How can one decry corrupt laws like the DMCA and at the same time continue to line the pockets of the very corporate special-interest groups that bought the law in the first place?
I can understand watching an occasional movie--it's not like there are many alternatives to the major studios out there on the movie scene--but posting movie reviews and recommendations for one of the worst companies in the bunch (i.e. Disney, purchaser of the Sonny Bono copyright extension) is beyond me.
I personally am in the midst of a three-year long boycott of all RIAA record labels and a two-year long boycott of all Hollywood movie studios, and I urge other like-minded readers to do the same. Note that the boycott does not mean I am depriving myself of all records and movies. Much as it may surprise you, not all music is RIAA, and not all movies are MPAA. While individual tastes differ, I'm sure that anyone who has bothered to look will agree with me that there is a lot of high quality material out there from independent studios.
Finally, a word of advice to anyone who doesn't want to support Hollywood, but wants to watch a Hollywood movie: Find a theater that shows independent films and also shows the movie you want, and buy a ticket for an independent film. Then once you're in the theater switch over to the movie you want to see. That way you get to see the movie but the Hollywood studio doesn't get anything for it. If theater personnel catch you, speak to the manager and explain what you're doing--the two times I've had to do this, the response from the manager was very positive.
I think it is OK to hit good customers at bad ISPs, as that is an efficient way to make the bad ISP behave in an acceptable manner.
Implicit in this argument is the assumption that people have the freedom to choose their ISP. This assumption doesn't hold any water: I myself know several people who consider themselves lucky to have even one broadband provider in their area, let alone two or three.
Although your guess is as good as mine, I predict that the lack of choice problem will only get worse as more and more companies merge.
When people have no choice of ISP, blocking innocent bystanders accomplishes no productive purpose and serves only to piss off the good guys and reduce the utility of the RBL.
I understand your point and I guess their current course of action makes sense in this situation, but I am concerned about where this course is heading.
In the inevitable future where POTS modems have been obseleted and a gigantic merged company such as AT&T-AOL-Time-Warner-Verizon is the sole provider of both cable modem and DSL services in the US, would it really be the wisest course of action for MAPS to add the entire behemoth ISP to the RBL, just to spite one spam-software website?
Where do you draw the line at what constitutes spam software? I can write a one-line shell script that bulk-mails a message to an ascii list of addresses. (I can even imagine situations where this script could be genuinely useful.) Does this count as spam software? What if I simply post the mail (1) man page, together with a short shell script tutorial. Does this count?
Right now I use the RBL, and I understand full well that I always have the choice of not using the RBL. However, as an RBL user I would prefer it if the RBL remained a useful service. Blocking an entire megacorp can certainly be very effective at times (e.g. Usenet death penalty), but the prospect of abuse worries me.
IPv4 addresses are not so plentifully available that one can simply block all questionable netblocks and expect there to be any unblocked addresses left for the good guys to reside in.
Also, with the current pace of mergers in the telecom sector, it is becoming increasingly the case that many people simply don't have the luxury of choosing their internet provider. Punishing innocent sites by mere association in this case is a cure worse than the disease.
Did you read the article by any chance? The problem being pointed out is that organizations such as Peacefire, who do not spam or harbor spammers or support spammers, are being blocked by the RBL, not for anything they did, but merely for being on the same netblock as the spammer websites.
Such a gaffe might be understandable if the IP addresses in question were dynamic, but they're not. They're static. There is no need for MAPS to list peacefire.org in the RBL.
but they have thrown a huge amount of cash at the problem, and if you don't want to look at their data, use the HGP instead
Nobody begrudges Celera the right to place restrictions on their hard-won data. The beef that most people have is that Celera wants to have their cake and eat it too: they want the glory of publication without paying the price of full disclosure.
I agree that Celera's data is "mostly free" but even that one inch of compromise represents the start of a slippery slope. In my (worthless) opinion journals should never have considered this work for publication.
The political rationalle behind "free" software doesn't really enter into Apple's reasons for releasing Darwin
Free software politics is irrelevant to Apple, but it is very relevant to the question posed by the slashdot article, namely, "Why isn't anyone interested in Darwin?"
A large fraction of the open source community is aware of the shortcomings of APSL as a free-software license, and at least some of these people are completely dismissing the idea of even having anything to do with Darwin development, because they know their code contributions won't be free for the public to use.
Nobody is claiming that lack of open-source community interest will hurt Darwin, or that such interest would help Darwin (look at the n years of development that have gone on with GNUstep). The question is why people don't care, not why should we care if people don't care.
While MathML may well dominate the web, there is no way it will replace TeX/LaTeX in the realm of printed publications.
Indeed, even the specification site admits that "MathML is not primarily intended for direct use by authors. While MathML is human-readable, in all but the simplest cases it is too verbose and error-prone for hand generation." This means: people will not write their publications in MathML. They will write their publications in TeX/LaTeX or some other program and publish the result as MathML.
From an authorship standpoint, MathML has the following serious shortcomings with respect to TeX/LaTeX:
No support for macros or functions
No support for internal citations (you can't cite a previous theorem as an abstract object; you have to cite it by its number, and keeping track of numbers by hand sucks)
Lack of outside bibliographic database integration
Doesn't look good on paper (no web browser can begin to match the years of thought that went into TeX's typesetting engine--kerning, ligatures, n-cubed optimal hyphenation, etc.)
I'm really shocked that you think MathML is any more human readable than TeX is. Try comparing "3+4i" in TeX to
<cn type="complex">3<sep/>4</cn>
in MathML and you'll see what I mean. Any way you look at it, TeX/LaTeX is not going away anytime soon.
michael... has in fact presented a very valid and well-informed opinion, backed by factual information
What exactly are you smoking? michael has not presented any evidence to support his claim that IE has "won the browser wars." Certainly there exists plenty of evidence for this claim, but michael has not presented a whit of it.
michael has not presented any evidence that "[IE] is clearly a better browser." First off, there is the familiar refrain that I can't run IE because for various reasons (among them not wanting to spend $5000 to get an unlimited-client web, mail, file, and login server) I must run Linux. Hard to argue that IE is better for me when I can't run it. Second, Mozilla and Konqueror are actually very high quality products right now. Mozilla in particular when compiled with optimizations and no debug (that is to say, do not use a precompiled nightly build) is as flighty on its feet as IE. Believe me I know: I've used IE on friends' boxes, and I use Mozilla on mine. No I'm not saying this is easy to do right now, but it will be once Mozilla hits 1.0.
Finally, michael's claim that IE "will [always] remain" better than the competition is utterly unsupported, and indeed unsupportable, by any evidence. In theory his other two claims above could have been backed by evidence if he had chosen to present it, but I don't see any conceivable line of reasoning that could prove IE will be on top forever.
The Social Security surplus fund is not this big pile of money sitting in a vault waiting to be used for current payouts. In fact it consists entirely of IOUs issued by the Treasury department. The actual money in the fund has already been long ago spent.
Social Security has since its inception relied entirely on incoming funds to support outgoing payments. The historical surplus accumulated by Social Security has already been spent away. Replacing any loss of incoming funds is going to take real money. It's not just some painless utilization of existing surplus funds that we already have.
Greenspan said directly in his last testimony that he'd rather see the debt eliminated (not merely the budget balanced) before passing any new tax cuts. Sorry I don't have a handy source...
As for the Social Security treadmill, if the trust fund were anything more than a legal fiction then "gradual unwinding" would work. However, since the current implementation of Social Security is pay-as-you-go, you can't cut off the incoming payments and still make the outgoing payments without some other program losing real money somewhere.
Debt reduction is automatic if Congress does nothing. Unfortunately, we all know that Congress is not going to sit on the sidelines and do nothing with money--they're going to be raiding the surplus with their money-grubbing hands as much as they can. Congress does nothing when it comes to important social issues, but when it comes to money they're first in line.
You're absolutely right that Gore is not really much better than Bush when it comes to debt reduction. But let's not kid ourselves: Greenspan supports debt reduction (i.e. doing nothing), and Bush made it sound as if Greenspan supports tax cuts instead.
As for privatization of pension funds (a totally separate point), I'm all for it except that Bush has promised to continue paying out current obligations without giving any indication where that money will come from. You can't divert incoming payments to private accounts and at the same time use them to do what you were doing before (paying existing obligations).
Nice try (and a good point), but Greenspan has actually said that if it were up to him, he would choose to completely eliminate the debt before allocating any additional dollars at all to tax reduction.
What else do you expect from an economist? And anyway, as we all know, it's not up to him, so this whole discussion is somewhat moot.
I guess my final dig at Bush is that newspaper pieces across the country have pointed out that if you take Bush's numbers at face value, the monies he promises to various groups adds up to way over the monies he started with. That makes it very hard for me (a mathematician) to take Bush's numbers at face value.
Bush's quote of Greenspan is literally true but implies the exact opposite of what Greenspan intended. It's a standard politician's trick.
As I pointed out in my other post, Greenspan's first priority is very clearly debt reduction. Yes, if the chairman had to choose between a tax cut or a spending increase, he'd prefer the tax cut. But Bush somehow twists it around to imply that Greenspan supports a tax cut, even over debt reduction.
Mr. Bush doesn't actually say Greenspan supports a tax cut (which is a clever omission, since it would be false). But if you didn't know any better, you'd think he did.
Chairman Greenspan has gone on record saying that he would rather see the surplus returned to taxpayers than spent on new government programs like Al Gore proposes.
This statement is very misleading. I've listened to a fair number of Congressional testimonies by Greenspan (not that he gives that many), and his list of priorities for any government surplus is as follows:
Debt reduction
Tax cut
Increased spending
While Bush's staff minion is literally correct (yes Greenspan prefers tax cuts to more spending), the minion omits the crucial point that Greenspan would prefer debt reduction over tax cuts.
[Re: Zip drives] the media is cheap and getting cheaper all the time, especially the 100s
[Re: CD-RW] media is kind of expensive
Maybe in 1997 what you said was correct, but here in the year 2000 you've got it completely backwards. CD-RW media is cheaper than Zip media, by a long shot.
A simple pricewatch check shows that 6 dollars gets you either one 100MB zip disk, or ten 650MB CD-RW discs. In price per-megabyte terms, CD-RW media beats the heck out of Zip media.
There are several reasons why floppies are worse today, and many have already been pointed out. One which people here have missed is the simple fact that floppies are now too low-margin (i.e. cheap) for any high quality manufacturer to stay in the market.
Such a simplistic comparison demonstrates extreme ignorance of both the FSF and Marxism. You're like the journalist who leaves out 90% of the words in a quote to obtain a completely different "quote".
Communism is about state ownership. Not no ownership. I'll shut up when you tell me which FSF web page advocates state ownership of software.
The lame attempts to equate free software with communism are so old by now that I don't even know why I bother responding, but here goes.
Free Software is, in essence, the same system that failed miserably in the Soviet Union
You ignore two points which utterly invalidate the analogy:
In a truly Adam Smith-style laissez faire capitalist society (laissez faire in French means "let [the public] do what it wants"), there would be no laws prohibiting me from making 5000 copies of Microsoft Windows and selling them at cost. If you are so rabidly capitalist, why don't you favor such a system?
The Soviet Union attempted to apply state-controlled socialism to the distribution of material goods. Materials are a zero-sum game: if I take your sandwich, you have none. Software is not a zero-sum game: if I copy your MS Windows you still have yours. Failure of state-controlled socialism for scarce material goods does not automatically imply failure of non-state-controlled socialism for abundant digital goods.
It is quite possible to make a cogent argument applying the lessons of Soviet communism to software copyright laws, but you have not done it.
how, for example, did RedHat get from the standard version of the kernel source to the version that they ship with their releases?
You have a serious misunderstanding of the structure of an SRPM. A source RPM contains a copy of the pristine source code as well as a separate copy of each individual patch that is to be applied to the original source code.
When a source RPM is built into a binary RPM, the original tar.gz is extracted, and then each patch is applied one by one to the original source. The patches aren't "pre-mixed" into the source code; they're separate files available for your perusal or removal.
The only legitimate complaint in here is that downloading 20 MB of source to get 2MB (compressed) of patches is impractical. If you bought their product, you get a CD containing all the source RPMs. If you didn't buy their product, then you'll just have to live with the download.
0.999... and real numbers [OT]
on
Does P = NP?
·
· Score: 1
reading the above-linked text is guaranteed to cause 9 out of 10 mathematicians to be blinded with rage...
I guess I must be in the 10% that think that his viewpoint is okay.
Actually my biggest gripe with Richman is his use of the term "real numbers" to denote entities like 0. The term "real number" in standard mathematics unquestionably refers to an element of the unique (up to isomorphism) complete ordered field. Adding infinitesimals like 0 and calling them real numbers is perfectly fine on a technical level; everything remains consistent and all. Problem is, it doesn't lead to real numbers as most people know them, since for example bounded sequences such as
0.9, 0.99, 0.999,...
suddenly fail to have any least upper bound.
The issue is not mathematical, it's linguistic. What Richman calls real numbers are not what other mathematicians call real numbers.
Slashdot Mirror
How can one decry corrupt laws like the DMCA and at the same time continue to line the pockets of the very corporate special-interest groups that bought the law in the first place?
I can understand watching an occasional movie--it's not like there are many alternatives to the major studios out there on the movie scene--but posting movie reviews and recommendations for one of the worst companies in the bunch (i.e. Disney, purchaser of the Sonny Bono copyright extension) is beyond me.
I personally am in the midst of a three-year long boycott of all RIAA record labels and a two-year long boycott of all Hollywood movie studios, and I urge other like-minded readers to do the same. Note that the boycott does not mean I am depriving myself of all records and movies. Much as it may surprise you, not all music is RIAA, and not all movies are MPAA. While individual tastes differ, I'm sure that anyone who has bothered to look will agree with me that there is a lot of high quality material out there from independent studios.
Finally, a word of advice to anyone who doesn't want to support Hollywood, but wants to watch a Hollywood movie: Find a theater that shows independent films and also shows the movie you want, and buy a ticket for an independent film. Then once you're in the theater switch over to the movie you want to see. That way you get to see the movie but the Hollywood studio doesn't get anything for it. If theater personnel catch you, speak to the manager and explain what you're doing--the two times I've had to do this, the response from the manager was very positive.
Implicit in this argument is the assumption that people have the freedom to choose their ISP. This assumption doesn't hold any water: I myself know several people who consider themselves lucky to have even one broadband provider in their area, let alone two or three.
Although your guess is as good as mine, I predict that the lack of choice problem will only get worse as more and more companies merge.
When people have no choice of ISP, blocking innocent bystanders accomplishes no productive purpose and serves only to piss off the good guys and reduce the utility of the RBL.
In the inevitable future where POTS modems have been obseleted and a gigantic merged company such as AT&T-AOL-Time-Warner-Verizon is the sole provider of both cable modem and DSL services in the US, would it really be the wisest course of action for MAPS to add the entire behemoth ISP to the RBL, just to spite one spam-software website?
Where do you draw the line at what constitutes spam software? I can write a one-line shell script that bulk-mails a message to an ascii list of addresses. (I can even imagine situations where this script could be genuinely useful.) Does this count as spam software? What if I simply post the mail (1) man page, together with a short shell script tutorial. Does this count?
Right now I use the RBL, and I understand full well that I always have the choice of not using the RBL. However, as an RBL user I would prefer it if the RBL remained a useful service. Blocking an entire megacorp can certainly be very effective at times (e.g. Usenet death penalty), but the prospect of abuse worries me.
Also, with the current pace of mergers in the telecom sector, it is becoming increasingly the case that many people simply don't have the luxury of choosing their internet provider. Punishing innocent sites by mere association in this case is a cure worse than the disease.
Such a gaffe might be understandable if the IP addresses in question were dynamic, but they're not. They're static. There is no need for MAPS to list peacefire.org in the RBL.
Nobody begrudges Celera the right to place restrictions on their hard-won data. The beef that most people have is that Celera wants to have their cake and eat it too: they want the glory of publication without paying the price of full disclosure.
I agree that Celera's data is "mostly free" but even that one inch of compromise represents the start of a slippery slope. In my (worthless) opinion journals should never have considered this work for publication.
More precisely, researchers have unlimited search access but are only allowed to download one million base pairs of data.
Correct but misleading. Public access and search are allowed for academic users, but downloads are limited to one megabase.
Free software politics is irrelevant to Apple, but it is very relevant to the question posed by the slashdot article, namely, "Why isn't anyone interested in Darwin?"
A large fraction of the open source community is aware of the shortcomings of APSL as a free-software license, and at least some of these people are completely dismissing the idea of even having anything to do with Darwin development, because they know their code contributions won't be free for the public to use.
Nobody is claiming that lack of open-source community interest will hurt Darwin, or that such interest would help Darwin (look at the n years of development that have gone on with GNUstep). The question is why people don't care, not why should we care if people don't care.
Indeed, even the specification site admits that "MathML is not primarily intended for direct use by authors. While MathML is human-readable, in all but the simplest cases it is too verbose and error-prone for hand generation." This means: people will not write their publications in MathML. They will write their publications in TeX/LaTeX or some other program and publish the result as MathML.
From an authorship standpoint, MathML has the following serious shortcomings with respect to TeX/LaTeX:
- No support for macros or functions
- No support for internal citations (you can't cite a previous theorem as an abstract object; you have to cite it by its number, and keeping track of numbers by hand sucks)
- Lack of outside bibliographic database integration
- Doesn't look good on paper (no web browser can begin to match the years of thought that went into TeX's typesetting engine--kerning, ligatures, n-cubed optimal hyphenation, etc.)
I'm really shocked that you think MathML is any more human readable than TeX is. Try comparing "3+4i" in TeX to in MathML and you'll see what I mean. Any way you look at it, TeX/LaTeX is not going away anytime soon.What exactly are you smoking? michael has not presented any evidence to support his claim that IE has "won the browser wars." Certainly there exists plenty of evidence for this claim, but michael has not presented a whit of it.
michael has not presented any evidence that "[IE] is clearly a better browser." First off, there is the familiar refrain that I can't run IE because for various reasons (among them not wanting to spend $5000 to get an unlimited-client web, mail, file, and login server) I must run Linux. Hard to argue that IE is better for me when I can't run it. Second, Mozilla and Konqueror are actually very high quality products right now. Mozilla in particular when compiled with optimizations and no debug (that is to say, do not use a precompiled nightly build) is as flighty on its feet as IE. Believe me I know: I've used IE on friends' boxes, and I use Mozilla on mine. No I'm not saying this is easy to do right now, but it will be once Mozilla hits 1.0.
Finally, michael's claim that IE "will [always] remain" better than the competition is utterly unsupported, and indeed unsupportable, by any evidence. In theory his other two claims above could have been backed by evidence if he had chosen to present it, but I don't see any conceivable line of reasoning that could prove IE will be on top forever.
I'd be very happy to see all Social Security obligations eliminated, not just reduced. Bush's goal is sound, but his numbers are not.
And, I should add, is being spent away (since you're referring to the current surplus).
Social Security has since its inception relied entirely on incoming funds to support outgoing payments. The historical surplus accumulated by Social Security has already been spent away. Replacing any loss of incoming funds is going to take real money. It's not just some painless utilization of existing surplus funds that we already have.
As for the Social Security treadmill, if the trust fund were anything more than a legal fiction then "gradual unwinding" would work. However, since the current implementation of Social Security is pay-as-you-go, you can't cut off the incoming payments and still make the outgoing payments without some other program losing real money somewhere.
You're absolutely right that Gore is not really much better than Bush when it comes to debt reduction. But let's not kid ourselves: Greenspan supports debt reduction (i.e. doing nothing), and Bush made it sound as if Greenspan supports tax cuts instead.
As for privatization of pension funds (a totally separate point), I'm all for it except that Bush has promised to continue paying out current obligations without giving any indication where that money will come from. You can't divert incoming payments to private accounts and at the same time use them to do what you were doing before (paying existing obligations).
What else do you expect from an economist? And anyway, as we all know, it's not up to him, so this whole discussion is somewhat moot.
I guess my final dig at Bush is that newspaper pieces across the country have pointed out that if you take Bush's numbers at face value, the monies he promises to various groups adds up to way over the monies he started with. That makes it very hard for me (a mathematician) to take Bush's numbers at face value.
As I pointed out in my other post, Greenspan's first priority is very clearly debt reduction. Yes, if the chairman had to choose between a tax cut or a spending increase, he'd prefer the tax cut. But Bush somehow twists it around to imply that Greenspan supports a tax cut, even over debt reduction.
Mr. Bush doesn't actually say Greenspan supports a tax cut (which is a clever omission, since it would be false). But if you didn't know any better, you'd think he did.
- Debt reduction
- Tax cut
- Increased spending
While Bush's staff minion is literally correct (yes Greenspan prefers tax cuts to more spending), the minion omits the crucial point that Greenspan would prefer debt reduction over tax cuts.[Re: CD-RW] media is kind of expensive Maybe in 1997 what you said was correct, but here in the year 2000 you've got it completely backwards. CD-RW media is cheaper than Zip media, by a long shot.
A simple pricewatch check shows that 6 dollars gets you either one 100MB zip disk, or ten 650MB CD-RW discs. In price per-megabyte terms, CD-RW media beats the heck out of Zip media.
As they say, you get what you pay for.
Communism is about state ownership. Not no ownership. I'll shut up when you tell me which FSF web page advocates state ownership of software.
- In a truly Adam Smith-style laissez faire capitalist society (laissez faire in French means "let [the public] do what it wants"), there would be no laws prohibiting me from making 5000 copies of Microsoft Windows and selling them at cost. If you are so rabidly capitalist, why don't you favor such a system?
- The Soviet Union attempted to apply state-controlled socialism to the distribution of material goods. Materials are a zero-sum game: if I take your sandwich, you have none. Software is not a zero-sum game: if I copy your MS Windows you still have yours. Failure of state-controlled socialism for scarce material goods does not automatically imply failure of non-state-controlled socialism for abundant digital goods.
It is quite possible to make a cogent argument applying the lessons of Soviet communism to software copyright laws, but you have not done it.You have a serious misunderstanding of the structure of an SRPM. A source RPM contains a copy of the pristine source code as well as a separate copy of each individual patch that is to be applied to the original source code.
When a source RPM is built into a binary RPM, the original tar.gz is extracted, and then each patch is applied one by one to the original source. The patches aren't "pre-mixed" into the source code; they're separate files available for your perusal or removal.
The only legitimate complaint in here is that downloading 20 MB of source to get 2MB (compressed) of patches is impractical. If you bought their product, you get a CD containing all the source RPMs. If you didn't buy their product, then you'll just have to live with the download.
I guess I must be in the 10% that think that his viewpoint is okay.
Actually my biggest gripe with Richman is his use of the term "real numbers" to denote entities like 0. The term "real number" in standard mathematics unquestionably refers to an element of the unique (up to isomorphism) complete ordered field. Adding infinitesimals like 0 and calling them real numbers is perfectly fine on a technical level; everything remains consistent and all. Problem is, it doesn't lead to real numbers as most people know them, since for example bounded sequences such as
suddenly fail to have any least upper bound.The issue is not mathematical, it's linguistic. What Richman calls real numbers are not what other mathematicians call real numbers.