To a great extent, we are the corporate power. Never before in American history has so much money been
invested in the stock market by so many people. We own our oppressor.
This is a common fallacy. Have a look at the numbers. As of 1989, nearly 90% of stocks, bonds, trusts, and business equity were owned by the richest 10% of the population -- more than 50% by the richest 1%.
Since then that share has continued to rise. Don't believe the hype.
On a side note, can screenshots be presented as legal evidence?
Considering how easy it is to fake a screenshot
of absolutely anything, I suspect not. (Certainly
if anyone ever charged *me* with anything based
on a screenshot, I'd just do a little demo for the judge and jury: "How to falsify evidence in ten minutes or less using a sub-$1000 laptop.")
You can use the firewalling kernel modules on
your own machine -- ipfwadm, ipchains, or
netfilter, depending on whether you're running
2.0.x, 2.2.x, or 2.3.x+. Start by limiting
everything incoming to localhost-only, and then
open up just the stuff you need to open up.
[Previous argument: that capitalism-as-implemented makes it too easy to externalize the cost of pollution and resource wastage, rewarding those who do so with lower costs and higher profits.]
This is not an attribute of the market itself, but of the legal structure in which it exists. Many free-market advocates are fans of strict liability which would internalize those externalities. The process is not hard -- just remove the tragedy of the commons incentives through privitization.
It's harder than you think. Privatization and strict liability works up to a point -- the point where your pollution damages my property. This goes a long way and if our legal framework recognized it we'd probably be in better shape than we are now: for instance, if people who clear-cut hillsides were liable for the resulting mudslides lower down in the valley.
However, what such a system doesn't do, is provide you an incentive not to damage your own property in pursuit of short-term profits. In the long term you're dead, so you might as well use up all your resources first. Strictly private property says what you do with your property is your own business, but in doing so it sets up the conditions for later generations to get screwed.
No other mechanism devised by man has yet provided as effective a means of resource allocation than the market. But it is defined by the legal structure in which it exists. And as long as we have the US Department of the Interior allocating rather than individuals and corporations with vested interest in the property, we'll have more of the same.
Ah, but how does the Department of the Interior decide how to allocate resources? In practice, it allocates them to those individuals and corporations who have the most short-term interest in the property -- i.e., those who are willing to spend the most (on lobbying, political donations, think tanks, amicus curiae briefs, etc.) to influence the political process.
The "legal structure" in which the market exists is also a marketable good. The reason we don't have strict liability now is that it's easier for those with a short-term interest in exploiting property to organize and bring their economic power to bear than it is for those with a long-term interest in maintaining the value of property to counter them.
To the extent that the market is the problem, it is also the solution, by allowing the internalizing of those externalities.
There are an awful lot of people who benefit from keeping those externalities external -- how does the market make sure they're not able to twist the legal system to their benefit? And I have yet to hear of a way to internalize long-term consequences for people who live in the short term. We ought to try getting those problems nailed down before we sell the national forests to Georgia Pacific, the oceans to Cargill, and the national parks to Disney.
The difference is: In the VTEC engine there are only two different valve timings. It is not continuously variable as an electronic valve system would be.
Could someone with a mechanical background explain the difference between this technology and whatever's in the Hondas and Acuras with "VTEC: Valve Timing Electronically Controlled" splashed on the back? I presume that's not as revolutionary or everyone would be using it... but what's the difference?
Last month, I bought a clearance laptop (Dell LM P90, 16 MB RAM, 1 Gig HD, and 640*480 active matrix display) for $500 Canadian.
Ah, but does it run for twelve hours on one battery charge and weigh less than three pounds?
I don't know about these pda's or sub-laptops, but I think they must get a lot cheaper before they can compete with out-of-date computers.
I don't think they're really in the same space. A used or clearance laptop (where did you find a *clearance* P90? I would have thought all of those were out of the shops some time in 1996) is a better deal if what you want is a cheap Linux box that you can throw in your backpack. But until batteries get better and/or they stop putting moving parts (i.e., hard drives) in laptops, there's a niche for machines like the z50.
Unfortunately, since IBM's discontinued it, there may not be enough demand at the $500-$1K price point. Too bad; in most ways the z50 was a much nicer machine than its competition (the HP Journadas and Compaq Aeros), being based on the rather slick Thinkpad 240 chassis. (The only problem is that it really ought to have had an 800x600 screen -- it's big enough.
I'm not sorry I bought mine; nothing better if you have to sit in a library all morning taking notes and in a cafe all afternoon writing your notes up, especially if you don't want to be bothered with carrying around a power supply or looking for electrical plugs. I just wish the Linux port was a little farther along.
Re:Part of a four-volume trilogy ...
on
The Star Fraction
·
· Score: 2
your opinion is that of someone quite far left(strong socialist).
Actually, I consider myself not far to the left of the American mainstream. Certainly I believe in free markets and private ownership -- at least if the alternative is state socialism and (at least with current knowledge, skills, and technology) central planning. I also believe in trade unions and consumer protection.
From my view (centralist), while the US is right politically, there is little resistance to socialist ideals, besides dismissing them as ineffective. Communism is a very different matter, but i feel that this is rightfully so. While now is not the time to start a debate on communism,
-- agreed --
because communism is so far to the extreme the only way to maintain it is with a dictatorship. This leads to a situation much like that of fascism, which is treated very similar to communism in the US. This leads me to believe that the ideals of dictatorship are more of the concern to Americans, and not socialist politics.
No offense, but this is exactly the sort of thing I mean -- the assumption that communist == totalitarian makes it very difficult to continue to have a rational discussion once the word "communism" comes up. MacLeod's books -- plausibly or not depends on your viewpoint -- present anarcho-communism without dictatorship. (So do Iain M. Banks' -- though unlike MacLeod, Banks never uses the word.) The fact that "communism" is portrayed as a word with positive connotations even vis-a-vis "socialism" in The Star Fraction makes it, IMHO, more difficult for an American audience to digest than The Cassini Division, even though The Star Fraction is probably the better novel.
I think that you are mistaking the strong corporate lobby in the US for the ideals of the citizens and leaders, although the leaders will do much for money (this is the biggest flaw in the country).
Actually, I'm working from conversations with individuals, here -- it's hard to get the corporate lobby to read books.:)
Well thank you for making your post intellegent, it makes it much easier to have a resonalble debate on an issue.
No problem.:)
Re:Part of a four-volume trilogy ...
on
The Star Fraction
·
· Score: 2
Hey, I am an American, and in my experience, most of the Americans I meet are ignorant of and somewhat hostile to other people's ideas.:)
I was being a bit sarcastic. But seriously, for a lot of Americans words like "socialism", "communism", and "Marx" seems to set off a certain, trained but still gut-level negative response that it takes some work to get past.
I would never assume that any individual American I meet isn't open to new ideas; but I also have a fairly decent idea of what works in a twenty-second sound bite (or on the back of a book cover) and what doesn't work except as part of an extended rational discussion.
I'm not claiming that Americans are more closed-minded than anyone else (though I think a case could be made that the average American is more closed-minded than the average European; possibly because the average European has been forced from an early age to deal with both European and American cultures and ideologies, and the average American hasn't).
The point I was trying to make about MacLeod's books is that they're easier to digest if you don't think that socialism is a dirty word -- which most Americans do, at first hearing.
Re:Part of a four-volume trilogy ...
on
The Star Fraction
·
· Score: 2
Oddly, Tor Books, his US publisher, decided to start with "The Cassini Division" (arguably the weakest book) then follow up with "The Stone Canal".
It's not that odd, really; Cassini Division is the easiest for an American audience to digest since it doesn't have all the British leftist politics the other three do.:) Say the word "Marxist" to most Americans (yes, I'm American) and the steel Cheyenne Mountain blast doors close over the eyes and ears; ask them to accept a radical union activist as a protagonist? The US as an oppressive world government? The UN as a tool of the US government, and not the other way around? Better to let them ease into it slowly.
(P.S. IMHO, Sky Road is weaker than Cassini Division, and so are the 'past' parts of Stone Canal... but the 'future' parts more than make up for it.:))
Isn't it Stone Canal in which the 'Fast Folk' first appear, and Cassini Division in which they become the major issue/threat/focus? In Star Fraction it's the 'Blind Watchmaker' -- the god in the machine, the Gibsonian cybernetic überverstand evolving independently out of software -- that everyone's worried about... and which by the end of the book they don't have to worry about any more. Clear the set for the Extropians -- sorry, 'Fast Folk'.
One of the things I find refreshing about MacLeod -- sort of in the way a slap in the face can be refreshing under the right circumstances -- is how casual he is about exterminating whole virtual civilizations; how callously his characters can say "consciousness is an emergent property of carbon" and deny AIs or 'uploaded' humans any sort of civil rights or social equality just because they ain't natural-born human.
The consensus in SF ever since, oh, the Blade Runner days is that a mind is a mind is a mind, and natural/artificial, carbon/silicon, wetware/software makes no difference. MacLeod's work highlights the fact that this is really just one of SF's social conventions, and just because we hold this particular truth to be self-evident doesn't mean the rest of humanity is going to... and not just the screaming anti-science mobs (has anyone actually seen a screaming anti-science mob?) but the smart, competent, and ruthless good guys, too.
And it's also damned refreshing to read something that doesn't take fin-de-millenaire corporate capitalism as the end-all be-all of human existence, for good or evil. Long live the Last International!
Doesn't this mean that the CEO of a certain big company could get RMS drunk and get him to sign the artistic license for ALL GNU project source and "steal" if for use it all in a commercial project!
In theory, yes, I think. Assuming that RMS is empowered to sign for the FSF, and that a contract signed while drunk is considered valid.
The danger that the FSF will be kidnapped and their brains taken over by rapatious commercial interests from Planet X has also been known to cause people to remove the popular "...or any later version" clause from the statement that their software is distributed under GPL v2. I think this is an excess of paranoia, myself, but some people think you can never have too much.:)
Is their a clause in the document which signs over copyright to the GNU project which says "I hand over copyright to the GNU project but only if my source is distributed under the GPL and no other licence"?
As I understand it, copyright just doesn't work that way. You could, however, license your work to the FSF rather than assign the copyright (as I should have remembered when I made my original post) and put whatever terms you like in it, mod what they're willing to accept -- though you would still have the versioning problem, above. I'd be surprised if they'd be willing to incorporate software that was tied to a certain GPL version -- it would make updates too difficult.
My mistake -- the FSF does not require you to assign copyright to them if you want your work to be incorporated as part of the GNU project; they just prefer it.
The relevant document is Legal issues about contributing code to GNU. In it they list three methods of allowing your software to be incorporated into the GNU project (allowing it, that is, in terms of copyright law):
Assigning the copyright to the FSF. (This is the easiest.)
Licensing the software to the FSF. (From context this seems to be more specific than just releasing your software under GPL. The main disadvantage of this is that if someone violates the terms of the license, the FSF can't sue them -- you have to do it yourself. Also, this doesn't work for modifications to existing GNU software.)
Putting the software in the public domain. (This allows anyone to do anything they like with it, including repackaging it under the Joe Bloggs Private License, though that would of course only apply to copies received from Joe Bloggs. This lets in all the evil the Artistic license keeps out.)
Why not just use the Artistic License? Then the authors can some day make money out of a commercial fork if they need to pay the bills!
Nothing in the GPL prohibits authors from releasing commercial versions of their own software -- or closed-source versions either.
In fact, you can't write a license that limits your rights as the author; the GPL is based on copyright law, which says that authors can do anything, but other users have to do what the author says (thus the "nothing else grants you permission to modify or distribute the software" note in the GPL).
So you're free to release your software under as many different licenses as you want, closed and/or open. IIRC, perl itself is a good example of this -- it's available under both the GPL and the Artistic License, so people who want to incorporate it into GPLed projects can do so, while people who need more flexibility have that option as well.
Some of the confusion may arise because if you want your program to become part of the GNU project (as distinct from part of the larger category of "software distrubuted under the GNU GPL") you have to assign your copyright to the Free Software Foundation (give the software to them, in other words). By doing that you relinquish your rights as author and can no longer release closed-source versions.
If you read the/. interview with Bruce Schneier a few weeks ago you'll see that he points out that quantum computing isn't a magic skeleton key; it reduces the complexity of calculation but doesn't eliminate it. Mathematically, it effectively halves your key length. So a 2048-bit PGP key (or 256-bit RSA key) is still secure even against quantum computers.
And steganography isn't the same thing as "security through obscurity". Steganography is the art of hiding one message inside another; "security through obscurity" is doing stupid things like XORing stored passwords with the programmer's birthday and hoping nobody notices.:)
If you're interested in alternatives to crypto, you should also check out chaffing and winnowing -- it's a bit complex (and I don't claim to understand it completely) but basically it involves mixing real information with garbage in such a way that the receiving system will automatically be able to tell the difference but an eavesdropper won't. No keys required, ergo, no government-mandated "key recovery" schemes.
Hmmm... I can't help but think you'd have more credibility if you posted something. (If you were Transmeta, you wouldn't have posted that message on/.:>)
-- Or, the way I learned it on the Apple ][ and C64:
10 PRINT A, B, C
:)
Python:
print a, b, c
I think Python's a good choice because it is about as simple, syntax-wise, as BASIC, it's somewhat less weird (i.e., less unlike what most of the industry's using) than Lisp, and it's not the industry Flavor Of The Month (unless you're working on RedHat Linux installation scripts). Plus you can use it for real work if you want to.
What do you get? It looks pretty much like plain BSD on top of Mach... it's hard to see what the incentive would be to hack on it, unless you want to write command-line apps for MacOS X. I suppose it has HFS+ filesystem drivers, but otherwise it doesn't look like there's anything you couldn't get with, say, LinuxPPC. And at least then you'd get an X server. It doesn't look like Darwin includes any sort of GUI -- certainly not the Mac GUI.
I suppose Apple's hope is that they can get the community to fix bugs in their kernel and in their daemons and CLI apps, but what's in it for the community?
I did. After considerable hair-tearing, pacing, and cursing, including a 40-minute intercontinental phone call to E*Trade in which they told me that according to their records I'd never passed the eligibility profile -- completely false, but no problem, they let me take it again -- and a message saying I didn't get any shares (bummer) -- followed three hours later by a message saying I did get shares after all.
Obviously I'm not wishing it never happened, but it was a big pain in the ass. I'm not going to be putting all my savings on the E*Trade roulette wheel any time soon.
I'm sure Universal could have spent a little bit of money on code and saved a lot of money on lawyers and come up with a technical solution -- as other people have suggested, it's not hard to check the URL of the referring page. If it's not in the universal.com domain or wherever, they can just redirect it to the top of the site -- I don't see where the problem is. It would remove the incentive for sites like movie-list to "pirate" the links in the first place.
I have to wonder why they didn't take that route. Is their web team clueless? (Surely the first thing you do is call your webmaster and say "how can we stop this?") Do they just like lawyers? Or is this part of some bigger, submarine int-prop scheme -- what advantage are they going to take if this sets a precedent?
Hey, does anyone know which, if any movie studios are behaving rationally on this issue?
I used to think Barnes and Noble was the Devil, until I went to visit my relatives in Nebraska after the Lincoln B&N opened and realized that for the first time I could remember Lincoln had a decent bookstore and a decent cafe. (Before B&N opened, "cafe" in Nebraska meant "diner", and "bookstore" meant "Cornhusker football souvenir store". Or Walden's.)
So I no longer think B&N is the Devil... yet.
But: Once upon a time, Microsoft wasn't the Devil either. Windows 3.x and DOS 3.3, like Barnes & Noble, were serious improvements over what was available before. The fact that they weren't a Mac and weren't UNIX was totally irrelvant in 1989 to those of us with PC/ATs and no money to spend on new hardware, just as the fact that B&N isn't Powell's or City Lights isn't relevant to those of us with nothing better available than Walden's.
Ten years later it's a different story -- what started out as a tool for empowering users has become a set of shackles (and it's still not as easy to use as MacOS or as powerful as UNIX). We're damned lucky to have Linus and the Internet and the Free Software movement to give (some of us) reasonable alternatives.
Here's a scenario: It's 2009. B&N and Borders together hold 90% of the bookstore market. Amazon, never quite profitable, and unable to raise more capital after the 2001 market crash (which put a serious dent in investor's enthusiasm for vaporware tech stocks), is long since out of business.
Without competition from the independent bookstore, do you think the chains will continue to carry those independent publishers? I'm afraid they'll be more like SuperCrown -- the NYT bestseller list, the Oprah list, a selection of media tie-in children's and coffee- table books, and a few Penguin Classics as loss leaders.
(If you think two vendors in an industry is enough competition, have a look at the US auto industry before the advent of Japanese competition, or the US computer industry before the advent of the PC.)
If we're lucky, new technologies like electronic distribution and just-in-time publishing will save the publishing industry the way the Internet and open source are saving the OS industry. But can we count on that? Should we trust to luck?
I'm not worried about Barnes & Noble now, but I'm worried about what they have the potential to become.
(P.S. If you have both a Border's and a Barnes & Noble in your town, compare them. Border's is usually better. Why is that?)
Never tried it myself, but I'd think a metal mesh of some kind would work about as well as solid metal -- after all, a Faraday cage doesn't have to be solid.
But wait, all a Faraday cage does is ensure there's no EMF inside the cage, which is sort of the opposite of what you want... someone with more electrical engineering knowledge bail me out here?
The short answer is yes
on
Java for EGCS
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· Score: 1
It's a Java source to native binary compiler. To write any interesting binaries in Java, you need compiled versions of the Java libraries (I mean, at a minimum, you'd need java.lang.Object, right?). These are only sorta done. But it's a start! (And one more excuse for me not to learn C++.)
Slashdot Mirror
Considering how easy it is to fake a screenshot of absolutely anything, I suspect not. (Certainly if anyone ever charged *me* with anything based on a screenshot, I'd just do a little demo for the judge and jury: "How to falsify evidence in ten minutes or less using a sub-$1000 laptop.")
See sections 7 and eight of the Firewall and Proxy Server HOWTO for ipfwadm and ipchains, respectively; and the Linu x 2.4 Packet Filtering HOWTO for netfilter.
(Of course, everything-off should be the default setting in the first place, but that's another story altogether.)
It's harder than you think. Privatization and strict liability works up to a point -- the point where your pollution damages my property. This goes a long way and if our legal framework recognized it we'd probably be in better shape than we are now: for instance, if people who clear-cut hillsides were liable for the resulting mudslides lower down in the valley.
However, what such a system doesn't do, is provide you an incentive not to damage your own property in pursuit of short-term profits. In the long term you're dead, so you might as well use up all your resources first. Strictly private property says what you do with your property is your own business, but in doing so it sets up the conditions for later generations to get screwed.
Ah, but how does the Department of the Interior decide how to allocate resources? In practice, it allocates them to those individuals and corporations who have the most short-term interest in the property -- i.e., those who are willing to spend the most (on lobbying, political donations, think tanks, amicus curiae briefs, etc.) to influence the political process.
The "legal structure" in which the market exists is also a marketable good. The reason we don't have strict liability now is that it's easier for those with a short-term interest in exploiting property to organize and bring their economic power to bear than it is for those with a long-term interest in maintaining the value of property to counter them.
There are an awful lot of people who benefit from keeping those externalities external -- how does the market make sure they're not able to twist the legal system to their benefit? And I have yet to hear of a way to internalize long-term consequences for people who live in the short term. We ought to try getting those problems nailed down before we sell the national forests to Georgia Pacific, the oceans to Cargill, and the national parks to Disney.
Could someone with a mechanical background explain the difference between this technology and whatever's in the Hondas and Acuras with "VTEC: Valve Timing Electronically Controlled" splashed on the back? I presume that's not as revolutionary or everyone would be using it... but what's the difference?
Unfortunately, since IBM's discontinued it, there may not be enough demand at the $500-$1K price point. Too bad; in most ways the z50 was a much nicer machine than its competition (the HP Journadas and Compaq Aeros), being based on the rather slick Thinkpad 240 chassis. (The only problem is that it really ought to have had an 800x600 screen -- it's big enough.
I'm not sorry I bought mine; nothing better if you have to sit in a library all morning taking notes and in a cafe all afternoon writing your notes up, especially if you don't want to be bothered with carrying around a power supply or looking for electrical plugs. I just wish the Linux port was a little farther along.
Actually, I consider myself not far to the left of the American mainstream. Certainly I believe in free markets and private ownership -- at least if the alternative is state socialism and (at least with current knowledge, skills, and technology) central planning. I also believe in trade unions and consumer protection.
-- agreed --
No offense, but this is exactly the sort of thing I mean -- the assumption that communist == totalitarian makes it very difficult to continue to have a rational discussion once the word "communism" comes up. MacLeod's books -- plausibly or not depends on your viewpoint -- present anarcho-communism without dictatorship. (So do Iain M. Banks' -- though unlike MacLeod, Banks never uses the word.) The fact that "communism" is portrayed as a word with positive connotations even vis-a-vis "socialism" in The Star Fraction makes it, IMHO, more difficult for an American audience to digest than The Cassini Division, even though The Star Fraction is probably the better novel.
Actually, I'm working from conversations with individuals, here -- it's hard to get the corporate lobby to read books. :)
No problem. :)
I was being a bit sarcastic. But seriously, for a lot of Americans words like "socialism", "communism", and "Marx" seems to set off a certain, trained but still gut-level negative response that it takes some work to get past.
I would never assume that any individual American I meet isn't open to new ideas; but I also have a fairly decent idea of what works in a twenty-second sound bite (or on the back of a book cover) and what doesn't work except as part of an extended rational discussion.
I'm not claiming that Americans are more closed-minded than anyone else (though I think a case could be made that the average American is more closed-minded than the average European; possibly because the average European has been forced from an early age to deal with both European and American cultures and ideologies, and the average American hasn't).
The point I was trying to make about MacLeod's books is that they're easier to digest if you don't think that socialism is a dirty word -- which most Americans do, at first hearing.
It's not that odd, really; Cassini Division is the easiest for an American audience to digest since it doesn't have all the British leftist politics the other three do. :) Say the word "Marxist" to most Americans (yes, I'm American) and the steel Cheyenne Mountain blast doors close over the eyes and ears; ask them to accept a radical union activist as a protagonist? The US as an oppressive world government? The UN as a tool of the US government, and not the other way around? Better to let them ease into it slowly.
(P.S. IMHO, Sky Road is weaker than Cassini Division, and so are the 'past' parts of Stone Canal... but the 'future' parts more than make up for it. :))
One of the things I find refreshing about MacLeod -- sort of in the way a slap in the face can be refreshing under the right circumstances -- is how casual he is about exterminating whole virtual civilizations; how callously his characters can say "consciousness is an emergent property of carbon" and deny AIs or 'uploaded' humans any sort of civil rights or social equality just because they ain't natural-born human.
The consensus in SF ever since, oh, the Blade Runner days is that a mind is a mind is a mind, and natural/artificial, carbon/silicon, wetware/software makes no difference. MacLeod's work highlights the fact that this is really just one of SF's social conventions, and just because we hold this particular truth to be self-evident doesn't mean the rest of humanity is going to... and not just the screaming anti-science mobs (has anyone actually seen a screaming anti-science mob?) but the smart, competent, and ruthless good guys, too.
And it's also damned refreshing to read something that doesn't take fin-de-millenaire corporate capitalism as the end-all be-all of human existence, for good or evil. Long live the Last International!
The danger that the FSF will be kidnapped and their brains taken over by rapatious commercial interests from Planet X has also been known to cause people to remove the popular "...or any later version" clause from the statement that their software is distributed under GPL v2. I think this is an excess of paranoia, myself, but some people think you can never have too much. :)
As I understand it, copyright just doesn't work that way. You could, however, license your work to the FSF rather than assign the copyright (as I should have remembered when I made my original post) and put whatever terms you like in it, mod what they're willing to accept -- though you would still have the versioning problem, above. I'd be surprised if they'd be willing to incorporate software that was tied to a certain GPL version -- it would make updates too difficult.The relevant document is Legal issues about contributing code to GNU. In it they list three methods of allowing your software to be incorporated into the GNU project (allowing it, that is, in terms of copyright law):
- Assigning the copyright to the FSF. (This is the easiest.)
- Licensing the software to the FSF. (From context this seems to be more specific than just releasing your software under GPL. The main disadvantage of this is that if someone violates the terms of the license, the FSF can't sue them -- you have to do it yourself. Also, this doesn't work for modifications to existing GNU software.)
- Putting the software in the public domain. (This allows anyone to do anything they like with it, including repackaging it under the Joe Bloggs Private License, though that would of course only apply to copies received from Joe Bloggs. This lets in all the evil the Artistic license keeps out.)
Apologies for my erroneous oversimplification.Nothing in the GPL prohibits authors from releasing commercial versions of their own software -- or closed-source versions either.
In fact, you can't write a license that limits your rights as the author; the GPL is based on copyright law, which says that authors can do anything, but other users have to do what the author says (thus the "nothing else grants you permission to modify or distribute the software" note in the GPL).
So you're free to release your software under as many different licenses as you want, closed and/or open. IIRC, perl itself is a good example of this -- it's available under both the GPL and the Artistic License, so people who want to incorporate it into GPLed projects can do so, while people who need more flexibility have that option as well.
Some of the confusion may arise because if you want your program to become part of the GNU project (as distinct from part of the larger category of "software distrubuted under the GNU GPL") you have to assign your copyright to the Free Software Foundation (give the software to them, in other words). By doing that you relinquish your rights as author and can no longer release closed-source versions.
And steganography isn't the same thing as "security through obscurity". Steganography is the art of hiding one message inside another; "security through obscurity" is doing stupid things like XORing stored passwords with the programmer's birthday and hoping nobody notices. :)
If you're interested in alternatives to crypto, you should also check out chaffing and winnowing -- it's a bit complex (and I don't claim to understand it completely) but basically it involves mixing real information with garbage in such a way that the receiving system will automatically be able to tell the difference but an eavesdropper won't. No keys required, ergo, no government-mandated "key recovery" schemes.
Hmmm... I can't help but think you'd have more credibility if you posted something. (If you were Transmeta, you wouldn't have posted that message on /. :>)
Is there a URL?
Python:
I think Python's a good choice because it is about as simple, syntax-wise, as BASIC, it's somewhat less weird (i.e., less unlike what most of the industry's using) than Lisp, and it's not the industry Flavor Of The Month (unless you're working on RedHat Linux installation scripts). Plus you can use it for real work if you want to.
I suppose Apple's hope is that they can get the community to fix bugs in their kernel and in their daemons and CLI apps, but what's in it for the community?
Am I missing something?
Obviously I'm not wishing it never happened, but it was a big pain in the ass. I'm not going to be putting all my savings on the E*Trade roulette wheel any time soon.
I have to wonder why they didn't take that route. Is their web team clueless? (Surely the first thing you do is call your webmaster and say "how can we stop this?") Do they just like lawyers? Or is this part of some bigger, submarine int-prop scheme -- what advantage are they going to take if this sets a precedent?
Hey, does anyone know which, if any movie studios are behaving rationally on this issue?
I used to think Barnes and Noble was the Devil, until I went to visit my relatives in Nebraska after the Lincoln B&N opened and realized that for the first time I could remember Lincoln had a decent bookstore and a decent cafe. (Before B&N opened, "cafe" in Nebraska meant "diner", and "bookstore" meant "Cornhusker football souvenir store". Or Walden's.)
So I no longer think B&N is the Devil... yet.
But: Once upon a time, Microsoft wasn't the Devil either. Windows 3.x and DOS 3.3, like Barnes & Noble, were serious improvements over what was available before. The fact that they weren't a Mac and weren't UNIX was totally irrelvant in 1989 to those of us with PC/ATs and no money to spend on new hardware, just as the fact that B&N isn't Powell's or City Lights isn't relevant to those of us with nothing better available than Walden's.
Ten years later it's a different story -- what started out as a tool for empowering users has become a set of shackles (and it's still not as easy to use as MacOS or as powerful as UNIX). We're damned lucky to have Linus and the Internet and the Free Software movement to give (some of us) reasonable alternatives.
Here's a scenario: It's 2009. B&N and Borders together hold 90% of the bookstore market. Amazon, never quite profitable, and unable to raise more capital after the 2001 market crash (which put a serious dent in investor's enthusiasm for vaporware tech stocks), is long since out of business.
Without competition from the independent bookstore, do you think the chains will continue to carry those independent publishers? I'm afraid they'll be more like SuperCrown -- the NYT bestseller list, the Oprah list, a selection of media tie-in children's and coffee- table books, and a few Penguin Classics as loss leaders.
(If you think two vendors in an industry is enough competition, have a look at the US auto industry before the advent of Japanese competition, or the US computer industry before the advent of the PC.)
If we're lucky, new technologies like electronic distribution and just-in-time publishing will save the publishing industry the way the Internet and open source are saving the OS industry. But can we count on that? Should we trust to luck?
I'm not worried about Barnes & Noble now, but I'm worried about what they have the potential to become.
(P.S. If you have both a Border's and a Barnes & Noble in your town, compare them. Border's is usually better. Why is that?)
But wait, all a Faraday cage does is ensure there's no EMF inside the cage, which is sort of the opposite of what you want... someone with more electrical engineering knowledge bail me out here?
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It's a Java source to native binary compiler. To write any interesting binaries in Java, you need compiled versions of the Java libraries (I mean, at a minimum, you'd need java.lang.Object, right?). These are only sorta done. But it's a start! (And one more excuse for me not to learn C++.)