My proposal would be different than just capping Copyrights at 5 years (or 10, or 120).
Similar to trademarks, and to a lesser extend patent continuations, I think copyrights should last as long as the work is being actively revised, promoted, and/or otherwise used commercially. But if the work languishes or has had no creative augmentation, the copyright should expire in 5-10 years. That leaves Disney in the clear to keep their copyrights while at the same time allowing the zillions of obscure books, songs, and material to enter the public domain instead of being lost forever.
It's not a perfect solution, but one I think that's substantially better than what we have now AND could actually make it through Congress (after all, Disney would suddenly get the perpetual copyright they've been lobbying for so long-- except that it wouldn't ruin it for everyone else).
If you even took a quick glance at TFA, you'd know that this only disables _saving_ in the old formats, one can still open them just fine....and if you take a slightly longer glance, you may realize that you're wrong. In particular, it will block the older PowerPoint files from being opened.
I agree with you in general. I've pretty much been Mac-only at home since 1988. However, as a Java developer the Mac is obviously very, very lacking. In addition, the hardware is frustrating-- no 2nd mouse button (why can't they do a Mighty Buttonbook?), no dock, no 2nd monitor out (which I get with a dock on my work Dell).
If I wasn't so tied to Macs, I'd be seriously thinking about a Dell right about now.
Microsoft is one of the major HD DVD backers. The makers of Windows, Word, Money, and a slew of other obvious, non-imaginative, non-trademarkable names. (Is it still true that Windows and Word are not trademarked on their own, and only "Microsoft Windows" and "Microsoft Word" are trademarked?)
Anyway, I think the amazing thing here is that they got something as generic as HD DVD trademarked. And when HD DVD dies in 6-12 months, maybe the DivX folks can subsume the name:)
People on Slashdot can dream up all sorts of hare-brained objections to papers that don't fit into their world view, but that has about as much importance as creationists making up arguments against evolution.
You obviously have a strong world-view in support of the paper, or you wouldn't be defending it beyond reason. It's fairly easy to get a paper as flawed as this one into peer review, and without it containing enough detail it's pretty worthless. I don't know whether GSM phones affect sleep-- I suspect not, but who knows. I do know that this paper didn't contribute much to answering that question. From my reading, it has as much scientific merit as your average episode of MythBusters.
Actually, the paper doesn't list any of the things that would have been required for it to be "carefully controlled". Noise from the device, whether the rooms were switched, the nature of the "placebo", the reasoning behind the power levels. The paper is only 3 pages long, and doesn't include enough detail to reproduce the experiment precisely, nor to know whether they were measuring EM effects or simply the background noise in their facility in different rooms.
I think it's worth noting that if it's this hard to predict whether a rock is going to hit a planet when there's confidence in the computational model but uncertainty in the observations, then it's absurd to talk about the climate in 2030-2100 when we have neither certainty that our models are accurate nor do we have very good data.
I disagree that that's worth noting. There is absolutely no doubt that the distance between this asteroid and Mars is going to continue to decline for awhile. That type of qualitative statement is much closer to making climate predictions. The analogy of whether it will hit is closer to making weather predictions for 2 decades out, which I agree is absurd.
For the record, from this casual observer's view, Blu-Ray is doing a much better job in brand recognition. Perhaps it is the catchy name, since HD-DVD sounds more like a spec than it does a product?
I don't know about that, but they're certainly doing way better in sales. In the US it's about 2:1 Blu-Ray to HD DVD, and in Europe it's 3:1. And in rentals it's even more heavily Blu-Ray both in the US and Europe. I suspect Japan goes even further towards Blu-Ray.
In other words, it's only a "stalemate" if you're a journalist who really wants to keep writing about this controversy and generating hits. At this point it's more a matter of when Blu-Ray will win. Microsoft wants to delay it, but at this point it's pretty much inevitable.
Get off your high horse; I've read it all. They are, in effect, the same (thus the apt term FOSS). They may have different motivations, but the FSF is just another aspect of the whole movement that likes to think it's different. And in all your prose you still didn't rebut the main point-- that FOSS doesn't lead to better software, just a "lowest common denominator".
Yeah, I admit SOSCoE is not something to hold up as the epitome of success, but it is a huge example of how the Army is willing to base an entire generation of weaponry on a linux software base. I wasn't measuring success, just the DoD's willingness to use linux.
And SOSCoE's development model isn't open source, but it's as close as you're going to get in a secret environment, I think. All companies involved have to give all their source code to the prime contractor and is owned by the government, which is a lot different than how such contracts usually work (where the government is willing to license binaries without having any rights to the source.)
I actually mostly agree with the author of the article. The FSF is virtually defined by re-implementing stuff that closed-source companies innovated, and most of the most popular open source projects are of the type that starts with "I wish there was an open-source version of [closed-source] product X". I do think there is immense value in making sure there's a "lowest common denominator" open-source version of everything so that the state-of-the-art can never again fall below that point regardless of who goes out of business or gets bought out by whom. But pretending that open-source automatically leads to innovation and/or quality is wishful thinking.
Actually, it seems he shared them via kazaa and that's why the RIAA is suing him. You didn't really think a Slashdot article's summary would be correct, did you?
The entire "Future Combat Systems" of the US Army is based on SOSCoE, a virtual environment that currently runs on linux. It includes development environments for C/C++/Java, but not Microsoft or.NET (yet, anyway). I'm not sure where the meme came in that the DoD is anti-linux. They are certainly proportional in their linux market share as the rest of the world, I'd say.
The phrase "techie" may be over-generalized, but there are a lot of deeply technical people who like Macs exactly because they never have to crack the case to do what they want. I am a software engineer and am no longer interested in assembling my own machines. Being out of school over a decade, I can afford someone else putting it all together for me and selling me a packaged machine that just lets me get stuff done. Besides, the only time I was heavily into the stuff inside the case is when I played a lot of games, and I don't prioritize games very highly anymore.
(The reason I'm considering a Dell for my next machine has nothing to do with the hardware, though... it's the fact that Java is woefully out of date and XCode is archaic. Apple has a small cabal of developers that love their stuff, but Apple has no idea how to attract the general software development community, so will probably lose many of those "techies" soon, too.)
They often use an arsenic compound as a dye. But the arsenic is fixed in a solid-state package, and in extremely tiny quantities. The mercury in one of the new bulbs is a small amount (but much more than the arsenic in a LED) and is in gaseous form, separated from the environment by breakable glass. Finally, LEDs last virtually forever, so will rarely see a landfill. In terms of harm to people and the environment, I think the fluorescent lights so popular today are orders of magnitude worse than LEDs. They're slightly better than incancesdents, but the mercury sure doesn't help things.
Yes we would. (Since you didn't support your argument with any facts, I don't feel compelled to do the same.)
Personally, I think what will happen in 10, 20, and 30 years is that these college kids will finally get real jobs and realize that when folks steal their stuff without compensation, they don't get paid. Then they'll all bemoan the next generation who will be hacking copyright protection with their newfangled brain implants.
Yes, but it's not as much as other applications such as thermometers...which is why those kind of thermometers were banned long ago, as were the manual thermostats containing mercury the site mentions. Considering how up-in-arms a lot of parents got about a harmless mercury-containing compound in vaccines, having actual harmful mercury throughout your house and in the environment seems like it might cause some issues.
In any case, as long as politicians just set efficiency standards and not dictate technology, I'm fine with it. LEDs don't contain mercury, and they're probably the future anyway. CFLs are just a stop-gap.
The good news is that they are doing in a free way what the Matlab Co. has been charging (a lot!) for
But taking their time at it. Don't get me wrong-- I'm glad open source exists. But this project kind of supports the idea that open source can't really innovate, only follow (sometimes far) behind what proprietary companies invent. It would have been really interesting to see what some of the open source folks could do if their goal was to surpass MATLAB instead of be an almost-free version that's almost as good as something that people almost like to use.
You seem to be implying that the Army is one big homogenous repository of data that is shared among all computers. Were it so. Actually, "the Army's" computer infrastructure is made up of hundreds of stovepipe systems that are largely completely non-interoperable. There are officers for whom most of a workday entails manually copying data out of one application and pasting it into another.
That being said, it doesn't really matter, because this article is very non-representative of the Army as I've seen it. The Army's software acquisition process generally contracts out changes in one year, tests it the next year, and deploys it the year after that (they call it the "software blocking cycle"). So since it takes about 2 years to get any piece of software to the field, all software written today is standardizing on Vista. They're spending millions to port software off Solaris and other OSes onto Vista. Ironically, the "Future Combat System" which is supposed to take over in 5 years or so (yeah, right) has linux as its core, supports C++ and Java as languages, and doesn't (yet) support.NET or C# at all.
So anyway, there's probably a Colonel or program manager somewhere who's mandated a mix of Macs in his or her fiefdom, but I'm sure there is no Pentagon-wide mandate to make that the case throughout the Army.
It's actually surprisingly hard to weed out the morons. It's especially hard to weed out the seemingly normal people who will go bonkers on you down the line. Interviewing well is one of the most difficult (and important) thing a company can possibly do, IMHO.
I was under the impression that trade secrets, unlike patents, have no protection under the law.
It varies widely by jurisdiction, but in the US this is not entirely true. The difference is that with a trade secret, if another company independently re-invents it, the other company can use it. However, a trade secret has legal standing in that employees cannot legally reveal them or take them to another company.
Although I don't recommend using Wikipedia to base legal decisions on, they have a description of the practical legal difference on the trade secrets page.
This was very similar to my reaction. There's a lot of cognitive dissonance and revisionist history going on at Microsoft regarding IE's standard compliance. The bottom line is that IE, with every release, regularly violates many existing and established standards in significant ways, and is never later patched to comply. Thus, we'll probably have to wait until 2015 or so before the installed base of a "standards compliant" IE8 has enough market share to eliminate all the crap that Microsoft has foisted on the web.
Well, that's a typical Republican sentiment lately, and the Republicans do manage to be succeeding at failing. It's kind of funny to put Bush at the top then complain that government "isn't working".
As for me, I think government can and has done vast amounts of good in "greasing the wheels" of capitalism. It significantly reduces the risk involved in taking a good idea from concept to product to business, and that spurs growth and innovation. A libertarian country would be a great place to live, with everyone shacked up in their Freedom Cabins living freely on home-grown potatoes.
I dislike this attitude, and would not consider the government a very good employer if it started treating all employees as a priori criminals. In the end, the government is just another employer. What matters to an employer? Results! What are you measuring with your cameras? Presence. And the two are hardly correlated.
I think employers get better results when they care less about what employees are doing minute-to-minute but have some metric for tracking success at a job function. And I want the government to be an employer that gets results.
Keep your cameras away from the workers, Mr Pointy Hair!
Didn't Flash just add support for H.264? That's about as high quality as you get without going into the fringe codecs. It's true that almost no one uses it yet, but if the BBC started it would probably drive adoption of Flash/H.264 much faster.
Slashdot Mirror
My proposal would be different than just capping Copyrights at 5 years (or 10, or 120).
Similar to trademarks, and to a lesser extend patent continuations, I think copyrights should last as long as the work is being actively revised, promoted, and/or otherwise used commercially. But if the work languishes or has had no creative augmentation, the copyright should expire in 5-10 years. That leaves Disney in the clear to keep their copyrights while at the same time allowing the zillions of obscure books, songs, and material to enter the public domain instead of being lost forever.
It's not a perfect solution, but one I think that's substantially better than what we have now AND could actually make it through Congress (after all, Disney would suddenly get the perpetual copyright they've been lobbying for so long-- except that it wouldn't ruin it for everyone else).
If you even took a quick glance at TFA, you'd know that this only disables _saving_ in the old formats, one can still open them just fine. ...and if you take a slightly longer glance, you may realize that you're wrong. In particular, it will block the older PowerPoint files from being opened.
I agree with you in general. I've pretty much been Mac-only at home since 1988. However, as a Java developer the Mac is obviously very, very lacking. In addition, the hardware is frustrating-- no 2nd mouse button (why can't they do a Mighty Buttonbook?), no dock, no 2nd monitor out (which I get with a dock on my work Dell).
If I wasn't so tied to Macs, I'd be seriously thinking about a Dell right about now.
Microsoft is one of the major HD DVD backers. The makers of Windows, Word, Money, and a slew of other obvious, non-imaginative, non-trademarkable names. (Is it still true that Windows and Word are not trademarked on their own, and only "Microsoft Windows" and "Microsoft Word" are trademarked?)
:)
Anyway, I think the amazing thing here is that they got something as generic as HD DVD trademarked. And when HD DVD dies in 6-12 months, maybe the DivX folks can subsume the name
People on Slashdot can dream up all sorts of hare-brained objections to papers that don't fit into their world view, but that has about as much importance as creationists making up arguments against evolution.
You obviously have a strong world-view in support of the paper, or you wouldn't be defending it beyond reason. It's fairly easy to get a paper as flawed as this one into peer review, and without it containing enough detail it's pretty worthless. I don't know whether GSM phones affect sleep-- I suspect not, but who knows. I do know that this paper didn't contribute much to answering that question. From my reading, it has as much scientific merit as your average episode of MythBusters.
Basically, the study is carefully controlled.
Actually, the paper doesn't list any of the things that would have been required for it to be "carefully controlled". Noise from the device, whether the rooms were switched, the nature of the "placebo", the reasoning behind the power levels. The paper is only 3 pages long, and doesn't include enough detail to reproduce the experiment precisely, nor to know whether they were measuring EM effects or simply the background noise in their facility in different rooms.
I think it's worth noting that if it's this hard to predict whether a rock is going to hit a planet when there's confidence in the computational model but uncertainty in the observations, then it's absurd to talk about the climate in 2030-2100 when we have neither certainty that our models are accurate nor do we have very good data.
I disagree that that's worth noting. There is absolutely no doubt that the distance between this asteroid and Mars is going to continue to decline for awhile. That type of qualitative statement is much closer to making climate predictions. The analogy of whether it will hit is closer to making weather predictions for 2 decades out, which I agree is absurd.
For the record, from this casual observer's view, Blu-Ray is doing a much better job in brand recognition. Perhaps it is the catchy name, since HD-DVD sounds more like a spec than it does a product?
I don't know about that, but they're certainly doing way better in sales. In the US it's about 2:1 Blu-Ray to HD DVD, and in Europe it's 3:1. And in rentals it's even more heavily Blu-Ray both in the US and Europe. I suspect Japan goes even further towards Blu-Ray.
In other words, it's only a "stalemate" if you're a journalist who really wants to keep writing about this controversy and generating hits. At this point it's more a matter of when Blu-Ray will win. Microsoft wants to delay it, but at this point it's pretty much inevitable.
Get off your high horse; I've read it all. They are, in effect, the same (thus the apt term FOSS). They may have different motivations, but the FSF is just another aspect of the whole movement that likes to think it's different. And in all your prose you still didn't rebut the main point-- that FOSS doesn't lead to better software, just a "lowest common denominator".
Yeah, I admit SOSCoE is not something to hold up as the epitome of success, but it is a huge example of how the Army is willing to base an entire generation of weaponry on a linux software base. I wasn't measuring success, just the DoD's willingness to use linux.
And SOSCoE's development model isn't open source, but it's as close as you're going to get in a secret environment, I think. All companies involved have to give all their source code to the prime contractor and is owned by the government, which is a lot different than how such contracts usually work (where the government is willing to license binaries without having any rights to the source.)
I actually mostly agree with the author of the article. The FSF is virtually defined by re-implementing stuff that closed-source companies innovated, and most of the most popular open source projects are of the type that starts with "I wish there was an open-source version of [closed-source] product X". I do think there is immense value in making sure there's a "lowest common denominator" open-source version of everything so that the state-of-the-art can never again fall below that point regardless of who goes out of business or gets bought out by whom. But pretending that open-source automatically leads to innovation and/or quality is wishful thinking.
Actually, it seems he shared them via kazaa and that's why the RIAA is suing him. You didn't really think a Slashdot article's summary would be correct, did you?
The entire "Future Combat Systems" of the US Army is based on SOSCoE, a virtual environment that currently runs on linux. It includes development environments for C/C++/Java, but not Microsoft or .NET (yet, anyway). I'm not sure where the meme came in that the DoD is anti-linux. They are certainly proportional in their linux market share as the rest of the world, I'd say.
The phrase "techie" may be over-generalized, but there are a lot of deeply technical people who like Macs exactly because they never have to crack the case to do what they want. I am a software engineer and am no longer interested in assembling my own machines. Being out of school over a decade, I can afford someone else putting it all together for me and selling me a packaged machine that just lets me get stuff done. Besides, the only time I was heavily into the stuff inside the case is when I played a lot of games, and I don't prioritize games very highly anymore.
(The reason I'm considering a Dell for my next machine has nothing to do with the hardware, though... it's the fact that Java is woefully out of date and XCode is archaic. Apple has a small cabal of developers that love their stuff, but Apple has no idea how to attract the general software development community, so will probably lose many of those "techies" soon, too.)
They often use an arsenic compound as a dye. But the arsenic is fixed in a solid-state package, and in extremely tiny quantities. The mercury in one of the new bulbs is a small amount (but much more than the arsenic in a LED) and is in gaseous form, separated from the environment by breakable glass. Finally, LEDs last virtually forever, so will rarely see a landfill. In terms of harm to people and the environment, I think the fluorescent lights so popular today are orders of magnitude worse than LEDs. They're slightly better than incancesdents, but the mercury sure doesn't help things.
Yes we would. (Since you didn't support your argument with any facts, I don't feel compelled to do the same.)
Personally, I think what will happen in 10, 20, and 30 years is that these college kids will finally get real jobs and realize that when folks steal their stuff without compensation, they don't get paid. Then they'll all bemoan the next generation who will be hacking copyright protection with their newfangled brain implants.
Yes, but it's not as much as other applications such as thermometers ...which is why those kind of thermometers were banned long ago, as were the manual thermostats containing mercury the site mentions. Considering how up-in-arms a lot of parents got about a harmless mercury-containing compound in vaccines, having actual harmful mercury throughout your house and in the environment seems like it might cause some issues.
In any case, as long as politicians just set efficiency standards and not dictate technology, I'm fine with it. LEDs don't contain mercury, and they're probably the future anyway. CFLs are just a stop-gap.
The good news is that they are doing in a free way what the Matlab Co. has been charging (a lot!) for
But taking their time at it. Don't get me wrong-- I'm glad open source exists. But this project kind of supports the idea that open source can't really innovate, only follow (sometimes far) behind what proprietary companies invent. It would have been really interesting to see what some of the open source folks could do if their goal was to surpass MATLAB instead of be an almost-free version that's almost as good as something that people almost like to use.
You seem to be implying that the Army is one big homogenous repository of data that is shared among all computers. Were it so. Actually, "the Army's" computer infrastructure is made up of hundreds of stovepipe systems that are largely completely non-interoperable. There are officers for whom most of a workday entails manually copying data out of one application and pasting it into another.
.NET or C# at all.
That being said, it doesn't really matter, because this article is very non-representative of the Army as I've seen it. The Army's software acquisition process generally contracts out changes in one year, tests it the next year, and deploys it the year after that (they call it the "software blocking cycle"). So since it takes about 2 years to get any piece of software to the field, all software written today is standardizing on Vista. They're spending millions to port software off Solaris and other OSes onto Vista. Ironically, the "Future Combat System" which is supposed to take over in 5 years or so (yeah, right) has linux as its core, supports C++ and Java as languages, and doesn't (yet) support
So anyway, there's probably a Colonel or program manager somewhere who's mandated a mix of Macs in his or her fiefdom, but I'm sure there is no Pentagon-wide mandate to make that the case throughout the Army.
It's actually surprisingly hard to weed out the morons. It's especially hard to weed out the seemingly normal people who will go bonkers on you down the line. Interviewing well is one of the most difficult (and important) thing a company can possibly do, IMHO.
I was under the impression that trade secrets, unlike patents, have no protection under the law.
It varies widely by jurisdiction, but in the US this is not entirely true. The difference is that with a trade secret, if another company independently re-invents it, the other company can use it. However, a trade secret has legal standing in that employees cannot legally reveal them or take them to another company.
Although I don't recommend using Wikipedia to base legal decisions on, they have a description of the practical legal difference on the trade secrets page.
This was very similar to my reaction. There's a lot of cognitive dissonance and revisionist history going on at Microsoft regarding IE's standard compliance. The bottom line is that IE, with every release, regularly violates many existing and established standards in significant ways, and is never later patched to comply. Thus, we'll probably have to wait until 2015 or so before the installed base of a "standards compliant" IE8 has enough market share to eliminate all the crap that Microsoft has foisted on the web.
Well, that's a typical Republican sentiment lately, and the Republicans do manage to be succeeding at failing. It's kind of funny to put Bush at the top then complain that government "isn't working".
As for me, I think government can and has done vast amounts of good in "greasing the wheels" of capitalism. It significantly reduces the risk involved in taking a good idea from concept to product to business, and that spurs growth and innovation. A libertarian country would be a great place to live, with everyone shacked up in their Freedom Cabins living freely on home-grown potatoes.
I dislike this attitude, and would not consider the government a very good employer if it started treating all employees as a priori criminals. In the end, the government is just another employer. What matters to an employer? Results! What are you measuring with your cameras? Presence. And the two are hardly correlated.
I think employers get better results when they care less about what employees are doing minute-to-minute but have some metric for tracking success at a job function. And I want the government to be an employer that gets results.
Keep your cameras away from the workers, Mr Pointy Hair!
Didn't Flash just add support for H.264? That's about as high quality as you get without going into the fringe codecs. It's true that almost no one uses it yet, but if the BBC started it would probably drive adoption of Flash/H.264 much faster.