The scary thing behind what was posted to Bugtraq is that it explicitly states that all digital media on the system is cataloged, and the list is sent to the RIAA. This assumes all digital media on a system is an illegal copy.
Yes, it does. And it shows what criminal, despicable, disgusting excuses for human beings work for, or with, the RIAA.
Sure, if the worm comes into your system over a P2P network, there's a good chance that at least *some* of your mp3s are pirated, but there's no way to differentiate pirated mp3s and those you ripped/encoded from your own CD collection.
All of my mp3 and ogg files are ripped from my own rather large, but no longer growing CD and Vinyl collection (because now I do not buy CDs, ever, nor will I, ever again). All of my avi's are recorded from my own television, my own animations, or my own media, and are not traded, ever. Indeed, none of my stuff is traded, ever.
However, I did install gtk-gnutella in order to download the hiliarious fan fiction Star Trek episode "Savage Empire", because the web site distributing the files had been slashdoted. A perfectly legal download, for which, if this story is true, these unlawful thugs have infected my machine.
I have enough money, and the will, to persue a very harsh lawsuit against these fucks if this story has any veracity, and if I am infected, and I will not hesitate to do so.
"In Corporate Fascist America You and Your Data Belong to the Copyright and Media Cartels. Bend Over and Enjoy the Ride, Consumer."
What intellectual property does SCO claim to own? Are these patents, or copyrights, and over what code or protocols?
It almost certainly is not copyrights. Linux was written from scratch by Linus Torvalds and released under the GNU GPL. Any and all code submitted to the kernel is likewise GPLed, so if SCO submitted code, they did so under the terms of the GPL. This is where the GPL really shines... it innoculates against entities such as SCO submarining code into the OS and then making copyright claims down the road.
Of course, if someone violated SCO's copyright and got it accepted into the kernel without divulging its origins (or claiming to have written it themselves), then SCO would probably have a copyright claim against the purported author, not those (the linux kernel folks, distros, and users) to whome that hypothetical black hat illegally licensed the code. And if said person were actually in the employ of SCO, then sco would have essentially granted a licenses and would be bitchslapped by the courts. None of those latter scenerios are even remotely likely, so, as I said, it is almost certainly not a copyright claim SCO's vague comments are asserting.
What they own are almost certainly software patents, likely patents written from looking at the source code written and developed by others, and granted rubber-stamp style from the notoriously irresponsible US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). As others have said, such are the equivelent of 'nuclear weapons' for IT, and if SCO were to do such a foolish thing (as a consiquence of their own stupidity, or shilling for Microsoft), the end result will be no GNU/Linux in the United States (the only country stupid enough to recognize such patents), and a United States with an IT industry that would be irrelevant not within the generous twenty years Alan Cox suggests, but within a scant 5 years at best.
In short, America would become the technological backwater its behavior and policies have so richly earned it. We in the States who care (a vanishingly small minority) would be unhappy with this... and, of course, powerless to do anything about it beneath a government that no longer even feels the need to feign democracy, much less practice it. However, the rest of the world will continue on quite happilly without us, probably breathing a sigh of relief that such an out of control, unilateral superpower has managed to shoot itself so severely in the foot.
In any event, if the rest of the world ever wants to throw off the yoke of the American Hegemony, the best and most effective first step they could take would be to reject our copyright and patent schemes outright... why should one country, one corporation, or one human being own knowledge and wisdom, regardless of whether they thought of it first (and most likely had their employer claim ownership of their thought), or, as is just as often the case, merely won the footrace to the patent office or cribbed the work of others.
The best thing the developing world could do for itself is tell America and western Europe to fuck off and none-too-gently place their IP regimes, patents and copyrights in particular, into a location where the sun never shines. If free software is destroyed by these knowledge-squatters, it will not be the first such promising work of humanity so destroyed, nor the last. Until people wake up and put these Robber Barons in their place (preferably behind bars), atrocities such as this potential fiasco will occur again and again, with human progress and public interests being trampled, again and again, by the attourney equivelent of a spoiled child's shreak "No, I thought of it first, you can't use it!"
...it would still be a patent infringement if SCO was the first to come up with the patented technology.
Correction....it would still be patent infringement of SCO was the first to win the footrace to the patent office.
Inventing isn't required. Being the first to pay the USPTO vig and have the government summarilly declare you "invented" it and grant you an entitlement to a 20 year monopoly is all that is required. Actually inventing the product, before or after the fact, is not only not required, it could be a hinderence.
Hmm. Well, if this is a troll, it is a clever enough one that I'll respond anyway.
And the reason why copyright reduced the number of books is because it got rid of those publishers who were making money by simply not giving the author any as they were just reprinting the novel themselves. So yes, we got rid of the leeches who were simply coasting on the coat-tails of somebody else's effort and the number of books printed dropped
Go study the history of copyright (hint, contrary to the myth proponents of copyright promote, copyright came into existence a century or so before the Statue of Anne). You couldn't be more wrong in your assertions. Original copyright didn't grant authors any rights whatsoever. It granted certain publishers the right to publish, and denied those rights to everyone else. The publishers who had been granted the right to copy by official sanctioned of the British Crown quickly learned they could make more money by not competing with one another. So they got together and formed a trust, something that would be illegal if it were to happen today, creating what they called the "White Book" in which a publisher would register a work and the other publishers would then refrain from publishing competing copies. It began as a gentleman's agreement, and later was encoded into formal, professional rules publishers in the cartel abided by, and later still into law. The authors and artists had no part in this... except that 2/3rds of their voices were silenced in the process.
It was cartel politics, pure and simple, that led to the monopoly regimes adopted by the Statute of Anne and subsequently the US constitution, a cartel created and formed with the express purpose of controlling what was published, facilitating censorship, and controlling who could gain access to publishing equipment. Much like the FCC does with modern radio and television today, and much like what Microsoft and the Hollywood cartels are trying to do to the Internet through Palladium and DRM (Digital Restriction Mechanisms).
Publishers who published their own works, unsanctioned by the Crown, were even drawn and quartered for their offense. The decrease in public materials came about directly as a result of the stifling and chilling effects of copyright, not because Authors suddenly had new monopoly entitlements that allowed them the privelege of ceasing to be published and read, but instead to demand publishers pull their works from the public eye and fade into historical oblivion.
This is the consequence of a regime designed to foster creativity, productivity, and fairness to those who use the limited time in their lives to create something that betters all of us.
Only someone completely ignornant of the early history of copyright could assert with a straight face that copyright was ever designed to foster creativity, productivity, much less fairness. The US constitution included copyright because, quite frankly, the founding fathers were hoodwinked by publishers... the same publishers who had fought the author rights and limited terms introduced into copyright by the Statue of Anne tooth and nail for decades previously, through bribery and litigation.
Copyright was established to provide a simple mechanism for the British monarch to censor the printing press. It has come full circle, returning to its roots, in that it has become, by far, the most effective means of censoring the modern internet and stifling a variety of otherwise protected speech. This is not what anyone without an agenda (c.f. the BSA, MPAA, RIAA) would characterize as "fostering creativity, productivity, or fairness."
I think this reminds me of the situation with the CPU IDs in the Intel Pentium processors. I have yet to see a BIOS supporting such processors without the ability to disable the serial number.
Yes, but Intel CPUs allows software to reenable the serial number at whim, so even though you've turned it off the BIOS, MS Spyware is still able to read it and stamp in onto every video library file you make, or even view, if it so desires.
The BIOS setting was a public relations gesture, with no real substance, and no protection for the consumer from exactly the sorts of abuses the public outcry against the feature engendered in the first place.
I suspect that the "trusted computing" features will be similar it its ability to disable such things. It will be required of virtually every motherboard manufacturer who wants to compete. I can't imagine hardware manufacturers being pressured into making a palladium only system.
I suspect you're right... it will be very like the CPU ID. You'll be able to turn it off in BIOS, and Microsoft SpyOS (or Real Networks SpyViewer for Linux) will turn it right back on again, right behind your back.
Worse, as another noted quite insightfully, Version 2 may not allow non-compliant OSes to boot at all. Goodbye FreeBSD, goodbye GNU/Linux, goodbye Free Software, goodbye Freedom. At least in the western world... China, Taiwan, and India will likely find a very receptive market in the rest of the world to a non-Palladium platform still capable of running GNU/Linux or FreeBSD... and the Palladium/DRM infected nations (USA, Australia, perhaps Europe) will be relegated to a technological backwater before the century is even half gone.
To date no good solution exists to entice authors into creating and preserve freedom at the same time. Street performer protocol and similar things do work in some cases but only in "niche" cases. For instance many authors have only written one good work in their lives (e.g. Steinbeck). They would starve with SPP. Many singers have had one or two hits (e.g. Billy Ray Cyrus (sp?)). Those guys would starve too.
Nonsense. They would work day jobs like the rest of us, and practice their craft as a hobby. The best authors are those who do it for love of writing, not for cash. The downside would be that they would spend less time working on their writing... but arguably that would be a good thing in some instances as well (consider the dreck produced by the paid writers in the last two Star Wars episodes and the last Star Trek movie, and contrast that with some of the excellent, and vastly superior, fan fiction that has been circulated for free, at no cost, with no profit incentive whatsoever.
Worse, people would not go to the trouble of creating stuff if they knew in advance that they would have to sustain their production over long stretches of time.
You mean, be productive over long stretches of time like every other working human being on the planet? Why is it content creators, and their purveyors (the publishers, who are generally the ones receiving the vast bulk of the profits) feel they are entitled to rest on their laurels forever, and never work another day in their life, or at least only as much as they deign to choose, for creating one work, while the rest of us accept that we will work, and work hard, until retirement?
This entitlement mentality must end, and the notion that we should destroy the internet, hobble libraries, shred the constitution, and turn every digital device in our homes and on our persons into a governance device that monitors and reports our usage of digital data is not only offensive and appalling, it is simply, flat out asinine.
The myth that people will only create valuable and worthwhile art is not only provably wrong, it has already been proven wrong countless times, not only by myself, but by many, many others. Peruse USENET or any number of Free Media and Free Literature sites... much of the best work is available online, at no cost, with no profit motive. Whether it fits your particular taste or not, the allegation that "people would not go to the grouble of creating stuff" if it were free (the assumption implicit in your statement) is simply false.
Content creators will have to give up the notion, and assumption, that they are entitled to be paid for creating content if we are to have anything other than a draconian, Orwellian society in the digital age, in which a police and surveillance state is instituted in order to enforce digital copyrights (and even that will likely prove insufficient, though I'm sure the effort will further overpopulate our prisons and destroy thousands, perhaps millions of lives in a misguided effort that will make the War on Drugs, and the former Communist East, look like a liberal , democratic picnic in comparison).
Copyright initially reduced the number of books printed to 1/3 of their former numbers... this is not the consiqence of a regime designed to foster creativity and productivity, it is the result of a regime designed to facilitate censorship and foster a profit motive above love of the art, and we as a culture have paid a heavy price in seeing our culture diminished and privatized to a point where singing "Happy Birthday" to your child is a technical violation of the law, punishable by fine and, if you send such a greeting to your college bound child over email, by 5 years imprisonment.
From the article on Salon: "Lawyers for the association told the Supreme Court that the stay was needed to keep Pavlovich from reposting the decryption program on the Internet."
Too bad for them the constitution still provides a modicum of protection of my right to write, and publish if I so wish, a novel that just so happens to contain not one, but TWO encodings of DeCSS (including the inspired haiku you point out).
The entire document is shared freely under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, with paper copies having already travelled throughout the world, and digital dissemination even wider.
Cry me a river for the DVD CSS thugs... arrogant enough to thing that US law applies to the world, that the constitution doesn't apply to them, and that their parasitical industry's interests should outweigh those of the computer and electronic industries which dwarf theirs, and the interests of the people, which dwarf all of those interests and which the government had better stop ignoring.
JBoss [jboss.org] follows this same idea. The software is open source but the documentation must be paid for. I don't disagree with this because its a business model supporting open source that may work.
I don't think anyone (even RMS) disagrees with this (though of course there are those who would advocate such manuals be published under the FDL... again only some, certainly not all, free software advocates).
As others have pointed out it is not the selling of manuals and documentation that is the issue, it is the added clause forbidding the purchaser from sharing that knowledge further.
Imagine if such a restriction were put on reading primers, Physics text books, or software documentation in general (much less documentation for free software and open source projects).
They are not out of line for selling documentation (indeed, the Blender Foundation does this, as do many others including the Free Software Foundation itself), but they are extraordinarilly out of line for treating basic documentation as trade secrets which may not be shared with the rest of their community. It is a disservice to their customers, it is a disservice to their (non-paying and paying) users, it is a disservice to whatever community has grown up around their product, and ultimately it is a disservice to themselves.
Someone over there needs a serious reality check, poste haste.
Use even a modicum of imagination
on
Starcraft
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· Score: 2
So what you're saying is that the aliens are too smart to want to do anything but (silently) chill on the homeworld? As in...
Good Lord.
Stop reading space opera tripe, read some Greg Egan or Verner Vinge, and grow your imagination a little.
The speed of light may well be an ABSOLUTE LIMIT, with no clever circumvention (wormholes, what have you) possible. However, their may well be vastly more interesting domains that are accessible (hacking into the stuff of which the universe is made at its lowest level, accessing, or constructing, alternative universes with vastly different physical constants... and no, I don't mean 'sliders-like' alternative histories, I mean completely different continuua, etc).
Perhaps the ability to access or construct a realm in which quantum limitations and speed of light limits do not apply (making vastly greater, perhaps infinite, computational resources availabel to them, to which they could upload their minds. Obviously causality would prevent them from using this as a short cut across our space, but it might free them from the doomed burnout that faces this universe, and free their minds to grow without bounds.
Of course, someone on the far side of the technological horizon is going to imagine vastly more, but even in these few moments I've managed to think of something a little more intriguing than FTL or whatever nonsense it is scurrying around your little mind.
It is entirely possible that emergent intelligences shake off the physical limits of this universe like an embryonic reptile would the shell of its hatching egg. It may not be able to make the egg any larger or more amenable to its conditions, but it is entirely capable of breaking out of it and moving on to greener pasteurs.
In which case intelligence could be reasonably common, and yet Fermi's paradox would be answered.
They aren't diaries. If you keep a text file on your local machine for "blogging" purposes, that's comperable to a diary but the file you make available for all to see isn't.
Ahem. A diary is a diary, whether you keep it locked in a cabinet or publish it for all the world to see. The number of readers it has makes absolutely no difference to what it is.
This underscores why the greatest dangers to our freedoms, including our freedom of speech, doesn't come from our government (although it is a threat, as current trends toward greater authoritariansim in the terrorist hysteria left by the wake of 9/11), but from private enterprise, corporations, and simple, unfettered greed.
Whether it is Hollywood, the Recording Industry, Microsoft, or Joe Blow's employer firing them for an unflattering entry in their blog, the trend is clear: "Your freedom of speech exists only on paper, and we're going to make sure it isn't worth even the paper it is written on."
Consider
"With the advent of cyberspace, we've had to evolve these policies," Farr said. "Somewhere between First Amendment rights and total repression there is a practical middle ground."
If that mentality doesn't concern you, much less send chills down your spine, then nothing will. You can't have "a little bit freedom of speech" any more than you can be "just a little bit pregnant." Any compromise of this nature must inherently mean you do not retain your freedom of speech (hint: the freedom to only do or say what is approved isn't freedom. Until people figure this out our trembling democracy will remain in need of serious triage).
The barbarians are at the gates and Rome is about to fall, and they are wearing suits and ties, wielding pens, and sidestepping the will and intent of the Consitution at every opportunity.
What is worse, we are passively letting it happen.
Verner's Singularity may answer Fermi's Paradox
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Starcraft
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· Score: 2
We can make all kinds of arguments like: alien intelligence leaves no trace of itself, isn't interested in us, or isn't interested in exploration. However, the one data point we have (ourselves) is very bad at cleaning up after itself, isn't shy at all about going after resources wherever they exist, and is very keen on exploration. There's no reason why other intelligence would be significantly different.
The answer may lie in what I call the "technological horizon" (no discontinuity implied) or Verner Vinge calls the "technological singularity" (discontinuity implied but not necessarilly required). Given the exponential increase in human knowledge and technology (stoppable only through the fall of civilization or the widespread adoption of intellectual property law, patent law in particular, something which arguably most intelligent spieces would be smart enough to avoid), it may be that the period of time when a species would be interested in physical exploration of the universe is relatively short (measurable perhaps in mere decades), before their interests (and their very existence) moves on to another state beyond, or perhaps orthogonal to, our current ability to comprehend.
The claim that they said such a thing flies directly in the face of logic when one considers their own writings on why *not* to use a license like the LGPL
Yes, like you many of the detractors of the Free Software Foundation and Richard Stallman like to oversimplify both the issues, and the FSF's stances on those issues. Clearly folks like RMS give these things a great deal more consideration than folks like you, and are perfectly able to be flexible in their strategies and stances when issues of freedom (in this case, a free, unpatented comperssion standard) require it. Although in this case, even for you, the simple word
hardware
or more verbosely
standards adoptation in both software and hardware
should have clued you in. The Fres Software Foundation and Richard Stallman are interested in seeing a patent and royalty free standard be widely adopted, in both free software and in hardware (we are talking about ogg-vorbis after all. Without portable ogg-vorbis players its adoption is likely to be stunted).
In response to the change of license, Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation says, "I agree. It is wise to make some of the Ogg Vorbis code available for use in proprietary software, so that commercial companies doing proprietary software will use it, and help Vorbis succeed in competition with other formats that would be restricted against our use." [
source]
Clearly, in cases where a standards adoption is paramount, allowing free and proprietary software equal access to the standard's base code is sufficently important to forego the protections of the GPL in order to facilitate it. As the BSD license is GPL compatible, the copies incorporated into GPLed software can themselves be GPLed, affording both the widespread adoption of the standard, and its protection under the GPL until it passes into the public domain.
That Russia gets more Democratic while America gets more Communistic.
The word you are looking for is authoritarian.
Communism, Socialism, and Capitalism are orthogonal to Democracy vs. Authoritarianism. There have been examples of democratic communism (Spain in the early 20th century... one of the rare times the Soviets and the Western powers were united in undermining a communist system, as it demonstrated two things neither side could tolerate, namely (1) that communism could work and compete effectively with capitalism in a dual economy, which the oligarchs of the west couldn't permit and (2) that communism didn't require authoritarianism to work, which undermined the Soviets justification for wielding unchecked athoritarian power in the east).
There have also been a plethora of examples of authoritarian capitalism in regions as diverse as central and south America, Europe, Asia, and Africa.
Russia is becoming more Democratic, while the United States is becoming more Authoritarian, and abusing the memories of the vitims of 9/11 to achieve it. Disgusting.
I thought that Netscape started off as a combination of open source (though not GPL, of course) projects.
No.
Netscape was not 'based' on mosaic... they reimplemnted the browser from scratch using Motif instead of xaw widgets (for their *nix versions) and obviously windows equivelents for their 'doz versions. It was a complete rewrite, and entirely proprietary code until they chose to GPL it much later... after Microsoft had nearly killed their market share through illegal leverage of their desktop monopoly (a crime for which Microsoft has been convicted, despite the current administration's unwillingness to uphold the law).
Netscape certainly falls in the category of "non-Linux company to embrace the GPL", though they certainly are not alone. Cygwin, Trolltech, and others have done likewise... the GPL ironically is a very protective license to those commercial entities which wish to open their code without having competitors take it and incorporate it into their proprietary products. It is an effective innoculation against such things, which makes it a very useful license for many companies who have much to gain from opening their code, but do not wish to empower their competitors directly in the process.
It isn't for everyone, or appropriate for all circumstances (recall that OggVorbis is being released under the BSD License so that it will be adopted far and wide, in both free and proprietary products... including hardware, and recall that the Free Software Foundation has endorsed this with its full support), but it is a very solid license in many (perhaps most) free software circumstances, and its innoculation against future abuse and closing off of the source is a very important, and very effective, feature in insuring that the public commons of code continue to grow and flourish.
this reminds me of that crappy 'tekwar' series
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Deadly Perversions
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· Score: 4, Interesting
"She was killed by that computer virus." Good god.
The show sucked regardless (perhaps even more than this book apparently does), but with that line it surpassed my tolerance threshold and I summarilly shut it off (and have studiously avoided it since). What utter crap... and now the same nonsensical garbage is being lauded in a book?
Please.
Its hard enough to educate people that computer viruses aren't real viruses, that memory (RAM) is volitile storage lost upon shutdown, while the hard drive ("memory" as it is called by some) is persistent, etc. etc.
We are already dealing with an abysmal state of computer literacy... and while science fiction and fantasy often takes liberties with the possible and probably, spewing utterly nonsensical tripe like that IMHO simply requires too much of a suspension of disbelief to even be worthwhile, while alas preying on the illiteracy of others and clouding their understanding of real technologies further.
The very, very worst of what science fiction can be (in stark contrast to Greg Egan's works, which educate as well as entertain, and often expand your imagination in the process, and to plenty of other speculative works that don't educate, but do entertain and at least don't misinform and cloud real issues in the process).
Those with children: Try explaining to little Suzy why she can't have the latest Britney cd, or why you don't want her to go the movies because of your beliefs.
I doubt she will care.
And when your child asks "[Daddy | Mommy], where were you when they took our rights and our democracy away?" you can turn around and tell your child it is there fault, for whining about the latest Britney CD, rather than admitting that it wasn't the child asking that was the problem, it was the spinelessness of an adult who knew better, but chose spoiling their child over education, over their own principles, and over the future of that child's freedom.
Nice. You get to help flush your child's freedom down the drain and send the child on a guilt trip for your decisions, and your inaction, all in one. With parents like that, who needs pedophiles and predators?
Of course, he may not want to do that to them, or they may not have enough to make it worthwhile. I'd consider suing the kid just to get her convicted of a felony, which gets to go on her permanent record and fucks her life about as squarely as she just fucked his.
But that's me, and I can be a vengeful asshole if you screw me first.
Your (or "Tom's") motive might be vengeful, but that wouldn't make it an entirely appropriate and constructive way to handle this sort of apalling injustice.
Constructive how, you ask? Because clearly the only deterrance that really exists against this sort of abusive false accusation (in addition to normal social pressures and etiquette, which people who make such accusations are unmoved by anyway) is the fear of very real, very profound consequences.
Her having her reputation and life ruined by having her deception, and its willfully harmful and destructive consequences, in the public record is a singuarly natural and appropriate consequence of her despicable actions.
Whether out of vengeance, or to simply deter future similar acts, "Tom" should seriously persue such a case regardless. His motive is irrelevant, the outcome that is desired is for the perpetrator (in this case, the false accuser) to suffer appropriately for her crime, and in an appropriately severe and public enough manner to deter others from such conduct.
Although this seems like a fine idea in theory, I am having difficulty imagining many situations where people would use it, which would be useful to others.
There is already a bunch of material licensed under their licenses, and numerous other efforts to achieve similar results under which a great deal of good music and prose is licensed. Clearly there are many others who are having little difficulty in finding these sorts of free licenses useful.
It is not going to replace copyright for music or books (I realise these aren't mentioned, I'm just trying to think of some possible use - theirs are pretty crap and unlikely) for example - the industry wouldn't touch it for obvious reasons.
It isn't "replacing copyright" (though drastic copyright reform eliminating the government monopoly entitlements it grants with a more balanced "sales tax as creator royalty" scheme would be highly desirable), it is creating a license that, similar to the BSD License, the FDL, and the GPL, will facilitate a growing commons of material all creative people can use and build upon.
Finally, who gives a fuck about the "industry" as such. Their purposes are already served, and have been so by a century of corrupt copyright legislation bought and paid for from our inexpensively purchased "representatives" in congress. The cultural squatters of New York, Nashville, and Hollywood, and the cartels they have formed, are the reason that the "vast cultural wasteland" of television and the lack of cultural depth in modern society have become so obvious, and such obvious truisms that they have become cliches.
These free licenses aren't intended to benefit the entrenched "industry" any more than the GPL is designed to Benefit the Sun Microsystems and Microsoft's of the world. It is intended to benefit ARTISTS and CREATIVE PEOPLE, not cultural squatters and an industry that has denigrated the art into a mere product of mass production, filtered down to the lowest common denominator.
If it takes off at all, it would be for the benefit of amateurs only, but then, what's the point?
First this is nonsense. One could have made the same inane (and in retrospect obviously incorrect) argument against the GPL, which has benefitted both amateurs (such as Linus Torvalds when he first began writing the Linux kernel) and professionals (such as IBM).
Likewise, the Creative Commons will empower amateurs (such as myself) and professionals. No, it won't empower Time Warner any more than the GPL empowers Microsoft, but it will empower Indy music and film makers (who are often professionals and not amateurs, though they often serve as a bridge in getting new and talented filmmakers noticed).
Second, every professional was at one time in their career an amateur. A great deal of amateur material is crap, but a great deal is also excellent. Having that material available as part of a commons, free to be distributed, improved upon, and incorporated into other, grander works is a very valuable thing to artists, to society, and to the health of our cultural heritage itself. No, it doesn't benefit Disney and Time-Warner, it benefits the tens of thousands of talented artists Disney, Time-Warner, and others of their ilk have traditionally trampled under their feet, and in addition it benefits the rest of us who enjoy and admire such works.
And that is very, very good thing, tripe and propoganda from the "industry" at its shills and astroturfers notwithstanding.
Yeah, let's see. Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings starting in 1940. I guess it reflects British immigration worries in 1950.
I can't tell if you're being sarcastic here or not (apologies if you were), but...
Tolkien would likely take great offense at this characterization, were he alive and able to hear (read) it. He truly disliked, one could perhaps even say DESPISED, allegory, and emphatically stated time and time again that his mythos was in no way allegorical about any of the political, social, or economic conditions of the time. It was intended as a MYTHOS drawing upon the rich historical and cultural heritage of Britain, and unlike so many novels of the era, had ABSOLUTELY NO MESSAGE with respect to current potitics, economics, or social commentary WHATSOEVER.
Other than that, I think you post is dead on (and find the tidbit you bring up about German translation very interesting).
This is a good point. Most scientific progress comes in leaps. At some point the steady, incremental progress made by CPU manufacturers has to end.
Yes and no. Scientific progress (though slower, as we were much further down the exponential curve) was pretty steady in the time before patents, and indeed during that part of history where the term of patents was signficantly shorter than the time between technological steps (again, as we were much further down on the exponential curve). Yes, there were interruptions that resulted from the collapse of civilizations (often due to the natural causes... even the fall of the Roman empire is attributed by many to a vulcanic eruption half way around the world in the south Pacific, and the resulting several year climatic cooling that followed), but, barring the fall of civilization itself, there is no evidence that progress is anything but exponential.
Now, with patents imposing a smaller exponent than in the past (because the patent term now far exceeds the time between technological steps, and will probably do so all the way to our current technolgical horizon or, if Verner Vinge is right (and I, who see it as a visual horizon and not a fundamental sigularity, am wrong), right through the technological singularity itself), there are bursts of creativity followed by years of little, incremental advance, but this is a very artificial artifact of the appalling practice of reducing thought and ideas to private, proprietary property.
Aviation is a great example of this, particularly in the time between the Wright Brother's patenting of the airplane and World War I, where the US fell generations behind Europe in the development of airplanes because of the patent, and where the US Government itself, in a desperate (and successful) bid to catch up with the Germans in World War I, essentially seized the patent and opened up the technology to all competitors (kicking back 1% as a royalty to the Wright Brothers). Progress in that environment returned to its exponetial characteristics, and remained so until further patents were granted, stifling development yet again.
The most common pro-patent argument (beyond the naive and debunked notion that no one would invent without patents... Benjamin Franklin and others have disproven that outright, as have countless programmers today) is that it forces the reinvention of the wheel by other non-licensed parties, thereby creating a plethora of wheel designs where there might have otherwise only been one.
But in reality, if the wheel is patented, there can only be improvements on that design by the licensees and inventor themselves. Others will have to invent sleds, or some other non-wheel method of interfacing a cart with the gound. The benefits of such are vastly less than the benefits of a competative improvement on the wheel would have been... benefits that are banned for a period of 20 years at least, possibly quite a bit longer if additional patents are filed for and granted.
#3 Revenue lost from consumers who would have bought the CD and after sampling it decided not to.
[...]
Usually the RIAA pushes #2 as their argument and then it's countered with #1 by P2P representatives. I'm pretty sure it's actually #3 that's scaring the industry.
Yes. God forbid that the recording industry (and movie industry for that matter: how many trailers have you seen that completely misrepresent the film being previewed?) actually be required to produce quality material before people would be willing to purchase it.
With copyright granting artists (and, more commonly through contractual law, publishers) governmental monopoly entitlements, there is no free, competative market to insure prices are fair, or that material in demand is even available, much less create an environment in which quality, through competative forces, is improved. The only remaining counterbalance is an informed purchaser, something that requires a person be able to listen to the entire CD, or even sample the entire movie, before paying good money for it.
I didn't go see Star Wars II because I saw it online first... and although I didn't watch the whole thing, I watched enough of it (an hour or so) to realize just how much the movie sucked.
OTOH I saw LOTR FoTR online, and purchased the one and only new (not used) DVD I've bought since beginning my boycott of the movie industry in the wake of the DeCSS debacle. A $50.00 purchase I would never have made had I not seen the movie online first, and been awed by its spectacular beauty.
The cartels need to be forced out of their cartelship, out of their cartel and monopoly mindset, and free market economics need to be returned to the equation. The best way to do this is through aggressive and significant copyright reform, reform which doesn't just reduce the length of copyright terms to a more paletable period, but one which does away with monopoly entitlements altogether, and replaces it with something far more benign (such as a sales tax on works being sold by someone other than the creative artist or their duly appointed publisher, a portion of which... perhaps the whole thing... is given to the artist as a de-facto royalty).
In the meantime we the appreciators of the art are reduced to either buying material blind (and being ripped off as a result more often that not), or violating the law so that we have something resembling a fair chance at making an informed purchase. And no, hearing one or two songs from a twelve-song album on the radio does not constitute a valid or accurate preview of the CD, anymore than a movie trailer gives an accurate perception of a film, as many CDs on my shelf, the other 10 songs, conviniently left unplayed by the radio, of which are crap, attest to.
The end of Moore's law is heralded on Slashdot every 2 months or so
Slashdot repeating the commentary of an idiot pundit is one thing, but Andy Grove is head of Intel and should truly be ashamed of himself.
Of course this isn't the end of Moore's Law, it simply means an end to Intel's ability to keep up. Remember, we had the Alpha, Sparc... there is a generation of 64-bit chips on the horizon, and that doesn't even begin to touch optical computing and quantum computing, both of which will undoubtably prove this clown wrong well into the middle of this century.
I am reminded of one forward looking quote in particular, that resemble's Andy Grove assertions as to the end of Moore's law in a way that would be quite amusing, were it not so pathetic that such people, like those who declared travel to the moon to be "impossible" a few scant years before it happened, simply never learn:
I will ignore all ideas for new works on engines of war, the invention of which has reached its limits and for whose improvements I see no further hope.
-- Sextus Julius Frontinus, 1st Century C.E.
Andy Grove should have been wise enough to learn from the countless other fools of history, who have predicted an end to progress, an end to exponential progress, and end that, despite the depridations (and damage) patents cause, simply refuses to come, and has refused to come for all of the thousands of years short sighted pessimists have been predicting it.
Things such as this are what the patent system was designed for. This is a legitimate 'new' device that performs a 'new' function that was previously unavailable - and it deserves a patent.
Yes, things like this (and the airplane, and numerous other inventsions) are exactly what the patent system was designed for, and by the rules set down the patent is completely legitimate.
Unfortunately, this technology will only be developed and improved by a small subset of those who could have improved and exploited it: namely the inventor(s) himself and those who chooses to license his patent to. A great deal of good science and engineering will be delayed by at least 20 years because of this patent, perhaps longer if patents on applications of the technology are granted (which often happens, and is how pharmaceutical companies often delay the release of generic drugs for even longer than the duration of their patents).
Even in the best case scenerio, where the patent system works exactly as designed, this new technology will be developed at a snail's pace until such a time as the patent expires and competing, unfettered interests can improve upon it. Of course, then that progress in turn will be brought back to a crawl once again, as patents on the improvements are granted, and so on, ad nauseum.
Unless of course we need the technology in a war, then the US Govt., desperate for improvements which can only be achieved through competition and free markets, will seize the patent and open it up to competing interests, just like they did Orval and Wilber Wright's patent on the airplane in World War I, and numerous other technologies since (eventually writing into law a nice loophole that excludes the government from adhering to patents altogether).
So yes, this inventor clearly deserves the patent and yes, the patent clearly stifles any further developments along that particular line of inquiry.
Well, I don't believe anyone who really appreciates movies would want these. It's a similar mentality to those hordes of 14year old "gimmes" who download tons and tons of mp3s and DivXs because they can, and it's somehow "cool" to have it before anyone else. Half the time, they don't even watch them!
Did you ever stop to consider where that attitude might come from?
Who gives the elite screening copies of films months prior to the "unwashed masses?" Who releases a movie on one continent, then waits several months before releasing it on another? Who has encoded region-specific information on the current medium of their consumer-grade product to facilitate the continuation of this sort of behavior even in the digital age and the age of globalism?
Who has done everything they can, using everything from marketing to outright market manipulation, to turn time, and the date one can see a movie, into a status symbol so large the lemmings all run to the same theaters on opening night and cheerfully stand in line in sub-zero temperatures in the hopes of getting one of the few seats available?
Hollywood, that is who.
Which is why I have no problem with people who choose to time-shift their entertainment from the schedule the media moghuls are trying to lay down to their own schedule...even if that means timeshifting the film from six months in the future to the present, then going out and purchasing the DVD (or going to the theater, or what have you) when the opportunity finally arrives, months later and according to the industry's timetable.
The industry created this time-sensitive demand, and have systematically hyped and developed the sense of presige that getting to see something earlier than others seems to provide so many. Now they can enjoy reaping precisely what they've sown.
Slashdot Mirror
The scary thing behind what was posted to Bugtraq is that it explicitly states that all digital media on the system is cataloged, and the list is sent to the RIAA. This assumes all digital media on a system is an illegal copy.
Yes, it does. And it shows what criminal, despicable, disgusting excuses for human beings work for, or with, the RIAA.
Sure, if the worm comes into your system over a P2P network, there's a good chance that at least *some* of your mp3s are pirated, but there's no way to differentiate pirated mp3s and those you ripped/encoded from your own CD collection.
All of my mp3 and ogg files are ripped from my own rather large, but no longer growing CD and Vinyl collection (because now I do not buy CDs, ever, nor will I, ever again). All of my avi's are recorded from my own television, my own animations, or my own media, and are not traded, ever. Indeed, none of my stuff is traded, ever.
However, I did install gtk-gnutella in order to download the hiliarious fan fiction Star Trek episode "Savage Empire", because the web site distributing the files had been slashdoted. A perfectly legal download, for which, if this story is true, these unlawful thugs have infected my machine.
I have enough money, and the will, to persue a very harsh lawsuit against these fucks if this story has any veracity, and if I am infected, and I will not hesitate to do so.
"In Corporate Fascist America You and Your Data Belong to the Copyright and Media Cartels. Bend Over and Enjoy the Ride, Consumer."
What intellectual property does SCO claim to own? Are these patents, or copyrights, and over what code or protocols?
... it innoculates against entities such as SCO submarining code into the OS and then making copyright claims down the road.
... and, of course, powerless to do anything about it beneath a government that no longer even feels the need to feign democracy, much less practice it. However, the rest of the world will continue on quite happilly without us, probably breathing a sigh of relief that such an out of control, unilateral superpower has managed to shoot itself so severely in the foot.
... why should one country, one corporation, or one human being own knowledge and wisdom, regardless of whether they thought of it first (and most likely had their employer claim ownership of their thought), or, as is just as often the case, merely won the footrace to the patent office or cribbed the work of others.
It almost certainly is not copyrights. Linux was written from scratch by Linus Torvalds and released under the GNU GPL. Any and all code submitted to the kernel is likewise GPLed, so if SCO submitted code, they did so under the terms of the GPL. This is where the GPL really shines
Of course, if someone violated SCO's copyright and got it accepted into the kernel without divulging its origins (or claiming to have written it themselves), then SCO would probably have a copyright claim against the purported author, not those (the linux kernel folks, distros, and users) to whome that hypothetical black hat illegally licensed the code. And if said person were actually in the employ of SCO, then sco would have essentially granted a licenses and would be bitchslapped by the courts. None of those latter scenerios are even remotely likely, so, as I said, it is almost certainly not a copyright claim SCO's vague comments are asserting.
What they own are almost certainly software patents, likely patents written from looking at the source code written and developed by others, and granted rubber-stamp style from the notoriously irresponsible US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). As others have said, such are the equivelent of 'nuclear weapons' for IT, and if SCO were to do such a foolish thing (as a consiquence of their own stupidity, or shilling for Microsoft), the end result will be no GNU/Linux in the United States (the only country stupid enough to recognize such patents), and a United States with an IT industry that would be irrelevant not within the generous twenty years Alan Cox suggests, but within a scant 5 years at best.
In short, America would become the technological backwater its behavior and policies have so richly earned it. We in the States who care (a vanishingly small minority) would be unhappy with this
In any event, if the rest of the world ever wants to throw off the yoke of the American Hegemony, the best and most effective first step they could take would be to reject our copyright and patent schemes outright
The best thing the developing world could do for itself is tell America and western Europe to fuck off and none-too-gently place their IP regimes, patents and copyrights in particular, into a location where the sun never shines. If free software is destroyed by these knowledge-squatters, it will not be the first such promising work of humanity so destroyed, nor the last. Until people wake up and put these Robber Barons in their place (preferably behind bars), atrocities such as this potential fiasco will occur again and again, with human progress and public interests being trampled, again and again, by the attourney equivelent of a spoiled child's shreak "No, I thought of it first, you can't use it!"
...it would still be a patent infringement if SCO was the first to come up with the patented technology.
...it would still be patent infringement of SCO was the first to win the footrace to the patent office.
Correction.
Inventing isn't required. Being the first to pay the USPTO vig and have the government summarilly declare you "invented" it and grant you an entitlement to a 20 year monopoly is all that is required. Actually inventing the product, before or after the fact, is not only not required, it could be a hinderence.
Hmm. Well, if this is a troll, it is a clever enough one that I'll respond anyway.
... except that 2/3rds of their voices were silenced in the process.
... the same publishers who had fought the author rights and limited terms introduced into copyright by the Statue of Anne tooth and nail for decades previously, through bribery and litigation.
And the reason why copyright reduced the number of books is because it got rid of those publishers who were making money by simply not giving the author any as they were just reprinting the novel themselves. So yes, we got rid of the leeches who were simply coasting on the coat-tails of somebody else's effort and the number of books printed dropped
Go study the history of copyright (hint, contrary to the myth proponents of copyright promote, copyright came into existence a century or so before the Statue of Anne). You couldn't be more wrong in your assertions. Original copyright didn't grant authors any rights whatsoever. It granted certain publishers the right to publish, and denied those rights to everyone else. The publishers who had been granted the right to copy by official sanctioned of the British Crown quickly learned they could make more money by not competing with one another. So they got together and formed a trust, something that would be illegal if it were to happen today, creating what they called the "White Book" in which a publisher would register a work and the other publishers would then refrain from publishing competing copies. It began as a gentleman's agreement, and later was encoded into formal, professional rules publishers in the cartel abided by, and later still into law. The authors and artists had no part in this
It was cartel politics, pure and simple, that led to the monopoly regimes adopted by the Statute of Anne and subsequently the US constitution, a cartel created and formed with the express purpose of controlling what was published, facilitating censorship, and controlling who could gain access to publishing equipment. Much like the FCC does with modern radio and television today, and much like what Microsoft and the Hollywood cartels are trying to do to the Internet through Palladium and DRM (Digital Restriction Mechanisms).
Publishers who published their own works, unsanctioned by the Crown, were even drawn and quartered for their offense. The decrease in public materials came about directly as a result of the stifling and chilling effects of copyright, not because Authors suddenly had new monopoly entitlements that allowed them the privelege of ceasing to be published and read, but instead to demand publishers pull their works from the public eye and fade into historical oblivion.
This is the consequence of a regime designed to foster creativity, productivity, and fairness to those who use the limited time in their lives to create something that betters all of us.
Only someone completely ignornant of the early history of copyright could assert with a straight face that copyright was ever designed to foster creativity, productivity, much less fairness. The US constitution included copyright because, quite frankly, the founding fathers were hoodwinked by publishers
Copyright was established to provide a simple mechanism for the British monarch to censor the printing press. It has come full circle, returning to its roots, in that it has become, by far, the most effective means of censoring the modern internet and stifling a variety of otherwise protected speech. This is not what anyone without an agenda (c.f. the BSA, MPAA, RIAA) would characterize as "fostering creativity, productivity, or fairness."
I think this reminds me of the situation with the CPU IDs in the Intel Pentium processors. I have yet to see a BIOS supporting such processors without the ability to disable the serial number.
... it will be very like the CPU ID. You'll be able to turn it off in BIOS, and Microsoft SpyOS (or Real Networks SpyViewer for Linux) will turn it right back on again, right behind your back.
... China, Taiwan, and India will likely find a very receptive market in the rest of the world to a non-Palladium platform still capable of running GNU/Linux or FreeBSD ... and the Palladium/DRM infected nations (USA, Australia, perhaps Europe) will be relegated to a technological backwater before the century is even half gone.
Yes, but Intel CPUs allows software to reenable the serial number at whim, so even though you've turned it off the BIOS, MS Spyware is still able to read it and stamp in onto every video library file you make, or even view, if it so desires.
The BIOS setting was a public relations gesture, with no real substance, and no protection for the consumer from exactly the sorts of abuses the public outcry against the feature engendered in the first place.
I suspect that the "trusted computing" features will be similar it its ability to disable such things. It will be required of virtually every motherboard manufacturer who wants to compete. I can't imagine hardware manufacturers being pressured into making a palladium only system.
I suspect you're right
Worse, as another noted quite insightfully, Version 2 may not allow non-compliant OSes to boot at all. Goodbye FreeBSD, goodbye GNU/Linux, goodbye Free Software, goodbye Freedom. At least in the western world
To date no good solution exists to entice authors into creating and preserve freedom at the same time. Street performer protocol and similar things do work in some cases but only in "niche" cases. For instance many authors have only written one good work in their lives (e.g. Steinbeck). They would starve with SPP. Many singers have had one or two hits (e.g. Billy Ray Cyrus (sp?)). Those guys would starve too.
... but arguably that would be a good thing in some instances as well (consider the dreck produced by the paid writers in the last two Star Wars episodes and the last Star Trek movie, and contrast that with some of the excellent, and vastly superior, fan fiction that has been circulated for free, at no cost, with no profit incentive whatsoever.
... much of the best work is available online, at no cost, with no profit motive. Whether it fits your particular taste or not, the allegation that "people would not go to the grouble of creating stuff" if it were free (the assumption implicit in your statement) is simply false.
... this is not the consiqence of a regime designed to foster creativity and productivity, it is the result of a regime designed to facilitate censorship and foster a profit motive above love of the art, and we as a culture have paid a heavy price in seeing our culture diminished and privatized to a point where singing "Happy Birthday" to your child is a technical violation of the law, punishable by fine and, if you send such a greeting to your college bound child over email, by 5 years imprisonment.
Nonsense. They would work day jobs like the rest of us, and practice their craft as a hobby. The best authors are those who do it for love of writing, not for cash. The downside would be that they would spend less time working on their writing
Worse, people would not go to the trouble of creating stuff if they knew in advance that they would have to sustain their production over long stretches of time.
You mean, be productive over long stretches of time like every other working human being on the planet? Why is it content creators, and their purveyors (the publishers, who are generally the ones receiving the vast bulk of the profits) feel they are entitled to rest on their laurels forever, and never work another day in their life, or at least only as much as they deign to choose, for creating one work, while the rest of us accept that we will work, and work hard, until retirement?
This entitlement mentality must end, and the notion that we should destroy the internet, hobble libraries, shred the constitution, and turn every digital device in our homes and on our persons into a governance device that monitors and reports our usage of digital data is not only offensive and appalling, it is simply, flat out asinine.
The myth that people will only create valuable and worthwhile art is not only provably wrong, it has already been proven wrong countless times, not only by myself, but by many, many others. Peruse USENET or any number of Free Media and Free Literature sites
Content creators will have to give up the notion, and assumption, that they are entitled to be paid for creating content if we are to have anything other than a draconian, Orwellian society in the digital age, in which a police and surveillance state is instituted in order to enforce digital copyrights (and even that will likely prove insufficient, though I'm sure the effort will further overpopulate our prisons and destroy thousands, perhaps millions of lives in a misguided effort that will make the War on Drugs, and the former Communist East, look like a liberal , democratic picnic in comparison).
Copyright initially reduced the number of books printed to 1/3 of their former numbers
From the article on Salon: "Lawyers for the association told the Supreme Court that the stay was needed to keep Pavlovich from reposting the decryption program on the Internet."
... arrogant enough to thing that US law applies to the world, that the constitution doesn't apply to them, and that their parasitical industry's interests should outweigh those of the computer and electronic industries which dwarf theirs, and the interests of the people, which dwarf all of those interests and which the government had better stop ignoring.
Too bad for them the constitution still provides a modicum of protection of my right to write, and publish if I so wish, a novel that just so happens to contain not one, but TWO encodings of DeCSS (including the inspired haiku you point out).
The entire document is shared freely under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, with paper copies having already travelled throughout the world, and digital dissemination even wider.
Cry me a river for the DVD CSS thugs
JBoss [jboss.org] follows this same idea. The software is open source but the documentation must be paid for. I don't disagree with this because its a business model supporting open source that may work.
... again only some, certainly not all, free software advocates).
I don't think anyone (even RMS) disagrees with this (though of course there are those who would advocate such manuals be published under the FDL
As others have pointed out it is not the selling of manuals and documentation that is the issue, it is the added clause forbidding the purchaser from sharing that knowledge further.
Imagine if such a restriction were put on reading primers, Physics text books, or software documentation in general (much less documentation for free software and open source projects).
They are not out of line for selling documentation (indeed, the Blender Foundation does this, as do many others including the Free Software Foundation itself), but they are extraordinarilly out of line for treating basic documentation as trade secrets which may not be shared with the rest of their community. It is a disservice to their customers, it is a disservice to their (non-paying and paying) users, it is a disservice to whatever community has grown up around their product, and ultimately it is a disservice to themselves.
Someone over there needs a serious reality check, poste haste.
So what you're saying is that the aliens are too smart to want to do anything but (silently) chill on the homeworld? As in...
... and no, I don't mean 'sliders-like' alternative histories, I mean completely different continuua, etc).
Good Lord.
Stop reading space opera tripe, read some Greg Egan or Verner Vinge, and grow your imagination a little.
The speed of light may well be an ABSOLUTE LIMIT, with no clever circumvention (wormholes, what have you) possible. However, their may well be vastly more interesting domains that are accessible (hacking into the stuff of which the universe is made at its lowest level, accessing, or constructing, alternative universes with vastly different physical constants
Perhaps the ability to access or construct a realm in which quantum limitations and speed of light limits do not apply (making vastly greater, perhaps infinite, computational resources availabel to them, to which they could upload their minds. Obviously causality would prevent them from using this as a short cut across our space, but it might free them from the doomed burnout that faces this universe, and free their minds to grow without bounds.
Of course, someone on the far side of the technological horizon is going to imagine vastly more, but even in these few moments I've managed to think of something a little more intriguing than FTL or whatever nonsense it is scurrying around your little mind.
It is entirely possible that emergent intelligences shake off the physical limits of this universe like an embryonic reptile would the shell of its hatching egg. It may not be able to make the egg any larger or more amenable to its conditions, but it is entirely capable of breaking out of it and moving on to greener pasteurs.
In which case intelligence could be reasonably common, and yet Fermi's paradox would be answered.
They aren't diaries. If you keep a text file on your local machine for "blogging" purposes, that's comperable to a diary but the file you make available for all to see isn't.
Ahem. A diary is a diary, whether you keep it locked in a cabinet or publish it for all the world to see. The number of readers it has makes absolutely no difference to what it is.
Whether it is Hollywood, the Recording Industry, Microsoft, or Joe Blow's employer firing them for an unflattering entry in their blog, the trend is clear: "Your freedom of speech exists only on paper, and we're going to make sure it isn't worth even the paper it is written on."
ConsiderIf that mentality doesn't concern you, much less send chills down your spine, then nothing will. You can't have "a little bit freedom of speech" any more than you can be "just a little bit pregnant." Any compromise of this nature must inherently mean you do not retain your freedom of speech (hint: the freedom to only do or say what is approved isn't freedom. Until people figure this out our trembling democracy will remain in need of serious triage).
The barbarians are at the gates and Rome is about to fall, and they are wearing suits and ties, wielding pens, and sidestepping the will and intent of the Consitution at every opportunity.
What is worse, we are passively letting it happen.
We can make all kinds of arguments like: alien intelligence leaves no trace of itself, isn't interested in us, or isn't interested in exploration. However, the one data point we have (ourselves) is very bad at cleaning up after itself, isn't shy at all about going after resources wherever they exist, and is very keen on exploration. There's no reason why other intelligence would be significantly different.
The answer may lie in what I call the "technological horizon" (no discontinuity implied) or Verner Vinge calls the "technological singularity" (discontinuity implied but not necessarilly required). Given the exponential increase in human knowledge and technology (stoppable only through the fall of civilization or the widespread adoption of intellectual property law, patent law in particular, something which arguably most intelligent spieces would be smart enough to avoid), it may be that the period of time when a species would be interested in physical exploration of the universe is relatively short (measurable perhaps in mere decades), before their interests (and their very existence) moves on to another state beyond, or perhaps orthogonal to, our current ability to comprehend.
A little google-challenged, aren't we?
The claim that they said such a thing flies directly in the face of logic when one considers their own writings on why *not* to use a license like the LGPL
Yes, like you many of the detractors of the Free Software Foundation and Richard Stallman like to oversimplify both the issues, and the FSF's stances on those issues. Clearly folks like RMS give these things a great deal more consideration than folks like you, and are perfectly able to be flexible in their strategies and stances when issues of freedom (in this case, a free, unpatented comperssion standard) require it. Although in this case, even for you, the simple word
hardware
or more verbosely
standards adoptation in both software and hardware
should have clued you in. The Fres Software Foundation and Richard Stallman are interested in seeing a patent and royalty free standard be widely adopted, in both free software and in hardware (we are talking about ogg-vorbis after all. Without portable ogg-vorbis players its adoption is likely to be stunted).Clearly, in cases where a standards adoption is paramount, allowing free and proprietary software equal access to the standard's base code is sufficently important to forego the protections of the GPL in order to facilitate it. As the BSD license is GPL compatible, the copies incorporated into GPLed software can themselves be GPLed, affording both the widespread adoption of the standard, and its protection under the GPL until it passes into the public domain.
That Russia gets more Democratic while America gets more Communistic.
... one of the rare times the Soviets and the Western powers were united in undermining a communist system, as it demonstrated two things neither side could tolerate, namely (1) that communism could work and compete effectively with capitalism in a dual economy, which the oligarchs of the west couldn't permit and (2) that communism didn't require authoritarianism to work, which undermined the Soviets justification for wielding unchecked athoritarian power in the east).
The word you are looking for is authoritarian.
Communism, Socialism, and Capitalism are orthogonal to Democracy vs. Authoritarianism. There have been examples of democratic communism (Spain in the early 20th century
There have also been a plethora of examples of authoritarian capitalism in regions as diverse as central and south America, Europe, Asia, and Africa.
Russia is becoming more Democratic, while the United States is becoming more Authoritarian, and abusing the memories of the vitims of 9/11 to achieve it. Disgusting.
I thought that Netscape started off as a combination of open source (though not GPL, of course) projects.
... they reimplemnted the browser from scratch using Motif instead of xaw widgets (for their *nix versions) and obviously windows equivelents for their 'doz versions. It was a complete rewrite, and entirely proprietary code until they chose to GPL it much later ... after Microsoft had nearly killed their market share through illegal leverage of their desktop monopoly (a crime for which Microsoft has been convicted, despite the current administration's unwillingness to uphold the law).
... the GPL ironically is a very protective license to those commercial entities which wish to open their code without having competitors take it and incorporate it into their proprietary products. It is an effective innoculation against such things, which makes it a very useful license for many companies who have much to gain from opening their code, but do not wish to empower their competitors directly in the process.
... including hardware, and recall that the Free Software Foundation has endorsed this with its full support), but it is a very solid license in many (perhaps most) free software circumstances, and its innoculation against future abuse and closing off of the source is a very important, and very effective, feature in insuring that the public commons of code continue to grow and flourish.
No.
Netscape was not 'based' on mosaic
Netscape certainly falls in the category of "non-Linux company to embrace the GPL", though they certainly are not alone. Cygwin, Trolltech, and others have done likewise
It isn't for everyone, or appropriate for all circumstances (recall that OggVorbis is being released under the BSD License so that it will be adopted far and wide, in both free and proprietary products
"She was killed by that computer virus." Good god.
... and now the same nonsensical garbage is being lauded in a book?
... and while science fiction and fantasy often takes liberties with the possible and probably, spewing utterly nonsensical tripe like that IMHO simply requires too much of a suspension of disbelief to even be worthwhile, while alas preying on the illiteracy of others and clouding their understanding of real technologies further.
The show sucked regardless (perhaps even more than this book apparently does), but with that line it surpassed my tolerance threshold and I summarilly shut it off (and have studiously avoided it since). What utter crap
Please.
Its hard enough to educate people that computer viruses aren't real viruses, that memory (RAM) is volitile storage lost upon shutdown, while the hard drive ("memory" as it is called by some) is persistent, etc. etc.
We are already dealing with an abysmal state of computer literacy
The very, very worst of what science fiction can be (in stark contrast to Greg Egan's works, which educate as well as entertain, and often expand your imagination in the process, and to plenty of other speculative works that don't educate, but do entertain and at least don't misinform and cloud real issues in the process).
Thanks, but I'll give this one a miss.
Those with children: Try explaining to little Suzy why she can't have the latest Britney cd, or why you don't want her to go the movies because of your beliefs.
I doubt she will care.
And when your child asks "[Daddy | Mommy], where were you when they took our rights and our democracy away?" you can turn around and tell your child it is there fault, for whining about the latest Britney CD, rather than admitting that it wasn't the child asking that was the problem, it was the spinelessness of an adult who knew better, but chose spoiling their child over education, over their own principles, and over the future of that child's freedom.
Nice. You get to help flush your child's freedom down the drain and send the child on a guilt trip for your decisions, and your inaction, all in one. With parents like that, who needs pedophiles and predators?
Of course, he may not want to do that to them, or they may not have enough to make it worthwhile. I'd consider suing the kid just to get her convicted of a felony, which gets to go on her permanent record and fucks her life about as squarely as she just fucked his.
But that's me, and I can be a vengeful asshole if you screw me first.
Your (or "Tom's") motive might be vengeful, but that wouldn't make it an entirely appropriate and constructive way to handle this sort of apalling injustice.
Constructive how, you ask? Because clearly the only deterrance that really exists against this sort of abusive false accusation (in addition to normal social pressures and etiquette, which people who make such accusations are unmoved by anyway) is the fear of very real, very profound consequences.
Her having her reputation and life ruined by having her deception, and its willfully harmful and destructive consequences, in the public record is a singuarly natural and appropriate consequence of her despicable actions.
Whether out of vengeance, or to simply deter future similar acts, "Tom" should seriously persue such a case regardless. His motive is irrelevant, the outcome that is desired is for the perpetrator (in this case, the false accuser) to suffer appropriately for her crime, and in an appropriately severe and public enough manner to deter others from such conduct.
Re:Who will use this?
I will, for one, and many others already have.
Although this seems like a fine idea in theory, I am having difficulty imagining many situations where people would use it, which would be useful to others.
There is already a bunch of material licensed under their licenses, and numerous other efforts to achieve similar results under which a great deal of good music and prose is licensed. Clearly there are many others who are having little difficulty in finding these sorts of free licenses useful.
It is not going to replace copyright for music or books (I realise these aren't mentioned, I'm just trying to think of some possible use - theirs are pretty crap and unlikely) for example - the industry wouldn't touch it for obvious reasons.
It isn't "replacing copyright" (though drastic copyright reform eliminating the government monopoly entitlements it grants with a more balanced "sales tax as creator royalty" scheme would be highly desirable), it is creating a license that, similar to the BSD License, the FDL, and the GPL, will facilitate a growing commons of material all creative people can use and build upon.
Finally, who gives a fuck about the "industry" as such. Their purposes are already served, and have been so by a century of corrupt copyright legislation bought and paid for from our inexpensively purchased "representatives" in congress. The cultural squatters of New York, Nashville, and Hollywood, and the cartels they have formed, are the reason that the "vast cultural wasteland" of television and the lack of cultural depth in modern society have become so obvious, and such obvious truisms that they have become cliches.
These free licenses aren't intended to benefit the entrenched "industry" any more than the GPL is designed to Benefit the Sun Microsystems and Microsoft's of the world. It is intended to benefit ARTISTS and CREATIVE PEOPLE, not cultural squatters and an industry that has denigrated the art into a mere product of mass production, filtered down to the lowest common denominator.
If it takes off at all, it would be for the benefit of amateurs only, but then, what's the point?
First this is nonsense. One could have made the same inane (and in retrospect obviously incorrect) argument against the GPL, which has benefitted both amateurs (such as Linus Torvalds when he first began writing the Linux kernel) and professionals (such as IBM).
Likewise, the Creative Commons will empower amateurs (such as myself) and professionals. No, it won't empower Time Warner any more than the GPL empowers Microsoft, but it will empower Indy music and film makers (who are often professionals and not amateurs, though they often serve as a bridge in getting new and talented filmmakers noticed).
Second, every professional was at one time in their career an amateur. A great deal of amateur material is crap, but a great deal is also excellent. Having that material available as part of a commons, free to be distributed, improved upon, and incorporated into other, grander works is a very valuable thing to artists, to society, and to the health of our cultural heritage itself. No, it doesn't benefit Disney and Time-Warner, it benefits the tens of thousands of talented artists Disney, Time-Warner, and others of their ilk have traditionally trampled under their feet, and in addition it benefits the rest of us who enjoy and admire such works.
And that is very, very good thing, tripe and propoganda from the "industry" at its shills and astroturfers notwithstanding.
Yeah, let's see. Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings starting in 1940. I guess it reflects British immigration worries in 1950.
...
I can't tell if you're being sarcastic here or not (apologies if you were), but
Tolkien would likely take great offense at this characterization, were he alive and able to hear (read) it. He truly disliked, one could perhaps even say DESPISED, allegory, and emphatically stated time and time again that his mythos was in no way allegorical about any of the political, social, or economic conditions of the time. It was intended as a MYTHOS drawing upon the rich historical and cultural heritage of Britain, and unlike so many novels of the era, had ABSOLUTELY NO MESSAGE with respect to current potitics, economics, or social commentary WHATSOEVER.
Other than that, I think you post is dead on (and find the tidbit you bring up about German translation very interesting).
This is a good point. Most scientific progress comes in leaps. At some point the steady, incremental progress made by CPU manufacturers has to end.
... even the fall of the Roman empire is attributed by many to a vulcanic eruption half way around the world in the south Pacific, and the resulting several year climatic cooling that followed), but, barring the fall of civilization itself, there is no evidence that progress is anything but exponential.
... Benjamin Franklin and others have disproven that outright, as have countless programmers today) is that it forces the reinvention of the wheel by other non-licensed parties, thereby creating a plethora of wheel designs where there might have otherwise only been one.
... benefits that are banned for a period of 20 years at least, possibly quite a bit longer if additional patents are filed for and granted.
Yes and no. Scientific progress (though slower, as we were much further down the exponential curve) was pretty steady in the time before patents, and indeed during that part of history where the term of patents was signficantly shorter than the time between technological steps (again, as we were much further down on the exponential curve). Yes, there were interruptions that resulted from the collapse of civilizations (often due to the natural causes
Now, with patents imposing a smaller exponent than in the past (because the patent term now far exceeds the time between technological steps, and will probably do so all the way to our current technolgical horizon or, if Verner Vinge is right (and I, who see it as a visual horizon and not a fundamental sigularity, am wrong), right through the technological singularity itself), there are bursts of creativity followed by years of little, incremental advance, but this is a very artificial artifact of the appalling practice of reducing thought and ideas to private, proprietary property.
Aviation is a great example of this, particularly in the time between the Wright Brother's patenting of the airplane and World War I, where the US fell generations behind Europe in the development of airplanes because of the patent, and where the US Government itself, in a desperate (and successful) bid to catch up with the Germans in World War I, essentially seized the patent and opened up the technology to all competitors (kicking back 1% as a royalty to the Wright Brothers). Progress in that environment returned to its exponetial characteristics, and remained so until further patents were granted, stifling development yet again.
The most common pro-patent argument (beyond the naive and debunked notion that no one would invent without patents
But in reality, if the wheel is patented, there can only be improvements on that design by the licensees and inventor themselves. Others will have to invent sleds, or some other non-wheel method of interfacing a cart with the gound. The benefits of such are vastly less than the benefits of a competative improvement on the wheel would have been
#3 Revenue lost from consumers who would have bought the CD and after sampling it decided not to.
... and although I didn't watch the whole thing, I watched enough of it (an hour or so) to realize just how much the movie sucked.
... perhaps the whole thing ... is given to the artist as a de-facto royalty).
[...]
Usually the RIAA pushes #2 as their argument and then it's countered with #1 by P2P representatives. I'm pretty sure it's actually #3 that's scaring the industry.
Yes. God forbid that the recording industry (and movie industry for that matter: how many trailers have you seen that completely misrepresent the film being previewed?) actually be required to produce quality material before people would be willing to purchase it.
With copyright granting artists (and, more commonly through contractual law, publishers) governmental monopoly entitlements, there is no free, competative market to insure prices are fair, or that material in demand is even available, much less create an environment in which quality, through competative forces, is improved. The only remaining counterbalance is an informed purchaser, something that requires a person be able to listen to the entire CD, or even sample the entire movie, before paying good money for it.
I didn't go see Star Wars II because I saw it online first
OTOH I saw LOTR FoTR online, and purchased the one and only new (not used) DVD I've bought since beginning my boycott of the movie industry in the wake of the DeCSS debacle. A $50.00 purchase I would never have made had I not seen the movie online first, and been awed by its spectacular beauty.
The cartels need to be forced out of their cartelship, out of their cartel and monopoly mindset, and free market economics need to be returned to the equation. The best way to do this is through aggressive and significant copyright reform, reform which doesn't just reduce the length of copyright terms to a more paletable period, but one which does away with monopoly entitlements altogether, and replaces it with something far more benign (such as a sales tax on works being sold by someone other than the creative artist or their duly appointed publisher, a portion of which
In the meantime we the appreciators of the art are reduced to either buying material blind (and being ripped off as a result more often that not), or violating the law so that we have something resembling a fair chance at making an informed purchase. And no, hearing one or two songs from a twelve-song album on the radio does not constitute a valid or accurate preview of the CD, anymore than a movie trailer gives an accurate perception of a film, as many CDs on my shelf, the other 10 songs, conviniently left unplayed by the radio, of which are crap, attest to.
Slashdot repeating the commentary of an idiot pundit is one thing, but Andy Grove is head of Intel and should truly be ashamed of himself.
Of course this isn't the end of Moore's Law, it simply means an end to Intel's ability to keep up. Remember, we had the Alpha, Sparc
I am reminded of one forward looking quote in particular, that resemble's Andy Grove assertions as to the end of Moore's law in a way that would be quite amusing, were it not so pathetic that such people, like those who declared travel to the moon to be "impossible" a few scant years before it happened, simply never learn:
Andy Grove should have been wise enough to learn from the countless other fools of history, who have predicted an end to progress, an end to exponential progress, and end that, despite the depridations (and damage) patents cause, simply refuses to come, and has refused to come for all of the thousands of years short sighted pessimists have been predicting it.
Things such as this are what the patent system was designed for. This is a legitimate 'new' device that performs a 'new' function that was previously unavailable - and it deserves a patent.
Yes, things like this (and the airplane, and numerous other inventsions) are exactly what the patent system was designed for, and by the rules set down the patent is completely legitimate.
Unfortunately, this technology will only be developed and improved by a small subset of those who could have improved and exploited it: namely the inventor(s) himself and those who chooses to license his patent to. A great deal of good science and engineering will be delayed by at least 20 years because of this patent, perhaps longer if patents on applications of the technology are granted (which often happens, and is how pharmaceutical companies often delay the release of generic drugs for even longer than the duration of their patents).
Even in the best case scenerio, where the patent system works exactly as designed, this new technology will be developed at a snail's pace until such a time as the patent expires and competing, unfettered interests can improve upon it. Of course, then that progress in turn will be brought back to a crawl once again, as patents on the improvements are granted, and so on, ad nauseum.
Unless of course we need the technology in a war, then the US Govt., desperate for improvements which can only be achieved through competition and free markets, will seize the patent and open it up to competing interests, just like they did Orval and Wilber Wright's patent on the airplane in World War I, and numerous other technologies since (eventually writing into law a nice loophole that excludes the government from adhering to patents altogether).
So yes, this inventor clearly deserves the patent and yes, the patent clearly stifles any further developments along that particular line of inquiry.
Well, I don't believe anyone who really appreciates movies would want these. It's a similar mentality to those hordes of 14year old "gimmes" who download tons and tons of mp3s and DivXs because they can, and it's somehow "cool" to have it before anyone else. Half the time, they don't even watch them!
Did you ever stop to consider where that attitude might come from?
Who gives the elite screening copies of films months prior to the "unwashed masses?" Who releases a movie on one continent, then waits several months before releasing it on another? Who has encoded region-specific information on the current medium of their consumer-grade product to facilitate the continuation of this sort of behavior even in the digital age and the age of globalism?
Who has done everything they can, using everything from marketing to outright market manipulation, to turn time, and the date one can see a movie, into a status symbol so large the lemmings all run to the same theaters on opening night and cheerfully stand in line in sub-zero temperatures in the hopes of getting one of the few seats available?
Hollywood, that is who.
Which is why I have no problem with people who choose to time-shift their entertainment from the schedule the media moghuls are trying to lay down to their own schedule...even if that means timeshifting the film from six months in the future to the present, then going out and purchasing the DVD (or going to the theater, or what have you) when the opportunity finally arrives, months later and according to the industry's timetable.
The industry created this time-sensitive demand, and have systematically hyped and developed the sense of presige that getting to see something earlier than others seems to provide so many. Now they can enjoy reaping precisely what they've sown.