It may lose its status as the majority language, but will it ever lose its status as the plurality language? That is to say, will some other language overtake it in popularity? Will some other language become the de facto language for addressing a global audience? It seems unlikely. The only possible trend away from English in general that I can see is simply an increase in sites that are multi-lingual.
My Sony Mavica MVC-FD91 is more than a year old now and wasn't exactly a new new thing when I got it, but it's been nothing but a joy to own. The floppy disk medium is very convenient, and the images are stored as JPEGs with an HTML index file. There's barely a computer known to man that has a floppy disk and can't make immediate use of these.
The FD91 was top of the range at the time it was released, and only intended for moderately serious use with a price tag to match. It has an excellent 14x optical zoom (no nasty expanding pixel tricks) and takes photos at either 640x480 or 1024x768 res with two different JPEG compression settings. There's also an uncompressed BMP mode that I've never used. At the tight end of the zoom you can get a whole lot of detail on a fairly distant object, so it's good for taking candid shots that people aren't aware of. This is helped by the camera's "steady shot" feature, that I rarely if ever turn off.
Purists will also be pleased to note that all its features are manually overridable, so you can focus manually if you like. Exposure is automatic, but you can do shutter or iris priority, and expose to the entire scene or turn on the spot meter for high contrast situations. There are several white balance modes as well.
On top of this, it will also do audio/visual MPEG recordings at 320x200 for 15 sec, or 160x100 for a minute. Probably more useful is the "audio annotation" feature where you take an ordinary still with several seconds worth of audio attached as a separate MPEG file. The audio can be a bit artifacty, and it's a "convenience" feature: you'd never mistake it for a serious audio recorder.
All in all the camera is easy to praise. It's easy to use and produces very nice results in most environments. My only gripes about the camera would be that the widest zoom angle is a bit narrow, and I'd like better low-light performance. Not that its low light performance is bad, but I know that CCDs can be really impressive in low light when they want to be, and getting a flash photo to work well can be a bit of a challenge.
I'd love to post a "photo gallery" link for you all, but my poor old 'net link would not stand the Slashdotting.
Disclosure: I used to be a Sony employee, and I got mine on the cheap as an ex-demo unit. Sony retrenched me, so it's not like I feel I have to say nice things about them, though.
I like your attitude, but the reasons why software is licensed are fairly obvious. What's less obvious is some of the nastier details, like why companies should have the right to say "no reverse engineering" and "no talking about our product in public". The "no copying" part is a normal part of copyright, and the usual restrictions on the number of machines you can run the software on is just an extension of that base concept to cope with the peculiarities of software compared to other copyrighted works.
That's not to say that I'm defending software licensing in general. I have no interest in copyrighting any of my work, and I see all that legal baggage as being a big minus for any product from a consumer's perspective.
You might be right, but I see a qualitative distinction between Public Domain and everything else. In the case of Public Domain, you are not placing the work under a license, but rather waiving your right to impose licensing terms. In the case of the GPL et al, you retain the copyright, and are therefore able to change the terms of the license. I would submit that in the case of Public Domain you have waived rights, and there is no possibility of getting them back retroactively. What the courts think may be entirely different, of course.
On his website, one of the two guys involved says the following.
If I ever did something like this again (not to a Microsystems or Mattel product, of course, because I've agreed to leave those alone), I would probably put a note in all the files explicitly making them public domain, to prevent the kind of situation that happened here.
If you've explicitly waived your copyrights and placed the work in the Public Domain, then there's no question of you assigning your rights to anyone, so the reassignment of rights that took place here is not an issue.
Whilst the GPL gives an excellent defensive edge in terms of keeping proprietarists off our grass and doing an embrace and extend on our software, waiving copyright entirely seems to be the more powerful concept in terms of keeping the software free, especially if this "free licenses are revocable" quip has any truth to it. I mean think about it: any piece of software which is under the GPL or a BSD style license can potentially be changed retroactively to a non-free license. Maybe the current copyright owner can be trusted to keep it free, but what about future owners? If the copyright is owned by a company, then it can be purchased along with the company in a buy-out. The havoc that could be wreaked with this concept is unthinkable, and I'd like to believe that it's impossible, but when it comes to The Law, who the heck knows? Unthinkably daft stuff seems to be the rule rather than the exception in IPR laws at the moment.
Public Domain may not make any guarantees about derived works being free, but if making something Public Domain won't keep the original work free, then nothing will. Here's to the Public Domiain.
And yes, of course, this post is Public Domain (P) 2000.
The statement "this statement is true" is self referential but non-paradoxical, as a trivial example (although it still has some odd properties as the result of its self-reference). Yes, I'm no Gödel, you don't need to remind me. I suspect you're not either. So is general AI one of those pesky meta problems, or is it one of the benign variety? Like I said, I can't prove it, but I lean towards suspecting that it is an insoluble problem until such time as it is proved otherwise. Analogy with Gödel is no proof, but in the absence of sufficient quantities of genius and a lifetime of study, it's the best I can offer.
You've assumed evolution to be true and then said that AI follows. Your logic is impeccable, but I disagree with your premises. I work from a design premise, and conclude that complete general AI is not possible. We would have to be better than ourselves in order to do it, which is self-contradictory.
If humans couldn't create things more "intelligent" than themselves, how can you explain the countless chess programs capable of beating their own creators?
Never mind chess. When I did "Knowledge Systems" at university, we had to write a program to play a variation on tic-tac-toe requiring five in a row on an eight by eight grid. I wrote a program to do this, and I had to play very carefully to force a draw. My program wasn't perfect, and I managed to beat it once by exploiting a flaw in its logic about which I knew. Often I would be sloppy in my game, and it would beat me.
So on average my own computer program beats me at this connect-five game. Does that make it a better player than me? Well, yes; the win ratio is the usual metric for measuring a player's quality. Does that make it more intelligent than me? Of course not. I devised the rules by which it is playing, and I could improve on them if I tried.
The important thing is that I not only know the rules, I implemented them in the AI. If I wanted to, I could follow the rules myself and be exactly as good a player as it. I'd be a lot slower, because I'm not optimised for that kind of approach -- I'd have to emulate a computer, and I do that badly.
The main problem with AI is that it is a "meta" problem. "Meta" problems are full of gotchas. Gödel's incompleteness theorem is an example of the kind of problem I'm talking about here. Mathematicians thought they could prove a system of mathematics using the system itself (a "meta" problem if there ever was one), but Gödel came up with this amazing (and hard to appreciate) proof that this kind of bootstrap-lifting just isn't possible: you can have a system that's complete, or consistent, but not both. Well, dang, because both was what we wanted.
Bearing the spirit of Gödel's theorem in mind, shift back over to AI for a moment. Let's suppose we want to construct a precise model of our own intelligence so that we can improve on it. (If we're going to make improvements, we need the baseline model to work on.) This is a meta-problem. This is you, as an intellectual being, trying to construct a compete and consistent model of your own intellect. This model will necessarily contain your own ability to analyze and determine the full extent of your own intellect and construct a model thereof. You can see that your model has to contain itself, and although I lack the mathematical prowess to turn this into a snazzy Gödelesque theorem, I think you can see that this looks like one of those "meta" problems that give us so many headaches.
I don't believe we can possibly even have a complete understanding of our own intellect, let alone improve on it. Thus the inevitable "Bert Bert" line of degradation from creator to creation. Note that the "meta" problem only remains a problem when we attempt to model our complete intellect: we should be able to model particular subsets of it (which are known to contain inaccuracies, but are useful none the less) without any theoretical difficulty, and I see plenty of hope for improvement in areas like speech regognition, pattern recognition and such like. We won't create "evolutionary replacements" this way, though, just more tools like stone axes and chess computers which do particular tasks better than we do. Also, I'm not saying that some creature better than humans cannot exist, but rather that if such a thing can exist, then we won't be the ones who make it.
In many peoples' minds this idea was discredited decades ago.
Yes, and that can be a bit of a problem, because it means that they won't listen to your arguments or even read the link that one provides as a supporting argument. From a simple epistemological perspective, you can be presented with as much evidence for design as you like and still deny that it is actually design, but merely something that has the appearance of design. This is Dawkins to a tee. But hell, even Dawkins tells us that stuff looks designed, and wasn't that what I said originally?
The point of my argument is that I don't believe we will be overtaken by machines because I believe in actual design rather than inevitable onward upward evolution which merely seems like design. In all cases of actual design, there is a lossy effect. You cannot design and build something which has more intelligence than you, because you had to use your intelligence in order to design and build it. Where is the extra intelligence going to come from in order to get a smarter end product?
Clearly Bert Bert forgot to evolve by natural selection.
Natural selection won't work. Let's assume that Bert Bert makes lots of replicas of himself and then picks the best one to take over the job. This will minimise the rate at which the system degrades. In order for actual improvement to take place, there has to be an improvement over the original. In the real world, this improvement is supposed to happen by chance, which seems a bit far-fetched, given that even relatively trivial things can't happen by chance. Without the supposed benefit of random changes, we are back to Bert Bert making a better design under his own steam, and if he can do that (I say that he can't, but if he could) then he doesn't need natural selection.
A stone axe cuts better than my hand does.
And so on. Yes, pretty much any example of a tool, right down to Ugg the Caveman walloping someone with a club-shaped lump of wood, disproves my theory if your assertion is relevant. Fortunately, it itsn't.
Even the earliest computers could perform mathematics faster and more reliably than a room full of accountants. That's why they were useful at all. But someone has to tell them what math to perform. And even where they make decisions about what math to perform, someone had to tell it how to make those decisions. And if we get programs to figure out how to make decisions on their own, then someone will have to have told them how to do that. See a pattern forming?
The only threat here is if a lower grade of intellect can be overcompensated by increased speed -- assuming that computers even would be able to out-do us in think-speed were they performing the same abstract mental tasks. It's not like we know enough about our own thought processes to tell how much CPU power they'd need. People tend to make the simplistic assumption that because computers can add numbers billions of times faster than they could, that the speed increase will scale up with the problem of general intelligence. Or maybe people just think that brains are the product of an undirected random process, and we can do better with electronics -- ironic, given that it's that very same randomly-evolved brain which thinks it can do better.
Like I say, if we face a threat from technology, it will probably be because we invent something lethal to ourselves or wreck the environment or stuff the gene pool or blow ourselves up. It will not be from producing the next step in evolution. That stuff is good for science fiction writing based on a theme of hubris, but it is not realistic.
Perhaps I suffer lack of imagination, given the quantity of SF writing (good and bad) which mines the subject of computers surpassing humans in their intellectual prowess, but I just can't convince myself that it's a credible scenario. Then again, there's a terribly strong parallel between the concept of an "artificial intelligence" outstripping the intelligence of its creator and the theory of evolution in general. Indeed, if one considers that life evolved -- whether by chance or by some unknown guiding cosmic force -- then it is only natural to be looking over one's shoulder for the new kid on the block to arrive.
But I don't subscribe to this view. Go ahead and call me names if you like, but at its most fundamental level, life looks designed. And this is a view that fits in well with normal experience: when you create something, then it is necessarily a subset of your total ability. If I were able to create a computer which was smarter than I, then presumably it would also be able to create a machine that was smarter than it, and so on. Where is all this additional information coming from? Out of thin air, apparently. I can't help but feel that this notion belongs in the same category as perpetual motion or pulling oneself up by the bootstraps.
Did you ever see the game The Neverhood? There's a huge wall of text in that game which is a sort of parody of the biblical style of narrative. Some of it is very funny, and some of it is just bizarre. If I recall correctly, the story of Bert Bert is relevant to this discussion. You see, Bert Bert was created by Quater in his own image, which means that Bert Bert also thought he was effectively Quater, and so Bert Bert created Bert Bert in his own image, and so on. The regress was not infinite, however. Like an accumulation of genetic errors, or noise in analog duplication, each successive Bert Bert was less of an image of Quater. After a few generations, the name was no longer Bert Bert but itself started to mutate and drift in an interesting variety of ways. Eventually, there was an end to the regress, as the final Bert Bert (whatever his name was) found himself unable to create a living replica of himself.
In short, if we are really clever, we may be able to create something that approximates ourselves fairly closely. I think that the act of creating something essentially proves the creator to be greater than the creation. If we are going to wipe ourselves out with technology, it won't be because it out-evolved us.
Boot Viruses are virtually extinct in their pure form. They relied on people booting of floppy disks. Several different floppy disks. The only boot viruses left are file viruses that get their dirty hooks into the boot sector as a means of making sure they are installed. We can ignore this category -- it's dead.
File Viruses are still out there, of course, but not nearly as much as they used to be. A "pure" file virus is one that inserts itself into some other executable (or executables in general). These are less of a problem than they used to be because software is generally obtained off a CD-ROM or remote download site, and viruses can't touch these files (unless the software company or FTP hoster does something really dumb). Not much actual copying of executables off one machine onto another is done anymore, which is how these things spread. Anyone old enough to remember when we used to copy executables as a matter of course? Come on, 'fess up! Gee -- I can remember those quaint old programs which you didn't "install" as such because they consisted of one executable.
Macro Viruses are still big, though. And Microsoft's feature-driven focus will assure that this problem only gets worse. The big problem is that their software is so ubiquitous, making them a big easy target. And they keep doing really dumb stuff. Everything keeps getting more and more "active". They love that word, don't they? "Active" means "I'm a big gaping security hole just waiting to be exploited!" Linux won't have this problem until either Microsoft starts porting their stuff, or we get virus-compatible equivalents, or somehow the marketroids take over Linux software development and we throw all common sense out the window. I mean seriously, if someone actually wrote a mail reader for Linux that was so helpful that it says, "hey -- here's some new mail for you! Let me immediately display it in this window for you! And run this javascript thing in it for you!" -- would anyone use it? Any takers? Maybe if you run it under jail, right?
Trojans on the other hand, have come into their own. I still see the damn Happy '99 trojan wandering around now and then. The trojan that emails itself to everyone in your address book is one of the more popular forms. The great thing about trojans is that they rely on the human to be the weak link, not some software hole that would get closed up the moment it was discovered (or at least would if the software in question was open source). Human stupidity is here to stay! It's going to decrease, but only because people are now growing up with email and learn the tricks at a young age. It is, however, entirely feasible to write a trojan email attachment for Linux. It's not likely to be worth anyone's while, though, because of the small target market and high likelyhood that the user has at least half a clue with regards to this sort of thing. In any case, the user isn't likely to be running an email reader which makes activating the attachment a "double click" operation, and which address book are you going to read?
In summary, I don't see a big target market for viruses here. I think that worms are more likely to be the issue. That, and security holes that get exploited manually. These all come under the banner of cracking, rather than viruses (although worms are a sort of overlap point). Another possibility, as others have suggested, is back-door code being placed in a kernel module or something which explicitly creates an exploitable weakness. We'll see if the "bug-finding is parallelable" principle of Linux development also maps to the finding of deliberate security holes. I think accidental ones are likely to be the real problem, however.
The author of the comment to which I am responding seems to know more about the state of law than I do (I am not even an American, let alone a lawyer), but here are the salient points as I understand them.
The main point of this law is that it finally makes the legality of a "software license" -- click-through or otherwise -- a definite thing. Software companies have been doing this "license" thing for a long time, but to my knowledge there has never been any legal precedent established as to whether they are in fact enforcable. Why is their enforcability in question?
Let's look a little at what a software license is. Software has been granted protection under the auspices of copyright law, which means there are certain things you may and may not do by merit of the fact that the software is a copyrighted work. Software licenses tend to re-state these terms, but you would have been subject to them anyway (even without the license terms) because that's what copyright law dictates. Software licenses also tend to extend these terms by such constraints as prohibitions on reverse engineering and disclaimers of warranty. Compare this to the GNU GPL which conditionally waives rights available to the copyright holder. Copyright normally prevents you from making duplicate or derived works; the GPL conditionally permits these actions.
Therein lies the crucial difference. I do not need your agreement in order to grant you privileges, but I do need your agreement for you to waive your rights. You have certain rights and prohibitions under copyright: the GPL relaxes or abolishes some of the prohibitions, and the BSD license relaxes even more, but a typical software license tries to take your rights away.
Now we move to step two: non-negotiability. You can, if you wish to do so, enter into an agreement with another party under which you waive certain rights or adopt certain responsibilities. That is what contract law is all about. Contracts are negotiated. This "software license" thing that you have to click through or rip open is not a contract. It is rarely disclosed up front, you have no opportunity to negotiate it, and you do not sign it. These fatal flaws in the scheme are weasel-worded around by such phrases as "by opening this package, you agree". Balderdash! Opening the package is the clear right of anyone who has purchased a product! You should not have to give up additional rights in order to use what you have rightfully purchased! Nor should you have to agree to a click-through license. There is a strong legal argument, I believe, in the notion that you have not agreed to a license just by clicking on "I Agree" -- it was simply a necessary action in order to use the product. It smacks of coercion, and a coerced contract is no contract at all.
Finally, what are we talking about here anyway? A license, or a contract? It looks like a contract, because you are expected to agree to it, but it calls itself a license. What's the difference? In my ignorant non-lawyer way of understanding things, a contract is a set of terms to which two parties mutually agree, whereas a license is a conditional grant of rights by an authoritative party. You do not have a right to drive: you must first obtain a license to do so. Nor do you have the right to bear arms if you live in a country which requires all firearms to be licensed: it is, rather, a privilege that the government grants you. So what's with this "software license" crap? Who gave the software companies the right to dictate to me what I can and can't do with software beyond the scope of copyright? The GPL and BSD licenses are true licenses because they grant privileges to the end-user; privileges which the software author is in a legal position to grant under copyright law. Any "thou shalt not reverse engineer", or "thou shalt not complain", or "thou shalt not say bad things about us" are unmitigated nonsense with no legal weight in a license unless the law already grants the copyright holder the option to assert these rights. Alas, we see a move towards granting many of these exact rights with the "Digital Millennium Copyright Act".
This is what the UCITA is about. It is a broad approach to making whatever language the software companies decide to put into their license terms legally enforcable. It establishes once and for all that a "software license" is a one-sided contract that you do "sign" by opening the packet or clicking on "I Agree", and thus opens up a whole new range of antisocial and unethical behaviour to the realms of legality.
That, at least, is my impression as an uninformed non-laywer who would almost certainly not understand the legislation even if I read it (and I haven't). Caveat lector.
The copyright holder of this post, The Famous Brett Watson, hereby places it in the Public Domain (P) 2000.
UCITA does not, in so many words, legalize Trojan Horses (so-called "self-help measures") without buyer consent. Nobody in his right mind is going to buy a TrojanWare shrinkwrap app.
Please clarify. Back doors are not a threat because (a) nobody in their right mind will buy a product that contained one or (b) they would be illegal under this legislation. The former is insufficient reason, since products have already been sold that have back doors, usually without the knowledge of the buyer.
Can Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, or another software giant force an onerous contract down your throat? Nope--markets do, in fact, work. In 1989 Lotus had a cast-iron lock on the spreadsheet market...
This is a non sequitur. The downfall of Lotus 123 and Wordperfect had 100% of nothing to do with their contract terms and everything to do with Microsoft's belligerent marketing of MS Office. Microsoft's failure with MS Bob proves that they can't force a bad product down our throats without the right leverage. (It may have been a different story if they had decided to bundle it with Windows, but they seem to reserve that tactic for killing competitor's products.)
What if, pray tell, Microsoft decide to assert their new-found rights under this bill and modify all future releases of Windows (and their respective licenses) such that "you agree to allow them to connect to your computer via the Internet in order to verify that you have a legally licensed copy of the software"? Will the free market suddenly move away from Windows in droves? Will all new computers suddenly be purchased with an alternative operating system? The god-like powers of the "free market" only work when the market is actually free, and a certain Judge Jackson finds that Microsoft has monopoly power in this area at the moment, which means the market is not in fact free.
I'd suggest that censorware is a loser for this situation. It does not guarantee that the clientelle will not be able to access pr0n, although it will make it hard enough to discourage those who actually want it. You lose twice there because there is still the possibility that some malicious but technically competent person will get some pr0n on screen and leave it there, and on the other hand you may well have reduced the marketability of the service. Even if you don't want pr0n at all, the censorware will miss some (underblock) and block some inoffensive stuff (overblock).
So attack the problem directly. I suggest the following.
Locate terminals such that people can browse with some privacy. Their screen should not be viewable by anyone else from a distance. Some sort of simple partitioning or "booth" should suffice. This is a selling point, since in general people don't like others reading over their shoulder.
Design the system such that it resets itself when a customer leaves. There should be some sort of "key" that the customer inserts in the terminal to activate it. Given that there has to be some sort of billing system anyhow, it might as well be tied in. If you are only charged for as long as your key is in the terminal, and the terminal resets itself when you remove the key, there is a strong incentive to remove your key when you are done. A prepaid, refundable key would provide the desired incentives, I believe.
The aforementioned criteria would allow anyone to use the terminals and view what they wanted, but the only way that someone could leave something "offensive" on screen would be to abandon a key that still contained some (refundable) credit. Why walk away from money? Better still if it did happen and a smart kid stumbled across it, she would grab the card and get it refunded -- completely neglecting to mention the pr0n factor: "I just found it."
I was keen on the idea of Optus@Home cable (I'm on a BigPond permanent modem at the moment), but the whole "dynamic IP/no servers" thing kills it totally and utterly stone dead -- unless anyone has some good suggestions as to how to work around it.
If I go to dynamic IP, then what about my mail domain? I don't want to have to adopt the domain of my ISP for an email address! I also don't want to rely on my ISP for services like a POP account and so on. I've been running my own servers for a couple of years now, and I like it that way thank you very much. What about my poor, pathetic web pages? Pathetic though they be, I want to run them off my Apache instance on my box in my domain under my administrative control.
Yet by the simple process of going from a static to dynamic IP, they would simultaneously wrest me of all this administrative control. My web pages will be served from their domain and their box and their http server, and so on, and so on. And what need is there for dynamic IP on a cable network anyhow? Maybe they can claim some small convenience in terms of not having to manually allocate IP addresses, but surely it adds complexity to their billing systems: dynamic IPs are harder to keep a track of than static ones, of course.
What really annoys me is that the technical decision to go with dynamic IP is probably there to prevent people using the system in certain ways, such as serving up gigabytes of pr0n or similar. But what about the little git like me? My needs and usage patterns are modest -- I probably consume less bandwidth than any number of NetMeeting users or enthusiastic websurfers, yet I'm going to be obliged to purchase pricier so-called "business" service just for the privilege of getting a permanent IP address -- and of course the "business" service won't be available until much later.
Alright -- my spleen is adequately vented now. Carry on, please.
I'm not in a position to give an authoritative answer, since I've never fiddled with the electronics of such a device or seen a specification, but since nobody else seems to have replied yet, here's my two cents worth.
Duck Hunt is actually one of the simpler variations on the theme. The arcade games (Virtua Cop, The Lost World, etc) have a more impressive system. In Duck Hunt, when you pull the trigger, the targets (ducks) are replaced with solid white squares and a black background. (This is assuming you mean the original Duck Hunt and not some more recent release of which I'm unaware.) The gun then acts as a light detector, and the game measures the light input on the gun at that instant and judges whether you hit or not. If the game is particularly clever, it will have a full frame of black before and/or after the frame with the white squares to measure the difference between the two. This reduces the chance of false triggering.
The smarter guns are probably rather more sensitive and well focused. It's possible to detect which part of the screen the gun is pointing at by causing the gun to trigger a latch on a raster beam counter when it reaches a certain light threshold. At the end of frame, read the value out of the raster beam counter register, and that provides your gun coordinates. If the gun is not pointing at the screen, then the register will not have latched, and the value will be some unreasonably high value. Alternatively, if the gun is pointing at some bright object other than the screen, then the latch will trigger immediately, and you will get a zero result in your register.
This second "precise" mode means that you must output a minimum level of light at all points on your screen that you wish to be able to target. If the light output at any point on the screen falls below your trigger threshold, then the register will not be latched when the gun is pointing at that part of the screen, and it will look as though the gun is not pointing at the screen at all.
I suppose I should take a little side-track into television theory here, just in case. Your screen is painted by an electron beam in a left to right and top to bottom manner, like the way English text is written. When the electron beam hits the phosphorous coating inside the glass, the phosphorous glows momentarily, emitting a characteristic spectrum of light (primarily red, green, or blue in the case of a colour monitor). This glow is actually quite brief, and if you saw the light output level of any particular point on the screen expressed as a graph, you'd wonder why the screen doesn't look like it's flashing. A trick of the eye and mind, known as Persistence of Vision, causes the image to look solid. In fact it is not solid, but flashing rapidly and unevenly, and this is what allows a light-sensor to be used to detect your aim. Other display technologies, such as LCD displays, may not be amenable to this kind of technique, depending on whether they use a measurable form of display refreshing.
As a side note, the late lamented Amiga actually had the required hardware to support this behaviour for the purposes of using a light pen, so I'm not making this up entirely. The Amiga also had the necessary raster beam counter register and latching facility, of course, although it only resolved to the equivalent of "lo-res" pixels. I never saw an actual device that utilised this hardware, unfortunately.
Sorry nerd-boys but, as I recall, Dilbert exposed a clandestine operation by NASA in which they had transported all the Women Who Love Engineers to the moon. Thus, unless you can convert your cubicle into a rocket and go there yourself, you're pretty much out of luck.
I will ignore the ad hominem element of your post and respond to the remainder.
No one is forced to GPL their software, and if you wish to build your work upon the work of others, you must abide by their licensing scheme. If you don't like it, do it yourself. It's rather simple.
Nor is anyone forced to buy proprietary software, but if you wish to use it, you must abide by the licensing scheme. Licenses are like that. My point is that a substantial amount of free software is not GPL'd, and for a component repository to be of general use to the free software community it should not be GPL'd, as this will make it legally incompatible with all the people who wish to contribute under any license other than the GPL. Now if you particularly want to be exclusivist, then by all means use the GPL, but exclusivism isn't going to help a project in my opinion.
The other obvious hole in the logic presented here is the notion that you can't use GPL'ed code in a public domain software package.... So, while it is true that you can't use GPL'ed code in public domain software and still have it be public domain...
Thanks for making my point for me. If I am actively maintaining a public domain program and a GPL'd library exists that would be useful to me, then I effectively have two choices: either abandon my public domain status and incorporate the library, or reimplement whatever features in the library I wanted. Of course, I could fork the code, but do I really want to maintain two versions of the code? No. If I'm going to have to implement a fully public domain version of the code, then why would I bother with the GPL'd code?
Maybe someone else will fork the code and GPL it, but that's no business of mine, and in any case, that's the benefit of public domain over GPL isn't it -- you can fork it under a different license.
Complaining that you can't turn GPL'ed software against its intended goal is paramount to complaining you can't enslave people anymore.
Oh, please! I'm not complaining that I can't turn the GPL against its intended goal. What I'm saying is that when it comes to a choice of licenses in a shared component repository, I counsel against the use of the GPL. If you are dead keen on GPLing your stuff, then go ahead and knock yourself out with it. In my opinion, you are making it less free and less usable if you do so. You and Richard M. Stallman can disagree all you like on that point. For everyone else, it's a no brainer: if you're using anything other than the GPL for your code, and you have a choice of incorporating third party GPL code or free-but-not-copyleft code of roughly equal quality and functionality, you'll choose the non-GPL code to save being sucked into the GPL event horizon.
Personally, I'm all for cooperatively written software, and a component repository would be great. CPAN is a good example. You'll note that nearly all of CPAN is dual-licensed GPL/Artistic precisely so that you don't have to become part of the GNU collective just to use it. And given the propensity of GPL advocates to accuse others of guilt by association with "slavery", "warez doodz", and other "abuses" of software, I'd rather keep my software genuinely free and well clear of the General Public Virus.
Yes it's my right not to be infected by your GPL'd code, and I intend to exercise it! The fact that I'm not the only one with this belief is one of the reasons why a purely GPL'd component library would not be popular. I can use Linux in good conscience because the GPL doesn't affect my ability to write non-copyleft free software on it. With a component library, the only way to use it is to infect your code with it!
I can see the ideology becoming a problem here with regard to the licensing of such components. There are other problems too, but let's just consider the GPL issue.
The General Public Virus is all very well for something like Linux, where the only thing you are likely to derive from the existing codebase is -- another Linux. Components are meant to be generic and widely-usable by their very nature. Will putting them under GPL mean that they infect the code that utilises them? That is the GPL's intent. This will make such components unusable not only in proprietary software, but also in BSD-licensed software (and public domain software for that matter). Such a severe limitation is counterproductive, in my estimation, and will probably limit the potential success (measured in terms of active users and contributors) such a project might otherwise enjoy.
I would therefore suggest that the LGPL be used in preference to the GPL, if one insists on a GNU-derived license.
Zuse (the German pronunciation is more like "Tsoo-zuh" than "Zeus") could also be credited with the invention (but not implementation) of the first high level programming language. Plankalkül is a language that he wrote about in 1945, although the paper wasn't published until 1972. In this paper he defined the language and wrote algorithms in it for a wide variety of problems.
Good thing for the rest of us that the Germans had Very Dumb Nazis to counterbalance their Very Smart Scientists.
Reference: Concepts of Programming Languages, Fourth Edition, Robert W. Sebesta.
For many reasons, Microsoft's excuse looks really lame, so let's assume it's a smokescreen.
This being so, the so-called NSAKEY would indeed be a key owned by the NSA.
We must then ask why would Microsoft allow the NSA a key and also deny the NSA's involvement?
It would seem fair to assume that Microsoft would not assist the NSA without compelling reason.
This raises the question as to what that compelling reason might be. Some sort of reward?
If we assume that Microsoft's cooperation is motivated by self-interest, what kind of benefit can the NSA offer Microsoft?
It is known that intercepted data is sometimes used for purposes of industrial espionage rather than just military intelligence.
Microsoft could benefit from spying on the R&D projects of overseas companies, so this is a plausible means of the NSA gaining their favour.
This raises the question as to why the NSA would care about Microsoft in the first place.
Microsoft's success will lead to an even greater penetration of their products -- products which we assume have at least one NSA-requested feature. It is in the NSA's interests for this software to be widely used.
Based on this line of reasoning, we could paint the following picture of the hypothesised cooperation between Microsoft and the NSA.
The NSA benefits by having a widespread piece of software with certain "features" (and a general lack of security anyhow), such that it simplifies their job of further information gathering.
Microsoft benefits by receiving industrial espionage data from the NSA with regards to (presumably foreign) companies.
Don't you hope I'm wrong? It's just too sleazy for words.
An announcement just dripping with potential implications, to be sure. I read between the lines a little and note the following.
For its part, Microsoft says it's not troubled by the move. "We do not feel threatened," said Andrew Dixon, group product manager for Microsoft Office. "This move by Sun really has no bearing on our product development and marketing efforts."
Microsoft feel that their current predatory -- sorry -- highly competitive pricing/licensing practices with respect to their sales of Office (particularly OEM sales) are sufficient to keep the screws on their customers. They also feel that they have sufficient leverage to play the "change the file formats so that the competitor's software becomes flaky" game.
While Sun will allow anyone to redistribute the software, those who sell it will have to pay a fee back to Sun, Boerries said. That has ramifications to companies such as Red Hat which sells Linux bundled with accompanying software.
"If you're distributing free to the community, you don't have to pay. If you're charging, we get a distribution charge," Boerries said. "In my opinion, it's the fairest model in the world."
Oh, rapture! Now we suffer special-casism. What a millstone. You won't see Sun Star Office appear anywhere on a Debian CD image with this particular restriction. It might not be such a bad idea for Red Hat, though, in a cynical kind of way. Consider: Red Hat puts Sun Star Office on their CD set; Red Hat is then obliged to pay a fee to Sun for every set sold, but presumably the fee is small, and they can add it into their shelf price. But lo! All those other cheapbytesey copiers of Red Hat discs run into a problem. Now if they sell copies of the disc, they have to pay tribute to Sun also! Red Hat can make reselling copies of their discs far less attractive, thus (presumably) increasing the percentage of buyers who go for the genuine article rather than a cheap (but identical) copy.
As for this "Community" license thing, well, I suppose it's better than no source at all. I don't expect it will attract any real open source developers, and I would suggest they continue to focus their efforts on the various real open source office suites. But hey -- from an ordinary end-user's perspective, Sun Star Office for zero dollars sounds better than MS Office at any non-negative price.
The thing about hacking up a fake client is that it can report "key not found in block X" really rapidly by not actually doing the search. This is an excellent heuristic which is correct in very close to 100% of all cases, with the minor drawback that it completely misses the point. If someone measures the size of a "not found" report message, we can use that to perform a meaningful calculation on their computer system: not the number of keys per second, but the throughput of the proxy server as measured from their client. Still, the hacked client thing is a bit of a problem. How do you tell whether the client at the other end of a net connection is legit? Too hard for me, Jimmy.
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It may lose its status as the majority language, but will it ever lose its status as the plurality language? That is to say, will some other language overtake it in popularity? Will some other language become the de facto language for addressing a global audience? It seems unlikely. The only possible trend away from English in general that I can see is simply an increase in sites that are multi-lingual.
The FD91 was top of the range at the time it was released, and only intended for moderately serious use with a price tag to match. It has an excellent 14x optical zoom (no nasty expanding pixel tricks) and takes photos at either 640x480 or 1024x768 res with two different JPEG compression settings. There's also an uncompressed BMP mode that I've never used. At the tight end of the zoom you can get a whole lot of detail on a fairly distant object, so it's good for taking candid shots that people aren't aware of. This is helped by the camera's "steady shot" feature, that I rarely if ever turn off.
Purists will also be pleased to note that all its features are manually overridable, so you can focus manually if you like. Exposure is automatic, but you can do shutter or iris priority, and expose to the entire scene or turn on the spot meter for high contrast situations. There are several white balance modes as well.
On top of this, it will also do audio/visual MPEG recordings at 320x200 for 15 sec, or 160x100 for a minute. Probably more useful is the "audio annotation" feature where you take an ordinary still with several seconds worth of audio attached as a separate MPEG file. The audio can be a bit artifacty, and it's a "convenience" feature: you'd never mistake it for a serious audio recorder.
All in all the camera is easy to praise. It's easy to use and produces very nice results in most environments. My only gripes about the camera would be that the widest zoom angle is a bit narrow, and I'd like better low-light performance. Not that its low light performance is bad, but I know that CCDs can be really impressive in low light when they want to be, and getting a flash photo to work well can be a bit of a challenge.
I'd love to post a "photo gallery" link for you all, but my poor old 'net link would not stand the Slashdotting.
Disclosure: I used to be a Sony employee, and I got mine on the cheap as an ex-demo unit. Sony retrenched me, so it's not like I feel I have to say nice things about them, though.
That's not to say that I'm defending software licensing in general. I have no interest in copyrighting any of my work, and I see all that legal baggage as being a big minus for any product from a consumer's perspective.
You might be right, but I see a qualitative distinction between Public Domain and everything else. In the case of Public Domain, you are not placing the work under a license, but rather waiving your right to impose licensing terms. In the case of the GPL et al, you retain the copyright, and are therefore able to change the terms of the license. I would submit that in the case of Public Domain you have waived rights, and there is no possibility of getting them back retroactively. What the courts think may be entirely different, of course.
If you've explicitly waived your copyrights and placed the work in the Public Domain, then there's no question of you assigning your rights to anyone, so the reassignment of rights that took place here is not an issue.
Whilst the GPL gives an excellent defensive edge in terms of keeping proprietarists off our grass and doing an embrace and extend on our software, waiving copyright entirely seems to be the more powerful concept in terms of keeping the software free, especially if this "free licenses are revocable" quip has any truth to it. I mean think about it: any piece of software which is under the GPL or a BSD style license can potentially be changed retroactively to a non-free license. Maybe the current copyright owner can be trusted to keep it free, but what about future owners? If the copyright is owned by a company, then it can be purchased along with the company in a buy-out. The havoc that could be wreaked with this concept is unthinkable, and I'd like to believe that it's impossible, but when it comes to The Law, who the heck knows? Unthinkably daft stuff seems to be the rule rather than the exception in IPR laws at the moment.
Public Domain may not make any guarantees about derived works being free, but if making something Public Domain won't keep the original work free, then nothing will. Here's to the Public Domiain.
And yes, of course, this post is Public Domain (P) 2000.
The statement "this statement is true" is self referential but non-paradoxical, as a trivial example (although it still has some odd properties as the result of its self-reference). Yes, I'm no Gödel, you don't need to remind me. I suspect you're not either. So is general AI one of those pesky meta problems, or is it one of the benign variety? Like I said, I can't prove it, but I lean towards suspecting that it is an insoluble problem until such time as it is proved otherwise. Analogy with Gödel is no proof, but in the absence of sufficient quantities of genius and a lifetime of study, it's the best I can offer.
You've assumed evolution to be true and then said that AI follows. Your logic is impeccable, but I disagree with your premises. I work from a design premise, and conclude that complete general AI is not possible. We would have to be better than ourselves in order to do it, which is self-contradictory.
Never mind chess. When I did "Knowledge Systems" at university, we had to write a program to play a variation on tic-tac-toe requiring five in a row on an eight by eight grid. I wrote a program to do this, and I had to play very carefully to force a draw. My program wasn't perfect, and I managed to beat it once by exploiting a flaw in its logic about which I knew. Often I would be sloppy in my game, and it would beat me.
So on average my own computer program beats me at this connect-five game. Does that make it a better player than me? Well, yes; the win ratio is the usual metric for measuring a player's quality. Does that make it more intelligent than me? Of course not. I devised the rules by which it is playing, and I could improve on them if I tried.
The important thing is that I not only know the rules, I implemented them in the AI. If I wanted to, I could follow the rules myself and be exactly as good a player as it. I'd be a lot slower, because I'm not optimised for that kind of approach -- I'd have to emulate a computer, and I do that badly.
The main problem with AI is that it is a "meta" problem. "Meta" problems are full of gotchas. Gödel's incompleteness theorem is an example of the kind of problem I'm talking about here. Mathematicians thought they could prove a system of mathematics using the system itself (a "meta" problem if there ever was one), but Gödel came up with this amazing (and hard to appreciate) proof that this kind of bootstrap-lifting just isn't possible: you can have a system that's complete, or consistent, but not both. Well, dang, because both was what we wanted.
Bearing the spirit of Gödel's theorem in mind, shift back over to AI for a moment. Let's suppose we want to construct a precise model of our own intelligence so that we can improve on it. (If we're going to make improvements, we need the baseline model to work on.) This is a meta-problem. This is you, as an intellectual being, trying to construct a compete and consistent model of your own intellect. This model will necessarily contain your own ability to analyze and determine the full extent of your own intellect and construct a model thereof. You can see that your model has to contain itself, and although I lack the mathematical prowess to turn this into a snazzy Gödelesque theorem, I think you can see that this looks like one of those "meta" problems that give us so many headaches.
I don't believe we can possibly even have a complete understanding of our own intellect, let alone improve on it. Thus the inevitable "Bert Bert" line of degradation from creator to creation. Note that the "meta" problem only remains a problem when we attempt to model our complete intellect: we should be able to model particular subsets of it (which are known to contain inaccuracies, but are useful none the less) without any theoretical difficulty, and I see plenty of hope for improvement in areas like speech regognition, pattern recognition and such like. We won't create "evolutionary replacements" this way, though, just more tools like stone axes and chess computers which do particular tasks better than we do. Also, I'm not saying that some creature better than humans cannot exist, but rather that if such a thing can exist, then we won't be the ones who make it.
Yes, and that can be a bit of a problem, because it means that they won't listen to your arguments or even read the link that one provides as a supporting argument. From a simple epistemological perspective, you can be presented with as much evidence for design as you like and still deny that it is actually design, but merely something that has the appearance of design. This is Dawkins to a tee. But hell, even Dawkins tells us that stuff looks designed, and wasn't that what I said originally?
The point of my argument is that I don't believe we will be overtaken by machines because I believe in actual design rather than inevitable onward upward evolution which merely seems like design. In all cases of actual design, there is a lossy effect. You cannot design and build something which has more intelligence than you, because you had to use your intelligence in order to design and build it. Where is the extra intelligence going to come from in order to get a smarter end product?
Natural selection won't work. Let's assume that Bert Bert makes lots of replicas of himself and then picks the best one to take over the job. This will minimise the rate at which the system degrades. In order for actual improvement to take place, there has to be an improvement over the original. In the real world, this improvement is supposed to happen by chance, which seems a bit far-fetched, given that even relatively trivial things can't happen by chance. Without the supposed benefit of random changes, we are back to Bert Bert making a better design under his own steam, and if he can do that (I say that he can't, but if he could) then he doesn't need natural selection.
And so on. Yes, pretty much any example of a tool, right down to Ugg the Caveman walloping someone with a club-shaped lump of wood, disproves my theory if your assertion is relevant. Fortunately, it itsn't.
Even the earliest computers could perform mathematics faster and more reliably than a room full of accountants. That's why they were useful at all. But someone has to tell them what math to perform. And even where they make decisions about what math to perform, someone had to tell it how to make those decisions. And if we get programs to figure out how to make decisions on their own, then someone will have to have told them how to do that. See a pattern forming?
The only threat here is if a lower grade of intellect can be overcompensated by increased speed -- assuming that computers even would be able to out-do us in think-speed were they performing the same abstract mental tasks. It's not like we know enough about our own thought processes to tell how much CPU power they'd need. People tend to make the simplistic assumption that because computers can add numbers billions of times faster than they could, that the speed increase will scale up with the problem of general intelligence. Or maybe people just think that brains are the product of an undirected random process, and we can do better with electronics -- ironic, given that it's that very same randomly-evolved brain which thinks it can do better.
Like I say, if we face a threat from technology, it will probably be because we invent something lethal to ourselves or wreck the environment or stuff the gene pool or blow ourselves up. It will not be from producing the next step in evolution. That stuff is good for science fiction writing based on a theme of hubris, but it is not realistic.
But I don't subscribe to this view. Go ahead and call me names if you like, but at its most fundamental level, life looks designed. And this is a view that fits in well with normal experience: when you create something, then it is necessarily a subset of your total ability. If I were able to create a computer which was smarter than I, then presumably it would also be able to create a machine that was smarter than it, and so on. Where is all this additional information coming from? Out of thin air, apparently. I can't help but feel that this notion belongs in the same category as perpetual motion or pulling oneself up by the bootstraps.
Did you ever see the game The Neverhood? There's a huge wall of text in that game which is a sort of parody of the biblical style of narrative. Some of it is very funny, and some of it is just bizarre. If I recall correctly, the story of Bert Bert is relevant to this discussion. You see, Bert Bert was created by Quater in his own image, which means that Bert Bert also thought he was effectively Quater, and so Bert Bert created Bert Bert in his own image, and so on. The regress was not infinite, however. Like an accumulation of genetic errors, or noise in analog duplication, each successive Bert Bert was less of an image of Quater. After a few generations, the name was no longer Bert Bert but itself started to mutate and drift in an interesting variety of ways. Eventually, there was an end to the regress, as the final Bert Bert (whatever his name was) found himself unable to create a living replica of himself.
In short, if we are really clever, we may be able to create something that approximates ourselves fairly closely. I think that the act of creating something essentially proves the creator to be greater than the creation. If we are going to wipe ourselves out with technology, it won't be because it out-evolved us.
The Famous Brett Watson
File Viruses are still out there, of course, but not nearly as much as they used to be. A "pure" file virus is one that inserts itself into some other executable (or executables in general). These are less of a problem than they used to be because software is generally obtained off a CD-ROM or remote download site, and viruses can't touch these files (unless the software company or FTP hoster does something really dumb). Not much actual copying of executables off one machine onto another is done anymore, which is how these things spread. Anyone old enough to remember when we used to copy executables as a matter of course? Come on, 'fess up! Gee -- I can remember those quaint old programs which you didn't "install" as such because they consisted of one executable.
Macro Viruses are still big, though. And Microsoft's feature-driven focus will assure that this problem only gets worse. The big problem is that their software is so ubiquitous, making them a big easy target. And they keep doing really dumb stuff. Everything keeps getting more and more "active". They love that word, don't they? "Active" means "I'm a big gaping security hole just waiting to be exploited!" Linux won't have this problem until either Microsoft starts porting their stuff, or we get virus-compatible equivalents, or somehow the marketroids take over Linux software development and we throw all common sense out the window. I mean seriously, if someone actually wrote a mail reader for Linux that was so helpful that it says, "hey -- here's some new mail for you! Let me immediately display it in this window for you! And run this javascript thing in it for you!" -- would anyone use it? Any takers? Maybe if you run it under jail, right?
Trojans on the other hand, have come into their own. I still see the damn Happy '99 trojan wandering around now and then. The trojan that emails itself to everyone in your address book is one of the more popular forms. The great thing about trojans is that they rely on the human to be the weak link, not some software hole that would get closed up the moment it was discovered (or at least would if the software in question was open source). Human stupidity is here to stay! It's going to decrease, but only because people are now growing up with email and learn the tricks at a young age. It is, however, entirely feasible to write a trojan email attachment for Linux. It's not likely to be worth anyone's while, though, because of the small target market and high likelyhood that the user has at least half a clue with regards to this sort of thing. In any case, the user isn't likely to be running an email reader which makes activating the attachment a "double click" operation, and which address book are you going to read?
In summary, I don't see a big target market for viruses here. I think that worms are more likely to be the issue. That, and security holes that get exploited manually. These all come under the banner of cracking, rather than viruses (although worms are a sort of overlap point). Another possibility, as others have suggested, is back-door code being placed in a kernel module or something which explicitly creates an exploitable weakness. We'll see if the "bug-finding is parallelable" principle of Linux development also maps to the finding of deliberate security holes. I think accidental ones are likely to be the real problem, however.
-- The Famous Brett Watson
The author of the comment to which I am responding seems to know more about the state of law than I do (I am not even an American, let alone a lawyer), but here are the salient points as I understand them.
The main point of this law is that it finally makes the legality of a "software license" -- click-through or otherwise -- a definite thing. Software companies have been doing this "license" thing for a long time, but to my knowledge there has never been any legal precedent established as to whether they are in fact enforcable. Why is their enforcability in question?
Let's look a little at what a software license is. Software has been granted protection under the auspices of copyright law, which means there are certain things you may and may not do by merit of the fact that the software is a copyrighted work. Software licenses tend to re-state these terms, but you would have been subject to them anyway (even without the license terms) because that's what copyright law dictates. Software licenses also tend to extend these terms by such constraints as prohibitions on reverse engineering and disclaimers of warranty. Compare this to the GNU GPL which conditionally waives rights available to the copyright holder. Copyright normally prevents you from making duplicate or derived works; the GPL conditionally permits these actions.
Therein lies the crucial difference. I do not need your agreement in order to grant you privileges, but I do need your agreement for you to waive your rights. You have certain rights and prohibitions under copyright: the GPL relaxes or abolishes some of the prohibitions, and the BSD license relaxes even more, but a typical software license tries to take your rights away.
Now we move to step two: non-negotiability. You can, if you wish to do so, enter into an agreement with another party under which you waive certain rights or adopt certain responsibilities. That is what contract law is all about. Contracts are negotiated. This "software license" thing that you have to click through or rip open is not a contract. It is rarely disclosed up front, you have no opportunity to negotiate it, and you do not sign it. These fatal flaws in the scheme are weasel-worded around by such phrases as "by opening this package, you agree". Balderdash! Opening the package is the clear right of anyone who has purchased a product! You should not have to give up additional rights in order to use what you have rightfully purchased! Nor should you have to agree to a click-through license. There is a strong legal argument, I believe, in the notion that you have not agreed to a license just by clicking on "I Agree" -- it was simply a necessary action in order to use the product. It smacks of coercion, and a coerced contract is no contract at all.
Finally, what are we talking about here anyway? A license, or a contract? It looks like a contract, because you are expected to agree to it, but it calls itself a license. What's the difference? In my ignorant non-lawyer way of understanding things, a contract is a set of terms to which two parties mutually agree, whereas a license is a conditional grant of rights by an authoritative party. You do not have a right to drive: you must first obtain a license to do so. Nor do you have the right to bear arms if you live in a country which requires all firearms to be licensed: it is, rather, a privilege that the government grants you. So what's with this "software license" crap? Who gave the software companies the right to dictate to me what I can and can't do with software beyond the scope of copyright? The GPL and BSD licenses are true licenses because they grant privileges to the end-user; privileges which the software author is in a legal position to grant under copyright law. Any "thou shalt not reverse engineer", or "thou shalt not complain", or "thou shalt not say bad things about us" are unmitigated nonsense with no legal weight in a license unless the law already grants the copyright holder the option to assert these rights. Alas, we see a move towards granting many of these exact rights with the "Digital Millennium Copyright Act".
This is what the UCITA is about. It is a broad approach to making whatever language the software companies decide to put into their license terms legally enforcable. It establishes once and for all that a "software license" is a one-sided contract that you do "sign" by opening the packet or clicking on "I Agree", and thus opens up a whole new range of antisocial and unethical behaviour to the realms of legality.
That, at least, is my impression as an uninformed non-laywer who would almost certainly not understand the legislation even if I read it (and I haven't). Caveat lector.
The copyright holder of this post, The Famous Brett Watson, hereby places it in the Public Domain (P) 2000.
Please clarify. Back doors are not a threat because (a) nobody in their right mind will buy a product that contained one or (b) they would be illegal under this legislation. The former is insufficient reason, since products have already been sold that have back doors, usually without the knowledge of the buyer.
This is a non sequitur. The downfall of Lotus 123 and Wordperfect had 100% of nothing to do with their contract terms and everything to do with Microsoft's belligerent marketing of MS Office. Microsoft's failure with MS Bob proves that they can't force a bad product down our throats without the right leverage. (It may have been a different story if they had decided to bundle it with Windows, but they seem to reserve that tactic for killing competitor's products.)
What if, pray tell, Microsoft decide to assert their new-found rights under this bill and modify all future releases of Windows (and their respective licenses) such that "you agree to allow them to connect to your computer via the Internet in order to verify that you have a legally licensed copy of the software"? Will the free market suddenly move away from Windows in droves? Will all new computers suddenly be purchased with an alternative operating system? The god-like powers of the "free market" only work when the market is actually free, and a certain Judge Jackson finds that Microsoft has monopoly power in this area at the moment, which means the market is not in fact free.
So attack the problem directly. I suggest the following.
The aforementioned criteria would allow anyone to use the terminals and view what they wanted, but the only way that someone could leave something "offensive" on screen would be to abandon a key that still contained some (refundable) credit. Why walk away from money? Better still if it did happen and a smart kid stumbled across it, she would grab the card and get it refunded -- completely neglecting to mention the pr0n factor: "I just found it."
If I go to dynamic IP, then what about my mail domain? I don't want to have to adopt the domain of my ISP for an email address! I also don't want to rely on my ISP for services like a POP account and so on. I've been running my own servers for a couple of years now, and I like it that way thank you very much. What about my poor, pathetic web pages? Pathetic though they be, I want to run them off my Apache instance on my box in my domain under my administrative control.
Yet by the simple process of going from a static to dynamic IP, they would simultaneously wrest me of all this administrative control. My web pages will be served from their domain and their box and their http server, and so on, and so on. And what need is there for dynamic IP on a cable network anyhow? Maybe they can claim some small convenience in terms of not having to manually allocate IP addresses, but surely it adds complexity to their billing systems: dynamic IPs are harder to keep a track of than static ones, of course.
What really annoys me is that the technical decision to go with dynamic IP is probably there to prevent people using the system in certain ways, such as serving up gigabytes of pr0n or similar. But what about the little git like me? My needs and usage patterns are modest -- I probably consume less bandwidth than any number of NetMeeting users or enthusiastic websurfers, yet I'm going to be obliged to purchase pricier so-called "business" service just for the privilege of getting a permanent IP address -- and of course the "business" service won't be available until much later.
Alright -- my spleen is adequately vented now. Carry on, please.
Duck Hunt is actually one of the simpler variations on the theme. The arcade games (Virtua Cop, The Lost World, etc) have a more impressive system. In Duck Hunt, when you pull the trigger, the targets (ducks) are replaced with solid white squares and a black background. (This is assuming you mean the original Duck Hunt and not some more recent release of which I'm unaware.) The gun then acts as a light detector, and the game measures the light input on the gun at that instant and judges whether you hit or not. If the game is particularly clever, it will have a full frame of black before and/or after the frame with the white squares to measure the difference between the two. This reduces the chance of false triggering.
The smarter guns are probably rather more sensitive and well focused. It's possible to detect which part of the screen the gun is pointing at by causing the gun to trigger a latch on a raster beam counter when it reaches a certain light threshold. At the end of frame, read the value out of the raster beam counter register, and that provides your gun coordinates. If the gun is not pointing at the screen, then the register will not have latched, and the value will be some unreasonably high value. Alternatively, if the gun is pointing at some bright object other than the screen, then the latch will trigger immediately, and you will get a zero result in your register.
This second "precise" mode means that you must output a minimum level of light at all points on your screen that you wish to be able to target. If the light output at any point on the screen falls below your trigger threshold, then the register will not be latched when the gun is pointing at that part of the screen, and it will look as though the gun is not pointing at the screen at all.
I suppose I should take a little side-track into television theory here, just in case. Your screen is painted by an electron beam in a left to right and top to bottom manner, like the way English text is written. When the electron beam hits the phosphorous coating inside the glass, the phosphorous glows momentarily, emitting a characteristic spectrum of light (primarily red, green, or blue in the case of a colour monitor). This glow is actually quite brief, and if you saw the light output level of any particular point on the screen expressed as a graph, you'd wonder why the screen doesn't look like it's flashing. A trick of the eye and mind, known as Persistence of Vision, causes the image to look solid. In fact it is not solid, but flashing rapidly and unevenly, and this is what allows a light-sensor to be used to detect your aim. Other display technologies, such as LCD displays, may not be amenable to this kind of technique, depending on whether they use a measurable form of display refreshing.
As a side note, the late lamented Amiga actually had the required hardware to support this behaviour for the purposes of using a light pen, so I'm not making this up entirely. The Amiga also had the necessary raster beam counter register and latching facility, of course, although it only resolved to the equivalent of "lo-res" pixels. I never saw an actual device that utilised this hardware, unfortunately.
Sorry nerd-boys but, as I recall, Dilbert exposed a clandestine operation by NASA in which they had transported all the Women Who Love Engineers to the moon. Thus, unless you can convert your cubicle into a rocket and go there yourself, you're pretty much out of luck.
I will ignore the ad hominem element of your post and respond to the remainder.
Nor is anyone forced to buy proprietary software, but if you wish to use it, you must abide by the licensing scheme. Licenses are like that. My point is that a substantial amount of free software is not GPL'd, and for a component repository to be of general use to the free software community it should not be GPL'd, as this will make it legally incompatible with all the people who wish to contribute under any license other than the GPL. Now if you particularly want to be exclusivist, then by all means use the GPL, but exclusivism isn't going to help a project in my opinion.
Thanks for making my point for me. If I am actively maintaining a public domain program and a GPL'd library exists that would be useful to me, then I effectively have two choices: either abandon my public domain status and incorporate the library, or reimplement whatever features in the library I wanted. Of course, I could fork the code, but do I really want to maintain two versions of the code? No. If I'm going to have to implement a fully public domain version of the code, then why would I bother with the GPL'd code?
Maybe someone else will fork the code and GPL it, but that's no business of mine, and in any case, that's the benefit of public domain over GPL isn't it -- you can fork it under a different license.
Oh, please! I'm not complaining that I can't turn the GPL against its intended goal. What I'm saying is that when it comes to a choice of licenses in a shared component repository, I counsel against the use of the GPL. If you are dead keen on GPLing your stuff, then go ahead and knock yourself out with it. In my opinion, you are making it less free and less usable if you do so. You and Richard M. Stallman can disagree all you like on that point. For everyone else, it's a no brainer: if you're using anything other than the GPL for your code, and you have a choice of incorporating third party GPL code or free-but-not-copyleft code of roughly equal quality and functionality, you'll choose the non-GPL code to save being sucked into the GPL event horizon.
Personally, I'm all for cooperatively written software, and a component repository would be great. CPAN is a good example. You'll note that nearly all of CPAN is dual-licensed GPL/Artistic precisely so that you don't have to become part of the GNU collective just to use it. And given the propensity of GPL advocates to accuse others of guilt by association with "slavery", "warez doodz", and other "abuses" of software, I'd rather keep my software genuinely free and well clear of the General Public Virus.
Yes it's my right not to be infected by your GPL'd code, and I intend to exercise it! The fact that I'm not the only one with this belief is one of the reasons why a purely GPL'd component library would not be popular. I can use Linux in good conscience because the GPL doesn't affect my ability to write non-copyleft free software on it. With a component library, the only way to use it is to infect your code with it!
The General Public Virus is all very well for something like Linux, where the only thing you are likely to derive from the existing codebase is -- another Linux. Components are meant to be generic and widely-usable by their very nature. Will putting them under GPL mean that they infect the code that utilises them? That is the GPL's intent. This will make such components unusable not only in proprietary software, but also in BSD-licensed software (and public domain software for that matter). Such a severe limitation is counterproductive, in my estimation, and will probably limit the potential success (measured in terms of active users and contributors) such a project might otherwise enjoy.
I would therefore suggest that the LGPL be used in preference to the GPL, if one insists on a GNU-derived license.
Good thing for the rest of us that the Germans had Very Dumb Nazis to counterbalance their Very Smart Scientists.
Reference: Concepts of Programming Languages, Fourth Edition, Robert W. Sebesta.
Based on this line of reasoning, we could paint the following picture of the hypothesised cooperation between Microsoft and the NSA.
Don't you hope I'm wrong? It's just too sleazy for words.
An announcement just dripping with potential implications, to be sure. I read between the lines a little and note the following.
Microsoft feel that their current predatory -- sorry -- highly competitive pricing/licensing practices with respect to their sales of Office (particularly OEM sales) are sufficient to keep the screws on their customers. They also feel that they have sufficient leverage to play the "change the file formats so that the competitor's software becomes flaky" game.
Oh, rapture! Now we suffer special-casism. What a millstone. You won't see Sun Star Office appear anywhere on a Debian CD image with this particular restriction. It might not be such a bad idea for Red Hat, though, in a cynical kind of way. Consider: Red Hat puts Sun Star Office on their CD set; Red Hat is then obliged to pay a fee to Sun for every set sold, but presumably the fee is small, and they can add it into their shelf price. But lo! All those other cheapbytesey copiers of Red Hat discs run into a problem. Now if they sell copies of the disc, they have to pay tribute to Sun also! Red Hat can make reselling copies of their discs far less attractive, thus (presumably) increasing the percentage of buyers who go for the genuine article rather than a cheap (but identical) copy.
As for this "Community" license thing, well, I suppose it's better than no source at all. I don't expect it will attract any real open source developers, and I would suggest they continue to focus their efforts on the various real open source office suites. But hey -- from an ordinary end-user's perspective, Sun Star Office for zero dollars sounds better than MS Office at any non-negative price.
The Mathematics of Monkeys and Shakespeare, or "Monkey Claims Copyright on Hamlet: Film at 11."
The thing about hacking up a fake client is that it can report "key not found in block X" really rapidly by not actually doing the search. This is an excellent heuristic which is correct in very close to 100% of all cases, with the minor drawback that it completely misses the point. If someone measures the size of a "not found" report message, we can use that to perform a meaningful calculation on their computer system: not the number of keys per second, but the throughput of the proxy server as measured from their client. Still, the hacked client thing is a bit of a problem. How do you tell whether the client at the other end of a net connection is legit? Too hard for me, Jimmy.