I hope I'm wrong, really I do. But in the hands of a decent lawyer, viewing is a fancy way of accessing encrypted copyrighted material, which is what the DMCA outlaws. Not that the access itself is outlawed, just the technology that enables it. I am somewhat heartened by one of the other posts which gives the exceptions for interoperability, but I don't know if they are broad enough.
Irrespective of whether LiViD is illegal, the law clearly tries to ban software which enables legitimate and legal activity. That is why it is wrong, and I hope unconstitutional. --
"We have received information that at the above address there have been offers to provide instructions on defeating DVD encryption so that illegal copies of DVDs can be made."
Did the MPAA copyright the procedure for cracking their own encryption scheme? If not, I don't see how this relates to anything. I would think that providing instructions on building bombs would fall into the same category (illegal) if what the MPAA twits are asserting is true.. and it isn't.
I'm afraid the law is more perverse than the lawyer in this case.
23. The Copyright Act, Title 17 U.S.C. 1201(a)(2), provides that:
[n]o person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that --
(A) is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title;
(B) has only limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title; or
(C) is marketed by that person or another acting in concert with that person with that person's knowledge for use in circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.
[emphasis added]
Thats right. Making or distributing program/device/whatever that's only purpose is defeating encyrption on copyrighted material (no matter how weak the encryption or whether the end user has full rights to perform such encryption) is against the law. This is a part of the copyright law enacted in 1998, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
The DMCA was enacted precisely to allow weak protection schemes like CSS to be feasible since it criminalizes selling or distributing anything which breaks it. I hope that this provision will be struck down by the courts since it undully restricts free speech by the author and distributor of the decryption program and restricts fair use by the consumer who otherwise has wide latitude to do what he wants privately with legally obtained copyrighted material.
Also, anyone else here think lawsuits for linking to "blah" is lame? Can I sue a search engine yet?
Until the courts start agreeing with you emphatically that lawsuits for linking are "lame", and the plaintiffs of nuisances suits are punished, we will need to keep reading about these cases on Slashdot. Public attention to the absurdity of these cases is the one of the factors that has the potential to stop them.
While it seems a little strong (it's not a good idea to piss off a pissed off lawyer), the original letter from the MPAA lawyer states plainly that he swears the information to be true under penalty of purjury, so I guess the reply had some justification.
They are far different than an FPGA. FPGAs are essentially matricies of programmable lookup tables, and muxes. Reprogramming them is relatively slow but they are good for prototyping ASICs or low volume production. The Crusoe processor is a VLIW processor with some extremely fancy translation software and power saving features. It quite far from an FPGA. --
China has a much longer history than Europe. In the last 500 years, Europeans colonized much of the world, started massive wars, and enslaved or killed millions of innocents. In the last 5000 years, the Chinese have never exerted significant military or political control outside of South East Asia. Which society has more to fear from the other?
Don't get me wrong. I do not support the current Chinese government's position on human rights, but I see no indication that China is threat to the territory or people of the US. China may be a threat to Taiwan, Tibet and their own people but not to the people of the US.
It is certainly different in the sense that FreeBSD development is more integrated than Linux. FreeBSD is after all a complete distribution and not "just" a kernel with several alternative distribution. Probably it is more fair to compare the development processes of Linux kernel + FSF + Debian to FreeBSD.
obFreeBSDExperience I mostly use Linux, but I tried FreeBSD for a short time. It's extremely cool if you have a fast internet connection since it is extremely simple to decide one day that you want to try tcsh, go to the tcsh ports directory and type make. The build script will grab the source for tcsh, patch it for FreeBSD if necessary, build it, and you can intall it with make install.
FreeBSD also has more complete and accurate man pages than Linux (and none of that info nonsense either (does anyone know of a decent pointy clicky or curses info viewer?)). It doesn't support all the exotic (crappy?) hardware that Linux does. And it uses BSDish utilities and config files (surprise surprise).
Currently the last point is keeping me from switching to BSD on my home box. (well that and the fear of destroying my Windows partition (blush)).
However, if you wish to use the GPLed code to make a COMMERCIAL product, you must pay royalties or licensing fees.
This is simply not true. Under no circumstances can you sell binaries derived from GPLed code and not make source available for those binaries. While this makes GPL derivatives less attractive commercial products perhaps, it is does not make them impossible. In many cases the GPL derived portions can be compartmentalized so that only a small amount of code is forced to be released. And in many cases release of source code does not mean a commercial entity can't make money. In any case, in no circumstances are royalties or any payments required unless the commercial entity chooses to licence the code seperately from the copyright holder(s) in order to release a PROPRIETARY product (or at least not GPL compatible product), in which case the code is obviously no longer GPLed.
So in the eyes of this regulation, I believe that GPL and BSD code is equally kosher. As to your point that licencing your code essentially as public domain is better for commercial developers, I have no doubt that it is for some, and I have no arguments against coders who do so. In the case of cryptographic code, I believe users should demand open source, at least to the point of source being available and patchable for the users own benefit. Both the GPL and BSD as well as many more restrictive licences should satisfy the user in this case. A second best from the user's point of view is an open source library that can be relinked into the application. BSD or LGPL libraries are both good for this purpose. Third best (what you are suggesting) is a tightly linked library of open source code that is standard but not replacable by the user. BSD allows this, GPL does not.
If you believe that proprietary code is valuable, a situation in which no one gets to even see the code without restrictive licensing agreements, surely you can agree that the GPL is at least as valuable. Yes there is a quid pro quo, and no I don't define what the GPL protects as "free" in an absolute sense. The BSD license offers to give freedom to all coders who make a first generation derivative but therefore can make no gaurantees about further generations of derivatives. The GPL offers to give freedom to all users of all generations of derivative code but therefore can not give coders complete freedom.
So if you are keeping score, I believe that you are wrong about the cryptographic regulations being anti-GPL due to a misreading of the GPL itself. I believe that BSD is a reasonable license and have no reason to fault people who use it, but I think that GPL is also a reasonable license and that it and the LGPL are fine licenses for cryptographic work.
I'm afraid that DeCSS's primary (only?) purpose is to provide access (defined as to decrypt or descramble in the law) copyrighted materials. It does not matter in the eyes of this law if the end user has purchased the material. --
While most comments I have seen on/. have rightly pointed out that DeCSS does not promote piracy, the suit does not mention piracy, only the distribution of an unauthorized viewer.
23. The Copyright Act, Title 17 U.S.C. 1201(a)(2), provides that:
[n]o person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that --
(A) is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title;
(B) has only limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title; or
(C) is marketed by that person or another acting in concert with that person with that person's knowledge for use in circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.
The choice of this section of the law is important. There is a parallel provision (1201(b)(1)) covering actual harms to the rights of the copyright holder, but this was not chosen, since allowing a user to view a DVD they have purchased clearly does not harm the copyright holder.
I believe 1201(a)(2) is unconstitutional since it restricts free speech and limits the options of fair use without clear harm to the copyright holder. It also makes any distributor of any decryption software, reverse engineering system, or security bug information vulnerable to malicious lawsuits.
That being said, as the law stands I believe the DeCSS creators and anyone else that distributes their code is in violation of 1201(a)(2), since their code allows access to 'effectively controlled' copyrighted material. Note that here 'effectively controlled' only means that there is some attempt at encyrption or scrambling, not that the encyrption is strong in any way. In fact it appears that this section is specifically designed (with the input of the MPAA and RIAA no doubt) to criminalize the distribution of third party viewers for weakly encrypted digital media.
Whatever the MPAA says about piracy, I doubt that is their main concern since there are many other avenues for piracy. I suspect that they are mainly concerned about royalties on viewer sales and control of the ease of which a user can exercise his fair use rights, such as buying a DVD and viewing it in another country.
This will be much more important when we start to get one to one encryption. It is within fair use to purchase a CD and lend it to a friend, but what if an EvilCD (TM) will only play on your EvilCD player. This law makes it illegal to tell somebody how to modify the EvilCD (or the friend's EvilCD player) to play the EvilCD on a friend's player, even though it is legal to modify the EvilCD or the player under fair use. It's an end run around fair use and a clear violation of free speech. I hope the courts will see it for the farce it is...and soon. --
I think that's the same company that has TV ads saying they're "Y3K compliant". I wonder if they bothered running that slogan past their sysadmins. I suspect they aren't completely Y2038 compliant yet if they use 32 bit OSes for anything. --
Some products are exported with longer than 40 bit keys but they must be granted an export license which means there is key escrow or a back door. The back door may "only" decrease the effective key length to 40 bits for the NSA.
In the case of the export version of Lotus Notes, encrypted messages expose 24 of the 64 bit key to the NSA enabling easier brute force attacks. You may agree or disagree with this, but it seems wrong to sell your customers a 64 bit encryption subsystem and not tell them about the back door. Of course the existence of a back door for one party generally means that any party has an easier time breaking the encryption. --
Exactly which major innovations of software have been patented (and defended successfully). Multi-tasking? Virtual memory? Spreadsheets? Databases? TCP/IP? Windowing GUIs?
I really don't know, but I haven't heard of any major ones. I know quite a few small (in scope) innovations have been patented. LZW, RSA, MP3 compression. But since each of these has non-patented alternatives, I think it is safe to say that innovation would not be hurt where it mattered if software patents were not issued. Where innovation was hurt, it would be more than made up for by the increase in programmer productivity from not having to worry about stupid patents.
While material costs for probe is not very significant, launch costs (especially manned ones like the shuttle), assembly costs, and ground monitoring costs are significant. Not to mention the fact that you would feel pretty foolish having two probes fail in exactly the same way. You would want to send a probe, then wait until the mission completed to send another. At that point, the state of the art would have progressed enough that sending the same probe again would be a waste of money.
Another way of looking at it is that you are asking for a more extensive testing program. Extensive testing programs is what got us to the $1b spacecraft in the first place, and much of that testing was on the ground. Doing the testing in space would be likely more expensive. --
Communications with spacecraft highly directional antennas on both ends. An emergency beacon would have to have an omnidirectional antenna to be any use so would require more power. This is not to say that it couldn't be done, and with an orbiting relay, it probably could be done on Mars, but you still have line of sight problems and the problem that a serious failure would likely cause a catastophic impact which no reasonable beacon could survive. --
Apparently strict constructionists don't believe in the Amendments. --
Re:Money makes the world go 'round....
on
Apocalypse Not
·
· Score: 2
While fears were obviously overblown, the problem rational people feared was never that the cash registers wouldn't work but that the supply chain would break down. Modern businesses keep very little inventory and rely on complex distributed inventory control systems relying on many computers and communications channels in many separate businesses to function properly to keep stock on the shelves. It was feared that such systems could have broken down for an extended period of time due to a fault in one of its parts, leading to shortages.
To be sure, there will always be goods for those with the money, hence the withdraw of cash from the ATMs. Although those expecting the breakdown of civilization probably got gold...or ammo. --
Real and Possibly Real Problems
on
Apocalypse Not
·
· Score: 2
Real Problems: I did a short consulting job fixing some payroll and inventory tracking database queries and data entry code on an AS/400 for a United Van Lines local office. The fixes weren't that hard (40 hours including the learning curve on AS/400) but there would have been problems in the first few weeks of 2000, nothing catastophic, but expensive to workaround and fix quickly.
Possibly Real Problem: I Called Long's Drugs (a fairly large pharmacy chain in California) and they could not fill any prescription because their computers had been down for 3 days. They didn't confirm it was Y2K related, but the coincidence is obvious. Probably a real Y2K problem or a problem caused by Y2K preventative measures gone wrong.
I suspect that companies that have real Y2K problems will do anything possible to cover up that fact, after all, what was the last time a major company that voluntarily told the world about internal computer foul ups. --
Bean is supposed to be younger and smaller than Ender. I don't know if they could fudge that one, especially if they wanted to make an Ender's Shadow movie. --
I find it hard to complain about an author that has written several of my favorite books, all quite different. Ender's Game, Songmaster, Speaker for the Dead, Wyrms, Seventh Son, Pastwatch, and Treasure Box. I have disliked a few as well: Xenocide, Folk of the Fringe, and Prentice Alvin, but great artists have great works and secondary works (i.e. works that I like and works that I don't). I think the charge of retelling the same story is a weak one. Card has written better in more genres than any author I have read (Suspense, Sci-fi, historical fiction, Fantasy). In fact when he has explicitly retold a story, as in Ender's Shadow or his novelization of The Abyss, it is with fresh insights that enriched my experience of the original. Indeed variations on a theme is an honored tradition in art. Does anyone think Van Gogh drew too many sunflowers, or that Austen wrote too many novels about romance among the landed elite? (Bonus points if you find published expressions of these opinions, which no doubt exist.) In short, to dislike his books or particularily his series is quite fair. To challenge his artisitic integrity because of this, is not. --
"Formics" is the formal name for the aliens, "bugger" is common slang. This is clear in Ender's Shadow (worth reading BTW) but I can't remember if it is in Ender's Game. --
To further confuse matters, UTC includes leap seconds but GPS time does not so they are off by 13 seconds IIRC (NTP servers obviously correct for this). --
Slashdot goes into "overload" mode when there are too many top level comments (50 IIRC). You can view the next pages by choosing the "2" link from the bottom of the page. --
Slashdot Mirror
I hope I'm wrong, really I do. But in the hands of a decent lawyer, viewing is a fancy way of accessing encrypted copyrighted material, which is what the DMCA outlaws. Not that the access itself is outlawed, just the technology that enables it. I am somewhat heartened by one of the other posts which gives the exceptions for interoperability, but I don't know if they are broad enough.
Irrespective of whether LiViD is illegal, the law clearly tries to ban software which enables legitimate and legal activity. That is why it is wrong, and I hope unconstitutional.
--
I'm afraid the law is more perverse than the lawyer in this case.
From the Connecticut suit by the MPAA[emphasis added]
Thats right. Making or distributing program/device/whatever that's only purpose is defeating encyrption on copyrighted material (no matter how weak the encryption or whether the end user has full rights to perform such encryption) is against the law. This is a part of the copyright law enacted in 1998, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
The DMCA was enacted precisely to allow weak protection schemes like CSS to be feasible since it criminalizes selling or distributing anything which breaks it. I hope that this provision will be struck down by the courts since it undully restricts free speech by the author and distributor of the decryption program and restricts fair use by the consumer who otherwise has wide latitude to do what he wants privately with legally obtained copyrighted material.
--
Until the courts start agreeing with you emphatically that lawsuits for linking are "lame", and the plaintiffs of nuisances suits are punished, we will need to keep reading about these cases on Slashdot. Public attention to the absurdity of these cases is the one of the factors that has the potential to stop them.
--
While it seems a little strong (it's not a good idea to piss off a pissed off lawyer), the original letter from the MPAA lawyer states plainly that he swears the information to be true under penalty of purjury, so I guess the reply had some justification.
--
They are far different than an FPGA. FPGAs are essentially matricies of programmable lookup tables, and muxes. Reprogramming them is relatively slow but they are good for prototyping ASICs or low volume production. The Crusoe processor is a VLIW processor with some extremely fancy translation software and power saving features. It quite far from an FPGA.
--
China has a much longer history than Europe. In the last 500 years, Europeans colonized much of the world, started massive wars, and enslaved or killed millions of innocents. In the last 5000 years, the Chinese have never exerted significant military or political control outside of South East Asia. Which society has more to fear from the other?
Don't get me wrong. I do not support the current Chinese government's position on human rights, but I see no indication that China is threat to the territory or people of the US. China may be a threat to Taiwan, Tibet and their own people but not to the people of the US.
--
If they can call us Les Etats Unis then we can call them Fraynce.
--
It is certainly different in the sense that FreeBSD development is more integrated than Linux. FreeBSD is after all a complete distribution and not "just" a kernel with several alternative distribution. Probably it is more fair to compare the development processes of Linux kernel + FSF + Debian to FreeBSD.
obFreeBSDExperience
I mostly use Linux, but I tried FreeBSD for a short time. It's extremely cool if you have a fast internet connection since it is extremely simple to decide one day that you want to try tcsh, go to the tcsh ports directory and type
make. The build script will grab the source for tcsh, patch it for FreeBSD if necessary, build it, and you can intall it with make install.
FreeBSD also has more complete and accurate man pages than Linux (and none of that info nonsense either (does anyone know of a decent pointy clicky or curses info viewer?)). It doesn't support all the exotic (crappy?) hardware that Linux does. And it uses BSDish utilities and config files (surprise surprise).
Currently the last point is keeping me from switching to BSD on my home box. (well that and the fear of destroying my Windows partition (blush)).
--
This is simply not true. Under no circumstances can you sell binaries derived from GPLed code and not make source available for those binaries. While this makes GPL derivatives less attractive commercial products perhaps, it is does not make them impossible. In many cases the GPL derived portions can be compartmentalized so that only a small amount of code is forced to be released. And in many cases release of source code does not mean a commercial entity can't make money. In any case, in no circumstances are royalties or any payments required unless the commercial entity chooses to licence the code seperately from the copyright holder(s) in order to release a PROPRIETARY product (or at least not GPL compatible product), in which case the code is obviously no longer GPLed.
So in the eyes of this regulation, I believe that GPL and BSD code is equally kosher. As to your point that licencing your code essentially as public domain is better for commercial developers, I have no doubt that it is for some, and I have no arguments against coders who do so. In the case of cryptographic code, I believe users should demand open source, at least to the point of source being available and patchable for the users own benefit. Both the GPL and BSD as well as many more restrictive licences should satisfy the user in this case. A second best from the user's point of view is an open source library that can be relinked into the application. BSD or LGPL libraries are both good for this purpose. Third best (what you are suggesting) is a tightly linked library of open source code that is standard but not replacable by the user. BSD allows this, GPL does not.
If you believe that proprietary code is valuable, a situation in which no one gets to even see the code without restrictive licensing agreements, surely you can agree that the GPL is at least as valuable. Yes there is a quid pro quo, and no I don't define what the GPL protects as "free" in an absolute sense. The BSD license offers to give freedom to all coders who make a first generation derivative but therefore can make no gaurantees about further generations of derivatives. The GPL offers to give freedom to all users of all generations of derivative code but therefore can not give coders complete freedom.
So if you are keeping score, I believe that you are wrong about the cryptographic regulations being anti-GPL due to a misreading of the GPL itself. I believe that BSD is a reasonable license and have no reason to fault people who use it, but I think that GPL is also a reasonable license and that it and the LGPL are fine licenses for cryptographic work.
--
I'm afraid that DeCSS's primary (only?) purpose is to provide access (defined as to decrypt or descramble in the law) copyrighted materials. It does not matter in the eyes of this law if the end user has purchased the material.
--
Here's a permanent link for theDigital Millennium Copyright Act.
--
From the Connecticut suit (emphasis added)
This is a provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act enacted in October of 1998.
The choice of this section of the law is important. There is a parallel provision (1201(b)(1)) covering actual harms to the rights of the copyright holder, but this was not chosen, since allowing a user to view a DVD they have purchased clearly does not harm the copyright holder.
I believe 1201(a)(2) is unconstitutional since it restricts free speech and limits the options of fair use without clear harm to the copyright holder. It also makes any distributor of any decryption software, reverse engineering system, or security bug information vulnerable to malicious lawsuits.
That being said, as the law stands I believe the DeCSS creators and anyone else that distributes their code is in violation of 1201(a)(2), since their code allows access to 'effectively controlled' copyrighted material. Note that here 'effectively controlled' only means that there is some attempt at encyrption or scrambling, not that the encyrption is strong in any way. In fact it appears that this section is specifically designed (with the input of the MPAA and RIAA no doubt) to criminalize the distribution of third party viewers for weakly encrypted digital media.
Whatever the MPAA says about piracy, I doubt that is their main concern since there are many other avenues for piracy. I suspect that they are mainly concerned about royalties on viewer sales and control of the ease of which a user can exercise his fair use rights, such as buying a DVD and viewing it in another country.
This will be much more important when we start to get one to one encryption. It is within fair use to purchase a CD and lend it to a friend, but what if an EvilCD (TM) will only play on your EvilCD player. This law makes it illegal to tell somebody how to modify the EvilCD (or the friend's EvilCD player) to play the EvilCD on a friend's player, even though it is legal to modify the EvilCD or the player under fair use. It's an end run around fair use and a clear violation of free speech. I hope the courts will see it for the farce it is...and soon.
--
I think that's the same company that has TV ads saying they're "Y3K compliant". I wonder if they bothered running that slogan past their sysadmins. I suspect they aren't completely Y2038 compliant yet if they use 32 bit OSes for anything.
--
Some products are exported with longer than 40 bit keys but they must be granted an export license which means there is key escrow or a back door. The back door may "only" decrease the effective key length to 40 bits for the NSA.
In the case of the export version of Lotus Notes, encrypted messages expose 24 of the 64 bit key to the NSA enabling easier brute force attacks. You may agree or disagree with this, but it seems wrong to sell your customers a 64 bit encryption subsystem and not tell them about the back door. Of course the existence of a back door for one party generally means that any party has an easier time breaking the encryption.
--
Exactly which major innovations of software have been patented (and defended successfully). Multi-tasking? Virtual memory? Spreadsheets? Databases? TCP/IP? Windowing GUIs?
I really don't know, but I haven't heard of any major ones. I know quite a few small (in scope) innovations have been patented. LZW, RSA, MP3 compression. But since each of these has non-patented alternatives, I think it is safe to say that innovation would not be hurt where it mattered if software patents were not issued. Where innovation was hurt, it would be more than made up for by the increase in programmer productivity from not having to worry about stupid patents.
--
While material costs for probe is not very significant, launch costs (especially manned ones like the shuttle), assembly costs, and ground monitoring costs are significant. Not to mention the fact that you would feel pretty foolish having two probes fail in exactly the same way. You would want to send a probe, then wait until the mission completed to send another. At that point, the state of the art would have progressed enough that sending the same probe again would be a waste of money.
Another way of looking at it is that you are asking for a more extensive testing program. Extensive testing programs is what got us to the $1b spacecraft in the first place, and much of that testing was on the ground. Doing the testing in space would be likely more expensive.
--
Communications with spacecraft highly directional antennas on both ends. An emergency beacon would have to have an omnidirectional antenna to be any use so would require more power. This is not to say that it couldn't be done, and with an orbiting relay, it probably could be done on Mars, but you still have line of sight problems and the problem that a serious failure would likely cause a catastophic impact which no reasonable beacon could survive.
--
Apparently strict constructionists don't believe in the Amendments.
--
While fears were obviously overblown, the problem rational people feared was never that the cash registers wouldn't work but that the supply chain would break down. Modern businesses keep very little inventory and rely on complex distributed inventory control systems relying on many computers and communications channels in many separate businesses to function properly to keep stock on the shelves. It was feared that such systems could have broken down for an extended period of time due to a fault in one of its parts, leading to shortages.
To be sure, there will always be goods for those with the money, hence the withdraw of cash from the ATMs. Although those expecting the breakdown of civilization probably got gold...or ammo.
--
Real Problems:
I did a short consulting job fixing some payroll and inventory tracking database queries and data entry code on an AS/400 for a United Van Lines local office. The fixes weren't that hard (40 hours including the learning curve on AS/400) but there would have been problems in the first few weeks of 2000, nothing catastophic, but expensive to workaround and fix quickly.
Possibly Real Problem:
I Called Long's Drugs (a fairly large pharmacy chain in California) and they could not fill any prescription because their computers had been down for 3 days. They didn't confirm it was Y2K related, but the coincidence is obvious. Probably a real Y2K problem or a problem caused by Y2K preventative measures gone wrong.
I suspect that companies that have real Y2K problems will do anything possible to cover up that fact, after all, what was the last time a major company that voluntarily told the world about internal computer foul ups.
--
Bean is supposed to be younger and smaller than Ender. I don't know if they could fudge that one, especially if they wanted to make an Ender's Shadow movie.
--
I find it hard to complain about an author that has written several of my favorite books, all quite different. Ender's Game, Songmaster, Speaker for the Dead, Wyrms, Seventh Son, Pastwatch, and Treasure Box. I have disliked a few as well: Xenocide, Folk of the Fringe, and Prentice Alvin, but great artists have great works and secondary works (i.e. works that I like and works that I don't).
I think the charge of retelling the same story is a weak one. Card has written better in more genres than any author I have read (Suspense, Sci-fi, historical fiction, Fantasy). In fact when he has explicitly retold a story, as in Ender's Shadow or his novelization of The Abyss, it is with fresh insights that enriched my experience of the original.
Indeed variations on a theme is an honored tradition in art. Does anyone think Van Gogh drew too many sunflowers, or that Austen wrote too many novels about romance among the landed elite? (Bonus points if you find published expressions of these opinions, which no doubt exist.)
In short, to dislike his books or particularily his series is quite fair. To challenge his artisitic integrity because of this, is not.
--
"Formics" is the formal name for the aliens, "bugger" is common slang. This is clear in Ender's Shadow (worth reading BTW) but I can't remember if it is in Ender's Game.
--
To further confuse matters, UTC includes leap seconds but GPS time does not so they are off by 13 seconds IIRC (NTP servers obviously correct for this).
--
Slashdot goes into "overload" mode when there are too many top level comments (50 IIRC). You can view the next pages by choosing the "2" link from the bottom of the page.
--