it still boggles my mind that anybody could actually argue that Napster should be shut down: they don't even distribute any copyrighted material! all Napster does is to tell people where to get information; information that may be copyrighted.
last i checked, it's not illegal for me to go around telling people where to buy drugs....
If you make an arrangement with people who do something illegal, in a way that their lawbreaking benefits you and you make their lawbreaking easier, then the courts will, at the very least, take a hard look at what you're doing.
On the one hand, if you just write a magazine article that mentions where a lot of drug sales are going on, you could defend that as journalism, and the First Amendment would shield you. On the other hand, if you published a magazine telling people where they could buy drugs, and encouraged dealers to advertise in your magazine, and set up your business office so the dealers could pay for their ads with cash and not leave records of their identities, I don't think the courts would let you off the hook. --
If I want to rent an apartment, the landlord will probably want to run a credit check on me, to reduce the odds that I'll stiff them on the rent. Because of this, anyone who claims to be a landlord (or some other legitimate business) can look up my credit report and get all sorts of personal information about me -- and if they misuse the information, it may take a long time for me to find out.
A more secure way of providing the same social benefit would be:
The credit-reporting agency keeps my photograph on file.
When I want to go apartment-hunting, the agency sends me a ticket with my photograph, a pseudonym, and an account number generated only for this transaction. "We certify that the person pictured here, who calls himself 'V. L. G. Potemkin', is credit-worthy enough to pay $1000/month for an apartment. To confirm this authorization, call 1-888-EXPERIAN and ask about account number 31337."
When I get approved for a lease, I sign it "V. L. G. Potemkin", and the landlord tells the reporting agency how much I am paying.
If I miss payments, if my lease expires, etc., then the landlord can call the agency and report the news, using that account number.
Unless the landlord (or the cops) can convince a court that they have a need to know, all the other information in my credit record -- other pseudonyms, other addresses, credit cards, my Social Security number, etc. -- remains secret.
Yeah, it's a real barrier to commerce, having to ask explicit questions like "Can I buy your car for $1000? Can I buy your car for $2000?" It's much easier to just hot-wire the car you want and drive away, leaving a $500 bill in the parking space. --
...But the king
said, "Theuth, my master of arts, to one man it is given to create the elements
of an art, to another to judge the extent of harm and usefulness it will have
for those who are going to employ it... The fact is that this invention will produce
forgetfulness in the souls of those who have learned it because they will not
need to exercise their memories, being able to rely on what is written, using
the stimulus of external marks that are alien to themselves, rather than, from
within, their own unaided powers to call things to mind.
(I wish I could have quoted that from memory, but I had to use Google to look up a citation.:-) --
But to the average guy squatting in a shanty town not far outside Rio, Internet access means (with apologizes to Buffy the Vampire Slayer) "pictures of pretty things I can't have."
It also means "communication with other shantytowns to exchange news, opinions, and advice that wealthier folks are not interested in publishing in their media because we folks in the shantytowns don't spend enough to make newspaper advertisers care about us, and we can't afford to buy non-advertiser-supported media, and the wealthy folks who provide us with information out of charity aren't always interested in having us speak for ourselves".
I agree that the Internet will not end poverty. However, I think the Brazilian taxpayers are not wasting the money spent on this particular program. --
At the time, digital audiotape was The New Technology That Threatened To End Copyright As We Know It; Congress required digital-recording devices to incorporate a certain kind of copy protection, and imposed a tax on digital recording media that would compensate musicians and studios for their lost revenue. Stallman proposed that the law be revised to (a) drop the copy-protection requirement and (b) distribute revenue from that tax to musicians alone, in proportion to their popularity. --
Assume, for the purpose of argument, that the only way to have anti-AIDS drugs is allow private companies to sell patented drugs at huge markups.
Fine. So let those companies sell those drugs at huge markups -- in countries that can afford to pay for them. An American insurance company, or a Canadian provincial health authority, could pay $20,000/year (or whatever) to supply one person with anti-AIDS drugs. But 99% of people with AIDS in the Third World don't have access to that kind of money. If they die slow painful deaths, the drug companies still don't get anything.
The drug companies may not care about this: perhaps they're afraid of cheap anti-AIDS drugs being smuggled back into the First World, or perhaps they're trying to set Third World prices to maximize profit rather than to maximize the number of people cured. But governments, which are supposed to consider the welfare of their population as a whole, certainly should. --
I can't help but think that it would be better code if it noted the flaws in the standard routines and either avoided them or wrapped them instead of replacing them outright.
Bernstein wrote his software to run on a wide range of Unixoid systems, and the software performs security-sensitive tasks (mail, Web, and DNS service, for example).
If you were in his position, how much effort would you want to spend keeping track of which routines were safe in which versions of which OSs -- particularly the closed-source Unix varieties? And if an upgrade to an OS introduces a security flaw in a routine that was previously safe, would you want to drop everything to get out a patch for that OS's users?
In this case, having a whole package of reimplemented routines that you know are safe strikes me as the lesser evil. --
Consumers are not total sheep. The software industry has realized, after years of attempts, that copy-protection technology doesn't work -- not because the consumers rose up in righteous indignation and outlawed it, but because complying with the system frustrated legitimate users, and people who wanted illicit copies could still find them. Companies selling software faced a choice: give up copy protection or give up customers. Sooner or later, the HDTV people will learn the same lesson.
Once analog signals are turned off and replaced completly with digital (I predict 5-10 years) you will not have a choice but to upgrade your TV, throw out your usless VCR, replace all your tapes with DVDs and welcome to a pay per view world.
Nonsense. You will have the choice to:
Pay twenty bucks to have your brother-in-law's neighbor's electrician solder in that doo-hickey that defeats your TV's copy protection.
Read a book.
From what I've seen in the news, HDTV is catching on a lot slower than originally anticipated. The protocol, as a political compromise, requires sets to support about a dozen digital TV formats, making HDTV equipment more expensive. Broadcasters, after being granted extra bandwidth from the FCC, are salivating at all the other things they could do with that bandwidth. Consumers seem pretty satisfied with the quality of regular TV.
On top of that, movie-theater owners (Loews et al.) are financially crunched because they have more theater seats than they can sell; if I were a TV-industry executive, I'd look at that news and wonder how much money I should risk to lure consumers to HDTV.
--
From a legal point of view, military officers, including the Commander-in-Chief, are subject to the law. The US Constitution (article 1, 8, cl. 14) empowers Congress "To make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval forces." (Perhaps some legal wacko will deduce from this that Congress has no right to regulate the Air Force, and so Clinton, in a fit of pique before he leaves office, might call in air strikes against the Capitol and the Supreme Court.:-)
From a practical point of view, if the President's armed forces are sufficiently loyal to him, then they would follow his orders to kill Members of Congress, the Supreme Court Justices, and my little dog Toto. However, that's true of the armed forces of any country in the world. --
No European democracy is controlled by the religious right as much as America is.
Most countries in Europe have some "established" church, in which clergy and religious schools are partly funded by the government. Therefore, most Europeans see religious institutions as things they must deal with, but not things they feel loyalty to. (Sort of like the banking system -- you can't avoid using its services, but as long as it gives you what you need, you don't particularly care what it thinks of you.)
The US has no nationally established church; some states used to have them, but they were dismantled by popular demand in the early 19th century. Therefore, the only religious institutions that survive in the US are the ones that can command genuine loyalty from their followers. And some of these institutions have enough followers, and enough organization, to be a political force. --
the pres. of Kodak proposed something similar...
on
13 Month Calendar?
·
· Score: 2
...way back in 1926. See his essay. I think Kodak even used this calendar for accounting purposes for a while, but eventually gave up on it. --
Arguing over what language to use in the AP CS curriculum obscures a more important issue: the content of the curriculum.
Judging from the documents I've seen, aside from a little OO gloss, AP CS students in 2000 learn pretty much the same content as they did in 1980. Another generation of high-school overachievers, it seems, will be judged on their ability to implement basic algorithms and data structures, even though:
These are tedious exercises that will convince beginners that computers are complicated and boring.
Most working programmers, when they need one of these algorithms or data structures, don't need to roll their own.
Someone with a degree in CS should be able to write these implementations -- but they don't need to learn how to do that in their first CS course. It's like the value of pi in mathematics: you need to know how to use it early on, but knowing how to compute it can be safely postponed for a while.
Meanwhile, consider what's left out:
Every day, Perl hackers all over the planet (ab)use regular expressions. Regular expressions are also an important part of a theoretical CS education -- both as a building block in designing a parser and as examples of finite-state machines. I don't see any sign of these on the AP, though: the proposed Java subset explicitly excludes "processing string input (e.g. with StringTokenizer)".
For decades, large businesses have depended on relational databases, and as the relevant hardware and software have become cheaper, more and more people and institutions have taken up the habit. Experience with imperative programming does very little to prepare you for wrangling a database. It would be nice to have a little bit of DB-oriented stuff on the curriculum (e.g., basic SQL commands and the concept of "third normal form"), but it doesn't seem to be there.
I learned about higher-order functions when I learned Scheme, and have applied them with great success in my Perl work; I know I'm not the only one who has found them extremely useful. (Perl is one of the few widely-used languages that treats functions as first-class objects and therefore permits all sorts of functional-programming tricks.) Higher-order functions are well-known among academics, where functional programming has become old hat. Also, discussing these functions creates a link between CS and calculus. But since the AP Java subset explictly excludes inner classes -- heck, it even excludes three-dimensional arrays -- I don't think many AP teachers will have time to teach higher-order functions.
It has been suggested that a language-independent examination might encourage a focus on ideas rather than language details. This
approach has merit, but...
This essay discusses why a language-independent AP exam, and an exam using multiple languages, were both rejected. --
Does it really cause a huge havoc to release the binaries? Lets see, it's not that much more work - it's easy and doesn't require any additional effort than releasing a properly setup tarball.
I suspect that most projects that don't offer binaries don't set their tarballs up properly, either.
There isn't a large quantity of work involved with either, but it isn't interesting work. Once a developer has learned a quirky build procedure (perhaps through trial and error combined with frequent email and IRC queries), it's easier to just put up with the procedure than to make it more user-friendly. --
I suppose I count as a "former child prodigy". I also spent two years getting a graduate degree in deaf education. The most important lesson I learned during those two years can be boiled down to four words:
Shut up and watch.
The biggest temptation I faced as a student teacher was to stand in front of the class and lecture. Sometimes this is necessary and useful, but sometimes this does more for the teacher's ego than the student's education.
However, while you are not-lecturing, you need to pay attention to what the student is learning, what the student's interests and learning style are, etc.
The trick is to provide the right direction at the right moment that keep the student from becoming either bored or frustrated. --
From the MPAA's point of view, DeCSS is illegal because it can be used as a cracking tool. Even if DeCSS were translated to a computer language that looked more like English, the MPAA would have the same objection to it. The issue is not what it looks like to you, but what it looks like to the computer.
On the other hand, if you described DVD encryption in plain English, in a way that a computer can't use as code, then even Judge Kaplan couldn't object to your posting that description on the Web. Another person could read the description and use it to re-invent DeCSS, but because that other person had to apply his or her own brain to composing the code, your description is not a circumvention tool.
The First Amendment protects your right to sell a description of how a gun works. It does not protect your right to sell a gun. The question before the appeals court is: should DeCSS be treated like a description of a gun, or like a gun? Where do you draw the line between giving someone education and giving them a tool? --
Only allow one message to be sent per second, per client, by each mail server.
How can this rule be enforced?
Any computer with a direct connection to the Internet can serve as a mail server. You can't trust that every person who can plug an old 486 into a DSL line will follow your rule.
An ISP could prevent every one of its clients from sending more than one email per second through its gateways. However, the good ISPs already enforce anti-spam policies. If an ISP doesn't want to enforce such a policy, it has no reason to enforce the rule you propose, either.
In theory, when ISPs exchange traffic with each other, the receiving ISP could insist that the transmitting ISP only send one email message per client per server on its network. But in practice... how would the receiving ISP filter through its incoming packets to enforce this policy efficiently?
The solution chosen was quite a simple one, and I'm amazed that more people have never noticed it. It is thus: The second digit of all area codes is either a zero or a one. Thus, if the second digit dialed in is a zero or a one, the phone switch will wait for 10 digits as opposed to just seven.
This hasn't been true since 1995 (possibly earlier). For example, some Boston suburbs have the area code 781, and some parts of Chicago use 773.
Of course, this transition provided its share of fodder for comp.risks. See here and here, for example. A comment here (search for "Re: Upcoming telephone number problems") points out that one advantage of the current scheme is that if you dial a number that doesn't begin with 1, then it's free.[*]
[*]
Footnote for non-Americans: residential customers in the US usually don't pay by the minute for local calls, which is why we can afford to spend obscenely long times with our modems running, exchanging email, surfing the Web, posting badly-written rants to Usenet, and otherwise extending American cultural hegemony.
PS: I'm reminded of Bjarne Stroustroup's remark (quoting from memory): "People used to say that the computer would become as easy to use as the telephone. That prediction has come true, because I can no longer use my telephone." --
One possible (and likely) scenario is that the Florida Supreme Court will look for a way to rewrite its opinion....
But this would raise the question: "If you can come to the same conclusion now without invoking the Florida Constitution, then why did you mention it at all the first time you ruled?"
Were I on the Florida Supreme Court, I would suggest issuing a revised opinion: "In light of the decision handed us by the U.S. Supreme Court, and in light of the fact that the late-certified election results are being contested in lower courts anyway, we declare this case to be moot. And by the way, on January 21, we are all taking a long vacation, and anyone who tries to send us a brief will be summarily executed." --
When my employer was acquired by Lucent, we got handed a new IP-assignment form. In exchange for being allowed to work for Lucent, we were asked to assign rights to any IP we created during or outside of work time that was related to Lucent's current or potential business.
As a co-worker of mine pointed out, if he signed that document and Lucent decided to go into the "content" business, his personal Web site would suddenly become Lucent's property.
I crossed out three or four words, so the contract no longer covered my "extracurricular" work, initialed the change, signed it, and sent it in. They never complained. --
Whoever becomes the next president will have a US Senate split 50-50...
If Gore wins, er, ends up inaugurated, then Lieberman will have to resign his Senate seat, and the Governor of Connecticut, a Republican, will appoint his replacement, so the Senate will be split 49-51. (Actually, there are one or two independents in the Senate, but they usually vote with the Democrats.)
If Bush wins, then the Senate will indeed be split 50-50. The House has a Republican majority, but a slim one.
If I were a Democratic Congressman, I would be praying for a Bush victory and not making too much noise on Gore's behalf, since (a) I, unlike Gore, will need to cooperate with Republicans next year to get any useful work done, and (b) the President's party tends to lose Congressional seats in the miderm elections. --
Whether or not this code-signing requirement is turned on by default, the majority of Whistler users will probably turn it off, because the majority of Whistler users will have at least one piece of unsigned code that they want to run (perhaps Emacs, perhaps a shareware game, perhaps a legacy program, perhaps some tool that's used within their companies).
But when a virus spreads through millions of Whistler machines, Microsoft can just blame the users for letting their machines run unsigned code. --
...for democracy to function, we don't just need a fair and accurate count, we need public confidence that the count is fair and accurate.
(Suppose somebody proposed a voting system where, on Election Day, you go to your parish priest and tell him your choices for all of the races; the priests then send their tally of votes for each parish to the Pope, who announces the winner. Devout Catholics might trust a system based on the honesty of priests more than a system based on mathematical techniques that most people can't understand.)
The great thing about paper-and-ink ballots is that an untrained Democrat and an untrained Republican can look at the same ballot and agree on who was selected -- and if they disagree, a judge can argue for one interpretation or another without needing to consult a technical expert. Yes, there are opportunities for fraud and error, but those exist in any system -- and at least in a paper-and-ink system, you don't need to be a hacker or cryptographer to understand what those opportunities are and how to guard against them. --
Palm Beach County's ballot is a great example of this; I could go over the problems with it again, but I'm pretty sure we're all fairly familiar with the commentary on it by now. If a UI designer ever tried to sneak something like this into a software interface, he/she'd be drummed out of the company in an instant.
Some of the exhibits in the Interface Hall of Shame make the Palm Beach County ballot look like a model of clarity. --
Slashdot Mirror
On the one hand, if you just write a magazine article that mentions where a lot of drug sales are going on, you could defend that as journalism, and the First Amendment would shield you. On the other hand, if you published a magazine telling people where they could buy drugs, and encouraged dealers to advertise in your magazine, and set up your business office so the dealers could pay for their ads with cash and not leave records of their identities, I don't think the courts would let you off the hook.
--
A more secure way of providing the same social benefit would be:
--
Yeah, it's a real barrier to commerce, having to ask explicit questions like "Can I buy your car for $1000? Can I buy your car for $2000?" It's much easier to just hot-wire the car you want and drive away, leaving a $500 bill in the parking space.
--
--
I agree that the Internet will not end poverty. However, I think the Brazilian taxpayers are not wasting the money spent on this particular program.
--
At the time, digital audiotape was The New Technology That Threatened To End Copyright As We Know It; Congress required digital-recording devices to incorporate a certain kind of copy protection, and imposed a tax on digital recording media that would compensate musicians and studios for their lost revenue. Stallman proposed that the law be revised to (a) drop the copy-protection requirement and (b) distribute revenue from that tax to musicians alone, in proportion to their popularity.
--
Fine. So let those companies sell those drugs at huge markups -- in countries that can afford to pay for them. An American insurance company, or a Canadian provincial health authority, could pay $20,000/year (or whatever) to supply one person with anti-AIDS drugs. But 99% of people with AIDS in the Third World don't have access to that kind of money. If they die slow painful deaths, the drug companies still don't get anything.
The drug companies may not care about this: perhaps they're afraid of cheap anti-AIDS drugs being smuggled back into the First World, or perhaps they're trying to set Third World prices to maximize profit rather than to maximize the number of people cured. But governments, which are supposed to consider the welfare of their population as a whole, certainly should.
--
If you were in his position, how much effort would you want to spend keeping track of which routines were safe in which versions of which OSs -- particularly the closed-source Unix varieties? And if an upgrade to an OS introduces a security flaw in a routine that was previously safe, would you want to drop everything to get out a patch for that OS's users?
In this case, having a whole package of reimplemented routines that you know are safe strikes me as the lesser evil.
--
- Pay twenty bucks to have your brother-in-law's neighbor's electrician solder in that doo-hickey that defeats your TV's copy protection.
- Read a book.
From what I've seen in the news, HDTV is catching on a lot slower than originally anticipated. The protocol, as a political compromise, requires sets to support about a dozen digital TV formats, making HDTV equipment more expensive. Broadcasters, after being granted extra bandwidth from the FCC, are salivating at all the other things they could do with that bandwidth. Consumers seem pretty satisfied with the quality of regular TV.On top of that, movie-theater owners (Loews et al.) are financially crunched because they have more theater seats than they can sell; if I were a TV-industry executive, I'd look at that news and wonder how much money I should risk to lure consumers to HDTV.
--
From a legal point of view, military officers, including the Commander-in-Chief, are subject to the law. The US Constitution (article 1, 8, cl. 14) empowers Congress "To make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval forces." (Perhaps some legal wacko will deduce from this that Congress has no right to regulate the Air Force, and so Clinton, in a fit of pique before he leaves office, might call in air strikes against the Capitol and the Supreme Court. :-)
From a practical point of view, if the President's armed forces are sufficiently loyal to him, then they would follow his orders to kill Members of Congress, the Supreme Court Justices, and my little dog Toto. However, that's true of the armed forces of any country in the world.
--
The US has no nationally established church; some states used to have them, but they were dismantled by popular demand in the early 19th century. Therefore, the only religious institutions that survive in the US are the ones that can command genuine loyalty from their followers. And some of these institutions have enough followers, and enough organization, to be a political force.
--
...way back in 1926. See his essay. I think Kodak even used this calendar for accounting purposes for a while, but eventually gave up on it.
--
Judging from the documents I've seen, aside from a little OO gloss, AP CS students in 2000 learn pretty much the same content as they did in 1980. Another generation of high-school overachievers, it seems, will be judged on their ability to implement basic algorithms and data structures, even though:
Meanwhile, consider what's left out:
--
--
There isn't a large quantity of work involved with either, but it isn't interesting work. Once a developer has learned a quirky build procedure (perhaps through trial and error combined with frequent email and IRC queries), it's easier to just put up with the procedure than to make it more user-friendly.
--
However, while you are not-lecturing, you need to pay attention to what the student is learning, what the student's interests and learning style are, etc.
The trick is to provide the right direction at the right moment that keep the student from becoming either bored or frustrated.
--
From the MPAA's point of view, DeCSS is illegal because it can be used as a cracking tool. Even if DeCSS were translated to a computer language that looked more like English, the MPAA would have the same objection to it. The issue is not what it looks like to you, but what it looks like to the computer.
On the other hand, if you described DVD encryption in plain English, in a way that a computer can't use as code, then even Judge Kaplan couldn't object to your posting that description on the Web. Another person could read the description and use it to re-invent DeCSS, but because that other person had to apply his or her own brain to composing the code, your description is not a circumvention tool.
The First Amendment protects your right to sell a description of how a gun works. It does not protect your right to sell a gun. The question before the appeals court is: should DeCSS be treated like a description of a gun, or like a gun? Where do you draw the line between giving someone education and giving them a tool?
--
--
Of course, this transition provided its share of fodder for comp.risks. See here and here, for example. A comment here (search for "Re: Upcoming telephone number problems") points out that one advantage of the current scheme is that if you dial a number that doesn't begin with 1, then it's free.[*]
PS: I'm reminded of Bjarne Stroustroup's remark (quoting from memory): "People used to say that the computer would become as easy to use as the telephone. That prediction has come true, because I can no longer use my telephone."
--
Were I on the Florida Supreme Court, I would suggest issuing a revised opinion: "In light of the decision handed us by the U.S. Supreme Court, and in light of the fact that the late-certified election results are being contested in lower courts anyway, we declare this case to be moot. And by the way, on January 21, we are all taking a long vacation, and anyone who tries to send us a brief will be summarily executed."
--
As a co-worker of mine pointed out, if he signed that document and Lucent decided to go into the "content" business, his personal Web site would suddenly become Lucent's property.
I crossed out three or four words, so the contract no longer covered my "extracurricular" work, initialed the change, signed it, and sent it in. They never complained.
--
If Bush wins, then the Senate will indeed be split 50-50. The House has a Republican majority, but a slim one.
If I were a Democratic Congressman, I would be praying for a Bush victory and not making too much noise on Gore's behalf, since (a) I, unlike Gore, will need to cooperate with Republicans next year to get any useful work done, and (b) the President's party tends to lose Congressional seats in the miderm elections.
--
But when a virus spreads through millions of Whistler machines, Microsoft can just blame the users for letting their machines run unsigned code.
--
(Suppose somebody proposed a voting system where, on Election Day, you go to your parish priest and tell him your choices for all of the races; the priests then send their tally of votes for each parish to the Pope, who announces the winner. Devout Catholics might trust a system based on the honesty of priests more than a system based on mathematical techniques that most people can't understand.)
The great thing about paper-and-ink ballots is that an untrained Democrat and an untrained Republican can look at the same ballot and agree on who was selected -- and if they disagree, a judge can argue for one interpretation or another without needing to consult a technical expert. Yes, there are opportunities for fraud and error, but those exist in any system -- and at least in a paper-and-ink system, you don't need to be a hacker or cryptographer to understand what those opportunities are and how to guard against them.
--
--