I've been a Q1 member of the IOOC 911.11 committee for programming languages since the early 90's
IOOC 911.11? Would that be the International Olive Oil Council, or the Iranian Offshore Oil Company?
Not to feed the troll, but for the benefit of any impressionable young programmers:
The goal of a programming language is to provide a machine with a set of instructions, not to sit down and read it a story.
Programming languages intended for use by humans (as opposed to languages intended primarily for machine generation) have multiple goals, three of which are to be human-writable, human-readable, and human-maintainable.
Literate programming may not be a perfect solution, but it's addressing a real issue. Current programming languages tend to be pretty horrible at expressing abstractions in a human readable way. The ideal programming language would be one that allowed you to express abstractions at the level of the problem domain, yet was able to translate that into something as efficiently executable, or close to it, as something written in a lower-level language. Literate programming allows you to do something along these lines, although it still involves a fair amount of "manual intervention" on the part of the programmer.
Sorry, you picked the wrong show to watch - Ally's lipstick shade doesn't actually have any bearing on the law. You should have been watching "Law and Order"...
P.S. I should have mentioned that Spetner also does propose that intelligent design would be required to produce the observed results. This is a huge and unscientific leap which his book doesn't do anything to justify, especially not his probabilistic arguments.
Spetner suggests that environmental factors cause non-random mutation. IANAES (Evolutionary Scientist), but that could be an important insight, if he's correct. He's not the first to suggest it - theories of this kind go back a hundred years or more. Claiming that this "completely discredits neo-Darwinian theory" betrays a fundamental lack of understanding of how science works.
While we're recommending books to each other, you might want to try Thomas Kuhn's "Structure of Scientific Revolutions" for some info on the subject of how science works - it's not the last word, but it serves as a good intro. I'll give you the ten-cent synopsis: just because someone comes along with a possibly plausible-sounding hypothesis, doesn't mean it's correct.
If Spetner does turn out to have a point, evolution would be changed fairly dramatically, but it is not really replaced, since crucial basic aspects of the theory remain unchanged. Saying that you are "amazed at how completely fooled Slashdot readers are" is a little like saying that you're amazed at how completely fooled people were by Newton's theory of gravity, right around the time Einstein first published his papers on General Relativity.
Slashdot readers are wise to reserve judgement on hypotheses like this one, until the affected discipline has had a chance to properly debate, test, and possibly assimilate the ideas.
Spatner's statistics often remind me of the statistics used to determine the probability of alien life in the universe: the results are all over the map, depending on who's doing the calculating and what their assumptions are. You could accept almost all of Spatner's logic and simply change a few assumptions, and come to a completely different conclusion.
An additional and unfortunate problem with Spetner's work is that the nature of the hypothesis is such that almost every crackpot religious group seems to have jumped on it as proof that "evolution can't be right", despite the fact that if anything, the hypothesis might in fact help to produce a more sophisticated theory of evolution. Blind religious crackpottery doesn't help in having a reasoned debate on the topic.
You probably know this, based on your "all your microsoft..." comment, but recent Microsoft EULAs have included language which gives them permission to update your computer automatically, specifically related to DRM kinds of issues. Now, you may dismiss that, being apathetic, pro-DRM, pro-Microsoft, or whatever. I don't dismiss it. Michael is right to raise the issue, the only flaw I see in what he posted is that he should have included a link to some more info for those who may not be aware of the specifics.
It's not a news site, it's Rob + Friends blog! If you don't like it, don't come back here. Is that it?
Well, I'd put it like this: the site is concerned with open source software, free software, Linux, privacy issues especially related to technology, various general tech issues and toys etc., plus various cultural things of interest to its target audience, like anime, sci-fi, etc. If you don't share the interests and perspective, and aren't interested in learning more about those things, then yeah, you probably shouldn't be here. Then again,/. could probably do with the advertising dollars, so by all means stick around, just try to keep down the whining.
Just a draft for a project with multiple backers. But is has MS in it so lets skew the editorial comment.
Huh? Did you actually read the referenced article? It explicitly talks about the potential dangers here to non-Microsoft systems.
Seems to me there are plenty of issues here that have the potential to affect Linux wireless access. We want to avoid a repeat of the winmodem situation, which in this case could be more severe because it affects access to networks, not just a local piece of hardware. The way to do that is to make sure information gets out early, along with awareness of the protocols, issues, and potential traps involved.
You describe yourself as "us on the Nix", but I have to wonder if you've ever touched anything other than Windows - otherwise, you might actually have some appreciation of the real-world problems of coexisting with Microsoft's perpetually broken stuff.
Sony's right to produce their property in any way they see fit trumps any right you have.
There are still ways in which this is not legally true, although proper tests of this in court are yet to come. Specific issues which are likely to come up include the ability to timeshift, spaceshift, and make backups, once protection mechanisms have made that impractical.
Intellectual property does not have the same legal (or actual) qualities as physical property, as the existence of the fair use exceptions attest. Recent law tries to move away from this principle, largely because legislators seem not to have understood this issue, and/or have been unduly influenced by the media industry.
The judiciary has a much better grasp of these issues, so I fully expect some of these wrongs to be redressed in future. The dancing around court tests of the DMCA are in part a reflection of the nervousness on the part of the media industry to test it in court - they know perfectly well that aspects of it are on extremely shaky legal ground. Instead, they want a law to use as an out-of-court club, and the DMCA was specifically designed for this purpose.
I'm saying it's survival of the fittest (or smartest).
I agree with that in general. However, laws do place some constraints on this - otherwise, the "discussions" with Jack Valenti and Hilary Rosen could be held using some of Charlton Heston's favorite instruments, for example. In the current battle between consumers and the industry, copyright laws which were once quite favorable to the law-abiding consumer have been turned against us, with the potential for criminalizing and/or stamping out much innocent behavior that was once legal. The media companies are now relying on invalid laws to protect their "property".
This battle should be fought in the technical arena, not the bribe-a-politician arena.
I disagree. If this were truly a completely lawless, survival of the fittest situation, you'd be right. It's not, though. Copyright law explicitly grants certain rights to consumers, and those rights are based on legal principles relating to the nature of intellectual property. The DMCA and other new laws represent an end run around these principles. If you accept the media company "right to produce their property in any way they see fit", you've already conceded a major point in their favor, which I do not concede.
Sony's right to protect their music far exceeds any "right" you think you have to fair use. Your fair use is to listen to the CD you've purchased directly.
That's not true in law. Fair use, according to case precedent, includes the right to copy music for personal use, timeshifting, spaceshifting, backup purposes, etc.
If you can beat Sony's copy protection, more power to you. Then your fair use right remains intact.
Except that the DMCA forbids circumventing copy protection, so some of your legally-protected fair use rights can only be obtained at the cost of breaking federal law.
If not, tough shit.
Nice attitude. I say the same to Sony and the other media companies, who are going to run into a lot of trouble with the one-sided "negotiating" they're doing. Consumers can "negotiate" too, which is exactly why the media companies are running scared.
I was looking at this the other day for a cross-browser web application which relies on DOM. If you look at this W3C DOM Compatibility Table and run your eyes down the Opera column, you'll see that it supports only a handful of the DOM features listed, and is by far the least DOM-compliant browser. This new version is a much-needed improvement to bring Opera into line with Mozilla, Explorer, and Konqueror.
Yeah, think of the efficiency! But why bother turning one into the other - as they're drinking their coffee, they could just eat the coffee cup as they go along. We don't need no fancy-ass topologists, just a really good baker and some waterproof icing!
Your idea might work if you only ever email with your buddies, but requiring business partners to use specific keywords in the subject when emailing you isn't viable. At the very least, it fails when a message is cc'd to a bunch of people, but even for one-to-one messages it's not really acceptable.
Hmm, slight problem there. Politicians tend to need highly developed social skills. That eliminates a large proportion of the geek population. A geek politician seems like a bit of an oxymoron...
Full source code provided under a "Developer Source" license, which makes it competitive with "free" products, at least from a commercial perspective
Development use is free - no licences need to be purchased for development and testing purposes. Runs well on Linux as well as Windows; latter can be useful for test deployments on developer machines
Inexpensive to deploy: $500 per server for the JSP version, $1000 for the EJB version; additional for priority support options.
Despite any appearances above, I'm not associated with Resin, except as a customer. I first heard about it here on Slashdot, a couple of years ago. We evaluated it and eventually switched a number of applications from both Tomcat and commercial servers and have never looked back.
Other servers that might be worth looking into are Orion and JBoss, but I don't know how they compare on some of the points above. The availability of commercial support from the vendor can be a clincher, and the source code provides some insurance against the vendor disappearing.
I agree with all the cautionary comments about Tomcat, although we haven't worked with it for some time now.
Well, I've seen one guy defend the DMCA on the grounds that it keeps uppity phreaks and crackers in their place. Oops, not his exact words, which I believe were "reign in overzealous programmers" (but he used "phreaks and crackers" too).
Good point: I missed the segment which sees various applications of digital technology as a threat to some perceived status quo. For them, any law which allows stricter regulation of the technology in question is a good thing.
Although Declan's article focused on the implications for security research, he repeatedly talked about the DMCA in general. He's simply exaggerating in a different way: by focusing on a narrow aspect of the law - the fact that certain research exemptions exist - he implies that the entire law isn't as bad as it's made out to be. Even if it weren't for the invalid logical leap here, the leap is made from a flawed foundation, since even with the security exemptions, the law can still inhibit legitimate discussion of security issues.
It makes it harder to obtain software cracks off the internet
It would have been more accurate to say "tries to make it harder..." But how much harder? It doesn't take much googling to find source and/or binaries for DeCSS, for example, a DMCA-violating program which was explicitly banned from distribution of any kind by a U.S. federal judge. So the DMCA seriously abrogates the rights of consumers (see the other reply to your post for an example) in order to achieve... what exactly?
You have to realize that not everybody who has been threatened have had legal departments to consult over the threats.
The most common threat I'm aware of is that of requests for removal of copyrighted material from a website. For that, small ISPs and website owners don't really need a lawyer: the DMCA clearly says that if a copyright owner asks them to remove copyrighted content, they'd better do so, or suffer some severe preemptive consequences, e.g. an ISP becoming liable for their customer's disputed content. It's difficult to overstate the "chilling effect" involved here, so I'd be interested to see examples of exaggeration about this.
Yes, the DMCA is dangerous. But many are going off on it like it's the end of the world. Which it isn't. It's more likely one of the signs that the end may be coming.
OK, I'll buy that.;)
The "end of the world" scenarios come from possibilities which the DMCA really does raise: for example, the possibility that it could become unnecessarily difficult or expensive, or even effectively impossible, for ordinary artists to create works on media that can be read by standard consumer players. There are other such issues related to the way in which human creations spring from, and are returned to, the public domain.
Of course, if and when these problems do arise, I have no doubt various ways around them will be found, possibly including striking down aspects of the DMCA. But I think there's a lot to be said for not waiting for the ship to hit the iceberg before starting to turn the wheel.
If there's any overstatement of the dangers of the DMCA going on (and I'm not sure I agree that there is, I'd need to see some examples), I think whether it qualifies as exaggeration is largely in the eye of the beholder. It's counterproductive to argue about whether the DMCA reaches way too far or just too far. If we agree it reaches too far, any more specific characterization will be subjective and not that relevant to the specifics of what should or shouldn't be changed.
The caving in to DMCA threats is not being driven by the EFF. The companies which cave have legal departments which have looked at the law and know the realities of the court system, the costs thereof, etc. The DMCA includes a number of large blunt instruments which give copyright holders enormous and unprecedented power, including the power to allege a violation and have said violation removed in the absence of any evidence. "Guilty until proven innocent" is not an exaggeration, applied to this part of the law.
In short, the claim that the EFF is exaggerating the problems with the DMCA are most likely being made by those who don't fully understand how dangerous the DMCA is. Unfortunately, it's full effects may take many more years to become apparent to those who aren't already directly affected by it.
For the record, I'm not associated with the EFF, although I probably should be.;)
You're right. Butter knives aren't bad. The DMCA, on the other hand, is bad.
If you think I'm wrong, could you tell me what legitimate purpose the DMCA serves? No-one ever seems able to explain that in a satisfactory and defensible way.
"The EFF is right. The chilling effects are real. "
You are just the kind of mark that has fallen for the scare mongering that makes this guys article all the more relevant.
We've seen numerous examples of the DMCA's chilling effect, including Felten, Sklyarov, and Perens. There have been many less well-publicized ones, many of which involve website takedowns on a "guilty until proven innocent" basis. Where's the scaremongering, exactly? I don't need the EFF to tell me that the DMCA represents a corporate grab for control over the public's right to fair use of media products.
The only people I've seen defending the DMCA are those who are ignorant of what it actually says, or who stand to benefit from it commercially. I have yet to come across anyone who is both well-informed about the DMCA, and doesn't benefit from it financially, who's willing to defend it. Which camp do you fall into: ignoramus, or profiteer?
I've got nothing against making a profit, but if you do it by bribing the legislature to illegally abrogate the rights of citizens, you deserve nothing but contempt. As well as bankruptcy, when consumers stop buying your unusable crap.
Slashdot Mirror
IOOC 911.11? Would that be the International Olive Oil Council, or the Iranian Offshore Oil Company?
Not to feed the troll, but for the benefit of any impressionable young programmers:
The goal of a programming language is to provide a machine with a set of instructions, not to sit down and read it a story.
Programming languages intended for use by humans (as opposed to languages intended primarily for machine generation) have multiple goals, three of which are to be human-writable, human-readable, and human-maintainable.
Literate programming may not be a perfect solution, but it's addressing a real issue. Current programming languages tend to be pretty horrible at expressing abstractions in a human readable way. The ideal programming language would be one that allowed you to express abstractions at the level of the problem domain, yet was able to translate that into something as efficiently executable, or close to it, as something written in a lower-level language. Literate programming allows you to do something along these lines, although it still involves a fair amount of "manual intervention" on the part of the programmer.
If only... if only.
Sorry, you picked the wrong show to watch - Ally's lipstick shade doesn't actually have any bearing on the law. You should have been watching "Law and Order"...
Caldera purchased the rights to DR-DOS from Novell in 1996.
Caldera has not acquired Novell. Novell is an independently traded public company listed on NASDAQ.
I was thinking they could have tripled their revenue, at least, by having one of their developers do some consulting...
..."it seemed like a good idea at the time!"
P.S. I should have mentioned that Spetner also does propose that intelligent design would be required to produce the observed results. This is a huge and unscientific leap which his book doesn't do anything to justify, especially not his probabilistic arguments.
While we're recommending books to each other, you might want to try Thomas Kuhn's "Structure of Scientific Revolutions" for some info on the subject of how science works - it's not the last word, but it serves as a good intro. I'll give you the ten-cent synopsis: just because someone comes along with a possibly plausible-sounding hypothesis, doesn't mean it's correct.
If Spetner does turn out to have a point, evolution would be changed fairly dramatically, but it is not really replaced, since crucial basic aspects of the theory remain unchanged. Saying that you are "amazed at how completely fooled Slashdot readers are" is a little like saying that you're amazed at how completely fooled people were by Newton's theory of gravity, right around the time Einstein first published his papers on General Relativity.
Slashdot readers are wise to reserve judgement on hypotheses like this one, until the affected discipline has had a chance to properly debate, test, and possibly assimilate the ideas.
Spatner's statistics often remind me of the statistics used to determine the probability of alien life in the universe: the results are all over the map, depending on who's doing the calculating and what their assumptions are. You could accept almost all of Spatner's logic and simply change a few assumptions, and come to a completely different conclusion.
An additional and unfortunate problem with Spetner's work is that the nature of the hypothesis is such that almost every crackpot religious group seems to have jumped on it as proof that "evolution can't be right", despite the fact that if anything, the hypothesis might in fact help to produce a more sophisticated theory of evolution. Blind religious crackpottery doesn't help in having a reasoned debate on the topic.
It's not a news site, it's Rob + Friends blog! If you don't like it, don't come back here. Is that it?
Well, I'd put it like this: the site is concerned with open source software, free software, Linux, privacy issues especially related to technology, various general tech issues and toys etc., plus various cultural things of interest to its target audience, like anime, sci-fi, etc. If you don't share the interests and perspective, and aren't interested in learning more about those things, then yeah, you probably shouldn't be here. Then again, /. could probably do with the advertising dollars, so by all means stick around, just try to keep down the whining.
Huh? Did you actually read the referenced article? It explicitly talks about the potential dangers here to non-Microsoft systems.
Seems to me there are plenty of issues here that have the potential to affect Linux wireless access. We want to avoid a repeat of the winmodem situation, which in this case could be more severe because it affects access to networks, not just a local piece of hardware. The way to do that is to make sure information gets out early, along with awareness of the protocols, issues, and potential traps involved.
You describe yourself as "us on the Nix", but I have to wonder if you've ever touched anything other than Windows - otherwise, you might actually have some appreciation of the real-world problems of coexisting with Microsoft's perpetually broken stuff.
There are still ways in which this is not legally true, although proper tests of this in court are yet to come. Specific issues which are likely to come up include the ability to timeshift, spaceshift, and make backups, once protection mechanisms have made that impractical.
Intellectual property does not have the same legal (or actual) qualities as physical property, as the existence of the fair use exceptions attest. Recent law tries to move away from this principle, largely because legislators seem not to have understood this issue, and/or have been unduly influenced by the media industry.
The judiciary has a much better grasp of these issues, so I fully expect some of these wrongs to be redressed in future. The dancing around court tests of the DMCA are in part a reflection of the nervousness on the part of the media industry to test it in court - they know perfectly well that aspects of it are on extremely shaky legal ground. Instead, they want a law to use as an out-of-court club, and the DMCA was specifically designed for this purpose.
I'm saying it's survival of the fittest (or smartest).
I agree with that in general. However, laws do place some constraints on this - otherwise, the "discussions" with Jack Valenti and Hilary Rosen could be held using some of Charlton Heston's favorite instruments, for example. In the current battle between consumers and the industry, copyright laws which were once quite favorable to the law-abiding consumer have been turned against us, with the potential for criminalizing and/or stamping out much innocent behavior that was once legal. The media companies are now relying on invalid laws to protect their "property".
This battle should be fought in the technical arena, not the bribe-a-politician arena.
I disagree. If this were truly a completely lawless, survival of the fittest situation, you'd be right. It's not, though. Copyright law explicitly grants certain rights to consumers, and those rights are based on legal principles relating to the nature of intellectual property. The DMCA and other new laws represent an end run around these principles. If you accept the media company "right to produce their property in any way they see fit", you've already conceded a major point in their favor, which I do not concede.
Said chip is covered in very hard black goop. Now what do I do?
That's not true in law. Fair use, according to case precedent, includes the right to copy music for personal use, timeshifting, spaceshifting, backup purposes, etc.
If you can beat Sony's copy protection, more power to you. Then your fair use right remains intact.
Except that the DMCA forbids circumventing copy protection, so some of your legally-protected fair use rights can only be obtained at the cost of breaking federal law.
If not, tough shit.
Nice attitude. I say the same to Sony and the other media companies, who are going to run into a lot of trouble with the one-sided "negotiating" they're doing. Consumers can "negotiate" too, which is exactly why the media companies are running scared.
I was looking at this the other day for a cross-browser web application which relies on DOM. If you look at this W3C DOM Compatibility Table and run your eyes down the Opera column, you'll see that it supports only a handful of the DOM features listed, and is by far the least DOM-compliant browser. This new version is a much-needed improvement to bring Opera into line with Mozilla, Explorer, and Konqueror.
Yeah, think of the efficiency! But why bother turning one into the other - as they're drinking their coffee, they could just eat the coffee cup as they go along. We don't need no fancy-ass topologists, just a really good baker and some waterproof icing!
Your idea might work if you only ever email with your buddies, but requiring business partners to use specific keywords in the subject when emailing you isn't viable. At the very least, it fails when a message is cc'd to a bunch of people, but even for one-to-one messages it's not really acceptable.
Yeah, but shareholders would cringe at the image of a naked Bill Gates. If that's not a breach of fiduciary responsibility, I don't know what is!
Hmm, slight problem there. Politicians tend to need highly developed social skills. That eliminates a large proportion of the geek population. A geek politician seems like a bit of an oxymoron...
Here are some good reasons to use Resin:
- Fast, reliable, scalable
- Easy configuration
- Full source code provided under a "Developer Source" license, which makes it competitive with "free" products, at least from a commercial perspective
- Development use is free - no licences need to be purchased for development and testing purposes. Runs well on Linux as well as Windows; latter can be useful for test deployments on developer machines
- Inexpensive to deploy: $500 per server for the JSP version, $1000 for the EJB version; additional for priority support options.
- Commercial support - see their pricing page.
Here's a testimonials and customer list which includes some pretty big names.Despite any appearances above, I'm not associated with Resin, except as a customer. I first heard about it here on Slashdot, a couple of years ago. We evaluated it and eventually switched a number of applications from both Tomcat and commercial servers and have never looked back.
Other servers that might be worth looking into are Orion and JBoss, but I don't know how they compare on some of the points above. The availability of commercial support from the vendor can be a clincher, and the source code provides some insurance against the vendor disappearing.
I agree with all the cautionary comments about Tomcat, although we haven't worked with it for some time now.
Good point: I missed the segment which sees various applications of digital technology as a threat to some perceived status quo. For them, any law which allows stricter regulation of the technology in question is a good thing.
Although Declan's article focused on the implications for security research, he repeatedly talked about the DMCA in general. He's simply exaggerating in a different way: by focusing on a narrow aspect of the law - the fact that certain research exemptions exist - he implies that the entire law isn't as bad as it's made out to be. Even if it weren't for the invalid logical leap here, the leap is made from a flawed foundation, since even with the security exemptions, the law can still inhibit legitimate discussion of security issues.
It would have been more accurate to say "tries to make it harder..." But how much harder? It doesn't take much googling to find source and/or binaries for DeCSS, for example, a DMCA-violating program which was explicitly banned from distribution of any kind by a U.S. federal judge. So the DMCA seriously abrogates the rights of consumers (see the other reply to your post for an example) in order to achieve... what exactly?
The most common threat I'm aware of is that of requests for removal of copyrighted material from a website. For that, small ISPs and website owners don't really need a lawyer: the DMCA clearly says that if a copyright owner asks them to remove copyrighted content, they'd better do so, or suffer some severe preemptive consequences, e.g. an ISP becoming liable for their customer's disputed content. It's difficult to overstate the "chilling effect" involved here, so I'd be interested to see examples of exaggeration about this.
Yes, the DMCA is dangerous. But many are going off on it like it's the end of the world. Which it isn't. It's more likely one of the signs that the end may be coming.
OK, I'll buy that. ;)
The "end of the world" scenarios come from possibilities which the DMCA really does raise: for example, the possibility that it could become unnecessarily difficult or expensive, or even effectively impossible, for ordinary artists to create works on media that can be read by standard consumer players. There are other such issues related to the way in which human creations spring from, and are returned to, the public domain.
Of course, if and when these problems do arise, I have no doubt various ways around them will be found, possibly including striking down aspects of the DMCA. But I think there's a lot to be said for not waiting for the ship to hit the iceberg before starting to turn the wheel.
If there's any overstatement of the dangers of the DMCA going on (and I'm not sure I agree that there is, I'd need to see some examples), I think whether it qualifies as exaggeration is largely in the eye of the beholder. It's counterproductive to argue about whether the DMCA reaches way too far or just too far. If we agree it reaches too far, any more specific characterization will be subjective and not that relevant to the specifics of what should or shouldn't be changed.
In short, the claim that the EFF is exaggerating the problems with the DMCA are most likely being made by those who don't fully understand how dangerous the DMCA is. Unfortunately, it's full effects may take many more years to become apparent to those who aren't already directly affected by it.
For the record, I'm not associated with the EFF, although I probably should be. ;)
If you think I'm wrong, could you tell me what legitimate purpose the DMCA serves? No-one ever seems able to explain that in a satisfactory and defensible way.
The only people I've seen defending the DMCA are those who are ignorant of what it actually says, or who stand to benefit from it commercially. I have yet to come across anyone who is both well-informed about the DMCA, and doesn't benefit from it financially, who's willing to defend it. Which camp do you fall into: ignoramus, or profiteer?
I've got nothing against making a profit, but if you do it by bribing the legislature to illegally abrogate the rights of citizens, you deserve nothing but contempt. As well as bankruptcy, when consumers stop buying your unusable crap.