Ok, obviously the universities aren't required to police the online activities of their students, but how the hell do you justify pirating music (not the only napster use, i know that, now hush) as "academic freedom" and "access to information"?
You don't. But in any truly free nation, you are innocent of any crime until you have been proven guilty. Simple use of Napster does not necessarily mean music piracy, so Metallica has no right to ban Napster, thereby punishing innocent people right along with the ones who are actually committing crimes. The US legal system was founded on the now somewhat cliched saying that it is better to let ten guilty people go free than to punish a single innocent person, and for Metallica to think they have a right to supercede that system is nothing more than hubris. They certainly have a right to their money if they want it, but that right is outweighed by the right of innocent people to not be punished for things they did not do. And that's the only fair way to do it, because while Metallica can always make more money, you can't "un-punish" an innocent person when the damage is done.
Coming from a school where most of the classes require some (if not all) work to be done on or based on the web, knowing I'm paying $30k and I'm not gonna be able to do my homework because a bunch of slackers who won't be there next semester because they're d/ling music truly pisses me off.
This is a legitimate concern, and a good question. Unfortunately, I don't know the answer to it. I do know that the students who are downloading music are paying just as much for the network access as you are; keep that in mind. Also note that you're paying no small amount, judging from your post (you wouldn't happen to be at RIT, would you?) At that rate, your college should be able to afford the necessary bandwidth upgrades. It should also be possible to establish some sort of bandwidth-limitation/traffic-shaping system, such that a portion of the network would be guaranteed reserved for student work use, with harsh penalties for using that portion of the network for any other purpose. ----------
...oh, great. Even though most Slashdotters are smarter than this, people are probably going to start panicking, if only for a brief time.
The Earth is in no danger whatsoever of being sucked into this black hole. The reason: the black hold has a mass of roughly 26 million suns. That's a finite mass, even if it is of near-infinite density. Expand that into a star with that mass. This star has the same mass as the black hole, and therefore has the same gravitational pull as the black hole. No more, no less.
So then why don't we get sucked into the star? Because gravitational pull is inversely proportional to the square of the distance, not from the surface of an object, but the center of gravity of the object. When the star collapses into the black hole, its center of gravity stays in about the same spot.
What this means is that, once you're further away from the black hole than the radius of the original star, the black hold has no more gravitational pull on you than the original star did. It's when you go inside that radius that the hole's pull gets really strong. So, if our sun were to collapse into a black hole at this very instant (which it can't do, but let's say it does for the sake of argument), we would be in no more danger of falling into the black hole than we were of falling into the sun. We'd be screwed anyway, due to the loss of solar energy and the X-ray bombardment, but we wouldn't fall into the black hole.
This is important, because studies have shown that the solar system is moving further away from the center of the Milky Way, not closer to it. Therefore, the Earth is perfectly safe from this new "threat."
Just finally managed to get OSX PB installed (turns out the installer doesn't like processor upgrades yet... go figure; worked just fine in DP4). On the whole, I love this thing. The best things...
1) Aqua. I didn't like it at first, but it grows on a person. The Graphite variant was a welcome addition (distracting the eye during graphics work is a legitimate concern), though it would be a good idea to make the three window widgets of varying brightness in this mode (they actually are in standard Aqua already, but the colors are carefully chosen so you don't notice the difference unless you can't see the color). Could be more configurable though.
2) The Dock. Again, I hated this at first, and I still have my reservations, but it's growing on me. I do wish there were an option to make it vertical and glue it to the right edge of the screen, but there are already Dock replacements that can do that.
3) Directory names that make sense. Ditto for the new directory structure. Like Unix, but without the just plain wierdness of some of the names (/bin,/usr, and tmp aren't too bad, but after two years in Linux I still haven't figured out what/etc stands for).
4) Not only the command-line, but the fact that the Terminal is only an option. I use it, but most users never need it, and by including it standard you would cause some developers to create OSX-specific apps that require it (this is still done on Win32, despite M$'s attempts to try and hide it). I'll get blasted for this one, I know, but command-lines aren't the Mac way of life, and to ever require an average user to work with one would be disastrous. But at the same time, totally denying anyone access to it would be bad for the Unix subsystem. This is a good compromise: it's there, but only if you want it to be. (NOTE: it's still standard in the betas, which makes sense, but if I remember right is being relegatd to an option in the final release).
5) The System Preferences app (analogous to the old Control Panel) is very nice; the layouts are much better than their old OS9 counterparts. A few things still need to make it in (like the monitor calibration assistant, the ability to configure multiple network interfaces, and more screensavers) but then again, this is beta, so it's expected that a few things will be missing.
6) Two-button mouse support, native. Don't believe me? Try using a multibutton mouse in any Cocoa app. Doesn't work in Carbon or Classic yet, though (see the next list).
7) Application Services. Too bad there aren't more of them yet (though I'm sure they will be), but if NeXTStep and even OSX Server are any indication, this has the potential for some seriously cool stuff.
8) QuickTime previewing for media files in Column view (or, for that matter, Column view itself). I hope this will be extensible to other types of files where appropriate.
9) What list like this wouldn't be complete without mention of the multitasking and memory management? I do worry that programmers will use this as a safety net and not debug their programs properly, as has happened at least to some degree on every OS I've ever seen that has these features (the MacOS system may crash more often, but in my experience apps crash less frequently there than in any other OS I've worked with... except those that were direct MacOS ports, or that have ports to MacOS. And yes, studies have been run confirming this). However, these features are still important
X) Finally, gotta love the X. Though I do wish you'd stop with the "ten" stuff like this was the same MacOS we've been using for sixteen years. It isn't, so just make a clean break and pronounce it like a letter of the alphabet; give the name real differentiation. Besides which, it sounds much cooler. A minor gripe, perhaps, but one which should be considered at least for marketing purposes. Or is there a trademark out there that prevents the use of the x pronunciation? And yes, I apologize for the cheesiness in using X as a list number, though it does make the columns line up more nicely.
There's some room for improvement, though (good thing this is a beta, so there's still lots of time to improve)...
1) More security. At the absolute least, use password shadowing (is there any legitimate excuse not to do this anymore?) Preferably also better GUI control of daemons/"services" and processes, though this isn't as big a deal (I'll write the frontend myself if I have to).
2) Hardware compatibility. Nuff said. Particularly in the areas of SCSI and serial support; keep in mind that the G3Beige still had these ports, and it's supposed to be supported. At least support all its standard equipment.
3) Fix the themeing. Or take it out. I don't care which myself; if they leave it in, great, if they take it out then someone else will write software to do it (knock knock... Mr. Landweber? Hello?). But the current half-done implementation doesn't cut it (the NextStep theme hack, for example, only works for some windows).
4) Drive icons on the Desktop. Where they belong (on Macs anyway).
5) Internally, mount drives in a/mnt directory, Linux-like. There's actually a very good reason for this one. Currently, drives are mounted at the root level. Thr major directories are mounted there too. Now, if the user has named a drive such that the name conflicts with one of those directories, the system gets confused and it seems as though neither is shown (according to reports I've already seen out there). This is a particular problem since "Applications" is a common name for a second hard drive or partition (and suddenly, the apps stop working).
6) Fix Carbon to allow it the same access to GUI functions as Cocoa (or at least similar access). Top priorities: get them on the same wavelength Appearance-wise, get two-button mouse working at least in Carbon (if not Classic also), and no resizing over the Dock (unless autohide is turned on). Try to do this for the other OS functions if feasible, but the interface at least is imperative.
7) Finish QuickTime 5.0. Again, nuff said.
8) For crying out loud, don't give the default user root acces! Let them create an Administrator password in the install, then have them create a separate user account for themselves (again, all still in the installer). And if they try to login as root, let them do it, but warn them of the dangers.
9) Drop shadows on the windows are really disorienting. Give the user the option to turn 'em off (or at least shrink the shadow), or better still only put them on the active window (where they do make some sense). Ditto for the fading windows and genie minimization (for the record I'd turn off the genie effect, shrink the window dropshadow and put it on the active window only, and leave the fading menu as is).
X) Stop requiring reboots for things like network config changes. This is Mach, and thanks to Mach's architecture this shouldn't be necessary. Even hardware drivers can load at runtime. Make it so the OS never needs to reboot (except when the machine itself must be powered down and a few other extraordinary circumstances, lke upgrading the Mach kernel itself) and you'll have a massive selling point, because none of the major desktop operating systems out there today can make that claim. ----------
It's too late to save Bungie, I fear. My guess: inside of two years, they'll be Windows-only. Halo will never come out for anything but Windows (or, if it comes out for MacOS, it'll be a crippled port not unlike what Sierra tried to do to Half-Life). Or if it comes out for anything but Windows and Mac (and remember that even a Mac port is highly unlikely), the inevitable sequel will not.
But this is more proof of why MS must be stopped. It buys companies with big cross-platform plans, and then turns them into platform-tied shadows of their former selves, more or less solely to try and keep control of the industry. Think about it: these guys even fought TCP/IP for years, because they couldn't control it (even MacOS, the supposed "lord of all things closed and proprietary," can file-share over TCP/IP out of the box; only Windows can't, at least not with the standard mechanisms they provide). ----------
By "helper apps" do you mean applications to handle protocols the browser isn't aware of, or applications to post-process downloaded files?
The former has been in for quite some time. It's the latter, though, that's far more desperately needed. Is this the one you're saying has landed? ----------
People have been taking the ads out of the Mac version for quite some time, no code required.
The oscilloscope is, admittedly, a new thing. But I could do that before with a WinAmp plugin (if I used WinAmp, anyway, which I don't).
But geez; first Gnutella and now this. Is this guy trying to make his bosses mad?
Incidentally, AIM has no paid ads; the only ads there advertise AOL's own stuff. So he hasn't damaged revenues at all, since the ads don't pay for anything AOL does. ----------
The article does bring up a valid point; can the government really be trusted to protect privacy?
The problem is, I'm not so certain we have any other choice. Anyone who thinks businesses will self-regulate privacy concerns is truly naive. Ther can sell the information (thereby increasing profits) or use it to target their advertising (thereby reducing marketing costs). And in the end, that's all any business wants to do. It's the nature of the beast; sometimes it's good and sometimes it's bad. In this case, I'd say, it's pretty damn bad. Sure, businesses shouldn't be hindered unduly in their relentless pursuit of The Almighty Buck, but the rights of the people to determine their own levels of privacy far outweigh the rights of a corporation to target their ads.
Given that businesses won't regulate privacy, and citizens don't, as a rule, have the clout to make them do it, I'm not so sure we have any choice but to bring the government into it. I can't say it's a particularly desirable choice, but if we want to keep our privacy I doubt there's any alternative. Even if you can keep your information to yourself for now, that will change eventually if nothing is done about it.
What I'd like to see come out of this, though, is a privacy amendment to the Constitution; quite possibly the only thing the Framers seem to have overlooked. Personally, I would word it something like this:
1) The governments of the States, and of the United States, recognize the rights of all people to due privacy, including but not limited to that of one's person, one's property, and one's personal information.
2) Neither Congress nor the States shall make any law permitting the violation of the rights defined in the above paragraph, except when the person in question has given explicit and informed consent, or when the proper warrants have been obtained in a court of Law.
3) In particular, no person shall be denied any business or governmental transaction on account of failure to provide one's own personal information, unless there be a bona fide necessity for such information to be given, else such transaction is not possible.
How's it sound? Opinions? Suggestions for refinement? ----------
I would strongly suggest that the fork into the Mozilla and PR3 branches not occur just yet, particularly if PR3 is supposed to be a feature-freeze for NS6 (and judging from that illustration, it appears that's the case). There's still a lot to be done on Windows/Linux, and the Mac version is lagging far behind those, particularly in terms of security (no PSM, despite it being promised "soon" for many months now) and helper apps (which, last I checked, didn't even work with InternetConfig yet, though it was certainly planned).
Besides, I liked the old Milestone system. Granted, some of the Milestones might need to be changed to reflect new developments, but it gave a clear look at where one is, how much progress has been made, and above all it wasn't a version number so there was no mistaking it for anything but a developmental release (this was Netscape's biggest problem with the preview releases; people keep seeming to think these should be fully finished browsers). ----------
The reason RSA released their algorithm into the public domain (where it belonged from the very beginning) was that the patent would have expired a week later anyway. Once it expired, RSA would have been forced to release the algorithm into the public domain; this is the way all patents work (you're granted a legal monopoly on whatever is patented for a limited amount of time, up to seventeen years if you keep renewing the patent. In exchange for that monopoly, you must release the item being patented into the public domain once the patent expires).
Also, just because an algorithm is public doesn't mean it is not secure. In fact, all known and trusted algorithms are publicly well-known (many are also patented, so they can't actually be used without a license). This is done for precisely the same reason software is Open-Sourced: peer review. You want people to try and crack the algorithm, because only if people try their hardest and still can't break it is your algorithm really secure.
Also, as for RSA being cracked, while you are technically correct there's the fact that the crack only works on keys up to a certain, relatively small, length. Make your keys nice and long (1024 bits or more, if I remember right; keep in mind that's not even 0.2K) and the crack is useless.
So no, RSA's releasing of the algorithm is no indication whatsoever that it's not secure enough. ----------
Apple did release the source to the BSD parts of OSX. It's called Darwin. Everything that Apple used that was Open-Source is still Open-Source, albeit under a different license.
Apple didn't have to do that, of course. They could have kept the source to themselves (If I remember right, NeXTStep did this; the only thing the community got back from them was GCC's Onjective-C compiler, and even that came only after a rather little-known court battle). Perhaps that's why Apple is Open-Sourcing Darwin; Steve hasn't forgotten his last tangle with the OSS community and doesn't want to risk another one.
Speaking of compilers, have Apple's modifications to GCC gotten back into the main or devel trees yet? I know they were going to contribute back their changes, and given Apple's history with MrC I would imagine this could help towards a truly kickass compiler on PPC. ----------
Moral relativism? Me? Sorry if I find that completely hilarious; you've lost a degree of your anonymity by proving quite conclusively that you're nobody I know. No one who knows me would ever call me a moral relativist.
Then again, you should have been able to see that from what I wrote. Note that I said "all ideas have a fundamental right to exist." How do you get less relative than "all"? Even the opposite, "no," only ties it for non-relativism.
By the way, notice I only said "to exist." You don't have to agree with them, or even like them. Hell, you can hate ideas if you want to; there's ideas I could be said to hate. What you can't do is attempt to destroy them or silence them. There's a very good reason for that; as soon as you silence even one single voice, you put every voice in jeopardy. Including your own. Think about that for a moment; what if someone were to say moral absolutism should be banned? I doubt you'd be pleased. What, then, makes you think the banning of moral relativism would be any different? ----------
To me, censorship is evil. End of story. Hmm, thinking about my comment about the bibles, if my kids wanted to read them, I wouldn't stop them, so maybe I'm not being such a hypocrit.
Frankly, I agree about censorship being evil, by and large. But I do recognize the fact that there is some material out there that some kids, even many kids in some cases, aren't mature enough to handle. It then becomes a parent's duty to ward off things like that until the kid is mature enough to handle it reasonably.
Parents don't necessarily have a duty to control what their kids see, only a right. It only becomes a duty when the kid genuinely couldn't handle the information in question.
This does put a duty on a parent to watch the kid and try to determine what sorts of information the kid could or could not handle; you seem to have done this. You don't think your kids are mature enough to handle the Bible, so you hide it from them. Probably for the best, actually; your viewpoints on Christianity aside that's not a children's book (take a spin through the books of Judges, Leviticus, Song of Solomon... heck, most of the Old Testament... and you'll see what I mean). Even the famous stories told to children are watered-down versions. It does lead me to an honest question: have you read it yourself? Seems to me as though someone who's anti-Christian ought to at least know about the religion they don't like, and no better way than by looking into what's generally considered the definitive book on the subject:) ----------
Speech is nothing more than what the public desires it to be...
In other words, only popular viewpoints are valid? The very principle the US was founded on was that while the majority may rule, the minority is protected from being squashed by them.
...and I think most people would agree that child pornography has no right to be classed in the same league as the works of Mozart, Van Gogh or Shakespeare.
Your argument is rather weak, unfortunately, because you can't even classify Mozart, Van Gogh, and Shakespeare in the same league. They worked in entirely different media, and it's impossible to make fair comparisons across media. And for the record, even if it were possible to make fair comparisons across media, I wouldn't class kiddie porn in the same league. But just because I happen to think something sucks doesn't mean it shouldn't exist. Just because a million people think something sucks doesn't mean it shouldn't exist either.
And if the public doesn't want it, then they have a right to not have it.
Right you are. Every person has an inherent right to not download anything they don't want to download. Implicit in the right to speak, after all, is the right of others to hear you as they wish, or to ignore you as they wish.
However, in no way does the right to free speech imply the right to silence another person, or to restrict what another may hear (again, the sole exception being parents, and even then only as concerns their own children). ----------
Things like instructions for making drugs, race hate literature and pornography are not "speech", and should not benefit from the protections built into Freenet.
Oh, yes, it is. All speech is speech. Even if you don't like it. I don't like the stuff you mentioned either, but I acknowledge its fundamental right to exist. Freenet is not a tool for bookburners.
So what I want to know is - is it possible to track this kind of rubbish and remove it, along with users who upload/download it?
No. You cannot track the users; that's a very large part of the whole point of Freenet. However, remember the old "ignore it and it'll go away" bit? Because of Freenet's architecture, this is actually true. If no one downloads it, it will eventually be deleted to make room for things people do want to see.
Keeping it free of this crap will mean that Freenet will be a much cleaner place than the web, and it will also attract less attention from governments looking for their next target.
Define "clean." Free of things you don't want to see? Who gave you, or anyone else, the authority to determine what a person may see (parents excepted solely in the case of their own children), except for that person him/herself? No one did, because you have no right to do that. Freenet, it seems to me, is not about giving people the right to see what they wish; it's about taking away the ability to censor.
OK, so Palm wants to charge for upgrades. Fair enough.
Now, could someone run down a list of differences between 3.3 and 3.5, for those of us who would like to determine if it's actually worth what they're charging? If it's not worth it, I'll stick with 3.3, thank you very much.
Honestly, I don't like this. PalmOS upgrades have always been free in the past; to delay upgrades for several months and then start charging for them with no warning whatsoever is questionable at best. Further, this isn't about R&D costs; Palm and Palm-related products are so popular they had to have recouped those costs ages ago from the devices they sell that run it (not to mention royalties from other companies who make devices that run the OS; I'll bet they don't have to pay nearly as much per unit).
But, as I said, fair enough that they charge $20 for an upgrade. Provided, of course, that the upgrade's actually worth $20. I'm not yet ruling out that it might be; unlike certain companies based in Redmond that change a couple lines of code and use that to try and justify exorbitant prices for their "upgrades," Palm might actually have a product worth selling. We'll have to wait and see. ----------
OK, so they accused a student of illegally distributing copyrighted material. Fair enough. Did they have proof? Did they have proof that those downloaders were not withing fair-use rights (meaning, of course, that they had already purchased the material being download, and keep in mind that they are also innocent until proven guilty)? Or, failing that, did they have proof that this guy hadn't purchased the materials he was making available? Or, failing even that, did they have proof that he was intentionallymaking these available, as opposed to simply having lots of stuff on his machine, which was then 0wn3d by some l33t Skr1pt k1dd13 who set up a server without this guy even knowing (as I understand, it was a Windows box after all...)
If they could prove any of this, then I have no problem with what they did. In fact, I applaud them if they had proof of wrongdoing; this is how such cases should be handled. Punish the guilty ones, rather than just everyone.
If, on the other hand, they had no proof, and simply sent a baseless accusation, then this is nothing more than presumption of guilt, and I can't support that. It's unconstiutional, and even if it weren't it would still trample the rights of innocent people, now in danger of being arrested just because some fat-cat record execs think you might be stealing from them. ----------
Unless I'm mistaken, that was a calculated move on 2600's part; they wanted to fight in higher courts than the one in which they were originally sued.
Of course, in the end it would take the SUpreme Court to shut down that travesty once and for all. But even the battles we lose will end up in our favor when that time comes, because we can use them to show the RIAA/MPAA/DVD-CCA/etc. for what they truly are. ----------
The reason: it prevents all copying, assuming that all copying is for criminal purposes. This is not true; there are plenty of legal reasons for copying, several of which (such as time-shifting, the most popular legitimate reason) have been explicitly defined as legal; "traditional rights" are not the only defense.
Therefore, this regulation assumes that a consumer copying a program is guilty of a criminal act until proven innocent, when in fact there is very reasonable doubt (how do you know the consumer isn't copying for legal reasons; chances are that's precisely the case!) That's indisputably unconstitutional, having been added to the Constitution before even the Bill of Rights was added.
Incidentally, this also means that the provision in DMCA about banning devices that can conceivably be used in piracy is also unconstitutional (forget fair use; it's about presumption of guilt!) ----------
It would have been really helpful if the poster of this article had actually said what piece of software Sun was distributing. For those who haven't read the article, it seems to be a pieve of software that converts Linux driver binaries to Solaris/x86 ones (note that this only seems to work for drivers). The software itself is, I believe, proprietary (but does not use any GPL'd code itself).
This isn't a GPL breach, in letter or in spirit. The author of the article is correct: it is the responsibility of driver porters to ensure that their drivers don't violate licenses, not Sun's. In the case of GPL'd drivers, they do this by providing the sources, which they must do for the Linux drivers. Since the Sun toolkit seems to be little more than a recompiler (less than that, actually; more like a relinker) it hasn't actually modified the source any more than a compiler does.
Maybe I'm wrong about the software's nature; I'd appreciate corrections if that is the case. But it looks like a lot of people are blowing this out of proportion. Sun is not violating the GPL. It has created software which could, theoretically, be used as an aid in GPL violation, but isn't intended for that purpose (rather like Napster and DeCSS can be used in violating more restrictive, and some might say unethical, licenses but are not intended for that purpose).
I'll admit, this looks a bit fishy. But I support Napster and DeCSS; because of that I can't cry out against this driver converter without being a hypocrite. ----------
There's only one problem with this: it still allows for lazy parents to shirk their responsibility by simply not granting permission at all. This is a Bad Thing, particularly where schools are concerned (what if a school has a course which requires Internet use but a slacking parent has forbidden access to their kids?).
I'd word it more like this:
Minors may use the Internet only with the permission of an adult supervisor. The supervisor granting permission assumes complete and total responsibility for exposing the minor to any Internet content viewed by the minor, during the time which the minor is actually accessing the Internet. In particular, the Internet Service Provider which provides access does not assume any responsibility for content viewed by the minor, unless it also assumes the role of supervisor or explicitly claims this responsibility for itself.
This allows a slacker parent's authority to be overriden if necessary (but the one doing the overriding assumes responsibility), and still disclaims an ISP's responsibility for the actions of users it cannot feasibly control.
...and I meant it. It's been way too long since I used C or C++ for very much (a shame, that; I like C a lot but haven't had the chance to use it for what I'm working on at the moment). ----------
I can't believe that so many governments could be bought out by corporations. Like it or not, computer code is a written work, not a device. The only "device" involved in the execution of software is the computer itself, which reads the instructions embodied by computer software and takes actions accordingly.
Written works are certainly protectable by copyright, and this is a Good Thing. A person's work should be protected. But copyrights, patents, and trademarks are meant to be mutually exclusive (you can't patent something that you could instead copyright, nor copyright something that should instead be trademarked, etc), and for a good reason. To claim patents on written works is to claim ownership of thought itself (not a specific thought, mind you, but ideas themselves); this can never be allowed.
How to prove software is a written work? How does this strike you:
"Mary had a little lamb."
This is obviously a written work. Well out of copyright in this specific instance, but that's irrelevant; all we're looking for is written work (and preferably a short one, as we're going to be doing a lot with it). Were I to use the whole rhyme, and were it an original work, it could be copyrighted.
María tenía un cordero pequeño.
The same sentence, translated into Spanish (my Spanish is, sadly, somewhat rusty, so forgive me if I got something wrong). Still obviously a written work; it's well established that a translation of a written work is still a written work.
program MaryLamb(output);
type
lamb: integer;
var
Mary: array[1..10] of lamb;
begin
Mary[1]:= 1;
end.
The same thing, translated into Pascal (as with Spanish, my Pascal is very rusty, so I'd appreciate any corrections). 1 is certainly a "little" value relative to the set or integers, or "lambs" as I'm calling them here, so we still communicate that Mary had a little lamb. It's been established that source code is a written work. Translation, therefore, still has not violated that, and source code as itself should, as a written, copyrightable work, not be patentable. But let's take this a little further...
/* MaryLamb.c */
#define LAMB int
int main() {
LAMB *Mary;
Mary = new LAMB;
*Mary = 1;
return 0;
}
A very rough translation of the MaryLamb program to C (and once again, my C is rusty). Translation from language to language doesn't make this a non-written work, does it?
"Zmel umq m yvggyr ymzo."
The English sentence again, but now it's ROT13'd. A simple one-to-one mapping of characters onto other characters; in other words, a cipher. However, it has been established that putting a written work into a cipher like this still does not affect its status as a written work.
"Blue green red yellow orange."
Same sentence, but I've mapped whole words now instead of characters. I've encoded it. But again, I haven't affected its status as a written work. I could get really crazy and map it to, say, Japanese katakana, but I'm not good with katakana and I would be willing to bet that the browsers of most Slashdotters wouldn't be able to display it anyway. But this is another type of encoding, where I've mapped parts of words (the syllables) rather than the whole words. And I still haven't affected the status.
Now, let's go back to the C-language version. Suppose I were to translate that into assembly (substitute your favorite architecture's ASM here; I'm not about to start flamewars by picking one in particular). Still human-readable, still the same message. And still not in dispute over whether or not it's a written work.
But now, let's run that through an assembler. What does this do?
In simple terms, it maps the individual instructions in ASM to their machine-language equivalents. Nothing but a re-encoding (I'll deal with linkers momentarily). This is still human-readable, though relatively few people except chip designers ever take the required study to do it (reading machine code is hard though by no means impossible). In other words, simple translation and encoding. We still have a written work, unless you're going to apply a double-standard.
Now, a program is more than the object code alone; other things are added to it to put it into an executable format (this is why linkers are necessary). But this is all still human-readable, if you take the time to learn it. In other words, by the definitions set earlier in this post, a program, in source or object form, is still provably a written work, and written works have been legally defined as unpatentable.
There are other ways to prove that software cannot be legally patented, such as proving the fact that all software is, at heart, a mathematical equation (these are already defined as unpatentable). I've just taken a more unusual route, and one which negates the argument that programmers' works need to be protected by still allowing for that protection, but only for the actual work (by means of copyright).
Comments? Corrections for any of the translations above? ----------
If your algorithm is good, it can't be exploited. Google's algorithm, which is quite well-known, seems to work quite well. For that matter, dmoz.org isn't doing badly.
What I'd suggest, though, is a compromise. The basic popularity rating is based off of number of links, like with Google. However, people would be able "rate" the effectiveness of a given site when it comes up in the list (nothing fancy, just "relevant," "neutral," or "irrelevant"; maybe a five-point scale rather than three-point). No individual vote could do very much to the system, but as votes add up trends start to show, and relevance ratings can be modified based on this. This would require a user registration system to keep track of moderations (though definitely not searches), but so long as registration isn't required to actually use the search engine itself I fail to see the problem in it. ----------
The $30 price tag on a piece of beta software is, to say the least, absolutely exorbitant. Enough, in fact, this this if going to deter a *lot* of people from buying and using it. Almost deterred me.
Then again, that's not entirely a Bad Thing. This is, after all, beta software. Get that through your head: beta beta beta. Most people, frankly, have no business running beta software which will do little but wreck their machines (or at the absolute least, put them at severe risk).
A lot of Slashdotters seem to forget that there are users and there are developers. All developers are users, but not all users are developers, and they shouldn't have to be. The line is a bit blurred in Linux and the BSD's(something I consider a weak point; just because you need to use a computer doesn't mean you should have to know how to program), but this isn't so in Windows, MacOS, or most other operating systems. But think about it: would you put production boxes on an unstable kernel release, no matter how solid a given kernel may be reputed to be, or would you keep with the stable cycle? Assuming that some critical feature hadn't surfaced in the development cycle that wasn't in stable yet, most admins would keep production boxes on the stable cycle, and they'd be right to do so.
To the guy whose school is running OSX: what is the IT staff smoking? Not only is the OS not ready for that sort of use by a long shot, but you're not even supposed to be able to get it legitimately for that (OSX Server notwithstanding, but that's a very different beast from OSX). Of course it sucks for business and academic purposes now; nobody, least of all Apple, ever claimed it was ready for that.
As for me, I think I'll pony up for the CD. The $30 price is certainly distasteful, but if it's being used to deter non-developers then I can see why Apple does it, and I can't blame them for it. Not this time.
The fact is, any proprietary data format can and will be hacked, regardless of whether or not TiVo moves to stop it. My guess: it'll be cracked inside of two years, probably more like one. Is that good? Not particularly. But the situation is what it is.
If you want to stop copying, you use encryption. Strong encryption, not the puny stuff MPAA used in DVD players (and even that wasn't as bad as most geeks make it out to be; the only reason CSS was hacked in the first place was because Xing left its key out in a non-secure spot, which the hackers then found). Hardware-based encryption chips can be made quite cheaply (and alleviate speed issues), and it doesn't take much to burn the key into a secured ROM. Even better, use battery-backed RAM so the contents of the chip are lost if it's removed (i.e. for analysis). The batteries on SRAM can last for ages (I have examples upwards of eight years old with the original batteries still in place and chugging away) so the chances of the batteries running out in an active unit are basically nil, and you provide some way of restoring the key at the factory just in case of an accident (if the user has to send the unit in, then it can also be checked for signs of tampering).
Once your encryption is in place, all you have to do is use standard MPEG-2, and you're all set to go (hardware MPEG-2 en/decoders aren't that expensive either). You have data that can be made as safe as you want it (to protect against media lawsuits), and you still save a ton in research and development (since you don't have to develop a proprietary format and the hardware/software to run it). ----------
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, obviously the universities aren't required to police the online activities of their students, but how the hell do you justify pirating music (not the only napster use, i know that, now hush) as "academic freedom" and "access to information"?
You don't. But in any truly free nation, you are innocent of any crime until you have been proven guilty. Simple use of Napster does not necessarily mean music piracy, so Metallica has no right to ban Napster, thereby punishing innocent people right along with the ones who are actually committing crimes. The US legal system was founded on the now somewhat cliched saying that it is better to let ten guilty people go free than to punish a single innocent person, and for Metallica to think they have a right to supercede that system is nothing more than hubris. They certainly have a right to their money if they want it, but that right is outweighed by the right of innocent people to not be punished for things they did not do. And that's the only fair way to do it, because while Metallica can always make more money, you can't "un-punish" an innocent person when the damage is done.
Coming from a school where most of the classes require some (if not all) work to be done on or based on the web, knowing I'm paying $30k and I'm not gonna be able to do my homework because a bunch of slackers who won't be there next semester because they're d/ling music truly pisses me off.
This is a legitimate concern, and a good question. Unfortunately, I don't know the answer to it. I do know that the students who are downloading music are paying just as much for the network access as you are; keep that in mind. Also note that you're paying no small amount, judging from your post (you wouldn't happen to be at RIT, would you?) At that rate, your college should be able to afford the necessary bandwidth upgrades. It should also be possible to establish some sort of bandwidth-limitation/traffic-shaping system, such that a portion of the network would be guaranteed reserved for student work use, with harsh penalties for using that portion of the network for any other purpose.
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...oh, great. Even though most Slashdotters are smarter than this, people are probably going to start panicking, if only for a brief time.
The Earth is in no danger whatsoever of being sucked into this black hole. The reason: the black hold has a mass of roughly 26 million suns. That's a finite mass, even if it is of near-infinite density. Expand that into a star with that mass. This star has the same mass as the black hole, and therefore has the same gravitational pull as the black hole. No more, no less.
So then why don't we get sucked into the star? Because gravitational pull is inversely proportional to the square of the distance, not from the surface of an object, but the center of gravity of the object. When the star collapses into the black hole, its center of gravity stays in about the same spot.
What this means is that, once you're further away from the black hole than the radius of the original star, the black hold has no more gravitational pull on you than the original star did. It's when you go inside that radius that the hole's pull gets really strong. So, if our sun were to collapse into a black hole at this very instant (which it can't do, but let's say it does for the sake of argument), we would be in no more danger of falling into the black hole than we were of falling into the sun. We'd be screwed anyway, due to the loss of solar energy and the X-ray bombardment, but we wouldn't fall into the black hole.
This is important, because studies have shown that the solar system is moving further away from the center of the Milky Way, not closer to it. Therefore, the Earth is perfectly safe from this new "threat."
IANAP - I Am Not A Physicist.
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Just finally managed to get OSX PB installed (turns out the installer doesn't like processor upgrades yet... go figure; worked just fine in DP4). On the whole, I love this thing. The best things...
/usr, and tmp aren't too bad, but after two years in Linux I still haven't figured out what /etc stands for).
/mnt directory, Linux-like. There's actually a very good reason for this one. Currently, drives are mounted at the root level. Thr major directories are mounted there too. Now, if the user has named a drive such that the name conflicts with one of those directories, the system gets confused and it seems as though neither is shown (according to reports I've already seen out there). This is a particular problem since "Applications" is a common name for a second hard drive or partition (and suddenly, the apps stop working).
1) Aqua. I didn't like it at first, but it grows on a person. The Graphite variant was a welcome addition (distracting the eye during graphics work is a legitimate concern), though it would be a good idea to make the three window widgets of varying brightness in this mode (they actually are in standard Aqua already, but the colors are carefully chosen so you don't notice the difference unless you can't see the color). Could be more configurable though.
2) The Dock. Again, I hated this at first, and I still have my reservations, but it's growing on me. I do wish there were an option to make it vertical and glue it to the right edge of the screen, but there are already Dock replacements that can do that.
3) Directory names that make sense. Ditto for the new directory structure. Like Unix, but without the just plain wierdness of some of the names (/bin,
4) Not only the command-line, but the fact that the Terminal is only an option. I use it, but most users never need it, and by including it standard you would cause some developers to create OSX-specific apps that require it (this is still done on Win32, despite M$'s attempts to try and hide it). I'll get blasted for this one, I know, but command-lines aren't the Mac way of life, and to ever require an average user to work with one would be disastrous. But at the same time, totally denying anyone access to it would be bad for the Unix subsystem. This is a good compromise: it's there, but only if you want it to be. (NOTE: it's still standard in the betas, which makes sense, but if I remember right is being relegatd to an option in the final release).
5) The System Preferences app (analogous to the old Control Panel) is very nice; the layouts are much better than their old OS9 counterparts. A few things still need to make it in (like the monitor calibration assistant, the ability to configure multiple network interfaces, and more screensavers) but then again, this is beta, so it's expected that a few things will be missing.
6) Two-button mouse support, native. Don't believe me? Try using a multibutton mouse in any Cocoa app. Doesn't work in Carbon or Classic yet, though (see the next list).
7) Application Services. Too bad there aren't more of them yet (though I'm sure they will be), but if NeXTStep and even OSX Server are any indication, this has the potential for some seriously cool stuff.
8) QuickTime previewing for media files in Column view (or, for that matter, Column view itself). I hope this will be extensible to other types of files where appropriate.
9) What list like this wouldn't be complete without mention of the multitasking and memory management? I do worry that programmers will use this as a safety net and not debug their programs properly, as has happened at least to some degree on every OS I've ever seen that has these features (the MacOS system may crash more often, but in my experience apps crash less frequently there than in any other OS I've worked with... except those that were direct MacOS ports, or that have ports to MacOS. And yes, studies have been run confirming this). However, these features are still important
X) Finally, gotta love the X. Though I do wish you'd stop with the "ten" stuff like this was the same MacOS we've been using for sixteen years. It isn't, so just make a clean break and pronounce it like a letter of the alphabet; give the name real differentiation. Besides which, it sounds much cooler. A minor gripe, perhaps, but one which should be considered at least for marketing purposes. Or is there a trademark out there that prevents the use of the x pronunciation? And yes, I apologize for the cheesiness in using X as a list number, though it does make the columns line up more nicely.
There's some room for improvement, though (good thing this is a beta, so there's still lots of time to improve)...
1) More security. At the absolute least, use password shadowing (is there any legitimate excuse not to do this anymore?) Preferably also better GUI control of daemons/"services" and processes, though this isn't as big a deal (I'll write the frontend myself if I have to).
2) Hardware compatibility. Nuff said. Particularly in the areas of SCSI and serial support; keep in mind that the G3Beige still had these ports, and it's supposed to be supported. At least support all its standard equipment.
3) Fix the themeing. Or take it out. I don't care which myself; if they leave it in, great, if they take it out then someone else will write software to do it (knock knock... Mr. Landweber? Hello?). But the current half-done implementation doesn't cut it (the NextStep theme hack, for example, only works for some windows).
4) Drive icons on the Desktop. Where they belong (on Macs anyway).
5) Internally, mount drives in a
6) Fix Carbon to allow it the same access to GUI functions as Cocoa (or at least similar access). Top priorities: get them on the same wavelength Appearance-wise, get two-button mouse working at least in Carbon (if not Classic also), and no resizing over the Dock (unless autohide is turned on). Try to do this for the other OS functions if feasible, but the interface at least is imperative.
7) Finish QuickTime 5.0. Again, nuff said.
8) For crying out loud, don't give the default user root acces! Let them create an Administrator password in the install, then have them create a separate user account for themselves (again, all still in the installer). And if they try to login as root, let them do it, but warn them of the dangers.
9) Drop shadows on the windows are really disorienting. Give the user the option to turn 'em off (or at least shrink the shadow), or better still only put them on the active window (where they do make some sense). Ditto for the fading windows and genie minimization (for the record I'd turn off the genie effect, shrink the window dropshadow and put it on the active window only, and leave the fading menu as is).
X) Stop requiring reboots for things like network config changes. This is Mach, and thanks to Mach's architecture this shouldn't be necessary. Even hardware drivers can load at runtime. Make it so the OS never needs to reboot (except when the machine itself must be powered down and a few other extraordinary circumstances, lke upgrading the Mach kernel itself) and you'll have a massive selling point, because none of the major desktop operating systems out there today can make that claim.
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It's too late to save Bungie, I fear. My guess: inside of two years, they'll be Windows-only. Halo will never come out for anything but Windows (or, if it comes out for MacOS, it'll be a crippled port not unlike what Sierra tried to do to Half-Life). Or if it comes out for anything but Windows and Mac (and remember that even a Mac port is highly unlikely), the inevitable sequel will not.
But this is more proof of why MS must be stopped. It buys companies with big cross-platform plans, and then turns them into platform-tied shadows of their former selves, more or less solely to try and keep control of the industry. Think about it: these guys even fought TCP/IP for years, because they couldn't control it (even MacOS, the supposed "lord of all things closed and proprietary," can file-share over TCP/IP out of the box; only Windows can't, at least not with the standard mechanisms they provide).
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By "helper apps" do you mean applications to handle protocols the browser isn't aware of, or applications to post-process downloaded files?
The former has been in for quite some time. It's the latter, though, that's far more desperately needed. Is this the one you're saying has landed?
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People have been taking the ads out of the Mac version for quite some time, no code required.
The oscilloscope is, admittedly, a new thing. But I could do that before with a WinAmp plugin (if I used WinAmp, anyway, which I don't).
But geez; first Gnutella and now this. Is this guy trying to make his bosses mad?
Incidentally, AIM has no paid ads; the only ads there advertise AOL's own stuff. So he hasn't damaged revenues at all, since the ads don't pay for anything AOL does.
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The problem is, I'm not so certain we have any other choice. Anyone who thinks businesses will self-regulate privacy concerns is truly naive. Ther can sell the information (thereby increasing profits) or use it to target their advertising (thereby reducing marketing costs). And in the end, that's all any business wants to do. It's the nature of the beast; sometimes it's good and sometimes it's bad. In this case, I'd say, it's pretty damn bad. Sure, businesses shouldn't be hindered unduly in their relentless pursuit of The Almighty Buck, but the rights of the people to determine their own levels of privacy far outweigh the rights of a corporation to target their ads.
Given that businesses won't regulate privacy, and citizens don't, as a rule, have the clout to make them do it, I'm not so sure we have any choice but to bring the government into it. I can't say it's a particularly desirable choice, but if we want to keep our privacy I doubt there's any alternative. Even if you can keep your information to yourself for now, that will change eventually if nothing is done about it.
What I'd like to see come out of this, though, is a privacy amendment to the Constitution; quite possibly the only thing the Framers seem to have overlooked. Personally, I would word it something like this:
How's it sound? Opinions? Suggestions for refinement?
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I would strongly suggest that the fork into the Mozilla and PR3 branches not occur just yet, particularly if PR3 is supposed to be a feature-freeze for NS6 (and judging from that illustration, it appears that's the case). There's still a lot to be done on Windows/Linux, and the Mac version is lagging far behind those, particularly in terms of security (no PSM, despite it being promised "soon" for many months now) and helper apps (which, last I checked, didn't even work with InternetConfig yet, though it was certainly planned).
Besides, I liked the old Milestone system. Granted, some of the Milestones might need to be changed to reflect new developments, but it gave a clear look at where one is, how much progress has been made, and above all it wasn't a version number so there was no mistaking it for anything but a developmental release (this was Netscape's biggest problem with the preview releases; people keep seeming to think these should be fully finished browsers).
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I'm sorry, but this is completely clueless.
The reason RSA released their algorithm into the public domain (where it belonged from the very beginning) was that the patent would have expired a week later anyway. Once it expired, RSA would have been forced to release the algorithm into the public domain; this is the way all patents work (you're granted a legal monopoly on whatever is patented for a limited amount of time, up to seventeen years if you keep renewing the patent. In exchange for that monopoly, you must release the item being patented into the public domain once the patent expires).
Also, just because an algorithm is public doesn't mean it is not secure. In fact, all known and trusted algorithms are publicly well-known (many are also patented, so they can't actually be used without a license). This is done for precisely the same reason software is Open-Sourced: peer review. You want people to try and crack the algorithm, because only if people try their hardest and still can't break it is your algorithm really secure.
Also, as for RSA being cracked, while you are technically correct there's the fact that the crack only works on keys up to a certain, relatively small, length. Make your keys nice and long (1024 bits or more, if I remember right; keep in mind that's not even 0.2K) and the crack is useless.
So no, RSA's releasing of the algorithm is no indication whatsoever that it's not secure enough.
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Apple did release the source to the BSD parts of OSX. It's called Darwin. Everything that Apple used that was Open-Source is still Open-Source, albeit under a different license.
Apple didn't have to do that, of course. They could have kept the source to themselves (If I remember right, NeXTStep did this; the only thing the community got back from them was GCC's Onjective-C compiler, and even that came only after a rather little-known court battle). Perhaps that's why Apple is Open-Sourcing Darwin; Steve hasn't forgotten his last tangle with the OSS community and doesn't want to risk another one.
Speaking of compilers, have Apple's modifications to GCC gotten back into the main or devel trees yet? I know they were going to contribute back their changes, and given Apple's history with MrC I would imagine this could help towards a truly kickass compiler on PPC.
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Moral relativism? Me? Sorry if I find that completely hilarious; you've lost a degree of your anonymity by proving quite conclusively that you're nobody I know. No one who knows me would ever call me a moral relativist.
Then again, you should have been able to see that from what I wrote. Note that I said "all ideas have a fundamental right to exist." How do you get less relative than "all"? Even the opposite, "no," only ties it for non-relativism.
By the way, notice I only said "to exist." You don't have to agree with them, or even like them. Hell, you can hate ideas if you want to; there's ideas I could be said to hate. What you can't do is attempt to destroy them or silence them. There's a very good reason for that; as soon as you silence even one single voice, you put every voice in jeopardy. Including your own. Think about that for a moment; what if someone were to say moral absolutism should be banned? I doubt you'd be pleased. What, then, makes you think the banning of moral relativism would be any different?
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To me, censorship is evil. End of story. Hmm, thinking about my comment about the bibles, if my kids wanted to read them, I wouldn't stop them, so maybe I'm not being such a hypocrit.
:)
Frankly, I agree about censorship being evil, by and large. But I do recognize the fact that there is some material out there that some kids, even many kids in some cases, aren't mature enough to handle. It then becomes a parent's duty to ward off things like that until the kid is mature enough to handle it reasonably.
Parents don't necessarily have a duty to control what their kids see, only a right. It only becomes a duty when the kid genuinely couldn't handle the information in question.
This does put a duty on a parent to watch the kid and try to determine what sorts of information the kid could or could not handle; you seem to have done this. You don't think your kids are mature enough to handle the Bible, so you hide it from them. Probably for the best, actually; your viewpoints on Christianity aside that's not a children's book (take a spin through the books of Judges, Leviticus, Song of Solomon... heck, most of the Old Testament... and you'll see what I mean). Even the famous stories told to children are watered-down versions. It does lead me to an honest question: have you read it yourself? Seems to me as though someone who's anti-Christian ought to at least know about the religion they don't like, and no better way than by looking into what's generally considered the definitive book on the subject
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Speech is nothing more than what the public desires it to be...
...and I think most people would agree that child pornography has no right to be classed in the same league as the works of Mozart, Van Gogh or Shakespeare.
In other words, only popular viewpoints are valid? The very principle the US was founded on was that while the majority may rule, the minority is protected from being squashed by them.
Your argument is rather weak, unfortunately, because you can't even classify Mozart, Van Gogh, and Shakespeare in the same league. They worked in entirely different media, and it's impossible to make fair comparisons across media. And for the record, even if it were possible to make fair comparisons across media, I wouldn't class kiddie porn in the same league. But just because I happen to think something sucks doesn't mean it shouldn't exist. Just because a million people think something sucks doesn't mean it shouldn't exist either.
And if the public doesn't want it, then they have a right to not have it.
Right you are. Every person has an inherent right to not download anything they don't want to download. Implicit in the right to speak, after all, is the right of others to hear you as they wish, or to ignore you as they wish.
However, in no way does the right to free speech imply the right to silence another person, or to restrict what another may hear (again, the sole exception being parents, and even then only as concerns their own children).
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Things like instructions for making drugs, race hate literature and pornography are not "speech", and should not benefit from the protections built into Freenet.
Oh, yes, it is. All speech is speech. Even if you don't like it. I don't like the stuff you mentioned either, but I acknowledge its fundamental right to exist. Freenet is not a tool for bookburners.
So what I want to know is - is it possible to track this kind of rubbish and remove it, along with users who upload/download it?
No. You cannot track the users; that's a very large part of the whole point of Freenet. However, remember the old "ignore it and it'll go away" bit? Because of Freenet's architecture, this is actually true. If no one downloads it, it will eventually be deleted to make room for things people do want to see.
Keeping it free of this crap will mean that Freenet will be a much cleaner place than the web, and it will also attract less attention from governments looking for their next target.
Define "clean." Free of things you don't want to see? Who gave you, or anyone else, the authority to determine what a person may see (parents excepted solely in the case of their own children), except for that person him/herself? No one did, because you have no right to do that. Freenet, it seems to me, is not about giving people the right to see what they wish; it's about taking away the ability to censor.
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OK, so Palm wants to charge for upgrades. Fair enough.
Now, could someone run down a list of differences between 3.3 and 3.5, for those of us who would like to determine if it's actually worth what they're charging? If it's not worth it, I'll stick with 3.3, thank you very much.
Honestly, I don't like this. PalmOS upgrades have always been free in the past; to delay upgrades for several months and then start charging for them with no warning whatsoever is questionable at best. Further, this isn't about R&D costs; Palm and Palm-related products are so popular they had to have recouped those costs ages ago from the devices they sell that run it (not to mention royalties from other companies who make devices that run the OS; I'll bet they don't have to pay nearly as much per unit).
But, as I said, fair enough that they charge $20 for an upgrade. Provided, of course, that the upgrade's actually worth $20. I'm not yet ruling out that it might be; unlike certain companies based in Redmond that change a couple lines of code and use that to try and justify exorbitant prices for their "upgrades," Palm might actually have a product worth selling. We'll have to wait and see.
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OK, so they accused a student of illegally distributing copyrighted material. Fair enough. Did they have proof? Did they have proof that those downloaders were not withing fair-use rights (meaning, of course, that they had already purchased the material being download, and keep in mind that they are also innocent until proven guilty)? Or, failing that, did they have proof that this guy hadn't purchased the materials he was making available? Or, failing even that, did they have proof that he was intentionallymaking these available, as opposed to simply having lots of stuff on his machine, which was then 0wn3d by some l33t Skr1pt k1dd13 who set up a server without this guy even knowing (as I understand, it was a Windows box after all...)
If they could prove any of this, then I have no problem with what they did. In fact, I applaud them if they had proof of wrongdoing; this is how such cases should be handled. Punish the guilty ones, rather than just everyone.
If, on the other hand, they had no proof, and simply sent a baseless accusation, then this is nothing more than presumption of guilt, and I can't support that. It's unconstiutional, and even if it weren't it would still trample the rights of innocent people, now in danger of being arrested just because some fat-cat record execs think you might be stealing from them.
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Unless I'm mistaken, that was a calculated move on 2600's part; they wanted to fight in higher courts than the one in which they were originally sued.
Of course, in the end it would take the SUpreme Court to shut down that travesty once and for all. But even the battles we lose will end up in our favor when that time comes, because we can use them to show the RIAA/MPAA/DVD-CCA/etc. for what they truly are.
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...this one will be easier to fight.
The reason: it prevents all copying, assuming that all copying is for criminal purposes. This is not true; there are plenty of legal reasons for copying, several of which (such as time-shifting, the most popular legitimate reason) have been explicitly defined as legal; "traditional rights" are not the only defense.
Therefore, this regulation assumes that a consumer copying a program is guilty of a criminal act until proven innocent, when in fact there is very reasonable doubt (how do you know the consumer isn't copying for legal reasons; chances are that's precisely the case!) That's indisputably unconstitutional, having been added to the Constitution before even the Bill of Rights was added.
Incidentally, this also means that the provision in DMCA about banning devices that can conceivably be used in piracy is also unconstitutional (forget fair use; it's about presumption of guilt!)
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It would have been really helpful if the poster of this article had actually said what piece of software Sun was distributing. For those who haven't read the article, it seems to be a pieve of software that converts Linux driver binaries to Solaris/x86 ones (note that this only seems to work for drivers). The software itself is, I believe, proprietary (but does not use any GPL'd code itself).
This isn't a GPL breach, in letter or in spirit. The author of the article is correct: it is the responsibility of driver porters to ensure that their drivers don't violate licenses, not Sun's. In the case of GPL'd drivers, they do this by providing the sources, which they must do for the Linux drivers. Since the Sun toolkit seems to be little more than a recompiler (less than that, actually; more like a relinker) it hasn't actually modified the source any more than a compiler does.
Maybe I'm wrong about the software's nature; I'd appreciate corrections if that is the case. But it looks like a lot of people are blowing this out of proportion. Sun is not violating the GPL. It has created software which could, theoretically, be used as an aid in GPL violation, but isn't intended for that purpose (rather like Napster and DeCSS can be used in violating more restrictive, and some might say unethical, licenses but are not intended for that purpose).
I'll admit, this looks a bit fishy. But I support Napster and DeCSS; because of that I can't cry out against this driver converter without being a hypocrite.
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I'd word it more like this:
This allows a slacker parent's authority to be overriden if necessary (but the one doing the overriding assumes responsibility), and still disclaims an ISP's responsibility for the actions of users it cannot feasibly control.
Opinions?
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...and I meant it. It's been way too long since I used C or C++ for very much (a shame, that; I like C a lot but haven't had the chance to use it for what I'm working on at the moment).
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I can't believe that so many governments could be bought out by corporations. Like it or not, computer code is a written work, not a device. The only "device" involved in the execution of software is the computer itself, which reads the instructions embodied by computer software and takes actions accordingly.
:= 1;
/* MaryLamb.c */
Written works are certainly protectable by copyright, and this is a Good Thing. A person's work should be protected. But copyrights, patents, and trademarks are meant to be mutually exclusive (you can't patent something that you could instead copyright, nor copyright something that should instead be trademarked, etc), and for a good reason. To claim patents on written works is to claim ownership of thought itself (not a specific thought, mind you, but ideas themselves); this can never be allowed.
How to prove software is a written work? How does this strike you:
"Mary had a little lamb."
This is obviously a written work. Well out of copyright in this specific instance, but that's irrelevant; all we're looking for is written work (and preferably a short one, as we're going to be doing a lot with it). Were I to use the whole rhyme, and were it an original work, it could be copyrighted.
María tenía un cordero pequeño.
The same sentence, translated into Spanish (my Spanish is, sadly, somewhat rusty, so forgive me if I got something wrong). Still obviously a written work; it's well established that a translation of a written work is still a written work.
program MaryLamb(output);
type
lamb: integer;
var
Mary: array[1..10] of lamb;
begin
Mary[1]
end.
The same thing, translated into Pascal (as with Spanish, my Pascal is very rusty, so I'd appreciate any corrections). 1 is certainly a "little" value relative to the set or integers, or "lambs" as I'm calling them here, so we still communicate that Mary had a little lamb. It's been established that source code is a written work. Translation, therefore, still has not violated that, and source code as itself should, as a written, copyrightable work, not be patentable. But let's take this a little further...
#define LAMB int
int main() {
LAMB *Mary;
Mary = new LAMB;
*Mary = 1;
return 0;
}
A very rough translation of the MaryLamb program to C (and once again, my C is rusty). Translation from language to language doesn't make this a non-written work, does it?
"Zmel umq m yvggyr ymzo."
The English sentence again, but now it's ROT13'd. A simple one-to-one mapping of characters onto other characters; in other words, a cipher. However, it has been established that putting a written work into a cipher like this still does not affect its status as a written work.
"Blue green red yellow orange."
Same sentence, but I've mapped whole words now instead of characters. I've encoded it. But again, I haven't affected its status as a written work. I could get really crazy and map it to, say, Japanese katakana, but I'm not good with katakana and I would be willing to bet that the browsers of most Slashdotters wouldn't be able to display it anyway. But this is another type of encoding, where I've mapped parts of words (the syllables) rather than the whole words. And I still haven't affected the status.
Now, let's go back to the C-language version. Suppose I were to translate that into assembly (substitute your favorite architecture's ASM here; I'm not about to start flamewars by picking one in particular). Still human-readable, still the same message. And still not in dispute over whether or not it's a written work.
But now, let's run that through an assembler. What does this do?
In simple terms, it maps the individual instructions in ASM to their machine-language equivalents. Nothing but a re-encoding (I'll deal with linkers momentarily). This is still human-readable, though relatively few people except chip designers ever take the required study to do it (reading machine code is hard though by no means impossible). In other words, simple translation and encoding. We still have a written work, unless you're going to apply a double-standard.
Now, a program is more than the object code alone; other things are added to it to put it into an executable format (this is why linkers are necessary). But this is all still human-readable, if you take the time to learn it. In other words, by the definitions set earlier in this post, a program, in source or object form, is still provably a written work, and written works have been legally defined as unpatentable.
There are other ways to prove that software cannot be legally patented, such as proving the fact that all software is, at heart, a mathematical equation (these are already defined as unpatentable). I've just taken a more unusual route, and one which negates the argument that programmers' works need to be protected by still allowing for that protection, but only for the actual work (by means of copyright).
Comments? Corrections for any of the translations above?
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If your algorithm is good, it can't be exploited. Google's algorithm, which is quite well-known, seems to work quite well. For that matter, dmoz.org isn't doing badly.
What I'd suggest, though, is a compromise. The basic popularity rating is based off of number of links, like with Google. However, people would be able "rate" the effectiveness of a given site when it comes up in the list (nothing fancy, just "relevant," "neutral," or "irrelevant"; maybe a five-point scale rather than three-point). No individual vote could do very much to the system, but as votes add up trends start to show, and relevance ratings can be modified based on this. This would require a user registration system to keep track of moderations (though definitely not searches), but so long as registration isn't required to actually use the search engine itself I fail to see the problem in it.
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The $30 price tag on a piece of beta software is, to say the least, absolutely exorbitant. Enough, in fact, this this if going to deter a *lot* of people from buying and using it. Almost deterred me.
Then again, that's not entirely a Bad Thing. This is, after all, beta software. Get that through your head: beta beta beta . Most people, frankly, have no business running beta software which will do little but wreck their machines (or at the absolute least, put them at severe risk).
A lot of Slashdotters seem to forget that there are users and there are developers. All developers are users, but not all users are developers, and they shouldn't have to be. The line is a bit blurred in Linux and the BSD's(something I consider a weak point; just because you need to use a computer doesn't mean you should have to know how to program), but this isn't so in Windows, MacOS, or most other operating systems. But think about it: would you put production boxes on an unstable kernel release, no matter how solid a given kernel may be reputed to be, or would you keep with the stable cycle? Assuming that some critical feature hadn't surfaced in the development cycle that wasn't in stable yet, most admins would keep production boxes on the stable cycle, and they'd be right to do so.
To the guy whose school is running OSX: what is the IT staff smoking? Not only is the OS not ready for that sort of use by a long shot, but you're not even supposed to be able to get it legitimately for that (OSX Server notwithstanding, but that's a very different beast from OSX). Of course it sucks for business and academic purposes now; nobody, least of all Apple, ever claimed it was ready for that.
As for me, I think I'll pony up for the CD. The $30 price is certainly distasteful, but if it's being used to deter non-developers then I can see why Apple does it, and I can't blame them for it. Not this time.
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TiVo should know better than this.
The fact is, any proprietary data format can and will be hacked, regardless of whether or not TiVo moves to stop it. My guess: it'll be cracked inside of two years, probably more like one. Is that good? Not particularly. But the situation is what it is.
If you want to stop copying, you use encryption. Strong encryption, not the puny stuff MPAA used in DVD players (and even that wasn't as bad as most geeks make it out to be; the only reason CSS was hacked in the first place was because Xing left its key out in a non-secure spot, which the hackers then found). Hardware-based encryption chips can be made quite cheaply (and alleviate speed issues), and it doesn't take much to burn the key into a secured ROM. Even better, use battery-backed RAM so the contents of the chip are lost if it's removed (i.e. for analysis). The batteries on SRAM can last for ages (I have examples upwards of eight years old with the original batteries still in place and chugging away) so the chances of the batteries running out in an active unit are basically nil, and you provide some way of restoring the key at the factory just in case of an accident (if the user has to send the unit in, then it can also be checked for signs of tampering).
Once your encryption is in place, all you have to do is use standard MPEG-2, and you're all set to go (hardware MPEG-2 en/decoders aren't that expensive either). You have data that can be made as safe as you want it (to protect against media lawsuits), and you still save a ton in research and development (since you don't have to develop a proprietary format and the hardware/software to run it).
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