This is actually real but rarely news: There was an article in c't 5/2000. The current issue (and the one which contains the April fool's jokes) is 07/2000.
I could see this as a backup mechanism, in case of some unpleasant disaster. For instance if I accidentally rm the term paper I just typed, I could have it back.
Well, there's a better solution: Use a file system that keeps deleted files and old versions of a file.
Or if the power goes off,
Use an UPS.
and the vi session didn't save what I had, or fsck couldn't recover the file,
Use a journaling file system.
again, I could get it back. Or if I'm using Windows, and I look crooked...
The whole LCD and battery idea is a nice one. Type all you want, then go back to a computer, and hit a button that dumps the buffer as normal keystrokes.
You get the feeling that NT could have been something better if they didn't have to make it compatible with Win9x.
Actually, NT consists of two parts: The NTOS kernel, which is much like a traditional Unix system and the Win32 subsystem (which is not Win9x-compatible, Win9x is compatible with Win32 from NT). The kernel has some interesting features that go beyond what a traditional Unix system can do.
However, it's not Unix. The native NT API is compatible to nothing and certainly not anything near POSIX-compliance.
Yes, NT has all features that make a POSIX-subsystem possible. But most of them are unused.
I'm not a lawyer, french, a french lawyer, nor can I even speak french, but this law could mean a few different things:
All french citizens with web pages on french servers are required to id themselves All french citizens with web pages on any web server are required to id themselves
The second option is impossible. Neither do French courts have legislation over non-French servers (unlike US courts, who are stupid enough to believe that) nor is it possible to find out whether a anonymous post comes from a French citizen or to enter criminal preceedings against him/her -- you know, anonymous posts are..., well, anonymous.
So, a poor newbie sysadmin, gets cracked, starts serving anonymous content, and he's probably liable. Great.
Although this is a good counter-argument, it won't help much. It's easy to rewrite or interpret the draft in a way that only someone who intentionally provided webspace to others will be liable. And then?
Europe is a socialist state. the telcos are run by gov'ts. Here in the greatest country in the history of the world, the market determines who gets what.
You should align your view with reality: In all EU member states, telcos have been privatized and there's full competition.
Yes. It's called "give us a way to pay for individual songs, and download them in the format of our choice."
This obviously can't work if someone who downloads it first then makes the song available at no cost.
However, the idea of having songs available for free is not new: You can download... er, record songs from radio too. Currently, getting those MP3s over the Internet is the easiest solution, especially with software like Napster. However, if there wasn't the Internet, people would just get it from other sources.
What is really new is that digital copies have better quality than analogue ones, and that you can get a song from the other end of the World. However, the quality of a tape copied from CD is not as bad as you might think. If you still buy a CD, it's not mainly because of the better quality: you get the inlay etc. and, yes, honour the artists. Further, gettings songs from anywhere only has an advantage if you can't get it anywhere near. However, most songs that are MP3ed are already those played on every radio station.
I wonder if it's ok to call them "free-floating planets". Actually, a planet is by dfinition orbiting a star. Shouldn't they be rather called "planet-sized asteroids"?
Maybe they are orbiting a (larger) sun or even a black hole, toghether with some other suns. Then, of course, they are not free-floating.
Yes, and Venus (eg) is not a planet but a free-floating moon...;-)
Copyrights AREN'T expiring. They're being perpetually extended. That's the problem.
Yes, that's part of the problem too. However, it is not the cause for cultural treasures being lost completly.
Acutally there's a difference between the copyright on finished stories, films, etc. and a copyright on eg comic characters (such as Mickey Mouse): The copyright on the first group can expire rather quickly without doing much harm. The copyright on the later (is it actually called "copyright") is more like trademarks: The product itself is not protected. Instead, it's something that identifies the creator.
Maybe, the best solution is to keep these different: Copyright on finished works just expires after a relativly short time. On the other hand, characters etc. should be protected like trademarks and expire after is has not been used for a certain time.
A different question is what should be considered fair use: If you can't "cite" (ie copy small parts) of eg a comic strip, that's simply stupid. But here again, technical provisions are dangerous too: If you're legally entitled to use single parts of a film in a work discussing it, this is rather useless if a copy protecting mechanism prevents that. IMO everything that can not possibly compete with the original work should be allowed. (Note that this does not mean that it must not do harm to the copyright holder's revenues: Critics often do.)
If you don't use a piece of land for a time but someone else does, they gain rights to that land after a time. That time is a mere 7 years in some states.
This is unknown here in Germany (and I guess in most other Civil Law systems too).
I seem to recall some clauses in physical property where if it's not used for some length of time, it reverts back to the government. Perhaps we need something like that in our current IP laws.
While I don't remember anything like that for physical property (maybe in Common Law systems), there are already such rules in Intellectual Property laws: Copyright, patents, etc. all expire after some time.
This is the consequence of the purpose of IP laws: They not only protect the author/inventor's revenue but by doing that also promote authorship and making the creations available to the public:
If there was no protection of inventions by patents, these inventions would probably be kept secret. Patents however must be published.
If there was no copyright, authors and other artists would not be able to spend so much time on creating their works.
So far, so good. But modern technologies break these rules:
Software copyright is granted without publishing of the source code. When copyright expires, the software itself will have become obsolete and useless. The algorithms can't be used because the source code is not available either. (Well, fortunatly, algorithms can only be protected by software patents...)
Modern copy protection systems don't expire. (Even if they could, content authors would probably not use this feature.) So when the Copyright expires, it will still not be possible to access the works. Or maybe, the creations will already have been lost completly because it will have been impossible to save the work from obsolete, but copy protected media.
The solution to this can be to only grant copyright to works whose full source code is avaiable or which are not copy-protected. Authors who do not want to support the second purpose of IP laws IMO don't deserve their protection either.
What we really need is a list of domains and subnets to which we may silently refuse cookies. Banning cookies on IMG requests isn't enough, as many of these sites use mini-javascript bits or other embedded crap in addition to images.
Just as a side note: Opera 4 Beta has such a domain- or host-based filter. And even more: Besides that, you can explicitly disable "third party cookies". Hopefully, Mozilla will have something similar...
It would be far easier to simply search for "cphack" or "cp4hash" and ban those sites.
Yes, but how many mirrors does eg anonymizer.com have?
And why isn't there a blocking category that just says "Information how to circumvent/disable Cyperpatrol"? Then it would be more transparent why these sites are blocked. And the company does not have lame excueses for listing them in every category.
I think it's futile to try to monitor such things with software given the size and variety of the web. The best thing is for parents to take charge and web surf WITH their kids.
I agree. A single company just can't do this job while maintaining high quality also in respect to false positives. On the other hand, blocking based on self-given PICS labels might be possible. Another approach would be to have a vast majority of web users vote on the classification of sites. So, whenever a user who cares steps on a site s/he believes inappropriate to children, s/he can submit the site to that database and rate it. (Hm, wouldn't that be similar to the Open Directory Project?) Of course, that would have to integrated into the browser.
I don't personally like the idea of censoring either. But as long as a adult user can access whatever s/he like, I don't have a great problem with parents wanting to do that for their children, although I don't think I'd do it myself (but maybe this is just because I don't have children, ask again in 10, 20 years).
Suppose, for instance, that a movie studio releases a DVD version of a very old movie that is no longer under copyright. They should have no right to control your ability to copy it, since it's now in the public domain.
Not really: The DVD itself still has the copyright, although the film does not.
But there's another problem: If content is copy-protected, this not only has effects on copyright expiration. As noone is able to copy it, there is no possibility to copy it to new media, convert the format etc. So after the author/company has lost interest in the product and does not produce any longer, the time will come when all copies are broken or can't be played in modern equippment - and no new copies are produced. Finally it's impossible to get the work in any form. The work will be lost completly.
So maybe in 100 years from now, it will be impossible to view any films that were created fully digitally - and copy protected.
Actually, that's not so offtopic as you might think:
While I think it's somewhat paranoid to believe that Diskkeeper could be more dangerous because it originated from a Scientology member (M$ certainly does have the full sources and compiled them themselves, further, a defragmenting solution does have less access to your data than a video driver), this anti-hype could actually lead to the conclusion that every proprietary software is potentially dangerous: If you can't look at the sources, you can never know what the software really does - whether it is from Scientology, Microsoft or the NSA does not matter then. Don't trust an operating system you don't have sources for.
That the German government is discovering this at the same time they discover that Open Source software is less expensive and better is maybe coincidence, maybe not.
Therefore, this site DOES fit every category available, because it will allow you to view forbidden content from EVERY category by simply disabling the filter.
Hm, maybe, but does this include sites that only link to this information or tools? Or sites that just criticize the blocking software vendor without providing such information?
Re:When it is finally out can I just download an I
on
SuSE 6.4 Announced
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· Score: 1
Well, you can download the bootdisk and install it via FTP. You don't even need to have a CD-ROM drive.
Just read the FTP install HOWTO. However, I'd strongly recommend not to install from ftp.suse.com, but from ftp.gwdg.de as due to US export laws the US server does not contain cryptographic software (such as ssh).
Only the bundled commercial software will be missing (OSS, Staroffice etc.) of course.
Slashdot Mirror
No, not yet. (99 minutes to go.)
This is actually real but rarely news: There was an article in c't 5/2000. The current issue (and the one which contains the April fool's jokes) is 07/2000.
Well, there's a better solution: Use a file system that keeps deleted files and old versions of a file.
Use an UPS.
Use a journaling file system.
Oh, I see the real problem now...
Aren't those called subnotebooks?
Maybe:
3dfx is a graphics chip, which does not provide new CPU instructions.
SIMD (single instruction multiple data) is just a generic term, which applied to several extended instruction sets, including some MMX instructions.
Actually, NT consists of two parts: The NTOS kernel, which is much like a traditional Unix system and the Win32 subsystem (which is not Win9x-compatible, Win9x is compatible with Win32 from NT). The kernel has some interesting features that go beyond what a traditional Unix system can do.
However, it's not Unix. The native NT API is compatible to nothing and certainly not anything near POSIX-compliance.
Yes, NT has all features that make a POSIX-subsystem possible. But most of them are unused.
The second option is impossible. Neither do French courts have legislation over non-French servers (unlike US courts, who are stupid enough to believe that) nor is it possible to find out whether a anonymous post comes from a French citizen or to enter criminal preceedings against him/her -- you know, anonymous posts are..., well, anonymous.
Although this is a good counter-argument, it won't help much. It's easy to rewrite or interpret the draft in a way that only someone who intentionally provided webspace to others will be liable. And then?
.co.uk stands for commercial.uk. It's the same as .com for international domains.
You should align your view with reality:
In all EU member states, telcos have been privatized and there's full competition.
This obviously can't work if someone who downloads it first then makes the song available at no cost.
However, the idea of having songs available for free is not new: You can download... er, record songs from radio too.
Currently, getting those MP3s over the Internet is the easiest solution, especially with software like Napster. However, if there wasn't the Internet, people would just get it from other sources.
What is really new is that digital copies have better quality than analogue ones, and that you can get a song from the other end of the World.
However, the quality of a tape copied from CD is not as bad as you might think. If you still buy a CD, it's not mainly because of the better quality: you get the inlay etc. and, yes, honour the artists.
Further, gettings songs from anywhere only has an advantage if you can't get it anywhere near. However, most songs that are MP3ed are already those played on every radio station.
I wonder if it's ok to call them "free-floating planets". Actually, a planet is by dfinition orbiting a star. Shouldn't they be rather called "planet-sized asteroids"?
Maybe they are orbiting a (larger) sun or even a black hole, toghether with some other suns.
Then, of course, they are not free-floating.
Yes, and Venus (eg) is not a planet but a free-floating moon... ;-)
Yes, that's part of the problem too. However, it is not the cause for cultural treasures being lost completly.
Acutally there's a difference between the copyright on finished stories, films, etc. and a copyright on eg comic characters (such as Mickey Mouse):
The copyright on the first group can expire rather quickly without doing much harm.
The copyright on the later (is it actually called "copyright") is more like trademarks: The product itself is not protected. Instead, it's something that identifies the creator.
Maybe, the best solution is to keep these different:
Copyright on finished works just expires after a relativly short time. On the other hand, characters etc. should be protected like trademarks and expire after is has not been used for a certain time.
A different question is what should be considered fair use:
If you can't "cite" (ie copy small parts) of eg a comic strip, that's simply stupid. But here again, technical provisions are dangerous too: If you're legally entitled to use single parts of a film in a work discussing it, this is rather useless if a copy protecting mechanism prevents that.
IMO everything that can not possibly compete with the original work should be allowed. (Note that this does not mean that it must not do harm to the copyright holder's revenues: Critics often do.)
This is unknown here in Germany (and I guess in most other Civil Law systems too).
While I don't remember anything like that for physical property (maybe in Common Law systems), there are already such rules in Intellectual Property laws:
Copyright, patents, etc. all expire after some time.
This is the consequence of the purpose of IP laws: They not only protect the author/inventor's revenue but by doing that also promote authorship and making the creations available to the public:
So far, so good. But modern technologies break these rules:
The solution to this can be to only grant copyright to works whose full source code is avaiable or which are not copy-protected.
Authors who do not want to support the second purpose of IP laws IMO don't deserve their protection either.
Just as a side note: Opera 4 Beta has such a domain- or host-based filter. And even more: Besides that, you can explicitly disable "third party cookies".
Hopefully, Mozilla will have something similar...
Yes, but how many mirrors does eg anonymizer.com have?
And why isn't there a blocking category that just says "Information how to circumvent/disable Cyperpatrol"? Then it would be more transparent why these sites are blocked. And the company does not have lame excueses for listing them in every category.
I agree. A single company just can't do this job while maintaining high quality also in respect to false positives.
On the other hand, blocking based on self-given PICS labels might be possible. Another approach would be to have a vast majority of web users vote on the classification of sites. So, whenever a user who cares steps on a site s/he believes inappropriate to children, s/he can submit the site to that database and rate it. (Hm, wouldn't that be similar to the Open Directory Project?) Of course, that would have to integrated into the browser.
I don't personally like the idea of censoring either. But as long as a adult user can access whatever s/he like, I don't have a great problem with parents wanting to do that for their children, although I don't think I'd do it myself (but maybe this is just because I don't have children, ask again in 10, 20 years).
Not really: The DVD itself still has the copyright, although the film does not.
But there's another problem: If content is copy-protected, this not only has effects on copyright expiration.
As noone is able to copy it, there is no possibility to copy it to new media, convert the format etc. So after the author/company has lost interest in the product and does not produce any longer, the time will come when all copies are broken or can't be played in modern equippment - and no new copies are produced. Finally it's impossible to get the work in any form. The work will be lost completly.
So maybe in 100 years from now, it will be impossible to view any films that were created fully digitally - and copy protected.
Nope. Tomorrow is the European Union's turn. With the French and the German gov't supporting OSS, this should be a snap.
The World will take until next week...
Actually English (250,000+) has over twice as many words as German.
Well, if you count kindergarten as an English word, but not as a German word (because it is just composed of Kind[er] and Garten)...
(Actually, the only German term is Opensourcesoftware or Open-Source-Software, ie adapted spelling, but there's no German word for it.)
Actually, that's not so offtopic as you might think:
While I think it's somewhat paranoid to believe that Diskkeeper could be more dangerous because it originated from a Scientology member (M$ certainly does have the full sources and compiled them themselves, further, a defragmenting solution does have less access to your data than a video driver), this anti-hype could actually lead to the conclusion that every proprietary software is potentially dangerous: If you can't look at the sources, you can never know what the software really does - whether it is from Scientology, Microsoft or the NSA does not matter then. Don't trust an operating system you don't have sources for.
That the German government is discovering this at the same time they discover that Open Source software is less expensive and better is maybe coincidence, maybe not.
Hm, maybe, but does this include sites that only link to this information or tools?
Or sites that just criticize the blocking software vendor without providing such information?
Well, you can download the bootdisk and install it via FTP.
You don't even need to have a CD-ROM drive.
Just read the FTP install HOWTO.
However, I'd strongly recommend not to install from ftp.suse.com, but from ftp.gwdg.de as due to US export laws the US server does not contain cryptographic software (such as ssh).
Only the bundled commercial software will be missing (OSS, Staroffice etc.) of course.
Nope. Stretching is intended for anamorphic signals from DVDs or other sources. So it has to be linear. Actually, it's unstretching. ;-)
The European PALplus TV standard uses a 16:9 aspect ratio. 16:9 is also used for anamorphic DVD and DVB (Digital Video Broadcasting) signals.
16:9 (1.66) was chosen because it lies inbetween the (old) 4:3 TV aspect ratio and the even wider formats used in cinemas/movies.