IANA(G)L, but is there anything stopping www.wikipedia.de from explicitly telling viewers how to get to the real German wikipedia site... e.g. a direct link to de.wikipedia.org
Suing the wikipedia.de site seems ineffective. By the way, there's more background on the case at the English wikipedia entry.
Yeah, doesn't make too much sense to me. If you use all 11 TV-tuners at once, are you actually gonna be able to watch everything you record???? I don't have cable, and I don't think I even get that many channels.
And the electricity bill, oof. I don't think a lot of people realize how much energy a computer uses. A typical desktop PC, idling, uses 150-200 W. That's like 2-3 typical incandescent bulbs or 8-12 typical compact fluorescent bulbs. Not so good for your wallet, or for the environment.
What do I know anyway... I don't even like TV. Perhaps I would if I built myself a PVR, but then again that's the reason I probably shouldn't:-)
Yeah, that's true. But by 1997 there was hardly a Minitel around anymore, at least not in Montpellier. It was pretty darned obsolete.
The reason Minitel (and stuff like TeleText in the UK) went obsolete was it wasn't "open." You couldn't just set up your own Minitel site in your basement/dorm room like the web. I'm not sure that the networking protocols were well-documented like TCP, IP, and HTTP... Plus it suffered from the same confusing pricing. You had to pay "per unit time" AND the price depended on what service you were accessing.
I think the web took off because it was open and because you could use it all you wanted for the cost of dial-up Internet. I remember countless hours tooling around in Lynx on an AIX shell account and learning to write HTML pages, back in middle school.
Errr....:-) I must admit I only read the Wikipedia entry halfway through. I remembered this example from high school history and in our History book they neglected to mention the fact that the postal service lost revenue.
So, admittedly, this particular example was a terrible business idea, though in the long run an enormous boon to British society and commerce. Perhaps it wouldn't have been such a loss for the postal service if they had used a HIGHER price, but kept it a flat rate nonetheless.
Yes, it's a good point that it would likely be cheaper for the ISP this time around (though no less potential to hamper commerce by confounding consumers and providers with complex fee structures).
Might I assume from your sig that you are French? Does France still have a confusing system for land line billing? I imagine lots of people in France have broadband these days... does that work on a flat fee like in the US?
Yeah, I think the explosion of transfer rates and bandwidth is key. At some point, it became cheaper for companies to simply provide more bandwidth than for them to go around metering the amount of bandwidth users are actually using.
This is what happened to the British Penny Post in the 19th century: originally you had to pay a different amount depending on how far your mail was traveling, within Britain. However, Rowland Hill showed that it would actually be cheaper for NEARLY EVERYONE to charge a flat rate, because the postal service wouldn't have to pay people to determine the postage rate for every darned letter.
More recently, I believe this explains why the Internet took off quicker in the US than in France: in 1997, when I lived in France, *no one* that I knew in my high school had Internet access, while practically everyone I knew had access in the USA. The reason was simple: in the US you pay a flat monthly fee for local calls. In France, you get a pamphlet that goes something like this (I'm not exaggerating):
Local calls are billed per unit. The cost of one unit is 0.13F on Monday through Saturday at noon, and 0.10F on Saturdays after noon, Sundays, and government holidays. The length of calling time per billing unit varies as follows:
Between 9 am and 4 pm on weekdays (1 pm on Wednesday): 39 seconds
Between 4 pm (1 pm on Wednesday) and 6 pm on weekdays: 62 seconds
Between 6 pm and 10 pm on weekdays, as well as 9 am and noon on Saturdays: 70 seconds
...
...
So in France in 1997, not only did you pay per call, and not only did the rate vary depending on the time of day and day of the week, but ON TOP OF THAT the amount of time that each billing unit was good for was constantly shifting. It was a mess. No wonder no one wanted to use their phone line for Internet access.
The title of the post is pure FUD, "Some Linux Users Violate Sarbanes-Oxley!!! TFA is only slightly better...
Why stop at Linux, or free software in general? If a company makes an embedded device that uses a pirated copy of a proprietary RTOS, that would violate the Sarbanes-Oxley law too.
This seems to me a fundamentally good law (at least this provision): companies must not claim to have rights to use or distribute software, unless they actually do have those rights!
So why is anyone linking this provision to Linux?????? The only reason is because it's easy to get Linux for free, so incompetent people think they can do whatever they want with it. No one would make the same mistake with Microsoft software, simply because it's wrapped in a menacing 10 page EULA.
Using restrictive licensing/evil marketing in general doesn't require evil and greed. Carelessness will do it. Market pressure can do it.
The consumer rights in most of these kinds of licenses are soap bubble rights. Their very fragile in terms of the strength of the guarantee. The companies who offer them are only offering you -their best efforts-. With most companies, this is not of any real value.
You got it.
The fact is you're giving up a lot of freedom by using DRM-encumbered media. You can only use it in the way allowed by the DRM.
In general, giving up freedom to someone who has no long-term incentive to maintain it is a very bad idea. Things may be okay while they last, but if the provider changes the terms down the line, you've got no recourse.
That's why democracy is good. Every few years, we elect officials and give them immense power over us. They can make laws, order wiretaps, etc. etc. But the hope is that they won't abuse their power because their actions will all be transparent to an informed electorate. And of course the people in power want to keep it after the next election. At least that's the *theory* of it:-P
You nullify the point you were trying to make with your closing statement. An effective argument does not contradict itself.
I contradicted myself nowhere! Saying something is ineffective does NOT mean it's not unjust. I think that Soviet-style communism is a stunningly bad way to run a government (so much so that's it's collapsed in most of the countries where it was tried), but that doesn't mean it's not unjust and worth fighting against.
This is why so many anti-DRM types come off as reactionary, there is ALWAYS a way around the protection for thse inclined to find and use it, so DRM is NOT A BIG DEAL.
The fact that a crack is found for almost all DRM does not make my anti-DRM arguments invalid.
DRM is more than a technical measure these days. It is also a legal measure. You can be charged with a crime for distributing a DRM crack (e.g. Skylarov, DVD Jon), even if the DRM is hopelessly insecure from a technical perspective.
Furthermore, cracking DRM takes time and needlessly wastes resources. Lots of users don't know how to get the cracks. Plus the cracks typically only run on systems with well-documented operating systems. To my knowledge no one has released an iTunes DRM crack that actually runs *on the iPod*. So even if DRM is cracked on desktop computers, it can still render a lot of portable devices nearly useless if the original vendor turns evil.
The way I see it, the worst examples of DRM (I would not include iTunes in that group) constantly harass users, even if they're easily circumvented. Imagine if books had DRM, for example: your hardback books would lock themselves shut unless you plugged them into the phone line for a few seconds to open them. Even if there was an easy hack, you'd still be paying the publishing company to put that crap in the book in the first place.
My point is: DRM places an economic and legal burden on consumers even if it's easy to circumvent.
Exactly! The enforcement issue seems to be one of the most common fallacies people make when talking about copyright.
A trademark is only valid if the owner AGGRESSIVELY ASSERTS CONTROL of it, so that people know it's THEIR trademark and it refers to THEIR product only. So, as a result, I can't invent a nanoteleporter and popularize use of the term, then come back in 2 years and say "Hey! Nanoteleporter is my trademark. I haven't enforced it so it can't be my trademark." The validity of a trademark is based on common recognition that it belongs to a specific product and is not a generic term.
A copyright, on the other hand, requires no such aggresive enforcement.
"They didn't enforce copyright against [violator X]!!!" is not a valid defense. Microsoft for the most part doesn't manage to enforce its copyright in lots of countries (and likely doesn't try too hard), but that isn't a valid defense if they crack down.
It's true that iTunes DRM is some of the least obnoxious in terms of the practical restrictions it places on the user...
BUT you're still entirely at the mercy of Apple. If they go out of business, or get bought out, or become more evil/greedy, then they can impose new restrictions on the use of their products.
And while iTunes DRM does stop average Joe's from pirating songs, there's software out there to crack it, and it works.
How the hell is CNN the "Jewish Media"??? The main CNN reporter in Iran is Christiane Amanpour, who's almost certainly not Jewish just based on her name...
I don't see what the fuss is about! The "ping" feature is a win-win situation.
For website operators who'd like to keep track of links being clicked on, this provides a cleaner way to do it that doesn't require multiple page loads for the user.
For users who feel that this feature may affect their privacy, they can turn it off... UNLIKE redirects, which cannot be turned off. So if websites adopt the "ping" feature on a large scale, this will IMPROVE privacy options for users.
So everyone wins. Website operators have a nifty new feature, users have more options for protecting their privacy. Where's the problem?
but for corporate teams developing enterprise-class business applications, emacs probably isn't even an option
Really!?! I worked at a mid-sized speech synthesis/recognition software company a few years ago, and did some pretty heavy work with Emacs under Solaris and a bit under Linux. I had my Sun Type 5 keyboard set up with all sorts of elisp macros attached to the extra column of keys on the let. *Sigh* I miss that keyboard:-)
We also used gcc, gprof, gmake, gdb, heavily. Gcc and MSVC were the two supported compilers for a product. I worked on very low-level code optimization of a virtual machine, and Gcc was *waaay* better for that kinda thing than MSVC.
"Waaaagghghggh! It's too hard to create voting-machine software that provides the possibility of verifying the security of the code, or fixing bugs in the case of a problem. We did it wrong the first time around, despite the fact that this application practically DEMANDS security and trasnparency. Now we don't want to fix it..."
That's about what Diebold is saying, right? Good riddance to them...
For the record, I agree that the "list all the programmers" requirement is fairly unworkable. I imagine the intention was to be able to determine blame in the case of an intentional backdoor in the code...
When voting with paper ballots, there's a documented process of what happens to your ballot, where it goes, and who counts it. An election monitor could trace the path of an individual ballot if needed. The same should be a requirement for any electronic voting system. It's crucial that there be a way to verify that any individual vote cast got added to the final tally.
The cost of the roads is built into the price of fuel, though.
Oh ya, how does that work?
State and federal governments *do* tax fuel to provide for road upkeep, but I think many would argue that these taxes don't come anywhere near covering the total cost. So in effect the government is subsidizing road usage, which encourages people to drive more and more...
As far as I can tell they used the 32-bit version of Windows XP on both 32-bit Intel processors and 64-bit AMD processors. So they're not taking advantage of the performance gains of 64-bit code on the x64 processors.
They also shortchanged the Intel side a bit by not really taking advantage of the dual-core processors in the benchmarks, as mentioned in the article.
It would be interesting to see the results if they could recompile all the programs to use the full capabilities of the x64 CPUs... If they were benchmarking open-source programs it would be easy O:-) I'd love to see a big benchmark comparing things like GCC, the Gimp, OpenOffice running natively on Intel and AMD64 processors...
Or perhaps the cost of roads is already built into vehicle registration.
Ha! Not likely:-) I don't think that $100 registration fee comes anywhere NEAR covering the enormous cost of building and maintaining roads in the USA...
I bike to work as well, for what it's worth. Ten miles round trip each day. I try to do most of my other errands by bike or metro (subway) as well.
One of the issues that have come up in the open-source community has to do with the GPL. Do you think that if they were to make changes to it, it might change the way things are today for the open-source world? Taylor: The GPL is a very complex licensing agreement, and they are working on different aspects of it. I don't know enough to even hypothesize how I would author it, but I would say that in any approach to licensing technology, the following things are important. . . . Second, people should have the ability to monetize that and build on top of it. So if I'm an ISV (independent software vendor), I should be able to take the technology that I've licensed, build something on top of it, and sell it. If I'm a reseller or distributor of this technology, I should have a way that I can build and monetize things around that. I think that's what helps you build a very vibrant ecosystem. It also allows you in some ways to protect the intellectual property in different ways.
Since when does using software licensed under the GPL prevent you from building a useful product on top of it, and selling it for money????
Most of the core Linux software is GPLed, and yet plenty of companies build proprietary and/or open source software on top of it... and sell it for money!
This is pure FUD... Microsoft is just perpetuating the myth that any software "touched by the GPL" is dirty and can never be sold as a proprietary product. In reality, only software that LINKS with or USES CODE FROM something that's GPLed is constrained.
Re:the code of conduct for free software distribut
on
Drafting GPL3
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Bingo! You're exactly right. People should (a) stop whining and honor software licenses or (b) write better licenses. And if you write a better license, you'll have to write some better software too, so that the license will get noticed.
If you *don't* like the license your software is available under, write your own software and write your own license. That's exactly what Richard Stallman and the FSF started doing back in the 1980s. And their GPL'd software has been a phenomenal success.
BSD licensed software has also been a phenomenal success.
The fact that people whine about BSD or GPL so much is merely a reflection of their great success. Not only are the licenses widely employed, but the software thereby licensed is enormously popular too.
I've often thought that refrigeration costs could be reduced in cooler climates as well.
For example, in Michigan, for probably 4 months of the year, the outside temperature is cold enough that the refrigerator in my family's garage freezes.
Why not build refrigerators that have intake/exhaust tubes from the outdoors. When it's cold enough, cold outdoor air could be circulated through the fridge!
I've been biking to work winter and summer for about 1.5 years (it's easy here in the DC area). I go 5 miles each way and would happily do twice as much. Most of the time is spent on a peaceful trail and it's very relaxing and enjoyable, only takes me 20 minutes each way.
... Why not raise the tax on a gallon of gasoline instead?
The proposed system makes no sense because people who drive more fuel-efficient cars will pay more mileage tax per GALLON than people who drive gas guzzlers. That's a strange way of encouraging more fuel-efficient cars.
Raising the tax on a gallon of gasoline would be simpler and actually promote fuel efficiency.
Slashdot Mirror
IANA(G)L, but is there anything stopping www.wikipedia.de from explicitly telling viewers how to get to the real German wikipedia site... e.g. a direct link to de.wikipedia.org
Suing the wikipedia.de site seems ineffective. By the way, there's more background on the case at the English wikipedia entry.
Yeah, doesn't make too much sense to me. If you use all 11 TV-tuners at once, are you actually gonna be able to watch everything you record???? I don't have cable, and I don't think I even get that many channels.
:-)
And the electricity bill, oof. I don't think a lot of people realize how much energy a computer uses. A typical desktop PC, idling, uses 150-200 W. That's like 2-3 typical incandescent bulbs or 8-12 typical compact fluorescent bulbs. Not so good for your wallet, or for the environment.
What do I know anyway... I don't even like TV. Perhaps I would if I built myself a PVR, but then again that's the reason I probably shouldn't
Yeah, that's true. But by 1997 there was hardly a Minitel around anymore, at least not in Montpellier. It was pretty darned obsolete.
The reason Minitel (and stuff like TeleText in the UK) went obsolete was it wasn't "open." You couldn't just set up your own Minitel site in your basement/dorm room like the web. I'm not sure that the networking protocols were well-documented like TCP, IP, and HTTP... Plus it suffered from the same confusing pricing. You had to pay "per unit time" AND the price depended on what service you were accessing.
I think the web took off because it was open and because you could use it all you wanted for the cost of dial-up Internet. I remember countless hours tooling around in Lynx on an AIX shell account and learning to write HTML pages, back in middle school.
Errr.... :-) I must admit I only read the Wikipedia entry halfway through. I remembered this example from high school history and in our History book they neglected to mention the fact that the postal service lost revenue.
So, admittedly, this particular example was a terrible business idea, though in the long run an enormous boon to British society and commerce. Perhaps it wouldn't have been such a loss for the postal service if they had used a HIGHER price, but kept it a flat rate nonetheless.
Yes, it's a good point that it would likely be cheaper for the ISP this time around (though no less potential to hamper commerce by confounding consumers and providers with complex fee structures).
Might I assume from your sig that you are French? Does France still have a confusing system for land line billing? I imagine lots of people in France have broadband these days... does that work on a flat fee like in the US?
This is what happened to the British Penny Post in the 19th century: originally you had to pay a different amount depending on how far your mail was traveling, within Britain. However, Rowland Hill showed that it would actually be cheaper for NEARLY EVERYONE to charge a flat rate, because the postal service wouldn't have to pay people to determine the postage rate for every darned letter.
More recently, I believe this explains why the Internet took off quicker in the US than in France: in 1997, when I lived in France, *no one* that I knew in my high school had Internet access, while practically everyone I knew had access in the USA. The reason was simple: in the US you pay a flat monthly fee for local calls. In France, you get a pamphlet that goes something like this (I'm not exaggerating):
So in France in 1997, not only did you pay per call, and not only did the rate vary depending on the time of day and day of the week, but ON TOP OF THAT the amount of time that each billing unit was good for was constantly shifting. It was a mess. No wonder no one wanted to use their phone line for Internet access.
The title of the post is pure FUD, "Some Linux Users Violate Sarbanes-Oxley!!! TFA is only slightly better...
Why stop at Linux, or free software in general? If a company makes an embedded device that uses a pirated copy of a proprietary RTOS, that would violate the Sarbanes-Oxley law too.
This seems to me a fundamentally good law (at least this provision): companies must not claim to have rights to use or distribute software, unless they actually do have those rights!
So why is anyone linking this provision to Linux?????? The only reason is because it's easy to get Linux for free, so incompetent people think they can do whatever they want with it. No one would make the same mistake with Microsoft software, simply because it's wrapped in a menacing 10 page EULA.
The fact is you're giving up a lot of freedom by using DRM-encumbered media. You can only use it in the way allowed by the DRM.
In general, giving up freedom to someone who has no long-term incentive to maintain it is a very bad idea. Things may be okay while they last, but if the provider changes the terms down the line, you've got no recourse.
That's why democracy is good. Every few years, we elect officials and give them immense power over us. They can make laws, order wiretaps, etc. etc. But the hope is that they won't abuse their power because their actions will all be transparent to an informed electorate. And of course the people in power want to keep it after the next election. At least that's the *theory* of it
DRM is more than a technical measure these days. It is also a legal measure. You can be charged with a crime for distributing a DRM crack (e.g. Skylarov, DVD Jon), even if the DRM is hopelessly insecure from a technical perspective.
Furthermore, cracking DRM takes time and needlessly wastes resources. Lots of users don't know how to get the cracks. Plus the cracks typically only run on systems with well-documented operating systems. To my knowledge no one has released an iTunes DRM crack that actually runs *on the iPod*. So even if DRM is cracked on desktop computers, it can still render a lot of portable devices nearly useless if the original vendor turns evil.
The way I see it, the worst examples of DRM (I would not include iTunes in that group) constantly harass users, even if they're easily circumvented. Imagine if books had DRM, for example: your hardback books would lock themselves shut unless you plugged them into the phone line for a few seconds to open them. Even if there was an easy hack, you'd still be paying the publishing company to put that crap in the book in the first place.
My point is: DRM places an economic and legal burden on consumers even if it's easy to circumvent.
Exactly! The enforcement issue seems to be one of the most common fallacies people make when talking about copyright.
A trademark is only valid if the owner AGGRESSIVELY ASSERTS CONTROL of it, so that people know it's THEIR trademark and it refers to THEIR product only. So, as a result, I can't invent a nanoteleporter and popularize use of the term, then come back in 2 years and say "Hey! Nanoteleporter is my trademark. I haven't enforced it so it can't be my trademark." The validity of a trademark is based on common recognition that it belongs to a specific product and is not a generic term.
A copyright, on the other hand, requires no such aggresive enforcement.
"They didn't enforce copyright against [violator X]!!!" is not a valid defense. Microsoft for the most part doesn't manage to enforce its copyright in lots of countries (and likely doesn't try too hard), but that isn't a valid defense if they crack down.
Good post, sir.
It's true that iTunes DRM is some of the least obnoxious in terms of the practical restrictions it places on the user...
BUT you're still entirely at the mercy of Apple. If they go out of business, or get bought out, or become more evil/greedy, then they can impose new restrictions on the use of their products.
And while iTunes DRM does stop average Joe's from pirating songs, there's software out there to crack it, and it works.
How the hell is CNN the "Jewish Media"??? The main CNN reporter in Iran is Christiane Amanpour, who's almost certainly not Jewish just based on her name...
So everyone wins. Website operators have a nifty new feature, users have more options for protecting their privacy. Where's the problem?
Really!?! I worked at a mid-sized speech synthesis/recognition software company a few years ago, and did some pretty heavy work with Emacs under Solaris and a bit under Linux. I had my Sun Type 5 keyboard set up with all sorts of elisp macros attached to the extra column of keys on the let. *Sigh* I miss that keyboard
We also used gcc, gprof, gmake, gdb, heavily. Gcc and MSVC were the two supported compilers for a product. I worked on very low-level code optimization of a virtual machine, and Gcc was *waaay* better for that kinda thing than MSVC.
"Waaaagghghggh! It's too hard to create voting-machine software that provides the possibility of verifying the security of the code, or fixing bugs in the case of a problem. We did it wrong the first time around, despite the fact that this application practically DEMANDS security and trasnparency. Now we don't want to fix it..."
That's about what Diebold is saying, right? Good riddance to them...
For the record, I agree that the "list all the programmers" requirement is fairly unworkable. I imagine the intention was to be able to determine blame in the case of an intentional backdoor in the code...
When voting with paper ballots, there's a documented process of what happens to your ballot, where it goes, and who counts it. An election monitor could trace the path of an individual ballot if needed. The same should be a requirement for any electronic voting system. It's crucial that there be a way to verify that any individual vote cast got added to the final tally.
State and federal governments *do* tax fuel to provide for road upkeep, but I think many would argue that these taxes don't come anywhere near covering the total cost. So in effect the government is subsidizing road usage, which encourages people to drive more and more...
As far as I can tell they used the 32-bit version of Windows XP on both 32-bit Intel processors and 64-bit AMD processors. So they're not taking advantage of the performance gains of 64-bit code on the x64 processors.
They also shortchanged the Intel side a bit by not really taking advantage of the dual-core processors in the benchmarks, as mentioned in the article.
It would be interesting to see the results if they could recompile all the programs to use the full capabilities of the x64 CPUs... If they were benchmarking open-source programs it would be easy O:-) I'd love to see a big benchmark comparing things like GCC, the Gimp, OpenOffice running natively on Intel and AMD64 processors...
Ha! Not likely
I bike to work as well, for what it's worth. Ten miles round trip each day. I try to do most of my other errands by bike or metro (subway) as well.
Since when does using software licensed under the GPL prevent you from building a useful product on top of it, and selling it for money????
Most of the core Linux software is GPLed, and yet plenty of companies build proprietary and/or open source software on top of it... and sell it for money!
This is pure FUD... Microsoft is just perpetuating the myth that any software "touched by the GPL" is dirty and can never be sold as a proprietary product. In reality, only software that LINKS with or USES CODE FROM something that's GPLed is constrained.
Bingo! You're exactly right. People should (a) stop whining and honor software licenses or (b) write better licenses. And if you write a better license, you'll have to write some better software too, so that the license will get noticed.
If you *don't* like the license your software is available under, write your own software and write your own license. That's exactly what Richard Stallman and the FSF started doing back in the 1980s. And their GPL'd software has been a phenomenal success.
BSD licensed software has also been a phenomenal success.
The fact that people whine about BSD or GPL so much is merely a reflection of their great success. Not only are the licenses widely employed, but the software thereby licensed is enormously popular too.
Are they serious?
I've often thought that refrigeration costs could be reduced in cooler climates as well.
For example, in Michigan, for probably 4 months of the year, the outside temperature is cold enough that the refrigerator in my family's garage freezes.
Why not build refrigerators that have intake/exhaust tubes from the outdoors. When it's cold enough, cold outdoor air could be circulated through the fridge!
I've been biking to work winter and summer for about 1.5 years (it's easy here in the DC area). I go 5 miles each way and would happily do twice as much. Most of the time is spent on a peaceful trail and it's very relaxing and enjoyable, only takes me 20 minutes each way.
... Why not raise the tax on a gallon of gasoline instead?
The proposed system makes no sense because people who drive more fuel-efficient cars will pay more mileage tax per GALLON than people who drive gas guzzlers. That's a strange way of encouraging more fuel-efficient cars.
Raising the tax on a gallon of gasoline would be simpler and actually promote fuel efficiency.