This whole hoo-hah has gotten me to thinking, and something just came to me (forgive me if it has already been said).
The censorware "hit lists" are encrypted because the companies put a lot of work into compiling the lists and they don't want competetors to simply take their hard work and use it in another censorware engine. As compilations these lists are protected under copyright, yet the censorware companies did not trust the copyright laws to protect them from predation by competetors.
Now they are trying to use the same copyright laws to harass someone who has broken their little kiddy-corner code.
If they had just used the copyright laws the way they were intended to be used, this whole encryption deal would not even have been necessary and everyone would have benefited from the user community being able to comment on detected deficiencies in the lists. (No, not open source but peer review.)
Goliard wrote: "You, friend, are an accoustic musician, as am I."
I have also done much electronic music. I know what it's like to spend 26 hours in the studio to produce a minute of music... that I could never produce "live". I just could not see how to make money that way without resorting to using a state-issued monopoly where I was responsible for the enforcement of that monopoly.
I'm not just a geek. I'm also an author and a musician. From that perspective, here's my $0.02:
I can't see why I should be paid when someone listens to a recording of my music. I just can't see it. I get paid when I perform. People come to hear me play (or I'm paid by the owner of the venue). WHYINHELL should I expect to be paid when I'm not doing anything?
Recordings of my music may create demand for my live performances. Why should I do anything to reduce the distribution of recordings?
If I'm selling a recording, I expect to make good the cost of the media. Distribution on the 'net kinda makes that point moot:-)
My only concern are OTHER artists who play my material in live performance.
I enjoyed the article. Now I've got to go to my employer (a military branch of a major world government) and explain the numerous "Net Nanny" hits that reading this article generated. Argh!
Most of the examples in the paper seem to be "influencing other people by persuation" vs. "influencing the influencers by coercion".
Anonymity is a refuge, but it will always be necessary so long as there are people (organizations, governments) who will respond to ideas with coercion.
(Personal observation: I was quite amused to note the many examples of anonymous writings by the "Fathers of the American Revolution". I suppose that's why the US Gummint knows how effective anonymous communication is at toppling governments... )
We had a system with about 750,000 lines of assembler, doing some heavy-duty, real-time math modeling of oceans. The hardware was old. The contractor said they'd deliver a modern system with the code in C.
They wrote a converter that digested the assembler and produced C code... about 4 lines of C for each line of assembler code.
So a math calculation that could easily be written in 1 line of C took 30 or 40 lines of assembler which converted into 120+ lines of C. (Stop screaming!)
Their converter did not put the original source line as a comment in the new source. (Now you may scream!)
Now I gotta maintain this pile of compost. I'm looking for another job.
The first n years of my career were spent maintaining old code. Assembler. I vowed "I will write maintainable code".
Now I write good code. Maintainable. Well commented. Meaningful variable names. Nothing fancy. I know what it's like to revisit my code ten years later.
There is a problem, though.
Nobody else seems able to maintain my code. They just can't understand it.
Despite high-level pseudo-code algorithm descriptions, threaded comments, good up to date written documentation, they just can't wrap their tiny little heads around how I do things.
I can go back to something I wrote 15 years ago and fix problems without generating new ones. My code is robust enought that I can shovel out a few thousand lines and jam in another 10,000 lines, test it for a day or two and release it... and get no bug reports for another 5 years. I consider this to be maintainable code!
Go ahead... break all the rules suggested in the article. You may still produce code that other, lesser programmers simply can't cope with. The code is an expression from the mind of the person who wrote it... and sometimes writing to the lowest common denominator simply isn't possible.
And then they blame you for writing unmaintainable code.
His plan was that Epcot would be run by Imagineers and Disney executives, not elected representatives. He probably feared that the all-too-human inhabitants would ruin his technology.
Looks like he failed here, too. I dunno about the Imagineers, but it certainly looks like the execs didn't do a very good job.
Somebody thinks they are losing something. The whole business about copyright is just an attempt to (ab)use the law to let them keep that something.
Do the professors fear loss of income on future textbooks that they might write?
Do they think that the students who buy notes won't show up in class... and that somehow will impact their standing (feedback scores, exam result medians, etc.)?
Is there just competition in the notes-selling business? (A lot of comments seem to support this.)
I don't know and I don't think it matters.
I'm personally sick and tired of someone trotting out copyright law and trying to mould it to fit their hand so that they can use it as a club to beat off competition. There are 1,000,001 interpretations of the law... and almost all of them were conceived and written before xerox machines and the 'net changed the playing field.
Don't talk about law. Talk about what is "right" and "good".
Disney's most visible technological showpieces often had to do with transportation. He understood that packing too many humans into a small space caused problems; that people weren't tempermentally suited to it. His generation's solution to the problem of overcrowding in the cities was to spawn suburbs (i.e. dilution). The resulting transportation problems begged for technological solutions... and his visionaries produced.
Disney then displayed these technological marvels in parks where people were packed into a space too small for comfort with thousands of strangers. Instead of applying the "suburb and transportation" model inside the parks, Disney used far more subtle technologies to allow people to rub up against one another with less friction, less rage.
It appears to me that the urban plan of the future is to re-centralize cities. Better and better roads/rail/etc. have just caused more sprawl and the result is that the capacity of those roads/rails/etc. has been saturated, usually as soon as they are built. Now the move appears to be the other way. For example, the techniques of traffic calming (at least how it's practiced in this corner of Canada) seem aimed at making the commute sufficiently intolerable that it will discourage folks from seeking "the good life" in the 'burbs, thus reducing traffic, pollution, etc.
Personally, I usually find crowds to be intolerable. I found Disney{land|world} to be crowded, but tolerable. But on my last trip to Disney, on a hot, August afternoon, I took a break and ate in a (simulated) New Orleans cafe with (simulated) stars in a clear, (simulated) sky, while (live) music played softly from a balcony and (live) people in boats drifted by on a (simulated) stream. Despite the presence of the (simulated) swamp, nearby, there were no (simulated or real) mosquitoes. It was a beautiful example of total environmental control (light, season, location, sound, temperature, insects, etc.) not dissimilar to the contrived environments at the Museum of Civilization (Hull, Quebec) or the Museum of Natural History (Winnipeg, Manitoba).
They had produced an environment that calmed. That soothed. That manipulated me into thinking that I wasn't in a crowd.
And it did it by applying some heavy duty (and nearly invisible) technology, and applying it well.
...and (I find this ironic) this is not the technology that is on display!
Slashdot Mirror
The censorware "hit lists" are encrypted because the companies put a lot of work into compiling the lists and they don't want competetors to simply take their hard work and use it in another censorware engine. As compilations these lists are protected under copyright, yet the censorware companies did not trust the copyright laws to protect them from predation by competetors.
Now they are trying to use the same copyright laws to harass someone who has broken their little kiddy-corner code.
If they had just used the copyright laws the way they were intended to be used, this whole encryption deal would not even have been necessary and everyone would have benefited from the user community being able to comment on detected deficiencies in the lists. (No, not open source but peer review.)
I have also done much electronic music. I know what it's like to spend 26 hours in the studio to produce a minute of music... that I could never produce "live". I just could not see how to make money that way without resorting to using a state-issued monopoly where I was responsible for the enforcement of that monopoly.
"I'm an artist, Jim, not a lawyer."
I can't see why I should be paid when someone listens to a recording of my music. I just can't see it. I get paid when I perform. People come to hear me play (or I'm paid by the owner of the venue). WHYINHELL should I expect to be paid when I'm not doing anything?
Recordings of my music may create demand for my live performances. Why should I do anything to reduce the distribution of recordings?
If I'm selling a recording, I expect to make good the cost of the media. Distribution on the 'net kinda makes that point moot :-)
My only concern are OTHER artists who play my material in live performance.
Anonymity is a refuge, but it will always be necessary so long as there are people (organizations, governments) who will respond to ideas with coercion.
(Personal observation: I was quite amused to note the many examples of anonymous writings by the "Fathers of the American Revolution". I suppose that's why the US Gummint knows how effective anonymous communication is at toppling governments... )
They wrote a converter that digested the assembler and produced C code... about 4 lines of C for each line of assembler code.
So a math calculation that could easily be written in 1 line of C took 30 or 40 lines of assembler which converted into 120+ lines of C. (Stop screaming!)
Their converter did not put the original source line as a comment in the new source. (Now you may scream!)
Now I gotta maintain this pile of compost. I'm looking for another job.
Now I write good code. Maintainable. Well commented. Meaningful variable names. Nothing fancy. I know what it's like to revisit my code ten years later.
There is a problem, though.
Nobody else seems able to maintain my code. They just can't understand it.
Despite high-level pseudo-code algorithm descriptions, threaded comments, good up to date written documentation, they just can't wrap their tiny little heads around how I do things.
I can go back to something I wrote 15 years ago and fix problems without generating new ones. My code is robust enought that I can shovel out a few thousand lines and jam in another 10,000 lines, test it for a day or two and release it... and get no bug reports for another 5 years. I consider this to be maintainable code!
Go ahead... break all the rules suggested in the article. You may still produce code that other, lesser programmers simply can't cope with. The code is an expression from the mind of the person who wrote it... and sometimes writing to the lowest common denominator simply isn't possible.
And then they blame you for writing unmaintainable code.
Looks like he failed here, too. I dunno about the Imagineers, but it certainly looks like the execs didn't do a very good job.
http://www.greens.org/s-r/17/17-21.html
http://thewinds.org /archive/newworld/terminator_seeds04-98.html
Do the professors fear loss of income on future textbooks that they might write?
Do they think that the students who buy notes won't show up in class... and that somehow will impact their standing (feedback scores, exam result medians, etc.)?
Is there just competition in the notes-selling business? (A lot of comments seem to support this.)
I don't know and I don't think it matters.
I'm personally sick and tired of someone trotting out copyright law and trying to mould it to fit their hand so that they can use it as a club to beat off competition. There are 1,000,001 interpretations of the law... and almost all of them were conceived and written before xerox machines and the 'net changed the playing field.
Don't talk about law. Talk about what is "right" and "good".
THEN talk about law.
Disney's most visible technological showpieces often had to do with transportation. He understood that packing too many humans into a small space caused problems; that people weren't tempermentally suited to it. His generation's solution to the problem of overcrowding in the cities was to spawn suburbs (i.e. dilution). The resulting transportation problems begged for technological solutions... and his visionaries produced.
Disney then displayed these technological marvels in parks where people were packed into a space too small for comfort with thousands of strangers. Instead of applying the "suburb and transportation" model inside the parks, Disney used far more subtle technologies to allow people to rub up against one another with less friction, less rage.
It appears to me that the urban plan of the future is to re-centralize cities. Better and better roads/rail/etc. have just caused more sprawl and the result is that the capacity of those roads/rails/etc. has been saturated, usually as soon as they are built. Now the move appears to be the other way. For example, the techniques of traffic calming (at least how it's practiced in this corner of Canada) seem aimed at making the commute sufficiently intolerable that it will discourage folks from seeking "the good life" in the 'burbs, thus reducing traffic, pollution, etc.
Personally, I usually find crowds to be intolerable. I found Disney{land|world} to be crowded, but tolerable. But on my last trip to Disney, on a hot, August afternoon, I took a break and ate in a (simulated) New Orleans cafe with (simulated) stars in a clear, (simulated) sky, while (live) music played softly from a balcony and (live) people in boats drifted by on a (simulated) stream. Despite the presence of the (simulated) swamp, nearby, there were no (simulated or real) mosquitoes. It was a beautiful example of total environmental control (light, season, location, sound, temperature, insects, etc.) not dissimilar to the contrived environments at the Museum of Civilization (Hull, Quebec) or the Museum of Natural History (Winnipeg, Manitoba).
They had produced an environment that calmed. That soothed. That manipulated me into thinking that I wasn't in a crowd.
And it did it by applying some heavy duty (and nearly invisible) technology, and applying it well.