That is very true... it makes you wonder: are the political campaigners going to play it smart and not send their messages at all on election day, or will they thoughtlessly set a trap for themselves and possibly set a legal precident against their system of spam advertising by making the mistake of leaving such a message on election day?
I honestly hope that such an error on the part of the spammers does take place, as I can't really imagine how else in the United States such action would have any hope of being ruled illegal.
OT, but it really does sadden me to see how much the United States has changed in the last fifty years. It appears that now the only way to get a law written or to change one is to purchase it. That is our biggest problem - people now consider it normal that we no longer vote with our ballets, but rather with our pocketbooks. Those without wallets that can measure up to the deep pockets of our corporations have no real voice at all... period.
This is one of the reasons that I am not extremely happy with the dual-licensed nature of programs such as Mozilla and OpenOffice. Sure, such power in open-source packages can truly be a godsend to all of us, but the fact is that such a licensing scheme protects contributors barely more than a BSD-style license would. If either of these projects (most notably OpenOffice) becomes so popular that its owner could make a good profit by being able to close the code and sell it for a high price, by turning it into, in efffect, just another Microsoft Office, then they are free to at any time fork the code from the open-source project and continue in-house development, only releasing closed versions and extracting a fee from users. In this case the open-source version of the program would have to choose between playing eternal catch-up with the commercial version or evolving into something entirely different and entirely incompatible.
I also firmly believe that this model discourages contributors, mostly for the lack of protection mentioned above. I would certainly be happy to contribute my work to a GPL project; if a company wants to close some of the code that I have written, however, or link it with closed code, then I would require a fee from that company. It is as simple as that.
This brings me to my point: No, we wouldn't have either of theses projects without either Sun or AOL, but such a licensing mechanism allows companies such as these to close and commercially use contributed code that many potential contributors would prefer be GPLed for their own gain, rather than the benefit of their users - such is this action by AOL which is the subject of our discussion.
How can it be determined who is a qualified patron if that patron is to remain anonymous?
Easily. Read it again.
What I am saying is that a charity may determine who is qualified to receive such aid in a non-anonymous manner; what needs to be anonymous is which books what patrons read. So Charity X gives Citizen Y a one-time donation of about $65 in cash for use as such a deposit. This is not anonymous, and for our purposes doesn't really need to be. Citizen Y can then use this charitable donation - anonymously, and as any citizen with higher economic resources would use his or her own money - to make the deposit for a book.
I know, this isn't perfect - such a charitable dontation could be easily abused, though if such a donation needs only be a one-time donation the potential for abuse by any one library patron is somewhat limited. It is just a thought.
I believe that, rather than being based on any such belief that anonymity belongs only to the wealthy, pensano's statement was just one good thought being put out on the table, so to speak.
Furthermore, I do believe that pensano's idea is a very good one. This is exactly the type of system that would ensure the anonymity of library patrons - it relies on neither the staff of the library nor the library's computer administrators to keep the logs in check. It rules out the theft of books (at least provided that the books in the library would be easily accessible from some book seller, such that a thief would not experience any net gain for stealing a book due to the difficulty of acquiring such a book by conventional means - perhaps the deposit should be about 125% of the price of any given book, just to ensure that the library can only gain a net profit through the theft of its books). And as for the issue that patrons of lower economic standing may not be able to afford the price of making such a deposit... it is entirely possible that the government or even local charities would be willing to make one-time donations to qualified patrons that would give them the money they would need for such deposits.
This idea seems to be one that deserves serious consideration in the near future, for the sake of our right to read.
You certainly are correct in that space shuttle control software would not be much use to me at all... =). Further, I do concede that you have a good point in that if NASA is able to sell proprietary applications to further raise funds toward their primary objectives, this is a good thing for taxpayers - this would, essentially, put NASA on the same playing field as the Carnegie Foundation itself, which (if I remember correctly) utilises private investment to help fund their public service initiatives, a system which appears to work remarkably well.
However, my concern is not specifically with the fact that NASA's software developed with the help of this project may be proprietary and closed-source. Rather, I am concerned because NASA is donating our tax money to a project whose aim is to create a closed set of guidelines for writing better applications. It does not bother me that NASA might write closed-source, non-free applications with the help of our taxpayer money; on the other hand, it bothers me that Adobe, for example, which is not a public institution and does not primarily serve the government or the taxpayers, might do the same.
While one might argue that the information that is to be provided by this project is not truly closed because anybody can gain access to it by paying a fee, I would disagree on the basis that this information cannot, due to licensing restrictions, be shared with all of the general public whose tax dollars helped fund it, unless they are each able to individually pay the fee. More importantly, perhaps, the value of the research that is to be obtained by this project is sure to far exceed any licensing fees, meaning that those able to afford a license are effectively being given taxpayer money, while those unable to buy a license get nothing at all. This is the foundation of my disagreement with NASA's investment in this project.
To rehash what appears to be a popular theme around these parts... I just don't see how one can excuse the use of public money for projects that only select private parties can benifit from. Granted, this project is likely to benifit NASA in that it could help them provide better mission-critical systems for the space station, future spacecraft, and so on... but I still feel that taxpayers should not be made to pay to help develop a product that targets them as consumers, a project with a licensing scheme that would make it anything but available to the general taxpaying public.
These are, perhaps, the kinds of things that we need better government accounting regulations to keep track of.
It seems very unlikely that we will ever be able to ensure that software providers will be completely honest and forthcoming in the distribution of their software. While a worthy goal, I think that the best way to ensure a system's security is not to be able to trust application software providers, but to be able to sandbox these applications - to remove the need to trust them in the first place.
In my opinion, UNIX in general is far closer to reaching this security goal than any other operating system class, although more work needs to be done in this area. Applications, including those compiled from source, need to be easer to install under user accounts. I know personally that OpenOffice's installation process makes great strides toward this...
We will never be able to ensure that all software vendors will comply with any given security or privacy standards... and even if we were able to succeed there, we would still have to worry about trojans not released by "vendors". Better to focus on making systems secure than applications trustworthy...
I find it quite disturbing that our United States patent office will accept such a broad claim, needless to say. What I find even more disturbing, however, is the precident for accepting such patent claims without, as the article states, any such encryption programs being submitted.
In my mind, it's one thing to stake your claim to an invention or creation of your own doing, something that you have already built. Even what may be viewed as a "fair" patent process, however, I object to on the principle that it tends to create unnecessary monopolization of certain products and only serves to lock down profits for one party. Patents, in my mind, are a competitive, money-making scheme and nothing more. It's another thing entirely, however, to patent an idea, preventing others from using it possibly, without submitting any such art of your own.
Think about this for a moment. If companies are allowed to patent thoughts and ideas they have not created, then this only creates a rush to create patents and not a race for innovation. If "prior art" of your own is not required in a patent submission, then the application for patents becomes nothing more than financial speculation on future technologies.
"The huge threat posed by file-compression techniques and networking
standards to a multibillion-dollar industry may say more about the
fragility of certain business models than it does about the dangers
of new technology."
There are a couple things that I feel are noteworthy about this article... I'm sure others too will have something to say about them, but I have not seen these things touched upon in this discussion yet...
For one thing, how exactly does Hollings come up with his "billions of dollars a year" figure with regard to yearly losses to piracy on the Internet? In other words, does he (or do his statisticians) assume that for every song traded on the Internet, a real purchase would have been made in its place, or does he somehow compensate for the fact that some people are far more willing to download a single song than buy the entire album that contains it? This is quite seriously not a flame; I really am interested in the reasoning behind this.
Perhaps a bit more to the point, I wonder how this legislation is going to help anybody at all, even the content industry that is so energetically pushing it? While I am against piracy on principle, I am thoroughly unconvinced that half of the music piracy that goes on over the Internet could possibly be translated into real sales if the means to such piracy were eliminated. Further, for me the ability to download songs on Audiogalaxy has if anything increased the number of CDs I buy over any given time period. Again, I am against piracy on principle - but I now would never purchase a CD without first being able to download a couple of songs from it just to make sure I like it okay. Granted, for many this is not the case, and there are people who listen entirely to illegally downloaded music rather than supporting the artists who create it. But one has to wonder what the proportions between these two different music sharing philosophies is an what the overall effect of music sharing on the Internet really comes out to be.
And even if this law really would help the RIAA and MPAA that much, is this really a worthwhile goal? Granted, the ability of money to speak may be the Democratic Way, but I still feel there is something wrong when an entire industry seeks to dis-empower its customers through a legal mechanism for the sole purpose of increasing profits.
Of course, there are other issues to this law; what, for example, will be the effect on computer hardware makers and sellers if this beast really goes into effect? How will this effect those who wish to play MP3s and OGGs on their computers and in their cars? I suppose we will have to wait until we can get ahold of a full copy of the legislation before we can say much intelligent about such specifics.
For my part, I would hate to see this go into effect. I don't want digital media to suddenly become a whole lot less useful to me...
Not trying to be a nitpick here, this is just for your info... if you download the latest ROM update for the 89 (I think it's still version 2.05), running assembly programs out of flash memory becomes possible.
It will not be possible for such programs to modify their own contents when they are run from flash memory, but this usually doesn't matter.
The thing that bothers me the most about complaints of indecency on the Internet is apparent ignorance to the difference between going out and looking for a certain kind of information, and having that information shoved in your face.
Suppose you're walking down the street in the city with your kids. That building to your right is a local strip joint. That's okay, though, because rather than having half-naked girls outside the buildings actively trying to attract patrons, the strip joint simply lets the customers come to it.
This is comparable to the difference between porn spam and a porn site. Granted, I don't morally approve of either, but porn sites are all right because people have to come to _them_ if they're going to get smuthered in smut. They have to first send a request to the site's server before receiving any "improper material".
Porn spam, on the other hand, actively looks for people, and I would say such mail violates the rights of minors (and others, for that matter) on the Internet because it causes people to be exposed to things they may be uncomfortable with without such materials being expressly requested.
So stop the spam; I'm all for it. But I still believe that people running servers on the Internet, just as people running outfits on the city streets, have the right to show their patrons whatever they want, as long as they don't actively seek people on the outside.
What is being discussed here seems to be exactly the situation at my high school, a public school in Indian River County, Florida.
Recently the entire school's network made the switch over from Windows NT 4 to Win 2000 (lots less crashes now, actually). With that, though, came a few unwelcome changes... now it seems that teachers are unable to install any programs on their own computers that would require Windows Registry entries to be made. This became clear when my physics teacher asked me to help her install Adobe Acrobat Reader on her computer to read a file she downloaded; Windows complained about something having to do with permissions.
The worst part, though, is that the teachers don't even seem to know that their computers are "locked-down" in this way until they run into a problem installing something that they need. It's a really messy system, to say the least.
Slashdot Mirror
That is very true... it makes you wonder: are the political campaigners going to play it smart and not send their messages at all on election day, or will they thoughtlessly set a trap for themselves and possibly set a legal precident against their system of spam advertising by making the mistake of leaving such a message on election day?
I honestly hope that such an error on the part of the spammers does take place, as I can't really imagine how else in the United States such action would have any hope of being ruled illegal.
OT, but it really does sadden me to see how much the United States has changed in the last fifty years. It appears that now the only way to get a law written or to change one is to purchase it. That is our biggest problem - people now consider it normal that we no longer vote with our ballets, but rather with our pocketbooks. Those without wallets that can measure up to the deep pockets of our corporations have no real voice at all... period.
This is one of the reasons that I am not extremely happy with the dual-licensed nature of programs such as Mozilla and OpenOffice. Sure, such power in open-source packages can truly be a godsend to all of us, but the fact is that such a licensing scheme protects contributors barely more than a BSD-style license would. If either of these projects (most notably OpenOffice) becomes so popular that its owner could make a good profit by being able to close the code and sell it for a high price, by turning it into, in efffect, just another Microsoft Office, then they are free to at any time fork the code from the open-source project and continue in-house development, only releasing closed versions and extracting a fee from users. In this case the open-source version of the program would have to choose between playing eternal catch-up with the commercial version or evolving into something entirely different and entirely incompatible.
I also firmly believe that this model discourages contributors, mostly for the lack of protection mentioned above. I would certainly be happy to contribute my work to a GPL project; if a company wants to close some of the code that I have written, however, or link it with closed code, then I would require a fee from that company. It is as simple as that.
This brings me to my point: No, we wouldn't have either of theses projects without either Sun or AOL, but such a licensing mechanism allows companies such as these to close and commercially use contributed code that many potential contributors would prefer be GPLed for their own gain, rather than the benefit of their users - such is this action by AOL which is the subject of our discussion.
Easily. Read it again.
What I am saying is that a charity may determine who is qualified to receive such aid in a non-anonymous manner; what needs to be anonymous is which books what patrons read. So Charity X gives Citizen Y a one-time donation of about $65 in cash for use as such a deposit. This is not anonymous, and for our purposes doesn't really need to be. Citizen Y can then use this charitable donation - anonymously, and as any citizen with higher economic resources would use his or her own money - to make the deposit for a book.
I know, this isn't perfect - such a charitable dontation could be easily abused, though if such a donation needs only be a one-time donation the potential for abuse by any one library patron is somewhat limited. It is just a thought.
I believe that, rather than being based on any such belief that anonymity belongs only to the wealthy, pensano's statement was just one good thought being put out on the table, so to speak.
Furthermore, I do believe that pensano's idea is a very good one. This is exactly the type of system that would ensure the anonymity of library patrons - it relies on neither the staff of the library nor the library's computer administrators to keep the logs in check. It rules out the theft of books (at least provided that the books in the library would be easily accessible from some book seller, such that a thief would not experience any net gain for stealing a book due to the difficulty of acquiring such a book by conventional means - perhaps the deposit should be about 125% of the price of any given book, just to ensure that the library can only gain a net profit through the theft of its books). And as for the issue that patrons of lower economic standing may not be able to afford the price of making such a deposit... it is entirely possible that the government or even local charities would be willing to make one-time donations to qualified patrons that would give them the money they would need for such deposits.
This idea seems to be one that deserves serious consideration in the near future, for the sake of our right to read.
You certainly are correct in that space shuttle control software would not be much use to me at all... =). Further, I do concede that you have a good point in that if NASA is able to sell proprietary applications to further raise funds toward their primary objectives, this is a good thing for taxpayers - this would, essentially, put NASA on the same playing field as the Carnegie Foundation itself, which (if I remember correctly) utilises private investment to help fund their public service initiatives, a system which appears to work remarkably well.
However, my concern is not specifically with the fact that NASA's software developed with the help of this project may be proprietary and closed-source. Rather, I am concerned because NASA is donating our tax money to a project whose aim is to create a closed set of guidelines for writing better applications. It does not bother me that NASA might write closed-source, non-free applications with the help of our taxpayer money; on the other hand, it bothers me that Adobe, for example, which is not a public institution and does not primarily serve the government or the taxpayers, might do the same.
While one might argue that the information that is to be provided by this project is not truly closed because anybody can gain access to it by paying a fee, I would disagree on the basis that this information cannot, due to licensing restrictions, be shared with all of the general public whose tax dollars helped fund it, unless they are each able to individually pay the fee. More importantly, perhaps, the value of the research that is to be obtained by this project is sure to far exceed any licensing fees, meaning that those able to afford a license are effectively being given taxpayer money, while those unable to buy a license get nothing at all. This is the foundation of my disagreement with NASA's investment in this project.
To rehash what appears to be a popular theme around these parts... I just don't see how one can excuse the use of public money for projects that only select private parties can benifit from. Granted, this project is likely to benifit NASA in that it could help them provide better mission-critical systems for the space station, future spacecraft, and so on... but I still feel that taxpayers should not be made to pay to help develop a product that targets them as consumers, a project with a licensing scheme that would make it anything but available to the general taxpaying public.
These are, perhaps, the kinds of things that we need better government accounting regulations to keep track of.
It seems very unlikely that we will ever be able to ensure that software providers will be completely honest and forthcoming in the distribution of their software. While a worthy goal, I think that the best way to ensure a system's security is not to be able to trust application software providers, but to be able to sandbox these applications - to remove the need to trust them in the first place.
In my opinion, UNIX in general is far closer to reaching this security goal than any other operating system class, although more work needs to be done in this area. Applications, including those compiled from source, need to be easer to install under user accounts. I know personally that OpenOffice's installation process makes great strides toward this...
We will never be able to ensure that all software vendors will comply with any given security or privacy standards... and even if we were able to succeed there, we would still have to worry about trojans not released by "vendors". Better to focus on making systems secure than applications trustworthy...
I find it quite disturbing that our United States patent office will accept such a broad claim, needless to say. What I find even more disturbing, however, is the precident for accepting such patent claims without, as the article states, any such encryption programs being submitted.
In my mind, it's one thing to stake your claim to an invention or creation of your own doing, something that you have already built. Even what may be viewed as a "fair" patent process, however, I object to on the principle that it tends to create unnecessary monopolization of certain products and only serves to lock down profits for one party. Patents, in my mind, are a competitive, money-making scheme and nothing more. It's another thing entirely, however, to patent an idea, preventing others from using it possibly, without submitting any such art of your own.
Think about this for a moment. If companies are allowed to patent thoughts and ideas they have not created, then this only creates a rush to create patents and not a race for innovation. If "prior art" of your own is not required in a patent submission, then the application for patents becomes nothing more than financial speculation on future technologies.
-Niten
I quote Marc Rotenburg in saying:
There are a couple things that I feel are noteworthy about this article... I'm sure others too will have something to say about them, but I have not seen these things touched upon in this discussion yet...
For one thing, how exactly does Hollings come up with his "billions of dollars a year" figure with regard to yearly losses to piracy on the Internet? In other words, does he (or do his statisticians) assume that for every song traded on the Internet, a real purchase would have been made in its place, or does he somehow compensate for the fact that some people are far more willing to download a single song than buy the entire album that contains it? This is quite seriously not a flame; I really am interested in the reasoning behind this.
Perhaps a bit more to the point, I wonder how this legislation is going to help anybody at all, even the content industry that is so energetically pushing it? While I am against piracy on principle, I am thoroughly unconvinced that half of the music piracy that goes on over the Internet could possibly be translated into real sales if the means to such piracy were eliminated. Further, for me the ability to download songs on Audiogalaxy has if anything increased the number of CDs I buy over any given time period. Again, I am against piracy on principle - but I now would never purchase a CD without first being able to download a couple of songs from it just to make sure I like it okay. Granted, for many this is not the case, and there are people who listen entirely to illegally downloaded music rather than supporting the artists who create it. But one has to wonder what the proportions between these two different music sharing philosophies is an what the overall effect of music sharing on the Internet really comes out to be.
And even if this law really would help the RIAA and MPAA that much, is this really a worthwhile goal? Granted, the ability of money to speak may be the Democratic Way, but I still feel there is something wrong when an entire industry seeks to dis-empower its customers through a legal mechanism for the sole purpose of increasing profits.
Of course, there are other issues to this law; what, for example, will be the effect on computer hardware makers and sellers if this beast really goes into effect? How will this effect those who wish to play MP3s and OGGs on their computers and in their cars? I suppose we will have to wait until we can get ahold of a full copy of the legislation before we can say much intelligent about such specifics.
For my part, I would hate to see this go into effect. I don't want digital media to suddenly become a whole lot less useful to me...
-Niten
Not trying to be a nitpick here, this is just for your info... if you download the latest ROM update for the 89 (I think it's still version 2.05), running assembly programs out of flash memory becomes possible.
It will not be possible for such programs to modify their own contents when they are run from flash memory, but this usually doesn't matter.
The thing that bothers me the most about complaints of indecency on the Internet is apparent ignorance to the difference between going out and looking for a certain kind of information, and having that information shoved in your face.
Suppose you're walking down the street in the city with your kids. That building to your right is a local strip joint. That's okay, though, because rather than having half-naked girls outside the buildings actively trying to attract patrons, the strip joint simply lets the customers come to it.
This is comparable to the difference between porn spam and a porn site. Granted, I don't morally approve of either, but porn sites are all right because people have to come to _them_ if they're going to get smuthered in smut. They have to first send a request to the site's server before receiving any "improper material".
Porn spam, on the other hand, actively looks for people, and I would say such mail violates the rights of minors (and others, for that matter) on the Internet because it causes people to be exposed to things they may be uncomfortable with without such materials being expressly requested.
So stop the spam; I'm all for it. But I still believe that people running servers on the Internet, just as people running outfits on the city streets, have the right to show their patrons whatever they want, as long as they don't actively seek people on the outside.
What is being discussed here seems to be exactly the situation at my high school, a public school in Indian River County, Florida.
Recently the entire school's network made the switch over from Windows NT 4 to Win 2000 (lots less crashes now, actually). With that, though, came a few unwelcome changes... now it seems that teachers are unable to install any programs on their own computers that would require Windows Registry entries to be made. This became clear when my physics teacher asked me to help her install Adobe Acrobat Reader on her computer to read a file she downloaded; Windows complained about something having to do with permissions.
The worst part, though, is that the teachers don't even seem to know that their computers are "locked-down" in this way until they run into a problem installing something that they need. It's a really messy system, to say the least.