This is absolutely true. I'm certainly no fan of the United States foreign or domestic policy, but the courts have usually filtered out the most idiotic legal proposals. The United States Supreme Court has even declared that a ban on virtual child pornography is illegal -- a decision like that would never have been made in Europe (German law, for example, explicitly prohibits virtual child porn). Regular porn is widely available -- there are tons of porn websites without any adult verification system. In Germany, on the other hand, institutions like jugendschutz.net keep a watchful eye on websites and warn those which are too explicit.
Germany has laws against distribution of nazi propaganda, of violent imagery, and even against blasphemy (most people don't know that -- it's the 166 StGB, and rarely enforced, but it does have demonstrable chilling effects). In the German state of Northrhine-Westphalia, there is currently an ongoing experiment to block sites like that of neo-nazi Gary Lauck and rotten.com on the ISP level! Depending on which data you use (purchasing power parity corrected or not), Germany is the third or fifth largest economy in the world. The political system itself is more democratic than that of the US -- there are multiple parties, coalitions, some direct democracy mechanisms, and most importantly, secure ballots (pencil and paper based). Where the Greens would have no chance to be in the goverment in the US, they are actually part of it here. (And got a lot more corrupt in the process.) Yet in terms of free spech, the United States retain the upper hand.
I have nothing but respect for the people who drafted the United States constitution -- it is a truly remarkable document. From things like the "limited times" restriction on copyright to freedom of speech, separation of church and state and many other issues, these were really smart people with a lot of forethought (they can be forgiven for the Second Amendment). So far, the attempts to pervert this document have mostly failed, and I am confident that this will stay so if the US gets a new government next year. Another 4 years under Bush and Ashcroft - I don't know. For us Europeans and for the Indians, the fact that we don't have something like the First Amendment means that we have to be even more cautious in defending free speech.
With enough effort/resources you can make *any* language and runtime scale.
And we all know that Slashdot has infinite resources at its disposal. Look, this site has been hacked together by a few geeks in their spare time. It scales well not because of the amount of effort and resources invested in its deployment, but because the platform is simply lightning fast -- there are no unnecessary libraries and APIs, instead, the webserver API is accessed directly using mod_perl. Database access is nevertheless not tied to a specific DB -- without any effort whatsoever, Perl DBI provides a transparent and fast interface to a large number of DBs.
For example, generating static pages from dynamic data at short intervals and serving those instead,
In Slashcode, old pages are archived. New ones are generated dynamically. This is necessary because of the rate of modifications.
If Slashdot used JSP or ASP.NET they'd be able to significantly decrease the load on their MySQL database
Not only is this statement unsupported, it is also irrelevant. According to the FAQ, Slashdot uses a single MySQL server and 8 webservers. This shows clearly where the major load is.
And their performance suffers as well.
Also an unsupported statement. I and many other people I know use Slashdot to check their connection speed because it is almost always highly responsive.
But this is business kid. It's not black and white, good versus evil.
Of course it's not. And I trust that you apply the same standards to Microsoft. But if you want to stop bad behavior from occurring, you should not support companies that practice it. Simple as this: By supporting Sun, you support SCO's battle against Linux. If you give them money, chances are that some of it goes directly into SCO's pockets. If you use their technology, you indirectly contribute to their bottom line.
Your proof is from internalmemos.com?
The authenticity of this memo has been well established and never denied by Sun.
This argument right here tells me you don't really know much about professional web application development.
I am well aware of the fact that Java is considered the development platform of choice for most ebusiness applications these days. So what? Most businesses still use Windows even though they together could save billions by switching to OSS on client and server and contributing to open source development. You yourself cite "conservative" companies, so don't act as if a company using a specific technology automatically validated said technology.
I wish people would try to write a few decent sized web applications
You mean like Slashdot, which is larger than 90% of these "professional applications", more reliable than your shitty JSP websites and hacked together by a few kids in Perl? The very site you are using would never have been possible in Java, because it never would have scaled to its present usage on the handful of low-end servers it is based on. Slashdot is a real-word application with impressive scalability and minimal implementation cost; this bullshit distinction between "professional" and non-professional application is nothing but close-minded "I get my paycheck for coding Java, so it's better" type thinking. How much have you done with Perl? How much have you done with Python? Have you even looked at Apache's powerful mod_perl 2.0 and CPAN's archive of modules for virtually anything you might ever need, updated every day by programmers from around the world and free to use? Have you looked at Perldoc, Perl-based object-oriented programming, Perl XML implementations ranging from XML::Simple to SAX and DOM parsers and so forth?
Sun bought StarOffice and released it as OpenOffice.
Because they see Microsoft as their arch-enemy and would love to be Microsoft. Once they have a significant market position with OpenOffice, they will cease supporting the open source version and make improvements available in the commercially marketed StarOffice only.
Sun put much needed people on the GNOME usuability project. Sun has been marketing Gnome to its customers
Because CDE, their own desktop environment, is such a piece of crap that anyone who spends more than 5 minutes with it leaves the room screaming or becomes clinically insane. Much like vi, really.
If Sun can't get Java right on their own friggin' operating system, where can they? The Linux Java implementation was crappy for years until they finally got around to making it at least somewhat usable, but in any case, Java, at least in its JIT-compiled form, is completely unsuitable for serious desktop applications. OpenOffice isn't written in Java for a reason, but true to form for Sun, it's still slow as molasses.
Furthermore, given that Sun makes its money selling big iron, it seems to me that they have a vested interest in keeping Java slow and bloated (each JRE being more massive than the last).
It's disgraceful how much of the tech community keeps reproducing all propaganda that the impressive Sun hype machine keeps churning out. Look, great, Sun takes open source software they haven't programmed, adds a few shitty Java apps, bundles them in a package and stamps "Sun Java Desktop" on the whole thing. Yay, Linux on the desktop! You got to be fucking kidding me.
Meanwhile, Sun sends millions of dollars in "license money" to SCO, and keeps spreading FUD about Linux to promote its own OS offering, Solaris. Even Sun's own employees know that Java is a piece of crap, and everyone who has ever tried to run a Java client application (without drinking Sun's Kool-Aid first) knows that, too. Sun should be boycotted for their collaboration with SCO alone, but the fact that they have pushed a programming language into academia which cannot be used to develop competitive client applications has done more to harm the tech community than Microsoft.
Yes, Java can be used for server applications (a claim which Java proponents ridiculuously uphold to demonstrate that Java is good technology -- if it couldn't, it would be quite useless, wouldn't it?), but so can Perl, Python, PHP, Ruby, OCaml and many other powerful and completely open programming language that are not controlled by a megacorporation which is in bed with SCO. There is no need whatsoever to use Sun, and the sooner the IT community learns that, the better.
First, the quality of Wikipedia texts is very heterogenous. There are superficial "stubs" but there are also in depth analyses of a particular, often obscure subject. It really depends on the writer and on the motivation. Some articles are far superior to what you would find in any other encyclopedia. Some are laughably wrong but will get updated sooner or later.
Second, you did not actually follow the link. It points to the Wiki-Textbook project, which is independent from Wikipedia.
Debian stable or testing are reasonably up-to-date, regularly updated by volunteers all around the world, and entirely free. Not only is updating to new versions a lot easier than with most other solutions, Debian packages also come with nice configuration scripts which make your work a lot easier. For servers, I really see no good reason to use a large, commercial distribution like Red Hat. For clients, Debian is a bit too outdated (unless you install lots of backports or use unstable, the latter not being an option for companies).
Support, you say? Debian has a nice directory of qualified Debian consultants, and in general, it makes sense to have a few Linux experts inhouse to deal with emergencies.
Software patents being enforced are always a bad precedent, no matter against whom. Hopefully, big corporations will wake up to the patent scam, which primarily benefits lawyers and idea pirates. Innovation does not come from patents, according to Cisco's VP of "Intellectual Property". He stated in an interview:
Patents don't stimulate innovation, they capture and protect innovation. My experience at Cisco is that the ability to get patents is not what inspires new developments. Instead, competition has been the major stimulus of innovation at Cisco. Our engineering teams are motivated by the desire to quickly turn their ideas into products and services that customers want, solutions that will help our customers improve their productivity. They don't ask "can we patent this?" before deciding whether to create new solutions.
In order to "capture and protect" innovation, companies register more and more patents each year, often just to prevent others from suing them. But some companies register patents for the sole purpose of engaging in legal warfare -- a risky gamble with potentially huge prizes.
The biggest danger inherent in software patents is to free software. Megacorporations can easily collect thousands of patents on trivial processes to use against open source programmers who have little means to defend themselves. Wait for Microsoft and others to attack on this front -- that would be nice extra FUD fodder with all the SCO crap going on right now. To ignore software patents as Linus Torvalds does is the wrong approach. They must be eliminated entirely.
As others have noted, they have funded Kroupware and gnupg. The German Ministry for the Economy has also funded BerliOS, an ad-free SourceForge replacement and news portal. There are plenty of public school and university projects, effectively funded by the government, and there's a heavily funded education software project which seems to be more concerned with remaining heavily funded than with presenting any concrete results, though. All in all, Germany is very OSS friendly, which may have something to do with the fact that Redmond is not within our present borders.
I can't resonably read a book that is filled with XML tags and if there is no longer software to parse them then its not to useful.
This is complete bullshit. With a proper setup you would convert the source into multiple output formats, including TXT, but you would keep the source in a format that maintains meta information such as formatting, chapters and pages. XML is used in the entire industry exactly with the expectation that it will be around for decades. Even if it won't, the open source code that we have to parse it will not magically disappear -- PG would keep using it to generate output texts from the XML source through all these years. You might as well argue that ASCII will go away.
Keep your node running a while and check the "catcher". This will show you which files are being broadcast, and allow you to subscribe to the channels they are sent on. The channel k2b_recommend should show up fairly quickly; it is used as an "official" recommendation channel by the K2B developer.
I've been running K2B for the last few days and it's quite impressive (the web-UI could still use some polishing, though). You can choose from several channels to subscribe to, such as "mp3jackpot", and automatically get the latest files broadcast in these channels while your node is running. At this time there are actually no illegal channels, at least I've seen none; the mp3jackpot channel above is run by mp34u, a site where music fans choose and rate freely available songs. Some of them are actually pretty good, and it's about time the net is used more effectively to promote the free music that's floating around.
There's even a channel called "publicdomain4u" which broadcasts very old music from the 1920s and 1930s. If you have something to say, you may consider setting up your own channel on k2b and use it to broadcast text files, music, videos etc. It is possible to share the private key to your channel so you can collaborate with others to broadcast files in it. I for one will be keeping an eye on the new channels that pop up. For those running other p2p clients: K2B doesn't normally take much bandwidth, you can use it in parallel.
P2P broadcasting may very well be the next important development. It's a bit like Usenet, but fully decentralized, and with some quality control (K2B has recommendation channels, and only users who own the channel private key can broadcast files in it, eliminating the spam problem).
Re:Most intense period of planetary exploration ev
on
Mars Express launch today
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Actually, Cassini will enter Saturn's orbit on July 1, 2004.
such as him possibly having some bootleg mp3's on his computer.
Sigh.. having some "bootleg MP3s" on your computer is not going to get you sent to prison, or held liable. Copyright infringement is illegal, possessing copyrighted materials -- in whatever form -- is not. To prove copyright infringement, you have to prove that the person actually offered the files through a file sharing network. If he just obtained them through one, making a strong case for CI is very difficult for various reasons ("copy of a legal CD which is now destroyed.. didn't know that he didn't have permission to send me the file.." etc.)
At least one of the students offered a few hundred MP3s on his own machine -- about 500 megs or so, nothing unusual. Because most of these kids trade MP3s like virtually everyone else does, the RIAA almost always can threaten them with direct copyright infringement. This kind of selective enforcement is the real danger of current copyright law. Want to ruin someone? Prove that they offered a few movies and MP3s on their machine and go for maximum damages. With millions of KaZaA and eDonkey users, this strategy is highly effective.
No signals? We haven't really looked. When it was government run, SETI had a budget of $12 million - which was eliminated in 1993, a year after its start, by the US Congress. "Waste of taxpayer money." (This PDF is a good overview of the funding history.) We're talking about millions of dollars, while hundreds of billions are funneled to defense corporations every year. Now SETI relies entirely on private funding such as the donations by Paul Allen. The ATA search starting 2005 is the first serious attempt, and it's still in the million dollar range. Until ATA, we have to rely on a couple of weeks telescope time in Arecibo every year.
High-end SETI and planet searching will probably require very large, orbital telescopes in the billion dollar range. At that level, you can start receiving unintended signals (TV broadcasts etc.) from light years away.
But perhaps the biggest problem SETI faces are universal timescales. Human civilization in detectable form has existed for barely 100 out of 4.6 billion years. We really have no clue what happens to most civilizations on the other side of that timescale:
A civilization can destroy itself. Hopefully, we are already past this stage.
A civilization might be destroyed by some cosmic event that cannot be technologically prevented and occurs regularly (e.g. supernovae).
A civilization might enter a state of artificially maintained cultural stagnation and isolation (Dark Age)
A civilization might decide to become totally undetectable, and do nothing but receive information.
A civilization might cease to exist in a physical form that is relevant to us ("transcension").
Sure, this may sound silly, but we really have no knowledge about the development of civilizations. The civilizations that are actually broadcasting signals right now (or rather, some years ago -- damn relativity) may be far away and few. So let's start looking.
The silliest idea of them all is that alien civilizations would be a threat to us. Why? Because it assumes that technology advances only in peripheral areas, but not in the one that is most essential: thinking. True, our brains haven't changed much in the last few thousand years, but then again, our modern industrial civilization is barely two centuries old, our understanding of the human brain and our little spacefaring ability is much younger still. Now think about the technological demands for interstellar travel -- it is hard to conceive that a civilization capable of sending a substantial number of its people to another planet (which needs to be located first!) would not also have made some advances in its own thinking.
And I'm not only talking about the software: Philosophy, culture etc. - which are also significant; as our history demonstrates, culturally underdeveloped civilizations tend to lose interest in space travel. We're already making small steps in interfacing chips with wetware. Any civilization that is sufficiently advanced for interstellar travel also has the technology to enhance its own thinking abilities beyond our current understanding.
What, then, would be the motivation for such a spacefaring civilization to attack another? Resources? Hardly. The energy requirements to get those resources are much higher than the value of the resources themselves, and if these energy requirements can be overcome, you are no longer dealing with a resource-dependent civilization anyway -- you have nanotechnology, molecular assemblers etc. Blind hatred? A product of our primitive reptile brains, in spite of what Star Trek may have taught you (Klingons! Painsticks!), it is very unlikely that a civilization on that level would still be guided by such emotions, which could be turned off on demand using the same neuro-interfacing technology that also enhances rational thinking. Threat eliminiation? Earth a threat? Only to ourselves. The Day the Earth Stood Still was nice, but nuclear technology isn't exactly going to turn us into an intergalactic pariah as the movie predicted.
No, the one motivation that will guide such civilizations is simple: information. They will want to learn about other worlds, other cultures, other planets. But they will not want to interfere with these cultures, for two reasons:
Giving a primitive, aggressive civilization access to highly advanced technology is, in fact, dangerous
You don't want to mess with your data. First alien contact has such a massive effect on any culture that it would ruin any observations to be carried out.
So, if interstellar travel is possible and desirable (let's not even talk about all the relativity issues involved), aliens would most likely only watch. If it isn't, they would listen using huge (solar system sized?) radio telescopes. But they certainly wouldn't start "punishment" missions in order to eliminate "inferior" civilizations -- these are primitive motivations that are not rationally justifiable.
You think like a Slahdotter trying to overcome a lameness filter. These filters are, however, applied by humans. Debian can obviously refuse to include any documentation that tries to overcome its guidelines using stupid tricks.
People who choose the FDL usually know little about its specifics -- they just want their documentation to be available under a copyleft license. Thus, virtually all FDL documents are free of invariant sections. Instead of condemning the license outright, a pragmatic approach would therefore be to define a threshold of invariant content (say, 20%), after which a document is no longer considered free. The FDL is the standard license for free, open content (see also Wikipedia, perhaps the largest open content project), and ostracizing it entirely will get us nowhere.
Upon reading the post, however, what I see is a bean counter mentality that can really be dangerous to open source projects as a whole. I shudder at the thought of hundreds of package maintainers being contacted to deal with this "license issue", which is really a non-issue to anyone with some common sense. This time would better be spent working on real problems -- it's not like Debian has none of those...
The Federal Circuit Bar Journal (FCBJ), as the official journal for the Federal Circuit Bar Association and the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, also known as the CAFC or the Federal Circuit, is charged with providing meaningful, insightful and timely coverage of issues within the journal's purview. The FCBJ is a national, quarterly, publication which carries a subscriber base of over three thousand judges, professors, attorneys and law students.
The scope of the FCBJ consists of all issues within the jurisdiction of the Federal Circuit. Because the CAFC is the sole arbiter of patent appeals in the United States, the primary emphasis of the journal is patent and trademark jurisprudence. However, the Court, and consequently the journal, covers a variety of other issues. The Federal Circuit handles appeals from the Court of International Trade and the International Trade Commission. In addition, the Federal Circuit decides government contract cases on appeal from the Court of Federal Claims and government personnel appeals from the Merit Systems Protection Board. On a smaller scale, the journal also covers certain specialized areas which include vaccination disputes, veterans appeals and environmental and natural resources litigation.
Continuing Patent Applications and Performance of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office shows that the patent statistics from the US PTO are deceptive, and that the actual patent allowance rate has been as high as 95 percent (in the examined period from 1993 to 1998). "Grant rates were just as high, reaching a maximum of 97 percent." This is a much higher level of patent acceptance than in Europe and Japan. The authors conclude that the US PTO currently grants a patent "for virtually every original application."
So what you're saying is that software patents might be a good idea because they can be used by a company to defend itself against.. software patents? Uh yeah, makes perfect sense to me;-)
Slashdot Mirror
Germany has laws against distribution of nazi propaganda, of violent imagery, and even against blasphemy (most people don't know that -- it's the 166 StGB, and rarely enforced, but it does have demonstrable chilling effects). In the German state of Northrhine-Westphalia, there is currently an ongoing experiment to block sites like that of neo-nazi Gary Lauck and rotten.com on the ISP level! Depending on which data you use (purchasing power parity corrected or not), Germany is the third or fifth largest economy in the world. The political system itself is more democratic than that of the US -- there are multiple parties, coalitions, some direct democracy mechanisms, and most importantly, secure ballots (pencil and paper based). Where the Greens would have no chance to be in the goverment in the US, they are actually part of it here. (And got a lot more corrupt in the process.) Yet in terms of free spech, the United States retain the upper hand.
I have nothing but respect for the people who drafted the United States constitution -- it is a truly remarkable document. From things like the "limited times" restriction on copyright to freedom of speech, separation of church and state and many other issues, these were really smart people with a lot of forethought (they can be forgiven for the Second Amendment). So far, the attempts to pervert this document have mostly failed, and I am confident that this will stay so if the US gets a new government next year. Another 4 years under Bush and Ashcroft - I don't know. For us Europeans and for the Indians, the fact that we don't have something like the First Amendment means that we have to be even more cautious in defending free speech.
And we all know that Slashdot has infinite resources at its disposal. Look, this site has been hacked together by a few geeks in their spare time. It scales well not because of the amount of effort and resources invested in its deployment, but because the platform is simply lightning fast -- there are no unnecessary libraries and APIs, instead, the webserver API is accessed directly using mod_perl. Database access is nevertheless not tied to a specific DB -- without any effort whatsoever, Perl DBI provides a transparent and fast interface to a large number of DBs.
For example, generating static pages from dynamic data at short intervals and serving those instead,
In Slashcode, old pages are archived. New ones are generated dynamically. This is necessary because of the rate of modifications.
If Slashdot used JSP or ASP.NET they'd be able to significantly decrease the load on their MySQL database
Not only is this statement unsupported, it is also irrelevant. According to the FAQ, Slashdot uses a single MySQL server and 8 webservers. This shows clearly where the major load is.
And their performance suffers as well.
Also an unsupported statement. I and many other people I know use Slashdot to check their connection speed because it is almost always highly responsive.
Of course it's not. And I trust that you apply the same standards to Microsoft. But if you want to stop bad behavior from occurring, you should not support companies that practice it. Simple as this: By supporting Sun, you support SCO's battle against Linux. If you give them money, chances are that some of it goes directly into SCO's pockets. If you use their technology, you indirectly contribute to their bottom line.
Your proof is from internalmemos.com?
The authenticity of this memo has been well established and never denied by Sun.
This argument right here tells me you don't really know much about professional web application development.
I am well aware of the fact that Java is considered the development platform of choice for most ebusiness applications these days. So what? Most businesses still use Windows even though they together could save billions by switching to OSS on client and server and contributing to open source development. You yourself cite "conservative" companies, so don't act as if a company using a specific technology automatically validated said technology.
I wish people would try to write a few decent sized web applications
You mean like Slashdot, which is larger than 90% of these "professional applications", more reliable than your shitty JSP websites and hacked together by a few kids in Perl? The very site you are using would never have been possible in Java, because it never would have scaled to its present usage on the handful of low-end servers it is based on. Slashdot is a real-word application with impressive scalability and minimal implementation cost; this bullshit distinction between "professional" and non-professional application is nothing but close-minded "I get my paycheck for coding Java, so it's better" type thinking. How much have you done with Perl? How much have you done with Python? Have you even looked at Apache's powerful mod_perl 2.0 and CPAN's archive of modules for virtually anything you might ever need, updated every day by programmers from around the world and free to use? Have you looked at Perldoc, Perl-based object-oriented programming, Perl XML implementations ranging from XML::Simple to SAX and DOM parsers and so forth?
Sun bought StarOffice and released it as OpenOffice.
Because they see Microsoft as their arch-enemy and would love to be Microsoft. Once they have a significant market position with OpenOffice, they will cease supporting the open source version and make improvements available in the commercially marketed StarOffice only.
Sun put much needed people on the GNOME usuability project. Sun has been marketing Gnome to its customers
Because CDE, their own desktop environment, is such a piece of crap that anyone who spends more than 5 minutes with it leaves the room screaming or becomes clinically insane. Much like vi, really.
Furthermore, given that Sun makes its money selling big iron, it seems to me that they have a vested interest in keeping Java slow and bloated (each JRE being more massive than the last).
Meanwhile, Sun sends millions of dollars in "license money" to SCO, and keeps spreading FUD about Linux to promote its own OS offering, Solaris. Even Sun's own employees know that Java is a piece of crap, and everyone who has ever tried to run a Java client application (without drinking Sun's Kool-Aid first) knows that, too. Sun should be boycotted for their collaboration with SCO alone, but the fact that they have pushed a programming language into academia which cannot be used to develop competitive client applications has done more to harm the tech community than Microsoft.
Yes, Java can be used for server applications (a claim which Java proponents ridiculuously uphold to demonstrate that Java is good technology -- if it couldn't, it would be quite useless, wouldn't it?), but so can Perl, Python, PHP, Ruby, OCaml and many other powerful and completely open programming language that are not controlled by a megacorporation which is in bed with SCO. There is no need whatsoever to use Sun, and the sooner the IT community learns that, the better.
Second, you did not actually follow the link. It points to the Wiki-Textbook project, which is independent from Wikipedia.
Support, you say? Debian has a nice directory of qualified Debian consultants, and in general, it makes sense to have a few Linux experts inhouse to deal with emergencies.
Only if you're a cop.
Wrong. Ignorance is no defense before law.
In order to "capture and protect" innovation, companies register more and more patents each year, often just to prevent others from suing them. But some companies register patents for the sole purpose of engaging in legal warfare -- a risky gamble with potentially huge prizes.
The biggest danger inherent in software patents is to free software. Megacorporations can easily collect thousands of patents on trivial processes to use against open source programmers who have little means to defend themselves. Wait for Microsoft and others to attack on this front -- that would be nice extra FUD fodder with all the SCO crap going on right now. To ignore software patents as Linus Torvalds does is the wrong approach. They must be eliminated entirely.
Your articles are great, but you overdo it a bit with the marketing. This will only hurt your reputation.
As others have noted, they have funded Kroupware and gnupg. The German Ministry for the Economy has also funded BerliOS, an ad-free SourceForge replacement and news portal. There are plenty of public school and university projects, effectively funded by the government, and there's a heavily funded education software project which seems to be more concerned with remaining heavily funded than with presenting any concrete results, though. All in all, Germany is very OSS friendly, which may have something to do with the fact that Redmond is not within our present borders.
Just wait until information is added to the list of forbidden substances, and included in the War on Drugs.
This is complete bullshit. With a proper setup you would convert the source into multiple output formats, including TXT, but you would keep the source in a format that maintains meta information such as formatting, chapters and pages. XML is used in the entire industry exactly with the expectation that it will be around for decades. Even if it won't, the open source code that we have to parse it will not magically disappear -- PG would keep using it to generate output texts from the XML source through all these years. You might as well argue that ASCII will go away.
Keep your node running a while and check the "catcher". This will show you which files are being broadcast, and allow you to subscribe to the channels they are sent on. The channel k2b_recommend should show up fairly quickly; it is used as an "official" recommendation channel by the K2B developer.
There's even a channel called "publicdomain4u" which broadcasts very old music from the 1920s and 1930s. If you have something to say, you may consider setting up your own channel on k2b and use it to broadcast text files, music, videos etc. It is possible to share the private key to your channel so you can collaborate with others to broadcast files in it. I for one will be keeping an eye on the new channels that pop up. For those running other p2p clients: K2B doesn't normally take much bandwidth, you can use it in parallel.
P2P broadcasting may very well be the next important development. It's a bit like Usenet, but fully decentralized, and with some quality control (K2B has recommendation channels, and only users who own the channel private key can broadcast files in it, eliminating the spam problem).
Actually, Cassini will enter Saturn's orbit on July 1, 2004.
Sigh .. having some "bootleg MP3s" on your computer is not going to get you sent to prison, or held liable. Copyright infringement is illegal, possessing copyrighted materials -- in whatever form -- is not. To prove copyright infringement, you have to prove that the person actually offered the files through a file sharing network. If he just obtained them through one, making a strong case for CI is very difficult for various reasons ("copy of a legal CD which is now destroyed .. didn't know that he didn't have permission to send me the file .." etc.)
At least one of the students offered a few hundred MP3s on his own machine -- about 500 megs or so, nothing unusual. Because most of these kids trade MP3s like virtually everyone else does, the RIAA almost always can threaten them with direct copyright infringement. This kind of selective enforcement is the real danger of current copyright law. Want to ruin someone? Prove that they offered a few movies and MP3s on their machine and go for maximum damages. With millions of KaZaA and eDonkey users, this strategy is highly effective.
High-end SETI and planet searching will probably require very large, orbital telescopes in the billion dollar range. At that level, you can start receiving unintended signals (TV broadcasts etc.) from light years away.
But perhaps the biggest problem SETI faces are universal timescales. Human civilization in detectable form has existed for barely 100 out of 4.6 billion years. We really have no clue what happens to most civilizations on the other side of that timescale:
Sure, this may sound silly, but we really have no knowledge about the development of civilizations. The civilizations that are actually broadcasting signals right now (or rather, some years ago -- damn relativity) may be far away and few. So let's start looking.
And I'm not only talking about the software: Philosophy, culture etc. - which are also significant; as our history demonstrates, culturally underdeveloped civilizations tend to lose interest in space travel. We're already making small steps in interfacing chips with wetware. Any civilization that is sufficiently advanced for interstellar travel also has the technology to enhance its own thinking abilities beyond our current understanding.
What, then, would be the motivation for such a spacefaring civilization to attack another? Resources? Hardly. The energy requirements to get those resources are much higher than the value of the resources themselves, and if these energy requirements can be overcome, you are no longer dealing with a resource-dependent civilization anyway -- you have nanotechnology, molecular assemblers etc. Blind hatred? A product of our primitive reptile brains, in spite of what Star Trek may have taught you (Klingons! Painsticks!), it is very unlikely that a civilization on that level would still be guided by such emotions, which could be turned off on demand using the same neuro-interfacing technology that also enhances rational thinking. Threat eliminiation? Earth a threat? Only to ourselves. The Day the Earth Stood Still was nice, but nuclear technology isn't exactly going to turn us into an intergalactic pariah as the movie predicted.
No, the one motivation that will guide such civilizations is simple: information. They will want to learn about other worlds, other cultures, other planets. But they will not want to interfere with these cultures, for two reasons:
So, if interstellar travel is possible and desirable (let's not even talk about all the relativity issues involved), aliens would most likely only watch. If it isn't, they would listen using huge (solar system sized?) radio telescopes. But they certainly wouldn't start "punishment" missions in order to eliminate "inferior" civilizations -- these are primitive motivations that are not rationally justifiable.
You think like a Slahdotter trying to overcome a lameness filter. These filters are, however, applied by humans. Debian can obviously refuse to include any documentation that tries to overcome its guidelines using stupid tricks.
Upon reading the post, however, what I see is a bean counter mentality that can really be dangerous to open source projects as a whole. I shudder at the thought of hundreds of package maintainers being contacted to deal with this "license issue", which is really a non-issue to anyone with some common sense. This time would better be spent working on real problems -- it's not like Debian has none of those ...
Continuing Patent Applications and Performance of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office shows that the patent statistics from the US PTO are deceptive, and that the actual patent allowance rate has been as high as 95 percent (in the examined period from 1993 to 1998). "Grant rates were just as high, reaching a maximum of 97 percent." This is a much higher level of patent acceptance than in Europe and Japan. The authors conclude that the US PTO currently grants a patent "for virtually every original application."
So what you're saying is that software patents might be a good idea because they can be used by a company to defend itself against .. software patents? Uh yeah, makes perfect sense to me ;-)