Then there is one of the
many cases
of Keith Henson, who at this moment is charged and facing criminal trial for trash talk on Usenet. The fun loving Scientologists convinced a DA in Hemet CA to treat it as a terrorist threat. (Their side here, to meet the pretense of objectivity.)
The point is that The Man has no sense of humour, and that trash talking can bring a world of hurt, even if it's technically protected and innocuous. You may get off eventually, but it can be very annoying and expensive.
The silence on IA64 from the BSD crowd is deafening. Why is that? For server applications, it would seem like BSD would very plausible as a good choice if it were available.
I've heard it said that programmers spend 10% of the time writing code and 90% debugging it.
Let's do the math-- if 47 days is 10% of your work time per year, then there are 470 work days out of the 365. Well, we work long hours, so say it's a 16 hour day on average, for the 4 days of a 50 work-week year, that's 400 days. Still short 70 days somewhere.
No, I'd say the average programmer spends maybe 20days a year writing new code. 47 seems way too high.
With ~1400 vinyl LPs to transfer, using.wav samples instead of mp3, which loses quality,
640G is marginal. If you include any DVD quality video a 8Gb/s, you'll fill it up pretty quick too.
Sound and video are still big. I've figured it would easily take 1TB of storage to archive my existing audio in a quality I wouldn't worry about. MP3 and 1.5Mb/s MPEG rot as far as quality goes.
Between the DMCA and cases such as Scientology v. Henson and Ford vs. Blue Oval News, it has already been determined that fair use is of no use as a defense to infringement. It always seems bad when someone copies an entire document w/o significant commentary. (This could cause problems for The Smoking Gun sometime). When you look back at what many think to be the harbinger case, The Pentagon Papers, you realize that wasn't about copyright at all, because it was a government document carrying no copyright. If it had been a private publication w/copyright, Ellsberg and the NYT would have been sunk.
The only ways to address these issues is to engage your politicians with speech and money, and to vote for those favoring enlightened policies.
Are you really suggesting that having an arm move pieces on a chessboard is hard to do these days?
Having the computer use the same wheel/pedals/paddles as the human normalizes the vehicle, and makes it "fair". In chess, the skill of the manipulation of the pieces is not at issue; in the proposed challenge, it is one of the key points.
To another poster, no GPS. The human doesn't have that capability. I'd let it have a gyro, as that is an internal spatial reference platform, which the meatware does have. Let's add another rule:
No radio to the vehicle for computer or human. Shumacher will have to do this one without Brawn's help.
Conditions and vehicles vary so much, that with a fair set of rules, I'd encourage Shuey to take it on. Heck, I'd even let Zonta take it on. But what would fair rules be?
Same FIA Formula 1 car for both operators
Computer must mechanically operate the same controls used by the human;
Computer must fit in the same space as the human, including power source.
Computer can have no electrical connection to vehicle for power or sensors; all its sensors must be self contained, and have no physical extension beyond what is allowed the human (no camera through the floor to follow the line:-)
Computer can have as many hands, legs, arms and eyes as it likes
Computer gets human equivalent sensors only - visible light vision and accelerometers; no radar, sonar, or active illumination allowed.
Computer controlled car must meet same weight requirements as the human/car combination
I won't demand race/traffic interactions. Solo qualification laps will suffice. Even under these conditions, I'll take the human for ten years easily, and probably twenty years.
I don't think it's an "AI" problem as much as a robotics, sensor, and machine vision problem. I don't think there's been so much progress in the last 20 years that it's feasible.
Though I sure Frank Williams and Patrick Head would sign it up as soon as it was available.
"This allows different languages to cooperate without the requirement of complex (slow, hard to understand) arbitration methods such as COM or CORBA. "
Did I miss some simplification? I thought.net was going to be built on COM (or SOAP, which is at least as complicated in its own way, and at least as slow).
On the Linux-HA mailing list, I suggested people ask IBM for the Phoenix clustering code. That contains a multi-node membership system, event distribution and a DLM. All that would be very handy for highly-available clusters, and is missing right now.
SGI previously released their
FailSafe application monitoring and restart service. Having the Phoenix stuff underneath it
and available for the GFS file system, and using the existing linux-ha bits would pretty much be a complete cluster solution. That would be good.
Regarding future actors strike, we should pay attention to that. Assume the actors hold out for residuals from pay-per-download. It matters if the payments are flat rate, or percentage. If flat rate, than all the residuals owed become a floor for the price of the download. We wouldn't want that too high, or the price will be too high. Take $0.05 per actor, for instance, and you can get to a coupla bucks pretty easy. On the other hand, a percentage sounds fair, but is an opportunity for Hollywood Accounting(tm) to screw the recipients, as is traditional.
keep the copy despite the fact that keeping that information is a felony crime"
Bzzt, wrong, it's not keeping it, it's distributing it. You are the one with the legal problem, for running that piece of paper through the Xerox(tm) machine. Nobody who receives it has a problem unless they redistribute it.
Let's ignore for the moment the specifics of programs, and go back to the out-of-print book analogy. The book is out of print; the publisher has folded; the author died in a car crash. Why not scan it, or run it through the copy machine?
The traditional argument is that the rights didn't vanish -- they probably fell to the author's estate, the one that is trying to keep three cute little kids and a puppy out of the poorhouse and pay for the operation for the dread disease. Unauthorized copies floating around possibly dilute the market for future versions, should something turn up. Maybe Kubrick rises from the dead and adapts it as his next film, and their are suddenly publishers wanting to put out a new edition with a 7 figure advance.
Yes, it's true that the work might get lost if the rights holder doesn't do a proper job exploiting the opportunities. Or, perhaps, is embarrased by the work and wants it surpressed. That's done, you know, and it's within the copyright holders' rights.
Returning to programs, the opportunities to commercially exploit older programs seem to be thinner than old books. Of the genres most likely to be exploitable, entertainment software seems highest. By analogy, it's entertainment books that are most likely to be exploitable after several lifetimes, not non-fiction (functional) works. See also movies and sound recordings, which have turned out to be more valuble than rights holders imagined (esp. old movies).
My feeling on abanonware is that it is right to seek some kind of approval from the rights holders. There -always- is a rights holder, though possibly difficult to locate.
I'd agree that in general copyright is too long. On the other hand, every now and then you get a story about some descendant of the author of an ancient work getting a pile of royalties long ago filched by some slimy intermediary. This might have been all the money long due someone who got screwed 80 years ago. The case of bluesman Robert Johnson is an case in point. A now old-man who is probably Johnson's only son has just gotten slice of the rights to the songs written a very long time ago.
Correction: Libertarians support the concept of charity. But the figures show that they just don't do it with actual support of time or funds. That leads one to think the philosphy is a smoke screen for an unacknowledged "me first" attitude.
It is also telling that the majority of the highly moderated responses are pro-libertarian, and don't contain much of the criticism of the lower rated followups. This speaks to the leanings of the moderator pool, which is probably a fair cross section.
Hey, moderators, goose up some of the reasoned non-libertarian comments!
Why isn't anyone doing it yet? (Using an open source player) Because none of them work well enough.
Yet.
In time, of course, they will, and people will use the fruits of these labors. In the mean time, the MPAA and its corporate sponsors will be seeking more legislation in an attempt to maintain control.
If you read the transcripts, the judge has quite often been telling garber that he has not properly argued several of the points that are very important. In pafrticular, it appears that he has not done a good job framing the issue of access control vs. piracy. The defense has been pounding internet capacity issues related to the practicality of downloading dvd contents, but this is a red-herring, in my opinion. The real issue is access to the disk that you already bought, and the use of the DMCA to prevent use of your ownership rights. We end up with the DMCA being used to prevent things that copyright doesn't prevent (fair use for playback), patent doesn't cover (because the CSS isn't patented), nor against misappropriation of a trade secret (since there is no CSS trade secret).
It's a botch for the defense, and the cards may collapse on this. However, it is unlikely to be the last DVD/CSS case -- once Livid works, there will almost certainly be a case against someone the MPAA selects as a suspect.
Slashdot Mirror
The point is that The Man has no sense of humour, and that trash talking can bring a world of hurt, even if it's technically protected and innocuous. You may get off eventually, but it can be very annoying and expensive.
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Let's do the math-- if 47 days is 10% of your work time per year, then there are 470 work days out of the 365. Well, we work long hours, so say it's a 16 hour day on average, for the 4 days of a 50 work-week year, that's 400 days. Still short 70 days somewhere.
No, I'd say the average programmer spends maybe 20days a year writing new code. 47 seems way too high.
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Sound and video are still big. I've figured it would easily take 1TB of storage to archive my existing audio in a quality I wouldn't worry about. MP3 and 1.5Mb/s MPEG rot as far as quality goes.
-dB
The only ways to address these issues is to engage your politicians with speech and money, and to vote for those favoring enlightened policies.
-dB
Having the computer use the same wheel/pedals/paddles as the human normalizes the vehicle, and makes it "fair". In chess, the skill of the manipulation of the pieces is not at issue; in the proposed challenge, it is one of the key points.
To another poster, no GPS. The human doesn't have that capability. I'd let it have a gyro, as that is an internal spatial reference platform, which the meatware does have. Let's add another rule:
No radio to the vehicle for computer or human. Shumacher will have to do this one without Brawn's help.
-dB
Same FIA Formula 1 car for both operators
Computer must mechanically operate the same controls used by the human;
Computer must fit in the same space as the human, including power source.
Computer can have no electrical connection to vehicle for power or sensors; all its sensors must be self contained, and have no physical extension beyond what is allowed the human (no camera through the floor to follow the line :-)
Computer can have as many hands, legs, arms and eyes as it likes
Computer gets human equivalent sensors only - visible light vision and accelerometers; no radar, sonar, or active illumination allowed.
Computer controlled car must meet same weight requirements as the human/car combination
I won't demand race/traffic interactions. Solo qualification laps will suffice. Even under these conditions, I'll take the human for ten years easily, and probably twenty years.
I don't think it's an "AI" problem as much as a robotics, sensor, and machine vision problem. I don't think there's been so much progress in the last 20 years that it's feasible.
Though I sure Frank Williams and Patrick Head would sign it up as soon as it was available.
-dB
Did I miss some simplification? I thought .net was going to be built on COM (or SOAP, which is at least as complicated in its own way, and at least as slow).
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SGI previously released their FailSafe application monitoring and restart service. Having the Phoenix stuff underneath it and available for the GFS file system, and using the existing linux-ha bits would pretty much be a complete cluster solution. That would be good.
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This will matter, a lot.
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Bzzt, wrong, it's not keeping it, it's distributing it. You are the one with the legal problem, for running that piece of paper through the Xerox(tm) machine. Nobody who receives it has a problem unless they redistribute it.
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The traditional argument is that the rights didn't vanish -- they probably fell to the author's estate, the one that is trying to keep three cute little kids and a puppy out of the poorhouse and pay for the operation for the dread disease. Unauthorized copies floating around possibly dilute the market for future versions, should something turn up. Maybe Kubrick rises from the dead and adapts it as his next film, and their are suddenly publishers wanting to put out a new edition with a 7 figure advance.
Yes, it's true that the work might get lost if the rights holder doesn't do a proper job exploiting the opportunities. Or, perhaps, is embarrased by the work and wants it surpressed. That's done, you know, and it's within the copyright holders' rights.
Returning to programs, the opportunities to commercially exploit older programs seem to be thinner than old books. Of the genres most likely to be exploitable, entertainment software seems highest. By analogy, it's entertainment books that are most likely to be exploitable after several lifetimes, not non-fiction (functional) works. See also movies and sound recordings, which have turned out to be more valuble than rights holders imagined (esp. old movies).
My feeling on abanonware is that it is right to seek some kind of approval from the rights holders. There -always- is a rights holder, though possibly difficult to locate.
I'd agree that in general copyright is too long. On the other hand, every now and then you get a story about some descendant of the author of an ancient work getting a pile of royalties long ago filched by some slimy intermediary. This might have been all the money long due someone who got screwed 80 years ago. The case of bluesman Robert Johnson is an case in point. A now old-man who is probably Johnson's only son has just gotten slice of the rights to the songs written a very long time ago.
-dB
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It is also telling that the majority of the highly moderated responses are pro-libertarian, and don't contain much of the criticism of the lower rated followups. This speaks to the leanings of the moderator pool, which is probably a fair cross section.
Hey, moderators, goose up some of the reasoned non-libertarian comments!
-dB
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Yet.
In time, of course, they will, and people will use the fruits of these labors. In the mean time, the MPAA and its corporate sponsors will be seeking more legislation in an attempt to maintain control.
-dB
It's a botch for the defense, and the cards may collapse on this. However, it is unlikely to be the last DVD/CSS case -- once Livid works, there will almost certainly be a case against someone the MPAA selects as a suspect.
-dB