Not the RIAA and MPAA, illegal tying is the issue
on
RIAA vs Linux and DVDs
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
in the DMCA.
Either I own my copy of a work, or I don't. If I own it (and not just a license of it), then I have the right to do anything I want to with it, other than selling or giving a copy to someone else (because only the copyright owner has the right to distribute copies).
But if I don't legally have the right to decrypt the information on the disk (because of the DMCA), then it doesn't matter what my ownership rights are, the "keeper of the decryption" owns my ability to do what I want with my copy, and I become subject to a whole slew of behavior-controlling devices such as pay per view, no "fair use", etc.
What this article highlights is that no country or law or organization is going to succeed for very long in creating laws to do the tying, even if they try to use the largest software company in the world (Microsoft). Why not? because tying is not economically viable in the Open Source era where the code itself is fundamentally free.
I wouldn't trust an M$ application to report on M$ operating system and other flaws even if I were offered large sums of money to do so.
Not only does it get into the age-old dilemna of "who will mind the keepers if the keepers are in charge?", and whether or not M$ will attempt to use their internally (and presumably profitable) anti-virus software in an anti-competitive manner against all other virus-detection products out there.
Given M$ history on both issues, my answer is never never never, and in this case I stand by my sig and state my opintion that the Open Source solution will always be much better minded and competitive in this critical area.
Granted that Novell has had an axe to grind with M$ for many years, here is an interesting white paper pdf at which discusses that exact issue.
None of the large IT concerns that I have worked for have done en-masse Linux desktop installs, by the way, but both had an approved "default" install CD-ROM image that had been sufficently tested (read that "tested tested and then triple tested again...") with the appropriate packages, etc. installed and all of the security settings tweaked and set. that it wasn't a big deal to get once the manager approved it.
Big problem was convincing the low- to mid- level managers to approve using it instead of M$.
How about asking all/.'ers who have jobs that can be threatened if the exploits damage their company's ability to maintain profitability (which presumably would cause a massive layoff) to copy the list of known vulnerabilities from the article, and send it to the available M$ e-mail addresses for bug fixes.
Conversation: "Mr. Bill (G.), our e-mail servers are getting DoS'd and/or flooded with so many requests for fixes on all our security problems."
Bill G.: "Oh wait, it's just the/. effect.... never mind. Don't patch anything and wait a few months to see if they go away..."
If scientists can find enough of the body's own "self repairing tissue" areas, (plus the stem cells available from umbilical cords, etc.) wouldn't it obviate the need for embryonic stem cell research with all of it's accompanying moral and ethical controversies?
So long as *good* newspapers have recognition as a valued source of information they will survive.
By which I mean, well written, meaningful articles that reach a wide target audience, whether that be local (the local newspaper), or the Wall Street Journal (international, but limited focus).
Why? because the better of these organizations tend to weed out poor writing, poor investigative and journalism techniques, and "grow" a network of trusted sources and strong investigators into the public well being. As opposed to the 'Net where there are millions of voices, but most of them untrusted and frankly untrustworthy in terms of fact checking, etc. What is happening is that the profitability of print as a mass marketing medium is declining, which means that the newspapers themselves may have to be "downsized" in terms of how much content is provided in print and how much is "upsized" online.
That said, great well thought out essay, Hemos, especially regarding moderation. FYI I have been a/.'er long enough to remember the bad-old-days (Pre-moderation, through the 400 moderator phase, to now) and what we have now is much much better, and I plan to incorporate something similar into my own CMS once it is ready to go.
RAID = "Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks". See also PC World's definition for an introduction, and follow the links for why RAID is important. (--annoying pun alert-- besides killing those annoying data cocka-roachas).
Basically the point of which is to remove a single point of failure (a single massive hard drive) from the server environment by allowing the data to be stored the same way in multiple places. There are 5 RAID levels, and the technology for RAID 5 (which is the highest level that I remember, anyway) has been out there and stable for a while.
How does allowing/requiring ala-carte channel selections block it from you?
It simply means I don't have to pay the cable company based on the fact that you don't find anything offensive and I do. Which is not to say that I expect prices to come down, in fact I can expect the cable providers trying to twist any ruling to their own profitable means no matter what I think is in my own or my own family's best interest(s).
Good points. But server-logs, etc. are enough removed from my actual identity (and I am with a small enough local ISP) that I would like to think that the judicial system(s) wouldn't grant a carte blanche "cyber-warrant" to an investigative agency to go after anyone who may have ever read a particular RSS based on some nebulous idea in a "bad-cop" world that such a warrant would help them identify me as something I am not.
Not to belabor the point, but why would I want a giant provider like Yahoo (or Google for that matter) to have any idea which RSS feeds I am getting?
Give me a local machine (which is to say non-spyware) version of this and I might just be interested because then my RSS choices don't automatically associate me with any particular group in the corporate and/or government mindsets. For example, if a particular RSS feed is read frequently by a known terrorist, I am also then to be associated with a known terrorist?
The problem has been that the networks offerings have generally become quite offensive and cable isn't much better on many of the channels. Which is why the cable controller in my house has 75% of the channels locked up. So as a consumer, my thought is --if I will never use it, why should I have to pay for it? as paying for it allows the cable companies, etc. to essentially underwrite the crap programming with my good $.
Secondarily, the reason that I consider this decision by the FCC to be good without regard to any belief system is this: Religious preferences aside, true consumer choices on cable in terms of which channels are paid for, profitability of the cable companies themselves will be more directly tied to who has the best content, and if the indicators from Hollywood are any indicator (most of the top earning movies of all time are at the most PG-13), less junk equals more profit.
I haven't booted it in a while but I have a small Acer laptop that only had around 16 meg of memory, seems like the processor was in the 100 MHz range and it was dual boot loaded with Win9X and a pre-Fedora Red-Hat distro that was fairly stable in terms of the core LAMP software. It ran just FINE.
I used it for rapid data conversions and also for prototyping screens based on a data description format I had created. [the ddf was processed via PHP into the SQL and initial insert, update, and query templates I needed to begin the data work], and never had a down moment or had to do a Linux reboot in the several years I had the laptop in active service.
In contrast, the only useful Win9x products I used on the other partition were MS-Access 97 and the Lotus Smartsuite tools of the day (v3.1) which I used to do data conversions and translations to the MySQL data store, and the reboots on that side of the machine were frequent.
My how things don't change. I still use Linux on slightly older machines and can still do 2-3x the work without rebooting, even though M$ has had another half decade to get things right.
Based on a number of mid-size projects that I have worked with, then Vista (which has 100X the scale in terms of code size) should be nearly production ready, sometime by hmmmm.... Christmas 2008? at the soonest
Because of the closed code base, anything sooner than that is laughable just in terms of code review and 1st level beta testing.
Methinks I will wait, or better yet work on my pet open source projects so that M$ becomes irrelevant sooner rather than later.
Actually I knew that (live nearby). But the Kansas Stateboard of education is over the University of Kansas as well, even though the evolution/intelligent design stuff is aimed more at the high school level, etc. than at the colleges.
But I didn't think the Darwin exhibit would fit in any of the local high schools so the U of K was the best quick sarcasm that I could think of at the moment.
Interestingly enough, I don't believe in the Origin of Species at all, except in the case of "intra-critter" micro-evolution. Which places me firmly in another camp, but I don't buy much of the current "intelligent design" logic either, as it is incomplete and flawed as well.
Not sure, but from where I sit, the ability to store XML natively is one of those "nice but not absolutely necessary" things you can do with a dbms. (database management system), because any of the current RDBMs can store XML chunks in {text fields, memo fields, C-LOBS}, etc. and I have been doing stuff like that since my days as a Clipper/Foxpro/xBase programmer. [aged myself right there, didn't I?:-) ]
So it's not the storage that counts, it is the ability to extract useful information from the text field/clob without requiring a great amount of processing overhead. Which is where I wonder how useful this is except in situations where there is very little post-processing or querying to be done against the XML. For example, if I am always just going to render the XML or pass it along without any post-processing. Even then, in terms of processor time, etc. it just isn't that hard to write good code to pull the data from a regular SQL database, output it as XML, etc. thus gaining gain all of the other advantages that a modern dbms has over flat file storage without imposing the dreadful data overhead required for all of the xml tags, etc.
Patents are for implementations of ideas, not the ideas themselves. So while the idea of a drug that "cures cancer" is decades old, a new drug's implementation that comes closer is patentable.
Similarly, this plenoptic camera seems to represent a new (i.e.) digital method of analyzing light along a path and using the information to digitally restore an image to focus, and as such it seems to clearly qualify for patent protection.
P.S. In case you wonder, I sometimes pick up extra work occasionally doing professional photography (commercial and some portrait work) when a project strikes my interest and/or the $$ are interesting enough, so I'm not just a casual reader on camera related technologies. Heaven knows, if I'd invented an after-the-fact refocusing system, I'd want a patent on it as well.
5 Minute DNA test at airports? I hope not...
on
Faster DNA Testing
·
· Score: 1
Scenario:
Skin swab taken, no match...
look up personal information in airline company computer...
link to master DNA database...
governement now owns my personal information...
government bureaucrats gain access to my personal information...
personal information proliferates across governemental systems until malicious info-users gain access to it...
I think you can see where I am going with this. The day they start something like this is the last day I fly, because IANAT (I Am Not a Terrorist) and deserve the anonymity I enjoy as a protection from government intrusion.
My experience might be a bit different, but it was Firefox's unobtrusive addition of a Pop Up Blocker that was the single most important change between the bad old days and now.
Why? the Netscape browser was dying, IE Version whatever was the buggy, proprietary, virus-target of the day only other thing out there, and because MS is also in the advertising game via MSN, etc., they weren't about to give users the ability to turn off a specific class of advertisements without making it odious.
Then Firefox declares war via pop-up blocker, and within a short time the early adopters (who are really the most important predictor of future technological trends, methinks) were moving in droves away from IE, and I don't think I was more than a few days behind them.
Same time, Google's model saves me bandwidth and eye strain, and --ka- boom!!-- between the two the 'Net returned to being a useful tool with one tenth the amount of pain.
Sort of like having a beautiful but high maintenance girlfriend who's a tiger in the sack - you learn to walk on eggshells, but with every great performance you convice yourself it's worth it.
Um, no, been there done that.
Fact is that with systems, printers, AND girlfriends, it is much better to keep shopping for low-maintenance, great performance.
Oh, and by the way, of the three the third one requires more attention and TLC than the other two and deserves it as well. So get up from/. occasionally and take care of the lady as well...
As is Slashcode, Postnuke, Xaraya, and a number of other projects.
Which means that a good developer can "stand on the shoulder of giants" so to say and raise the standard on one or more simply by contributing to the community. By which I mean that I am in the process of delivering a semi-customized content management system for a small non-profit that I donate programming time to, and at present, the MySQL schema (database definition for the non-technical reader) that I am writing has drawn "coding wisdom" from approximately ten different open-source CMS or BLOG projects. This doesn't begin to count the exponential increase in my own library of coding skills based on looking at how others have implemented similar functionality and then picking and choosing the best techniques to follow.
But the bottom line about open source is that even if I write every line of code myself, when the time comes to release* my stuff back to the community, and then perhaps someone else will "stand on my shoulders" to make whatever I do even better.
(BTW time to release = when I have time to bulletproof and secure the codebase better than I have done so far in terms of the most recent types of attacks and spam abusers).
As an author, I like the idea of a company as massive as Google has become in essence acting as a free publicist, in fact in some ways I can see how a whole new publisher-free method of getting into print could come about because of it, for example, if I print one copy of a book and donate it to one of those university libraries.
As an open source advocate who is opposed to any single corporate entity becoming a "sole source" of online content, etc., I don't like the idea very much at all. It raises the possiblility of that corporate entity essentially controlling access or profiting from my work with no derivative income to me, the creator of the work.
However, my thoughts (written in 2005 with a 99 year copyright period in the US of A) are irrelevant for what is presumably a major part of this project: there are many many books out of copyright that have no legal encumberance and Google is entitled to do what they wish with these books whether we like it or not.
Calling FDR or any American president a fascist is a denigration of the American political process as a whole, so I must vehemently disagree. I won't even bother to touch why or who the US President who is closest to the definition of dictator in this post (hints: in his day he was known as the Tyrant, and was a wartime president without whom the nation might not have survived), but FDR fought against fascists, worked through a difficult legislative process to keep our nation free in difficult times, appointed Supreme Court justices that had to be approved by that same elected legislature, and had to be re-elected every four years, and never had much more than the majority he needed to do so.
A key feature of fascism or any totalitarian regime is that the vote totals are always rigged to result in nearly 100% approval via the vote because opposition results in the death penalty.
By the way, I don't like a lot of things FDR did either. But the next time you post something with that much flamebait, at least make sure you are painting your target with an accurate tar brush.
what if in archaeology, I had this theory that an unkown creator created everything. There should be evidence for that, right? We just haven't found it yet. Riiiiiight.
Wrong theory methinks. Try this one instead:
An unknown creator organized what is scientifically observable using controllable forces on both a galactic and microscopic scale" similar to how the creator of a published work didn't create the language in the publication, he/she organized language into a completed work.
Slashdot Mirror
Either I own my copy of a work, or I don't. If I own it (and not just a license of it), then I have the right to do anything I want to with it, other than selling or giving a copy to someone else (because only the copyright owner has the right to distribute copies).
But if I don't legally have the right to decrypt the information on the disk (because of the DMCA), then it doesn't matter what my ownership rights are, the "keeper of the decryption" owns my ability to do what I want with my copy, and I become subject to a whole slew of behavior-controlling devices such as pay per view, no "fair use", etc.
What this article highlights is that no country or law or organization is going to succeed for very long in creating laws to do the tying, even if they try to use the largest software company in the world (Microsoft). Why not? because tying is not economically viable in the Open Source era where the code itself is fundamentally free.
Not only does it get into the age-old dilemna of "who will mind the keepers if the keepers are in charge?", and whether or not M$ will attempt to use their internally (and presumably profitable) anti-virus software in an anti-competitive manner against all other virus-detection products out there.
Given M$ history on both issues, my answer is never never never, and in this case I stand by my sig and state my opintion that the Open Source solution will always be much better minded and competitive in this critical area.
None of the large IT concerns that I have worked for have done en-masse Linux desktop installs, by the way, but both had an approved "default" install CD-ROM image that had been sufficently tested (read that "tested tested and then triple tested again...") with the appropriate packages, etc. installed and all of the security settings tweaked and set. that it wasn't a big deal to get once the manager approved it.
Big problem was convincing the low- to mid- level managers to approve using it instead of M$.
How about asking all /.'ers who have jobs that can be threatened if the exploits damage their company's ability to maintain profitability (which presumably would cause a massive layoff) to copy the list of known vulnerabilities from the article, and send it to the available M$ e-mail addresses for bug fixes.
/. effect.... never mind. Don't patch anything and wait a few months to see if they go away..."
Conversation:
"Mr. Bill (G.), our e-mail servers are getting DoS'd and/or flooded with so many requests for fixes on all our security problems."
Bill G.: "Oh wait, it's just the
Hmmm.....
--as me dons the flame retardant pajamas output--
/.'ers think?
If scientists can find enough of the body's own "self repairing tissue" areas, (plus the stem cells available from umbilical cords, etc.) wouldn't it obviate the need for embryonic stem cell research with all of it's accompanying moral and ethical controversies?
What do the
By which I mean, well written, meaningful articles that reach a wide target audience, whether that be local (the local newspaper), or the Wall Street Journal (international, but limited focus).
Why? because the better of these organizations tend to weed out poor writing, poor investigative and journalism techniques, and "grow" a network of trusted sources and strong investigators into the public well being. As opposed to the 'Net where there are millions of voices, but most of them untrusted and frankly untrustworthy in terms of fact checking, etc. What is happening is that the profitability of print as a mass marketing medium is declining, which means that the newspapers themselves may have to be "downsized" in terms of how much content is provided in print and how much is "upsized" online.
That said, great well thought out essay, Hemos, especially regarding moderation. FYI I have been a /.'er long enough to remember the bad-old-days (Pre-moderation, through the 400 moderator phase, to now) and what we have now is much much better, and I plan to incorporate something similar into my own CMS once it is ready to go.
Basically the point of which is to remove a single point of failure (a single massive hard drive) from the server environment by allowing the data to be stored the same way in multiple places. There are 5 RAID levels, and the technology for RAID 5 (which is the highest level that I remember, anyway) has been out there and stable for a while.
It simply means I don't have to pay the cable company based on the fact that you don't find anything offensive and I do. Which is not to say that I expect prices to come down, in fact I can expect the cable providers trying to twist any ruling to their own profitable means no matter what I think is in my own or my own family's best interest(s).
Good points. But server-logs, etc. are enough removed from my actual identity (and I am with a small enough local ISP) that I would like to think that the judicial system(s) wouldn't grant a carte blanche "cyber-warrant" to an investigative agency to go after anyone who may have ever read a particular RSS based on some nebulous idea in a "bad-cop" world that such a warrant would help them identify me as something I am not.
Give me a local machine (which is to say non-spyware) version of this and I might just be interested because then my RSS choices don't automatically associate me with any particular group in the corporate and/or government mindsets. For example, if a particular RSS feed is read frequently by a known terrorist, I am also then to be associated with a known terrorist?
No thanks, I'd rather be invisible and local.
Secondarily, the reason that I consider this decision by the FCC to be good without regard to any belief system is this: Religious preferences aside, true consumer choices on cable in terms of which channels are paid for, profitability of the cable companies themselves will be more directly tied to who has the best content, and if the indicators from Hollywood are any indicator (most of the top earning movies of all time are at the most PG-13), less junk equals more profit.
I haven't booted it in a while but I have a small Acer laptop that only had around 16 meg of memory, seems like the processor was in the 100 MHz range and it was dual boot loaded with Win9X and a pre-Fedora Red-Hat distro that was fairly stable in terms of the core LAMP software. It ran just FINE.
I used it for rapid data conversions and also for prototyping screens based on a data description format I had created. [the ddf was processed via PHP into the SQL and initial insert, update, and query templates I needed to begin the data work], and never had a down moment or had to do a Linux reboot in the several years I had the laptop in active service.
In contrast, the only useful Win9x products I used on the other partition were MS-Access 97 and the Lotus Smartsuite tools of the day (v3.1) which I used to do data conversions and translations to the MySQL data store, and the reboots on that side of the machine were frequent.
My how things don't change. I still use Linux on slightly older machines and can still do 2-3x the work without rebooting, even though M$ has had another half decade to get things right.
Because of the closed code base, anything sooner than that is laughable just in terms of code review and 1st level beta testing.
Methinks I will wait, or better yet work on my pet open source projects so that M$ becomes irrelevant sooner rather than later.
Agreed.
But I didn't think the Darwin exhibit would fit in any of the local high schools so the U of K was the best quick sarcasm that I could think of at the moment.
Interestingly enough, I don't believe in the Origin of Species at all, except in the case of "intra-critter" micro-evolution. Which places me firmly in another camp, but I don't buy much of the current "intelligent design" logic either, as it is incomplete and flawed as well.
So it's not the storage that counts, it is the ability to extract useful information from the text field/clob without requiring a great amount of processing overhead. Which is where I wonder how useful this is except in situations where there is very little post-processing or querying to be done against the XML. For example, if I am always just going to render the XML or pass it along without any post-processing. Even then, in terms of processor time, etc. it just isn't that hard to write good code to pull the data from a regular SQL database, output it as XML, etc. thus gaining gain all of the other advantages that a modern dbms has over flat file storage without imposing the dreadful data overhead required for all of the xml tags, etc.
Am I missing something?
--sarcasm mode on--
The University of Kansas?
--sarcasm mode off--
Patents are for implementations of ideas, not the ideas themselves. So while the idea of a drug that "cures cancer" is decades old, a new drug's implementation that comes closer is patentable.
Similarly, this plenoptic camera seems to represent a new (i.e.) digital method of analyzing light along a path and using the information to digitally restore an image to focus, and as such it seems to clearly qualify for patent protection.
P.S. In case you wonder, I sometimes pick up extra work occasionally doing professional photography (commercial and some portrait work) when a project strikes my interest and/or the $$ are interesting enough, so I'm not just a casual reader on camera related technologies. Heaven knows, if I'd invented an after-the-fact refocusing system, I'd want a patent on it as well.
I think you can see where I am going with this. The day they start something like this is the last day I fly, because IANAT (I Am Not a Terrorist) and deserve the anonymity I enjoy as a protection from government intrusion.
Why? the Netscape browser was dying, IE Version whatever was the buggy, proprietary, virus-target of the day only other thing out there, and because MS is also in the advertising game via MSN, etc., they weren't about to give users the ability to turn off a specific class of advertisements without making it odious.
Then Firefox declares war via pop-up blocker, and within a short time the early adopters (who are really the most important predictor of future technological trends, methinks) were moving in droves away from IE, and I don't think I was more than a few days behind them.
Same time, Google's model saves me bandwidth and eye strain, and --ka- boom!!-- between the two the 'Net returned to being a useful tool with one tenth the amount of pain.
Um, no, been there done that.
Fact is that with systems, printers, AND girlfriends, it is much better to keep shopping for low-maintenance, great performance.
Oh, and by the way, of the three the third one requires more attention and TLC than the other two and deserves it as well. So get up from /. occasionally and take care of the lady as well...
Which means that a good developer can "stand on the shoulder of giants" so to say and raise the standard on one or more simply by contributing to the community. By which I mean that I am in the process of delivering a semi-customized content management system for a small non-profit that I donate programming time to, and at present, the MySQL schema (database definition for the non-technical reader) that I am writing has drawn "coding wisdom" from approximately ten different open-source CMS or BLOG projects. This doesn't begin to count the exponential increase in my own library of coding skills based on looking at how others have implemented similar functionality and then picking and choosing the best techniques to follow.
But the bottom line about open source is that even if I write every line of code myself, when the time comes to release* my stuff back to the community, and then perhaps someone else will "stand on my shoulders" to make whatever I do even better.
(BTW time to release = when I have time to bulletproof and secure the codebase better than I have done so far in terms of the most recent types of attacks and spam abusers).
As an author, I like the idea of a company as massive as Google has become in essence acting as a free publicist, in fact in some ways I can see how a whole new publisher-free method of getting into print could come about because of it, for example, if I print one copy of a book and donate it to one of those university libraries.
As an open source advocate who is opposed to any single corporate entity becoming a "sole source" of online content, etc., I don't like the idea very much at all. It raises the possiblility of that corporate entity essentially controlling access or profiting from my work with no derivative income to me, the creator of the work.
However, my thoughts (written in 2005 with a 99 year copyright period in the US of A) are irrelevant for what is presumably a major part of this project: there are many many books out of copyright that have no legal encumberance and Google is entitled to do what they wish with these books whether we like it or not.
A key feature of fascism or any totalitarian regime is that the vote totals are always rigged to result in nearly 100% approval via the vote because opposition results in the death penalty.
By the way, I don't like a lot of things FDR did either. But the next time you post something with that much flamebait, at least make sure you are painting your target with an accurate tar brush.
Wrong theory methinks. Try this one instead:
An unknown creator organized what is scientifically observable using controllable forces on both a galactic and microscopic scale" similar to how the creator of a published work didn't create the language in the publication, he/she organized language into a completed work.
Try disproving that.... Riiiiiight