The internet isn't a game at all, so what does this last comment actually mean?
It means that the internet isn't a pie of a fixed size, where the only way to get more of it is to take it away from somebody else. The creation of corporate web sites has not eliminated the right of ordinary people to create the web sites that they want to make (litigation aside). If Disney wants to create a massive web portal that draws 1 billion hits per day, it has zero impact on my ability to create my goldfish cam page.
We had a chance, an opportunity, for a commerce free web, an
arena of equality and information. But we did not grasp it, we did not show enough imagination. It is our fault, us, the geeks, that the commercial
corporations are taking the initiative and providing the internet that the common man wants.
What a crock of shit. If geeks are incapable of creating the internet that the common man wants, just how exactly are the supposed to stop somebody else from stepping in and creating it? Think about it. You have roughly three choices:
The net is restricted to geeks who can keep commerce out. The goal of it being an arena of equality and opportunity is not possible because only geeks are allowed in.
Geeks try to provide a web that the common man likes. You claim that geeks are only interested in dry academia, and thus incapable of building such a web.
The web is open and non-geeks step in to provide the content that the common man wants (the current situation). You complain because it's commercialized.
Guess what. None of these scenarios results in the open, wonderful, commerce free web you want. It's impossible for the web to be both open and to keep corporations out.
Anyway, who cares? The dry, academic, non-commercial side of the web is still there for the people who want it. There are tons of academic papers, personal web pages, and all of the kinds of things that existed on the web before it was corporatized. In fact, in many ways it's better than before it was corporatized because there are now vastly better authoring and content management tools available to the common man because corporations needed them to develop their web content. And there's also the flashy, whizz band side of the net that the people who don't want the dry academic stuff are interested in.
In a word, no. Think of it this way. To authenticate this way, there has to be some system by which the server requests authentication from the client and the client responds with the checksum or other security code. But the means of carrying out this challenge-response has to be included in the client code, which is GPLed. That means that at least a cheater can read the code, and figure out how to force the client to respond to a pseudo-server under his control. He the has the authentication code that the client sends back to the server.
From this point it's easy. He just rewrites the "return authentication code" routine so that it sends back the known value, rather than the value derived from the checksum of the actual compiled code. Now he can hack the code to his heart's content and the server will continue to think that it's talking to a valid client.
On the other hand, easy scriptability is a game defect. If a game can be "mastered" by writing a script, then the game is uninteresting -- deterministic -- a solved problem, and playing the game is going to get boring after a while.
Like chess, right? Basically, home computer "scripts" play chess better than most people, and the best computers play better than any person. Is chess boring?
Well, a reasonable person could claim that yes, chess is deterministic. You always start from the same position, the rules are comparatively simple, and there are no random elements at all. If that's not deterministic, I don't know what is. And in any case, it's not as though programing a chess computer that can take on a good human player is exactly trivial, either. When you start throwing in rules that are significantly more complex than chess- like just about any decent war game- and designing an AI that can beat a competent human opponent becomes much more difficult. When you start adding in the possibility of social interactions ("Hey, there's a killer bot. Lets gang up on it so it doesn't wipe up out one at a time") and it may prove very difficult to make a really capable bot.
This won't stop people from writing scripts to do things like camp on a spawn point and wait for items to appear. If you couple it with other game
mechanics (ie, cost to train/study, time for training/practice, finding a trainer/teacher, etc.) it might help eliminate the abuses. Then again, it could lead to
entirely new abuses...
Wait a second. Are you actually suggesting using clever game design to solve a problem instead of a techno-fix? What kind of heretic are you?
It seems to me that this boils down to how old your boss is.
It also depends on your boss's attitude, and also to some extent on how you act outside of direct work behavior. I happen to work for two supervisors, both of whom are old enough to be one of my parents, but both seem to respect me. Part of that is because they're both smart enough to respect ability regardless of age, but part of it is because I've been told that I act older than most people my age. If you buckle down and act like the people who are 10 years older than you are while you're at work, maybe your boss will treat you like you're 10 years older than you are.
Actually, to roll your own without exposing yourself to side attacks is really difficult.
Not really. Take a look at the RFC2040 description of the RC5 algorithm. It includes C reference implementations for just about every part of RC5, so that a programer would just have to stitch them together to create a useful program. Nor is this a singular example; IIRC part of the requirement for the new advanced encryption algorithm developed by the US was that there be a published, freely available reference implementation. I didn't bother to look, but I'll bet that there's similarly available information about well established asymmetric cyphers like RSA. This stuff is published and can't be unpublished.
Only outlaws will use encryption. I know it's an old saw, but how exactly is banning encryption supposed to stop terrorists from using it? The mathematical basis for most algorithms is still out there, and just about anyone reasonably competent at programming can roll their own. Not to mention that software can legally be written in countries other than the US, so unilateral action won't do any good anway. The genie is out of the bottle, and it can't be put back in.
While most of the attacks described do sound like they require fairly intense effort, the general vulernability of the CRC sounds like a serious problem. It means that a clever attacker can send duplicate packets to a destination of his choice, which is not at all nice. It also sounds as though it validates the objection that the designers lacked appropriate knowledge of cryptography. Any kind of hashing function would eliminate that problem while still achieving the goal of protecting data integrity.
The fact is, if noone else has done enough, you only have one choice.
No, you don't have only one choice. You have at least three choices: do nothing and continue complaining about the lack of alternatives, switch to Microsoft, or help to develop a non-MS alternative. Remember that if nobody had decided that working on *BSD/Linux/whatever was worthwhile because Microsoft had the market locked up, those potential alternative wouldn't exist. And I'm willing to bet that WinterKnight isn't the only Hebrew speaker in the world who wants a non-MS alternative, so there are going to be other people to help develop Hebrew support for other Operating Systems.
I was raised speaking basque, and NO operating systems support my language. SO I have been forced to learn
English. But the benefits far outweigh the penalties. I say quit crying and use the best tool for the job. Even if it's the
only tool. Even if it's MS.
Why not work to develop a better tool instead? The only way there will ever be an alternative to unpleasant choices is if somebody stands up and develops one. If you want Basque support, develop some. People have bothered to develop Esperanto support, so it should certainly be possible to do the same for an "easy" language like Basque.
Analysis is not the be-all of solving problems in this world, even in "rational" fields like science. Experience, too, plays a key role, and here memory is key. Many are those "eureka" moments when your brain, for some reason, connects two things together and you leap forward. Te more "stuff" you remember, the more your brain can draw on here. Without that library of experience, it's like you're solving a new problem every time from scratch.
But experience and analysis are two sides of the same coin. Experience as you describe it is simply the unconscious analysis of a body of facts to find the underlying principles. The important facet of memory involved is the ability to integrate those facts, not the kind of instant recall that's generally thought of as representing great memory. IOW, it's remembering that a particular result tends to follow from a type of action that's important, not inconsequential details.
IMO, this kind of complaint really represents a deep problem in both science and education. In many cases, the things that we really want to find out about are deep and difficult to measure, so we substitute simpler, easier to measure tests. We test whether students can regurgitate facts, rather than whether they can use their knowledge to solve practical problems, because practical problems take too long to make for easy classroom tests. We perform simple experiments to measure correlation because proving causation is too difficult. Eventually we forget that our real goal is the deeper, harder to measure thing and focus exclusively on the surface measurement, to our great detriment.
Activities other than copying, distribution and modification are not covered by this License; they are outside its scope.
The act of running the Program is not restricted, and the output from the Program is covered only if its contents constitute a work based on the Program (independent of having been made by running the Program)
[emphasis is mine]
That makes it pretty clear that the GPL does not restrict you from running the program. If you don't want to copy, modify, or redistribute the software you can just ignore the GPL, because it applies only to those areas.
This is at best stupid and at worst counter to the spirit and word of the GPL. There's no point in refusing license to people who won't accept the GPL, because accepting the GPL only grants rights. It's not as though users gain some advantage by denying the GPL- although that also means that adding "you must accept the GPL" is hardly an imposition. After all, as long as the user doesn't try to redistribute the software it's impossible to tell if he's actually accepted the GPL or not. Hell, the GPL itself states explicitly that:
Activities other than copying, distribution and modification are not covered by this License; they are outside its scope. The act of running the Program is not restricted, and the output from the Program is covered only if its contents constitute a work based on the Program (independent of having been made by running the Program)
That means that you can't violate the GPL just by running the program, so if you accept that you've agreed to the GPL so long as you comply with its terms, simple use of the program can't constitute a violation.
Well Duh! They're suing somebody who doesn't have the money to afford as good lawyers as Microsoft. Do you think the case is actually likely to be won based on evidence or something? Hell, the case pretty clearly isn't going to go to trial- Apple sent a cease and desist letter, and the target ceased and desisted. Who cares if you're actually likely to win at trial if you can bully the other guy to the point that he gives up before you even get there?
Or you can design ways to monitor possible covert channels and alert computer security if something suspicious is going on. This should actually work pretty well together with various covert bandwidth reduction approaches. If you can reduce bandwidth to, say, 1 bit/second, it will take several minutes to send even the most trivial message covertly, and that should give you plenty of time to notify the bandwidth police to monitor the situation and stop it if something fishy is going on. And if you save all of your critical data as MS Word files, it will take all day to get through the endless Word headers and make it to the vital data;-)
Because it undermines a lot of the advantages of having a single system. If you allocate each separate VM a fixed percentage of system resources, you also prevent one process from being able to access complete system resources if none of the other ones are using them. IOW, if you have 2 VMs on a system and each is allocated equal resources, you won't ever be able to go over 50% usage with a single process. Admittedly, that may be acceptable in a system where you have a small number of separate security compartments, but if you have 10 different compartments on a single machine, it's just not acceptable to restrict each of them to 10% or less of system resources at all times.
In practice, it would probably be acceptable to go to a moderately coarse grained resource allocation scheme that would limit covert channel bandwidth (the secure computing guidelines suggest that any channel that can transmit data about as fast as a person can type is critical) and then audit any remaining channels. You may actually be better off letting people think they're getting away with something and catching them then shutting off something you know about and letting them find out about something you don't know about.
It seems to me that this approach would still be very succeptible to various forms of covert timing channels. Since the different systems are running on the same hardware, you could still signal between them by having one system hog system resources or not as a way of signaling bits to the other system. There was some discussion of this approach to covert channels in this discussion here on slashdot.
Essentially, the article says that Raskin doesn't like MacOS X, MS Windows, or any other general purpose operating system for that matter, because he thinks that computers should be pure appliances, relieving the user of having to worry about mundanities like file storage or program launching, rather than infinitely mutable environments. Raskin is a visionary, which is a good thing, but it means that he is concentrating on the future possabilities of ideal computer interfaces, while missing the more prosaic uses of technology today.
But the real problem is that it's not clear how many of these difficulties can really be solved with an optimal human interface. As long as people want a machine that is capable of performing multiple functions (and the trend certainly seems to be more in the direction of increased, rather than decreased functionality) the choice of available capabilities is an essential difficulty. You can't get around it. You must present the user with an interface that allows him to choose what he wants to do, and if there are 100 choices you have to have a system that lets him pick from those choices efficiently.
The same thing is true of documents, resources, web sites, etc. If I'm going to use a word processor, I have to be able to pick the document I'm going to work on. If that means choosing among thousands of documents, the computer has to have an efficient system for letting me sort through thousands of documents. You just aren't going to get around a need for some kind of filing system (even if it isn't heirarchical like most existing today) and a way to access it.
You're not giving anyone more usability through this. You're giving people something close to PalmOS on a computer, which a few might like, but many would disapprove of. What happens when I want to have two spreadsheets open? do I have two of my keyboard buttons allocated now, or is this even possible? Multitasking on a user level gets thrown out the window with a system like this, and that's a loss in functionality.
And at a deeper level, you're really throwing away the idea of user expertise. This is the think that bothers me about a lot of the ideas presented by MacOS developers. They seem to think that it's worthwhile to spend a huge amount of effort to develop systems to make computers easy to use, when a few hours of training will do the job. It's not as though learning to push the start button, going to programs, MS Office, Excel is really so complex that somebody can't pick it up with a bit of training. Most people who use a computer enough to want something more than a single-purpose appliance are going to wind up spending a lot of time using it. It isn't unreasonable to expect them to spend a few minutes learning the basics.
Besides, I've got an even more radical idea. Instead of pushing a specific button to get the program you want, we'll have a special area of the screen. When you select it, you can just type the name of the program you want to run, and the OS will pop that program right up. I think I'll call it a command line interface.
Please. The environmental regs are a small part of the problem.
This is very true. There was a recent article in the LA Times which pointed out that there is a grand total of 1 powerplant in the state which is operating at any reduced capacity because of environmental regulations, and that one had refused to participate in a program that would have allowed it to operate at 100% had it wanted to. The NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) syndrome has a lot more to do with it than environmental regs. Nobody wants a power plant near them, and California is full enough so that makes it tough to find anywhere in the state to put one. When people discover that comparatively clean powerplants can generate a lot of local jobs, they'll be much more willing to let them be built.
This is a classic example of a "generated shortage." There's enough power in California, but almost 10,000 MW of generation is "offline for maintenance." And has been for a year.
This is at best a distortion. It's true that there are plants off-line for maintenance, but that happens every winter. Plants can't run 24/7/365, and there is some work that requires plants to be down for extended periods, rather than just at night. The generators cleverly schedule this for periods (like the winter) when peak demand is low so that it doesn't completely hose the grid. The problem right now is that:
Power consumption is higher this year than last year because of population growth
Power consumption is higher this year because it's been an unusually cold winter in California
More plants are off-line than usual because they ran harder than normal to meet last summer's power crisis
The utilities are having trouble convincing power suppliers to sell them power because the producers are (rightly) worried about getting paid when the utilities go bankrupt
The current power crisis is the result of a number of factors, and is not just the product of a big conspiracy among power producers to drive up prices.
Oh, come on. Everyone knows that you can't possibly patent the Internet, because Al Gore has clearly established prior art. It was on the news so much that even patent examiners who have been buried in hole to prevent them from knowing anything about anything that's been invented before should know about it.
(Note to the humor impaired: I do realize that the Al Gore inventing the Internet thing was a misquote. This is intended to be funny.)
The DMCA essentially allows corporations to create new laws on their own.
Of course this is scarcely exclusive to the DMCA. There are a lot of attempts underway by various interests that would allow them to defacto write their own laws about their products. Shrinkwrap licenses are another excellent example. If a company is allowed to place restrictions in addition to copyright as required conditions of gaining access to their products, then they are effectively allowed to legislate additions to copyright. Hell, if shrinkwrap licenses are deemed to be legal, those companies don't really need copyright protection either; they can just put "no copying for any reason" as one of their shrinkwrap terms and they've gotten all the protection of copyright and then some. It's ludicrous.
Re:Microsoft can't do anything about free..
on
Linux Is Going Down
·
· Score: 1
And the Ramen worm depended on security holes that had been patched long before. The only people who were effected were those who hadn't bothered to apply the patches in the several months between when they had come out and when the worm was developed. Yes it would have been nice if the holes had never existed, but considering the number of times that MS complains about a security problem not being real because it was a result of users not applying patches, you'd think it would only be fair to give the other guy a break in the same situation.
Slashdot Mirror
It means that the internet isn't a pie of a fixed size, where the only way to get more of it is to take it away from somebody else. The creation of corporate web sites has not eliminated the right of ordinary people to create the web sites that they want to make (litigation aside). If Disney wants to create a massive web portal that draws 1 billion hits per day, it has zero impact on my ability to create my goldfish cam page.
What a crock of shit. If geeks are incapable of creating the internet that the common man wants, just how exactly are the supposed to stop somebody else from stepping in and creating it? Think about it. You have roughly three choices:
Guess what. None of these scenarios results in the open, wonderful, commerce free web you want. It's impossible for the web to be both open and to keep corporations out.
Anyway, who cares? The dry, academic, non-commercial side of the web is still there for the people who want it. There are tons of academic papers, personal web pages, and all of the kinds of things that existed on the web before it was corporatized. In fact, in many ways it's better than before it was corporatized because there are now vastly better authoring and content management tools available to the common man because corporations needed them to develop their web content. And there's also the flashy, whizz band side of the net that the people who don't want the dry academic stuff are interested in.
In a word, no. Think of it this way. To authenticate this way, there has to be some system by which the server requests authentication from the client and the client responds with the checksum or other security code. But the means of carrying out this challenge-response has to be included in the client code, which is GPLed. That means that at least a cheater can read the code, and figure out how to force the client to respond to a pseudo-server under his control. He the has the authentication code that the client sends back to the server. From this point it's easy. He just rewrites the "return authentication code" routine so that it sends back the known value, rather than the value derived from the checksum of the actual compiled code. Now he can hack the code to his heart's content and the server will continue to think that it's talking to a valid client.
Well, a reasonable person could claim that yes, chess is deterministic. You always start from the same position, the rules are comparatively simple, and there are no random elements at all. If that's not deterministic, I don't know what is. And in any case, it's not as though programing a chess computer that can take on a good human player is exactly trivial, either. When you start throwing in rules that are significantly more complex than chess- like just about any decent war game- and designing an AI that can beat a competent human opponent becomes much more difficult. When you start adding in the possibility of social interactions ("Hey, there's a killer bot. Lets gang up on it so it doesn't wipe up out one at a time") and it may prove very difficult to make a really capable bot.
Wait a second. Are you actually suggesting using clever game design to solve a problem instead of a techno-fix? What kind of heretic are you?
It also depends on your boss's attitude, and also to some extent on how you act outside of direct work behavior. I happen to work for two supervisors, both of whom are old enough to be one of my parents, but both seem to respect me. Part of that is because they're both smart enough to respect ability regardless of age, but part of it is because I've been told that I act older than most people my age. If you buckle down and act like the people who are 10 years older than you are while you're at work, maybe your boss will treat you like you're 10 years older than you are.
Not really. Take a look at the RFC2040 description of the RC5 algorithm. It includes C reference implementations for just about every part of RC5, so that a programer would just have to stitch them together to create a useful program. Nor is this a singular example; IIRC part of the requirement for the new advanced encryption algorithm developed by the US was that there be a published, freely available reference implementation. I didn't bother to look, but I'll bet that there's similarly available information about well established asymmetric cyphers like RSA. This stuff is published and can't be unpublished.
Only outlaws will use encryption. I know it's an old saw, but how exactly is banning encryption supposed to stop terrorists from using it? The mathematical basis for most algorithms is still out there, and just about anyone reasonably competent at programming can roll their own. Not to mention that software can legally be written in countries other than the US, so unilateral action won't do any good anway. The genie is out of the bottle, and it can't be put back in.
While most of the attacks described do sound like they require fairly intense effort, the general vulernability of the CRC sounds like a serious problem. It means that a clever attacker can send duplicate packets to a destination of his choice, which is not at all nice. It also sounds as though it validates the objection that the designers lacked appropriate knowledge of cryptography. Any kind of hashing function would eliminate that problem while still achieving the goal of protecting data integrity.
No, you don't have only one choice. You have at least three choices: do nothing and continue complaining about the lack of alternatives, switch to Microsoft, or help to develop a non-MS alternative. Remember that if nobody had decided that working on *BSD/Linux/whatever was worthwhile because Microsoft had the market locked up, those potential alternative wouldn't exist. And I'm willing to bet that WinterKnight isn't the only Hebrew speaker in the world who wants a non-MS alternative, so there are going to be other people to help develop Hebrew support for other Operating Systems.
Why not work to develop a better tool instead? The only way there will ever be an alternative to unpleasant choices is if somebody stands up and develops one. If you want Basque support, develop some. People have bothered to develop Esperanto support, so it should certainly be possible to do the same for an "easy" language like Basque.
But experience and analysis are two sides of the same coin. Experience as you describe it is simply the unconscious analysis of a body of facts to find the underlying principles. The important facet of memory involved is the ability to integrate those facts, not the kind of instant recall that's generally thought of as representing great memory. IOW, it's remembering that a particular result tends to follow from a type of action that's important, not inconsequential details.
IMO, this kind of complaint really represents a deep problem in both science and education. In many cases, the things that we really want to find out about are deep and difficult to measure, so we substitute simpler, easier to measure tests. We test whether students can regurgitate facts, rather than whether they can use their knowledge to solve practical problems, because practical problems take too long to make for easy classroom tests. We perform simple experiments to measure correlation because proving causation is too difficult. Eventually we forget that our real goal is the deeper, harder to measure thing and focus exclusively on the surface measurement, to our great detriment.
Perhaps you should RTFL. The GPL states:
[emphasis is mine]That makes it pretty clear that the GPL does not restrict you from running the program. If you don't want to copy, modify, or redistribute the software you can just ignore the GPL, because it applies only to those areas.
This is at best stupid and at worst counter to the spirit and word of the GPL. There's no point in refusing license to people who won't accept the GPL, because accepting the GPL only grants rights. It's not as though users gain some advantage by denying the GPL- although that also means that adding "you must accept the GPL" is hardly an imposition. After all, as long as the user doesn't try to redistribute the software it's impossible to tell if he's actually accepted the GPL or not. Hell, the GPL itself states explicitly that:
That means that you can't violate the GPL just by running the program, so if you accept that you've agreed to the GPL so long as you comply with its terms, simple use of the program can't constitute a violation.
Don't you actually mean litigate, not legislate? After all, we're talking about a lawsuit, here, not something that Congress is doing.
Well Duh! They're suing somebody who doesn't have the money to afford as good lawyers as Microsoft. Do you think the case is actually likely to be won based on evidence or something? Hell, the case pretty clearly isn't going to go to trial- Apple sent a cease and desist letter, and the target ceased and desisted. Who cares if you're actually likely to win at trial if you can bully the other guy to the point that he gives up before you even get there?
Or you can design ways to monitor possible covert channels and alert computer security if something suspicious is going on. This should actually work pretty well together with various covert bandwidth reduction approaches. If you can reduce bandwidth to, say, 1 bit/second, it will take several minutes to send even the most trivial message covertly, and that should give you plenty of time to notify the bandwidth police to monitor the situation and stop it if something fishy is going on. And if you save all of your critical data as MS Word files, it will take all day to get through the endless Word headers and make it to the vital data ;-)
Because it undermines a lot of the advantages of having a single system. If you allocate each separate VM a fixed percentage of system resources, you also prevent one process from being able to access complete system resources if none of the other ones are using them. IOW, if you have 2 VMs on a system and each is allocated equal resources, you won't ever be able to go over 50% usage with a single process. Admittedly, that may be acceptable in a system where you have a small number of separate security compartments, but if you have 10 different compartments on a single machine, it's just not acceptable to restrict each of them to 10% or less of system resources at all times.
In practice, it would probably be acceptable to go to a moderately coarse grained resource allocation scheme that would limit covert channel bandwidth (the secure computing guidelines suggest that any channel that can transmit data about as fast as a person can type is critical) and then audit any remaining channels. You may actually be better off letting people think they're getting away with something and catching them then shutting off something you know about and letting them find out about something you don't know about.
It seems to me that this approach would still be very succeptible to various forms of covert timing channels. Since the different systems are running on the same hardware, you could still signal between them by having one system hog system resources or not as a way of signaling bits to the other system. There was some discussion of this approach to covert channels in this discussion here on slashdot.
But the real problem is that it's not clear how many of these difficulties can really be solved with an optimal human interface. As long as people want a machine that is capable of performing multiple functions (and the trend certainly seems to be more in the direction of increased, rather than decreased functionality) the choice of available capabilities is an essential difficulty. You can't get around it. You must present the user with an interface that allows him to choose what he wants to do, and if there are 100 choices you have to have a system that lets him pick from those choices efficiently.
The same thing is true of documents, resources, web sites, etc. If I'm going to use a word processor, I have to be able to pick the document I'm going to work on. If that means choosing among thousands of documents, the computer has to have an efficient system for letting me sort through thousands of documents. You just aren't going to get around a need for some kind of filing system (even if it isn't heirarchical like most existing today) and a way to access it.
And at a deeper level, you're really throwing away the idea of user expertise. This is the think that bothers me about a lot of the ideas presented by MacOS developers. They seem to think that it's worthwhile to spend a huge amount of effort to develop systems to make computers easy to use, when a few hours of training will do the job. It's not as though learning to push the start button, going to programs, MS Office, Excel is really so complex that somebody can't pick it up with a bit of training. Most people who use a computer enough to want something more than a single-purpose appliance are going to wind up spending a lot of time using it. It isn't unreasonable to expect them to spend a few minutes learning the basics.
Besides, I've got an even more radical idea. Instead of pushing a specific button to get the program you want, we'll have a special area of the screen. When you select it, you can just type the name of the program you want to run, and the OS will pop that program right up. I think I'll call it a command line interface.
This is very true. There was a recent article in the LA Times which pointed out that there is a grand total of 1 powerplant in the state which is operating at any reduced capacity because of environmental regulations, and that one had refused to participate in a program that would have allowed it to operate at 100% had it wanted to. The NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) syndrome has a lot more to do with it than environmental regs. Nobody wants a power plant near them, and California is full enough so that makes it tough to find anywhere in the state to put one. When people discover that comparatively clean powerplants can generate a lot of local jobs, they'll be much more willing to let them be built.
This is at best a distortion. It's true that there are plants off-line for maintenance, but that happens every winter. Plants can't run 24/7/365, and there is some work that requires plants to be down for extended periods, rather than just at night. The generators cleverly schedule this for periods (like the winter) when peak demand is low so that it doesn't completely hose the grid. The problem right now is that:
The current power crisis is the result of a number of factors, and is not just the product of a big conspiracy among power producers to drive up prices.
Oh, come on. Everyone knows that you can't possibly patent the Internet, because Al Gore has clearly established prior art. It was on the news so much that even patent examiners who have been buried in hole to prevent them from knowing anything about anything that's been invented before should know about it.
(Note to the humor impaired: I do realize that the Al Gore inventing the Internet thing was a misquote. This is intended to be funny.)
Of course this is scarcely exclusive to the DMCA. There are a lot of attempts underway by various interests that would allow them to defacto write their own laws about their products. Shrinkwrap licenses are another excellent example. If a company is allowed to place restrictions in addition to copyright as required conditions of gaining access to their products, then they are effectively allowed to legislate additions to copyright. Hell, if shrinkwrap licenses are deemed to be legal, those companies don't really need copyright protection either; they can just put "no copying for any reason" as one of their shrinkwrap terms and they've gotten all the protection of copyright and then some. It's ludicrous.
And the Ramen worm depended on security holes that had been patched long before. The only people who were effected were those who hadn't bothered to apply the patches in the several months between when they had come out and when the worm was developed. Yes it would have been nice if the holes had never existed, but considering the number of times that MS complains about a security problem not being real because it was a result of users not applying patches, you'd think it would only be fair to give the other guy a break in the same situation.