I do that all the time - not the brothel thing, but set my outbound Caller ID to what I want it to be. I am an attorney in solo practice. I work from home frequently, if the project I'm working on doesn't require me to meet with clients or use resources I've got at the office. My answering service E-mails me when I get a phone message. I don't give clients my home phone number, but many people don't accept incoming calls where Caller ID is blocked.
So I use my home Asterisk box to set the outbound Caller ID on my calls to my office number - the people I call can see who's calling, take the call if they want (or not if they don't want), they can call me back at that number if they need to, and they don't get my home phone number. It all works out pretty well.
Granted, the application described in the newspaper articles is a creepy one - but the technique can also be used for good.
Laws don't need to be perfectly enforced or perfectly followed/obeyed to have a significant impact. In fact, most laws are used precisely when you seem to think they have failed - e.g., they have been violated. Murder is forbidden, but your analysis would seem to suggest that laws against murder are "not enforceable", because people do it so often, and even get away with it.
Now, some of the people who commit murder get caught, and that's useful, so we haven't tossed out our laws against murder yet.. and I don't think we're going to.
Similarly, look at the US' "war on drugs" that we've been fighting since the Nixon administration in the 1970's.. that should make two things clear about the utility of unpopular and difficult-to-enforce laws:
The unwanted/forbidden behavior will continue despite its prohibition (in fact, drugs are used and sold even in countries where drug criminals get the death penalty).
Hundreds of thousands of people can be arrested, jailed, and killes, across decades, in service of enforcing an "unenforceable" law.
The observation that crypto bans are unlikely to be obeyed perfectly is not going to mean much to legislators - they pass lots of other laws they fully expect to be broken. That's what criminal laws are for. In the US, law enforcement and intelligence agencies would prefer that nobody use crypto, ever - but they've had to settle for significantly hindering its adoption with complicated export laws and periodic domestic regulatory proposals. While you say that the US is an example of "crypto freedom", it's also an example of the ways that, while crypto might not be effectively forbidden, its use and distribution can be limited such that surveillance and eavesdropping are still productive activities.
Hey, maybe you've got lots of cash sitting around cluttering up your brokerage account, such that the difference between $700 and $1400 doesn't look very interesting to you. Feel free to Paypal some over to me.
The question most people face is not "given infinite cash, what is the most efficient way to organize one's affairs", but "given a limited amount of cash, which isn't available all at once, how can I maximize my output?"
If someone really needs all or most of the features that Word provides, it would obviously be more sensible to purchase it rather than write it from scratch. On the other hand, one doesn't need to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on some website log analysis tool to count up the number of unique visitor IP's for a website, or to check for broken links. Again, the question is not "what is the most efficient way to achieve Word's functionality?", but "what is the actual problem I need to solve, and how can I do that in an efficient, economical fashion?" If the problem to be solved is a search-and-replace over some text files, or counting words and lines, etc., then the easy thing to do is handle that with free tools like awk or perl or grep, rather than invest hundreds of dollars in some pig of a spyware application that's going to need updating in six months.
I'll start by saying I mostly agree with you.. but I think you oversimplify the comparison. Specifically, you ignore the cash flow side of this - does your hypothetical $20/hr developer want to get put on unpaid leave-of-absence for a week because his boss had to pay for a new software package? If not, then the "buy the software" approach costs $700 more than the "write it from scratch" approach, even if the second is less efficient overall.
Compression doesn't help make interactive keystrokes go faster, it helps make interactive screens refresh faster; but the big win is for non-interactive stuff, like tunnelled HTTP or SMTP or POP; or file moves, via scp or sftp. That's where compression makes a big difference, and why it's a bummer to turn if off unless absolutely necessary.
Re:You don't even need to learn morse code !
on
Field Day 2002
·
· Score: 1
In the US, there's a complicated hierarchical system of licenses, which govern which frequencies and power levels a radio operator is permitted to use; it's now possible to get a license for the lower levels without proving Morse code proficiency.
Bruce Perens was involved in the creation of an organization called "No-Code International", whose goal is to eliminate code requirements for any class of amateur radio license.
I think the entire licensing scheme is one big control-freak nightmare, and don't find ham culture very interesting, but there's some interesting technology there, if you can get past the political/cultural stuff.
Umm, no. Some firearms are sold in gun stores, some are sold in "sporting goods" stores, and some are sold in big generalized stores like Wal-mart.
Also, the merchant type is set by the merchant once, when their credit card merchant account is set up - so only gun-only stores are likely to show up as "gun store", and even they will be wary if that designation is likely to make it harder to buy things there. (What if a non-shooter goes to a gun store to buy hearing protection, or pepper spray, or a gift for a shooter?)
I don't know where you got the idea that people don't buy guns with credit cards - most of my guns were paid for with credit or debit cards, because nobody uses checks any more, and I don't usually carry enough cash to buy an average-priced gun (probably between $500 and $1500 for moderate quality handguns or long guns).
Here in the People's Repbulik of Kalifornia, you can't take a gun home the day you buy it (even if you've already got a safe full of 'em, and hence aren't prevented from whatever mayhem the legislature thinks you've got planned).. which means you're paying in advance for something you're allegedly going to receive in 11 days or so.. which is the perfect situation to use a credit card for, given the obligations of the issuing bank to refund your money if the transaction fails between purchase and when you pick up the gun. (What if they sell it to someone else/lose it? What if the store burns down? If you paid with cash/check/debit card, you're at their mercy. If you paid with a credit card, you initiate a chargeback and let them sweat over the details.)
Re:Anyone know how to do this with a BBS?
on
Remembering the BBS
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· Score: 1
This sounds like a job for an old Livingston Portmaster 2 (or similar) from Ebay for ~ $100, connected between the local ethernet and the serial ports on the Wildcat box.
Actually, it's required. The Magunuson-Moss Warranty Act or 1975 requires that warranty disclaimers or limitations be "fully and conspicuously disclosed" in order to be effective, and delegates to the Federal Trade Commission the authority to provide standards for disclosure.
The FTC's standards have indicated that appropriate disclosures for warranty terms are likely to use visually distinct type or printing to refer to warranty terms considered especially important.
Now, human factors/usability people will tell you that using all caps makes blocks of text unpleasant to read and understand - so it may be that the FTC and people trying to follow their rules are actually making it less likely, not more likely, that consumers will understand what's happening.
But that's what the rules are today. Limitations of liability need to be visually distinct, and conservative managers and lawyers tend to do what everyone else does (which isn't a bad strategy for avoiding legal risk) and use ALL CAPS.
Oracle also donated $25K on 6/20/01 and another $25K on 12/27/2000 to the campaign of Bill Lockyer, the current California Attorney General who's leading the investigation into this mess.
ok, I'm just coming off of 80 hours of classes to be certified as a tax preparer in California, and the answers provided are a little short on information. let's see if we can get things cleaned up..
Yes, charitable contributions are tax deductible.. if you itemize. If you don't itemize, they won't change your tax picture at all.
Would it make sense to itemize? Only if you can accumulate more deductions than the default "standard deduction", which is $4550 for tax year 2001 for single people in the US. The big (and common) itemized deductions are home mortgage interest and points, state income taxes paid, real estate taxes paid, charitable contributions, substantial unreimbursed medical expenses (they're deductible to the extent that they exceed 7.5% of your adjusted gross income), and miscellaneous items like tax prep fees, safe deposit boxes used to store tax records or investment records, but only to the extent that the miscellaneous deductions exceed 2% of your adjusted gross income.
If you want to play with the numbers, try the TurboTax online estimator at http://www.quicken.com/taxes/taxslashing/estimator/; give it the numbers from your last paycheck(s) this year, make up some reasonable ballpark numbers for capital gain/loss and interest, and enter any deductions you can identify, and look at the bottom line.. then go back and add some charitable contributions and see if it makes a difference.
But the short version is.. if you made less than $100K, you're single, no kids or alimony, don't own a home, and are in good health, you probably should take the standard deduction, so charitable donations won't change your tax picture unless you're thinking about a donation of $5K or more. (And if you are thinking about that, you might be thinking about donating money that came from the sale of stock, in which case you ought to think about donating appreciated stock, not taking a capital gain, getting taxed on that, then donating the already-taxed proceeds, because that's a bummer.)
But the bottom line is that EFF rocks and you should donate anyway - I've donated a little every year for the last 5 years or so, even when it didn't change my taxes, and intend to continue, because they're the only ones fighting important battles.
Even better, buy a power cord for $1 (many models to choose from), plug it into your existing PC (free), plug in your existing 802.11b network card (free), install Linux or a *BSD (free), get your mom to take you out to lunch (free) and do your laundry (free), and you've got an access point, lunch, and clean laundry for $1. Whee!
That's not politics, it's risk management, and it's the sort of boring but essential thinking that's crucial to building a long-term business. No apologies or excuses are necessary.
Irrational prejudice against (or for) "hacker" versus "corporate" things is silly - but preferring familiar, well-known, well-documented, easily-supported tools over more avant-garde or experimental things, where reliability and uptime and long-term persistence is important is not silly.
That's the same argument that works for open-source tools in the long run - while they don't always look as safe as their closed-source competitors in their early years, as they get more mature and a userbase develops, they become safer - e.g., Commodore can kill off the Amiga, IBM can stop making OS/2, and Microsoft can stop selling MS-DOS, but nobody can kill Linux or Perl, because there's such a big installed base that they'll be user-supported for the next 20 or 30 years, no matter what happens.
You're right, the Slashdot guys screwed up.. I want my money back, right now, you cheap Slashdot motherfuckers. How dare you run a free website without online fail-over routers? I'm goin' down to the Salvation Army and getting some free lunch and when I get back I want to see TWO rows of blinky lights in that rack, or I want a refund on my subscription, pronto.
The intellectual property created here does not belong to the U of U, unless it was created by their employees, or assigned to them in writing.
Now, the computers holding the intellectual property might belong to the U of U - and as a result, they may be in a position to erase it, or deny access to others - but they do not hold the copyright (or trademark, or patent, or trade secret) rights in it.
The Slashcode elements of the IP remain the property of Slashcode's creators and assignees.
The modifications, customizations, etc., prepared by the admin during his 2000 hours of work belong to him.
The messages posted by users belong to them.
Possession or ownership of storage media which contains bits which represent intellectual property is not even close to the same thing as owning the rights to the intellectual property.
The fact that the U of U's name appears on the site might subject the site's creator to trademark claims from the U of U, if he didn't get permission - but it doesn't act to change the underlying ownership in messages, site configuration & customization, etc., to the U of U, nor does ownership of the machines.
(if owning the machine which hosts a website means ownership of the website.. then wouldn't that mean that webhosting companies own all of the IP in the sites that they host? that can't be true. that's not true.)
Consumer time shifting is fair use (see Sony v. Universal City Studios); but sharing your time-shifted copy of a TV show is probably not fair use. Sharing it in its entirety prior to airtime with everyone on the Internet is not fair use. (not that I'm saying it's wrong, just I'm confident it doesn't match the fair use factors of 17 USC 107 - in particular, see the part of the Sony opinion discussing the "market effect" fair use test.)
"works from the government specifically excluded from copyright.." is too broad.
The (federal) copyright law specifically excludes works created by the federal government. It doesn't address state government creations, or private creations which are subsequently adopted as law.
Also, the federal government can still hold copyrights - it has to get someone else (like a private corporation) to create the work, and then transfer the copyright to the federal government.
I'm not saying I think the situation described is reasonable - it's not - but it's not easily wrong, as a matter of legal precedent.
Right, and Schneier's understanding of the legal issues isn't a whole lot better than the average lawyer's understanding of the cryptographic issues.. which is to say it's not good.
In particular, he seems to be completely unfamiliar with the rules of evidence or the role of fact-finders within the legal system.
That information isn't unavailable - it's in libraries. Evidentiary Foundations by Ed Imwinkelreid or any of the Evidence treatises by Laird Kirkpatrick and Christopher Mueller might be educational on this topic.
It's silly for people to make up their own ideas about crypto without first learning about prior work in the field.. and equally (or more) silly for people to make up their own ideas about law without first learning about prior work in that field.
Have they ever documented their algorithms and subjected them to peer review? Last I saw they said their crypto was proprietary "patent pending" stuff and they refused to explain how it works, or allow outsiders to vet the quality of the design or the implementation. I'd stay away from mysterious undocumented algorithms who claim to be secure but can't/won't explain why.
I used anonymizer for a shell for some time; it was useful but frequently slow. My account stopped working some time ago; I have been unable to reach anyone by phone or email to figure out what went wrong or how to get back in, despite several tries. YMMV.
It's a shame that nobody from AOL Legal was available to add a little clarity to those internal forums, because the above is just gibberish, legally speaking.
Either AOL has the copyright or the editor does; if AOL only got a nonexclusive license, it didn't get the copyright.
If AOL got the copyright, it did that by getting a signed memorandum assigning it (or by employing the editors), not by simply asserting it on some web page. See 17 USC 204 if you're confused about that, or why the FSF is picky about getting permissions/assignments on paper.
A much better solution would have been to form a nonprofit organization to manage the ODP (which wouldn't put AOL's assets at risk in a suit) and donate/transfer AOL's license to the ODP to the new organization, or ask ODP contributors to relicense the new non-profit. Then again, that wouldn't allow AOL to retain control of the ODP, which might be important to them.
I think "market share" deserves more careful thought when applied to free software - the study would seem to describe "market share among people who purchased packaged distributions" which is pretty different from number of installations, which is what many people think "market share" means, or ought to mean.
Is Apache's "market share" of the webserver market 0%, because the Apache Software Foundation doesn't sell any copies? I don't think so.
The methodology used is great if you're trying to figure out who's making how much money from selling Linux distributions, but isn't so great if you're trying to figure out which distributions are good ones, or popular ones.
In particular, distributions which are easy to install via the Net and/or easy to install without documentation are much less likely to require the use of floppies, CD's, or installation manuals - so it may be that distributions which sell a lot are actually inferior, technically, but that inferiority drives sales.
I don't say that to pick on Red Hat - one of my boxes runs Red Hat, and I've been pretty happy with it, and don't know enough about the other contemporary distros to pick on them. I just think it's a shame to read more into these numbers than is reasonable.
No, read Part II of the interview - FreeBSD sees their mission as building a stable, functional OS for common desktops or "PC's", not Intel x86's. If/when other platforms attract users, it makes sense to make FreeBSD available there, too.
I've been using x86 platforms for 15 years now (yow!) and must say that I'm pleased to see FreeBSD isn't tied to them - I think it's time to dump the old architecture and incremental changes to it, especially in light of the friendliness both Intel and AMD have shown towards user-hostile processor "features" like software-readable serial numbers.
There are a number of comments here arguing that it's useful to know about electronics basics and Morse code - it's possible to agree that those are good things to know about, without agreeing that the government ought to force people to learn about them before using basic electromagnetic techniques to communicate with each other.
I guess the implication behind the arguments to keep the old rules is that people won't learn that stuff if they don't have to - which suggests that it isn't as valuable as the proponents of the arguments would have us believe. If those really are useful skills, people will learn them voluntarily. If they aren't useful (or more useful or entertaining than other activities available), people won't bother with them. That seems fine to me.
It would also be useful if everyone knew how cars work, and how computers work - but it would be silly to think that the government should require people to pass a test about internal combustion engines or the manufacturing processes behind radial tires before getting a drivers' license, or to to pass a test about webservers and operating systems before using a browser.
(In fact, in the US it's silly to talk about "licensing" forms of communication, as all of them should be covered by the First Amendment, but that's another argument for another day.)
Slashdot Mirror
I do that all the time - not the brothel thing, but set my outbound Caller ID to what I want it to be. I am an attorney in solo practice. I work from home frequently, if the project I'm working on doesn't require me to meet with clients or use resources I've got at the office. My answering service E-mails me when I get a phone message. I don't give clients my home phone number, but many people don't accept incoming calls where Caller ID is blocked.
So I use my home Asterisk box to set the outbound Caller ID on my calls to my office number - the people I call can see who's calling, take the call if they want (or not if they don't want), they can call me back at that number if they need to, and they don't get my home phone number. It all works out pretty well.
Granted, the application described in the newspaper articles is a creepy one - but the technique can also be used for good.
Now, some of the people who commit murder get caught, and that's useful, so we haven't tossed out our laws against murder yet .. and I don't think we're going to.
Similarly, look at the US' "war on drugs" that we've been fighting since the Nixon administration in the 1970's .. that should make two things clear about the utility of unpopular and difficult-to-enforce laws:
The observation that crypto bans are unlikely to be obeyed perfectly is not going to mean much to legislators - they pass lots of other laws they fully expect to be broken. That's what criminal laws are for. In the US, law enforcement and intelligence agencies would prefer that nobody use crypto, ever - but they've had to settle for significantly hindering its adoption with complicated export laws and periodic domestic regulatory proposals. While you say that the US is an example of "crypto freedom", it's also an example of the ways that, while crypto might not be effectively forbidden, its use and distribution can be limited such that surveillance and eavesdropping are still productive activities.
The question most people face is not "given infinite cash, what is the most efficient way to organize one's affairs", but "given a limited amount of cash, which isn't available all at once, how can I maximize my output?"
If someone really needs all or most of the features that Word provides, it would obviously be more sensible to purchase it rather than write it from scratch. On the other hand, one doesn't need to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on some website log analysis tool to count up the number of unique visitor IP's for a website, or to check for broken links. Again, the question is not "what is the most efficient way to achieve Word's functionality?", but "what is the actual problem I need to solve, and how can I do that in an efficient, economical fashion?" If the problem to be solved is a search-and-replace over some text files, or counting words and lines, etc., then the easy thing to do is handle that with free tools like awk or perl or grep, rather than invest hundreds of dollars in some pig of a spyware application that's going to need updating in six months.
I'll start by saying I mostly agree with you .. but I think you oversimplify the comparison. Specifically, you ignore the cash flow side of this - does your hypothetical $20/hr developer want to get put on unpaid leave-of-absence for a week because his boss had to pay for a new software package? If not, then the "buy the software" approach costs $700 more than the "write it from scratch" approach, even if the second is less efficient overall.
Compression doesn't help make interactive keystrokes go faster, it helps make interactive screens refresh faster; but the big win is for non-interactive stuff, like tunnelled HTTP or SMTP or POP; or file moves, via scp or sftp. That's where compression makes a big difference, and why it's a bummer to turn if off unless absolutely necessary.
In the US, there's a complicated hierarchical system of licenses, which govern which frequencies and power levels a radio operator is permitted to use; it's now possible to get a license for the lower levels without proving Morse code proficiency.
Bruce Perens was involved in the creation of an organization called "No-Code International", whose goal is to eliminate code requirements for any class of amateur radio license.
I think the entire licensing scheme is one big control-freak nightmare, and don't find ham culture very interesting, but there's some interesting technology there, if you can get past the political/cultural stuff.
Umm, no. Some firearms are sold in gun stores, some are sold in "sporting goods" stores, and some are sold in big generalized stores like Wal-mart.
.. which means you're paying in advance for something you're allegedly going to receive in 11 days or so .. which is the perfect situation to use a credit card for, given the obligations of the issuing bank to refund your money if the transaction fails between purchase and when you pick up the gun. (What if they sell it to someone else/lose it? What if the store burns down? If you paid with cash/check/debit card, you're at their mercy. If you paid with a credit card, you initiate a chargeback and let them sweat over the details.)
Also, the merchant type is set by the merchant once, when their credit card merchant account is set up - so only gun-only stores are likely to show up as "gun store", and even they will be wary if that designation is likely to make it harder to buy things there. (What if a non-shooter goes to a gun store to buy hearing protection, or pepper spray, or a gift for a shooter?)
I don't know where you got the idea that people don't buy guns with credit cards - most of my guns were paid for with credit or debit cards, because nobody uses checks any more, and I don't usually carry enough cash to buy an average-priced gun (probably between $500 and $1500 for moderate quality handguns or long guns).
Here in the People's Repbulik of Kalifornia, you can't take a gun home the day you buy it (even if you've already got a safe full of 'em, and hence aren't prevented from whatever mayhem the legislature thinks you've got planned)
This sounds like a job for an old Livingston Portmaster 2 (or similar) from Ebay for ~ $100, connected between the local ethernet and the serial ports on the Wildcat box.
Actually, it's required. The Magunuson-Moss Warranty Act or 1975 requires that warranty disclaimers or limitations be "fully and conspicuously disclosed" in order to be effective, and delegates to the Federal Trade Commission the authority to provide standards for disclosure.
The FTC's standards have indicated that appropriate disclosures for warranty terms are likely to use visually distinct type or printing to refer to warranty terms considered especially important.
Now, human factors/usability people will tell you that using all caps makes blocks of text unpleasant to read and understand - so it may be that the FTC and people trying to follow their rules are actually making it less likely, not more likely, that consumers will understand what's happening.
But that's what the rules are today. Limitations of liability need to be visually distinct, and conservative managers and lawyers tend to do what everyone else does (which isn't a bad strategy for avoiding legal risk) and use ALL CAPS.
Oracle also donated $25K on 6/20/01 and another $25K on 12/27/2000 to the campaign of Bill Lockyer, the current California Attorney General who's leading the investigation into this mess.
No, look more closely, the $2000 was returned to the contributor in 2000; that's why the total for the year is $0.
Larry Ellison did give a lot of money to Orrin Hatch recently, though.
Yes, charitable contributions are tax deductible
Would it make sense to itemize? Only if you can accumulate more deductions than the default "standard deduction", which is $4550 for tax year 2001 for single people in the US. The big (and common) itemized deductions are home mortgage interest and points, state income taxes paid, real estate taxes paid, charitable contributions, substantial unreimbursed medical expenses (they're deductible to the extent that they exceed 7.5% of your adjusted gross income), and miscellaneous items like tax prep fees, safe deposit boxes used to store tax records or investment records, but only to the extent that the miscellaneous deductions exceed 2% of your adjusted gross income.
If you want to play with the numbers, try the TurboTax online estimator at http://www.quicken.com/taxes/taxslashing/estimato
But the short version is
But the bottom line is that EFF rocks and you should donate anyway - I've donated a little every year for the last 5 years or so, even when it didn't change my taxes, and intend to continue, because they're the only ones fighting important battles.
Even better, buy a power cord for $1 (many models to choose from), plug it into your existing PC (free), plug in your existing 802.11b network card (free), install Linux or a *BSD (free), get your mom to take you out to lunch (free) and do your laundry (free), and you've got an access point, lunch, and clean laundry for $1. Whee!
Irrational prejudice against (or for) "hacker" versus "corporate" things is silly - but preferring familiar, well-known, well-documented, easily-supported tools over more avant-garde or experimental things, where reliability and uptime and long-term persistence is important is not silly.
That's the same argument that works for open-source tools in the long run - while they don't always look as safe as their closed-source competitors in their early years, as they get more mature and a userbase develops, they become safer - e.g., Commodore can kill off the Amiga, IBM can stop making OS/2, and Microsoft can stop selling MS-DOS, but nobody can kill Linux or Perl, because there's such a big installed base that they'll be user-supported for the next 20 or 30 years, no matter what happens.
You're right, the Slashdot guys screwed up .. I want my money back, right now, you cheap Slashdot motherfuckers. How dare you run a free website without online fail-over routers? I'm goin' down to the Salvation Army and getting some free lunch and when I get back I want to see TWO rows of blinky lights in that rack, or I want a refund on my subscription, pronto.
Boy, it's hard to get more wrong than this.
.. then wouldn't that mean that webhosting companies own all of the IP in the sites that they host? that can't be true. that's not true.)
The intellectual property created here does not belong to the U of U, unless it was created by their employees, or assigned to them in writing.
Now, the computers holding the intellectual property might belong to the U of U - and as a result, they may be in a position to erase it, or deny access to others - but they do not hold the copyright (or trademark, or patent, or trade secret) rights in it.
The Slashcode elements of the IP remain the property of Slashcode's creators and assignees.
The modifications, customizations, etc., prepared by the admin during his 2000 hours of work belong to him.
The messages posted by users belong to them.
Possession or ownership of storage media which contains bits which represent intellectual property is not even close to the same thing as owning the rights to the intellectual property.
The fact that the U of U's name appears on the site might subject the site's creator to trademark claims from the U of U, if he didn't get permission - but it doesn't act to change the underlying ownership in messages, site configuration & customization, etc., to the U of U, nor does ownership of the machines.
(if owning the machine which hosts a website means ownership of the website
Consumer time shifting is fair use (see Sony v. Universal City Studios ); but sharing your time-shifted copy of a TV show is probably not fair use. Sharing it in its entirety prior to airtime with everyone on the Internet is not fair use. (not that I'm saying it's wrong, just I'm confident it doesn't match the fair use factors of 17 USC 107 - in particular, see the part of the Sony opinion discussing the "market effect" fair use test.)
"works from the government specifically excluded from copyright.." is too broad.
The (federal) copyright law specifically excludes works created by the federal government. It doesn't address state government creations, or private creations which are subsequently adopted as law.
Also, the federal government can still hold copyrights - it has to get someone else (like a private corporation) to create the work, and then transfer the copyright to the federal government.
I'm not saying I think the situation described is reasonable - it's not - but it's not easily wrong, as a matter of legal precedent.
Right, and Schneier's understanding of the legal issues isn't a whole lot better than the average lawyer's understanding of the cryptographic issues .. which is to say it's not good.
.. and equally (or more) silly for people to make up their own ideas about law without first learning about prior work in that field.
In particular, he seems to be completely unfamiliar with the rules of evidence or the role of fact-finders within the legal system.
That information isn't unavailable - it's in libraries. Evidentiary Foundations by Ed Imwinkelreid or any of the Evidence treatises by Laird Kirkpatrick and Christopher Mueller might be educational on this topic.
It's silly for people to make up their own ideas about crypto without first learning about prior work in the field
Have they ever documented their algorithms and subjected them to peer review? Last I saw they said their crypto was proprietary "patent pending" stuff and they refused to explain how it works, or allow outsiders to vet the quality of the design or the implementation. I'd stay away from mysterious undocumented algorithms who claim to be secure but can't/won't explain why.
I used anonymizer for a shell for some time; it was useful but frequently slow. My account stopped working some time ago; I have been unable to reach anyone by phone or email to figure out what went wrong or how to get back in, despite several tries. YMMV.
Either AOL has the copyright or the editor does; if AOL only got a nonexclusive license, it didn't get the copyright.
If AOL got the copyright, it did that by getting a signed memorandum assigning it (or by employing the editors), not by simply asserting it on some web page. See 17 USC 204 if you're confused about that, or why the FSF is picky about getting permissions/assignments on paper.
A much better solution would have been to form a nonprofit organization to manage the ODP (which wouldn't put AOL's assets at risk in a suit) and donate/transfer AOL's license to the ODP to the new organization, or ask ODP contributors to relicense the new non-profit. Then again, that wouldn't allow AOL to retain control of the ODP, which might be important to them.
I think "market share" deserves more careful thought when applied to free software - the study would seem to describe "market share among people who purchased packaged distributions" which is pretty different from number of installations, which is what many people think "market share" means, or ought to mean.
Is Apache's "market share" of the webserver market 0%, because the Apache Software Foundation doesn't sell any copies? I don't think so.
The methodology used is great if you're trying to figure out who's making how much money from selling Linux distributions, but isn't so great if you're trying to figure out which distributions are good ones, or popular ones.
In particular, distributions which are easy to install via the Net and/or easy to install without documentation are much less likely to require the use of floppies, CD's, or installation manuals - so it may be that distributions which sell a lot are actually inferior, technically, but that inferiority drives sales.
I don't say that to pick on Red Hat - one of my boxes runs Red Hat, and I've been pretty happy with it, and don't know enough about the other contemporary distros to pick on them. I just think it's a shame to read more into these numbers than is reasonable.
No, read Part II of the interview - FreeBSD sees their mission as building a stable, functional OS for common desktops or "PC's", not Intel x86's. If/when other platforms attract users, it makes sense to make FreeBSD available there, too.
I've been using x86 platforms for 15 years now (yow!) and must say that I'm pleased to see FreeBSD isn't tied to them - I think it's time to dump the old architecture and incremental changes to it, especially in light of the friendliness both Intel and AMD have shown towards user-hostile processor "features" like software-readable serial numbers.
There are a number of comments here arguing that it's useful to know about electronics basics and Morse code - it's possible to agree that those are good things to know about, without agreeing that the government ought to force people to learn about them before using basic electromagnetic techniques to communicate with each other.
I guess the implication behind the arguments to keep the old rules is that people won't learn that stuff if they don't have to - which suggests that it isn't as valuable as the proponents of the arguments would have us believe. If those really are useful skills, people will learn them voluntarily. If they aren't useful (or more useful or entertaining than other activities available), people won't bother with them. That seems fine to me.
It would also be useful if everyone knew how cars work, and how computers work - but it would be silly to think that the government should require people to pass a test about internal combustion engines or the manufacturing processes behind radial tires before getting a drivers' license, or to to pass a test about webservers and operating systems before using a browser.
(In fact, in the US it's silly to talk about "licensing" forms of communication, as all of them should be covered by the First Amendment, but that's another argument for another day.)