if this was such a obvious, silly, beginner's mistake, where was your fucking patch for it? Huh? What was stopping you? I know fuck-all about computer programming, so I couldn't have repaired the error. You, however, are a fucking expert, apparently. So what's your excuse?
If you write an insecure system with passwords in plaintext when you're a college student with a small website, and you expect "the community" to download the code, notice the error and fix it for you, you're going to be disappointed.
Taco should not be so hard on himself over that particular flaw; the real shame should be felt by the million and one fuckheads who downloaded the code and didn't even look at it before installing.
'Course, this puts the whole "security through obscurity" thing in a slightly different light...
This is like deciding between an armed guard (you standing over their shoulder) and a security camera (logging everything). I'd prefer an armed guard any day
Why? Do you plan to flirt with the guard? Or are you really so very scared about having your own conscience being the arbiter of your behaviour?
errrrrmmmmmm..... The Post Office, as it then was, also "knew about hyperlinking before the WWW", inventing it for their Prestel system.
If anyone would bother to read the patent, rather than just going "I know what a hyperlink is, so I understand all the issues involved here!", then you would see that this is not by any means an open and shut case; BT may actually be in the right.
You see, whatever Rob Malda thinks, BT are not claiming to have patented the idea of hyperlinks. For a very good reason -- you can't patent ideas. What the Post Office did patent was a specific schema for a device which allowed information to be accessed using hyperlinks over the telephone system, in a certain way.
In much a similar way, whoever invents the flying car (in the sense of producing an actually working, commercially viable version) will be able to patent the technology they use to build it their way, in spite of all the footage that no doubt exists of weird and wacky flying car ideas. It so happens that BT patented their way of doing this, and, without knowing, the inventors of the Internet happened upon the idea of doing it the same way. If you independently come up with someone's patented idea, you're in the hole for a patent violation.
Note that BT doesn't have a claim against publishers of hyperlinks; they aren't using BT's patented system.
yes, but you see, their version, didn't work. BT's (perhaps Englebart's) did.
Similarly, when someone invents a machine shaped like a telephone box that can actually travel through time, you will not expect to see the BBC getting any royalties.
no, because they didn't invent those. They invented the technology (the device, not the idea) that originally allowed hyperlinked data over the telephone system. Doing something over a network IS substantially different from doing it on a single device, because somebody has to Actually Do It.
Y'see, I bet there's all sorts of footage hanging around of various loopy-loo flying cars, but when someone actually invents a working, viable flying car, they'll be able to patent the technology they used.
NOT my personal files, but the way my machine is configured
Why not your personal files? That's your information, and it's valuable to you. "The Real Slim Shady" is Eminem's information, and it's valuable to him (and to the company which he sold it to).
See, I get this feeling that Slashdot is very keen on their own intellectual property, but against everyone else's. And that's a fairly difficult position to defend.
Your sentence reads better thus:
So, then, if someone invents a fantastic tool to break into houses [and copy the contents {thus destroying their value to the owners}], then conventional property [law] will be "rendered obsolete", then, will it?
You are telling me that there is literally no limit on the ability of private companies to spend money on defending their property, while contrasting this with the fantastic, rational, incorruptible process whereby the US Congress decides to spend money on placing unnecessary air force bases in marginal districts of MidWestern states.
Think about this for a while: Your example of a rational cost-benefit analysis is the US Congress' decisions on spending taxpayers' money
So, then, if someone invents a fantastic tool to break into houses, then conventional property will be "rendered obsolete", then, will it?
Intellectual property is not an "industry", it is a right a right owned by the owners of copyrights and patents, and not, however, clever you become at stealing it, owned by you. Every technological advance in theft has a counterpart in the prevention of theft, and the existence of this arms race does not make natural human rights obsolete. One of those rights being the ownership of works which you have created.
Perhaps in your world, the invention of Rohypnol made a woman's right not to be raped "obslete by technology"? We can do without your kind of "progress", thank you very much.
F'kng great isn't it? This probably counts as "insightful" round here. Yes, you moron, the only people who profit directly from doing law are lawyers. How many people, however, profit from the existence of a coherent and practical commercial code? Or to put it another way, what do the following countries have in common: Laos, the USSR, France and Equatorial Guinea? Two things: they don't have as many lawsuits as the USA, and they're not as rich as the USA. A strong economy requires as little as possible prior resraint of activity. Which means, inevitably that there will be more ex post regulation of activity, or in other words lawsuits.
Of course, Slashdot "gets it" when they say that the best way to produce software is through a thousand and one tiny revisions, rather than a huge monolithic system. But when the best IP law system in the world is developed in the same way (through a thousand and one lawsuits), the knees start jerking.
Let's apply some of your stupid populist logic to other industries, shall we?
Bread
Looks like the only people who are going to profit from this are the bakers
Cure for cancer
Looks like the only people who are going to profit from this are the doctors
Sexual intercourse
Looks like the only people who are going to profit from this are the hookers
VA Linux has an IPO
Looks like the only people who are going to profit from this are..... well, nobody.
It's in the nation's best interest that it has the best businesses in the world. Isn't it?
What, precisely, is the "nation's interest", as distinct from the private interests of its citizens, and why should the "nation's interest" take precedence. I'm undecided on the H1B issue, but I don't like your Volkstaat reasoning.
The best way to guarantee that is to have as many qualified people to compete for the job as possible.
This is amazingly debatable; it could quite easily be possible that people are more productive when they're actually relaxing and thinking about a problem rather than constantly watching their back trying to save their job. And in any case, if you expand the labour pool, you have no guarantee that the employer's strategy will be to hold wages constant and take higher quality; they might just decide to lower wages and cut quality.
Geek economics, like geek politics, is best avoided.
If your answer is "yes", please indicate what it means to "own" a sporting event
Errrrr... to own it. To own the trademark (remember the Ted Turner World Peace Games?) and to organise it.
But if I attended the game, can I make a webpage that gives a general outline of the game. Sure! I'm not "rebroadcasting" anything--I'm reporting (in my own words) on an event
Major League Baseball decides to give you that right as part of the terms on which it sells you your ticket. You haven't signed a contract saying that you won't do this; the Olympic athletes have (a fact which Slashdot chose not to post, and you chose not to bother finding out).
You can run an event but you can't own the rights to tell people about it
Nonsense; owning the event means that you control access to it; if you are minded to, you can only allow access to people who agree to respect the exclusivity of your broadcasting rights. This is not exactly a controversial matter of law.
That must be why the ancient Greeks never held any Olympics.
Perhaps if we return to a slave economy, your economic model will once more be viable for a few citizens.
Don't be fooled by the techonology here. What this thing depends on is the willingness of people to develop for it, and that is determined by the market realities, not the technology. No developer is going to risk their ass to produce an Idrema-specific game. This would be gross financial irresponsibility; at the moment, it's vapourware and Idrema simply doesn't have the financial resources to invest in marketing and promotion for the consoles, let alone to cross-promote any software (check out Sony and Sega's market capitalisation to see how big a league this is). So, Idrema consoles will, for the most part, be running games that were developed for the wider PC market, and which happen to also run on Idrema. In other words, economically, it's a PC that you can't do much with, not a console. You can't just wake up in the morning and announce you're in the console market and expect anyone to take you seriously, unless you've got the resources of a Microsoft behind you.
I'd rather pay for open software than get closed software for free.
This is silly; you clearly don't mean what you're saying here. In order for the software to be "open", you have to have the option of getting it for free. So why would you pay for it? And, knowing this, why would any games developer make the software open in the first place. Even Eric Raymond knows that the Open Source model isn't appropriate for games until they've passed the end of their commercial life.
Consoles are about marketing, not technology. Don't bring your server mentality to the mass market and expect anything other than a sound ass-whipping.
Again, the X-Box (if it's not shipping yet, it's still vapor!).
That's right, head in the sand. Ignore it and it will go away...
Now, if the console companies seem (and they do at that!) to be doing well for themselves without DirectX, why on this Earth would it be an issue for this machine?
Errrrrr.... because they are consoles? Do you not think that this is just a tiny bit different from PC gaming? Or are you suggesting to me that dedicated games developers (who have to have their feet held to the fire to make them develop for freakin' Sony and Nintendo if they don't think the console has a future), are going to be falling over themselves to optimise for one guy's Linux console? Particularly when they know that the target market of this console is notorious for its desire to pick up all of its software, DVDs and music without paying for it?
Face it, unless Linux has suddenly developed drivers for a whole load of modern graphics accelerator cards through some form of magic, this console is fair and square in the PC gaming market. In which, the standard is DirectX or nothing. Why the hell can't the "community" just bite on the bullet and produce DirectX support? You'd think that this would be an itch that someone wanted to scratch. Or is everyone just too comfortable with their WIndows partition "just for games"? Or, (equally probable) has the CLI environment, string-munging PERL obsessive nature of Open SOurce Software and its most prominent snobs ^H^H^H^H^H advocates just scared off 99% of the talented 3D graphics programmers out there?
Alright, this is te question that nobody wants to face up to, but it's going to have to be answered if Linux gaming is ever going to be more than an in-principle-you-can phenomenon:
What are you going to do about the lack of DirectX support?
This idea -- invented by Phil Karn for IPV6 and known as Photuris cookies there -- was long ago implemented in IPV4 to prevent SYN floods. It's descried in several RFCs and it's available in the Linux Kernel as the "SYN cookies" option.
... the difference that this version is patented and there's fuck all you can do about it.
Which, I suppose, is why you never hear any criticism of Amazon on the Web.... errrr.... kind of wraps it up for your "media power" theory, doesn't it?
He misunderstands the concept of a "library". A library, in its historic definition, is not just a heap of information and publications; it represents someone's selection and preservation of worthwhile knowledge. A massive cache of shitty Geocities sites, corporate bumph and pathetically precious weblogs is not a library by any stretch of the imagination. A library isn't a library unless it has a librarian, deciding what needs to be preserved and, importantly editing out the dross. His servers might have three times as many bytes as the Library of Congress has letters, but I know which one I'd rather spend an afternoon with.
The Internet will be useless as a repository of knowledge until it is quite ruthlessly edited. I doubt any posts on this thread (including this one) would survive in a proper library.
The alternatives to having a service contract over a period of time are:
1) Constantly rushing round like a demented lackey, desperately trying to get business and undercutting each other all the time. and 2)Selling software, for money.
Since Slashdot has decided that the second is morally wrong, and the first seems to suck a bit, contracts are the obvious way forward.
Slashdot Mirror
if this was such a obvious, silly, beginner's mistake, where was your fucking patch for it? Huh? What was stopping you? I know fuck-all about computer programming, so I couldn't have repaired the error. You, however, are a fucking expert, apparently. So what's your excuse?
Taco should not be so hard on himself over that particular flaw; the real shame should be felt by the million and one fuckheads who downloaded the code and didn't even look at it before installing.
'Course, this puts the whole "security through obscurity" thing in a slightly different light ...
Why? Do you plan to flirt with the guard? Or are you really so very scared about having your own conscience being the arbiter of your behaviour?
If anyone would bother to read the patent, rather than just going "I know what a hyperlink is, so I understand all the issues involved here!", then you would see that this is not by any means an open and shut case; BT may actually be in the right.
You see, whatever Rob Malda thinks, BT are not claiming to have patented the idea of hyperlinks. For a very good reason -- you can't patent ideas. What the Post Office did patent was a specific schema for a device which allowed information to be accessed using hyperlinks over the telephone system, in a certain way.
In much a similar way, whoever invents the flying car (in the sense of producing an actually working, commercially viable version) will be able to patent the technology they use to build it their way, in spite of all the footage that no doubt exists of weird and wacky flying car ideas. It so happens that BT patented their way of doing this, and, without knowing, the inventors of the Internet happened upon the idea of doing it the same way. If you independently come up with someone's patented idea, you're in the hole for a patent violation.
Note that BT doesn't have a claim against publishers of hyperlinks; they aren't using BT's patented system.
I hope, without hope, that this is now clear.
Similarly, when someone invents a machine shaped like a telephone box that can actually travel through time, you will not expect to see the BBC getting any royalties.
Y'see, I bet there's all sorts of footage hanging around of various loopy-loo flying cars, but when someone actually invents a working, viable flying car, they'll be able to patent the technology they used.
Why not your personal files? That's your information, and it's valuable to you. "The Real Slim Shady" is Eminem's information, and it's valuable to him (and to the company which he sold it to).
See, I get this feeling that Slashdot is very keen on their own intellectual property, but against everyone else's. And that's a fairly difficult position to defend.
Your sentence reads better thus: So, then, if someone invents a fantastic tool to break into houses [and copy the contents {thus destroying their value to the owners}], then conventional property [law] will be "rendered obsolete", then, will it?
And the answer is still "no".
You are telling me that there is literally no limit on the ability of private companies to spend money on defending their property, while contrasting this with the fantastic, rational, incorruptible process whereby the US Congress decides to spend money on placing unnecessary air force bases in marginal districts of MidWestern states.
Think about this for a while: Your example of a rational cost-benefit analysis is the US Congress' decisions on spending taxpayers' money
Intellectual property is not an "industry", it is a right a right owned by the owners of copyrights and patents, and not, however, clever you become at stealing it, owned by you. Every technological advance in theft has a counterpart in the prevention of theft, and the existence of this arms race does not make natural human rights obsolete. One of those rights being the ownership of works which you have created.
Perhaps in your world, the invention of Rohypnol made a woman's right not to be raped "obslete by technology"? We can do without your kind of "progress", thank you very much.
Of course, Slashdot "gets it" when they say that the best way to produce software is through a thousand and one tiny revisions, rather than a huge monolithic system. But when the best IP law system in the world is developed in the same way (through a thousand and one lawsuits), the knees start jerking.
Let's apply some of your stupid populist logic to other industries, shall we?
- Bread
- Cure for cancer
- Sexual intercourse
- VA Linux has an IPO
God, sometimes I wonder why I bother.Looks like the only people who are going to profit from this are the bakers
Looks like the only people who are going to profit from this are the doctors
Looks like the only people who are going to profit from this are the hookers
Looks like the only people who are going to profit from this are ..... well, nobody.
Read it. Have a go at "Three Concepts of Liberty" by Isaiah Berlin, for a throughgoing kicking of Rousseau.
You are aware that he has been found innocent of all charges, aren't you? No, thought not.
What, precisely, is the "nation's interest", as distinct from the private interests of its citizens, and why should the "nation's interest" take precedence. I'm undecided on the H1B issue, but I don't like your Volkstaat reasoning.
The best way to guarantee that is to have as many qualified people to compete for the job as possible.
This is amazingly debatable; it could quite easily be possible that people are more productive when they're actually relaxing and thinking about a problem rather than constantly watching their back trying to save their job. And in any case, if you expand the labour pool, you have no guarantee that the employer's strategy will be to hold wages constant and take higher quality; they might just decide to lower wages and cut quality.
Geek economics, like geek politics, is best avoided.
Hmmm, yeah, government control of the entire base of "Knowledge", that sounds like a good idea.
Errrrr ... to own it. To own the trademark (remember the Ted Turner World Peace Games?) and to organise it.
But if I attended the game, can I make a webpage that gives a general outline of the game. Sure! I'm not "rebroadcasting" anything--I'm reporting (in my own words) on an event
Major League Baseball decides to give you that right as part of the terms on which it sells you your ticket. You haven't signed a contract saying that you won't do this; the Olympic athletes have (a fact which Slashdot chose not to post, and you chose not to bother finding out).
You can run an event but you can't own the rights to tell people about it
Nonsense; owning the event means that you control access to it; if you are minded to, you can only allow access to people who agree to respect the exclusivity of your broadcasting rights. This is not exactly a controversial matter of law.
That must be why the ancient Greeks never held any Olympics.
Perhaps if we return to a slave economy, your economic model will once more be viable for a few citizens.
The IOC takes measures to ensure that it can deliver the exclusive rights.
What's the news story here? If Hemos started his own site whereby he kept on publishing all the story submissions he gets from slashdot, plus his book reviews, and sold advertising in competition with slashdot, you betcha ass he'd get reminded of the little print "The Rest © 1997-2000 OSDN. ".
If you own the event, you get to set the terms on which people attend your event.
If this didn't happen, we wouldn't have big sporting events.
I'd rather pay for open software than get closed software for free.
This is silly; you clearly don't mean what you're saying here. In order for the software to be "open", you have to have the option of getting it for free. So why would you pay for it? And, knowing this, why would any games developer make the software open in the first place. Even Eric Raymond knows that the Open Source model isn't appropriate for games until they've passed the end of their commercial life.
Consoles are about marketing, not technology. Don't bring your server mentality to the mass market and expect anything other than a sound ass-whipping.
sorry, meant to post that with my main account
That's right, head in the sand. Ignore it and it will go away ...
Now, if the console companies seem (and they do at that!) to be doing well for themselves without DirectX, why on this Earth would it be an issue for this machine?
Errrrrr .... because they are consoles? Do you not think that this is just a tiny bit different from PC gaming? Or are you suggesting to me that dedicated games developers (who have to have their feet held to the fire to make them develop for freakin' Sony and Nintendo if they don't think the console has a future), are going to be falling over themselves to optimise for one guy's Linux console? Particularly when they know that the target market of this console is notorious for its desire to pick up all of its software, DVDs and music without paying for it?
Face it, unless Linux has suddenly developed drivers for a whole load of modern graphics accelerator cards through some form of magic, this console is fair and square in the PC gaming market. In which, the standard is DirectX or nothing. Why the hell can't the "community" just bite on the bullet and produce DirectX support? You'd think that this would be an itch that someone wanted to scratch. Or is everyone just too comfortable with their WIndows partition "just for games"? Or, (equally probable) has the CLI environment, string-munging PERL obsessive nature of Open SOurce Software and its most prominent snobs ^H^H^H^H^H advocates just scared off 99% of the talented 3D graphics programmers out there?
What are you going to do about the lack of DirectX support?
... the difference that this version is patented and there's fuck all you can do about it.
Which, I suppose, is why you never hear any criticism of Amazon on the Web .... errrr .... kind of wraps it up for your "media power" theory, doesn't it?
The Internet will be useless as a repository of knowledge until it is quite ruthlessly edited. I doubt any posts on this thread (including this one) would survive in a proper library.
1) Constantly rushing round like a demented lackey, desperately trying to get business and undercutting each other all the time. and
2)Selling software, for money.
Since Slashdot has decided that the second is morally wrong, and the first seems to suck a bit, contracts are the obvious way forward.