"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
WIPO is neither the "States" nor "the People". Thus WIPO has zero legal power in the USA to enforce anything and its rulings are not at all binding on US citizens or residents.
That's great, except that these are issues that the Constitution specifically delegated to the Federal Government. The Federal Government is specifically set to be in charge of:
Regulating interstate commerce
Regulating international trade
Dealing with intellectual property issues such as patents and copyrights
Making legally binding treaties with other countries
The internet certainly counts as interstate and international commerce by any rational view of what those terms mean. That gives the Federal Government the power to regulate it. If the Government wants to designate authority for resolving domain name disputes to an international body like the WIPO, that is its decision to make.
You really ought to read up on legality and constitutionality before saying nonsense like that. It's not as though the treaty just magically appeared one day and claimed jurisdiction over the U.S. It was signed by the President and ratified by Congress, which makes it a part of U.S. civil law.
What'd be really great is if 'use strict;' were the norm, and 'no strict;' were the exception, in Perl6... but then probably only 20% of older code would fly, and -e would be horrid.
There's no particular reason why you couldn't handle this. For instance you could have strict be the default unless you're running -e, and set it to ignore use strict when it sees it and strict is already on. One of the nice things about Perl is that Perl people aren't generally zealots about the evils of having the language do things the right way automagically, so nobody would throw a fit over making things work that way.
Sure some scripts that won't run under strict would break, but A) they should be running under strict anyway and B) it would take about 2 seconds to add a no strict to the front of them. Neither of your objections is serious enough to be a real roadblock to making strict the default mode, and hopefully the writers will see it that way when it comes time to code Perl6.
Of course not. Mulder has never been particularly stable. I actually get the impression that people who are serious about this stuff actually don't want a stable version of Mulder. If you want stability, you should try something related like Scully-10.13.
Speak for yourself, not for others. I have actually put my money where my mouth is by buying a small, fuel efficient car rather than an SUV- and no it's not because I couldn't afford an SUV. Of course my economy car actually got better crash test ratings than a lot of mid-sized SUV's, so I'm not actually giving that much up.
I don't understand how you say this 33% gain in fuel economy is more significant than the Insight's ~70% gain? I guess you are saying that if you are drive x miles in either vehicle, you will reduce the volume of gas used more in the Chrysler (33% of a huge number is more than 70% of a much smaller number), but that seems a bit on the perverse way of looking at things...
It's not a perverse way of looking at things at all. The goal of high fuel efficiency is to reduce total gasoline consumption. Converting a behemoth from execrable gas milage to merely bad has a much bigger impact on total gas consumption than moving a car from really good gas milage to phenomenal. This is similar to the (unfortunately ignored) point that pollution reduction can be accomplished more cheaply by removing a handful of gross polluters from the streets than by requiring all new cars to be pollution free. Overall it's much easier and more effective to fix the biggest offenders (in either fuel consumption or pollution) than to require the cars that are already really good to get even better.
Well, two obvious examples are web browsers (the first were free software, followed by proprietaries like Netscape and IE) and the various proprietary Unixes (most of which were built on BSD).
They might include BSD code, but people who offer their code under BSD-style licenses don't have a moral objection to proprietary software.
Sure, but it doesn't erase the issue (which the original poster raised) of lack of originality. Just because somebody says that it's fine to copy his work doesn't mean that it's not unoriginal to do so.
Furthermore, I'm not sure that all uses of BSD style licenses necessarily reflect a willingness to allow proprietary versions. My general impression is that the BSD license wasn't created with that in mind because nobody really thought about the issue when it first came out. The GPL was created later as a way of addressing some of the (perceived) problems with BSD-style licensing. I suspect, though I'm not sure, that if the writers of BSD Unix might have chosen a more restrictive license if they had been able to forsee the fractured nature of Unix that the freedom of the BSD license allowed.
My reason for having an SUV is simple: I will survive a collision.
Yeah, but unfortunately you're also driving a behemoth with lousy steering, brakes, and acceleration compared to those "deathboxes". While it is frequently possible to determine blame in accidents, that doesn't mean that those accidents were inevitable products of one driver's incompetence. In most accidents, the correct action by the not-at-fault driver could have avoided or at least mitigated the accident. The superior maneverability, accelaration, and brakes of nimbler cars can help tremendously in this.
Apparently Chrysler is looking at hybrids for, of all things, SUVs. The use a somewhat different system, with the gas engine driving the rear wheels and the electric motor driving the front wheels (when needed). This apparently simplifies it a lot and makes the system cost only about $3000. They can get away with a lot by doing this, too; they can use a V-6 instead of a V-8, don't need a 4WD system, etc.
They claim that it boosts gas mileage from about 12 mpg to about 16 mpg, which is actually a more significant gain in terms of total gas consumption than moving from the Civic HX's 35/42 to the Insight's 60/71. With gas prices where they are, they can't justify the system based on fuel savings alone, but it may pay for itself with a combination of gas savings, reduced gas guzzler tax, and improvements to the Corporate Average Fuel Economy. Certainly if the Government starts increasing the gas tax or bumping fuel economy standards, this may be a reasonable choice.
Good luck getting one for that price, though. I recently bought a new Honda (Civic HX, since I am interested in gas mileage) and took a look at the Insight they had on display. They had marked it up by $2000 over MSRP, apparently because they thought they could get away with charging that much. That has to piss Honda off pretty badly, because AFAIK they're selling for below cost in an attempt to spark some sales.
The real question is why it took as long as it did for this to come out into the open. Judge Kaplan has to have known what he did in the past; he should have recused himself at the very start of the trial. Did he really think that it was OK to preside over a trial where he had consulted for the plaintif on matters of relevance to the trial in the past?
I am criticizing its tendency to follow, not lead: How many projects announced on Freshmeat or hosted on SourceForge exist as 'Free' alternatives to already existing proprietary software?
There's an important flip side to this; look at how many pieces of proprietary software started out as clones, or even descendents, of free software. The idea of taking ideas from one world and applying them to the other is a very, very old one, and its hardly a one way street. If anything, it's been a lot harder to make free versions of proprietary software than vice versa because the proprietary companies can start on the backs of free code (what the GPL was intended to stop).
Actually, this is much, much better than if they had decided to announce a bunch of new TLD's. The big problem with the current system is that it's essentially ad hoc, and just coming up with some new TLDs wouldn't have helped that. Instead, they appear to have decided that there needs to be a formal process for generating new TLDs.
This has two big advantages for the system. For one thing, it means that the registrars for the new TLDs will actually have to have a plan and a reason for being. Rather than just coming up with some new TLDs, they'll have to justify why their new TLD is worth adding. For another thing, it means that the process will now be regularized and not necessarily require high level action to approve new TLDs. That means that as a new need arises it will be much, much faster to fill it with a new TLD.
One last thing, is the GPL really considered to be the free-est license around? I am not expert or even that informed, but I was understand that the BSD license took that title? Anyone offer a little help with it?
Are you deliberately trying to start a holy war?
Honestly, though, which license is the most free is as much a question of what you consider to be free as it is an objective matter of what each license allows. The BSD license does, in fact, allow people to do more with your software, so you could claim that it is thus more free than the GPL. OTOH, one of the things that it allows is for people to make non-free derivatives of your software, which the GPL does not allow. Some people thus claim that this makes the GPL better because it preserves software freedom, which the BSD license does not.
The real issue about licenses is why you're planning on freeing the software. I think that in Sun's case they're making the software free because they don't want to spend as much on development as it would probably take to make a version of Star Office that's as good as they want. My general impression is that their long term strategy is to develop a version of Star Office that will be managed by an application server- presumably in many cases run on Sun hardware- and replaces the need for separate copies on each desktop. They have probably decided that they want to develop it more rapidly than they can with in-house resources, so they want to open the source and let other people hack it.
With a BSD-style license, though, some of those people could turn around and make a closed source derivative that would compete with Sun's variant, which is presumably what they want to stop. Thus the GPL, which preserves a fixed level of software freedom, is probably better suited to their purpose than a "free-er" license like BSD that would allow non-free derivatives. IOW, the GPL is better suited to their purposes because the way in which it is less free than BSD is exactly the lack of freedom that Sun wants.
Not only that, but they're being moderately paranoid about the whole thing, probably in a reasonable attempt to prevent ballot stuffing. You have both an assigned password, which you receive via email, and an assigned PIN, which you get via mail. Anything official that you do requires both of them, and it appears that you're not allowed to change them or use a username instead of a user number. If you lose your PIN, they'll send it to you only via snail mail, and IIRC they use this to prevent more than one person from registering per postal address.
I just got done activating my membership. Now I can vote for board members. Woo Hoo! Honestly, though, I'd encourage everyone who's interested to sign up. If you don't, but keep complaining about how ICANN is screwing up, you're just like the people who bitch about the mistakes the government makes and then fail to vote.
It also looks as though they're not completely brain-dead on the topic of trademark infringement and/or cybersquatting. One of their criteria for evaluating the proposals of new domain registrars is their treament of the following:
measures proposed for minimizing use of the TLD to carry out infringements or other abuses of intellectual property rights.
IOW, if you want to register new TLDs, you'd better have a plan for how you're going to prevent trademark infringement and cybersquatting. It's too bad that they can't go back and apply those criteria retroactively to their existing registrars for.com,.net, and.org.
Seriously, what's the f***ing point? Of course all the major companies will squat on all the new domains as well (think etoys.gnu, etoys.rob, etoys.sux and so on) because they don't have a choice if they want to preserve brand recognition.
This isn't necessarily so. The problem with some of the existing TLD's is that they don't have any clear criteria for who will and won't be allowed to register a domain. Essentially anyone is allowed to register a.com address, so it's essential to preempt anyone else from getting desired domain names.
But if the FSF gets their wish to have a.gnu TLD, they can (and probably will be required to by ICANN) have a strict policy about what one has to do to qualify for a.gnu address. You might, for instance, be required to have a software project with the name you intend to register that meets FSF guidelines as free software. Thus there couldn't be an etoys.gnu unless someone had a free software program called etoys, and the fact that it was a software program rather than an online toy merchant would be adequate defense against trademark infringement. Similarly, the registrar for.sux might very well require that the owner of a copyright is forbidden from owning the corresponding.sux domain. It's perfectly reasonable in serving the purpose of the TLD.
The point is that the whole problem with the existing system is that there's a real shortage of top level domains. This wasn't a problem when the current system was established, because people weren't setting up personal internet addresses or a zillion different addresses for the same company with different names for each product. Now, though, there's serious collision between any person named Barbie who wants to set up a personal web site and Mattel Corporation, and you know who's going to win in that kind of a showdown.
If, though, there were a.mine or.per domain for personal web sites, and a.prod domain for product names, it would be obvious to anyone that barbie.mine was the personal web site of someone named barbie and barbie.prod was the site for Barbie dolls. Then all you'd need is a little bit of case law (or legislation) to show that these sites are sufficiently distinctive that a trademark holder doesn't have to sue to take down personal web sites and a lot of problems go away.
Maybe it's because Macs use a different kind of mouse from PC's. To adapt the system to Unix/Linux all they have to do is write a new driver. For Mac, though, they actually have to go to the trouble of building a different piece of hardware.
Um, no. The site claims, at least, that the "template" is not reversible. They specifically mention that it's not possible to regenerate the fingerprint from the "template", and mention this as a privacy feature.
One of the best parts of the system is that it doesn't actually send a complete fingerprint scan to the computer. Instead, it crunches it down into a 500 byte "template" that can't be used to reconstruct the user's fingerprint. This seems intelligent both from the standpoint of minimizing necessary mouse-computer bandwidth and for their stated objective of protecting privacy. I guess that this is sort of like storing passwords using an MD5 hash.
The only problem I can see is that it seems as though it would be comparatively straightforward to spoof. All you'd need would be a hardware tap on the mouse plug and you could capture the fingerprint template as it's sent to the computer. Then you can log in as anyone else by reversing the transmission and sending their fingerprint template instead of your. Since it uses a standard PS/2 port, this shouldn't be too hard to engineer. I guess that you'll have to use this as a secondary system together with a password.
One point not made in the Slashdot comment is that Congress is also interested in the issue. House Majority Leader Dick Armey has asked the FBI to stop using Carnivore until 4th Ammendment issues have been looked at, and the House Judiciary Committee is holding hearings on the matter on July 24th. That means that this isn't just a lonely fight of a few privacy advocates; some big guns in the government are at least interested and asking the right kinds of questions.
Personally, I have a love-hate relationship with Orrin Hatch. Yes, he's sponsored some boneheaded legislation, the DMCA being the most recent major example, but he's also been a strong critic of Microsoft and now, holy of holies, the RIAA.
I find it a bit strange to be defending both Hatch and the DMCA, but it sounds as though Hatch has his heart in the right place and is upset because the DMCA isn't turning out the way that he intended. The goal of the DMCA was worthy enough; it was intended to encourage the distribution of information in digital format by providing some additional protections to counteract the easier copying of digital information. That it has failed to live up to its goals is an indication that it was poorly written, not poorly conceived.
In this case, Hatch is particularly upset because the RIAA seems to be trying to turn the purpose of the DMCA on its head. Rather than encouraging digital distribution, they're trying to use it to prevent digital distribution. At the same time they're trying to stamp on illicit distribution, they're absolutely refusing to initiate any sort of licit distribution. If I were in Hatch's position, I'd be pretty inclined to take the same stance.
Do remember that just because the RIAA web site says that ripping a CD that you own for personal use is not fair use doesn't make it so. At least some of the information on their web site about the legality of making copies for personal use was not simply a misinterpretation of the relevant statute but was actually 180 degrees wrong. They're apparently perfectly happy to lie through their teeth on their web site if it helps to convince people not to do things that might cost them money.
It seems that there seems to be one big point of disagreement about MP3's, which is whether they hurt music sales or not. One group suggests that they hurt sales by discouraging people from buying the album, while another suggests that they help sales by letting more people listen to the music. Another point of argument is that some people claim that a lot of downloads are just people getting copies of music they already own because they can't rip the music themselves.
To solve this combination of problems, I suggest the following:
CD's would be distributed with an extra data track containing pre-ripped and encoded MP3s of the music on the album. The artists would be free to decide the quality of the encoding at a level they felt comfortable would present their music well without making the full-quality versions on the CD tracks unnecessary.
Users would be free to trade the premade MP3s that came with the album with their friends, etc.
On each MP3 would be information not just about the album, but also about the artist's web site, where the listener can buy a copy of the full CD version.
I'm pretty sure that if this version were implemented that the legitimate, artist endorsed MP3s would pretty much displace illegitimate versions. That would guarantee that anyone who copied the song would know where to get the full version, which is exactly the kind of targeted advertizing that's most likely to succeed. Furthermore, the web site could contain information about the same artist's other albums, tour dates, merchandise, etc. providing further income potential.
Slashdot Mirror
That's great, except that these are issues that the Constitution specifically delegated to the Federal Government. The Federal Government is specifically set to be in charge of:
The internet certainly counts as interstate and international commerce by any rational view of what those terms mean. That gives the Federal Government the power to regulate it. If the Government wants to designate authority for resolving domain name disputes to an international body like the WIPO, that is its decision to make.
You really ought to read up on legality and constitutionality before saying nonsense like that. It's not as though the treaty just magically appeared one day and claimed jurisdiction over the U.S. It was signed by the President and ratified by Congress, which makes it a part of U.S. civil law.
There's no particular reason why you couldn't handle this. For instance you could have strict be the default unless you're running -e, and set it to ignore use strict when it sees it and strict is already on. One of the nice things about Perl is that Perl people aren't generally zealots about the evils of having the language do things the right way automagically, so nobody would throw a fit over making things work that way.
Sure some scripts that won't run under strict would break, but A) they should be running under strict anyway and B) it would take about 2 seconds to add a no strict to the front of them. Neither of your objections is serious enough to be a real roadblock to making strict the default mode, and hopefully the writers will see it that way when it comes time to code Perl6.
Of course not. Mulder has never been particularly stable. I actually get the impression that people who are serious about this stuff actually don't want a stable version of Mulder. If you want stability, you should try something related like Scully-10.13.
Speak for yourself, not for others. I have actually put my money where my mouth is by buying a small, fuel efficient car rather than an SUV- and no it's not because I couldn't afford an SUV. Of course my economy car actually got better crash test ratings than a lot of mid-sized SUV's, so I'm not actually giving that much up.
It's not a perverse way of looking at things at all. The goal of high fuel efficiency is to reduce total gasoline consumption. Converting a behemoth from execrable gas milage to merely bad has a much bigger impact on total gas consumption than moving a car from really good gas milage to phenomenal. This is similar to the (unfortunately ignored) point that pollution reduction can be accomplished more cheaply by removing a handful of gross polluters from the streets than by requiring all new cars to be pollution free. Overall it's much easier and more effective to fix the biggest offenders (in either fuel consumption or pollution) than to require the cars that are already really good to get even better.
Well, two obvious examples are web browsers (the first were free software, followed by proprietaries like Netscape and IE) and the various proprietary Unixes (most of which were built on BSD).
Sure, but it doesn't erase the issue (which the original poster raised) of lack of originality. Just because somebody says that it's fine to copy his work doesn't mean that it's not unoriginal to do so.
Furthermore, I'm not sure that all uses of BSD style licenses necessarily reflect a willingness to allow proprietary versions. My general impression is that the BSD license wasn't created with that in mind because nobody really thought about the issue when it first came out. The GPL was created later as a way of addressing some of the (perceived) problems with BSD-style licensing. I suspect, though I'm not sure, that if the writers of BSD Unix might have chosen a more restrictive license if they had been able to forsee the fractured nature of Unix that the freedom of the BSD license allowed.
Yeah, but unfortunately you're also driving a behemoth with lousy steering, brakes, and acceleration compared to those "deathboxes". While it is frequently possible to determine blame in accidents, that doesn't mean that those accidents were inevitable products of one driver's incompetence. In most accidents, the correct action by the not-at-fault driver could have avoided or at least mitigated the accident. The superior maneverability, accelaration, and brakes of nimbler cars can help tremendously in this.
Apparently Chrysler is looking at hybrids for, of all things, SUVs. The use a somewhat different system, with the gas engine driving the rear wheels and the electric motor driving the front wheels (when needed). This apparently simplifies it a lot and makes the system cost only about $3000. They can get away with a lot by doing this, too; they can use a V-6 instead of a V-8, don't need a 4WD system, etc.
They claim that it boosts gas mileage from about 12 mpg to about 16 mpg, which is actually a more significant gain in terms of total gas consumption than moving from the Civic HX's 35/42 to the Insight's 60/71. With gas prices where they are, they can't justify the system based on fuel savings alone, but it may pay for itself with a combination of gas savings, reduced gas guzzler tax, and improvements to the Corporate Average Fuel Economy. Certainly if the Government starts increasing the gas tax or bumping fuel economy standards, this may be a reasonable choice.
Good luck getting one for that price, though. I recently bought a new Honda (Civic HX, since I am interested in gas mileage) and took a look at the Insight they had on display. They had marked it up by $2000 over MSRP, apparently because they thought they could get away with charging that much. That has to piss Honda off pretty badly, because AFAIK they're selling for below cost in an attempt to spark some sales.
It's already been thought of. Unfortunately, IIRC, it made the keyboard feel really lousy and didn't help the battery life very much. C'est la vie.
The real question is why it took as long as it did for this to come out into the open. Judge Kaplan has to have known what he did in the past; he should have recused himself at the very start of the trial. Did he really think that it was OK to preside over a trial where he had consulted for the plaintif on matters of relevance to the trial in the past?
There's an important flip side to this; look at how many pieces of proprietary software started out as clones, or even descendents, of free software. The idea of taking ideas from one world and applying them to the other is a very, very old one, and its hardly a one way street. If anything, it's been a lot harder to make free versions of proprietary software than vice versa because the proprietary companies can start on the backs of free code (what the GPL was intended to stop).
Actually, this is much, much better than if they had decided to announce a bunch of new TLD's. The big problem with the current system is that it's essentially ad hoc, and just coming up with some new TLDs wouldn't have helped that. Instead, they appear to have decided that there needs to be a formal process for generating new TLDs.
This has two big advantages for the system. For one thing, it means that the registrars for the new TLDs will actually have to have a plan and a reason for being. Rather than just coming up with some new TLDs, they'll have to justify why their new TLD is worth adding. For another thing, it means that the process will now be regularized and not necessarily require high level action to approve new TLDs. That means that as a new need arises it will be much, much faster to fill it with a new TLD.
Are you deliberately trying to start a holy war?
Honestly, though, which license is the most free is as much a question of what you consider to be free as it is an objective matter of what each license allows. The BSD license does, in fact, allow people to do more with your software, so you could claim that it is thus more free than the GPL. OTOH, one of the things that it allows is for people to make non-free derivatives of your software, which the GPL does not allow. Some people thus claim that this makes the GPL better because it preserves software freedom, which the BSD license does not.
The real issue about licenses is why you're planning on freeing the software. I think that in Sun's case they're making the software free because they don't want to spend as much on development as it would probably take to make a version of Star Office that's as good as they want. My general impression is that their long term strategy is to develop a version of Star Office that will be managed by an application server- presumably in many cases run on Sun hardware- and replaces the need for separate copies on each desktop. They have probably decided that they want to develop it more rapidly than they can with in-house resources, so they want to open the source and let other people hack it.
With a BSD-style license, though, some of those people could turn around and make a closed source derivative that would compete with Sun's variant, which is presumably what they want to stop. Thus the GPL, which preserves a fixed level of software freedom, is probably better suited to their purpose than a "free-er" license like BSD that would allow non-free derivatives. IOW, the GPL is better suited to their purposes because the way in which it is less free than BSD is exactly the lack of freedom that Sun wants.
Not only that, but they're being moderately paranoid about the whole thing, probably in a reasonable attempt to prevent ballot stuffing. You have both an assigned password, which you receive via email, and an assigned PIN, which you get via mail. Anything official that you do requires both of them, and it appears that you're not allowed to change them or use a username instead of a user number. If you lose your PIN, they'll send it to you only via snail mail, and IIRC they use this to prevent more than one person from registering per postal address.
I just got done activating my membership. Now I can vote for board members. Woo Hoo! Honestly, though, I'd encourage everyone who's interested to sign up. If you don't, but keep complaining about how ICANN is screwing up, you're just like the people who bitch about the mistakes the government makes and then fail to vote.
It also looks as though they're not completely brain-dead on the topic of trademark infringement and/or cybersquatting. One of their criteria for evaluating the proposals of new domain registrars is their treament of the following:
IOW, if you want to register new TLDs, you'd better have a plan for how you're going to prevent trademark infringement and cybersquatting. It's too bad that they can't go back and apply those criteria retroactively to their existing registrars for .com, .net, and .org.
This isn't necessarily so. The problem with some of the existing TLD's is that they don't have any clear criteria for who will and won't be allowed to register a domain. Essentially anyone is allowed to register a .com address, so it's essential to preempt anyone else from getting desired domain names.
But if the FSF gets their wish to have a .gnu TLD, they can (and probably will be required to by ICANN) have a strict policy about what one has to do to qualify for a .gnu address. You might, for instance, be required to have a software project with the name you intend to register that meets FSF guidelines as free software. Thus there couldn't be an etoys.gnu unless someone had a free software program called etoys, and the fact that it was a software program rather than an online toy merchant would be adequate defense against trademark infringement. Similarly, the registrar for .sux might very well require that the owner of a copyright is forbidden from owning the corresponding .sux domain. It's perfectly reasonable in serving the purpose of the TLD.
The point is that the whole problem with the existing system is that there's a real shortage of top level domains. This wasn't a problem when the current system was established, because people weren't setting up personal internet addresses or a zillion different addresses for the same company with different names for each product. Now, though, there's serious collision between any person named Barbie who wants to set up a personal web site and Mattel Corporation, and you know who's going to win in that kind of a showdown.
If, though, there were a .mine or .per domain for personal web sites, and a .prod domain for product names, it would be obvious to anyone that barbie.mine was the personal web site of someone named barbie and barbie.prod was the site for Barbie dolls. Then all you'd need is a little bit of case law (or legislation) to show that these sites are sufficiently distinctive that a trademark holder doesn't have to sue to take down personal web sites and a lot of problems go away.
Maybe it's because Macs use a different kind of mouse from PC's. To adapt the system to Unix/Linux all they have to do is write a new driver. For Mac, though, they actually have to go to the trouble of building a different piece of hardware.
Um, no. The site claims, at least, that the "template" is not reversible. They specifically mention that it's not possible to regenerate the fingerprint from the "template", and mention this as a privacy feature.
One of the best parts of the system is that it doesn't actually send a complete fingerprint scan to the computer. Instead, it crunches it down into a 500 byte "template" that can't be used to reconstruct the user's fingerprint. This seems intelligent both from the standpoint of minimizing necessary mouse-computer bandwidth and for their stated objective of protecting privacy. I guess that this is sort of like storing passwords using an MD5 hash.
The only problem I can see is that it seems as though it would be comparatively straightforward to spoof. All you'd need would be a hardware tap on the mouse plug and you could capture the fingerprint template as it's sent to the computer. Then you can log in as anyone else by reversing the transmission and sending their fingerprint template instead of your. Since it uses a standard PS/2 port, this shouldn't be too hard to engineer. I guess that you'll have to use this as a secondary system together with a password.
One point not made in the Slashdot comment is that Congress is also interested in the issue. House Majority Leader Dick Armey has asked the FBI to stop using Carnivore until 4th Ammendment issues have been looked at, and the House Judiciary Committee is holding hearings on the matter on July 24th. That means that this isn't just a lonely fight of a few privacy advocates; some big guns in the government are at least interested and asking the right kinds of questions.
I find it a bit strange to be defending both Hatch and the DMCA, but it sounds as though Hatch has his heart in the right place and is upset because the DMCA isn't turning out the way that he intended. The goal of the DMCA was worthy enough; it was intended to encourage the distribution of information in digital format by providing some additional protections to counteract the easier copying of digital information. That it has failed to live up to its goals is an indication that it was poorly written, not poorly conceived.
In this case, Hatch is particularly upset because the RIAA seems to be trying to turn the purpose of the DMCA on its head. Rather than encouraging digital distribution, they're trying to use it to prevent digital distribution. At the same time they're trying to stamp on illicit distribution, they're absolutely refusing to initiate any sort of licit distribution. If I were in Hatch's position, I'd be pretty inclined to take the same stance.
Do remember that just because the RIAA web site says that ripping a CD that you own for personal use is not fair use doesn't make it so. At least some of the information on their web site about the legality of making copies for personal use was not simply a misinterpretation of the relevant statute but was actually 180 degrees wrong. They're apparently perfectly happy to lie through their teeth on their web site if it helps to convince people not to do things that might cost them money.
It seems that there seems to be one big point of disagreement about MP3's, which is whether they hurt music sales or not. One group suggests that they hurt sales by discouraging people from buying the album, while another suggests that they help sales by letting more people listen to the music. Another point of argument is that some people claim that a lot of downloads are just people getting copies of music they already own because they can't rip the music themselves.
To solve this combination of problems, I suggest the following:
I'm pretty sure that if this version were implemented that the legitimate, artist endorsed MP3s would pretty much displace illegitimate versions. That would guarantee that anyone who copied the song would know where to get the full version, which is exactly the kind of targeted advertizing that's most likely to succeed. Furthermore, the web site could contain information about the same artist's other albums, tour dates, merchandise, etc. providing further income potential.