The biggest thing that Randites ignore is that MS and other big companies they hold up as examples rely on government control of the markets.
If it wasn't for the government being able (and willing) to take all of your assets and toss you in jail as the result of a lawsuit, Microsoft would have a lot less power. They exist largely by suing competitors and buying the remains at auction.
Not to mention that MS also relies on government control in the area of passing the UCITA, etc.
We aren't in a truly capitalist society. Rand's books were just her heros vs straw men.
It's perfectly scientific. You test what you can, you report how you tested and what the results were.
CPU Benchmarks that rely *only* on Quake 3 are perfectly valid. They show that given the test systems used, certain CPUs are better than others for Quake.
If you use something stupid as a benchmark (SiSoft Sandra, for example) all it proves is that one system runs certain stupid benchmarks better than the other, but it does prove that.
If they post all the benchmarking numbers, and the test suites used, then it's a perfectly valid test. A test which showed MS Access and Corel Paradox beating Oracle into the ground would be of great help... it'd prevent anyone from buying a system that was orders of magnitude above what they needed.
But the only conclusion you can gain is that the systems, as described, are that fast at the things tested. The test results may have little bearing on performance in other areas, only a professional is likely to really be able to extrapolate accurately.
They have no right at all to say what you do with their product, or to control your behaviour during or after your use of their product.
Does GM get to say you can't haul Ford parts in a truck you bought from them? Do they get to say you can't go around tell people you think their truck is crap? Hell no.
So why does MS? Just because they stick a piece of paper in the box and claim it's a contract?
Not bloody likely.
Their contracts aren't valid for a number of reasons. 1) You gain nothing from agreeing because you already own the software. 2) You weren't shown the contract before purchase. 3) It controls customers in a way that has been ruled unconstitutional in the USA. (I didn't idly say GM couldn't control your use of a truck. Companies have been smacked down in court many times for that crap.)
So why is it different when they sell software? Hint: It's not. They just lie like the lawyers they are.
Their EULA is worth shit. They can claim all they want, they can't do it though.
Why don't I just do what MS is 'asking me to do' and not use the software is I don't like the EULA? Because I don't like bullies. MS is just like that kid at school who said he'd break your leg if you told the teacher about his bullying. Microsoft is threatening to take all your money, all your future money, and level criminal charges is possible (breach of contract) if you do anything they don't like.
Fuck em.
Someone has to stand up to this shit.
Microsoft isn't capitalist, they rely on government control to sustain their monopoly. If the legal system wasn't so oppressively weighted to those with money, MS wouldn't be able to compete.
As it is, start rich (Billy boy definately didn't pay his way through Harvard) and it's really damn easy to get richer. Anyone with less money gets in your way, sue 'em and take what they've got.
I get so fed up with MS apologists who think that MS is doing something great just because they have a lot of money.
This is where a DBA comes in. They'll know enough about how the data is stored (that stuff nobody is supposed to need to know) that they can tell if page level locking is sufficient. In most cases, I agree, it would be. If you're writing to phone records stored (for instance) in name order, page locking is okay for random access patterns. You'll get a block or two, but who cares in the long run. But if it was St. Patrick's day and you got a a run of calls from names starting with Mc, you'd be in trouble.
This is why keys are often assigned with things like MD5, an even distribution random appearing hash will prevent too many concurrent accesses from blocking.
Then you simply index by everything you want to look up. As long as the table doesn't block, who cares what order it's in.
But a skilled DBA will give you an answer that's related to the actual product you use, not just general comp-sci answers.
Really? This doesn't fit with what I've seen. In my experience, disk read/write performance falls off about the same from first to last sector, on all products in a line. Regardless of the number of platters in the drive.
The fastest drives come out in small sizes first, but that's more of a sales and simplicity of manufacturing I'm sure than anything else. Toss more platters in it and you simply spread the performance curve over a much large data space.
As a reply to the post below this...
It's not as much "See this, it's *real* hardware which you require to run Oracle." as "You don't really need Oracle (or DB2, etc) unless you also need this kind of hardware - if you're playing with x86-level hardware, you don't need the high-end software."
That's all dependant on the appearance (to the customer) of the person claiming to have 'agency'.
It would (likely) be ruled by a judge that janitors don't ususally legally sell cars from the back of the lot, at night, and that the customer would know that. Thus they knew they weren't forming an agreement with the dealership.
But if the guy was dressed in a suit, had valid looking contracts, and gave you working keys, during business hours, you could safely assume he's an authorized salesman.
This establishes who gets blamed for theft. If the janitor sells you a car, you get nailed for buying stolen goods (and him for fraud, or theft, or such). If you buy from a fake salesman, he's guilty of the theft and the ownership of the auto is a little gray. If you buy from a clerk whose boss later says they didn't have authority, you own the car.
In the case of the software, the website (and implied back-end processing) is what accepts all contracts (on a site that doesn't just email the order to a person) and if it accepts a smaller payment and sends out a product, you can't argue that it didn't have permission. If an employee can sell a product, they can bargain for its sale. If they broke their contract with you by selling it for less than they were told, that's between you and them, the customer is blameless.
But, because this involves you telling the software what something cost, instead of a situation where you'd expect the ability to bargain, I'd say that it would be a crime of some sort.
Hey! Here's an idea... The UCITA is looking to make click-through licenses just as binding as a real paper contract, which you do have the right to modify and resubmit. If you live where the UCITA is in force, that computer program *IS* fully authorized to accept contracts in the name of its creator.:) I should try placing orders from companies in those few states that have passed the UCITA. heheheh
I'm thinking that the ideal system isn't one actually *on* Sealand, simply because the bandwidth consumers aren't also there. You're paying for traffic you'd get cheaper elsewhere.
You'd also create problems for Sealand if you ran something like Napster there, people would target them much like ISPs get targetted these days. They'd have proof of violation of international treaty and they'd make everyone's life dificult.
So the answer is to put the main part of your server on the mainland in a large city. Then encrypt all client communications via keys served from Sealand. It wouldn't be any more secure vs crypto attacks, RSA is still RSA... the benefits come in when the corporation realizes it can't simply demand the police arrest both ends of the communication and subpoena keys.
Do an anonymous system where the server doesn't know who clients are (except by a MD5 hash of their IP, etc). All the server does is match requests to providers, then passes the hashed IDs to the Sealand server which looks up the real IPs and passes the information to both parties.
This way the Sealand system isn't involved in anything illegal by the laws of any big country, meaning that there's no justification for international action to shut them down or open their records. But without doing so, the clients are anonymous until they actually start the peer-to-peer trading action.
As long as the system on the mainland has other reasonable uses than trading MP3s (like Gnutella which will trade any files) then it can't be directly shut down without evidence, but the evidence is locked away in a foreign country (Even if Sealand is ruled to be the UK after a tense armed standoff and years in court it wouldn't be the US, forcing the RIAA to fight a legal action while coordinating in two countries.) and can't be obtained without essentially an act of war.
The key is to have plausible uses for these systems other than the 'illegal' uses. Then have one end in one jurisdiction and the other end as far away as possible.
(Someone mentioned Iraq... If there wasn't a trade embargo it'd work great. Your bandwidth requirements in the US-hostile country are minimal, you're just using them as a blind transfer point for the setup data. Afghanistan might work, there isn't an embargo but they're pretty down on the western entertainment industry and other things.)
You know, in most markets, if a product performs badly without a service rep, people would call it a badly performing product...
In the computer field, people don't seem to question statements like yours.
I know that some tuning is required for all products, like picking the gear to drive in, but a product that performs so badly in default that it gets beaten by another product in default configuration look really bad.
And as for the NT thing... For development work, compiling any fairly serious application in VC++ v6, NT is quite unstable. Not only does NT not completely protect memory (a malicious app can clober certain things, so can a buggy app that accesses those directly), but it also doesn't limit ram or CPU usage to provide a certain minimum level of functionality. It doesn't matter if NT technically hasn't crashed, if I hit ctrl-alt-delete and it takes ten minutes to swap until it pulls up the task manager, it's as good as dead.
I use NT4SP6a and W2kProSP1 on a daily basis at work and neither of them is 'enterprise ready' IMHO.
You can tweak and tune both so they they perform better, but no matter how well you tweak, they've still got many fundamental flaws.
I admit I've never used MS-SQL, but based on all other MS products, I wouldn't trust it with a big job (for your corporate website, sure, for your web-based commerce site, hell no.)
Especially since your copying would cause financial damage.
In the USA the criminal and civil courts are quite seperated. To use O.J. as an example... he wasn't convicted of the crime, but he was liable for damages. But, they had to prove he did it to fine him, but they couldn't use that to convict him, etc... (IMHO if they can't convict you, they shouldn't be able to use less evidence to hit you in civil court.)
So you could be educating people of a scam which frees you from liable/slander (if it's true), but that's unconnected to your copyright violation in using their materials as an example. So they shut you down by claiming that your use isn't covered under fair-use and that every person you copied it to is a lost sale, thus a huge ammount of damages. Effectively supressing speech they don't like.
Even worse, they encrypt the message (deliver it on a DVD, etc) and because you'd distribute a snippet (sampled into a non DVD form) they'd hit you under the DMCA as well.
It's just a further step in limiting free speech. They technically allow it but limit your ability to supply context (copyright violation on the quotes and/or DMCA violation) and on your access to the media.
Will the next generation of DVD players even play unencrypted media? Or will they, "for our protection" require all media to be encrypted? Of course, using DeCSS v2, a patented algorithm with a copyrighted master key, will require a huge payout (trivial to someone pressing a multi-million dollar movie, exorbitant to an individual.) which would effectively forbid anyone except the controlling corporations from using the media.
I agree. If everyone breaks the law, they can't properly enforce them.
Either they select a few people to make examples of and fine them into oblivion, or they try to attack everyone. Either way it shows people that the law is stupid and doesn't follow the will of the people.
And that, really, is what the law is supposed to do. If nobody believed you could own blue things, a law granting property rights to blue things wouldn't fit with the will of the people. If nobody wants a law, it shouldn't be.
In a less esoteric example, implied right to copy... If everyone agrees that a message someone sent to you is okay to distribute, then it should be.
I don't know any rational person (ie, not just mouthing the copyright-is-god party line) who thinks you shouldn't be able to forward email. It's just insane.
There is a line somewhere, if an author emails you a book to proofread, that is a message, but shouldn't be free to copy. But that's where the courts should step in and interpret.
Otherwise you could get a contract emailed to you that you weren't allowed to print out and show to your lawyer, or a threat you'd be prosecuted if you showed to the police.
P2P reduces the bandwidth that any one site must have available. If Napster had to serve all those MP3s it'd never have gotten big. But with P2P, each user serves up only a few songs at once, while downloading for themselves.
P2P makes sense, but only in a case where there are many things being downloaded and any given user will have some of them.
It wouldn't work for the LoTR trailer because everyone wanted to get it, and nobody had it. But if you applied it to movie trailers in general, then it would start to work.
The problem with it is that it relies on the users having content that other people want. This is okay in small communities, but if the you didn't recognize any MP3s on someone's drive, you probably wouldn't bother downloading any. The fact that you're trading a well-known group of songs makes people more willing to trust in the worth of the content.
You can't compare someone offering a limited resource to someone trying to control an unlimited one.
And a lot of those 'taxi drivers' in the software field are intentionally putting car manufacturers out of business so that the only transportation choice will be their taxi. In those cases, yes, they are greedy asses.
As for the programming. I started to learn when I was six, without any idea of programming for money. It was fun and challenging so I worked on it. Even without a profit motive, many people would program.
I doubt the profit motive would go away. People want things like OpenBSD where Theo and a team have stuck their name on a product. He could charge a lot for it and companies would pay if they wanted support for it from the creator. In the same way, id software could release the code for Doom3 and sell one giant add-on of copyrighted graphics, levels, and sounds.
But if it did there are people who'd do it to have fun. People who'd do it for research purposes (Programming their new telescope control programs, etc). People who'd program at work to customize existing applications or write new ones.
The only thing that could harm programming is if it's something you can't do in the future because to see how anything works violates the DMCA and the only way to learn anything is in university classes geared to turn out the next generation of VB scripters to make the assistants for Office 2050.
GPLing everything and fighting laws like the DMCA (and UCITA) will ensure that the future stays open enough that programmers can continue to make profit in the industry if they desire, or continue to support their other work/hobby/research.
Heh. There's a lot of stuff in perl that makes life much easier.
Hashes for instance... Once you use them, data manipulation is never the same.
Hell, even being able to treat an array as a stack or a queue (push/pop and shift/unshift).
I've just recently (3 months) started programming in perl and it's really great for stuff that doesn't take tons of performance or hardware dependant stuff.
C still wins for doing things like declaring an arrays of RGBA structs over video memory. Or letting you see the ASM produced and tweak it if necessary for a really tight loop.
But Perl people are right, in most cases, the dev time saved makes up for slightly longer runtimes.
Grab the O'Reilly 'Learning Perl' and 'Programming Perl', those are the best hardcopy references I've found.
But nobody would buy a computer just to run SETI or Folding @Home (or the other similar projects). The computers are purchased because there's a periodic task (games, 3d rendering, etc) which takes a kick-ass CPU. Then the spare cycles can be put to good use. But those cycles wouldn't exist if the machine wasn't made and sold for another purpose.
I think the person you're responding to said that if a Mac user brags about their photoshop results he'll point them here where it says that a Mac will win in those cases, but not in anything else.
For those of us who don't apply four-pixel gaussian blurs to 256MB CMYK images...
Which is why I think we need to make the laws accessible to the common people and make that part of the curriculum in school.
Then nobody would have the excuse that they didn't know, (because the whole text of the laws would be available everywhere and would be taught extensively) so the excuse wouldn't work.
Nowadays, you don't know who knows the law and not because our system makes no effort to inform people of the law. Even when the law is available it's often in a form that few people can understand and even fewer people can grasp all the implications of.
Now, it's basically impossible except for someone who specializes in an area of law, to know the law. Ignorance isn't an excuse, it's the standard condition.
Imagine if speed limits weren't posted but were enforced with variable penalties. And if companies were allowed to set speed limits and enforce the law in some areas.
Even if you did check the limits at the library before a trip, how would you know if it had changed? (Like the DMCA just being recently passed, and changing the whole legal landscape.)
> It would be like the government one day decided to give every citizen a government-made
> car. The market for private cars would collapse, and the government would have erected a state-run
> monopoly over the automotive industry.
But, if the government could give everyone cars, they'd still have to produce them which means auto workers would be making them. But, assuming that these cars *were* pulled out of thin air, doesn't it make sense to give one to each citizen instead of making them buy something that is no longer a scarce comodity?
I mean, the government is for the people. Seems to me that giving everyone a car will do more good for more people than keeping the car companies around which helps the owners, a small fraction of the people.
> Who would hire us and why? My guess is less people would be hired and for less compelling reasons.
My current job hires one full-time programmer just to work on development tools. He tweaks our CVS, writes testing tools, debugging tools, etc. And in my last job I wrote front-end modules for a DB (Access or Paradox) specifically tailored for the company. Ordering systems designed to fit our needs, DB queries that the accountant wanted, etc. Nothing new, stuff they could have done with a spreadsheet and a DB without forms. But they wanted it made easier enough to hire me for a year and a half as I tweaked, added, etc. (I also did some other things, I'm not that slow. But all custom software that nobody else would get any use from, even if it were released.)
> The GPL forbids you from selling add-ons, open source or not, for GPL-licensed software. You must
> give the add-ons away for free under GPL or not distribute at all.
Not quite. You can sell apps that run in X on Linux. They don't have to be GPLed. That's a way. The other alternative is to release GPLed software for free and sell the documentation and such.
It's not a new idea, but I've been thinking a lot about that these days.
Ignorance isn't an excuse in the eyes of the law, we all hear that. So nobody can plead that they didn't know murder was a crime.
But honestly, nobody can know about the DMCA, UCITA, and all the other new (and crooked, but that's another topic) laws coming out. Even lawyers specializing in the area aren't sure exactly what is and isn't allowed.
So how exactly is someone supposed to keep from breaking the law? Being psychic?
The complete total text of all laws should be in a form easily readable by a high-school graduate in less than a day.
And before anyone answers that a high-school graduate probably only has a grade-six reading level, that should change the form of the laws. If they're too complex for the citizens to understand, make them simpler. If something can only be expressed in ten-syllable latin words, it's probably not relevant to the people.
I really think that ignorance should be an excuse, if the laws aren't announced to the people and not taught in schools.
There are problems with it, but all in all, I think it's a good idea.
It'd also get rid of lawyers, if everyone understood the law. You might hire a representative who is a good public speaker, but you wouldn't be dependant on them to tell you what the law is.
There are also baseball bats. I have a feeling that if they weren't careful who they threatened they'd end up with a lot more than $10k in legal bills.
And I can't really say I'd care. I mean, if you use death-by-lawyer as a threat and are willing to back it up with more money than your target, you shouldn't be suprised when they circumvent the system in responding to the charges.
People have expressed suprise that this guy hasn't opened a mailbomb. I'll second that. He's basically threatening to ruin people, financially and with criminal charges. They're supposed to lay there and take it, or pay for a lawyer who only MIGHT get them off, and then has a smaller chance of winning anything as compensation... I don't think many people would take that path.
I don't see why it's a good thing that you can take a public program developed by the government, make a few changes, make it proprietary, and sell it. Sure, it makes people money, but so does slavery. Note that I'm not saying you advocate slavery, I'm just saying that not everything which results in the transfer of cash is really a good thing.
If someone can't compete against free software, imho, they don't deserve to be in business. Imagine me trying to argue that FAQ maintainers are cutting into my business selling how-to books. If I didn't provide a better product, why would I deserve any money?
And it's not like there'd be less of a market for programmers, we'd just be hired to customize things.
I think people would still sell add-ons, but they'd have to sell a modular add-on, or an open source one. There's nothing extraordinary about paying for open source software... The company I work for has spent ~$50k on a realtime OS and they're looking for spend another $25k or so on another. Both of these have source code available and could be implemented for free. We're buying them to get the service package. One of these is also an addition to Linux. We've had great luck in buying open source, we get a superior product (the companies realize we read their code, they don't produce sloppy work) and we know what we're getting because we downloaded and tested it beforehand.
While they don't like bootlegs made with a cam-corder, or recorded at a concert or from a CD, they tolerate them because they know generational loss will make the product lousy enough that anyone who would have paid for the real thing will do so anyway.
But if one person with a good sound setup played their copy protected music and recorded it, they'd have a digital copy so there'd be no generational loss. Then they MP3 that and release it on Napster (or AudioGalaxy, or Gnutella, etc) *without* the copyright bit set.
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The biggest thing that Randites ignore is that MS and other big companies they hold up as examples rely on government control of the markets.
If it wasn't for the government being able (and willing) to take all of your assets and toss you in jail as the result of a lawsuit, Microsoft would have a lot less power. They exist largely by suing competitors and buying the remains at auction.
Not to mention that MS also relies on government control in the area of passing the UCITA, etc.
We aren't in a truly capitalist society. Rand's books were just her heros vs straw men.
It's perfectly scientific. You test what you can, you report how you tested and what the results were.
CPU Benchmarks that rely *only* on Quake 3 are perfectly valid. They show that given the test systems used, certain CPUs are better than others for Quake.
If you use something stupid as a benchmark (SiSoft Sandra, for example) all it proves is that one system runs certain stupid benchmarks better than the other, but it does prove that.
If they post all the benchmarking numbers, and the test suites used, then it's a perfectly valid test. A test which showed MS Access and Corel Paradox beating Oracle into the ground would be of great help... it'd prevent anyone from buying a system that was orders of magnitude above what they needed.
But the only conclusion you can gain is that the systems, as described, are that fast at the things tested. The test results may have little bearing on performance in other areas, only a professional is likely to really be able to extrapolate accurately.
They have no right at all to say what you do with their product, or to control your behaviour during or after your use of their product.
Does GM get to say you can't haul Ford parts in a truck you bought from them? Do they get to say you can't go around tell people you think their truck is crap? Hell no.
So why does MS? Just because they stick a piece of paper in the box and claim it's a contract?
Not bloody likely.
Their contracts aren't valid for a number of reasons. 1) You gain nothing from agreeing because you already own the software. 2) You weren't shown the contract before purchase. 3) It controls customers in a way that has been ruled unconstitutional in the USA. (I didn't idly say GM couldn't control your use of a truck. Companies have been smacked down in court many times for that crap.)
So why is it different when they sell software? Hint: It's not. They just lie like the lawyers they are.
Or, use the software and publish your results.
Their EULA is worth shit. They can claim all they want, they can't do it though.
Why don't I just do what MS is 'asking me to do' and not use the software is I don't like the EULA? Because I don't like bullies. MS is just like that kid at school who said he'd break your leg if you told the teacher about his bullying. Microsoft is threatening to take all your money, all your future money, and level criminal charges is possible (breach of contract) if you do anything they don't like.
Fuck em.
Someone has to stand up to this shit.
Microsoft isn't capitalist, they rely on government control to sustain their monopoly. If the legal system wasn't so oppressively weighted to those with money, MS wouldn't be able to compete.
As it is, start rich (Billy boy definately didn't pay his way through Harvard) and it's really damn easy to get richer. Anyone with less money gets in your way, sue 'em and take what they've got.
I get so fed up with MS apologists who think that MS is doing something great just because they have a lot of money.
This is where a DBA comes in. They'll know enough about how the data is stored (that stuff nobody is supposed to need to know) that they can tell if page level locking is sufficient. In most cases, I agree, it would be. If you're writing to phone records stored (for instance) in name order, page locking is okay for random access patterns. You'll get a block or two, but who cares in the long run. But if it was St. Patrick's day and you got a a run of calls from names starting with Mc, you'd be in trouble.
This is why keys are often assigned with things like MD5, an even distribution random appearing hash will prevent too many concurrent accesses from blocking.
Then you simply index by everything you want to look up. As long as the table doesn't block, who cares what order it's in.
But a skilled DBA will give you an answer that's related to the actual product you use, not just general comp-sci answers.
Really? This doesn't fit with what I've seen. In my experience, disk read/write performance falls off about the same from first to last sector, on all products in a line. Regardless of the number of platters in the drive.
The fastest drives come out in small sizes first, but that's more of a sales and simplicity of manufacturing I'm sure than anything else. Toss more platters in it and you simply spread the performance curve over a much large data space.
As a reply to the post below this...
It's not as much "See this, it's *real* hardware which you require to run Oracle." as "You don't really need Oracle (or DB2, etc) unless you also need this kind of hardware - if you're playing with x86-level hardware, you don't need the high-end software."
That's all dependant on the appearance (to the customer) of the person claiming to have 'agency'.
:) I should try placing orders from companies in those few states that have passed the UCITA. heheheh
It would (likely) be ruled by a judge that janitors don't ususally legally sell cars from the back of the lot, at night, and that the customer would know that. Thus they knew they weren't forming an agreement with the dealership.
But if the guy was dressed in a suit, had valid looking contracts, and gave you working keys, during business hours, you could safely assume he's an authorized salesman.
This establishes who gets blamed for theft. If the janitor sells you a car, you get nailed for buying stolen goods (and him for fraud, or theft, or such). If you buy from a fake salesman, he's guilty of the theft and the ownership of the auto is a little gray. If you buy from a clerk whose boss later says they didn't have authority, you own the car.
In the case of the software, the website (and implied back-end processing) is what accepts all contracts (on a site that doesn't just email the order to a person) and if it accepts a smaller payment and sends out a product, you can't argue that it didn't have permission. If an employee can sell a product, they can bargain for its sale. If they broke their contract with you by selling it for less than they were told, that's between you and them, the customer is blameless.
But, because this involves you telling the software what something cost, instead of a situation where you'd expect the ability to bargain, I'd say that it would be a crime of some sort.
Hey! Here's an idea... The UCITA is looking to make click-through licenses just as binding as a real paper contract, which you do have the right to modify and resubmit. If you live where the UCITA is in force, that computer program *IS* fully authorized to accept contracts in the name of its creator.
I'm thinking that the ideal system isn't one actually *on* Sealand, simply because the bandwidth consumers aren't also there. You're paying for traffic you'd get cheaper elsewhere.
You'd also create problems for Sealand if you ran something like Napster there, people would target them much like ISPs get targetted these days. They'd have proof of violation of international treaty and they'd make everyone's life dificult.
So the answer is to put the main part of your server on the mainland in a large city. Then encrypt all client communications via keys served from Sealand. It wouldn't be any more secure vs crypto attacks, RSA is still RSA... the benefits come in when the corporation realizes it can't simply demand the police arrest both ends of the communication and subpoena keys.
Do an anonymous system where the server doesn't know who clients are (except by a MD5 hash of their IP, etc). All the server does is match requests to providers, then passes the hashed IDs to the Sealand server which looks up the real IPs and passes the information to both parties.
This way the Sealand system isn't involved in anything illegal by the laws of any big country, meaning that there's no justification for international action to shut them down or open their records. But without doing so, the clients are anonymous until they actually start the peer-to-peer trading action.
As long as the system on the mainland has other reasonable uses than trading MP3s (like Gnutella which will trade any files) then it can't be directly shut down without evidence, but the evidence is locked away in a foreign country (Even if Sealand is ruled to be the UK after a tense armed standoff and years in court it wouldn't be the US, forcing the RIAA to fight a legal action while coordinating in two countries.) and can't be obtained without essentially an act of war.
The key is to have plausible uses for these systems other than the 'illegal' uses. Then have one end in one jurisdiction and the other end as far away as possible.
(Someone mentioned Iraq... If there wasn't a trade embargo it'd work great. Your bandwidth requirements in the US-hostile country are minimal, you're just using them as a blind transfer point for the setup data. Afghanistan might work, there isn't an embargo but they're pretty down on the western entertainment industry and other things.)
You know, in most markets, if a product performs badly without a service rep, people would call it a badly performing product...
In the computer field, people don't seem to question statements like yours.
I know that some tuning is required for all products, like picking the gear to drive in, but a product that performs so badly in default that it gets beaten by another product in default configuration look really bad.
And as for the NT thing... For development work, compiling any fairly serious application in VC++ v6, NT is quite unstable. Not only does NT not completely protect memory (a malicious app can clober certain things, so can a buggy app that accesses those directly), but it also doesn't limit ram or CPU usage to provide a certain minimum level of functionality. It doesn't matter if NT technically hasn't crashed, if I hit ctrl-alt-delete and it takes ten minutes to swap until it pulls up the task manager, it's as good as dead.
I use NT4SP6a and W2kProSP1 on a daily basis at work and neither of them is 'enterprise ready' IMHO.
You can tweak and tune both so they they perform better, but no matter how well you tweak, they've still got many fundamental flaws.
I admit I've never used MS-SQL, but based on all other MS products, I wouldn't trust it with a big job (for your corporate website, sure, for your web-based commerce site, hell no.)
Re: Spam... fined for demonstrating a scam.
Especially since your copying would cause financial damage.
In the USA the criminal and civil courts are quite seperated. To use O.J. as an example... he wasn't convicted of the crime, but he was liable for damages. But, they had to prove he did it to fine him, but they couldn't use that to convict him, etc... (IMHO if they can't convict you, they shouldn't be able to use less evidence to hit you in civil court.)
So you could be educating people of a scam which frees you from liable/slander (if it's true), but that's unconnected to your copyright violation in using their materials as an example. So they shut you down by claiming that your use isn't covered under fair-use and that every person you copied it to is a lost sale, thus a huge ammount of damages. Effectively supressing speech they don't like.
Even worse, they encrypt the message (deliver it on a DVD, etc) and because you'd distribute a snippet (sampled into a non DVD form) they'd hit you under the DMCA as well.
It's just a further step in limiting free speech. They technically allow it but limit your ability to supply context (copyright violation on the quotes and/or DMCA violation) and on your access to the media.
Will the next generation of DVD players even play unencrypted media? Or will they, "for our protection" require all media to be encrypted? Of course, using DeCSS v2, a patented algorithm with a copyrighted master key, will require a huge payout (trivial to someone pressing a multi-million dollar movie, exorbitant to an individual.) which would effectively forbid anyone except the controlling corporations from using the media.
I agree. If everyone breaks the law, they can't properly enforce them.
Either they select a few people to make examples of and fine them into oblivion, or they try to attack everyone. Either way it shows people that the law is stupid and doesn't follow the will of the people.
And that, really, is what the law is supposed to do. If nobody believed you could own blue things, a law granting property rights to blue things wouldn't fit with the will of the people. If nobody wants a law, it shouldn't be.
In a less esoteric example, implied right to copy... If everyone agrees that a message someone sent to you is okay to distribute, then it should be.
I don't know any rational person (ie, not just mouthing the copyright-is-god party line) who thinks you shouldn't be able to forward email. It's just insane.
There is a line somewhere, if an author emails you a book to proofread, that is a message, but shouldn't be free to copy. But that's where the courts should step in and interpret.
Otherwise you could get a contract emailed to you that you weren't allowed to print out and show to your lawyer, or a threat you'd be prosecuted if you showed to the police.
Try the right to not use GPL'd software.
Just don't use it. And don't whine about it.
Nobody cares if you don't. You're *never* going to make a contribution anyways, so we won't feel deprived when you refuse the participate.
Go and code another closed-source VB app. Yay you.
What's with the title? It's like "All you bullshit belong to us!" or something.
P2P reduces the bandwidth that any one site must have available. If Napster had to serve all those MP3s it'd never have gotten big. But with P2P, each user serves up only a few songs at once, while downloading for themselves.
P2P makes sense, but only in a case where there are many things being downloaded and any given user will have some of them.
It wouldn't work for the LoTR trailer because everyone wanted to get it, and nobody had it. But if you applied it to movie trailers in general, then it would start to work.
The problem with it is that it relies on the users having content that other people want. This is okay in small communities, but if the you didn't recognize any MP3s on someone's drive, you probably wouldn't bother downloading any. The fact that you're trading a well-known group of songs makes people more willing to trust in the worth of the content.
By not releasing the software.
You can't compare someone offering a limited resource to someone trying to control an unlimited one.
And a lot of those 'taxi drivers' in the software field are intentionally putting car manufacturers out of business so that the only transportation choice will be their taxi. In those cases, yes, they are greedy asses.
As for the programming. I started to learn when I was six, without any idea of programming for money. It was fun and challenging so I worked on it. Even without a profit motive, many people would program.
I doubt the profit motive would go away. People want things like OpenBSD where Theo and a team have stuck their name on a product. He could charge a lot for it and companies would pay if they wanted support for it from the creator. In the same way, id software could release the code for Doom3 and sell one giant add-on of copyrighted graphics, levels, and sounds.
But if it did there are people who'd do it to have fun. People who'd do it for research purposes (Programming their new telescope control programs, etc). People who'd program at work to customize existing applications or write new ones.
The only thing that could harm programming is if it's something you can't do in the future because to see how anything works violates the DMCA and the only way to learn anything is in university classes geared to turn out the next generation of VB scripters to make the assistants for Office 2050.
GPLing everything and fighting laws like the DMCA (and UCITA) will ensure that the future stays open enough that programmers can continue to make profit in the industry if they desire, or continue to support their other work/hobby/research.
Heh. There's a lot of stuff in perl that makes life much easier.
Hashes for instance... Once you use them, data manipulation is never the same.
Hell, even being able to treat an array as a stack or a queue (push/pop and shift/unshift).
I've just recently (3 months) started programming in perl and it's really great for stuff that doesn't take tons of performance or hardware dependant stuff.
C still wins for doing things like declaring an arrays of RGBA structs over video memory. Or letting you see the ASM produced and tweak it if necessary for a really tight loop.
But Perl people are right, in most cases, the dev time saved makes up for slightly longer runtimes.
Grab the O'Reilly 'Learning Perl' and 'Programming Perl', those are the best hardcopy references I've found.
But nobody would buy a computer just to run SETI or Folding @Home (or the other similar projects). The computers are purchased because there's a periodic task (games, 3d rendering, etc) which takes a kick-ass CPU. Then the spare cycles can be put to good use. But those cycles wouldn't exist if the machine wasn't made and sold for another purpose.
I think the person you're responding to said that if a Mac user brags about their photoshop results he'll point them here where it says that a Mac will win in those cases, but not in anything else.
For those of us who don't apply four-pixel gaussian blurs to 256MB CMYK images...
Variables in "" strings are interpreted as the value of the variable.
You can just do
print "This is a $variable\n";
If you want a variable to run up against text, do this...
print "Another ${test}Script";
That'll make your life a lot easier. (in most cases)
That's the problem now.
Which is why I think we need to make the laws accessible to the common people and make that part of the curriculum in school.
Then nobody would have the excuse that they didn't know, (because the whole text of the laws would be available everywhere and would be taught extensively) so the excuse wouldn't work.
Nowadays, you don't know who knows the law and not because our system makes no effort to inform people of the law. Even when the law is available it's often in a form that few people can understand and even fewer people can grasp all the implications of.
Now, it's basically impossible except for someone who specializes in an area of law, to know the law. Ignorance isn't an excuse, it's the standard condition.
Imagine if speed limits weren't posted but were enforced with variable penalties. And if companies were allowed to set speed limits and enforce the law in some areas.
Even if you did check the limits at the library before a trip, how would you know if it had changed? (Like the DMCA just being recently passed, and changing the whole legal landscape.)
> It would be like the government one day decided to give every citizen a government-made
> car. The market for private cars would collapse, and the government would have erected a state-run
> monopoly over the automotive industry.
But, if the government could give everyone cars, they'd still have to produce them which means auto workers would be making them. But, assuming that these cars *were* pulled out of thin air, doesn't it make sense to give one to each citizen instead of making them buy something that is no longer a scarce comodity?
I mean, the government is for the people. Seems to me that giving everyone a car will do more good for more people than keeping the car companies around which helps the owners, a small fraction of the people.
> Who would hire us and why? My guess is less people would be hired and for less compelling reasons.
My current job hires one full-time programmer just to work on development tools. He tweaks our CVS, writes testing tools, debugging tools, etc. And in my last job I wrote front-end modules for a DB (Access or Paradox) specifically tailored for the company. Ordering systems designed to fit our needs, DB queries that the accountant wanted, etc. Nothing new, stuff they could have done with a spreadsheet and a DB without forms. But they wanted it made easier enough to hire me for a year and a half as I tweaked, added, etc. (I also did some other things, I'm not that slow. But all custom software that nobody else would get any use from, even if it were released.)
> The GPL forbids you from selling add-ons, open source or not, for GPL-licensed software. You must
> give the add-ons away for free under GPL or not distribute at all.
Not quite. You can sell apps that run in X on Linux. They don't have to be GPLed. That's a way. The other alternative is to release GPLed software for free and sell the documentation and such.
It's not a new idea, but I've been thinking a lot about that these days.
Ignorance isn't an excuse in the eyes of the law, we all hear that. So nobody can plead that they didn't know murder was a crime.
But honestly, nobody can know about the DMCA, UCITA, and all the other new (and crooked, but that's another topic) laws coming out. Even lawyers specializing in the area aren't sure exactly what is and isn't allowed.
So how exactly is someone supposed to keep from breaking the law? Being psychic?
The complete total text of all laws should be in a form easily readable by a high-school graduate in less than a day.
And before anyone answers that a high-school graduate probably only has a grade-six reading level, that should change the form of the laws. If they're too complex for the citizens to understand, make them simpler. If something can only be expressed in ten-syllable latin words, it's probably not relevant to the people.
I really think that ignorance should be an excuse, if the laws aren't announced to the people and not taught in schools.
There are problems with it, but all in all, I think it's a good idea.
It'd also get rid of lawyers, if everyone understood the law. You might hire a representative who is a good public speaker, but you wouldn't be dependant on them to tell you what the law is.
> Besides, there's always appeals :-)
There are also baseball bats. I have a feeling that if they weren't careful who they threatened they'd end up with a lot more than $10k in legal bills.
And I can't really say I'd care. I mean, if you use death-by-lawyer as a threat and are willing to back it up with more money than your target, you shouldn't be suprised when they circumvent the system in responding to the charges.
People have expressed suprise that this guy hasn't opened a mailbomb. I'll second that. He's basically threatening to ruin people, financially and with criminal charges. They're supposed to lay there and take it, or pay for a lawyer who only MIGHT get them off, and then has a smaller chance of winning anything as compensation... I don't think many people would take that path.
Oh well, scum gets what scum deserves.
I don't see why it's a good thing that you can take a public program developed by the government, make a few changes, make it proprietary, and sell it. Sure, it makes people money, but so does slavery. Note that I'm not saying you advocate slavery, I'm just saying that not everything which results in the transfer of cash is really a good thing.
If someone can't compete against free software, imho, they don't deserve to be in business. Imagine me trying to argue that FAQ maintainers are cutting into my business selling how-to books. If I didn't provide a better product, why would I deserve any money?
And it's not like there'd be less of a market for programmers, we'd just be hired to customize things.
I think people would still sell add-ons, but they'd have to sell a modular add-on, or an open source one. There's nothing extraordinary about paying for open source software... The company I work for has spent ~$50k on a realtime OS and they're looking for spend another $25k or so on another. Both of these have source code available and could be implemented for free. We're buying them to get the service package. One of these is also an addition to Linux. We've had great luck in buying open source, we get a superior product (the companies realize we read their code, they don't produce sloppy work) and we know what we're getting because we downloaded and tested it beforehand.
While they don't like bootlegs made with a cam-corder, or recorded at a concert or from a CD, they tolerate them because they know generational loss will make the product lousy enough that anyone who would have paid for the real thing will do so anyway.
But if one person with a good sound setup played their copy protected music and recorded it, they'd have a digital copy so there'd be no generational loss. Then they MP3 that and release it on Napster (or AudioGalaxy, or Gnutella, etc) *without* the copyright bit set.