You guys are absolutely insane if you think Celine or any other artist is going to see a cent of this money.
Huh? What are you talking about? Of course artists are going to see money from this, just like they see money from the other fees that are collected.
Poor Celine, she only got $75 million dollars as a signing bonus for her 1997 Sony contract. Boo hoo, she's crying all the way to the bank about how the record companies are ripping her off. She'd be much better off if she just gave her music away and asked for donations, like Mandrake Linux. Wow, that's a great idea!
Blank videocasette tapes in the US are sold with a portion of sales going to the MPAA for lost revenue due to piracy.
No, sorry, althought the MPAA has lobbied for this many times, it has not passed. I know it's dogma on Slashdot that big business gets whatever legislation they want, it's just not so.
The sad thing about all of this is that most of the independent labels with bands worth pirating wouldn't see a dime from this outrageously high tax, and I severely doubt that, say, Qbert, DJ Seishi, or Courtney Love will get their fair share. Do artists ever get a cut from the RIAA?
From http://www.cpcc.ca/English/FAQ/faq.html "CPCC and its four member collectives represent authors, composers, music publishers, performing artists and both major and independent record labels. For membership information, please contact CMRRA, NRCC, SODRAC and SOCAN directly."
I haven't found out yet how the money is divided. In the U. S., the money from radio station copyright licensing goes directly to ASCAP and BMI, not to the record companies. Again, I'm sorry to dispel the Slashdot mythology, but the artist does not get screwed every time.
Incidentally, you might be interested to know that the closest thing to total-free-market libertarianism that has occurred so far in western society (UK, 18th century) resulted in MASS poverty, and the price of bread rising above levels the vast majority of the population could afford.
Yeah, right, how about any kind of reference to back this up. Actually, the reverse is true:
From http://www.historyguide.org/intellect/lecture17a.h tml: "The result of these developments taken together was a period of high productivity and low food prices. And this, in turn, meant that the typical English family did not have to spend almost everything it earned on bread (as was the case in France before 1789), and instead could purchase manufactured goods."
Under totally free markets, people 'compete' until there is no time/money left over after production to inject back into the economy or use to enjoy said fruits of the system.
That's a novel theory; unfortunately for you, history shows the exact opposite.
Yet another symptom of the corporatizing of America. If you have money, you win.
Ummm...no. He lost because he didn't show up. That's true in any civil trial, no matter who has money.
Instead of just whining about "corporate America", we could talk about reforms that might make a difference. For example, if it's true that he didn't know about the lawsuit, we could require that a process server deliver the notice in person, or that the notice be sent by the clerk of the court with a return receipt required.
Or, in general, we could look at reforms that discourage meritless lawsuits. Most other countries have limits on judgments, rules where the loser pays the legal costs, or other rules. Of course, millionaire lawyers like Ralph Nader are against these rules. We won't mention how much money the trial lawyers give to the Democratic Party, because they're not big corporations, so they must be okay.
This is not a new problem. In ancient Athens, there would be a large jury for a trial. If the plaintiff got over half the votes, he won. But, if he didn't get at least 10% (I think that was the percent) of the votes, he would have to pay the defendant.
But, go on, whine about "corporatizing of America", whatever that means.
Advertising is the hemoragging wound of capitalism: the only way to compete with advertising is to advertise in response. The net result is higher prices without value, a completely useless sector of the economy, and a lot of cultural pollution.
The FTC did studies about twenty years ago and found that prices were lower for eyeglasses in states that permitted advertising of prescription eyeglasses. One thing that gets advertised is prices, which results in more competition.
Also, although much advertising is image and puffery, there is also a lot of valuable information conveyed in ads. I've learned a lot about new products and product features from ads.
The problem with this assumption is that you don't know what other things you're screening out when you screen out the disease. A somewhat contrived example of this is Stephen Hawking. Of course no really knows the cause of ALS, but suppose it turns out to be genetic. Stephen Hawking would have been screened out of existance, and consequently all of his contributions to science.
Or let the guy who wrote "Jose Chung's From Outer Space" write it
That's Darin Morgan, who also wrote the Episodes Humbug (you know, the hilarious one set in the town of retired sideshow freaks), War of the Coprophages (good, not great), and Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose (hilarious, moving, Emmy-award-winning).
He also appearead as Eddie Van Blundht in the episode Small Potatoes, which he did not write.
The raw cost of DRAM ($/MB) is still much higher, but that is not the complete analysis. Database god Jim Gray's analysis shows that you should keep data in memory if it is going to be accessed every five minutes or less.
Schnier never said SOAP was a Microsoft product he said "Implementation of Microsoft SOAP...." The reason why web services are so convienent is because they can bypass inconvienent security devices by tunneling through other protocols such as HTTP/HTTPS. Embedding a control protocol (SOAP) in a data protocol (HTTP) is just as bad (security-wise) as macros in email documents.
There is nothing inherent in HTTP being a "data protocol". It is just a communication protocol. It hasn't been just a data protocol since the first CGI program was written.
Schneier might as well say, don't let any PHP progams run as SOAP. The security issues are identical. Yes, if you write a bad PHP program (or ASP or Perl or whatever you write active web content in), you are potentially compromising the web server. SOAP is no more powerful, but it is a lot more structured.
Of course, it goes without saying that everyone should still use their local mirror, particularly as kernel.org will only be accessible to mirrors for the forseeable future
I've thought a bit about this. It seems that every separate open-source project has to set up their own mirrors, there is no automatic system for finding "nearby" connections or for load-balancing, and volunteering for being a mirror can cause you to incur quite a bit of bandwidth costs.
I would be willing to pay a modest fee for downloads. I don't know if many of the other open-source fans (notorious cheapskates) would be willing, but if they were:
A site like SourceForge could take the lead.
Anybody who wants could have their software hosted there.
Anybody who wants to would create an account to download.
Charges would be proportional to bandwidth used, possibly off-peak times lower.
SourceForge (or whoever) could subcontract connections to Akamai, Connxion, or others.
Possibly a portion of the money collected could go to the creators of the software, the big problem being how to decide how the money gets divided for projects with many contributors or a lot of code re-use.
Anybody could still distribute independently. It would not (could not) be an exclusive arrangement.
Get ready to see your programming job get exported to India and China. Drop your mythical notions that all people in these countries know how to do is customer support.
Many programming jobs are internal to companies and require a lot of communication with other workers. I doubt these jobs will be exported. Most of the work I've heard being successfully exported to India involve porting large applications sytems--either from one OS to another or one language to another.
It may be that communications are too important for externally-sold software, also. After all, Microsoft keeps all its programmers in one city. It doesn't even export jobs to Oregon.
Also, don't forget as the productivity of Indian and Chinese workers rises, the wages in those countries will rise. Japan was once a low-wage country.
On top of that, get ready to be "Moore's law'd'" out of most other programming jobs you might be thinking of taking - by 2015 computers will be fast enough that point-and-drool paint-by-numbers tools will be available to rapidly and idiotically autogenerate most of the code you write today with no discernable performance loss.
That's what they said about Fortran...then COBOL... then "4GL" reporting and forms programs. Seriously!
Another question is how do you keep the site marked, and perceived as dangerous, for 10K years? What message will last through whatever potential societal chaos/collapse/evolution is a'comin?
You don't, but it doesn't really matter. The stuff that is most radioactive decays very rapidly, so it's not really all that dangerous.
Anyway, it's bogus to assume that future civilizations are going to be more ignorant than we are. We can't avoid all possible dangers to the future citizens of the world. If civilization collapses and people are unable to read English or use Geiger counters, I think they have bigger problems than worrying about one dangerous site.
People lose their perspective when it comes to nuclear energy. Over 1,000 people a year die because of the relatively mild CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Efficiency) standards, yet we're supposed to worry about one reckless miner 10,000 years from now?
By the way, the 1,000 people per year is a conservative estimate, it is NOT auto-industry hype and it is NOT because large cars plow into small cars. The last time I mentioned this on slashdot, somebody ignorantly said it was and he was, of course, moderated up as insightful. Here's a good article from USA Today about this issue.
I haven't read the book, but I did hear Kasanoff last week on the Todd Mundt Show and he was very reasonable about privacy. He said that one aspect of personalization was providing the level of privacy that the customer wants, and that's something that is possible with the current technology.
There are a lot of aspects to the field that haven't changed much in the last 20-30 years. For example:
The UNIX shell
C
C++
Motif(?)
Berkeley Sockets/TCP
SQL
I hate to disappoint you, but most of these did not exist thirty years ago (1971!), some barely existed 20 years ago, and all have significantly changed since then.
In 1981, you had to write to Bjarne Stroustrup to get 'ClassC', which is what C++ was called at the time--very experimental. SQL was not very widespread and was much less mature than now. TCP existed but everyone expected it to be replaced by the OSI protocols when they were done. When did Motif come out? I think it was after 1981.
From chrisd: I bet anyday that the RIAA will sue cisco for making routers that could be used to infringe.
The RIAA is very careful to only pick on groups that can't afford better lawyers than they can. I wish they would sue; Cisco might well succeed in creating some sort of binding precedent that would put a stop to all this nonsense. The RIAA will never do that, of course...
What crap! The law makes the distinction all the time between things whose main use is illegal and things that incidentally can be used for breaking the law. Laws against selling burglary tools have not been used to prosecute Ace Hardware.
All the cases Slashdot has covered--DeCSS, Napster, Sklyarov, KazaA, the one in Korea--are programs designed primarily to enable mass copyright infringement, even though they also have non-infringing uses. Get over this straw man argument that next they'll be coming after Cisco and FTP. It's nonsense.
So now, instead of putting directors and officers in jail for legitimate legal transgressions, environmental damage, collusion, union-busting, bribery, corruption and the like, which people have been demanding. Instead the slugs in the corporate offices hide behind SantaClaraCounty vs. Southern Pacific Railroad [iiipublishing.com], officer non-liability, and various other bits of ill-logic
Corporate officers, directors, and employees are liable (civilly and criminally) for their own actions. They can be liable for the actions of subordinates if they knew about them or (rarely) if the they should have known about them.
Corporate personhood is a limited legal doctrine which asserts that corporations have equal protection under the law and the right to due process of law. That's it.
It has nothing to do with limitations on sharehold liability (which do exist) or non-existant limitations on the liability of corporate officers.
It hit me then that the whole discipline of estimating cost completion is all bullshit. You might as well be estimating with a crystal ball or divining the future with chicken bones. Since I've been working, the best advice I've gotten so far has been "take how long you think it'll take and double it". There is a methodology which works pretty well within its limits. That is function point estimating. If the requirements of the project are well-defined enough to use it, then the estimates are not complete bullshit. See, for example, the book Function Point Analysis[goatse.cx]
The paper that started this Slashdot discussion is sort of silly, but it does reference a good empirical work in the CACM which finds that function point analysis works and most other methods don't.
Of course there are projects which have vague, always-changing requirements that even this wouldn't work.
DRM usually relies on Encryption. Encryption itself has always depended on evolution. The idea that algorythms that need a system at least several orders more powerful than the one required to encrypt the data to break the data (without the key). DRM is a logistical nightmere, as it requires being able to run on last years hardware and next years regardless of the system invented next year.
No, that is not the problem. Encryption, when used to keep third party eavesdroppers without the key from understanding your communications, works just fine.
The problem is that DRM tries to keep the intended recipient, who must have the key (in a hidden form), from sharing the information. That is another problem and it is one that encryption is not good for.
Read this article: F.B.I. Limited Inquiry of Man Now a Suspect in the Attacks. The F.B.I couldn't examine his computer or phone records because they couldn't show beforehand that he was a foreign agent. They couldn't get the warrants under a criminal investigation because "a criminal investigation would prohibit it from obtaining approval for a warrant under the surveillance act allowing covert intelligence gathering and searches related to Mr. Moussaoui."
This is something the ACLU insists on, even though it greatly limits the authorities. Very likely, this attack would have been prevented if the laws had been just slightly different. Some of the changes make a great deal of sense, such as roving wiretaps. It would have been more convincing to me if the ACLU had suggested some better alternatives. As to those who insist a police state is just around the corner: BULLSHIT!!. Every country in western Europe has different laws about how the police conduct searches. Not one of them is a police state. We can make rational adjustments in our laws. It's fine to point out flaws in the legislation, but slashdotters sound like they are against any changes, which is just paranoid.
What if a camera just happened to be pointed towards somebodys window... Could be just some guy, or maybe someone they suspect of something but can't get a warrant to watch
Police don't need a warrant to watch the outside of someone's house or look in through an open window. That's what a lot of us just don't get: these cameras are in public and you don't have an expectation of privacy now.
What's remarkable about this article is that it fails to identify any harm whatsoever that has come about because of these cameras.
What is scaring you guys with these proposals??? The FBI may scan your emails? Log your web-traffic? What about every curious sys. admin. in every ISP that your traffic goes throu? They all already have the power to do this.
They already have the ability to do this, but not the legal right without a warrant (or at least it can't be used as evidence). Just because it's in plain text does not mean you have no rights protecting you.
They already have the ability to listen in on your phone line, but they do not have the legal right to do so without a warrant. This is not much different, really.
Actually, there is a legal distinction made between the records of whom you called and the content of the conversations. The police just have to get a subpoena for phone company records, not a search warrant.
As I understand it (IANAL), the courts have ruled that you don't have an expectation of privacy for these records, or at least not the same level of privacy as the content of the conversations.
Slashdot Mirror
Huh? What are you talking about? Of course artists are going to see money from this, just like they see money from the other fees that are collected.
Poor Celine, she only got $75 million dollars as a signing bonus for her 1997 Sony contract. Boo hoo, she's crying all the way to the bank about how the record companies are ripping her off. She'd be much better off if she just gave her music away and asked for donations, like Mandrake Linux. Wow, that's a great idea!
No, sorry, althought the MPAA has lobbied for this many times, it has not passed. I know it's dogma on Slashdot that big business gets whatever legislation they want, it's just not so.
From http://www.cpcc.ca/English/FAQ/faq.html
"CPCC and its four member collectives represent authors, composers, music publishers, performing artists and both major and independent record labels. For membership information, please contact CMRRA, NRCC, SODRAC and SOCAN directly."
I haven't found out yet how the money is divided. In the U. S., the money from radio station copyright licensing goes directly to ASCAP and BMI, not to the record companies. Again, I'm sorry to dispel the Slashdot mythology, but the artist does not get screwed every time.
Yeah, right, how about any kind of reference to back this up. Actually, the reverse is true:
From http://www.historyguide.org/intellect/lecture17a.
That's a novel theory; unfortunately for you, history shows the exact opposite.
Instead of just whining about "corporate America", we could talk about reforms that might make a difference. For example, if it's true that he didn't know about the lawsuit, we could require that a process server deliver the notice in person, or that the notice be sent by the clerk of the court with a return receipt required.
Or, in general, we could look at reforms that discourage meritless lawsuits. Most other countries have limits on judgments, rules where the loser pays the legal costs, or other rules. Of course, millionaire lawyers like Ralph Nader are against these rules. We won't mention how much money the trial lawyers give to the Democratic Party, because they're not big corporations, so they must be okay.
This is not a new problem. In ancient Athens, there would be a large jury for a trial. If the plaintiff got over half the votes, he won. But, if he didn't get at least 10% (I think that was the percent) of the votes, he would have to pay the defendant.
But, go on, whine about "corporatizing of America", whatever that means.
The FTC did studies about twenty years ago and found that prices were lower for eyeglasses in states that permitted advertising of prescription eyeglasses. One thing that gets advertised is prices, which results in more competition.
Also, although much advertising is image and puffery, there is also a lot of valuable information conveyed in ads. I've learned a lot about new products and product features from ads.
Hawking believes strongly in genetic engineering.
That's Darin Morgan, who also wrote the Episodes Humbug (you know, the hilarious one set in the town of retired sideshow freaks), War of the Coprophages (good, not great), and Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose (hilarious, moving, Emmy-award-winning).
He also appearead as Eddie Van Blundht in the episode Small Potatoes, which he did not write.
Farsite
Butler Lampson, for papers on Byzantine reliability, mostly based on the work of
Leslie Lamport
See The Five-Minute Rule, ten years later (Word Doc) or it's HTML-ified Google Cache
There is nothing inherent in HTTP being a "data protocol". It is just a communication protocol. It hasn't been just a data protocol since the first CGI program was written.
Schneier might as well say, don't let any PHP progams run as SOAP. The security issues are identical. Yes, if you write a bad PHP program (or ASP or Perl or whatever you write active web content in), you are potentially compromising the web server. SOAP is no more powerful, but it is a lot more structured.
I've thought a bit about this. It seems that every separate open-source project has to set up their own mirrors, there is no automatic system for finding "nearby" connections or for load-balancing, and volunteering for being a mirror can cause you to incur quite a bit of bandwidth costs.
I would be willing to pay a modest fee for downloads. I don't know if many of the other open-source fans (notorious cheapskates) would be willing, but if they were:
Many programming jobs are internal to companies and require a lot of communication with other workers. I doubt these jobs will be exported. Most of the work I've heard being successfully exported to India involve porting large applications sytems--either from one OS to another or one language to another.
It may be that communications are too important for externally-sold software, also. After all, Microsoft keeps all its programmers in one city. It doesn't even export jobs to Oregon.
Also, don't forget as the productivity of Indian and Chinese workers rises, the wages in those countries will rise. Japan was once a low-wage country.
That's what they said about Fortran...then COBOL... then "4GL" reporting and forms programs. Seriously!
You don't, but it doesn't really matter. The stuff that is most radioactive decays very rapidly, so it's not really all that dangerous.
Anyway, it's bogus to assume that future civilizations are going to be more ignorant than we are. We can't avoid all possible dangers to the future citizens of the world. If civilization collapses and people are unable to read English or use Geiger counters, I think they have bigger problems than worrying about one dangerous site.
People lose their perspective when it comes to nuclear energy. Over 1,000 people a year die because of the relatively mild CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Efficiency) standards, yet we're supposed to worry about one reckless miner 10,000 years from now?
By the way, the 1,000 people per year is a conservative estimate, it is NOT auto-industry hype and it is NOT because large cars plow into small cars. The last time I mentioned this on slashdot, somebody ignorantly said it was and he was, of course, moderated up as insightful. Here's a good article from USA Today about this issue.
I haven't read the book, but I did hear Kasanoff last week on the Todd Mundt Show and he was very reasonable about privacy. He said that one aspect of personalization was providing the level of privacy that the customer wants, and that's something that is possible with the current technology.
Fortunately, the Soviet Union was hiring at the time, and with their experience...
I hate to disappoint you, but most of these did not exist thirty years ago (1971!), some barely existed 20 years ago, and all have significantly changed since then.
In 1981, you had to write to Bjarne Stroustrup to get 'ClassC', which is what C++ was called at the time--very experimental. SQL was not very widespread and was much less mature than now. TCP existed but everyone expected it to be replaced by the OSI protocols when they were done. When did Motif come out? I think it was after 1981.
Well, it might, except that there hasn't been a huge upswing in cancer over the last 40 years, except for lung cancer caused by smoking.
Compare the tables for 1950-1969 and 1970-1994:
1970-94
1950-1969
These are age-adjusted rates, of course, since older people get more cancers.
What crap! The law makes the distinction all the time between things whose main use is illegal and things that incidentally can be used for breaking the law. Laws against selling burglary tools have not been used to prosecute Ace Hardware.
All the cases Slashdot has covered--DeCSS, Napster, Sklyarov, KazaA, the one in Korea--are programs designed primarily to enable mass copyright infringement, even though they also have non-infringing uses. Get over this straw man argument that next they'll be coming after Cisco and FTP. It's nonsense.
Corporate officers, directors, and employees are liable (civilly and criminally) for their own actions. They can be liable for the actions of subordinates if they knew about them or (rarely) if the they should have known about them.
Corporate personhood is a limited legal doctrine which asserts that corporations have equal protection under the law and the right to due process of law. That's it.
It has nothing to do with limitations on sharehold liability (which do exist) or non-existant limitations on the liability of corporate officers.
There is a methodology which works pretty well within its limits. That is function point estimating. If the requirements of the project are well-defined enough to use it, then the estimates are not complete bullshit. See, for example, the book Function Point Analysis[goatse.cx]
The paper that started this Slashdot discussion is sort of silly, but it does reference a good empirical work in the CACM which finds that function point analysis works and most other methods don't.
Of course there are projects which have vague, always-changing requirements that even this wouldn't work.
Kuwait was about oil, but none of the other U.S. military actions of the last few decades have been about oil--Lebanon, Somalia, Haiti, Kosovo.
A pipeline across Afghanistan would be extremely costly and impossible to defend. It's just the black helicopter set that takes this idea seriously.
No, that is not the problem. Encryption, when used to keep third party eavesdroppers without the key from understanding your communications, works just fine.
The problem is that DRM tries to keep the intended recipient, who must have the key (in a hidden form), from sharing the information. That is another problem and it is one that encryption is not good for.
This is something the ACLU insists on, even though it greatly limits the authorities. Very likely, this attack would have been prevented if the laws had been just slightly different. Some of the changes make a great deal of sense, such as roving wiretaps. It would have been more convincing to me if the ACLU had suggested some better alternatives. As to those who insist a police state is just around the corner: BULLSHIT!!. Every country in western Europe has different laws about how the police conduct searches. Not one of them is a police state. We can make rational adjustments in our laws. It's fine to point out flaws in the legislation, but slashdotters sound like they are against any changes, which is just paranoid.
Police don't need a warrant to watch the outside of someone's house or look in through an open window. That's what a lot of us just don't get: these cameras are in public and you don't have an expectation of privacy now.
What's remarkable about this article is that it fails to identify any harm whatsoever that has come about because of these cameras.
Actually, there is a legal distinction made between the records of whom you called and the content of the conversations. The police just have to get a subpoena for phone company records, not a search warrant.
As I understand it (IANAL), the courts have ruled that you don't have an expectation of privacy for these records, or at least not the same level of privacy as the content of the conversations.