"We're doing some forensic review of the hard drive and determining what is there," Eaton said. "After we finish that review, we will
evaluate the amount of substance he was distributing."
Eaton, OSU's "public safety director," is using drug-war terminology about intellectual property? People who distribute music are like drug dealers?
"L realized L swltched a couple of keys when L put them back. Guess my typlng skllis were
better than thlers."
Several years ago, my aunt's family gave me a blank keyboard. There's no marking on any of the keys. I love it! I plugged it right in and have been using it ever since. It looks so aesthetically clean.
Of course, since my aunt's family gave it to me and it is harder to use than a regular keyboard, it is my auntie-ergonomic keyboard.
"What if the phone knew where you are so it could tell you that, around the corner, your friend is sitting in a cafe?"
What if the phone could tell your psycho ex-boyfriend you're leaving the office? What if every store you walked past pleaded on your phone for you to come in?
"What if the phone could tell you that there is traffic ahead so you should get of the freeway or you will be stuck in the jam for 45 minutes?"
What if the jam notice were delivered to every driver at the same time, all of whom responded with sudden direction changes at the same time?
"What if you could do your banking using the phone and order tickets? What if the phone had a Java virtual machine and a TCP/IP stack?"
What if the latest virus bought everything you passed in a store window? What if Libya released a virus that transferred every American's bank balance to Libya?
It's no problem. When I need an IP address, I'll start doing business as 123.45.67.89, trademark it, and sue the current holder of the address for trademark violation and petition the court to order the holder to turn the address over to me.
For crying out loud, there is an infinite supply of integers; we shouldn't be squabbling over them. Bring on bigger address fields already.
By the way, do corporations report their IP address allocations as assets? E.g., the early network participants got big chunks of space. Digital Equipment Corporation (since purchased by Compaq) had all IP addresses 16.*.*.*. That has some economic value now. Maybe the tax assessors would like to take a look.
"Now you have court-admissable proof of the identity and date of authorship."
This is an old chestnut that I have never seen any substantiation for. Aside from your testimony, how do you prove to the court that the package was sealed when you mailed it? One could easily mail an envelope that is closed but not sealed. Postal clerks don't check. For all you know, I have hundreds of empty, unsealed envelopes at home with various postmarks and matching mailing certificates at home, waiting to be filled.
From some page in China (I haven't checked their source of authority, but the figures match those I have seen elsewhere, e.g., from Richard Lederer):
"The statistics of English are astonishing. Of all the world's languages (which now number some 2700), it is arguably the richest in
vocabulary. The Compendious Oxford English Dictionary lists about 500,000 words; and a further half million technical and scientific terms
remain uncatalogued. According to traditional estimates, neighbouring German has a vocabulary of about 185,000 words and French fewer
than 100,000, including such Franglais as le snacque-barre and le hit-parade."
Murdoch concentrates only on how many speakers there are, as if languages competed for superiority by pitting speaker against speaker. This neglects two important factors: What language is, and how language changes. English is not merely the language of old Anglo-Saxons. One of its strengths is that it has adopted and adapted many words from many languages. English has many more words (in common use) than other Romance languages. (I'm not sure about others.) Even if a monolingual English speaker knows fewer languages than a bilingual person, they may know more words.
This rich vocabulary gives English a greater ability (not always used) for subtlety, precision, art, humor, and even local/cultural dialects. English attracts speakers based not just on how many speakers it already has, but what its features are. It is powerful and flexible.
That brings us to the second factor, how language changes. If Spanish is an up-and-coming language, English will suck it in. English already uses plenty of Spanish words and will readily absorb more. A language does not have to win by taking over speakers; it can also win by taking over speakers' languages.
Absorbing a more distant relation, such as Mandarin, might be more problematic. But a third factor enters here: China has kept itself relatively isolated from the rest of the world. Mandarin may have more speakers, but the language will not win the "war" if its speakers do not enter battle. Perhaps somebody more knowledgeable can comment on the vocabulary and grammar of Mandarin and compare it to the features of English.
Thanks for the correction. I just assumed they would have gone up, not across. Programming the PowerPC without AltiVec isn't nearly as much of a nuisance. It still requires attention to internal CPU details to get the best performance, but, if you ignore them, you don't lose as much as you do with AltiVec.
As soon as we started programming, we found to our surprise that it
wasn't as easy to get programs right as we had thought. Debugging had
to be discovered. I can remember the exact instant when I realized
that a large part of my life from then on was going to be spent in
finding mistakes in my own programs.
"As far as I know, the only people who really have experience with this sort of
thing are the supercomputer programmers. . . . The N-cube specs suggest, to me, a more conventional design, although I would hardly call that page detailed or
technical."
I write optimized assembly code for high-performance computer systems that use a PowerPC chip with AltiVec, the family that is used in the N-cube. Although you describe the N-cube as a more conventional design, making effective use of the AltiVec features requires careful attention to detail, just as you describe for the PlayStation 2 system (whose specifications I have not seen). When we want the performance the system can give, we count CPU cycles for instructions and even consider the internal CPU stages and resources. Programming for the N-cube will not be conventional.
On the other hand, much of the need for speed can be isolated to good libraries that do the grunt work. Then only a few top-notch programmers are needed to get the best performance in the library routines that do the number-crunching parts of the games. Most game programmers can then work at a higher level, thinking about game concepts instead of computing performance.
> Example: Gandhi (yes, at
nonviolent.org) has signed Dave Del Torto's key who has signed Theo Ts'o's key who is a kernel hacker and has
signed the Kernel key.
How does this direction illustrate any problem? Your previous text speaks of signatures by trusted people, but this example is of a signature by an untrusted person using a fictitious name. A signature from an unknown person is not expected to be any good, so it is not a problem that it is not. If you had an example of a trusted person signing a key for a fictitious name, that would be a problem.
I wish people who came up with novel ideas also
developed methods to debug them. Can you imagine
trying to find a bug in a CPU that is constantly
changing its signal voltage, turning parts on and
off, and speeding up and slowing down? Can you
say "not reproducible"? Hardware has historically
been more reliable than software in large part
because it has been rigid. As hardware adapts
the flexibility of software, it will also adapt
other features of software: bugs and crashes.
I can't believe an article with so many logical fallacies was moderated up.
>If I steal something physical from you I can't get as much for
it with a fence as you could have gotten by selling it on the open market; thus the total wealth in society has
decreased.
This is an incorrect analysis and a circular argument. It does not explain why we make theft illegal, because the reason a fence will not pay as much is because theft is illegal, so they have to discount their payment for the danger of getting caught. Theft actually damages society as a whole (that is, the gain to the thief does not balance the loss to the victim) because the thief only gains the property, but the victim loses the property and has to go to the trouble of replacing it and is not able to rely on their property being there day after day. So there is more loss than gain, and that is not even considering the damage that often accompanies theft and the disruption that occurs if people had to take it into their own hands to discourage theft without legal support.
>The only possible loser is the manufacturer of the software - who was deprived of
an additional sale by my act of copying.
The manufacturer is deprived of a sale only if you would have purchased a copy had you not been able to copy one. Such instances are a fraction of the total numbers of illegal copies made. (This just modifies the amount of the loss, not its existence.)
>Under the free market system the person who creates software is very rarely the person who benefits
from the sale of that software.
The fact that the future value of a piece of software was estimated and negotiated in a contract between publisher and creator does not mean the creator does not benefit from future sales. The fact that a market exists and can be estimated just means the creator can be paid in advance.
>By failing to do
so they lose the moral right to complain about the loss in sales caused by duplication of disks.
This is a non sequitor. Taking physical property and copying information are distinctly different acts, and failing to complain about the former in no way implies any lack of right to complain about the latter.
>Please note that the actual creators of the software are paid chicken feed to create the digital patterns which
Microsoft...
I hear compensation for software engineers in Washington state is pretty nice these days.
>We need to come up with a system which rewards
the actual CREATORS of software...
The issue of whether to permit copying of software in various circumstances has nothing to do with whether rewards go to the creators versus the publishers. Creators can negotiate compensation from publishers based on what the publishers reap from the market. Changing what copying is legal would change how much publishers make but would not fundamentally change arrangements between creators and publishers.
One of the reasons abandonment is not a problem with books is that there is a well-established library system. Almost all books of any significant interest or value are available for free loan. It might be interesting to establish a software library -- a web site where you could "check out" and download software the library had acquired. Then the library would not let anybody else download the software until you returned it, by visiting the web site and going through the return process, which marks the program returned and deletes the downloaded copy. If a patron did not return a program on time, the library would charge a late fee.
Libraries could easily acquire material through donations of old software. In fact, once the library had acquired its first copy of a program, additional contributors do not need to upload new copies; they merely need to tell the library they are donating their rights to the copy they have. "Click here to donate your copy of Zork to the library."
Nothing in this model prevents a person from copying the software while it is in their possession, but nothing in the book library model prevents that either. Lending libraries would not be useful for people looking for software to run regularly on their computers, but it would be useful for playing games and for working with old documents in obscure or no-longer-supported formats.
Has a court said so? The purpose of copyright protection is to increase the material available to society. If a program is unavailable by any means other than copying without the consent of the author or their agents, then a court might well decide the copying is fair use, as that is the only way to achieve the purpose of the law.
"aren't you violating the publisher's rights? the
author's rights?"
I have a right to, say, park my car in a public parking space. But if I choose not to use that right, other people are entitled to use it instead. If an author or publisher chooses not to publish, they have little claim to loss when other people choose to publish instead.
Discovery in such a case might reveal that a publisher, by their own evaluation, would have to expend $100,000 in costs to create and distribute copies of a program that would reap $80,000 in revenue. Thus they would lose money. The defendant who provided copies of this abandonware would have cost the company to lose the opportunity to lose $20,000. Thus there are no damages, and hence should be no court award.
Things may be different in the cases of books, which are sometimes reprinted years or decades after the original printing. We have not seen such a market for software yet, and we are not likely to, except for nostalgia. So software should be ruled and judged by a standard appropriate for it, not for books.
So which is it, RIAA? You want it both ways, but if you can't have it both ways, which will it be?
You can have it both ways. If X owes money to A, B, and C, then A, B, and C can sell those debts to R, and R has a legal right to collect them from X. On the other hand, if X is owed money by each of A, B, and C, X has no right to collect money from R. Similarly, recording companies can contract their rights to sue to RIAA.
Yes, petitioning by electronic signature favors the technologically elite. However, that is rapidly changing, and the technology will rapidly be available to almost everybody -- freeware/shareware petition/signature-gathering software will be disseminated. It will likely be incorporated into web browsers. In a few years, web browsers will be available to everybody with a job or a nearby public library.
By contrast, the paper method you recommend is, in any sizable jurisdiction, available only to the wealthy and to movements which already have broad support. It is either expensive or time-consuming, or both, to collect paper signatures. It takes a lot of volunteer labor or a lot of money to hire professional signature collectors.
Re:Always Withhold your Social Security #
on
A Matter Of Trust?
·
· Score: 2
Anyone who has the right to ask for your social security number is *required by law* to give you documentation that they have this right and can withhold items or services until you give it to them.
This is false. The Privacy Act, Public Law 93-579, requires "Any Federal, State, or local government agency" to inform the requestee whether "disclosure is mandatory or voluntary, by what statutory or other authority such number is solicited, and what uses will be made of it." The relevant part of the law is codified at 5 USC 552a, Note 7 (b). To my knowledge, no federal law imposes any similar requirement on non-government parties, and very few states do.
I claim trademark rights to the combination of a noxious odor and software. This will put Microsoft out of business, as they will no longer be permitted to sell software that stinks.
"The Federal Gov't, which is not supposed to be involved in making local state law (10th amendment) effectively extorted states into mandating 55MPH by refusing them federal highway dollars if they refused to comply and legislate 55.... The threat was finally ruled UNCONSTITUTIONAL and highway funds were ordered maintained regardless of local state speed limits."
Are you aware of some court decision I am not? Speed limits were raised to 65 miles per hour after Congressional legislation. In a suit about a similar issue, drinking age, the Supreme Court ruled against the states on 23 June 1987 (Stuart Taylor, Jr., "Justices Back Use of Aid to Get States to Raise Drinking Age," New York Times, 24 June 1987, sec. A, 20). I know of no successful suit to overturn federal impositions of speed limits.
"The shortfall to the pseudo-random number sequences you get from your computer is that the numbers are not truely random because they repeat after a (very long) sequence."
That's not really a shortfall of pseudo-random number sequences. Maybe of some poorly implemented sequences, but it's not hard to implement a sequence that repeats only after around 2^1024 elements (Numerical Recipes, Knuth's Art of Computer Programming, etc.). Repetition after such a long time is unlikely to adversely affect any actual use of the sequence. If it does, I would like to borrow your CPU.
The real shortfall of pseudo-random number sequences is that they contain patterns of various kinds. E.g., some of them show up as alignments of points when the pseudo-random elements are used as coordinates of points in a multidimensional space. There are solutions for this (Art, Recipes). Basically, if the patterns in the generator have no relation to your use of the generator, you don't care about them. And for modeling work, that's fine.
However, if you are using the numbers for cryptography, you may care about the distinction between random and pseudo-random, because if you do not have a truly random key, somebody else might be able to find it. E.g., if you generate a key using the current time as part of a seed, somebody might be able to try all keys that could have been generated around the time they think you generated the key. A truly random sequence protects you from this. In such a situation, it is sufficient to generate enough random bits that nobody has the processing power to try many of the possibilities. Those bits can be used as a seed to generate as many pseudo-random numbers as you want, provided your generator and your application do not leak information. So a small quantity of random bits can be useful.
Another interesting method to generate random numbers is to use lava lamps.
A recent issue of Nature 404, 13 April 2000, page 694, has an article, "Music software to come to genome aid?" "When Lincoln Stein, a bioinformaticist at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York, heard about Napster, he was struck by the parallels with his own work on writing software for the human genome." Stein thinks Napster would be useful for sharing gene-sequence data, and peer-to-peer sharing with open-source like "debugging" of the annotations of the data has advantages over alternatives like gene banks that restrict modifications to submitters.
Rightly or wrongly, Napster has entangled the issue of sharing with the issue of copying protected intellectual property. The concept of sharing should not fall victim to fears about such copying. Uses of Napster or Napster-like software for clearly legitimate and universally beneficial uses, such as Stein contemplates, would help separate the issues and strengthen and stabilize the acceptance and use of sharing software independently of intellectual property issues.
I recommend Donald Norm's Design of Everyday Things. Written before computers and the net exploded, it's a book about how to design things -- doors, stove controls, car dashboards, anything. Even though he didn't think about computers originally, his ideas are about interfaces, and he offers seven points that userfaces should strive for. I don't remember all of them, but they are something like:
The state of the system should be apparent to the user.
The changes that can be made in the state should be apparent.
The controls should be apparent.
It should be apparent what changes the controls can make.
It should be apparent what manipulation the user performs on a control, and what that manipulation will do.
These sound simple, but it is amazing how many interfaces fail. How many stoves have you seen where the controls are in a line while the burners are in a square? Wrong! Put the controls in a square, and the user knows instantly which control is for which burner. Similarly, too many graphic interfaces just throw information and controls at the user, without organizing it well.
Norman makes these points with wonderful examples, and he discusses how controls can indicate their functions and the affordances (available manipulations). E.g., a plate on a door says "push", and a vertical bar says "pull".
Similar rules apply to graphic computer interfaces. Style differences between interfaces are irrelevant, but style differences between active controls and passive parts of the display make all the difference in the world. A "raised button" appearance tells the user a lot.
Some affordances are natural -- to increase volume, a control should be moved up, or an up arrow should be used. Some require the user to learn a metaphor, and then are natural to use. (A set of lines drawn on a screen isn't a "window" until you've played with it a bit. But after that, it's properties are completely apparent to you.) Some are cultural convention. Whatever they are, the designer should pay attention to them and use them.
Slashdot Mirror
What the heck is this:
"We're doing some forensic review of the hard drive and determining what is there," Eaton said. "After we finish that review, we will evaluate the amount of substance he was distributing."
Eaton, OSU's "public safety director," is using drug-war terminology about intellectual property? People who distribute music are like drug dealers?
"L realized L swltched a couple of keys when L put them back. Guess my typlng skllis were better than thlers."
Several years ago, my aunt's family gave me a blank keyboard. There's no marking on any of the keys. I love it! I plugged it right in and have been using it ever since. It looks so aesthetically clean.
Of course, since my aunt's family gave it to me and it is harder to use than a regular keyboard, it is my auntie-ergonomic keyboard.
"What if the phone knew where you are so it could tell you that, around the corner, your friend is sitting in a cafe?"
What if the phone could tell your psycho ex-boyfriend you're leaving the office? What if every store you walked past pleaded on your phone for you to come in?
"What if the phone could tell you that there is traffic ahead so you should get of the freeway or you will be stuck in the jam for 45 minutes?"
What if the jam notice were delivered to every driver at the same time, all of whom responded with sudden direction changes at the same time?
"What if you could do your banking using the phone and order tickets? What if the phone had a Java virtual machine and a TCP/IP stack?"
What if the latest virus bought everything you passed in a store window? What if Libya released a virus that transferred every American's bank balance to Libya?
It's no problem. When I need an IP address, I'll start doing business as 123.45.67.89, trademark it, and sue the current holder of the address for trademark violation and petition the court to order the holder to turn the address over to me.
For crying out loud, there is an infinite supply of integers; we shouldn't be squabbling over them. Bring on bigger address fields already.
By the way, do corporations report their IP address allocations as assets? E.g., the early network participants got big chunks of space. Digital Equipment Corporation (since purchased by Compaq) had all IP addresses 16.*.*.*. That has some economic value now. Maybe the tax assessors would like to take a look.
"Now you have court-admissable proof of the identity and date of authorship."
This is an old chestnut that I have never seen any substantiation for. Aside from your testimony, how do you prove to the court that the package was sealed when you mailed it? One could easily mail an envelope that is closed but not sealed. Postal clerks don't check. For all you know, I have hundreds of empty, unsealed envelopes at home with various postmarks and matching mailing certificates at home, waiting to be filled.
From some page in China (I haven't checked their source of authority, but the figures match those I have seen elsewhere, e.g., from Richard Lederer):
"The statistics of English are astonishing. Of all the world's languages (which now number some 2700), it is arguably the richest in vocabulary. The Compendious Oxford English Dictionary lists about 500,000 words; and a further half million technical and scientific terms remain uncatalogued. According to traditional estimates, neighbouring German has a vocabulary of about 185,000 words and French fewer than 100,000, including such Franglais as le snacque-barre and le hit-parade."
Murdoch concentrates only on how many speakers there are, as if languages competed for superiority by pitting speaker against speaker. This neglects two important factors: What language is, and how language changes. English is not merely the language of old Anglo-Saxons. One of its strengths is that it has adopted and adapted many words from many languages. English has many more words (in common use) than other Romance languages. (I'm not sure about others.) Even if a monolingual English speaker knows fewer languages than a bilingual person, they may know more words.
This rich vocabulary gives English a greater ability (not always used) for subtlety, precision, art, humor, and even local/cultural dialects. English attracts speakers based not just on how many speakers it already has, but what its features are. It is powerful and flexible.
That brings us to the second factor, how language changes. If Spanish is an up-and-coming language, English will suck it in. English already uses plenty of Spanish words and will readily absorb more. A language does not have to win by taking over speakers; it can also win by taking over speakers' languages.
Absorbing a more distant relation, such as Mandarin, might be more problematic. But a third factor enters here: China has kept itself relatively isolated from the rest of the world. Mandarin may have more speakers, but the language will not win the "war" if its speakers do not enter battle. Perhaps somebody more knowledgeable can comment on the vocabulary and grammar of Mandarin and compare it to the features of English.
"The Game Cube does not have AltiVec!"
Thanks for the correction. I just assumed they would have gone up, not across. Programming the PowerPC without AltiVec isn't nearly as much of a nuisance. It still requires attention to internal CPU details to get the best performance, but, if you ignore them, you don't lose as much as you do with AltiVec.
It was Maurice Wilkes, 1949:
As soon as we started programming, we found to our surprise that it wasn't as easy to get programs right as we had thought. Debugging had to be discovered. I can remember the exact instant when I realized that a large part of my life from then on was going to be spent in finding mistakes in my own programs.
"As far as I know, the only people who really have experience with this sort of thing are the supercomputer programmers. . . . The N-cube specs suggest, to me, a more conventional design, although I would hardly call that page detailed or technical."
I write optimized assembly code for high-performance computer systems that use a PowerPC chip with AltiVec, the family that is used in the N-cube. Although you describe the N-cube as a more conventional design, making effective use of the AltiVec features requires careful attention to detail, just as you describe for the PlayStation 2 system (whose specifications I have not seen). When we want the performance the system can give, we count CPU cycles for instructions and even consider the internal CPU stages and resources. Programming for the N-cube will not be conventional.
On the other hand, much of the need for speed can be isolated to good libraries that do the grunt work. Then only a few top-notch programmers are needed to get the best performance in the library routines that do the number-crunching parts of the games. Most game programmers can then work at a higher level, thinking about game concepts instead of computing performance.
> Example: Gandhi (yes, at nonviolent.org) has signed Dave Del Torto's key who has signed Theo Ts'o's key who is a kernel hacker and has signed the Kernel key.
How does this direction illustrate any problem? Your previous text speaks of signatures by trusted people, but this example is of a signature by an untrusted person using a fictitious name. A signature from an unknown person is not expected to be any good, so it is not a problem that it is not. If you had an example of a trusted person signing a key for a fictitious name, that would be a problem.
I wish people who came up with novel ideas also developed methods to debug them. Can you imagine trying to find a bug in a CPU that is constantly changing its signal voltage, turning parts on and off, and speeding up and slowing down? Can you say "not reproducible"? Hardware has historically been more reliable than software in large part because it has been rigid. As hardware adapts the flexibility of software, it will also adapt other features of software: bugs and crashes.
I can't believe an article with so many logical fallacies was moderated up.
>If I steal something physical from you I can't get as much for it with a fence as you could have gotten by selling it on the open market; thus the total wealth in society has decreased.
This is an incorrect analysis and a circular argument. It does not explain why we make theft illegal, because the reason a fence will not pay as much is because theft is illegal, so they have to discount their payment for the danger of getting caught. Theft actually damages society as a whole (that is, the gain to the thief does not balance the loss to the victim) because the thief only gains the property, but the victim loses the property and has to go to the trouble of replacing it and is not able to rely on their property being there day after day. So there is more loss than gain, and that is not even considering the damage that often accompanies theft and the disruption that occurs if people had to take it into their own hands to discourage theft without legal support.
>The only possible loser is the manufacturer of the software - who was deprived of an additional sale by my act of copying.
The manufacturer is deprived of a sale only if you would have purchased a copy had you not been able to copy one. Such instances are a fraction of the total numbers of illegal copies made. (This just modifies the amount of the loss, not its existence.)
>Under the free market system the person who creates software is very rarely the person who benefits from the sale of that software.
The fact that the future value of a piece of software was estimated and negotiated in a contract between publisher and creator does not mean the creator does not benefit from future sales. The fact that a market exists and can be estimated just means the creator can be paid in advance.
>By failing to do so they lose the moral right to complain about the loss in sales caused by duplication of disks.
This is a non sequitor. Taking physical property and copying information are distinctly different acts, and failing to complain about the former in no way implies any lack of right to complain about the latter.
>Please note that the actual creators of the software are paid chicken feed to create the digital patterns which Microsoft ...
I hear compensation for software engineers in Washington state is pretty nice these days.
>We need to come up with a system which rewards the actual CREATORS of software ...
The issue of whether to permit copying of software in various circumstances has nothing to do with whether rewards go to the creators versus the publishers. Creators can negotiate compensation from publishers based on what the publishers reap from the market. Changing what copying is legal would change how much publishers make but would not fundamentally change arrangements between creators and publishers.
One of the reasons abandonment is not a problem with books is that there is a well-established library system. Almost all books of any significant interest or value are available for free loan. It might be interesting to establish a software library -- a web site where you could "check out" and download software the library had acquired. Then the library would not let anybody else download the software until you returned it, by visiting the web site and going through the return process, which marks the program returned and deletes the downloaded copy. If a patron did not return a program on time, the library would charge a late fee.
Libraries could easily acquire material through donations of old software. In fact, once the library had acquired its first copy of a program, additional contributors do not need to upload new copies; they merely need to tell the library they are donating their rights to the copy they have. "Click here to donate your copy of Zork to the library."
Nothing in this model prevents a person from copying the software while it is in their possession, but nothing in the book library model prevents that either. Lending libraries would not be useful for people looking for software to run regularly on their computers, but it would be useful for playing games and for working with old documents in obscure or no-longer-supported formats.
"this is illegal."
Has a court said so? The purpose of copyright protection is to increase the material available to society. If a program is unavailable by any means other than copying without the consent of the author or their agents, then a court might well decide the copying is fair use, as that is the only way to achieve the purpose of the law.
"aren't you violating the publisher's rights? the author's rights?"
I have a right to, say, park my car in a public parking space. But if I choose not to use that right, other people are entitled to use it instead. If an author or publisher chooses not to publish, they have little claim to loss when other people choose to publish instead.
Discovery in such a case might reveal that a publisher, by their own evaluation, would have to expend $100,000 in costs to create and distribute copies of a program that would reap $80,000 in revenue. Thus they would lose money. The defendant who provided copies of this abandonware would have cost the company to lose the opportunity to lose $20,000. Thus there are no damages, and hence should be no court award.
Things may be different in the cases of books, which are sometimes reprinted years or decades after the original printing. We have not seen such a market for software yet, and we are not likely to, except for nostalgia. So software should be ruled and judged by a standard appropriate for it, not for books.
"Cromulent" is a Simpsonian word that embiggens us all.
So which is it, RIAA? You want it both ways, but if you can't have it both ways, which will it be?
You can have it both ways. If X owes money to A, B, and C, then A, B, and C can sell those debts to R, and R has a legal right to collect them from X. On the other hand, if X is owed money by each of A, B, and C, X has no right to collect money from R. Similarly, recording companies can contract their rights to sue to RIAA.
Yes, petitioning by electronic signature favors the technologically elite. However, that is rapidly changing, and the technology will rapidly be available to almost everybody -- freeware/shareware petition/signature-gathering software will be disseminated. It will likely be incorporated into web browsers. In a few years, web browsers will be available to everybody with a job or a nearby public library.
By contrast, the paper method you recommend is, in any sizable jurisdiction, available only to the wealthy and to movements which already have broad support. It is either expensive or time-consuming, or both, to collect paper signatures. It takes a lot of volunteer labor or a lot of money to hire professional signature collectors.
Anyone who has the right to ask for your social security number is *required by law* to give you documentation that they have this right and can withhold items or services until you give it to them.
This is false. The Privacy Act, Public Law 93-579, requires "Any Federal, State, or local government agency" to inform the requestee whether "disclosure is mandatory or voluntary, by what statutory or other authority such number is solicited, and what uses will be made of it." The relevant part of the law is codified at 5 USC 552a, Note 7 (b). To my knowledge, no federal law imposes any similar requirement on non-government parties, and very few states do.
It is interesting that the author of this program to reveal the identity of people sharing files does not want their identity revealed.
I claim trademark rights to the combination of a noxious odor and software. This will put Microsoft out of business, as they will no longer be permitted to sell software that stinks.
"The Federal Gov't, which is not supposed to be involved in making local state law (10th amendment) effectively extorted states into mandating 55MPH by refusing them federal highway dollars if they refused to comply and legislate 55.... The threat was finally ruled UNCONSTITUTIONAL and highway funds were ordered maintained regardless of local state speed limits."
Are you aware of some court decision I am not? Speed limits were raised to 65 miles per hour after Congressional legislation. In a suit about a similar issue, drinking age, the Supreme Court ruled against the states on 23 June 1987 (Stuart Taylor, Jr., "Justices Back Use of Aid to Get States to Raise Drinking Age," New York Times, 24 June 1987, sec. A, 20). I know of no successful suit to overturn federal impositions of speed limits.
"The shortfall to the pseudo-random number sequences you get from your computer is that the numbers are not truely random because they repeat after a (very long) sequence."
That's not really a shortfall of pseudo-random number sequences. Maybe of some poorly implemented sequences, but it's not hard to implement a sequence that repeats only after around 2^1024 elements (Numerical Recipes, Knuth's Art of Computer Programming, etc.). Repetition after such a long time is unlikely to adversely affect any actual use of the sequence. If it does, I would like to borrow your CPU.
The real shortfall of pseudo-random number sequences is that they contain patterns of various kinds. E.g., some of them show up as alignments of points when the pseudo-random elements are used as coordinates of points in a multidimensional space. There are solutions for this (Art, Recipes). Basically, if the patterns in the generator have no relation to your use of the generator, you don't care about them. And for modeling work, that's fine.
However, if you are using the numbers for cryptography, you may care about the distinction between random and pseudo-random, because if you do not have a truly random key, somebody else might be able to find it. E.g., if you generate a key using the current time as part of a seed, somebody might be able to try all keys that could have been generated around the time they think you generated the key. A truly random sequence protects you from this. In such a situation, it is sufficient to generate enough random bits that nobody has the processing power to try many of the possibilities. Those bits can be used as a seed to generate as many pseudo-random numbers as you want, provided your generator and your application do not leak information. So a small quantity of random bits can be useful.
Another interesting method to generate random numbers is to use lava lamps.
A recent issue of Nature 404, 13 April 2000, page 694, has an article, "Music software to come to genome aid?" "When Lincoln Stein, a bioinformaticist at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York, heard about Napster, he was struck by the parallels with his own work on writing software for the human genome." Stein thinks Napster would be useful for sharing gene-sequence data, and peer-to-peer sharing with open-source like "debugging" of the annotations of the data has advantages over alternatives like gene banks that restrict modifications to submitters.
Rightly or wrongly, Napster has entangled the issue of sharing with the issue of copying protected intellectual property. The concept of sharing should not fall victim to fears about such copying. Uses of Napster or Napster-like software for clearly legitimate and universally beneficial uses, such as Stein contemplates, would help separate the issues and strengthen and stabilize the acceptance and use of sharing software independently of intellectual property issues.
I recommend Donald Norm's Design of Everyday Things. Written before computers and the net exploded, it's a book about how to design things -- doors, stove controls, car dashboards, anything. Even though he didn't think about computers originally, his ideas are about interfaces, and he offers seven points that userfaces should strive for. I don't remember all of them, but they are something like:
These sound simple, but it is amazing how many interfaces fail. How many stoves have you seen where the controls are in a line while the burners are in a square? Wrong! Put the controls in a square, and the user knows instantly which control is for which burner. Similarly, too many graphic interfaces just throw information and controls at the user, without organizing it well.
Norman makes these points with wonderful examples, and he discusses how controls can indicate their functions and the affordances (available manipulations). E.g., a plate on a door says "push", and a vertical bar says "pull".
Similar rules apply to graphic computer interfaces. Style differences between interfaces are irrelevant, but style differences between active controls and passive parts of the display make all the difference in the world. A "raised button" appearance tells the user a lot.
Some affordances are natural -- to increase volume, a control should be moved up, or an up arrow should be used. Some require the user to learn a metaphor, and then are natural to use. (A set of lines drawn on a screen isn't a "window" until you've played with it a bit. But after that, it's properties are completely apparent to you.) Some are cultural convention. Whatever they are, the designer should pay attention to them and use them.