AFAIK, you can ensure that you can collect some damages by registering your copyright with the Copyright and Trademark office. Every work is inherently copyright by its authors unless they explicitly place it into the public domain, but without registering it they're only allowed to collect real damages, i.e. proven economic losses resulting from the infringement. If it's registered, though, they're allowed to collect statutory damages, which are specific fines established by law as a punishment for violation. Also, IIRC, once you've won your case the violator has to stop distributing in violation of copyright, and if they continue to infringe then you can collect more in the way of damages.
But there's a difference between finding something in a work that the author didn't explicitly put in, like finding unintentional allegory and metaphor, and the kind of numerology/anagrams that people are complaining about in this case. It's inherent in the artistic process that works of art reflect their creators, and to the extent that their creators are people of their time, place, social status, etc. the art will thus also reflect that. Thus a talented and well trained artist will almost certainly include unconscious connections to others in his works.
But it's difficult to see how some of the more esoteric connections that analysts dredge up could be inserted unconsciously. Do you really think that authors subconsciously include ellaborate anagrams, numerological calculations, and the like in their writing. I personally can't- not just don't but actually can't- believe that. It's just too far fetched.
I'm sorry, but I seem to have been unintentionally misleading above. The show in which these artistic works were inserted was not Twin Peaks (which I don't believe was a Spelling Production) but Melrose Place. The works were presented as part of a larger exhibition entitled "Uncommon Sense" that focused on art as part of the public process, and the specific section was titled "In the Name of the Place". The creators of the work have a nice web site at http://www.arts.ucsb.edu/projects/mpart/. All in all, it was one of the most interesting exhibits I've ever been to.
One assumes, though, that in Dragonball Z the names are intended to be funny, rather than allegorical. A better example, IMO, is the Wiggin children in Ender's Game. They all have saints' names, and their characters are (IIRC) linked to the saints for whom they were named. Of course in that case, Orson Scott Card deliberately draws the reader's attention to the choice of names. One character specifically mentions that the children were all baptized with valid saints' names, and another points out the possibility of names having connotations. Again, when an author has deliberately put something like that into the work, he'll generally try to point it out, either by having it be glaringly obvious or by including written in suggestions that it's worth looking at.
Of course some time these things are most certainly conscious. In the X-Files, for instance, they love to have clocks pointing to 10:13 because Chris Carter's production company is named Ten Thirteen. They'll also name minor characters after regular posters on the X-Files newsgroup. That kind of thing is actually comparatively common, a kind of insider's joke.
What is even more wild is that once in a while a TV show will do something even more radical deliberately. I saw a very, very interesting art exhibit at the LA Museum of Contemporary Art. A group of artists had convinced Aaron Spelling to let them insert various symbolically significant props into the show. There was a pillow that showed up in some bedroom scenes, for instance, that had pictures of condoms all over it. Every container of alcohol that appeared in the season when they were doing this was redone to make it symbollically linked to its role in the plot. When somebody did something stupid after drinking, for instance, their beer cans were of "Be Wiser" rather than "Budweiser". After appearing there, they were moved to the top shelf of the bar that served as a hangout for the characters. More amazingly, the height of stacked glasses and pitchers on the middle shelf of the bar formed a bar graph (and the pun was deliberate) of average per-capital alcohol consumption in the U.S. since the revolution, and the bottles on the bottom shelf were matched with the next shelf up and had labels relevant to public perceptions and attitudes toward drinking at that time. It was pretty amazing, especially considering that the viewers had pretty much no chance of figuring all that stuff out.
The take home lesson, though, is that sometimes people really do hide things in TV shows.
I find that a good rule of thumb is that most of the time when the author is thinking about something wacky like making names into anagrams, he tends to do it compulsively rather than just once or twice. If names are significant, for instance, he'll use a group of names that have related significance- all names of saints, or characters from some other work, or the like. If you wind up finding one interesting anagram, one name that's a biblical reference, and one odd similarity to some other work, the chances are that it's just the analyst looking too deep. And, quite honestly, most authors aren't going to bury this stuff too deep in the first place. They put it in there to be, after all, so making it so obscure that it takes ages and ages to notice pretty much defeats the point.
IIRC, part of the Universal Commercial Code is a restriction on the ability to require acceptance of some terms as a condition of purchasing. A company legally can't require you to give up certain rights, notably the implied warrant of merchantability, as part of your purchase. If that were allowable, the laws establishing the implied warrant of merchantability and other legally protected rights wouldn't be worth the paper they were printed on. Any purchase contract that purports to give up those rights is legally invalid on its face. If we convince our legislators to include wording in UCITA that prevents software companies from making those requirements, they can keep putting them into their licenses until the end of time but they still won't be valid.
One thing that I noticed in the speech was the following comment:
It also fundamentally undermines the independent commercial software sector because it effectively makes it impossible to distribute software on a basis where recipients pay for the product rather than just the cost of distribution.
In this sense, open source software based on the GPL mirrors the.com business models that proved the least successful during the past year. They ask software developers to give away for free the very thing they create that is of greatest value in the hope that somehow they'll make money selling something else. In effect, it puts at risk the continued vitality of the independent software sector. The business model for OSS may well be attractive for software as an adjunct to hardware - the model of the '60s and '70s - or for service businesses that do not generate the revenue needed for major investments in technology. But as history has shown, while this type of model may have a place, it isn't successful in building a mass market and making powerful, easy-to-use software broadly accessible to consumers.
Microsoft misses (or ignores) two major points here. One, which is pretty clearly an ignored point rather than a missed one, is that the "software as adjunct to hardware" model is still very alive and doing well. Vendors like Sun, IBM, Palm, and Apple certainly seem to view Operating System software as being primarily a means to sell hardware, rather than as a direct major revenue source. And then, of course, there are all the component manufacturers, who would dearly love not to have to write drivers for their hardware.
The more important point, though, is that a key advantage of the whole Open Source/Free Software idea is that it's no longer necessary for a single company to do all of the development singlehanded. What the companies are sharing isn't just their IP, but also the IP of all of the people who have shared with them. Shared code means shared development costs, so each company only has to make a partial contribution to the overall package. The fact that the Free/Open Source software market has so many small firms competing effectively with much larger ones is evidence that it's possible to do well without a massive up-front investment. None of the big Linux companies has done the majority of the development on the packages in its distro. Every one of them has contributed some here and some there but gotten most of its product by using other developers' shared code.
That's what Microsoft is really scared about. As long as software development is limited to single companies, it's a natural ground for monopolism, as a single company with huge resources has a huge competitive advantage. By sharing development costs, though, Free/Open Source development lets small companies compete on a level playing field with giants like Microsoft.
GPL isn't altruistic at all. The way I feel about it is like this:
"I'm releasing my software for free! But if you want to use my source, I'm going to make you release your software for free too, so that I can use your modifications."
But that's not what the GPL really says. It says that you're free to use my source, but that you must release your changes to my software for public use. There's no requirement for people who use GPLed software to apply the GPL to unrelated projects, only to extensions to the original GPLed work. That's why the BSDs are free to use the GPLed gcc as a compiler and still release the other components of their system under a BSD license.
... seriously, if all you people are serious about the GPL (I'll take a neutral stance on the GPL itself), for God's sakes, get a real organization together to handle these things, so that there's always someone to turn to when there is a GPL violation. You know, some professional and legal experts to help the cause out.
That would be The Free Software Foundation. One of the things that the FSF does is to provide legal help in dealing with apparent GPL violations. Apparently their basic strategy is to start out nice ("You may not realize it, but you're violating the GPL. Here's how to get into compliance.") and only make threatening noises after being nice fails. That seems like a pretty reasonable way of doing things to me. FWIW, they've been pretty successful at getting violators into compliance, with Objective C being a notable success story (they got NeXT to release the source of their compiler for it, as it was built around gcc.)
Don't think of it as having been mistaken. Think of it as having learned something new. That's really one of the big points of reading slashdot; you're exposed to people who have studied the issues more than you have. If you listen when somebody corrects you, you'll often walk away better informed than you were before. Of course you should double check what they say so that you're not "corrected" into replacing true beliefs with false ones, but in general it's a pretty good place to learn more about issues like this.
why does the "poor illiterate farmer" out in the fields need a computer?
Well, there are a lot of those poor farmers who aren't illiterate. According to the CIA world factbook, India has a 52% literacy rate and 67% of the labor force is involved in agriculture. That means that even if every non-agricultural worker is literate then about 1/4 of the agricultural workers are literate. That's a pretty big market when you consider the size of India's population- just over 1 billion.
And, of course, a lot of those farmers may not want to stay as farmers forever. Remember that India is currently viewed as being a potentially big player in the computer industry in the future, so some of those farmers may want to learn about computers or have their children learn about computers to get in on the anticipated boom. Just because they're poor farmers doesn't mean that they're stupid, ignorant, or happy about being poor farmers.
I think that you're slightly confused here. Even under the FSF definition, Free Software does not necessarily require that further distribution must also be free. Thus the new BSD license is classified as a Free Software license by the FSF. The distinction you're making is between copylefted software (i.e. that which does require redistributed versions to remain Free) and non-copylefted (i.e. those that allow non-Free derivatives). BSD licensed software is Free, but companies like Apple are allowed to make non-Free derivatives.
338 Million cubic foot mine. It is 2200 feet below the ground and spans 7763 acres. At up to 1500psi, how much energy is this? As a fraction of nuke? What would happen if that bubble popped?"
<LITERAL>Well, lets do some simple physics. You can't get the power out from the data provided, but you can get the energy. Energy is just pressure times volume. Converting into more useful metric units, that's about 9.6 million cubic meters and a pressure of 10 MPa. That gives a total energy storage of about 96 trillion Joules, or 27,000 MW/hr; about enough to run the state of California for an hour at off-peak consumption rates. In comparison, one gram of TNT stores on the order of 4 thousand Joules of energy, so that's about 24 kilotons, or a fairly small nuke. Anyone want to check those figures?</LITERAL>
ReiserFS really shines with lots of small files. (your mp3 collection for example)
Since when do mp3s count as small files? Most of the interesting ones are several MB in size- much larger than a typical block size- so the extent to which ReiserFS would actually help is minimal. Where something like ReiserFS would be really helpful is in dealing with directories like/etc and/dev that are full of a large number of very small files. It might also be useful for/var, as ISTR that it has some anti-fragmentation aspects to it that would help with the rapidly changing data there.
However, such measures could make the copying task difficult and time consuming and such an effort would involve significant manual or engineered effort.
But the engineering effort invovled is pretty much a one-time investment. There may be substantial up-front effort (I'd assume that the best way of doing something like this properly is to run the OS over something like VMWare and extract the memory image directly) but once it's invested you can copy anything that you can access. The effort needed to perform the crack is likely to be less than the effort needed to design the system in the first place, and nobody would develop a system like this unless they thought that the data they were protecting was likely to be pretty damn valuable.
Not particularly useful if the content is encrypted enroute, which any reasonable system would do, and the decrypting program automatically forgets the decryption key after closing. It's not going to be possible to make the system foolproof (somebody can always run the OS in emulation and snapshot the system with the decrypted version in memory, for instance) but it should be possible to make it basically that tough to get the data into memory (as opposed to using non-computer methods of copying).
There is a tradeoff here. If you increase the reliability enough, the loss of user servicability can be worthwhile in the long run. A classic example is carburation vs. electronic fuel injection in cars. There are a lot of people who complain about the fact that they need to take their car into the shop to get the injectors fixed but they can rebuild the carb themselves. The fact is, though, that they need to be able to rebuild the carb because it's so much more failure prone than modern fuel injectors are. And remember that, like a car breakdown, the inconvenience cost of a server failure can be much more than the repair bill.
Most free software is released "when it's ready", without any metrics. Ponder on whether this is a strength or a weakness.
Of course the concept of a Free Software release is a little bit fuzzier than a commercial software release, as the software is generally available for use by anyone who's willing to download it well before the official release date. That means that the release is more generally a statement of confidence by the developers than anything else. As suce it's necessarily a bit murkier than a proprietary software release, as it's going to reflect a quantitative, rather than qualitative, difference in the number of users.
Well, they have been doing experiments on animals, which is normally the first stage in these things. After they have the procedure pretty much down cold with animals, then they can start trying it with human volunteers in clinical studies. Once they've established the safety there, it should be possible to allow it as a general purpose procedure. That's the way that these things normally proceed, and that's the logical course to take here, as well.
So what? There's no ban against giving birth to a baby with a genetic defect that would limit it's life, why should their be one on creating a broken clone? What's the moral difference?
One of them is an artificial medical procedure and the other one is a natural biological process. The FDA (and they are the logical agency to make this kind of decision) currently has the role of approving or disapproving novel medical procedures, and IMO they should use that role to temporarily block approval of cloning until the problems are worked out. It's their job to approve new procedures only after their safety and efficacy has been established, which has certainly not happened yet with cloning. Nobody has the right to restrict the natural biological process of producing a baby; it's pretty clearly one of the non-enumerated rights reserved to the people by the 10th Ammendment, and IIRC it's now also protected legislatively. As a practical matter it's also now A) grandfathered as a procedure that was well established before the FDA started it's regulatory role and B) clearly safer and more effeective than cloning and hence a better choice by the normal standards of regulatory approval.
It only makes sense to put a hold on human cloning until the clones are actually likely to be as healthy as an ordinary baby...
Sounds good, but you've got to give somebody the power to define "likely" and "healthy" and "ordinary". And once those restrictions are put on clones, what's to keep that power from being applied to regular old-fasioned conception?
As stated above, the natural agency to regulate this would be the FDA, who actually have a pretty good track record of serving the public interest on these issues. If there are any real complaints, it's been that they've recently been too lax in allowing new procedures and drugs to be used before their safety has been established. As for adding new restrictions on doing it the old fashioned way, I think that it will be essentially impossible to do so both as a practical matter and a political one. Nobody would stand to have their right to have sex restricted, and it would be pretty much impossible to implement anyway.
I'm a bit dubious about a permanent ban on cloning, but a medium term moratorium seems like a very reasonable precaution. While it was initially believed that clones were going to be genetically perfect copies of their progenitors, there's always been some suspicion that there might be problems with the cells they've started from. Now it looks as though there genuinely are some problems with the clones having reduced viability, so there are some very serious long term health issues to clear up. It only makes sense to put a hold on human cloning until the clones are actually likely to be as healthy as an ordinary baby, the same way that other medical procedures are not permitted until their safety is adequately demonstrated.
One thing that I haven't seen mentioned yet is that books are easier to read than monitors. Monitors just can't match a book's DPI, and the higher resolution of the printed page can actually improve reading speed and retention and reduce eye strain. That may or may not be a big issue for you, but it can be a big deal and a reasonable justification for the extra expense. Another advantage of a printed book is that the author has already gone to the trouble of cobbling together the data for you so that you don't have to spend your time scrounging the web for it; if you're a consultant getting paid $100 per hour it doesn't take much time scouring the web for information to add up to more than the cost of the book.
OT Note: the correct term is tome (from the Greek word meaning to cut, and the same root as in medical procedures ending in -otomy, as tomes were originally produced by cutting a long scroll into smaller sections) not tomb (which is where somebody is buried).
And although the journal does not pay them for the rights to the article, certainly the journal
doesn't have the rights to the artcle when all is said and done...
Actually, in a lot of cases the journals do wind up with the rights to the article when all is said and done. Signing over copyright is a standard part of getting something published. The authors are even nominally supposed to buy reprints from the journal if they want to send them out to people, rather than just running off copies or printing out from PDF files. Hell, I was actually amazed last year when I found out that I was getting paid in exchange for the copyright to something I had written (though my institution wound up requiring me to sign over the check since the work had been written on company time). Often it's the other way around; the researcher pays page charges to get the work published and still has to sign over his copyright to the journal.
So what happens when you run out of space for dead trees? This is not a silly or irrelevant question; it's an issue that real world libraries face all the time. I can tell you that the library at my institution is getting rid of old journals, cutting back on subscriptions in some areas, and the like just because they lack physical space to store the paper. Who cares if it will last forever if it can't be kept forever because of space constraints?
Slashdot Mirror
AFAIK, you can ensure that you can collect some damages by registering your copyright with the Copyright and Trademark office. Every work is inherently copyright by its authors unless they explicitly place it into the public domain, but without registering it they're only allowed to collect real damages, i.e. proven economic losses resulting from the infringement. If it's registered, though, they're allowed to collect statutory damages, which are specific fines established by law as a punishment for violation. Also, IIRC, once you've won your case the violator has to stop distributing in violation of copyright, and if they continue to infringe then you can collect more in the way of damages.
But there's a difference between finding something in a work that the author didn't explicitly put in, like finding unintentional allegory and metaphor, and the kind of numerology/anagrams that people are complaining about in this case. It's inherent in the artistic process that works of art reflect their creators, and to the extent that their creators are people of their time, place, social status, etc. the art will thus also reflect that. Thus a talented and well trained artist will almost certainly include unconscious connections to others in his works.
But it's difficult to see how some of the more esoteric connections that analysts dredge up could be inserted unconsciously. Do you really think that authors subconsciously include ellaborate anagrams, numerological calculations, and the like in their writing. I personally can't- not just don't but actually can't- believe that. It's just too far fetched.
I'm sorry, but I seem to have been unintentionally misleading above. The show in which these artistic works were inserted was not Twin Peaks (which I don't believe was a Spelling Production) but Melrose Place. The works were presented as part of a larger exhibition entitled "Uncommon Sense" that focused on art as part of the public process, and the specific section was titled "In the Name of the Place". The creators of the work have a nice web site at http://www.arts.ucsb.edu/projects/mpart/. All in all, it was one of the most interesting exhibits I've ever been to.
One assumes, though, that in Dragonball Z the names are intended to be funny, rather than allegorical. A better example, IMO, is the Wiggin children in Ender's Game. They all have saints' names, and their characters are (IIRC) linked to the saints for whom they were named. Of course in that case, Orson Scott Card deliberately draws the reader's attention to the choice of names. One character specifically mentions that the children were all baptized with valid saints' names, and another points out the possibility of names having connotations. Again, when an author has deliberately put something like that into the work, he'll generally try to point it out, either by having it be glaringly obvious or by including written in suggestions that it's worth looking at.
Of course some time these things are most certainly conscious. In the X-Files, for instance, they love to have clocks pointing to 10:13 because Chris Carter's production company is named Ten Thirteen. They'll also name minor characters after regular posters on the X-Files newsgroup. That kind of thing is actually comparatively common, a kind of insider's joke.
What is even more wild is that once in a while a TV show will do something even more radical deliberately. I saw a very, very interesting art exhibit at the LA Museum of Contemporary Art. A group of artists had convinced Aaron Spelling to let them insert various symbolically significant props into the show. There was a pillow that showed up in some bedroom scenes, for instance, that had pictures of condoms all over it. Every container of alcohol that appeared in the season when they were doing this was redone to make it symbollically linked to its role in the plot. When somebody did something stupid after drinking, for instance, their beer cans were of "Be Wiser" rather than "Budweiser". After appearing there, they were moved to the top shelf of the bar that served as a hangout for the characters. More amazingly, the height of stacked glasses and pitchers on the middle shelf of the bar formed a bar graph (and the pun was deliberate) of average per-capital alcohol consumption in the U.S. since the revolution, and the bottles on the bottom shelf were matched with the next shelf up and had labels relevant to public perceptions and attitudes toward drinking at that time. It was pretty amazing, especially considering that the viewers had pretty much no chance of figuring all that stuff out.
The take home lesson, though, is that sometimes people really do hide things in TV shows.
I find that a good rule of thumb is that most of the time when the author is thinking about something wacky like making names into anagrams, he tends to do it compulsively rather than just once or twice. If names are significant, for instance, he'll use a group of names that have related significance- all names of saints, or characters from some other work, or the like. If you wind up finding one interesting anagram, one name that's a biblical reference, and one odd similarity to some other work, the chances are that it's just the analyst looking too deep. And, quite honestly, most authors aren't going to bury this stuff too deep in the first place. They put it in there to be, after all, so making it so obscure that it takes ages and ages to notice pretty much defeats the point.
IIRC, part of the Universal Commercial Code is a restriction on the ability to require acceptance of some terms as a condition of purchasing. A company legally can't require you to give up certain rights, notably the implied warrant of merchantability, as part of your purchase. If that were allowable, the laws establishing the implied warrant of merchantability and other legally protected rights wouldn't be worth the paper they were printed on. Any purchase contract that purports to give up those rights is legally invalid on its face. If we convince our legislators to include wording in UCITA that prevents software companies from making those requirements, they can keep putting them into their licenses until the end of time but they still won't be valid.
One thing that I noticed in the speech was the following comment:
Microsoft misses (or ignores) two major points here. One, which is pretty clearly an ignored point rather than a missed one, is that the "software as adjunct to hardware" model is still very alive and doing well. Vendors like Sun, IBM, Palm, and Apple certainly seem to view Operating System software as being primarily a means to sell hardware, rather than as a direct major revenue source. And then, of course, there are all the component manufacturers, who would dearly love not to have to write drivers for their hardware.
The more important point, though, is that a key advantage of the whole Open Source/Free Software idea is that it's no longer necessary for a single company to do all of the development singlehanded. What the companies are sharing isn't just their IP, but also the IP of all of the people who have shared with them. Shared code means shared development costs, so each company only has to make a partial contribution to the overall package. The fact that the Free/Open Source software market has so many small firms competing effectively with much larger ones is evidence that it's possible to do well without a massive up-front investment. None of the big Linux companies has done the majority of the development on the packages in its distro. Every one of them has contributed some here and some there but gotten most of its product by using other developers' shared code.
That's what Microsoft is really scared about. As long as software development is limited to single companies, it's a natural ground for monopolism, as a single company with huge resources has a huge competitive advantage. By sharing development costs, though, Free/Open Source development lets small companies compete on a level playing field with giants like Microsoft.
But that's not what the GPL really says. It says that you're free to use my source, but that you must release your changes to my software for public use. There's no requirement for people who use GPLed software to apply the GPL to unrelated projects, only to extensions to the original GPLed work. That's why the BSDs are free to use the GPLed gcc as a compiler and still release the other components of their system under a BSD license.
That would be The Free Software Foundation. One of the things that the FSF does is to provide legal help in dealing with apparent GPL violations. Apparently their basic strategy is to start out nice ("You may not realize it, but you're violating the GPL. Here's how to get into compliance.") and only make threatening noises after being nice fails. That seems like a pretty reasonable way of doing things to me. FWIW, they've been pretty successful at getting violators into compliance, with Objective C being a notable success story (they got NeXT to release the source of their compiler for it, as it was built around gcc.)
Don't think of it as having been mistaken. Think of it as having learned something new. That's really one of the big points of reading slashdot; you're exposed to people who have studied the issues more than you have. If you listen when somebody corrects you, you'll often walk away better informed than you were before. Of course you should double check what they say so that you're not "corrected" into replacing true beliefs with false ones, but in general it's a pretty good place to learn more about issues like this.
Well, there are a lot of those poor farmers who aren't illiterate. According to the CIA world factbook, India has a 52% literacy rate and 67% of the labor force is involved in agriculture. That means that even if every non-agricultural worker is literate then about 1/4 of the agricultural workers are literate. That's a pretty big market when you consider the size of India's population- just over 1 billion.
And, of course, a lot of those farmers may not want to stay as farmers forever. Remember that India is currently viewed as being a potentially big player in the computer industry in the future, so some of those farmers may want to learn about computers or have their children learn about computers to get in on the anticipated boom. Just because they're poor farmers doesn't mean that they're stupid, ignorant, or happy about being poor farmers.
I think that you're slightly confused here. Even under the FSF definition, Free Software does not necessarily require that further distribution must also be free. Thus the new BSD license is classified as a Free Software license by the FSF. The distinction you're making is between copylefted software (i.e. that which does require redistributed versions to remain Free) and non-copylefted (i.e. those that allow non-Free derivatives). BSD licensed software is Free, but companies like Apple are allowed to make non-Free derivatives.
<LITERAL>Well, lets do some simple physics. You can't get the power out from the data provided, but you can get the energy. Energy is just pressure times volume. Converting into more useful metric units, that's about 9.6 million cubic meters and a pressure of 10 MPa. That gives a total energy storage of about 96 trillion Joules, or 27,000 MW/hr; about enough to run the state of California for an hour at off-peak consumption rates. In comparison, one gram of TNT stores on the order of 4 thousand Joules of energy, so that's about 24 kilotons, or a fairly small nuke. Anyone want to check those figures?</LITERAL>
Since when do mp3s count as small files? Most of the interesting ones are several MB in size- much larger than a typical block size- so the extent to which ReiserFS would actually help is minimal. Where something like ReiserFS would be really helpful is in dealing with directories like /etc and /dev that are full of a large number of very small files. It might also be useful for /var, as ISTR that it has some anti-fragmentation aspects to it that would help with the rapidly changing data there.
But the engineering effort invovled is pretty much a one-time investment. There may be substantial up-front effort (I'd assume that the best way of doing something like this properly is to run the OS over something like VMWare and extract the memory image directly) but once it's invested you can copy anything that you can access. The effort needed to perform the crack is likely to be less than the effort needed to design the system in the first place, and nobody would develop a system like this unless they thought that the data they were protecting was likely to be pretty damn valuable.
Not particularly useful if the content is encrypted enroute, which any reasonable system would do, and the decrypting program automatically forgets the decryption key after closing. It's not going to be possible to make the system foolproof (somebody can always run the OS in emulation and snapshot the system with the decrypted version in memory, for instance) but it should be possible to make it basically that tough to get the data into memory (as opposed to using non-computer methods of copying).
There is a tradeoff here. If you increase the reliability enough, the loss of user servicability can be worthwhile in the long run. A classic example is carburation vs. electronic fuel injection in cars. There are a lot of people who complain about the fact that they need to take their car into the shop to get the injectors fixed but they can rebuild the carb themselves. The fact is, though, that they need to be able to rebuild the carb because it's so much more failure prone than modern fuel injectors are. And remember that, like a car breakdown, the inconvenience cost of a server failure can be much more than the repair bill.
Of course the concept of a Free Software release is a little bit fuzzier than a commercial software release, as the software is generally available for use by anyone who's willing to download it well before the official release date. That means that the release is more generally a statement of confidence by the developers than anything else. As suce it's necessarily a bit murkier than a proprietary software release, as it's going to reflect a quantitative, rather than qualitative, difference in the number of users.
Well, they have been doing experiments on animals, which is normally the first stage in these things. After they have the procedure pretty much down cold with animals, then they can start trying it with human volunteers in clinical studies. Once they've established the safety there, it should be possible to allow it as a general purpose procedure. That's the way that these things normally proceed, and that's the logical course to take here, as well.
One of them is an artificial medical procedure and the other one is a natural biological process. The FDA (and they are the logical agency to make this kind of decision) currently has the role of approving or disapproving novel medical procedures, and IMO they should use that role to temporarily block approval of cloning until the problems are worked out. It's their job to approve new procedures only after their safety and efficacy has been established, which has certainly not happened yet with cloning. Nobody has the right to restrict the natural biological process of producing a baby; it's pretty clearly one of the non-enumerated rights reserved to the people by the 10th Ammendment, and IIRC it's now also protected legislatively. As a practical matter it's also now A) grandfathered as a procedure that was well established before the FDA started it's regulatory role and B) clearly safer and more effeective than cloning and hence a better choice by the normal standards of regulatory approval.
As stated above, the natural agency to regulate this would be the FDA, who actually have a pretty good track record of serving the public interest on these issues. If there are any real complaints, it's been that they've recently been too lax in allowing new procedures and drugs to be used before their safety has been established. As for adding new restrictions on doing it the old fashioned way, I think that it will be essentially impossible to do so both as a practical matter and a political one. Nobody would stand to have their right to have sex restricted, and it would be pretty much impossible to implement anyway.
I'm a bit dubious about a permanent ban on cloning, but a medium term moratorium seems like a very reasonable precaution. While it was initially believed that clones were going to be genetically perfect copies of their progenitors, there's always been some suspicion that there might be problems with the cells they've started from. Now it looks as though there genuinely are some problems with the clones having reduced viability, so there are some very serious long term health issues to clear up. It only makes sense to put a hold on human cloning until the clones are actually likely to be as healthy as an ordinary baby, the same way that other medical procedures are not permitted until their safety is adequately demonstrated.
One thing that I haven't seen mentioned yet is that books are easier to read than monitors. Monitors just can't match a book's DPI, and the higher resolution of the printed page can actually improve reading speed and retention and reduce eye strain. That may or may not be a big issue for you, but it can be a big deal and a reasonable justification for the extra expense. Another advantage of a printed book is that the author has already gone to the trouble of cobbling together the data for you so that you don't have to spend your time scrounging the web for it; if you're a consultant getting paid $100 per hour it doesn't take much time scouring the web for information to add up to more than the cost of the book.
OT Note: the correct term is tome (from the Greek word meaning to cut, and the same root as in medical procedures ending in -otomy, as tomes were originally produced by cutting a long scroll into smaller sections) not tomb (which is where somebody is buried).
Actually, in a lot of cases the journals do wind up with the rights to the article when all is said and done. Signing over copyright is a standard part of getting something published. The authors are even nominally supposed to buy reprints from the journal if they want to send them out to people, rather than just running off copies or printing out from PDF files. Hell, I was actually amazed last year when I found out that I was getting paid in exchange for the copyright to something I had written (though my institution wound up requiring me to sign over the check since the work had been written on company time). Often it's the other way around; the researcher pays page charges to get the work published and still has to sign over his copyright to the journal.
So what happens when you run out of space for dead trees? This is not a silly or irrelevant question; it's an issue that real world libraries face all the time. I can tell you that the library at my institution is getting rid of old journals, cutting back on subscriptions in some areas, and the like just because they lack physical space to store the paper. Who cares if it will last forever if it can't be kept forever because of space constraints?