it is possible to have copyright laws without violating due process or restrictions on cruel and unusual punishment.
[citation needed] - seriously. I know that it used to be possible, but I think there's pretty clear evidence that the "intellectual property" lobby is now organised and will use any small thing you give them to demand more and more. Also that they tend to be capable of getting it. Can you show anywhere in the world where things like fair dealing / fair use are really being protected as they should be? Is there anywhere where the penalties for unlicensed copying are really propoortional and reasonable and likely to stay that way in the medium to long term?
This sounds like an excellent opportunity four a counter-hack.
no
If you follow the chain of computers back to the source, won't it end up in the opponent's critical systems?
likely not.
The people behind this are probably reasonably good at what they are doing. Most likely it will at best lead to a compromised host which is being controlled remotely. Very likely the loss of the actual original control system where the bot herder is sitting would not be a big deal. Probably there will be one or more levels where you will go through a P2P network which doesn't make it clear at all where the commands are coming from. The only way to be absolutely sure is to actually raid the physical location where the bot control is coming from and catch the guy at his keyboard.
Having said that, counter-hacking might be a useful investigative technique. If it was legal.
of their pictures, tax returns, email and other important documents.
If they have proper backups they will only have a small amount wiped out. If they don't have proper backups then there is only one way to learn to do proper backups. That's to have everything wiped. Right now we are beginning to build seriously important stuff on quicksand. There will be more of this and if it's as small as it sounds (a few 10s of Ks of computers is nothing) then we should be happy.
or he is confusing (on purpose?) income tax with capital gains tax.
If you follow the links, you'll find out a) you are sort of right and b) he isn't confusing things; he's perfectly clear. He's talking about income as in all the money you get in a year and he makes most of his money as capital gains. Income tax only applies to a small proportion of his income.
Having said that; WB appears to be almost deliberately paying more tax than he needs. Most of the seriously rich have better ways of engineering things. He doesn't "have a tax shelter," at all; or so he says. By putting money into trusts and keeping it in tax havens, most of the rich avoid taxes almost completely.
It's this level of innocent happiness that makes Slashdotters such suitable people for this job. He'll be the only person who actually demands a technical installation (they companies selected will be horrified by the idea of having to actually build enough of a network to supply one location with broadband) at the same time, when he realises all he got was free WiMax and everyone else on his committee got at least a Hawaiian island, if not a cruise liner to go with it, he would probably freak out and grass them all up. Go for it sonny; you'll be the best.
This seems to me to be a case where the patent is working exactly as expected. There's a quote in the original article "their years of endeavor[sic] are now being rewarded". In other words, it seems that patents here have actually encouraged research that might not otherwise be done. I don't see much evidence of how these patents will do harm. Some companies will license them which will pay for the research team. Some companies will work around them which will lead to other (possibly better) technologies which do the same thing.
How is this different from software patents?
software changes much more quickly; a 20 year delay to implement a feature could cause a real problem. Cars typically have a ten or more year life themselves.
software is created by small companies and individuals who can't afford lawyers; Car companies, even when having a crisis, are the definition of big.
software is a intangible and so has near zero reproduction cost. The burden of patents licenses on the marginal cost of software can be "almost infinite" (==burden >> total cost to distribute to everyone). Cars are made of real metal and have real production costs.
Cars are easily interchangeable; that I use a Prius doesn't mean you can't use a Ford. Networking makes that difficult for many computer programs.
Patents have been in use since the beginning of the automobile industry. Software patents were introduced by legal misunderstanding and territory grabbing long after software was begun.
Nobody is threatening amateur car makers. Microsoft is threatening you.
etc.
If you want rid of car patents then you essentially should want rid of the whole patent system. That's possibly not wrong, but you have to explain how people like Toyota are going to pay for their R&D operations and how you are going to do the system switch over fairly.
This article seems a bit rich coming from a major US business newspaper which is a major "IP" supporter (and I don't mean the protocol). If you take money from others, you shouldn't be surprised when they come back asking for money from you.
You and the grandparent are under a misapprehension. Generally the rich do not pay "duty" or "tax". Many of the people who buy this will be oil baron types from countries with no fuel tax. The type of people who "can afford it" are the type of people who pay almost nothing. Hell even Warren Buffet (who pays 17% tax whilst his assistant pays 30%) and Bill Gates (Sr.) have been campaigning against the unfairness of how little they pay.
Once again with feeling. Tax is for little people. Like you.
P.S. Actually an interesting thing about Warren Buffet's comments is that if you look through the Google search it seems this hasn't been reported much in mainstream media????
Strictly speaking you are certainly right. Any human cells can survive outside the body in tissue culture. However, the information I can find suggests that normally they die off in just the same way as normal human cells so they can't normally survive outside the body.
An inability to distinguish between "bias" and "opinion" seems to me to be one of the fundamental failings of much of modern society. Bias is when you launch "an independent study of Linux TCO" and it turns out that you used models which are specifically favourable for you. Opinion is when you say "I think you should boycott Novell and this is why".
The difference between bias and opinion is in the aim of deception.
You are the person who invented sending four line comments in powerpoints aren't you. Now we have your ID we are going to hunt you to the ends of the internet. You can't run and you can't hide. Our advance team is in Montréal already. They will be arriving at your home soon. Stay there so that at least you die surrounded by the things you know.
THAT FREAKIN SERIOUS then you don't let a teacher deal with it, you call the police and let THEM deal with it
No you don't; You call the parents in. At least the first few times until it's clear that they won't or can't deal with it in which case calling the cops can easily be justified and is at least partly about dealing with the problems of the parents. Schools should rightly be very careful about bringing the police in since the consequences can be extremely serious and it basically represents a failure of the school if it has to happen. They should normally have reacted earlier.
Sure, being the RTFA troll, I read the article. But that still doesn't convince me. The keyboard press is a brief instant on a device which is easy to place more or less out of line of sight. A visible password on a screen is present for a long time and there are a number of interesting ways to capture this. Whilst keyboards are not perfect I think that some protection is worthwhile. One thing is for sure. Nobody is going to remember to turn this on when they are in public and your password only needs to be captured once.
One thing that might be a possible compromise is the system the mail client on my Nokia phone uses. The most recent character entered in the password is displayed for a short time. I can see each individual character, but the entire password is not exposed. I worry on the subway, but since it's a personal device it's easier to make this difficult to see.
It's true that for most of the time during war, the top German tank was, one on one, superior to the top tanks of all other nations. However, the T34 is a very specific exception and probably one of the crucial elements in the war. It was At the time of its introduction the T34 outclassed all of the "light tanks" on the battlefield in most practical aspects except accuracy and ergonomics. At the end of the war the IS-2 & IS-3 tanks did pretty well against top end German tanks in equal conditions.
The Wikipedia articles (which I used to refresh my memory on this) are pretty good and worth reading.
You will find that it's more effective to work together with others. Even if you do want to start a separate organisation, get in touch with the EFF; start working with them and see if they can give you advice and help. See what you can do for them. Maybe they want to do what you want to do but just don't have a volunteer who is able to do it or get the money together?
You're sort of wrong. Or rather your experience is in a different situation from mine and that of netbook purchasers. My current computer had several driver problems which were solved by a small amount (1 hour - sound card) of messing and six months of waiting (next Fedora release - web cam & full VT compatibility). The difference is that I bought absolute state of the art (1 year ago) since I wanted VT and low power consumption. With old hardware, Linux is always better than Windows. With new, the OEM Windows will normally be badly set up (OEMs always do that; spyware stupidity and overtuning) but at least compatible.
Netbook purchasers are always buying latest hardware. If they don't get Linux pre-installed they can expect some problems until the distros catch up with their new hardware. The solution is to use old hardware or, if you need the latest and greatest buy new hardware from a Linux specialist such as System 76
Nerds like yourself (the readership of the "blogs and press") might care about installing windows. The average punter doesn't even really know what it is or care whether they have it or not. If they can web browse then it's working. If they can't then it isn't Hint for future. To the normal person "the press" is things like USA today; the Sun; Bild, etc. There has never been an article in "the press" about how to install Windows on anything. And with good reason.
The people only choose "windows" because that's what the guy in the shop tells them to choose. He tells them this because that's what the manufacturer puts on the PC. The manufacturer does this because Microsoft threatens them if they do otherwise.
If you were posting to a story about how easy it is to install Linux on a Netbook, you would be right. Because it doesn't come pre-installed, Linux has a big problem: installing any operating system on a computer is difficult and requires searching for drivers etc. etc. However, you are posting to a story about netbooks with pre-installed linux. This means that the users never have to look up the drivers because they are already there when they buy the computer. Go to Windows support forums for people doing fresh installs and you will find exactly the same problems as you described. However, almost nobody does a fresh install of windows; they just reinstall from the image which came with their computer; so they basically don't experience these problems.
What I'm trying to convey here, is that netbook manufacturers never planned to keep Linux for a long time.
As with all companies, they couldn't care less what they sell with their laptops as long as it sells for profit. In theory you might be right that they didn't plan to invest further in Linux, but there's no way that they will kill a product which is already sellilng. The disappearance of successful Linux notebooks even though they are popular and don't cause any extra costs through returns clearly points to pressure from outside.
The first netbooks; the ones so successful they started the entire trend; were based on Linux. It is very strange that we have quite a few of the first people posting here people claiming that nobody tried Linux based netbooks. That no one is "showing off" Linux products now is likely because Microsoft made it clear to them that they had better not.
If this was a civil matter then the damage would be the actual damage done (==at a maximum the value of the songs not bought). What this is is a criminal matter disguised as a civil matter to make it cheaper to proscute. That's the whole point of the challenge as unconstitutional.
I looked at the instructions; They seem to be proposing open proxies without encryption and without a system for validation. This seems a simple way to set up many of the Iranian dissidents to be found. It may well be worth taking quite a risk, but much more could be done to protect the Iranians who are involved and they don't seem to be doing it.
The problem is not the "supporting freedom"; it's who and how they do it. During the invasion of Iraq, a clear promise that all oil money from Iraq will go to Iraqi infrastructure; that independent Iraqi oil companies will be set up to get the oil and that there will be more money than that available to rebuild Iraq after the invasion (with a clear, guaranteed budget) would have simply disposed of the question of whether the USA was invading Iraq for oil. Without it there was a wide belief that the Iraq invasion was about oil (partly right of course: most things are done for many complex reasons).
Right now the USA is not Iran's trusted friend and so any help must be offered in a way that clearly gives the Iranian people the ability to make their own decisions without US help. An example would be to promise not to interfere now, but to guarantee economic cooperation later. Another thing that could be done would be to get real videos and recordings of the supposed Arab fighters broadcast on international radio and TV where people in Iran can see them and use them to prove that other people are interfering with their country. Actually going in and "meddling" could be bad.
You cannot restrict access to this functionality and continue to take part in modern commerce
This is just terribly wrong and a very dangerous meme. The example of China proves, that if you are totalitarian enough you can do terrible damage to freedom with little damage to your commercial communications. I think that many of the people write this stuff have a slight grasp of technology and believe that they live in some cyberpunk future. The way that you restrict things is simple. Every device has first allegiance to the government and second to it's owner. The device provides continual reporting on what the "owner" is doing and if something suspicious comes up you investigate until you are sure what they were doing. What if someone gets a device which isn't hobbled or finds a way of de-hobbling their device? Arrest and torture them till they tell you who their co-consiprators are. How do you find them? Random house to house searches and hidden cameras in random locations. If they "didn't mean any harm" or had the device by mistake you might eventually release them. They will serve as a good example so that others know not to do that in future.
The only way to overcome this is to consciously build commercial technologies which do not allow this kind of monitoring and which are useful. We have to make sure that we give as little as possible cooperation to people who do build these technologies. People who report bloggers to the police for Microsoft and Yahoo or who support the building of the great firewall of China have to know that what they are doing threatens not only the future freedom of some distant "Chinese" people but of everybody. We may already be too late for that.
You should read the paper which is behind the blog posting more carefully. Whilst it is also overly optimistic, it is much more nuanced and specifically mentions the dangers of DRM and the need for free and open standards. Without the majority of people demanding these we can easily slide towards a situation where only specific parts of speech are free. It contains a 'call to action' which is probably the most important part of its message.
Hint: peak oil doesn't mean "oil has run out". It could just mean that the price of oil has had a long term decline and people are no longer trying as hard to get oil out and never will. You need to show a bit more evidence than "you don't have a fucking clue" before we can believe you are right. To be honest, his statement is probably more a hopeful prediction about the level of usage of wind power and other renewable energy sources than about oil reserves.
Slashdot Mirror
it is possible to have copyright laws without violating due process or restrictions on cruel and unusual punishment.
[citation needed] - seriously. I know that it used to be possible, but I think there's pretty clear evidence that the "intellectual property" lobby is now organised and will use any small thing you give them to demand more and more. Also that they tend to be capable of getting it. Can you show anywhere in the world where things like fair dealing / fair use are really being protected as they should be? Is there anywhere where the penalties for unlicensed copying are really propoortional and reasonable and likely to stay that way in the medium to long term?
This sounds like an excellent opportunity four a counter-hack.
no
If you follow the chain of computers back to the source, won't it end up in the opponent's critical systems?
likely not.
The people behind this are probably reasonably good at what they are doing. Most likely it will at best lead to a compromised host which is being controlled remotely. Very likely the loss of the actual original control system where the bot herder is sitting would not be a big deal. Probably there will be one or more levels where you will go through a P2P network which doesn't make it clear at all where the commands are coming from. The only way to be absolutely sure is to actually raid the physical location where the bot control is coming from and catch the guy at his keyboard.
Having said that, counter-hacking might be a useful investigative technique. If it was legal.
of their pictures, tax returns, email and other important documents.
If they have proper backups they will only have a small amount wiped out. If they don't have proper backups then there is only one way to learn to do proper backups. That's to have everything wiped. Right now we are beginning to build seriously important stuff on quicksand. There will be more of this and if it's as small as it sounds (a few 10s of Ks of computers is nothing) then we should be happy.
or he is confusing (on purpose?) income tax with capital gains tax.
If you follow the links, you'll find out a) you are sort of right and b) he isn't confusing things; he's perfectly clear. He's talking about income as in all the money you get in a year and he makes most of his money as capital gains. Income tax only applies to a small proportion of his income.
Having said that; WB appears to be almost deliberately paying more tax than he needs. Most of the seriously rich have better ways of engineering things. He doesn't "have a tax shelter," at all; or so he says. By putting money into trusts and keeping it in tax havens, most of the rich avoid taxes almost completely.
It's this level of innocent happiness that makes Slashdotters such suitable people for this job. He'll be the only person who actually demands a technical installation (they companies selected will be horrified by the idea of having to actually build enough of a network to supply one location with broadband) at the same time, when he realises all he got was free WiMax and everyone else on his committee got at least a Hawaiian island, if not a cruise liner to go with it, he would probably freak out and grass them all up. Go for it sonny; you'll be the best.
This seems to me to be a case where the patent is working exactly as expected. There's a quote in the original article "their years of endeavor[sic] are now being rewarded". In other words, it seems that patents here have actually encouraged research that might not otherwise be done. I don't see much evidence of how these patents will do harm. Some companies will license them which will pay for the research team. Some companies will work around them which will lead to other (possibly better) technologies which do the same thing.
How is this different from software patents?
If you want rid of car patents then you essentially should want rid of the whole patent system. That's possibly not wrong, but you have to explain how people like Toyota are going to pay for their R&D operations and how you are going to do the system switch over fairly.
This article seems a bit rich coming from a major US business newspaper which is a major "IP" supporter (and I don't mean the protocol). If you take money from others, you shouldn't be surprised when they come back asking for money from you.
You and the grandparent are under a misapprehension. Generally the rich do not pay "duty" or "tax". Many of the people who buy this will be oil baron types from countries with no fuel tax. The type of people who "can afford it" are the type of people who pay almost nothing. Hell even Warren Buffet (who pays 17% tax whilst his assistant pays 30%) and Bill Gates (Sr.) have been campaigning against the unfairness of how little they pay.
Once again with feeling. Tax is for little people. Like you.
P.S. Actually an interesting thing about Warren Buffet's comments is that if you look through the Google search it seems this hasn't been reported much in mainstream media????
Strictly speaking you are certainly right. Any human cells can survive outside the body in tissue culture. However, the information I can find suggests that normally they die off in just the same way as normal human cells so they can't normally survive outside the body.
Do you have a better reference for this?
An inability to distinguish between "bias" and "opinion" seems to me to be one of the fundamental failings of much of modern society. Bias is when you launch "an independent study of Linux TCO" and it turns out that you used models which are specifically favourable for you. Opinion is when you say "I think you should boycott Novell and this is why".
The difference between bias and opinion is in the aim of deception.
You are the person who invented sending four line comments in powerpoints aren't you. Now we have your ID we are going to hunt you to the ends of the internet. You can't run and you can't hide. Our advance team is in Montréal already. They will be arriving at your home soon. Stay there so that at least you die surrounded by the things you know.
THAT FREAKIN SERIOUS then you don't let a teacher deal with it, you call the police and let THEM deal with it
No you don't; You call the parents in. At least the first few times until it's clear that they won't or can't deal with it in which case calling the cops can easily be justified and is at least partly about dealing with the problems of the parents. Schools should rightly be very careful about bringing the police in since the consequences can be extremely serious and it basically represents a failure of the school if it has to happen. They should normally have reacted earlier.
Sure, being the RTFA troll, I read the article. But that still doesn't convince me. The keyboard press is a brief instant on a device which is easy to place more or less out of line of sight. A visible password on a screen is present for a long time and there are a number of interesting ways to capture this. Whilst keyboards are not perfect I think that some protection is worthwhile. One thing is for sure. Nobody is going to remember to turn this on when they are in public and your password only needs to be captured once.
One thing that might be a possible compromise is the system the mail client on my Nokia phone uses. The most recent character entered in the password is displayed for a short time. I can see each individual character, but the entire password is not exposed. I worry on the subway, but since it's a personal device it's easier to make this difficult to see.
It's true that for most of the time during war, the top German tank was, one on one, superior to the top tanks of all other nations. However, the T34 is a very specific exception and probably one of the crucial elements in the war. It was At the time of its introduction the T34 outclassed all of the "light tanks" on the battlefield in most practical aspects except accuracy and ergonomics. At the end of the war the IS-2 & IS-3 tanks did pretty well against top end German tanks in equal conditions.
The Wikipedia articles (which I used to refresh my memory on this) are pretty good and worth reading.
You will find that it's more effective to work together with others. Even if you do want to start a separate organisation, get in touch with the EFF; start working with them and see if they can give you advice and help. See what you can do for them. Maybe they want to do what you want to do but just don't have a volunteer who is able to do it or get the money together?
You're sort of wrong. Or rather your experience is in a different situation from mine and that of netbook purchasers. My current computer had several driver problems which were solved by a small amount (1 hour - sound card) of messing and six months of waiting (next Fedora release - web cam & full VT compatibility). The difference is that I bought absolute state of the art (1 year ago) since I wanted VT and low power consumption. With old hardware, Linux is always better than Windows. With new, the OEM Windows will normally be badly set up (OEMs always do that; spyware stupidity and overtuning) but at least compatible.
Netbook purchasers are always buying latest hardware. If they don't get Linux pre-installed they can expect some problems until the distros catch up with their new hardware. The solution is to use old hardware or, if you need the latest and greatest buy new hardware from a Linux specialist such as System 76
Nerds like yourself (the readership of the "blogs and press") might care about installing windows. The average punter doesn't even really know what it is or care whether they have it or not. If they can web browse then it's working. If they can't then it isn't Hint for future. To the normal person "the press" is things like USA today; the Sun; Bild, etc. There has never been an article in "the press" about how to install Windows on anything. And with good reason.
The people only choose "windows" because that's what the guy in the shop tells them to choose. He tells them this because that's what the manufacturer puts on the PC. The manufacturer does this because Microsoft threatens them if they do otherwise.
FUD much? There was no practical difference in the return rate. Something which has been discussed many times.
If you were posting to a story about how easy it is to install Linux on a Netbook, you would be right. Because it doesn't come pre-installed, Linux has a big problem: installing any operating system on a computer is difficult and requires searching for drivers etc. etc. However, you are posting to a story about netbooks with pre-installed linux. This means that the users never have to look up the drivers because they are already there when they buy the computer. Go to Windows support forums for people doing fresh installs and you will find exactly the same problems as you described. However, almost nobody does a fresh install of windows; they just reinstall from the image which came with their computer; so they basically don't experience these problems.
What I'm trying to convey here, is that netbook manufacturers never planned to keep Linux for a long time.
As with all companies, they could n't care less what they sell with their laptops as long as it sells for profit. In theory you might be right that they didn't plan to invest further in Linux, but there's no way that they will kill a product which is already sellilng. The disappearance of successful Linux notebooks even though they are popular and don't cause any extra costs through returns clearly points to pressure from outside.
The first netbooks; the ones so successful they started the entire trend; were based on Linux. It is very strange that we have quite a few of the first people posting here people claiming that nobody tried Linux based netbooks. That no one is "showing off" Linux products now is likely because Microsoft made it clear to them that they had better not.
If this was a civil matter then the damage would be the actual damage done (==at a maximum the value of the songs not bought). What this is is a criminal matter disguised as a civil matter to make it cheaper to proscute. That's the whole point of the challenge as unconstitutional.
I looked at the instructions; They seem to be proposing open proxies without encryption and without a system for validation. This seems a simple way to set up many of the Iranian dissidents to be found. It may well be worth taking quite a risk, but much more could be done to protect the Iranians who are involved and they don't seem to be doing it.
The problem is not the "supporting freedom"; it's who and how they do it. During the invasion of Iraq, a clear promise that all oil money from Iraq will go to Iraqi infrastructure; that independent Iraqi oil companies will be set up to get the oil and that there will be more money than that available to rebuild Iraq after the invasion (with a clear, guaranteed budget) would have simply disposed of the question of whether the USA was invading Iraq for oil. Without it there was a wide belief that the Iraq invasion was about oil (partly right of course: most things are done for many complex reasons).
Right now the USA is not Iran's trusted friend and so any help must be offered in a way that clearly gives the Iranian people the ability to make their own decisions without US help. An example would be to promise not to interfere now, but to guarantee economic cooperation later. Another thing that could be done would be to get real videos and recordings of the supposed Arab fighters broadcast on international radio and TV where people in Iran can see them and use them to prove that other people are interfering with their country. Actually going in and "meddling" could be bad.
You cannot restrict access to this functionality and continue to take part in modern commerce
This is just terribly wrong and a very dangerous meme. The example of China proves, that if you are totalitarian enough you can do terrible damage to freedom with little damage to your commercial communications. I think that many of the people write this stuff have a slight grasp of technology and believe that they live in some cyberpunk future. The way that you restrict things is simple. Every device has first allegiance to the government and second to it's owner. The device provides continual reporting on what the "owner" is doing and if something suspicious comes up you investigate until you are sure what they were doing. What if someone gets a device which isn't hobbled or finds a way of de-hobbling their device? Arrest and torture them till they tell you who their co-consiprators are. How do you find them? Random house to house searches and hidden cameras in random locations. If they "didn't mean any harm" or had the device by mistake you might eventually release them. They will serve as a good example so that others know not to do that in future.
The only way to overcome this is to consciously build commercial technologies which do not allow this kind of monitoring and which are useful. We have to make sure that we give as little as possible cooperation to people who do build these technologies. People who report bloggers to the police for Microsoft and Yahoo or who support the building of the great firewall of China have to know that what they are doing threatens not only the future freedom of some distant "Chinese" people but of everybody. We may already be too late for that.
You should read the paper which is behind the blog posting more carefully. Whilst it is also overly optimistic, it is much more nuanced and specifically mentions the dangers of DRM and the need for free and open standards. Without the majority of people demanding these we can easily slide towards a situation where only specific parts of speech are free. It contains a 'call to action' which is probably the most important part of its message.
Hint: peak oil doesn't mean "oil has run out". It could just mean that the price of oil has had a long term decline and people are no longer trying as hard to get oil out and never will. You need to show a bit more evidence than "you don't have a fucking clue" before we can believe you are right. To be honest, his statement is probably more a hopeful prediction about the level of usage of wind power and other renewable energy sources than about oil reserves.