The Threat... ... that the RIAA and the MPAA like to hold over your heads is, "If we don't get this protection, we won't create anything new because we won't have any incentive to."
Let them. Call their bluff. "Okay, go ahead. Quit making music and movies. Well? I'm waiting." Watch it not happen.
More likely the threat they'll hold over everyone's heads is that without appropriate copyright protection and the DMCA to back it up legally, they won't be able to make money, and there will be a huge depression because the entertainment industry collapsed. (well, they probably won't put it in quite such dramatic terms, but that's the gist of it). This is what got DMCA passed, and this is their mantra. It's bullshit, of course, but congressmen are too stupid to realize this (we'd be better off without the goddamn entertainment industry, anyway).
And anyway, we're not talking about the entertainment industry, we're talkin about the computer industry. RIAA and MPAA have little to say about this (though it may seem like they would, at first). This primarily concerns software copying, not music or movies.
I don't worry too much about this. It's not like the government is trying to force hardware manufacturers to do this. If Intel starts making chips that have copyright protection built-in, it only opens up a market to a chip manufacturer that won't. And hard drives? I find it unlikely that IBM, Seagate, Maxtor, Fujitsu, and all others would all uniformly adopt copy-protection technology in the competitive storage market, when that technology is a potential turn-off to the consumer.
This is a good point. Notice the articles only vaguely mentioned "giants like IBM, M$, and Intel" and didn't specifically name any other companies (that I saw, anyway). My guess is that there are few, if any, other companies going along with this crap.
Just as AMD has little to gain from adopting any Intel-developed "copy-protection" schemes, Seagate, W-D, Maxtor, et. al. have little to gain from adopting IBM's copy-protection schemes for hard drives. And lord knows nobody has anything to gain from anything Microsoft does (other than Microsoft and their investors).
There are slimy ways to go about ensuring the adoption of things like this, of course, so maybe a complete "que sera sera" attitude is not exactly approriate, but nevertheless, I don't see trouble just yet.
Now should patents be applied to software products? That is a different question. The One-Click patent should clearly explain the process involved in creating a working system (whether through actual source code or through a series of diagrams). In this way, the idea of a one-click system is still open for innovation by other developers who wish to seek new ways of improving on the idea. To prematurely close off a whole area of software by issuing a broad patent would be a bad thing.
In once sense, what you're saying is right, since it strikes to the heart of what patents are for: the hard part is the research and development effort required to turn an idea into a working product, and it is this effort that is protected by the patent.
But on the other hand, the problem with software patents is precisely the difficulty in drawing this distinction. It's not at all clear if an implementation is not just a detailed expression of an idea. Basically, if a patent contains a detailed explanation of something (say, my new-fangled B-crap-tree database file structure) through the use of diagrams, UML, or whatever, and no source code, than I've merely expressed the idea in detail and have not given the details of how I implemented it. But if it goes all the way to the level of source code, it's really too particular to be useful as a patent, because anyone can change the structure of their program and implement basically the same thing without stressing their R&D effort too much.
I guess all this does is suggest that answering the question of what constitutes patentable software is an in principle hard question. The same is true of anything, but I think it's a particularly hard balance to strike with software, and hence the difficulty of writing regulations and standards that a government agency will have to abide by.
19. The Government's conclusion is thus to reaffirm the principle that patents are for technological innovations. Software should not be patentable where there is no technological innovation, and technological innovations should not cease to be patentable merely because the innovation lies in software.
This, by the way, is almost exactly the conclusion of the United States Supreme Court in the Diamond vs. (who was it, again?) that opened up the floodgate for software patents in the U.S. Before that, the U.S. patent office in the U.S. had been denying all patents involving software at all. They took this as an invitation to accept all software patents that weren't already patented (almost literally).
I don't think this is the correct interpretation, but just a precaution that there is precendent for such interpretation in the U.S. at least (of course, the U.S. has perhaps one of the stupidest patent offices in the world).
Why should a company be motivated to research new business practises if it cannot profit from its own work? In todays fast moving, morphing world, business plans are what businesses live and die by - they are the modern rocket science, and many billions are spent daily on their research and practise.
Okay, I am not an economist or an MBA (I'm a computer scientist and aspiring cognitive
scientist), but I fail to see how development of
new business methods qualifies as "research". It
is innovation in a sense, to be sure, but on what
basis should new businesses be allowed to be
granted a 15-year (or whatever--is it that long
for business method patents normally?) exclusive
right to do business a certain way? Isn't allowing
business method patents akin to granting the right
to limited (in time) ownership of an idea?
The whole point of patents was that it wasn't the
idea per se that was being owned (hence,
the reason for publication of the invention), but,
rather, the physical realization of it, and the
individual (and by logical extension corporation,
which is a legal person in the U.S. at least)
should thus have the right to grant (or deny)
license for others to physically realize the same
idea. It's supposed to encourage innovation and
invention by enticing others to find better ways
to physically realize the same idea, or else to
come up with a better idea and, hence, approach
to the relevant problem.
It's never been clear to me that business method
patents (and software patents) exactly
capture this idea. (certainly not as implemented
in the U.S. Patent office, but that's another
rant for another time....).
Jobs are still abundant, but it's not quite as easy as the media would have you believe to get rehired in an instant
This is a good point. Last year, my senior year as a comp sci major, I recall going through the hiring practices and wondering when, exactly, the employers were supposed to start throwing money at me.
I mean, I'm not a fool. I was graduating cum laude, from the honors program (that sounds sort of redundant if you know what cum laude means...), with two degrees to boot (applied math and comp sci), having done a co-op, etc. Never happened. I interviewed with maybe a dozen companies over about a 4 month period and got precisely one job offer: from the people I co-oped with (and I already knew about that one before it came).
The media made it seem like you just knock on employers' doors, tell them you're a programmer, and *bam*, money, stock options, prostitutes, ferraris, etc.
No industry works like that. Not one. HR departments of big companies are AWLAYS going to go through their motions to weed out duds (legitimate or otherwise) and match buzzwords from your resume and your interview with buzzwords from the job description and "desired qualifications" description, and small companies have always got to worry how you'll fit into their particular, quirky environment, whether or not they can afford to continue to pay you until you finish whatever it was they hired you to work on, etc.
And, of course, if your company has to fire you because the VC cut the funding, take that as a sign that the company was not paying its own bills anyway, and couldn't afford to hire you in the first place. You don't want to work for companies like that in any industry, it's just plain stupid.
The term Hacker (and now this made-up term Cracker as well) is being used so loosely that it's slowly becoming a totally worthless term. A hacker was once an amateur, usually a bad one. The metaphor becomes clear if you think of a golfer or tennis player that doesn't really know what s/he's doing but does it all the time anyway, hacking away at the ball.
In typical counter-culture fashion, programmers adopted the term as a description of a good programmer. But often, knowing how something works means knowing how something can be broken, so the term has slowly morphed to mean someone who looks for weaknesses in computer systems.
And now, when it's been realized that a lot of damange can be done and felonies can be committed by such people if they should choose to be join the Dark Side, it's come to refer to criminals, vandals, and script kiddies. These people have nothing to do with programming, and in no way, shape, or form demonstrate any knowledge of a particular system at all by the crap they pull.
That's so many diametrically opposed transformations of one word in just a few decades it's dizzying. The sad part is that my parents still use the original sense of the word while my grandparents and non-computer-savvy friends use it in the last sense, while computer geeks still use it in the programming sense. All senses of the word are still intact.
The worst part is that context cannot usually differentiate between these different uses of the word (given any technical context, all four of them would work, and yet would refer to totally different kinds of people). This, I think, is where the debate over the meaning of the term arises. And, of course, the news media are in no hurry at all to clear it up (why should they, after all?)
According to t his NY Times article (free reg. required), Microsoft said the following:
There's always the potential for misuse, More important than the technical side of this is the human side. It's not something technology is ever going to be able to solve.
And later:
We as a society chose to get more connected One of the perils of doing that is, the more connected you are with everybody, the more connected you are with malicious people
Though I must admit they do have a point, there is another side to this. Technology might not be able to help it, but I think we can all agree that a goal should be to at least try to avoid technology that encourages it. If you don't think the technology is encouraging such behavior, then just ask yourself: why are such occurrences as e-mail macro viruses and such so common?
Aren't trade secrets enforced only by state laws? If so, if I download it here in RTP, NC (from their site in Redmond, WA--the point being that it's across state boundaries, which two states are not really important), isn't it now unenforceable as a trade secret? States aren't obliged to enforce each other's laws (otherwise why would each state bother to have it's own legislature??). Anyway the only thing trade secret laws allow you to do is sue somebody for damages if they reveal it (AND agreed previously to protect it as a trade secret--this being the point of an NDA--as this license appears to be trying to get you to do).
Of course, I suspect they might be able to use a few provisions of DMCA to enforce it, but somehow it just seems.. well.. weak. Why bother?
It would be a good thing if the next person who manages to download the entire page (whenever that happens) sees if s/he can mirror it somewhere faster than this. I'd do it but I don't think I have time to wait for the rest of it (I can't stay logged in here when I leave), and I don't have a good place to mirror it (if I put it up here the sysadmins would get very upset if our server gets slashdotted too..).
George Washington University maintains what they call a National Security Archive which is an archive of declassified government documents. They include all kinds of juicy stuff: Iran-Contra affair, Bay of Pigs, Cuban Missile Crisis, etc. It's a conspiracy theorist's paradise.
The program, codenamed ECHELON, has been described as a global surveillance network that intercepts and processes the world' communications and distributes it among the primary partners in the decades-old UKUSA alliance-the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand
And this right after it:
In reality, ECHELON is a more limited program, allowing the UKUSA allies to specify intelligence requirements and automatically receive relevant intercepts obtained by the UKUSA facilities which intercept satellite communications (but not the U.S. facilities that receive data from SIGINT satellites). It is also limited by both technological barriers (the inability to develop word-spotting software so as to allow for the automatic processing of intercepted conversations) and the limitations imposed on collection activities by the UKUSA allies-at least as regards the citizens of those countries. Thus, the NAVSECGRU instruction also specifies that one of the responsibilities of the commander of the Sugar Grove site is to "ensure the privacy of U.S. citizens are properly safeguarded pursuant to the provisions of USSID 18."
(no, I don't know what the references to the "Sugar Grove site" are referring to, and don't ask me about all those silly government acronyms). Somewhere on George Washington's National Security Archive is where they claimed to have found these documents about echelon. I searched for a while but found nothing concrete. But I was pretty lazy about it. There's no reason to doubt that some juicier stuff is there somewhere, since it looks like it's a pretty big archive.
And no, I'm not a student at George Washington University (nor am I anywhere near it or in any way associated with it--I just went hunting around their web page looking for this stuff after I read the article).
Okay now how does this work? The French government (is that right?) sues the UK and the US governments over this espionage deal in France. WTF?? What did I miss? How does France sue our government in their country? Who's our lawyer? What court has the authority to try the case? In what country does the lawyer have to have passed the bar exam? This doesn't make any damn sense at all.
I mean, I can see why the French are pissed off. That's certainly understandable. But sue? How? In what court? What judge gets to order a government (any government) to pay damages to another government? What about the sovereign right of nations? Does anyone else see the problem, here?
This is a little like having a corporation arrested: who the hell gets arrested, since a corporation is only a person on paper, and no one individual can legally be held liable for the entire corporation's actions (this is why you can't sue, say, the CEO for something the corporation did; you have to sue the company itself).
Movies that come on optical disks do not have 1900x1200 quality, or anything even near it. Listen to the commentors who say that digital projection will not become big until huge advances in storage occur (though huge advances may take as little as a few years, given Moore's law...).
A little numerical experiment to demonstrate: at 1900x1200, that's 2.28 million "dots" per frame. Assuming true color (24 bit), that's 6.84 million bytes (not mega bytes!) per frame. Ebert mentioned that existing projectors display about 24 frames per second, so that's 164 million bytes per second (about 156 or so megabytes). Now, for a two hour movie, that adds up to about 1.18 trillion (yes, with a 't') bytes for one movie. That's just a bit over one terabyte for a movie. Starting to see, now, why in the article as Roger Ebert mentioned TI had to have an array of 20 18GB hard drives to store the movie?
Now, you could cut this by a factor of three if you settle for old-fashioned VGA quality color, and you could cut it by a factor of between 2 and 5 with some moderate lossy compression (that much compression won't see much loss), and there are other clever ways to compress a motion picture, besides that might contribute to that. You could cut the resolution down, as well. But now what you have is hundreds of gigabytes for one 2 hour movie of not very good quality. Given that the theatres are getting the ass-end of this deal anyhow (given how expensive the technology is, that is--and how much it saves hollywood), and that theatres still have a choice, I wonder about which way this will go. If there was a real gain in quality here (like with THX, for instance) then Mr. Ebert might well be wrong, but that's not the case at all. There is a loss in quality for the sake of hollywood's convenience.
Doesn't this sort of thing (inter-species breeding, that is) happen all the time in suburban neighborhoods? I mean, dogs.....
....most species of dogs are "mixes" of other species. That's one species mating with another. And you can't tell me that they aren't all that different. I mean, that little yappy white furry thing next door bears almost no resemblance to the german sheperd up the street. And yet....
What the Surgeon General was trying to say--and what should have been more well taken than it was--is that mental disorders are far more physical than most people think. As another poster pointed out (in another thread), and as the Surgeon General himself pointed out in an interview, you don't tell a diabetic to just go walk it off, and to pick herself up and get over it. That's ridiculous. Diabetes is a specific kind of chemical imbalance, and so are many "mental" disorders. Instead of dismissing these people as "nuts" maybe we should look into treatment. Depression is the classic example. I heard a report on NPR that pointed out that depression was far more physical than many people think. They cited the example of a "silent stroke" (a stroke that doesn't cause you to colapse in pain, or severe brain damage or death, but may still cause some "light" damage to your brain nonetheless). They have a tendency to cause depression. But it has absolutely nothing to do with a person's situation. It may be the result of a fat-rich diet. This is (sometimes) treatable with medication. The fact is this: the condition of your body may affect your behavior, perhaps in dramatic ways. It most definitely does not mean you're nuts. What it means is that the condition of your body causing this probably needs to be addressed, and when it is your behavior may very well change. This connection is not very well understood, even by doctors. This, essentially, is the motivation behind this report, according to the Surgeon General himself (in an interview I heard).
I heard another interesting report on NPR (more people should listen to NPR--it's a great source of news. No I don't work for an NPR station:) that is somewhat relevant was about stress, and specifically about a book entitled something like Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers. The idea was that stress is a physical response to, say, running for your life (or chasing down your lunch), and in almost every other animal doesn't last more than a few seconds. But in humans, we get it sitting down at the desk, we feel it for extended periods of time. It's extremely physical in nature and has very physical consequences (some of them rather dramatic). This message is very similar, I think, to what the Surgeon General was saying (if on a slightly different, and more specific, topic).
Slashdot Mirror
Let them. Call their bluff. "Okay, go ahead. Quit making music and movies. Well? I'm waiting." Watch it not happen.
More likely the threat they'll hold over everyone's heads is that without appropriate copyright protection and the DMCA to back it up legally, they won't be able to make money, and there will be a huge depression because the entertainment industry collapsed. (well, they probably won't put it in quite such dramatic terms, but that's the gist of it). This is what got DMCA passed, and this is their mantra. It's bullshit, of course, but congressmen are too stupid to realize this (we'd be better off without the goddamn entertainment industry, anyway).
And anyway, we're not talking about the entertainment industry, we're talkin about the computer industry. RIAA and MPAA have little to say about this (though it may seem like they would, at first). This primarily concerns software copying, not music or movies.
This is a good point. Notice the articles only vaguely mentioned "giants like IBM, M$, and Intel" and didn't specifically name any other companies (that I saw, anyway). My guess is that there are few, if any, other companies going along with this crap.
Just as AMD has little to gain from adopting any Intel-developed "copy-protection" schemes, Seagate, W-D, Maxtor, et. al. have little to gain from adopting IBM's copy-protection schemes for hard drives. And lord knows nobody has anything to gain from anything Microsoft does (other than Microsoft and their investors).
There are slimy ways to go about ensuring the adoption of things like this, of course, so maybe a complete "que sera sera" attitude is not exactly approriate, but nevertheless, I don't see trouble just yet.
In once sense, what you're saying is right, since it strikes to the heart of what patents are for: the hard part is the research and development effort required to turn an idea into a working product, and it is this effort that is protected by the patent.
But on the other hand, the problem with software patents is precisely the difficulty in drawing this distinction. It's not at all clear if an implementation is not just a detailed expression of an idea. Basically, if a patent contains a detailed explanation of something (say, my new-fangled B-crap-tree database file structure) through the use of diagrams, UML, or whatever, and no source code, than I've merely expressed the idea in detail and have not given the details of how I implemented it. But if it goes all the way to the level of source code, it's really too particular to be useful as a patent, because anyone can change the structure of their program and implement basically the same thing without stressing their R&D effort too much.
I guess all this does is suggest that answering the question of what constitutes patentable software is an in principle hard question. The same is true of anything, but I think it's a particularly hard balance to strike with software, and hence the difficulty of writing regulations and standards that a government agency will have to abide by.
This, by the way, is almost exactly the conclusion of the United States Supreme Court in the Diamond vs. (who was it, again?) that opened up the floodgate for software patents in the U.S. Before that, the U.S. patent office in the U.S. had been denying all patents involving software at all. They took this as an invitation to accept all software patents that weren't already patented (almost literally).
I don't think this is the correct interpretation, but just a precaution that there is precendent for such interpretation in the U.S. at least (of course, the U.S. has perhaps one of the stupidest patent offices in the world).
Okay, I am not an economist or an MBA (I'm a computer scientist and aspiring cognitive scientist), but I fail to see how development of new business methods qualifies as "research". It is innovation in a sense, to be sure, but on what basis should new businesses be allowed to be granted a 15-year (or whatever--is it that long for business method patents normally?) exclusive right to do business a certain way? Isn't allowing business method patents akin to granting the right to limited (in time) ownership of an idea?
The whole point of patents was that it wasn't the idea per se that was being owned (hence, the reason for publication of the invention), but, rather, the physical realization of it, and the individual (and by logical extension corporation, which is a legal person in the U.S. at least) should thus have the right to grant (or deny) license for others to physically realize the same idea. It's supposed to encourage innovation and invention by enticing others to find better ways to physically realize the same idea, or else to come up with a better idea and, hence, approach to the relevant problem.
It's never been clear to me that business method patents (and software patents) exactly capture this idea. (certainly not as implemented in the U.S. Patent office, but that's another rant for another time....).
This is a good point. Last year, my senior year as a comp sci major, I recall going through the hiring practices and wondering when, exactly, the employers were supposed to start throwing money at me. I mean, I'm not a fool. I was graduating cum laude, from the honors program (that sounds sort of redundant if you know what cum laude means...), with two degrees to boot (applied math and comp sci), having done a co-op, etc. Never happened. I interviewed with maybe a dozen companies over about a 4 month period and got precisely one job offer: from the people I co-oped with (and I already knew about that one before it came).
The media made it seem like you just knock on employers' doors, tell them you're a programmer, and *bam*, money, stock options, prostitutes, ferraris, etc. No industry works like that. Not one. HR departments of big companies are AWLAYS going to go through their motions to weed out duds (legitimate or otherwise) and match buzzwords from your resume and your interview with buzzwords from the job description and "desired qualifications" description, and small companies have always got to worry how you'll fit into their particular, quirky environment, whether or not they can afford to continue to pay you until you finish whatever it was they hired you to work on, etc.
And, of course, if your company has to fire you because the VC cut the funding, take that as a sign that the company was not paying its own bills anyway, and couldn't afford to hire you in the first place. You don't want to work for companies like that in any industry, it's just plain stupid.
In typical counter-culture fashion, programmers adopted the term as a description of a good programmer. But often, knowing how something works means knowing how something can be broken, so the term has slowly morphed to mean someone who looks for weaknesses in computer systems.
And now, when it's been realized that a lot of damange can be done and felonies can be committed by such people if they should choose to be join the Dark Side, it's come to refer to criminals, vandals, and script kiddies. These people have nothing to do with programming, and in no way, shape, or form demonstrate any knowledge of a particular system at all by the crap they pull.
That's so many diametrically opposed transformations of one word in just a few decades it's dizzying. The sad part is that my parents still use the original sense of the word while my grandparents and non-computer-savvy friends use it in the last sense, while computer geeks still use it in the programming sense. All senses of the word are still intact.
The worst part is that context cannot usually differentiate between these different uses of the word (given any technical context, all four of them would work, and yet would refer to totally different kinds of people). This, I think, is where the debate over the meaning of the term arises. And, of course, the news media are in no hurry at all to clear it up (why should they, after all?)
The term is worthless.
Of course, I suspect they might be able to use a few provisions of DMCA to enforce it, but somehow it just seems.. well.. weak. Why bother?
But then, IANAL ...
Anyway, on this list of NSA documents with descriptions I found the following passage:
The program, codenamed ECHELON, has been described as a global surveillance network that intercepts and processes the world' communications and distributes it among the primary partners in the decades-old UKUSA alliance-the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand
And this right after it:
In reality, ECHELON is a more limited program, allowing the UKUSA allies to specify intelligence requirements and automatically receive relevant intercepts obtained by the UKUSA facilities which intercept satellite communications (but not the U.S. facilities that receive data from SIGINT satellites). It is also limited by both technological barriers (the inability to develop word-spotting software so as to allow for the automatic processing of intercepted conversations) and the limitations imposed on collection activities by the UKUSA allies-at least as regards the citizens of those countries. Thus, the NAVSECGRU instruction also specifies that one of the responsibilities of the commander of the Sugar Grove site is to "ensure the privacy of U.S. citizens are properly safeguarded pursuant to the provisions of USSID 18."
(no, I don't know what the references to the "Sugar Grove site" are referring to, and don't ask me about all those silly government acronyms). Somewhere on George Washington's National Security Archive is where they claimed to have found these documents about echelon. I searched for a while but found nothing concrete. But I was pretty lazy about it. There's no reason to doubt that some juicier stuff is there somewhere, since it looks like it's a pretty big archive.
And no, I'm not a student at George Washington University (nor am I anywhere near it or in any way associated with it--I just went hunting around their web page looking for this stuff after I read the article).
I mean, I can see why the French are pissed off. That's certainly understandable. But sue? How? In what court? What judge gets to order a government (any government) to pay damages to another government? What about the sovereign right of nations? Does anyone else see the problem, here?
This is a little like having a corporation arrested: who the hell gets arrested, since a corporation is only a person on paper, and no one individual can legally be held liable for the entire corporation's actions (this is why you can't sue, say, the CEO for something the corporation did; you have to sue the company itself).
How is this supposed to work?
A little numerical experiment to demonstrate: at 1900x1200, that's 2.28 million "dots" per frame. Assuming true color (24 bit), that's 6.84 million bytes (not mega bytes!) per frame. Ebert mentioned that existing projectors display about 24 frames per second, so that's 164 million bytes per second (about 156 or so megabytes). Now, for a two hour movie, that adds up to about 1.18 trillion (yes, with a 't') bytes for one movie. That's just a bit over one terabyte for a movie. Starting to see, now, why in the article as Roger Ebert mentioned TI had to have an array of 20 18GB hard drives to store the movie?
Now, you could cut this by a factor of three if you settle for old-fashioned VGA quality color, and you could cut it by a factor of between 2 and 5 with some moderate lossy compression (that much compression won't see much loss), and there are other clever ways to compress a motion picture, besides that might contribute to that. You could cut the resolution down, as well. But now what you have is hundreds of gigabytes for one 2 hour movie of not very good quality. Given that the theatres are getting the ass-end of this deal anyhow (given how expensive the technology is, that is--and how much it saves hollywood), and that theatres still have a choice, I wonder about which way this will go. If there was a real gain in quality here (like with THX, for instance) then Mr. Ebert might well be wrong, but that's not the case at all. There is a loss in quality for the sake of hollywood's convenience.
I heard another interesting report on NPR (more people should listen to NPR--it's a great source of news. No I don't work for an NPR station :) that is somewhat relevant was about stress, and specifically about a book entitled something like Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers. The idea was that stress is a physical response to, say, running for your life (or chasing down your lunch), and in almost every other animal doesn't last more than a few seconds. But in humans, we get it sitting down at the desk, we feel it for extended periods of time. It's extremely physical in nature and has very physical consequences (some of them rather dramatic). This message is very similar, I think, to what the Surgeon General was saying (if on a slightly different, and more specific, topic).