Sun did something similar in the Network Extendable Windowing System (NeWS). This was in the days of the OSF. The OSF decided that X and Motif were the way to go and left Sun out on a limb with what, IMHO, was a better system.
How much does it cost te set yourself up as a recording company in the USA? If you are a recording company and this law passes then presumably all you need to do is to have a suspicion that the RIAA is stealing your copyright material and away you go.
He already did. There are pictures of him with Tony Blair after he did a flying visit.
Seriously though, with the current Labour party fixation on big money (they have already taken donations off pornographers) can you imagine thisk taking off if his Billness says he would not be amused.
> MS will coerce chipmakers into putting circuits on ALL of their chips that require software running on those chips to carry out patented processes.
What, you mean SPARC, PowerPC, and whatever chips are used in System 390 mainframes will have to licence this scheme from Microsoft?
Micosoft's reach might be long, but it isn't that long.
To quote from one of my favourite books "The poor have occasionally objected to being governed badly, the rich have always objected to being governed at all". I think we are seeing the robber barons in their new guise, as thieves of land in the middle ages, thieves of the means of production during the industrial revolution and now thieves of intellectual and artistic achievement.
This is one more attempt to take away democratic freedoms that have been won by people all over the world. Rather than an attempt to defeat this individual attack on liberty it needs a concerted effort to defeat all such attacks.
The article is important and Americans should be concerned about it. However it has nothing to do with The Internet, it has to with American access to the Internet.
Seemingly unbeknownst to many in the USA we actually have access to the Internet here in Europe. I believe it is available in Australia and Japan too.
Certainly in the UK we have similar sorts of difficulties with broadband access, with an effective monopoly supplier in the shape of British Telecom. However, I wouldn't glorify this with an article containing a line like "BT is taking over control of the Internet". Hyperbole anyone?
Unfortunately for SuSe, Caldera, et. al, the standard most American businesses are choosing is Red Hat.
Emphasis and addition mine.
I think you will find that outside of America the picture is quite different, with SuSE and Mandrake doing well in Europe and TurboLinux doing well in the far east.
The exact opposite, it is the aim of every capitalist to have (monopoly) control over his marketplace. There are no moral or ethical imperatives within capitalism that work against this aim.
There are pragmatic constraints, it would be stupid to produce something that killed your consumers, though making them ill wouldn't matter too much (hence the degraded food sold in the 19th century).
Capitalism, like government and trades unions need constraints to stop them becoming corrupt or gaining too much power. The difficulty in the USA seems to be that the legislature and the corporations are effectively conspiring together to gain more control over the average person than Stalin had in his heyday in the USSR.
We have just removed a program that has been in service for some 30 years on our mainframes. It has been modified, upgraded and bug fixed in that time, but it has been in constantly in use over 3 decades.
We want a similarly stable service on our other systems, including desktops. Admittedly we don't necessarily want the same software lifetime. But given that we have some 50,000 or so desktops we don't want to be patching or upgrading the software on them very often. It takes a lot of effort to plan and install a new piece of software across all our desktops.
You can't grow your market. If you can't grow your market, then how do you increase your revenues? The only way is to change your pricing structure. Since you are a monopoly everyone has to cough up (or at least that's what MS thought).
Unfortunately for MS it seems to be inducing people to look for alternative ways of reducing the money they pay. This is the time to do some evangalisation folks!
> Linux won't be "the threat" to Microsoft until any average Joe can put in the CD's,
> select what they want, install, reboot, and EVERYTHING works.
The type of installation we are talking about is one like mine, where there are 60,000 desktops. This is where Linux could be a threat to MS, think of 60K WXP and Office XP licences to keep track of. Think of the number of servers you have to keep up to provide file and print. Think of the effort you need to implement and maintain PDC/BDC or Active Directory. Moving that from Windows to Linux could really cost MS a packet.
"If the source code were ?compiled? to create object code, we would agree that the resulting composition of zeroes and ones would not convey ideas."
Arguably therefore the Perl version of the code (or any other scripted language) should be "Free speech".
However, since whatever language you write in gets translated to 0s and 1s eventually one could also argue that it is legal to distribute the source code, but illegal to actually execute it.
The only couple of qualms I would have about this are
Published papers are available virtually forever. Go down to the Bodleian library and book out articles published by Michael Faraday or Robert Hook. Whatever they do here has got have the same sort of permanence.
Remember all those tapes that NASA has that they don't have the drives for anymore, or don't know the format? Paper doesn't have that sort of problem. Again, they need to ensure that whatever they produce can be moved on to whatever the current technology is
Other than that I think it is an excellent idea. I hope it scares the shit out of whatever the journal publishing equivalent of the RIAA is.
There used to be a need for the industry when vinyl and CDs were the primary distribution mechanism for music. They held the whip hand over musicians, in the same way music publishers and patrons did in Mozart's day.
Now that musicians can produce their own material and sell it without reference to the music industry then there is little need for them.
In the push for online music we must not impoverish the artists who produce it. The fact that the music industry's profits disappear is irrelevant.
In one of Asimov's books about robots. Admittedly this was a client/server type robot, rather than a peer to peer one.
However, unless someone can prove otherwise, it looks like the original idea was Asimov's.
Rational governments?
on
More WTC News
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
"installed rational govenments"
This I think is the crux of of the matter. You haven't (and I am not being anti-American in this, Britain has made many of the same mistakes).
You gave support to Saddam Hussein in the Iran-Iraq war when your client government in the shape of the Shah was ousted.
You supported the Islamic fundamentalists in Afghanistan (including Bin Laden, who allegedly was funded by the CIA) when it looked as though they could be a thorn in the side of the Soviet Union.
You can hardly expect the people of Chile to believe you installed rational governments when they had to put up with Pinochet for so many years.
Yes, this was an appalling crime, done by some appalling people. Some understanding of the history of the population from where the criminals came from might prevent such a crime happening again.
But you aren't trying to break a mechanism used to control access to information, unlike the DeCSS and Sklyarov cases.
If some time in the future MS make their file format dependent on on some undisclosed encryption methodology (XOR with "Open Source Sucks" backwards as such like) then the DMCA may be invoked.
Slashdot Mirror
Sun did something similar in the Network Extendable Windowing System (NeWS). This was in the days of the OSF. The OSF decided that X and Motif were the way to go and left Sun out on a limb with what, IMHO, was a better system.
How much does it cost te set yourself up as a recording company in the USA? If you are a recording company and this law passes then presumably all you need to do is to have a suspicion that the RIAA is stealing your copyright material and away you go.
> so to use it as an example of American arrogance is as inaccurate as it is tedious
Humour Deficit Disorder?
> Yes, that game Cricket, that Americans have heard of, but cannot fathom--it is not baseball.
For one thing - the World (Cup|Series) actually includes more than one country.
He already did. There are pictures of him with Tony Blair after he did a flying visit.
Seriously though, with the current Labour party fixation on big money (they have already taken donations off pornographers) can you imagine thisk taking off if his Billness says he would not be amused.
Yeah - fits MS, No Ability, Zero Intelligence
in which MS can dump $750M. That would use up their cash mountain wouldn't it?
> MS will coerce chipmakers into putting circuits on ALL of their chips that require software running on those chips to carry out patented processes.
What, you mean SPARC, PowerPC, and whatever chips are used in System 390 mainframes will have to licence this scheme from Microsoft?
Micosoft's reach might be long, but it isn't that long.
To quote from one of my favourite books "The poor have occasionally objected to being governed badly, the rich have always objected to being governed at all". I think we are seeing the robber barons in their new guise, as thieves of land in the middle ages, thieves of the means of production during the industrial revolution and now thieves of intellectual and artistic achievement.
This is one more attempt to take away democratic freedoms that have been won by people all over the world. Rather than an attempt to defeat this individual attack on liberty it needs a concerted effort to defeat all such attacks.
Seemingly unbeknownst to many in the USA we actually have access to the Internet here in Europe. I believe it is available in Australia and Japan too.
Certainly in the UK we have similar sorts of difficulties with broadband access, with an effective monopoly supplier in the shape of British Telecom. However, I wouldn't glorify this with an article containing a line like "BT is taking over control of the Internet". Hyperbole anyone?
Emphasis and addition mine.
I think you will find that outside of America the picture is quite different, with SuSE and Mandrake doing well in Europe and TurboLinux doing well in the far east.
> Why didn't Mr. Taco just say "in the red corner, VI and KDE, in the blue corner EMACS and GNOME, this is the MOTHER of all flamewars! FIGHT!"
Got to get Xemacs involved in this too. Then we could have RMS and Jamie Zawinski as tag partners.
> Simply put it is the misuse of capitalism.
The exact opposite, it is the aim of every capitalist to have (monopoly) control over his marketplace. There are no moral or ethical imperatives within capitalism that work against this aim.
There are pragmatic constraints, it would be stupid to produce something that killed your consumers, though making them ill wouldn't matter too much (hence the degraded food sold in the 19th century).
Capitalism, like government and trades unions need constraints to stop them becoming corrupt or gaining too much power. The difficulty in the USA seems to be that the legislature and the corporations are effectively conspiring together to gain more control over the average person than Stalin had in his heyday in the USSR.
I can't argue with your conclusions, I simply don't know enough about the encryption technology.
However, if they used the equipment that was stated it would have been expensive to crack the encryption.
If they used brute force to crack the triple DES encryption they would have needed significant amounts of compute power. This too is expensive.
In either case it looks as though it would have been out of the realm of the average cracker.
It is a good argument. If the Internet is to be subject to law at all, it should be international law.
Of course the USA has decided that they won't subscribe to the idea of an international court...
We have just removed a program that has been in service for some 30 years on our mainframes. It has been modified, upgraded and bug fixed in that time, but it has been in constantly in use over 3 decades.
We want a similarly stable service on our other systems, including desktops. Admittedly we don't necessarily want the same software lifetime. But given that we have some 50,000 or so desktops we don't want to be patching or upgrading the software on them very often. It takes a lot of effort to plan and install a new piece of software across all our desktops.
You can't grow your market. If you can't grow your market, then how do you increase your revenues? The only way is to change your pricing structure. Since you are a monopoly everyone has to cough up (or at least that's what MS thought).
Unfortunately for MS it seems to be inducing people to look for alternative ways of reducing the money they pay. This is the time to do some evangalisation folks!
> Linux won't be "the threat" to Microsoft until any average Joe can put in the CD's,
> select what they want, install, reboot, and EVERYTHING works.
The type of installation we are talking about is one like mine, where there are 60,000 desktops. This is where Linux could be a threat to MS, think of 60K WXP and Office XP licences to keep track of. Think of the number of servers you have to keep up to provide file and print. Think of the effort you need to implement and maintain PDC/BDC or Active Directory. Moving that from Windows to Linux could really cost MS a packet.
"If the source code were ?compiled? to create object code, we would agree that the resulting composition of zeroes and ones would not convey ideas."
Arguably therefore the Perl version of the code (or any other scripted language) should be "Free speech".
However, since whatever language you write in gets translated to 0s and 1s eventually one could also argue that it is legal to distribute the source code, but illegal to actually execute it.
- Published papers are available virtually forever. Go down to the Bodleian library and book out articles published by Michael Faraday or Robert Hook. Whatever they do here has got have the same sort of permanence.
- Remember all those tapes that NASA has that they don't have the drives for anymore, or don't know the format? Paper doesn't have that sort of problem. Again, they need to ensure that whatever they produce can be moved on to whatever the current technology is
Other than that I think it is an excellent idea. I hope it scares the shit out of whatever the journal publishing equivalent of the RIAA is.There used to be a need for the industry when vinyl and CDs were the primary distribution mechanism for music. They held the whip hand over musicians, in the same way music publishers and patrons did in Mozart's day.
Now that musicians can produce their own material and sell it without reference to the music industry then there is little need for them.
In the push for online music we must not impoverish the artists who produce it. The fact that the music industry's profits disappear is irrelevant.
It reduces the freedom of spammers to send junk mail.
It increases my freedom to have a mailbox full of meaningful messages.
In one of Asimov's books about robots. Admittedly this was a client/server type robot, rather than a peer to peer one.
However, unless someone can prove otherwise, it looks like the original idea was Asimov's.
"installed rational govenments"
This I think is the crux of of the matter. You haven't (and I am not being anti-American in this, Britain has made many of the same mistakes).
You gave support to Saddam Hussein in the Iran-Iraq war when your client government in the shape of the Shah was ousted.
You supported the Islamic fundamentalists in Afghanistan (including Bin Laden, who allegedly was funded by the CIA) when it looked as though they could be a thorn in the side of the Soviet Union.
You can hardly expect the people of Chile to believe you installed rational governments when they had to put up with Pinochet for so many years.
Yes, this was an appalling crime, done by some appalling people. Some understanding of the history of the population from where the criminals came from might prevent such a crime happening again.
Their systems may be up - but what about the people to use them?
But you aren't trying to break a mechanism used to control access to information, unlike the DeCSS and Sklyarov cases.
If some time in the future MS make their file format dependent on on some undisclosed encryption methodology (XOR with "Open Source Sucks" backwards as such like) then the DMCA may be invoked.