Do you know any form of property that is not taxed?
So, if the "intellectual property" mafia wants to continue to use that analogy, then perhaps it is time that we started to take their analogy seriously and treat their property more like other property.
Then they would have to start making some decisions on how much the property is really worth to them, and whether it is worth it to continue to hold a property from the rest of humanity.
Oh, there are problems with this, particularly with valuation. I propose that each property holder self-declare, with mandatory buyout clauses and maybe a limited number of total exemptions (franchise players).
Oh, and one more thing. The messages definately
change from day-to-day. There is no doubt in
my mind that the spammers have (at least) the ability to upload the message and the mailing list
to the victims' machines.
The return addresses change more slowly.
They look to be generated randomly from several
hundred names. They are definately not names
of actual users.
I suspect that they have much more control than
that.
I have the good fortune of being one of the
return addresses in use - so, I am getting several
hundred bounce messages per day.
I have seen nothing but windows boxes as hosts.
I have not seen much porn. DVD burners, sale prices on TVs (in Russian), kitchen appliances (www.kuhny.ru), mosquito killing system,
email service www.mail15.com (yeah, right!),
anti-spam software (sure, I'll buy anything this
spammer offers!)
systems give EHLO of compuserve.com, microsoft.com,
or more rarely yahoo.com. Other than that, there
is no attempt to disguize headers.
systems are pretty much worldwide. Big hosts
are rr.com, attbi.com, attbb.com, kornet.com,
a bunch of sites in china, at least three edu's. All in all, I think I have sent out over 1000 spam reports. The response has been underwhelming.
skynet.be deserves special shaming, their "action"
consists of sending an automatic response
explaining what spam is. No worry that they have
clients who are ownzered.
I have been able to get in touch with exactly one
owner of a spambot. He did say that he
found that he was running MartFinder, Alexa, Avenue A, BFast, Common Hijacker, Double Click, DSO Exploit, Hitbox, Mediaplex, WindowsMediaPlayer.
Unfortunately, none of those look like the villian.
We really need to create a concept "distribution-right". What commercial authors, and
for that matter the FSF are really concerned about
are having the authority and governmental right of
controlling distribution.
The problem with the term copyright is that
certain members of the Intellectual Property
(hate that term, it implies owning minds)
cartel have understood copyright to apply to every
cached object in the stream between source and
eyeball. It would be very helpful if it was
clear that what was being restricted was distribution, rather than copies.
Also, copyright, as it is applied to computer
programs protects the wrong object (and lasts too
long). It should be protecting the source, not
the object file. And if it is protecting the
source, then it needs to be public. I will accept
its not being immediately public, as a tradeoff
"to promote the progress of science and the useful
arts" by giving a temporary secrecy to the creator. But without the source eventually being visible, there is no proegress!
1)All forms of intellectual property are property, and have value. The initial value is declared by the filer. Filer is responsible for property taxes, say 10% per annum.
2) After the first year, and every seven years thereafter, the property is put up for auction, with a minimum bid of its current value. 5% goes to the general fund, 5% goes to the registrar (copyright office, patent office, etc.), rest goes to current owner of the property.
[Auction on the first year is intended to keep filer from assigning an artificially low price to avoid taxes. Giving 90% of the auction value to the current owner has two effects -- it gives the current owner an advantage in retaining a property. Also, it prevents a "taking" argument from being used, the current owner got a fair market value for his property.]
3) if there is no bid that equals or exceeds the reserve, the property reverts to the public domain.
4) The current property holder may grant the property to the public domain at any time. The property holder is not taxed on the property after this grant, but neither does he get a tax credit for this grant.
[I am willing to give a tax credit to anyone except the initial filer. I don't want the initial filer to declare a value of $1,000,000 for the sole purpose of receiving a tax credit.]
5) Fixed term. No property can be held for a time-period exceeding average lifespan at time of original filing.
How about patenting "A software system for remotely controlling mammals".
Think about the remote controlled rat experiments.
Highlight its the methods special applicatibility to humans. Workers who would rather work than eat. Make anyone into a remote controlled bomb. Assassins. More Senators from Disney.
Read the
viant report and how they monitored IRC.
The copyright holders have both the legal and
manpower tools to punish "evil-doers". Read
The No Electronic Theft Act, which provides for
lengthy prison sentences, forfeiture of all equipment used in making or distributing the
equipment, and pretty heavy fines.
You are not seeing these cases prosecuted
because the copyright holders do not want the
bad publicity, not because they have inadequate
tools.
What laws do need to be changed
Copyright needs to be a "use it or lose it"
system. I.e., if the copyright holder does
not make a work widely available for a 14 year
period; the copyright should be then placed
in a mandatory auction clearinghouse. There should be some minimum reserve, and if there is
no bid exceeding it, the work returns to the
public domain.
Copyright must return to a registration system.
One of the greatest problems with the current system is that it is virtually impossible to find
the copyright holder of many works. If the holder
is deceased, and the work is not extremely well
known, there is often no way of determining who
to contact or pay. Registration should be required every 21 years.
zope - when to use it
on
Zope Bible
·
· Score: 2, Informative
First, zope is relatively complicated. It can be used to cover a lot of ground. It has an object database, four scripting languages (DTML, python, TAL/METAL, and by extension perl), database connectivity to many SQL databases, and a couple hundred plugin products, including products which allow access to filesystems, a document library, various problem trackers, xml-rpc, xml, email,
etc.
This means that a good zope developer has to know quite a lot.
The problem that is now facing beginners is that the toolset is rich enough and the advice offered is disparate enough that they are ususally confused for quite a while.
DTML is ugly, is no longer encouraged, etc. It is also easy to pick up. You really want to use
only dtml-var, dtml-in, and maybe dtml-if.
TAL/METAL is an XML dialect that is supposed to
be GUI designer tool compatible and still allow
limited program expressiblity. This is what most of the gurus use now, rather than DTML. To my eyes, it is even uglier than DTML.
For more complicated constructs, use Script (Python) methods. Most of the power of python, reasonable attempts are made to keep programmers from accidentally opening security holes.
If you need more power than that, and carefully
think about security, python is avaliable in external methods. The biggest issue here is that no security checks are made and the programmer must have write access to the file-system; something that is not required for Script (Python).
And finally, you can build your own extensions,
most people seem to be using pure Products, these days. There are a couple HOWTOs on the process.
With this number of independent choices (ZOBD/filesystem/SQL database), (DTML/TAL/Script (Python)/External Method/Product); and with the number of things that you have to worry about with a number of different kinds of people zope is targeted at (website designer, DTML/TAL developer, python developer, SQL administrator/developer, product developer, core developer), it is no wonder that these books are a bit schizophrenic and skip from high point to high point.
My best advice is that 1) if you want to be anything other than a website designer, you better know HTML very well. 2) Do something like a simple phone book application. Pick one programming language (DTML/TAL/python), and one data store (ZODB, SQL, filesystem). Try to learn as little as possible. It will probably take you about ten days; and you will be ready to chuck the mess out the window. 3) Now, throw everything away. Do your phonebook again, without
refering to anything in your old design. You will probably find that you can do it in about 4 hours. When that point comes, you find that, yes, the initial headaches are worth it; and that, most of what you learned ended up not coming from the book anyway.
As a final remark, the phone book exercise is worth repeating every six months or so. Use the same toolset, or a new one. Think of ways to generalize it, sort orders, reverse lookup, etc.
You will be astonished at how much better you get
and how much the choice of problem influences the choice of toolset!
It is bad for the same reasons star wars is bad.
It cannot work (well), but it can cost tremendous
amounts of money.
The paper specifically mentions IP, pre-existing
fiber, unsubscribed capacity, and strongly
implies common-off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware.
And each and every router, fiber line, etc. would
have to be guarded. A single unauthorized tap would negate most of the benefit. It has to reach, at least, every city in which a major US government installation exists (does this include USPS?)
And every person who uses it must be sure not to
carry malware from public networks to private via
floppy, CDROM, etc.
Further, this is all supposed to be under the control of a single non-governmental entity, in keeping with current administration dogma. (And how many such entities exist? IBM, ATT&T? Any others? Microsoft is not big enough!)
How do you keep ordinary salarymen committed to
the idea that their work must never have contact
with the Internet? What about when they want/need
to do administration from home?
And said entity is going to try to reduce cost by requiring a uniform set of devices. I.e. nothing but a handful of routers, nothing but a single OS, etc. A nice, plump, juicy, underbelly that is
completely unguarded (because there is an air gap;
it is hack proof; no need for redundant, expensive
firewalls; no need for virus protection, since no virus can reach the network; an internal monoculture; etc.)
Sounds like a recipe for a few years of success, followed by catastrophic failure!
See http://python.org/doc/Comparisons.html for a refreshingly unbiased, given that the source is one of the languages in question, selection of similar papers.
They count only (some) commercial sales, without ever announcing which sources are included. I.e. are cheapbytes, etc counted? How about SuSe and other non-US based distributions?
They make no attempt to scale sales into installs--remember each linux sale can convert into a very large number of installs.
They make no attempt to count downloads.
I suspect that these combine to vastly underestimate the number of linux installs, although probably not revenue.
Moreover, the CNET story says Corel sold $3.2 million worth of Linux in 6 to 7 weeks. These may have been counted as desktop rather than server, but it strikes me as very odd that a single, latecoming distribution, available for a very narrow window of time, had a market equal to 10% of the supposed total (server) market!
Slashdot Mirror
Do you know any form of property that is not taxed?
So, if the "intellectual property" mafia wants to continue to use that analogy,
then perhaps it is time that we started to take their analogy seriously and
treat their property more like other property.
Then they would have to start making some decisions on how much the property
is really worth to them, and whether it is worth it to continue to hold a
property from the rest of humanity.
Oh, there are problems with this, particularly with valuation. I propose that
each property holder self-declare, with mandatory buyout clauses and maybe a
limited number of total exemptions (franchise players).
Oh, and one more thing. The messages definately change from day-to-day. There is no doubt in my mind that the spammers have (at least) the ability to upload the message and the mailing list to the victims' machines.
The return addresses change more slowly. They look to be generated randomly from several hundred names. They are definately not names of actual users.
I suspect that they have much more control than that.
I have seen nothing but windows boxes as hosts.
I have not seen much porn. DVD burners, sale prices on TVs (in Russian), kitchen appliances (www.kuhny.ru), mosquito killing system, email service www.mail15.com (yeah, right!), anti-spam software (sure, I'll buy anything this spammer offers!)
systems give EHLO of compuserve.com, microsoft.com, or more rarely yahoo.com. Other than that, there is no attempt to disguize headers.
systems are pretty much worldwide. Big hosts are rr.com, attbi.com, attbb.com, kornet.com, a bunch of sites in china, at least three edu's. All in all, I think I have sent out over 1000 spam reports. The response has been underwhelming.
skynet.be deserves special shaming, their "action" consists of sending an automatic response explaining what spam is. No worry that they have clients who are ownzered.
I have been able to get in touch with exactly one owner of a spambot. He did say that he found that he was running MartFinder, Alexa, Avenue A, BFast, Common Hijacker, Double Click, DSO Exploit, Hitbox, Mediaplex, WindowsMediaPlayer.
Unfortunately, none of those look like the villian.
We really need to create a concept "distribution-right". What commercial authors, and for that matter the FSF are really concerned about are having the authority and governmental right of controlling distribution.
The problem with the term copyright is that certain members of the Intellectual Property (hate that term, it implies owning minds) cartel have understood copyright to apply to every cached object in the stream between source and eyeball. It would be very helpful if it was clear that what was being restricted was distribution, rather than copies.
Also, copyright, as it is applied to computer programs protects the wrong object (and lasts too long). It should be protecting the source, not the object file. And if it is protecting the source, then it needs to be public. I will accept its not being immediately public, as a tradeoff "to promote the progress of science and the useful arts" by giving a temporary secrecy to the creator. But without the source eventually being visible, there is no proegress!
This is my scheme:
1)All forms of intellectual property are property,
and have value. The initial value is declared by
the filer. Filer is responsible for property
taxes, say 10% per annum.
2) After the first year, and every seven years
thereafter, the property is put up for auction,
with a minimum bid of its current value. 5% goes
to the general fund, 5% goes to the registrar
(copyright office, patent office, etc.),
rest goes to current owner of the property.
[Auction on the first year is intended to keep
filer from assigning an artificially low price
to avoid taxes. Giving 90% of the auction value
to the current owner has two effects -- it gives
the current owner an advantage in retaining a
property. Also, it prevents a "taking" argument
from being used, the current owner got a fair
market value for his property.]
3) if there is no bid that equals or exceeds the
reserve, the property reverts to the public domain.
4) The current property holder may grant the
property to the public domain at any time.
The property holder is not taxed on the property
after this grant, but neither does he get a tax
credit for this grant.
[I am willing to give a tax credit to anyone
except the initial filer. I don't want the
initial filer to declare a value of $1,000,000
for the sole purpose of receiving a tax credit.]
5) Fixed term. No property can be held for a
time-period exceeding average lifespan at time
of original filing.
How about patenting "A software system for remotely controlling mammals".
Think about the remote controlled rat experiments.
Highlight its the methods special applicatibility to humans. Workers who would rather work than eat. Make anyone into a remote controlled bomb. Assassins. More Senators from Disney.
Read the viant report and how they monitored IRC. The copyright holders have both the legal and manpower tools to punish "evil-doers". Read The No Electronic Theft Act, which provides for lengthy prison sentences, forfeiture of all equipment used in making or distributing the equipment, and pretty heavy fines.
You are not seeing these cases prosecuted because the copyright holders do not want the bad publicity, not because they have inadequate tools.
Copyright needs to be a "use it or lose it" system. I.e., if the copyright holder does not make a work widely available for a 14 year period; the copyright should be then placed in a mandatory auction clearinghouse. There should be some minimum reserve, and if there is no bid exceeding it, the work returns to the public domain.
Copyright must return to a registration system. One of the greatest problems with the current system is that it is virtually impossible to find the copyright holder of many works. If the holder is deceased, and the work is not extremely well known, there is often no way of determining who to contact or pay. Registration should be required every 21 years.
This means that a good zope developer has to know quite a lot.
The problem that is now facing beginners is that the toolset is rich enough and the advice offered is disparate enough that they are ususally confused for quite a while.
DTML is ugly, is no longer encouraged, etc. It is also easy to pick up. You really want to use only dtml-var, dtml-in, and maybe dtml-if.
TAL/METAL is an XML dialect that is supposed to be GUI designer tool compatible and still allow limited program expressiblity. This is what most of the gurus use now, rather than DTML. To my eyes, it is even uglier than DTML.
For more complicated constructs, use Script (Python) methods. Most of the power of python, reasonable attempts are made to keep programmers from accidentally opening security holes.
If you need more power than that, and carefully think about security, python is avaliable in external methods. The biggest issue here is that no security checks are made and the programmer must have write access to the file-system; something that is not required for Script (Python).
And finally, you can build your own extensions, most people seem to be using pure Products, these days. There are a couple HOWTOs on the process.
With this number of independent choices (ZOBD/filesystem/SQL database), (DTML/TAL/Script (Python)/External Method/Product); and with the number of things that you have to worry about with a number of different kinds of people zope is targeted at (website designer, DTML/TAL developer, python developer, SQL administrator/developer, product developer, core developer), it is no wonder that these books are a bit schizophrenic and skip from high point to high point.
My best advice is that 1) if you want to be anything other than a website designer, you better know HTML very well. 2) Do something like a simple phone book application. Pick one programming language (DTML/TAL/python), and one data store (ZODB, SQL, filesystem). Try to learn as little as possible. It will probably take you about ten days; and you will be ready to chuck the mess out the window. 3) Now, throw everything away. Do your phonebook again, without refering to anything in your old design. You will probably find that you can do it in about 4 hours. When that point comes, you find that, yes, the initial headaches are worth it; and that, most of what you learned ended up not coming from the book anyway.
As a final remark, the phone book exercise is worth repeating every six months or so. Use the same toolset, or a new one. Think of ways to generalize it, sort orders, reverse lookup, etc. You will be astonished at how much better you get and how much the choice of problem influences the choice of toolset!
It is bad for the same reasons star wars is bad. It cannot work (well), but it can cost tremendous amounts of money.
The paper specifically mentions IP, pre-existing fiber, unsubscribed capacity, and strongly implies common-off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware.
And each and every router, fiber line, etc. would have to be guarded. A single unauthorized tap would negate most of the benefit. It has to reach, at least, every city in which a major US government installation exists (does this include USPS?)
And every person who uses it must be sure not to carry malware from public networks to private via floppy, CDROM, etc.
Further, this is all supposed to be under the control of a single non-governmental entity, in keeping with current administration dogma. (And how many such entities exist? IBM, ATT&T? Any others? Microsoft is not big enough!)
How do you keep ordinary salarymen committed to the idea that their work must never have contact with the Internet? What about when they want/need to do administration from home?
And said entity is going to try to reduce cost by requiring a uniform set of devices. I.e. nothing but a handful of routers, nothing but a single OS, etc. A nice, plump, juicy, underbelly that is completely unguarded (because there is an air gap; it is hack proof; no need for redundant, expensive firewalls; no need for virus protection, since no virus can reach the network; an internal monoculture; etc.)
Sounds like a recipe for a few years of success, followed by catastrophic failure!
Lutz Prechelt's preprint An Empirical Comparison of C, C++, Java, Perl, Python, Rexx, and Tcl for a Search/String-Processing Program (available in ps and pdf only)
See http://python.org/doc/Comparisons.html for a refreshingly unbiased, given that the source is one of the languages in question, selection of similar papers.
- They count only (some) commercial sales, without ever announcing which sources are included. I.e. are cheapbytes, etc counted? How about SuSe and other non-US based distributions?
- They make no attempt to scale sales into installs--remember each linux sale can convert into a very large number of installs.
- They make no attempt to count downloads.
I suspect that these combine to vastly underestimate the number of linux installs, although probably not revenue.Moreover, the CNET story says Corel sold $3.2 million worth of Linux in 6 to 7 weeks. These may have been counted as desktop rather than server, but it strikes me as very odd that a single, latecoming distribution, available for a very narrow window of time, had a market equal to 10% of the supposed total (server) market!