Make a big stink. Make sure everyone at the company that sold you the CD (the retailer) knows that the CD won't work in most/many players.
Then find someone else they sell it to. Sue them for fraud and misrepresentation.
They knew the CD wouldn't work, they had a policy against letting people return it if it didn't work, they sold it anyways...
If you think returns are costly, think of what a them hiring a lawyer and sending a manager to small claims court will cost. Not to mention paying you for the CD, and your court costs and inconvenience.
It's also illegal, if they continued, they could get charged in criminal court.
How about the assumption that Napster is no more liable for the content it serves than the city bus company is for the intent of the people who ride their busses?
Napster should be able to list any songs a user tells it (implicitly, by pointing Napster to them) are okay, unless specifically told otherwise.
Idiocy has been upheld by the courts before. Giving someone money isn't speech. Ask a policeman to reconsider giving you a speeding ticket. That's speech. Give him a $20 and ask him again, that's bribery. So why is it okay if you hand him a cheque for $20 million and say that it's for campaign funds? Paying ANY money to a politician is bribery. The person paying should do time for bribery, the politician accepting should do time for treason - they are subverting their nation.
As for the child labour laws... Sure, maybe the moral thing to do is quit the business instead of employ children. But how does that protect children? All it does is give the greedy exploiters a monopoly. Changing your business practices and paying five times more for labour is just another way to go out of business.
Laws like that are for a reason. You can't compete by playing nice, but you don't want to play dirty. So you pass rules forcing everyone to play nice. You might have had to sink to their level to get the rules passed, but at least you're doing it with a purpose. The ends don't always justify the means, but sometimes they do.
I've been thinking about a voting system for a while that would work somewhat like that.
It requires secure and untraceable voting over the net, so it's not likely to happen any time soon.
I envision a system where you could vote on any individual measure, or proxy your vote to someone on one vote, a range of issues, or everything.
Someone could accept proxies or not, doing so would make their votes public. Someone wanting privacy wouldn't accept.
Someone with proxies wouldn't know how many, or who. Just a rough number (~100, ~10Million, etc) and that would be averaged over the last week or so, to prevent someone from forcing people to proxy and then being able to check. Votes cast by someone with a proxy would be made public for twenty-four hours before being counted, to allow people who had proxied to be able to withdraw their vote before it was counted, if they felt it was used improperly.
Voting would be done after reading a short blurb about the issue and relevant facts. There'd be a quick test (that you could keep taking until you passed) that you'd have to answer before voting. Just something to slow down knee-jerk reactions to something seen on TV.
I'm picturing that the blurb would contain the plain wording of the issue, the legal wording, and the views of a few paid editorialists on all sides of the issue. The test wouldn't be like "This bill will prevent kiddy-port (y/n)" but "This bill will make it illegal to a) take nude pictures of children b) posses same c) sell/profit from same." and "John Doe fears this bill with cause X because of Y. (True/False)" where John Doe is one of the authors of the editorial. The idea is to make sure that someone knows the facts, and the opinions on both sides, not to try to influence them either way.
The constitution (and similar documents in other countries) would be protected by having a much higher threshold of votes needed to change, and a mandatory waiting period after which the vote again needs to pass. (IMHO the constitution *never* needs to be changed NOW, if there's a serious problem it'll still be there in five years when the vote comes up again, and people will still support the change.) If nothing else, it gives the jews time to move out before the next Hitler comes to power.
To enforce a consistency of action, things like foreign policy would require less votes to pass if they followed the status quo, more if they reversed a past policy. (The vote to continue a law or policy would be easier, the vote to revoke one would be a bit harder.) This way we wouldn't provide foreign care one day, revoke it the next after a Rush Limbaugh rant, reinstate it the next, etc. (But if we DID vote to revoke it, that would be the status quo and it'd take less votes to keep that.)
Then my last change would be to make proposed bills invalid if they covered two unrelated subjects. Riders are one of the most misused features of the US legal system and Canada's (where I live) isn't far behind.
On a seperate topic, I'd make laws expire. That way if a law lost support it wouldn't stick around forever. Nobody is going to risk their political neck by removing anti-sodomy laws, but if it expired 25 years after being passed unless voted back in, it'd just gradually die out. Certain laws (murder, theft) would be so hot-button that they'd always get renewed. I'm not sure how I'd work this, so I've left it as an asside - a good idea, but one that needs work.
I agree, that's a lousy idea. It assumes that the only use for blank CDs is to burn music.
Actually, I don't give a shit about music. I have about 20 MP3s.
This system is obviously designed to enrich the already wealthy, the musicians who are easy to find in the stores. The payments (in countries where this is already in place) are based on the number of CDs sold. This doesn't help the small artists whose CDs aren't available and whose fans often turn to piracy from lack of decent alternative.
If the music-centered assholes would pull their heads out of their butts for a minute, they'd realize that not much of the copyrighted material being burned to CDs is music. Most, I'd imagine, because CD burners work on computers, is computer software. Certainly, when I look at my circle of friends 90% of the copied CDs are software, 80% games, 20% OSes and Apps. Maybe 5-6 CDs each are music, tops. (With MP3s so small, a person can have their whole collection on a few CDs and still have 100 CDs worth of music.)
So for this system to even begin to be fair, it'd have to pay producers of software, of clip-art CDs, etc. Music is such a small part of it that I'd be tempted to leave them out of it.
And even if we did do this system, the 'obvious' answer would be to just give all this money to Microsoft. After all, they claim more in losses to piracy each year than any other software company makes.
But that doesn't help any of the companies actually hurt by piracy. Microsoft makes $900 office suites, no kid I know if going to buy one, if they copy MS Office it doesn't cost MS a potential sale. But small companies sell software from $10 to $50, the range where unauthorized copying could replace a sale, even for starving students.
So these systems are fatally flawed because they measure losses by CD sales. I know six people who have unpayed copies of 4Dos, a shareware util than afaik you can't even buy on CD; the company wouldn't make a dime from this scheme. Ditto with music. B. Spears would get a bit richer, nobody else except the RIAA would see a dime.
And this would all be subsidised by people like you who write your own data to CDs. I wonder if the people who advocate this idea would support you sending in a directory listing (to show that it's your content on the CD) and sending you a check for the CD-tax that you're entitled to...
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I know. I was attempting to just sum up the basic. If the NSA (and thus the US Gov behind them) wanted to know exactly what was on any specific computer in the USA, or anywhere they had significant influence, they'd take it. Maybe they'd have MI5 call the FBI and get them to take it, maybe they'd call up CSIS in Canada and have it taken (if it was a Canadian computer).
But the point is that large government agencies don't bother hacking into a PC to collect evidence. They simply show that you're acting suspiciously (using encryption, etc) and they come and take it. They may have to wear a different TLA while they do it, but it gets taken.
The more-secure OS thus isn't a barrier to them. But it is a barrier to smaller countries' intelligence departments as well as groups like the mafia, terrorists, etc.
So it doesn't hurt them, and gets in the way of the groups/agencies that they oppose. Win/win from their point of view.
The problem with that is that Microsoft and other closed-source companies will just tack on a new file format, make it the default in the next gen, and then people will claim the open-source product is crap because it can't read the new format.
What is really needed is proper Word97 support, or some other older but still usable format. The new formats don't support anything that 99.8% of people will ever use, they're just there to keep other applications from being compatible.
And this isn't a open-source whine. The closed-source companies are trying to proprietize to stop any competitors. WordPerfect support MS formats, so MS invents new ones. WordPerfect developers (back before it was owner by Corel) admitted to such, and they said they knew that Microsoft was doing the same for the same reason. In fact, things like the Halloween document prove it.
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The NSA could use TEMPEST or many other things, to see what you're doing right now. But it wouldn't show them what's in the files you don't access. And I don't really think they can break SSH/SSL, at least, not easily. I'm sure they've got far more computer power than we think, but I don't think they can trivially read encrypted data like that.
So they'd use TEMPEST and other non-invasive methods to decide if you looked like a criminal. Then they'd take the computer and prove it. (and maybe take you too...)
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My point is that the NSA could just come and take the computer, if they wanted. MAC might make it harder for them to hack in and get data, but if they really believed you were worth it, they'd take the computer.
But it'd raise the bar for hackers, organizations without the NSA's govermental power would have to hack in to get what they wanted and MAC would mean that they would find few easy targets.
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Well, Mandatory Access Controls are a good thing for security, but they don't do anything vs. the NSA. MAC just means that you don't accidentally forget to secure a file, and that you don't accidentally lessen security on a file without knowing it.
This is seperate from encryption. The NSA could come and take your HD with a MAC-enabled filesystem/OS on it and read all the files, by simply sticking the disk in another computer and reading the raw data.
But it'll make the computer more resistant to penetration. This wouldn't stop the NSA, they'd come through the front door with guns (and FBI agents) and simply take the computer, access controls be damned.
It helps 'us' by making 'our' (I'm not in the USA) country's computers more resistant to foreign spying, and lets them establish a secure OS (unlike Windows where it's hard to say what the source of a particular version is) that they can use for medium to low security jobs. (Beyond which you simply use the airwall method.)
If the system is being used to ask questions that people don't have a right to know, I don't see a problem with it.
Not answering isn't an accepted action, it'll result in contempt. Lying is the only reasonable action when you refuse to answer a question.
I don't the the Monica thing being related to the presidency at all, so Clinton being harassed over it seems like nothing but mud slinging. I don't begrudge him his lies in trying to avoid it.
Maybe when partisan control can't be used to direct oversight commitees in witch hunts, is the day I won't support lying to them.
So, post the text. Grab a copy for the multiple posts here. Then post it with your user ID.
Make it clear in the post that you're doing it to educate people as to the many illegal acts of the church and their insane religious beliefs. This will help establish that you aren't doing it JUST to violate copyright. Perhaps comment on their wacky beliefs every paragraph of so.
Then post links to it on Slashdot, hell, submit it to the editors as a story. A test case posting (on your own webpage) of the scientology lies.
Register at fairtunes.org, and mention that. You'll get people helping with the legal bills. Ditto no doubt with the EFF and ACLU.
Well, yes. Their RAM sucks. It's only useful in certain carefully tweaked synthetic benchmarks, and Quake 3. As far as I know, Quake 3 and video encoding are the only two things the P3 and RAMBUS are good at.
But that's not because it's 16b. That's because it's high latency.
Many good (ie, not Rambus) ideas involve 16b or 8b memory, a thin interface that runs very quickly should theoretically cut down latency, and provide the same throughput. (16b ram would have to run at 533Mhz to provide the bandwidth of PC133 SDRAM)
That's not as bad as it sounds. A simpler bus is often easy to get running at higher speeds. Synchronizing 64 signals is hard. Synchronizing 8 or 16 is fairly easy.
And then, if it takes that few traces on the motherboard, you can throw another seperate channel, or more. That would immediately double your bandwidth.
So the thin bus isn't a bad idea, RAM might go there eventually, but we won't be using Rambus.
If you're in the business where you're licensing something like that you're going to buy more than 512MB of RAM. 2 CPU P3 server vendors recommend 2-4GB, that's $4000 (CDN $) in RAM. In a 4 or 8-way server you're going to want a lot more.
The prices don't work for RDRAM for *most* things. If you're looking for a fast single CPU to do little except stream data, RDRAM is faster. But if you're worried about latency which is the real issue in any non-contrived server example, then RDRAM doesn't cut it anyways. The extra cost just makes it worse.
If RAMBUS actually offered performance benefits in those areas, it might justify the price.
But, if you really care about performance, you don't use x86 and you don't run NT. Sun, SGI, Compaq (Alpha), and IBM are in business for a reason...
Most moderators would agree, probably nobody modded it past 3, but if a few people with mod pages load the page at once they'll see a funny post at 2, so two or three independantly decide to mod it up. When they all do, they find it's at 5.
Moderation is destined to be a little inaccurate when there's a delay involved like that.
And that's despite all the moderators who read at 2+, Highest First. All they ever see is the high-rated posts.
IMHO having moderator points should put you into 0+, nested.
I wouldn't force 'oldest first', but if anyone moded something 'redundant' while reading in 'newest first' I'd slap them with a tuna.
Not in a patent sense. Being innovative and inventive is what counts.
Amazon was probably the first to implement one-click. So what? It's so trivial that it doesn't deserve a patent. Patents aren't supposed to be granted on things so trivial that given the task, an average professional in the field could do it. Especially if your method offers no benefit over other methods.
Now Amazon didn't just patent a method, they patented the whole idea of one-click ordering.
So, they used it first and got famous. It took others a while to decide it was worth copying. That's the benefit for Amazon. They can claim to be innovative because they were the first to offer something.
But we shouldn't give them a patent for it. Patents are NOT for rewarding the first. They are for rewarding the inventive. Amazon simply used existing tools in the intended way.
What is innovative about using a cookie to identify a user and fetch their information? What about that couldn't everyone else have done, had they felt customers would want it?
Imagine when the first car came with a round indent in the dash to hold a cup. Would that company deserve to be the only company allowed to sell a car with a cup holder?
It's exactly the same case as with Amazon. Neither involves new technology. So why does Amazon deserve a patent?
Amazon was one of the first huge 'e-tailers'. If they did do something first it still doesn't prove that it was innovating and non-obvious. What if whichever company had gotten there first would have eventually implemented the same thing?
The idea of patents isn't to reward the first person into a new field. The idea is to reward someone who has an idea which other people couldn't have come up with on their own, were they in the same position.
Patents are a social contract... society grants a limited monopoly in exchange for complete disclosure of a new idea. For that deal to be worthwhile, the idea must be worth something.
If someone simply does some standard thing, on the internet, who cares? That's obvious. We want to enter into this social contract with someone who will offer us something of value. We want an idea that we wouldn't have thought of ourselves.
Now, if Amazon had a unique linkage of databases and some incredibly clever routines that enabled them to pull all the data together so much faster that they could offer one-click sales where, for example, it took everyone else too much processing to do in realtime, then Amazon would have innovated.
As is, there's nothing clever about it. They used a technology that was designed for customer identification, the cookie, to tell who they were dealing with. They did a simple SQL query to pull their info from a standard DB. They then process that order unless told not to before a certain time. To be sarcastic for a second, "Wow!"
There's nothing there anyone else who wanted to implement one-click ordering couldn't have done.
Why are we giving them a monopoly? What's in it for us? What's Amazon providing as their end of the contract? Details on basic SQL that could have come from _Web Design for Dummies_? Sorry, but I don't think that deserves a government enforced monopoly for seventeen years.
Patents are NOT a competitive advantage. There is no competition in a monopoly. If you're the only company allowed to make something then market forces can't select the best product.
Patents IMHO last longer than they should. The purpose of a patent shouldn't be to ensure a monopoly, it's to let you get to market first. This is accomplished with a limited term monopoly sure, but the monopoly should be the means, not the end.
With a mechanical process you need to tool up, a process that isn't even taking as long these days, and then ship a new physical product. With software you can ship a product in six months (I know of which I speak, my company is releasing products we were having first design meetings about in September 2000.) so a nearly twenty year monopoly is insane.
So, that's a problem with the implementation of patents in general. If it takes a company two years to bring hardware to market the patent should be for three years or so, not seventeen (last I heard). Protection should be removed when the company brings a product to market, or when they stop production. This would stop companies from laying a mine-field in an undeveloped industry.
Then, onto the specifics of software patents... Most software patents seem to either cover a basic universal property just used in a new medium. Discoveries supposedly can't be patented. If you discover a formula for pi you can't patent pi, or the formula. But that's the sort of thing I feel you see in software patents. What should be patentable is a specific chip that is designed to calculate pi more quickly than a general CPU.
To use the favorite example, using XOR to draw a cursor.
This was patented in the late 70s, before the PC revolution. Nobody was really working on GUIs and the ones who were weren't doing it for production systems. To implement ASM-level optimization in drawing routines on a concept system would have made it harder to design for and wasted developer time on speed tweaks. (Tweaks for speed come before release, when the number of users is such to justify their savings vs the outlay of the programmer's time.)
So this patent was basically granted to the first company to get around to optimizing a GUI to the point where they did the obvious thing for drawing a cursor.
For a cursor you want speed much more than looks. It doesn't matter if the cursor changes color as it moves, in fact, it's easier to see if it's always in reverse-video relative to the background. So the tradeoffs involved in display quality are irrelevant with the usefulness of being able to draw and erase the cursor with the same routine, and with not having to have a buffer to store the part of the screen being overwritten.
But there's no reason this would have been developed early. A generic drawing routine would have been of use for anything you wanted to draw. It would have been slower and taken more memory, but a single test system can afford to be faster and have more memory than the eventual target system. Thus slower, more general routines are obviously what should have been used.
So why does a company deserve a patent on someone that any competent programmer (of the era, back when people learned ASM) could have done, had they had the need?
Patents are supposed to reward innovation, not simply the first person into an area.
Similarly, almost all software patents I've heard about have been trivially obvious. Sure, the patenter was the first, but that's not a high enough standard for non-software patents. We also require that an average professional in the industry wouldn't think of the same thing in the same circumstance.
But was any programmer of the era asked to optimize a cursor drawing routine in ASM, to see how they'd go about it?
It's not enough that someone is first (if indeed they were), the idea also needs to be innovative and can't be obvious.
I don't doubt that it wasn't implemented much before 1978, very few computers existed back then (before the PC revolution). That sort of trick is more important to get speed on a low-end computer and it what a PC programmer would have done.
So, of the fewer computer programmers in the late seventies, and the 0.01% who used a GUI system, none doing an open source (or one where they could show off some code) had used XOR for a cursor.
That still doesn't mean it's deserving of a patent because if you stuck any of the great programmers down and asked them how to implement a fast cursor, what do you think they'd have said after thinking about it?
Yeah, the clubs are usually ruled to be illegally discriminating.
But, when someone starts a fitness club that is women only, that's okay.
Obviously any man who wants to hang out with a bunch of women is a psycho pervert, but a woman who wants to hang out with a bunch of men is well within her rights...
I think we should be able to discriminate on some things. For one, until everyone uses the same bathroom regardless of gender, I think we should be allowed to choose who we want in our club.
I personally don't see any need for a single-gender club, but I don't think it's really a bad thing.
Personally, I'd prefer a club with a minimum age limit. The older I get, the more inane young people tend to seem, especially when in groups.
(That's why I like the net, I can get a sense of someone's mental state and personality without irrelevancies intruding. If they can carry on a conversation, that's good enough.)
Sorry, but it's not a bloody tough idea. The whole point of XOR is that you can XOR A and B to get C, then XOR C and B to get A.
If you think about drawing, an obvious feature is being able to draw and then erase without looking up a saved image.
Wow, what a stunning leap of logic it must have taken. That certainly deserves a patent. I mean, your average third-grader couldn't have done it. That certainly meets the standard for non-obvious and innovative.
Sorry for the sarcasm, but using XOR to draw is a basic and obvious use. Maybe a programmer today, in our API-driven world wouldn't think of it, but when cycles counted, they sure would.
If the bugs are made illegal, AND diseminating any information from them is made illegal, then yes, I imagine it would stop it. Or at least, would stop people from distributing the data on the internet so that everyone could have it.
But big companies would continue to flout the law, paying a fine or two here and there.
It's like credit reporting agencies. If a private person wrote that it was a fact that I had done 'X, Y, and Z' which proved I was a bad credit risk, I could sue them for damages if that wasn't true. CRAs though bought a few politicians and are protected with a law basically giving them immunity in these cases. As long as someone tells them it's true, they're not liable. Even if common sense would say it wasn't true. (They could report I incurred debt before I was born, if someone told them that.)
Must be nice to be the executive of a multi-billion dollar company and not be bound in any way by the law.
Slashdot Mirror
Even better.
Make a big stink. Make sure everyone at the company that sold you the CD (the retailer) knows that the CD won't work in most/many players.
Then find someone else they sell it to. Sue them for fraud and misrepresentation.
They knew the CD wouldn't work, they had a policy against letting people return it if it didn't work, they sold it anyways...
If you think returns are costly, think of what a them hiring a lawyer and sending a manager to small claims court will cost. Not to mention paying you for the CD, and your court costs and inconvenience.
It's also illegal, if they continued, they could get charged in criminal court.
How about the assumption that Napster is no more liable for the content it serves than the city bus company is for the intent of the people who ride their busses?
Napster should be able to list any songs a user tells it (implicitly, by pointing Napster to them) are okay, unless specifically told otherwise.
Idiocy has been upheld by the courts before. Giving someone money isn't speech. Ask a policeman to reconsider giving you a speeding ticket. That's speech. Give him a $20 and ask him again, that's bribery. So why is it okay if you hand him a cheque for $20 million and say that it's for campaign funds? Paying ANY money to a politician is bribery. The person paying should do time for bribery, the politician accepting should do time for treason - they are subverting their nation.
As for the child labour laws... Sure, maybe the moral thing to do is quit the business instead of employ children. But how does that protect children? All it does is give the greedy exploiters a monopoly. Changing your business practices and paying five times more for labour is just another way to go out of business.
Laws like that are for a reason. You can't compete by playing nice, but you don't want to play dirty. So you pass rules forcing everyone to play nice. You might have had to sink to their level to get the rules passed, but at least you're doing it with a purpose. The ends don't always justify the means, but sometimes they do.
I've been thinking about a voting system for a while that would work somewhat like that.
It requires secure and untraceable voting over the net, so it's not likely to happen any time soon.
I envision a system where you could vote on any individual measure, or proxy your vote to someone on one vote, a range of issues, or everything.
Someone could accept proxies or not, doing so would make their votes public. Someone wanting privacy wouldn't accept.
Someone with proxies wouldn't know how many, or who. Just a rough number (~100, ~10Million, etc) and that would be averaged over the last week or so, to prevent someone from forcing people to proxy and then being able to check. Votes cast by someone with a proxy would be made public for twenty-four hours before being counted, to allow people who had proxied to be able to withdraw their vote before it was counted, if they felt it was used improperly.
Voting would be done after reading a short blurb about the issue and relevant facts. There'd be a quick test (that you could keep taking until you passed) that you'd have to answer before voting. Just something to slow down knee-jerk reactions to something seen on TV.
I'm picturing that the blurb would contain the plain wording of the issue, the legal wording, and the views of a few paid editorialists on all sides of the issue. The test wouldn't be like "This bill will prevent kiddy-port (y/n)" but "This bill will make it illegal to a) take nude pictures of children b) posses same c) sell/profit from same." and "John Doe fears this bill with cause X because of Y. (True/False)" where John Doe is one of the authors of the editorial. The idea is to make sure that someone knows the facts, and the opinions on both sides, not to try to influence them either way.
The constitution (and similar documents in other countries) would be protected by having a much higher threshold of votes needed to change, and a mandatory waiting period after which the vote again needs to pass. (IMHO the constitution *never* needs to be changed NOW, if there's a serious problem it'll still be there in five years when the vote comes up again, and people will still support the change.) If nothing else, it gives the jews time to move out before the next Hitler comes to power.
To enforce a consistency of action, things like foreign policy would require less votes to pass if they followed the status quo, more if they reversed a past policy. (The vote to continue a law or policy would be easier, the vote to revoke one would be a bit harder.) This way we wouldn't provide foreign care one day, revoke it the next after a Rush Limbaugh rant, reinstate it the next, etc. (But if we DID vote to revoke it, that would be the status quo and it'd take less votes to keep that.)
Then my last change would be to make proposed bills invalid if they covered two unrelated subjects. Riders are one of the most misused features of the US legal system and Canada's (where I live) isn't far behind.
On a seperate topic, I'd make laws expire. That way if a law lost support it wouldn't stick around forever. Nobody is going to risk their political neck by removing anti-sodomy laws, but if it expired 25 years after being passed unless voted back in, it'd just gradually die out. Certain laws (murder, theft) would be so hot-button that they'd always get renewed. I'm not sure how I'd work this, so I've left it as an asside - a good idea, but one that needs work.
I agree, that's a lousy idea. It assumes that the only use for blank CDs is to burn music.
Actually, I don't give a shit about music. I have about 20 MP3s.
This system is obviously designed to enrich the already wealthy, the musicians who are easy to find in the stores. The payments (in countries where this is already in place) are based on the number of CDs sold. This doesn't help the small artists whose CDs aren't available and whose fans often turn to piracy from lack of decent alternative.
If the music-centered assholes would pull their heads out of their butts for a minute, they'd realize that not much of the copyrighted material being burned to CDs is music. Most, I'd imagine, because CD burners work on computers, is computer software. Certainly, when I look at my circle of friends 90% of the copied CDs are software, 80% games, 20% OSes and Apps. Maybe 5-6 CDs each are music, tops. (With MP3s so small, a person can have their whole collection on a few CDs and still have 100 CDs worth of music.)
So for this system to even begin to be fair, it'd have to pay producers of software, of clip-art CDs, etc. Music is such a small part of it that I'd be tempted to leave them out of it.
And even if we did do this system, the 'obvious' answer would be to just give all this money to Microsoft. After all, they claim more in losses to piracy each year than any other software company makes.
But that doesn't help any of the companies actually hurt by piracy. Microsoft makes $900 office suites, no kid I know if going to buy one, if they copy MS Office it doesn't cost MS a potential sale. But small companies sell software from $10 to $50, the range where unauthorized copying could replace a sale, even for starving students.
So these systems are fatally flawed because they measure losses by CD sales. I know six people who have unpayed copies of 4Dos, a shareware util than afaik you can't even buy on CD; the company wouldn't make a dime from this scheme. Ditto with music. B. Spears would get a bit richer, nobody else except the RIAA would see a dime.
And this would all be subsidised by people like you who write your own data to CDs. I wonder if the people who advocate this idea would support you sending in a directory listing (to show that it's your content on the CD) and sending you a check for the CD-tax that you're entitled to...
I know. I was attempting to just sum up the basic. If the NSA (and thus the US Gov behind them) wanted to know exactly what was on any specific computer in the USA, or anywhere they had significant influence, they'd take it. Maybe they'd have MI5 call the FBI and get them to take it, maybe they'd call up CSIS in Canada and have it taken (if it was a Canadian computer).
But the point is that large government agencies don't bother hacking into a PC to collect evidence. They simply show that you're acting suspiciously (using encryption, etc) and they come and take it. They may have to wear a different TLA while they do it, but it gets taken.
The more-secure OS thus isn't a barrier to them. But it is a barrier to smaller countries' intelligence departments as well as groups like the mafia, terrorists, etc.
So it doesn't hurt them, and gets in the way of the groups/agencies that they oppose. Win/win from their point of view.
Most people now say "The farthest we can go with technology X is ..." instead of just saying there's an absolute limit.
And it's a reasonable thing to say. You won't get trace size under twice the wavelength of the light you use to etch it. That's really obvious.
So you either read that as there being a hard limit on what can be done, or as someone saying a new technology is required to go past those limits.
I haven't heard any good "To go beyond X is impossible." quotes in quite a while.
The problem with that is that Microsoft and other closed-source companies will just tack on a new file format, make it the default in the next gen, and then people will claim the open-source product is crap because it can't read the new format.
What is really needed is proper Word97 support, or some other older but still usable format. The new formats don't support anything that 99.8% of people will ever use, they're just there to keep other applications from being compatible.
And this isn't a open-source whine. The closed-source companies are trying to proprietize to stop any competitors. WordPerfect support MS formats, so MS invents new ones. WordPerfect developers (back before it was owner by Corel) admitted to such, and they said they knew that Microsoft was doing the same for the same reason. In fact, things like the Halloween document prove it.
The NSA could use TEMPEST or many other things, to see what you're doing right now. But it wouldn't show them what's in the files you don't access. And I don't really think they can break SSH/SSL, at least, not easily. I'm sure they've got far more computer power than we think, but I don't think they can trivially read encrypted data like that.
So they'd use TEMPEST and other non-invasive methods to decide if you looked like a criminal. Then they'd take the computer and prove it. (and maybe take you too...)
My point is that the NSA could just come and take the computer, if they wanted. MAC might make it harder for them to hack in and get data, but if they really believed you were worth it, they'd take the computer.
But it'd raise the bar for hackers, organizations without the NSA's govermental power would have to hack in to get what they wanted and MAC would mean that they would find few easy targets.
Well, Mandatory Access Controls are a good thing for security, but they don't do anything vs. the NSA. MAC just means that you don't accidentally forget to secure a file, and that you don't accidentally lessen security on a file without knowing it.
This is seperate from encryption. The NSA could come and take your HD with a MAC-enabled filesystem/OS on it and read all the files, by simply sticking the disk in another computer and reading the raw data.
But it'll make the computer more resistant to penetration. This wouldn't stop the NSA, they'd come through the front door with guns (and FBI agents) and simply take the computer, access controls be damned.
It helps 'us' by making 'our' (I'm not in the USA) country's computers more resistant to foreign spying, and lets them establish a secure OS (unlike Windows where it's hard to say what the source of a particular version is) that they can use for medium to low security jobs. (Beyond which you simply use the airwall method.)
If the system is being used to ask questions that people don't have a right to know, I don't see a problem with it.
Not answering isn't an accepted action, it'll result in contempt. Lying is the only reasonable action when you refuse to answer a question.
I don't the the Monica thing being related to the presidency at all, so Clinton being harassed over it seems like nothing but mud slinging. I don't begrudge him his lies in trying to avoid it.
Maybe when partisan control can't be used to direct oversight commitees in witch hunts, is the day I won't support lying to them.
You need to add headers to this, which makes all strings somewhat larger.
Those folks are the ones who are the furthest from being replaced.
The best targets for replacement are crowd scenes (where a small group can be replicated) and the over-priced stars.
So, post the text. Grab a copy for the multiple posts here. Then post it with your user ID.
Make it clear in the post that you're doing it to educate people as to the many illegal acts of the church and their insane religious beliefs. This will help establish that you aren't doing it JUST to violate copyright. Perhaps comment on their wacky beliefs every paragraph of so.
Then post links to it on Slashdot, hell, submit it to the editors as a story. A test case posting (on your own webpage) of the scientology lies.
Register at fairtunes.org, and mention that. You'll get people helping with the legal bills. Ditto no doubt with the EFF and ACLU.
You're the perfect person to test this.
Well, yes. Their RAM sucks. It's only useful in certain carefully tweaked synthetic benchmarks, and Quake 3. As far as I know, Quake 3 and video encoding are the only two things the P3 and RAMBUS are good at.
But that's not because it's 16b. That's because it's high latency.
Many good (ie, not Rambus) ideas involve 16b or 8b memory, a thin interface that runs very quickly should theoretically cut down latency, and provide the same throughput. (16b ram would have to run at 533Mhz to provide the bandwidth of PC133 SDRAM)
That's not as bad as it sounds. A simpler bus is often easy to get running at higher speeds. Synchronizing 64 signals is hard. Synchronizing 8 or 16 is fairly easy.
And then, if it takes that few traces on the motherboard, you can throw another seperate channel, or more. That would immediately double your bandwidth.
So the thin bus isn't a bad idea, RAM might go there eventually, but we won't be using Rambus.
If you're in the business where you're licensing something like that you're going to buy more than 512MB of RAM. 2 CPU P3 server vendors recommend 2-4GB, that's $4000 (CDN $) in RAM. In a 4 or 8-way server you're going to want a lot more.
The prices don't work for RDRAM for *most* things. If you're looking for a fast single CPU to do little except stream data, RDRAM is faster. But if you're worried about latency which is the real issue in any non-contrived server example, then RDRAM doesn't cut it anyways. The extra cost just makes it worse.
If RAMBUS actually offered performance benefits in those areas, it might justify the price.
But, if you really care about performance, you don't use x86 and you don't run NT. Sun, SGI, Compaq (Alpha), and IBM are in business for a reason...
Most moderators would agree, probably nobody modded it past 3, but if a few people with mod pages load the page at once they'll see a funny post at 2, so two or three independantly decide to mod it up. When they all do, they find it's at 5.
Moderation is destined to be a little inaccurate when there's a delay involved like that.
And that's despite all the moderators who read at 2+, Highest First. All they ever see is the high-rated posts.
IMHO having moderator points should put you into 0+, nested.
I wouldn't force 'oldest first', but if anyone moded something 'redundant' while reading in 'newest first' I'd slap them with a tuna.
Not in a patent sense. Being innovative and inventive is what counts.
Amazon was probably the first to implement one-click. So what? It's so trivial that it doesn't deserve a patent. Patents aren't supposed to be granted on things so trivial that given the task, an average professional in the field could do it. Especially if your method offers no benefit over other methods.
Now Amazon didn't just patent a method, they patented the whole idea of one-click ordering.
So, they used it first and got famous. It took others a while to decide it was worth copying. That's the benefit for Amazon. They can claim to be innovative because they were the first to offer something.
But we shouldn't give them a patent for it. Patents are NOT for rewarding the first. They are for rewarding the inventive. Amazon simply used existing tools in the intended way.
What is innovative about using a cookie to identify a user and fetch their information? What about that couldn't everyone else have done, had they felt customers would want it?
Imagine when the first car came with a round indent in the dash to hold a cup. Would that company deserve to be the only company allowed to sell a car with a cup holder?
It's exactly the same case as with Amazon. Neither involves new technology. So why does Amazon deserve a patent?
Amazon was one of the first huge 'e-tailers'. If they did do something first it still doesn't prove that it was innovating and non-obvious. What if whichever company had gotten there first would have eventually implemented the same thing?
The idea of patents isn't to reward the first person into a new field. The idea is to reward someone who has an idea which other people couldn't have come up with on their own, were they in the same position.
Patents are a social contract... society grants a limited monopoly in exchange for complete disclosure of a new idea. For that deal to be worthwhile, the idea must be worth something.
If someone simply does some standard thing, on the internet, who cares? That's obvious. We want to enter into this social contract with someone who will offer us something of value. We want an idea that we wouldn't have thought of ourselves.
Now, if Amazon had a unique linkage of databases and some incredibly clever routines that enabled them to pull all the data together so much faster that they could offer one-click sales where, for example, it took everyone else too much processing to do in realtime, then Amazon would have innovated.
As is, there's nothing clever about it. They used a technology that was designed for customer identification, the cookie, to tell who they were dealing with. They did a simple SQL query to pull their info from a standard DB. They then process that order unless told not to before a certain time. To be sarcastic for a second, "Wow!"
There's nothing there anyone else who wanted to implement one-click ordering couldn't have done.
Why are we giving them a monopoly? What's in it for us? What's Amazon providing as their end of the contract? Details on basic SQL that could have come from _Web Design for Dummies_? Sorry, but I don't think that deserves a government enforced monopoly for seventeen years.
Patents are NOT a competitive advantage. There is no competition in a monopoly. If you're the only company allowed to make something then market forces can't select the best product.
Patents IMHO last longer than they should. The purpose of a patent shouldn't be to ensure a monopoly, it's to let you get to market first. This is accomplished with a limited term monopoly sure, but the monopoly should be the means, not the end.
With a mechanical process you need to tool up, a process that isn't even taking as long these days, and then ship a new physical product. With software you can ship a product in six months (I know of which I speak, my company is releasing products we were having first design meetings about in September 2000.) so a nearly twenty year monopoly is insane.
So, that's a problem with the implementation of patents in general. If it takes a company two years to bring hardware to market the patent should be for three years or so, not seventeen (last I heard). Protection should be removed when the company brings a product to market, or when they stop production. This would stop companies from laying a mine-field in an undeveloped industry.
Then, onto the specifics of software patents... Most software patents seem to either cover a basic universal property just used in a new medium. Discoveries supposedly can't be patented. If you discover a formula for pi you can't patent pi, or the formula. But that's the sort of thing I feel you see in software patents. What should be patentable is a specific chip that is designed to calculate pi more quickly than a general CPU.
To use the favorite example, using XOR to draw a cursor.
This was patented in the late 70s, before the PC revolution. Nobody was really working on GUIs and the ones who were weren't doing it for production systems. To implement ASM-level optimization in drawing routines on a concept system would have made it harder to design for and wasted developer time on speed tweaks. (Tweaks for speed come before release, when the number of users is such to justify their savings vs the outlay of the programmer's time.)
So this patent was basically granted to the first company to get around to optimizing a GUI to the point where they did the obvious thing for drawing a cursor.
For a cursor you want speed much more than looks. It doesn't matter if the cursor changes color as it moves, in fact, it's easier to see if it's always in reverse-video relative to the background. So the tradeoffs involved in display quality are irrelevant with the usefulness of being able to draw and erase the cursor with the same routine, and with not having to have a buffer to store the part of the screen being overwritten.
But there's no reason this would have been developed early. A generic drawing routine would have been of use for anything you wanted to draw. It would have been slower and taken more memory, but a single test system can afford to be faster and have more memory than the eventual target system. Thus slower, more general routines are obviously what should have been used.
So why does a company deserve a patent on someone that any competent programmer (of the era, back when people learned ASM) could have done, had they had the need?
Patents are supposed to reward innovation, not simply the first person into an area.
Similarly, almost all software patents I've heard about have been trivially obvious. Sure, the patenter was the first, but that's not a high enough standard for non-software patents. We also require that an average professional in the industry wouldn't think of the same thing in the same circumstance.
But was any programmer of the era asked to optimize a cursor drawing routine in ASM, to see how they'd go about it?
It's not enough that someone is first (if indeed they were), the idea also needs to be innovative and can't be obvious.
I don't doubt that it wasn't implemented much before 1978, very few computers existed back then (before the PC revolution). That sort of trick is more important to get speed on a low-end computer and it what a PC programmer would have done.
So, of the fewer computer programmers in the late seventies, and the 0.01% who used a GUI system, none doing an open source (or one where they could show off some code) had used XOR for a cursor.
That still doesn't mean it's deserving of a patent because if you stuck any of the great programmers down and asked them how to implement a fast cursor, what do you think they'd have said after thinking about it?
Yeah, the clubs are usually ruled to be illegally discriminating.
But, when someone starts a fitness club that is women only, that's okay.
Obviously any man who wants to hang out with a bunch of women is a psycho pervert, but a woman who wants to hang out with a bunch of men is well within her rights...
I think we should be able to discriminate on some things. For one, until everyone uses the same bathroom regardless of gender, I think we should be allowed to choose who we want in our club.
I personally don't see any need for a single-gender club, but I don't think it's really a bad thing.
Personally, I'd prefer a club with a minimum age limit. The older I get, the more inane young people tend to seem, especially when in groups.
(That's why I like the net, I can get a sense of someone's mental state and personality without irrelevancies intruding. If they can carry on a conversation, that's good enough.)
Sorry, but it's not a bloody tough idea. The whole point of XOR is that you can XOR A and B to get C, then XOR C and B to get A.
If you think about drawing, an obvious feature is being able to draw and then erase without looking up a saved image.
Wow, what a stunning leap of logic it must have taken. That certainly deserves a patent. I mean, your average third-grader couldn't have done it. That certainly meets the standard for non-obvious and innovative.
Sorry for the sarcasm, but using XOR to draw is a basic and obvious use. Maybe a programmer today, in our API-driven world wouldn't think of it, but when cycles counted, they sure would.
If the bugs are made illegal, AND diseminating any information from them is made illegal, then yes, I imagine it would stop it. Or at least, would stop people from distributing the data on the internet so that everyone could have it.
But big companies would continue to flout the law, paying a fine or two here and there.
It's like credit reporting agencies. If a private person wrote that it was a fact that I had done 'X, Y, and Z' which proved I was a bad credit risk, I could sue them for damages if that wasn't true. CRAs though bought a few politicians and are protected with a law basically giving them immunity in these cases. As long as someone tells them it's true, they're not liable. Even if common sense would say it wasn't true. (They could report I incurred debt before I was born, if someone told them that.)
Must be nice to be the executive of a multi-billion dollar company and not be bound in any way by the law.