MicroSoft said they were stopping all other work while they found and fixed security holes lurking undiscovered in their software. They're obviously not going to take time out of this important project to fix known security holes. Things like releasing patches and applying them to their websites will have to wait until the entire codebase has been carefully examined.
I can't help but notice that your list of "big console titles" doesn't include anything more than a few months old. DooM was about as big in its day as any of these, and basically continued to be just as big for several years, until Quake took over. Considering that Half-Life uses the Quake engine, Quake is arguably still doing well today based on mods, after nearly 6 years.
In 6 years, people probably won't be able to remember any of the console games (except for the FF series, which is pretty distintive), and few people will actually play them.
First, let's clear something up. If someone is buying a book used (or even selling a book used), then the author already got money for the book sale.
Not quite. A publisher is likely to distribute a bunch of copies of a book at promotional discounts so that enough people will find out about the book that it can become popular. Aside from established authors and series, people buy books on positive reviews more than anything else. In order to get positive reviews, people have to read the book. If people won't buy the book unless they've heard good things about it,they'll have to get the book for free at first. So that means there will be a bunch of copies in circulation before anyone will actually buy it, and those copies could come up as used books.
But, in any case, what the author's guild is doing is telling authors not to link to Amazon. If an author links to Amazon, people might follow the link, and buy the author's book used, thereby removing it from the used book selection and preventing people who didn't know the author from stumbling over it. The people who are coming from the author's website have clearly heard of the author and the book, and thus making used books available to them doesn't help, while having used books available to people who aren't coming from the author's website does help promote the book.
If Amazon's selling a used book, then somebody's got a copy of the book they don't want. One would guess that the person got the book new. So despite the fact that they don't get anything out of the second sale, they presumably got something out of the first sale, which didn't benefit the customer enough (for whatever reason) to make them keep the book.
I suspect that the real issue is that a lot of copies of new books are getting distributed at a loss to promote the book, and then those books get sold used at under new prices. This means that the publishers spend a lot of money to promote books, and that money goes to getting people to buy the book used instead of new.
Being able to buy books speculatively encourages people to buy them. Being able to buy books used for little money encourages people to buy similar books for more. But these sorts of grassroots promotion conflict with organized promotion; if you don't promote enough, nobody finds out about the book. If you promote too much, you flood the market with cheap used copies. Unless the book is a real crowd-pleaser and you know it will be in advance, the number of books you have to send out to make the book popular is enough to flood the market (except for later books by popular authors).
I agree that it's reasonable to link to sites that will only sell you the book new, because, if someone is following your link, they've actually been convinced by your promotion. Having your books available used is good for getting new readers, but you don't want to direct the readers you've got to the used book market.
The existence of used books encourages book sales. If everyone buys the used copies, there won't be any of them left, which is obviously bad. So you don't want to drain the used book market by sending the people who already like your books there.
Re:Poorly written summary of a poorly titled artic
on
No More Rebooting?
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· Score: 3, Interesting
The article wasn't any better written than the summary. It seems like this is suitable as a replacement for flash memory, not for either disk (which is huge), or for RAM (which is really fast). Of course, having a flash-like technology be cost-effective would change things; you could keep a copy of system memory as it is when it has just been booted (but before it initializes devices) there. Then you "reboot" by copying the virtual memory table from the nvram to main memory, and the system is immediately ready to initialize devices and run.
It would also be useful if programs could put some of their data in the nvram region, so (for instance), your emacs buffers don't go away when the power goes out. It would also be a good place to put write buffers, such that, as soon as the data is written to nvram, it will definitely make it into the filesystem, whether or not you lose power. This means that you can accumulate more dirty buffers safely and write them out in larger chunks, which is more efficient.
Keeping everything in nvram (if that were fast enough) may or may not be a good idea. You'd still want to reboot on occasion to refresh the system (load a new kernel, e.g.), but there's no particular reason you'd want to reboot at exactly those times when you power down and back up. Of course, you'd need everything to be hotswappable (replace the processor with programs running?) and restartable (disks have to be told to spin up, e.g.).
What I'd demonstrate is a program with a bug in how it calls a library function. You run the program and it segfaults. You run the program under ddd or gdb or something of that sort, and get the backtrace. You look at the source for your program where it calls the library function, and it's not obvious what's wrong. Then (and here's the neat part), you go down the backtrace to where the segfault is, and you're looking at the library source. There, by looking at the values of local variables, it's obvious what's wrong with your program (you're calling the library with the wrong thing or something).
One of the coolest things about Linux is that you have all of the source to everything available, and you can have your libraries with debugging symbols, and you can look at exactly what it's doing. This can be incredibly helpful when the documentation is somehow vague or when you're misreading it (and don't know what part you're misreading). I certainly miss that when developing in Java with Sun's library.
What we need is not for someone to run a public data store, because whoever runs it isn't going to be trusted by some people. What we need is a protocol for getting data from such a store with the identity information in email address form. Then the users can put their data on a machine they trust, either one provided by an ISP or something or one of their own.
For example, web sites should be able to authenticate users with a client certificate that the client provides when creating the web site account. This client certificate can be essentially anything, so long as it is how the client wishes to be identified. Of course, the client will want to be able to use a different certificate later (if the first one expires), so what the client really is identified by is the certificate chain, which has to have the same name up as far as the self-signed root certificate, and have the same root certificate.
With a scheme like this, users need only find a certificate authority (or create one), and have a way to "log in" with the CA in order to get a client certificate (probably one which expires rapidly).
The server that acts as a CA can also act as a store for other data. Ideally, the browser would be able to fetch form entries from the CA automatically, in response to the user requesting it after logging in. So you could move to the "credit card number" field, hit the "fetch identity value" button, type "CCN" (or whatever you've called it), and the browser would do a HTTPS request with your client cert to get that value and fill in the field with it.
For most people, the CA and data store may be AOL or something, but there's no reason that the CA couldn't be your own machine. While you're at it, you could set it up to recognize other certificates than your own and provide the information you want to make available to these people. If you have a suitable field available to the right set of people, this solves the instant messaging location problem.
Expedition leader Monty Halls said: "Our divers were presented with a series of structures that clearly showed man-made attributes. The scale of the site appears to be extremely extensive, with 50 dives conducted over a three-day period covering only a small area of the overall ruin field."
Right, and now they're going to find tons of overly powerful items and monsters which are not dangerous considering the characters.
Extending DNS won't work, because DNS is designed for naming things that don't move around much. Finding a person requires a different design because, if you wait a day to propagate the information of where I'm sitting, it will always be wrong. What you need is a system where my name determines the only machine you ask to get my location, and that machine tells you how to reach me. Standard DNS won't work, because it expects to cache the IP addresses locally or at intermediate points.
Problem one is actually more general: given a globally-unique username, find out (in a machine-readable way) a piece of information about the user. At the same time, given your own password (or whatever), securely set a piece of information about you (also in a way that can be automatic). For privacy, you may want to demand some authentication in order to provide some sorts of information.
Problem two is then: specify a piece of information such that it will suffice from getting a text message to a person that piece of information is associated with.
MicroSoft has a habit of doing large projects, and then changing focus such that everything has to be changed. Open source projects are generally designed with a particular focus in mind, and never change that focus. In a different focus is needed, different people will probably do a different project.
How many open source projects started out with no internet support, and got internet support later? (1: Emacs) How many open source projects started out with no attention to security, and got it later? (3: BIND, sendmail, and wu-ftpd)
As far as I can tell, every MicroSoft project more than a few years old started out without any network support, and got it later. And every MicroSoft project started out without any security and is getting it now.
MicroSoft has an enormous amount of effort to throw around, and runs its projects accordingly. Open source projects have a limited amount of effort to put into projects, and also need to get results in order to get developers.
Open source projects are not necessarily better for being more efficient in developer effort. But it doesn't make any more sense for MicroSoft to brag about how much effort they can put into things, since the main benefit of this effort is the ability to put off figuring out what's important, which is nice for MicroSoft, but not helpful for their customers.
If it's easy enough to get the judgement, lots of people will get them. If someone has a thousand delinquent $5 judgements, it'll probably start to be a pain for them to deal with. It'd probably wreak their credit rating, and interfere with renewing their license.
Of course, you're unlikely to get your $5 if nobody else joins in. But if someone isn't bothering anyone but you, they're not really a spammer, anyway.
Politicians always listen to their constituents. Normally, they don't hear from enough of their constituents to make a difference. In this case, however, it seems like the bill is sufficiently obvious that the constituents aren't overwhelmingly apathetic.
Of course, in this case, the bill is also opposed by the majority of the deep-pocketted industries, which might be the real reason.
Actually, you want to gain market share, not establish a monopoly. It's just that the end point of gaining market share is a monopoly. Actually having a monopoly is a bad thing (unless your goal is to leverage it, which is illegal), which is why what you really want is to have competitors with market share small enough that it doesn't impact your profits.
A metadistribution would be a distribution of instructions for building a system, rather than the system itself. This will let you get your packages from the original authors, while getting a set of packages that have been researched (found, configured, etc) by someone who is putting together a coherent system.
I think this would be better with $1/mail to a maximum of $100, because then they could do it in small claims court. The thing about spam is that individual ones aren't a problem; the problem is the total volume. If everybody takes a spammer to small claims court, the individual ones aren't a problem so much as the fact that the spammer will have to pay $5 to a ton of people on a number of occasions, which means that it's a pain to be a spammer.
Besides, it's a lot easier to say each email caused you $1 of damage, making you have a bad day overall, than it is to claim the each email caused you $50 of damage.
Plus, if someone works out exactly how you do the small claims suit, and publishes the information, it's easy for anyone who feels annoyed or wants to see how the legal system works or just has to go be the courthouse anyway, and the tactic of spamming everyone who hasn't tried suing anyone won't work.
In those two months, MicroSoft has probably fixed more security-compromising bugs than most open source projects (expect for sendmail and BIND) will ever have. MicroSoft can put far more effort behind solving the problems that they have created for themselves that the open source community could ever hope to, both in terms of solving problems and in terms of creating them.
The open source community is always taking shortcuts by not making every possible mistake and them fixing it. Who cares about results? MicroSoft can do more work than anybody else, and that's all that matters.
Actually, it seems to me that MandrakeSoft is saying that it is innovative to get money in return for doing what you'd do anyway.
If you give them money, they'll be grateful. In return, they'll go on doing what it was that made you want to pay them, and not make you go to the store.
It seems to me that this is just a matter of unbundling the things people want (inprovements in Mandrake) from the things people don't want (paper, cardboard, and plastic).
Of course, there's the fact that people will rarely pay any amount of money which doesn't appear on a price tag, so setting a range of prices for nothing in particular will make people who want to give you money much more likely to do so. Giving them more stuff in return is less important.
(My reason for not supporting Mandrake is not what I'm about to say, but that I disagree with the rest of the computer industry on what is friendly to users)
I think that much of the point of the open source community is that, if someone doesn't make it, anything they managed lives on, and the next people start out that much better. If MandrakeSoft didn't make it, anyone who was interested would continue what they'd started. The point is to not be dependent on the business success of a company for whether you can use your software.
The open source community is much more about the people and their work than about the companies. It's likely that if MandrakeSoft went under, their developers would actually end up working on other user-friendly GNU/Linux distros, bringing with them what they'd done at MandrakeSoft.
Of course, it's better for everyone if MandrakeSoft doesn't go under, because dealing with that would slow down the process, and not everyone who worked on Mandrake would end up doing the same thing elsewhere.
In this economy, there's going to be a revolving door of companies that fail due to mismanagement, profit-taking, bad luck, or whatever. The real cause is in making progress anyway, and it is possible because all of a company's work doesn't die with it.
Furthermore, the open source world is really driven by trying to make things which are actually better. If something isn't better and doesn't show promise of being better, it's not going to get anywhere. In the case of a user-friendly distribution, there's really no point in supporting one that isn't popular, since, if users don't like it, it's not actually user-friendly.
That said, I'm glad to hear MandrakeSoft is doing well, because they actually promote Linux, which is a need that the open source community isn't good at filling. Marketting is generally thought of as a black art, but it's obviously in everyone's interest if it is done well.
The experience I've had with handspring tech support has been very positive. They're really quick about replacing broken devices and less likely to charge you for it that you'd expect.
My wife broke her first one by dropping it, and they replaced it for free, and didn't complain when she took a long time to send back the broken one.
Neither of us have had any problems with the hardware (other than when it had been dropped), so it seems to me like you either get one that's fine or you get one that's just broken, and you can get it replaced without too much trouble.
So interoperability supposedly risks loss of IP. If merely working together risks pollution, one would presume that working together by design, with knowledge of the "dangerous" side, with no alternative on the "dangerous" side would be even more risky.
MicroSoft software-produced documents fit in this category. If the GPL is a threat to MicroSoft, then MicroSoft is similarly a threat to all of their customers.
Of course, MicroSoft is doing this both to be inconvenient to open-source competition, and to put fear of the GPL in people's minds. But this also raises the possibility that MicroSoft will decide that they want to put you out of business and take all of your IP, and that they seem to think that would be possible.
Re:14 years - ok for an artist - big suckage for c
on
When Elephants Dance
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· Score: 3, Insightful
LOTR paid back the whole series in the first few weeks the first movie was out. Everything to do with DVDs, product licenses, and so forth, not to mention the other 2/3 of the movies, is profit. As far as whether bootlegs are concerned, they'd made back their investment nicely before the bootlegs were even available.
Having the copyright on the movies (and images from them) expire after 14 years is plenty long enough, provided that studios acquire a modicum of taste and try not to make movies that are obviously bad. Moving movies is a major risk only because they don't weed out movies which are not worth making, and because they sometimes throw a huge budget at a movie which has a limited appeal and should be done for what people will pay to see it (since the diehards who will see such a movie won't care much that the budget was low).
Prohibiting corporations from holding copyrights wouldn't be so big a problem; you just let the artists retain the copyright, but finance them (and provide camera teams and such) for a license, with terms depending on what they want. Corporations don't create anything, but it's not like a corporation is founded with pre-existing works, which it then makes all of its money by licensing.
The real issue, though, is what person gets the copyright for something collaborative like LOTR, if corporations can't hold copyrights. It would be like trying to get a non-GPL license to Linux: you contact every single person who did anything on the project and try to figure out what's going on. The editors own the particular cut, but the images in the cut are owned by the animators and camera crews (with the lighting owned by someone diffierent), but all of the acting in the images in the cut is owned by the actors, who also own the voices, except that the audio splicing is owned by the sound editors...
In any case, the ownership of copyrights by corporations isn't much of a problem, if the copyright term isn't related to the lifetime of the original owner. Make it 14 years for any work, regardless of whether it was created by an individual or by a group collectively assigning copyright to a corporation.
Actually, that's old news. This is very similar to Tatama, which used to be used by people who were both deaf and blind to; the speaker would speak normally (in English), and the "listener" would feel what the person was saying with fingers on the side of the person's face and in front of the person's mouth.
If you don't agree to their terms, you can't get a license to sell Windows bundled with your machines at all.
The interesting question is what they'd do now. If an OEM lost its license to sell Windows on their machines, and kept doing so, MicroSoft would presumably have to sue in order to stop them. It would probably now be hard for MicroSoft to win that lawsuit, even with a clear copyright violation in progress. "Yes, I know we're an illegal monopoly, and I know the license terms we had given them were illegal, but make them stop anyway." A civil court is not likely to be particularly happy to help a convicted criminal commit a crime, even if the law is clear and the court is immune from a conspiracy charge.
It seems to me that there are a lot of tasks we know how to do in the AFSM sort of way, such as folling our regular commutes, walking, catching balls, typing, and so forth. These are the tasks which do not normally impact out consciousness; we know that we're doing them, but we're remarkably bad at explaining how we do them.
These models don't have an internal representation of the world, and for good reason: the world itself is the best representation you could ever want. But it isn't sufficient for conscious thought, because that depends on measuring the world as you imagine it, not as you can perceive it.
It's not so much that the problems associated with consciousness are harder than the problems involving subconscious behavior; the latter turn out to be essentially impossible to solve using general intelligence (either by AI researchers or by humans with specific brain damage). But the problems associated with consciousness are almost certainly equally difficult to solve with AFSMs. It's certainly possible, but it'd be like trying to write software by arranging electrons.
Of course, the interesting stuff happens when both types of systems work together. Read Phantoms in the Brain by VS Ramachandran for a lot of examples, or consider that, when you picture a scene you know well, the visual areas of your brain are actually affected, and your conscious thought can alter your perception of space (like looking at an MC Escher picture).
Consider the non-AI case of graphics. Hardware is great for digital camera processing, and you wouldn't want to write any of that in software. Software is great for photo manipulation, and you wouldn't want to write it in hardware. And there are a lot of really interesting things you can't do with either of them alone.
Slashdot Mirror
MicroSoft said they were stopping all other work while they found and fixed security holes lurking undiscovered in their software. They're obviously not going to take time out of this important project to fix known security holes. Things like releasing patches and applying them to their websites will have to wait until the entire codebase has been carefully examined.
I can't help but notice that your list of "big console titles" doesn't include anything more than a few months old. DooM was about as big in its day as any of these, and basically continued to be just as big for several years, until Quake took over. Considering that Half-Life uses the Quake engine, Quake is arguably still doing well today based on mods, after nearly 6 years.
In 6 years, people probably won't be able to remember any of the console games (except for the FF series, which is pretty distintive), and few people will actually play them.
First, let's clear something up. If someone is buying a book used (or even selling a book used), then the author already got money for the book sale.
Not quite. A publisher is likely to distribute a bunch of copies of a book at promotional discounts so that enough people will find out about the book that it can become popular. Aside from established authors and series, people buy books on positive reviews more than anything else. In order to get positive reviews, people have to read the book. If people won't buy the book unless they've heard good things about it,they'll have to get the book for free at first. So that means there will be a bunch of copies in circulation before anyone will actually buy it, and those copies could come up as used books.
But, in any case, what the author's guild is doing is telling authors not to link to Amazon. If an author links to Amazon, people might follow the link, and buy the author's book used, thereby removing it from the used book selection and preventing people who didn't know the author from stumbling over it. The people who are coming from the author's website have clearly heard of the author and the book, and thus making used books available to them doesn't help, while having used books available to people who aren't coming from the author's website does help promote the book.
If Amazon's selling a used book, then somebody's got a copy of the book they don't want. One would guess that the person got the book new. So despite the fact that they don't get anything out of the second sale, they presumably got something out of the first sale, which didn't benefit the customer enough (for whatever reason) to make them keep the book.
I suspect that the real issue is that a lot of copies of new books are getting distributed at a loss to promote the book, and then those books get sold used at under new prices. This means that the publishers spend a lot of money to promote books, and that money goes to getting people to buy the book used instead of new.
Being able to buy books speculatively encourages people to buy them. Being able to buy books used for little money encourages people to buy similar books for more. But these sorts of grassroots promotion conflict with organized promotion; if you don't promote enough, nobody finds out about the book. If you promote too much, you flood the market with cheap used copies. Unless the book is a real crowd-pleaser and you know it will be in advance, the number of books you have to send out to make the book popular is enough to flood the market (except for later books by popular authors).
I agree that it's reasonable to link to sites that will only sell you the book new, because, if someone is following your link, they've actually been convinced by your promotion. Having your books available used is good for getting new readers, but you don't want to direct the readers you've got to the used book market.
The existence of used books encourages book sales. If everyone buys the used copies, there won't be any of them left, which is obviously bad. So you don't want to drain the used book market by sending the people who already like your books there.
The article wasn't any better written than the summary. It seems like this is suitable as a replacement for flash memory, not for either disk (which is huge), or for RAM (which is really fast). Of course, having a flash-like technology be cost-effective would change things; you could keep a copy of system memory as it is when it has just been booted (but before it initializes devices) there. Then you "reboot" by copying the virtual memory table from the nvram to main memory, and the system is immediately ready to initialize devices and run.
It would also be useful if programs could put some of their data in the nvram region, so (for instance), your emacs buffers don't go away when the power goes out. It would also be a good place to put write buffers, such that, as soon as the data is written to nvram, it will definitely make it into the filesystem, whether or not you lose power. This means that you can accumulate more dirty buffers safely and write them out in larger chunks, which is more efficient.
Keeping everything in nvram (if that were fast enough) may or may not be a good idea. You'd still want to reboot on occasion to refresh the system (load a new kernel, e.g.), but there's no particular reason you'd want to reboot at exactly those times when you power down and back up. Of course, you'd need everything to be hotswappable (replace the processor with programs running?) and restartable (disks have to be told to spin up, e.g.).
What I'd demonstrate is a program with a bug in how it calls a library function. You run the program and it segfaults. You run the program under ddd or gdb or something of that sort, and get the backtrace. You look at the source for your program where it calls the library function, and it's not obvious what's wrong. Then (and here's the neat part), you go down the backtrace to where the segfault is, and you're looking at the library source. There, by looking at the values of local variables, it's obvious what's wrong with your program (you're calling the library with the wrong thing or something).
One of the coolest things about Linux is that you have all of the source to everything available, and you can have your libraries with debugging symbols, and you can look at exactly what it's doing. This can be incredibly helpful when the documentation is somehow vague or when you're misreading it (and don't know what part you're misreading). I certainly miss that when developing in Java with Sun's library.
What we need is not for someone to run a public data store, because whoever runs it isn't going to be trusted by some people. What we need is a protocol for getting data from such a store with the identity information in email address form. Then the users can put their data on a machine they trust, either one provided by an ISP or something or one of their own.
For example, web sites should be able to authenticate users with a client certificate that the client provides when creating the web site account. This client certificate can be essentially anything, so long as it is how the client wishes to be identified. Of course, the client will want to be able to use a different certificate later (if the first one expires), so what the client really is identified by is the certificate chain, which has to have the same name up as far as the self-signed root certificate, and have the same root certificate.
With a scheme like this, users need only find a certificate authority (or create one), and have a way to "log in" with the CA in order to get a client certificate (probably one which expires rapidly).
The server that acts as a CA can also act as a store for other data. Ideally, the browser would be able to fetch form entries from the CA automatically, in response to the user requesting it after logging in. So you could move to the "credit card number" field, hit the "fetch identity value" button, type "CCN" (or whatever you've called it), and the browser would do a HTTPS request with your client cert to get that value and fill in the field with it.
For most people, the CA and data store may be AOL or something, but there's no reason that the CA couldn't be your own machine. While you're at it, you could set it up to recognize other certificates than your own and provide the information you want to make available to these people. If you have a suitable field available to the right set of people, this solves the instant messaging location problem.
Expedition leader Monty Halls said: "Our divers were presented with a series of structures that clearly showed man-made attributes. The scale of the site appears to be extremely extensive, with 50 dives conducted over a three-day period covering only a small area of the overall ruin field."
Right, and now they're going to find tons of overly powerful items and monsters which are not dangerous considering the characters.
In Cambridge, MA, on Memorial Drive, there's a Shell station with a big neon sign that lost the 's' for a while.
Extending DNS won't work, because DNS is designed for naming things that don't move around much. Finding a person requires a different design because, if you wait a day to propagate the information of where I'm sitting, it will always be wrong. What you need is a system where my name determines the only machine you ask to get my location, and that machine tells you how to reach me. Standard DNS won't work, because it expects to cache the IP addresses locally or at intermediate points.
Problem one is actually more general: given a globally-unique username, find out (in a machine-readable way) a piece of information about the user. At the same time, given your own password (or whatever), securely set a piece of information about you (also in a way that can be automatic). For privacy, you may want to demand some authentication in order to provide some sorts of information.
Problem two is then: specify a piece of information such that it will suffice from getting a text message to a person that piece of information is associated with.
MicroSoft has a habit of doing large projects, and then changing focus such that everything has to be changed. Open source projects are generally designed with a particular focus in mind, and never change that focus. In a different focus is needed, different people will probably do a different project.
How many open source projects started out with no internet support, and got internet support later? (1: Emacs) How many open source projects started out with no attention to security, and got it later? (3: BIND, sendmail, and wu-ftpd)
As far as I can tell, every MicroSoft project more than a few years old started out without any network support, and got it later. And every MicroSoft project started out without any security and is getting it now.
MicroSoft has an enormous amount of effort to throw around, and runs its projects accordingly. Open source projects have a limited amount of effort to put into projects, and also need to get results in order to get developers.
Open source projects are not necessarily better for being more efficient in developer effort. But it doesn't make any more sense for MicroSoft to brag about how much effort they can put into things, since the main benefit of this effort is the ability to put off figuring out what's important, which is nice for MicroSoft, but not helpful for their customers.
If it's easy enough to get the judgement, lots of people will get them. If someone has a thousand delinquent $5 judgements, it'll probably start to be a pain for them to deal with. It'd probably wreak their credit rating, and interfere with renewing their license.
Of course, you're unlikely to get your $5 if nobody else joins in. But if someone isn't bothering anyone but you, they're not really a spammer, anyway.
Politicians always listen to their constituents. Normally, they don't hear from enough of their constituents to make a difference. In this case, however, it seems like the bill is sufficiently obvious that the constituents aren't overwhelmingly apathetic.
Of course, in this case, the bill is also opposed by the majority of the deep-pocketted industries, which might be the real reason.
Actually, you want to gain market share, not establish a monopoly. It's just that the end point of gaining market share is a monopoly. Actually having a monopoly is a bad thing (unless your goal is to leverage it, which is illegal), which is why what you really want is to have competitors with market share small enough that it doesn't impact your profits.
A metadistribution would be a distribution of instructions for building a system, rather than the system itself. This will let you get your packages from the original authors, while getting a set of packages that have been researched (found, configured, etc) by someone who is putting together a coherent system.
I think this would be better with $1/mail to a maximum of $100, because then they could do it in small claims court. The thing about spam is that individual ones aren't a problem; the problem is the total volume. If everybody takes a spammer to small claims court, the individual ones aren't a problem so much as the fact that the spammer will have to pay $5 to a ton of people on a number of occasions, which means that it's a pain to be a spammer.
Besides, it's a lot easier to say each email caused you $1 of damage, making you have a bad day overall, than it is to claim the each email caused you $50 of damage.
Plus, if someone works out exactly how you do the small claims suit, and publishes the information, it's easy for anyone who feels annoyed or wants to see how the legal system works or just has to go be the courthouse anyway, and the tactic of spamming everyone who hasn't tried suing anyone won't work.
In those two months, MicroSoft has probably fixed more security-compromising bugs than most open source projects (expect for sendmail and BIND) will ever have. MicroSoft can put far more effort behind solving the problems that they have created for themselves that the open source community could ever hope to, both in terms of solving problems and in terms of creating them.
The open source community is always taking shortcuts by not making every possible mistake and them fixing it. Who cares about results? MicroSoft can do more work than anybody else, and that's all that matters.
Actually, it seems to me that MandrakeSoft is saying that it is innovative to get money in return for doing what you'd do anyway.
If you give them money, they'll be grateful. In return, they'll go on doing what it was that made you want to pay them, and not make you go to the store.
It seems to me that this is just a matter of unbundling the things people want (inprovements in Mandrake) from the things people don't want (paper, cardboard, and plastic).
Of course, there's the fact that people will rarely pay any amount of money which doesn't appear on a price tag, so setting a range of prices for nothing in particular will make people who want to give you money much more likely to do so. Giving them more stuff in return is less important.
(My reason for not supporting Mandrake is not what I'm about to say, but that I disagree with the rest of the computer industry on what is friendly to users)
I think that much of the point of the open source community is that, if someone doesn't make it, anything they managed lives on, and the next people start out that much better. If MandrakeSoft didn't make it, anyone who was interested would continue what they'd started. The point is to not be dependent on the business success of a company for whether you can use your software.
The open source community is much more about the people and their work than about the companies. It's likely that if MandrakeSoft went under, their developers would actually end up working on other user-friendly GNU/Linux distros, bringing with them what they'd done at MandrakeSoft.
Of course, it's better for everyone if MandrakeSoft doesn't go under, because dealing with that would slow down the process, and not everyone who worked on Mandrake would end up doing the same thing elsewhere.
In this economy, there's going to be a revolving door of companies that fail due to mismanagement, profit-taking, bad luck, or whatever. The real cause is in making progress anyway, and it is possible because all of a company's work doesn't die with it.
Furthermore, the open source world is really driven by trying to make things which are actually better. If something isn't better and doesn't show promise of being better, it's not going to get anywhere. In the case of a user-friendly distribution, there's really no point in supporting one that isn't popular, since, if users don't like it, it's not actually user-friendly.
That said, I'm glad to hear MandrakeSoft is doing well, because they actually promote Linux, which is a need that the open source community isn't good at filling. Marketting is generally thought of as a black art, but it's obviously in everyone's interest if it is done well.
The experience I've had with handspring tech support has been very positive. They're really quick about replacing broken devices and less likely to charge you for it that you'd expect.
My wife broke her first one by dropping it, and they replaced it for free, and didn't complain when she took a long time to send back the broken one.
Neither of us have had any problems with the hardware (other than when it had been dropped), so it seems to me like you either get one that's fine or you get one that's just broken, and you can get it replaced without too much trouble.
So interoperability supposedly risks loss of IP. If merely working together risks pollution, one would presume that working together by design, with knowledge of the "dangerous" side, with no alternative on the "dangerous" side would be even more risky.
MicroSoft software-produced documents fit in this category. If the GPL is a threat to MicroSoft, then MicroSoft is similarly a threat to all of their customers.
Of course, MicroSoft is doing this both to be inconvenient to open-source competition, and to put fear of the GPL in people's minds. But this also raises the possibility that MicroSoft will decide that they want to put you out of business and take all of your IP, and that they seem to think that would be possible.
LOTR paid back the whole series in the first few weeks the first movie was out. Everything to do with DVDs, product licenses, and so forth, not to mention the other 2/3 of the movies, is profit. As far as whether bootlegs are concerned, they'd made back their investment nicely before the bootlegs were even available.
Having the copyright on the movies (and images from them) expire after 14 years is plenty long enough, provided that studios acquire a modicum of taste and try not to make movies that are obviously bad. Moving movies is a major risk only because they don't weed out movies which are not worth making, and because they sometimes throw a huge budget at a movie which has a limited appeal and should be done for what people will pay to see it (since the diehards who will see such a movie won't care much that the budget was low).
Prohibiting corporations from holding copyrights wouldn't be so big a problem; you just let the artists retain the copyright, but finance them (and provide camera teams and such) for a license, with terms depending on what they want. Corporations don't create anything, but it's not like a corporation is founded with pre-existing works, which it then makes all of its money by licensing.
The real issue, though, is what person gets the copyright for something collaborative like LOTR, if corporations can't hold copyrights. It would be like trying to get a non-GPL license to Linux: you contact every single person who did anything on the project and try to figure out what's going on. The editors own the particular cut, but the images in the cut are owned by the animators and camera crews (with the lighting owned by someone diffierent), but all of the acting in the images in the cut is owned by the actors, who also own the voices, except that the audio splicing is owned by the sound editors...
In any case, the ownership of copyrights by corporations isn't much of a problem, if the copyright term isn't related to the lifetime of the original owner. Make it 14 years for any work, regardless of whether it was created by an individual or by a group collectively assigning copyright to a corporation.
Actually, that's old news. This is very similar to Tatama, which used to be used by people who were both deaf and blind to; the speaker would speak normally (in English), and the "listener" would feel what the person was saying with fingers on the side of the person's face and in front of the person's mouth.
If you don't agree to their terms, you can't get a license to sell Windows bundled with your machines at all.
The interesting question is what they'd do now. If an OEM lost its license to sell Windows on their machines, and kept doing so, MicroSoft would presumably have to sue in order to stop them. It would probably now be hard for MicroSoft to win that lawsuit, even with a clear copyright violation in progress. "Yes, I know we're an illegal monopoly, and I know the license terms we had given them were illegal, but make them stop anyway." A civil court is not likely to be particularly happy to help a convicted criminal commit a crime, even if the law is clear and the court is immune from a conspiracy charge.
It seems to me that there are a lot of tasks we know how to do in the AFSM sort of way, such as folling our regular commutes, walking, catching balls, typing, and so forth. These are the tasks which do not normally impact out consciousness; we know that we're doing them, but we're remarkably bad at explaining how we do them.
These models don't have an internal representation of the world, and for good reason: the world itself is the best representation you could ever want. But it isn't sufficient for conscious thought, because that depends on measuring the world as you imagine it, not as you can perceive it.
It's not so much that the problems associated with consciousness are harder than the problems involving subconscious behavior; the latter turn out to be essentially impossible to solve using general intelligence (either by AI researchers or by humans with specific brain damage). But the problems associated with consciousness are almost certainly equally difficult to solve with AFSMs. It's certainly possible, but it'd be like trying to write software by arranging electrons.
Of course, the interesting stuff happens when both types of systems work together. Read Phantoms in the Brain by VS Ramachandran for a lot of examples, or consider that, when you picture a scene you know well, the visual areas of your brain are actually affected, and your conscious thought can alter your perception of space (like looking at an MC Escher picture).
Consider the non-AI case of graphics. Hardware is great for digital camera processing, and you wouldn't want to write any of that in software. Software is great for photo manipulation, and you wouldn't want to write it in hardware. And there are a lot of really interesting things you can't do with either of them alone.