>> It's understandable why a book like this would have some errors
No, it's not. It's called proofreading, a concept that may or may not be familiar to the Slashdot editorial staff. Books with a lot more detail than this one (I bought it months ago) are published every day without mistakes. How about going through the galleys and testing each command and example?
Until the law says they can't block the RIAA. The RIAA legislation is an obvious threat to the net, but attempts to defeat the bill's intent (before it's even passed and signed) by clever gimmicks like this divert attention from the political arena, which is where this can be defeated. Again, if Congress passes the RIAA legislation, you really don't believe they'll allow an ISP to block the RIAA? They'll simply make it illegal to interfere.
The way to win this is to convince politicians that copying CD's, DVD', whatever, is not a crime. Most of them believe it is, and actions like Information Wave's will, I'm sure, be viewed as just another bunch of techies trying to sustain the free ride.
No. You don't get it. Using the tools of the net to thwart the RIAA is clever, but this game is being played way over the heads of ISP's. When Congress passes and the President signs this miserable RIAA legislation, you can bet that it will include a provision that ISP's can't legally stop the RIAA.
What Information Wave is doing will be perceived as demonstrating the ability of a private company to block consumer access to sites they don't want their customers to visit. It will not be perceived as an effort to prevent attacks on their network. All it will do is convince more naive legislators that the Internet needs more, not less, regulation.
By yammering away about preverving the "right" to copy and freely distribute music and entertainment, the community is playing right into the hands of the RIAA by letting them define the boundaries of the playing field. But, don't worry. Pretty soon, the feds will mandate the use of software that monitors and arbitrates downloads and the exchange of files across the web.
What this is really liable to do is convince Congress of the "need" to prevent the owners of the net's infrastructure from imposing their own kind of vigilante justice. Here's how it will go: If one ISP can restrict RIAA then the next ISP can block, say, access to certain religious sites because they think the sites spread evil thoughts. That's how it will be spun to Congress. In the end. this will simply ensure that any RIAA-supported legislation that passes will explicitly include prohibitions on ISP's doing what Information Wave says they will do. I.e., when it becomes legal for the RIAA to break into my computer, it will be illegal for my ISP to stop them.
I agree, actually. But, this isn't about what is "right". This is about what is politically possible. I believe that this action is likely to backfire and, in the end, provide more political ammunition for the RIAA. If they win, they can legally break into our computers. I take that to imply that ISP's will not be allowed to block them, and that I won't be allowed to add them to my firewall rules.
The stakes here are much, much larger than trading in MP3's of flavor-of-the-day music. Information Wave's actions are liable to be seen, particularly in Congress, as more evidence of the need to police and regulate technology. That is, Information Wave's actions will be perceived as more evidence of a technology company's ability to interfere in the actions of others. I.e., if they can interfere with the RIAA, then they can do the same thing to any entity. Follow that argument a little further, and you soon decide to impose heavy restrictions on the net (and ISP's) in order to "protect" all its users.
Don't believe I used the phrase "free speech". But, listen: If the RIAA or anyone else commits an illegal act -- like trolling around in my computer -- using my ISP, then my ISP needs to do something about it. If they don't, their customers may take legal action against them. The RIAA wants to make it legal for them to break into my property and look around. That would be a restiction of my use of my property in my little corner of the Internet. If the RIAA-supported legislation becomes law, then an ISP who restricts their ability to engage in legal activity will, presumably, be acting illegally.
Whatever their motivation, Information Wave probably deserves an "A for Effort", but I believe that the RIAA will simply use this as "evidence" that more legislation is needed to thwart ISP's who support and facilitate their customers' ability to "steal" copywritten product. The fact that the RIAA is wrong is irrelevant. Congress will believe them.
This ISP's intent is laudable, but unless AOL, et al, emulate them it is a quixotic campaign. How, exactly, will this ISP's action help defeat the legislation the RIAA is sponsoring? If it passes, Information Wave's actions will be illegal. Then what will have been gained? I'm arguing that outside the tech community -- where Congress lives -- the very real differences between what the RIAA wants to do and what Information Wave is planning will not be apparent.
If an ISP takes action against someone who has stated an intention to commit an illegal act using the ISP's facilities, I agree -- the ISP should report it to the authorities and act to protect its other customers.
As a political instrument, intended to thwart the RIAA's efforts to change the law, however, this kind of "good guys restricting the bad guys" activity will fail. The 'bad guys" will simply point to anyone's restriction of Internet use and call them hypocrites. Restrictions on freedom restrict freedom, regardless of their souce.
So..restricting Internet use is OK if you're restricting people you don't like?
If you can do it to them, they can do it to you. Pretty difficult to argue otherwise.
An ISP that blocks or restricts RIAA use of the net is legitimizing the practice they purport to oppose. This is not the way to fight this particular battle.
I'll take exception to your asssertion that theft of intellectual property did not exist prior to copyright legisltation. In fact, it did, because there was nothing to prevent any publisher from copying and selling a work created and published elsewhere.
That said, I'll make my own assertions:
The notion of fair use has been widely accepted and understood for decades.
Typically, fair use does not extend to the reproduction of entire works and the distribution of those copies to a mass, and potentially unknown, audience.
Copyright laws are rooted in a milieu of printed material. Widespread copying and distribution of printed material (sometimes known as counterfeiting) has traditionally been beyond the means of an ordinary individual.
Copyright law needs to change to account for new technology and to protect the rights of individual authors.
The entertainment industry wants to protect its own financial resources, not those of authors or consumers. It is a special interest group with the money and ability to sway Congressional votes. E.g., the several extensions of the copyright expiration date. No institution of comparable clout exists among those who oppose restrictive legislation. Their remedies are in the courts and, preferably, at the ballot box.
Wholesale copying and distribution of works of IP without a means to deliver payment to the authors of those works threatens the livelihood of those authers and will eventually force many to seek other livelihoods.
Constant focus on the alleged right to make unfettered copies of popular entertainment -- music CD's, TV, and movies -- weakens the case of those who oppose new restrictive legislation and technologies. No one in Congress is going to get reelected arguing for the 'right" of college students to post music on the web. No significant political constituency exists to support this activity. Focus on something of legitimate and lasting intellectual value.
Forget about people who are more interested in the OS than the apps it runs -- that accounts, I suspect, for most Linux users. Then, the reason so many people continue to run Win98 is apparent: Nothing is acting as an incentive for change. If your current OS is handling everything satisfactorily, why change? Visually, the differences between Win98 and win2K are almost invisible. Even WinXP's default appearance is really new paint on the same building. So, after buying and risking the OS upgrade, they get something that looks pretty much the same. Why bother?
Linux? Well, even if you accept the doubtful proposition that they've heard of it, it is doomed to be a nonstarter as long as no Linux apps are compelling enough to draw people away from Windows. (Forget Wine and all that. Why go thru the hassle, risk and cost of switching to Linux just to run the same apps you're running now quite happily in Windows? Again, why bother?)
Re:Space Travel, Internet Changing the Nation-Stat
on
Man Conquers Space
·
· Score: 2
Nicely put, and here's hoping for a bit more common sense and less religiosity. For whatever reasons, many in the Linux and open source communities seem to think ease of use and desktop design issues are beneath them. Of course they aren't, and the 25-year history of Unix prior to Linux testifies to the basic unmarketablility of the command shell as a pleasing desktop for all but the already converted.
I dropped Linux as my desktop last month because, even with the MS fonts, it was just too bleedin' hard on my esyes.
Space Travel, Internet Changing the Nation-State
on
Man Conquers Space
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
The Internet and the development of manned spaceflight capabiity have in common perhaps the most important political and economic trend of the last 100-plus years: creating, illustrating and accelerating the diminished relevance of the nation-state. Just as the Internet creates and exposes new forms of behavior and economic exchange that cannot reasonably be supported or regulated within the sphere of a single nation-state, a viable effort to put humans in space will further create and sustain the changing nature and increasing irrelevancy of the traditional nation-state.
It is dismaying that so many posters here, and also in response to similar stories, criticize and deny the need for space travel (it is as natural and necessary as humanity's migration from th Great Rift Valley). Their imaginations and aspirations seem bounded by the limits on their credit cards.
Financial resources aside, where else can New Orleans go to get this done? IBM? Sun? Oracle? Lockheed-Martin? The alternatives are few. Who in the open source world could handle this?
1. A sneaky deal? Sounds like it, but Microsoft does represent computers to the 99.99 percent of the population that doesn't read Slashdot.
2. Sneaky deals and monopolism aside, the simple fact that Microsoft is a corportation allows them to speak with one voice and make a coherent proposal that has a real chance of being implemented.
3. So...how could the free software/open sourcee world do the same thing? How could a similar wall-to-wall open source solution be offered to New Orleans? Does such an institution exist, or is the notion antithetical to the community?
Too bad you were bored. Going faster for less money is usually considered a good thing. This is a proof of concept of a technology that promises to dramatically lower the cost of getting payloads to orbit. The fact that it plowed into the ground is irrelevant: the point was to get the scramjet to ignite. We know how to land aircraft. (BTW, the Concorde is expensive because it uses 40-year old technology. France and the UK subsidized development for reasons other than creating cost-effective travel. If someone would market a commercial aircraft that could do New York-London at 1,500 mph and cost no more to operate per passenger than a 747, that would be interesting, too.
The first manned supersonic flight was Chuck Yeager's in 1947. In World War II, the Nazi's V-2 had a top speed of about 3,600 mph, several times the speed of sound.
In light of the, uh, apparent lack of historical perspective illustrated by many of these posts, here's a rough timeline:
Orville and Wilbur fly -- 1903 World War II -- 1939-1945 Chuck Yeager flies the X-1 beyond Mach 1 -- 1947 First Artificial Satellite Launched -- 1957 First manned satellite launched -- 1961 First manned lunar landing -- 1969
Traveling at mach 7.6., or higher, poses no risk by itself. Getting to that speed is a different matter. Extra g's come from rapid acceleration or deceleration, not constant speed. E.g., run your car into a brick wall at 40 mph and you will feel some serious g-forces.
Keep the acceleration at the one-gee level and everyone would be as comfortable as they are in their living room. (Believe me, a space propulsion system that could maintain a constant one-gee acceleration level would revolutionize space travel.
>> 1. You can get from England to Australia in two hours, but what about going to America. You'd be up there for all of like 5 minutes and pay millions of dollars to do it.>
If you're flying at about 5,000 mph, you could cover the London-New York distance in about 40 minutes. Add a bit more time for acceleration and decceleration.
You won't see it used for puddle-jumping. The speed of sound at sea level is about 760 miles per hour (1225 kph); it's variable per the nature and density of the medium, so in the atmosphere at 20,000 feet it drops to 660 mph (1062 kph).
So, let's drop it down to an over-ambitious 600 mph, since scramjet-powered craft will be flying considerably higher than 20,000 feet. Multiply by 7.6 and you get 4560 mph, In other words, a tad faster than the fastest speed reached by the X-15 decades ago.
The point of this thing is to test technology that might allow operational craft to go faster for less money. Very practical if you need to launch small satellites or get people or cargo from, say, Berlin to Tokyo in 3 hours. Or New York to Los Angeles in about 40 minutes.
Half those companies don't exist, and the products haven't been marketed for years. Even if documentation could be found, Robertson's real interest is probably in the cultural and historical record and the interplay between those windowing products and Microsoft's. One way to break Microsoft's stranglehold on the word "Windows" is to demonstrate that Microsoft brought no new concepts to the mix, only its own particular implementaton of an accepted and common interface.
Most people think the way computers and software work is about as exciting as a refrigerator. They're no more likely to RTFM than they are to read a refrigerator repair manual. And, that's the way it ought to be. Unless you live on Planet Geek, RFFM = Too Difficult to Mess With.
Part of me wants to say: "That's what happens when you use a computer as a glorified hi-fi..."
On the other hand, MS's format program probably hasn't seen a serious revision in years. If they want to impose these nuisances on us, maybe they should replace format with a generalized disk wipe routine that's smart enough to warn people when they're about to zap all these protected files.
Slashdot Mirror
Ummm...this is silly, but you can't reasonably expect someone to transpose two characters using a mouse?
>> It's understandable why a book like this would have some errors
No, it's not. It's called proofreading, a concept that may or may not be familiar to the Slashdot editorial staff. Books with a lot more detail than this one (I bought it months ago) are published every day without mistakes. How about going through the galleys and testing each command and example?
The way to win this is to convince politicians that copying CD's, DVD', whatever, is not a crime. Most of them believe it is, and actions like Information Wave's will, I'm sure, be viewed as just another bunch of techies trying to sustain the free ride.
What Information Wave is doing will be perceived as demonstrating the ability of a private company to block consumer access to sites they don't want their customers to visit. It will not be perceived as an effort to prevent attacks on their network. All it will do is convince more naive legislators that the Internet needs more, not less, regulation.
By yammering away about preverving the "right" to copy and freely distribute music and entertainment, the community is playing right into the hands of the RIAA by letting them define the boundaries of the playing field. But, don't worry. Pretty soon, the feds will mandate the use of software that monitors and arbitrates downloads and the exchange of files across the web.
What this is really liable to do is convince Congress of the "need" to prevent the owners of the net's infrastructure from imposing their own kind of vigilante justice. Here's how it will go: If one ISP can restrict RIAA then the next ISP can block, say, access to certain religious sites because they think the sites spread evil thoughts. That's how it will be spun to Congress. In the end. this will simply ensure that any RIAA-supported legislation that passes will explicitly include prohibitions on ISP's doing what Information Wave says they will do. I.e., when it becomes legal for the RIAA to break into my computer, it will be illegal for my ISP to stop them.
The stakes here are much, much larger than trading in MP3's of flavor-of-the-day music. Information Wave's actions are liable to be seen, particularly in Congress, as more evidence of the need to police and regulate technology. That is, Information Wave's actions will be perceived as more evidence of a technology company's ability to interfere in the actions of others. I.e., if they can interfere with the RIAA, then they can do the same thing to any entity. Follow that argument a little further, and you soon decide to impose heavy restrictions on the net (and ISP's) in order to "protect" all its users.
Whatever their motivation, Information Wave probably deserves an "A for Effort", but I believe that the RIAA will simply use this as "evidence" that more legislation is needed to thwart ISP's who support and facilitate their customers' ability to "steal" copywritten product. The fact that the RIAA is wrong is irrelevant. Congress will believe them.
This ISP's intent is laudable, but unless AOL, et al, emulate them it is a quixotic campaign. How, exactly, will this ISP's action help defeat the legislation the RIAA is sponsoring? If it passes, Information Wave's actions will be illegal. Then what will have been gained? I'm arguing that outside the tech community -- where Congress lives -- the very real differences between what the RIAA wants to do and what Information Wave is planning will not be apparent.
As a political instrument, intended to thwart the RIAA's efforts to change the law, however, this kind of "good guys restricting the bad guys" activity will fail. The 'bad guys" will simply point to anyone's restriction of Internet use and call them hypocrites. Restrictions on freedom restrict freedom, regardless of their souce.
If you can do it to them, they can do it to you. Pretty difficult to argue otherwise.
An ISP that blocks or restricts RIAA use of the net is legitimizing the practice they purport to oppose. This is not the way to fight this particular battle.
Linux? Well, even if you accept the doubtful proposition that they've heard of it, it is doomed to be a nonstarter as long as no Linux apps are compelling enough to draw people away from Windows. (Forget Wine and all that. Why go thru the hassle, risk and cost of switching to Linux just to run the same apps you're running now quite happily in Windows? Again, why bother?)
Sure. Have at it.
Nicely put, and here's hoping for a bit more common sense and less religiosity. For whatever reasons, many in the Linux and open source communities seem to think ease of use and desktop design issues are beneath them. Of course they aren't, and the 25-year history of Unix prior to Linux testifies to the basic unmarketablility of the command shell as a pleasing desktop for all but the already converted.
I dropped Linux as my desktop last month because, even with the MS fonts, it was just too bleedin' hard on my esyes.
It is dismaying that so many posters here, and also in response to similar stories, criticize and deny the need for space travel (it is as natural and necessary as humanity's migration from th Great Rift Valley). Their imaginations and aspirations seem bounded by the limits on their credit cards.
Financial resources aside, where else can New Orleans go to get this done? IBM? Sun? Oracle? Lockheed-Martin? The alternatives are few. Who in the open source world could handle this?
Some points:
1. A sneaky deal? Sounds like it, but Microsoft does represent computers to the 99.99 percent of the population that doesn't read Slashdot.
2. Sneaky deals and monopolism aside, the simple fact that Microsoft is a corportation allows them to speak with one voice and make a coherent proposal that has a real chance of being implemented.
3. So...how could the free software/open sourcee world do the same thing? How could a similar wall-to-wall open source solution be offered to New Orleans? Does such an institution exist, or is the notion antithetical to the community?
Too bad you were bored. Going faster for less money is usually considered a good thing. This is a proof of concept of a technology that promises to dramatically lower the cost of getting payloads to orbit. The fact that it plowed into the ground is irrelevant: the point was to get the scramjet to ignite. We know how to land aircraft. (BTW, the Concorde is expensive because it uses 40-year old technology. France and the UK subsidized development for reasons other than creating cost-effective travel. If someone would market a commercial aircraft that could do New York-London at 1,500 mph and cost no more to operate per passenger than a 747, that would be interesting, too.
In light of the, uh, apparent lack of historical perspective illustrated by many of these posts, here's a rough timeline:
Orville and Wilbur fly -- 1903
World War II -- 1939-1945
Chuck Yeager flies the X-1 beyond Mach 1 -- 1947
First Artificial Satellite Launched -- 1957
First manned satellite launched -- 1961
First manned lunar landing -- 1969
Keep the acceleration at the one-gee level and everyone would be as comfortable as they are in their living room. (Believe me, a space propulsion system that could maintain a constant one-gee acceleration level would revolutionize space travel.
If you're flying at about 5,000 mph, you could cover the London-New York distance in about 40 minutes. Add a bit more time for acceleration and decceleration.
So, let's drop it down to an over-ambitious 600 mph, since scramjet-powered craft will be flying considerably higher than 20,000 feet. Multiply by 7.6 and you get 4560 mph, In other words, a tad faster than the fastest speed reached by the X-15 decades ago.
The point of this thing is to test technology that might allow operational craft to go faster for less money. Very practical if you need to launch small satellites or get people or cargo from, say, Berlin to Tokyo in 3 hours. Or New York to Los Angeles in about 40 minutes.
Half those companies don't exist, and the products haven't been marketed for years. Even if documentation could be found, Robertson's real interest is probably in the cultural and historical record and the interplay between those windowing products and Microsoft's. One way to break Microsoft's stranglehold on the word "Windows" is to demonstrate that Microsoft brought no new concepts to the mix, only its own particular implementaton of an accepted and common interface.
Most people think the way computers and software work is about as exciting as a refrigerator. They're no more likely to RTFM than they are to read a refrigerator repair manual. And, that's the way it ought to be. Unless you live on Planet Geek, RFFM = Too Difficult to Mess With.
On the other hand, MS's format program probably hasn't seen a serious revision in years. If they want to impose these nuisances on us, maybe they should replace format with a generalized disk wipe routine that's smart enough to warn people when they're about to zap all these protected files.