With the usual IANAL disclaimer,
Here are the parts I find most interesting:
The district court granted a permanent injunction against (1)
posting on any Internet site, or in any other way manufacturing,
importing or offering to the public, providing, or otherwise
trafficking in DeCSS or any other technology primarily designed to
circumvent CSS, and (2) linking any Internet web site, either directly
or through a series of links, to any other Internet web site
containing DeCSS.
Hmm...the injunction, according to the appeal judges, is ONLY against 2600. That fact is conveniently left out, and thus the letter implies that EVERYONE in the court's jurisdiction is thus enjoined, does it not?
Also:
Also pursuant to DMCA, we hereby state, under penalty of perjury under
the law of California and under the laws of the United States, that
the information in this notification is accurate and that we are
authorized to act on behalf of the owners of the exclusive rights
being infringed as set forth in this notification.
Hmm, guess the MPAA is guilty of any number of counts of perjury then, aren't they? They told how many people that this injunction applies directly to them?
The other issue is that the MPAA has used this case to turn around and harass other sites and the ISPs serving them since this initial win. There was a whole new round of C&D letters (I'm sure people can make these available) after the case, warning ISPs for example that with this win, there was legal precendent that allowing DeCSS source on sites hosted by them could result in legal action, blah blah blah.
No offense, but if your C++ code is going more than, say, 10% slower than equivalent code in C, you're not writing good code. Write the functionality first, then (and this part is important), OPTIMIZE. Profile, and then improve the places where you're spending the most time.
If you believe you have optimized the code, look at build/link options, you may be able to improve there. Explicit vs. implicit vs. static template instantiation, etc.
To give the answer the forum speakers gave, they just finished NOT doing anything for a few years, to give the compiler groups time to catch up. They don't want to wait any longer.
C# is proprietary.
C# will probably NEVER run on anything but windows.
C# will exhibit no better performance than Java. C++ is and will continue to be the language of choice for complex applications with performance constraints.
There's 3 reasons C++ will still be around, and thus is worth improving.
I was at the Conference this article is about. I heard Bjarne's speech, and I also attended an 8-hour tutorial on C# (by Stan Lippman, if anyone's wondering). I can see where C# will have some utility (rapid GUI development for the Windows platform, mainly), but it won't be replacing C++ for most of the situations where C++ is currently the best choice.
You came a lot closer to getting my point than the guy above did;)
My whole point was that ALL students don't NEED laptops, as you personally illustrated. My other point was that a lot of public-school college students can't afford to drop another 2 grand or so on a laptop they WON'T NEED.
If the universities want to encourage computer literacy, they need to start with their own administration, which by and large is far behind the student body. Then, provide enough _lab_ machines for the students' needs, and/or provide machines in the dorms, etc. Making students buy computers they won't use is a waste, whether it's subsidized or not. Sorry if I didn't say that clearly the first time around.
East Carolina University and the even-more-(in)famous University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill (both public-funded universities) have both started requiring Laptops for undergrads... possibly a whole year back already, in fact.
Personally, I think it's a cop-out by the universities. If they want every student to have a computer, they should provide every student a computer, or make them available at a REAL discount through the university system. Making students buy laptops with their own money or financial aid, in addition to tuition, board, beer, etc, can be a hefty financial hit for lots of students.
NCSU doesn't require students to buy computers -- yet, at least. It still has enough lab machines to meet the demand. Of course, lots of students buy computers on their own, and that helps alleviate the demand. But requiring machines for everyone? Waste of the student's money, in my humble opinion. Are they next going to require them to purchase Visual Studio for programming classes, or Photoshop for art classes? These are resources the school (and the students' tuition) should be providing up-front.
I will apply for a patent on a new business model. This is the model of patenting ideas other people have invented but not patented, and suing the rightful inventors into license agreements or just a big wad of cash.
There is prior art, but they haven't patented it (see Rambus, Amazon). Therefore, the attached document dated to AD 27 drafting this model, and which I wrote, serves as the earliest form and confirms my right to the patent. (Datestamps are such ephemeral things)
The RIAA would never win this. There's a clear precedent at the ISP level that, boiling it down, says that "general knowledge of infringement" is NOT sufficient grounds for an injunction or damages against the ISP. Preventing such violations would require a use-inhibitive and cost-prohibitive level of monitoring by the ISP of its customers' every move and action, which no-one wants (except, of course, the RIAA perhaps).
Now, if a University became notorious for thumbing their noses at a copyright holder even when given _specific_ infringement notices (ie, which student infringed on which copyright), THEN the copyright holder could (and probably should) go after the University.
I know NCSU (from which I recently graduated) has a well established use policy, and procedures it will take upon violating that policy. But, like UNC and Duke (d00k and Orange County Community College, as we're fond of calling them), NCSU will almost certainly never ban Napster. The traffic is shaped down to reasonable volumes (max 10% of the off-campus traffic, I believe). NCSU has a vested interest in researching, understanding, and contributing to the Internet, and blanket censorship of such a major and emerging technology would be contrary to this interest.
Personally, I don't use Napster much anymore, and much of that use was to get songs I already own on CD in MP3 format. Napster isn't the final or best answer to digital music issues. But it's not a unilaterally wrong answer, either.
Well, this is just shooting from the hip, but someone should look into writing an improved client for broadband connected users. This client would feature caching of results to and from its immediate connections, and perhaps out to two or 3 nodes distant.
If you've got a big pipe, and you're going to be connected to gnutella for awhile, this would improve the performance of your client and those closest to you.
Of course, if you really want improvement, you'd have to build this capability into the protocol. Allow clients to register as either low or high bandwidth. Then low bandwidth clients could do anything, but traffic could only go through them for a level or two. Ideally, you'd want every client to be able to reach a high-bandwidth node within 3-5 hops. A connected client would then note and rely upon these distribution nodes to do the work. Perhaps even reconnect to distributors directly...
Just a thought. Isn't this the kind of thing that Freenet already does?
Exactly. Plus, by paying RH for an update service, they have a means of recourse if something goes wrong on RH's side, that would probably not be available if they were getting the updates for free.
Of course, companies being companies, some will probably seek recourse when their own idiot employees do something stupid or ignorant, but I'm sure Red Hat Legal will be prepared...
I've gotten a phone bill for 3 cents. In the mail. I paid it online by credit card -- one cent at a time. So it cost them postage (~33 cents) plus 25 cents (about how much they have to pay a credit card company per transaction to accept payment by credit)* 3 = $1.08US to collect on $0.03US:) That'll teach them to skip some business logic on their billing system.
If K-Mart decides they don't want to sell any product to a minor, I believe that's their right. Discrimination laws (including those based on age) are all aimed at adults, as in 50 vs. 20, not 20 vs. 12.
Whether such law even applies to sales from a private company (as in, non-government -- I know K-Mart is publicly held), I'm not sure. I would think a store can say "We don't want to sell gummy bears to Blondes because they're too air-headed already" if they want, but maybe that's illegal...
Bad PR is what keeps such activity from occuring, by and large.
The default Computer Science answer fits here, of course: "It depends."
It all depends on who you have and who you work with. If you can form a solid, comfortable relationship between the in-house experts and the outsource "grunts," they will be effective. They will still require some time from your people, and will take a little longer than the same number of your own staff, but with effort and a good attitude on both sides, the overall productivity will still be higher than without the outsource group.
That being said, if there is NOT a good relationship, the $h!+ will interface with the fan. Your people will be spending most of their time helping/reviewing/yelling at the outsource people, and will not end up having their time freed up to persue other work. Quality of work is more a question of the general expertise of the outsource group and their ability to understand your requirements than anything else.
If you feel you have a good relationship with an outsource group, it should work out. If you don't feel that, or you haven't found an outsource group to work with yet, think long and hard.
The Mythical Man Month doesn't really apply here, because you're probably looking at a similar (but separate) number of people on the project, not just adding X more people to the same set of tasks. Again, it's mostly a question of how well the outsource group can take over the work, balancing their productivity against the need to keep your people in the loop.
Actually, the Napster legal team is using the "must enforce" principle in regards to the RIAA's claim that Napster users directly infringe on the RIAA copyrights. Napster's briefs have essentially said "the RIAA allows and even encourages sampling of copyrighted material in mp3 format from their own websites. Since they allow this type of usage, by extension lose the right to disallow this usage by others."
Rough paraphrasing, I know. Now whether they have a leg to stand on here, I can't say, since they claim that their users are safe under "Fair Use" prior to claiming they've lost the right to enforce copyright. Which is it?
At any rate, this would suggest that copyrights are also subject to the 'enforce it or lose it' principle when it comes to legal backing of IP claims.
Actually, all higher animals need to sleep. Snakes and most (all?) other reptiles, mammals, birds...all need sleep.
Sleep deprivation leads to all sorts of problems, eventually ending in death due to massive organ failure (prompted by your chemical balance going out of whack -- toxic degrees of chemical imbalance). Not a fun way to die, I'm sure.
It does bypass CSS access control. However, there is an exception that ALLOWS circumvention of access controls "to establish interoperability with" existing, alternative systems. In the DeCSS case, the end goal was to create a Linux software DVD player. Linux, I think we can all agree, qualifies as existing alternative (and a Free one, at that). So, bypassing CSS in order to make a DVD viewable on Linux falls within allowable circumvention of an access control.
My question is whether the judge ignored this fact, or if this just wasn't stressed enough during the case.
"Never even considered" means just that. Of course I'd be idealistic Open-Source Free as in Beer/Speech when it's reasonable to be like that. But I'm sure Google's founders reached a crisis, like every company does at some point, if not often. There's went along the lines of "Well, we said we'd never advertise, but we need money if we want to keep being the Google that people like." Would you rather they said, "Well, we said we'd never advertise, and since we can't afford our hardware and bandwidth, we're going to shut down rather than stay afloat with some banner ads."
Didn't think so. While their no-ads motto might be a nice idea, I think their service is more valuable than just being ad-free. The speed and relevance of their search engine is what makes Google good. The lack of ads was just a little gravy on top.
And let's be honest, who cares? When's the last time you clicked a banner ad? I rarely even SEE banner ads, unless the page they're on is using annoying pop-ups or just abysmally slow. And I certainly don't click on them -- if it's interesting, I note the URL and type in the relevant part by hand.
Those of us who truly despise banner ads learn to not be bothered by them, indeed to not even notice them. So those truly savvy 'Net users who use Google won't notice a change, unless they screw up the technical side (unlikely). Those people who DO follow banner ads will probably be happy to see them on Google -- I'm sure Google can parlay their relevance expertise to come up with targeted banner advertising on their search results pages.
This isn't a Metallica-degree of sellout...it's a smart decision from a smart company -- one of the few web-only smart companies out there.
I doubt they even considered the possibility of their current level of success when they said that. Who else can say they provide the search engine for the most-visited site on the internet, and a dozen others (more probably)? To get to where they are now, and stay there, they have to be fast and accurate. They need LOTS of hardware and lots of bandwidth for that. And they need lots of money for THAT. Web-only companies don't have a lot of options when it comes to revenue, and a little advertising is probably the best solution -- low overhead, no outsider VC's to siphon off the profit that might be down the road...lots of good reasons.
Of course, my biggest concern is that these ads might affect those response times. If they can add banners to their site in a nice, ignorable way, i.e. not too much clutter and no image-loading delay, I think it'll be a smart decision.
Based on the post below, I'd say it's just an issue of the station not happening to pass over San Jose during the period from Aug 22-28. It has to pass over your position eventually, since you're lower than 51.6 degrees latitude...
Slashdot Mirror
Nah. I'm not flaming him for it, just kinda funny.
Hemos posted on this same topic just a few months ago...guess he forgot ;)
They even used the same (rather silly) concept art.
Xentax
Here are the parts I find most interesting:
Hmm...the injunction, according to the appeal judges, is ONLY against 2600. That fact is conveniently left out, and thus the letter implies that EVERYONE in the court's jurisdiction is thus enjoined, does it not?
Also:
Hmm, guess the MPAA is guilty of any number of counts of perjury then, aren't they? They told how many people that this injunction applies directly to them?
Xentax
The other issue is that the MPAA has used this case to turn around and harass other sites and the ISPs serving them since this initial win. There was a whole new round of C&D letters (I'm sure people can make these available) after the case, warning ISPs for example that with this win, there was legal precendent that allowing DeCSS source on sites hosted by them could result in legal action, blah blah blah.
No chilling effect my port peanut.
Xentax
True. I didn't mean to imply that there was any real 'work' going on, only that what was being done was to _enhance_, not _replace_, standard C++.
:)
I was at the discussion at SD
Xentax
No offense, but if your C++ code is going more than, say, 10% slower than equivalent code in C, you're not writing good code. Write the functionality first, then (and this part is important), OPTIMIZE. Profile, and then improve the places where you're spending the most time.
If you believe you have optimized the code, look at build/link options, you may be able to improve there. Explicit vs. implicit vs. static template instantiation, etc.
Xentax
To give the answer the forum speakers gave, they just finished NOT doing anything for a few years, to give the compiler groups time to catch up. They don't want to wait any longer.
Xentax
C# is proprietary. C# will probably NEVER run on anything but windows. C# will exhibit no better performance than Java. C++ is and will continue to be the language of choice for complex applications with performance constraints. There's 3 reasons C++ will still be around, and thus is worth improving. I was at the Conference this article is about. I heard Bjarne's speech, and I also attended an 8-hour tutorial on C# (by Stan Lippman, if anyone's wondering). I can see where C# will have some utility (rapid GUI development for the Windows platform, mainly), but it won't be replacing C++ for most of the situations where C++ is currently the best choice.
Xentax
They're not creating a new language. They're working on the next revision of Standard (That's ANSI _AND_ ISO Standard) C++.
You came a lot closer to getting my point than the guy above did ;)
My whole point was that ALL students don't NEED laptops, as you personally illustrated. My other point was that a lot of public-school college students can't afford to drop another 2 grand or so on a laptop they WON'T NEED.
If the universities want to encourage computer literacy, they need to start with their own administration, which by and large is far behind the student body. Then, provide enough _lab_ machines for the students' needs, and/or provide machines in the dorms, etc. Making students buy computers they won't use is a waste, whether it's subsidized or not. Sorry if I didn't say that clearly the first time around.
Xentax
East Carolina University and the even-more-(in)famous University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill (both public-funded universities) have both started requiring Laptops for undergrads... possibly a whole year back already, in fact.
Personally, I think it's a cop-out by the universities. If they want every student to have a computer, they should provide every student a computer, or make them available at a REAL discount through the university system. Making students buy laptops with their own money or financial aid, in addition to tuition, board, beer, etc, can be a hefty financial hit for lots of students.
NCSU doesn't require students to buy computers -- yet, at least. It still has enough lab machines to meet the demand. Of course, lots of students buy computers on their own, and that helps alleviate the demand. But requiring machines for everyone? Waste of the student's money, in my humble opinion. Are they next going to require them to purchase Visual Studio for programming classes, or Photoshop for art classes? These are resources the school (and the students' tuition) should be providing up-front.
Xentax
I will apply for a patent on a new business model. This is the model of patenting ideas other people have invented but not patented, and suing the rightful inventors into license agreements or just a big wad of cash.
There is prior art, but they haven't patented it (see Rambus, Amazon). Therefore, the attached document dated to AD 27 drafting this model, and which I wrote, serves as the earliest form and confirms my right to the patent. (Datestamps are such ephemeral things)
Submitted in "Good Faith",
Xentax
The RIAA would never win this. There's a clear precedent at the ISP level that, boiling it down, says that "general knowledge of infringement" is NOT sufficient grounds for an injunction or damages against the ISP. Preventing such violations would require a use-inhibitive and cost-prohibitive level of monitoring by the ISP of its customers' every move and action, which no-one wants (except, of course, the RIAA perhaps).
Now, if a University became notorious for thumbing their noses at a copyright holder even when given _specific_ infringement notices (ie, which student infringed on which copyright), THEN the copyright holder could (and probably should) go after the University.
I know NCSU (from which I recently graduated) has a well established use policy, and procedures it will take upon violating that policy. But, like UNC and Duke (d00k and Orange County Community College, as we're fond of calling them), NCSU will almost certainly never ban Napster. The traffic is shaped down to reasonable volumes (max 10% of the off-campus traffic, I believe). NCSU has a vested interest in researching, understanding, and contributing to the Internet, and blanket censorship of such a major and emerging technology would be contrary to this interest.
Personally, I don't use Napster much anymore, and much of that use was to get songs I already own on CD in MP3 format. Napster isn't the final or best answer to digital music issues. But it's not a unilaterally wrong answer, either.
Xentax
*ponders smacking l33t j03 around with said pipe*
Hmm, maybe the hammer would be more appropriate.
Xentax
Well, this is just shooting from the hip, but someone should look into writing an improved client for broadband connected users. This client would feature caching of results to and from its immediate connections, and perhaps out to two or 3 nodes distant.
If you've got a big pipe, and you're going to be connected to gnutella for awhile, this would improve the performance of your client and those closest to you.
Of course, if you really want improvement, you'd have to build this capability into the protocol. Allow clients to register as either low or high bandwidth. Then low bandwidth clients could do anything, but traffic could only go through them for a level or two. Ideally, you'd want every client to be able to reach a high-bandwidth node within 3-5 hops. A connected client would then note and rely upon these distribution nodes to do the work. Perhaps even reconnect to distributors directly...
Just a thought. Isn't this the kind of thing that Freenet already does?
Xentax
Exactly. Plus, by paying RH for an update service, they have a means of recourse if something goes wrong on RH's side, that would probably not be available if they were getting the updates for free.
Of course, companies being companies, some will probably seek recourse when their own idiot employees do something stupid or ignorant, but I'm sure Red Hat Legal will be prepared...
Xentax
I've gotten a phone bill for 3 cents. In the mail. I paid it online by credit card -- one cent at a time. So it cost them postage (~33 cents) plus 25 cents (about how much they have to pay a credit card company per transaction to accept payment by credit)* 3 = $1.08US to collect on $0.03US :) That'll teach them to skip some business logic on their billing system.
Xentax
If K-Mart decides they don't want to sell any product to a minor, I believe that's their right. Discrimination laws (including those based on age) are all aimed at adults, as in 50 vs. 20, not 20 vs. 12.
Whether such law even applies to sales from a private company (as in, non-government -- I know K-Mart is publicly held), I'm not sure. I would think a store can say "We don't want to sell gummy bears to Blondes because they're too air-headed already" if they want, but maybe that's illegal...
Bad PR is what keeps such activity from occuring, by and large.
Xentax
The default Computer Science answer fits here, of course: "It depends."
It all depends on who you have and who you work with. If you can form a solid, comfortable relationship between the in-house experts and the outsource "grunts," they will be effective. They will still require some time from your people, and will take a little longer than the same number of your own staff, but with effort and a good attitude on both sides, the overall productivity will still be higher than without the outsource group.
That being said, if there is NOT a good relationship, the $h!+ will interface with the fan. Your people will be spending most of their time helping/reviewing/yelling at the outsource people, and will not end up having their time freed up to persue other work. Quality of work is more a question of the general expertise of the outsource group and their ability to understand your requirements than anything else.
If you feel you have a good relationship with an outsource group, it should work out. If you don't feel that, or you haven't found an outsource group to work with yet, think long and hard.
The Mythical Man Month doesn't really apply here, because you're probably looking at a similar (but separate) number of people on the project, not just adding X more people to the same set of tasks. Again, it's mostly a question of how well the outsource group can take over the work, balancing their productivity against the need to keep your people in the loop.
Hope that helps!
Xentax
Actually, the Napster legal team is using the "must enforce" principle in regards to the RIAA's claim that Napster users directly infringe on the RIAA copyrights. Napster's briefs have essentially said "the RIAA allows and even encourages sampling of copyrighted material in mp3 format from their own websites. Since they allow this type of usage, by extension lose the right to disallow this usage by others."
Rough paraphrasing, I know. Now whether they have a leg to stand on here, I can't say, since they claim that their users are safe under "Fair Use" prior to claiming they've lost the right to enforce copyright. Which is it?
At any rate, this would suggest that copyrights are also subject to the 'enforce it or lose it' principle when it comes to legal backing of IP claims.
Xentax
Actually, all higher animals need to sleep. Snakes and most (all?) other reptiles, mammals, birds...all need sleep.
Sleep deprivation leads to all sorts of problems, eventually ending in death due to massive organ failure (prompted by your chemical balance going out of whack -- toxic degrees of chemical imbalance). Not a fun way to die, I'm sure.
Xentax
It does bypass CSS access control. However, there is an exception that ALLOWS circumvention of access controls "to establish interoperability with" existing, alternative systems. In the DeCSS case, the end goal was to create a Linux software DVD player. Linux, I think we can all agree, qualifies as existing alternative (and a Free one, at that). So, bypassing CSS in order to make a DVD viewable on Linux falls within allowable circumvention of an access control.
My question is whether the judge ignored this fact, or if this just wasn't stressed enough during the case.
Xentax
Did you actually read what I said?
"Never even considered" means just that. Of course I'd be idealistic Open-Source Free as in Beer/Speech when it's reasonable to be like that. But I'm sure Google's founders reached a crisis, like every company does at some point, if not often. There's went along the lines of "Well, we said we'd never advertise, but we need money if we want to keep being the Google that people like." Would you rather they said, "Well, we said we'd never advertise, and since we can't afford our hardware and bandwidth, we're going to shut down rather than stay afloat with some banner ads."
Didn't think so. While their no-ads motto might be a nice idea, I think their service is more valuable than just being ad-free. The speed and relevance of their search engine is what makes Google good. The lack of ads was just a little gravy on top.
And let's be honest, who cares? When's the last time you clicked a banner ad? I rarely even SEE banner ads, unless the page they're on is using annoying pop-ups or just abysmally slow. And I certainly don't click on them -- if it's interesting, I note the URL and type in the relevant part by hand.
Those of us who truly despise banner ads learn to not be bothered by them, indeed to not even notice them. So those truly savvy 'Net users who use Google won't notice a change, unless they screw up the technical side (unlikely). Those people who DO follow banner ads will probably be happy to see them on Google -- I'm sure Google can parlay their relevance expertise to come up with targeted banner advertising on their search results pages.
This isn't a Metallica-degree of sellout...it's a smart decision from a smart company -- one of the few web-only smart companies out there.
Xentax
I doubt they even considered the possibility of their current level of success when they said that. Who else can say they provide the search engine for the most-visited site on the internet, and a dozen others (more probably)? To get to where they are now, and stay there, they have to be fast and accurate. They need LOTS of hardware and lots of bandwidth for that. And they need lots of money for THAT. Web-only companies don't have a lot of options when it comes to revenue, and a little advertising is probably the best solution -- low overhead, no outsider VC's to siphon off the profit that might be down the road...lots of good reasons.
Of course, my biggest concern is that these ads might affect those response times. If they can add banners to their site in a nice, ignorable way, i.e. not too much clutter and no image-loading delay, I think it'll be a smart decision.
Xentax
Based on the post below, I'd say it's just an issue of the station not happening to pass over San Jose during the period from Aug 22-28. It has to pass over your position eventually, since you're lower than 51.6 degrees latitude...