Actually, this may be why ESR has his "Geeks with Guns" bent. "When they come for my router, they'll have to fight for it."
Contract law can be something very good. Properly applied it could simplify some of the legal maze we've built - imagine if the labels on products were contracts - if the package of grits says it great for pouring down your pants, but when you try that... - then the manufacture has broken the contract.
Unfortunately, these days contract disputes tend to be won by the side with the most lawyers, and consumers are consumers, not partners in a contract.
Ah - but PETA is doing their actions For A Good Cause, that is they are promoting their belief system and we know that anyone with a differing believe system is a sexist racist murderous pervert and, like, totally wrong.
Let's not forget their attempts to promote beer comsumption by youth. I'm wondering when MADD or someone else is going to toss lawyers at PETA over that on. But then, MADD seems to be a bit more rational than the PETA promoters that have come pounding at my door.
I've been fairly vegetarian in the last few years, but PETA is being to change how I think....
* Portability across processors: it currently runs on Intel, Sparc, MIPS, ARM, HP-PA, and PowerPC architectures and is readily portable to others.
(means they've got the virtual machine for those)
* Portability across environments: it runs as a stand-alone operating system on small terminals, and also as a user application under Windows NT, Windows 95, Unix (Irix, Solaris, FreeBSD, Linux, AIX, HP/UX) and Plan 9. In all of these environments, Inferno applications see an identical interface.
* Distributed design: the identical environment is established at the user's terminal and at the server, and each may import the resources (for example, the attached I/O devices or networks) of the other. Aided by the communications facilities of the run-time system, applications may be split easily (and even dynamically) between client and server.
* Minimal hardware requirements: it runs useful applications stand-alone on machines with as little as 1 MB of memory, and does not require memory-mapping hardware.
(Not too bad for a full fill+networking system)
* Portable applications: Inferno applications are written in the type-safe language Limbo, whose binary representation is identical over all platforms.
* Dynamic adaptability: applications may, depending on the hardware or other resources available, load different program modules to perform a specific function. For example, a video player application might use any of several different decoder modules.
Note that the namespace and a homogeneous model of the system are ideas that have been suggested as desirable for some time.
1) Not everyone who questions the current state of patents, copyrights, and IP, is out to steal such. Saying "what a minute, is this a good idea" does not make one a criminal.
2) Current copyright laws are not necessarily what the US founders had in mind. And then he goes on to show why I thinks that way.
The US patent system, and the UK's as well, was explicitly set up to spread learning in the population. The Statute of Anne in 1710, which gave the rights to works to the authors as opposied to the printers-publishers, has the title 'an act for the encouragement of learning . ..'. It took until 1774 for the House of Lords to fight off the publishers' fighting of the Statute and to "affirm the public domain created by the 1710 statute by denying common law claims to the perpetual protection of intellectual property"
Before the late 1500s there wasn't much of anything like IP. There were some granted patents, which tended to run for 5 years or less. The response of IP holders to easier copying has been to push the period of ownership out further and further, which doesn't really address the problem of copying IP. Of course, neither does running around trading files and shouting "Music should be free".
Some of the push for longer term IP came from Europe, where establish wealthy families and companies wanted to maintain control longer. The result has been that the the longer terms have spread to the US, where control of IP has left the actual creators and ended up in the hands of large organizations. It's worth the trouble of getting copyright to go for life+70, if it means that the company that actually controls the IP can now make money off of it for 100+years. Corporations can live "forever", people don't.
You got it right - that was the early meaning, various people have commented on the drifting meaning over the years. It appears that some pointy haired management type years ago heard the phrase and, showing their true skills, immediately reversed the meaning and used it whenever they could. Y axis is how much you know, X is how long you've spent. That way one tends to climb higher and higher - more skill/learning - unless the skill is abandoned. If someone is slow at learning the subject, their curve is fairly flat. If they give up the curve plateaus at their level of skill, or decays as they forget. Pick the guy with the largest Y value. If Y was the amount of effort then learing would be a series of hills, assuming that the subject being learned got easier to deal with after time. If you never learned it the curve would plateau at the level of effort you continue expend. If the subject became more and more difficult the curve would continue up endlessly. But you couldn't tell if a dropping curve meant that the subject was being grasped or if the learner had just given up and wasn't expending any more effort on it.
Forget the low bidder take - plenty of US governmental agentcies are requiring Win95/98/2000/NT as the OS for various RFQ/RFBs "Windows? Well of course, it's the standard and it's the most powerful and secure and stable around. Bill said so" Think of that next time you dial 911...
As should be well know, birthdate collision are to be expected. Citizen ID #s, US SSN and the like, do have cases of several people having the same number although governments are trying to fix such cases. So there's currently no simple way to make oneself unique from the standpoint of information gathering or reporting.This has disadvatages and advatages. Note that some companies will perform background checks even if they are not to do so without your OK. I know someone why had a problem similar to that described here, who had a good interview and then got a "we're not interested in you" phoe call. Turned out that the company had done a background check, on the sly and using a fly-by-night company to do the check. Libel might be an interesting tack to take, especially given that comapnies often end up sharing information of the "avoid this person" sort (again, under the table).
At a place I worked at eons ago, one guy would drop lines such as "if you read this, tell me and I'll buy you lunch" into design documents he was writing. As he was planning to leave in a predetermined number of months he wasn't too worried about fallout from that. He never once had to pay up - the managers just took the docs into meetings, where they did chest thumping by seeing who had the largest doc pile this week; after that the filed to stuff and never read it.
Copyright laws may have been applied to recordable music and film since day one; however it was often applied by people usuing it to protect their swip of someone else's work. Often the big powers stomped on the little guys, so that the big guys could make more money. On the other hand, plenty of knock-offs were done of popular writers works by publishers who either were based in other countries or ready to fold one "front" company and start another. In any case, successful copyright violations are as old as copyright laws. If you want to toss in patents, then look at TA Edison and what he did with film (patented competative technologies) and music. I'll agree ith the rest of this, that record comapnies where the bst way for musicians to distribute and that said companies have tended to become large beasts disintrested in musicians except as cash flow generators.
It all depends on how much you trust the software you're using. > But I'm sure, when signing a contract of well... > let's 20 pages of text, only some form of > checksum will actually be transfered to the smartcard... > Will the display then read: "You are signing a > document whose md5-sum is > 68b329da9893e34099c7d8ad5cb9c940?"... The software presents you with the document. It calculates the RIPE160 & MD-5 & SHA-1 sums for that document. You type whatever text you want in you signature area, which also gets automatic stuff such as UTC inserted. The sums for that are gen'd. Those sets of sums are passed to the smart card, which spits back a magic cookie. The program sticks the sums and the cookie into the signature section of the document. Anyone wanting to verify the signature passes the entire document through the verification operation. This validates the signature block including the sums therein; if good then it confires that the sums match those created from the matching section of the document.
Read the references - you need to opt into getting the electronic form. And I'd bet that you will find that a signed ereceipt will be needed to prove that you received the notification.
quothe: Mercury also directly relates to cryptography 300 years ago because of John Wilkins' 1694 book on the subject "Mercury or the Secret and Swift Messenger". And the new novel takes place 3 centuries ago, and JWikins has been mentioned by Stephenson in the context of Cryptonomicon's 'universe'. Late 16th early 17th century - the stirrings of the industrial revolution, the hard sciences are starting to take form. The Bill of Rights was recent passed (in England). The British and French are fighting each other in North America. The Jacobites are still active. Peter the Great, Catherine I, Louis XV, Johnathan Swift, Blackbeard the pirate. This was the roots and foundation of the Age of Enlightenmen, the American Revolution, and other minor events. Should be interesting.
Dave Cutler worked at DEC on RSX-11, and the VMS. He was on the Prism/Mica team when DEC canceled that. Cutler brought roughly 20 people with him from DEC to Microsoft, where they worked on what became Windows/NT. NT was to be OS2-nextgen : OS/2-NT; when Windows 3 took off MS ditched the OS2 idea and went after Windows/NT, changing a bunch of the API needs. NT and VMS are very similar, the major difference is the load balancing when VMS uses swapping a lot. The similarities between VMS and NT were noted by DEC, who had their lawyers talk to Microsoft's lawyers. Microsoft got real nice to DEC.
While I don't really like this idea, we may find ourselves faced with a choice between something like this and, perhaps, always-on monitoring of our connections - such as the US government is working towards for in mobile communications (CALEA is just the start). Asking if "joe 6pack is at fault for a bad alternator?" isn't the best comparison, at least to most people. It would be closer to "Is Joe 6pack at fault for failing to stop in time while driving with bald tires?" While, I believe, the ideal is not to have access licenses, or constant or spot surveillance, but the open and unfettered `net of the old days. However I fear that one or more of the bad choices will be forced upon the inhabitants of various countries. I oppose such, but want to have the fallback to the less intrusive "access licencing". And then I want to figure out some around those controls and restrictions, and allow everyone to get back to the old ways.
I suspect that Motorola may have missed some of the target markets for Iridium. They seemed to go after the worold wide roaming cell phone market; given the bicks the phones are hurts this effort. Perhaps they should have looked at markets such as small ships, outback overland truck traffic, and trains. These users could accept equipment that resembled current two-way radios to get mounted onto the vehicle. The cost is in the same range as alternative for those markets. From what I've heard, Iridium doesn't handle data traffic too well. Does anyone know if this is true ?
Re:Do it & it's adios. I'll tell banner ad folks t
on
Privacy vs. Anonymity
·
· Score: 1
Perhaps don't let AC post until N noneAC post have occured, just to get rid of the 1sters.
Allow any logged in user to hit an AC post with a fractional moderate down or up. If enough logged in users don't like the post it will be pushed down to the floor, if an AC gets directly moderated down the general logged in readership would be able to moderate it back up - addressing those cases claiming biased moderators are surpressing certain views.
I think that you will find that much of the early pro-independence pamphlets in the USA were printed anonymously. It is not unusual to do so when criticizing the powers that be, for those powers often can make life unpleasent for one or even terminate it.
Yes, it shows that you really believe in what you are saying when you sign it. However, if you are likely to be locked away or killed the first time you do so, your effectiveness at changing things may be greatly reduced. If you can continue to publish your offically unpopular ideas, you may be able to influence enough of the public to bring about change (and allow you to start signing those publications).
Think of the major represive countries in the 20th century, and then tell me that you would be will to publically and non-anonymously criticize them. Then think back to the anti-Vietnam war protests in the USA, and the earlier McCarthy era Red bashing.
Or perhaps you are discussing something that happen to you. You may not want it known that these events happened to you - as a identified person; however you may still feel that telling about them anonymously can help others.
NDA stuff such as knowledge of features, products, & releases not yet told to the public, all sorts of long terms plans. The tech folks know about things that one might think of as more of as marketing side, but that still affects the company's sales. Even if they plan to GPL some software being worked on, not making that product public until near release time can be important.
Embedded Planet, at http://www.rpcgllc.com , has several credit card sized systems based on the Motorola MPC8xx PowerPC family. They take 3-4 watss at 3 volts, and several have 2 Ehternet ports. Hmmm. think 8-16 M DRAM, 2-32 M Flash. Priced under $1K.
Should be able to fit some PPC version of *NIX in one of those, along with a load of name-your-protocol servers.
Something to remember is that those Scenix chips max out at about 1/4K or RAM, with some of that going to the UART and TCP/IP stack. Doesn't leave a lot for anything else; note that their demo is a few bits of I/O.
Several of the points raised could be expanded upon. Copyright did have little meaning until mechanical reproduction of text came about. Before then each book would often be unique, with its own errors and embellishments. And very expensive in terms of labour.
But there was a second stage to this. In the 1800s the printng press took another step forward, and books got cheaper to make once again. At this point knockoff copies of books became common; if you read biographies of popular 19th Century writers you'll find that many of them were constantly complaining about and taking on unauthorised printings of their works. And during this time it became much cheaper to reproduce artwork as well.
In the mid-1900s the photo-offset press addded on more step to this process. For not too much of an outlay anyone could be a print shop for short runs. While this didn't hurt bookpublishers much, I suspect that it did cause a decline in the sales of music scores and plays - fairly pricy items that small performing groups needed only a few copies of.
Electronic methods have made it even cheaper to copy, and removed most barriers to the distribution of the copies (actual the distribution is the copying process). So now the original publishers are being hurt, and fight back.
This may be signalling another major change in the publishing business. Perhaps the creators - author, producers, performers - will begin to bypass the publishers, go straight to electronic distribution, and take their chances on how many people use the product without payment vs. paying for it. I've heard that King did alright on his recent electronic release, earning more than he would have with a sale to a standard print outlet even with the amount of pirating that went on.
Cheap copies are a big part of historical changes in obscenity laws, too. The authorities were not very worried about porn so long as it remained limited in its distribution, the expense of making copies kept it in the hands of the wealthy. Cheap printing and cheap image reproduction allowed the masses access to these materials, and lead to a large increase in laws attempting to control it.
Porn also drove the cost reduction of many technologies. The printing press was quickly used to print such. The small businesses turning out naughty photos in the later 1800s help boost sales of photographic equipment and bring the prices down. As for VCRs, need we speak?
The same is holding true with the Net. So long as the dirty pictures were being passed about by some members of a small handfull of taxpayer subsidized egghead weirdoes then the government wasn't really worried. But let just anyone at it, and it's a hot issue.
Note that the cost of producing material things has come down over the same time period, jsut not so dramatically. Check how someone in the 13th and 16th centuries would think about buying a dozen drinking glasses/mugs, and then what it cost today. But manufacturing of material objects is still not as low cost as the copying of ideas, people will still pay for real matter implementations of someting.
These changes are much of what is driving the economy to the service side - currently there's no easy way to replace a person doing something for you. Good scifi robots could change part of that, but creative services would still be in demand. In the langer term these trends may lead to more creators looking at their work as the orginal creation of something, for which they receive compensation, and not the ownership of the creation itself.
The thought of genetic engineering frankly scares the hell out of me. I don't think that human kind, as a whole, is mature enough for that kind of power over the very building blocks of life itself.
But we've been doing this for thousands of years, albet with less understanding and cruder tools. And Nature has been doing it for much longer - bacteria swap DNA, and viruses carry chunks of DNA across species.
The newer technology allows more control over this engineering, with the result that new gene combinations are likely to be rushed into the field before the full impact can assessed. However a few changes to the legal system can help here - every time there's a messup from geneng just slowly torture to death the CEOs of the offending company; then watch how carefully new stuff gets introduced.
A few years ago several European countries were looking into smartcard digital cash. One of their big goals was to have these function truely as cash - transactions using digital cash would not be traceable.
The US view was that ever transaction had to be recorded, in detail.
Microsoft has a _long_ history of products with security holes. I think every network supporting OS major release made the drives on your machine public. IE did it, too. And once when I was forced to get the Powerpoint viewer app I noticed that the current release was a fix to a "problem where the user's drives would be published on any connected network". Uh, a viewer app made my drive public - this doesn't sound like a simple programming bug to me.
Then there was the copy protect diskwiping trojan horse someone at MS put into ? Excel ? eons ago. Me thinks they drink a bit too much caffeine in Redmond.
Slashdot Mirror
Contract law can be something very good. Properly applied it could simplify some of the legal maze we've built - imagine if the labels on products were contracts - if the package of grits says it great for pouring down your pants, but when you try that ... - then the manufacture has broken the contract.
Unfortunately, these days contract disputes tend to be won by the side with the most lawyers, and consumers are consumers, not partners in a contract.
Let's not forget their attempts to promote beer comsumption by youth. I'm wondering when MADD or someone else is going to toss lawyers at PETA over that on. But then, MADD seems to be a bit more rational than the PETA promoters that have come pounding at my door.
I've been fairly vegetarian in the last few years, but PETA is being to change how I think. ...
* Portability across processors: it currently runs on Intel, Sparc, MIPS, ARM, HP-PA, and PowerPC architectures and is readily portable to others.
(means they've got the virtual machine for those)
* Portability across environments: it runs as a stand-alone operating system on small terminals, and also as a user application under Windows NT, Windows 95, Unix (Irix, Solaris, FreeBSD, Linux, AIX, HP/UX) and Plan 9. In all of these environments, Inferno applications see an identical interface.
* Distributed design: the identical environment is established at the user's terminal and at the server, and each may import the resources (for example, the attached I/O devices or networks) of the other. Aided by the communications facilities of the run-time system, applications may be split easily (and even dynamically) between client and server.
* Minimal hardware requirements: it runs useful applications stand-alone on machines with as little as 1 MB of memory, and does not require memory-mapping hardware.
(Not too bad for a full fill+networking system)
* Portable applications: Inferno applications are written in the type-safe language Limbo, whose binary representation is identical over all platforms.
* Dynamic adaptability: applications may, depending on the hardware or other resources available, load different program modules to perform a specific function. For example, a video player application might use any of several different decoder modules.
Note that the namespace and a homogeneous model of the system are ideas that have been suggested as desirable for some time.
1) Not everyone who questions the current state of patents, copyrights, and IP, is out to steal such. Saying "what a minute, is this a good idea" does not make one a criminal.
2) Current copyright laws are not necessarily what the US founders had in mind. And then he goes on to show why I thinks that way.
The US patent system, and the UK's as well, was explicitly set up to spread learning in the population. The Statute of Anne in 1710, which gave the rights to works to the authors as opposied to the printers-publishers, has the title 'an act for the encouragement of learning . . .'. It took until 1774 for the House of Lords to fight off the publishers' fighting of the Statute and to "affirm the public domain created by the 1710 statute by denying common law claims to the perpetual protection of intellectual property"
Before the late 1500s there wasn't much of anything like IP. There were some granted patents, which tended to run for 5 years or less. The response of IP holders to easier copying has been to push the period of ownership out further and further, which doesn't really address the problem of copying IP. Of course, neither does running around trading files and shouting "Music should be free".
Some of the push for longer term IP came from Europe, where establish wealthy families and companies wanted to maintain control longer. The result has been that the the longer terms have spread to the US, where control of IP has left the actual creators and ended up in the hands of large organizations. It's worth the trouble of getting copyright to go for life+70, if it means that the company that actually controls the IP can now make money off of it for 100+years. Corporations can live "forever", people don't.
You got it right - that was the early meaning, various people have commented on the drifting meaning over the years. It appears that some pointy haired management type years ago heard the phrase and, showing their true skills, immediately reversed the meaning and used it whenever they could. Y axis is how much you know, X is how long you've spent. That way one tends to climb higher and higher - more skill/learning - unless the skill is abandoned. If someone is slow at learning the subject, their curve is fairly flat. If they give up the curve plateaus at their level of skill, or decays as they forget. Pick the guy with the largest Y value. If Y was the amount of effort then learing would be a series of hills, assuming that the subject being learned got easier to deal with after time. If you never learned it the curve would plateau at the level of effort you continue expend. If the subject became more and more difficult the curve would continue up endlessly. But you couldn't tell if a dropping curve meant that the subject was being grasped or if the learner had just given up and wasn't expending any more effort on it.
Forget the low bidder take - plenty of US governmental agentcies are requiring Win95/98/2000/NT as the OS for various RFQ/RFBs "Windows? Well of course, it's the standard and it's the most powerful and secure and stable around. Bill said so" Think of that next time you dial 911 ...
As should be well know, birthdate collision are to be expected. Citizen ID #s, US SSN and the like, do have cases of several people having the same number although governments are trying to fix such cases. So there's currently no simple way to make oneself unique from the standpoint of information gathering or reporting.This has disadvatages and advatages. Note that some companies will perform background checks even if they are not to do so without your OK. I know someone why had a problem similar to that described here, who had a good interview and then got a "we're not interested in you" phoe call. Turned out that the company had done a background check, on the sly and using a fly-by-night company to do the check. Libel might be an interesting tack to take, especially given that comapnies often end up sharing information of the "avoid this person" sort (again, under the table).
At a place I worked at eons ago, one guy would drop lines such as "if you read this, tell me and I'll buy you lunch" into design documents he was writing. As he was planning to leave in a predetermined number of months he wasn't too worried about fallout from that. He never once had to pay up - the managers just took the docs into meetings, where they did chest thumping by seeing who had the largest doc pile this week; after that the filed to stuff and never read it.
Copyright laws may have been applied to recordable music and film since day one; however it was often applied by people usuing it to protect their swip of someone else's work. Often the big powers stomped on the little guys, so that the big guys could make more money. On the other hand, plenty of knock-offs were done of popular writers works by publishers who either were based in other countries or ready to fold one "front" company and start another. In any case, successful copyright violations are as old as copyright laws. If you want to toss in patents, then look at TA Edison and what he did with film (patented competative technologies) and music. I'll agree ith the rest of this, that record comapnies where the bst way for musicians to distribute and that said companies have tended to become large beasts disintrested in musicians except as cash flow generators.
It all depends on how much you trust the software you're using. > But I'm sure, when signing a contract of well... > let's 20 pages of text, only some form of > checksum will actually be transfered to the smartcard... > Will the display then read: "You are signing a > document whose md5-sum is > 68b329da9893e34099c7d8ad5cb9c940?"... The software presents you with the document. It calculates the RIPE160 & MD-5 & SHA-1 sums for that document. You type whatever text you want in you signature area, which also gets automatic stuff such as UTC inserted. The sums for that are gen'd. Those sets of sums are passed to the smart card, which spits back a magic cookie. The program sticks the sums and the cookie into the signature section of the document. Anyone wanting to verify the signature passes the entire document through the verification operation. This validates the signature block including the sums therein; if good then it confires that the sums match those created from the matching section of the document.
Read the references - you need to opt into getting the electronic form. And I'd bet that you will find that a signed ereceipt will be needed to prove that you received the notification.
quothe: Mercury also directly relates to cryptography 300 years ago because of John Wilkins' 1694 book on the subject "Mercury or the Secret and Swift Messenger". And the new novel takes place 3 centuries ago, and JWikins has been mentioned by Stephenson in the context of Cryptonomicon's 'universe'. Late 16th early 17th century - the stirrings of the industrial revolution, the hard sciences are starting to take form. The Bill of Rights was recent passed (in England). The British and French are fighting each other in North America. The Jacobites are still active. Peter the Great, Catherine I, Louis XV, Johnathan Swift, Blackbeard the pirate. This was the roots and foundation of the Age of Enlightenmen, the American Revolution, and other minor events. Should be interesting.
Plums Per Liter ? Is this about plum brandy? Does Microsoft make that, too? I'm confused.
Dave Cutler worked at DEC on RSX-11, and the VMS. He was on the Prism/Mica team when DEC canceled that. Cutler brought roughly 20 people with him from DEC to Microsoft, where they worked on what became Windows/NT. NT was to be OS2-nextgen : OS/2-NT; when Windows 3 took off MS ditched the OS2 idea and went after Windows/NT, changing a bunch of the API needs. NT and VMS are very similar, the major difference is the load balancing when VMS uses swapping a lot. The similarities between VMS and NT were noted by DEC, who had their lawyers talk to Microsoft's lawyers. Microsoft got real nice to DEC.
While I don't really like this idea, we may find ourselves faced with a choice between something like this and, perhaps, always-on monitoring of our connections - such as the US government is working towards for in mobile communications (CALEA is just the start). Asking if "joe 6pack is at fault for a bad alternator?" isn't the best comparison, at least to most people. It would be closer to "Is Joe 6pack at fault for failing to stop in time while driving with bald tires?" While, I believe, the ideal is not to have access licenses, or constant or spot surveillance, but the open and unfettered `net of the old days. However I fear that one or more of the bad choices will be forced upon the inhabitants of various countries. I oppose such, but want to have the fallback to the less intrusive "access licencing". And then I want to figure out some around those controls and restrictions, and allow everyone to get back to the old ways.
I suspect that Motorola may have missed some of the target markets for Iridium. They seemed to go after the worold wide roaming cell phone market; given the bicks the phones are hurts this effort. Perhaps they should have looked at markets such as small ships, outback overland truck traffic, and trains. These users could accept equipment that resembled current two-way radios to get mounted onto the vehicle. The cost is in the same range as alternative for those markets. From what I've heard, Iridium doesn't handle data traffic too well. Does anyone know if this is true ?
Allow any logged in user to hit an AC post with a fractional moderate down or up. If enough logged in users don't like the post it will be pushed down to the floor, if an AC gets directly moderated down the general logged in readership would be able to moderate it back up - addressing those cases claiming biased moderators are surpressing certain views.
Yes, it shows that you really believe in what you are saying when you sign it. However, if you are likely to be locked away or killed the first time you do so, your effectiveness at changing things may be greatly reduced. If you can continue to publish your offically unpopular ideas, you may be able to influence enough of the public to bring about change (and allow you to start signing those publications).
Think of the major represive countries in the 20th century, and then tell me that you would be will to publically and non-anonymously criticize them. Then think back to the anti-Vietnam war protests in the USA, and the earlier McCarthy era Red bashing.
Or perhaps you are discussing something that happen to you. You may not want it known that these events happened to you - as a identified person; however you may still feel that telling about them anonymously can help others.
NDA stuff such as knowledge of features, products, & releases not yet told to the public, all sorts of long terms plans. The tech folks know about things that one might think of as more of as marketing side, but that still affects the company's sales. Even if they plan to GPL some software being worked on, not making that product public until near release time can be important.
Should be able to fit some PPC version of *NIX in one of those, along with a load of name-your-protocol servers.
But there was a second stage to this. In the 1800s the printng press took another step forward, and books got cheaper to make once again. At this point knockoff copies of books became common; if you read biographies of popular 19th Century writers you'll find that many of them were constantly complaining about and taking on unauthorised printings of their works. And during this time it became much cheaper to reproduce artwork as well.
In the mid-1900s the photo-offset press addded on more step to this process. For not too much of an outlay anyone could be a print shop for short runs. While this didn't hurt bookpublishers much, I suspect that it did cause a decline in the sales of music scores and plays - fairly pricy items that small performing groups needed only a few copies of.
Electronic methods have made it even cheaper to copy, and removed most barriers to the distribution of the copies (actual the distribution is the copying process). So now the original publishers are being hurt, and fight back.
This may be signalling another major change in the publishing business. Perhaps the creators - author, producers, performers - will begin to bypass the publishers, go straight to electronic distribution, and take their chances on how many people use the product without payment vs. paying for it. I've heard that King did alright on his recent electronic release, earning more than he would have with a sale to a standard print outlet even with the amount of pirating that went on.
Cheap copies are a big part of historical changes in obscenity laws, too. The authorities were not very worried about porn so long as it remained limited in its distribution, the expense of making copies kept it in the hands of the wealthy. Cheap printing and cheap image reproduction allowed the masses access to these materials, and lead to a large increase in laws attempting to control it.
Porn also drove the cost reduction of many technologies. The printing press was quickly used to print such. The small businesses turning out naughty photos in the later 1800s help boost sales of photographic equipment and bring the prices down. As for VCRs, need we speak?
The same is holding true with the Net. So long as the dirty pictures were being passed about by some members of a small handfull of taxpayer subsidized egghead weirdoes then the government wasn't really worried. But let just anyone at it, and it's a hot issue.
Note that the cost of producing material things has come down over the same time period, jsut not so dramatically. Check how someone in the 13th and 16th centuries would think about buying a dozen drinking glasses/mugs, and then what it cost today. But manufacturing of material objects is still not as low cost as the copying of ideas, people will still pay for real matter implementations of someting.
These changes are much of what is driving the economy to the service side - currently there's no easy way to replace a person doing something for you. Good scifi robots could change part of that, but creative services would still be in demand. In the langer term these trends may lead to more creators looking at their work as the orginal creation of something, for which they receive compensation, and not the ownership of the creation itself.
But we've been doing this for thousands of years, albet with less understanding and cruder tools. And Nature has been doing it for much longer - bacteria swap DNA, and viruses carry chunks of DNA across species.
The newer technology allows more control over this engineering, with the result that new gene combinations are likely to be rushed into the field before the full impact can assessed. However a few changes to the legal system can help here - every time there's a messup from geneng just slowly torture to death the CEOs of the offending company; then watch how carefully new stuff gets introduced.
The US view was that ever transaction had to be recorded, in detail.
Then there was the copy protect diskwiping trojan horse someone at MS put into ? Excel ? eons ago. Me thinks they drink a bit too much caffeine in Redmond.