver, transaction database, etc. Since it is quite possible for a badly behaved application to compromise even a very good operating system, you are then faced with choosing who to hold responsible for any failure, the OS vendor, or the app vendor (if they differ).
Admittedly, the better the OS, the less likely is the above scenario, but the only really secure system is a secure SYSTEM, in other words, if any part of the system is insecure, the entire system can be considered to be insecure, by extension.
Assuming that we allow the establishment of responsibility on the part of the vendor for security issues, one of the telling parameters that is involved is that of forseeability, or was the compromise that occured one that could have been reasonably forseen, and guarded against before the fact. And we haven't even addressed the issue of bugs.
Due diligence doesn't mean that the product must be perfect, it means that the manufacturer is required to make a reasonable effort to prevent, and / or correct, any issue that might arise. To use the Melissa virus as an example, it is not necessarily MS's fault that such an exploit can be made in the first place, but they could be reasonable held accountable if they failed to address this issue after the fact. I would also say that the same applies to Open Source products as well. It is disingenuous to apply a double standard, if MS can be held accountable, so can Open Source, and vice versa.
Notwithstanding the fact that both MS's EULA, and the GPL both contain warranty disclaimers, it is also true that such disclaimers are not protection against negligence or failure to exercise due diligence.
The above diatribe aside, when it comes down to the crunch, it is my belief that the architects/administrators of the system should be responsible for security issues on their system. And this is where OSS really works best, it places in the architects hands the ability to fully scrutinize the particulars of the system they create, and provides them with the greatest amount of control over the operation of the system. If the system architect chooses a closed system, they still must be responsible, since they CHOSE the system they provide.
The big problem is the issue of geographical boundaries. A brick and mortar business operates and does business primarily within the community in which it exists, and is subject to the tax laws of that location. In most cases, if you personally visit a business, you'll pay the taxes appropriate to that location, while if you mail order, often there are no taxes unless you live in that location.
On the internet, commerce has the mail order dynamics, multiplied. The big question is, who are the taxes paid to? The state that contains the business, or the state that the purchaser lives in?
This NC issue is essentially saying that you pay them for any purchase made over the net, regardless of the location of the business. This is not done with mail order, and probably shouldn't be done over the net. If internet commerce must be taxed, it should probably use the tax system that is used for mail order, since the business mechanisms are similar.
can be undone, as well.
Not that we shouldn't still make use of technological solutions where practical, but technology isn't really going to make a dent in the real threats to privacy, i.e. the end points of the chain.
Encrypting the transmission media (for example) won't do much good if the other end of the transmission has no scruples about the distribution of the information that they receive.
Unfortunately, privacy isn't about technology, but about respect. By and large, technological solutions aren't much more than stopgap measures, and will ultimately fail, unless we address the fact that to have privacy, others need to respect that privacy (and we need to respect the privacy of others, as well).
I tend to be loathe to suggest any kind of government intervention, but in some cases, only the force of law will address the worst of the issues.
By all means, we should use all technical means at our disposal to help protect our rights to privacy, such as encryption, some kind of provable authentication that doesn't require your life history to prove your identity, etc., but without a proper social framework that provides for privacy, and meaningful penalties for those that violate it, technology will be of only limited use.
"It may very well be that non-evil non-christians are reborn to try things again, while evil christians AND evil non-christians are thrown into the lake for eternity and non-evil christians go to heaven"
Problem is that this viewpoint, by definition, automatically excludes non-christians from the blanket of your belief.
I fully respect your choice of belief, as well as the choices of others. But the fact remains (just to use an example) that believers in Judaism, Islam and Christianity all worship the SAME God, and have just as much a revealed expression of that belief. It is disingenous to claim that any single one of these beliefs is the only right belief to the exclusion of the others. The belief that God is playing favorites for a subgroup of all of his followers is questionable at best, and the height of arrogance at worst.
I believe that God is concerned with how you live, not what you believe. A just, honorable, and loving God would do exactly that, and any God that punishes or otherwise discriminates solely because of some arbitrary belief system is not a God I have any desire to follow.
Whoops, answered my own question, should have looked at the Sun web page before posting :).
According to the news blurb, the Windows, et.al. would only run with the SunPCI card.
Since the box runs Windows and Dos, Solaris would have to be the x86 version.
I also wonder what the base system would be, especially memory and cpu, since I'm running x86 Solaris on a 433 Mhz Celeron w 128M ram, and it's still pretty much a dog. A virtually indestructable dog, but a dog nonetheless.
I do like Solaris, but the x86 version could use some optimizations for the platform. A roughly equivalent sparc system runs Solaris considerably faster.
I have to wonder what's in the base system. What kind of video, memory, drives, etc. Are these any better than a standard x86 PC? If not, I can almost certainly build an equivalent system for quite a bit less.
Gravitons do exist, even if only as a theoretical construct in the realm of quantum gravity, which is the attempt to unify the theory of relativity with quantum mechanics, by trying to explain the behaviour of the universe at planck lenghts (1 x 10 to the -35th power).
A mechanism called perturbative quantum field theory has been successfully used to express and explain electrodynamics. Perturbative quantum field theory is essentially the sum of many method, summing all (or as many as possible) potential pathways which are renormalized after the subtraction of infinities from the corresponding Feynman diagrams. In the realm of quantum gravity, this same approach is being used by some physicists, and one of the theoretical constructs used to aid in this expression are gravitons, described as zero order approximations to quantized gravitational waves in flat space-time. There are already a set of expected characteristics of these particles, such that they are spin two massless particles.
It might not be immediately obvious what, if any, connection a neutrino observatory could have in regard to gravitons, but I would argue that the attempt to understand both the sources and behaviours of neutrinos, especially at high energies, would translate to a potential ability to examine events at the planck length, which to do so in an accelerator would require an accelerator 10 to the 15th times more powerful than any currently existing.
Here are a couple of links to the antares site, with some more in depth information about the project.
/ intro_texte.html
m l
http://antares.in2p3.fr/antares/antares.html
http://antares.in2p3.fr/antares/booklet/english
Here's a site with links to most of the other research involving neutrinos.
http://www.phys.washington.edu/~superk/links.ht
In the last few weeks, I've been playing with the 2.1 version of Debian. I actually like the install, even though it requires a few more brain cells than Redhat's does. It does a lot of what I think all the installs should do, which is to allow/require the user to configure many of the apps and daemons. Although it requires a bit more work up front, it makes you get it out of the way right at first, rather than having a daemon installed and then leaving up to you to see to it sometime later, in which case it might not get done.
:^).
There was also a brief dislocation as I had to get used to a slightly different directory structure, and some app locations, a good argument for the Linux standard base, I guess
Right now, Redhat 6 is still my main system, but I'm really starting to like Debian, and once I get just a bit more comfortable with it, I'll probably switch over for good.
Even though I'm currently using the Redhat dist, I still prefer to install the majority of my software from the sources. I like the additional control I get, and to be honest, I'm not all that thrilled with Redhat's package manager (Even though the update feature usually works, I find myself uninstalling the old RPM's first anyway, or I tend to get undefined behaviour, and I don't have these problems when I compile).
Compiling lets me provide further optimization for my platform (using PGCC, for example), and with apps like KDE and Gnome, every little bit helps to keep them running as fast as possible.
On another note, Kdevelop (a quite cool IDE) isn't included in 1.1.2 (although it had been considered), since the Kdevelop folks don't think it's quite ready. While a few might be disappointed by this, it is an example of one of the core OSS philosophies, that if it isn't ready, it won't be included, and IMHO, that's a very good thing. For those who want to try it (and don't know where to find it) http://www.kdevelop.org.
I am currently using the 1.1 beta, and it is very good, only a few rough edges. It will be an outstanding addition to KDE when the developers think it's ready.
The original patent was Dutch.
Summarized from Kahn, "The Codebreakers"
Hugo Alexander Koch filed a patent in the Netherlands on a rotor based cipher machine. He assigned these patent rights in 1927 to Arthur Scherbius who invented and had been marketing the Enigma machine since about 1923.
There's a good history of cryptography at:
http://www.clark.net/pub/cme/html/timeline.html