> All the more shameful is Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu and the rest of the putatively democratic ANC's refusal to speak out against Mugabe and his thugs.
> Chances are, in my opinion, America _was_ atlantis
I think Crete and Santorini are a considerably better bet if you're looking for the origins of the Atlantis myth.
They're closer to where the myth grew up, they had a flourishing civilisation at the right time and it probably was wiped out by natural disaster (volcanic explosion on Santorini, leading to a tidal wave hitting Crete). You can visit these places and look at rather ancient ruins, and wonder if these are the places which inspired the story.
Putting the Spanish arrival in America "at least a millenium" later is an underestimate, two to three millenia might be a bit closer.
It is available and it does work; but where is the announcement? http://www.debian.org/security/ claims to correct most problems "with 48 hours", but we've yet to see any mention of this subject (at least at time of writing).
It's true that Netscape lives in non-free and thus isn't officially part of Debian, but in my opinion if you distribute any software, you should make at least some effort to keep your users informed when you discover a problem with it.
This idea is at least somewhat testable: is anyone making a living from shareware? The answer to that should provide a hint as to whether the same model could work more globally.
(Personally I prefer the "pretend there's no problem" approach.)
Looking beyond the specific case to the general question...
It's surely news to nobody that traditional approaches to copyright don't mix well with the net. What possible solutions to this are there?
We can abandon the notion of copyright. That raises the question of how creators are to be compensated. Personally I give some of the software and fiction I've created away - but not everyone is happy with this, and I wouldn't be happy if some of my favourite authors (say) had to gave up writing because they couldn't make a living from it.
The Street Performer Protocol will doubtless be familiar. That's one approach that might be useful. Another approaches might be for the state to support artists - this already happens to an extent anyway in some countries, but has the difficulty that you end up with a bias towards whatever the state (or its agents) prefer. (But would that be worse than a bias towards what the record companies prefer?) You have to collect the money, too, and new taxes are rarely popular.
We could do it through voluntary donations - charity, essentially - but that could be a bit hit-and-miss.
If we want to keep the notion of copyright, we could enforce it very strictly. But that would be expensive and intrusive even to do badly, and is surely impossible to do well.
We could all fit hardware-supported digital rights management subsystems to our computers, but that would again be intrusive and may be hard or impossible to do well; it'd only take one "chipped" PCs for the copyrighted cats to get out of the bag.
One can imagine a system where the content provider distributes (via the net, radio, etc) encrypted content to a tamper-proof player (hifi, TV, walkman, toaster, etc) in your home that they've sold, rented or just given you, and charges micropayments for each performance. The infrastructure costs would be hideous, though, as would be the impact on individual choice of playback equipment, and again once unencrypted versions of the content becomes available the whole systems falls apart.
We could just ignore the problem, and trust that unauthorized copying isn't such a huge problem after all. This might even be true; I still buy music CDs despite knowing that digital copies are often (illegally) available for nothing, for example.
cable modems are [...] vapourware in this part of the country
We've found that the NTL cable modem service has mostly worked. There've been a couple of outages a few hours long, and the performance was a bit poor the other night - I think the connection from Cambridge to London is getting a bit full.
NTL have taken quite a bit of flack for the problems with providing free dialup, but personally I'm fairly happy with them at the moment; web browsing with graphics turned on is a joy compared to dialup, and interactive logins are snappy and responsive.
Are they saying that human consciousness is just a program running on biological hardware?
That's quite a common view. If you disagree with it - if you think there is a "soul", for want of a better word - then it'd be interesting to know what evidence for the existence of a soul you think there is. I would suggest that in fact there isn't any...
SF has featured artificial minds of various kinds for years and years, yet nothing we see today even approaches simulating a mind which is remotely comparable to a human brain. (Feel free to point out counterexamples...)
As for the proposition that we'll have trouble holding our own, I find this rather doubtful; if the worst comes to the worst, we'll still control the physical layer.
And these "known opinions" you think he holds would be...?
AIUI he uses Linux himself, and my impression that he has nothing against it. Possibly you're referring to the naming controversy; but anyone with two brain cells to rub together can see that one's opinions about the name of a thing can be quite separate from any other opinions about it.
If you have off-site backups, it doesn't matter too much if your data is destroyed.
The original claim that Harvard were going to destroy the site and its backups just emphasizes the point that you need off-sites which are under different administrative control than the originals, as well as at a physically different location.
Why does free software (or whatever you want to call it) need to be marketed? There was plenty of readily available good free software before ESR started his crusade, and frankly Linux and FreeBSD (to pick a couple of well-known examples) seem pretty much able to sell themselves.
Put bluntly: what has ESR done for the rest of us?
1(1)(b) and 1(1)(c) still apply because publication involves many people other than the publisher. For example in the case of a newspaper then it may involve a printing company, a distributor, and many newsagents. In the case of a Usenet posting, it involves the ISPs that carry the posting.
If you distribute a libelous document then your actions have caused damage to the victim that would not have occurred had you not done so. So, the act makes it possible to sue someone who knowingly does this.
Note that it could easily be much stricter - it could make it possible to sue people even if they are unknowingly responsible for the distribution of libelous material. Then Usenet would really be impossible in the UK - but so would snailmail; traditionally the postman doesn't open letters before delivering them.
In the UK, delivering a newspaper which you knew to contain defamatory remarks would indeed be illegal. Yes, our libel laws really do allow the libelled party to go after the distributors, if the distributors know that they are distributing libellous material.
IANAL, but I can at least read the facts of the case; I would urge other posters to do likewise.
I addressed the question about nuisance complaints in another posting. We had a similar fuss in this country about obscenity on Usenet a year or two back; it's long since been something of a non-question, thanks to the efforts of the IWF. All we need now is a similar structure for dealing with claims of libel (and if done right it will benefit both ISPs and victims of libel).
I don't think it's as bad as you think. In the case at hand, the article in question was a forgery and clearly defamatory; as such I can't imagine why an ISP would mind removing it once notified, and I find Demon's behaviour puzzling.
The bulk of articles on Usenet are, in contrast, clearly not defamatory of anyone; and if someone tries to make a nuisance of themselves by threatening to sue, the result of ignoring them will be either (a) nothing or (b) a libel case which the ISP wins, plus a bankrupt nuisance.
(Of course not all operators of news servers are in a position to defend themselves against a bogus libel action; but see my remarks below.)
The important case of course is where it is not clear whether an article which is the subject of a complaint is defamatory. My suspicion is that these will be few in number - meaning that it's not going to be a large burden to call in a lawyer to check them over, and not too disastrous if occasionally an ISP errs on the side of caution.
If this suspicion turns out to be wrong then clearly some alternative approach is needed. But the same laws have applied to newspapers and their distributors without destroying the industry; I don't see that there's any reason to believe they'll destroy the net in the UK either.
That said - the high cost even of defending against legal action does mean that it can be too easy for the rich to abuse UK libel law to silence poorer critics, and I think this should be reformed. This is hardly a problem unique to Usenet however - so far it has been much more relevant to print media .
Personally, I try to write "bits" or "bytes" explicitly, so that there's no possibility of confusion. (Except of course there is, because sometimes "mega" means 2^20, and sometimes it means 10^6.)
http://www.bafug.org/NewRecord.html implies that the amount of data shifted really was 1.39*10^12 bytes in a day, which I reckon comes to around 15 megabytes a second on average.
Slashdot Mirror
> All the more shameful is Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu and the rest of the putatively democratic ANC's refusal to speak out against Mugabe and his thugs.
e ws id_739000/739258.stm
e ws id_1754000/1754307.stm
They are not entirely silent, for example:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/africa/n
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/africa/n
> Chances are, in my opinion, America _was_ atlantis
I think Crete and Santorini are a considerably better bet if you're looking for the origins of the Atlantis myth.
They're closer to where the myth grew up, they had a flourishing civilisation at the right time and it probably was wiped out by natural disaster (volcanic explosion on Santorini, leading to a tidal wave hitting Crete). You can visit these places and look at rather ancient ruins, and wonder if these are the places which inspired the story.
Putting the Spanish arrival in America "at least a millenium" later is an underestimate, two to three millenia might be a bit closer.
> And like the HURD, it's software that's here right now, and isn't vapourware.
This must be a curious definition of "vapourware"; I clearly remember downloading and running Hurd some years ago.
It is available and it does work; but where is the announcement? http://www.debian.org/security/ claims to correct most problems "with 48 hours", but we've yet to see any mention of this subject (at least at time of writing).
It's true that Netscape lives in non-free and thus isn't officially part of Debian, but in my opinion if you distribute any software, you should make at least some effort to keep your users informed when you discover a problem with it.
This idea is at least somewhat testable: is anyone making a living from shareware? The answer to that should provide a hint as to whether the same model could work more globally.
(Personally I prefer the "pretend there's no problem" approach.)
Looking beyond the specific case to the general question...
It's surely news to nobody that traditional approaches to copyright don't mix well with the net. What possible solutions to this are there?
We can abandon the notion of copyright. That raises the question of how creators are to be compensated. Personally I give some of the software and fiction I've created away - but not everyone is happy with this, and I wouldn't be happy if some of my favourite authors (say) had to gave up writing because they couldn't make a living from it.
The Street Performer Protocol will doubtless be familiar. That's one approach that might be useful. Another approaches might be for the state to support artists - this already happens to an extent anyway in some countries, but has the difficulty that you end up with a bias towards whatever the state (or its agents) prefer. (But would that be worse than a bias towards what the record companies prefer?) You have to collect the money, too, and new taxes are rarely popular.
We could do it through voluntary donations - charity, essentially - but that could be a bit hit-and-miss.
If we want to keep the notion of copyright, we could enforce it very strictly. But that would be expensive and intrusive even to do badly, and is surely impossible to do well.
We could all fit hardware-supported digital rights management subsystems to our computers, but that would again be intrusive and may be hard or impossible to do well; it'd only take one "chipped" PCs for the copyrighted cats to get out of the bag.
One can imagine a system where the content provider distributes (via the net, radio, etc) encrypted content to a tamper-proof player (hifi, TV, walkman, toaster, etc) in your home that they've sold, rented or just given you, and charges micropayments for each performance. The infrastructure costs would be hideous, though, as would be the impact on individual choice of playback equipment, and again once unencrypted versions of the content becomes available the whole systems falls apart.
We could just ignore the problem, and trust that unauthorized copying isn't such a huge problem after all. This might even be true; I still buy music CDs despite knowing that digital copies are often (illegally) available for nothing, for example.
Any other suggestions?
cable modems are [...] vapourware in this part of the country
We've found that the NTL cable modem service has mostly worked. There've been a couple of outages a few hours long, and the performance was a bit poor the other night - I think the connection from Cambridge to London is getting a bit full.
NTL have taken quite a bit of flack for the problems with providing free dialup, but personally I'm fairly happy with them at the moment; web browsing with graphics turned on is a joy compared to dialup, and interactive logins are snappy and responsive.
Are they saying that human consciousness is just a program running on biological hardware?
That's quite a common view. If you disagree with it - if you think there is a "soul", for want of a better word - then it'd be interesting to know what evidence for the existence of a soul you think there is. I would suggest that in fact there isn't any...
Computing has overtaken Sci-Fi.
SF has featured artificial minds of various kinds for years and years, yet nothing we see today even approaches simulating a mind which is remotely comparable to a human brain. (Feel free to point out counterexamples...)
As for the proposition that we'll have trouble holding our own, I find this rather doubtful; if the worst comes to the worst, we'll still control the physical layer.
Unfortunately even with source it's not quite that simple; consider file systems and network protocols which encode times and 32 bit fields.
Which comments were you thinking of? Most of the comments with negative score would appear to be nothing more constructive than random abuse.
And these "known opinions" you think he holds would be...?
AIUI he uses Linux himself, and my impression that he has nothing against it. Possibly you're referring to the naming controversy; but anyone with two brain cells to rub together can see that one's opinions about the name of a thing can be quite separate from any other opinions about it.
If you have off-site backups, it doesn't matter too much if your data is destroyed.
The original claim that Harvard were going to destroy the site and its backups just emphasizes the point that you need off-sites which are under different administrative control than the originals, as well as at a physically different location.
Why does free software (or whatever you want to call it) need to be marketed? There was plenty of readily available good free software before ESR started his crusade, and frankly Linux and FreeBSD (to pick a couple of well-known examples) seem pretty much able to sell themselves.
Put bluntly: what has ESR done for the rest of us?
1(1)(b) and 1(1)(c) still apply because publication involves many people other than the publisher. For example in the case of a newspaper then it may involve a printing company, a distributor, and many newsagents. In the case of a Usenet posting, it involves the ISPs that carry the posting.
If you distribute a libelous document then your actions have caused damage to the victim that would not have occurred had you not done so. So, the act makes it possible to sue someone who knowingly does this.
Note that it could easily be much stricter - it could make it possible to sue people even if they are unknowingly responsible for the distribution of libelous material. Then Usenet would really be impossible in the UK - but so would snailmail; traditionally the postman doesn't open letters before delivering them.
I don't have any kind of legal background.
In the UK, delivering a newspaper which you knew to contain defamatory remarks would indeed be illegal. Yes, our libel laws really do allow the libelled party to go after the distributors, if the distributors know that they are distributing libellous material.
See http://www.courtservice.gov.uk/godfrey2 .htm for more details.
IANAL, but I can at least read the facts of the case; I would urge other posters to do likewise.
I addressed the question about nuisance complaints in another posting. We had a similar fuss in this country about obscenity on Usenet a year or two back; it's long since been something of a non-question, thanks to the efforts of the IWF. All we need now is a similar structure for dealing with claims of libel (and if done right it will benefit both ISPs and victims of libel).
Have a look at http://www.courtservice.gov.uk/godfrey2 .htm. In particular see paragraphs 19 and 20.
I don't think it's as bad as you think. In the case at hand, the article in question was a forgery and clearly defamatory; as such I can't imagine why an ISP would mind removing it once notified, and I find Demon's behaviour puzzling.
The bulk of articles on Usenet are, in contrast, clearly not defamatory of anyone; and if someone tries to make a nuisance of themselves by threatening to sue, the result of ignoring them will be either (a) nothing or (b) a libel case which the ISP wins, plus a bankrupt nuisance.
(Of course not all operators of news servers are in a position to defend themselves against a bogus libel action; but see my remarks below.)
The important case of course is where it is not clear whether an article which is the subject of a complaint is defamatory. My suspicion is that these will be few in number - meaning that it's not going to be a large burden to call in a lawyer to check them over, and not too disastrous if occasionally an ISP errs on the side of caution.
If this suspicion turns out to be wrong then clearly some alternative approach is needed. But the same laws have applied to newspapers and their distributors without destroying the industry; I don't see that there's any reason to believe they'll destroy the net in the UK either.
That said - the high cost even of defending against legal action does mean that it can be too easy for the rich to abuse UK libel law to silence poorer critics, and I think this should be reformed. This is hardly a problem unique to Usenet however - so far it has been much more relevant to print media .
Personally, I try to write "bits" or "bytes" explicitly, so that there's no possibility of confusion. (Except of course there is, because sometimes "mega" means 2^20, and sometimes it means 10^6.)
http://www.bafug.org/NewRecord.html implies that the amount of data shifted really was 1.39*10^12 bytes in a day, which I reckon comes to around 15 megabytes a second on average.
1.39 terabits/day wouldn't be news.
It wouldn't have to be GPL'd as such, just GPL-compatible - examples of such include the LGPL and the Xfree86 copyright.
IANAL so don't bet your house on this. l-)