I cannot imagine a world in whiich MSFT or the BSA would lobby to overturn the DMCA. Can you?
No, but I can imagine a world in which Microsoft or the BSA would choose not to help defend the DMCA (thought directly legal or PR means) in the face of a judicial or legislative challenge. Convincing them to stay on the sidelines would be an important step toward reversing or overturning the DMCA. It's always useful to have fewer giant corporations opposing you.:)
how do they manage to cost *you* time? They don't
cost me any of mine...
The first few cost me time because I hadn't heard about the worm, and was trying to figure out why friends were sending me these large random attachments which my virus scanner didn't like.
The next few dozen cost me time as I got alerted that an email had arrived, went to check it, and deleted it.
Then I had to spend five minutes or so adding a procmail rule to dump sircam mail into a holding pen folder. Since then, I've had to spend a few additional minutes making sure the filter wasn't accidentally eating 'real' mail, and bulk-deleting the holding pen emails now and then.
In addition to all that, I administer a couple of mailing lists, and I had to respond to user inquiries about sircam both on- and offlist.
All told, the sircam worm has probably cost me half an hour. No huge thing on the cosmic scale, of course. But still, it's half an hour that was stolen from me, during which I would have prefered to work on something else. Multiply that by all the techies out there dealing with the effects of sircam, and it gets pretty significant.
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Re:The best way to expose a bad law is to enforce
on
Still in DMCA Prison
·
· Score: 2
Just keep in mind, the folks who made the law are to blame, not the folks mandated to enforce it.
And, of course, we are the folks who made the law. Big media interests were able to get the DMCA enacted because voters didn't care about it one way or another. There is not a single congressman or senator now in office who thinks his or her reelection hinges on opposing the DMCA or similar legislation. Our representatives can do Big Media's bidding (and collect healthy campaign contributions and other support) without jeopardizing their positions. What do you expect them to do?
For the moment, at least, we still live in something close to a representative republic. Sufficiently irate citizens routinely change government policies and influence important votes. Our only challenge is how to make our case compelling enough to get a groundswell of popular opinion behind it -- people who are mad enough to vote incumbents out of office over this issue. Then we'll see changes.
Intellectual property law is an esoteric enough issue that I don't even know whether this is possible or not. But I do know that we're spending most of our time preaching to the choir. Try explaining the situation to your non-techie friends and family. Write to your representatives, and to the local paper. Above all, vote, and let all the candidates know why you're voting for your choice.
It may be too late to preserve our freedoms; I don't know. But we have to act as if it's not, or it definitely will be too late, very soon.
I can understand where Coursey is coming from, certainly. Virus (and worm) writing is a blatantly antisocial activity with huge costs and light (if any) penalties, and it would be viscerally satisfying to shoot a few of the perpetrators.
Oddly, though, with this SirCam outbreak, I find more of my wrath landing on those who help spread the stupid thing. Every single one of the hundreds of emails I have received thanks to SirCam resulted from some otherwise intelligent person being incredibly negligent about network security. I have spent significant amounts of my own time paying for their lack of caution.
I have taken to sending a standard reply to each person from whom I receive SirCam, pointing out that connecting to the net without proper precautions in place is both silly and rude. I'm hoping to trigger a shame response that will motivate people to think about security enough to avoid being so rude again.
If we can foster a culture in which abetting the spread of a virus or worm though lax security is considered a serious social faux pas, we may have be able to contain them better. People are motivated by considerations of power, prestige, and group acceptance; push those buttons properly, and you can sculpt behavior as you will.
WT News: White House Computer Threat Fizzles
NYT News: "White House Worm" Causes Little Harm
WT Ed: Can Microsoft Shake Security Worries?
NYT Ed: The Growing Threat of Cyberwar
That's not to say that the contestants aren't good engineers, but the show is trying to present them as superhuman engineers when they're typically not. By rigging the contest they're no more credible than Jeopardy contestants who get a little help from Alex during the commercials.
A good friend of mine was a five-time winner (and hence also championship contestant) on Jeopardy. I was in the studio audience while three of his games were being filmed. There was no help from Alex or anyone else involved. Not saying the same is true for all game shows, but Jeopardy seems to be pretty honest.
It also includes a Java-based search engine to search the books
The article goes on to mention that the Java search engine is proprietary and has cross-platform compatibility problems.
Oh, if only there were some sort of cross-platform language available, perhaps even one especially well suited to text processing and regular expression searching!
COM objects are semantically equivalent to Java classes, but also
provide the ability to discover what interfaces exist at run time,
via QueryInterface. This important feature is being introduced to Java
through the JavaBeans Spec 1.0, via the BeanInfo class ("introspection").
Introspection has been around in Java for a couple of years, now; that spec is from 1999, for example. Java version 1.1 introduced class-level introspection, available without explicit programmer support (which the BeanInfo idiom requires).
In other words, the phrasing above is inaccurate in suggesting that introspection is something (currently) new to Java, or requiring changes to (current) JVMs.
The nasty thing IMHO is all the email collecting bots that wander trough ALL groups pr0n or no pr0n. A newbie has no chance to know about this and fake an email or SPAM-prove it. Many an email accounts are rendered useless by this.
I use my real email address in Usenet postings, and I post quite frequently to several groups (comp.lang.perl.misc and sci.space.science being at the top of the list). I feel that it is polite to offer a real, unmunged address to those who might wish to contact you privately. Part of this attitude probably comes from my having started using Usenet way back when in the early 80s, when the online world was indeed a different place.
So, my email address does in fact get harvested by a lot of Usenet crawlers, and I get a lot of spam sent to me as a result. But I never see 95% of it. The trick is to use a good mail filter, and to spend perhaps 15 minutes a week tweaking its patterns. This can be a fun activity for...well, for anyone likely to be reading/., actually.:-)
Don't let the abusers chase you into hiding. Use the power that technology gives you. Take control.
Asimov, in his ususal hyper-egotistic yet self-deprecating way, once told the story of his behavior at the New York premier of "2001". The movie was presented with an intermission, and by the time the intermission occurred, it was already clear that HAL was up to no good. Asimov apparently stomped around saying "They're violating the First Law!" to anyone who would listen...until one of his friends replied "So strike them down with lightning, Isaac."
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Re:Not really important
on
Space Blimps
·
· Score: 2
Read the Mars Direct site I posted. You'll find that the bulk of the mission complexity and cost involves return-flight issues. It's not that fuel is expensive, it's that hauling it out to Mars or generating (some of) it in situ there, and making a lander that can also take off again and reach Mars orbit, are hard/expensive propositions.
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Re:Not really important
on
Space Blimps
·
· Score: 2
(I would propose establishing a permanent presence on the Moon or Mars, but I'm trying to be at least slightly realistic:) )
Oddly enough, it would probably be cheaper to establish a permanent presence on Mars than to conduct a there-and-back mission. The logistics involved in returning to orbit from the Martian surface and boosting back to Earth get hairy. If you can find volunteers willing to go to Mars with virtually no hope of returning in their lifetimes, you can massively reduce the size (and hence cost) of the vehicle(s) required. What's more, using a scheme like Zubrin's Mars Direct, you can robotically land supplies, power and atmosphere generation gear, and the like before the colonists arrive, and supplementary supplies afterward on a continuing basis.
I'm not sure the public is ready to support a one-way Mars colony project, but I'm sure there would be no shortage of volunteers.
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Trademark infringement?
on
Star In A Jar
·
· Score: 5
Could one describe these experiments as producing "Sun Microsystems"?
I personally believe that everything should be free. If I'm a farmer, I distribute my grain free to everyone in your family and extended family, and in return, you as a tractor-maker give me a tractor for free. After all, my farm produces much more food than I can possibly eat, and you as a tractor maker actually have little use for a tractor once it's built... But that's just an idyllic dream, of course.
No, it's not a dream; in fact, it's how things operate under capitalism. A farmer produces more grain than he can eat, and needs a tractor, so he sells some grain, and uses it to buy a tractor. A tractor maker produces a tractor he can't personally use, and needs grain to eat, so he sells the tractor, and uses the money to buy grain. Money is just a convenient score-keeping system that allows us to barter our goods and services far more conveniently.
What's more, this system automagically determines the 'correct' exchange rate between goods. If Bob will give me a tractor for a thousand bushels of grain, and Steve offers a similar tractor for five hundred bushels of grain, then I trade with Steve. Again, the directness of the trade is masked by using money as an intermediary.
Magnetic ballasts dim the lamp about every 1/120th of a second--the normal oscillation of alternating current--causing an imperceptible flicker. Newer electronic ballasts speed up the flicker rate to milliseconds, eliminating eyestrain and hum, two complaints long associated with fluorescents.
1/120 second is just a bit over 8 milliseconds. "Speed[ing] up the flicker rate to milliseconds" just doesn't seem like a huge breakthrough, somehow...
Sun has more launches than landings. Too much of their new stuff goes away, rather than reaching a solid, usable state. This is a problem.
I disagree. Failures are an inevitable part of being innovative. The trick is to learn from them, and to have enough skill or luck to succeed often enough to pay the bills while you tinker with bleeding-edge possibilities. How many filament materials did Edison try before he got the lightbulb working well enough to get rich selling them?
I have a megabit line into my home office, and when I view a streaming video feed, I still get a herky-jerky 20-Kbps stream. The true advantage of broadband is realized only on FTP sites or peer-to-peer, where downloading is optimized for speed.
I'm not sure what he's trying to say, here. If anything, most video servers are far better optimized for real-time bit streaming than most FTP servers. And "peer-to-peer" is so broad a classification as to be meaningless. As any Napster user can attest, it's quite common to find oneself at the receiving end of a 0.1 kbps feed from some hapless dialup user supporting 20 simultaneous downloads.
The point Dvorak seems to be trying to make is that the "last mile" (be it dialup, DSL, cable, or dedicated connection) isn't the only potential bottleneck in the path from a content provider to your computer. I used to work for a broadband media company, and I can attest that there are quite a few DSL providers out there who offer megabit connections to their subscribers, but who have an aggregate CO-to-backbone bandwidth adequate to support less than 20% of their subscribers at maximum rate. This oversubscription model works most of the time, as odds are good that only one subscriber out of five (or fewer) will need max bandwidth simultaneously. But let the law of averages fail, and suddenly everybody's bandwidth suffers.
Similarly, there can be significant congestion between the content provider and the backbone, if capacity on this leg is poorly modeled or if demand grows beyond what was modeled. I call this phenomenon "suicide through success", in which a content service becomes popular, grows faster than was planned, and at some threshhold number of users saturates its outbound pipe and begins to degrade for everyone, driving users away.
The best summary of the situation I've ever seen is: "Solving the broadband problem by increasing DSL and cable modem penetration is like solving traffic gridlock by widening driveways."
There are no "Linux system libraries." Linux is a kernel. It exports functionality via system calls, not via any libraries. You are probably thinking of glibc, which has nothing whatever to do with Linux, and happens to be under the LGPL license which specifically permits this sort of activity.
Believe it or not, I know about glibc and its license. But...how is glibc implemented? In terms of kernel system calls. glibc is (in part) a wrapper around the kernel. So we have:
The Linux kernel, which is GPL
glibc, which is certainly a 'derived product' of the kernel (given that it is implemented through kernel system calls), yet is somehow LGPL
Linux applications, which link with glibc to gain access to Linux kernel services, but may have any license themselves thanks to the glibc LGPL trick.
So, to clarify my original question: How goes glibc pull off the magic trick of being an LGPL library implemented using GPL underlying code?
So Red Hat bundling non-GPL and GPL apps on a single CD do not violate the GPL, and neither do you after installation, since both cases are 'mere aggregation'.
Ah, but you're forgetting that each of those applications is 'based on' Linux, in the sense of linking to its libraries (dynamic or static) and using its system services through them at runtime. None of them could run without those GPL'd components that make up Linux. Isn't that much stronger coupling than "mere aggregation"?
Again, it all depends on how you look at things. We tend to see OS libraries and services as being in a different category from app-specific libraries and services, but in terms of implementation and useage, this is a false dichotomy. The pragmatic implementation details of the two are identical.
So, why is it okay to build Apache httpd linked to Linux system libraries and release it under the Apache license, but not okay to build a DVD app linked to GPL'd utility code and release it under the app's license? It's a mystical convention we've all agreed to follow because it makes our lives easier, but lawyers and juries are unlikely to accept this arbitrary distinction.
Clearly if you write non-derived modules and distribute them individually, such pieces are not under the GPL. Once you package it all up for distribution everything falls under the GPL.
Not quite so clear as it might first seem, alas. The key question is what level of "packaging" creates a real connection between components. For example, Red Hat routinely distributes applications with non-GPL licenses (Apache, BSD, etc.) bundled with the pure-GPL Linux core product. Other than a few extremists, nobody considers this a GPL violation, despite the fact that the non-GPL apps cannot operate without access to Linux system services.
The line between 'bundling' and 'linking' gets fuzzy when discussing dynamic link libraries (and similar loose-coupling technologies). I personally feel that Vidomi has violated the terms of the GPL, but I'd hate to try to prove it in court.
Sounds like the IP analog for radio Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum (FHSS). Which, by the way, was invented and patented as a radio security technique during WWII by movie star Hedy Lamarr and her pianist. A movie star geek girl? I was definitely born in the wrong generation...
Slashdot Mirror
No, but I can imagine a world in which Microsoft or the BSA would choose not to help defend the DMCA (thought directly legal or PR means) in the face of a judicial or legislative challenge. Convincing them to stay on the sidelines would be an important step toward reversing or overturning the DMCA. It's always useful to have fewer giant corporations opposing you. :)
--
The first few cost me time because I hadn't heard about the worm, and was trying to figure out why friends were sending me these large random attachments which my virus scanner didn't like.
The next few dozen cost me time as I got alerted that an email had arrived, went to check it, and deleted it.
Then I had to spend five minutes or so adding a procmail rule to dump sircam mail into a holding pen folder. Since then, I've had to spend a few additional minutes making sure the filter wasn't accidentally eating 'real' mail, and bulk-deleting the holding pen emails now and then.
In addition to all that, I administer a couple of mailing lists, and I had to respond to user inquiries about sircam both on- and offlist.
All told, the sircam worm has probably cost me half an hour. No huge thing on the cosmic scale, of course. But still, it's half an hour that was stolen from me, during which I would have prefered to work on something else. Multiply that by all the techies out there dealing with the effects of sircam, and it gets pretty significant.
--
And, of course, we are the folks who made the law. Big media interests were able to get the DMCA enacted because voters didn't care about it one way or another. There is not a single congressman or senator now in office who thinks his or her reelection hinges on opposing the DMCA or similar legislation. Our representatives can do Big Media's bidding (and collect healthy campaign contributions and other support) without jeopardizing their positions. What do you expect them to do?
For the moment, at least, we still live in something close to a representative republic. Sufficiently irate citizens routinely change government policies and influence important votes. Our only challenge is how to make our case compelling enough to get a groundswell of popular opinion behind it -- people who are mad enough to vote incumbents out of office over this issue. Then we'll see changes.
Intellectual property law is an esoteric enough issue that I don't even know whether this is possible or not. But I do know that we're spending most of our time preaching to the choir. Try explaining the situation to your non-techie friends and family. Write to your representatives, and to the local paper. Above all, vote, and let all the candidates know why you're voting for your choice.
It may be too late to preserve our freedoms; I don't know. But we have to act as if it's not, or it definitely will be too late, very soon.
--
Oddly, though, with this SirCam outbreak, I find more of my wrath landing on those who help spread the stupid thing. Every single one of the hundreds of emails I have received thanks to SirCam resulted from some otherwise intelligent person being incredibly negligent about network security. I have spent significant amounts of my own time paying for their lack of caution.
I have taken to sending a standard reply to each person from whom I receive SirCam, pointing out that connecting to the net without proper precautions in place is both silly and rude. I'm hoping to trigger a shame response that will motivate people to think about security enough to avoid being so rude again.
If we can foster a culture in which abetting the spread of a virus or worm though lax security is considered a serious social faux pas, we may have be able to contain them better. People are motivated by considerations of power, prestige, and group acceptance; push those buttons properly, and you can sculpt behavior as you will.
--
--
A good friend of mine was a five-time winner (and hence also championship contestant) on Jeopardy. I was in the studio audience while three of his games were being filmed. There was no help from Alex or anyone else involved. Not saying the same is true for all game shows, but Jeopardy seems to be pretty honest.
--
The article goes on to mention that the Java search engine is proprietary and has cross-platform compatibility problems.
Oh, if only there were some sort of cross-platform language available, perhaps even one especially well suited to text processing and regular expression searching!
--
Introspection has been around in Java for a couple of years, now; that spec is from 1999, for example. Java version 1.1 introduced class-level introspection, available without explicit programmer support (which the BeanInfo idiom requires).
In other words, the phrasing above is inaccurate in suggesting that introspection is something (currently) new to Java, or requiring changes to (current) JVMs.
--
--
--
I use my real email address in Usenet postings, and I post quite frequently to several groups (comp.lang.perl.misc and sci.space.science being at the top of the list). I feel that it is polite to offer a real, unmunged address to those who might wish to contact you privately. Part of this attitude probably comes from my having started using Usenet way back when in the early 80s, when the online world was indeed a different place.
So, my email address does in fact get harvested by a lot of Usenet crawlers, and I get a lot of spam sent to me as a result. But I never see 95% of it. The trick is to use a good mail filter, and to spend perhaps 15 minutes a week tweaking its patterns. This can be a fun activity for...well, for anyone likely to be reading /., actually. :-)
Don't let the abusers chase you into hiding. Use the power that technology gives you. Take control.
--
--
--
Oddly enough, it would probably be cheaper to establish a permanent presence on Mars than to conduct a there-and-back mission. The logistics involved in returning to orbit from the Martian surface and boosting back to Earth get hairy. If you can find volunteers willing to go to Mars with virtually no hope of returning in their lifetimes, you can massively reduce the size (and hence cost) of the vehicle(s) required. What's more, using a scheme like Zubrin's Mars Direct, you can robotically land supplies, power and atmosphere generation gear, and the like before the colonists arrive, and supplementary supplies afterward on a continuing basis.
I'm not sure the public is ready to support a one-way Mars colony project, but I'm sure there would be no shortage of volunteers.
--
--
No, it's not a dream; in fact, it's how things operate under capitalism. A farmer produces more grain than he can eat, and needs a tractor, so he sells some grain, and uses it to buy a tractor. A tractor maker produces a tractor he can't personally use, and needs grain to eat, so he sells the tractor, and uses the money to buy grain. Money is just a convenient score-keeping system that allows us to barter our goods and services far more conveniently.
What's more, this system automagically determines the 'correct' exchange rate between goods. If Bob will give me a tractor for a thousand bushels of grain, and Steve offers a similar tractor for five hundred bushels of grain, then I trade with Steve. Again, the directness of the trade is masked by using money as an intermediary.
--
1/120 second is just a bit over 8 milliseconds. "Speed[ing] up the flicker rate to milliseconds" just doesn't seem like a huge breakthrough, somehow...
--
I disagree. Failures are an inevitable part of being innovative. The trick is to learn from them, and to have enough skill or luck to succeed often enough to pay the bills while you tinker with bleeding-edge possibilities. How many filament materials did Edison try before he got the lightbulb working well enough to get rich selling them?
--
From Dvorak's article:
I'm not sure what he's trying to say, here. If anything, most video servers are far better optimized for real-time bit streaming than most FTP servers. And "peer-to-peer" is so broad a classification as to be meaningless. As any Napster user can attest, it's quite common to find oneself at the receiving end of a 0.1 kbps feed from some hapless dialup user supporting 20 simultaneous downloads.
The point Dvorak seems to be trying to make is that the "last mile" (be it dialup, DSL, cable, or dedicated connection) isn't the only potential bottleneck in the path from a content provider to your computer. I used to work for a broadband media company, and I can attest that there are quite a few DSL providers out there who offer megabit connections to their subscribers, but who have an aggregate CO-to-backbone bandwidth adequate to support less than 20% of their subscribers at maximum rate. This oversubscription model works most of the time, as odds are good that only one subscriber out of five (or fewer) will need max bandwidth simultaneously. But let the law of averages fail, and suddenly everybody's bandwidth suffers.
Similarly, there can be significant congestion between the content provider and the backbone, if capacity on this leg is poorly modeled or if demand grows beyond what was modeled. I call this phenomenon "suicide through success", in which a content service becomes popular, grows faster than was planned, and at some threshhold number of users saturates its outbound pipe and begins to degrade for everyone, driving users away.
The best summary of the situation I've ever seen is: "Solving the broadband problem by increasing DSL and cable modem penetration is like solving traffic gridlock by widening driveways."
--
An econ professor of mine summed this up rather neatly: "It seldom makes good business sense to bomb your customers."
--
Believe it or not, I know about glibc and its license. But...how is glibc implemented? In terms of kernel system calls. glibc is (in part) a wrapper around the kernel. So we have:
So, to clarify my original question: How goes glibc pull off the magic trick of being an LGPL library implemented using GPL underlying code?
--
Ah, but you're forgetting that each of those applications is 'based on' Linux, in the sense of linking to its libraries (dynamic or static) and using its system services through them at runtime. None of them could run without those GPL'd components that make up Linux. Isn't that much stronger coupling than "mere aggregation"?
Again, it all depends on how you look at things. We tend to see OS libraries and services as being in a different category from app-specific libraries and services, but in terms of implementation and useage, this is a false dichotomy. The pragmatic implementation details of the two are identical.
So, why is it okay to build Apache httpd linked to Linux system libraries and release it under the Apache license, but not okay to build a DVD app linked to GPL'd utility code and release it under the app's license? It's a mystical convention we've all agreed to follow because it makes our lives easier, but lawyers and juries are unlikely to accept this arbitrary distinction.
--
Not quite so clear as it might first seem, alas. The key question is what level of "packaging" creates a real connection between components. For example, Red Hat routinely distributes applications with non-GPL licenses (Apache, BSD, etc.) bundled with the pure-GPL Linux core product. Other than a few extremists, nobody considers this a GPL violation, despite the fact that the non-GPL apps cannot operate without access to Linux system services.
The line between 'bundling' and 'linking' gets fuzzy when discussing dynamic link libraries (and similar loose-coupling technologies). I personally feel that Vidomi has violated the terms of the GPL, but I'd hate to try to prove it in court.
--
--
--