When you download a song what are you sharing with the artist?
I'm not downloading a song; I am downloading a copy of a recording of a song encoded as data. I am not downloading it from the musician; I am downloading it from an assortment of bittorrent peers. With those peers from whom I received little pieces parts of the recording data -- and with others from whom I have received nothing! -- I share little pieces parts of other data.
There are some things a commercially viable OEM Linux PC must deliver at retail. H.264 support is one of them. It needs to be in hardware. it needs to competitive - and it needs to be there today.
Holy shit -- I actually agree with westlake. This Sam Imperial White must be some good beer...
Seriously, I don't have a problem with how Canonical is approaching this. They are making this license easily available to OEM hardware vendors, if the vendors wish to purchase it. That's important for vendors who want to sell consumer-ready devices with Ubuntu pre-installed, in countries like the US that lumber beneath the yoke of intellectual monopoly laws.
Intellectual monopoly laws are unjust, and we should all work to have them repealed or struck down. One could plausibly argue that, until they are overturned, conscientious citizens have a moral obligation to violate them. It is however much tougher to argue that a company such as a hardware vendor has a right, much less a duty, to civil disobedience.
From TFA: "That doesn't mean, though, that all PCs with Ubuntu pre-installed are covered by Canonical's H.264 license." If I understand correctly, this is a sort of pass-through license arrangement. OEM vendors using Ubuntu who wish to license H.264 through Canonical may do so, presumably at some cost. I see nothing in the article suggesting the license will be given to the OEMs for free.
Gosh that's a wonderful statement. So much better than all the 'property' sophism and 'compensation' demands that one usually sees. It captures, with uncommonly bare honesty, everything that's wrong with anti-sharing ideology.
"Sir, it is illegal for you to listen to that song!"
The only way this conversation makes any kind of sense is that it seems like a generation has grown up in the last ten years who simply don't understand or respect either the concept of law or freedom.
For better or worse, I don't think lack of respect for freedom is anything new. Else Ben Franklin would not have had occasion to say, "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
What's wrong with OpenJDK? Isn't it 95% the same code as Sun's Java?
At least one of the various tools tools I use regularly has issues with OpenJDK, as of last year. Don't remember which one -- might have been Pentaho Data Integration, but please do not quote me on that -- because it was way easier for me just to use the Sun JDK and get on with work.
these are the same people who don't have Sun's Java6 in the repository for Lucid
You just need to enable the partner repository in the Software Sources control panel. Lucid has had sun-java6-jdk package available -- I know this because I have personally been using it -- at least since release day.
You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave - until the boss says so. Irritate the wrong boss, and you'll never work in that town, city, State or Country again, because that's how networking works at the upper levels. This makes it impossible to switch jobs, save by your boss' consent.
This may be true in smaller towns, but fortunately the case does not seem so grim in larger metro areas. There are enough bosses, and enough different cliques of which they are part, that no one boss can make sure 'you never work in this town again'.
I agree with your other points. But if high inflation is anticipated, wouldn't it be more prudent for Joe to increase his nominal debt load -- locked in at a fixed rate, of course. He could then put the money to some productive use, and let inflation eat away at the real value of his debt.
I have yet to find something good out of paying taxes.
I'm a big fan of the local fire department and building code inspector. Likewise national defense, the court system, and the police are all important. However, one would have to be pretty out of touch to claim that most of what the military does is defensive; or that the American court system is competent at delivering justice; or that the police (in any city I have lived) are either effective or ethical.
I'm not so sure the fire department really warrants 1/3 of my income...
Yea, and then we can force all americans to convert to Muslim religions and eliminate democracy. There will ALWAYS be reasons to terrorize us.
Ya know, I disagree pretty strongly with many policies of the US government. Yet that never inspires me to blow stuff up. That's probably because the violence the government engages in overseas never directly touches my life. Persuasion and political activism are much more appealing than terrorism to most people, when there is no violence to incite them to reciprocal violence.
However, I suspect I would feel an awful, awful lot more malicious & violent if an American bombing raid had blown up my family. Maybe if we stopped squandering our national wealth and moral authority -- if we still have any of either left -- on wars of aggression, then folks in other countries wouldn't feel so motivated to attack us.
And believe me, they would be way happier if there was more funding so they could have better people on the force, or more backup. But until awesome people start wishing to be cops again, until the profession starts paying better, we won't see any improvement...
The last thing the police in most cities need is more funding. The fact that SPD responded to a report of "accidentally hit by a small foam ball" and "he insulted me" with a whole gang of cops, suggests there are too many police chasing too little real crime. Now sure, you could make a quite reasonable argument that the cops aren't over-funded per say, they just make excruciatingly poor decisions about how to use their resources. But that doesn't make me want to give them more tax money either.
People hitting other people in the streets and then insulting them.
I'm not sure that really describes what happened. TFA says one guy accidentally hit a passerby with a bad golf shot. So one fellow got smacked by a small foam ball. Apparently the golfer & his inadvertent victim had some harsh words.
Was it a dick move for the golfer to argue with the person he accidentally hit, rather than just apologize? Sure. Was it an even bigger dick move for the dude who was hit to call 911? Totally.
If there's a guy out in the street waving a gun around & threatening to shoot people, then by all means, call the cops right away. If someone insults you, try either (a) insulting them back, or (b) being a bigger man and walking away.
They were all a bunch of hooligans, and a public nuisance.
Hooligans? Because they played nerf golf in the street while drinking? My dear sir, sometime you must spend time around real hooligans, so that you may come to appreciate the silliness of your overstatement.
The better armed forces and quasi-military organisations such as the police have a strong culture of ethical behaviour, knowing that ethics are the only difference between law enforcement and an armed and uniformed thug.
My personal experience is, pretty much every (ex-)soldier I have met has evidenced, in speech and mannerism, strong ethical training. Sadly, for police types, it has been more like 50%.
Our society probably does need a professional, ethical police force under strict civilian control. What it does not need is an increasingly paramilitary police force, with wide authority to interpret the law, under only token civilian oversight.
When you create a law that permits or requires the officer to interpret it, it's a Bad Law. And if you can't figure out a way to word a law to make only exactly what you want to be judged illegal, that's no excuse for creating a Bad Law.
Amen.
Someone with mod points, please spend them on the parent.
and the cop was polite and reasonible in his request.
So what matters is that the office was polite while violating the citizen's rights?
I can't blame police for being suspicous these days with all the shit they put up with and all the crazies out there.
I think just showing the cop your ID would have been a lot less painful.
Yeah, like all these crazy anti-American SOBs trying to sell our precious civil rights, for which our ancestors fought and died, for the meager ransom of a momentary sense of security.
This seems to me to be only valid for long term funds invested in bonds and Treasuries or something.
It applies to CDOs, and perhaps to the broader class of structured investment vehicles. Nothing an individual investor is likely to meet face-to-face. (But your mutual fund manager most likely is wrangling with these beasts...)
Isn't the bulk of what brought the house of cards down either unknowable, in denial, or covered over with Enron type mark to market delusions?
Yes. But denial and deception are made much easier when no one really understands the investments they are making.
I understand the theoretical aspect of codifying some set parameters around an investment fund under which returns could be computed on a range of conditions, and that it couldn't be an attempt to capture business method criteria used in trading.
The purpose here is not just to publish a predictive model. Rather, it's to publish an algorithm that can over time be populated with the actual data on the return of underlying assets (e.g. mortgages), and based on that data give a definitive answer as to which tranche of the investment will receive what payments. The point seems to be twofold: (1) There is presumably less opportunity for litigation when the formula for payout on the investment is precisely specified in code; and (2) By providing an algorithm that exactly describes the investment, it is at least in theory possible for potential investors to understand what they are buying.
I just don't see how the mortgage backed funds such as derivatives fo example could be codified since these people didn't know and quite frankly didn't care what was in them,
Someone (e.g. Paulson & Co) knew and cared what was in those derivatives. Problem is, not everyone had the same level of knowledge. Transparency helps any market.
they counted on a sham ratings scam to say that they were of such and such value
The ratings agencies were often tasked with writing models to describe the investments they were rating. These models were proprietary information, available to investors at the rating firm's discretion, if at all. At least here, the models will be out in the bright light of day, for anyone who wants to examine and try to understand.
I can't imagine that this would provide the average Joe Sixpack any useful information.
Joe Sixpack doesn't typically buy collateralized debt obligations. In fact, if he bought a tranche of a CDO, I think that would immediately disqualify him from his everyman status. The main customers for these sometimes obscenely complex instruments are investment firms.
Problem is, the legalese is so dense, even professional investment analysts have a hard time understanding the payout scheme. If I understand the proposal correctly, the Python code will itself authoritatively define the flow of funds from the investment vehicle. It won't simply be a model that makes predictions based on initial assumptions -- it will also "allow the use of the proposed asset-level data file that will be filed at the time of the offering and on a periodic basis thereafter". Thus given specific data about the performance of underlying assets up to any given point, the code will spit out an authoritative answer of "who gets paid what (if anything)".
Since a structured investment vehicle is essentially an algorithm wrapped in a contract, it makes sense to use a programming language to specify that algorithm. I personally like Python; but I agree with other posters who have said the regulation should ensure that other languages can be added over time.
I am not sure either, the only possible value is to inject code, but even that is quite hard since every commit is sent through mailing lists so that the committer usually might be aware of third party commits under his name.
Presumably Apache will reload all the code repositories from the last backup before the compromise, and leave it to developers to re-submit any code that had been committed after that point. There is no reason to believe that a skilled intruder could not have injected code in a way that would be hard to detect.
My personal guess is that it just was for 'fun' but for doing it for 'fun' involved a lot of work over several days with questionable results aka, nothing to be gained, since there are not trade secrets and everything can be downloaded anyway. But on the other hand some people justify their existence due to being destructive, so for many this is motivation enough.
They have gained notoriety -- much more than they would have gained had they cracked into a lower profile site. It's not really clear they are being destructive -- so far, at least. But if I were the admin of a major open source related website or repository, I'd be on the lookout for suspicious activity patterns that might suggest this fellow trying to make use of his stolen email/password pairs.
the newspaper market in Japan is radically different from that in the US. Although some smaller outlets are experimenting with new ways of reaching readers, most papers require subscriptions to access online content, and the barriers have kept circulation of print editions quite high compared to the US.
Another factor may contribute to stronger print circulation. Most Japanese commute to work by train, an environment that is very conducive to newspaper reading. Most Americans, in contrast, commute by car. One cannot comfortably or safely read a paper while driving. So Americans are more likely to read their news at their desk -- making internet often their preferred media.
Here's the thing: The bits? They might not cost anything to replicate, or at the very least its negligible (as you said, you need a storage medium). Obtaining those bits, however, can cost quite a lot. Someone didn't just take a magnet and randomly flip bits somewhere. Movies and stuff actually costs money to produce. Just because something has a very low distribution cost doesn't mean it doesn't have a high production or creation cost.
Fear not. People are not about to stop making movies. The shape of the market may change -- probably in the favor of smaller productions that can more easily be financed by theatre runs, sponsorships, donations, etc; to the detriment of mega-budget blockbusters, which must be financed on the expectation of long term residual sales.
The end of a business model is not the end of an art form.
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When you download a song what are you sharing with the artist?
I'm not downloading a song; I am downloading a copy of a recording of a song encoded as data. I am not downloading it from the musician; I am downloading it from an assortment of bittorrent peers. With those peers from whom I received little pieces parts of the recording data -- and with others from whom I have received nothing! -- I share little pieces parts of other data.
There are some things a commercially viable OEM Linux PC must deliver at retail. H.264 support is one of them. It needs to be in hardware. it needs to competitive - and it needs to be there today.
Holy shit -- I actually agree with westlake. This Sam Imperial White must be some good beer...
Seriously, I don't have a problem with how Canonical is approaching this. They are making this license easily available to OEM hardware vendors, if the vendors wish to purchase it. That's important for vendors who want to sell consumer-ready devices with Ubuntu pre-installed, in countries like the US that lumber beneath the yoke of intellectual monopoly laws.
Intellectual monopoly laws are unjust, and we should all work to have them repealed or struck down. One could plausibly argue that, until they are overturned, conscientious citizens have a moral obligation to violate them. It is however much tougher to argue that a company such as a hardware vendor has a right, much less a duty, to civil disobedience.
give it away even to their OEM vendors.
From TFA: "That doesn't mean, though, that all PCs with Ubuntu pre-installed are covered by Canonical's H.264 license." If I understand correctly, this is a sort of pass-through license arrangement. OEM vendors using Ubuntu who wish to license H.264 through Canonical may do so, presumably at some cost. I see nothing in the article suggesting the license will be given to the OEMs for free.
consume music illegally
Gosh that's a wonderful statement. So much better than all the 'property' sophism and 'compensation' demands that one usually sees. It captures, with uncommonly bare honesty, everything that's wrong with anti-sharing ideology.
"Sir, it is illegal for you to listen to that song!"
The only way this conversation makes any kind of sense is that it seems like a generation has grown up in the last ten years who simply don't understand or respect either the concept of law or freedom.
For better or worse, I don't think lack of respect for freedom is anything new. Else Ben Franklin would not have had occasion to say, "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
Wine all you want, open-source fanatics
Remember friend, without those "fanatics", there would be no Free Software for you to enjoy.
What's wrong with OpenJDK? Isn't it 95% the same code as Sun's Java?
At least one of the various tools tools I use regularly has issues with OpenJDK, as of last year. Don't remember which one -- might have been Pentaho Data Integration, but please do not quote me on that -- because it was way easier for me just to use the Sun JDK and get on with work.
these are the same people who don't have Sun's Java6 in the repository for Lucid
You just need to enable the partner repository in the Software Sources control panel. Lucid has had sun-java6-jdk package available -- I know this because I have personally been using it -- at least since release day.
It is difficult to understate how little security there is in the legal field.
Is there any field -- besides government workers and investment bilkers -- that has job security? Not an entirely rhetorical question...
You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave - until the boss says so. Irritate the wrong boss, and you'll never work in that town, city, State or Country again, because that's how networking works at the upper levels. This makes it impossible to switch jobs, save by your boss' consent.
This may be true in smaller towns, but fortunately the case does not seem so grim in larger metro areas. There are enough bosses, and enough different cliques of which they are part, that no one boss can make sure 'you never work in this town again'.
(b) paid down debt
I agree with your other points. But if high inflation is anticipated, wouldn't it be more prudent for Joe to increase his nominal debt load -- locked in at a fixed rate, of course. He could then put the money to some productive use, and let inflation eat away at the real value of his debt.
I have yet to find something good out of paying taxes.
I'm a big fan of the local fire department and building code inspector. Likewise national defense, the court system, and the police are all important. However, one would have to be pretty out of touch to claim that most of what the military does is defensive; or that the American court system is competent at delivering justice; or that the police (in any city I have lived) are either effective or ethical.
I'm not so sure the fire department really warrants 1/3 of my income...
Yea, and then we can force all americans to convert to Muslim religions and eliminate democracy. There will ALWAYS be reasons to terrorize us.
Ya know, I disagree pretty strongly with many policies of the US government. Yet that never inspires me to blow stuff up. That's probably because the violence the government engages in overseas never directly touches my life. Persuasion and political activism are much more appealing than terrorism to most people, when there is no violence to incite them to reciprocal violence.
However, I suspect I would feel an awful, awful lot more malicious & violent if an American bombing raid had blown up my family. Maybe if we stopped squandering our national wealth and moral authority -- if we still have any of either left -- on wars of aggression, then folks in other countries wouldn't feel so motivated to attack us.
And believe me, they would be way happier if there was more funding so they could have better people on the force, or more backup. But until awesome people start wishing to be cops again, until the profession starts paying better, we won't see any improvement...
The last thing the police in most cities need is more funding. The fact that SPD responded to a report of "accidentally hit by a small foam ball" and "he insulted me" with a whole gang of cops, suggests there are too many police chasing too little real crime. Now sure, you could make a quite reasonable argument that the cops aren't over-funded per say, they just make excruciatingly poor decisions about how to use their resources. But that doesn't make me want to give them more tax money either.
People hitting other people in the streets and then insulting them.
I'm not sure that really describes what happened. TFA says one guy accidentally hit a passerby with a bad golf shot. So one fellow got smacked by a small foam ball. Apparently the golfer & his inadvertent victim had some harsh words.
Was it a dick move for the golfer to argue with the person he accidentally hit, rather than just apologize? Sure. Was it an even bigger dick move for the dude who was hit to call 911? Totally.
If there's a guy out in the street waving a gun around & threatening to shoot people, then by all means, call the cops right away. If someone insults you, try either (a) insulting them back, or (b) being a bigger man and walking away.
They were all a bunch of hooligans, and a public nuisance.
Hooligans? Because they played nerf golf in the street while drinking? My dear sir, sometime you must spend time around real hooligans, so that you may come to appreciate the silliness of your overstatement.
the group definitely should have paid for their activities that night.
Oh noez! People having fun in the street -- quick, call out the army!
The better armed forces and quasi-military organisations such as the police have a strong culture of ethical behaviour, knowing that ethics are the only difference between law enforcement and an armed and uniformed thug.
My personal experience is, pretty much every (ex-)soldier I have met has evidenced, in speech and mannerism, strong ethical training. Sadly, for police types, it has been more like 50%.
Our society probably does need a professional, ethical police force under strict civilian control. What it does not need is an increasingly paramilitary police force, with wide authority to interpret the law, under only token civilian oversight.
When you create a law that permits or requires the officer to interpret it, it's a Bad Law. And if you can't figure out a way to word a law to make only exactly what you want to be judged illegal, that's no excuse for creating a Bad Law.
Amen.
Someone with mod points, please spend them on the parent.
and the cop was polite and reasonible in his request.
So what matters is that the office was polite while violating the citizen's rights?
I can't blame police for being suspicous these days with all the shit they put up with and all the crazies out there.
I think just showing the cop your ID would have been a lot less painful.
Yeah, like all these crazy anti-American SOBs trying to sell our precious civil rights, for which our ancestors fought and died, for the meager ransom of a momentary sense of security.
This seems to me to be only valid for long term funds invested in bonds and Treasuries or something.
It applies to CDOs, and perhaps to the broader class of structured investment vehicles. Nothing an individual investor is likely to meet face-to-face. (But your mutual fund manager most likely is wrangling with these beasts...)
Isn't the bulk of what brought the house of cards down either unknowable, in denial, or covered over with Enron type mark to market delusions?
Yes. But denial and deception are made much easier when no one really understands the investments they are making.
I understand the theoretical aspect of codifying some set parameters around an investment fund under which returns could be computed on a range of conditions, and that it couldn't be an attempt to capture business method criteria used in trading.
The purpose here is not just to publish a predictive model. Rather, it's to publish an algorithm that can over time be populated with the actual data on the return of underlying assets (e.g. mortgages), and based on that data give a definitive answer as to which tranche of the investment will receive what payments. The point seems to be twofold: (1) There is presumably less opportunity for litigation when the formula for payout on the investment is precisely specified in code; and (2) By providing an algorithm that exactly describes the investment, it is at least in theory possible for potential investors to understand what they are buying.
I just don't see how the mortgage backed funds such as derivatives fo example could be codified since these people didn't know and quite frankly didn't care what was in them,
Someone (e.g. Paulson & Co) knew and cared what was in those derivatives. Problem is, not everyone had the same level of knowledge. Transparency helps any market.
they counted on a sham ratings scam to say that they were of such and such value
The ratings agencies were often tasked with writing models to describe the investments they were rating. These models were proprietary information, available to investors at the rating firm's discretion, if at all. At least here, the models will be out in the bright light of day, for anyone who wants to examine and try to understand.
I can't imagine that this would provide the average Joe Sixpack any useful information.
Joe Sixpack doesn't typically buy collateralized debt obligations. In fact, if he bought a tranche of a CDO, I think that would immediately disqualify him from his everyman status. The main customers for these sometimes obscenely complex instruments are investment firms.
Problem is, the legalese is so dense, even professional investment analysts have a hard time understanding the payout scheme. If I understand the proposal correctly, the Python code will itself authoritatively define the flow of funds from the investment vehicle. It won't simply be a model that makes predictions based on initial assumptions -- it will also "allow the use of the proposed asset-level data file that will be filed at the time of the offering and on a periodic basis thereafter". Thus given specific data about the performance of underlying assets up to any given point, the code will spit out an authoritative answer of "who gets paid what (if anything)".
Since a structured investment vehicle is essentially an algorithm wrapped in a contract, it makes sense to use a programming language to specify that algorithm. I personally like Python; but I agree with other posters who have said the regulation should ensure that other languages can be added over time.
I am not sure either, the only possible value is to inject code, but even that is quite hard since every commit is sent through mailing lists so that the committer usually might be aware of third party commits under his name.
Presumably Apache will reload all the code repositories from the last backup before the compromise, and leave it to developers to re-submit any code that had been committed after that point. There is no reason to believe that a skilled intruder could not have injected code in a way that would be hard to detect.
My personal guess is that it just was for 'fun' but for doing it for 'fun' involved a lot of work over several days with questionable results aka, nothing to be gained, since there are not trade secrets and everything can be downloaded anyway.
But on the other hand some people justify their existence due to being destructive, so for many this is motivation enough.
They have gained notoriety -- much more than they would have gained had they cracked into a lower profile site. It's not really clear they are being destructive -- so far, at least. But if I were the admin of a major open source related website or repository, I'd be on the lookout for suspicious activity patterns that might suggest this fellow trying to make use of his stolen email/password pairs.
the newspaper market in Japan is radically different from that in the US. Although some smaller outlets are experimenting with new ways of reaching readers, most papers require subscriptions to access online content, and the barriers have kept circulation of print editions quite high compared to the US.
Another factor may contribute to stronger print circulation. Most Japanese commute to work by train, an environment that is very conducive to newspaper reading. Most Americans, in contrast, commute by car. One cannot comfortably or safely read a paper while driving. So Americans are more likely to read their news at their desk -- making internet often their preferred media.
Here's the thing: The bits? They might not cost anything to replicate, or at the very least its negligible (as you said, you need a storage medium). Obtaining those bits, however, can cost quite a lot. Someone didn't just take a magnet and randomly flip bits somewhere. Movies and stuff actually costs money to produce. Just because something has a very low distribution cost doesn't mean it doesn't have a high production or creation cost.
Fear not. People are not about to stop making movies. The shape of the market may change -- probably in the favor of smaller productions that can more easily be financed by theatre runs, sponsorships, donations, etc; to the detriment of mega-budget blockbusters, which must be financed on the expectation of long term residual sales.
The end of a business model is not the end of an art form.