This is brilliant. Everyone should send him a copy of the note (if you don't mind us violating your copyright on it, that is...) That way, he might realize that actually saying what people are allowed (or not allowed to do), like CC, is better than replying to multiple emails. It also means that his work might live on even when he's dead and no longre able to reply to email.
He seems to think that CC damages fair use, which is only true in the sense that any statement of copyright might have a chilling effect on fair use. The real problem with fair use, as Lessig points out often, is overzealous corporate lawyers.
Most publishers are scared of other publishers' lawyers: Because it costs so much to defend against a law-suit, they simply won't publish fair use excerpts, and require authors who want to use any portion of someone else's work to get signed permission first. It's the same with music: If your song is a fair use parody (eg. Weird Al) or includes fair use samples, the RIAA labels won't put it out without licenses from everyone who might potentially sue.
Greasemonkey is hardly alone. Other Firefox extensions have done this, often for what seem like less important reasons. For example, ForecastFox (a widget that uses a Web service to check the weather) changed its service provider from weather.com to accuweather, breaking many user settings that were customized to the specific data available from weather.com. The lesson is to check what changes an update makes before downloading it.
Many security holes are the result of increased functionality, so the easiest way to fix them is to remove it. Microsoft does this all the time. For example, an update to Outlook stopped it from running.exe and.vbs attachments automatically. That helps stop viruses, and is IMHO a good idea, but it also inconvenience the few people (other than virus writers) who used the feature.
Trusted computing is (mostly) bad, as has been discussed many times on Slashdot, but TFA makes so many mistakes that his whole argument is BS. Among them:
He gets the basic acronyms wrong: The chip is called a Trusted Platform Module (TPM), not "Trusted Computer Module". I know that seems like a minor nitpick, but if he can't even get the name of the technology right (despite working for a magazine that I assume has copy-editors and perhaps even fact-checkers or access to Google), what else has he got wrong?
Intel isn't the only manufacturer of TPMs (or TCMs as he calls them). Right now, it doesn't officially* make them at all, though several other companies do. Intel has a long-term plan to build the TPM into the CPU, but so do AMD and others. (*: I say officially because many people suspect that Intel might already be building TPMs into CPUs and not enabling them, a bit like it did with x86-64. But that's still speculation, and it doesn't make a lot of difference.)
The Trusted Network Connect spec that he talks about is only one of the TPM's applications, and not the most important. Depending on who you believe, it was designed for DRM or for encryption (most likely the former).
Trusted Network Connect isn't a Microsoft inititative. Like most standards, MS would prefer not to use it, and so is developing a proprietary system ("NAP") instead. That's still vaporware, of course (supposdely built into Longhorn).
This doesn't mean that we shouldn't be extremely concerned about TNC and its proprietary counterparts. (As well as NAP, there's a Cisco one called "NAC", which isn't entirely vaporware.) The Bush administration has even suggested making something like it mandatory for everyone who wants to access the Internet, which would scare me a lot if I thought the technology would actually work. But none of that has anynthing to do with Apple using Intel.
I mostly agree with you, but actually there's more to DRM than just making people pay for content sveeral times. The intention is also to lock people into proprietary file formats.
For example, music download services that use Microsoft DRM lock customers into mp3 players that support the WMA format. At present, most player makers (with the major exception of Apple) do include WMA, but that's mostly because it doesn't cost them anything. If the format takes off, MS will start charging for it.
Similarly, iTunes customers who want a portable music player are locked into the iPod for as long as the DRM remains in place. The only reason they're not really locked in (and not coincidentally, also why Apple is beating MS in the mjusic market) is that it's fairly easy to remove the DRM: There's a deliberate loophole (burn to standard Redbook-compliant CD), and people like DVD Jon have made user-friendly cracking programs (iOpener, hymn, etc.).
The access keys are stored on your PC, so that you can listen to music without the PC having to connect to iTunes for authorization each time. (Otherwise, it would only work while you were online.)
Programs like hymn (aka PlayFair) are able to access the PC's copy of the key and thus crack the DRM without connecting to itunes. Unfortunately, they only work under Windows so far: The access keys are themselves encrypted, and AFAIK this encryption hasn't yet been cracked on the Mac.
The external fuel tank was blamed for the Columbia accident, so they've extensively redesigned it this time round. The problem isn't that the tank is getting old: It's that it's new and untested.
Intel and IBM (and other chip makers) should really contribute some code to GCC, or at least release their own compilers under some kind of free license.
Obviously, they can't if they're involved in the kind of dirty tricks that AMD is alleging, or if they make a lot of money selling software. But chip companies are mostly in the business of selling chips, not s/w, so they would benefit from helping developers produce code optimized for their platform.
One of the worrying parts about this story is the automatic assumption that Qinetiq will get the contract to make all these machines. There's no particular reason other than corruption: They didn't invent the technology, and there are other companies who can do it.
But like Halliburton, Qinetiq (or Carlyle) has strong political connections.
Most countries, the UK and US included, provide greater rights for their own citizens and permanent residents than for illegal immigrants. The government won't throw out citizens simply because people find their political or religious views offensive.
The London police did take action against the most famous hate-preaching immam, Sheikh Abu Hamza al-Masri (a British citizen). They arrested him and charged him with crimes including inciting terrorism, encouraging murder, etc. His trial began last week, so there's a good chance that the bombings were actually related to that (as well as the Iraq and the G8 summit).
You're missing the second, even greater miracle: That even though the bread and wine have been turned into the body and blood of Christ, they still have all the physical effects of bread and wine. So arsenic and cyanide that had been miraculously transubstantiated into flesh would still poison in the same way as regular, non-transubstantiated arsenic and cyanide.
Also, the dogma doesn't say that transubstantiation happens at the moment of consumption. It happens during a ritual a few minutes earlier. This is important, as it means that the priest has to consume any leftovers himself. (Allowing the body of Christ to rot in a garbage dump or sewer is considered very sinful.) I used to have a priest who was always drunk by Sunday lunchtime, yet claimed (truthfully, according to Catholic doctrine) that he hadn't consumed a drop of alcohol.
Intel will probably still license its technology to AMD. After all, Intel needs AMD's technology too, thanks to its 64-bit extensions.
Also, most of the technology licensed is in the form of patents. The original x86 is gtetting quite old --- so old that the patents are expiring. (Unlike copyright, patents do actually pass into the public domain.) So over time, Intel's advantage in the licensing game will actually diminish.
It's only good if you never use them. Unfortunately, an application can't know that you're never going to need something: It just sees that you haven't used something yet, and decides to hide it. Or even worse, it hides by default everything except the most commonly-used features.
It's all designed to make computing simpler for newbies, of course. But a better way to do this would be to emphasize the often-used features, perhaps putting them in bold or showing an icon beside the name within the menu. That way, everything is always there, but people aren't as likely to be confused by a long list of options.
Most browsers (including Firefox and even IE) do this already, though you need to alter the settings to make it happen. The browser makers figure (probably rightly) that most users won't want to take the trouble to enable cookies for every site where they want a persistent login, so the default is usually just to accept them.
Another workaround is just to delete *all* cookies regularly, and let the browser remember usenames and passwords.
It's free and simple: Just a database of events. I'd prefer to be able to see more than one month at a time, and I don't see much point in the ToDo List, but overall it does the job.
There's nothing wrong with Outlook, but it's overkill if you're not using Exchange.
Fawlty Towers is hardly a nerd cult. It was one of the BBC's all-time most popular shows, and even today still scores large audiences in reruns. UK viewers consistently rate it the best thing that's ever been on TV.
Blackadder was also hugely successful in its day, probably moreso than The Office, though it isn't as universally loved as Fawlty Towers. And as a fan, I have to admit that the final episode (made for the Millennium Dome) was crap.
When HP made its (insane) decision to switch to from Alpha to Intel, it didn't happen overnight: There were a couple more generations of Alpha. This could be the same.
Not just as easily. With Google, they can get lots of people's email all at once, and perhaps even perform a Google search on everyone's email at once.
Now, I still use Gmail, because I also find the features worth the risk, but that might change. I don't use some of Google's other privacy-invading features, like the PageRank indicator on the Googlebar (IE only, anwyay) or the Web accelerator.
But "My" doesn't help in a multi-user environment. Most multi-user machines have multiple folders called "My Documents", which can be accessed by anyone on the machine. It should be "$username's Documents".
"My Computer" is even more annoying, as it isn't dynamic: It's alwasy the same computre. And MS's choices aboiut what is presented at the same hierarchical level as a disk drive seem fairly arbitrary.
On the other hand, the CD burned using the system won't be redbook-compliant. So it will only work on a CD player that's running Microsoft's WMA codec. That's what DRM is really about: extending Microsoft's monopoly.
If music is in Microsoft format, you'll eventually need to pay Bill Gates for the right to listen to it, just like you now need to buy Microsoft Office to read all those files in.doc format. (Well, actually it's much worse, because the.doc format has been reverse-engineered by OO.org and others, whereas the DMCA makes reverse-engineering DRM illegal.)
Friday and Monday nights. They started re-running it right from the beginning as soon as the series ended, so that people who'd missed it would have another chance to see it.
Unlike most other shows that go to reruns, BSG is being shown in the correct order, and they'll just have time to show all 13 episodes before season 2 starts, so you won't have to suffer the three-month gap between seasons! They even posted the first episode online (legally, I mean, on the official site).
The mini-series is even better, but that is out on DVD, and it's also been on regular broadcast TV (NBC, I think).
The FSF wouldn't be able to shakedown proprietary software companies, as they could just retaliate. But a patent portfoilio would help deter patent attacks from Microsoft: Gates woould know that any lawsuits against Linux users or developers could result in similar attacks against Windows.
Microsoft goes after big corporations because they have money. The CIO has a big budget, and Microsoft wants as much of that as possible.
The people in the trenches might not actually use some of the Microsoft products much, but in the short term that doesn't really matter. MS is more concerned with what companies buy than what they use. (This even applies to indvidual users: Whenever you buy a PC, you're paying for IE, even if you choose to use Firefox instead.)
The makers of Battlestar Galactica are aware that free content helps boost viewing figures. While I doubt that they'd condone P2P, they actually made the first episode available for free download from their official site/a.
They've taken it down now, unfortunately, I think because it was re-run recently. But there's still lots of other stuff, including deleted scenes and episode commentaries (as mp3 podcasts) --- basically, all the stuff that would normally (and undoubtedly will) be included on the DVD release.
The WSJ frequently prints distortions, smears and outright lies, but these are usually confined to its opinion page. And even when it does run hatchet jobs masquerading as news, it doesn't print the home addresses and phone numbers of its targets, let alone their relatives.
Most of the tabloids are above that too. They'll often invade the privacy of a public figure, in ways that are arguably unethical, but they won't print photographs, phone numbers and addresses of celebrity's relatives.
Slashdot Mirror
This is brilliant. Everyone should send him a copy of the note (if you don't mind us violating your copyright on it, that is...) That way, he might realize that actually saying what people are allowed (or not allowed to do), like CC, is better than replying to multiple emails. It also means that his work might live on even when he's dead and no longre able to reply to email.
He seems to think that CC damages fair use, which is only true in the sense that any statement of copyright might have a chilling effect on fair use. The real problem with fair use, as Lessig points out often, is overzealous corporate lawyers.
Most publishers are scared of other publishers' lawyers: Because it costs so much to defend against a law-suit, they simply won't publish fair use excerpts, and require authors who want to use any portion of someone else's work to get signed permission first. It's the same with music: If your song is a fair use parody (eg. Weird Al) or includes fair use samples, the RIAA labels won't put it out without licenses from everyone who might potentially sue.
Greasemonkey is hardly alone. Other Firefox extensions have done this, often for what seem like less important reasons. For example, ForecastFox (a widget that uses a Web service to check the weather) changed its service provider from weather.com to accuweather, breaking many user settings that were customized to the specific data available from weather.com. The lesson is to check what changes an update makes before downloading it.
.exe and .vbs attachments automatically. That helps stop viruses, and is IMHO a good idea, but it also inconvenience the few people (other than virus writers) who used the feature.
Many security holes are the result of increased functionality, so the easiest way to fix them is to remove it. Microsoft does this all the time. For example, an update to Outlook stopped it from running
This doesn't mean that we shouldn't be extremely concerned about TNC and its proprietary counterparts. (As well as NAP, there's a Cisco one called "NAC", which isn't entirely vaporware.) The Bush administration has even suggested making something like it mandatory for everyone who wants to access the Internet, which would scare me a lot if I thought the technology would actually work. But none of that has anynthing to do with Apple using Intel.
I mostly agree with you, but actually there's more to DRM than just making people pay for content sveeral times. The intention is also to lock people into proprietary file formats.
For example, music download services that use Microsoft DRM lock customers into mp3 players that support the WMA format. At present, most player makers (with the major exception of Apple) do include WMA, but that's mostly because it doesn't cost them anything. If the format takes off, MS will start charging for it.
Similarly, iTunes customers who want a portable music player are locked into the iPod for as long as the DRM remains in place. The only reason they're not really locked in (and not coincidentally, also why Apple is beating MS in the mjusic market) is that it's fairly easy to remove the DRM: There's a deliberate loophole (burn to standard Redbook-compliant CD), and people like DVD Jon have made user-friendly cracking programs (iOpener, hymn, etc.).
The access keys are stored on your PC, so that you can listen to music without the PC having to connect to iTunes for authorization each time. (Otherwise, it would only work while you were online.)
Programs like hymn (aka PlayFair) are able to access the PC's copy of the key and thus crack the DRM without connecting to itunes. Unfortunately, they only work under Windows so far: The access keys are themselves encrypted, and AFAIK this encryption hasn't yet been cracked on the Mac.
The external fuel tank was blamed for the Columbia accident, so they've extensively redesigned it this time round. The problem isn't that the tank is getting old: It's that it's new and untested.
Intel and IBM (and other chip makers) should really contribute some code to GCC, or at least release their own compilers under some kind of free license.
Obviously, they can't if they're involved in the kind of dirty tricks that AMD is alleging, or if they make a lot of money selling software. But chip companies are mostly in the business of selling chips, not s/w, so they would benefit from helping developers produce code optimized for their platform.
One of the worrying parts about this story is the automatic assumption that Qinetiq will get the contract to make all these machines. There's no particular reason other than corruption: They didn't invent the technology, and there are other companies who can do it.
But like Halliburton, Qinetiq (or Carlyle) has strong political connections.
Most countries, the UK and US included, provide greater rights for their own citizens and permanent residents than for illegal immigrants. The government won't throw out citizens simply because people find their political or religious views offensive.
The London police did take action against the most famous hate-preaching immam, Sheikh Abu Hamza al-Masri (a British citizen). They arrested him and charged him with crimes including inciting terrorism, encouraging murder, etc. His trial began last week, so there's a good chance that the bombings were actually related to that (as well as the Iraq and the G8 summit).
You're missing the second, even greater miracle: That even though the bread and wine have been turned into the body and blood of Christ, they still have all the physical effects of bread and wine. So arsenic and cyanide that had been miraculously transubstantiated into flesh would still poison in the same way as regular, non-transubstantiated arsenic and cyanide.
Also, the dogma doesn't say that transubstantiation happens at the moment of consumption. It happens during a ritual a few minutes earlier. This is important, as it means that the priest has to consume any leftovers himself. (Allowing the body of Christ to rot in a garbage dump or sewer is considered very sinful.) I used to have a priest who was always drunk by Sunday lunchtime, yet claimed (truthfully, according to Catholic doctrine) that he hadn't consumed a drop of alcohol.
Intel will probably still license its technology to AMD. After all, Intel needs AMD's technology too, thanks to its 64-bit extensions.
Also, most of the technology licensed is in the form of patents. The original x86 is gtetting quite old --- so old that the patents are expiring. (Unlike copyright, patents do actually pass into the public domain.) So over time, Intel's advantage in the licensing game will actually diminish.
It's only good if you never use them. Unfortunately, an application can't know that you're never going to need something: It just sees that you haven't used something yet, and decides to hide it. Or even worse, it hides by default everything except the most commonly-used features.
It's all designed to make computing simpler for newbies, of course. But a better way to do this would be to emphasize the often-used features, perhaps putting them in bold or showing an icon beside the name within the menu. That way, everything is always there, but people aren't as likely to be confused by a long list of options.
Most browsers (including Firefox and even IE) do this already, though you need to alter the settings to make it happen. The browser makers figure (probably rightly) that most users won't want to take the trouble to enable cookies for every site where they want a persistent login, so the default is usually just to accept them.
Another workaround is just to delete *all* cookies regularly, and let the browser remember usenames and passwords.
It's free and simple: Just a database of events. I'd prefer to be able to see more than one month at a time, and I don't see much point in the ToDo List, but overall it does the job.
There's nothing wrong with Outlook, but it's overkill if you're not using Exchange.
Fawlty Towers is hardly a nerd cult. It was one of the BBC's all-time most popular shows, and even today still scores large audiences in reruns. UK viewers consistently rate it the best thing that's ever been on TV.
Blackadder was also hugely successful in its day, probably moreso than The Office, though it isn't as universally loved as Fawlty Towers. And as a fan, I have to admit that the final episode (made for the Millennium Dome) was crap.
When HP made its (insane) decision to switch to from Alpha to Intel, it didn't happen overnight: There were a couple more generations of Alpha. This could be the same.
Not just as easily. With Google, they can get lots of people's email all at once, and perhaps even perform a Google search on everyone's email at once.
Now, I still use Gmail, because I also find the features worth the risk, but that might change. I don't use some of Google's other privacy-invading features, like the PageRank indicator on the Googlebar (IE only, anwyay) or the Web accelerator.
But "My" doesn't help in a multi-user environment. Most multi-user machines have multiple folders called "My Documents", which can be accessed by anyone on the machine. It should be "$username's Documents".
"My Computer" is even more annoying, as it isn't dynamic: It's alwasy the same computre. And MS's choices aboiut what is presented at the same hierarchical level as a disk drive seem fairly arbitrary.
On the other hand, the CD burned using the system won't be redbook-compliant. So it will only work on a CD player that's running Microsoft's WMA codec. That's what DRM is really about: extending Microsoft's monopoly.
.doc format. (Well, actually it's much worse, because the .doc format has been reverse-engineered by OO.org and others, whereas the DMCA makes reverse-engineering DRM illegal.)
If music is in Microsoft format, you'll eventually need to pay Bill Gates for the right to listen to it, just like you now need to buy Microsoft Office to read all those files in
Friday and Monday nights. They started re-running it right from the beginning as soon as the series ended, so that people who'd missed it would have another chance to see it.
Unlike most other shows that go to reruns, BSG is being shown in the correct order, and they'll just have time to show all 13 episodes before season 2 starts, so you won't have to suffer the three-month gap between seasons! They even posted the first episode online (legally, I mean, on the official site).
The mini-series is even better, but that is out on DVD, and it's also been on regular broadcast TV (NBC, I think).
The FSF wouldn't be able to shakedown proprietary software companies, as they could just retaliate. But a patent portfoilio would help deter patent attacks from Microsoft: Gates woould know that any lawsuits against Linux users or developers could result in similar attacks against Windows.
Microsoft goes after big corporations because they have money. The CIO has a big budget, and Microsoft wants as much of that as possible.
The people in the trenches might not actually use some of the Microsoft products much, but in the short term that doesn't really matter. MS is more concerned with what companies buy than what they use. (This even applies to indvidual users: Whenever you buy a PC, you're paying for IE, even if you choose to use Firefox instead.)
The makers of Battlestar Galactica are aware that free content helps boost viewing figures. While I doubt that they'd condone P2P, they actually made the first episode available for free download from their official site/a.
They've taken it down now, unfortunately, I think because it was re-run recently. But there's still lots of other stuff, including deleted scenes and episode commentaries (as mp3 podcasts) --- basically, all the stuff that would normally (and undoubtedly will) be included on the DVD release.
The WSJ frequently prints distortions, smears and outright lies, but these are usually confined to its opinion page. And even when it does run hatchet jobs masquerading as news, it doesn't print the home addresses and phone numbers of its targets, let alone their relatives.
Most of the tabloids are above that too. They'll often invade the privacy of a public figure, in ways that are arguably unethical, but they won't print photographs, phone numbers and addresses of celebrity's relatives.
The truth has a liberal bias. But fairness demands that it be balanced with a lie.