1) Who said that voluntary payment online had to be anonymous?
2) People still tip even if they don't expect to return to a restaurant
3) Just because one example of a non-funded, low-profile, voluntary payment mechanism hasn't been a success yet, does not justify a dismissal of the whole idea.
By your argument, nobody would tip waiters unless there was a chance that they might see them again, or see the people around them again. This clearly isn't the case. Further, the "I want my friends to see that I am generous" can just as easily apply to voluntary tipping mechanisms, nobody said they had to be anonymous.
So if voluntary payment is so flawed, how come the entire American service industry is largely subsidised by voluntary payment? What is the substantive difference between tipping a waiter and paying for music - that makes tipping work so well, but voluntary payment for music fail?
I would argue that the opposite is true. People tend to form an emotional relationship with those whose music they like (just look at the amount fans spend on merchandising), that is much stronger than any relationship you might form with a waiter. If anything, voluntary payment will work better for music than it does for the service industry.
Your simplistic argument about public good, compares information to property, but the difference is that information costs effectively nothing to reproduce and distribute. Whether you force 100% of 10,000 people to pay for something, or whether 10% of 1,000,000 people pay one tenth of the amount, makes little difference to the producer of the information. Why not exploit the fact that the internet permits almost free distribution of your creative output, rather than using oppressive laws to prevent it from happening?
Reading the DMCA, someone is legally liable if they wrongly take advantage of the take-down provision. In theory this means that if even one of these people were incorrectly taken-down, they may be able to take legal action. In practice, this is pretty weighted in favour of copyright.net as the test is one of "good faith", which may mean that it must be demonstrated that they were acting in bad faith, which could be tough to prove.
I wonder if there could be any legal response that could be sent to copyright.net which would cause them to spend more time per-user than would be economical...? Any lawers care to comment on this?
Even though I am slightly irritated that every discussion of legality must be accompanied by an IANAL disclaimer (you don't need to lay eggs to tell a bad one), IANAL.
I am not a lawyer, so please verify this with someone who is, but under
the terms of the DMCA *THEY* are required to tell you who is infringing
and with which files. Only then are you required to remove those
people.
Additionally, if they ask you to remove something under the terms of the
DMCA, and do so falsely, they may be leaving themselves open to legal
action.
This is little more than Microsoft taking a side in the BSD vs GPL debate, namely the BSD side. Moreover they are indicating that the government should take the BSD side too. While I personally prefer the GPL, there are very good arguments in favour of BSD, and so I don't think it is so easy to dismiss his argument.
I will be there too, along with most of the other core Freenet developers. It will actually be the first time the core developers have met in person so it should be great fun. A number of developers are giving a variety of talks on different subjects, generally all Freenet related in some way. If you are there, feel free to say "hi" - this is what I look like.
If this website constitutes evidence that animals have been abused, then they should be punished (I suggest forcing them into a small jar for several months). If this is a parody and those images are artificial, then it should be left alone (which is more likely). Taking down the website without punishing them for their crime (if a crime had taken place) would be getting it totally backwards.
A tax on CDRs would effectively be an assumption that people will use them to pirate music. If I am being taxed because I am expected to do something, then I think I have a darn good right to do it.
This is the worst idea I have heard in a long time. Perhaps Linux should be taxed and the proceeds given to Microsoft, since Linux might hurt them?
This would basically turn the music business into a state supported industry in the worst traditions of communism.
The problem is that HTML was originally intended to be a relatively abstracted specification of the content, but this wasn't what people wanted. TABLE tags weren't forced on people by browser makers, but were embraced enthusiastically by web site creators. Basically the mistake was thinking that content creators wouldn't want to control how that content was presented to the user. Of course standardization is a good thing, but people need to admit that the intention of HTML has changed from a way to specify text abstractly (like DOCBOOK), to a way to specify a layout for a page in a flexible and robust manner.
The guy that was being quoted by the author is being quoted so that the author can say exactly what you just said - perhaps you should have read past the first few paragraphs....
ESR and others behind the Open Source movement have been preaching that Open Source is a viable business model, those in the RMS Free Software camp have been preaching that business model or no business model, this is about freedom. I think we are starting to see that Free Software/Open Source is great for society, but not so great for those who hope to make money from producing it. Giving to charity is a good thing, but you are never going to get rich doing it. I am not criticising free software, or those who create it, merely saying that it is disingenuous to tell people that you can get rich from writing open source.
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X over wireless? - you must be joking
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Cheap Linux PDAs
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· Score: 2
X is an extremely inefficient protocol when it comes to network usage, it works great when the X server is on the same machine as the client, and works tolerably over a 10 megabit network, but even over broadband it is too slow, and over a wireless connection - you must be joking.
VNC
works much better over slower connections than X, and there are clients for most popular platforms (although I am not aware of one for the Palm pilot).
Oh, and I supposed it is just a coincedence that this will allow people to track where everyone drives in the UK?
I actually heard a company pitch this idea a few months ago in Silicon Valley, they enthusiastically described that in future the government could use the system to track everyone's driving, and how it could be made compulsory. I gave him a piece of my mind with respect to the privacy implications of this.
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What happens if 2600 lose the appeal?
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DVD Case Follow-Up
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· Score: 4
It is worth considering what should happen if 2600 lose the court appeal (and any subsequent appeals). Personally I subscribe to the view that it is the responsibility of every patriot to ignore an unjust law (although I am not American). We are fortunate in that it seems technology is on our side. As communication technologies such as the Internet improve, attempts to prevent communication and the sharing of ideas (such as the DMCA) will become more and more difficult to enforce. Systems such as Freenet hold the promise of making enforcement of these unjust laws next to impossible.
Nature is much more robust than people think. It requires quite an ego to think that the simple-minded meddling that humans are doing now with genetics could achieve anything that billions of years of evolution could not.
Many people seem to classify human cloning as the ultimate excess of science, worse than nuclear power, worse still than the Internet! I just don't see what the big deal is. A clone will be no more the same person as you than an indentical twin you never met. Since they are likely to grow up under completely different environmental conditions (eating different food, getting different amounts of exercise etc) it is likely that as they grow they will get less and less like you.
As has been found by many European countries who have "Data protection" laws designed to protect people's privacy, the fact that you can't apply your country's laws to foreign websites may make this rather ineffective.
I don't see why this would have an effect on Linux. Even if Linus was somehow brainwashed by AMD into trying to make Linux AMD-only or something silly like that, he would rapidly find himself sidelined in Linux development.
I really don't see how such speculation merits front-page treatment. Slashdot's pro-Transmeta propoganda should have died off as soon as it was clear that Transmeta's chips are not the cure for Microsoft, world hunger, and freedom for all.
My question with the whole distributed computation branch of the P2P
bandwagon has always been one of "where are the applications?". The
criteria for which applications would be appropriate for this seem to be
rather limiting - these criteria are as follows:
Firstly, the algorithm must be parallelizable. This means that it
should be possible to split an algorithm which normally takes N time,
across a number of, say P processors, and have it take less than N time,
and ideally N/P time.
Secondly, the algorithm must have minimal communication requirements.
Rendering, for example, is parallelizable, however in most modern
rendering applications each computer would need an entire description of
the scene being rendered. This could be a huge amount of information,
running into gigabytes, yet it would need to be distributed to every
participant in the rendering process. Recall that in most distributed
computation applications connectivity will be limited to a 56k modem
which is only connected to the Internet intermittently. Even if you
limit users to broadband, communication bandwidth is still a problem.
Thirdly, the algorithm must be robust, if someone decides to screw
things up, and hack their client to send back malicious data (as
happened with Seti@home) they must not be able to invalidate the work
that everyone else has done. Ideally there would be an easy way to
validate the work done by each client in the system.
Now, I am not saying that there are no applications which do not conform
to these criteria, for example, cracking crypto algorithms and
processing information from space telescopes in search of intelligent
life clearly work quite well - however neither of them can really be
used to make vast amounts of money. The only other thing I can think of are genetic algorithms, but again, whether there is a revenue stream there is an important question.
Perhaps some of these distributed computation people have found a killer
application for this technology, some of them certainly claim that they have, but I really wonder whether such applications will stand up to scrutiny on the grounds I outline above.
Slashdot Mirror
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2) People still tip even if they don't expect to return to a restaurant
3) Just because one example of a non-funded, low-profile, voluntary payment mechanism hasn't been a success yet, does not justify a dismissal of the whole idea.
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I would argue that the opposite is true. People tend to form an emotional relationship with those whose music they like (just look at the amount fans spend on merchandising), that is much stronger than any relationship you might form with a waiter. If anything, voluntary payment will work better for music than it does for the service industry.
Your simplistic argument about public good, compares information to property, but the difference is that information costs effectively nothing to reproduce and distribute. Whether you force 100% of 10,000 people to pay for something, or whether 10% of 1,000,000 people pay one tenth of the amount, makes little difference to the producer of the information. Why not exploit the fact that the internet permits almost free distribution of your creative output, rather than using oppressive laws to prevent it from happening?
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I wonder if there could be any legal response that could be sent to copyright.net which would cause them to spend more time per-user than would be economical...? Any lawers care to comment on this?
Even though I am slightly irritated that every discussion of legality must be accompanied by an IANAL disclaimer (you don't need to lay eggs to tell a bad one), IANAL.
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Additionally, if they ask you to remove something under the terms of the DMCA, and do so falsely, they may be leaving themselves open to legal action.
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This is the worst idea I have heard in a long time. Perhaps Linux should be taxed and the proceeds given to Microsoft, since Linux might hurt them?
This would basically turn the music business into a state supported industry in the worst traditions of communism.
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VNC works much better over slower connections than X, and there are clients for most popular platforms (although I am not aware of one for the Palm pilot).
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I actually heard a company pitch this idea a few months ago in Silicon Valley, they enthusiastically described that in future the government could use the system to track everyone's driving, and how it could be made compulsory. I gave him a piece of my mind with respect to the privacy implications of this.
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What do you do when the law fails you?
Ignore it.
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Just what is the great danger of human cloning?
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I really don't see how such speculation merits front-page treatment. Slashdot's pro-Transmeta propoganda should have died off as soon as it was clear that Transmeta's chips are not the cure for Microsoft, world hunger, and freedom for all.
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Firstly, the algorithm must be parallelizable. This means that it should be possible to split an algorithm which normally takes N time, across a number of, say P processors, and have it take less than N time, and ideally N/P time.
Secondly, the algorithm must have minimal communication requirements. Rendering, for example, is parallelizable, however in most modern rendering applications each computer would need an entire description of the scene being rendered. This could be a huge amount of information, running into gigabytes, yet it would need to be distributed to every participant in the rendering process. Recall that in most distributed computation applications connectivity will be limited to a 56k modem which is only connected to the Internet intermittently. Even if you limit users to broadband, communication bandwidth is still a problem.
Thirdly, the algorithm must be robust, if someone decides to screw things up, and hack their client to send back malicious data (as happened with Seti@home) they must not be able to invalidate the work that everyone else has done. Ideally there would be an easy way to validate the work done by each client in the system.
Now, I am not saying that there are no applications which do not conform to these criteria, for example, cracking crypto algorithms and processing information from space telescopes in search of intelligent life clearly work quite well - however neither of them can really be used to make vast amounts of money. The only other thing I can think of are genetic algorithms, but again, whether there is a revenue stream there is an important question.
Perhaps some of these distributed computation people have found a killer application for this technology, some of them certainly claim that they have, but I really wonder whether such applications will stand up to scrutiny on the grounds I outline above.
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