Only if you really believe that someone can "own" something that does not exist. I own an idea. It's in your brain, too, so I own part of your brain. I own these bits: 1001010100 01010101010. If you use them, you owe me money.
If that doesn't sound ridiculous to you, you're not really thinking about it.
And I forgot to mention: there is nothing stopping a "commercial entity" like Slashdot from using the.org domain. The RFC does not say anything about.org being restricted to non-profits organizations.
You must know the moderator, because you're Trolling, if I ever saw it. That remark certainly didn't deserve a 4.
And to the point: Napster isn't eroding anyone's rights. Their business is not illegal. The constitution clearly lays out the right to trade creative works, specifically saying that there may be a very limited amount of time in which the works are protected from this -- to support the ARTIST, not the record companies and RIAA. Jefferson and Franklin, among others, expressed fear that this very thing would be happening, that lawyers and greedy buffoons would sell the idea that there is such a thing as owning ideas (they call it "intellectual property", an oxymoron).
You cannot own ideas. You cannot own a series of bits, no matter how unique. This is obvious to anyone who thinks enough about it. Copyright was supposed to exist for a short period to give artists more reason to create -- not to create property. You're telling me that if I know a song you wrote, you own the part of my brain that knows it? That's not only bullshit, that's tatamount to slavery.
The thing is, you know all this, and you're just saying the opposite to get us to flame you. My score for your post: 0. Troll and Flamebait.
I hope I get to moderate the moderator who gave you the "4. Interesting."
> Please. When's the last time you installed a
> Linux distribution? 1995?
You're absolutely right here.
> Munging text files is the only way to make sure
> they work. Microsoft used the same arguments
> for the Winblows 95 registry. No more config
> files to edit. The all-encompassing
> registry 'will do it' (tm). Windows 'simply
> works' (tm).
That is a cop-out. If you have to screw with configuration files, it means the technology is not sufficiently advanced enough to take care of itself. You're mooting your own (good) point! When was the last time you were forced to hand-configure X, or edit the source code for a SCSI driver?
> And just like all Macs before it, no one will
> write any software for OS X.
Perhaps, but that doesn't mean it's not good technology. Using your logic, Windows would be the superior platform here.
I think this article is simply kicking us in the ass to motivate us, and I think we deserve it. We should take Apple as an example of good attempts to produce a modern computing system -- and then we should out-do what Apple has done.
They point here is that we nerds treat the interface as an after-thought. We need to grasp this fundamental truth: The Interface *is* the Computer!
Windows' success shows how even a lame-assed imitation of a good interface will work. We need to do better -- better than KDE has done, better than Gnome is so far, and god knows, better than Windows. There are too many details! Too much technical knowledge required! We can do so much better.
Jef Raskin did not have any hand in designing the Macintosh as we know it. He had the original idea of an "appliance" computer (sound like his current rant?) and started the project, misspelling its name as "Macintosh" (instead of McIntosh).
Shortly after, Steve Jobs kicked Jef off the project and changed it completely, basing it on the idea of a low-cost version of the Lisa (which was not selling well at $10k a pop). Guys like Andy Hertzfeld and Bill Atkinson are to thank for the Mac GUI, not Jef.
Hmm, maybe my points were muddled. I'm not advocating more power to the government. I am saying that we ought to use law to restrict corporations' predatory behavior. There is a huge difference.
I fear governments and corporations both. Freedom, not power, indeed: I completely agree. But sometimes freedom is gained by law -- especially when we're talking about *reversing* a bad law, such as the DMCA. I don't call the right to tell me what I can and cannot think, read, and say "freedom." It's a first step toward tyranny.
You're right in this, at least: corporations are gaining excessive power because of bad governing.
Calls to hate large segments of the population? This ain't a call to hate, not at all. And corporations, while technically "owned" by the people, are run by very small segments of the population.
But what Adam Smith didn't foresee was the situation wherein corporations gain enough control over legislation that they don't have to try to please the consumer anymore.
Instead, they make money from patent licensing fees (Priceline), stamp out any competition, particularly small competition (Microsoft), or fix prices (gasoline, music CDs).
Our choices are then limited, and attempts to change the situation are met with legislation and lawsuits.
He is NOT us. While corporations are indeed owned by stockholders, few stockholders have a voice in how a corporation is run.
And only a relative few got rich from Wal-Mart and AOL stock, compared to the population that has to put up with the companies' existence. A very small percentage of the American population owns stock in Microsoft. It is most likely NOT the same people who are complaining.
Most people seem to believe in capitalism, but, ironically, only within limits.
And for the government: the Cuban people elected Fidel Castro, only to have him betray them and launch a dictatorship. Are the Cuban people their own enemy? Only in the crassest way of expressing it.
It's not hate of corporations, it's fear of them -- the same kind of fear you'd feel if you were alone with an uncaged carnivore.
According to their brand of capitalism, corporations are obligated to do ANYTHING to maximize their profits. Break the law, constrict our rights, manipulate the government, risk our safety, lie, cheat, steal, whatever.
Remember that you're talking about a different breed of animal than we are: business people, litigators. They do not have the kind of morals we do, and they do not understand our objections to their behavior, except as the whining of losers. The idea that we should take some responsibility for where and what we are is sadly naive or completely irrelevant, in their eyes.
How has this been reigned in, in the past? Only one way I can think of: law. There have been lawyers, judges, and lawmakers who have understood the societal dangers of allowing a hungry corporation to eat what it wants. It will eat everything it can.
Our recent troubles seem to stem from two basic events:
- the liberalization of law and its interpretation to benefit big business (see DMCA, UTICA, ad nauseum) at the expense of individual rights
- the introduction of new media technology, and the failure of lawmakers to treat these media as something new. (They instead, for instance, treat bytes as property, as demonstrated in the MP3 DeCSS cases.)
Corporations can exercise insidious power because they control things you aren't aware of. AOL/Time Warner scares people, for instance, because it will be able to dictate what you are told in a large variety of media, from magazines to television to the net. AOL *IS* the net, to many people, and in as much as it owns a good chunk of the US backbone, it is.
You ask "please tell me how corporations exercise power over you without government help" -- the point here is that they don't, although they could. But sadly, government has marched right along with them, giving corporate interests the laws they want, with little or no consideration of the individual.
DMCA, to my understanding, allows "offenders" to be jailed for "illegally" accessing media -- even reading a book. Tell me that does not scare you. Sounds like a combination of Farenheit 451 and 1984, to me.
Book publishers have been planning to "address" our new media by finding ways to charge you for every "page" you read, every time you read it. The DMCA allows for this, I believe.
Corporations are setting things up so that their "game" maximizes their rights while minimizing ours: media, software "inventions", heck, IDEAS are their PROPERTY. If you understand the concept of Amazon's One-Click ordering, then Jeff Bezos claims he owns part of your brain -- he has the patent on the idea, doesn't he?
Meanwhile, in corporate plans, we are pigs paying to eat at the trough, paying again and again, maximizing profits. How far will they go? As far as they're allowed to.
That is what corporate outrage is about, Charlie Brown.
Ebay's problem was that it was running new hardware (E10000) with a very old OS (Solaris 2.5, not even 2.5.1) and a version of Oracle that had documented problems with that version of Solaris.
It had nothing to do with RAM, although I'm sure their former IT director would love to claim that.
Ok, that works as a good short-sighted perspective.
In a broader view, technology is again changing society. We treat ideas and expressions like they are physical commodities? We won't anymore: technological evolution will force us not to.
There will always be musicians and writers and idea people. They just won't make money the way they do today.
So we have a choice: we can either try to uninvent the technology, or we can begin to cope with the changes it forces.
Errr... let me guess. Throughout your formative years, your parents lived in a maze of underground caverns with the mutant cyber-wizards who were secretly plotting to overthrow the mega-corporations that dominated your collective's artistic freedom... and that's why you've never met, seen, or even heard of black people before -- right?
If you aren't aware of the militant laws that are in effect today (software patents, DMCA, UTICA in some states), your ignorance is your own fault. It might benefit you to pay attention to the world around you before you try to form sentences.
Maybe you should start breaking the Prozacs in half.
Re:Yet Another New License Agreement?
on
Copyrant
·
· Score: 1
The idea of corporate versus underworld culture with an element of computer trickery has been around since the late 70's
No, no. This is what you don't get. It's not that it wasn't predicted.
It's that it's fucking happening NOW.
Ten years ago, the masses were not being told what they could say. No one was being told what they cannot create (because the idea is already "owned" by someone else). No one was threatened with jail time because he re-sold some software.
Lawyers have always run the world, to its detriment. (See Shakespeare: "first thing, let's kill all the lawyers.") But never have they had so much frightening and freedom-threatening power.
The best defences seem to be, in order: * protect yourself from IP spoofing by configuring your firewall * hold off on honouring changes to DNS info (so you can check whether they're legit "manually"). * and of course: keep installing those security patches!
Uh, well, if it were only that simple. Config your firewall to drop spoofed packets? Nice idea, but if your firewall is swamped with source-routed packets to drop, you're out of business anyway.
Same goes for "security patches." The problem is network-based, and its solution is going to be network-based. Patches to hosts aren't going to help.
I don't think you will find database failover in an open source product -- it's too specialized an area to have gathered interest from the necessary critical mass of developers.
I don't understand the logic here, and I don't buy it, either. It'd be just as easy to say: I don't think you'll find failover in a commercial product -- it's too specialized to have gathered interest from the commercial realm.
What?
Bottom line: it's not necessarily difficult to do auto-failover. You need to:
have the hot spare constantly checking the live server
if the db server is dead, even if the box is alive, use ARP spoofing to steal the box's IP, and then mount the database (using Oracle terminology here)
The ARP spoofing stuff is easy on linux -- there's a project on freshmeat (HA Linux? something like that) to implement it. Now, this doesn't work for Solaris: the networking code is too different. Ok, so I did some quick research (a few months ago, not just now), and wrote an ARP spoofer that does work on Solaris.
The rest? It just isn't that hard, and certainly worthy of a formal open source project. The hardest part is the monitor-and-take-over stuff, which isn't database-specific, and the hardware itself. I'll be glad to contribute the code I've written toward such a project.
I am amazed how short-sighted and old-school so many of you posters are.
YOU CANNOT OWN AN IDEA. You cannot own something that is intangible. Let that sink in.
Katz is 100% correct in this essay. If you disagree, try to realize this: you're stuck in ancient, inappropriate ways of thinking. It makes no sense to try and treat the intangible as if it was tangible.
Say it to yourself: I cannot own an idea. I cannot own the intangible expression of that idea. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Slashdot Mirror
>
> Does p2p enable theft? Yes.
Only if you really believe that someone can "own" something that does not exist. I own an idea. It's in your brain, too, so I own part of your brain. I own these bits: 1001010100 01010101010. If you use them, you owe me money.
If that doesn't sound ridiculous to you, you're not really thinking about it.
And I forgot to mention: there is nothing stopping a "commercial entity" like Slashdot from using the .org domain. The RFC does not say anything about .org being restricted to non-profits organizations.
:
.com TLD, not who issues registrations in that TLD.
: If you don't like Verisign, then don't buy
: domains from them.
The issue here is about who has control over the
I do appreciate the tip about Ghandi, tho!
> You can, its called 'Meta Moderation' and its
> displayed at the top of the main page, pretty
> clearly in view
Uh, DUH. That's what I was talking about. I was merely hoping that particular posting shows up in meta moderation.
And btw, the contraction of "it is" is spelled "it's", not "its."
You must know the moderator, because you're Trolling, if I ever saw it. That remark certainly didn't deserve a 4.
And to the point: Napster isn't eroding anyone's rights. Their business is not illegal. The constitution clearly lays out the right to trade creative works, specifically saying that there may be a very limited amount of time in which the works are protected from this -- to support the ARTIST, not the record companies and RIAA. Jefferson and Franklin, among others, expressed fear that this very thing would be happening, that lawyers and greedy buffoons would sell the idea that there is such a thing as owning ideas (they call it "intellectual property", an oxymoron).
You cannot own ideas. You cannot own a series of bits, no matter how unique. This is obvious to anyone who thinks enough about it. Copyright was supposed to exist for a short period to give artists more reason to create -- not to create property. You're telling me that if I know a song you wrote, you own the part of my brain that knows it? That's not only bullshit, that's tatamount to slavery.
The thing is, you know all this, and you're just saying the opposite to get us to flame you. My score for your post: 0. Troll and Flamebait.
I hope I get to moderate the moderator who gave you the "4. Interesting."
Uh, the problem is, the RIAA would remind you that Happy Birthday is *still* under copyright after some 100 years, and would be illegal to share.
Yeah, that's what the constitution meant by a limited period of protection. That's the ticket.
> Please. When's the last time you installed a
> Linux distribution? 1995?
You're absolutely right here.
> Munging text files is the only way to make sure
> they work. Microsoft used the same arguments
> for the Winblows 95 registry. No more config
> files to edit. The all-encompassing
> registry 'will do it' (tm). Windows 'simply
> works' (tm).
That is a cop-out. If you have to screw with configuration files, it means the technology is not sufficiently advanced enough to take care of itself. You're mooting your own (good) point! When was the last time you were forced to hand-configure X, or edit the source code for a SCSI driver?
> And just like all Macs before it, no one will
> write any software for OS X.
Perhaps, but that doesn't mean it's not good technology. Using your logic, Windows would be the superior platform here.
I think this article is simply kicking us in the ass to motivate us, and I think we deserve it. We should take Apple as an example of good attempts to produce a modern computing system -- and then we should out-do what Apple has done.
They point here is that we nerds treat the interface as an after-thought. We need to grasp this fundamental truth: The Interface *is* the Computer!
Windows' success shows how even a lame-assed imitation of a good interface will work. We need to do better -- better than KDE has done, better than Gnome is so far, and god knows, better than Windows. There are too many details! Too much technical knowledge required! We can do so much better.
Shortly after, Steve Jobs kicked Jef off the project and changed it completely, basing it on the idea of a low-cost version of the Lisa (which was not selling well at $10k a pop). Guys like Andy Hertzfeld and Bill Atkinson are to thank for the Mac GUI, not Jef.
Hmm, maybe my points were muddled. I'm not advocating more power to the government. I am saying that we ought to use law to restrict corporations' predatory behavior. There is a huge difference.
I fear governments and corporations both. Freedom, not power, indeed: I completely agree. But sometimes freedom is gained by law -- especially when we're talking about *reversing* a bad law, such as the DMCA. I don't call the right to tell me what I can and cannot think, read, and say "freedom." It's a first step toward tyranny.
You're right in this, at least: corporations are gaining excessive power because of bad governing.
Calls to hate large segments of the population? This ain't a call to hate, not at all. And corporations, while technically "owned" by the people, are run by very small segments of the population.
It's true, in some cases.
But what Adam Smith didn't foresee was the situation wherein corporations gain enough control over legislation that they don't have to try to please the consumer anymore.
Instead, they make money from patent licensing fees (Priceline), stamp out any competition, particularly small competition (Microsoft), or fix prices (gasoline, music CDs).
Our choices are then limited, and attempts to change the situation are met with legislation and lawsuits.
He is NOT us. While corporations are indeed owned by stockholders, few stockholders have a voice in how a corporation is run.
And only a relative few got rich from Wal-Mart and AOL stock, compared to the population that has to put up with the companies' existence. A very small percentage of the American population owns stock in Microsoft. It is most likely NOT the same people who are complaining.
Most people seem to believe in capitalism, but, ironically, only within limits.
And for the government: the Cuban people elected Fidel Castro, only to have him betray them and launch a dictatorship. Are the Cuban people their own enemy? Only in the crassest way of expressing it.
Yes, it's spelled Fahrenheit, not "farenheit."
Clearly, YOU miss the point. Your post is either the result of a bug, or a humorous non sequitur.
Either way, point missed, pal.
It's not hate of corporations, it's fear of them -- the same kind of fear you'd feel if you were alone with an uncaged carnivore.
According to their brand of capitalism, corporations are obligated to do ANYTHING to maximize their profits. Break the law, constrict our rights, manipulate the government, risk our safety, lie, cheat, steal, whatever.
Remember that you're talking about a different breed of animal than we are: business people, litigators. They do not have the kind of morals we do, and they do not understand our objections to their behavior, except as the whining of losers. The idea that we should take some responsibility for where and what we are is sadly naive or completely irrelevant, in their eyes.
How has this been reigned in, in the past? Only one way I can think of: law. There have been lawyers, judges, and lawmakers who have understood the societal dangers of allowing a hungry corporation to eat what it wants. It will eat everything it can.
Our recent troubles seem to stem from two basic events:
- the liberalization of law and its interpretation to benefit big business (see DMCA, UTICA, ad nauseum) at the expense of individual rights
- the introduction of new media technology, and the failure of lawmakers to treat these media as something new. (They instead, for instance, treat bytes as property, as demonstrated in the MP3 DeCSS cases.)
Corporations can exercise insidious power because they control things you aren't aware of. AOL/Time Warner scares people, for instance, because it will be able to dictate what you are told in a large variety of media, from magazines to television to the net. AOL *IS* the net, to many people, and in as much as it owns a good chunk of the US backbone, it is.
You ask "please tell me how corporations exercise power over you without government help" -- the point here is that they don't, although they could. But sadly, government has marched right along with them, giving corporate interests the laws they want, with little or no consideration of the individual.
DMCA, to my understanding, allows "offenders" to be jailed for "illegally" accessing media -- even reading a book. Tell me that does not scare you. Sounds like a combination of Farenheit 451 and 1984, to me.
Book publishers have been planning to "address" our new media by finding ways to charge you for every "page" you read, every time you read it. The DMCA allows for this, I believe.
Corporations are setting things up so that their "game" maximizes their rights while minimizing ours: media, software "inventions", heck, IDEAS are their PROPERTY. If you understand the concept of Amazon's One-Click ordering, then Jeff Bezos claims he owns part of your brain -- he has the patent on the idea, doesn't he?
Meanwhile, in corporate plans, we are pigs paying to eat at the trough, paying again and again, maximizing profits. How far will they go? As far as they're allowed to.
That is what corporate outrage is about, Charlie Brown.
Ebay's problem was that it was running new hardware (E10000) with a very old OS (Solaris 2.5, not even 2.5.1) and a version of Oracle that had documented problems with that version of Solaris.
It had nothing to do with RAM, although I'm sure their former IT director would love to claim that.
Ok, that works as a good short-sighted perspective.
In a broader view, technology is again changing society. We treat ideas and expressions like they are physical commodities? We won't anymore: technological evolution will force us not to.
There will always be musicians and writers and idea people. They just won't make money the way they do today.
So we have a choice: we can either try to uninvent the technology, or we can begin to cope with the changes it forces.
If you aren't aware of the militant laws that are in effect today (software patents, DMCA, UTICA in some states), your ignorance is your own fault. It might benefit you to pay attention to the world around you before you try to form sentences.
Maybe you should start breaking the Prozacs in half.
This is a joke.
Right?
The idea of corporate versus underworld culture with an element of computer trickery has been around since the late 70's
No, no. This is what you don't get. It's not that it wasn't predicted .
It's that it's fucking happening NOW .
Ten years ago, the masses were not being told what they could say. No one was being told what they cannot create (because the idea is already "owned" by someone else). No one was threatened with jail time because he re-sold some software.
Lawyers have always run the world, to its detriment. (See Shakespeare: "first thing, let's kill all the lawyers.") But never have they had so much frightening and freedom-threatening power.
* protect yourself from IP spoofing by configuring your firewall
* hold off on honouring changes to DNS info (so you can check whether they're legit "manually").
* and of course: keep installing those security patches!
Uh, well, if it were only that simple. Config your firewall to drop spoofed packets? Nice idea, but if your firewall is swamped with source-routed packets to drop, you're out of business anyway.
Same goes for "security patches." The problem is network-based, and its solution is going to be network-based. Patches to hosts aren't going to help.
I don't understand the logic here, and I don't buy it, either. It'd be just as easy to say: I don't think you'll find failover in a commercial product -- it's too specialized to have gathered interest from the commercial realm.
What?
Bottom line: it's not necessarily difficult to do auto-failover. You need to:
- have the hot spare constantly checking the live server
- if the db server is dead, even if the box is alive, use ARP spoofing to steal the box's IP, and then mount the database (using Oracle terminology here)
The ARP spoofing stuff is easy on linux -- there's a project on freshmeat (HA Linux? something like that) to implement it. Now, this doesn't work for Solaris: the networking code is too different. Ok, so I did some quick research (a few months ago, not just now), and wrote an ARP spoofer that does work on Solaris.The rest? It just isn't that hard, and certainly worthy of a formal open source project. The hardest part is the monitor-and-take-over stuff, which isn't database-specific, and the hardware itself. I'll be glad to contribute the code I've written toward such a project.
I am amazed how short-sighted and old-school so many of you posters are.
YOU CANNOT OWN AN IDEA. You cannot own something that is intangible. Let that sink in.
Katz is 100% correct in this essay. If you disagree, try to realize this: you're stuck in ancient, inappropriate ways of thinking. It makes no sense to try and treat the intangible as if it was tangible.
Say it to yourself: I cannot own an idea. I cannot own the intangible expression of that idea. Lather, rinse, repeat.