Re:Promoting progress through copyright extension
on
Eldred vs. Ashcroft
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· Score: 4, Informative
Thomas Jefferson signed the 1808 and 1809 patent term extensions into law, and James Madison signed the 1815 patent term extension into law. Thus the nation's founders never meant "limited times" to mean "unalterable limited times".
Lessig isn't arguing that the "limited times" should be unalterable in the sense that you are presenting. He's arguing that once a work is created the expiry-time for that work should be unalterable. Lessig says that if the creator accepted X years copyright protection before creating the work, then a retroactive copyright extension to X+N years does not (and cannot) encourage the creator to create more work or better work. There is no value to society from retroactive copyright extension.
People like you are just as bad as the malicious priests of the inqusition. Oh my gosh! Somebody sees a flaw in a theory.
Except you didn't see a flaw. You were too stupid to understand the reasoning. In your arrogance you assume that if you don't understand it then it can't be true.
Okay, I expect all those people complaining about the "open source must be considered" laws to start complaining about this "nothing but Windows is allowed to be considered" administrative policy.
I'd complain just as bitterly if some naive bureaucrat declared "nothing but open source is allowed to be considered". So what's your point?
what is is that you are implying here? that running a solution that fits their needs is bad?
Which part of "everybody will use this single piece of proprietary software" allows people to choose a solution which fits their needs?
should they suddenly switch to Linux or some other system that doesn't fulfill their requirements just to satisfy some zealots?
It's more likely that they are running Linux or some other system and this decision is forcing them to change to something that doesn't suit their requirements.
NB: taking this all with a grain of salt. A geocities page with some "leaked documents" that slashdots within 5 minutes might just be a hoax.
People adore videos. People are willing to travel to a video rental store, search through 1000s of poorly labelled tapes, wait in crowded lines, receive a low-quality VHS tape for their effort, and they still have to return the tape the next day. Yet people will do this - and pay for the privilege - rather than watch broadcast TV.
Video on demand takes it to the next logical step. No tapes. No queues. No travel. No stock. You watch what you want, when you want it. All the benefits of broadcast TV combined with all the benefits of video rentals.
Unfortunately the local companies offering video on demand seem intent on killing the medium. They want $8 for a movie when the local video rental is $3. Video on demand should be cheaper! I can only imagine that they're blinded by greed.
Re:Filesystems...
on
Tiny Boxen
·
· Score: 3, Informative
And/var, and then make/etc/mtab a symlink into
one of the writable mounts, and configure syslogd
to stop writing to/dev/log, and make xfs stop
writing to/usr/lib/X11/fonts, and then make
sure the home directories are writeable if you
don't want a whole lot of applications to scream
and fail, etc.
/dev/log is a socket, not a file./etc/mtab is already a symlink in some distributions.
And while some warts remain it's a darn sight better these days than it used to be. You can reasonably expect that only/var,/tmp and/home need to be writable filesystems. And if you find an exception then most people will agree that's buggy and needs to be fixed. A few years ago it took a Herculean effort to convince some people that writable/usr was not a good thing!
Hmmm.. I'd assume that ext3 wouldn't be as good.. A fix on a fix usually sucks.
You assume incorrectly. Yes, ext3 shares the same on-disk structure as ext2, but LK members (eg, Andrew Morton) say this wasn't a compromise.
"The ext2-compatibility seems to be a bit of a political albatross
for ext3, really - people appear to be of the opinion that the
ext3 design was somehow compromised by the compatibility requirement.
This isn't so - ext3 is a block-level journalled filesystem."
[Andrew Morton, http://www.uwsg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0109.3/0000.html]
What is bad with girl bands, boy bands, Brittany type artists is that the initial step is missing. They clump together a bunch of no talents and then throw them on the stage to perform like circus acts.
I've had enough of this. I don't particularly like Britney Spears or the boy-band-of-the-week. I think their music is dull. But it's going too far to say these people have NO TALENT at all. All of these entertainers can dance better than most of us. Several of them can sing better than most of us. Ok, perhaps they don't write their own lyrics or play their own instruments, but they don't claim to be songwriters or musicians. They're ENTERTAINERS. They're not very talented musically, but they're still talented.
I agree it's frustrating that they are more popular than musical talents, but tough luck. Insulting these people and downplaying whatever skills they do have is completely unfair.
Employers are contemptuous towards resumes that list dozens of languages that the applicant claims to "know". The employer is skeptical that the person is truly experienced with all these languages, and also distrusts people who think programming is all about knowing syntax. If your list is truly over the top then the employer will rightfully discard the resume rather than risk hiring a big-mouthed know-it-all.
Do yourself a favour and don't list every single piece of technology you've ever touched on your resume. That's what agencies are for. Your resume is meant to sell yourself as a person, not yourself as a reference library. List some problems you've worked on, some experiences you've had, mistakes you've made and how you coped with them, how you work in a team, etc.
Yes, it was. I remember the Slashdot comments at the time were saying that Microsoft had released patches for the Nimda exploit and the fault lies with lazy & incompetent administrators.
There is no double standard here, no matter how hard you try and look for one.
Should we immediately start referring to Linux (et al) as an easy touch for these worms? This is now two serious vulnerabilities in the last three days.
This is an Apache exploit, not a Linux exploit.
Apache ships with Solaris, Oracle, MacOS X, J2EE systems, etc.
Blaming Linux for an Apache exploit is as sensible as blaming Windows for a ColdFusion exploit, or blaming Solaris for an Oracle exploit. In other words, not sensible at all.
Let's face it. Linux programs are high upkeep projects.
The problems you listed for Linux are also on Windows. Multiple widget sets: OWL vs Win32 vs MFC. Cut and paste: OLE or DDE or COM. Packages: multiple third party suppliers. Latest glibc: Windows developers invented the phrase "DLL hell".
ANY program written for ANY platform is high maintenance. Windows changes just as often and just as much as Linux. Apple are also guilty of making radical changes to MacOS. So yes, maintaining applications is hard. But no, it's not a unique difficulty of Linux.
The size of the reference would be as large as the size of the file in that sequence. So all you've done is create an inefficient encryption algorithm. Encrypting a file before transmitting it doesn't avoid the copyright problem.
It's a reference from Spinal Tap; a cult film from the 80s done in the style of a documentary for a rock and roll band. The lead guitarist at one point is bragging about his guitar amp because the volume knob goes up to 11 instead of the normal 10. You have to watch the movie to understand why this is hilarious.
Would any of these problems be solved with an open source solution? Do these problems have anything at all to do with the fact that the solution is closed source? Is the fact that these systems are closed source ironic, or telling in any way?
Yes, it's important. Every other voting system is "open" in the sense that the process is well documented, well reviewed, and entirely transparent to the voting public. These closed source electronic systems are not transparent and their results cannot be validated. I'm surprised they were even commissioned. You Americans sure don't seem to care about your rights, these days.
You Americans have some nerve complaining about government subsidies. The Australian prime minister recently had to BEG the USA to practise what they preach with regards to no-tariffs on imports. His pleas fell on deaf ears.
Example: The ggi project wanted to provide a kernel abstraction layer for video hardware in the same manner such abstractions are presented for everything else, from your ethernet adapter to your system's RAM and hard drive. Linus thought the idea sucked, then ended up doing a "poor man's" version of frame buffer support instead. How much better things would have been if the original vision of the GGI folks had been realized and supported we'll never know.
I don't agree with your interpretation for why the GGI failed.
The way I saw it, the GGI developers had very grand ideas but insufficient time/resources. In the end, the GGI lost out because FB and the DRI offered something tangible with a reduced complexity. Maybe you could argue that GGI offered more but that's just confirmation of the classic 80/20 rule.
While you're at it, preach to them the gospel of Christ, inform them about the evils of abortion, and warn them against the space aliens trying to invade their brains while they sleep.
Slashdot Mirror
Lessig isn't arguing that the "limited times" should be unalterable in the sense that you are presenting. He's arguing that once a work is created the expiry-time for that work should be unalterable. Lessig says that if the creator accepted X years copyright protection before creating the work, then a retroactive copyright extension to X+N years does not (and cannot) encourage the creator to create more work or better work. There is no value to society from retroactive copyright extension.
Except you didn't see a flaw. You were too stupid to understand the reasoning. In your arrogance you assume that if you don't understand it then it can't be true.
Either that or you're trolling.
I'd complain just as bitterly if some naive bureaucrat declared "nothing but open source is allowed to be considered". So what's your point?
Which part of "everybody will use this single piece of proprietary software" allows people to choose a solution which fits their needs?
It's more likely that they are running Linux or some other system and this decision is forcing them to change to something that doesn't suit their requirements.
NB: taking this all with a grain of salt. A geocities page with some "leaked documents" that slashdots within 5 minutes might just be a hoax.
Video on demand.
People adore videos. People are willing to travel to a video rental store, search through 1000s of poorly labelled tapes, wait in crowded lines, receive a low-quality VHS tape for their effort, and they still have to return the tape the next day. Yet people will do this - and pay for the privilege - rather than watch broadcast TV.
Video on demand takes it to the next logical step. No tapes. No queues. No travel. No stock. You watch what you want, when you want it. All the benefits of broadcast TV combined with all the benefits of video rentals.
Unfortunately the local companies offering video on demand seem intent on killing the medium. They want $8 for a movie when the local video rental is $3. Video on demand should be cheaper! I can only imagine that they're blinded by greed.
/dev/log is a socket, not a file. /etc/mtab is already a symlink in some distributions.
And while some warts remain it's a darn sight better these days than it used to be. You can reasonably expect that only /var, /tmp and /home need to be writable filesystems. And if you find an exception then most people will agree that's buggy and needs to be fixed. A few years ago it took a Herculean effort to convince some people that writable /usr was not a good thing!
You assume incorrectly. Yes, ext3 shares the same on-disk structure as ext2, but LK members (eg, Andrew Morton) say this wasn't a compromise.
I've had enough of this. I don't particularly like Britney Spears or the boy-band-of-the-week. I think their music is dull. But it's going too far to say these people have NO TALENT at all. All of these entertainers can dance better than most of us. Several of them can sing better than most of us. Ok, perhaps they don't write their own lyrics or play their own instruments, but they don't claim to be songwriters or musicians. They're ENTERTAINERS. They're not very talented musically, but they're still talented.
I agree it's frustrating that they are more popular than musical talents, but tough luck. Insulting these people and downplaying whatever skills they do have is completely unfair.
NOBODY is wasting their time if they enjoy what they're doing.
Oh, not another one explaining the success of Microsoft.
Employers are contemptuous towards resumes that list dozens of languages that the applicant claims to "know". The employer is skeptical that the person is truly experienced with all these languages, and also distrusts people who think programming is all about knowing syntax. If your list is truly over the top then the employer will rightfully discard the resume rather than risk hiring a big-mouthed know-it-all.
Do yourself a favour and don't list every single piece of technology you've ever touched on your resume. That's what agencies are for. Your resume is meant to sell yourself as a person, not yourself as a reference library. List some problems you've worked on, some experiences you've had, mistakes you've made and how you coped with them, how you work in a team, etc.
Yes, it was. I remember the Slashdot comments at the time were saying that Microsoft had released patches for the Nimda exploit and the fault lies with lazy & incompetent administrators.
There is no double standard here, no matter how hard you try and look for one.
This is an Apache exploit, not a Linux exploit.
Apache ships with Solaris, Oracle, MacOS X, J2EE systems, etc.
Blaming Linux for an Apache exploit is as sensible as blaming Windows for a ColdFusion exploit, or blaming Solaris for an Oracle exploit. In other words, not sensible at all.
The problems you listed for Linux are also on Windows. Multiple widget sets: OWL vs Win32 vs MFC. Cut and paste: OLE or DDE or COM. Packages: multiple third party suppliers. Latest glibc: Windows developers invented the phrase "DLL hell".
ANY program written for ANY platform is high maintenance. Windows changes just as often and just as much as Linux. Apple are also guilty of making radical changes to MacOS. So yes, maintaining applications is hard. But no, it's not a unique difficulty of Linux.
The size of the reference would be as large as the size of the file in that sequence. So all you've done is create an inefficient encryption algorithm. Encrypting a file before transmitting it doesn't avoid the copyright problem.
It's a reference from Spinal Tap; a cult film from the 80s done in the style of a documentary for a rock and roll band. The lead guitarist at one point is bragging about his guitar amp because the volume knob goes up to 11 instead of the normal 10. You have to watch the movie to understand why this is hilarious.
The people who paid for it: the taxpayers. The taxpayers do not benefit here from closed-source.
Who the hell is going to review the software used to elect the president?!! Nobody would do that! Who cares which president gets in!
Oh wait, you're in the USA, I guess you're right.
Yes, it's important. Every other voting system is "open" in the sense that the process is well documented, well reviewed, and entirely transparent to the voting public. These closed source electronic systems are not transparent and their results cannot be validated. I'm surprised they were even commissioned. You Americans sure don't seem to care about your rights, these days.
Spelt rediculous properly? Thats' unpossible.
You Americans have some nerve complaining about government subsidies. The Australian prime minister recently had to BEG the USA to practise what they preach with regards to no-tariffs on imports. His pleas fell on deaf ears.
I suppose you prefer the visual beauty of a strip mine?
I don't agree with your interpretation for why the GGI failed.
The way I saw it, the GGI developers had very grand ideas but insufficient time/resources. In the end, the GGI lost out because FB and the DRI offered something tangible with a reduced complexity. Maybe you could argue that GGI offered more but that's just confirmation of the classic 80/20 rule.
While you're at it, preach to them the gospel of Christ, inform them about the evils of abortion, and warn them against the space aliens trying to invade their brains while they sleep.
"Honey, the doctor says I've got cancer... yeah, I'm glad it wasn't anything serious.".
All you're proving is that you don't know what "[sic]" means.