you forgot that you have to shell out a million bucks for legal fees and experts to explain the judge and jury that your implementation does not infringe on the microsoft patent. Good luck.
Once you start playing the patent game, you sure need to have deep pockets.
Calculating these probabilities for poker is by no means difficult. It is computationally perfectly feasible to calculate the probabilities of every possible hand your opponent may have and base your strategy on that. All combinations of three cards out of a stock of 52 - 7 (5 your own cards, 2 the cards of the opponents you can see ) = 45^3 = 91125 probabilities in your state space. No problem whatsoever.
The state space increases with the number of rounds you can bet and the amounts you can bet, but it does not seem to really blow up in your face as all possible games of chess does.
REAL freedom would be the absence of copyright law. Then all software is public domain and the GPL no longer applies.
This situation is (I think) the entire purpose of the GPL, to make itself obsolete. When copyright law is gone, there's no more BSA, no more DMCA, let alone we would need a gnu-police as there's also no GPL. Everybody has the right to copy binaries, copy source code, give these to their neighbours and their neighbour's cat.
That's not the point. What people here are afraid of is yet another weapon in the hands of microsoft that can be used to thwart competition in an unfair way. Microsoft has the history and reputation of doing this.
So about these drivers (and apps): MS says they received a lot of reports that driver X does not work on XP. Do they tell the truth or do they have a hidden agenda? Will they make it possible to check this? If people accept this particular way of uncontrolled certification, will it not be leveraged in the future to block other stuff (for instance output grabbers for soundcards)?
The fact that I'm paranoid does not mean Microsoft is not out to get us!
Re:Does business always have to be this way ?
on
Dan Gillmor on WinXP
·
· Score: 1
I think you're confusing 'Capitalism' with 'free market' here. If you would replace the words, your post would actually make sense.
Capitalism is only concerned with accumulation of capital. Consumers are providers of capital and business collectors. Monopolies are the ultimate goals of capitalism, as there the accumulation of capital is easiest.
In a pure capitalistic society businesses would be free to do whatever they want to accumulate capital, this includes private armies (remember the East-India companies; now these where truly capitalistic). In a free market society however, business would be forced to compete. The only institutions powerful enough to force capitalists to compete are governments.
So if you change all your references from 'capitalism' to 'free market' I agree with you completely.
Re:Does business always have to be this way ?
on
Dan Gillmor on WinXP
·
· Score: 1
Wrong. What you're defining is the 'quantity': number of items shipped. The quality of a product is not measurable by counting things; if it were we would call it a quantity.
The quality of a software product can be 'measured' amongs the same lines as music (which is a product btw). Pleasing to the user, level of erronuous (sp) operations etc.
No need to help the poor researchers with extending the copyright of the journal publishers. Researchers don't own their works, the journal publishers do.
They're currently fighting their own fight in getting out of the publisher's stranglehold and get control over the works they write, select, review and edit. Of course, as thanks uni. libraries have to pay through their noses to pay for the journals writting by the uni. researchers.
Are you also tired of doing the same old job time and time again. HERE is your possibility for getting rich without leaving the comfort of your own home... etc.
Too bad/. doesn't allow me to fully mimick the capitalization, but you get the picture.
They're using the strong point of the GPL --- no closed-source variants can exist --- to force people to BUY their product if they want to sell their binaries. This is a brilliant strategy and is impossible using any other license. If they did a BSD-style license noone would care to buy their commercial development kit, and if they disallowed you from distributing at all (demo lincence) it wouldn't get much exposure as noone except the developer can run it.
As they have it now, people can produce great apps using Kylix under the GPL (free advertising), once people want to sell their stuff they have to go to Borland and give them cash.
hmm, Dmitry's presentation at DefCon seemed to show that no matter what security Adobe would put in their ebooks, he would be able to crack it, simply because the key needs to be known and stored locally in the application or the documents. So no, Adobe can not fix the security hole as the entire brand of technology they're trying to implement is inherently insecure.
Re:civil action via hostage-taking?
on
Adobe Backs Down
·
· Score: 1
Elcom backed down (probably rightly, because Dmitry doesn't deserve to rot in jail for his employer's actions). Adobe got everything they wanted.
Actually, it seems that ElcomSoft backed down even before Dmitry set foot on US soil! IIRC, Adobe send the US distributor for Elcomsoft's stuff a cease and desist letter, they ceased and desisted with the online selling of the software in the US, a while later(!) Dmitry goes to DefCon and gets arrested.
If you really want to get rid of the DMCA, or at least have a good stab at it, let EFF create some trivial software for viewing some ROT13 encrypted text. Sell copyrighted material ROT13 encoded to be viewed with this software.
Protect this software with a special dongle that requires a simple key to be turned to put the dongle in action. Now give away the dongle for free, but sell the key for a profit. Make sure that there is only one key, so every copy can activate any dongle. Give the software and a few dongles to your friends, and let one of them buy a key. There's no need to let your friends copy the key, but let the key-owner inquire at a local store how much it will cost to duplicate the key.
Now everything is set to sue every key-duplicator in every convenience store out of existence as they sell services for copyright-circumvention. This will not only make lockpicks illegal, but any service that allows duplicating keys. I don't know about the US, but here in Europe you can find these services around every corner. This will either wipe out an entire industry with associated layoffs, or (more likely) will require at least an amendment of the DMCA.
The EFF might have the legal muscle to start the lawsuit, and ask the FBI to throw everyone that sells duplicating key services into the slammer.
Yes, and some smart ass company has taken this as a cue that this is bad. Reading Bruce Schneier's latest Crypto-Gram newsletter, for all of you people that are restrained by Outlook's new and improved security, there's good news;
Outlook Redemption is a developer tool specifically designed to let Outlook
applications evade the Outlook security patches and built-in features of
Outlook 2000 that warn users when applications send mail on their behalf,
read their address book, and so forth. This can't possibly be a good idea.
On the other hand, the "security patch" is a really terrible idea, too; it
won't let you receive bunches of different types of attachments, rather
than letting the user choose. And there's no way to uninstall the security
patch, once installed. That's what inspired this tool, I'll bet.
Thank Bruce for this info and let's wait and see if this thing becomes popular. Let the games begin!
Differences in crime rates themselves can be indicative of some problems, though granted, not neccessarily to do with (lack of) freedom. I don't believe that the soil of North America makes otherwise non-violant people violent, so it must be something in the society that creates the monsters.
One of the possibilities is the socialistic perspective that the incredibly difference in wealth between the highest incomes and the lowest in the US (which is an order of magnitude larger then western european societies and again in the same league as third world dicatorships) is cause for violent reactions. But I don't think so.
The main reason is of course your war on drugs, which you incidentelly have enforced on the world. It is well known that drug-traffic and drug-use, once made illegal, is a very violent occupation (prohibition, anyone?). I think (but can't find a link) that this is the main reason you lock up up to 5% of your population (look around you, for every 19 people you see, one is rotting away in a prison somewhere). This *is* a freedom related issue, as you do not allow people to use substances that they obviously want. This is also related to a main point in my previous message, that your bill of rights does not neccesserily help in keeping free. You might be able to speak up, but there are consequences.
Suppose for instance that you want to lobby against the war on drugs. Would you do that with a few hemp plants in your basement or would you destroy those first?
You are now in the process of adding so-called Intellectual Property to the list of controlled substances. So next to the murderers, rapist and the recreational drug users you are going to add programmers, readers and music lovers to your prison population. If you want to speak up about this, do make sure that you wipe all illegal substances from your harddrive!
In any case, I do think that the percentage of imprisoned people is indicative of large problems in your society, but granted, not all of them directly related to freedom. It is however an interesting paradox that the US has a top-position in rankings designed to measure the wealth of industrial nations and at the same time has a top-position in many rankings designed to measure the the lack of rights and lack of development in third-world countries.
Not exactly, according to the Original Complaint, they arrested Dmitry because he is the copyright owner of the Elcomsoft's warez. So he probably has some financial interest in the distribution of the software.
I still think that it's completely ridicolous to arrest him though, as by this logic any random stockholder of Microsoft could be arrested for anything Microsoft does as they do own a bit of Microsoft. Come to think of it, maybe it's time to arrest Adobe's stockholders that visit Russia because they are selling eBooks which do not allow making the mandatory backup.
According to some reports , the percentage of the population that is imprisoned in the U.S.A. is a whooping 5%. This is closer to countries like Iraq and Nigeria than to (other?) western democracies, even China has a better record (thought that's probably because there they shoot to kill eve quicker than in the US). The land of the free, pfah, the land of the bound more likely! So now they start to imprison citizens of other countries as well. The economy must really be bad that the only way forward seems to be the enlargement of the prison-industrial complex. Now that's a growth market!
So Russia has a former KGB thug as president and Berlusconi controls the Italian telecracy. Big deal, they still don't lock up and kill their population in the same numbers as you do. Think about it: three strikes and you are out! No judgement, automatic punishment. This is about the worst travesty of judgement that's currently in place. Most absolute dictatorships have more consideration about individual cases than you guys have.
I'm sorry to attack your country in this way, but you do have some serious problems that you people don't seem to be taken seriously. You contain 25% of the global prison population in your country, yet you dare to claim that your rights are stronger than in most countries. It might be such on paper, and you might be more free to speak up, but this kind of freedom seems to be used more as a way to shut you up (!) than as a way to influence how your country is run. You've got freedom of speech, but you don't have a right to be heard.
Anyway, this became more of a rant then I intended. It is just that I am really upset about this case. I just returned from a trip to the US, and as usual I'm happy that I returned in one piece. I need to go to the US from time to time for research purposes, but I am always rather frightened that some stuff I did that was totally legal in the countries where I live would be held against me in the US.
This case again proves that this paranoia is quite rational.
As I am not a US citizen, I do not have any rights to change anything in your country, although your power and attitude does influence what I can do. So I'm asking you guys to not sit back and relax reading your bill of rights but to stand up and try to do something with your alleged freedoms. If you think that such a thing cannot be done, please stop ranting about your freedoms as with that attitude you show that you do not have the freedom you think you enjoy.
I'm a foreigner (an alien as your government likes to call me) and all I can do is to try and prevent some of the US laws to become law in my part of the world; this because corporate America is backed by the US government to make the rest of the world more like the 'land of the free'. I'm trying to prevent this at my end, I hope you guys will try to make your corner of the world a better place.
Not quite, it was a US company that sold the forbidden goodies. If anyone should be arrested it's that company and not our Russian friend.
Check this with creating a flamethrower in the US (perfectly legal), sell it to a company who is located in and sells it in a flamethrower unfriendly country. Would the US based CEO have to do time in the other countries prison when he gives a speech there?
Jane Blow: Help,.word does not work, it says: "unexpected bytecode in.net.native.compile"
MS.help: have you tried rebooting your.windows machine?
Jane Blow: Yes, the error still occurs
MS. help: Ok, wipe your hard disk, reinstall.windows and call me back to get a new registration number. If that doesn't work, we will go through your hardware and see if it is.net approved. We'll send you an invoice for $100
Slashdot Mirror
you forgot that you have to shell out a million bucks for legal fees and experts to explain the judge and jury that your implementation does not infringe on the microsoft patent. Good luck.
Once you start playing the patent game, you sure need to have deep pockets.
oops, should have been 45*44*43 of course, silly me. Probably made some other mistakes as well. Bad idea to do combinatorics today.
Calculating these probabilities for poker is by no means difficult. It is computationally perfectly feasible to calculate the probabilities of every possible hand your opponent may have and base your strategy on that. All combinations of three cards out of a stock of 52 - 7 (5 your own cards, 2 the cards of the opponents you can see ) = 45^3 = 91125 probabilities in your state space. No problem whatsoever.
The state space increases with the number of rounds you can bet and the amounts you can bet, but it does not seem to really blow up in your face as all possible games of chess does.
Also here, no surprises, just probabilities.
REAL freedom would be the absence of copyright law. Then all software is public domain and the GPL no longer applies.
This situation is (I think) the entire purpose of the GPL, to make itself obsolete. When copyright law is gone, there's no more BSA, no more DMCA, let alone we would need a gnu-police as there's also no GPL. Everybody has the right to copy binaries, copy source code, give these to their neighbours and their neighbour's cat.
So in this case, where does the police come in?
Well, I really like the warnings gcc 2.96 gives:
-- header files should end with an empty newline, otherwise warn.
-- no text should appear after a #endif directive (there goes my habit of commenting which directive I close)
Small annoyances that suddenly appeared when running -Wall.
That's not the point. What people here are afraid of is yet another weapon in the hands of microsoft that can be used to thwart competition in an unfair way. Microsoft has the history and reputation of doing this.
So about these drivers (and apps): MS says they received a lot of reports that driver X does not work on XP. Do they tell the truth or do they have a hidden agenda? Will they make it possible to check this? If people accept this particular way of uncontrolled certification, will it not be leveraged in the future to block other stuff (for instance output grabbers for soundcards)?
The fact that I'm paranoid does not mean Microsoft is not out to get us!
I think you're confusing 'Capitalism' with 'free market' here. If you would replace the words, your post would actually make sense.
Capitalism is only concerned with accumulation of capital. Consumers are providers of capital and business collectors. Monopolies are the ultimate goals of capitalism, as there the accumulation of capital is easiest.
In a pure capitalistic society businesses would be free to do whatever they want to accumulate capital, this includes private armies (remember the East-India companies; now these where truly capitalistic). In a free market society however, business would be forced to compete. The only institutions powerful enough to force capitalists to compete are governments.
So if you change all your references from 'capitalism' to 'free market' I agree with you completely.
Wrong. What you're defining is the 'quantity': number of items shipped. The quality of a product is not measurable by counting things; if it were we would call it a quantity.
The quality of a software product can be 'measured' amongs the same lines as music (which is a product btw). Pleasing to the user, level of erronuous (sp) operations etc.
Are Mc. Donalds hamburgers high-quality food?
and patents will have to be abandoned because they create an insurmountable obstacle for doing any sort of business, big or small.
Go, patent trolls, go!
No need to help the poor researchers with extending the copyright of the journal publishers. Researchers don't own their works, the journal publishers do.
They're currently fighting their own fight in getting out of the publisher's stranglehold and get control over the works they write, select, review and edit. Of course, as thanks uni. libraries have to pay through their noses to pay for the journals writting by the uni. researchers.
Are you also tired of doing the same old job time and time again. HERE is your possibility for getting rich without leaving the comfort of your own home... etc.
/. doesn't allow me to fully mimick the capitalization, but you get the picture.
Too bad
Au contraire, they ABSOLUTELY get it.
They're using the strong point of the GPL --- no closed-source variants can exist --- to force people to BUY their product if they want to sell their binaries. This is a brilliant strategy and is impossible using any other license. If they did a BSD-style license noone would care to buy their commercial development kit, and if they disallowed you from distributing at all (demo lincence) it wouldn't get much exposure as noone except the developer can run it.
As they have it now, people can produce great apps using Kylix under the GPL (free advertising), once people want to sell their stuff they have to go to Borland and give them cash.
What's the price difference between WinXP with and without CD-R software?
Is it 10 bucks, is it 20? You don't know and can't find out? That's where you are cheated!
hmm, Dmitry's presentation at DefCon seemed to show that no matter what security Adobe would put in their ebooks, he would be able to crack it, simply because the key needs to be known and stored locally in the application or the documents. So no, Adobe can not fix the security hole as the entire brand of technology they're trying to implement is inherently insecure.
Elcom backed down (probably rightly, because Dmitry doesn't deserve to rot in jail for his employer's actions). Adobe got everything they wanted.
Actually, it seems that ElcomSoft backed down even before Dmitry set foot on US soil! IIRC, Adobe send the US distributor for Elcomsoft's stuff a cease and desist letter, they ceased and desisted with the online selling of the software in the US, a while later(!) Dmitry goes to DefCon and gets arrested.
If you really want to get rid of the DMCA, or at least have a good stab at it, let EFF create some trivial software for viewing some ROT13 encrypted text. Sell copyrighted material ROT13 encoded to be viewed with this software.
Protect this software with a special dongle that requires a simple key to be turned to put the dongle in action. Now give away the dongle for free, but sell the key for a profit. Make sure that there is only one key, so every copy can activate any dongle. Give the software and a few dongles to your friends, and let one of them buy a key. There's no need to let your friends copy the key, but let the key-owner inquire at a local store how much it will cost to duplicate the key.
Now everything is set to sue every key-duplicator in every convenience store out of existence as they sell services for copyright-circumvention. This will not only make lockpicks illegal, but any service that allows duplicating keys. I don't know about the US, but here in Europe you can find these services around every corner. This will either wipe out an entire industry with associated layoffs, or (more likely) will require at least an amendment of the DMCA.
The EFF might have the legal muscle to start the lawsuit, and ask the FBI to throw everyone that sells duplicating key services into the slammer.
I'm curious what would happen then.
Outlook Redemption is a developer tool specifically designed to let Outlook applications evade the Outlook security patches and built-in features of Outlook 2000 that warn users when applications send mail on their behalf, read their address book, and so forth. This can't possibly be a good idea.
Outlook Redemption link
On the other hand, the "security patch" is a really terrible idea, too; it won't let you receive bunches of different types of attachments, rather than letting the user choose. And there's no way to uninstall the security patch, once installed. That's what inspired this tool, I'll bet.
Thank Bruce for this info and let's wait and see if this thing becomes popular. Let the games begin!
Differences in crime rates themselves can be indicative of some problems, though granted, not neccessarily to do with (lack of) freedom. I don't believe that the soil of North America makes otherwise non-violant people violent, so it must be something in the society that creates the monsters.
One of the possibilities is the socialistic perspective that the incredibly difference in wealth between the highest incomes and the lowest in the US (which is an order of magnitude larger then western european societies and again in the same league as third world dicatorships) is cause for violent reactions. But I don't think so.
The main reason is of course your war on drugs, which you incidentelly have enforced on the world. It is well known that drug-traffic and drug-use, once made illegal, is a very violent occupation (prohibition, anyone?). I think (but can't find a link) that this is the main reason you lock up up to 5% of your population (look around you, for every 19 people you see, one is rotting away in a prison somewhere). This *is* a freedom related issue, as you do not allow people to use substances that they obviously want. This is also related to a main point in my previous message, that your bill of rights does not neccesserily help in keeping free. You might be able to speak up, but there are consequences.
Suppose for instance that you want to lobby against the war on drugs. Would you do that with a few hemp plants in your basement or would you destroy those first?
You are now in the process of adding so-called Intellectual Property to the list of controlled substances. So next to the murderers, rapist and the recreational drug users you are going to add programmers, readers and music lovers to your prison population. If you want to speak up about this, do make sure that you wipe all illegal substances from your harddrive!
In any case, I do think that the percentage of imprisoned people is indicative of large problems in your society, but granted, not all of them directly related to freedom. It is however an interesting paradox that the US has a top-position in rankings designed to measure the wealth of industrial nations and at the same time has a top-position in many rankings designed to measure the the lack of rights and lack of development in third-world countries.
But that might just be coincidental.
Not exactly, according to the Original Complaint, they arrested Dmitry because he is the copyright owner of the Elcomsoft's warez. So he probably has some financial interest in the distribution of the software.
I still think that it's completely ridicolous to arrest him though, as by this logic any random stockholder of Microsoft could be arrested for anything Microsoft does as they do own a bit of Microsoft. Come to think of it, maybe it's time to arrest Adobe's stockholders that visit Russia because they are selling eBooks which do not allow making the mandatory backup.
So Russia has a former KGB thug as president and Berlusconi controls the Italian telecracy. Big deal, they still don't lock up and kill their population in the same numbers as you do. Think about it: three strikes and you are out! No judgement, automatic punishment. This is about the worst travesty of judgement that's currently in place. Most absolute dictatorships have more consideration about individual cases than you guys have.
I'm sorry to attack your country in this way, but you do have some serious problems that you people don't seem to be taken seriously. You contain 25% of the global prison population in your country, yet you dare to claim that your rights are stronger than in most countries. It might be such on paper, and you might be more free to speak up, but this kind of freedom seems to be used more as a way to shut you up (!) than as a way to influence how your country is run. You've got freedom of speech, but you don't have a right to be heard.
Anyway, this became more of a rant then I intended. It is just that I am really upset about this case. I just returned from a trip to the US, and as usual I'm happy that I returned in one piece. I need to go to the US from time to time for research purposes, but I am always rather frightened that some stuff I did that was totally legal in the countries where I live would be held against me in the US. This case again proves that this paranoia is quite rational.
As I am not a US citizen, I do not have any rights to change anything in your country, although your power and attitude does influence what I can do. So I'm asking you guys to not sit back and relax reading your bill of rights but to stand up and try to do something with your alleged freedoms. If you think that such a thing cannot be done, please stop ranting about your freedoms as with that attitude you show that you do not have the freedom you think you enjoy.
I'm a foreigner (an alien as your government likes to call me) and all I can do is to try and prevent some of the US laws to become law in my part of the world; this because corporate America is backed by the US government to make the rest of the world more like the 'land of the free'. I'm trying to prevent this at my end, I hope you guys will try to make your corner of the world a better place.
Not quite, it was a US company that sold the forbidden goodies. If anyone should be arrested it's that company and not our Russian friend.
Check this with creating a flamethrower in the US (perfectly legal), sell it to a company who is located in and sells it in a flamethrower unfriendly country. Would the US based CEO have to do time in the other countries prison when he gives a speech there?
hmm, I found rot13 is /usr/games. Should the entire debian team now go to jail?
:-)
apt-get remove --purge acroread
I feel better now, at least I didn't pay for it
You mean... actually leaving my screen and go out into the real world??? NO WAY! There are crazy people carrying guns out there!
and I don't know what my friends look like either... actually I seem not even to be allowed to browse their CD collection anymore.
Cool, which CD's of Yes have you got already? I bought quite a few Yes CD's recently but I'm still missing some, wanna share?
Jane Blow: Help, .word does not work, it says: "unexpected bytecode in .net.native.compile"
.help: have you tried rebooting your .windows machine?
.windows and call me back to get a new registration number. If that doesn't work, we will go through your hardware and see if it is .net approved. We'll send you an invoice for $100
MS
Jane Blow: Yes, the error still occurs
MS. help: Ok, wipe your hard disk, reinstall
Jane Blow: Thanks!