Astronomers really need to boost their self esteem. Personally, I always choose myself as the reference point. Don't let this mislead you to the assumption that the common center of mass is always within my body...
Even less know that neither goes around the other one. It totally depends on what you define as your reference coordinate system. If you'll excuse me now, I'll do some weightlifting with mother earth...
Offtopic: Right now, on a tv show in Europe, someone is betting that the showmaster can't find three U.S. citizens who count the seats in the audience and report the same number.
If that involved writing part of it in the kernal, more power to them.[...](Aside from security.. but that is being fixed, although slowly)
*Cough*
But Microsoft is setting the standards. Obviously the W3 et all are not doing a good job of enforcing their web standards. What the internet really needs, it's sad to say, but is Microsoft to win the browser wars and create a standard that everybody will obey.
Now that you opened my eyes, I think we should return to monarchy, when people knew what was right and what was not, because there was only one opinion to choose from: the king's. If I could only remember why we moved away from monarchy...
Oh sure, Rome had its orgies, slavery, egomaniacal emperors, and gladiatorial games but they also had one of the most vibrant and advanced civilizations of their day and paved the way for modern Western society.
What exactly is bad about having an advanced civilization and paving the way for modern Western society?
Do not forget the amount of damage that would have to be done to the ecosystem to boost MIR into a much higher orbit or even out of earth orbit. Moving enough fuel into orbit would burn a great deal of fuel in earth's atmosphere. I do agree that dangerous materials should be removed before dropping it into the ocean, though.
You have a very strange idea of what a "large chunk of water" is...
Stop using cars, you're killing flies. Dropping MIR into the ocean is a rare event as opposed to dumping hot water and industrial waste into coastal areas of the oceans. It's like the difference between an extraordinarily hot summer day and a change in climate. And there is much less coastal area than there is offshore ocean.
There is a homepage dedicated to the German Future Award 2000. It is of course in german, so fish all you want.
The other innovations nominated for the award were:
Autonomous Radiosensors
Integrated process for manufacturing paper
Helium-3-Magnetic-Resonance-Tomography
Personally, I would have loved to see the autonomous sensors win. Small sensors, without an electric power supply, send changes in temperature and other properties wirelessly. On top of that, these sensors are extremely robust. But since this is slashdot, that'll probably earn me ignorance or -1, offtopic.
Most people just don't think about whether they want intellectual property law or not. They just give in to their "want to have" drive extremely fast. If there really is a single right answer to the question "Is intellectual property a good idea?", then it sure isn't obvious. Intellectual property is different from all other property that we know. Only in terms of intellectual property you can create something just to find out that someone else owns what you just created. This single difference alone suggests that we better not treat intellectual property like all other property. But should the concept of intellectual property be trashed altogether? What about innovation being crippled because cost will not be matched by revenue when revenue will be crippled by non-existance of intellectual property laws?
Since other passages in the text also suggest that AMM thinks that we need to give out-of-the-norm stuff some room, I think it's just that he must be mad. Or not. Depends. Project 2501: Life perpetuates itself through diversity.
Since there are some typos and an undeclared ambiguity in the translation, I would like to post some corrections. BTW: I do of course not claim copyright in the translation. Feel free to use it as you please.
The note about the amiguity of "Regierungserklaerung" really should be made before the text and look something like this:
[Translator's note: "Regierungserklaerung" translates to "government statement", but
has a second word-by-word meaning which translates to "government explanation". The
german original is titled "Regierungs erklaerung"
which suggests the latter meaning.
The ambiguity is present throughout the whole text however.]
the the is one the surplus
I had visited the local police office...
Add explanation: ...sympathetic people, whom, on top of that, the suits obviously disliked.
[Translator's note: The german original is ambiguous at this point. The sentence could
also be translated to "..., who obviously didn't like the suits either."]
know is now:
And who now, that the internet thing is just starting to really take off
worldwide,...
on networked should be just networked:
Everybody goes their own way and all are networked.
Yes, I do have some intellectual property. It isn't much but then I am not rich in "real world" terms either. If you think that intellectual property is a tool of oppression, then you are mistaking the effect for the cause, in a way.
I do agree though that there is a problem with ip: you can create something just to find that what you just created belongs to someone else. This just can't happen with physical property rights and is the key reason why even those who would benefit from ip are not generally pro ip.
"Do we really want one hundred percent freedom from any kind of intellectual property? The existance of the public domain should be fought for, but at the same time people have the right to choose to sell the end-product of their time and effort, not have it stolen and copied the instant they attempt to make it available."
I think that is what AMM wants: Choose your gamemode and play by the rules of that mode. If you're on suit turf, play by suit rules, if you're on the no-ip turf, play by no-ip rules. He says, he's trying to allow suits to have their place on the net as well. He does not say exactly how this is going to work. The government statement/explanation is probably more about saying that he tries to be the counterweight which brings the discussion into balance. There are enough suits on the board already, so it would be unwise to enter the discussion with a well balanced compromise as starting point.
Very well. Ladies and Gentlemen, I have been asked to write a government
statement. And after all I have been asked to do that by a newspaper which
is said to be read in government circles.
So I am supposed to write a government statement. But I never liked governments.
Not at all. You should thank my mother for her vigilance, without which I had, around
the age of 11, joined the RAF. Granted, I was a little young.
But somehow I found the terrorists sympathetic. I had visited the the
local police office and got myself a wanted poster. Finally pictures of some
sympathetic people, whom, on top of that, the tie-wearers obviously disliked.
Somehow my mother didn't think that was ok, a real wanted poster between pictures
of pop-bands and the "Deutsche Welle". And it was gone. Even today I still resent
this invasive event a little.
Somehow I may have grown up later. Critics claim exactly that hasn't happened.
So after all, you will have to do the judging yourself. Anyways, I have been elected,
into world government. What do you mean you don't believe that? That's of course why
I am writing this government statement. Some governments just have to be explained.
Or maybe let's say, some more, some less.
[Translator's note: "Regierungserklaerung" translates to "government statement", but
has a second word-by-word meaning which translates to "government explanation".]
Presently, people's view of the world is being increasingly influenced by
media content, which is accessible through electronic networks. The internet
isn't just one of these networks, based on protocols, standards, addressing schemes
and rules. First and foremost, it's a cultural area, where participants are by principle
not determined to be either sender or receiver. That way net reality is made by
the users.
ICANN regulates the assignment of names, numbers and the introduction
of protocols and issues the applicable rules - the architecture of the net. Or
in other words, the government.
Since I am supposed to explain the government to you, I probably have to
to talk a little about the view of media in general which is prevalent in
your culture group. The governing generation is predominantly one which grew
up with the valve radio. Back then, when sender and receiver where easily
distinguishable. This is called the one-way model. And that's over.
Today, the net comprises an area of communication. This is called the
network model. And everybody who plugs in can enter that area. Can look around,
take something for himself, can put something into it. On the internet we call
this gift culture. A small electronic paradise. Who just said social romanticism?
Funny things developed in there, while, in the network of networks, many
different people in colorful exchange created a new global cultural space.
Everything was available, because the planet is big, the aliens are among us
and, well, lawyers were far away. Back then, they were busy passing laws
against terrorists and creating gigantic constructs for security.
Today things have changed a little. At some point in time, everything
outside was completely safe, but unfortunately also a little put in stone.
And because not all liked being so confined, they created for themselves
a new area of freedom. With no states, with no lawyers, just free flow of
information, a few rough rules of conduct and apart from that, everybody
just does what he wants. Rough consensus and running code.
You know, blowing up freshly cemented concrete prisons was ok somehow,
but moving into the internet was the more thorough way. Thoughts are free
after all. Granted, even some members of the internet culture were a little
pressed by that free thought thing. Then money came into play, and if already
borderless, then of course unlimited amounts of money.
Since I don't want to hurt anyone's religious feelings, least of all in a
government statement, I will not talk about "eCommerce" or
"eBusiness".
Believe in what you want to believe. Belief is said to be able to move mountains
after all.
But stop bothering us with your lawyers. Unfortunately, the business people
have brought them with them, these pals who see a contractual activity in
buying a pack of jellybabies and talk about the unobjectionable and natural,
not even sexual, act of proliferation of bits in horrid terms like
"pirate copies".
And who know, that the internet thing is just starting to really take off
worldwide, want to declare intellectual property. And cry out loud when they
realize that theft is committed, all day long, on every computer on this planet.
And who naturally want to add filters, policemen, prisons and barricades against
theft.
Ok, so the situation is there. And we, the inhabitants of the net, have to
react. Some of us concentrate more on that unlimited money thing, others have precautiously
rented spaceports, South Sea islands and servers in satellites, to be prepared for
the coming confrontation.
Well, then there was this government thing. The net was essentially based
just on a common language, which the computers use to talk to eachother, and
an address space, so they could contact one another, but the U.S. government
had been involved with the development of the language, the assignment of
addresses and the creation of the namespace. And some day, when the governments
of other countries and the generation of suits knew about the "Double-U Double-U
Double-U", they of course also wanted a say. But this is really a separate
and rather long story, even though it finally lead to ICANN being the corporate
construct it is.
At this point and another I abbreviate a little.
This point: So now there is ICANN, it's a business founded by the U.S.
government under Californian jurisdiction, not only do they regulate the
assignment of names, numbers and implementation of protocols worldwide,
they also - almost - operate the vital parts of the centralistic and hierarchical
namespace. Almost, because the U.S. government prefers not to lose control
over the core of it all, the root-zone file.
The other point: ICANN wanted to govern, but without admitting it. Attention
had always been paid to be "just" a technical board, which "just"
regulates technical issues and "just" creates the rules for assigning
names and numbers. But it was no use. What happened is what always happens when central
bodies are created, no matter if they handle things "representativly"
or not: the era of greed began.
And that brings us back to the lawyers, the suits and the other governments.
Aside from the fact that ICANN's understatement was of course also guided by
business interests and not taking into account that there are some unpleasant
stories about the mafia-like connection between ICANN and the first registrar
- Network Solutions, lawyers suddenly wanted to declare right of
ownership on names.
There were already some cases of legal disputes between trademark and domain owners.
The lawyers had discovered the internet and it annoyed them. Really annoyed
them. Obtrusive greed, hidden behind laws. In a sense, the government should
have intervened then. It could have said: Why not have a separate namespace
where trademark law does not apply. But the government, ICANN, didn't want that.
Because it is itself comprised of lawyers. And they wore ties, which are known
to cut down on the brain's oxygen supply. And because of that, they did not
have any imagination and didn't understand at all why a public space like that
is needed or what a parallel universe is.
And because they were Americans, they of course preferred U.S. trademark law,
designated WIPO to be the potential arbitration court (the plaintiff's choice)
and thus gave way to the other lawyers taking hold of that namespace.
This is not just annoying, it's a crime. A crime against the nature of the
internet, a crime against the internet as a cultural public domain.
What is called "intellectual property" by the lawyers is - as every
Latin student knows - simply theft from the public domain. And since we - the
inhabitants of the net - don't feel like having the public domain destroyed
by thiefs, we had to take some proactive steps.
Everybody goes their own way and all are on networked. Through the public
space, the collective subconsciousness and the goddess of conflict, discord and
dispute, Eris. Who rampaged between the lines. But before you misunderstand
this as New Age talk, back to government business.
So, I am in the government now, nominally speaking, and de jure sometime
in November. And i still will intend to keep the public domain free of commercial
rules, to guard the free flow of information and to let the bits have their
freedom. We want gardens of data all over, where they can grow, flourish and
reproduce. Those are the cultural aspects of my upcoming government work.
Then of course, there are the organisational questions, and since governments,
centralistic and hierarchical systems, are vulnerable to abuse and an obstacle
to progress, I would like to let everything run as decentralized as possible, and
on top of that, it has to become transparent. And the U.S. government, they should
worry more about their education system instead of trying to control the namespace.
Just look at the geographical understanding of ICANN; that tells a lot about them.
The rest of government work will probably be to create networked parallel
universes through the coexistence of different cultures, each with rules of
their own. And after that, everybody just does what they want. So, the suits
will have their own space, too. They can play trademark law there (not standardized
globally, but who cares), sue eachother over different views of freedom of
expression or just dissolve into nothingness.
As long as they accept other cultures, that's all ok. I am really trying, too,
honestly. To make the coexistence thing work.
So, I am now declaring the government to you, and that means that you are now
supposed to govern yourselves. Just do whatever you want. That's what I am doing.
Just because the signal appears to be unencrypted it doesn't have to contain only the obvious datastream. Steganographic methods could have added something else. It could of course be some illegal content, but who's gonna find out? The legal system can of course create enough fear to make people stop "abusing" the net. But since such "crime" is really hard to detect, penalties would have to be really extreme just to compensate for the rarity of convictions. Before you know it, copyright infringement puts you in the ranks of terrorists. That's a tradeoff I would not like to see made into that direction.
The point was that as long as ones end up as ones and zeros end up as zeros on the other side of the cable, there is no need for a better cable. The example of cd-pickups and cabling is excellent. There is absolutely no point in putting a better cable or a better pickup-mechanism into a cd-player if the ordinary one achieves bit-error-rates which are uncritical to the error-correction. C't, a german computer and technology magazine, tested how well audio cds are read by various CD-ROM drives. The drives which were not susceptible to frame jitter read the discs flawlessly, meaning 0 errors. That would not be improved by throwing more money in the form of more expensive cables at it. A perfect result can not be improved. It is this fact which some audiophiles fail to acknowledge because they are so used to their world, where there is no such thing as a perfect result.
The superstition that certain audiophiles' attitude to audio equipment is based on is crucial in the analogue domain: It is the driving force for ever better equipment which, by lack of objective means to measure quality, would otherwise always produce the feeling of not getting a "good enough sound". Digital absoluteness doesn't allow for superstition. If you don't trust it, you can measure bit-error-rates, calculate signal to noise ratios and generally make objective statements about the quality of the equipment. Until the signal finally leaves the digital world. That's why audiophiles are turned to when it comes to lossy compression: All of a sudden, the drive for (unachievable) perfect signal reproduction is the only hope to get a good enough result, because there is no truly objective way of measuring quality.
MP3 compression is all about knowing what parts of an audio signal the human ear "hears" and what parts it doesn't "hear". This information is known as a "psycho-acoustic" model. There's much more you can't hear than just low-bit jitter. Analog-digital-analog conversion leaves these unaudible parts of the signal intact, because they are important parts of the signal to the converters, just not to your ears/brain.
The trick with watermarks is to have a better psycho-acoustic model than what most everybody else uses, and then to replace the parts of the signal, which according to the more advanced model are inaudible but treated as "signal" by other models, with the information of the watermark.
The other way around: High-pass filters filter out low frequencies (and let the high frequencies pass through, thus the name), low-pass filters filter out high frequencies.
BTW, it is much more complicated than that. MP3 compression is achieved in the quantization step, where psycho-acoustic models of human perception dictate which part of the signal gets encoded in which number of bits. These psycho-acoustic models describe what will and what won't be heard. Since these models are based on empirical research, they can probably be refined to a point where the commonly used models encode parts of the signal as audible where the more advanced model identifies this part as unaudible and can put the watermark in there. The parts of the signal which are unaudible are much more complicated to describe than just with frequency ranges. For example, you can't hear a low-volume sound right after (and even a really short time before) a much louder sound of a similar frequency.
The biggest problem I have with counterstrike is that there are always some players in a game who know that the camper will win. For an untrained CS player like me this just means that I play the run und gun style, die and wait for the next round. A game of CS usually means 60 seconds of play and 2 minutes of watching someone being shot by a camper.
Today's games, even if reduced to the fps-genre, offer just as much variation and innovation as games from the good ole 8-bit days. I guess it's just because it looks more realistic that people don't see at first sight in which way a game introduces new ideas. The common ground is a 3d-environment and players running around in it, trying to shoot other players and mostly everything else is different from game to game. I have yet to hear someone complaining about basketball being unoriginal or unentertaining, because it's just some players running around with a ball, like in so many other games.
Warning: This comment will feature anti Slashdot-mainstream opinions.
The discussion about reverse engineering is directly linked to software patents. Either software patents will have to be allowed or reverse engineering will have to be prohibited in a country. RE without SP would be a bad move and SP without RE would be an equally bad move. The primary reason for disallowing reverse engineering is to keep competitors from using your research results for free and thus gaining an unfair advantage over you. This can be more elegantly achieved by software patents: Only truly new ideas will be protected (in theory) and they will be better protected. Disallowing RE in a situation like that would of course inhibit finding SP violations, so that wouldn't be wise.
A way to stop spyware is to make it illegal and attach really prohibitive fines to each single incident. RE is not the only way to detect abuse of user data. You could create some sort of honey-pot and create false but identifiable user data. Then wait until it is used. Granted, this way is not nearly as easy or failsafe as RE, but it should work.
The one big mistake of the open software community and think-alikes is the feeling that technology can replace law to a great extent. We are now in a situation where the do's and dont's are mostly dictated by technical rules because "real life" rules often don't apply without serious bending. Thus, for example, port scans are now legal. People claim they can be used for legitimate purposes, like polling systems for web server versions and making statistics of that information. How would you feel, if every 10 minutes somebody came to your front door and pushed the handle down to see if the door is open, for statistical purposes...?
I do agree that reverse engineering should be allowed, but then there has to be some other way of protecting research results. Society is not advanced enough yet to honor research directly and unforced. And that other way will most likely be a law, not a technology.
The file is in the process of being mirrored by several of the sites mentioned on the official mirrors list. Most of these sites have not finished the downloading yet, but here is one working mirror. I'm downloading at about 90k/s via T-DSL, Germany.
The file is as of now in the process of being mirrored; it is not there yet (about 60% done).
The link misses the unix directory. The correct link is
ftp://ftp.sunet.se/pub/unix/Linux/distributions/su se/suse/i386/live-eval-7.0/
>I was always entertained by 3dfx's late
>notion of including support for 22.5 bit
>colour, as a halfway point between 16 and
>32. I don't remember how they were going
>to get alf a bit, so if someone else knows
>the details, I'd be most interested.
The colourdepth is a technical value which describes the number of distinctive colours that a card can produce. 16 bit equals 65536 colours, 32 bit equals more than 16.7 million colours. The problem with these technical numbers is that they don't take into account what a human eye can distinguish. Visual perception is not linear. Users of early drivers for tnt-cards used to have the problem of games showing up too dark. That is because games were optimized for Voodoo2 gamma values. Gamma is a number which describes the non-linearity of the digital-to-analogue conversion. The Voodoo2 had a gamma value which "wasted" less colours on the dark end of the scale and was better adapted to human vision. To get the numbers of distinguishable colours which can be put on the screen by a Voodoo2, a graphics card with the now more common TNT1-gamma would need 22.5 bits per pixel.
Slashdot Mirror
Astronomers really need to boost their self esteem. Personally, I always choose myself as the reference point. Don't let this mislead you to the assumption that the common center of mass is always within my body...
Even less know that neither goes around the other one. It totally depends on what you define as your reference coordinate system. If you'll excuse me now, I'll do some weightlifting with mother earth... Offtopic: Right now, on a tv show in Europe, someone is betting that the showmaster can't find three U.S. citizens who count the seats in the audience and report the same number.
If that involved writing part of it in the kernal, more power to them.[...](Aside from security.. but that is being fixed, although slowly)
*Cough*
But Microsoft is setting the standards. Obviously the W3 et all are not doing a good job of enforcing their web standards. What the internet really needs, it's sad to say, but is Microsoft to win the browser wars and create a standard that everybody will obey.
Now that you opened my eyes, I think we should return to monarchy, when people knew what was right and what was not, because there was only one opinion to choose from: the king's. If I could only remember why we moved away from monarchy...
Oh sure, Rome had its orgies, slavery, egomaniacal emperors, and gladiatorial games but they also had one of the most vibrant and advanced civilizations of their day and paved the way for modern Western society.
What exactly is bad about having an advanced civilization and paving the way for modern Western society?
Do not forget the amount of damage that would have to be done to the ecosystem to boost MIR into a much higher orbit or even out of earth orbit. Moving enough fuel into orbit would burn a great deal of fuel in earth's atmosphere. I do agree that dangerous materials should be removed before dropping it into the ocean, though.
You have a very strange idea of what a "large chunk of water" is...
Stop using cars, you're killing flies. Dropping MIR into the ocean is a rare event as opposed to dumping hot water and industrial waste into coastal areas of the oceans. It's like the difference between an extraordinarily hot summer day and a change in climate. And there is much less coastal area than there is offshore ocean.
Ok, the ignorant has found the post. Now to the moderators...
There is a homepage dedicated to the German Future Award 2000. It is of course in german, so fish all you want.
The other innovations nominated for the award were:
- Autonomous Radiosensors
- Integrated process for manufacturing paper
- Helium-3-Magnetic-Resonance-Tomography
Personally, I would have loved to see the autonomous sensors win. Small sensors, without an electric power supply, send changes in temperature and other properties wirelessly. On top of that, these sensors are extremely robust. But since this is slashdot, that'll probably earn me ignorance or -1, offtopic.Most people just don't think about whether they want intellectual property law or not. They just give in to their "want to have" drive extremely fast. If there really is a single right answer to the question "Is intellectual property a good idea?", then it sure isn't obvious. Intellectual property is different from all other property that we know. Only in terms of intellectual property you can create something just to find out that someone else owns what you just created. This single difference alone suggests that we better not treat intellectual property like all other property. But should the concept of intellectual property be trashed altogether? What about innovation being crippled because cost will not be matched by revenue when revenue will be crippled by non-existance of intellectual property laws?
Since other passages in the text also suggest that AMM thinks that we need to give out-of-the-norm stuff some room, I think it's just that he must be mad. Or not. Depends.
Project 2501: Life perpetuates itself through diversity.
[Translator's note: "Regierungserklaerung" translates to "government statement", but has a second word-by-word meaning which translates to "government explanation". The german original is titled "Regierungs erklaerung" which suggests the latter meaning. The ambiguity is present throughout the whole text however.]
I had visited the local police office...
And who now, that the internet thing is just starting to really take off worldwide,...
Everybody goes their own way and all are networked.
I do agree though that there is a problem with ip: you can create something just to find that what you just created belongs to someone else. This just can't happen with physical property rights and is the key reason why even those who would benefit from ip are not generally pro ip.
"Do we really want one hundred percent freedom from any kind of intellectual property? The existance of the public domain should be fought for, but at the same time people have the right to choose to sell the end-product of their time and effort, not have it stolen and copied the instant they attempt to make it available."
I think that is what AMM wants: Choose your gamemode and play by the rules of that mode. If you're on suit turf, play by suit rules, if you're on the no-ip turf, play by no-ip rules. He says, he's trying to allow suits to have their place on the net as well. He does not say exactly how this is going to work. The government statement/explanation is probably more about saying that he tries to be the counterweight which brings the discussion into balance. There are enough suits on the board already, so it would be unwise to enter the discussion with a well balanced compromise as starting point.
Government statement
Very well. Ladies and Gentlemen, I have been asked to write a government statement. And after all I have been asked to do that by a newspaper which is said to be read in government circles.
So I am supposed to write a government statement. But I never liked governments. Not at all. You should thank my mother for her vigilance, without which I had, around the age of 11, joined the RAF. Granted, I was a little young.
But somehow I found the terrorists sympathetic. I had visited the the local police office and got myself a wanted poster. Finally pictures of some sympathetic people, whom, on top of that, the tie-wearers obviously disliked. Somehow my mother didn't think that was ok, a real wanted poster between pictures of pop-bands and the "Deutsche Welle". And it was gone. Even today I still resent this invasive event a little.
Somehow I may have grown up later. Critics claim exactly that hasn't happened. So after all, you will have to do the judging yourself. Anyways, I have been elected, into world government. What do you mean you don't believe that? That's of course why I am writing this government statement. Some governments just have to be explained. Or maybe let's say, some more, some less.
[Translator's note: "Regierungserklaerung" translates to "government statement", but has a second word-by-word meaning which translates to "government explanation".]
Presently, people's view of the world is being increasingly influenced by media content, which is accessible through electronic networks. The internet isn't just one of these networks, based on protocols, standards, addressing schemes and rules. First and foremost, it's a cultural area, where participants are by principle not determined to be either sender or receiver. That way net reality is made by the users.
ICANN regulates the assignment of names, numbers and the introduction of protocols and issues the applicable rules - the architecture of the net. Or in other words, the government.
Since I am supposed to explain the government to you, I probably have to to talk a little about the view of media in general which is prevalent in your culture group. The governing generation is predominantly one which grew up with the valve radio. Back then, when sender and receiver where easily distinguishable. This is called the one-way model. And that's over. Today, the net comprises an area of communication. This is called the network model. And everybody who plugs in can enter that area. Can look around, take something for himself, can put something into it. On the internet we call this gift culture. A small electronic paradise. Who just said social romanticism?
Funny things developed in there, while, in the network of networks, many different people in colorful exchange created a new global cultural space. Everything was available, because the planet is big, the aliens are among us and, well, lawyers were far away. Back then, they were busy passing laws against terrorists and creating gigantic constructs for security.
Today things have changed a little. At some point in time, everything outside was completely safe, but unfortunately also a little put in stone. And because not all liked being so confined, they created for themselves a new area of freedom. With no states, with no lawyers, just free flow of information, a few rough rules of conduct and apart from that, everybody just does what he wants. Rough consensus and running code.
You know, blowing up freshly cemented concrete prisons was ok somehow, but moving into the internet was the more thorough way. Thoughts are free after all. Granted, even some members of the internet culture were a little pressed by that free thought thing. Then money came into play, and if already borderless, then of course unlimited amounts of money.
Since I don't want to hurt anyone's religious feelings, least of all in a government statement, I will not talk about "eCommerce" or "eBusiness". Believe in what you want to believe. Belief is said to be able to move mountains after all.
But stop bothering us with your lawyers. Unfortunately, the business people have brought them with them, these pals who see a contractual activity in buying a pack of jellybabies and talk about the unobjectionable and natural, not even sexual, act of proliferation of bits in horrid terms like "pirate copies".
And who know, that the internet thing is just starting to really take off worldwide, want to declare intellectual property. And cry out loud when they realize that theft is committed, all day long, on every computer on this planet. And who naturally want to add filters, policemen, prisons and barricades against theft.
Ok, so the situation is there. And we, the inhabitants of the net, have to react. Some of us concentrate more on that unlimited money thing, others have precautiously rented spaceports, South Sea islands and servers in satellites, to be prepared for the coming confrontation.
Well, then there was this government thing. The net was essentially based just on a common language, which the computers use to talk to eachother, and an address space, so they could contact one another, but the U.S. government had been involved with the development of the language, the assignment of addresses and the creation of the namespace. And some day, when the governments of other countries and the generation of suits knew about the "Double-U Double-U Double-U", they of course also wanted a say. But this is really a separate and rather long story, even though it finally lead to ICANN being the corporate construct it is.
At this point and another I abbreviate a little.
This point: So now there is ICANN, it's a business founded by the U.S. government under Californian jurisdiction, not only do they regulate the assignment of names, numbers and implementation of protocols worldwide, they also - almost - operate the vital parts of the centralistic and hierarchical namespace. Almost, because the U.S. government prefers not to lose control over the core of it all, the root-zone file.
The other point: ICANN wanted to govern, but without admitting it. Attention had always been paid to be "just" a technical board, which "just" regulates technical issues and "just" creates the rules for assigning names and numbers. But it was no use. What happened is what always happens when central bodies are created, no matter if they handle things "representativly" or not: the era of greed began.
And that brings us back to the lawyers, the suits and the other governments. Aside from the fact that ICANN's understatement was of course also guided by business interests and not taking into account that there are some unpleasant stories about the mafia-like connection between ICANN and the first registrar - Network Solutions, lawyers suddenly wanted to declare right of ownership on names.
There were already some cases of legal disputes between trademark and domain owners.
The lawyers had discovered the internet and it annoyed them. Really annoyed them. Obtrusive greed, hidden behind laws. In a sense, the government should have intervened then. It could have said: Why not have a separate namespace where trademark law does not apply. But the government, ICANN, didn't want that. Because it is itself comprised of lawyers. And they wore ties, which are known to cut down on the brain's oxygen supply. And because of that, they did not have any imagination and didn't understand at all why a public space like that is needed or what a parallel universe is.
And because they were Americans, they of course preferred U.S. trademark law, designated WIPO to be the potential arbitration court (the plaintiff's choice) and thus gave way to the other lawyers taking hold of that namespace.
This is not just annoying, it's a crime. A crime against the nature of the internet, a crime against the internet as a cultural public domain. What is called "intellectual property" by the lawyers is - as every Latin student knows - simply theft from the public domain. And since we - the inhabitants of the net - don't feel like having the public domain destroyed by thiefs, we had to take some proactive steps.
Everybody goes their own way and all are on networked. Through the public space, the collective subconsciousness and the goddess of conflict, discord and dispute, Eris. Who rampaged between the lines. But before you misunderstand this as New Age talk, back to government business.
So, I am in the government now, nominally speaking, and de jure sometime in November. And i still will intend to keep the public domain free of commercial rules, to guard the free flow of information and to let the bits have their freedom. We want gardens of data all over, where they can grow, flourish and reproduce. Those are the cultural aspects of my upcoming government work.
Then of course, there are the organisational questions, and since governments, centralistic and hierarchical systems, are vulnerable to abuse and an obstacle to progress, I would like to let everything run as decentralized as possible, and on top of that, it has to become transparent. And the U.S. government, they should worry more about their education system instead of trying to control the namespace. Just look at the geographical understanding of ICANN; that tells a lot about them.
The rest of government work will probably be to create networked parallel universes through the coexistence of different cultures, each with rules of their own. And after that, everybody just does what they want. So, the suits will have their own space, too. They can play trademark law there (not standardized globally, but who cares), sue eachother over different views of freedom of expression or just dissolve into nothingness.
As long as they accept other cultures, that's all ok. I am really trying, too, honestly. To make the coexistence thing work.
So, I am now declaring the government to you, and that means that you are now supposed to govern yourselves. Just do whatever you want. That's what I am doing.
Just because the signal appears to be unencrypted it doesn't have to contain only the obvious datastream. Steganographic methods could have added something else. It could of course be some illegal content, but who's gonna find out? The legal system can of course create enough fear to make people stop "abusing" the net. But since such "crime" is really hard to detect, penalties would have to be really extreme just to compensate for the rarity of convictions. Before you know it, copyright infringement puts you in the ranks of terrorists. That's a tradeoff I would not like to see made into that direction.
The point was that as long as ones end up as ones and zeros end up as zeros on the other side of the cable, there is no need for a better cable. The example of cd-pickups and cabling is excellent. There is absolutely no point in putting a better cable or a better pickup-mechanism into a cd-player if the ordinary one achieves bit-error-rates which are uncritical to the error-correction. C't, a german computer and technology magazine, tested how well audio cds are read by various CD-ROM drives. The drives which were not susceptible to frame jitter read the discs flawlessly, meaning 0 errors. That would not be improved by throwing more money in the form of more expensive cables at it. A perfect result can not be improved. It is this fact which some audiophiles fail to acknowledge because they are so used to their world, where there is no such thing as a perfect result.
The superstition that certain audiophiles' attitude to audio equipment is based on is crucial in the analogue domain: It is the driving force for ever better equipment which, by lack of objective means to measure quality, would otherwise always produce the feeling of not getting a "good enough sound". Digital absoluteness doesn't allow for superstition. If you don't trust it, you can measure bit-error-rates, calculate signal to noise ratios and generally make objective statements about the quality of the equipment. Until the signal finally leaves the digital world. That's why audiophiles are turned to when it comes to lossy compression: All of a sudden, the drive for (unachievable) perfect signal reproduction is the only hope to get a good enough result, because there is no truly objective way of measuring quality.
The trick with watermarks is to have a better psycho-acoustic model than what most everybody else uses, and then to replace the parts of the signal, which according to the more advanced model are inaudible but treated as "signal" by other models, with the information of the watermark.
BTW, it is much more complicated than that. MP3 compression is achieved in the quantization step, where psycho-acoustic models of human perception dictate which part of the signal gets encoded in which number of bits. These psycho-acoustic models describe what will and what won't be heard. Since these models are based on empirical research, they can probably be refined to a point where the commonly used models encode parts of the signal as audible where the more advanced model identifies this part as unaudible and can put the watermark in there. The parts of the signal which are unaudible are much more complicated to describe than just with frequency ranges. For example, you can't hear a low-volume sound right after (and even a really short time before) a much louder sound of a similar frequency.
Today's games, even if reduced to the fps-genre, offer just as much variation and innovation as games from the good ole 8-bit days. I guess it's just because it looks more realistic that people don't see at first sight in which way a game introduces new ideas. The common ground is a 3d-environment and players running around in it, trying to shoot other players and mostly everything else is different from game to game. I have yet to hear someone complaining about basketball being unoriginal or unentertaining, because it's just some players running around with a ball, like in so many other games.
The discussion about reverse engineering is directly linked to software patents. Either software patents will have to be allowed or reverse engineering will have to be prohibited in a country. RE without SP would be a bad move and SP without RE would be an equally bad move. The primary reason for disallowing reverse engineering is to keep competitors from using your research results for free and thus gaining an unfair advantage over you. This can be more elegantly achieved by software patents: Only truly new ideas will be protected (in theory) and they will be better protected. Disallowing RE in a situation like that would of course inhibit finding SP violations, so that wouldn't be wise.
A way to stop spyware is to make it illegal and attach really prohibitive fines to each single incident. RE is not the only way to detect abuse of user data. You could create some sort of honey-pot and create false but identifiable user data. Then wait until it is used. Granted, this way is not nearly as easy or failsafe as RE, but it should work.
The one big mistake of the open software community and think-alikes is the feeling that technology can replace law to a great extent. We are now in a situation where the do's and dont's are mostly dictated by technical rules because "real life" rules often don't apply without serious bending. Thus, for example, port scans are now legal. People claim they can be used for legitimate purposes, like polling systems for web server versions and making statistics of that information. How would you feel, if every 10 minutes somebody came to your front door and pushed the handle down to see if the door is open, for statistical purposes...?
I do agree that reverse engineering should be allowed, but then there has to be some other way of protecting research results. Society is not advanced enough yet to honor research directly and unforced. And that other way will most likely be a law, not a technology.
How did the space make it into the URL? Slashcode inserted it... Here is the correct link to the directory: ftp://ftp.e sat .net/...
ftp://ftp.esat.net/mirrors/ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/i 386/live-eval-7.0/live-evaluation-i386-7 0.iso
The file is as of now in the process of being mirrored; it is not there yet (about 60% done).u se/suse/i386/live-eval-7.0/
The link misses the unix directory. The correct link is
ftp://ftp.sunet.se/pub/unix/Linux/distributions/s
>notion of including support for 22.5 bit
>colour, as a halfway point between 16 and
>32. I don't remember how they were going
>to get alf a bit, so if someone else knows
>the details, I'd be most interested.
The colourdepth is a technical value which describes the number of distinctive colours that a card can produce. 16 bit equals 65536 colours, 32 bit equals more than 16.7 million colours. The problem with these technical numbers is that they don't take into account what a human eye can distinguish. Visual perception is not linear. Users of early drivers for tnt-cards used to have the problem of games showing up too dark. That is because games were optimized for Voodoo2 gamma values. Gamma is a number which describes the non-linearity of the digital-to-analogue conversion. The Voodoo2 had a gamma value which "wasted" less colours on the dark end of the scale and was better adapted to human vision. To get the numbers of distinguishable colours which can be put on the screen by a Voodoo2, a graphics card with the now more common TNT1-gamma would need 22.5 bits per pixel.