You can just make a map for Quake. I tried it once, to model my (now old) school. I got bored of adding classroom after classroom, though:)
It is tricky, though, because I don't know what shape the Quake model is, but his eyes are in the wrong place relative to his size or something; everything looked a bit disproportionate, however I scaled things.
I read the essay. I haven't read the book. But just from the essay, I wonder if a potential flaw in the experiment has ever been considered (I know nothing about psychology)
Obviously the `teacher' had discomfort about administering the shocks. But it seems to me that the teacher was just delegating the moral responsibility of care back to the experimenter. The teacher may not have known about the actual effects of the shocks (and labelling the switches with voltages may not be a good idea because people's understanding of the actual numbers vary), and just trusting that it was safe, because the experimenter was implying it.
Of course, the `learner' banging on the wall is a different thing:)
Authorized by who? Who says that the disclaimer is legal? IMO when I walk into a shop and buy something, I'm buying it, not licensing it. If I were licensing it then I would be given a contract to sign at the counter.
Unfortunately it is becoming `industry-standard practice' for these `licenses' to exist on these products, without it actually being tested in court. But please don't accept them! This will only mean that when it does get tested in court, the defence will be "it's industry standard practice".
Sure, I shouldn't be able to copy them (other than for archive purposes etc). I shouldn't be able to publicly perform them, because I take it that that would be breach of copyright. But that's because the law says so, not because the company writing that notice says so.
And as for licenses that you can't view until you've opened the package ("if you don't agree to these terms, return the product for a full refund"), they should be illegal, because they're an attempt to change the terms after you've purchased the goods.
A DVD must be decrypted to be viewed; it does not have to be decrypted to be copied since the players do the decrypting, plain and simple.
I agree with the rest of your post, but it is easier to use DeCSS to convert the DVD into (say) an MPEG file and distribute that over the internet, than it is for `pirates' to distribute disc images and for the end person to write the DVD image on his DVD writer, and play it through an authorized player.
I don't think that DeCSS should be illegal, because it can be used for legitimate purposes. But it's important to admit the facts to be able to be useful in any debate to that end.
This project is a great example of the things open source can accomplish.
This is fine for games like freeciv, where the game is mainly gameplay and not fancy graphics; the goalpost isn't being moved.
But what about things like first-person shooters? These games are always pushing the boundaries of hardware, and so it needs a lot of time and effort just to keep up. Can open source keep up with this?
Another issue is with map design; in a game like Half-Life (for example), a huge amount of effort has to go into designing the story, and you can only play it once, unlike freeciv. This means that there would be have to be a single point where the game would be considered complete and released; otherwise both the designers and the gameplayers would lose interest.
So games like freeciv are fine, but what about the rest of the computer game market? Is it practical for open source development to continue? Or are companies like Loki going to be producing most of our decent games?
I think the main point that Microsoft are
complaining about is the requirement of the GNU
GPL that the source code of distributed derived
works must also be distributed. This isn't the
case with the BSD license, nor with the MFC
library (I'm not familiar with the other two you
mentioned, so I won't comment on those).
Of course, the point that Microsoft is
blurring is the distinction between people who
are essentially consumers, who don't make
modifications to source and therefore who don't
need to worry about these particular clauses in
the GNU GPL (this applies to most companies), and
the people who may want to modify source code.
Of course, Microsoft doesn't exactly allow you
to modify their code, so this whole issue of what
requirements are placed upon you when you do don't
really apply.
But if everyone avoided it, or if the cache didn't exist at all, the result would very likely be slower access for everyone.
Except that (due to the widespread incompetence of web "designers" everywhere) the vast majority of the sites to which the vast majority of (l)users frequent is not cacheable.
My ISP does, and it's a right pain. The only reason I want them to do caching is to speed up my service; in practice the opposite happens.
The advantage an ISP gets from providing a cache is to reduce traffic. It has no interest in making sure that the cache isn't getting overloaded with requests, which it appears to be.
I'm pretty sure that I now get a slower service than without my ISP caching, especially with dynamic content, such as slashdot. I'm switching my ISP in a few weeks.
I agree that running a web server in the kernel is a risk.
Is it really such a big risk, though? Seeing as we're talking seriously high performance and something that (I presume) is not so easy to set up (relatively, being in the kernel and everything), the main place that Tux would be used would be server farms. Now, if all a computer does is serve web pages, then if someone gets root it isn't really that much different to getting whatever Apache runs as.
Of course, it's easier to graffiti as root, but it is possible as the apache user seeing as it's the apache user that serves the pages.
With the UI policy, you license any software you submit to UI under a non-GPL license.
Is this the general case? Are you sure about this? As far as I understood this (in terms of employment anyway), your employer owns the code you write; that is, you have no right to license it to anyone.
Of course, if the university allows you to, that's fine. But maybe all universities don't let you.
As an aside, I don't recall signing anything when I started uni (or else my memory fails me). Does this mean that I'm not bound by any of this? Luckily I started a program before I started uni, so I presume that means that I own at least joint copyright?
So what would happen if a company just ignored that and went out and did it? I presume the MPAA would sue, but under what law?
If they claim DMCA, then how exactly is the device bypassing copy protection measures (even if the device did do Macrovision)? If all it did was allow multi-region playing, then how would the MPAA prove the copy protection bypass that is required by the DMCA?
So basically, that would mean that a company could go out and made a DVD player without a "license". How would they prevent it?
One issue I've yet to resolve, which you may like to look into, is how to build a *nix system where you can spin down all drives.
I've managed to do this, with a bit of experimentation. I'm running Debian Potato (rev2). The only thing making the drive spin up was exim flushing it's queue every half-hour, and possibly the cronjob that made it do the same. I turned off the exim daemon (it's not really needed as it's a non-networked system) and made the cron stuff all happen at once. This makes the hard drive spin up once at four in the morning for ten minutes; it's off all the other time.
I don't know how useful that is, though, because if the computer's doing so little that it doesn't need to have the hard drive spinning, it might as well be in suspend or off. Except for servers with little loads, of course.
But how do we know that they're system is secure? I've heard of mobile phone card numbers being used before you've bought them and scratched the number off. Being anonymous, how do you prove that it wasn't you who spent it?
No one else seems to have pointed out that subscription for software is nothing new; although maybe not in the mainstream OS and Office applications, specialized applications have licenses where you have to subscribe for a fixed amount of time.
For example, my department's license for an electronic CAD and simulation software expires in about a month, which we are all reminded of when we start it (in this case, the powers that be have decided to move to a different package, and so won't be renewing their dues).
A side effect could be that Microsoft actually starts putting more weight on improving quality rather than adding new features, since there's no need to "lure" old customers to buy the new version - they will still pay for the subscription regardless of what version they are using.
On the contrary, is it not possible that, now that Microsoft have a much more predictable (and guaranteed) revenue stream, they will have less of an incentive to improve their product? Until now, at least they have had to add new features. What is to stop them from sitting on their backsides and doing nothing?
Of course, if a business gets too exasperated at Microsoft for a substandard product then it can switch to alternatives; but if it isn't doing that already, it would take more than just the current products staying static.
I suppose that we'll just have to wait till the alternatives get better; except that they are already - for example the Lotus office suite (which I have briefly used) is (IMHO) just as functional. So the main problem is the momentum that Microsoft products have, and this is not going to change if businesses do accept this new model.
This is my main
problem with some (not all) Linux users is that some think everything is easy because it went easy for them.
You've described one problem on Linux you've had with regards to X. I was a happy Windows user until I discovered Linux, and that includes system administration. I've installed Windows on computers which BSOD on the first reboot (the install still hadn't finished) thanks to driver problems - and still regularly need to manage IRQ channels myself since Windows can't seem to figure out how to arrange them so they all work.
It's hard to compare Windows and Linux by looking at individual experiences, as it's generally only the people with bad ones who speak out, and one person's experience is not enough to make a sound decision.
This is WHY even when someone who is pretty savvy about computers trys Linux, it takes them 6 hours to find the
freaking bug that ends up being a easy fix.
But what about the other world, for which there is often no feasible means for fixing problems, and people simply learn to work around them?
Can I put protections on only parts of a file? Say I want the introduction of my paper to be public but the financial data to be private? No.
Well, if you use/(la)?tex/, then you can include two files, one which contains the public part and one which contains the private part. Change permissions accordingly. This is much simpler than making permissions very complicated to understand.
Can I put access protections so that other people can't see what processes I'm running? Or so that they can only see how long it has been running but
not how much memory it takes up? No.
Dunno about the second part, but Sourceforge manages to do this on its shell server. Probably a patch or something.
I don't think this would help; by the law of conservation of momentum, the only propulsion you could get from that is equivalent to the momentum of the photons (but as they have no mass...:-)
Even if we had an efficient energy-to-matter converter, the overall momentum of the matter/antimatter would be nothing, and hence no propulsion.
The energy required to run the vehicle's systems is surely peanuts compared to propulsion.
Joe Sixpack tries to copy some hot new song from his friend Ernie, it doesn't work, so he goes and buys it himself.
No. Joe Sixpack tries to copy some hot new song from his friend Ernie, it doesn't work, but he hears about this tool called De-Something, downloads it, then the copy works.
Once one person has cracked the encryption, it'll spread all over the place for everyone to see. Even without DeCSS, how easy is it to find a program that let's you bypass the region coding on a DVD for any common software player?
Why do companies continue to try to do it? They are clueless about technology in general. There are plenty of people who claim to know they're way around computers, when all they know is how to use the GUI that Microsoft provides them inside out. It's difficult for a non technically-savvy employer to find a person who really does know what he is talking about.
It is well known in the cryptography world that any company that produces its own, proprietary algorithm most likely doesn't know what it's talking about, resulting in a product that's easy to crack. This may or may not apply to this case, but we can see that this is what happened with DeCSS.
Evidence of this? DeCSS provides the perfect example. Although harder to capture an outgoing digital video stream than audio, it is possible. Worse than that, the whole encryption scheme was cracked. If the companies involved really did know what they were doing, we wouldn't have DeCSS (we'd be simply be left to capturing the decrypted stream instead).
The whole CyberPatrol issue show us the same thing happening again. In fact, capturing the unencrypted stream isn't even necessary if this continues:-)
Unfortunately not. Most sites which the majority visit often are dynamically generated pages which are not cachable. For example, CNN returns a Last-Modified header of what appears to be the current time. Search engine results clearly can't be effectively cached, nor can Hotmail.
Slashdot Mirror
You can just make a map for Quake. I tried it once, to model my (now old) school. I got bored of adding classroom after classroom, though :)
It is tricky, though, because I don't know what shape the Quake model is, but his eyes are in the wrong place relative to his size or something; everything looked a bit disproportionate, however I scaled things.
I read the essay. I haven't read the book. But just from the essay, I wonder if a potential flaw in the experiment has ever been considered (I know nothing about psychology)
Obviously the `teacher' had discomfort about administering the shocks. But it seems to me that the teacher was just delegating the moral responsibility of care back to the experimenter. The teacher may not have known about the actual effects of the shocks (and labelling the switches with voltages may not be a good idea because people's understanding of the actual numbers vary), and just trusting that it was safe, because the experimenter was implying it.
Of course, the `learner' banging on the wall is a different thing :)
"...They are not authorized for any other use..."
Authorized by who? Who says that the disclaimer is legal? IMO when I walk into a shop and buy something, I'm buying it, not licensing it. If I were licensing it then I would be given a contract to sign at the counter.
Unfortunately it is becoming `industry-standard practice' for these `licenses' to exist on these products, without it actually being tested in court. But please don't accept them! This will only mean that when it does get tested in court, the defence will be "it's industry standard practice".
Sure, I shouldn't be able to copy them (other than for archive purposes etc). I shouldn't be able to publicly perform them, because I take it that that would be breach of copyright. But that's because the law says so, not because the company writing that notice says so.
And as for licenses that you can't view until you've opened the package ("if you don't agree to these terms, return the product for a full refund"), they should be illegal, because they're an attempt to change the terms after you've purchased the goods.
A DVD must be decrypted to be viewed; it does not have to be decrypted to be copied since the players do the decrypting, plain and simple.
I agree with the rest of your post, but it is easier to use DeCSS to convert the DVD into (say) an MPEG file and distribute that over the internet, than it is for `pirates' to distribute disc images and for the end person to write the DVD image on his DVD writer, and play it through an authorized player.
I don't think that DeCSS should be illegal, because it can be used for legitimate purposes. But it's important to admit the facts to be able to be useful in any debate to that end.
This project is a great example of the things open source can accomplish.
This is fine for games like freeciv, where the game is mainly gameplay and not fancy graphics; the goalpost isn't being moved.
But what about things like first-person shooters? These games are always pushing the boundaries of hardware, and so it needs a lot of time and effort just to keep up. Can open source keep up with this?
Another issue is with map design; in a game like Half-Life (for example), a huge amount of effort has to go into designing the story, and you can only play it once, unlike freeciv. This means that there would be have to be a single point where the game would be considered complete and released; otherwise both the designers and the gameplayers would lose interest.
So games like freeciv are fine, but what about the rest of the computer game market? Is it practical for open source development to continue? Or are companies like Loki going to be producing most of our decent games?
And what if you were linking to a site which incited people to criminal acts? Should that be legal?
I think the main point that Microsoft are complaining about is the requirement of the GNU GPL that the source code of distributed derived works must also be distributed. This isn't the case with the BSD license, nor with the MFC library (I'm not familiar with the other two you mentioned, so I won't comment on those).
Of course, the point that Microsoft is blurring is the distinction between people who are essentially consumers, who don't make modifications to source and therefore who don't need to worry about these particular clauses in the GNU GPL (this applies to most companies), and the people who may want to modify source code.
Of course, Microsoft doesn't exactly allow you to modify their code, so this whole issue of what requirements are placed upon you when you do don't really apply.
But if everyone avoided it, or if the cache didn't exist at all, the result would very likely be slower access for everyone.
Except that (due to the widespread incompetence of web "designers" everywhere) the vast majority of the sites to which the vast majority of (l)users frequent is not cacheable.
Via: 1.0 pr-netcache-2 (NetCache NetApp/5.0.1R1)
My ISP does, and it's a right pain. The only reason I want them to do caching is to speed up my service; in practice the opposite happens.
The advantage an ISP gets from providing a cache is to reduce traffic. It has no interest in making sure that the cache isn't getting overloaded with requests, which it appears to be.
I'm pretty sure that I now get a slower service than without my ISP caching, especially with dynamic content, such as slashdot. I'm switching my ISP in a few weeks.
Over 95% of the research which IDC produces has not been sponsored. Therefore, our research studies are completely independent.
Is it just me, or does this not make any sense at all? 95% == completely? 0.95 == 1?
I agree that running a web server in the kernel is a risk.
Is it really such a big risk, though? Seeing as we're talking seriously high performance and something that (I presume) is not so easy to set up (relatively, being in the kernel and everything), the main place that Tux would be used would be server farms. Now, if all a computer does is serve web pages, then if someone gets root it isn't really that much different to getting whatever Apache runs as.
Of course, it's easier to graffiti as root, but it is possible as the apache user seeing as it's the apache user that serves the pages.
With the UI policy, you license any software you submit to UI under a non-GPL license.
Is this the general case? Are you sure about this? As far as I understood this (in terms of employment anyway), your employer owns the code you write; that is, you have no right to license it to anyone.
Of course, if the university allows you to, that's fine. But maybe all universities don't let you.
As an aside, I don't recall signing anything when I started uni (or else my memory fails me). Does this mean that I'm not bound by any of this? Luckily I started a program before I started uni, so I presume that means that I own at least joint copyright?
So what would happen if a company just ignored that and went out and did it? I presume the MPAA would sue, but under what law?
If they claim DMCA, then how exactly is the device bypassing copy protection measures (even if the device did do Macrovision)? If all it did was allow multi-region playing, then how would the MPAA prove the copy protection bypass that is required by the DMCA?
So basically, that would mean that a company could go out and made a DVD player without a "license". How would they prevent it?
One issue I've yet to resolve, which you may like to look into, is how to build a *nix system where you can spin down all drives.
I've managed to do this, with a bit of experimentation. I'm running Debian Potato (rev2). The only thing making the drive spin up was exim flushing it's queue every half-hour, and possibly the cronjob that made it do the same. I turned off the exim daemon (it's not really needed as it's a non-networked system) and made the cron stuff all happen at once. This makes the hard drive spin up once at four in the morning for ten minutes; it's off all the other time.
I don't know how useful that is, though, because if the computer's doing so little that it doesn't need to have the hard drive spinning, it might as well be in suspend or off. Except for servers with little loads, of course.
But how do we know that they're system is secure? I've heard of mobile phone card numbers being used before you've bought them and scratched the number off. Being anonymous, how do you prove that it wasn't you who spent it?
You mean like the fact that (as far as I understand from their website) you can buy the thing now (if you're a student or you're buying three)?
No one else seems to have pointed out that subscription for software is nothing new; although maybe not in the mainstream OS and Office applications, specialized applications have licenses where you have to subscribe for a fixed amount of time.
For example, my department's license for an electronic CAD and simulation software expires in about a month, which we are all reminded of when we start it (in this case, the powers that be have decided to move to a different package, and so won't be renewing their dues).
A side effect could be that Microsoft actually starts putting more weight on improving quality rather than adding new features, since there's no need to "lure" old customers to buy the new version - they will still pay for the subscription regardless of what version they are using.
On the contrary, is it not possible that, now that Microsoft have a much more predictable (and guaranteed) revenue stream, they will have less of an incentive to improve their product? Until now, at least they have had to add new features. What is to stop them from sitting on their backsides and doing nothing?
Of course, if a business gets too exasperated at Microsoft for a substandard product then it can switch to alternatives; but if it isn't doing that already, it would take more than just the current products staying static.
I suppose that we'll just have to wait till the alternatives get better; except that they are already - for example the Lotus office suite (which I have briefly used) is (IMHO) just as functional. So the main problem is the momentum that Microsoft products have, and this is not going to change if businesses do accept this new model.
This is my main problem with some (not all) Linux users is that some think everything is easy because it went easy for them.
You've described one problem on Linux you've had with regards to X. I was a happy Windows user until I discovered Linux, and that includes system administration. I've installed Windows on computers which BSOD on the first reboot (the install still hadn't finished) thanks to driver problems - and still regularly need to manage IRQ channels myself since Windows can't seem to figure out how to arrange them so they all work.
It's hard to compare Windows and Linux by looking at individual experiences, as it's generally only the people with bad ones who speak out, and one person's experience is not enough to make a sound decision.
This is WHY even when someone who is pretty savvy about computers trys Linux, it takes them 6 hours to find the freaking bug that ends up being a easy fix.
But what about the other world, for which there is often no feasible means for fixing problems, and people simply learn to work around them?
Can I put protections on only parts of a file? Say I want the introduction of my paper to be public but the financial data to be private? No.
Well, if you use /(la)?tex/, then you can include two files, one which contains the public part and one which contains the private part. Change permissions accordingly. This is much simpler than making permissions very complicated to understand.
Can I put access protections so that other people can't see what processes I'm running? Or so that they can only see how long it has been running but not how much memory it takes up? No.
Dunno about the second part, but Sourceforge manages to do this on its shell server. Probably a patch or something.
You can feed energy to your vehicle with a laser.
I don't think this would help; by the law of conservation of momentum, the only propulsion you could get from that is equivalent to the momentum of the photons (but as they have no mass... :-)
Even if we had an efficient energy-to-matter converter, the overall momentum of the matter/antimatter would be nothing, and hence no propulsion.
The energy required to run the vehicle's systems is surely peanuts compared to propulsion.
eWatch are obviously very efficient, then - that was a whole five minutes!
Joe Sixpack tries to copy some hot new song from his friend Ernie, it doesn't work, so he goes and buys it himself.
No. Joe Sixpack tries to copy some hot new song from his friend Ernie, it doesn't work, but he hears about this tool called De-Something, downloads it, then the copy works.
Once one person has cracked the encryption, it'll spread all over the place for everyone to see. Even without DeCSS, how easy is it to find a program that let's you bypass the region coding on a DVD for any common software player?
Why do companies continue to try to do it? They are clueless about technology in general. There are plenty of people who claim to know they're way around computers, when all they know is how to use the GUI that Microsoft provides them inside out. It's difficult for a non technically-savvy employer to find a person who really does know what he is talking about.
It is well known in the cryptography world that any company that produces its own, proprietary algorithm most likely doesn't know what it's talking about, resulting in a product that's easy to crack. This may or may not apply to this case, but we can see that this is what happened with DeCSS.
Evidence of this? DeCSS provides the perfect example. Although harder to capture an outgoing digital video stream than audio, it is possible. Worse than that, the whole encryption scheme was cracked. If the companies involved really did know what they were doing, we wouldn't have DeCSS (we'd be simply be left to capturing the decrypted stream instead).
The whole CyberPatrol issue show us the same thing happening again. In fact, capturing the unencrypted stream isn't even necessary if this continues :-)
Unfortunately not. Most sites which the majority visit often are dynamically generated pages which are not cachable. For example, CNN returns a Last-Modified header of what appears to be the current time. Search engine results clearly can't be effectively cached, nor can Hotmail.
I'm British; I have a National Insurance number, similar to a Social Security number in the US.