I think there really isn't that much disagreement between the two of you. I say that because I agree with both.
I think you can easily create a website that highly device-independent, and that will transform and degrade gracefully on any reasonably standards-compliant browser.
For that reason, I would serve the same web-page to Mozilla as I would to a speech-browser. They would both perform excellently.
However, there are browsers out there that are so terribly broken, it gives you a really hard time. NN4 and IE3 are the obvious examples, to some extent you can say that about IE4 too. It is quite reasonable to serve something entirely different to these browsers, but for the browsers that work well, feeding them good, standards-compliant code and let them do the work to present it to the user is a very viable path.
Free as in beer: price of 0. Strings may be attached. You get no rights.
Free as in speech: Any price (usually 0), you can use, modify and redistribute the stuff, but there may be strings attached, such as that you are not allowed to take those above things away from anybody else.
In either of the definitions above "free" is used in a context. Otherwise, "free" means "without relation".
Yeah, this is interesting! Funnily, my fathers old PC had a Pentium PRO, we bought it for his desktop computer.
Nowadays, this box is acting like my main web and mail server. It works great, so I guess it has finally found home. It is a little low on RAM, though....:-)
You have the Mozilla SVG page, but it has not been updated in a while. I heard they had some licensing problems....?
Then, there's a message at from Sue Sims who I think works at Opera, she says it is scheduled for the next version. This was in May, and that would imply version 7, I think, but it doesn't seem to be in there.
The harder it gets to copy things, the fewer people will do it. I suppose you could argue that p2p networks mean only one person has to crack it for everybody to get it, but all they have to do then is crack down on the p2p networks as well.
True. But for one thing, I find it strange that harder to copy things is desireable. I think that it should be the other way around, that the cost of copying has been marginalized is probably the most significant progress technology has given us in very many years. It has allowed me to have a production that has overgone my father's 40 years of authorship, easily and with hardly no cost to myself. That is very, very significant.
But of course, there is this problem about getting money from the end user to the author...
The other point that you point out is also very significant, that once a content protection scheme is broken, it cannot be unbroken. Indeed, you can prosecute those who broke it, and destroy the lives of a few teenagers in the process. But then, the alarm bells ought to go off, do we really want to create a society where that is how you enforce copyright?
I don't equate free spech with content protection. Copying something for no cost != free speech imo. You can still say whatever you like.
True. But the real point is that you have no forum to say it, other than (perhaps!) face-to-face conversation. Of course, free speech does not grant a forum. You can't demand to go on CNN to say what you want. But freedom of expression is worthless if you have no forum. If nobody can hear you, even if they wanted, you might as well shut up. That is the problem we're looking at.
I think this is best illustrated by a case where a scientific paper dealt with the genetic differences between jews and palestinians. The research revealed that there were no significant differences at all. The author managed to call palestinian refugee camps "concentration camps", and for that reason, the paper was removed.
It has allready been rumors that Israel has developed biological weapons that exploits the genetic differences between jews and palestinians to only kill palestinians. This paper makes it very clear that this rumor is completely false, it just isn't possible. In a similar manner, it is not unthinkable that Bush will suddenly present "evidence" that Iraq has developed biological weapons to kill only jews. With "content protection", it will be possible to completely remove papers that show that this is impossible. It will become possible to remove any comment that shows that.
Asterix has always been among my favorites. I have all the albums, and I started collecting when I was 8 years old. It is a great cartoon, and there is even a story about how money corrupts, in which the Romans send in a guy to buy all the bautas the Gauls can produce. Obelix makes bautas, and suddenly the village gets industrialized, the villagers get rich and things start going really wrong.....
They should start reading Asterix too.
I found this e-mail address:
contact@albert-rene.com
I told them I would never buy an album again unless they drop this suit immediately.
Yeah, content protection really sucks, and the loss of fair use rights is a slippery slope. Unfortunately, for all the flag waving over anti-DRM for content, I have yet to see people come up with a compelling economic system that lets people release their content for free, yet still get rewarded for it.
That's true. However, it is not just the fair use rights, it is the problem that for DRM to work, you got to allow a content producer, that is, a cartel in reality, to control everything from production, to the senses of the end user. It is insufficient to control e.g. the soundcard, because you can always record something as the sound propagates through the air. It boils down to the simple fact that you can't use encryption to keep a secret if one of the parties involved has no interest in keeping it secret.
However, what it means if this cartel can control all speech, is that freedom of expression is gone.
That means end of democracy, and say hello to totalitarian rule.
This is so bad that it just can't be accepted. Unfortunately, I believe a total system collapse is the only thing that can bring about change, and I'd rather have a total system collapse in the entertainment industry than say goodbye to freedom of expression. I'm also quite sure that academic publishing and public debate will be largely unaffected by such a collapse, as well as many indy bands and stuff, so the real loss isn't that large.
But, I'd much rather come up with some alternative before seeing a total system collapse. But it is clear that we would have to do it...
Hehe, yeah.... I know what it is like.... In 1997 I started adding those LINK elements, and just now browsers are really starting to use them. Things are soooo sloooooow.... But it means that somebody just has to start using new things, because nobody will support things unless somebody uses it (and nobody use things that are unsupported)....:-)
Anyway, my newsites will have RDF. But it is being worked on, there's nothing to see yet...:-)
Anyway, I think you would find at least something if you start spidering at e.g..
Tom Berners-Lee will undoubtedly and correctly be remembered as the Father of the Interweb, but not a single thing of his since then has caught on even a tiny bit. We can stop talking about him now.
Uhm, Tim Berners-Lee has his name on every recommendation that comes out of the World Wide Web Consortium. Perhaps you've heard about XML? No, he's not among the editors, but the architectural principles he put down has a very significant influence on that, as well as pretty much every other technology that comes out of there. You can argue about the merits of stuff like XML, but you can't argue about the influence of TimBL. That he pulls the strings in the background and are not in the forefront shouting buzzwords, that can hardly be held against him. But if the buzzwords are the only things that you hear, yeah, well then probably you haven't heard too much about TimBL lately.
To me, technologies that TimBL are working on is a big part of my daily life. But there are those of us who write the code and try to make things work who are creating the future, not some Genius on/.
OK, so the connection to Tolkien was probably not the strongest, but that's a minor thing, and I can't help to fear the stuff moderators are smoking when they mod a post with a knee-jerk response like this up.
Well, I'm not so sure it is going to happen that easily. As you may know, there were big flamewars in the RSS community over the use of RDF, and in RSS 2.0, it is not RDF Site Summary, but Real Simple Syndication.
There are many who feel that RSS could be the first Semantic Web application, and I agree, it has potential and it is quite close to becoming one. But RSS 2.0 was a big step away from it, and it depends on people realizing what it is about, and given the comments so far to this story
it isn't really encouraging....
It seems that people are too content with today's screen-only WWW that they feel no urge to be creative.
Yeah, this is really cool, and I would certainly like to participate. But rather than insert yet more code in my pages, I think it would be much better if they just looked for the RDF metadata provided by the CC project.
The CC License Engine framework really does all that is needed to identify a license that would allow the P2P network to redistribute the material , so why not use it?
I'm totally without a clue on this, really, but I can think of one obvious use: You want to back up your music collection but use less space to back it up.
If the CD is lost or destroyed by scratches (many of mine are allready), you still have the original recording that you can compress with lossy compression of the day for your daily use. Conversion between lossy codecs is meaningless, but compressing from a lossless format to a lossy format is OK.
So, if Ogg Vorbis 2.0 is better than 1.0, you can make 2.0 files from your lossless compressed files.
Actually, the main author behind this stuff is Pål Brekke, a Norwegian scientist, working for ESA, but stationed at NASA's GSFC. He is one of two Norwegian astronomers I know personally who is working on the SOHO project. He dropped me note about it too, since he knows I've got some good contacts with the press.
But there are no turf wars and other silly things going on, so whether it is NASA, ESA, US or Norway or whatever, people don't care who gets the credit. It's only about popularizing science.
As for mad scientists... I don't know, but I'm doing stuff like firewalking, got a world record. I think the best thing is to look around and jump on things that look cool.
It could be something in that, given that Unix has a large market share on the server side.
However, we should be very careful about bragging about it, because as it turns out UNIX admins are not that fast either. A study of an OpenSSL vulnerability and the subsequent release of the Slapper worm shows that many admins need some fire before they get moving.
"Look, I've been on the Internet since the mid '80s, and there are enormous amounts of prior art on this patent you're claiming infringement of. If you decide to prosecute, we'll dig it up. And, oh, BTW, we'll dig up prior art to the other 30 patents in your portofolio. Click Accept to continue."
Threatening to attempt to invalidate their entire portofolio might get them off your backs, they would need some guts to continue. Of course, you should know what you're talking about, so your threats are not just empty. But a bit of bluffing might do the trick...
Hm, my own pages from back then isn't prior art, as I merely did cutnpaste of stuff into mostly static pages. However, I had the idea back then, just couldn't carry it out. If I understood the patent correctly, that is.
Uh-oh... Now the/. editors are going to post this on the front-page before it is announced...:-)
Really, I think the posting on/. should wait untill it is announced.
The release-schedule says that it is going to be uploaded a bit before the announcement.
See my other response, but it isn't big. It is actually at most a couple of pixels. The image has very clearly been resampled to a resolution much bigger than the resolution of the detector.
Re:I don't believe, but...
on
SOHO Strikes Back
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I'm not working on SOHO, but the SOHO Deputy Project Scientist just dropped me a note about their stuff, so I guess I should try...:-)
It is very hard to analyze that if you don't know what has happened to the picture. The planet is easy enough, that's an over-exposed planet. The "exhaust fumes" is I guess what you're pointing at which is not straight. You would expect it to be straight if it is pixel bleeding, not if it is e.g. a cosmic ray. And if you look at it closely, you'll see that the streak consists of no more than 7-8 pixels, some in pairs, other alone on a line. What you're seeing there is actually the lines in the CCD, the image has been resampled to a resolution much greater than that of the detector, and then smoothed. I would say that a cosmic ray that has hit the detector in the vicinity of the planet. If you look at how many rays you would see during a sun storm, it is very unlikely that no cosmic would never be close to a planet in the field... Also, it is a very weak cosmic, it didn't even saturate the detector.
Yeah, and there's another very good reason why "we" should be very skeptical about all this:
Now, the (MP|RI)AA can claim that "oh, those high-tech companies are so big and powerful, and they have so huge amounts of money, and they make that money by stealing the food off the tables of the poor, starving artists".
And, you know, there may be some truth to this too.
For us, it is important to emphasize that consumers (I kinda hate that word, to music, I'm a listener, not a consumer), and artists are in the same boat. The goliaths, the distributors and the tech industry are not fighting a fight for the rights of any of us. They are fighting their own fights, for their respective monopolies.
That's not a fight where neither consumers nor artists are winners, if we are to win, the problems that are facing us must be addressed in an entirely different manner.
I think this is a very interesting idea, and if it was easy and safe enough to make the transaction, I would certainly participate in this.
I think the money should be up front, so that the hacker who does it gets the money the moment when bug is marked as fixed.
The problem is the implementation, and this goes for micropayments in general. It has to be easy and safe, and we have to have todays financial institutions into it, so that money can be transfered from your account. The problem is that their costs in performing a transaction is pretty much constant regardless of transfered amount, and this cost is currently prohbitively large for micropayments. That is a very big problem.
OTOH, I think we must get something like this working. If we don't, the *AA's are going to destroy everything, so we have to make something that allows people to make money without taking people's rights away. "They" won't do it, cause they are allready making huge piles of cash, so it is up to us to do it. When we have proven that we make money, then they will come running.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you can easily create a website that highly device-independent, and that will transform and degrade gracefully on any reasonably standards-compliant browser.
For that reason, I would serve the same web-page to Mozilla as I would to a speech-browser. They would both perform excellently.
However, there are browsers out there that are so terribly broken, it gives you a really hard time. NN4 and IE3 are the obvious examples, to some extent you can say that about IE4 too. It is quite reasonable to serve something entirely different to these browsers, but for the browsers that work well, feeding them good, standards-compliant code and let them do the work to present it to the user is a very viable path.
Free as in beer: price of 0. Strings may be attached. You get no rights.
Free as in speech: Any price (usually 0), you can use, modify and redistribute the stuff, but there may be strings attached, such as that you are not allowed to take those above things away from anybody else.
In either of the definitions above "free" is used in a context. Otherwise, "free" means "without relation".
Yup. And they have a firm stance against software patents too.
Nowadays, this box is acting like my main web and mail server. It works great, so I guess it has finally found home. It is a little low on RAM, though.... :-)
You have the Mozilla SVG page, but it has not been updated in a while. I heard they had some licensing problems....?
Then, there's a message at from Sue Sims who I think works at Opera, she says it is scheduled for the next version. This was in May, and that would imply version 7, I think, but it doesn't seem to be in there.
True. But for one thing, I find it strange that harder to copy things is desireable. I think that it should be the other way around, that the cost of copying has been marginalized is probably the most significant progress technology has given us in very many years. It has allowed me to have a production that has overgone my father's 40 years of authorship, easily and with hardly no cost to myself. That is very, very significant.
But of course, there is this problem about getting money from the end user to the author...
The other point that you point out is also very significant, that once a content protection scheme is broken, it cannot be unbroken. Indeed, you can prosecute those who broke it, and destroy the lives of a few teenagers in the process. But then, the alarm bells ought to go off, do we really want to create a society where that is how you enforce copyright?
True. But the real point is that you have no forum to say it, other than (perhaps!) face-to-face conversation. Of course, free speech does not grant a forum. You can't demand to go on CNN to say what you want. But freedom of expression is worthless if you have no forum. If nobody can hear you, even if they wanted, you might as well shut up. That is the problem we're looking at.
I think this is best illustrated by a case where a scientific paper dealt with the genetic differences between jews and palestinians. The research revealed that there were no significant differences at all. The author managed to call palestinian refugee camps "concentration camps", and for that reason, the paper was removed.
It has allready been rumors that Israel has developed biological weapons that exploits the genetic differences between jews and palestinians to only kill palestinians. This paper makes it very clear that this rumor is completely false, it just isn't possible. In a similar manner, it is not unthinkable that Bush will suddenly present "evidence" that Iraq has developed biological weapons to kill only jews. With "content protection", it will be possible to completely remove papers that show that this is impossible. It will become possible to remove any comment that shows that.
Nobody should have that power.
Asterix has always been among my favorites. I have all the albums, and I started collecting when I was 8 years old. It is a great cartoon, and there is even a story about how money corrupts, in which the Romans send in a guy to buy all the bautas the Gauls can produce. Obelix makes bautas, and suddenly the village gets industrialized, the villagers get rich and things start going really wrong.....
They should start reading Asterix too.
I found this e-mail address: contact@albert-rene.com
I told them I would never buy an album again unless they drop this suit immediately.
I'm not really karmawhoring, because I hit the Karma Kap long ago, I'm just linking to the Warhol Worm... :-)
That's true. However, it is not just the fair use rights, it is the problem that for DRM to work, you got to allow a content producer, that is, a cartel in reality, to control everything from production, to the senses of the end user. It is insufficient to control e.g. the soundcard, because you can always record something as the sound propagates through the air. It boils down to the simple fact that you can't use encryption to keep a secret if one of the parties involved has no interest in keeping it secret.
However, what it means if this cartel can control all speech, is that freedom of expression is gone. That means end of democracy, and say hello to totalitarian rule.
This is so bad that it just can't be accepted. Unfortunately, I believe a total system collapse is the only thing that can bring about change, and I'd rather have a total system collapse in the entertainment industry than say goodbye to freedom of expression. I'm also quite sure that academic publishing and public debate will be largely unaffected by such a collapse, as well as many indy bands and stuff, so the real loss isn't that large.
But, I'd much rather come up with some alternative before seeing a total system collapse. But it is clear that we would have to do it...
Anyway, my new sites will have RDF. But it is being worked on, there's nothing to see yet... :-)
Anyway, I think you would find at least something if you start spidering at e.g. .
Uhm, Tim Berners-Lee has his name on every recommendation that comes out of the World Wide Web Consortium. Perhaps you've heard about XML? No, he's not among the editors, but the architectural principles he put down has a very significant influence on that, as well as pretty much every other technology that comes out of there. You can argue about the merits of stuff like XML, but you can't argue about the influence of TimBL. That he pulls the strings in the background and are not in the forefront shouting buzzwords, that can hardly be held against him. But if the buzzwords are the only things that you hear, yeah, well then probably you haven't heard too much about TimBL lately.
To me, technologies that TimBL are working on is a big part of my daily life. But there are those of us who write the code and try to make things work who are creating the future, not some Genius on /.
OK, so the connection to Tolkien was probably not the strongest, but that's a minor thing, and I can't help to fear the stuff moderators are smoking when they mod a post with a knee-jerk response like this up.
There are many who feel that RSS could be the first Semantic Web application, and I agree, it has potential and it is quite close to becoming one. But RSS 2.0 was a big step away from it, and it depends on people realizing what it is about, and given the comments so far to this story it isn't really encouraging....
It seems that people are too content with today's screen-only WWW that they feel no urge to be creative.
The CC License Engine framework really does all that is needed to identify a license that would allow the P2P network to redistribute the material , so why not use it?
Or am I missing something now?
If the CD is lost or destroyed by scratches (many of mine are allready), you still have the original recording that you can compress with lossy compression of the day for your daily use. Conversion between lossy codecs is meaningless, but compressing from a lossless format to a lossy format is OK.
So, if Ogg Vorbis 2.0 is better than 1.0, you can make 2.0 files from your lossless compressed files.
But there are no turf wars and other silly things going on, so whether it is NASA, ESA, US or Norway or whatever, people don't care who gets the credit. It's only about popularizing science.
As for mad scientists... I don't know, but I'm doing stuff like firewalking, got a world record. I think the best thing is to look around and jump on things that look cool.
Funny, I visited Peru this summer, and there, VoIP Blaster cards were on display in every other net cafe... I guess I should have bought one...
However, we should be very careful about bragging about it, because as it turns out UNIX admins are not that fast either. A study of an OpenSSL vulnerability and the subsequent release of the Slapper worm shows that many admins need some fire before they get moving.
Threatening to attempt to invalidate their entire portofolio might get them off your backs, they would need some guts to continue. Of course, you should know what you're talking about, so your threats are not just empty. But a bit of bluffing might do the trick...
Anyway, Great Outdoor Recreation Pages is a fairly old site, and while wayback only goes back to November 1996, I think it may be older.
Really, I think the posting on /. should wait untill it is announced.
The release-schedule says that it is going to be uploaded a bit before the announcement.
Me, I'm downloading! ;-)
See my other response, but it isn't big. It is actually at most a couple of pixels. The image has very clearly been resampled to a resolution much bigger than the resolution of the detector.
It is very hard to analyze that if you don't know what has happened to the picture. The planet is easy enough, that's an over-exposed planet. The "exhaust fumes" is I guess what you're pointing at which is not straight. You would expect it to be straight if it is pixel bleeding, not if it is e.g. a cosmic ray. And if you look at it closely, you'll see that the streak consists of no more than 7-8 pixels, some in pairs, other alone on a line. What you're seeing there is actually the lines in the CCD, the image has been resampled to a resolution much greater than that of the detector, and then smoothed. I would say that a cosmic ray that has hit the detector in the vicinity of the planet. If you look at how many rays you would see during a sun storm, it is very unlikely that no cosmic would never be close to a planet in the field... Also, it is a very weak cosmic, it didn't even saturate the detector.
Now, the (MP|RI)AA can claim that "oh, those high-tech companies are so big and powerful, and they have so huge amounts of money, and they make that money by stealing the food off the tables of the poor, starving artists".
And, you know, there may be some truth to this too.
For us, it is important to emphasize that consumers (I kinda hate that word, to music, I'm a listener, not a consumer), and artists are in the same boat. The goliaths, the distributors and the tech industry are not fighting a fight for the rights of any of us. They are fighting their own fights, for their respective monopolies.
That's not a fight where neither consumers nor artists are winners, if we are to win, the problems that are facing us must be addressed in an entirely different manner.
Oh, I thought it was a PHB smiling... :-)
I think the money should be up front, so that the hacker who does it gets the money the moment when bug is marked as fixed.
The problem is the implementation, and this goes for micropayments in general. It has to be easy and safe, and we have to have todays financial institutions into it, so that money can be transfered from your account. The problem is that their costs in performing a transaction is pretty much constant regardless of transfered amount, and this cost is currently prohbitively large for micropayments. That is a very big problem.
OTOH, I think we must get something like this working. If we don't, the *AA's are going to destroy everything, so we have to make something that allows people to make money without taking people's rights away. "They" won't do it, cause they are allready making huge piles of cash, so it is up to us to do it. When we have proven that we make money, then they will come running.