I like responding to Word documents by picking another esoteric file format. Even EPS is as good as opaque to most users.
And there was a government colleague of mine a few years ago who was required to submit documents in WordPerfect® - and he hated to use that program. So he would compose his documents in LaTEX, generate PostScript® pages, and import it into WordPerfect® as images...
So, if I send you a Word97 doc and you have Word2002 (is that what it's called?) do you think it will look the same? If I send you my Standard A4 formatted document and you print it on your Standard Letter printer do you think it will look the same...
If you're running WORD and you have two different Standard A4 printers, and you think it will give you the same pagination on both, you're dreaming!
In fact, if you think it will give you the same pagination on the same printer, you're out of luck.
Editors like VIM are *extremely* complicated and unintuitive for new users.
And nedit (http://nedit.org/ is easier yet (it started out as a notepad clone, after all:-) while at the same time offering greatly enhanced capabilities for its power users...
event-driven hard particle simulation...
the paper in which the algorithm I'm using was published stated that the program produced from the C compiler run about 10% faster than the equivalent Fortran program... Many-Body Hard Particle Molecular Dynamics...
...an indirect-addressing problem, no? So you have a problem dominated by memory-based data dependencies, not one dominated by computation (and so the alias-analysis aspect is not important to that particular class of codes. If you look at your peak FLOPpage, you'll find that it is almost certainly less than 10% of theoretical processor peak. Dense computational codes (for which alias
analysis is important) will run at 50% or better (if well-written).
The bad news is that your 10% will get to be a progressively smaller fraction, given trends in processor architecture (deeper pipelines, greater scalarity).
The important point is that there's nothing about OO languages that require or favor recursive vs. iterative coding.
If, as he says, he is interested in large engineering problems, then there are two likely things he will target:
small problems for which run-time is not a problem; and
compute-intensive problems for which run-time is important.
For the first of these, an interpreted prototyping language with an embedded symbolic processor (like
mathematica) may well be the best bet.
For the second kind of problem, optimization can be of critical importance. It is inherent in the language that Fortran is more optimizable than C: due to the rules of the language, alias analysis in Fortran is a (relatively simple) polynomial-time problem. At present (though there is effort being put into the
C 2X standard to try to change this), alias analysis for C and C++ is a NP-complete problem. And given the current processor trends (deeply pipelined superscalar processors running much faster than their memory interfaces), that gives Fortran a factor of 2 performance edge (at present; this promises to become even more marked in the future...)
That doesn't mean that you can't write object-based software in Fortran; I've been doing that for many years, on large scientific modeling codes. Bertrand Meyer's seminal book (The Construction of Object Oriented Software? -- not sure of the title; I'm snowed in at home and my copy is at the office:-( ) even has a section on writing object based Fortran.
Based on two decades of experience in computer modeling, my advice to ThChalm is:
Write object-based software
with large objects. By this, I mean that you should make entire field objects (whose attributes are large arrays), for example, rather than having fine-grained objects with just values as attributes. Then the iterators and solvers properly are methods that contain the procedural code
And frequently this attitude will cause you to re-think the problem, and use far better algorithms than you would have otherwise.
When I applied these ideas to various problems in the high-performance environmental modeling problem domain, I wound up with an emissions model that is 600 times faster than its fine-grained OO
predecessor, and an atmospheric chemistry/transport model that is 10 times faster than a competing naively-written procedural-style model.
Oh, and by the way, so far this year I've spent a little over $150 this year on postage to Congress about IP issues. And so far, a grand total of one reply.
A copyright regime as in the DMCA, which authorizes "technical means of protection" that never expire does not satisfy the constitutional demand that copyright term be "for a limited time." As far as I am concerned (as a 48-year-old conservative mathematician with a very well-tuned bullshit-meter), this provision is unconstitutional on its face.
As far as that goes, if Congress is free retroactively to extend the term of existing copyrights, then that term is by definition not limited. (I have also heard the argument that this extension is not a Constitutionally-forbidden ex post facto law; having heard ito, I fully understand the origin of Bill Clinton's "It depends upon what the meaning of 'is' is".)
Nor, given that no copyright term has expired within my adult lifetime, nor can I expect any to expire before I'm dead, can I consider copyright term to be "limited" in any operational sense.
I see the current copyright regime as a Constitutional outrage, and I see very few in the legal profession, the courts, Congress, and Executive--all sworn to uphold the Constitution, by the way--who are willing even to consider these issues.
Re:though the suggestions might be usefull...
on
Homepage Usability
·
· Score: 2
[many things]...don't work as expected.
That said, frames have their uses...
But, generally speaking, frame-bombs do work as expected.
Does anyone know how MS Outlook handles them
in email? (I don't permit Microsoft products
on my systems...:-) )
One of the things I have been very disappointed
with, in both my nVidia-based home and work machines, is
that I have not been able to get virtual screen
sizes larger than 2048x1536 when there should be
plenty of memory (32M and 64M, respectively) to
run much larger virtual screens. This
is particularly timely with the arrival of much
higher resolution displays (like the 2048x1536
physical screen of the top-end Viewsonic).
These larger virtual displays would be very useful for scientific visualization,
or even to look at the 3200x2400 Hubble pictures at
http://heritage.stsci.edu/
One of the points the brief brings out is the
fact that the Constitution gives power to Congress
to grant copyrights to authors. From the brief:
The House Subcommittee on the Courts and Intellectual Property held a hearing on the issues
raised by the amendment. Recording artist Sheryl Crow testified on behalf of featured recording
artists that the amendment effected a dramatic change in the relevant balance of power between
recording artists and the recording companies, to the detriment of artists' right to termination
under the Copyright Act. Professor Marci Hamilton testified that the "sound recordings"
amendment was a substantive change in work-for-hire law that violated the requirement in the Copyright Clause, Art. I, sec. 8, cl. 8, to vest copyright in "authors." Statement of Professor Marci A. Hamilton, available at http://www.house.gov/judiciary/hami0525.html.
The RIAA is not the author! That is what this whole brief is about!
It is in
the interest of all of us creative types to have it reinforced that the US Constitution requires
that copyright go to authors and not to some
faceless corporate behemoth.
Copyright is going to have to be overhauled. I suggest a twist on Jessica Litman's
idea...
Still needs a few more constraints:
Fraudulent claim of copyright should be punished at least as strictly as copyright infringement.
All law -- local, state, and federal -- should be public domain, and therefore not subject to copyright coverage.
Creation of enhanced copies in order to cope with disabilities should be "fair use". If a comercial enterprise uses "technical means" to prevent copying, then it must provide disability-enhanced copies at the same price schedule it uses for "normal" copies. And presbyopia is a disability.
If copyright term is extensible at any time by Congress, then that term is by mathematical definition not "limited" (which the US Constitution requires for copyright term). All copyright terms are returned to the term in force at the time the works were copyrighted.
Hmm, this example sounds a little far fetched to me. You do not present your ID when you buy something.
How long has it been since you traveled by air?
Try asking for an airline ticket without ID, and see how far you get...
This kind of thing is particularly attractive to the non-capitalist lazy businesses who want the government to protect their markets by preventing resale on what they sell. If secondary markets are forbidden, it's not capitalism, it's fascism.
What if something that you do now is legal, but becomes illegal, and the go after people retroactivly?
Uh, no. That's unconstitutional, directly contradicting Article I, Section 9 of the United States Constitution regarding Congress:
No bill of attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed.
Tell that to everyone who had to pay more taxes
when they retroactively raised the tax rates back
five years ago.
Tell that to everyone who doesn't have access to music from the twenties, thirties, and forties, because they retroactively changed the term of copyright.
The lawyers make the claim (I will not call it "Jesuitical" because they do not deserve that kind of insult) that the prohibition of "ex post facto" only applies to criminal law.
Somehow they're inventing extra words I can't find in the Constitution.
According to them, as long as they don't make it a criminal offense, it's perfectly OK if they impose a ten million dollar excise tax on your behavior, ten years after the fact.
We once had a Constitutional republic, a government of laws not of men. Now we have a tyranny of lawyer-politicians.
It sickens me to see the publishing industry, Congress, the Executive Branch, and the courts ignoring the Constitution's demand that copyright protection must have limited duration.
From a mathematical point of view, if Congress is free to extend the term of copyright at will, then by definition that copyright term is not "limited".
From an operational point of view, a copyright term that has been extended so that
during my adult entire lifetime, past, present, and future, no work has had nor will have its copyright expire is operationally indistinguishable from an unlimited one (for no experiment I can perform can make the distinction).
From a human point of view, a copyright term that lasts for multiple human lifetimes is not limited in any meaningful sense.
In the United States, the Constitution is the supreme law of the land. I say that the fundamental lawbreakers are the RIAA and their cronies in Congress, the Executive Branch, and the Courts.
And existence of secondary markets is a primary characteristic of capitalism: those who use the power of the government to prevent re-sale are not capitalists; in the technical sense of the term, they are fascists.
So it is technically at least half-right to declaim,
... nor, in the absence of an agreement, does transfer of ownership of a copyright or of any exclusive rights under a copyright convey property rights in any material object.
Copyright law distinguishes the ownership of a copy
of a protected work (a print of a photograph, a
compact disc, a book, a diskette) from ownership of the intangible copyright rights...If you buy a copy of a work, you have a right to resell (distribute) that copy.
...if there is something that enough consumers want someone will step in and supply it to them...
Have a look at http://www.linux.org/vendors/systems.html:
I count 114 maker/assemblers of Linux systems
in the US (with even more others worldwide) on this page -- I'll bet at least some of them
will do just what you want!
My success rate is not nearly as good as Fizzlewhiff's: I wrote snail main detailing my objections to the SSSCA to 65 senators two weeks ago (including thse from my own home state and all the ones on the Commerce Committee). I have yet to receive the first reply.
When I wrote in opposition to the DMCA a few years back, my reply rate was about 50%. But in particular, my experience is similar to firewort 's: my home state's Sen. Edwards (or his staff, rather) wrote back a reply thanking me for advocating his position in support of it! I hate having that level of incompetence allegedly representing me!
Almost a century and a half ago, the United States fought the bloodiest war in its history, over the institution of slavery. One of the outcomes of this war were the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth amendments to the US Cnstitution, which codified the decision made in fire and blood on the battlefield. They outlawed slavery, and decreed that a "previous condition of servitude" might not be a condition for exercising the rights of citizenship.
One of the unstated but vehement reasons for objections to such developments as the W3C RAND proposal, I feel, is the intuition that they demand a "previous condition of servitude" as a prerequisite for full and proper participation in the Internet. How do you answer those whose unstated gut response is that RAND would demand that they enslave themselves to the patent owners before they might use the Internet?
I am a mathematician and computer scientist (PH.D., MIT 1978). I am
writing to you to express my vehement opposition to the "Security
Systems Standards and Certification Act" (SSSCA), a bill drafted by
Senators Ernest Hollings (SC) and Ted Stevens (AL). I urge you in the
strongest possible terms to oppose this bill. There are four reasons
for my opposition:
It represents a serious threat to the national security and the
well-being of the United States;
Its provisions are outrageously un-Constitutional;
It represents poor public policy, advancing a narrow corporate
interest against the interests of the public at large; and
It is (deliberately) over-broad and unconscionably vague in its
provisions, particularly as regards its definition of "digital device".
These points, as well as changes I think are needed in current
copyright law, are more fully discussed below
A. Introduction.
The Constitution requires that copyright term be limited. From this
point of view, the current copyright law is no less than a
Constitutional outrage. Triply so: From a theoretical point of view,
if Congress is free retroactively to extend copyright term at will (as
it has repeatedly done in this century), then copyright term fails to
fit the definition of "limited". From an operational point of view, a
copyright law that has been repeatedly extended so that no works have
actually made it or will make it into the public domain during my
entire adult lifetime, both past and future, is a copyright law that
fails the operational definition of "limited". And finally, in human
terms, a copyright term that extends more than a lifetime after the
death of the author fails the definition of "limited" on the human
scale. It has been argued that this extension of copyright encourages
authorship. Such an argument is purely specious: it is impossible
that an author already 50 years dead can be encouraged to produce
further works by the extension of his copyrights for another twenty
years.
B. Discussion
1. National Security: First of all, this bill is a serious threat to
the national security of the United States. The reason for this is as
follows: Both the Internet and digital computers have become critical
to the continued security and prosperity of the United States. This
bill, by outlawing all digital equipment that does not " include and
utilize certified security technologies" would have the de facto effect
of outlawing all software and computers except those from a few large
corporate sources--particularly, the effect of outlawing so-called
"Open Source" software such as the Linux operating system and the
Apache web-server, which are distributed in human readable and
modifiable form. What would remain is exactly the systems and software
which have shown themselves most vulnerable to attack: virtually all
of the disruptive "virus" and "worm" attacks of the last five years
have been made possible by defects in the inherent design of Microsoft
operating system, server, and email and application software. The
computer-security situation is so serious that earlier this week the
very staid Gartner Group management consulting firm issued a warning
recommending that their clients immediately remove Microsoft internet
server software and replace it with products from other vendors such as
Apache and IPlanet (see
http://www3.gartner.com/DisplayDocument?doc_cd=101 034). A year ago,
the US National Security Agency concluded that it was impossible to
make Microsoft systems sufficiently secure for sensitive applications,
and constructed an especially secure configuration of the Linux
operating system for that purpose (see http://www.nsa.gov/selinux/).
The SSSCA would make Apache and Linux illegal.
2. Un-Constitutionality: The SSSCA, with its absolutist protection for
"security technologies" is an affront to the Constitutional provision
for copyright. The Constitution grants Congress the power to establish
a LIMITED monopoly,
To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for
limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their
respective writings and discoveries;
against whose conditions the SSSCA is an outrage. The SSSCA admits no
limit on the term of protection it espouses. Nor does it make any
provision for fair use. In its original 1823 decision establishing the
doctrine of fair use, the Supreme Court stated that Congress may make
no copyright law so strict as to deny freedom of speech nor freedom of
the Press. The SSSCA violates this Constitutional requirement also.
3. Poor public Policy: The Founding Fathers did not regard
"intellectual property" as a natural right, but rather as a limited
legislated monopoly which was of benefit to society as a whole _if
managed properly_. They had had relatively recent experiences with
both no-copyright situations and with permanent Crown monopolies on
publishing (and, sadly, they tended to be better versed in history than
many are today.) They knew that copyright was of greatest benefit to
society at large if it offered a quid pro quo: in exchange for a
temporary monopoly on copying, the authors must pass their works into
the public domain--the property of all of us--at the expiration of the
limited term. This bargain has already been brought to the breaking
point by current copyright law,e specially the DMCA; the SSSCA breaks
it completely. It is purely and specifically for the narrow benefit of
a few large publishing houses who fear that digital technology will
break both their stranglehold on the authors and music-writers and
their captivation of the public at large. (Note that the SSSCA's
provision for setting "standards" has the effect of freezing out both
writers and the general public.)
4. Over-breadth and Vagueness: Finally, Sen. Hollings himself has
admitted in interviews with Wired magazine that the provisions are
deliberately vague, in order to get a bill passed with provisions that
may be applied far more broadly than Congress intends or believes
reasonable. Congress should not permit itself to be so deceived.
C. Needed Copyright Reforms.
There are reforms that do need to be made in copyright law; let me
suggest that any copyright bill should be amended to include at least
the following:
Section 105 should be amended so as include not only "any work of
the United States Government" but also all laws -- Federal, State, and
local -- in the public domain. (Note that some trade associations have
had local and state governments adopt their copyrighted codes as public
laws, while still maintaining a copyright upon them. As a matter of
public policy, the law should not be owned by private interest groups.)
Section 107 should be amended so as to protect the rights of
persons with disabilities. When a disabled person owns a copy of a
copyright work which is by reason of disability inaccessible, it should
be fair use to make an enhanced copy for private use, in order to make
accomodation for that disability. Commercial publishers who use
"technical means of protection" (as under the DMCA) or "certified
security technologies" (under the SSSCA or its ilk) should be required
to publish enhanced copies for the accomodation of persons with
disabilities, at the same price that they sell un-enhanced copies.
Fraudulent claim of copyright should be a crime punishable at least
as severely as copyright infringement. Fraudulent claim of copyright
steals from the patrimony of us all. Such fraudulent claim of
copyright is rampant in at least the classical music publishing
industry. And since the record of the last decade shows that the
Department of Justice cannot be relied upon to prosecute copyright
offenses, and since it steals from us all, any member of the public
should have standing for civil suit against such fraud.
D. Conclusion
You have sworn to uphold the Constitution of the United States.
Copyright law should be returned to its Constitutional limits.
Forget about the GEForce2 vs. GEForce3 issue,
but remember all that memory bandwidth and the
off-loaded high performance connects for networking and disk access.
...I wonder how feasible it would be to modify a cryptosystem so that when the government used their backdoor, the message decrypted into some aribtrary text chosen by the individual, but when decrypted through the proper channels, the message is the intended one...
Unfortunately, this involves solving simultaneous number-theory equations, multiple equations of the sort that would be necessary to break the code algorithmically in the first place by calculating private keys from public keys. If it is computationally infeasible to do that, what you suggest is far harder!
...The fact is, Islam preaches the Golden Mean - everything in moderation, nothing to excess....
True. At least for its first thousand years.
In this article in the Washington Times, economist Bruce Bartlett notes,
This raises an interesting question. Where does this hatred of capitalism come from? Contrary to popular belief, it does not come from Islam.
Indeed, one could argue that Islam is the most pro-business of all the world's major religions. It is worth remembering that the Prophet Mohammed was a businessman, who engaged in extensive commerce during the years before he devoted himself exclusively to religious affairs in the year 611. Even afterward, Mohammed often made comments and took actions that demonstrated his support for business and the free market.
For example, he forbade the imposition of price controls, saying prices were in God's hands and that he wished to meet God (the same God to whom Christians and Jews pray) without having to answer for some injustice that he might commit in this respect.
And neo-con economist Jude Wanniski is all the time quoting one of the twelfth-century Arab political philosophers...
... All he needs to do is shoot at any of the windows and you're in a virtually uncontrollable 28,000 foot free-fall...
As it happens, this is Hollywood movie fiction rather than the actual physics of the situation. Sorry.
There were two partial victories that day: because of them, the White House and the Capitol are intact (but rather the Pentagon and some Pennsylvania countryside were hit). The only thing that could have saved the World Trade Towers would have been passengers willing to take out the terrorists (hopefully with weapons adequate to the task) -- ESR is right about that. And (as others have observed), if this had been tried during the forties or fifties, the passengers would have been a lot more willing to take on the terrorists than they are now.
Treat it as an ecology-modeling problem, with populations of terrorists and citizens, with some fraction of the latter armed. Under all realistic initial conditions (citizen population much larger than terrorist population), where the armed fraction is positive, the terrorists get killed off and the situation assymptotically tends to negligible terrorist activity. The bloody-minmded way to think about is is that quite a bit of damage may be done while achieving this limit, but (realistically) you do run out of terrorists before running out of citizens.
And this admittedly-oversimplified kind of model ignores an important psychological impact: the last thing a terrorist wants to do is to appear stupid and futile:
Terrorist (holds up gun): I'm taking over this plane!
some subset of the passengers: No, you're not.
Terrorist: Certainly did not fly the plane into the WTT.>
Slashdot Mirror
Damned incompetent crap of a software system!
And nedit ( http://nedit.org/ is easier yet (it started out as a notepad clone, after all
The bad news is that your 10% will get to be a progressively smaller fraction, given trends in processor architecture (deeper pipelines, greater scalarity).
- small problems for which run-time is not a problem; and
- compute-intensive problems for which run-time is important.
For the first of these, an interpreted prototyping language with an embedded symbolic processor (like mathematica) may well be the best bet.For the second kind of problem, optimization can be of critical importance. It is inherent in the language that Fortran is more optimizable than C: due to the rules of the language, alias analysis in Fortran is a (relatively simple) polynomial-time problem. At present (though there is effort being put into the C 2X standard to try to change this), alias analysis for C and C++ is a NP-complete problem. And given the current processor trends (deeply pipelined superscalar processors running much faster than their memory interfaces), that gives Fortran a factor of 2 performance edge (at present; this promises to become even more marked in the future...)
That doesn't mean that you can't write object-based software in Fortran; I've been doing that for many years, on large scientific modeling codes. Bertrand Meyer's seminal book (The Construction of Object Oriented Software? -- not sure of the title; I'm snowed in at home and my copy is at the office :-( ) even has a section on writing object based Fortran.
Based on two decades of experience in computer modeling, my advice to ThChalm is:
And frequently this attitude will cause you to re-think the problem, and use far better algorithms than you would have otherwise.When I applied these ideas to various problems in the high-performance environmental modeling problem domain, I wound up with an emissions model that is 600 times faster than its fine-grained OO predecessor, and an atmospheric chemistry/transport model that is 10 times faster than a competing naively-written procedural-style model.
fwiw
As far as that goes, if Congress is free retroactively to extend the term of existing copyrights, then that term is by definition not limited. (I have also heard the argument that this extension is not a Constitutionally-forbidden ex post facto law; having heard ito, I fully understand the origin of Bill Clinton's "It depends upon what the meaning of 'is' is".)
Nor, given that no copyright term has expired within my adult lifetime, nor can I expect any to expire before I'm dead, can I consider copyright term to be "limited" in any operational sense.
I see the current copyright regime as a Constitutional outrage, and I see very few in the legal profession, the courts, Congress, and Executive--all sworn to uphold the Constitution, by the way--who are willing even to consider these issues.
Does anyone know how MS Outlook handles them in email? (I don't permit Microsoft products on my systems... :-) )
It is in the interest of all of us creative types to have it reinforced that the US Constitution requires that copyright go to authors and not to some faceless corporate behemoth.
fwiw
Would you trust both Bill Clinton and Richard Nixon with that kind of power ??
Both of them DID get elected.
This kind of thing is particularly attractive to the non-capitalist lazy businesses who want the government to protect their markets by preventing resale on what they sell. If secondary markets are forbidden, it's not capitalism, it's fascism.
Tell that to everyone who doesn't have access to music from the twenties, thirties, and forties, because they retroactively changed the term of copyright.
The lawyers make the claim (I will not call it "Jesuitical" because they do not deserve that kind of insult) that the prohibition of "ex post facto" only applies to criminal law. Somehow they're inventing extra words I can't find in the Constitution.
According to them, as long as they don't make it a criminal offense, it's perfectly OK if they impose a ten million dollar excise tax on your behavior, ten years after the fact.
We once had a Constitutional republic, a government of laws not of men. Now we have a tyranny of lawyer-politicians.
- From a mathematical point of view, if Congress is free to extend the term of copyright at will, then by definition that copyright term is not "limited".
- From an operational point of view, a copyright term that has been extended so that
during my adult entire lifetime, past, present, and future, no work has had nor will have its copyright expire is operationally indistinguishable from an unlimited one (for no experiment I can perform can make the distinction).
- From a human point of view, a copyright term that lasts for multiple human lifetimes is not limited in any meaningful sense.
In the United States, the Constitution is the supreme law of the land. I say that the fundamental lawbreakers are the RIAA and their cronies in Congress, the Executive Branch, and the Courts.So it is technically at least half-right to declaim,
NO. Copyright is only a right to control the first distribution channel, as established by the Supreme Court in a case dealing precisely with second-sale of books. The law is (q.v. http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/casecode/uscodes/17/ chapters/2/sections/section_202.html:
or, for a readable-English account of what this means, see http://profs.lp.findlaw.com/copyown/copyown_8.htmWhen I wrote in opposition to the DMCA a few years back, my reply rate was about 50%. But in particular, my experience is similar to firewort 's: my home state's Sen. Edwards (or his staff, rather) wrote back a reply thanking me for advocating his position in support of it! I hate having that level of incompetence allegedly representing me!
One of the unstated but vehement reasons for objections to such developments as the W3C RAND proposal, I feel, is the intuition that they demand a "previous condition of servitude" as a prerequisite for full and proper participation in the Internet. How do you answer those whose unstated gut response is that RAND would demand that they enslave themselves to the patent owners before they might use the Internet?
- It represents a serious threat to the national security and the
well-being of the United States;
- Its provisions are outrageously un-Constitutional;
- It represents poor public policy, advancing a narrow corporate
interest against the interests of the public at large; and
- It is (deliberately) over-broad and unconscionably vague in its
provisions, particularly as regards its definition of "digital device".
These points, as well as changes I think are needed in current copyright law, are more fully discussed below A. Introduction.The Constitution requires that copyright term be limited. From this point of view, the current copyright law is no less than a Constitutional outrage. Triply so: From a theoretical point of view, if Congress is free retroactively to extend copyright term at will (as it has repeatedly done in this century), then copyright term fails to fit the definition of "limited". From an operational point of view, a copyright law that has been repeatedly extended so that no works have actually made it or will make it into the public domain during my entire adult lifetime, both past and future, is a copyright law that fails the operational definition of "limited". And finally, in human terms, a copyright term that extends more than a lifetime after the death of the author fails the definition of "limited" on the human scale. It has been argued that this extension of copyright encourages authorship. Such an argument is purely specious: it is impossible that an author already 50 years dead can be encouraged to produce further works by the extension of his copyrights for another twenty years.
B. Discussion1 034). A year ago,
the US National Security Agency concluded that it was impossible to
make Microsoft systems sufficiently secure for sensitive applications,
and constructed an especially secure configuration of the Linux
operating system for that purpose (see http://www.nsa.gov/selinux/).
The SSSCA would make Apache and Linux illegal.
1. National Security: First of all, this bill is a serious threat to the national security of the United States. The reason for this is as follows: Both the Internet and digital computers have become critical to the continued security and prosperity of the United States. This bill, by outlawing all digital equipment that does not " include and utilize certified security technologies" would have the de facto effect of outlawing all software and computers except those from a few large corporate sources--particularly, the effect of outlawing so-called "Open Source" software such as the Linux operating system and the Apache web-server, which are distributed in human readable and modifiable form. What would remain is exactly the systems and software which have shown themselves most vulnerable to attack: virtually all of the disruptive "virus" and "worm" attacks of the last five years have been made possible by defects in the inherent design of Microsoft operating system, server, and email and application software. The computer-security situation is so serious that earlier this week the very staid Gartner Group management consulting firm issued a warning recommending that their clients immediately remove Microsoft internet server software and replace it with products from other vendors such as Apache and IPlanet (see http://www3.gartner.com/DisplayDocument?doc_cd=10
2. Un-Constitutionality: The SSSCA, with its absolutist protection for "security technologies" is an affront to the Constitutional provision for copyright. The Constitution grants Congress the power to establish a LIMITED monopoly,
against whose conditions the SSSCA is an outrage. The SSSCA admits no limit on the term of protection it espouses. Nor does it make any provision for fair use. In its original 1823 decision establishing the doctrine of fair use, the Supreme Court stated that Congress may make no copyright law so strict as to deny freedom of speech nor freedom of the Press. The SSSCA violates this Constitutional requirement also.3. Poor public Policy: The Founding Fathers did not regard "intellectual property" as a natural right, but rather as a limited legislated monopoly which was of benefit to society as a whole _if managed properly_. They had had relatively recent experiences with both no-copyright situations and with permanent Crown monopolies on publishing (and, sadly, they tended to be better versed in history than many are today.) They knew that copyright was of greatest benefit to society at large if it offered a quid pro quo: in exchange for a temporary monopoly on copying, the authors must pass their works into the public domain--the property of all of us--at the expiration of the limited term. This bargain has already been brought to the breaking point by current copyright law,e specially the DMCA; the SSSCA breaks it completely. It is purely and specifically for the narrow benefit of a few large publishing houses who fear that digital technology will break both their stranglehold on the authors and music-writers and their captivation of the public at large. (Note that the SSSCA's provision for setting "standards" has the effect of freezing out both writers and the general public.)
4. Over-breadth and Vagueness: Finally, Sen. Hollings himself has admitted in interviews with Wired magazine that the provisions are deliberately vague, in order to get a bill passed with provisions that may be applied far more broadly than Congress intends or believes reasonable. Congress should not permit itself to be so deceived.
C. Needed Copyright Reforms.
There are reforms that do need to be made in copyright law; let me suggest that any copyright bill should be amended to include at least the following:
D. Conclusion
You have sworn to uphold the Constitution of the United States. Copyright law should be returned to its Constitutional limits.
I want a cluster of Palomino'ed 420's running Mosix scalable linux clustering (see http://www.mosix.cs.huji.ac.il/) to do my meteorology/air quality forecasts (see http://envpro.ncsc.org/projects/SECMEP/secmep.html with.
Unfortunately, this involves solving simultaneous number-theory equations, multiple equations of the sort that would be necessary to break the code algorithmically in the first place by calculating private keys from public keys. If it is computationally infeasible to do that, what you suggest is far harder!
True. At least for its first thousand years.
In
this article in the Washington Times, economist Bruce Bartlett notes,
And neo-con economist Jude Wanniski is all the time quoting one of the twelfth-century Arab political philosophers...
As it happens, this is Hollywood movie fiction rather than the actual physics of the situation. Sorry.
There were two partial victories that day: because of them, the White House and the Capitol are intact (but rather the Pentagon and some Pennsylvania countryside were hit). The only thing that could have saved the World Trade Towers would have been passengers willing to take out the terrorists (hopefully with weapons adequate to the task) -- ESR is right about that. And (as others have observed), if this had been tried during the forties or fifties, the passengers would have been a lot more willing to take on the terrorists than they are now.
Treat it as an ecology-modeling problem, with populations of terrorists and citizens, with some fraction of the latter armed. Under all realistic initial conditions (citizen population much larger than terrorist population), where the armed fraction is positive, the terrorists get killed off and the situation assymptotically tends to negligible terrorist activity. The bloody-minmded way to think about is is that quite a bit of damage may be done while achieving this limit, but (realistically) you do run out of terrorists before running out of citizens.
And this admittedly-oversimplified kind of model ignores an important psychological impact: the last thing a terrorist wants to do is to appear stupid and futile: