The value of the copyrighted material on servers like this is frequently in the millions of dollars. Factor in the number of times those titles are distributed over the Internet, and the damage amounts skyrocket. The sentencing structure reflects this harm.
This reflects exactly the fallacy we complain about -- the assumption that each copy pirated would have been purchased had it not been available for free. This is ludicrous and the number 1 source of inflated damage estimates.
I also suspect their sentencing example is rigged -- how does it work out if you remove the "sexual" to get "aggravated assult"? shrugging it off to the local level is evading the question.
For the moderators: the linked-to article is my page.
I thought of another point in rereading the question. WinXP failed the to be useful for reading papers due to the hibernate problem with acroread, but it would have been perfectly suitable for taking notes and doing hand calculations except for several problems:
As usual the MS ink format is closed. I esentially refuse to store information that I'm going to want in 10 years in a closed format. I could have just converted to.ps or something, but with that hassle it's easier to just skip the middleware and use linux. (remember for equations, abbreviations, graphs, messy handwriting and even technical terms and names handwriting recognition is useless.)
I want to use real network filesystems. i.e. Coda. With support for local caching and disconnected access. I don't see that happening in XP.
And lastly there's the small fact that MS is a monopolistic company with a long history of abusing it's costomers for it's own interest. e.g. I think it would be nice to integrate a pen-app with something like adobe acrobat so one could edit any.pdf file. write notes and cut pages and graphs and things. You think MS is going to work to support an open format like PDF? no way they will ever do so.
This is why I opted for the Acer over say, the HP. I can just flip the screen over and I have the keyboard and all the terminals I want. I think this is more about flexibility. When I want to read a paper, show somebody some graphs or do some calculations (i.e. write equations) the tablet is more convenient.
The problem, which some here have eluded to in various ways, is that the CLI is actually adapted to the keyboard. This makes using CLI with handwriting recognition clumsy. (I would even go so far as to say that the CLI is adapted for the qwerty keyboard -- I use dvorak.) This adaptation has happened over many decades. The widespread avalability of pen-based devices happeden essentially this year. Things need some time to adapt. The best thing at this point is to just adopt the point-and-grunt interface. Useful, though linguistically somewhat underpowered.
My plan is to write a tcl control app that has all the essential tasks I need and I can adapt it to my purposes.
I think this is a bigger issue than many people think. When I tried to get help from Acer they just ignored me completely. And Wacom asked me to sign an NDA for a tablet protocol that took me about a day to reverse engineer. COME ON!
The only reason that I can think of for such lack of help is that they don't want to "upset" MS, since the tablet PC market is so important to them.
But while I recieved no "assistance" from the vendors, I have to give them credit for the good hardware. Figuring out buggy or illogically designed hardware setups is a nightmare. This tablet is sensible and intelligently put-together, making it possible for me to get it working just with common knowledge. (previous Wacom protocols, normal ACPI stuff, etc)
My main reason was simple: stability and security. I simply don't trust that I can secure a windows XP box because of my inexperience with XP (it's a pretty young OS come to think of it) and MS's hush-hush policies (you recall XP was RELEASED with a known remote root exploit). Also acroread closes it's document on hibernate/resume, pretty annoying when you're reading a paper. And it crashed on me once when suspending and I lost some notes because as usual the "recover from autosave" function in the MS notes program didn't work!! I hate it when things go wrong that I can't even try to fix it.
For a tablet PC to replace paper it has to be extremely stable. Even XP didn't fit the bill for me.
(and I found the handwriting recognition essentially useless.)
The fact that the channel was unused in Boston in the past I think is not being emphasized enough. Essentially the police radios were operating in a quiet band (no physical neighbors) so they were able to under-deploy repeaters and still operate. Now they actually have neighbors and have to deploy a repeater system comparable to everyone else. This "law enforcement trumps TV" is just a an excuse to not bring their system up to par.
This simply reflects the fact that it's painful to reallocate spectrum. The only thing this has to do with digital TV is that since digital TV uses bandwith very efficiently it's especially good at blanketing over underpowered signals (compared to regular TV).
Very interesting to read, and quite enlightening on how monopolies work.
However, your representation of the piece and Hetzel's position is that government-granted monopolies such as patent and copyright are what allow the creation of business "monopolies".
This is simply not true. The monopolies discussed on slashdot are mainly Microsoft's monopoly on compatibility and the RIAA's monopoly on distribution. Both of these are maintained by contracts, (sometimes illegal) practices, and even collusion, with patents and copyrights playing only a small role. Copyright simply provides a "default" contract for the exchange of the work, an actual contract would substitute just fine.
Constructing a monopoly on a resource is a simple matter of shrewdly buying up all the sources of that resource. Government has nothing to do with this. The monopolists read Adam Smith too, and know if they can create a monopoly they stand to make a lot of money.
In Debian, at least, the fixes were backported to 0.9.6c. Updated packages fixing this problem were released almost a month an a half ago for all major distributions. (July 30 for Debian., packages numbered 0.9.6c-2.woody.0)
Also as mentioned by another poster, the netcraft report about the number of unpatched apache servers is complete nonsense. This is an openSSL bug, which has nothing to do with the apache version number, which what they measure and use to conclude people haven't updated.
(presumably older apache versions don't work with the newer openSSL libraries. Guess what... that's why the fixes were backported!)
1) All you succeed in doing is pointing out how little sense copyright makes in the context of digital information. Certainly if I can buy and own something I can sell it. But what if I have copies of it in archival backups, maybe even on read-only media? Shouldn't non-use of those copies be enough avoid copyright infringement after I sell? Making backup copies is fair use right?
2) As you can probably tell, the poster thinks EULA's are a bunch of hooey. Let's put it this way: They can either sell software like a book (i.e. on shelves in a store), and they have no say about what I do with it after I buy it, or they can make a contract with me specifying what I can do with their software (just like I have a contract for my apartment). They can't have it both ways, that is the whole point of copyright law, it supposed to give *all* the rules for the first method of sale. They can decide to exempt me from some rules, but they can't make up new ones. And unless I signed some piece of paper which both they and I have a copy of, I have a hard time saying that any contract was involved.
e.g. software stores should be set up like this: I go in, some guy explains to me the contract for a particular piece of software, what I can and can't do with it and what updates I am entitled to etc. I then sign it and he burns me a CD with the software that I made a contract for. All clean and nice eh? The bookstore model with a EULA is essentially a bait-and-switch.
You don't get it. A 120GB HDD costs like $300 right? now you want to back it up.
CDs are out of the question (can you say 170 CDs!!)
A DVD-R drive (right now) costs the same or more than the drive, then you have to buy the media, and you don't want to buy the cheapest right, because it's a backup. And it still takes like 24+ disks to do a backup.
So the only viable option for backup is DDS tape. Which you need like $4000 just to get going. So the backup costs over 10x the media?!?! Most places simply CANNOT affort this, it's not an issue of will not. You can buy like 4 whole systems for that.
So what do you do. Well you just buy another drive for $300, put it in another machine, and work up a system whereby it's mostly isolated from the system it's backing up. (off-site being ideal.) You could even buy 2 or 3 and not even come close to the price of the DDS solution.
At some point DDS becomes economical, say if you have 15 120GB drives to back up, but if you only have one sometimes you just can't justify it. Also there is some breakpoint in how much that data is worth. If it's worth enough, yes you should probably have it on tapes in a saftey deposit box or something.
Consider that fancy graphics card and multi-sync monitor on your desk. It can display 1280 x 1024 at 60 Hz, or at 72 Hz, or at 75 Hz, or at 85 Hz. Did it cost you a fortune? Not relatively, no.
HA! you're joking right. A 20" veiewable area monitor (which can only do 1600x1200, not full 1080i) costs like 400+ more like 800+ for a good one. Plus about $100 for the videocard+part of computer. A TV that size costs like $100 or less.
The bottom line is analog TVs are incredibly simple pieces of technology essentially unchanged since the '30s. A modern multi-sync monitor is really quite sophisticated by comparison. The only reason it can make sense is because the price of anything can be beat down just by making enough of them.
(I'm not saying that this is a market problem, but that the market CAN make anything profitable even with bad standards. That just hasn't worked here, so the bad standards show.)
Particularly considering most consumer sets out there only have one sync rate-- 60 Hz-- and one resolution-- 1080 x 1920. They convert all other formats internally to that display format.
You do realize that displaying 24fps on a 60Hz display is a pain. DVD players do this, but with lots of hints from the stream, doing it with no hints is a pain. And I won't even touch trying to display an interlaced signal on a non-interlaced display and vice versa (think visible artifacts in motion)
As far as the rest, I think the point is that there are so many standards it seems like none at all. You have just said that the setmakers make their sets to do 1080i and rig all the rest. That's called a (de facto) standard. i.e. ONE format chosen above the others.
There is actually a reason for minutes and hours to be divided into 60 units. It's the lowest number that is divisible by 2,3,4,and 5 i.e. it's easy to divide an hour or minute into sections: 1/2 hour, 1/3 hour 1/5 hour etc.
And why 24 hours do you say. Well 12 is divisible by 2,3 and 4, and there's two parts to a day (night and day).
365 days is just the way it is.
So those anchient babylonians really did know what they were doing.
The other guy is right, but to add, if you get time from a stratum 1 server you are stratum 2 server. At least that's how I understood it. I don't know anything about Windows ntp implementation but it sounnds like your configuration is not right since the host should figure out it's stratum from the stratum of it's references. I use the local server at my university just fine (stratum 2 I think), but that's in Linux.
Actually so-called "hybrid" cars are a step in this direction. Trying to use the gasoline engine only in it's efficient band and the electric motor in other rpm ranges.
Why aren't cars like this? Why do people drive drive SUVs on the highway instead of compacts? It's cultural, people seem intent on buying inefficient, high-maintenance vehicles, so that's what gets manufactured.
But you still have to pay capital gains on the money from the buyback right? Wouldn't this only be 'good' if you make more than a certain amount of money so that the capital gains rate is less than your income tax rate?
His point is that the DRM people should stick to technology and leave the laws alone. He believes that without the laws to back them up, the market will do away with them for exactly the reasons you give.
Copyright is a negotiated agreement for material that is publically disseminated (the author gets a limited monopoly in exchange for not keeping his work under lock and key). Movie companies don't like this agreement, so they want to change the laws to extend their theatre into your home. i.e. they want to be able to publically distrubte material and keep it under lock and key also! Alan's point is to leave copyright alone and they should use their own hardware and possibly contractual measures to 'reach into the home'. Then just let the market do it's job and determine if this is a viable business model.
I'm not going to go to the library and dig out your references, but the correct comparison is, for example, to 250 people each of whom must go through the sample of 10,000 pictures and find their designated person. I figure humans would probably be pretty decent at that.
We're evaluating the pattern matching ability of the computer, not it's efficiency. Computers can do things terribly and still beat a human at efficiency just because they can do it so fast. (c.f. any brute-force encryption breaking technique)
No, I believe it was the avowed goal of Americans to keep the USSR from creating a worldwide communist reign (with them in charge). It was kill-or-be-killed.
Notice that China is communist and we're not actively trying to destroy them.
Americans are historically VERY isolationist. But the threat of the USSR gaining influence over most of the world was just too much to ignore.
You apparently don't know anything about fusion either. Current reactors have a hugh shield around them (made of Lithium I believe) to catch all the stray neutrons. That stuff ends up being radioactive due to the constant bombardment by high-energy neutrons.
Nuclear waste is only dangerous in a concentrated form. At low enough concentrations you can hold it in your hand without danger. So probably the best thing to do is take a teeeny bit and put it EVERYWHERE. Maybe gauged by the amount of natural radiation in the soil in any particular place. But try getting the public to go for that! Putting nuclear waste in EVERYONE'S back yard. (note that this is essentially what current power plants do by putting all their waste into the air.)
Sounds to me like you are in a totally weird special case:
MCSE: Then we must release our source code to public! This is confidential!!
Presumably this means that you are somehow REQUIRED to keep the source code secret. Is there a similar requirement for the executable? I think that in such a case one would be safer going with non-GPL code (i.e. write it from scratch) to keep unforseen bad things from happening. (Say some guy in the future mistakenly distributes the executable, you're probably still required to give out the source.)
I think the proper question is "why is this confidential". Sounds like an awful lot like a security through obscurity situation to me, but that may just be because you haven't said very much.
The lottery is NOT A TAX not regressive or otherwise!
The fact that "everybody knows" that whatever the lottery funds (usually schools) gets it's "normal" budget cut (which came from tax revenues) makes it a tax.
I have never met anyone who played the lottery to give money to schools or anything else. People play the lottery because they want to.
But giving money to schools is why it got passed! A lottery like the state run ones is something that it is illegal for private organizations to do. A special legal exception had to be made, the most common justification for this is to fund schools.
It's OK for the government to take more of my money because I can afford it?
Our entire income tax system is based on this concept. I would counter -- It's ok to take the same amount of money from people below the poverty line as from a multimillionaire? of course it's not. (Lotteries are worse, a multimillionaire would never even play.)
State Lotteries are a bad idea that somehow it became popular to for the states to pass. Kinda like winner-takes-all in electoral votes, just dumb in hindsight (yes this is a state thing).
For those who don't know, PKI=Public Key Infrastructure. It's how you know that a public key you have for someone is actually the right one. Having a working (i.e. secure) PKI is what makes "using" encryption difficult. Everyone always assumes that explaining PKI to anybody is too difficult, so reporters like the one who wrote this article say things like "products aren't easy to use" when really they are and all the difficulty is in having a secure PKI.
It is probably telling that most widespread PKI, used for web certificates is pretty much completely broken in practice. Do YOU look at the company name listed on the certificate before you send you submit your credit card info? I've never seen a browser that by default gets you to at least verify that the company name on the cert is right. This makes man-in-the middle attacks almost easy.
Hopefully the moderation on this will go down with time.
"we released the web into the public domain"?
Just by using this language you definintely aren't in the "We". "the Web" as you put it is not a piece of code that has some license on it. Most of what one could call "the Web" is a set of open standards. You can implement this standard in code under any license you want. This is largely due to the lack of patents on the methods described in those standards but that has nothing directly to do with the GPL in this case.
You seem to have made a normal ignorant/.er mistake (there are many enlightented/.er's) of confusing patents and copyrights when they are actually entirely different things.
Well currently mine is about a $500 linux box (not real-time encoding, that's not what I was interested in) and about a $100 tv-tuner add on (and a $200 hard drive at the time) but it also acts as a backup server, answering machine, general big disk machine and a few other functions. And I can write the recorded shows off to CDR recorded at my choice of bitrates and edit commercials out if I want, and watch the shows on any machine I want. And if I need more space I'll just buy a new hard drive at commodity prices. And at the time it was my desktop machine (i.e. already owned), but I stopped doing that because it was pretty annoying to use when it was recording.
Oh and there's no subscription fee or company watching my viewing habits.
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I also suspect their sentencing example is rigged -- how does it work out if you remove the "sexual" to get "aggravated assult"? shrugging it off to the local level is evading the question.
For the moderators: the linked-to article is my page.
.ps or something, but with that hassle it's easier to just skip the middleware and use linux. (remember for equations, abbreviations, graphs, messy handwriting and even technical terms and names handwriting recognition is useless.)
.pdf file. write notes and cut pages and graphs and things. You think MS is going to work to support an open format like PDF? no way they will ever do so.
I thought of another point in rereading the question. WinXP failed the to be useful for reading papers due to the hibernate problem with acroread, but it would have been perfectly suitable for taking notes and doing hand calculations except for several problems:
As usual the MS ink format is closed. I esentially refuse to store information that I'm going to want in 10 years in a closed format. I could have just converted to
I want to use real network filesystems. i.e. Coda. With support for local caching and disconnected access. I don't see that happening in XP.
And lastly there's the small fact that MS is a monopolistic company with a long history of abusing it's costomers for it's own interest. e.g. I think it would be nice to integrate a pen-app with something like adobe acrobat so one could edit any
(just so you know, it'm my page)
This is why I opted for the Acer over say, the HP. I can just flip the screen over and I have the keyboard and all the terminals I want. I think this is more about flexibility. When I want to read a paper, show somebody some graphs or do some calculations (i.e. write equations) the tablet is more convenient.
The problem, which some here have eluded to in various ways, is that the CLI is actually adapted to the keyboard. This makes using CLI with handwriting recognition clumsy. (I would even go so far as to say that the CLI is adapted for the qwerty keyboard -- I use dvorak.) This adaptation has happened over many decades. The widespread avalability of pen-based devices happeden essentially this year. Things need some time to adapt. The best thing at this point is to just adopt the point-and-grunt interface. Useful, though linguistically somewhat underpowered.
My plan is to write a tcl control app that has all the essential tasks I need and I can adapt it to my purposes.
I think this is a bigger issue than many people think. When I tried to get help from Acer they just ignored me completely. And Wacom asked me to sign an NDA for a tablet protocol that took me about a day to reverse engineer. COME ON!
The only reason that I can think of for such lack of help is that they don't want to "upset" MS, since the tablet PC market is so important to them.
But while I recieved no "assistance" from the vendors, I have to give them credit for the good hardware. Figuring out buggy or illogically designed hardware setups is a nightmare. This tablet is sensible and intelligently put-together, making it possible for me to get it working just with common knowledge. (previous Wacom protocols, normal ACPI stuff, etc)
-Dean
My main reason was simple: stability and security. I simply don't trust that I can secure a windows XP box because of my inexperience with XP (it's a pretty young OS come to think of it) and MS's hush-hush policies (you recall XP was RELEASED with a known remote root exploit). Also acroread closes it's document on hibernate/resume, pretty annoying when you're reading a paper. And it crashed on me once when suspending and I lost some notes because as usual the "recover from autosave" function in the MS notes program didn't work!! I hate it when things go wrong that I can't even try to fix it.
For a tablet PC to replace paper it has to be extremely stable. Even XP didn't fit the bill for me.
(and I found the handwriting recognition essentially useless.)
-Dean
This simply reflects the fact that it's painful to reallocate spectrum. The only thing this has to do with digital TV is that since digital TV uses bandwith very efficiently it's especially good at blanketing over underpowered signals (compared to regular TV).
Very interesting to read, and quite enlightening on how monopolies work.
However, your representation of the piece and Hetzel's position is that government-granted monopolies such as patent and copyright are what allow the creation of business "monopolies".
This is simply not true. The monopolies discussed on slashdot are mainly Microsoft's monopoly on compatibility and the RIAA's monopoly on distribution. Both of these are maintained by contracts, (sometimes illegal) practices, and even collusion, with patents and copyrights playing only a small role. Copyright simply provides a "default" contract for the exchange of the work, an actual contract would substitute just fine.
Constructing a monopoly on a resource is a simple matter of shrewdly buying up all the sources of that resource. Government has nothing to do with this. The monopolists read Adam Smith too, and know if they can create a monopoly they stand to make a lot of money.
Also as mentioned by another poster, the netcraft report about the number of unpatched apache servers is complete nonsense. This is an openSSL bug, which has nothing to do with the apache version number, which what they measure and use to conclude people haven't updated.
(presumably older apache versions don't work with the newer openSSL libraries. Guess what... that's why the fixes were backported!)
1) All you succeed in doing is pointing out how little sense copyright makes in the context of digital information. Certainly if I can buy and own something I can sell it. But what if I have copies of it in archival backups, maybe even on read-only media? Shouldn't non-use of those copies be enough avoid copyright infringement after I sell? Making backup copies is fair use right?
2) As you can probably tell, the poster thinks EULA's are a bunch of hooey. Let's put it this way: They can either sell software like a book (i.e. on shelves in a store), and they have no say about what I do with it after I buy it, or they can make a contract with me specifying what I can do with their software (just like I have a contract for my apartment). They can't have it both ways, that is the whole point of copyright law, it supposed to give *all* the rules for the first method of sale. They can decide to exempt me from some rules, but they can't make up new ones. And unless I signed some piece of paper which both they and I have a copy of, I have a hard time saying that any contract was involved.
e.g. software stores should be set up like this: I go in, some guy explains to me the contract for a particular piece of software, what I can and can't do with it and what updates I am entitled to etc. I then sign it and he burns me a CD with the software that I made a contract for. All clean and nice eh? The bookstore model with a EULA is essentially a bait-and-switch.
You don't get it. A 120GB HDD costs like $300 right? now you want to back it up.
CDs are out of the question (can you say 170 CDs!!)
A DVD-R drive (right now) costs the same or more than the drive, then you have to buy the media, and you don't want to buy the cheapest right, because it's a backup. And it still takes like 24+ disks to do a backup.
So the only viable option for backup is DDS tape. Which you need like $4000 just to get going. So the backup costs over 10x the media?!?! Most places simply CANNOT affort this, it's not an issue of will not. You can buy like 4 whole systems for that.
So what do you do. Well you just buy another drive for $300, put it in another machine, and work up a system whereby it's mostly isolated from the system it's backing up. (off-site being ideal.) You could even buy 2 or 3 and not even come close to the price of the DDS solution.
At some point DDS becomes economical, say if you have 15 120GB drives to back up, but if you only have one sometimes you just can't justify it. Also there is some breakpoint in how much that data is worth. If it's worth enough, yes you should probably have it on tapes in a saftey deposit box or something.
The bottom line is analog TVs are incredibly simple pieces of technology essentially unchanged since the '30s. A modern multi-sync monitor is really quite sophisticated by comparison. The only reason it can make sense is because the price of anything can be beat down just by making enough of them.
(I'm not saying that this is a market problem, but that the market CAN make anything profitable even with bad standards. That just hasn't worked here, so the bad standards show.)
You do realize that displaying 24fps on a 60Hz display is a pain. DVD players do this, but with lots of hints from the stream, doing it with no hints is a pain. And I won't even touch trying to display an interlaced signal on a non-interlaced display and vice versa (think visible artifacts in motion)As far as the rest, I think the point is that there are so many standards it seems like none at all. You have just said that the setmakers make their sets to do 1080i and rig all the rest. That's called a (de facto) standard. i.e. ONE format chosen above the others.
There is actually a reason for minutes and hours to be divided into 60 units. It's the lowest number that is divisible by 2,3,4,and 5 i.e. it's easy to divide an hour or minute into sections: 1/2 hour, 1/3 hour 1/5 hour etc.
And why 24 hours do you say. Well 12 is divisible by 2,3 and 4, and there's two parts to a day (night and day).
365 days is just the way it is.
So those anchient babylonians really did know what they were doing.
The other guy is right, but to add, if you get time from a stratum 1 server you are stratum 2 server. At least that's how I understood it. I don't know anything about Windows ntp implementation but it sounnds like your configuration is not right since the host should figure out it's stratum from the stratum of it's references. I use the local server at my university just fine (stratum 2 I think), but that's in Linux.
Actually so-called "hybrid" cars are a step in this direction. Trying to use the gasoline engine only in it's efficient band and the electric motor in other rpm ranges.
Why aren't cars like this? Why do people drive drive SUVs on the highway instead of compacts? It's cultural, people seem intent on buying inefficient, high-maintenance vehicles, so that's what gets manufactured.
But you still have to pay capital gains on the money from the buyback right? Wouldn't this only be 'good' if you make more than a certain amount of money so that the capital gains rate is less than your income tax rate?
Copyright is a negotiated agreement for material that is publically disseminated (the author gets a limited monopoly in exchange for not keeping his work under lock and key). Movie companies don't like this agreement, so they want to change the laws to extend their theatre into your home. i.e. they want to be able to publically distrubte material and keep it under lock and key also! Alan's point is to leave copyright alone and they should use their own hardware and possibly contractual measures to 'reach into the home'. Then just let the market do it's job and determine if this is a viable business model.
Why are you comparing it to one person?
I'm not going to go to the library and dig out your references, but the correct comparison is, for example, to 250 people each of whom must go through the sample of 10,000 pictures and find their designated person. I figure humans would probably be pretty decent at that.
We're evaluating the pattern matching ability of the computer, not it's efficiency. Computers can do things terribly and still beat a human at efficiency just because they can do it so fast. (c.f. any brute-force encryption breaking technique)
No, I believe it was the avowed goal of Americans to keep the USSR from creating a worldwide communist reign (with them in charge). It was kill-or-be-killed.
Notice that China is communist and we're not actively trying to destroy them.
Americans are historically VERY isolationist. But the threat of the USSR gaining influence over most of the world was just too much to ignore.
You apparently don't know anything about fusion either. Current reactors have a hugh shield around them (made of Lithium I believe) to catch all the stray neutrons. That stuff ends up being radioactive due to the constant bombardment by high-energy neutrons.
Nuclear waste is only dangerous in a concentrated form. At low enough concentrations you can hold it in your hand without danger. So probably the best thing to do is take a teeeny bit and put it EVERYWHERE. Maybe gauged by the amount of natural radiation in the soil in any particular place. But try getting the public to go for that! Putting nuclear waste in EVERYONE'S back yard. (note that this is essentially what current power plants do by putting all their waste into the air.)
MCSE: Then we must release our source code to public! This is confidential!!
Presumably this means that you are somehow REQUIRED to keep the source code secret. Is there a similar requirement for the executable? I think that in such a case one would be safer going with non-GPL code (i.e. write it from scratch) to keep unforseen bad things from happening. (Say some guy in the future mistakenly distributes the executable, you're probably still required to give out the source.)
I think the proper question is "why is this confidential". Sounds like an awful lot like a security through obscurity situation to me, but that may just be because you haven't said very much.
The fact that "everybody knows" that whatever the lottery funds (usually schools) gets it's "normal" budget cut (which came from tax revenues) makes it a tax.
I have never met anyone who played the lottery to give money to schools or anything else. People play the lottery because they want to.
But giving money to schools is why it got passed! A lottery like the state run ones is something that it is illegal for private organizations to do. A special legal exception had to be made, the most common justification for this is to fund schools.
It's OK for the government to take more of my money because I can afford it?
Our entire income tax system is based on this concept. I would counter -- It's ok to take the same amount of money from people below the poverty line as from a multimillionaire? of course it's not. (Lotteries are worse, a multimillionaire would never even play.)
State Lotteries are a bad idea that somehow it became popular to for the states to pass. Kinda like winner-takes-all in electoral votes, just dumb in hindsight (yes this is a state thing).
It's called a regressive tax, those less able to pay end up paying more.
With property taxes, those with more property bear more burden. This is the same reason that basic food usually has no sales tax.
Exactly!!
For those who don't know, PKI=Public Key Infrastructure. It's how you know that a public key you have for someone is actually the right one. Having a working (i.e. secure) PKI is what makes "using" encryption difficult. Everyone always assumes that explaining PKI to anybody is too difficult, so reporters like the one who wrote this article say things like "products aren't easy to use" when really they are and all the difficulty is in having a secure PKI.
It is probably telling that most widespread PKI, used for web certificates is pretty much completely broken in practice. Do YOU look at the company name listed on the certificate before you send you submit your credit card info? I've never seen a browser that by default gets you to at least verify that the company name on the cert is right. This makes man-in-the middle attacks almost easy.
Hopefully the moderation on this will go down with time.
/.er mistake (there are many enlightented /.er's) of confusing patents and copyrights when they are actually entirely different things.
"we released the web into the public domain"?
Just by using this language you definintely aren't in the "We". "the Web" as you put it is not a piece of code that has some license on it. Most of what one could call "the Web" is a set of open standards. You can implement this standard in code under any license you want. This is largely due to the lack of patents on the methods described in those standards but that has nothing directly to do with the GPL in this case.
You seem to have made a normal ignorant
Just clearing the air a little.
Well currently mine is about a $500 linux box (not real-time encoding, that's not what I was interested in) and about a $100 tv-tuner add on (and a $200 hard drive at the time) but it also acts as a backup server, answering machine, general big disk machine and a few other functions. And I can write the recorded shows off to CDR recorded at my choice of bitrates and edit commercials out if I want, and watch the shows on any machine I want. And if I need more space I'll just buy a new hard drive at commodity prices. And at the time it was my desktop machine (i.e. already owned), but I stopped doing that because it was pretty annoying to use when it was recording.
Oh and there's no subscription fee or company watching my viewing habits.
$1300 Tivo it is not.