Consider what would happen if an open-source encryption/decryption algorithm was created (like CSS, the strength of the algorithm is not important), with a license that explicitly forbade both commercial and governmental use.
That wouldn't work. Copyrights protect implementations of algorithms, not the algorithms themselves. An independent implementation of the encryption algorithm would not be subject to the conditions of the restricted license.
Another problem is that most judges will laugh at anyone who tries to avoid prosecution by claiming that the police lied or violated a contract.
Macrovision dosn't stop the signal from passing through VCRs, it only stops it from being recorded to a VHS tape. If your going to rant, you should at least get your facts straight.
That was what I thought until I bought a DVD player and connected it to my VCR. Real life beats theory every time. The picture on my TV had annoying variations in brightness, even though the DVD player's signal was just passing through the VCR to the TV set. It turns out to be a common problem. The solution is to directly connect the DVD output to the TV input. I don't have schematics for my VCR to determine why Macrovision causes a problem. I had to buy a mechanical video input switch for the TV because of Macrovision.
Sony, Sega and Nintendo are designing race cars. Microsoft is designing a mini-van with chrome hubcaps. Yuk.
A Wintel box carries so much legacy junk with it that it can never be a fast, efficient game machine. Not to mention that the quality of most PC games is terrible by game console standards. Consumers want an appliance that works, not a PC.
Some psychologist (I forget the name, somebody please reply with the name and/or links to info) a couple of years ago came up with something he called the triangle of needs (or something like that).
Abraham Maslow, see this page for a description of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.
For the price of a computer, you could feed a lot of ppl for a long time.
You don't need a full-blown PC and a telephone line to have Internet access. A wireless, battery operated, portable computer with flash memory and a cheap LCD display could provide inexpensive access to the Internet for email and basic web browsing. They could be inexpensive if produced in very large numbers.
Common carrier status involves more than not filtering content. You have to be offering a communications service to the public on a non-discriminatory basis. You can't pick and choose your customers. I doubt that many ISPs would like that part. Not to mention the laws and regulations that common carriers must obey.
Many years ago there was an article in Scientific American about fiber optic telephone networks. It had a description of a prototype telephone designed by Northern Telecom that used fiber instead of copper. The telephone converted light to electrical energy to power its circuits. I don't remember what they used for a ringer.
Unless Boeing comes public with a pledge that they'll absorb the cost, the perceived effect on the taxpaying community will be that the taxpayer gets to absorb the overrun resulting from Boeing's egregious mistake, and that Boeing suffer's a mere moment's bad PR.
I wouldn't assume that the loss is Boeing's fault. From personal experience, I have seen how property accountability and other functions can get screwed up on government contracts. This can happen during reorganizations when the contractor is changed, departments are eliminated, functions are moved to a different contractor or budgets are cut.
One day there is a group of people responsible for X, the next day the bureaucratic equivalent of a neutron bomb is dropped and the people have disappeared, even if X is still needed. It can take months or years for the resulting problems to get fixed.
I have seen equipment rot in place or fall out of calibration because the slots for the technicians were eliminated or because of problems transitioning to a new contractor.
Systems can't be maintained because the development hardware is broken and nobody is willing to fund the retention of the hardware and software engineers who know the system.
Configuration control, quality assurance, testing and documentation get screwed up because they are the favorite targets of managers when budgets get cut.
The Congress and agency heads demand that we do more with less. This often results in massive reorganizations, budget cuts and managers having to decide who and what is expendable.
Why not. I used to have a 3COM Ethernet bridge that supported RS-232 and telnet for the console terminal. It needed a terminal connected to the serial port for initial setup but everything after that could be done by telnet.
They need their own distribution to maintain configuration control over the software. Any operating system that is expected to maintain 99.999% availability requires extensive testing and iron-clad configuration control. All changes must be justified, the new/modified code must be reviewed, tested and integrated into a new build. The new build must be extensively tested before it is released into production. Building fault-tolerant hardware is relatively easy. Getting the same reliability out of the software is much more difficult.
Where I work, excess (unneeded/obsolete) equipment is sent to a central warehouse. Other people in the agency get a chance to grab anything that they can make use of. Several times a year, public auctions are used to clear out the accumulated equipment. Sometimes you can find decent printers and monitors at the auctions. Most of the computers are obsolete junk by the time they are excessed. I've been bugging one of my cow orkers to excess the Apple II, VT-220s, CGA monitors and IBM PC XTs that are cluttering up the office.
One difference between factory marked and overclocked chips is that the factory marked chips have been tested at their rated frequency by the manufacturer. This is an important difference for non-recreational users. A dealer or end user can not properly test an overclocked CPU. The manufacturer uses a very expensive chip test system with proprietary test vectors.
AT&T has released free source and binaries of KornShell for non-commerical and educational use.
Maybe I didn't look at the right web page. The license displayed on the download page is confusing. I didn't see a restriction to non-commercial and educational use in that license. Can anyone clarify the situation?
From what I have read, the tricky part of computing ballistic missile trajectories is having to use a high fidelity model of the gravitational field around the Earth. There are also questions about the accuracy of existing models. I'm not sure how atmospheric effects are handled, this was a major problem for the USA during World War II. Precision bombing missions by high altitude bombers often missed targets by large distances due to wind effects.
I recently bought some software from a vendor on the Internet. Everything, including delivery and payment, was done on-line. I expect this will become much more common in the future as information content, such as audio and video, is separated from transport media like CDs and DVDs. What will the tax man do when anyone can buy a copy of the latest movie by downloading it over an encrypted connection from a virtual video store in Hong Kong?
The ADL doesn't "get it" when it comes to the Constitution and Bill of Rights. During the assault weapons scare, the ADL was lobbying for a ban on assault weapons because a few racist nuts were running around in camouflage fatigues, playing soldier. This really pissed me off because their attitude was based on the bankrupt old ideas that "good Jews don't own guns" and "the government will protect us from the antisemites", ghetto thinking that helped make the holocaust possible. They think that the government will only ban "bad" speech, certainly nothing that would affect them.
Well, the local affiliate in my area (in this case KING TV in Seattle) paid big money to be an affiliate, and now, because I can watch the NY station, they've lost their market.
Are you sure about that? My understanding of the television business is that the television networks pay their affiliates to carry network programming. The networks get to sell most of the advertising slots in network provided programming. The affiliates get a limited number of slots for local advertising plus they get fees from the network. The affiliates also agree to carry all of the network's prime time programming.
What if I installed a broadband VHF/UHF antenna in downtown Toronto and connected it to an Internet server through a high speed analog to digital converter (ADC). Assuming the Internet backbone was several orders of magnitude faster, anyone could take the packets from the Toronto server, feed them into a digital to analog converter (DAC), and plug the DAC output into a TV set. You could watch any Toronto broadcast station, just as if you were physically in Toronto. The server created an RF wormhole between Toronto and your location. Do wormholes violate copyright law?
Just issue both parties baseball bats and let them slug it out. Get rid of lawyers and discourage frivolous lawsuits in one swoop...
This might actually work. According to this web page, Trial by Combat is still a valid part of the common law in Maryland, and perhaps other states in the USA. I can just see it, Bill Gates and Ray Noorda in an arena, hacking at each other with battle axes.
Slashdot Mirror
That wouldn't work. Copyrights protect implementations of algorithms, not the algorithms themselves. An independent implementation of the encryption algorithm would not be subject to the conditions of the restricted license.
Another problem is that most judges will laugh at anyone who tries to avoid prosecution by claiming that the police lied or violated a contract.
That was what I thought until I bought a DVD player and connected it to my VCR. Real life beats theory every time. The picture on my TV had annoying variations in brightness, even though the DVD player's signal was just passing through the VCR to the TV set. It turns out to be a common problem. The solution is to directly connect the DVD output to the TV input. I don't have schematics for my VCR to determine why Macrovision causes a problem. I had to buy a mechanical video input switch for the TV because of Macrovision.
A Wintel box carries so much legacy junk with it that it can never be a fast, efficient game machine. Not to mention that the quality of most PC games is terrible by game console standards. Consumers want an appliance that works, not a PC.
Andover/Slashdot should take a bit of their IPO money and hire some copy editors.
Abraham Maslow, see this page for a description of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.
You don't need a full-blown PC and a telephone line to have Internet access. A wireless, battery operated, portable computer with flash memory and a cheap LCD display could provide inexpensive access to the Internet for email and basic web browsing. They could be inexpensive if produced in very large numbers.
If the Campus Crusade for Hitler wants telephone service, and can pay for it, the telephone company must provide them service.
An ISP can refuse to sell them Internet access and can terminate any existing business relationship without giving cause.
The FCC has explicitly refrained from classifying ISPs as common carriers. See OPP Working Paper No. 31, The FCC and the Unregulation of the Internet.
Many years ago there was an article in Scientific American about fiber optic telephone networks. It had a description of a prototype telephone designed by Northern Telecom that used fiber instead of copper. The telephone converted light to electrical energy to power its circuits. I don't remember what they used for a ringer.
Many American telephone companies are pioneering the provision of second-rate service. It's the bit about lower prices that they have trouble with.
I wouldn't assume that the loss is Boeing's fault. From personal experience, I have seen how property accountability and other functions can get screwed up on government contracts. This can happen during reorganizations when the contractor is changed, departments are eliminated, functions are moved to a different contractor or budgets are cut.
One day there is a group of people responsible for X, the next day the bureaucratic equivalent of a neutron bomb is dropped and the people have disappeared, even if X is still needed. It can take months or years for the resulting problems to get fixed.
I have seen equipment rot in place or fall out of calibration because the slots for the technicians were eliminated or because of problems transitioning to a new contractor.
Systems can't be maintained because the development hardware is broken and nobody is willing to fund the retention of the hardware and software engineers who know the system.
Configuration control, quality assurance, testing and documentation get screwed up because they are the favorite targets of managers when budgets get cut.
The Congress and agency heads demand that we do more with less. This often results in massive reorganizations, budget cuts and managers having to decide who and what is expendable.
Why not. I used to have a 3COM Ethernet bridge that supported RS-232 and telnet for the console terminal. It needed a terminal connected to the serial port for initial setup but everything after that could be done by telnet.
They need their own distribution to maintain configuration control over the software. Any operating system that is expected to maintain 99.999% availability requires extensive testing and iron-clad configuration control. All changes must be justified, the new/modified code must be reviewed, tested and integrated into a new build. The new build must be extensively tested before it is released into production. Building fault-tolerant hardware is relatively easy. Getting the same reliability out of the software is much more difficult.
Where I work, excess (unneeded/obsolete) equipment is sent to a central warehouse. Other people in the agency get a chance to grab anything that they can make use of. Several times a year, public auctions are used to clear out the accumulated equipment. Sometimes you can find decent printers and monitors at the auctions. Most of the computers are obsolete junk by the time they are excessed. I've been bugging one of my cow orkers to excess the Apple II, VT-220s, CGA monitors and IBM PC XTs that are cluttering up the office.
One difference between factory marked and overclocked chips is that the factory marked chips have been tested at their rated frequency by the manufacturer. This is an important difference for non-recreational users. A dealer or end user can not properly test an overclocked CPU. The manufacturer uses a very expensive chip test system with proprietary test vectors.
AT&T has released free source and binaries of KornShell for non-commerical and educational use.
Maybe I didn't look at the right web page. The license displayed on the download page is confusing. I didn't see a restriction to non-commercial and educational use in that license. Can anyone clarify the situation?
From what I have read, the tricky part of computing ballistic missile trajectories is having to use a high fidelity model of the gravitational field around the Earth. There are also questions about the accuracy of existing models. I'm not sure how atmospheric effects are handled, this was a major problem for the USA during World War II. Precision bombing missions by high altitude bombers often missed targets by large distances due to wind effects.
Just connect the analog output from the sound card to an ADC and compress it with the algorithm of your choice.
I would hope that they keep the name and not cave in to the drooling segment of society that considers "Beavis & Butthead" to be high art.
I recently bought some software from a vendor on the Internet. Everything, including delivery and payment, was done on-line. I expect this will become much more common in the future as information content, such as audio and video, is separated from transport media like CDs and DVDs. What will the tax man do when anyone can buy a copy of the latest movie by downloading it over an encrypted connection from a virtual video store in Hong Kong?
The ADL doesn't "get it" when it comes to the Constitution and Bill of Rights. During the assault weapons scare, the ADL was lobbying for a ban on assault weapons because a few racist nuts were running around in camouflage fatigues, playing soldier. This really pissed me off because their attitude was based on the bankrupt old ideas that "good Jews don't own guns" and "the government will protect us from the antisemites", ghetto thinking that helped make the holocaust possible. They think that the government will only ban "bad" speech, certainly nothing that would affect them.
Are you sure about that? My understanding of the television business is that the television networks pay their affiliates to carry network programming. The networks get to sell most of the advertising slots in network provided programming. The affiliates get a limited number of slots for local advertising plus they get fees from the network. The affiliates also agree to carry all of the network's prime time programming.
What if I installed a broadband VHF/UHF antenna in downtown Toronto and connected it to an Internet server through a high speed analog to digital converter (ADC). Assuming the Internet backbone was several orders of magnitude faster, anyone could take the packets from the Toronto server, feed them into a digital to analog converter (DAC), and plug the DAC output into a TV set. You could watch any Toronto broadcast station, just as if you were physically in Toronto. The server created an RF wormhole between Toronto and your location. Do wormholes violate copyright law?
This might actually work. According to this web page, Trial by Combat is still a valid part of the common law in Maryland, and perhaps other states in the USA. I can just see it, Bill Gates and Ray Noorda in an arena, hacking at each other with battle axes.
The bug is intentional. Microsoft is copying the behaviour of the date handling in Lotus 1-2-3, which made the original error.