On one level it looks like the downloader is the one making a copy, but actually the server is making the copy and then sending that copy over the network to the client machine. The client never possesses more than one instance of the file (except maybe in cases of buffering or temp files or something like that). Doesn't the law center more on distribution than the actual duplication anyway?
What are you talking about? Copyright means the right to control distribution (i.e. "copy" + "right"), not the right to control reception. If you are distributing copyright works, that is the violation. Otherwise every time I buy any copyrighted work anywhere I'd have to go through a lengthy process of verifying that the seller had the right to sell that work in order to protect myself from liability.
If I'm listening to web radio, am I going to be liable because the "broadcaster" didn't pay his/her ASCAP/BMI fees? I sure as hell hope not. Ditto if I download any other file. Maybe if I am knowingly involved in receiving illegal copies I can be held liable for contributory infringement of some sort, but how am I to know that it's not the record company sharing those files on Kazaa? (just an example... I don't actually use Kazaa)
I'm a Linux user and I spend money. In fact, quite a bit of it. I've spent at least $500 this year on pre-recorded media-- although the only Hollywood film was LOTR and all of the music was non-RIAA or foreign labels. If Linux iTunes were reasonably priced and allowed me reasonable access to a decent catalog of 99 cent tunes, I'd probably pay for that.
The catch for me sounds like the type of DRM used. If I can't transfer these songs to my headless audio server (which feeds the stereo amplifier), then what's the point? And will I be able to burn the files to CD for play in an affordable portable mp3 player? Or will I be stuck burning them to audio CD only (which severely limits the number of files I can store on a CD)?
As it is, it sounds like I might be better off just buying the CD from Sam Goody or a used record store and ripping it since my 100% fair use intentions would be less likely to get tripped up by some lame DRM scheme. Until they get Macrovision on everything that is.
Actually, without people out there actively breaking the rules, we wouldn't even be having this discussion. It's a necessary part of this battle and a common feature of most social struggles.
You're absolutely right. The world is exactly the same today as it was 10 years ago. Nothing has changed.
Which is to say BZZZT!:)
Ten years ago the web was nothing compared to what it is today. Much of what existed on the web ten years ago was funded via things like government research grants or private foundational research grants. Or it was quid pro quo amongst various entities. Perfect example being the phsyicists who started this whole mess in the first place.
When commercial entities joined the "webscape", the problems associated with commercial entities came along with them. If I was coping with intrusive banner ads at www.irs.gov, I would be righteously outraged. But I don't hear people complaining about full page ads in newspapers or magazines, or whining about commercials on cable channels. So why should it be different on the web?
If you like free web sites, there are plenty of them out there that don't have annoying advertising practices. Nobody is forcing you to visit the sites with poor manners. Just like no one is forcing me to visit sites that use Flash (yet).
Not if enough people buy cable as a result of something like this being offered. In that case the incremental expense of adding this programming would either be met or exceeded by the number of new subscribers (or more importantly, continuing subscribers). What I'd like to see is true a-la carte cable ordering. I'd love to be able to just get a local channels package and add Animal Planet, Cartoon Network and maybe one or two others rather than paying $50 for a whole host of channels I have no interest in at all.
Dogs are great for deterring casual intruders, but they would not deter serious intruders (like the FBI or organized criminals)-- dogs can be mitigated easily with things like heavy blankets or bags, non-lethal nooses, and tranquilizers. Nor can the dog communicate meaningfully about intrusions once they've occurred, so you might know someone had been in, but not what they did.
Best bet is small hidden cameras or other intrusion detection systems. That way you have a much higher likelihood of getting an accurate record of what happened during the intrusion. This is important during the recovery phase, because otherwise you have no idea what was compromised. Did they bug the keyboard? Did they install software? Did they simply plant a small wireless camera facing your keyboard or monitor? If you can pinpoint what they did, then you can counter that threat directly rather than having to take the most extreme measures available (i.e. complete destruction of all incriminating evidence and/or keys).
On deterring casual intruders: I like to leave my mp3 server running a little digital DJ I wrote, that uses voice synthesis to announce songs and times between songs. Very hard to tell if I'm home or not with that on. Lower tech solution would be to just leave the radio or tv running.
Because Slashdot is all about what Cmdr Taco and his buddies like and reinforcing geek stereotypes moreso than breaking them down? RTFM.:)
Sports are nearly ubiquitous in American culture. Anime is not. That's my take on why sports do not belong here, but anime might.
For my part, I'm not going to subscribe to cable even to get an all-anime channel. Just not worth it-- especially since all the anime is likely to be dubbed and not subbed. I am considering getting Dish Network though, because that way I can get at least one semi-authentic Japanese channel (albeit with very little anime on the schedule) in addition to stuff like Cartoon Network and probably eventually this Anime Network.
Is it really asking too much to insist that we not be bombarded with advertising everywhere we look, everywhere we listen?
No, it's not too much to insist. The problem is that web sites cost money to provide. Until other revenue sources prove to have better ROI than ads, ads will continue. What would you prefer? Micropayments? Government grants? Subscriptions?
You make it sound like we don't already have these. USB hard drives have been around for years. And I don't know how long they've been available, but I've got a removable IDE hard drive tray on my main system. Requires rebooting though (at least I don't know how to swap IDE drives without rebooting).
Personally I'm going to stick with my threatening letters from the BSA warning me of impending doom if I don't license all of my software correctly. They actually had the nerve to tell me they were offering me a "truce" for a while, and that if I didn't comply... I guess we would be at war. If anything ever cemented my desire not to become a Microsoft customer, it was the notion that I would be at war with the very company(s) I was a customer of.
Of course, if I actually used Kazaa or Grokster, I might like to have my own such IM to brag about.:)
Too bad BitTorrent doesn't include a chat feature (not). I can't wait to see how the lawsuits on that one shake out.
Just make sure to use a silencer on the handgun, as the sound of one firing is somewhat explosive. Although if you do it often enough, you may be lucky enough to damage your hearing to where a little fan whirring isn't such a problem after all.
It's fine that he wants to include the rants, but to make then not only immutable in form but inviolate in terms of inclusion is where people have an issue. I think some people balk at the notion that this is fully in the same spirit as the freedoms they have with the software itself. Although this clause hasn't been abused that I've ever noticed, it certainly doesn't prevent someone from including a section that contains something objectionable... that would be required for all subsequent distributors to include with the document when they share it.
One would hope that we would either 1) not look a gift horse too closely in the mouth (is passing the short essay along going to hurt you), or when that doesn't work 2) simply turn the free market for free documentation. If the emacs manual were 2/3rds program usage and 1/3 anti-Jello gelatin rants, I think someone else would come along and simply write a completely separate and different manual and we would all start using that.
That said, I understand the problem some parts of the Debian community are having with this, but in the long run it's a waste of effort to get all excited about it. I know I wish I had all the time back I've wasted on this question... could've used the time to write software or documentation.
Between the people in the audience and the crap they've been showing on the screen, it's a wonder anyone actually goes to movies anymore... but apparently attendance is up-- which is why I really don't get all this anti-piracy effort. Who the hell wants to watch some lame videotape of a movie screen when you can go see an actual screening for under $10? That's a lot cheaper than the price of concert tickets to some band that's just lipsyncing through the whole show anyway.
The log maker type of approach is suitable for newsprint and limited quantities of non-newsprint paper (i.e. the daily paper), but not for most junk mail. Your description of the content of paper is way off. A lot of the paper you'd receive as junk mail has as much filler in it as it does wood-derived cellulose. This is things like plastics or clays that help make the paper glossy or smoother or less likely to bleed-- not to mention the amount of work you'd have pulling off pieces of actual plastic from window envelopes, stickers, and the like. Not necessarily stuff that you want to burn anywhere near where you also plan to breathe.
Ooh. Tough tradeoff between the huge amount of storage on that thing and the flexibility and larger screen one gets with a Zaurus. I've already got the Zaurus, but that Archos looks pretty nice too-- might just have to add to the gadget collection.:)
I'm still not sure I understand. If the program is compiled to native machine code, and sitting out on my drive as a separate file from the source code, and I go to run it with the standard notation, how is the compiler going to modify the running code without being linked into the program (either dynamically or statically)? And if the compiler is linked in, how is this materially different from running byte-code in an interpreter?
So is the compiler running the program then? If not, how is it changing the code while it's in memory, being executed? Perhaps I should not have mentioned Lisp, but mostly what I was thinking of was the Lisp interpreter in emacs.
And flying cars! Where the heck are the flying cars?? They had those lame arcologies and microwave power plants, but their transportation systems were all old news as of the 1920s.
They should have all kinds of stuff in there. Better mass transit options and greenways (bike paths essentially) and like you said, more kinds of roads (especially working multi-lanes and one-ways). Sigh. And how about better tax options to encourage certain modes over others?
We do already have some primitive forms of this conversation idea via versioning systems like CVS. The problem is writing a program that recognizes patterns in the changes and learns to do that stuff on its own.
Also, think about languages like Ruby or Lisp where the interpreter can alter a program while it's running. As an example I wrote a small text editor in Ruby/Tk in which you could modify the source code to the editor in a buffer, then choose "eval buffer in application", and that code would run in the context of the application. Once you have the core of such a program, with proper error handling, you need never turn the program off again (as long as you don't redefine the core engine with a bug). I was able to add menus, menu items, rewrite existing routines, etc, all while executing the original code. Of course, emacs has been doing this same thing for years...
Using both CVS and live eval you get much closer to code being a conversation between the programmer and the system.
Right. That's pretty much what I'm saying. You can't really compare the raw number of security bugs from any Linux to a plain MS Windows because a Linux distribution includes a breadth and depth of software that you won't find in a raw install of MS Windows.
Quantitatively 60+ security bugs for Gentoo is fine with me. The real question is: how many of those bugs are guaranteed to affect every user, the way something like this faulty VM will (not everyone is using it, but they've all got it installed by default, and therefore have to patch it)? You can't just count the total number of bugs and compare.
Your KDE example is perfect. If I am using Gentoo and GNOME, and I don't even have Qt3 installed, let alone KDE, then any bug that only affects users of KDE doesn't count for me. My system didn't experience 60+ bugs it experience 50 bugs... and so on down the list.
So what we need for Linux distributions are two numbers: a minimum number of bugs (i.e. glibc or the kernel or whatever had a bug) and an average number of bugs (i.e. across a variety of uses this is the number of bugs likely to have hit your machine-- maybe even broken down by server/desktop). The total number of bugs is not useful to end users or CIOs or whoever because it's a maximum, not necessarily a good predictor of what your security update life will be like.
Slashdot Mirror
On one level it looks like the downloader is the one making a copy, but actually the server is making the copy and then sending that copy over the network to the client machine. The client never possesses more than one instance of the file (except maybe in cases of buffering or temp files or something like that). Doesn't the law center more on distribution than the actual duplication anyway?
What are you talking about? Copyright means the right to control distribution (i.e. "copy" + "right"), not the right to control reception. If you are distributing copyright works, that is the violation. Otherwise every time I buy any copyrighted work anywhere I'd have to go through a lengthy process of verifying that the seller had the right to sell that work in order to protect myself from liability.
If I'm listening to web radio, am I going to be liable because the "broadcaster" didn't pay his/her ASCAP/BMI fees? I sure as hell hope not. Ditto if I download any other file. Maybe if I am knowingly involved in receiving illegal copies I can be held liable for contributory infringement of some sort, but how am I to know that it's not the record company sharing those files on Kazaa? (just an example... I don't actually use Kazaa)
I believe they both wrote spidering software AND hosted quite a few files themselves. It is this latter activity that probably led them to settle.
I'm a Linux user and I spend money. In fact, quite a bit of it. I've spent at least $500 this year on pre-recorded media-- although the only Hollywood film was LOTR and all of the music was non-RIAA or foreign labels. If Linux iTunes were reasonably priced and allowed me reasonable access to a decent catalog of 99 cent tunes, I'd probably pay for that.
The catch for me sounds like the type of DRM used. If I can't transfer these songs to my headless audio server (which feeds the stereo amplifier), then what's the point? And will I be able to burn the files to CD for play in an affordable portable mp3 player? Or will I be stuck burning them to audio CD only (which severely limits the number of files I can store on a CD)?
As it is, it sounds like I might be better off just buying the CD from Sam Goody or a used record store and ripping it since my 100% fair use intentions would be less likely to get tripped up by some lame DRM scheme. Until they get Macrovision on everything that is.
Actually, without people out there actively breaking the rules, we wouldn't even be having this discussion. It's a necessary part of this battle and a common feature of most social struggles.
You're absolutely right. The world is exactly the same today as it was 10 years ago. Nothing has changed.
:)
Which is to say BZZZT!
Ten years ago the web was nothing compared to what it is today. Much of what existed on the web ten years ago was funded via things like government research grants or private foundational research grants. Or it was quid pro quo amongst various entities. Perfect example being the phsyicists who started this whole mess in the first place.
When commercial entities joined the "webscape", the problems associated with commercial entities came along with them. If I was coping with intrusive banner ads at www.irs.gov, I would be righteously outraged. But I don't hear people complaining about full page ads in newspapers or magazines, or whining about commercials on cable channels. So why should it be different on the web?
If you like free web sites, there are plenty of them out there that don't have annoying advertising practices. Nobody is forcing you to visit the sites with poor manners. Just like no one is forcing me to visit sites that use Flash (yet).
Not if enough people buy cable as a result of something like this being offered. In that case the incremental expense of adding this programming would either be met or exceeded by the number of new subscribers (or more importantly, continuing subscribers). What I'd like to see is true a-la carte cable ordering. I'd love to be able to just get a local channels package and add Animal Planet, Cartoon Network and maybe one or two others rather than paying $50 for a whole host of channels I have no interest in at all.
Dogs are great for deterring casual intruders, but they would not deter serious intruders (like the FBI or organized criminals)-- dogs can be mitigated easily with things like heavy blankets or bags, non-lethal nooses, and tranquilizers. Nor can the dog communicate meaningfully about intrusions once they've occurred, so you might know someone had been in, but not what they did.
Best bet is small hidden cameras or other intrusion detection systems. That way you have a much higher likelihood of getting an accurate record of what happened during the intrusion. This is important during the recovery phase, because otherwise you have no idea what was compromised. Did they bug the keyboard? Did they install software? Did they simply plant a small wireless camera facing your keyboard or monitor? If you can pinpoint what they did, then you can counter that threat directly rather than having to take the most extreme measures available (i.e. complete destruction of all incriminating evidence and/or keys).
On deterring casual intruders: I like to leave my mp3 server running a little digital DJ I wrote, that uses voice synthesis to announce songs and times between songs. Very hard to tell if I'm home or not with that on. Lower tech solution would be to just leave the radio or tv running.
Because Slashdot is all about what Cmdr Taco and his buddies like and reinforcing geek stereotypes moreso than breaking them down? RTFM. :)
Sports are nearly ubiquitous in American culture. Anime is not. That's my take on why sports do not belong here, but anime might.
For my part, I'm not going to subscribe to cable even to get an all-anime channel. Just not worth it-- especially since all the anime is likely to be dubbed and not subbed. I am considering getting Dish Network though, because that way I can get at least one semi-authentic Japanese channel (albeit with very little anime on the schedule) in addition to stuff like Cartoon Network and probably eventually this Anime Network.
Is it really asking too much to insist that we not be bombarded with advertising everywhere we look, everywhere we listen?
No, it's not too much to insist. The problem is that web sites cost money to provide. Until other revenue sources prove to have better ROI than ads, ads will continue. What would you prefer? Micropayments? Government grants? Subscriptions?
You make it sound like we don't already have these. USB hard drives have been around for years. And I don't know how long they've been available, but I've got a removable IDE hard drive tray on my main system. Requires rebooting though (at least I don't know how to swap IDE drives without rebooting).
Personally I'm going to stick with my threatening letters from the BSA warning me of impending doom if I don't license all of my software correctly. They actually had the nerve to tell me they were offering me a "truce" for a while, and that if I didn't comply... I guess we would be at war. If anything ever cemented my desire not to become a Microsoft customer, it was the notion that I would be at war with the very company(s) I was a customer of.
:)
Of course, if I actually used Kazaa or Grokster, I might like to have my own such IM to brag about.
Too bad BitTorrent doesn't include a chat feature (not). I can't wait to see how the lawsuits on that one shake out.
Just make sure to use a silencer on the handgun, as the sound of one firing is somewhat explosive. Although if you do it often enough, you may be lucky enough to damage your hearing to where a little fan whirring isn't such a problem after all.
It's fine that he wants to include the rants, but to make then not only immutable in form but inviolate in terms of inclusion is where people have an issue. I think some people balk at the notion that this is fully in the same spirit as the freedoms they have with the software itself. Although this clause hasn't been abused that I've ever noticed, it certainly doesn't prevent someone from including a section that contains something objectionable... that would be required for all subsequent distributors to include with the document when they share it.
One would hope that we would either 1) not look a gift horse too closely in the mouth (is passing the short essay along going to hurt you), or when that doesn't work 2) simply turn the free market for free documentation. If the emacs manual were 2/3rds program usage and 1/3 anti-Jello gelatin rants, I think someone else would come along and simply write a completely separate and different manual and we would all start using that.
That said, I understand the problem some parts of the Debian community are having with this, but in the long run it's a waste of effort to get all excited about it. I know I wish I had all the time back I've wasted on this question... could've used the time to write software or documentation.
Between the people in the audience and the crap they've been showing on the screen, it's a wonder anyone actually goes to movies anymore... but apparently attendance is up-- which is why I really don't get all this anti-piracy effort. Who the hell wants to watch some lame videotape of a movie screen when you can go see an actual screening for under $10? That's a lot cheaper than the price of concert tickets to some band that's just lipsyncing through the whole show anyway.
It's been done. It's one of the most popular games of all time: chess. :)
The log maker type of approach is suitable for newsprint and limited quantities of non-newsprint paper (i.e. the daily paper), but not for most junk mail. Your description of the content of paper is way off. A lot of the paper you'd receive as junk mail has as much filler in it as it does wood-derived cellulose. This is things like plastics or clays that help make the paper glossy or smoother or less likely to bleed-- not to mention the amount of work you'd have pulling off pieces of actual plastic from window envelopes, stickers, and the like. Not necessarily stuff that you want to burn anywhere near where you also plan to breathe.
Last time I checked a dog's nose was part of its head. :)
Ooh. Tough tradeoff between the huge amount of storage on that thing and the flexibility and larger screen one gets with a Zaurus. I've already got the Zaurus, but that Archos looks pretty nice too-- might just have to add to the gadget collection. :)
Does it work with Linux?
I'm still not sure I understand. If the program is compiled to native machine code, and sitting out on my drive as a separate file from the source code, and I go to run it with the standard notation, how is the compiler going to modify the running code without being linked into the program (either dynamically or statically)? And if the compiler is linked in, how is this materially different from running byte-code in an interpreter?
So is the compiler running the program then? If not, how is it changing the code while it's in memory, being executed? Perhaps I should not have mentioned Lisp, but mostly what I was thinking of was the Lisp interpreter in emacs.
And flying cars! Where the heck are the flying cars?? They had those lame arcologies and microwave power plants, but their transportation systems were all old news as of the 1920s.
They should have all kinds of stuff in there. Better mass transit options and greenways (bike paths essentially) and like you said, more kinds of roads (especially working multi-lanes and one-ways). Sigh. And how about better tax options to encourage certain modes over others?
We do already have some primitive forms of this conversation idea via versioning systems like CVS. The problem is writing a program that recognizes patterns in the changes and learns to do that stuff on its own.
Also, think about languages like Ruby or Lisp where the interpreter can alter a program while it's running. As an example I wrote a small text editor in Ruby/Tk in which you could modify the source code to the editor in a buffer, then choose "eval buffer in application", and that code would run in the context of the application. Once you have the core of such a program, with proper error handling, you need never turn the program off again (as long as you don't redefine the core engine with a bug). I was able to add menus, menu items, rewrite existing routines, etc, all while executing the original code. Of course, emacs has been doing this same thing for years...
Using both CVS and live eval you get much closer to code being a conversation between the programmer and the system.
MacOS X is already arguably light years behind Linux as a desktop OS??? Even GNU/Linux zealots like me would say you have that backwards.
Right. That's pretty much what I'm saying. You can't really compare the raw number of security bugs from any Linux to a plain MS Windows because a Linux distribution includes a breadth and depth of software that you won't find in a raw install of MS Windows.
Quantitatively 60+ security bugs for Gentoo is fine with me. The real question is: how many of those bugs are guaranteed to affect every user, the way something like this faulty VM will (not everyone is using it, but they've all got it installed by default, and therefore have to patch it)? You can't just count the total number of bugs and compare.
Your KDE example is perfect. If I am using Gentoo and GNOME, and I don't even have Qt3 installed, let alone KDE, then any bug that only affects users of KDE doesn't count for me. My system didn't experience 60+ bugs it experience 50 bugs... and so on down the list.
So what we need for Linux distributions are two numbers: a minimum number of bugs (i.e. glibc or the kernel or whatever had a bug) and an average number of bugs (i.e. across a variety of uses this is the number of bugs likely to have hit your machine-- maybe even broken down by server/desktop). The total number of bugs is not useful to end users or CIOs or whoever because it's a maximum, not necessarily a good predictor of what your security update life will be like.