Logical basis? The reason software patents are Teh Suxx0r(tm) is because software is a big black box.
From the patenter's point of view, you patent "LZW compression in a GIF" (or some other "process"), then go after anyone writing GIFs. You get to court and after legal fees and court costs go "Ooops, my bad, I had no idea they didn't use LZW". Small companies settle out of court, just to avoid the chance that the judge was smoking something just before the trial or because they have no clue whether they really infringe or not (some of the patents are just incredibly obfuscated).
Open source helps with this, since any claim in court that they "didn't know" could not be backed up. But in a commercial closed source setting, this stuff is a royal pain in the ass.
I'm suprised, the USPTO actually managed to issue a patent for something new and innovative and unique, rather than for something thats been common practice for a few years.
This flip response is all fine and good until it's your child who's abducted by a pedophile.
Quick your child is in danger! burn all the cars and telephone poles and power plants before them pedophiles use the internet to abduct your child, or drive by and snatch them, or...
Files are transmitted node-to-node in reverse of the search path. Everything you get comes from the upstream node you asked for it from, not directly from the hosting system.
Now, if you compromised 99.9999% of the nodes on the network, you could be *somewhat* certain that if your childporn request was answered by an IP you hadn't compromised, that it *might* be on that server. (In which case you compromise it and search again). If it came from one of your own servers, check its connection logs to see where it got its answer from, and repeat.
I'm still waiting for the day when people use banning software that might be used to commit a crime as a precedent to start banning guns. I can't believe the NRA is so short-sighted that it can't see this day approaching.
I would say that given the fact that the sites are only censored in certain regions, google must want to post them. After all if they didn't want to post them, these wouldn't appear anywhere in the world.
Oh wait, we're making the mistake of attributing "wanting" of something that wasn't a liquid asset. After all, companies in the US are expected to be money grubbing, coldhearted, amoral (or is that "immoral" in the light of Enron?) bastards who don't give a shit about anything but money, Money, MONEY $$$.
There is nothing that says that a company can upgrade to the newest versions of everything all the time, and who supplies fixes to a large set of dated versions?
And this is different from Microsoft EOLing their products and forcing people to upgrade (for a fee) ((for a larger fee if you waited too long)) for continued bugfixes and patches?
This is a problem for any software, unless you contract a company to provide support for you in perpetuity. In which case, why not just hire a programmer to maintain your sendmail 8.0 server code and backport new patches for you? They're plentiful and cheap right now.
Yeah, you tell yourself that, if it makes you feel better.
Fine then, I'll tell myself that. Meanwhile, I'll be ordering another round of CDs from CD Japan pretty soon, for instance the SaiKano OST and the GitS:SAC OST which I "borrowed" from a friend since I wasn't a big fan of the show, only the music (amongst other CDs that I have mp3s from.
Why bother, when downloading it is so much easier
I only have one reply to this: snort. I'm really sure its "so much easier" to deal with the drek, people who never let you fetch stuff, and other crap on kazaa and the like. And thats if anyone else out there actually had my interests in music.
Now, I'm completely against the people who do as you describe and resell the burnt CDs for 500% profit (at this point, I would call it "bootlegging"). But you have to face it: Today's US music industry relies on people not hearing the crap on the disc ahead of time, so that they might be fooled into buying it. Since they have managed to get their industry into such a run-down state that the only way they can manage to sell anything is by accident or deceit (wouldn't you call filling a CD with two good songs which get radio advertising time, and the remainder with remixes or other crap deceit?) they have to force people to not preview the music. So they push for laws against it.
You know what really makes me feel better? It's not telling myself that I'm going to buy the stuff I like, because I know that to be true. It's that I look out and see civil disobedience performed against the gross misuse of a once-honorable law (copyright law, to be specific). Once upon a time it let people be creative and get money for their creations. Now, the music industry (amongst others) has shifted the power of the law from protecting authors to protecting the publishers. Once upon a time, an author granted permission to a publisher to publish the work. Nowadays, the publishers use work-for-hire loopholes and other tricks to take the work by force and leave the author with nothing but debt. For instance, if you read the text of the DMCA, you'll notice that there are no rights assigned to authors of a work. If I record a song in a DRM-enabled format, I have no right to remove the DRM from it, because the DMCA protects the DRM, not my work. (And before you claim "bullshit", take a look at this where legal threats were made against a person who wrote his own tool for fixing the "don't embed" bit for fonts he created himself. It hasn't gone to court, apparently, but given that the DMCA repeals rights of due process, that doesn't matter much, does it?)
So do the American thing. Protest the commercialization of your government and download an mp3 today.
They don't tell you why you fail, just that you fail
<offtopic> This is one of the arguments against having government (or private) databases of personal information. You don't know why you failed. Could it be because according to the FBI's records, you've been arrested 32 times? An illegal alien? A murderer? It may be that you're none of those, but since they didn't tell you what their records say about you, you have no idea if its even right. </offtopic>
The way I think completion should work is to match the shortest matching non-unique segment. If I type "www.moz" and I've been to "www.mozilla.com" (and various subdirectories) and "www.mozone.com" (and various subdirectories), it should show just those two matches, without the subdirectories. I should then be able to hit tab to choose one or the other, and then continue to type. Say I choose www.mozilla.com and type/info. Now, if the only pages matching this is "/info/win32/editor.html" "info/win32/browser.html" "/info/linux/browser.html" then I should get to choose between "/info/linux/" and "/info/win32/".
This way I can type "sl" and see all the individual sites starting with sl, before looking through thousands of lines like "http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/03/13 /20282 09&mode=nested&tid=95&tid=185&tid=154"
Also, if there are no matches, the window shouldn't come up at all. It's a pain to have to click repeatedly to get out of the URL entry if the url you are entering doesn't match anything. (at least on the Linux version)
This article makes it sound as if MS is doing something completely improper with XML
And you know what, the article is absolutely right. Microsoft is doing something horrible with XML... using it for something it wasn't intended.
When was the last time you saw a word document consisting of only data? No bold, italics, font settings, formatting, or any of that other "unwanted" presentation information. What would powerpoint be, without presentation metadata? A collection of words and images?
Now, I haven't used the software, and the article doesn't mention how much is actually stripped out... is it basically a text dump bordered by...? Does it include formatting tags (that may or may not be publicly defined)? Does it include some kind of tag for images and other embedded objects? Does it include markup for change tracking, annotation, and other Office features?
I would reserve final judgement until I saw an.xml file generated by Word.
Sorry bub, buy gypsum board is a solid, not a "dust".
What crack are you smoking? Gypsum board is dust compressed into a board. rub your finger on some exposed gypsum and see. Or better yet, get it wet enough and watch it crumble back to dust.
I'm all for choosing something else over Microsoft, but its gotta be a choice. To say "You must use X" is just as bad whether or not X is "microsoft".
I say go back to the benefactors and ask them to reconsider. Perhaps they could fund a student-access lab stocked with non-MS computers. Get them involved in the setup, maintenance of the lab(s).
Maybe it would be better spent just donating the money to departments who promise to not require homework be done in microsoft format only.
What if all of these independent game developers got together and released their software on a subscription model? $N lets you download N games per month. When a game gets old, download a new game. Or perhaps even better would be something like ORA's Bookshelf model, where you have N games at a time, and if you decide the one you just tried sucks, swap it for a different one.
This solves the problem one poster had, where indie games don't get press coverage... with everyone going to one site for their indie game supply, they can just hit the "Whats New" link and see whats up.
The only problem with this model, is that unlike the bookshelf, they'll need a continuous supply of software titles for people to use (This doesn't necessarially have to restrict itself to games, now). They'll also need a revenue model that is fair to independent developers and which can still draw people to pay. ORA's honor system may not work too well against game piracy, as well, without some kind of controls (although I've been thinking... didn't someone do a web-based game delivery system for Half Life? Maybe this could be adapted to these needs, although it would require a whole lot of bandwidth on the hosting side.)
Great idea! This way, the thugs can break into the tracking system and use it to know when you leave, and just walk in without the guns next time.
Or maybe it will be some gumshoe, upset that he's not going to get that gold watch when he retires because of budget cuts, so he turns on the scanner for some fun.
Or maybe you'll be trying to sell your store one day, and a fed just happens to overhear your conversation, and tells his buddy who just happens to open a giant store next door, driving the value of your store down.
Sure, the system's great when it works, but how often is that? And you can't claim it won't be misused, with the long history of wiretap abuse and so on. Plus this morning's news that the US bugged offices of people on the UN to try and figure out how to get the votes for war.
As the answer to your question, let me suggest: "Prosecute those who infringe"
I have no problem with beating down the pirates and lamers. I do have a problem with the fact that fully half of the DMCA isn't about copy protection but access protection. Access protection does nothing to further the arts or promote development, instead, it allows publishers to turn their limited monopoly (on sometimes-permanent loan from the creator of the work) into a stranglehold across many layers of the economy. For instance a publisher could invent a unique system for encrypting e-books, and suddenly not only have the monopoly on Piers Anthony's books, but the monopoly on ways to read Piers Anthony's books.
I have to wonder if this doesn't boost piracy more than hinder it, as the access-derestricted versions leak out.
Read the thread of discussion. The first post complains that this system will lead to every application having its own unique libraries, defeating the purpose of libraries. The second post said that it won't happen because they can share the same version of a library. My post was "why share?" since this blesses what was going on anyway, with software coming with conflicting libraries instead of sharing common libraries.
Why? Why should I bother to use the standard version of foo.dll when I can use my version of foo.dll with a few custom extensions? Or just have my own library called foo.dll that has nothing to do with the original foo.dll? Now I don't have to worry about installing my app breaking something made by someone else who used a standard (or their custom) foo.dll.
Getting hard core pr0n spam in my inbox makes it harder for me to raise my child how I want to.
So don't let your kid use unfiltered email. Check through your kids email and make sure there isn't anything bad in it. You can do this, and with filtering you'll just have one or two spams the filter missed and maybe an occasional dirty old man in there to go through, so its not like a major drain on your time.
While I would personally love it to not get spam anymore, this isn't the way to go about it. Filtering software is available for you to evaluate and purchase and use if you choose to, not for the government to impose on everyone.
From the article: Ancient folk wisdom, rediscovered or repackaged, is unlikely to match the output of modern scientific laboratories.
Now would be a good time to point out that science still doesn't understand how aspirin (derived from salicylic acid, which was discovered at least 2000 years ago, works.
It keeps the system simple. If someone gets hit by a ddos, the victim pays. No tracking people down, no trying to get money from a 13 year old PFY who got mad because the girl who sits next to him in class didn't laugh at his joke today.
Unfortunately, as long as its like this, there will be no improvement. DDoS's would die overnight if all spoofed traffic went straight to the bitbucket. Tracking down the few people silly enough to try would be a cinch, simply follow the ip trail backwards.
How to stop spoofed packets? Simple. At the border of the internet, simply start filtering. If your cable modem starts spewing packets with a source IP in china, something is wrong and the first router you hit should say "Damn, I had no idea China was in the middle of Arkansas." then immediately drop the packet and notify someone there is a problem.
But, the money and the laziness is in the system as it stands now. There is no money in fixing it, and unless everyone all over the world fixes it, it won't be completely effective.
Slashdot Mirror
Logical basis? The reason software patents are Teh Suxx0r(tm) is because software is a big black box.
From the patenter's point of view, you patent "LZW compression in a GIF" (or some other "process"), then go after anyone writing GIFs. You get to court and after legal fees and court costs go "Ooops, my bad, I had no idea they didn't use LZW". Small companies settle out of court, just to avoid the chance that the judge was smoking something just before the trial or because they have no clue whether they really infringe or not (some of the patents are just incredibly obfuscated).
Open source helps with this, since any claim in court that they "didn't know" could not be backed up. But in a commercial closed source setting, this stuff is a royal pain in the ass.
Maybe.
Ah the wonders of modern law. Nobody's innocent or guilty, theres just "maybe".
I'm suprised, the USPTO actually managed to issue a patent for something new and innovative and unique, rather than for something thats been common practice for a few years.
Not only that, but they have no way of finding out.
This flip response is all fine and good until it's your child who's abducted by a pedophile.
Quick your child is in danger! burn all the cars and telephone poles and power plants before them pedophiles use the internet to abduct your child, or drive by and snatch them, or...
Note IP address which is sending the results.
Bzzzt, wrong answer.
Files are transmitted node-to-node in reverse of the search path. Everything you get comes from the upstream node you asked for it from, not directly from the hosting system.
Now, if you compromised 99.9999% of the nodes on the network, you could be *somewhat* certain that if your childporn request was answered by an IP you hadn't compromised, that it *might* be on that server. (In which case you compromise it and search again). If it came from one of your own servers, check its connection logs to see where it got its answer from, and repeat.
I'm still waiting for the day when people use banning software that might be used to commit a crime as a precedent to start banning guns. I can't believe the NRA is so short-sighted that it can't see this day approaching.
I would say that given the fact that the sites are only censored in certain regions, google must want to post them. After all if they didn't want to post them, these wouldn't appear anywhere in the world.
Oh wait, we're making the mistake of attributing "wanting" of something that wasn't a liquid asset. After all, companies in the US are expected to be money grubbing, coldhearted, amoral (or is that "immoral" in the light of Enron?) bastards who don't give a shit about anything but money, Money, MONEY $$$.
There is nothing that says that a company can upgrade to the newest versions of everything all the time, and who supplies fixes to a large set of dated versions?
And this is different from Microsoft EOLing their products and forcing people to upgrade (for a fee) ((for a larger fee if you waited too long)) for continued bugfixes and patches?
This is a problem for any software, unless you contract a company to provide support for you in perpetuity. In which case, why not just hire a programmer to maintain your sendmail 8.0 server code and backport new patches for you? They're plentiful and cheap right now.
Yeah, you tell yourself that, if it makes you feel better.
Fine then, I'll tell myself that. Meanwhile, I'll be ordering another round of CDs from CD Japan pretty soon, for instance the SaiKano OST and the GitS:SAC OST which I "borrowed" from a friend since I wasn't a big fan of the show, only the music (amongst other CDs that I have mp3s from.
Why bother, when downloading it is so much easier
I only have one reply to this: snort. I'm really sure its "so much easier" to deal with the drek, people who never let you fetch stuff, and other crap on kazaa and the like. And thats if anyone else out there actually had my interests in music.
Now, I'm completely against the people who do as you describe and resell the burnt CDs for 500% profit (at this point, I would call it "bootlegging"). But you have to face it: Today's US music industry relies on people not hearing the crap on the disc ahead of time, so that they might be fooled into buying it. Since they have managed to get their industry into such a run-down state that the only way they can manage to sell anything is by accident or deceit (wouldn't you call filling a CD with two good songs which get radio advertising time, and the remainder with remixes or other crap deceit?) they have to force people to not preview the music. So they push for laws against it.
You know what really makes me feel better? It's not telling myself that I'm going to buy the stuff I like, because I know that to be true. It's that I look out and see civil disobedience performed against the gross misuse of a once-honorable law (copyright law, to be specific). Once upon a time it let people be creative and get money for their creations. Now, the music industry (amongst others) has shifted the power of the law from protecting authors to protecting the publishers. Once upon a time, an author granted permission to a publisher to publish the work. Nowadays, the publishers use work-for-hire loopholes and other tricks to take the work by force and leave the author with nothing but debt. For instance, if you read the text of the DMCA, you'll notice that there are no rights assigned to authors of a work. If I record a song in a DRM-enabled format, I have no right to remove the DRM from it, because the DMCA protects the DRM, not my work. (And before you claim "bullshit", take a look at this where legal threats were made against a person who wrote his own tool for fixing the "don't embed" bit for fonts he created himself. It hasn't gone to court, apparently, but given that the DMCA repeals rights of due process, that doesn't matter much, does it?)
So do the American thing. Protest the commercialization of your government and download an mp3 today.
They don't tell you why you fail, just that you fail
<offtopic>
This is one of the arguments against having government (or private) databases of personal information. You don't know why you failed. Could it be because according to the FBI's records, you've been arrested 32 times? An illegal alien? A murderer? It may be that you're none of those, but since they didn't tell you what their records say about you, you have no idea if its even right.
</offtopic>
All other graphics cards work fine in true color mode.
Its an ATI bug, not a mozilla bug.
Just because only one application triggers the bug doesn't mean its not there, it just means that its hard to diagnose.
The way I think completion should work is to match the shortest matching non-unique segment. /info.
3 /20282 09&mode=nested&tid=95&tid=185&tid=154"
If I type "www.moz" and I've been to "www.mozilla.com" (and various subdirectories) and "www.mozone.com" (and various subdirectories), it should show just those two matches, without the subdirectories. I should then be able to hit tab to choose one or the other, and then continue to type. Say I choose www.mozilla.com and type
Now, if the only pages matching this is "/info/win32/editor.html" "info/win32/browser.html" "/info/linux/browser.html" then I should get to choose between "/info/linux/" and "/info/win32/".
This way I can type "sl" and see all the individual sites starting with sl, before looking through thousands of lines like
"http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/03/1
Also, if there are no matches, the window shouldn't come up at all. It's a pain to have to click repeatedly to get out of the URL entry if the url you are entering doesn't match anything. (at least on the Linux version)
Yes clearly since ATI can't make a decent driver, the mozilla crew should drop everything and fork mozilla-ati to work around ATI's problems
This article makes it sound as if MS is doing something completely improper with XML
...? Does it include formatting tags (that may or may not be publicly defined)? Does it include some kind of tag for images and other embedded objects? Does it include markup for change tracking, annotation, and other Office features?
.xml file generated by Word.
And you know what, the article is absolutely right. Microsoft is doing something horrible with XML... using it for something it wasn't intended.
When was the last time you saw a word document consisting of only data? No bold, italics, font settings, formatting, or any of that other "unwanted" presentation information. What would powerpoint be, without presentation metadata? A collection of words and images?
Now, I haven't used the software, and the article doesn't mention how much is actually stripped out... is it basically a text dump bordered by
I would reserve final judgement until I saw an
I'm no software designer, but surely we could find some concept for migrating off of SMTP and POP and to a better, more secure protocol
Sure. Just like we convinced everyone to close off their open relays. Not going to work.
Sorry bub, buy gypsum board is a solid, not a "dust".
What crack are you smoking? Gypsum board is dust compressed into a board. rub your finger on some exposed gypsum and see. Or better yet, get it wet enough and watch it crumble back to dust.
I'm all for choosing something else over Microsoft, but its gotta be a choice. To say "You must use X" is just as bad whether or not X is "microsoft".
I say go back to the benefactors and ask them to reconsider. Perhaps they could fund a student-access lab stocked with non-MS computers. Get them involved in the setup, maintenance of the lab(s).
Maybe it would be better spent just donating the money to departments who promise to not require homework be done in microsoft format only.
What if all of these independent game developers got together and released their software on a subscription model? $N lets you download N games per month. When a game gets old, download a new game. Or perhaps even better would be something like ORA's Bookshelf model, where you have N games at a time, and if you decide the one you just tried sucks, swap it for a different one.
This solves the problem one poster had, where indie games don't get press coverage... with everyone going to one site for their indie game supply, they can just hit the "Whats New" link and see whats up.
The only problem with this model, is that unlike the bookshelf, they'll need a continuous supply of software titles for people to use (This doesn't necessarially have to restrict itself to games, now). They'll also need a revenue model that is fair to independent developers and which can still draw people to pay. ORA's honor system may not work too well against game piracy, as well, without some kind of controls (although I've been thinking... didn't someone do a web-based game delivery system for Half Life? Maybe this could be adapted to these needs, although it would require a whole lot of bandwidth on the hosting side.)
Great idea! This way, the thugs can break into the tracking system and use it to know when you leave, and just walk in without the guns next time.
Or maybe it will be some gumshoe, upset that he's not going to get that gold watch when he retires because of budget cuts, so he turns on the scanner for some fun.
Or maybe you'll be trying to sell your store one day, and a fed just happens to overhear your conversation, and tells his buddy who just happens to open a giant store next door, driving the value of your store down.
Sure, the system's great when it works, but how often is that? And you can't claim it won't be misused, with the long history of wiretap abuse and so on. Plus this morning's news that the US bugged offices of people on the UN to try and figure out how to get the votes for war.
As the answer to your question, let me suggest: "Prosecute those who infringe"
I have no problem with beating down the pirates and lamers. I do have a problem with the fact that fully half of the DMCA isn't about copy protection but access protection. Access protection does nothing to further the arts or promote development, instead, it allows publishers to turn their limited monopoly (on sometimes-permanent loan from the creator of the work) into a stranglehold across many layers of the economy. For instance a publisher could invent a unique system for encrypting e-books, and suddenly not only have the monopoly on Piers Anthony's books, but the monopoly on ways to read Piers Anthony's books.
I have to wonder if this doesn't boost piracy more than hinder it, as the access-derestricted versions leak out.
Read the thread of discussion. The first post complains that this system will lead to every application having its own unique libraries, defeating the purpose of libraries. The second post said that it won't happen because they can share the same version of a library. My post was "why share?" since this blesses what was going on anyway, with software coming with conflicting libraries instead of sharing common libraries.
Multiple programs can use the same version
Why? Why should I bother to use the standard version of foo.dll when I can use my version of foo.dll with a few custom extensions? Or just have my own library called foo.dll that has nothing to do with the original foo.dll? Now I don't have to worry about installing my app breaking something made by someone else who used a standard (or their custom) foo.dll.
Getting hard core pr0n spam in my inbox makes it harder for me to raise my child how I want to.
So don't let your kid use unfiltered email. Check through your kids email and make sure there isn't anything bad in it. You can do this, and with filtering you'll just have one or two spams the filter missed and maybe an occasional dirty old man in there to go through, so its not like a major drain on your time.
While I would personally love it to not get spam anymore, this isn't the way to go about it. Filtering software is available for you to evaluate and purchase and use if you choose to, not for the government to impose on everyone.
From the article: Ancient folk wisdom, rediscovered or repackaged, is unlikely to match the output of modern scientific laboratories.
Now would be a good time to point out that science still doesn't understand how aspirin (derived from salicylic acid, which was discovered at least 2000 years ago, works.
It keeps the system simple. If someone gets hit by a ddos, the victim pays. No tracking people down, no trying to get money from a 13 year old PFY who got mad because the girl who sits next to him in class didn't laugh at his joke today.
Unfortunately, as long as its like this, there will be no improvement. DDoS's would die overnight if all spoofed traffic went straight to the bitbucket. Tracking down the few people silly enough to try would be a cinch, simply follow the ip trail backwards.
How to stop spoofed packets? Simple. At the border of the internet, simply start filtering. If your cable modem starts spewing packets with a source IP in china, something is wrong and the first router you hit should say "Damn, I had no idea China was in the middle of Arkansas." then immediately drop the packet and notify someone there is a problem.
But, the money and the laziness is in the system as it stands now. There is no money in fixing it, and unless everyone all over the world fixes it, it won't be completely effective.