Most virus writers will, therefor, statistically use Microsoft's products.
Most virus writers will target systems with which they are familiar, which happens to be Microsoft's products.
Thus, most virus/worm/trojan products target Microsoft products.
The fact that such an overwhelming number of these attacks are successful, indeed devistating, is a testiment and real world demonstration of just how severely flawed Microsofts entire security paradigm continues to be. That the so-called "service" packs and security fixes generally break more than they fix (whether maliciously or through negligence) is a strong indication of how flawed Microsoft's development process and QA/QC procedures are.
Excellent concept! I would go further than removing government from the process, and remove lawyers from the process altogether. Scientific peer review. That which passes is given a patent, that which does not may be appealed to another group operating independently of the first.
Why? To provide a check and balance against any one group of cronies gaining too much power over the patenting process. Right now its a former patent attourney running the patent office, but a group of scientists or engineers with their own agenda would be just as bad, possibly worse, unless some kind of check is in place.
I would also argue that patenting as a whole needs to be revamped in terms of the period of validity (17 years is way too long for most technical patents these days, and I would argue software and algorithmic patents shouldn't be permissible at all).
This is not rumour mongering. The situation with respect to DR DOS has been established already, and is being rehashed in a lawsuite brought by the makers of DR DOS (since acquired by Caldera).
Reference the consent decree (which Microsoft appears to have violated) as well as the Findings of Fact in the currently ongoing DOJ department.
Unfortunately, the Microsoft Astroturfers and Apologists are relying on the notion that if you repeat something often enough, some people will start to believe it. Fortunately, their immoral tactics aren't working as well as they used to.
- when exactly was VMC released? With any luck at all it can provide prior art to get this patent nullified
- this looks like the first case I can think of where a Linux company (if it can be described as such) may have earned themselves a serious boycott of their product.
You raise a very interesting concern, and it does bear some watching.
However, Linus has long since handed off much of his responsiblity vis-a-vis the kernel to Alan Cox and others. Development in all areas appears to be continuing regardless. This may have been deliberate, to give Linus room (not to mention time) to do his "day job" without compromizing the integrity of the kernel development process. Then, of course, there are some 10-20 million highly individualistic Linux users keeping an eye on things, none of whome are afraid to scream bloody murder if that integrity should at some point be compromized.
I usually don't believe in this whole "Linux is God" aspect that some members of the Linux community follow, but he does have some pretty good things to say
I get tired of this characterization of the Linux community, or even some of its members. It really doesn't have much basis in reality, and can generally be attributed to those who are opposed to the success of Linux for whatever reason. Indeed, it is a kind of personal FUD, aimed at the users and advocates of Linux more than anything else. While some may jokingly say something to the effect of "Linus is God", even the most ardent Linux advocate has his or her toung firmly in cheek.
There is a great deal of respect, gratitude, and good will toward Linus for what he has done and the contributions he has made and yes, even some hero worship. Compared to the adulations others (such as what Michael Jordan or Bill Gates get from their followings, for example), the adulations Linus Torvalds has gotten are generally quite moderate.
Is competition necessary? Sure. If nothing else it shows places where improvement is needed.
Absolutely. We know this, the DOJ knows this, and the Judge knows this. Others appear not to grasp this concept quite as well.
All so-called scientific facts are in fact theory. No theory is ever considered proven beyond a doubt. Proven beyond a reasonable doubt perhaps, but one thing science always allows, no matter how overwhelming the evidence, is the notion that a theory can be supplanted should new evidence be brought forward. This flexibility in no way undermines the potency or relevance of theories which have proven themselves over time and are supported by overwhelming evidence.
Even the so-called Law of Gravity is a theory, first put forth by Newton, later refined by such great thinkgers as Einstein. Evolution is a theory which has roughly the same weight of overwhelming evidence as the theory of gravity.
Say, why don't we give local school boards the option to teach the theory of magic, rather than the various and sundry (and much drier) theories of physics. After all, they are theories, and we should be tolerant of those supersititous ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H individuals who don't buy into mainstream science. After all, they're people too, so their opinions should count for just as much as some aging physiscist in a white smock, right? After all, to do otherwise would be to buy into "the theory that Washintgton D.C. knows best."
The idiots in Kansas who gutted their childrens scientific education in the area of biology are dolts. So are people who defend this idiocy by making trite pleas for tolerance. The scientific method is orthogonal to tolerance, as should be the standards for scientific education. Science is about forming theories and then backing them up with emperical evidence. The more emperical evidence supports a particular theory, the more credibility that theory has. Gravitation, and evolution, have a tremendous degree of credibility because they are supported by truly overwhelming amounts of emperical evidence. Science is not about tolerance, indeed tolerance of absurdities is not, nor should it become, a part of the scientific method, or the scientific curriculum.
Oddly enough, current emperical evidence does appear to support "the theory that Washington D.C. knows best", at least when compared to Kansas. Pulling that off really took talent -- one must truly appluad the Kansas Board of Education on that remarkable achievment.
1) in order to be able to use legal terror against any citizen impertinent enough to devize a method for countering the effectiveness of such a device, and thereby limiting their ability to invade our individual privacy at will.
There is a pretty good chance a countermeasure could involve using the same (patentented) technology as the snooping itself. Even if it didn't, the proximity to a patented technology might be enough to give them sufficient leverage to make the legal process too expensive for a private defendent.
2) To prevent private industry from employing the technique, by patenting the process and then not licensing it to anyone else. If this is the case, one may assume they have much more sophisticated tools available, and are thus less concerned with other government's security agencies obtaining the technology than they are with private industry or individuals making use of it.
I have no idea if either of these reasons is correct, but both appear reasonably plausibel.
The notion that Linux (preinstalled) is difficult for beginners to grasp or use is a complete fallacy, perpetuated primarilly by the likes of Microsoft and numerous astroturfers lurking about the net. It has absolutely no basis in reality, to wit:
I gave Linux to my mother. Now she refuses to ever use Windows.
I gave Linux to my sister. Now she refuses to ever use Windows.
I gave Linux to a pilot friend of mine. Now he spits on the Microsoft name (I kid you not)!
What do these people have in common? They are all basically computer illiterate. For a long time they remained that way because they were running Windows. Whenever the machine would break running Windows they would blame themselves for "having done something wrong and broken it." They were afraid to try doing things themselves, without someone (usually me) holding their hand, for the same reason. Lost Saturdays and reinstalls of the hosed Windows OS were all too frequent.
All three are very pleased with Linux, StarOffice, Netscape, and KDE (gnome in one case), and aren't afraid to try things out because, after months of having things work right, they have gained confidence in knowing that, as a regular user, they CAN'T break anything. The kinds of questions I am now confronted with take about two seconds two answer and are of the form of "Jean, how do I do... with Linux?" which is a breath of fresh air compared to what I used to get "Jean, my Windows PC doesn't work anymore, can you come over and fix it?"
Now they can use their computers to reliably get done what they want to get done, and I can get on with my life, spending almost no time having to play tech support for them.
When I was in high school I pirated some games, more as an act of rebellion (and because I had almost no money) than anything else. Many weren't very playable without the manual. Once or twice I may have actually gone through the effort of xeroxing a manual to a particular game, but that costs money too, so why not just buy the damn thing to begin with. It generally it wasn't worth the trouble, so the pirated game usually ended up rotting on the shelf and was never being played. Someone compared this to trading baseball cards -- a very accurate analogy IMHO.
It didn't take long to learn that piracy was at best useful for previewing a game which, if it was good, I went ahead and bought in order to have (a) the original media and (b) the docs necessary for really effective play. Piracy is a juvinile behavior most people quickly outgrow, for pragmatic reasons having nothing to do with draconian laws or big-brother gestapo organizations such as the SPA and BSA.
Ironically, the gaming software industry probably came out ahead financially in the additional game sales that resulted from our piracy at the time, however inappropriate or illegal it may have been. The makers of Wolfenstein 3d, Doom, and Quake (id) as well as the makers of Descent obviously learned this lesson and put it to very good (and very profitable) use, as have others.
I would define Operating System to be everything that is needed to bring the System into an Operattional state
A reasonable definition. That would mean the number of lines of Win2k that are part of the operating system equal to either NaN or 0. After all, even if you execute all 40,000,000 lines of code, you still don't have a operational system. Unless one cosiders a frozen error dump on a blue background operational.:-)
A utility, even one you might consider to be critical, is not necessarilly a part of the operating system. If it were, we wouldn't refer to it as a utility at all.
Of course, Microsoft will define anything it finds legally convinient as part of the OS, but lets face it, an OS such as Linux can perform a large number of tasks quite well without even a shell, much less such useful utilities as "ls". Of course, maintenance is more difficult in those situations, but programs designed to make our adminstrative tasks easier (or even possible) are not necessarilly a part of the operating system itself.
Perhaps the clearest example of this are some embedded systems, where one may have to boot off of a DOS disk to run a flash utility to perform maintenance or upgrades, yet these utilities (even the DOS program loader) are quite often not a part of the embedded operating system the device runs when performing day to day tasks. An external utility to allow an engineer to perform needed tasks on an as-needed basis, but having nothing to do with the OS proper.
This concept is also present in Ian M. Banks's Culture novels
Indeed, I particularly enjoyed the Culture adage "Money is a sign of poverty," i.e. the concept that any society which still used money had scarcity, and was (by comparison to the Culture) impoverished.
A libertarianesque form of communism was practiced briefly in Spain earlier this century by collectives organized around small communities and groups with commen interests, with surprising success -- even able to compete very effectively against capitalist competitors in the (at the time) mixed economy. They were briefly co-opted by the government, then legislation brutally out of existence. Just a little historical footnote that communism did work, briefly, even amidst scarcity.
I suspect capitalism's success lies more in its good fortune to be the economic system of DEMOCRATIC societies, whereas totalitarianism doomed marxism from the start. The dichotomies which threatened to destroy capitalism (e.g unregulated free markets leading to monopolies and wildly erratic economic and market upheavals) were dealt with through legislation due to feedback of public discontent through democratic channels, while communism's dichotomies (such as the egalitarian notion "to each according to their needs" being subsumed by the elitist power structure which formed to collect and dispense goods) had no avenue for self correction beneath the autocrats and party apparatchik, and thus remained unaddressed (despites Gorbochov's 11th hour efforts) until communism's ultimate collapse.
Alas, it was a UK law being used against a UK citizen in (AFAIK) the UK...
The Y2K bug we let sneak up on us (despite warnings here and elsewhere when the law was passed) is that something very similar takes effect in just under two months here in the US, I believe. With any luck maybe we can get a good css-auth library put together and exported to a friendly place before then, then just write great apps that link against that library for css authentication and decryption.
IANAL... can anyone else confirm that these draconian restrictions kick in Jan 1?
Ah, but it does facilitate the circumvention of copy protection, by providing a place where the pirated data may reside. Worse, the compiler (gcc) and the underlying OS (Linux or FreeBSD) actually enables the software which circumvents the copy protection to run!
The interpretation of the law which excludes intent from consideration opens a pandora's box of absurd consequences. As another person noted, every DVD player on the market circumvents copy protection (they have to, in oder to playback the DVDs), so any advertisment for a DVD drive would violate this law as interpreted. Any compiler, operating system, library (e.g. glibc), filesystem, linker, or any other piece of software even remotely assisting in bypassing any copy protection of any kind, would also run afoul of this law (as interpreted before), as they are (1) facilitating the bypassing of copy protection and (2) have been published, either as source code or executable binary.
No, the idiots who wrote this law are dicks. You are shooting the messenger, when it should be the lawyers you have in your sights (just kidding, folks -- I think).
If the interpretation of 2b given before is correct (which I kind of doubt, given that it appears to be at odds with the intent of the law as described in 2a), then a new era of frivolous lawsuits is at hand. If I write a program which, say, allows one to use a filesystem on a hard disk (let's say I call it, oh, I dunno, mke2fs), to which one might one day write, say, pirated mp3s, then, according to the interpretation some are putting forth, I can be held liable for writing something which could facilitate piracy, even though my intent was otherwise. dd might be a better example, since it writes raw blocks irrespective of most digital copy protection schemes. Nevertheless, this kind of legislation -- if indeed intended as described before -- could well result in everything from mke2fs to dd to cp being illegal, because somewhere, someone might use it to circumvent copy protection and pirate something. Hell, writing an operating system could be illegal, as it certainly facilitates the operation of any software designed to run under it, including that which might be used to circumvent copy protection schemes. Never mind the Linus never intended Linux to be used for such, the fact that someone, somewhere, can misuse it for such neferious purposes makes him guilty by association! Sue Linus, sue Linus. Oh wait, then there's gcc, which was used to compile the evil software. Sue the FSF! Sue the FSF!
Absurd. I doubt any of this would hold up in court, but then again, IANAL and, given the illogic of our justice system to date, who knows?
Spitting in somebody's face is an infringement on their rights (assault).
Whether it is theft is hardly an excercise in rhetoric, unless all things equal all things in your world. Theft != Assualt != murder != copyright infringement. It is that simple.
The problem with the RIAA (and now the film industry) is that they are happy to redefine "copyright infringement" as "theft", even though legally, ethically, and semanticly they are not the same. Indeed, they often even go further, equating "fair use" (legally permitted) and "reverse engineering" (also legally permitted if you are trying to get something to interoperate with something else, such as, say DVD and Linux mentioned in another thread). Their purpose in doing this is to demonize those infringing upon the copyright, which includes just about everybody who ever taped a song off the radio, a television show with their VCR, or made a tape from their CD, if they *gasp* went so far as to share it with another.
Let me make myself crystal clear to any "Film Industry" types or representatives lurking here. I just purchased 4 DVDs over the weekend, with the expectation of being able to view them under Linux in the near future (I do not run Windows anymore, at all), and so that I could help in debugging the (until now) forthcoming Linux and drivers and software.
You have chosen to make that difficult, if not impossible. As a result, you will find me purchasing no further DVDs, at all, forever, until such a time as I am able to view them using the platform of my choice in an open and free manner. If you were to check my financial records over the last several years, you would find I have spent thousands of dollars on Laser Disks. Future thousands for DVD releases could also have been yours.
Not anymore.
Not only will I not be purchasing any further DVDs until I can view them under Linux, I won't be purchasing any further movies of any kind, on any medium, from you folks. I am going to rediscover the library as a form of entertainment, and do my best to insure that no further dollars pass from my wallet to yours, either at the video store, video rental store, cable box, or even at the theater.
It is my hope that others will feel, and do, likewise.
In the meantime, perhaps you should reflect upon your own strategies, and consider the following carefully.
This action is not aimed at commercial pirates, but individuals. Pirates can already mass produce DVDs of their own:
Without css decryption, using the analog out, redigitizing, and mastering the non-encrypted result. Loss of quality: minimal.
Running Microsoft Windows and any one of several widely and freely available Windows utilities for ripping DVDs.
By placing a video camera (digital or otherwise) in front of the screen, digitizing the results, and pressing the DVD.
The folks working on the css decryption and Linux DVD stuff are trying to make a product they have paid for work with Linux. The law clearly allows this, even if they do not have the same deep pockets to defend themselves with that the film industry does to make their lives difficult.
Those of us wanting to watch DVD under Linux do not, for the most part, have any interest in pirating DVDs. While I am sure there are exceptions, the vast majority of pirates already have such tools available under Windows (see above). By alienating Linux and FreeBSD users you people in the film industry have alienated some of the most technically savvy folks in the world -- the very demographic group most likely to embrace an emerging technology such as DVD, and a by and large well paid group with lots of disposable income to spend on your product. Nice shooting, Tex.
While I am annoyed with those who insist on using mp3 as a method of propogating warez music and giving the rest of us a bad name, who simply want open standards and convinient fair use of the music we have purchased, I must say I find the notion of universities becoming a collective police force for the RIAA more than a little disturbing. When I was in college we all shared cassette tape recordings of music we couldn't afford to buy. This story calls to mind images of University employees and RAs entering dorm rooms, spot checking tape collections for illegal tapes.
While what we did as students was not strictly legal, it was pretty damn harmless. I suspect the RIAA has made a great deal of money on each and every student who did this in college, as nearly all of us have no doubt moved on to buying CD's (and some of us going the extra step and ripping them into mp3 format for convinient access on our hard drives).
I don't approve of what the students did, especially if the files in question were in areas with public access, which being on a web page implies. If they were running warez sites for the world to steal from, then shame on them. But if they were simply exchanging files among themselves, for their own use, then shame on the university and the RIAA for swatting a fly with a sledgehammer.
I once considered making my mp3 collection available *to myself only*, via 128-bit encryption and password authentication, on my web page so I could listen to my music anywhere in the world, without lugging cdroms around. I opted out, as explaining that subtle but critical difference -- the difference between fair use and piracy -- is not something I wanted to do before a judge, especially with the extreme presumption of guilt when the phrase "made his mp3 collection available on a web page" is uttered. While these students probably weren't doing this, can anyone be certain based on the article as written?
No matter how one slices this story, one thing is clear. Even the limited privacy we enjoyed as students even a few short years ago appears to have been vastly more sacrosanct than whatever it is students have now (calling it privacy would be a farce of the worst kind, I'm afraid).
Perhaps a script translation utility capable of converting autoLisp scripts to MBS, coupled with Varkon itself, would address the original poster's concerns and allow his shop to migrate.
Interoperability with existing, installed software is important, if only to preserve and maintain existing work and data. This is one of the reasons I was so dismayed when Sun bought StarOffice (which has excellent interoperability with M$ Office), even though I personally prefer Word Perfect. The ability to read and write M$ native formats made migration away from Windows for our office staff much, much easier.
Volitility is all over the place, and trading volume is very high.
You are correct, though, fund managers will not be dumping the stock all at once. This will happen over time... perhaps as long as several months. If there is any truth to the allegations of stock manipulations presented in another article linked to by slashdot last week (or week before last?) this entire process could be distorted even more.
It is very telling that MS stock is down in heavy trading (even slightly) with options volitility all over the place, while most other tech stocks (including the under-siege CORL, not to mention SUNW, RHAT, etc.) are up, in some cases way up.
Your right, though, I would have expected (and relished) a more dramatic move in the price, but MSFT has defied reason for quite some time now, actually going up after unfavorable court rulings in the past, if you can believe that! Sometimes I am reminded of the Emporer's New Clothes...
Hey! It works for me (and I don't even own a gun). In all seriousness, I was very much a supporter of restrictive gun legislation in the US, especially after living several years in Europe with its relatively low crime rate, its relaxed drug and alcohol policies, and pleasant cosmopolitan outlook.
However, events in Bosnia, Croatia, and Kosovo have brought about a 180 degree change in my opinions. Specifically, I find it very interesting that Montenegro (which does have an armed populace) hasn't yet been decimated by the Serbs, yet the others have. There is something to be said about making such repressive activities expensive for the oppressor, and while guns may not enable a populace to claim military victory against a well equipped, modern army, they can make using such a military for such purposes prohibitively expensive in terms of resources and soldiers' lives. Given a number of other disturbing trends in the United States today with respect to privacy, freedom of speach, etc., that particular check and balance, however dubious, is IMHO becoming ever more important.
Sorry for the double post -- netscape crashed mid-submit. Still not sure why that would commit it twice, though -- once with a correction and once without...
The film industry really should do an unbiased and intelligent analysis of the impact of emerging technologies on their product, if they want to actually protect their interests in a constructive and effective manner. Some points which should be considered.
- consumers have had the capability of recording and copying movies to their hearts' content since the advent of the VCR. Videophile and audiophiles may not be happy with the quality, but as far as the average consumer is concerned the quality is "close enough" to perfect. Despite this, movie makers have been selling and renting movies like hotcakes. Being able to copy DVDs will not change this at all
- commercial pirates, for whome the "infinite perfect copy" does make a difference, could already do this by using $5,000 DVD-Rs or buying their own DVD production equipment. One analog copy, reconverted to digital format, and they could produce an infinite supply of nearly perfect DVD copies for sale on the black market. This is a problem, but one which the cracking of the pathetically week css algorithm will not significantly affect.
- high-end consumers do not like having their technology "messed with." The destruction of DAT is an example of consumers refusing to buy into crippled technology. Likewise, DVD playback which is limited to Windows, or by region, is not only an invitation to hack, but worse, creates unnecessary bad relations between the seller and the consumer.
- finally, unlike the RIAA member companies, movie studios are not parasitical entities acting as a paid go-between between artists and their customers. They provide the capital, resources, and equipment for shooting films and play a very necessary role as part of the art form. Contrast this to the music industry, whose contribution to the art form, beyond providing a distribution channel they happen to enjoy a monopoly on, and perhaps a place to record and master (which any technically savvy musician can do in their own home), is negligable at best and quite often destructive. This suggests that the movie studios aren't nearly as vulnerable to artists switching to an internet medium and cutting them out of the loop as the RIAA member companies are, and have a lot less to fear from open internet standards and distribution channels than their record company counterparts.
Even with copyable DVDs the film industry has little to fear. The target they should be most worried about -- the professional "industrial strength" pirates -- is the group least affected by these developments. The fear that the grassroots mp3 warez phenominon will happen with DVDs is unwarrented, not only because of bandwidth and storage limitations, but also because of a difference in consumer habits, and a fundamental difference in the relationship of the affected artists and consumers with the movie studios vs. the music industry.
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Most computer users use Microsoft's products.
Most virus writers will, therefor, statistically use Microsoft's products.
Most virus writers will target systems with which they are familiar, which happens to be Microsoft's products.
Thus, most virus/worm/trojan products target Microsoft products.
The fact that such an overwhelming number of these attacks are successful, indeed devistating, is a testiment and real world demonstration of just how severely flawed Microsofts entire security paradigm continues to be. That the so-called "service" packs and security fixes generally break more than they fix (whether maliciously or through negligence) is a strong indication of how flawed Microsoft's development process and QA/QC procedures are.
Excellent concept! I would go further than removing government from the process, and remove lawyers from the process altogether. Scientific peer review. That which passes is given a patent, that which does not may be appealed to another group operating independently of the first.
Why? To provide a check and balance against any one group of cronies gaining too much power over the patenting process. Right now its a former patent attourney running the patent office, but a group of scientists or engineers with their own agenda would be just as bad, possibly worse, unless some kind of check is in place.
I would also argue that patenting as a whole needs to be revamped in terms of the period of validity (17 years is way too long for most technical patents these days, and I would argue software and algorithmic patents shouldn't be permissible at all).
Oh. My. God.
This is not rumour mongering. The situation with respect to DR DOS has been established already, and is being rehashed in a lawsuite brought by the makers of DR DOS (since acquired by Caldera).
Reference the consent decree (which Microsoft appears to have violated) as well as the Findings of Fact in the currently ongoing DOJ department.
Unfortunately, the Microsoft Astroturfers and Apologists are relying on the notion that if you repeat something often enough, some people will start to believe it. Fortunately, their immoral tactics aren't working as well as they used to.
Two Points
- when exactly was VMC released? With any luck at all it can provide prior art to get this patent nullified
- this looks like the first case I can think of where a Linux company (if it can be described as such) may have earned themselves a serious boycott of their product.
You raise a very interesting concern, and it does bear some watching.
However, Linus has long since handed off much of his responsiblity vis-a-vis the kernel to Alan Cox and others. Development in all areas appears to be continuing regardless. This may have been deliberate, to give Linus room (not to mention time) to do his "day job" without compromizing the integrity of the kernel development process. Then, of course, there are some 10-20 million highly individualistic Linux users keeping an eye on things, none of whome are afraid to scream bloody murder if that integrity should at some point be compromized.
I usually don't believe in this whole "Linux is God" aspect that some members of the Linux community follow, but he does have some pretty good things to say
I get tired of this characterization of the Linux community, or even some of its members. It really doesn't have much basis in reality, and can generally be attributed to those who are opposed to the success of Linux for whatever reason. Indeed, it is a kind of personal FUD, aimed at the users and advocates of Linux more than anything else. While some may jokingly say something to the effect of "Linus is God", even the most ardent Linux advocate has his or her toung firmly in cheek.
There is a great deal of respect, gratitude, and good will toward Linus for what he has done and the contributions he has made and yes, even some hero worship. Compared to the adulations others (such as what Michael Jordan or Bill Gates get from their followings, for example), the adulations Linus Torvalds has gotten are generally quite moderate.
Is competition necessary? Sure. If nothing else it shows places where improvement is needed.
Absolutely. We know this, the DOJ knows this, and the Judge knows this. Others appear not to grasp this concept quite as well.
All so-called scientific facts are in fact theory. No theory is ever considered proven beyond a doubt. Proven beyond a reasonable doubt perhaps, but one thing science always allows, no matter how overwhelming the evidence, is the notion that a theory can be supplanted should new evidence be brought forward. This flexibility in no way undermines the potency or relevance of theories which have proven themselves over time and are supported by overwhelming evidence.
Even the so-called Law of Gravity is a theory, first put forth by Newton, later refined by such great thinkgers as Einstein. Evolution is a theory which has roughly the same weight of overwhelming evidence as the theory of gravity.
Say, why don't we give local school boards the option to teach the theory of magic, rather than the various and sundry (and much drier) theories of physics. After all, they are theories, and we should be tolerant of those supersititous ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H individuals who don't buy into mainstream science. After all, they're people too, so their opinions should count for just as much as some aging physiscist in a white smock, right? After all, to do otherwise would be to buy into "the theory that Washintgton D.C. knows best."
The idiots in Kansas who gutted their childrens scientific education in the area of biology are dolts. So are people who defend this idiocy by making trite pleas for tolerance. The scientific method is orthogonal to tolerance, as should be the standards for scientific education. Science is about forming theories and then backing them up with emperical evidence. The more emperical evidence supports a particular theory, the more credibility that theory has. Gravitation, and evolution, have a tremendous degree of credibility because they are supported by truly overwhelming amounts of emperical evidence. Science is not about tolerance, indeed tolerance of absurdities is not, nor should it become, a part of the scientific method, or the scientific curriculum.
Oddly enough, current emperical evidence does appear to support "the theory that Washington D.C. knows best", at least when compared to Kansas. Pulling that off really took talent -- one must truly appluad the Kansas Board of Education on that remarkable achievment.
Two possibilities come to mind:
1) in order to be able to use legal terror against any citizen impertinent enough to devize a method for countering the effectiveness of such a device, and thereby limiting their ability to invade our individual privacy at will.
There is a pretty good chance a countermeasure could involve using the same (patentented) technology as the snooping itself. Even if it didn't, the proximity to a patented technology might be enough to give them sufficient leverage to make the legal process too expensive for a private defendent.
2) To prevent private industry from employing the technique, by patenting the process and then not licensing it to anyone else. If this is the case, one may assume they have much more sophisticated tools available, and are thus less concerned with other government's security agencies obtaining the technology than they are with private industry or individuals making use of it.
I have no idea if either of these reasons is correct, but both appear reasonably plausibel.
The notion that Linux (preinstalled) is difficult for beginners to grasp or use is a complete fallacy, perpetuated primarilly by the likes of Microsoft and numerous astroturfers lurking about the net. It has absolutely no basis in reality, to wit:
... with Linux?" which is a breath of fresh air compared to what I used to get "Jean, my Windows PC doesn't work anymore, can you come over and fix it?"
I gave Linux to my mother. Now she refuses to ever use Windows.
I gave Linux to my sister. Now she refuses to ever use Windows.
I gave Linux to a pilot friend of mine. Now he spits on the Microsoft name (I kid you not)!
What do these people have in common? They are all basically computer illiterate. For a long time they remained that way because they were running Windows. Whenever the machine would break running Windows they would blame themselves for "having done something wrong and broken it." They were afraid to try doing things themselves, without someone (usually me) holding their hand, for the same reason. Lost Saturdays and reinstalls of the hosed Windows OS were all too frequent.
All three are very pleased with Linux, StarOffice, Netscape, and KDE (gnome in one case), and aren't afraid to try things out because, after months of having things work right, they have gained confidence in knowing that, as a regular user, they CAN'T break anything. The kinds of questions I am now confronted with take about two seconds two answer and are of the form of "Jean, how do I do
Now they can use their computers to reliably get done what they want to get done, and I can get on with my life, spending almost no time having to play tech support for them.
When I was in high school I pirated some games, more as an act of rebellion (and because I had almost no money) than anything else. Many weren't very playable without the manual. Once or twice I may have actually gone through the effort of xeroxing a manual to a particular game, but that costs money too, so why not just buy the damn thing to begin with. It generally it wasn't worth the trouble, so the pirated game usually ended up rotting on the shelf and was never being played. Someone compared this to trading baseball cards -- a very accurate analogy IMHO.
It didn't take long to learn that piracy was at best useful for previewing a game which, if it was good, I went ahead and bought in order to have (a) the original media and (b) the docs necessary for really effective play. Piracy is a juvinile behavior most people quickly outgrow, for pragmatic reasons having nothing to do with draconian laws or big-brother gestapo organizations such as the SPA and BSA.
Ironically, the gaming software industry probably came out ahead financially in the additional game sales that resulted from our piracy at the time, however inappropriate or illegal it may have been. The makers of Wolfenstein 3d, Doom, and Quake (id) as well as the makers of Descent obviously learned this lesson and put it to very good (and very profitable) use, as have others.
I would define Operating System to be everything that is needed to bring the System into an Operattional state
:-)
A reasonable definition. That would mean the number of lines of Win2k that are part of the operating system equal to either NaN or 0. After all, even if you execute all 40,000,000 lines of code, you still don't have a operational system. Unless one cosiders a frozen error dump on a blue background operational.
A utility, even one you might consider to be critical, is not necessarilly a part of the operating system. If it were, we wouldn't refer to it as a utility at all.
Of course, Microsoft will define anything it finds legally convinient as part of the OS, but lets face it, an OS such as Linux can perform a large number of tasks quite well without even a shell, much less such useful utilities as "ls". Of course, maintenance is more difficult in those situations, but programs designed to make our adminstrative tasks easier (or even possible) are not necessarilly a part of the operating system itself.
Perhaps the clearest example of this are some embedded systems, where one may have to boot off of a DOS disk to run a flash utility to perform maintenance or upgrades, yet these utilities (even the DOS program loader) are quite often not a part of the embedded operating system the device runs when performing day to day tasks. An external utility to allow an engineer to perform needed tasks on an as-needed basis, but having nothing to do with the OS proper.
This concept is also present in Ian M. Banks's Culture novels
Indeed, I particularly enjoyed the Culture adage "Money is a sign of poverty," i.e. the concept that any society which still used money had scarcity, and was (by comparison to the Culture) impoverished.
A libertarianesque form of communism was practiced briefly in Spain earlier this century by collectives organized around small communities and groups with commen interests, with surprising success -- even able to compete very effectively against capitalist competitors in the (at the time) mixed economy. They were briefly co-opted by the government, then legislation brutally out of existence. Just a little historical footnote that communism did work, briefly, even amidst scarcity.
I suspect capitalism's success lies more in its good fortune to be the economic system of DEMOCRATIC societies, whereas totalitarianism doomed marxism from the start. The dichotomies which threatened to destroy capitalism (e.g unregulated free markets leading to monopolies and wildly erratic economic and market upheavals) were dealt with through legislation due to feedback of public discontent through democratic channels, while communism's dichotomies (such as the egalitarian notion "to each according to their needs" being subsumed by the elitist power structure which formed to collect and dispense goods) had no avenue for self correction beneath the autocrats and party apparatchik, and thus remained unaddressed (despites Gorbochov's 11th hour efforts) until communism's ultimate collapse.
It's not the brown that's icky, its the pea green. Brown and YellowChiffon might have been nice, though ...
Alas, it was a UK law being used against a UK citizen in (AFAIK) the UK...
... can anyone else confirm that these draconian restrictions kick in Jan 1?
The Y2K bug we let sneak up on us (despite warnings here and elsewhere when the law was passed) is that something very similar takes effect in just under two months here in the US, I believe. With any luck maybe we can get a good css-auth library put together and exported to a friendly place before then, then just write great apps that link against that library for css authentication and decryption.
IANAL
Ah, but it does facilitate the circumvention of copy protection, by providing a place where the pirated data may reside. Worse, the compiler (gcc) and the underlying OS (Linux or FreeBSD) actually enables the software which circumvents the copy protection to run!
The interpretation of the law which excludes intent from consideration opens a pandora's box of absurd consequences. As another person noted, every DVD player on the market circumvents copy protection (they have to, in oder to playback the DVDs), so any advertisment for a DVD drive would violate this law as interpreted. Any compiler, operating system, library (e.g. glibc), filesystem, linker, or any other piece of software even remotely assisting in bypassing any copy protection of any kind, would also run afoul of this law (as interpreted before), as they are (1) facilitating the bypassing of copy protection and (2) have been published, either as source code or executable binary.
No, the idiots who wrote this law are dicks. You are shooting the messenger, when it should be the lawyers you have in your sights (just kidding, folks -- I think).
If the interpretation of 2b given before is correct (which I kind of doubt, given that it appears to be at odds with the intent of the law as described in 2a), then a new era of frivolous lawsuits is at hand. If I write a program which, say, allows one to use a filesystem on a hard disk (let's say I call it, oh, I dunno, mke2fs), to which one might one day write, say, pirated mp3s, then, according to the interpretation some are putting forth, I can be held liable for writing something which could facilitate piracy, even though my intent was otherwise. dd might be a better example, since it writes raw blocks irrespective of most digital copy protection schemes. Nevertheless, this kind of legislation -- if indeed intended as described before -- could well result in everything from mke2fs to dd to cp being illegal, because somewhere, someone might use it to circumvent copy protection and pirate something. Hell, writing an operating system could be illegal, as it certainly facilitates the operation of any software designed to run under it, including that which might be used to circumvent copy protection schemes. Never mind the Linus never intended Linux to be used for such, the fact that someone, somewhere, can misuse it for such neferious purposes makes him guilty by association! Sue Linus, sue Linus. Oh wait, then there's gcc, which was used to compile the evil software. Sue the FSF! Sue the FSF!
Absurd. I doubt any of this would hold up in court, but then again, IANAL and, given the illogic of our justice system to date, who knows?
Spitting in somebody's face is an infringement on their rights (assault).
Whether it is theft is hardly an excercise in rhetoric, unless all things equal all things in your world. Theft != Assualt != murder != copyright infringement. It is that simple.
The problem with the RIAA (and now the film industry) is that they are happy to redefine "copyright infringement" as "theft", even though legally, ethically, and semanticly they are not the same. Indeed, they often even go further, equating "fair use" (legally permitted) and "reverse engineering" (also legally permitted if you are trying to get something to interoperate with something else, such as, say DVD and Linux mentioned in another thread). Their purpose in doing this is to demonize those infringing upon the copyright, which includes just about everybody who ever taped a song off the radio, a television show with their VCR, or made a tape from their CD, if they *gasp* went so far as to share it with another.
You have chosen to make that difficult, if not impossible. As a result, you will find me purchasing no further DVDs, at all, forever, until such a time as I am able to view them using the platform of my choice in an open and free manner. If you were to check my financial records over the last several years, you would find I have spent thousands of dollars on Laser Disks. Future thousands for DVD releases could also have been yours.
Not anymore.
Not only will I not be purchasing any further DVDs until I can view them under Linux, I won't be purchasing any further movies of any kind, on any medium, from you folks. I am going to rediscover the library as a form of entertainment, and do my best to insure that no further dollars pass from my wallet to yours, either at the video store, video rental store, cable box, or even at the theater.
It is my hope that others will feel, and do, likewise.
In the meantime, perhaps you should reflect upon your own strategies, and consider the following carefully.
While I am annoyed with those who insist on using mp3 as a method of propogating warez music and giving the rest of us a bad name, who simply want open standards and convinient fair use of the music we have purchased, I must say I find the notion of universities becoming a collective police force for the RIAA more than a little disturbing. When I was in college we all shared cassette tape recordings of music we couldn't afford to buy. This story calls to mind images of University employees and RAs entering dorm rooms, spot checking tape collections for illegal tapes.
While what we did as students was not strictly legal, it was pretty damn harmless. I suspect the RIAA has made a great deal of money on each and every student who did this in college, as nearly all of us have no doubt moved on to buying CD's (and some of us going the extra step and ripping them into mp3 format for convinient access on our hard drives).
I don't approve of what the students did, especially if the files in question were in areas with public access, which being on a web page implies. If they were running warez sites for the world to steal from, then shame on them. But if they were simply exchanging files among themselves, for their own use, then shame on the university and the RIAA for swatting a fly with a sledgehammer.
I once considered making my mp3 collection available *to myself only*, via 128-bit encryption and password authentication, on my web page so I could listen to my music anywhere in the world, without lugging cdroms around. I opted out, as explaining that subtle but critical difference -- the difference between fair use and piracy -- is not something I wanted to do before a judge, especially with the extreme presumption of guilt when the phrase "made his mp3 collection available on a web page" is uttered. While these students probably weren't doing this, can anyone be certain based on the article as written?
No matter how one slices this story, one thing is clear. Even the limited privacy we enjoyed as students even a few short years ago appears to have been vastly more sacrosanct than whatever it is students have now (calling it privacy would be a farce of the worst kind, I'm afraid).
Shame on everyone. This is despicable.
Perhaps a script translation utility capable of converting autoLisp scripts to MBS, coupled with Varkon itself, would address the original poster's concerns and allow his shop to migrate.
Interoperability with existing, installed software is important, if only to preserve and maintain existing work and data. This is one of the reasons I was so dismayed when Sun bought StarOffice (which has excellent interoperability with M$ Office), even though I personally prefer Word Perfect. The ability to read and write M$ native formats made migration away from Windows for our office staff much, much easier.
It is having an effect on the stock.
... perhaps as long as several months. If there is any truth to the allegations of stock manipulations presented in another article linked to by slashdot last week (or week before last?) this entire process could be distorted even more.
Volitility is all over the place, and trading volume is very high.
You are correct, though, fund managers will not be dumping the stock all at once. This will happen over time
It is very telling that MS stock is down in heavy trading (even slightly) with options volitility all over the place, while most other tech stocks (including the under-siege CORL, not to mention SUNW, RHAT, etc.) are up, in some cases way up.
Your right, though, I would have expected (and relished) a more dramatic move in the price, but MSFT has defied reason for quite some time now, actually going up after unfavorable court rulings in the past, if you can believe that! Sometimes I am reminded of the Emporer's New Clothes...
Hey! It works for me (and I don't even own a gun). In all seriousness, I was very much a supporter of restrictive gun legislation in the US, especially after living several years in Europe with its relatively low crime rate, its relaxed drug and alcohol policies, and pleasant cosmopolitan outlook.
However, events in Bosnia, Croatia, and Kosovo have brought about a 180 degree change in my opinions. Specifically, I find it very interesting that Montenegro (which does have an armed populace) hasn't yet been decimated by the Serbs, yet the others have. There is something to be said about making such repressive activities expensive for the oppressor, and while guns may not enable a populace to claim military victory against a well equipped, modern army, they can make using such a military for such purposes prohibitively expensive in terms of resources and soldiers' lives. Given a number of other disturbing trends in the United States today with respect to privacy, freedom of speach, etc., that particular check and balance, however dubious, is IMHO becoming ever more important.
ARGH!!!
Sorry for the double post -- netscape crashed mid-submit. Still not sure why that would commit it twice, though -- once with a correction and once without...
The film industry really should do an unbiased and intelligent analysis of the impact of emerging technologies on their product, if they want to actually protect their interests in a constructive and effective manner. Some points which should be considered.
- consumers have had the capability of recording and copying movies to their hearts' content since the advent of the VCR. Videophile and audiophiles may not be happy with the quality, but as far as the average consumer is concerned the quality is "close enough" to perfect. Despite this, movie makers have been selling and renting movies like hotcakes. Being able to copy DVDs will not change this at all
- commercial pirates, for whome the "infinite perfect copy" does make a difference, could already do this by using $5,000 DVD-Rs or buying their own DVD production equipment. One analog copy, reconverted to digital format, and they could produce an infinite supply of nearly perfect DVD copies for sale on the black market. This is a problem, but one which the cracking of the pathetically week css algorithm will not significantly affect.
- high-end consumers do not like having their technology "messed with." The destruction of DAT is an example of consumers refusing to buy into crippled technology. Likewise, DVD playback which is limited to Windows, or by region, is not only an invitation to hack, but worse, creates unnecessary bad relations between the seller and the consumer.
- finally, unlike the RIAA member companies, movie studios are not parasitical entities acting as a paid go-between between artists and their customers. They provide the capital, resources, and equipment for shooting films and play a very necessary role as part of the art form. Contrast this to the music industry, whose contribution to the art form, beyond providing a distribution channel they happen to enjoy a monopoly on, and perhaps a place to record and master (which any technically savvy musician can do in their own home), is negligable at best and quite often destructive. This suggests that the movie studios aren't nearly as vulnerable to artists switching to an internet medium and cutting them out of the loop as the RIAA member companies are, and have a lot less to fear from open internet standards and distribution channels than their record company counterparts.
Even with copyable DVDs the film industry has little to fear. The target they should be most worried about -- the professional "industrial strength" pirates -- is the group least affected by these developments. The fear that the grassroots mp3 warez phenominon will happen with DVDs is unwarrented, not only because of bandwidth and storage limitations, but also because of a difference in consumer habits, and a fundamental difference in the relationship of the affected artists and consumers with the movie studios vs. the music industry.