Last I looked, Sun's J2SE runtime is free to distribute with your software in binary form, provided due credit is given, it is unmodified, and any extensions are clearly identified as such. Mobile JVMs, enterprise features and such are of course another matter.
If you compile your own version, you have a program based on the PGP source code that understands the PGP file formats and protocols, but by trademark law you can't actually call it "PGP"-- the trademark name is reserved for the official distribution only. That's the same reason CheapBytes has to sell their copy of Red Hat's Linux distribution images under the name "Pink Tie Linux"-- so people know up front that it's not the official Red Hat distribution.
The transition of Zelda toward 3D started with Link's Awakening and Link to the Past, with the introduction of balconies, jumping, holes in the ground, and other such effects. Heck, Link's Awakening even had stompable Goombas! Ocarina of Time kept the essence of what made the Zelda games great-- interesting puzzles, tricky critters, item hunts, the occasional psychotic fit of sword antics, and an overall sense of a highly polished game-- while doing pretty well with the 3D aspect (and integrating it into the puzzles!), and having probably the least irritating camera logic of any 3D chase-cam view game I've played. Majora's Mask got most of it right, but pretty much blew it in terms of polish -- and the reuse of NPC skins (not just models) for entirely new characters was just painful -- but the new items and their effects were brilliant.
Actually, tucows == acronym("The Ultimate Collection Of Winsock Software"), but since it sounds like "two cows", they ran with it for marketing -- and the name stuck even after they expanded beyond Windows crudware.
The copyright assignment of GNU licensed s/w diminishes noone...
It can certainly make it difficult for you to maintain both a free and a proprietary version of the same basic software, as is done with Ghostscript. If you own the copyright, you can offer it under multiple license terms-- if you assign it to FSF, it's simply not in their interest to permit alternative non-free licensing of the software.
It's the effect of the Safe Harbour provision... the DMCA gives the asserting party the ability to shift the onus of proof from the plaintiff to the defendant through sheer economics.
Not exactly. The safe harbor provision is to protect hosting providers and ISPs, not site creators, and safe harbor based takedowns are not final. If the site creator replies to the takedown request with a letter claiming that the material on the site is in fact non-infringing, the hosting provider can reverse the takedown yet remain in safe harbor -- at that point it's up to the copyright holder to hash it out with the site creator, with the hosting provider absolved of liability. This is a good thing for the hosting provider, and doesn't really change the situation otherwise.
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. This is not legal advice. Your mileage may vary. Offer void where taxed, regulated or prohibited by law. Not for use in nuclear facilities. Side effects may include... never mind, you get the idea.
Unfortunately, at least semiconductor-based betavoltaic battery efficiencies are pretty low-- a tritium-silicon battery has an efficiency of about 7-8%, but can realistically be improved to ~10% or better. Nickel-63 throws those electrons a lot harder than tritium does, as well-- hard enough to damage semiconductors. Another technique is to use a conventional lithium-ion battery charged by a lower-powered betavoltaic battery, to work around the relatively low power density of betavoltaics (~1 milliwatt per cubic centimeter) while taking advantage of their high energy density (100 watt-hours per cubic centimeter-- wowza!).
Having read the briefing, this really is interesting, solidly built stuff. The whole packet is encrypted, including the source and destination MAC addresses, which defeats simple sniffer-based traffic analysis. The crypto key is copied onto the card by a separate cable, not through the host, and the host can't get a copy of the key from the card, so even if the host is hacked the proverbial beans aren't spilled. The form factor is annoying, but if you need this kind of security annoyances don't matter. Well worth the $2500 per card if you really need a bulletproof WLAN.
Dang it! Now you've made me hungry for Indian food.:-)
I wonder... could problems like that be addressed through localized versions of the tests, so that rather than being merely language translations, a Mexican test would compare tostada and burrito? Admittedly, that still doesn't account for regional subvariations within a country (beignets? hush puppies?) but maybe a third locale level (variant) could be used there. The down side to this is an explosion of localized versions...
If it has a crappy Pigeon^WPageRank, or doesn't use the keywords you were looking for, or is banished to the tenth results page by a data-poisoning attack, anything can be effectively obscure even given the might of Google.
the Smith & Wesson extraction method destroys the keys. If you need a copy of the clear data, and you're dealing with someone who maintains that "you can have my keys when you pry them from my cold, dead fingers", shooting them won't do you much good. You'll have to either use some sort of subterfuge to sneak off with a copy of the keys or break the keyholder's will with some form of duress.
Offshoring only gets one so far... while protected from US anti-trust regulations, it would also be effectively prohibited from doing business in the US.
As far as I know, larger companies usually detest pay-per-use services because if one thread goes runaway, or one employee messes up, or one metric spamload of DoS hits the server, they get a surprise spike in their bill, which plays merry hell with budgets. Pay-per-use telephone service and software licensing are equally disliked for the same reasons.
While I agree with your point about GDP being a poor measure of wealth, I simply can't resist picking some nits with your example.:-)
Who's offering the vase for sale? If it's not one (or a consortium) of those 100 people, you're sinking the money instead of moving it, and its velocity becomes irrelevant.
If the money is merely being passed in a circle, is real value being exchanged? Is an actual trade taking place? Juggling money in that manner may be a part of a tax dodge in some cases, but it doesn't contribute to the true velocity of money.
Even if the money stays within the community, since money is a relative measure of value, there has to be something else to measure it against-- another good, or more of the same good, or the same item going up for sale again later, or what have you. People will work this one out, though: there's always a derivatives market, and here's an extended example based on it.:-)
Suppose a consortium of 51 people wins the bid (a bid of $5100 is a majority of the total dollars and so cannot be outbid), buys the vase from its original owner(s), then leases it out to non-members who need to carry water (exploiting it as capital). A year passes, and the Vase Management Group collects $6000 in lease fees. Gross economic product is $11100 ($5100 + $6000) for the year, and we've derived a new good: leased use of the vase.
The other 49 people decide that they want the vase for a while, borrow $2000 from members of the Vase Management Group, combine it with what money they have left, and make an offer of $6000 to buy the vase, which gets accepted. The newly formed Container Corporation collects $6100 from the members of the former Vase Management Group that year; they pay back the $2000 borrowed, plus $200 in interest. Gross economic product for the year is $12300 ($6000 + $6100 + $200), and we've derived another new good: loans, or leased use of money.
An enterprising former Vase Management Group member notices the rate fees are collected at, and offers to buy the vase from the Corporation for $10500! Only $50 is paid up front from the buyer's own money, while the rest is borrowed from others including the Container Corporation. Something interesting occurs: the effective money supply is stretched. The money that was borrowed from the Container Corporation need never materialize, since it was paid right back to them; once the Mister Vase Proprietorship owns the vase, lease fees paid by anyone he owes money to need never materialize, since it can be paid right back toward the loan balance. The buyer can even pay the interest on the loans in this fashion. Over the course of the year, Mister Vase collects $12000 in lease fees (there are about twice as many people to lease the vase to) and pays off its $10450 in loans plus $1045 in interest. Gross economic product is $23545 ($10500 + $12000 + $1045) for the year.
In the first year, the gross product was higher than the total amount of money in the system because some dollars changed hands twice-- the velocity of money in action, with the derivative market giving it a reason to move. In the second year, it was even higher since the vase price went up and a new good, the use of money, was being traded. In the third year, vase appreciation powered by quantum-leaping dollars lifted the gross product into the stratosphere!
The "virtual money"-- the payments that only exist as changes in who owes whom how much-- still contribute to the total velocity of money: there's real value (either ownership or use of a resource) changing hands. At the same time, undeniably, neither the number of dollar bills nor the number of vases within the system has increased; using gold coins instead of dollars would not have changed the effect.
Of course, if our enterprising vase buyer's business fails, its creditors are collectively up a creek unless they either form a new consortium or sell the vase again and split the proceeds... but that's another matter.
Apologies if I offend anyone, but I'm about to launch into a jumble of freshman economics, derivation, and opinion here-- please correct me if I bungle anything.:-)
What makes the GDP approach seductive is that GDP is a straightforward number to measure, and once obtained, a very easy metric to use as a basis of comparison, in support of an argument, or anything else such a measure might be used for. Unfortunately, while it's easy to measure, it's measuring the wrong thing: the mere movement of money doesn't measure of quality of life, production capacity, or available resources. In other words, while money might be something you can trade for good stuff, money itself is not wealth.
Fundamentally, money is just a means of determining resource allocation. It serves three major functions:
It provides a common measure of value-- so people can compare what things are worth to them individually on a unified scale.
It serves as a medium of exchange, simplifying trade by avoiding the hassle of barter systems.
It serves as a store of value, so you can spread trade resolution out over time as well as space.
As a measure of value, while it works well on a micro scale, it fails on a macro scale, since the total money supply is effectively an arbitrary number relative to the quantity of resources in the system.
As a medium of exchange, on the whole, money has been a smashing success, although individual currencies have certainly hit bumps in the road (and lately a few hedge fund managers have been exploiting those bumps to the detriment of bondholders and citizens).
As a store of value, it works quite well in the short term, but the fact that its value is subject to significant change over time, coupled with the relative uselessness of money as anything but a trade token, makes it a poor choice for long-term storage of value. I'd say the disadvantages of using a fiat currency as a store of value are even more pronounced, since its value fluctuations are subject to politics and policy, and it lacks any use whatsoever should its backing institution not hold up its end of the bargain, while gold isn't created by administrative action, and if the central bank goes under, you can still make stuff out of it. On the other hand, using a commodity like gold as a common measure of value seems somewhat dubious to me, since changing technology can sharply alter both its supply and demand curves relative to other goods-- the price of platinum, for example, was driven up by its use in catalytic converters-- while I would expect the disconnected nature of fiat currency to render it more stable in the presence of such shifts.
From the speculation department: Could a hard currency not directly bound to an external commodity or another currency even exist? Would it successfully dodge the disadvantages of both commodity and fiat currencies?
That's not security so much as sanity checking. Being warned "hey, the versions of Binary X and Policy X don't match" is a lot nicer than just going south at runtime. The fact that it might trip up (Tripwire up?) a naïve cracker is just a small bonus.
I remember a vehicle from the 1930's in the Deutches (spelling) Museum in Munich that could do 70 miles an hour on a very low power engine (I seem to remeber about 50 hoursepower).
That would be the 1921 Rumpler Wagon. Very good aerodynamics even by current standards, even though it doesn't look all that sleek. Then again, it was designed by an aircraft engineer...
[A] lone guy putting the squeeze on Ebay with a patent might well persuade many with money (and power) to abolish or restrict software and business model patents.
I expect it'll only drive up the barriers to patent acquisition, ensuring that anyone wielding a patent has invested enough to actually be afraid of a legal wrangle with an entity of nontrivial resources.
Most people do not understand the Certificate Authority panel, or any other security panel, in their browser, well enough to be able to tell if they're doing the right thing.
Usability and security are at least superficially at odds here. Usability dictates that the user should be allowed to do whatever is desired, while security would rather break out the straitjacket. Perhaps a better compromise would be an obscure little option buried in the browser's advanced preferences that, in its default state, would simply not allow the user to click past a security warning. This little problem has more people than just you and I quaking in their collective boots.
Which one of these did I make up? And, more importantly, how did you decide that it was bogus?
Knee-jerk reaction: "SecureNet who?" Second look: "Wait a minute, CyberTrust isn't by RSA."
In any case, GTE CyberTrust is in the default roots, which would have me looking twice if it popped up in a security warning. I remember seeing the remaining two last time I skimmed the CA list.
Disclaimer: I get paid to understand the issues around public-key cryptography and its associated infrastructure, so maybe I should be disqualified from your quiz.:-)
In any case, I'd much sooner trust a self-signed certificate or obviously private CA hierarchy for minor snoop repellent (such as keeping nosy folks away from my 'blog passwords) than one made up to look official but didn't pass muster. Besides, with a self-signed cert, you can always stash a copy of it and have your browser scream if it changes, much like with SSH.
Besides, the Bible is one of the greatest works of fiction of all time right? (ok, that was a cheap shot);)
More like one of the greatest anthologies of all time, actually. It's a collection of books that includes political and religious history, poetry, parables, biography, myths, legends, advice on dealing with people, et cetera.
HSV Technologies has thrown together two such devices: a tetanizing beam (similar to a Tazer), and a vehicle-disabling weapon (Oops, did you need those electronics?). In case you were wondering, yep, it's patented.
As far as I know, it's to prevent any very long string of text with no spaces from being inserted into a message, to make page-widening crapflooders have to think harder... it'd be too easy if you just had to insert <pre>lotsOfCrapCharsWithNoSpaces</pre> to make the entire known world have to scroll horizontally to read every comment.
One thing I'd like to see is more open "AI"/bot APIs in games. While I agree that using a bot in what is ostensibly an all-human game is somewhere between pointless and shameful, I think bot tourneys and "cyborg" (bot-assisted human player) tourneys have their place as well, especially in games outside the FPS domain. Bot tourneys in particular are well established in chess; why not in, say, RTS?
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My sources are open. ;-) The free redistributability of the runtime is in the JRE license, and is also mentioned in the Java Licensing FAQ.
Last I looked, Sun's J2SE runtime is free to distribute with your software in binary form, provided due credit is given, it is unmodified, and any extensions are clearly identified as such. Mobile JVMs, enterprise features and such are of course another matter.
If you compile your own version, you have a program based on the PGP source code that understands the PGP file formats and protocols, but by trademark law you can't actually call it "PGP"-- the trademark name is reserved for the official distribution only. That's the same reason CheapBytes has to sell their copy of Red Hat's Linux distribution images under the name "Pink Tie Linux"-- so people know up front that it's not the official Red Hat distribution.
The transition of Zelda toward 3D started with Link's Awakening and Link to the Past, with the introduction of balconies, jumping, holes in the ground, and other such effects. Heck, Link's Awakening even had stompable Goombas! Ocarina of Time kept the essence of what made the Zelda games great-- interesting puzzles, tricky critters, item hunts, the occasional psychotic fit of sword antics, and an overall sense of a highly polished game-- while doing pretty well with the 3D aspect (and integrating it into the puzzles!), and having probably the least irritating camera logic of any 3D chase-cam view game I've played. Majora's Mask got most of it right, but pretty much blew it in terms of polish -- and the reuse of NPC skins (not just models) for entirely new characters was just painful -- but the new items and their effects were brilliant.
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. This is not legal advice. Your mileage may vary. Offer void where taxed, regulated or prohibited by law. Not for use in nuclear facilities. Side effects may include ... never mind, you get the idea.
Unfortunately, at least semiconductor-based betavoltaic battery efficiencies are pretty low-- a tritium-silicon battery has an efficiency of about 7-8%, but can realistically be improved to ~10% or better. Nickel-63 throws those electrons a lot harder than tritium does, as well-- hard enough to damage semiconductors. Another technique is to use a conventional lithium-ion battery charged by a lower-powered betavoltaic battery, to work around the relatively low power density of betavoltaics (~1 milliwatt per cubic centimeter) while taking advantage of their high energy density (100 watt-hours per cubic centimeter-- wowza!).
Having read the briefing, this really is interesting, solidly built stuff. The whole packet is encrypted, including the source and destination MAC addresses, which defeats simple sniffer-based traffic analysis. The crypto key is copied onto the card by a separate cable, not through the host, and the host can't get a copy of the key from the card, so even if the host is hacked the proverbial beans aren't spilled. The form factor is annoying, but if you need this kind of security annoyances don't matter. Well worth the $2500 per card if you really need a bulletproof WLAN.
Dang it! Now you've made me hungry for Indian food. :-)
I wonder... could problems like that be addressed through localized versions of the tests, so that rather than being merely language translations, a Mexican test would compare tostada and burrito? Admittedly, that still doesn't account for regional subvariations within a country (beignets? hush puppies?) but maybe a third locale level (variant) could be used there. The down side to this is an explosion of localized versions...
If it has a crappy Pigeon^WPageRank, or doesn't use the keywords you were looking for, or is banished to the tenth results page by a data-poisoning attack, anything can be effectively obscure even given the might of Google.
the Smith & Wesson extraction method destroys the keys. If you need a copy of the clear data, and you're dealing with someone who maintains that "you can have my keys when you pry them from my cold, dead fingers", shooting them won't do you much good. You'll have to either use some sort of subterfuge to sneak off with a copy of the keys or break the keyholder's will with some form of duress.
A few years ago that was Eight instead of Eighty. Apparently Moore's Law is affecting the editor holy wars as much as the machines!
Offshoring only gets one so far... while protected from US anti-trust regulations, it would also be effectively prohibited from doing business in the US.
As far as I know, larger companies usually detest pay-per-use services because if one thread goes runaway, or one employee messes up, or one metric spamload of DoS hits the server, they get a surprise spike in their bill, which plays merry hell with budgets. Pay-per-use telephone service and software licensing are equally disliked for the same reasons.
While I agree with your point about GDP being a poor measure of wealth, I simply can't resist picking some nits with your example. :-)
Who's offering the vase for sale? If it's not one (or a consortium) of those 100 people, you're sinking the money instead of moving it, and its velocity becomes irrelevant.
If the money is merely being passed in a circle, is real value being exchanged? Is an actual trade taking place? Juggling money in that manner may be a part of a tax dodge in some cases, but it doesn't contribute to the true velocity of money.
Even if the money stays within the community, since money is a relative measure of value, there has to be something else to measure it against-- another good, or more of the same good, or the same item going up for sale again later, or what have you. People will work this one out, though: there's always a derivatives market, and here's an extended example based on it. :-)
Suppose a consortium of 51 people wins the bid (a bid of $5100 is a majority of the total dollars and so cannot be outbid), buys the vase from its original owner(s), then leases it out to non-members who need to carry water (exploiting it as capital). A year passes, and the Vase Management Group collects $6000 in lease fees. Gross economic product is $11100 ($5100 + $6000) for the year, and we've derived a new good: leased use of the vase.
The other 49 people decide that they want the vase for a while, borrow $2000 from members of the Vase Management Group, combine it with what money they have left, and make an offer of $6000 to buy the vase, which gets accepted. The newly formed Container Corporation collects $6100 from the members of the former Vase Management Group that year; they pay back the $2000 borrowed, plus $200 in interest. Gross economic product for the year is $12300 ($6000 + $6100 + $200), and we've derived another new good: loans, or leased use of money.
An enterprising former Vase Management Group member notices the rate fees are collected at, and offers to buy the vase from the Corporation for $10500! Only $50 is paid up front from the buyer's own money, while the rest is borrowed from others including the Container Corporation. Something interesting occurs: the effective money supply is stretched. The money that was borrowed from the Container Corporation need never materialize, since it was paid right back to them; once the Mister Vase Proprietorship owns the vase, lease fees paid by anyone he owes money to need never materialize, since it can be paid right back toward the loan balance. The buyer can even pay the interest on the loans in this fashion. Over the course of the year, Mister Vase collects $12000 in lease fees (there are about twice as many people to lease the vase to) and pays off its $10450 in loans plus $1045 in interest. Gross economic product is $23545 ($10500 + $12000 + $1045) for the year.
In the first year, the gross product was higher than the total amount of money in the system because some dollars changed hands twice-- the velocity of money in action, with the derivative market giving it a reason to move. In the second year, it was even higher since the vase price went up and a new good, the use of money, was being traded. In the third year, vase appreciation powered by quantum-leaping dollars lifted the gross product into the stratosphere!
The "virtual money"-- the payments that only exist as changes in who owes whom how much-- still contribute to the total velocity of money: there's real value (either ownership or use of a resource) changing hands. At the same time, undeniably, neither the number of dollar bills nor the number of vases within the system has increased; using gold coins instead of dollars would not have changed the effect.
Of course, if our enterprising vase buyer's business fails, its creditors are collectively up a creek unless they either form a new consortium or sell the vase again and split the proceeds ... but that's another matter.
Apologies if I offend anyone, but I'm about to launch into a jumble of freshman economics, derivation, and opinion here-- please correct me if I bungle anything. :-)
What makes the GDP approach seductive is that GDP is a straightforward number to measure, and once obtained, a very easy metric to use as a basis of comparison, in support of an argument, or anything else such a measure might be used for. Unfortunately, while it's easy to measure, it's measuring the wrong thing: the mere movement of money doesn't measure of quality of life, production capacity, or available resources. In other words, while money might be something you can trade for good stuff, money itself is not wealth.
Fundamentally, money is just a means of determining resource allocation. It serves three major functions:
As a measure of value, while it works well on a micro scale, it fails on a macro scale, since the total money supply is effectively an arbitrary number relative to the quantity of resources in the system.
As a medium of exchange, on the whole, money has been a smashing success, although individual currencies have certainly hit bumps in the road (and lately a few hedge fund managers have been exploiting those bumps to the detriment of bondholders and citizens).
As a store of value, it works quite well in the short term, but the fact that its value is subject to significant change over time, coupled with the relative uselessness of money as anything but a trade token, makes it a poor choice for long-term storage of value. I'd say the disadvantages of using a fiat currency as a store of value are even more pronounced, since its value fluctuations are subject to politics and policy, and it lacks any use whatsoever should its backing institution not hold up its end of the bargain, while gold isn't created by administrative action, and if the central bank goes under, you can still make stuff out of it. On the other hand, using a commodity like gold as a common measure of value seems somewhat dubious to me, since changing technology can sharply alter both its supply and demand curves relative to other goods-- the price of platinum, for example, was driven up by its use in catalytic converters-- while I would expect the disconnected nature of fiat currency to render it more stable in the presence of such shifts.
From the speculation department: Could a hard currency not directly bound to an external commodity or another currency even exist? Would it successfully dodge the disadvantages of both commodity and fiat currencies?
That's not security so much as sanity checking. Being warned "hey, the versions of Binary X and Policy X don't match" is a lot nicer than just going south at runtime. The fact that it might trip up (Tripwire up?) a naïve cracker is just a small bonus.
That would be the 1921 Rumpler Wagon. Very good aerodynamics even by current standards, even though it doesn't look all that sleek. Then again, it was designed by an aircraft engineer ...
I expect it'll only drive up the barriers to patent acquisition, ensuring that anyone wielding a patent has invested enough to actually be afraid of a legal wrangle with an entity of nontrivial resources.
Usability and security are at least superficially at odds here. Usability dictates that the user should be allowed to do whatever is desired, while security would rather break out the straitjacket. Perhaps a better compromise would be an obscure little option buried in the browser's advanced preferences that, in its default state, would simply not allow the user to click past a security warning. This little problem has more people than just you and I quaking in their collective boots.
Knee-jerk reaction: "SecureNet who?" Second look: "Wait a minute, CyberTrust isn't by RSA."
In any case, GTE CyberTrust is in the default roots, which would have me looking twice if it popped up in a security warning. I remember seeing the remaining two last time I skimmed the CA list.
Disclaimer: I get paid to understand the issues around public-key cryptography and its associated infrastructure, so maybe I should be disqualified from your quiz. :-)
In any case, I'd much sooner trust a self-signed certificate or obviously private CA hierarchy for minor snoop repellent (such as keeping nosy folks away from my 'blog passwords) than one made up to look official but didn't pass muster. Besides, with a self-signed cert, you can always stash a copy of it and have your browser scream if it changes, much like with SSH.
More like one of the greatest anthologies of all time, actually. It's a collection of books that includes political and religious history, poetry, parables, biography, myths, legends, advice on dealing with people, et cetera.
HSV Technologies has thrown together two such devices: a tetanizing beam (similar to a Tazer), and a vehicle-disabling weapon (Oops, did you need those electronics?). In case you were wondering, yep, it's patented.
The only potential issue here is that it's not a single-character option name.
Oh, while I'm on the subject of user interfaces, I gotta remember not to hit ^E to go to end of line in Mozilla. D'oh!:-)
As far as I know, it's to prevent any very long string of text with no spaces from being inserted into a message, to make page-widening crapflooders have to think harder... it'd be too easy if you just had to insert <pre>lotsOfCrapCharsWithNoSpaces</pre> to make the entire known world have to scroll horizontally to read every comment.
One thing I'd like to see is more open "AI"/bot APIs in games. While I agree that using a bot in what is ostensibly an all-human game is somewhere between pointless and shameful, I think bot tourneys and "cyborg" (bot-assisted human player) tourneys have their place as well, especially in games outside the FPS domain. Bot tourneys in particular are well established in chess; why not in, say, RTS?