Now you see, your problem here is that you are discussing this stuff as if it is happening in the analog domain as it was designed to be done.
These young kids on/. now all only know how to do things in the digital domain, and doing all that stuff that takes "a dozen tubes and passive parts hand soldered" is really complicated when you try to do it with a digitally sampled signal in a dsp. Do it with analog components and suddenly it's a lot simpler to deal with. Just like it was designed to be.
Geez, I'm no that old, I'm not supposed to be talking like this already!
If you're doing a one-off development, and everything is going to be for that specific purpose and no other use, sure, Big Picture stuff can be useful.
But if you want to make reuseable code that you can then take on to your next project... the Big Picture is a hindrance, not a help.
Most people tend to do one or the other, and not both. Writing good reuseable code *requires* abstracting away details that would otherwise get in the way of writing modules/objects that are general purpose.
As with so many things, this is a balancing act, and you get better with experience. You get better at asking about constraints, flexibility, limitations, interface requirements, error handling, and all the other things you have to keep in mind when writing code you will be proud to admit you wrote 5 years down the line.
Don't expect to leave college knowing everything you need to know for the rest of your professional life. Continue learning and picking up skills, and you'll justify those fat raises and bonuses you want.
Geez, you people still travel on horseback, don't you? Hate these new-fangled "wheel" things that might keep rolling downhill after you want to stop.
Or maybe you only drive manual-transmission cars because automatic transmissions just don't do everything exactly the way you want them to?
This is called a "house of hte future" because we aren't ready to make a production version of it right now. How shocking. Complaining that the technology isn't ready is missing the point.
This is talking about how to make things better. Yes, there is a *lot* to develop before it is ready for production use, but guess what, it will never be ready for production use unless people work on it. Congrats to MS for working on it, and for understanding that it is "future" and not "current" tech. (You did read that paragraph in the article, right?)
Yes, there will be growing pains. There will be systems that don't work quite right. Guess what, if market forces work the way they are supposed to... bad systems will either improve or die, and good systems will get even better.
But systems won't improve if people don't work on them. I'd like to see groups other than MS working on it (and guess, what, there are other groups doing this type of R&D also), but a lot of this simply goes under the generic heading of "Making software work with people better" which is a good thing from anyone.
Frankly, my concerns are less with getting the systems to work right, and more with getting the laws properly made so that your data about you in your house belongs to you only. Engineering problems are easy, legal/privacy problems are hard.
My only solution is to backup reasonably often. Still, I don't backup everything - just data - since it would use gobs of media. So if somebody hoses my system I'll be reinstalling everything - and that is quite a bit of junk - hundreds of megabytes of it having been downloaded from the web (redownloading over a 26k modem link isn't fun either).
If you like the system configuration the way it is right now, with the apps installed as they are...
Image the drive. Several good apps around (Norton Ghost and others) that will image a drive to a set of CD-R discs, and then you can restore from a bootable floppy/cd and re-image the drive from that cd-r set.
Then keep backing up data files only. If the system ever gets hosed, instead of re-installing everything, you restore from the drive image, and then restore your then-most-recent data files.
Saves a lot of time. You might use a 50-spindle of cd-r discs if you have a lot of stuff on a 100gig drive, but it will be worth it if/when you have to restore.
And if you are a believer in the "Windows is just happier if you do a fresh install every 6 months" theory... this works for that too.
Some licenses are incompatible, even if they're all opensource. So what mplayer did was redistribute all the source, but you couldn't compile it together and redistribute it because of the license incompatibilities.
If you can't legally redistribute, then most likely you can't legally compile it either.
This is what you don't seem to understand. The binary result has the same license as the source. If the source licenses are incompatible, the binary is illegal.
But it's okay it the user makes the illegal binary instead of the developers? This is your argument?
Amazing how mother nature can help enforce OSHA guidelines (which recommend getting up from your desk and walking around for about 1 minute every hour or so).
In the end, this whole episode will be spun to promomte TCPA.
I don't necessarily disagree with this statement, but it will take some creative speaking to spin it that way.
This was an exploit against SQL Server 2000. You think this would be an approved application on a TCPA machine? Yeah, me too. You think the SQL Server was already approved for network transactions? Yeah, me too. (Okay, it should have been approved for only local network transactions... which was the problem with Microsoft's network, wasn't it?)
TCPA protects against non-approved applications. It doesn't help much against approved network-aware applications that have network-related security vulnerabilities. It's a system for safely running perfect software. But when the TCPA-approved software has a security vulnerability that causes elevated use of a resource that software is already allowed to use... it doesn't help much.
You can easily encrypt the signal so it's safe from at least civilian eavesdropping. It's all cheap standard technology. It could use Airport ("802.11b"?) and record directly to your laptop!
Encrypting the signal after you do device handshaking/negotiation is easy.
How do you handle device handshaking/negotiation? You have 2 of these wireless harddrives for recording (and your neighbor has 1 too...). How does the camera decide which receiver to send to? I'll accept that it is easy to do excryption after that... (that's fairly well understood for most internet crypto stuff). But how does this stuff decide who the proper recipient is? How do you switch from one receiving harddrive to another when the first fills up? Without accidentally sending it to your neighbor's unit?
This has to be easy enough a normal consumer to handle. No keying in a 32-digit serial number for the receiver into the transmitter. As close to automatic as possible. Press a button on both simultaneously to synch them, maybe.
Remember, this is no longer a geek toy. This is consumer electronics... it needs to "just work". Easy. Simple. And without having your bedroom home movies show up on your neighbor's tv.
You're hitting the problem with wireless security... secure *or* convenient... both together... that's very difficult.
I'll take a U.S.-centric view, because, hey, that's where I live.
The U.S. is not a democracy. It's a republic. Do some reading, learn the difference. It was made that way 200+ years ago on purpose.
Yes, the Founding Fathers that we respect so much didn't really fully trust the unwashed masses. And the more I see, the more I think they were right.:(
And when you are comparing the price of anything to a nearly-equivalent version of the product that is offered for free, almost any amount of money, no matter how small, will not be considered "fair" by most people.
Most people don't copy music to spite the record companies. (Oh, a sizable percentage of/. readers might, but not most normal kazaa users.) Most people copy music, and let other people copy it, because it doesn't cost them anything, except a little bit of time. And most people don't properly value their time.
This is one of the problems that unlimited internet access causes. (Don't get me wrong, I love unlimited internet access and would be very upset if I were charged per-megabyte fees.) I don't mind giving a friend a lift across town in my car. It doesn't cost me much at all, maybe $0.25 in gas or so, and 10 minutes of my time. I will think seriously about driving a friend from one coast of the U.S. to the other, because that is a non-trivial expense, just in terms of gas and vehicle maintenance. Time expense also becomes unreasonable.
There should be a similar thought process with sharing music. Giving a friend a copy of a cd you bought, so they can listen to it and see if they want to get more stuff by that group, is a reasonable thing to do. Giving 2000 copies of it to people all over the world isn't.
But with unlimited internet access... Giving 2000 copies away to total strangers costs you the same as giving one copy to a good friend. The only "cost" to you is your time to set up the client and music files on your system.
It's hard to compete with free.
Competing with quality or convenience? Quality won't work. It will be too easy for P2P networks to add the equivalent of karma. Add a crc value to the information transmitted in a file search. After a verified good transfer, compare the crc value. That lets you verify the other client isn't lying about contents. Then you can listen to the music, and "moderate" on quality of the rip. Not if you like the song, but if the rip is good quality. Enough "nothing but skips and cracks" votes and that client drops to the bottom of the search results. You just solved the quality problem on p2p networks. Convenience can be handled also.
It's hard to compete with free.
We love this when talking about Microsoft, and any other propreitary vendor competing with an open source product. But the recording industry (and the artists that want to distribute their own stuff without dealing with the Major 5 Labels) has this problem also.
I admire the problem... and I wish I could offer a good solution. I really think it will just end up being a version of Apple's solution. An advertising campaign "Don't steal music" and almost no real limitations enforced. Because nothing else will let the industry keep the honest customers, which I like to think are the majority.
No, I don't really think you want to go out shooting anyone that pings your system. I do think most people that want this law want to have their systems running reliably, and don't really care what damage they have to cause to other people's systems for that to happen.
Your comparison of Nimda to a brake recall on a car is actually rather interesting. It allows us to consider a lot of things that might actually make sense here, and some that don't make much sense.
First, your comparison to a brake recall would make more sense if the people driving the vehicle didn't know their vehicle *had* brakes. Many (not most, I believe, but a large minority) of the people that were running non-patched systems when Nimda became a problem didn't know they were running IIS. This is one of the reasons MS switched to services off by default.
Second, the manufacturer found the problem, but didn't actually send out notices, just put a note on a web site somewhere where most people don't even know to look. Unless you make a specific effort to become aware of security issues, you won't know. You either join a mailing list and wade through way too much traffic for people that have real work to do also, or regularly visit a website and, again, read through too much traffic. Yes, I'm assuming these are not dedicated sysadmins, which is the case for most small and medium-sized businesses and homes.
Third, for people that get regular service done at a dealer service center, the driver may not know or care about recall work, the dealer does it for them. That's supposed to be one of the reasons you get regular maintenance done by the dealer. Not just because you like paying horrible prices for an oil change.:)
This is actually worth thinking about from the point of view of computer services companies. If IBM Global Services has a support contract with your company to maintain computers, and doesn't supply a patch, they are probably negligent. If IGS doesn't do it, is the company that owns the computers negligent, if they though IGS would? (No, I don't work for IBM, they are just a convenient example.)
Does a home user have a requirement to have their computer serviced regularly by a professional? How about a small business owner?
If a small business buys a microwave oven for the break room and that microwave is subject to a recall because it causes fires... If the business never hears about this (never sent in their warranty card so they don't get notices, and they don't check an online recall site) and doesn't replace it, if someone dies in a fire caused by that microwave oven, is the business liable for not exercising due dilligence?
Frankly, I don't know. I just know this is more complicated than we'd like to pretend it is. I'm looking for a quote here, something along the lines of "For every complicated problem, there is a solution that is simple, easy, and wrong."
"No Duty to Retreat" is also generally called the "Castle Doctrine" as in, Your home is your castle.
It is very much a state-specific concept. For instance, Florida has Castle Doctine in it's law, you have no duty to retreat from your home if someone is attacking you. New York has no such law, and actually specifically states that you must retreat if you have any possible option to do so. If you get trapped in your basement by a home invader, and you have a 16"x16" window in your basement that you might possibly be able to squeeze through to get away, you *must* try to get out through that window before you may legally use deadly force to defend yourself.
Also note that, for businesses and private individuals, there is nothing resembing Castle Doctrine for a place of business, only for a personal residence. Physical security forces are a special case, as they are nearly quasi-governmental.
But this proposal raises several other interesting problems. One of the neat statistics that 2nd Amendment supporters love is the accidental shooting statistics comparison between police and people that legally carry a concealed weapon. Police are much more likely to shoot an "innocent bystander" or similar than someone with a CCW permit. The reason for this, if you look into things, is that a CWW permit holder is usually involved in the assualt/crime from the beginning and knows exactly who the bad guys are. The CCW holder is usually the one *being* assualted, and can see the assaulter right in front of them. The cops come in in the middle of things, and have to figure out who the bad guys are in mid-stream, sometimes under extreme time pressures.
This relates to the Strikeback proposal rather directly. How many DDOS attacks use IP spoofing? Will you know who is attacking your system with certainty? How many systems are you allowed to incorrectly strike back at before you are legally liable?
Which incompetent admins that can't secure their own systems are you going to let decide who to strike back at???
Think of this in terms of the sniper attacks in the DC area last year. How much worse would it have been if 10 people nearby had pulled out guns and started randomly shooting at nearby vehicles that looked like they might be able to hide someone with a rifle? Thankfully, most people that carry a concealed weapon have more sense than to shoot at targets they are unsure of. I don't believe that of BOFHs on the internet.
Nah, the law makes perfect sense once you realize that in the instant that the person breaking down your door crosses your threshold, you are then able to read their mind.
Before crossing your threshold, you can't read their mind, and can reasonably assume that someone trying to break down your door wants to cause death or serious bodily injury to you.
After they cross your door threshold, you can read their mind, and realize they are nice polite don't-wanna-hurt-nobody petty theives, and just want your stereo and tv set. They are no longer a threat to your life, so you can't kill them in self defense.
The MPEG4 standard is patent-encumbered. It is licensed RAND (Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory). This means they'll give a license to just about anyone willing to pay for it, at published rates.
It it "open" because anyone can get a copy of the standard (though some standards organizations charge you a nice fee to buy an official copy of the standard).
But implementing it is non-free, because of the patents.
Now we understand why people object to software patents, yes?
This is the difference between proprietary standards, open standards, and free and open standards.
I actually agree and disagree with you simultaneously. (I'm pretty good at holding two conflicting opinions at the same time, yes it drives me just as batty as it does my friends.)
Science should have two distinct goals, with requirements set as makes sense for those goals.
Simply because scientific learning has so many interesting unintended consequences (who knew the Mercury program would put a microwave oven in my kitchen?) basic scientific research (the Research part of R&D) should have as few external requirements as possible.
Directed research for the point of specific applications (the Development part of R&D, rather than the Research part) should have as many controls as whoever is providing the money wants to put in it.
Of course, all this really did is shift the argument to defining what is research, and what is development. Exactly where you draw the line becomes significant.
This also leads to another argument about how much funding/time should be spent on research, and how much on development. My impression (based on not enough data, I admit) is that a lot of research is being abandoned to focus more on development. That's sad, and will cost us as a society in the next 100 years or so.
Does the name Galileo Galilei ring a bell? You remember, the guy that was branded a heretic for saying the Earth wasn't the center of the universe. Who branded him a heretic? Why, the Catholic church, which just happened to control most European governments at the time, one way or another.
Science as a tool of public policy is standard practice for *any* long-standing established govenment.
And "intellecutal property" problems? Look into how many English people came to the Colonies in the 1700s so they could use patened machines without paying patent fees. It's amazing how much industry came here for that reason. Lots of textiles, for example.
What is the quote from Plato? "The youth these days, they have no respect for their elders." There are no new problems, only people with a poor knowledge of history. (And I count myself in that group.)
Still, at least you haven't got idiots of Tony Blair's calibre in charge - Dubya's at least got the excuse of moderate intellect to justify his actions...
This has got to be a wonderful example of "The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence, err, pond."
This is just subscriptions. But the author thinks people don't like paying subscriptions, so he decided to call his subscription a micropayment-equivalent.
From a large corporation, I'd call this scummy and dishonest. From a person, I'll simply call it dishonest.
The point with micropayments is that I can visit a pay site once in a year, and only pay 3cents for that individual visit. (With, of course, a transaciton cost of about $2 on that 3cent bill.)
KalvinB's system is good only for long-term site users. Which admittedly is what a site wants, but it would be nice if he were honest enough to say that's what he's doing.
I will admit, the idea of subscriptions that only pay bandwidth costs is a reasonable thing to do. But it isn't a replacement for advertisements. It is a companion to them, to make the advertiser willing to pay more. You have the same deal with a subscription to newspapers... Your cost for a subscription to the New York Times or Washington Post just about covers the raw costs for the paper - the processed wood pulp - only. All other costs of running the business - salaries, equipment, general overhead - are paid by advertising.
You are paying for the privelege of allowing the paper to sell access to "people that are willing to spend money" while yourself getting access to good quality news coverage.
If you get something that's worthwhile to you, that's fine. But don't think KalvinB's thing has anything to do with micropayments.
The more I look at it, the more I think the law is a lot like undebugged computer code.
a bag of peanuts I got on American last time I flew had this on the package "Instructions: Open bag, eat nuts" and "Warning: contains peanuts".
Yep, I've seen those. The instructions really worry me. The warning? Some people have very extreme allergic reactions to nuts. Any kind of nuts. So some law/regulation was enacted that if your food product contains nuts, you must put a warning label on it saying it contains nuts.
This sounds really good as a general rule. Until you realize you didn't cover the special case of "food product that contains only nuts" needing such a label.
Sounds like a lot of computer software I've seen. (And some I've written...) Makes a lot of sense in general, but doesn't handle special cases too well...
It all depends on what you were doing, doesn't it? If you were doing fifteen miles over the speed limit and the roads are slick, and you run someone down, then you're probably going to get in hot water. OTOH, if you were driving safely, hit the brakes to avoid the other guy (who was going well over the speed limit), and was hit in the side, then his insurance company is going to be paying out to you. Having crash data available benefits the honest people that *aren't* misusing their cars. Sounds fine to me, frankly.
Sorry, no. There is no such thing as "driving safely" on a road with more than one vehicle on it. In your previous sentence, you stated "over the speed limit" so I'm going to assume you include "driving within the speed limit" in "driving safely". (Yes, this is putting words in your mouth. If I'm wrong, I apologize.)
Have you done much driving in the US? If you are going the speed limit, you are not driving safely. You are being a traffic hazard. On a road with traffic flowing at 15 miles per hour over the speed limit, you can, quite seriously, be ticketed for "reckless driving" for driving the speed limit. Because you are a traffic hazard by driving within the speed limit.
The system is designed so that you are, simply by being on the road, acting outside the law. It is also designed with the assumption that traffic laws will be enforced by a reasonable human being, so that conflicting laws will be properly applied. Mostly, with humans enforcing the laws, this works rather well.
With insurance companies run by computers and actuarial tables, this works much less well. Your car will record that you were doing something dangerous while driving. It doesn't much matter what you were doing, it was still dangerous somehow. Congratulations, your insurance company probably has no liability when you are not "driving safely".
This isn't bad so much from the point of view of being used against you, as it is from the point of view that it needs to be understood that life is dangerous, and you don't lose coverage simply for living.
This also goes along with the problem of technology giving the ability to actually enforce all laws all the time. Most law wasn't designed with that in mind. Most non-felony law would be truly awful if it were actually completely enforced all the time. But technology is coming close to giving that ability, and we as a society need to consider the implications of that before we jump into it.
Yes, they do have those warnings now, and they're rather silly.
However, you notice the cups don't have warnings saying "Warning! Contents hotter than our own regulations say they should be!" which was what ended up most contributing to McDonald's being found liable in that case. They had faulty equipment that was heating coffee hotter than their own regs said it should be, knew the equipment was faulty, and didn't fix/replace it in a timely manner.
Therefore, they were found legally liable for a customer making a simple mistake. This was "negligence contributing to a follow-on injury".
Frankly, I'd *like* to agree with you. I really would. My stuff isn't worth a life. Even the life of someone who breaks into my home to steal it while I sleep.
But I live in Florida. Florida has this nifty law they call 10-20-Life. Commit a crime with a gun, you get a mandatory sentence of 10 years. Doesn't matter what the crime is. Draw that weapon for any reason during the commission of a crime, and you get a mandatory sentence of 20 years. Fire that weapon (doesn't matter if you hit anything or hurt anyone with it or not) and you get a mandatory life sentence.
Someone that breaks into my house with a gun... I'm not willing to take the chance that they will say "okay, 10 years I can handle, but not 20, and not a life sentence" when they realize they're going to leave the crime scene with a witness there.
Quite frankly, people that break into an occupied dwelling are not nice people. And they don't think like nice people think.
If I discover someone in my living room stealing my dvd player, if they simply run for the door with it, they'll get away clean. I'll reach for a phone to call the police when I see them running, not for a weapon. But if they drop the dvd player and reach for their pants, I'm going to assume they are going for a weapon. And there's only one sane response there.
This is why lawyers cite court verdicts, and not laws, when giving precedent for requests for judgement. Caselaw is almost more important than law, for sufficiently complicated matters.
This is why it is important to have good judges on the bench. They very nearly *make* law, simply by interpretting existing/new statutes. (The Supreme Court generally doesn't get involved unless different circuit courts interpret the law differently. They get involved to provide consistency across circuits.)
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Now you see, your problem here is that you are discussing this stuff as if it is happening in the analog domain as it was designed to be done.
/. now all only know how to do things in the digital domain, and doing all that stuff that takes "a dozen tubes and passive parts hand soldered" is really complicated when you try to do it with a digitally sampled signal in a dsp. Do it with analog components and suddenly it's a lot simpler to deal with. Just like it was designed to be.
These young kids on
Geez, I'm no that old, I'm not supposed to be talking like this already!
If you're doing a one-off development, and everything is going to be for that specific purpose and no other use, sure, Big Picture stuff can be useful.
But if you want to make reuseable code that you can then take on to your next project... the Big Picture is a hindrance, not a help.
Most people tend to do one or the other, and not both. Writing good reuseable code *requires* abstracting away details that would otherwise get in the way of writing modules/objects that are general purpose.
As with so many things, this is a balancing act, and you get better with experience. You get better at asking about constraints, flexibility, limitations, interface requirements, error handling, and all the other things you have to keep in mind when writing code you will be proud to admit you wrote 5 years down the line.
Don't expect to leave college knowing everything you need to know for the rest of your professional life. Continue learning and picking up skills, and you'll justify those fat raises and bonuses you want.
I thought intimidation *was* the purpose of the legal system! Or have I been reading about too many bought-and-paid-for laws lately?
Geez, you people still travel on horseback, don't you? Hate these new-fangled "wheel" things that might keep rolling downhill after you want to stop.
Or maybe you only drive manual-transmission cars because automatic transmissions just don't do everything exactly the way you want them to?
This is called a "house of hte future" because we aren't ready to make a production version of it right now. How shocking. Complaining that the technology isn't ready is missing the point.
This is talking about how to make things better. Yes, there is a *lot* to develop before it is ready for production use, but guess what, it will never be ready for production use unless people work on it. Congrats to MS for working on it, and for understanding that it is "future" and not "current" tech. (You did read that paragraph in the article, right?)
Yes, there will be growing pains. There will be systems that don't work quite right. Guess what, if market forces work the way they are supposed to... bad systems will either improve or die, and good systems will get even better.
But systems won't improve if people don't work on them. I'd like to see groups other than MS working on it (and guess, what, there are other groups doing this type of R&D also), but a lot of this simply goes under the generic heading of "Making software work with people better" which is a good thing from anyone.
Frankly, my concerns are less with getting the systems to work right, and more with getting the laws properly made so that your data about you in your house belongs to you only. Engineering problems are easy, legal/privacy problems are hard.
If you like the system configuration the way it is right now, with the apps installed as they are...
Image the drive. Several good apps around (Norton Ghost and others) that will image a drive to a set of CD-R discs, and then you can restore from a bootable floppy/cd and re-image the drive from that cd-r set.
Then keep backing up data files only. If the system ever gets hosed, instead of re-installing everything, you restore from the drive image, and then restore your then-most-recent data files.
Saves a lot of time. You might use a 50-spindle of cd-r discs if you have a lot of stuff on a 100gig drive, but it will be worth it if/when you have to restore.
And if you are a believer in the "Windows is just happier if you do a fresh install every 6 months" theory... this works for that too.
If you can't legally redistribute, then most likely you can't legally compile it either.
This is what you don't seem to understand. The binary result has the same license as the source. If the source licenses are incompatible, the binary is illegal.
But it's okay it the user makes the illegal binary instead of the developers? This is your argument?
You'll be forced to get up every hour or so. :)
Amazing how mother nature can help enforce OSHA guidelines (which recommend getting up from your desk and walking around for about 1 minute every hour or so).
I don't necessarily disagree with this statement, but it will take some creative speaking to spin it that way.
This was an exploit against SQL Server 2000. You think this would be an approved application on a TCPA machine? Yeah, me too. You think the SQL Server was already approved for network transactions? Yeah, me too. (Okay, it should have been approved for only local network transactions... which was the problem with Microsoft's network, wasn't it?)
TCPA protects against non-approved applications. It doesn't help much against approved network-aware applications that have network-related security vulnerabilities. It's a system for safely running perfect software. But when the TCPA-approved software has a security vulnerability that causes elevated use of a resource that software is already allowed to use... it doesn't help much.
Encrypting the signal after you do device handshaking/negotiation is easy.
How do you handle device handshaking/negotiation? You have 2 of these wireless harddrives for recording (and your neighbor has 1 too...). How does the camera decide which receiver to send to? I'll accept that it is easy to do excryption after that... (that's fairly well understood for most internet crypto stuff). But how does this stuff decide who the proper recipient is? How do you switch from one receiving harddrive to another when the first fills up? Without accidentally sending it to your neighbor's unit?
This has to be easy enough a normal consumer to handle. No keying in a 32-digit serial number for the receiver into the transmitter. As close to automatic as possible. Press a button on both simultaneously to synch them, maybe.
Remember, this is no longer a geek toy. This is consumer electronics... it needs to "just work". Easy. Simple. And without having your bedroom home movies show up on your neighbor's tv.
You're hitting the problem with wireless security... secure *or* convenient... both together... that's very difficult.
I'll take a U.S.-centric view, because, hey, that's where I live.
:(
The U.S. is not a democracy. It's a republic. Do some reading, learn the difference. It was made that way 200+ years ago on purpose.
Yes, the Founding Fathers that we respect so much didn't really fully trust the unwashed masses. And the more I see, the more I think they were right.
And when you are comparing the price of anything to a nearly-equivalent version of the product that is offered for free, almost any amount of money, no matter how small, will not be considered "fair" by most people.
/. readers might, but not most normal kazaa users.) Most people copy music, and let other people copy it, because it doesn't cost them anything, except a little bit of time. And most people don't properly value their time.
Most people don't copy music to spite the record companies. (Oh, a sizable percentage of
This is one of the problems that unlimited internet access causes. (Don't get me wrong, I love unlimited internet access and would be very upset if I were charged per-megabyte fees.) I don't mind giving a friend a lift across town in my car. It doesn't cost me much at all, maybe $0.25 in gas or so, and 10 minutes of my time. I will think seriously about driving a friend from one coast of the U.S. to the other, because that is a non-trivial expense, just in terms of gas and vehicle maintenance. Time expense also becomes unreasonable.
There should be a similar thought process with sharing music. Giving a friend a copy of a cd you bought, so they can listen to it and see if they want to get more stuff by that group, is a reasonable thing to do. Giving 2000 copies of it to people all over the world isn't.
But with unlimited internet access... Giving 2000 copies away to total strangers costs you the same as giving one copy to a good friend. The only "cost" to you is your time to set up the client and music files on your system.
It's hard to compete with free.
Competing with quality or convenience? Quality won't work. It will be too easy for P2P networks to add the equivalent of karma. Add a crc value to the information transmitted in a file search. After a verified good transfer, compare the crc value. That lets you verify the other client isn't lying about contents. Then you can listen to the music, and "moderate" on quality of the rip. Not if you like the song, but if the rip is good quality. Enough "nothing but skips and cracks" votes and that client drops to the bottom of the search results. You just solved the quality problem on p2p networks. Convenience can be handled also.
It's hard to compete with free.
We love this when talking about Microsoft, and any other propreitary vendor competing with an open source product. But the recording industry (and the artists that want to distribute their own stuff without dealing with the Major 5 Labels) has this problem also.
I admire the problem... and I wish I could offer a good solution. I really think it will just end up being a version of Apple's solution. An advertising campaign "Don't steal music" and almost no real limitations enforced. Because nothing else will let the industry keep the honest customers, which I like to think are the majority.
Why solder? Just accept that your "rapid-response" button became a "semi-rapid-response" button.
Most power buttons on ATX systems will perform a manual power-off if you hold the button in for 5 seconds.
If you just do a press-and-immediately-release it will ask the OS to start its shutdown procedure. In Windows, this pops up the "Shutdown" dialog box.
If you press the button and hold it in for about 5 seconds, the bios turns off power as if you had a real power switch. Kinda useful.
No, I don't really think you want to go out shooting anyone that pings your system. I do think most people that want this law want to have their systems running reliably, and don't really care what damage they have to cause to other people's systems for that to happen.
:)
Your comparison of Nimda to a brake recall on a car is actually rather interesting. It allows us to consider a lot of things that might actually make sense here, and some that don't make much sense.
First, your comparison to a brake recall would make more sense if the people driving the vehicle didn't know their vehicle *had* brakes. Many (not most, I believe, but a large minority) of the people that were running non-patched systems when Nimda became a problem didn't know they were running IIS. This is one of the reasons MS switched to services off by default.
Second, the manufacturer found the problem, but didn't actually send out notices, just put a note on a web site somewhere where most people don't even know to look. Unless you make a specific effort to become aware of security issues, you won't know. You either join a mailing list and wade through way too much traffic for people that have real work to do also, or regularly visit a website and, again, read through too much traffic. Yes, I'm assuming these are not dedicated sysadmins, which is the case for most small and medium-sized businesses and homes.
Third, for people that get regular service done at a dealer service center, the driver may not know or care about recall work, the dealer does it for them. That's supposed to be one of the reasons you get regular maintenance done by the dealer. Not just because you like paying horrible prices for an oil change.
This is actually worth thinking about from the point of view of computer services companies. If IBM Global Services has a support contract with your company to maintain computers, and doesn't supply a patch, they are probably negligent. If IGS doesn't do it, is the company that owns the computers negligent, if they though IGS would? (No, I don't work for IBM, they are just a convenient example.)
Does a home user have a requirement to have their computer serviced regularly by a professional? How about a small business owner?
If a small business buys a microwave oven for the break room and that microwave is subject to a recall because it causes fires... If the business never hears about this (never sent in their warranty card so they don't get notices, and they don't check an online recall site) and doesn't replace it, if someone dies in a fire caused by that microwave oven, is the business liable for not exercising due dilligence?
Frankly, I don't know. I just know this is more complicated than we'd like to pretend it is. I'm looking for a quote here, something along the lines of "For every complicated problem, there is a solution that is simple, easy, and wrong."
"No Duty to Retreat" is also generally called the "Castle Doctrine" as in, Your home is your castle.
It is very much a state-specific concept. For instance, Florida has Castle Doctine in it's law, you have no duty to retreat from your home if someone is attacking you. New York has no such law, and actually specifically states that you must retreat if you have any possible option to do so. If you get trapped in your basement by a home invader, and you have a 16"x16" window in your basement that you might possibly be able to squeeze through to get away, you *must* try to get out through that window before you may legally use deadly force to defend yourself.
Also note that, for businesses and private individuals, there is nothing resembing Castle Doctrine for a place of business, only for a personal residence. Physical security forces are a special case, as they are nearly quasi-governmental.
But this proposal raises several other interesting problems. One of the neat statistics that 2nd Amendment supporters love is the accidental shooting statistics comparison between police and people that legally carry a concealed weapon. Police are much more likely to shoot an "innocent bystander" or similar than someone with a CCW permit. The reason for this, if you look into things, is that a CWW permit holder is usually involved in the assualt/crime from the beginning and knows exactly who the bad guys are. The CCW holder is usually the one *being* assualted, and can see the assaulter right in front of them. The cops come in in the middle of things, and have to figure out who the bad guys are in mid-stream, sometimes under extreme time pressures.
This relates to the Strikeback proposal rather directly. How many DDOS attacks use IP spoofing? Will you know who is attacking your system with certainty? How many systems are you allowed to incorrectly strike back at before you are legally liable?
Which incompetent admins that can't secure their own systems are you going to let decide who to strike back at???
Think of this in terms of the sniper attacks in the DC area last year. How much worse would it have been if 10 people nearby had pulled out guns and started randomly shooting at nearby vehicles that looked like they might be able to hide someone with a rifle? Thankfully, most people that carry a concealed weapon have more sense than to shoot at targets they are unsure of. I don't believe that of BOFHs on the internet.
Nah, the law makes perfect sense once you realize that in the instant that the person breaking down your door crosses your threshold, you are then able to read their mind.
Before crossing your threshold, you can't read their mind, and can reasonably assume that someone trying to break down your door wants to cause death or serious bodily injury to you.
After they cross your door threshold, you can read their mind, and realize they are nice polite don't-wanna-hurt-nobody petty theives, and just want your stereo and tv set. They are no longer a threat to your life, so you can't kill them in self defense.
Makes perfect sense now, doesn't it?
The MPEG4 standard is patent-encumbered. It is licensed RAND (Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory). This means they'll give a license to just about anyone willing to pay for it, at published rates.
It it "open" because anyone can get a copy of the standard (though some standards organizations charge you a nice fee to buy an official copy of the standard).
But implementing it is non-free, because of the patents.
Now we understand why people object to software patents, yes?
This is the difference between proprietary standards, open standards, and free and open standards.
I actually agree and disagree with you simultaneously. (I'm pretty good at holding two conflicting opinions at the same time, yes it drives me just as batty as it does my friends.)
Science should have two distinct goals, with requirements set as makes sense for those goals.
Simply because scientific learning has so many interesting unintended consequences (who knew the Mercury program would put a microwave oven in my kitchen?) basic scientific research (the Research part of R&D) should have as few external requirements as possible.
Directed research for the point of specific applications (the Development part of R&D, rather than the Research part) should have as many controls as whoever is providing the money wants to put in it.
Of course, all this really did is shift the argument to defining what is research, and what is development. Exactly where you draw the line becomes significant.
This also leads to another argument about how much funding/time should be spent on research, and how much on development. My impression (based on not enough data, I admit) is that a lot of research is being abandoned to focus more on development. That's sad, and will cost us as a society in the next 100 years or so.
Read more history.
I'll keep this short.
Does the name Galileo Galilei ring a bell? You remember, the guy that was branded a heretic for saying the Earth wasn't the center of the universe. Who branded him a heretic? Why, the Catholic church, which just happened to control most European governments at the time, one way or another.
Science as a tool of public policy is standard practice for *any* long-standing established govenment.
And "intellecutal property" problems? Look into how many English people came to the Colonies in the 1700s so they could use patened machines without paying patent fees. It's amazing how much industry came here for that reason. Lots of textiles, for example.
What is the quote from Plato? "The youth these days, they have no respect for their elders." There are no new problems, only people with a poor knowledge of history. (And I count myself in that group.)
This has got to be a wonderful example of "The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence, err, pond."
Thank you, I needed the laugh.
This is just subscriptions. But the author thinks people don't like paying subscriptions, so he decided to call his subscription a micropayment-equivalent.
From a large corporation, I'd call this scummy and dishonest. From a person, I'll simply call it dishonest.
The point with micropayments is that I can visit a pay site once in a year, and only pay 3cents for that individual visit. (With, of course, a transaciton cost of about $2 on that 3cent bill.)
KalvinB's system is good only for long-term site users. Which admittedly is what a site wants, but it would be nice if he were honest enough to say that's what he's doing.
I will admit, the idea of subscriptions that only pay bandwidth costs is a reasonable thing to do. But it isn't a replacement for advertisements. It is a companion to them, to make the advertiser willing to pay more. You have the same deal with a subscription to newspapers... Your cost for a subscription to the New York Times or Washington Post just about covers the raw costs for the paper - the processed wood pulp - only. All other costs of running the business - salaries, equipment, general overhead - are paid by advertising.
You are paying for the privelege of allowing the paper to sell access to "people that are willing to spend money" while yourself getting access to good quality news coverage.
If you get something that's worthwhile to you, that's fine. But don't think KalvinB's thing has anything to do with micropayments.
Yep, I've seen those. The instructions really worry me. The warning? Some people have very extreme allergic reactions to nuts. Any kind of nuts. So some law/regulation was enacted that if your food product contains nuts, you must put a warning label on it saying it contains nuts.
This sounds really good as a general rule. Until you realize you didn't cover the special case of "food product that contains only nuts" needing such a label.
Sounds like a lot of computer software I've seen. (And some I've written...) Makes a lot of sense in general, but doesn't handle special cases too well...
Sorry, no. There is no such thing as "driving safely" on a road with more than one vehicle on it. In your previous sentence, you stated "over the speed limit" so I'm going to assume you include "driving within the speed limit" in "driving safely". (Yes, this is putting words in your mouth. If I'm wrong, I apologize.)
Have you done much driving in the US? If you are going the speed limit, you are not driving safely. You are being a traffic hazard. On a road with traffic flowing at 15 miles per hour over the speed limit, you can, quite seriously, be ticketed for "reckless driving" for driving the speed limit. Because you are a traffic hazard by driving within the speed limit.
The system is designed so that you are, simply by being on the road, acting outside the law. It is also designed with the assumption that traffic laws will be enforced by a reasonable human being, so that conflicting laws will be properly applied. Mostly, with humans enforcing the laws, this works rather well.
With insurance companies run by computers and actuarial tables, this works much less well. Your car will record that you were doing something dangerous while driving. It doesn't much matter what you were doing, it was still dangerous somehow. Congratulations, your insurance company probably has no liability when you are not "driving safely".
This isn't bad so much from the point of view of being used against you, as it is from the point of view that it needs to be understood that life is dangerous, and you don't lose coverage simply for living.
This also goes along with the problem of technology giving the ability to actually enforce all laws all the time. Most law wasn't designed with that in mind. Most non-felony law would be truly awful if it were actually completely enforced all the time. But technology is coming close to giving that ability, and we as a society need to consider the implications of that before we jump into it.
Yes, they do have those warnings now, and they're rather silly.
However, you notice the cups don't have warnings saying "Warning! Contents hotter than our own regulations say they should be!" which was what ended up most contributing to McDonald's being found liable in that case. They had faulty equipment that was heating coffee hotter than their own regs said it should be, knew the equipment was faulty, and didn't fix/replace it in a timely manner.
Therefore, they were found legally liable for a customer making a simple mistake. This was "negligence contributing to a follow-on injury".
But I still think the warning labels are amusing.
Frankly, I'd *like* to agree with you. I really would. My stuff isn't worth a life. Even the life of someone who breaks into my home to steal it while I sleep.
But I live in Florida. Florida has this nifty law they call 10-20-Life. Commit a crime with a gun, you get a mandatory sentence of 10 years. Doesn't matter what the crime is. Draw that weapon for any reason during the commission of a crime, and you get a mandatory sentence of 20 years. Fire that weapon (doesn't matter if you hit anything or hurt anyone with it or not) and you get a mandatory life sentence.
Someone that breaks into my house with a gun... I'm not willing to take the chance that they will say "okay, 10 years I can handle, but not 20, and not a life sentence" when they realize they're going to leave the crime scene with a witness there.
Quite frankly, people that break into an occupied dwelling are not nice people. And they don't think like nice people think.
If I discover someone in my living room stealing my dvd player, if they simply run for the door with it, they'll get away clean. I'll reach for a phone to call the police when I see them running, not for a weapon. But if they drop the dvd player and reach for their pants, I'm going to assume they are going for a weapon. And there's only one sane response there.
It is the job of judges to *interpret* the law.
This is why lawyers cite court verdicts, and not laws, when giving precedent for requests for judgement. Caselaw is almost more important than law, for sufficiently complicated matters.
This is why it is important to have good judges on the bench. They very nearly *make* law, simply by interpretting existing/new statutes. (The Supreme Court generally doesn't get involved unless different circuit courts interpret the law differently. They get involved to provide consistency across circuits.)