Your comment reminds me of the Simpson's episode where the departing Mafia don says "Remember: In the End, Crime Doesn't Pay", and then gets into his fleet of limos.
Face facts, SCO was a company whose stock price was floundering. Then Darl came along, ginned up a lawsuit, and multiplied it manyfold. He also got real revenue for the company from "sales" of "licenses" to Microsoft. He's already a multi-millionaire as a result. And despite how slashdot members feel, it's extremely unlikely he'll ever see any jail time.
Big name spammers are much the same. We may all hate them, but they've done very well by themselves. What's the worst that most have them have seen from their billions of dollars of theft of service? A slap on the wrist.
Same thing for Bush and Rove. Had either been remotely honorable or honest, Bush wouldn't have won reelection. Tell me, how is is losing?
Face facts: evil tactics are often winning strategies. Especially because our collective tolerance for corruption is so high (and going higher).
Only because the U.S. military has been ordered to bring a political settlement, as opposed to actually fight, except in a very limited way. We know quite well that Sunni Arab settlements are sheltering the insurgents. Yet we don't just lay waste to those places because our moral position is compromised.
That is the mistake Republicans keep making - going to war in a halfhearted way to try to achieve economic aims (cheap oil), while pretending to be good. Democrats only go to war when the nation is so angry it really doesn't care what people think, or what happens to hostile "civilians" who are working for the enemy. And the message gets through pretty quick.
That's why I think that as soon as the U.S. leaves, the problems in Iraq will solve themselves. The Shiites and Kurds are that angry because of Saddam, so if the Bathists keep pulling that car-bombing crap, they'll tell them "we'll kill 5000 of your family members each time it happens". A couple of car-bombs will go off, 10,000 Sunnis will be slaughtered, and then the Sunnis will suddenly decide it's better to cooperate.
Voila! Peace.
Terrorism only occurs when it's safe. Funny how that works.
Don't be silly. The two major parties are not interchangable. We briefly had 2 years of all Democratic party rule back during Clinton's first term. What horrible legislation did the Democrats "railroad"? The family Medical Leave Act? Big whoop. With the Republians we've gotten a war of choice that they're managing to loose, a budget busting tax cut targeted at the leisure class, a dramatic reduction of our civil liberties, an anti-bankrupcy bill that pointedly allows CEO con-men off the hook, etc, etc, etc, etc.
In fact, we need 12 years of solid Democratic rule to even start erasing the damage the unfettered right has done to this nation. Only when the GOP shows some willingness to control it's whacked-out wing should it be allowed veto over anything.
Even assuming that SCO actually owned the copyrights to Unix (which they don't), that the "similar code" wasn't already in the public domain (which it probably was), and IBM used this kind of methodology to create their own code (which they probably didn't), SCO has no case. There is no concept in Copyright that allows holders to make broad claims over concepts and ideas. That's what Patents are for. The so-called "ladder" theory is barely a crude legal supposition on SCO's part - a plea for the worst sort of Republican judicial activism in the Utah courts.
Here is the way established law actually works. I can buy a copyrighted book, change every sentence and chapter in it until there is nothing left of the original work, and then release it as my own. By that point, it is my own. You cannot copyright people's inspiration. It is silly to try.
#1 What a sublime joke from the Slashdot editors, slipping in a real news article among the obvious jokes. A NASA paper airplane is far more believable than thinking the Washington Post editoralizing like Pravda. I was suitably misled.
If you buy something from California mail order, and are not a California resident, you don't owe California sales tax. You owe the sales tax where you made the purchase (if applicable).
Of course, just because you owe the tax, doesn't mean that many people pay it. Tracking who mail-order recepts is problematic, especially in States like Oregon, which doesn't have any sales tax.
Oh, and by the way, the "no new tax" is a fairly absurd pledge in the face of massive tax cutting that have gone on in the past few years. The dollar wouldn't be in nearly as much trouble if we simply restored taxes to what they were under the Clinton administration.
While CBS does lean slightly conservative, it's nowhere near as conservative as typical U.S. media.
Having 65 Democrats/Liberal commentators shown on CBS vs 91 Republican/Conservative ones isn't that bad, given that there were 5 items of liberal commentary vs 5 items of conservative commentary (Liberal commentary in mainstream U.S. media actually equal to conservative commentary? Amazing!)
CBS is so close to neutral in their coverage, one can almost even forgive them for "mistating" facts to pretend that Social Security will have financial problems sooner than it will (parroting administration lies), and refusing to accept a paid advertisement for The United Church of Christ stating "Jesus didn't turn anyone away - neither do we" because other so-called "Christian" churches preaching hate in Jesus's name might not like it.
I think they're going to run into the same problem that DRM manufacturers have: there's no benefit to the people who are untimately in charge.
In this case, it isn't the 'paying customers', it's the developing free software engineers. The proliferation of licenses comes directly from the fact that developers have found some aspect of the GPL or LGPL to be too onerous to release under. And there is no way you're going to get them to alter their license just because Stallman thinks they should.
So here's a different idea. Instead of trying to reduce the number of Open Source licenses, people should instead come up with a comparison chart. Much like the Unix rosetta stone except for legalese, identifying general contract features in common (or different) between them.
That way developers can see the difference in a single place, and pick the best license for their particular purpose.
There's a critical difference between DDOSing a 409 scammer and DDOSing people you don't like politically. 409 scamming is illegal.
This is only a slippery slope if you think crooks who accidentally drop their guns at the scene of the crime - and go back to ask for it back the next day - have a "point" (it's their property after all!). For the rest of us, we understand that DDOSing democrats.org or gop.org is much more likely to get you in legal trouble than doing that to some random phisher. And rightly so.
Honestly - I work in the industry, and I'm still amazed at the lengths content providers will go to to try to prevent a single D-to-A, A-to-D conversion.
Apparently they just don't get that people - who seem willing to buy cheap videos recorded on consumer cameras in movie theaters - are going to be completely unable to see the difference in a re-recorded playback of what they see on T.V.
Folks - if you're too stupid to realize the network effect will swamp the casual copyright infringement, do something simple: don't release it. That's your only option.
I don't know about the author, but I remember the days when twin pentium 90's and 128 Megs of RAM were considered awesome....
That was about 10 years ago.
Sure, this thing isn't going to be a screaming game machine, but honestly, how much horsepower do you need for text editing, email, and some casual browsing, anyway?
(Slashdot)... used to be a place to read about... things on topic for the online community, not stuffed with politicking.
Hmmm. Don't like after-the-purchase EULAs the UCITA enforces interfering with your ability to examine code? Worried about the Patriot act leading you to be investigated because of your opinions or curiosity? (note: happened to friend of mine). Concerned with Microsoft OS security flaws in eVoting? Dislike the broken U.S. patent system? Don't like the DMCA forbidding what you can and cannot release? Want a good anti-spam law, or at least the existing laws to be enforced (or not?) Here's a clue: these are all LAWS. LAWS are approved by various Representatives we colloquilly call POLITICIANS. Selecting the most acceptable Politicians is called Politics.
Maybe it was true 20 years ago that Nerd-type news could safely ignore politics. But not today. Why? Because we nerds collectively create a lot of money, and where money is involved, there will be a lot of businessmen pushing and shoving, power plays, and even less savory things that require our attention, unless we want to be steamrolled.
Oh, but you are not really upset about Politics per se. It's really that Slashdot allows people of any opinion to post. In this very discussion, I've read several Libertarian viewpoints, some Democratic, some Republican, a number of foreigners, and one that might be considered too socialist to be Green. This obviously disturbs you. Like most US conservatives these days, you are obviously more comfortable with the "Shut up Shut up Shut up Cut His Mike" style of GOP cable news in the U.S., so anything that doesn't censor opinions you disagree with must be, perforce, "Bias". You want validation, dammit!
In truth, you're right: Taco is "biased". He's given a substantial media platform to third party candidates far disproportionate to their ability to ever get them implemented. He seems positively enamored with Libertarians. That's ok. I'm not whining. I like having my views challenged. Enjoying intellectual discourse is part of being a "Nerd".
There must be some really frustrated speech writers working for President Bush. I threw the responses into a text editor, and came up with the following stats:
Bush:
7337 Words
16853 Characters w/o spaces
Kerry:
1401 Words
6732 Characters w/o spaces
The Kerry campaign used fewer Characters than the Bush campaign used words!
They also must not have their top people working on this - at least for the Bush campaign. I did a search for some of the words used in his responses here (like "quell"), and found that Bush himself never uses them in any of his accessable online speeches. That's not a mistake a seasoned campaign speech writer would make.
All you need to do is have the voter machine print the voter's response on a cash-register-type tape roll that is visible under glass (but not accessable - so as to prevent the kind of dirty tricks that Bejing is putting on Hong Kong's pro-democracy advocates). That way you have a hard, difficult to falsify record of every voter's preference.
The software to do this is almost immaterial, but the source code needs to be accessable to anyone for review.
We really need to repurpose the sticky bit...
on
Is Swap Necessary?
·
· Score: 1
The sticky bit on Unix systems keeps the image of an excutable from abandoning the swap space image when the last user has stopped running it. It speeds startup time of selected applications in a heavy multi-user environment. Not very useful feature anymore.
What would be really cool is to repurpose this bit to tell the OS to not page out the application instead.
That way you could have all the benefits of swap, but your U.I. programs (with this bit set) could still give you snappy response because they'd always be in RAM. Call it a "half-swap" system.
Linus, you listening?
That's the point the professor was trying to make
on
More From Tanenbaum
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
This isn't being disingenious, that is a highbrow critique.
If the author was serious then he would have given his "target" - Linus - at least some chance to respond. He didn't. Therefore he isn't a serious author.
Professors generally don't go saying directly, 'that author is such a luuusor dude!' And authors who write trash books about Di aren't exactly people to take seriously either.
Or use Google...
on
Freecache
·
· Score: 3, Informative
If the referrer is slashdot, return a link to the google cache of your page element, rather than the actual element.
The problem is that it's not easy to "prove". File creation dates can be manipulated pretty easily.
Now is it easy for prosecutors to essentially figure out? Yes. But then you are at the mercy of whether the DA wants to make 'an example' of you, regardless of whether you actually committed the crime.
This happens more often than you might think. It's a pride thing. Furthermore, in certain jurisdictions, it's a job performance thing too -- prosecutors are evaluated on their conviction percentage.
Trust me. No matter how obvious the facts are, the best way to stay out of the system is to never get in it at all. Miscarriage of justice isn't just something that happens in Iraq.
The reason why iTunes has been so successful is because of Jobs's ability to cajole all of the labels to participate. As soon as he indicated that he wanted to compete with them, this cooperation would instantly disappear, and iTunes would become yet another service with a tiny library. Too tiny to be interesting.
A much better solution would be for Apple to drop the one-price fits all aspect of the store. Simplicity is good, but frankly, some songs are simply worth more than others.
In fact, if he wanted to subtly discourage overcharging by the labels, he could increase his margins on the higher end stuff. In other words: 99 cents a regular song, 4 dollars for a "premium" song. And if Labels found that these "premium" songs tended to get pirated in the P2Ps more, well, they always have the option to price them at the more reasonable lower tier.
Ah yes, but if you actually try to run it on an unpatched system still vulnerable to Sasser, it will ask you to upgrade. And that upgrade requires a key.
I had to do this just a couple hours ago -- on my Tektronix scope (that happens to run Win2k).
You have it in your PCs and disk drives. This form of nanotech has a bright future.
What isn't here, and probably never will be, is the SciFi "self-assembly" nanotech. Throw out some powder on a rock and watch it turn it into a new car. Or something equally silly.
Strangely, we don't expect steam shovels to make other steam shovels. We don't expect cars to run without gasoline. And we certainly don't expect it to all just work without breaking down. But make the robotics very very small, and suddenly magic is supposed to occur.
This article seems to be something that I learned twenty years ago... performance is an aspect of good design.
That is why I insist on "optmization" in the beginning. Not peephole optimization - but design optimization. Designs (or "patterns" in the latest terminology) that are fast are also naturally simple. And simple - while hard to come up with initially - is easy to understand.
But that's also why I discount any "high level language is easier" statement, like this fellow makes. It is significantly harder to come up with a good architecture than learning to handle a "hard" language. If you can't do the former (including understanding the concepts of resource allocation, threads, and other basic concepts), you certainly aren't going to do the latter. Visual Basic is not an inherently bad language because you can't program well in it. It just attracts bad programmers.
And that goes the same for many of the newer "Basics": these "managed languages" that make it so that people can "code" without really understanding what they're doing. Sure, you can get lines of code that way. But you don't get a good product.
According to this report (partly done with the help of Lawrence Lessig), ClearChannel owns 1244 stations and owns 27% of the listenership. They've achieved this largely by playing to the safe music picks in CHR (Contemporary Hit Radio) and other formats, with a focus on crossover music (songs that fit in more than one genre) so they can play the same song on all the different stations they own in the same market.
Or, to put it a different way, ClearChannel is the "McDonalds" of radio. They find safe bland songs within each genre (mostly about sexual attraction), and serve it up constantly, heavily laden with ads. About a quarter of Americans love this format -- just like some people love McDonalds. And they have parlayed that profitability into such a dominant position in radio that they can use their market power to drive even better deals for themselves from the RIAA and musicians.
New songs? Forget it. Unless you have already climbed the dial elsewhere or have big money backing you.
In this case, if you read the article, the "triangles" aren't triangles. They're spheres of energy and matter in the cosmic background radiation. Or rather, they should be spheres based on flat space topology. When we look at them, we see three dimentional ovals instead.
Something is causing that stretching. This is one theory that explains it.
The DMCA is not there to "enforce the contract when you purchase a DVD". Contracts are already covered under Tort law. (And among other things, Tort law does not allow you to impose additional conditions on a purchase after consideration has been given.)
The DMCA outlaws publishing decryption techniques so that copyright holders can effectively demand a second payment from consumers (a "license fee" that you have to pay as part of buying an approved player of that material), and as an end run around fair use laws (including region encoding lockout - preventing people from viewing material they have legally purchased).
So, despite its name, the DMCA expressly has NOTHING TO DO WITH COPYRIGHT. It does nothing that normal copyright laws didn't do. It doesn't stop real commercial pirates (like those found all over Asia), nor does it protect people from taking the final material decoded and republishing it. (Despite the lack of reconstruction filters, a single A-to-D/D-to-A on a decent consumer player does far less damage to a video or audio stream than the original codec in terms of blockiness and frequency response; it's multiple iterations that cause noticable degradation.)
The answer, in my opinion, is to repeal the DMCA. And simultaneously to link serious anti-Pirate measures in China to their ability to import to the U.S. to get them to crack down on the flagrant abuses happening there. Our copyright conglomerates are crying crocodile tears over this stuff, but the Hong Kong entertainment industry has been decimated because of companies openly making and distributing knock-off copies.
We do need to get serious about real piracy. But peer-to-peer is no more piracy than taping songs off the radio.
Slashdot Mirror
Your comment reminds me of the Simpson's episode where the departing Mafia don says "Remember: In the End, Crime Doesn't Pay", and then gets into his fleet of limos.
Face facts, SCO was a company whose stock price was floundering. Then Darl came along, ginned up a lawsuit, and multiplied it manyfold. He also got real revenue for the company from "sales" of "licenses" to Microsoft. He's already a multi-millionaire as a result. And despite how slashdot members feel, it's extremely unlikely he'll ever see any jail time.
Big name spammers are much the same. We may all hate them, but they've done very well by themselves. What's the worst that most have them have seen from their billions of dollars of theft of service? A slap on the wrist.
Same thing for Bush and Rove. Had either been remotely honorable or honest, Bush wouldn't have won reelection. Tell me, how is is losing?
Face facts: evil tactics are often winning strategies. Especially because our collective tolerance for corruption is so high (and going higher).
Only because the U.S. military has been ordered to bring a political settlement, as opposed to actually fight, except in a very limited way. We know quite well that Sunni Arab settlements are sheltering the insurgents. Yet we don't just lay waste to those places because our moral position is compromised.
That is the mistake Republicans keep making - going to war in a halfhearted way to try to achieve economic aims (cheap oil), while pretending to be good. Democrats only go to war when the nation is so angry it really doesn't care what people think, or what happens to hostile "civilians" who are working for the enemy. And the message gets through pretty quick.
That's why I think that as soon as the U.S. leaves, the problems in Iraq will solve themselves. The Shiites and Kurds are that angry because of Saddam, so if the Bathists keep pulling that car-bombing crap, they'll tell them "we'll kill 5000 of your family members each time it happens". A couple of car-bombs will go off, 10,000 Sunnis will be slaughtered, and then the Sunnis will suddenly decide it's better to cooperate.
Voila! Peace.
Terrorism only occurs when it's safe. Funny how that works.
p.s. I'm a Democrat
Don't be silly. The two major parties are not interchangable. We briefly had 2 years of all Democratic party rule back during Clinton's first term. What horrible legislation did the Democrats "railroad"? The family Medical Leave Act? Big whoop. With the Republians we've gotten a war of choice that they're managing to loose, a budget busting tax cut targeted at the leisure class, a dramatic reduction of our civil liberties, an anti-bankrupcy bill that pointedly allows CEO con-men off the hook, etc, etc, etc, etc.
In fact, we need 12 years of solid Democratic rule to even start erasing the damage the unfettered right has done to this nation. Only when the GOP shows some willingness to control it's whacked-out wing should it be allowed veto over anything.
Even assuming that SCO actually owned the copyrights to Unix (which they don't), that the "similar code" wasn't already in the public domain (which it probably was), and IBM used this kind of methodology to create their own code (which they probably didn't), SCO has no case. There is no concept in Copyright that allows holders to make broad claims over concepts and ideas. That's what Patents are for. The so-called "ladder" theory is barely a crude legal supposition on SCO's part - a plea for the worst sort of Republican judicial activism in the Utah courts.
Here is the way established law actually works. I can buy a copyrighted book, change every sentence and chapter in it until there is nothing left of the original work, and then release it as my own. By that point, it is my own. You cannot copyright people's inspiration. It is silly to try.
... wait a minute ... it isn't
Two thoughts:
#1 What a sublime joke from the Slashdot editors, slipping in a real news article among the obvious jokes. A NASA paper airplane is far more believable than thinking the Washington Post editoralizing like Pravda. I was suitably misled.
#2 Be afraid for our nation. Be very afraid.
If you buy something from California mail order, and are not a California resident, you don't owe California sales tax. You owe the sales tax where you made the purchase (if applicable).
Of course, just because you owe the tax, doesn't mean that many people pay it. Tracking who mail-order recepts is problematic, especially in States like Oregon, which doesn't have any sales tax.
Oh, and by the way, the "no new tax" is a fairly absurd pledge in the face of massive tax cutting that have gone on in the past few years. The dollar wouldn't be in nearly as much trouble if we simply restored taxes to what they were under the Clinton administration.
While CBS does lean slightly conservative, it's nowhere near as conservative as typical U.S. media.
Having 65 Democrats/Liberal commentators shown on CBS vs 91 Republican/Conservative ones isn't that bad, given that there were 5 items of liberal commentary vs 5 items of conservative commentary (Liberal commentary in mainstream U.S. media actually equal to conservative commentary? Amazing!)
CBS is so close to neutral in their coverage, one can almost even forgive them for "mistating" facts to pretend that Social Security will have financial problems sooner than it will (parroting administration lies), and refusing to accept a paid advertisement for The United Church of Christ stating "Jesus didn't turn anyone away - neither do we" because other so-called "Christian" churches preaching hate in Jesus's name might not like it.
I think they're going to run into the same problem that DRM manufacturers have: there's no benefit to the people who are untimately in charge.
In this case, it isn't the 'paying customers', it's the developing free software engineers. The proliferation of licenses comes directly from the fact that developers have found some aspect of the GPL or LGPL to be too onerous to release under. And there is no way you're going to get them to alter their license just because Stallman thinks they should.
So here's a different idea. Instead of trying to reduce the number of Open Source licenses, people should instead come up with a comparison chart. Much like the Unix rosetta stone except for legalese, identifying general contract features in common (or different) between them.
That way developers can see the difference in a single place, and pick the best license for their particular purpose.
There's a critical difference between DDOSing a 409 scammer and DDOSing people you don't like politically. 409 scamming is illegal.
This is only a slippery slope if you think crooks who accidentally drop their guns at the scene of the crime - and go back to ask for it back the next day - have a "point" (it's their property after all!). For the rest of us, we understand that DDOSing democrats.org or gop.org is much more likely to get you in legal trouble than doing that to some random phisher. And rightly so.
Honestly - I work in the industry, and I'm still amazed at the lengths content providers will go to to try to prevent a single D-to-A, A-to-D conversion.
Apparently they just don't get that people - who seem willing to buy cheap videos recorded on consumer cameras in movie theaters - are going to be completely unable to see the difference in a re-recorded playback of what they see on T.V.
Folks - if you're too stupid to realize the network effect will swamp the casual copyright infringement, do something simple: don't release it. That's your only option.
I don't know about the author, but I remember the days when twin pentium 90's and 128 Megs of RAM were considered awesome....
That was about 10 years ago.
Sure, this thing isn't going to be a screaming game machine, but honestly, how much horsepower do you need for text editing, email, and some casual browsing, anyway?
Hmmm. Don't like after-the-purchase EULAs the UCITA enforces interfering with your ability to examine code? Worried about the Patriot act leading you to be investigated because of your opinions or curiosity? (note: happened to friend of mine). Concerned with Microsoft OS security flaws in eVoting? Dislike the broken U.S. patent system? Don't like the DMCA forbidding what you can and cannot release? Want a good anti-spam law, or at least the existing laws to be enforced (or not?) Here's a clue: these are all LAWS. LAWS are approved by various Representatives we colloquilly call POLITICIANS. Selecting the most acceptable Politicians is called Politics.
Maybe it was true 20 years ago that Nerd-type news could safely ignore politics. But not today. Why? Because we nerds collectively create a lot of money, and where money is involved, there will be a lot of businessmen pushing and shoving, power plays, and even less savory things that require our attention, unless we want to be steamrolled.
Oh, but you are not really upset about Politics per se. It's really that Slashdot allows people of any opinion to post. In this very discussion, I've read several Libertarian viewpoints, some Democratic, some Republican, a number of foreigners, and one that might be considered too socialist to be Green. This obviously disturbs you. Like most US conservatives these days, you are obviously more comfortable with the "Shut up Shut up Shut up Cut His Mike" style of GOP cable news in the U.S., so anything that doesn't censor opinions you disagree with must be, perforce, "Bias". You want validation, dammit!
In truth, you're right: Taco is "biased". He's given a substantial media platform to third party candidates far disproportionate to their ability to ever get them implemented. He seems positively enamored with Libertarians. That's ok. I'm not whining. I like having my views challenged. Enjoying intellectual discourse is part of being a "Nerd".
Bush:
- 7337 Words
- 16853 Characters w/o spaces
Kerry:- 1401 Words
- 6732 Characters w/o spaces
The Kerry campaign used fewer Characters than the Bush campaign used words!They also must not have their top people working on this - at least for the Bush campaign. I did a search for some of the words used in his responses here (like "quell"), and found that Bush himself never uses them in any of his accessable online speeches. That's not a mistake a seasoned campaign speech writer would make.
Really folks, this isn't so hard.
All you need to do is have the voter machine print the voter's response on a cash-register-type tape roll that is visible under glass (but not accessable - so as to prevent the kind of dirty tricks that Bejing is putting on Hong Kong's pro-democracy advocates). That way you have a hard, difficult to falsify record of every voter's preference.
The software to do this is almost immaterial, but the source code needs to be accessable to anyone for review.
The sticky bit on Unix systems keeps the image of an excutable from abandoning the swap space image when the last user has stopped running it. It speeds startup time of selected applications in a heavy multi-user environment. Not very useful feature anymore.
What would be really cool is to repurpose this bit to tell the OS to not page out the application instead.
That way you could have all the benefits of swap, but your U.I. programs (with this bit set) could still give you snappy response because they'd always be in RAM. Call it a "half-swap" system.
Linus, you listening?
This isn't being disingenious, that is a highbrow critique.
If the author was serious then he would have given his "target" - Linus - at least some chance to respond. He didn't. Therefore he isn't a serious author.
Professors generally don't go saying directly, 'that author is such a luuusor dude!' And authors who write trash books about Di aren't exactly people to take seriously either.
If the referrer is slashdot, return a link to the google cache of your page element, rather than the actual element.
I trust google to be faster than these guys.
The problem is that it's not easy to "prove". File creation dates can be manipulated pretty easily.
Now is it easy for prosecutors to essentially figure out? Yes. But then you are at the mercy of whether the DA wants to make 'an example' of you, regardless of whether you actually committed the crime.
This happens more often than you might think. It's a pride thing. Furthermore, in certain jurisdictions, it's a job performance thing too -- prosecutors are evaluated on their conviction percentage.
Trust me. No matter how obvious the facts are, the best way to stay out of the system is to never get in it at all. Miscarriage of justice isn't just something that happens in Iraq.
The reason why iTunes has been so successful is because of Jobs's ability to cajole all of the labels to participate. As soon as he indicated that he wanted to compete with them, this cooperation would instantly disappear, and iTunes would become yet another service with a tiny library. Too tiny to be interesting.
A much better solution would be for Apple to drop the one-price fits all aspect of the store. Simplicity is good, but frankly, some songs are simply worth more than others.
In fact, if he wanted to subtly discourage overcharging by the labels, he could increase his margins on the higher end stuff. In other words: 99 cents a regular song, 4 dollars for a "premium" song. And if Labels found that these "premium" songs tended to get pirated in the P2Ps more, well, they always have the option to price them at the more reasonable lower tier.
Ah yes, but if you actually try to run it on an unpatched system still vulnerable to Sasser, it will ask you to upgrade. And that upgrade requires a key.
I had to do this just a couple hours ago -- on my Tektronix scope (that happens to run Win2k).
You have it in your PCs and disk drives. This form of nanotech has a bright future.
What isn't here, and probably never will be, is the SciFi "self-assembly" nanotech. Throw out some powder on a rock and watch it turn it into a new car. Or something equally silly.
Strangely, we don't expect steam shovels to make other steam shovels. We don't expect cars to run without gasoline. And we certainly don't expect it to all just work without breaking down. But make the robotics very very small, and suddenly magic is supposed to occur.
This article seems to be something that I learned twenty years ago... performance is an aspect of good design.
That is why I insist on "optmization" in the beginning. Not peephole optimization - but design optimization. Designs (or "patterns" in the latest terminology) that are fast are also naturally simple. And simple - while hard to come up with initially - is easy to understand.
But that's also why I discount any "high level language is easier" statement, like this fellow makes. It is significantly harder to come up with a good architecture than learning to handle a "hard" language. If you can't do the former (including understanding the concepts of resource allocation, threads, and other basic concepts), you certainly aren't going to do the latter. Visual Basic is not an inherently bad language because you can't program well in it. It just attracts bad programmers.
And that goes the same for many of the newer "Basics": these "managed languages" that make it so that people can "code" without really understanding what they're doing. Sure, you can get lines of code that way. But you don't get a good product.
And then the whole thing falls apart.
Your suspicions are largely correct.
According to this report (partly done with the help of Lawrence Lessig), ClearChannel owns 1244 stations and owns 27% of the listenership. They've achieved this largely by playing to the safe music picks in CHR (Contemporary Hit Radio) and other formats, with a focus on crossover music (songs that fit in more than one genre) so they can play the same song on all the different stations they own in the same market.
Or, to put it a different way, ClearChannel is the "McDonalds" of radio. They find safe bland songs within each genre (mostly about sexual attraction), and serve it up constantly, heavily laden with ads. About a quarter of Americans love this format -- just like some people love McDonalds. And they have parlayed that profitability into such a dominant position in radio that they can use their market power to drive even better deals for themselves from the RIAA and musicians.
New songs? Forget it. Unless you have already climbed the dial elsewhere or have big money backing you.
In this case, if you read the article, the "triangles" aren't triangles. They're spheres of energy and matter in the cosmic background radiation. Or rather, they should be spheres based on flat space topology. When we look at them, we see three dimentional ovals instead.
Something is causing that stretching. This is one theory that explains it.
The DMCA is not there to "enforce the contract when you purchase a DVD". Contracts are already covered under Tort law. (And among other things, Tort law does not allow you to impose additional conditions on a purchase after consideration has been given.)
The DMCA outlaws publishing decryption techniques so that copyright holders can effectively demand a second payment from consumers (a "license fee" that you have to pay as part of buying an approved player of that material), and as an end run around fair use laws (including region encoding lockout - preventing people from viewing material they have legally purchased).
So, despite its name, the DMCA expressly has NOTHING TO DO WITH COPYRIGHT. It does nothing that normal copyright laws didn't do. It doesn't stop real commercial pirates (like those found all over Asia), nor does it protect people from taking the final material decoded and republishing it. (Despite the lack of reconstruction filters, a single A-to-D/D-to-A on a decent consumer player does far less damage to a video or audio stream than the original codec in terms of blockiness and frequency response; it's multiple iterations that cause noticable degradation.)
The answer, in my opinion, is to repeal the DMCA. And simultaneously to link serious anti-Pirate measures in China to their ability to import to the U.S. to get them to crack down on the flagrant abuses happening there. Our copyright conglomerates are crying crocodile tears over this stuff, but the Hong Kong entertainment industry has been decimated because of companies openly making and distributing knock-off copies.
We do need to get serious about real piracy. But peer-to-peer is no more piracy than taping songs off the radio.