If A's address is hidden from C, how can C send IP packets to A, performing the "middleman" role?
Generally speaking, you can easily, right now, but probably not for much longer, spit out IP packets with addresses that are incorrect. Hence it makes sense that this is a system for hiding A's address from B. However, somewhere along the line, A's address has to be known by someone otherwise the packets will never be routed to A.
Now B's address is quite probably hidable from C. The transaction would go something like:
A to C: Would you proxy packets to me? Please, pretty please?
C: Sure kid, knock yourself out.
A (without a correct sender IP address) to B: You don't know who I am, but would you mind sending file "Star Wars III: Revenge of the Lucas, The Good Version" to C.
B: Sure, here's the file.
B (without a correct sender IP address) to C: You don't know who I am, I understand you have someone who wants this file. Here it is.
C to A: Here's the file you requested.
In the above, C's address isn't hidden. A's is, from B, but not from C. B's is, but A knows about it. For A to be the eventual destination of the file, someone must know A's address, otherwise the packets will never get there.
As for the FBI intercepting this traffic, they really have few options. It's unlikely what A's doing is illegal, and there's no smoking gun with respect to B. If they are C, they cannot find out B's address so will not know who's copying their content. They know A's address, but A isn't copying anything.
Incidentally, before anyone comments, I'm commenting on this as a technical solution. I do not endorse this as a way to facilitate copyright infringement, something I'm generally opposed to. A quick look at my posting history will confirm this.
Indeed, I'm actually relatively unhappy with what's being proposed as, unfortunately, the primary reason it appears to have been developed has been to facilitate copyright infringement. Right now, as I said in a previous post:
We need to disassociate ourselves with copyright infringement. We need to devise ways of keeping unauthorized music away from the P2P networks, and replace that content with new, original work, devising new and innovative ways to fund it.
The best way to destroy a technology and ensure it cannot be used for good is to make its primary purpose bad and/or easy to legally attack. The kind of thing being proposed here today will make ever more draconian legislative attacks on Internet users a reality. We need a new approach.
And this law came completely out of the blue, correct? It was like the recording industry suddenly got up one day and said "Let's deal with a problem that doesn't exist"?
This is not to suggest that the situation today isn't far, far, worse than what the music industry had to contend with during the eighties (largely people bulk buying tapes and distributing music to friends that way.) We've gone from a situation where one CD might end up being "used" by four or five people to a situation where one CD might end up being "used" by thousands to millions of people.
In many ways, it's surprising the recording industry is being so restrained.
What we're looking at here is another bad idea. There's no technical way of enforcing what they're suggesting, the chances are this is "same old" copy prevention coupled with a few DRM'd WMV files and a custom burner that can recognize these files. Needless to say, this means the prevention only works under supported operating systems, with unsupported operating systems ignoring the restrictions completely and making copies as usual.
In some ways, it's a positive thing. If it's a "same old prevention" system coupled with a "way out" that allows users to make a limited number of copies, then that shows Sony "gets it" insofar as they recognize people do want to make backups, quite legitimately, and shouldn't be restricted from doing what they can to protect their own works. But ultimately, we need be[tt]er solutions. These types of thing will eventually turn into effective efforts that lock out alternative platforms and technologies, undermining innovation and making it much harder to do the kinds of things that lead to the invention of the MP3 player, MP3 CD, home theatre system, etc.
In that respect, part of the effort has to come from the grassroots music listening community. Those who have repeatedly proffered technologies that have put the music industry on the defensive in this way need to be denounced, not revered. People like Shawn Fanning are treated as heroes within the Slashdot community, but why? Making the unauthorized distribution of copyrighted music via IRC easier via the replacement of Napster? How does that help anyone? For a few years, we've had access to so-called "Free" music, but at what cost? Restrictions on our technologies, a movie industry that has treated the GNU/Linux communities as hostile by default, and more and more draconian laws. Meanwhile the artists we want to fund haven't been helped in the slightest by these kinds of technologies. We want to encourage the creation of new art, but Napster and its successors such as Kazaa have done an extraordinary amount of damage to the ability of artists to do so.
In some ways, there's no such thing as the Slashdot "community". My guess is the majority of people reading this will be nodding their heads in agreement, but there'll be the usual gaggle of "Fight the man, why should artists be paid anyway, true art comes from love and money shouldn't exist" types itching to respond. The point though is that the system that created the vast bulk of the music we see distributed on networks like Kazaa is the system most harmed by it. And we can expect "compromises" that really don't meet us half way like Sony's becoming the norm if we're unprepared to do something about it, kicking out the rogues and piracy advocates from our midst. We need to disassociate ourselves with copyright infringement. We need to devise ways of keeping unauthorized music away from the P2P networks, and replace that content with new, original work, devising new and innovative ways to fund it.
One thing to be aware of is that this isn't a total victory, the principle really hasn't come to a vote and that's what's prevented a ban. It's not as if you can safely argue "A consensus was reached, and that's that a ban would have been a good idea."
And that's reasonable, because such a ban would be both positive and negative. Positive in that a local government would have been able to use taxpayers money to compete with perfectly adequate private services, but bad in that the fact is, with dumbass port blocking and ridiculous terms and conditions, and a lack of coverage in many areas, the private sector needs its backside kicked. We still lack "IP common carriers".
What was needed was not a ban but regulation. Specific circumstances in which a local authority would be allowed to enter the market. Restrictions on what it could do, with privacy only eroded to the minimum required to comply with State and Federal law) and with subsidies capped at a per-body maximum needed to be drawn up, with serious penalties for breaches. A specific minimum standard for private IP providers to supply at reasonable prices above which a local network would be deemed unnecessary, which should include an unfiltered, non-NAT, IP routing service set at a price level equal to its other popular consumer broadband offerings.
By doing this, the legislature would have let municipal broadband be a threat only to telecommunication companies unwilling to play fair and provide access. It would also have ensured that municipalities would always have an escape route against poor entrenched infrastructure companies.
This has been promoted too much in "black and white" terms (I refer to the use of that imagery to highlight absurdly contrasting views, as in "You're either for me or against me" type rationale, not the popular nick name for monochrome television), and this, perhaps, endangers the chance of the right approach being made. People often believe that compromise is a sign of weakness, and it is, but you shouldn't always mistake solutions that form a middle ground and answer everyone's concerns for compromise. Often they're the right answer nobody wants to hear.
A dupe would be if the same story were duplicated, rather than topic.
For example, if both stories had said that Sirius planned to use podcasting to put their content onto iPods, then that would be a dup.
Likewise, if both stories had said that future iPods would have Sirius radio receivers, then that too would have been a dup.
However, a story that says that Sirius is going to build their receivers (their "technology") into iPods is not a dupe of a story that says that Sirius is planning to create big-ass MP3 files you'll download from the iTunes Music Store and load into your iPod.
How you and 37 million other Slashdot readers missed that is anyone's guess.
I forgot one thing: ultimately they should use a modern streaming technology such as Windows Media, or even better the cross-platform Real Media - the la[tt]er may have its critics, but it is, at the end of the day, available to more people. Sorry, I intended to put the above paragraph in the parent comment, please read the parent comment as if it had that paragraph in it.
That might be a problem. If they show it at, say, 7pm in Britain, that'll mean it'll be 2pm the Eastern part of the US, or even earlier further West. Most Americans will be either at work, or if the weekend, at the stores or in church of having their lunches at that time.
Alternatively, if they were to show it at 9pm Eastern, in Britain it'd be two in the morning.
Ultimately I don't think there's an easy solution for this. Perhaps the best would be if the TV show is initially made avaiable for pay-per-view DRM'd streaming download a few days before they're due to show it on either side of "the pond". Then the diehards will get it immediately, and the only people who'll watch it on TV would be those who think that spending hours downloading a low quality rip is pointless anyway.
The main reason for a small box is so it can be put on show, thus style and design need to be seen to make a judgement.
I don't think so! The main reason for a small box is so it can be hidden or unobtrusive. I want a computer in the living room. My girlfriend agrees but is very unhappy about it currently being a large beige box next to the coffee table. A Mac Mini would solve that problem nicely, and is on our list of "things to get eventually."
Personally, I think the Mac Mini is ugly. It's a mis-shapen grey-metal box. My silver Nintendo Gamecube is more attractive. But that's not the point. The point is it can be hidden. Hopefully it, and Intel's announcement, constitutes a move away from the insistance that all computers should be large and in your way.
That, presumably, would be why the earliest draft of the script was entitled "Adventures of the Starkiller, part I."
The reason "Star Wars", as it was, came across as a standalone movie was because it had to be. That's the way Lucas had to make it, because anything less would have been rejected by Hollywood. Despite this, the film has a significant unseen backstory, and doesn't wrap everything up at the end - Darth Vader escapes the exploding Death Star, and the Emperor clearly is nowhere near the action. Not to mention the fact that the film appears to be attempting to start a love story (actually two potential stories, Luke and Leia, Han and Leia) that never actually goes anywhere.
It's relatively easy to see that Lucas intended this to be the middle, not the start and finish, of a longer story. One can argue about how detailed the over all universe was when Lucas put together the original, but I have serious problems with the "Oh no, Lucas only realised it could be expanded upon when he saw how much money the first had made" theory. It may be justified cynicism, but the actually film you're talking about doesn't match up with the accusation.
From memory, the browser originally had "Phoenix" in the name. Nonetheless, even now, calling Mozilla Firefox "Phoenix" would be a trademark violation as Phoenix is a registered trademark, and the company is involved in making webbrowsers. If you doubt this, try calling your next distribution of Linus's kernel "Microsoft" and see where that gets you!
Surprisingly enough, the article's correct. Phoenix was trying to sell a BIOS that contained a webbrowser at the time, and asked the Mozilla people to rename the browser that became Firefox. Here's the current status of that particular product.
Let's lose the emotive language. The movie industry isn't a monopoly, and nor is it a cartel. It's an industry, and like any industry, there are things that will help virtually every participant, and things that will hurt virtually every participant. Groups like the MPAA, not to mention the BSA, RIAA, etc, all represent members of their industries and generally propose things that will help those members.
Sometimes those wishes coincide with what the rest of us want. the MPAA and RIAA, for example, have gone to the legislators to undermine proposed controls on freedom of speech. Very often though, the interests do not coincide with ours, or are so obscure that industry members are likely to believe in things that hurt "us", as geeks.
The fundamental issue for the content producers such as those represented by the MPAA is that they need money. They need it to fund the movies they create which is their primary business. Anything that threatens any aspect of this, directly (such as creating competition between previously separate sources of revenue) or indirectly (such as discouraging artists by allowing third parties to trample upon their moral rights and freedoms), is something they're concerned about. They do not want broadcast TV to be such an adequate substitute for cinema and DVD (or DVD2) viewing, that nobody bothers to do pay for either of the latter systems of movie viewing. They know that there's a sizable portion of people who "wait until it comes on TV" with virtually every movie, and they certainly don't want that to increase. They especially do not want people who'd otherwise buy a DVD waiting for the movie to appear on TV and then recording it at glorious DVD-quality, able, with the technology now in every modern PC, to remove ads.
It's pretty much difficult to be in the business of making movies and not want to keep your options open. Movie makers want to be able to sell cinema seats, DVDs, and TV showings. They really don't want to feel like one minor source of revenue (as TV showings generally are) would heavily hit a major source of revenue (such as DVD showings.) This isn't because they don't have competition, it's because that's the industry they are. I can start an independent studio tomorrow and my interests would suddenly converge with those of MGM and Universal before I'd even contacted by bank manager.
This is something those who propose conspiracies and bad-faith dealing behind every curtain need to recognize. You can scream "cartel!" and "Monopoly!" as much as you like, but if it's not true or, at any rate, that's not the reason, then all you're doing is yelling insults without addressing the fundamental problem.
Innnovation means coming up with the idea in the first place, not copying it or enhacing it.
That's incorrect actually. If it were true, there'd be no point in the word, given "invention" already means that. Innovation means introducing a technology for the first time. If only a small group of people have used a technology, then it's perfectly fair for someone who manages to get the rest of the world on board to claim to have innovated.
The Web was not an innovation of open source.
I never said it was. The "Open Source" movement started in the mid-nineties. Nonetheless, the web was introduced to the world using Free Software: most people encountered it first via Mosaic, and the initial release was WorldWideWeb.app. Both of these were Free Software packages.
Ethernet was a product of Xerox; ARPANet (which became the Internet) and TCP/IP were military projects funder by tax dollars; the WWW was funded by Tim Berner's Lee employer CERN labs, Apache was based on HTTP Daemon from NCSA labs, etc, etc.
Your point being what exactly? Xerox's role is irrelevent, they invented Ethernet which wasn't on my list of Free Software innovations. The first TCP/IP stack was written by the University of Berkeley and released as Free Software. That's a fact. The WWW was written by Tim Berners Lee, and released as Free Software. That's a fact. NCSA released various tools including httpd, released as Free Software. That's a fact. In all these cases, the institutions that funded them were not proprietary software vendors. They were developing Free Software and saw Free Software as critical to the success of the technologies they developed.
Most of modern computing, including networking, bitmapped displays, mice, windows, object orientated programming (SmallTalk), all originated at Xerox.
Object Orientated programming originated with SNOBOL, not SmallTalk. The model used by SmallTalk has been overwhelmingly rejected by programmers who prefer to use C++ and its ancestors. As for the rest, that doesn't constitute "most of modern computing" by a long shot.
What Stallman's FSF...
Stallman's FSF is responsible for a small part of Free Software development. He's created the infrastructure to make it possible however, and that, by itself, is innovative. He's also behind some remarkably influential technologies developed as part of EMACS.
Now, there HAS been some innovation by the open source community, but for the most part open source is about people reinventing the wheel (OS, compiler, desktop, office suite, etc, etc) and giving it away for free.
Most of proprietary software development is the same way. Your point is what, exactly? Are you are aware just how many word processors, editors, desktop publishers, spreadhseets, OSs, compilers, etc, the proprietary software industry has created?
Like McVoy, you choose to exaggerate the contribution of the proprietary software industry and pretend that the Free Software community hasn't created anything. From the World Wide Web to mainstream Object-based programming, that couldn't be more false. Like McVoy, you're an ignorant idiot.
I would go the other direction. Right now, we know that we can provide individuals with extra-sensory input via electrodes on the tongue, and read unused parts of the brain in order to provide people with additional methods to transmit commands. (source, other source. It should be perfectly obvious to anyone who's understood the implications of both that virtual reality is a reality today, if someone would just get on with it.
What the guy needs to do for his "High-Tech Meeting/Conference Room" is create it virtually. What we need is a bank of computers in every location where people necessary for the conferences may reside, together with some form of sensory deprivation tanks coupled with devices to clamp onto the tongue and MRI scanners. Then the computers simply generate images into the minds of conference participants and allow them to interact with the virtual world via the MRI-read brain signals.
Not only does this fit the bill and is increadibly high tech, but it also allows for much more spectacular PowerPoint presentations. Imagine 3D imagery, wipes that literally cause the ground to shake, and screens bigger than the eye (were it an eye, rather than electrodes on the tongue) could ever see.
It also has other positive side effects. If the CEO has bad BO, for example, this will never be suffered by anyone in the meetings. Participants will be able to pick avatars that constitute idealised versions of themselves - salesmen wearing the perfect suits coupled with the most trustworthy faces, project leaders with an air of friendly authority that would motivate almost anyone, and computer programmers dressed as "Gandalf" from Lord of the Rings.
If anyone misread what I wrote, I apologise. But I did say "for Unix" when refering to vi being the first visual editor, and I did say visual editors were developed as far back as the sixties (obviously predating Unix.)
The reason why Lucas keeps doing prequels is because he keeps creating back stories.
Darth and Luke and Obi-Wan came from somewhere, and the nuts and bolts were essentially in place once he made The Empire Strikes Back.
(Spoilers ahead)
Now we have Anakin apparently being the product of a Sith Lord playing God, and Palpatine being being that Sith's apprentice. So we have another back story. And that'll lead onto another back story, etc, etc.
In some ways, by design, Lucas's world is easier to go backwards in than forwards. Clouded the future is. Or to put it another way, the future can always go in all sorts of directions. The past, however, always has to have created something that lead to you being where you are today. This is all rather appropriate for a series where one of the most famous characters speaks "backwards" (well, not quite, but close enough.)
The first web servers were free. It's the proprietary software industry that copied the Free Software community here.
Your PHP response is silly BTW. PHP isn't a copy of anything, and it's exactly what you'd expect people to do: "I want something that works like this".
Re:So, you programmers ready to give up your jobs?
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Well, 90% of us will continue to work for our employers, churning out software that our employers have no intention of selling.
Surprised? Check the job listings. Take a good look at the companies that employ the majority of programmers, and try to work out what software Vodafone, Verizon, GM, Ford, Nokia, General Mills, Philip Morris and Kraft Foods, First National Bank, Progressive Insurance, Capital One, Samsung, Comcast, Accenture, Visa, (continued on page 94) actually sells.
The vast majority of programmers do not work in the software industry. Our programs are used by millions of people, and are never found on the shelves of Circuit City or Office Depot. And we'll be needed whoever writes the software before us, because no matter whether it comes from Microsoft or the Apache Foundation, it'll never do exactly what our employers need.
Netscape started as a rewrite of Mosaic, an academic project, and I don't believe there were any proprietary browsers at the time Mosaic was written and released, as Lynx (which wasn't initially a Web Browser but soon became one) and WorldWideWeb.app were, I believe, Free Software.
So apart from the World Wide Web, the socket-based TCP/IP model, increasingly powerful systems to transfer large files from one place to another, email, discussion networks both in "instant messaging" form (IRC) and store-and-forward conferencing (Usenet), the bulk of the underlying technologies used to build today's applications (C++ style object-based programming, plus Perl; CVS), etc, what has the Free Software movement ever given to us?;-)
I think it's one thing to argue that we've had a lot of innovation from both sides. It's another, as McVoy does, to pretend the only source of innovation has been proprietary software and the Free Software community hasn't done a thing except clone existing technologies. People scratch itches. Sometimes they do so in a commercial "we can sell this" environment. And sometimes, well, they just scratch those itches because they want to.
McVoy, of course, based his SCM system on a model defined by his friend Linus Torvalds. There's little reason why such a system couldn't have been Free Software and developed by Free Software People, Linus chose, however, to work with Larry. It's interesting Linus didn't make any high profile complaints about the Free Software communities lack of options until after he adopted Bitkeeper.
If McVoy believes what he's said, he's a utterly ignorant idiot.
Re:That's just silly. And here's why.
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The Word Processor didn't really start as anything specific. Visual editors were developed throughout the late sixties and early seventies, and were usually combined with some sort of preprocessor such as ROFF (you know, as in troff, nroff, etc.)
Some popular Word Processors that were packaged as such essentially started off as the combination, usually packaged into one executable for space reasons. WordStar would be a good example. Essentially a visual editor, WordStar allowed you to embed formatting commands in your document, that, when the time came to print, would be interpreted in the same fashion as the "dual program" system of word processing had.
Really, nobody "invented" the word processor. It just kind of came about. Pretty much every development that happened was obvious. Programmers sought to move from line editors to visual editors. They sought to have the visual editors show the effects of the formatting and integrate the packages to a certain extent. They sought to have the visual editors show a good approximation of what would be printed. When GUIs came about, the notion a word processor should display a document exactly as it would be printed became obvious and programmers sought to implement that.
As such, saying word processing was the product of "open source" (or "Free Software", or whatever) or "proprietary" methodologies isn't really right. Both contributed to an overall model that we use today. The chances are that word processing would look as it does today regardless of whether Microsoft had invented the EULA, or Stallman the GPL.
Two interesting anecdotes about WP btw: Unix was originally justified internally at AT&T as a powerful word processor, rather than an operating system. That's not to say Thompson et al started out with the intention of writing such a thing. The first visual editor for Unix was "vi", a Free Software project from Berkeley.
The other is that one of the major players in the early development of visual editors was a certain Richard Stallman.
Not exactly. If they're being honest, and trying to keep to the letter and spirit of the GPL, they're not going to sue as long as future versions of the kernel do not infringe on their patents in ways it doesn't already today.
That's difficult to word (bet the above looks pretty convoluted as it is), so let me put it this way. Suppose the kernel contains a routine to implement a GSM protocol that happens to infringe on Nokia's patents. Nokia are saying "That's fine", and are obliged to treat it as fine as long as the future implementations that infringe upon that patent are based directly on that code.
Now suppose someone unrelated adds code, without modifying the above, to support, I don't know, an iDEN protocol, and it happens that this entirely new code also infringes upon Nokia's patents. In this case, Nokia probably has the right to sue, and is saying they may do so depending on whether they feel it's worth their while or not.
The way around this is probably for the iDEN code submitters to base their code on the Nokia's submitted GSM code.
In this respect, I suspect Nokia's statement is a little disingenious given that if they weren't to engage in this policy, they would be violating the GPL by providing Linux with the handheld in the first place. But it certainly shouldn't be read as saying that they may sue those who redistribute or use a future version of the Linux kernel that contains no new code revelent to Nokia's patents.
I can't take it seriously anyway. To start with, I'm not on any of the lists. Nor are any of my Slashdot or LiveJournal friends. I mean, if it doesn't even have The_Mad_Poster, or cyranoVR, or even pudge for crying out loud, what value is it?
Slashdot Mirror
If A's address is hidden from C, how can C send IP packets to A, performing the "middleman" role?
Generally speaking, you can easily, right now, but probably not for much longer, spit out IP packets with addresses that are incorrect. Hence it makes sense that this is a system for hiding A's address from B. However, somewhere along the line, A's address has to be known by someone otherwise the packets will never be routed to A.
Now B's address is quite probably hidable from C. The transaction would go something like:
A to C: Would you proxy packets to me? Please, pretty please?
C: Sure kid, knock yourself out.
A (without a correct sender IP address) to B: You don't know who I am, but would you mind sending file "Star Wars III: Revenge of the Lucas, The Good Version" to C.
B: Sure, here's the file.
B (without a correct sender IP address) to C: You don't know who I am, I understand you have someone who wants this file. Here it is.
C to A: Here's the file you requested.
In the above, C's address isn't hidden. A's is, from B, but not from C. B's is, but A knows about it. For A to be the eventual destination of the file, someone must know A's address, otherwise the packets will never get there.
As for the FBI intercepting this traffic, they really have few options. It's unlikely what A's doing is illegal, and there's no smoking gun with respect to B. If they are C, they cannot find out B's address so will not know who's copying their content. They know A's address, but A isn't copying anything.
Incidentally, before anyone comments, I'm commenting on this as a technical solution. I do not endorse this as a way to facilitate copyright infringement, something I'm generally opposed to. A quick look at my posting history will confirm this.
Indeed, I'm actually relatively unhappy with what's being proposed as, unfortunately, the primary reason it appears to have been developed has been to facilitate copyright infringement. Right now, as I said in a previous post:
The best way to destroy a technology and ensure it cannot be used for good is to make its primary purpose bad and/or easy to legally attack. The kind of thing being proposed here today will make ever more draconian legislative attacks on Internet users a reality. We need a new approach.This is not to suggest that the situation today isn't far, far, worse than what the music industry had to contend with during the eighties (largely people bulk buying tapes and distributing music to friends that way.) We've gone from a situation where one CD might end up being "used" by four or five people to a situation where one CD might end up being "used" by thousands to millions of people.
In many ways, it's surprising the recording industry is being so restrained.
In some ways, it's a positive thing. If it's a "same old prevention" system coupled with a "way out" that allows users to make a limited number of copies, then that shows Sony "gets it" insofar as they recognize people do want to make backups, quite legitimately, and shouldn't be restricted from doing what they can to protect their own works. But ultimately, we need be[tt]er solutions. These types of thing will eventually turn into effective efforts that lock out alternative platforms and technologies, undermining innovation and making it much harder to do the kinds of things that lead to the invention of the MP3 player, MP3 CD, home theatre system, etc.
In that respect, part of the effort has to come from the grassroots music listening community. Those who have repeatedly proffered technologies that have put the music industry on the defensive in this way need to be denounced, not revered. People like Shawn Fanning are treated as heroes within the Slashdot community, but why? Making the unauthorized distribution of copyrighted music via IRC easier via the replacement of Napster? How does that help anyone? For a few years, we've had access to so-called "Free" music, but at what cost? Restrictions on our technologies, a movie industry that has treated the GNU/Linux communities as hostile by default, and more and more draconian laws. Meanwhile the artists we want to fund haven't been helped in the slightest by these kinds of technologies. We want to encourage the creation of new art, but Napster and its successors such as Kazaa have done an extraordinary amount of damage to the ability of artists to do so.
In some ways, there's no such thing as the Slashdot "community". My guess is the majority of people reading this will be nodding their heads in agreement, but there'll be the usual gaggle of "Fight the man, why should artists be paid anyway, true art comes from love and money shouldn't exist" types itching to respond. The point though is that the system that created the vast bulk of the music we see distributed on networks like Kazaa is the system most harmed by it. And we can expect "compromises" that really don't meet us half way like Sony's becoming the norm if we're unprepared to do something about it, kicking out the rogues and piracy advocates from our midst. We need to disassociate ourselves with copyright infringement. We need to devise ways of keeping unauthorized music away from the P2P networks, and replace that content with new, original work, devising new and innovative ways to fund it.
And that's reasonable, because such a ban would be both positive and negative. Positive in that a local government would have been able to use taxpayers money to compete with perfectly adequate private services, but bad in that the fact is, with dumbass port blocking and ridiculous terms and conditions, and a lack of coverage in many areas, the private sector needs its backside kicked. We still lack "IP common carriers".
What was needed was not a ban but regulation. Specific circumstances in which a local authority would be allowed to enter the market. Restrictions on what it could do, with privacy only eroded to the minimum required to comply with State and Federal law) and with subsidies capped at a per-body maximum needed to be drawn up, with serious penalties for breaches. A specific minimum standard for private IP providers to supply at reasonable prices above which a local network would be deemed unnecessary, which should include an unfiltered, non-NAT, IP routing service set at a price level equal to its other popular consumer broadband offerings.
By doing this, the legislature would have let municipal broadband be a threat only to telecommunication companies unwilling to play fair and provide access. It would also have ensured that municipalities would always have an escape route against poor entrenched infrastructure companies.
This has been promoted too much in "black and white" terms (I refer to the use of that imagery to highlight absurdly contrasting views, as in "You're either for me or against me" type rationale, not the popular nick name for monochrome television), and this, perhaps, endangers the chance of the right approach being made. People often believe that compromise is a sign of weakness, and it is, but you shouldn't always mistake solutions that form a middle ground and answer everyone's concerns for compromise. Often they're the right answer nobody wants to hear.
That's not even close to what this article is about.
For example, if both stories had said that Sirius planned to use podcasting to put their content onto iPods, then that would be a dup.
Likewise, if both stories had said that future iPods would have Sirius radio receivers, then that too would have been a dup.
However, a story that says that Sirius is going to build their receivers (their "technology") into iPods is not a dupe of a story that says that Sirius is planning to create big-ass MP3 files you'll download from the iTunes Music Store and load into your iPod.
How you and 37 million other Slashdot readers missed that is anyone's guess.
I forgot one thing: ultimately they should use a modern streaming technology such as Windows Media, or even better the cross-platform Real Media - the la[tt]er may have its critics, but it is, at the end of the day, available to more people. Sorry, I intended to put the above paragraph in the parent comment, please read the parent comment as if it had that paragraph in it.
Alternatively, if they were to show it at 9pm Eastern, in Britain it'd be two in the morning.
Ultimately I don't think there's an easy solution for this. Perhaps the best would be if the TV show is initially made avaiable for pay-per-view DRM'd streaming download a few days before they're due to show it on either side of "the pond". Then the diehards will get it immediately, and the only people who'll watch it on TV would be those who think that spending hours downloading a low quality rip is pointless anyway.
But there's also some amazing, non-experimental, stuff being done here and here. They've been doing "Wireless power" for many decades...
Personally, I think the Mac Mini is ugly. It's a mis-shapen grey-metal box. My silver Nintendo Gamecube is more attractive. But that's not the point. The point is it can be hidden. Hopefully it, and Intel's announcement, constitutes a move away from the insistance that all computers should be large and in your way.
The reason "Star Wars", as it was, came across as a standalone movie was because it had to be. That's the way Lucas had to make it, because anything less would have been rejected by Hollywood. Despite this, the film has a significant unseen backstory, and doesn't wrap everything up at the end - Darth Vader escapes the exploding Death Star, and the Emperor clearly is nowhere near the action. Not to mention the fact that the film appears to be attempting to start a love story (actually two potential stories, Luke and Leia, Han and Leia) that never actually goes anywhere.
It's relatively easy to see that Lucas intended this to be the middle, not the start and finish, of a longer story. One can argue about how detailed the over all universe was when Lucas put together the original, but I have serious problems with the "Oh no, Lucas only realised it could be expanded upon when he saw how much money the first had made" theory. It may be justified cynicism, but the actually film you're talking about doesn't match up with the accusation.
From memory, the browser originally had "Phoenix" in the name. Nonetheless, even now, calling Mozilla Firefox "Phoenix" would be a trademark violation as Phoenix is a registered trademark, and the company is involved in making webbrowsers. If you doubt this, try calling your next distribution of Linus's kernel "Microsoft" and see where that gets you!
Surprisingly enough, the article's correct. Phoenix was trying to sell a BIOS that contained a webbrowser at the time, and asked the Mozilla people to rename the browser that became Firefox. Here's the current status of that particular product.
Sometimes those wishes coincide with what the rest of us want. the MPAA and RIAA, for example, have gone to the legislators to undermine proposed controls on freedom of speech. Very often though, the interests do not coincide with ours, or are so obscure that industry members are likely to believe in things that hurt "us", as geeks.
The fundamental issue for the content producers such as those represented by the MPAA is that they need money. They need it to fund the movies they create which is their primary business. Anything that threatens any aspect of this, directly (such as creating competition between previously separate sources of revenue) or indirectly (such as discouraging artists by allowing third parties to trample upon their moral rights and freedoms), is something they're concerned about. They do not want broadcast TV to be such an adequate substitute for cinema and DVD (or DVD2) viewing, that nobody bothers to do pay for either of the latter systems of movie viewing. They know that there's a sizable portion of people who "wait until it comes on TV" with virtually every movie, and they certainly don't want that to increase. They especially do not want people who'd otherwise buy a DVD waiting for the movie to appear on TV and then recording it at glorious DVD-quality, able, with the technology now in every modern PC, to remove ads.
It's pretty much difficult to be in the business of making movies and not want to keep your options open. Movie makers want to be able to sell cinema seats, DVDs, and TV showings. They really don't want to feel like one minor source of revenue (as TV showings generally are) would heavily hit a major source of revenue (such as DVD showings.) This isn't because they don't have competition, it's because that's the industry they are. I can start an independent studio tomorrow and my interests would suddenly converge with those of MGM and Universal before I'd even contacted by bank manager.
This is something those who propose conspiracies and bad-faith dealing behind every curtain need to recognize. You can scream "cartel!" and "Monopoly!" as much as you like, but if it's not true or, at any rate, that's not the reason, then all you're doing is yelling insults without addressing the fundamental problem.
Like McVoy, you choose to exaggerate the contribution of the proprietary software industry and pretend that the Free Software community hasn't created anything. From the World Wide Web to mainstream Object-based programming, that couldn't be more false. Like McVoy, you're an ignorant idiot.
What the guy needs to do for his "High-Tech Meeting/Conference Room" is create it virtually. What we need is a bank of computers in every location where people necessary for the conferences may reside, together with some form of sensory deprivation tanks coupled with devices to clamp onto the tongue and MRI scanners. Then the computers simply generate images into the minds of conference participants and allow them to interact with the virtual world via the MRI-read brain signals.
Not only does this fit the bill and is increadibly high tech, but it also allows for much more spectacular PowerPoint presentations. Imagine 3D imagery, wipes that literally cause the ground to shake, and screens bigger than the eye (were it an eye, rather than electrodes on the tongue) could ever see.
It also has other positive side effects. If the CEO has bad BO, for example, this will never be suffered by anyone in the meetings. Participants will be able to pick avatars that constitute idealised versions of themselves - salesmen wearing the perfect suits coupled with the most trustworthy faces, project leaders with an air of friendly authority that would motivate almost anyone, and computer programmers dressed as "Gandalf" from Lord of the Rings.
Someone HAS to do this.
Now.
If anyone misread what I wrote, I apologise. But I did say "for Unix" when refering to vi being the first visual editor, and I did say visual editors were developed as far back as the sixties (obviously predating Unix.)
Darth and Luke and Obi-Wan came from somewhere, and the nuts and bolts were essentially in place once he made The Empire Strikes Back.
(Spoilers ahead)
Now we have Anakin apparently being the product of a Sith Lord playing God, and Palpatine being being that Sith's apprentice. So we have another back story. And that'll lead onto another back story, etc, etc.
In some ways, by design, Lucas's world is easier to go backwards in than forwards. Clouded the future is. Or to put it another way, the future can always go in all sorts of directions. The past, however, always has to have created something that lead to you being where you are today. This is all rather appropriate for a series where one of the most famous characters speaks "backwards" (well, not quite, but close enough.)
Your PHP response is silly BTW. PHP isn't a copy of anything, and it's exactly what you'd expect people to do: "I want something that works like this".
Surprised? Check the job listings. Take a good look at the companies that employ the majority of programmers, and try to work out what software Vodafone, Verizon, GM, Ford, Nokia, General Mills, Philip Morris and Kraft Foods, First National Bank, Progressive Insurance, Capital One, Samsung, Comcast, Accenture, Visa, (continued on page 94) actually sells.
The vast majority of programmers do not work in the software industry. Our programs are used by millions of people, and are never found on the shelves of Circuit City or Office Depot. And we'll be needed whoever writes the software before us, because no matter whether it comes from Microsoft or the Apache Foundation, it'll never do exactly what our employers need.
So apart from the World Wide Web, the socket-based TCP/IP model, increasingly powerful systems to transfer large files from one place to another, email, discussion networks both in "instant messaging" form (IRC) and store-and-forward conferencing (Usenet), the bulk of the underlying technologies used to build today's applications (C++ style object-based programming, plus Perl; CVS), etc, what has the Free Software movement ever given to us? ;-)
I think it's one thing to argue that we've had a lot of innovation from both sides. It's another, as McVoy does, to pretend the only source of innovation has been proprietary software and the Free Software community hasn't done a thing except clone existing technologies. People scratch itches. Sometimes they do so in a commercial "we can sell this" environment. And sometimes, well, they just scratch those itches because they want to.
McVoy, of course, based his SCM system on a model defined by his friend Linus Torvalds. There's little reason why such a system couldn't have been Free Software and developed by Free Software People, Linus chose, however, to work with Larry. It's interesting Linus didn't make any high profile complaints about the Free Software communities lack of options until after he adopted Bitkeeper.
If McVoy believes what he's said, he's a utterly ignorant idiot.
Some popular Word Processors that were packaged as such essentially started off as the combination, usually packaged into one executable for space reasons. WordStar would be a good example. Essentially a visual editor, WordStar allowed you to embed formatting commands in your document, that, when the time came to print, would be interpreted in the same fashion as the "dual program" system of word processing had.
Really, nobody "invented" the word processor. It just kind of came about. Pretty much every development that happened was obvious. Programmers sought to move from line editors to visual editors. They sought to have the visual editors show the effects of the formatting and integrate the packages to a certain extent. They sought to have the visual editors show a good approximation of what would be printed. When GUIs came about, the notion a word processor should display a document exactly as it would be printed became obvious and programmers sought to implement that.
As such, saying word processing was the product of "open source" (or "Free Software", or whatever) or "proprietary" methodologies isn't really right. Both contributed to an overall model that we use today. The chances are that word processing would look as it does today regardless of whether Microsoft had invented the EULA, or Stallman the GPL.
Two interesting anecdotes about WP btw: Unix was originally justified internally at AT&T as a powerful word processor, rather than an operating system. That's not to say Thompson et al started out with the intention of writing such a thing. The first visual editor for Unix was "vi", a Free Software project from Berkeley.
The other is that one of the major players in the early development of visual editors was a certain Richard Stallman.
That's difficult to word (bet the above looks pretty convoluted as it is), so let me put it this way. Suppose the kernel contains a routine to implement a GSM protocol that happens to infringe on Nokia's patents. Nokia are saying "That's fine", and are obliged to treat it as fine as long as the future implementations that infringe upon that patent are based directly on that code.
Now suppose someone unrelated adds code, without modifying the above, to support, I don't know, an iDEN protocol, and it happens that this entirely new code also infringes upon Nokia's patents. In this case, Nokia probably has the right to sue, and is saying they may do so depending on whether they feel it's worth their while or not.
The way around this is probably for the iDEN code submitters to base their code on the Nokia's submitted GSM code.
In this respect, I suspect Nokia's statement is a little disingenious given that if they weren't to engage in this policy, they would be violating the GPL by providing Linux with the handheld in the first place. But it certainly shouldn't be read as saying that they may sue those who redistribute or use a future version of the Linux kernel that contains no new code revelent to Nokia's patents.
I can't take it seriously anyway. To start with, I'm not on any of the lists. Nor are any of my Slashdot or LiveJournal friends. I mean, if it doesn't even have The_Mad_Poster, or cyranoVR, or even pudge for crying out loud, what value is it?
This device is not actually a phone, so I wouldn't worry about it. It can connect to a phone via BlueTooth, but that's about it.