What the hell are you talking about? The type of security that the various "security-enhanced" linux are working for is completely orthogonal with the type of security OpenBSD or Bastille Linux is working for.
The goal of OpenBSD and Bastille Linux is to develop distributions where it is impossible (well, extremely difficult) for users to gain permissions they were not explicitely granted. I.E., you get root access if and only if you were explicitely granted root access.
The goal of the security-enhanced Linux work is to make the permissions more granular -- more levels of permission, and standard methods for defining and granting those permissions. I.E., your name server can connect to port 53 if and only if you grant your name server access to that port. The backup operator can read everyone's email if and only if he's explicitely given permission to read everyone's email.
This doesn't have jack squat to do with user-land security systems, or code auditing, or how easy the OS is to r00t. These pluggable linux security modules will probably never, ever be used by 95% of even the most hardcore h4x0rs reading slashdot. They'll certainly never be used in any sort of application where stock OpenBSD provides the security model the application needs. Why? Because OpenBSD and stock Linux have (nearly) the same security model, differing only in the amount of auditing. If the OpenBSD security model is good enough for your application, if follows that the Linux security model is good enough for your application. This is for people who need a different security model.
What I don't understand is why so many people say that this is clearly the US's fault, and that the US should clearly apologize?
No-one gives a fuck if we Americans say "Oops! Sorry we hit your plane! We'll try to avoid crashing our $50,000,000.00 planes into your $17,000,000.00 planes in the future!".
The "apology" that the Chinese are looking for is something along the lines of "Oops! We're sorry we routinely eavesdropping on all of your electronic communications, and send a huge stream of data back to the NSA for analysis! We'll stop doing that!". Good or bad, I can't imagine the United States making an apology of this nature. It's simply never going to happen.
Remember, the people who are pumping us full of the "China wants us to apologize for hitting the plane" bullshit were the same ones who were pumping us full of the "the votes have already been counted and recounted time and time again" bullshit five months ago.
Basicly I hope they will try to make it compile with LCC
The LCC license is a fucked up pile of crap. The LCC license essentially says "you can't sell or use this this compiler, except under a set of conditions that we can't be bothered to clearly define. If you have any questions, talk to our publisher." I'm not a lawyer, but it's pretty clear they didn't bother to consult a decent one when they wrote up the license, and I'd be very suprised if the license they wrote didn't effectively say, "You are not allowed to use this code, ever, for anything. Go to Hell."
I'll take the restrictive and well understood Gnu license any day of the week.
It is however available in postscript which is easily read in X windows on a redhat machine... However, *some* of us dont use X windows, and for us select few, we cant view it.
What the hell are you talking about? Why on earth would you need X to read a PostScript document? GhostScript will run on damn near anything.
Not only that, but the book is available in LaTeX source form. That pretty much guarantees that it's available on just about any computer and any operating system that's come out in the last 15 or 20 years. LaTeX is so ubiquitous that if you have a spare IBM PCjr from 1984, an old black and white TV for a monitor, and no hard drive, you can probably use it to format and preview the document. I would also be very suprised if you could find any working printer that could not be used to typeset that book.
However, the one about letting the user enter a username/password/IP combination is a little stupid. I mean, that kind of defeats the whole purpose.
That's true. Why not just put in the name and IP number? Obviously, the server is going to have the public keys for the remote machines, and is only going to successfully negotiate a connection with a remote machine that has the right private key, so the password seems like a pointless extra step.
But, passwords are the sort of thing that would make people feel good, so it's probably not too bad to have it. Like you say, though, there's a really great danger that somebody would use the same password for this application as they would for an application that required a password, so they should be sent over HTTPS just to avoid someone leaking a password that's used for some other system.
Your security policy allows covert tunnels, but doesn't allow explicit tunnels? Did you think of that yourself, or did it require the doublethink of an entire comittee to ratify?
You don't want to open a port, because then you'd have to monitor the port, but you do want to open a tunnel, because then you mistakenly believe you'd never have to monitor the tunnel? Is this the "ostrich head in the sand" model of security that seems so popular nowdays?
I did read the full question, and I mistankely assumed that the slashdot editors had somehow mangled it into some sort of hilarious bufoonery by accident. It's sad to see that instead, they were fed the dranged rantings of an idiot, and then published it.
But IMHO this is *not* the way formal education should be delivered.
In MIT's not so humble opinion, its not the way education will be delivered. That's why they won't give credit for web courses. That's also why they feel they can give away the stuff on the web for free, but still charge something like $30,000 a year in tuition to their real students. They understand that the real value lies not in the materials, but in the interaction with the people at the school. But you'd know that if you'd bothered to read the article. Why don't you go do that now?
A french press full of peet's french roast only costs about $1.50, and those usually keep me awake for at least another 12 hours.
Of course, that means that one week's work costs me about $15.00. It's considerably cheaper for any of you pansies that sleep, of course. It's considerably more for you pansies that have to buy pre-made coffee.
A degree from a reputable school with a good computer science department gives some assurance that the holder of the degree has some valuable knowledge and has been trained in relevant ways
Unfortunately, there are only four or five good schools that people intrested in computer science degrees go to. If this guy manages even manages to interview one of the two or three hundred graduates each year who "aren't interested in theoretical computer science", he's going to discover that they're interested in "the business side of things."
If someone manages to graduate with a decent GPA from one of the decent schools, and is interested in going out into the world and programming, don't be suprised when that person doesn't want to work for some imcompetent manager who doesn't want to be bothered to figure out what programmers do for a living. This is especially true when you realize that this guy want one person to do all the hardware and software and understand the physics behind the expiraments, which to me is just a diplomatic way to say "we don't have the budget to hire two or three mediocre people, which means we certainly don't have the budget to hire one outstanding person."
Everyone else has said this a hundred times, but it can't be emphasized enough. First, stop looking only at CS majors. Second, stop trying to one person that can solve all your software need and all your hardware needs. Third, it's very, very hard to evaluate what a programmer is doing, especially if you have no idea exactly what he's doing.
I'm guessing that you're not affiliated with an american university; if you were, you'd have an unending supply of graduate and undergraduate students, and you would have long ago discovered some great computer geeks from the EE department and the Theatre Arts department, and everywhere in between. You'd also have discovered at least one incredibly bright, insanely productuve Journalism School droupout who come to work for you in the mid-70's because you had the tools he needed to work on his motorcycle, and who you simply couldn't imagine how you'd ever get anything done without.
You'd also quickly realize that the few people that you can find who are insanely good at everything they do -- the ones that understand the physics behind your expiraments, and can write diagnostics software, and can build diagnostics hardware, and can get it all done in a time frame you can both agree is reasonable -- still have to specialize. These things are all suprisingly different skills, and for you to expect someone to spend the amount of intellectual capital it takes to keep up with all of them, and still be productive, is unreasonable.
And, of course, when you ask someone to do something you don't understand, there are two very important, and totally unrelated, skills for that person to have. They have to be able to do what you ask, and they have to be able to convince you they're doing what you ask. It's pretty easy to find a person that does one or the other; people who can do both are rare, and make a lot of money. As long as you allow yourself to be unaware of exactly what this person is doing, you're going to disappointed again and again.
You're saying that if I show you the first as heads, then the second as tails that the odds of the third flip being heads is *higher* than it being tails? I don't buy it.
No. That's different than the scenario I described. Flip three coins. You're told that there is at least one head, and you're shown one coin at random, and it is a tail. Now, what is the probability that there are two tails?
This is very different than being told "coin 1 is a head, and coin 2 is a tail." Do you see why?
No, try again. You have a binary number of 3 digits. You are have two pieces of information:
You choose one digit randomly, and are told it is a 0.
You are told that there is at least one 1.
Notice that the two pieces of information are not of the same "quality". Now, what are the odds that there are two 0's? What are the odds that there are two 1's?
Re:Arent there any mandatory insurances in the US?
on
Linuxgruven Deorbits
·
· Score: 1
I don't know... I've heard some mighty strange things about Germany. Like, you need a permit for just about everything; imagine the almost laughable set of permits you need to do anything in Berkeley, CA, and then imagine many, many more.
Your "start a consulting business and go broke in six months" scam probably wouldn't work, but not because they'd be wise to you and not give you money at the end. Instead, it would probably take you far longer than six months to get the nescessary permits in the first place.
Of course, my information could be all wrong. But in general, the ancedotes I hear describe a Germany where the government strictly regulates far more of the average citizens everyday life than would be imaginable here in the States.
Ughh... I can't imagine using C++ to model the class structure in a game like the SIM's. The static class system combined with the difficulty of single-dispatch methods would make any reasonable simulation a pain in the ass to develop.
That doesn't mean one couldn't write a decent dynamic class system on top of C++, but only that C++ by itself doesn't have any of the things that would go into a decent dynamic class system.
Yes. Dual hosting the SCSI bus to keep the storage available even if a node fails has been available for at least ten years, if not even longer. I can't possibly imagine that such wouldn't work with firewire, too.
Umm... wait. You are using VMS, right? Or do you want to give us some clue what kind of operating system and hardware you plan to use this on?
I would imagine that at 20 km/s, anyone with infrared goggles is going to see the superheated column of air in the wake of the projectile.
In fact, I wouldn't be suprised if surface of the projectile got hot enough to boil off and leave a residue of buring gas behind it. I doubt you'd be able to see this in the daytime...
Of course, if I wasn't such a lazy ass I'd do some math, and find out...
The fact that you paid for the right to use that information is the only relevant fact!
Precisely! You've explained it exactly. And when you bought a copy of a copyright work, you didn not pay for the "right to use that information." You've paid for a copy of that information, and you have certain rights to use that information under the notion of fair use. None of those rights include having a friend make you an additional copy for your use, if your copy has become destroyed.
Maybe a lawyerly reading of the law says otherwise, but who does that really serve?
All of us. It is extrodinarily bad to pretend that the law that the law says something other than it says. Once we give society the right to have "implicit" laws -- laws that exist and are enforcable entirely on the whims of the people enforcing them -- then we stop being a nation governed by law, and start being a nation governed by whim.
Of course, that is the case already, and perhaps always has been the case, but like all good libertarians I have a notion of the ideal; I also realize that the ideal itself is not a goal, and we would not be served by achieving the ideal, but we are served by working towards the ideal.
Copyright law is fucked. I know that, you know that, and anyone who's spent any time thinking about it knows that. But the current alternative to to tying information to a physical representation is the notion of "license", and license are way, way, way more fucked than copyright -- if we move to a system where all information is licensed, and none of it falls under fair use, we are totally and completely fucked as a society. We must have a legal and reasonable alternative to copyright, or we will end up with a situation where all your textbooks will have EULA's on them. And ignoring copyright law because it's too lawerly doesn't get us there.
My rights and limitations on a Papa Roach CD are precisely those rights and limitations governed by American Copyright law. Papa Roach could write anything he wants on the back of the CD -- he could say "you are only licensed to listen to this CD while naked in the precense of at least three other people." But just because he writes it down, that doesn't make it a license, and it doesn't make it legally binding.
Your use of the CD is governed by copyright law, period. There is no license. It's pretty fucking scary that a non-zero number of people believe works traditionally have been covered by a license -- you have no idea what you're giving up as modern media moves toward licensing programs and pay per use, and away from the rights traditionally conferred by copyright. Licensing information is a significant change in the way that we traditionally trade information, and it's not one that we should take lightly, and it's definately not a step we should take simply because everyone now believes it to be the case, and can't remember any time when it wasn't the case.
To the best of my knowledge, I have never purchased a book or a CD with a "resale" clause. I seriously doubt such a thing would hold up in court.
Can you give any references to this idea that I get a "license" with a book or CD? Can you point to where such a thing exists in law or practice?
My understanding is that the only things that are "licensed" are copyright materials that require a "license" to copy, where copying is a prerequisite for use -- the idea apparently being that buying a copy of some software such as Microsoft Windows is not sufficient in itself to run the software, because to run it must be copied into memory, and the copyright owner only provides you limited rights to copy the software into memory, and only under the terms of the license agreement for the software. Naturally, many people are disturbed by such license. I have no idea how they stand up in court.
I also believe that periodically some publisher will try to put a license in a book, but those license almost always have no legal standing -- they're of the same level of validity as the following license:
By reading this post, you agree to stand on your head and cluck like a chicken for five full minutes.
i.e., they're very pretty, very official looking, and entirely baseless.
As it currently stands, I understand that the body of copyright law provides me with certain fair use rights to copyright works, regardless of any resale or license clause the copyright holders may wish to impose. I do not believe that this these fair use rights are some type of separate asset tied to the ownership of the medium, but not its existence. I have no idea what it means to own a vaporized CD, and I have no idea why ownership of such a thing would provide you the right to copy someone else's CD.
OK... some of my other responses in this thread were clear abuses of the +1 bonus -- go mod down my nasty replys to that troll pb, if you want to use some points.
But the above is certainly not a troll. When I say that the erosion of copyright law, so often touted as making information free, is paradoxically doing exactly the opposite, I'm being very serious.
Slashdot Mirror
What the hell are you talking about? The type of security that the various "security-enhanced" linux are working for is completely orthogonal with the type of security OpenBSD or Bastille Linux is working for.
The goal of OpenBSD and Bastille Linux is to develop distributions where it is impossible (well, extremely difficult) for users to gain permissions they were not explicitely granted. I.E., you get root access if and only if you were explicitely granted root access.
The goal of the security-enhanced Linux work is to make the permissions more granular -- more levels of permission, and standard methods for defining and granting those permissions. I.E., your name server can connect to port 53 if and only if you grant your name server access to that port. The backup operator can read everyone's email if and only if he's explicitely given permission to read everyone's email.
This doesn't have jack squat to do with user-land security systems, or code auditing, or how easy the OS is to r00t. These pluggable linux security modules will probably never, ever be used by 95% of even the most hardcore h4x0rs reading slashdot. They'll certainly never be used in any sort of application where stock OpenBSD provides the security model the application needs. Why? Because OpenBSD and stock Linux have (nearly) the same security model, differing only in the amount of auditing. If the OpenBSD security model is good enough for your application, if follows that the Linux security model is good enough for your application. This is for people who need a different security model.
What I don't understand is why so many people say that this is clearly the US's fault, and that the US should clearly apologize?
No-one gives a fuck if we Americans say "Oops! Sorry we hit your plane! We'll try to avoid crashing our $50,000,000.00 planes into your $17,000,000.00 planes in the future!".
The "apology" that the Chinese are looking for is something along the lines of "Oops! We're sorry we routinely eavesdropping on all of your electronic communications, and send a huge stream of data back to the NSA for analysis! We'll stop doing that!". Good or bad, I can't imagine the United States making an apology of this nature. It's simply never going to happen.
Remember, the people who are pumping us full of the "China wants us to apologize for hitting the plane" bullshit were the same ones who were pumping us full of the "the votes have already been counted and recounted time and time again" bullshit five months ago.
Basicly I hope they will try to make it compile with LCC
The LCC license is a fucked up pile of crap. The LCC license essentially says "you can't sell or use this this compiler, except under a set of conditions that we can't be bothered to clearly define. If you have any questions, talk to our publisher." I'm not a lawyer, but it's pretty clear they didn't bother to consult a decent one when they wrote up the license, and I'd be very suprised if the license they wrote didn't effectively say, "You are not allowed to use this code, ever, for anything. Go to Hell."
I'll take the restrictive and well understood Gnu license any day of the week.
It is however available in postscript which is easily read in X windows on a redhat machine... However, *some* of us dont use X windows, and for us select few, we cant view it.
What the hell are you talking about? Why on earth would you need X to read a PostScript document? GhostScript will run on damn near anything.
Not only that, but the book is available in LaTeX source form. That pretty much guarantees that it's available on just about any computer and any operating system that's come out in the last 15 or 20 years. LaTeX is so ubiquitous that if you have a spare IBM PCjr from 1984, an old black and white TV for a monitor, and no hard drive, you can probably use it to format and preview the document. I would also be very suprised if you could find any working printer that could not be used to typeset that book.
You're just trolling here, and you know it.
However, the one about letting the user enter a username/password/IP combination is a little stupid. I mean, that kind of defeats the whole purpose.
That's true. Why not just put in the name and IP number? Obviously, the server is going to have the public keys for the remote machines, and is only going to successfully negotiate a connection with a remote machine that has the right private key, so the password seems like a pointless extra step.
But, passwords are the sort of thing that would make people feel good, so it's probably not too bad to have it. Like you say, though, there's a really great danger that somebody would use the same password for this application as they would for an application that required a password, so they should be sent over HTTPS just to avoid someone leaking a password that's used for some other system.
Wow! You're pretty damned stupid.
Your security policy allows covert tunnels, but doesn't allow explicit tunnels? Did you think of that yourself, or did it require the doublethink of an entire comittee to ratify?
You don't want to open a port, because then you'd have to monitor the port, but you do want to open a tunnel, because then you mistakenly believe you'd never have to monitor the tunnel? Is this the "ostrich head in the sand" model of security that seems so popular nowdays?
I did read the full question, and I mistankely assumed that the slashdot editors had somehow mangled it into some sort of hilarious bufoonery by accident. It's sad to see that instead, they were fed the dranged rantings of an idiot, and then published it.
But IMHO this is *not* the way formal education should be delivered.
In MIT's not so humble opinion, its not the way education will be delivered. That's why they won't give credit for web courses. That's also why they feel they can give away the stuff on the web for free, but still charge something like $30,000 a year in tuition to their real students. They understand that the real value lies not in the materials, but in the interaction with the people at the school. But you'd know that if you'd bothered to read the article. Why don't you go do that now?
A french press full of peet's french roast only costs about $1.50, and those usually keep me awake for at least another 12 hours.
Of course, that means that one week's work costs me about $15.00. It's considerably cheaper for any of you pansies that sleep, of course. It's considerably more for you pansies that have to buy pre-made coffee.
A degree from a reputable school with a good computer science department gives some assurance that the holder of the degree has some valuable knowledge and has been trained in relevant ways
Unfortunately, there are only four or five good schools that people intrested in computer science degrees go to. If this guy manages even manages to interview one of the two or three hundred graduates each year who "aren't interested in theoretical computer science", he's going to discover that they're interested in "the business side of things."
If someone manages to graduate with a decent GPA from one of the decent schools, and is interested in going out into the world and programming, don't be suprised when that person doesn't want to work for some imcompetent manager who doesn't want to be bothered to figure out what programmers do for a living. This is especially true when you realize that this guy want one person to do all the hardware and software and understand the physics behind the expiraments, which to me is just a diplomatic way to say "we don't have the budget to hire two or three mediocre people, which means we certainly don't have the budget to hire one outstanding person."
Everyone else has said this a hundred times, but it can't be emphasized enough. First, stop looking only at CS majors. Second, stop trying to one person that can solve all your software need and all your hardware needs. Third, it's very, very hard to evaluate what a programmer is doing, especially if you have no idea exactly what he's doing.
I'm guessing that you're not affiliated with an american university; if you were, you'd have an unending supply of graduate and undergraduate students, and you would have long ago discovered some great computer geeks from the EE department and the Theatre Arts department, and everywhere in between. You'd also have discovered at least one incredibly bright, insanely productuve Journalism School droupout who come to work for you in the mid-70's because you had the tools he needed to work on his motorcycle, and who you simply couldn't imagine how you'd ever get anything done without.
You'd also quickly realize that the few people that you can find who are insanely good at everything they do -- the ones that understand the physics behind your expiraments, and can write diagnostics software, and can build diagnostics hardware, and can get it all done in a time frame you can both agree is reasonable -- still have to specialize. These things are all suprisingly different skills, and for you to expect someone to spend the amount of intellectual capital it takes to keep up with all of them, and still be productive, is unreasonable.
And, of course, when you ask someone to do something you don't understand, there are two very important, and totally unrelated, skills for that person to have. They have to be able to do what you ask, and they have to be able to convince you they're doing what you ask. It's pretty easy to find a person that does one or the other; people who can do both are rare, and make a lot of money. As long as you allow yourself to be unaware of exactly what this person is doing, you're going to disappointed again and again.
You're saying that if I show you the first as heads, then the second as tails that the odds of the third flip being heads is *higher* than it being tails? I don't buy it.
No. That's different than the scenario I described. Flip three coins. You're told that there is at least one head, and you're shown one coin at random, and it is a tail. Now, what is the probability that there are two tails?
This is very different than being told "coin 1 is a head, and coin 2 is a tail." Do you see why?
- You choose one digit randomly, and are told it is a 0.
- You are told that there is at least one 1.
Notice that the two pieces of information are not of the same "quality". Now, what are the odds that there are two 0's? What are the odds that there are two 1's?I don't know... I've heard some mighty strange things about Germany. Like, you need a permit for just about everything; imagine the almost laughable set of permits you need to do anything in Berkeley, CA, and then imagine many, many more.
Your "start a consulting business and go broke in six months" scam probably wouldn't work, but not because they'd be wise to you and not give you money at the end. Instead, it would probably take you far longer than six months to get the nescessary permits in the first place.
Of course, my information could be all wrong. But in general, the ancedotes I hear describe a Germany where the government strictly regulates far more of the average citizens everyday life than would be imaginable here in the States.
Ughh... I can't imagine using C++ to model the class structure in a game like the SIM's. The static class system combined with the difficulty of single-dispatch methods would make any reasonable simulation a pain in the ass to develop.
That doesn't mean one couldn't write a decent dynamic class system on top of C++, but only that C++ by itself doesn't have any of the things that would go into a decent dynamic class system.
Perhaps you could make a tombstone out of the same kind of stone that statue was made of in Percy Bysshe Shelley's poem Ozymandius?
That thing certainly lasted a long time, and was a fitting tribute to the sort of person who expects the world to remember him forever.
OOP and "visual" programming languages are nothing more than the digital manifestation of the lazy tendencies our society has sunken into.
Oh my god! Lazy programmers! What comes next -- Impatience and Hubris? The horror!
If you can't do object oriented programming in plain, vanilla C, then you don't understand object oriented programming.
Period.
"I can't imagine it wouldn't work" is bad grammer. Yeah! Yeah!
If you don't get the reference, you're a pretty shitty grammer nazi.
Yes. Dual hosting the SCSI bus to keep the storage available even if a node fails has been available for at least ten years, if not even longer. I can't possibly imagine that such wouldn't work with firewire, too.
Umm... wait. You are using VMS, right? Or do you want to give us some clue what kind of operating system and hardware you plan to use this on?
Is it just me, or does everyone have a little side of them rooting for the record industry this time?
Yep. I'm rooting for Time Warner! Err, I'm rooting for AOL/Time Warner. No, wait... I'm rooting for AOL/Germany.
Seriously, why on earth would I be rooting for the recording industry in this case?
I would imagine that at 20 km/s, anyone with infrared goggles is going to see the superheated column of air in the wake of the projectile.
In fact, I wouldn't be suprised if surface of the projectile got hot enough to boil off and leave a residue of buring gas behind it. I doubt you'd be able to see this in the daytime...
Of course, if I wasn't such a lazy ass I'd do some math, and find out...
The fact that you paid for the right to use that information is the only relevant fact!
Precisely! You've explained it exactly. And when you bought a copy of a copyright work, you didn not pay for the "right to use that information." You've paid for a copy of that information, and you have certain rights to use that information under the notion of fair use. None of those rights include having a friend make you an additional copy for your use, if your copy has become destroyed.
Maybe a lawyerly reading of the law says otherwise, but who does that really serve?
All of us. It is extrodinarily bad to pretend that the law that the law says something other than it says. Once we give society the right to have "implicit" laws -- laws that exist and are enforcable entirely on the whims of the people enforcing them -- then we stop being a nation governed by law, and start being a nation governed by whim.
Of course, that is the case already, and perhaps always has been the case, but like all good libertarians I have a notion of the ideal; I also realize that the ideal itself is not a goal, and we would not be served by achieving the ideal, but we are served by working towards the ideal.
Copyright law is fucked. I know that, you know that, and anyone who's spent any time thinking about it knows that. But the current alternative to to tying information to a physical representation is the notion of "license", and license are way, way, way more fucked than copyright -- if we move to a system where all information is licensed, and none of it falls under fair use, we are totally and completely fucked as a society. We must have a legal and reasonable alternative to copyright, or we will end up with a situation where all your textbooks will have EULA's on them. And ignoring copyright law because it's too lawerly doesn't get us there.
My rights and limitations on a Papa Roach CD are precisely those rights and limitations governed by American Copyright law. Papa Roach could write anything he wants on the back of the CD -- he could say "you are only licensed to listen to this CD while naked in the precense of at least three other people." But just because he writes it down, that doesn't make it a license, and it doesn't make it legally binding.
Your use of the CD is governed by copyright law, period. There is no license. It's pretty fucking scary that a non-zero number of people believe works traditionally have been covered by a license -- you have no idea what you're giving up as modern media moves toward licensing programs and pay per use, and away from the rights traditionally conferred by copyright. Licensing information is a significant change in the way that we traditionally trade information, and it's not one that we should take lightly, and it's definately not a step we should take simply because everyone now believes it to be the case, and can't remember any time when it wasn't the case.
We were not always at war with Eurasia.
Can you give any references to this idea that I get a "license" with a book or CD? Can you point to where such a thing exists in law or practice?
My understanding is that the only things that are "licensed" are copyright materials that require a "license" to copy, where copying is a prerequisite for use -- the idea apparently being that buying a copy of some software such as Microsoft Windows is not sufficient in itself to run the software, because to run it must be copied into memory, and the copyright owner only provides you limited rights to copy the software into memory, and only under the terms of the license agreement for the software. Naturally, many people are disturbed by such license. I have no idea how they stand up in court.
I also believe that periodically some publisher will try to put a license in a book, but those license almost always have no legal standing -- they're of the same level of validity as the following license:i.e., they're very pretty, very official looking, and entirely baseless.
As it currently stands, I understand that the body of copyright law provides me with certain fair use rights to copyright works, regardless of any resale or license clause the copyright holders may wish to impose. I do not believe that this these fair use rights are some type of separate asset tied to the ownership of the medium, but not its existence. I have no idea what it means to own a vaporized CD, and I have no idea why ownership of such a thing would provide you the right to copy someone else's CD.
OK... some of my other responses in this thread were clear abuses of the +1 bonus -- go mod down my nasty replys to that troll pb, if you want to use some points.
But the above is certainly not a troll. When I say that the erosion of copyright law, so often touted as making information free, is paradoxically doing exactly the opposite, I'm being very serious.