UPS does handle packages worth a lot of money, such as works of art. What I'm surprised about is that it they sent it out through their product shipping dept. You'd think that if this thing was so important, the R&D guys would slap on the label themselves...
I had no idea where the quote came from, and it doesn't really matter to me.
There is a place for ethics and morality in my world; my ethics would not permit me to not share something that someone else needs, especially not if I can share it without any cost to me. My morality wouldn't allow me claim ownership over a law of nature.
If you think it's ok to do so, then you respect the law, and that's up to you. A law does not make things right or wrong.
The purpose of copyright and patent in the US was not to protect anybody's work or anybody's investment. It was put in to promote a public good. What public good is served by a 95 year corporate copyright term? What public good comes from patenting of genetic sequences, or one click ordering? Or reverse auctions?
By the way, I enjoy your books. I bought them from amazon.com before they went and turned evil on me.
You can call it naive, or wrong, or whatever you want. We disagree. So be it.
Scarcity is the root of all evil- people say money is, but we wouldn't need money without scarcity. Intellectual property makes something that is not scarce into something that is- and forces us to subsidize it. That is what I have a problem with.
I don't think that it's wrong to sell software and I don't think it's wrong to keep a piece of software secret. I don't think it's wrong to not give someone a copy of software without their explicit agreement to a contract that requires them to keep it secret. This is what the shrink wrap agreements on software are for. I do have a problem with the government being involved in the enforcement of these contracts, beyond their involvement through providing the courts in which contract disputes are settled.
I agree that the desire to be paid for your work is human nature. My work is what I do that I can find someone to pay me for. Right now, I am a woodworker. If people didn't want to pay for wooden products, I would have to find another line of work. The world can live without my wooden products just as they can live without your software.
The ideal world for programmers is the world where anyone which wants software pays someone eo develop it. Obviously this ignores economies of scale. The Ideal world for people who want software is the world where everything is free. This ignores the diversity of situations for which people need software.
The situation we have is where some software is free, some software is commercial, and some software is custom. Eventually, I predict, the commercial software will all but disappear. Is this because Linus, et al, are depriving people of their livlihood?
No; it's because people who make and sell commercial software are arrogant, and do not give their consumers the respect they deserve. I give as an example Microsoft; they release defective products and they disclaim any warrenty. At least with free software, you don't have to pay to be fucked.
So when I make a hypothetical decesion to pirate or not to pirate, I take that into consideration.
Commercial software is worth nothing to me; I rarely have a need to pirate it because I rarely have a need to use it. It's definately not worth tying up my 56k modem for a day to download it.
I'll pass on the other questions. Though, I'll note that I do not meet the statutary criteria for a criminal copyright violation that could lead to a prison sentence.
And yes, I advocate breaking those laws.
The software that I use for my work is paid for by my company.
I know enough people, who support copyright law in theory, but are happy to pirate software, to take the opinion that casual copying is human nature.
Since amazon.com IS its shareholders, an effective boycott would hurt them. Rightly so, they are the ones who should be hurt. If shareholder grow wary of asserting IP, then it will go away.
In all situations where IP is asserted, an effort to make it less valuable should be the least we do. We pirate mp3s, don't we? Who of us pays for software?
When someone pirates something, I doubt they have idealistic intentions, but they get the job done by decreasing the value of holding copyrights. For patents on business models, the best thing we can do is boycott; we can't exactly pirate amazon.com. If someone would break into their warehouse and steal some books, they'd recover insurance. There is no insurance against a boycott.
I've been boycotting amazon since the first mention of the patent. I'm glad RMS has called for a boycott- because I respect him and I know that he can influence a lot of people, which magnifies my beliefs. Had I never heard of the amazon patent lawsuit, and he called for a boycott, I would have considered participating as such with no more than his request.
Everyone likes to put down RMS, but he is the moral leader of the free-media movement- and if he loses in the long run, we all lose. This is our freedom- we have to be vigilant, today, so that we'll have our freedom tomorrow. Call RMS a kook, but I don't think that ESR's pragamatism is going to deliver us from serfdom.
Patents and copyrights long ago ceased to be for the public good in most fields- usually they are merely subsies. Calling RMS a communist because he opposes subsidies is absurd, like calling me a woman because I have a penis.
In summary- pirate everything and boycott patent holders.
Nobody should be surprised when napster is taken down- when I first went there I knew it would be.
I've been thinking about my idea up there and you could let anyone in on it. The central database would simply be the file locations. There could be plaintext entries, for public files, and obscured entries for private files. Various other sites could make rules for how to format an obscured file so that anybody can find it, but it's not obvious for the database owner what the file is. Then these independant front end sites could release software to automate the process of getting files and decrypting them.
Eg, I have a song I want to make available.. The software goes to piracyportal.com and takes my standardized song name 'Nine Inch Nails-Head Like A Hole.mp3' and returns a string encrypted by their key. I rename my file to that string, set my program to use secure transmission, and give that string to the db site to make it available- When someone downloads the file, I create a des key, encrypt it with their puclic key, xor the song name string against it, and encrypt the song using the des key as I send it to them. The front ends are not related to the db service- and the db service doesn't know what files are being transmitted through his service.. Napster could probably be used in this manner right now... The whole thing could be automated, and the frontends would change their key from time to time..
We should take as evidence the huge number of people who use napster, who have made it a success. Our government is by the people.. At some point the argument will be sustainable that most people want to copy music freely- and the government preventing it is a tyrannical act. Right now, copyright laws are more for corporations than people. Are we going to have a government for the corporations?
When I first used napster, I thought to myself that this surely can't last, and that I better get as much done as possible before it's gone.. I got the songs I couldn't find anywhere else..
So we need an underground napster. How about a PKI network where you have to be voted in by people already in the system. Each song would be encrypted with some 128 bit scheme, and to get the keys you have to prove your identity, presumably as a non-gov't, non-riaa person, to X people who are already on the system. It could be heirarchical, so If i bring in greg, I would have to approve everyone that greg brings in, then greg and I would have to approve everyone that they bring in. It's a private club, so we can exclude whoever we want.. When a song is transmitted, a key is generated and sent to downloader, encrypted to his private key, and the software ensures that no trace of the key is left after it's decrypted. It would take longer than the life of the universe to prove that a song was being transmitted over the system, unless they got sympathetic people on the inside... The server's database could be concealed too, such that if I was looking for a song by Dave Mathews Band, I would encrypt the name of the band and the name of the song, (MD5 it?) and look that up in the database. Doesn't facilitate browsing, and it would require strict naming conventions for song files, but it coule be used to obscure the key part of the cyphertext, such that you'd prolly have to know the name of the song to get the cyphertext to attack the public key alg.. A separate service could be set up that allows you to search for song titles, and gives you the exact plaintext you should use to get the key to search the database. This service would be by people who have absolutely no connection to the napster like providers, not even an email ever sent between them, not knowing their names. That service could be located offshore.
The great thing is that the encrypted napster db could be used for securely transferring any type of file, including software, terrorist bomb plans (g)
Open source the server, and have flat distributed server system such that any running server can find any file for you.
Who are you going to sue?
Wouldn't grow as fast as napster, but it would be impossible to prove that the server knew what files were being linked to by it's system- which is napster's problem. Comprimising the system by getting someone in would only comprimise his server.
I sent a letter to amazon telling them that I was boycotting them over this issue, and to remove me from their system. I've also sent them a list of books that I would have bought from them if they weren't being assholes- I bought the books from Barnes and Noble instead. They sent a stupid form letter back:
Thank you for writing to Amazon.com.
The patent system is designed to encourage innovation, and we spent thousands of hours developing our 1-Click® shopping feature. This feature securely stores billing and shipping information so that returning customers need only click their mouse once, without re-entering or re-confirming that information, to purchase selected items conveniently.
In recognition of the innovative and unique nature of the 1-Click® technology, the U.S. Patent Office awarded Patent No. 5,960,411 to Amazon.com on September 28, 1999.
We're pleased that the court recognized the innovation underlying our 1-Click® feature by granting a preliminary injunction barring barnesandnoble.com from using it while our suit is pending.
I hope you'll understand that we are unable to discuss this case any further as we are currently in litigation. Thank you for taking the time to share your views with us.
Best regards,
Dave Wagner Happy Holidays from Amazon.com Earth's Biggest Selection http://www.amazon.com
A reason why universities may want to stop this sort of thing, but citing intellectual property violations is, IMHO, disingenuous(sp).
I figure they would want to stop this because it dilutes the value of having particular people to teach classes. I, as a GMU student, could augment my education by reading the notes from professors at UCLA, and not pay them a dime.
Most of my professors put a lot of notes on thier web sites or make copies available for cost to any comers. This is the Way of the Future(tm) and any professor or school fighting this is just being clueless.
I'm a college student- If I use the knowledge I have gleaned from school in my work, do I have to pay royalties to my professors? NO! Notes, unless they are a transcript of what the teacher is saying, are obviously not the property of the teacher, any more than are the locations of bookmarks that I've placed in my textbooks the property of the author.
Diplomatic pouch doesn't mean a little bag- it can be almost anything, though I doubt they would actually bring them in through any official channel. Perhaps they snuck them in by submarine- or even in mules like drug smugglers (joke!).
As for our spooks knowing it- I don't think we have as much success in that dept. After all, our spooks don't have accurate maps..
As for radioactive signatures- I don't think either U-235 or P-239 decay with gamma rays. As to whether we can detect them from far away- I would doubt that.. Even if we could, there are vast stretches of coastline where a minisub could deliver a bomb (or the parts) into the USA where we have no one watching.
It would surprise me if there were not any foreign bombs on US soil. It wouldn't be that hard- and if the shit hits the fan, just the threat of a nuc in Manhatten would probably prevent the US from being enthusiastic about Taiwanese independence.
No, I don't think it's hard to smuggle things in- in fact my pet conspiracy theory is that China, Russia probably have nucs in the US. Probably brought in via diplomatic pouch.
I believe there are treaties to deal with space based weapons- to forbid them, that is.
I do agree that we should scrap the ABM treaty, though, and deploy the anti-icmb system. When someone wants to nuc us, make them do it the hard way- smuggle it in and drive it to ground zero.
I think we should disarm all our icbms, fill the warheads with Ricky Martin CD's and Titanic Videos and launch a pre-emptive cutural annihilation strike. It's the only way to be sure.
Comparing IP to physical property doesn't make sense.
Any ethical arguement for IP can be dismissed as easily as an ethical arguement against it; the same applies to any ethical arguement for following an unjust law.
Sorry, but copyright protection is already longer than 80 years.. I don't know where the 40 year number came from, I don't think it's ever been 40 exactly. I believe that it is 95 years for corporate copyrights now. Personal copyrigths are a certian amount of time after the death of the holder- I think it's 70 years. I think it was originaly 14 with an extension of 7...
Mickey was to be freed in 2003, IIRC. They've extended his sentence another 20 years (recently- 1997 or 98, I think)
I may be wrong, but I thought the movie was first? Didn't Kubrick (it was his movie, right?) ask Clarke for a different sci fi movie idea and 2001 was the result?
I haven't read the book 2001 or 2010, but I read the other two. I thought the end of 3001 was pretty lame. I'm also annoyed by all the retrospective view of history crap in most sci fi. I'm pretty annoyed at everything today, though.
Service packs seem to change a lot of stuff, suddenly, rather than Linux patches, which in the stable brances change a little bit of stuff at a time. I think the Linux way is better. At least i know that any bug I find will probably be fixed soon! I haven't bothered to DL NT service pack 5 yet, mainly because Civilization II and Quicken run just fine for me. Likewise, I haven't bothered to patch up to 2.2.12 because everything (with one irratating but rare exception) works fine for me in Linux.
Microsoft has said five versions of w2k- doesn't this make you suspicious after the w98se bs? They're going to make you pay for patches! Remember when Bill Gates said that nobody would buy software to fix bugs? We'll, he must have decided that he was wrong.
Anyway, when this industry matures, customers will mature and demand quality. Let the ucita go through- it will be the downfall of the commercial software business. Open/Free software will win because no other model will be credible.
It would have been trivial for Harris and Klebold to kill off two busloads of students with bombs in their backpacks. That's 60 to 100 people. If you have a desire to kill yourself and take people with you, a bomb is a much more effective means to do so than a gun. You can even get away with bombing something- at least for a while. It was just luck that the FBI caught the Unabomber. Tim McVeigh almost got away with the Ok City bombing. Ideally, everyone would be armed because what we have here in america is worth defending- from people who run amok or tyrannical government or even a foreign invader, god forbid. Ideally, criminals would be in jail for the crimes they commit- as to what should / shouldn't be considered a crime, that's another debate. If by some horrible twist of fate, they come by to put you on a train to some death camp, I'll be shooting at them. I hope you say thank you. The atomic bomb and its descendents kept the world pretty damned safe since the end of world war two. MAD may seem crazy in hindsight, but it kept both the US and the Soviets in check. I think this is a good thing. Keep in mind that bomb research fueled much computer research. Where would we be without the bomb? We'd be speaking Russian and counting on abacuses. Someone else mentioned the terrible effect of the crossfire of people defending themselves with guns, and pointed out that civilians make fewer mistakes than police. Your specialized, highly trained police force would be- humm- the FBI Hostage Rescue Team? I hope not, they are way too trigger happy. Fact is, police work is boring- I submit to you the Pa town which just won a discrimination lawsuit against a guy they didn't hire because he was too smart. I don't want to put down cops, but we have to put a limit on how much trust we grant them. As for armed students thwarting a car bomb- it would be rather difficult- That is the point! BTW, if you can't figure out how to conceal a bomb, you either have no imagination, or you've never thought about it.
The truely ideal situation would be if every american citezen was armed, and every american criminal was in prison. Unfortunately we don't play that way.
If one kid in the library had a gun, and the balls to use it, many lives may have been saved. We're too afraid of guns to trust 'children' with them, but not all children are messed up like 'we' were.
With muggers it may be a better choice to give up your money than to fight. For other crimes, such as kidnapping, it is never a better choice to give in to your attacker's demands. An armed female who is the object of an abduction is much better off than an unarmed one.
You also ignore the peripheral benefits of an armed populace. It doesn't have to be YOU who has a gun to thwart crime, just someone around you, or the populace at large that can dissuade a potential criminal.
Finally, these two managed to place two large bombs in the school before anybody had any clue what they were doing. Had they been more skilled with their bombmaking they would have done much more damage. I don't think it's hard to believe that a high school kid could become a competent bombmaker. Had they placed the bombs in a car and driven into the cafeteria and manually exploded them, how many would have died? 169? In any event, more.
How does one defend one's self against a bomb? By not being there when it goes off-prety hard when it's a surprise attack. I am inclined to believe that we're lucky that most of these attacks aren't made by bombs rather than guns.
Slashdot Mirror
UPS does handle packages worth a lot of money, such as works of art. What I'm surprised about is that it they sent it out through their product shipping dept. You'd think that if this thing was so important, the R&D guys would slap on the label themselves...
shrug
Surfing the net and other cliches...
Depends on if you measure by market cap or by revenues.
Microsoft wins on market cap, but IBM wins on revenues.
chris
Surfing the net and other cliches...
I had no idea where the quote came from, and it doesn't really matter to me.
There is a place for ethics and morality in my world; my ethics would not permit me to not share something that someone else needs, especially not if I can share it without any cost to me. My morality wouldn't allow me claim ownership over a law of nature.
If you think it's ok to do so, then you respect the law, and that's up to you. A law does not make things right or wrong.
The purpose of copyright and patent in the US was not to protect anybody's work or anybody's investment. It was put in to promote a public good. What public good is served by a 95 year corporate copyright term? What public good comes from patenting of genetic sequences, or one click ordering? Or reverse auctions?
By the way, I enjoy your books. I bought them from amazon.com before they went and turned evil on me.
Surfing the net and other cliches...
You can call it naive, or wrong, or whatever you want. We disagree. So be it.
Scarcity is the root of all evil- people say money is, but we wouldn't need money without scarcity. Intellectual property makes something that is not scarce into something that is- and forces us to subsidize it. That is what I have a problem with.
I don't think that it's wrong to sell software and I don't think it's wrong to keep a piece of software secret. I don't think it's wrong to not give someone a copy of software without their explicit agreement to a contract that requires them to keep it secret. This is what the shrink wrap agreements on software are for. I do have a problem with the government being involved in the enforcement of these contracts, beyond their involvement through providing the courts in which contract disputes are settled.
I agree that the desire to be paid for your work is human nature. My work is what I do that I can find someone to pay me for. Right now, I am a woodworker. If people didn't want to pay for wooden products, I would have to find another line of work. The world can live without my wooden products just as they can live without your software.
The ideal world for programmers is the world where anyone which wants software pays someone eo develop it. Obviously this ignores economies of scale. The Ideal world for people who want software is the world where everything is free. This ignores the diversity of situations for which people need software.
The situation we have is where some software is free, some software is commercial, and some software is custom. Eventually, I predict, the commercial software will all but disappear. Is this because Linus, et al, are depriving people of their livlihood?
No; it's because people who make and sell commercial software are arrogant, and do not give their consumers the respect they deserve. I give as an example Microsoft; they release defective products and they disclaim any warrenty. At least with free software, you don't have to pay to be fucked.
So when I make a hypothetical decesion to pirate or not to pirate, I take that into consideration.
Commercial software is worth nothing to me; I rarely have a need to pirate it because I rarely have a need to use it. It's definately not worth tying up my 56k modem for a day to download it.
Surfing the net and other cliches...
I am a linux user, thankyouverymuch.
I'll pass on the other questions. Though, I'll note that I do not meet the statutary criteria for a criminal copyright violation that could lead to a prison sentence.
And yes, I advocate breaking those laws.
The software that I use for my work is paid for by my company.
I know enough people, who support copyright law in theory, but are happy to pirate software, to take the opinion that casual copying is human nature.
Surfing the net and other cliches...
Since amazon.com IS its shareholders, an effective boycott would hurt them. Rightly so, they are the ones who should be hurt. If shareholder grow wary of asserting IP, then it will go away.
In all situations where IP is asserted, an effort to make it less valuable should be the least we do. We pirate mp3s, don't we? Who of us pays for software?
When someone pirates something, I doubt they have idealistic intentions, but they get the job done by decreasing the value of holding copyrights. For patents on business models, the best thing we can do is boycott; we can't exactly pirate amazon.com. If someone would break into their warehouse and steal some books, they'd recover insurance. There is no insurance against a boycott.
I've been boycotting amazon since the first mention of the patent. I'm glad RMS has called for a boycott- because I respect him and I know that he can influence a lot of people, which magnifies my beliefs. Had I never heard of the amazon patent lawsuit, and he called for a boycott, I would have considered participating as such with no more than his request.
Everyone likes to put down RMS, but he is the moral leader of the free-media movement- and if he loses in the long run, we all lose. This is our freedom- we have to be vigilant, today, so that we'll have our freedom tomorrow. Call RMS a kook, but I don't think that ESR's pragamatism is going to deliver us from serfdom.
Patents and copyrights long ago ceased to be for the public good in most fields- usually they are merely subsies. Calling RMS a communist because he opposes subsidies is absurd, like calling me a woman because I have a penis.
In summary- pirate everything and boycott patent holders.
Surfing the net and other cliches...
Nobody should be surprised when napster is taken down- when I first went there I knew it would be.
I've been thinking about my idea up there and you could let anyone in on it. The central database would simply be the file locations. There could be plaintext entries, for public files, and obscured entries for private files. Various other sites could make rules for how to format an obscured file so that anybody can find it, but it's not obvious for the database owner what the file is. Then these independant front end sites could release software to automate the process of getting files and decrypting them.
Eg, I have a song I want to make available.. The software goes to piracyportal.com and takes my standardized song name 'Nine Inch Nails-Head Like A Hole.mp3' and returns a string encrypted by their key. I rename my file to that string, set my program to use secure transmission, and give that string to the db site to make it available- When someone downloads the file, I create a des key, encrypt it with their puclic key, xor the song name string against it, and encrypt the song using the des key as I send it to them. The front ends are not related to the db service- and the db service doesn't know what files are being transmitted through his service.. Napster could probably be used in this manner right now... The whole thing could be automated, and the frontends would change their key from time to time..
chris
Surfing the net and other cliches...
We should take as evidence the huge number of people who use napster, who have made it a success. Our government is by the people.. At some point the argument will be sustainable that most people want to copy music freely- and the government preventing it is a tyrannical act. Right now, copyright laws are more for corporations than people. Are we going to have a government for the corporations?
When I first used napster, I thought to myself that this surely can't last, and that I better get as much done as possible before it's gone.. I got the songs I couldn't find anywhere else..
So we need an underground napster. How about a PKI network where you have to be voted in by people already in the system. Each song would be encrypted with some 128 bit scheme, and to get the keys you have to prove your identity, presumably as a non-gov't, non-riaa person, to X people who are already on the system. It could be heirarchical, so If i bring in greg, I would have to approve everyone that greg brings in, then greg and I would have to approve everyone that they bring in. It's a private club, so we can exclude whoever we want.. When a song is transmitted, a key is generated and sent to downloader, encrypted to his private key, and the software ensures that no trace of the key is left after it's decrypted. It would take longer than the life of the universe to prove that a song was being transmitted over the system, unless they got sympathetic people on the inside... The server's database could be concealed too, such that if I was looking for a song by Dave Mathews Band, I would encrypt the name of the band and the name of the song, (MD5 it?) and look that up in the database. Doesn't facilitate browsing, and it would require strict naming conventions for song files, but it coule be used to obscure the key part of the cyphertext, such that you'd prolly have to know the name of the song to get the cyphertext to attack the public key alg.. A separate service could be set up that allows you to search for song titles, and gives you the exact plaintext you should use to get the key to search the database. This service would be by people who have absolutely no connection to the napster like providers, not even an email ever sent between them, not knowing their names. That service could be located offshore.
The great thing is that the encrypted napster db could be used for securely transferring any type of file, including software, terrorist bomb plans (g)
Open source the server, and have flat distributed server system such that any running server can find any file for you.
Who are you going to sue?
Wouldn't grow as fast as napster, but it would be impossible to prove that the server knew what files were being linked to by it's system- which is napster's problem. Comprimising the system by getting someone in would only comprimise his server.
chris
Surfing the net and other cliches...
It's coded in ASM?
It's de facto open source.. Just disassemble...
chris
Surfing the net and other cliches...
I sent a letter to amazon telling them that I was boycotting them over this issue, and to remove me from their system. I've also sent them a list of books that I would have bought from them if they weren't being assholes- I bought the books from Barnes and Noble instead. They sent a stupid form letter back:
Thank you for writing to Amazon.com.
The patent system is designed to encourage innovation, and we spent thousands of hours developing our 1-Click® shopping feature. This feature securely stores billing and shipping information so that returning customers need only click their mouse once, without re-entering or re-confirming that information, to purchase selected items conveniently.
In recognition of the innovative and unique nature of the 1-Click® technology, the U.S. Patent Office awarded Patent No. 5,960,411 to Amazon.com on September 28, 1999.
We're pleased that the court recognized the innovation underlying our 1-Click® feature by granting a preliminary injunction barring barnesandnoble.com from using it while our suit is pending.
I hope you'll understand that we are unable to discuss this case any further as we are currently in litigation. Thank you for taking the time to share your views with us.
Best regards,
Dave Wagner
Happy Holidays from Amazon.com
Earth's Biggest Selection
http://www.amazon.com
Surfing the net and other cliches...
A reason why universities may want to stop this sort of thing, but citing intellectual property violations is, IMHO, disingenuous(sp).
I figure they would want to stop this because it dilutes the value of having particular people to teach classes. I, as a GMU student, could augment my education by reading the notes from professors at UCLA, and not pay them a dime.
Most of my professors put a lot of notes on thier web sites or make copies available for cost to any comers. This is the Way of the Future(tm) and any professor or school fighting this is just being clueless.
I'm a college student- If I use the knowledge I have gleaned from school in my work, do I have to pay royalties to my professors? NO! Notes, unless they are a transcript of what the teacher is saying, are obviously not the property of the teacher, any more than are the locations of bookmarks that I've placed in my textbooks the property of the author.
Sheesh..
chris
Surfing the net and other cliches...
I have a copy of this book! Got it for 50 cents at a school library used book clearance.
Surfing the net and other cliches...
Diplomatic pouch doesn't mean a little bag- it can be almost anything, though I doubt they would actually bring them in through any official channel. Perhaps they snuck them in by submarine- or even in mules like drug smugglers (joke!).
As for our spooks knowing it- I don't think we have as much success in that dept. After all, our spooks don't have accurate maps..
As for radioactive signatures- I don't think either U-235 or P-239 decay with gamma rays. As to whether we can detect them from far away- I would doubt that.. Even if we could, there are vast stretches of coastline where a minisub could deliver a bomb (or the parts) into the USA where we have no one watching.
It would surprise me if there were not any foreign bombs on US soil. It wouldn't be that hard- and if the shit hits the fan, just the threat of a nuc in Manhatten would probably prevent the US from being enthusiastic about Taiwanese independence.
If someone wants to nuc us, they will.
Surfing the net and other cliches...
No, I don't think it's hard to smuggle things in- in fact my pet conspiracy theory is that China, Russia probably have nucs in the US. Probably brought in via diplomatic pouch.
Surfing the net and other cliches...
I believe there are treaties to deal with space based weapons- to forbid them, that is.
I do agree that we should scrap the ABM treaty, though, and deploy the anti-icmb system. When someone wants to nuc us, make them do it the hard way- smuggle it in and drive it to ground zero.
I think we should disarm all our icbms, fill the warheads with Ricky Martin CD's and Titanic Videos and launch a pre-emptive cutural annihilation strike. It's the only way to be sure.
Surfing the net and other cliches...
Comparing IP to physical property doesn't make sense.
Any ethical arguement for IP can be dismissed as easily as an ethical arguement against it; the same applies to any ethical arguement for following an unjust law.
Surfing the net and other cliches...
Sorry, but copyright protection is already longer than 80 years.. I don't know where the 40 year number came from, I don't think it's ever been 40 exactly. I believe that it is 95 years for corporate copyrights now. Personal copyrigths are a certian amount of time after the death of the holder- I think it's 70 years. I think it was originaly 14 with an extension of 7...
Mickey was to be freed in 2003, IIRC. They've extended his sentence another 20 years (recently- 1997 or 98, I think)
Free Mickey!!
Surfing the net and other cliches...
Fair Use and Parody both apply to copyrights, not trademarks.
Surfing the net and other cliches...
I am against IP laws, but not trademark laws. IDG is perfectly justified in making this request. This is not stupid.
Surfing the net and other cliches...
For more peace of mind, just perterb their cookies a little bit. Be someone else...
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I doubt it- assembly language is not necessarily faster than compiled c code. Depends on the compiler though.
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I may be wrong, but I thought the movie was first? Didn't Kubrick (it was his movie, right?) ask Clarke for a different sci fi movie idea and 2001 was the result?
I haven't read the book 2001 or 2010, but I read the other two. I thought the end of 3001 was pretty lame. I'm also annoyed by all the retrospective view of history crap in most sci fi. I'm pretty annoyed at everything today, though.
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Service packs seem to change a lot of stuff, suddenly, rather than Linux patches, which in the stable brances change a little bit of stuff at a time. I think the Linux way is better. At least i know that any bug I find will probably be fixed soon! I haven't bothered to DL NT service pack 5 yet, mainly because Civilization II and Quicken run just fine for me. Likewise, I haven't bothered to patch up to 2.2.12 because everything (with one irratating but rare exception) works fine for me in Linux.
Microsoft has said five versions of w2k- doesn't this make you suspicious after the w98se bs? They're going to make you pay for patches! Remember when Bill Gates said that nobody would buy software to fix bugs? We'll, he must have decided that he was wrong.
Anyway, when this industry matures, customers will mature and demand quality. Let the ucita go through- it will be the downfall of the commercial software business. Open/Free software will win because no other model will be credible.
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It would have been trivial for Harris and Klebold to kill off two busloads of students with bombs in their backpacks. That's 60 to 100 people. If you have a desire to kill yourself and take people with you, a bomb is a much more effective means to do so than a gun. You can even get away with bombing something- at least for a while. It was just luck that the FBI caught the Unabomber. Tim McVeigh almost got away with the Ok City bombing. Ideally, everyone would be armed because what we have here in america is worth defending- from people who run amok or tyrannical government or even a foreign invader, god forbid. Ideally, criminals would be in jail for the crimes they commit- as to what should / shouldn't be considered a crime, that's another debate. If by some horrible twist of fate, they come by to put you on a train to some death camp, I'll be shooting at them. I hope you say thank you. The atomic bomb and its descendents kept the world pretty damned safe since the end of world war two. MAD may seem crazy in hindsight, but it kept both the US and the Soviets in check. I think this is a good thing. Keep in mind that bomb research fueled much computer research. Where would we be without the bomb? We'd be speaking Russian and counting on abacuses. Someone else mentioned the terrible effect of the crossfire of people defending themselves with guns, and pointed out that civilians make fewer mistakes than police. Your specialized, highly trained police force would be- humm- the FBI Hostage Rescue Team? I hope not, they are way too trigger happy. Fact is, police work is boring- I submit to you the Pa town which just won a discrimination lawsuit against a guy they didn't hire because he was too smart. I don't want to put down cops, but we have to put a limit on how much trust we grant them. As for armed students thwarting a car bomb- it would be rather difficult- That is the point! BTW, if you can't figure out how to conceal a bomb, you either have no imagination, or you've never thought about it.
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The truely ideal situation would be if every american citezen was armed, and every american criminal was in prison. Unfortunately we don't play that way.
If one kid in the library had a gun, and the balls to use it, many lives may have been saved. We're too afraid of guns to trust 'children' with them, but not all children are messed up like 'we' were.
With muggers it may be a better choice to give up your money than to fight. For other crimes, such as kidnapping, it is never a better choice to give in to your attacker's demands. An armed female who is the object of an abduction is much better off than an unarmed one.
You also ignore the peripheral benefits of an armed populace. It doesn't have to be YOU who has a gun to thwart crime, just someone around you, or the populace at large that can dissuade a potential criminal.
Finally, these two managed to place two large bombs in the school before anybody had any clue what they were doing. Had they been more skilled with their bombmaking they would have done much more damage. I don't think it's hard to believe that a high school kid could become a competent bombmaker. Had they placed the bombs in a car and driven into the cafeteria and manually exploded them, how many would have died? 169? In any event, more.
How does one defend one's self against a bomb? By not being there when it goes off-prety hard when it's a surprise attack. I am inclined to believe that we're lucky that most of these attacks aren't made by bombs rather than guns.
Surfing the net and other cliches...