I agree that any filtering will not work perfectly, but that's not a very good reason. Hardly any software works perfectly either, but a lot of software is good enough. Similarly, no computer security is perfect, but we still try to do the best we can.
Personally, I have no problem with filtering software provided it is implemented properly and openly, so that you could see what agenda was being pushed. In particular, I would like to see that the librarians have the capability of adding or removing any sites.
As for using a public resource any way you want, why don't you try that in a public park and find out how amused the police are?
Without thinking too hard about it, I think copyright protection will become a hotter issue. Clinton/Gore was a friend to copyright protectionists, but Bush will be even a better buddy. At some point, the two sides will square off, and civil disobedience will be the order of the day. The question is whether Bush will pursue those evil copyright protection violators as criminals, or just let the media sic their lawyers on them.
The problem is not that the information is known, but that it will be used for unethical discrimination. Medical information, sexual orientation, disabilities, race, etc., can all be used improperly. I don't think we will have much success trying to outlaw the transfer of this sort of information (privacy laws). After all, isn't "Information wants to be free." one of our mantras. Instead, we will have more success outlawing improper use of this information (discrimination laws). Complete success is unlikely given that it is all too often easy to make up an acceptable excuse for not hiring so-and-so. But I think will be a more successful approach than trying to bottle up information.
Maybe there is no compromise between free and proprietary software, or perhaps between free and proprietary information in general. This proposal is just one more indication that the proprietary side simply wants total control over what you can read or see or hear and when you can do it.
With no or little academic CS background, no self-respecting university will admit you to their MS program without conditions. If they admit you with conditions, then you are stuck with satisfying all the conditions.
A better approach is to take some UG courses before you apply. If you can show that you can handle the upper-level UG courses, they will probably admit you with few conditions. Look at the core courses in the CS BS program, and take the junior and senior level courses. Where I teach, we look at Analysis of Algorithms, Computer Architecture, and Operating Systems. YMMV.
I thought one of the arguments against regulating the content of the internet was that software could filter out the "bad" stuff (bad = whatever you don't want you or your children to see). That is, we should allow a great deal of freedom for content on web sites because web site users who wanted to avoid "bad" content could easily filter it out. Wasn't this one of the arguments against one or more of the anti-content laws passed by the US congress?
If you claim that is not easy to filter out, then you are running the risk of even more heavy-handed laws, because, after all, this is the only way to regulate "bad" stuff.
It seems to me that reasonable censorware should be easy for all the great open-source programmers that read Slashdot. Of course, filtering everything "bad" would be impossible, but filtering a substantial portion should be easy to do with very little of the dumb filtering we keep hearing about. A lot of people want reasonable censorware. Why not give it to them?
NAT is an easy way to provide reasonable security, and an easy way to create a network from only one IP address. Hence, the increasing popularity of so-called security appliances. BTW, these are nice XMas gifts for your geeky significant other.
NAT will not save you if you are running an insecure server, but for insecure clients, it will save you from hackers trying to create a connection to the client. At least that is true if the NAT is properly set up.
What is exactly moral or ethical about gaming? Gaming is pretty much pure entertainment, with little to no socially redeeming values and often with many socially unredeeming values. Is gaming any more than goofing off? How exactly is gaming going to save the world? The only answer I can come up with is that gaming might keep some juvenile delinquents glued to the tube instead of roaming the streets. [I didn't say all gamers were juvenile delinquents, so don't say that I said that.] Maybe some gamers learn some useful technical knowledge, but this hardly applies to gamers as a whole.
Should we be in a "moral panic" because youth are wasting time on entertainment instead of doing to learning something useful? I would rate this a 4 on the panic scale. Youth have always tried to avoid being useful from time immemorial.
Should we be in a "moral panic" because youth are learning violent and sexually abusive behavior from games? I would rate this a 6 on the panic scale. I simply don't accept the argument that there is no effect if you view and (virtually) do this behavior over and over and over again. How else do you learn except by watching and practice?
The US constitution states that one of the powers of the Congress is:
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive
Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
However, a DMCA protection mechanism effectively secures this right for an unlimited time.
Also, this clause provides for an exclusive right. If I innocently use a DMCA protection mechanism to record my "Writings and Discoveries", then if circumventing the mechanism becomes necessary to retrieve my "Writings and Discoveries", but is illegal (or effectively so), then I have lost my exclusive right.
In theory, software patents are good because they help to promote innovation. Companies won't do research if they have to give away the fruits of their research for free.
In theory, the death penalty is good because some crimes are so heinous and some criminals are so evil that the best thing to do is to kill the criminal.
In practice, the situation is a mess.
The patent office is incompetent at determining what is a true innovation. Patents given to non-innovations is unfair and discourages real research (and ignores real research). Companies spend too much effort to build up a fluff patent portfolio to defend themselves from other companies with fluff patent portfolios.
The criminal justice system is competent, but nowhere near perfect. Too many innocent people have been given a death penalty verdict. Death penalty cases are much more costly than life-in-prison verdicts. Not that life-in-prison is much fun, but there is more time for correcting mistakes.
The point is that, while there might be a theoretical benefit, the total benefit in practice is a minus. Many of us I think do not mind patents so much for algorithms like RSA and GIF compression. It might be a hassle if you want to use them, but at least they were innovative and precise. However, this is not what the patent office is doing, and it does not appear that the patent office will change anytime soon.
In current programming, there are many ways that two (or more) program elements (networks, computers, processes, threads, components, libraries, etc.) can communicate or interact with one another. Probably more will be invented. Communication protocols currently do not reveal the underlying licenses. So if two program elements communicate with another, and if one is GPLed and the other is GPL-incompatible, will GPL, version 3, prohibit this?
This seems unrealistic, at the very least. As long as some types of communication between license-incompatible program elements are allowed, there will be a GPL loophole. And the GPL cannot disallow all such communication because that would make everybody on the internet a GPL violator.
The old Jerusalem is currently inflamed. Of all the thing the world needs, we certainly don't need another Jerusalem to fight over.
There are no utopias. What makes most of the messes in the world is one group imposing their utopia on another group. Instead, we need to provide enough constaints (laws, regulations, etc.) so that we and our descendants have the opportunity to lead full and productive lives.
Insurance is a bet made by the insurance company that they will make money on the people they insure and a hedge made by the consumer to avoid a large loss. In a fair gambling situation, everyone knows the same information and the odds so everyone can make their decisions fairly. Usually, neither the company nor the consumer knows for sure that a large loss will occur. That is why insurance is a bet/hedge. In this context, if the customer finds out (e.g., by genetic testing) that a large loss is expected, the customer can unfairly cheat the insurance companies.
However, we in the USA also expect insurance companies to perform a public service, and we view affordable insurance almost as a right. Well, if it is a right, then the government should provide for it. This is already partially true as insurance is heavily regulated. If it is not a right or we don't want the government involved, then we should quit our whining. Insurance companies are not in the business of losing money.
My view is that we (in the USA) have been and will continue to slowly move toward more government involvement. Social security and medicare are firmly in place. Some sort of child health care is on the horizon, I think. Genetic testing is another element that will result in more government involvement.
Clearly, there was a need for a new release, both because Redhat has a profit motive, and because a lot of updates were needed, especially security-related. I admit to being one of those people who only update when the new version comes out. Otherwise, I wouldn't get what I am supposed to be doing done.
However, a lot of things are just not ready yet, in particular the 2.4 kernel, and just behind that, gcc 3.0. For me, KDE 2 is also coming soon, but that's probably not too important to you Gnomers.
Amazingly, the simple answer is to release Redhat 6.3 with stable versions of key software. When the 2.4 kernel and hopefully gcc 3.0 is ready, then do a Redhat 7.0. Presumably, that is just a couple of months away, and would be much more popular. The current Redhat 7.0, as any other new version, updates lots of packages, but the instability in key software is not a good thing.
It used to be the case that people believed that the the GPL was
compatible with any license that permitted free redistribution of the
source. RMS's claim that the QPL was incompatible with the GPL really
came from nowhere, and I don't believe it can be correct.
It would be interesting if someone would give us a history of how the GPL has been interpreted.
Wasn't it also the intent of the GPL to prevent proprietary code from using the GPL code? In the KDE case, it is the opposite, the GPL code uses the proprietary code. Isn't this why the GPL has the OS exception?
No security is going to be perfect, but you can make it arbitrarily difficult to break in. It seems to me that the reality is a tradeoff between security and a combination of cost, convenience, and ignorance. These are formidable obstacles, but it seems to me you can make headway on them.
Taking another poster's Java example. If you use a language like Java, you have no buffer overruns. But this is at the cost of checking array bounds.
Many of Microsoft's security problems is because MS wants to give you convenience and damn the security implications. Macros in Word files and email attachments as clickable applications are just two examples.
The problem of ignorance is twofold. One is that many users are not knowledgable system admins, and yet they will be on the Internet 24/7. The other is that the current OS model is just not security conscious. It take enormous work (e.g., OpenBSD) to get a semi-secure OS and even then, it is easy to slap on telnet, ftp, and every other insecure service. Combining ignorant users with inherently insecure OSes is a potent mix.
Dealing with cost and convenience is a social issue. Costumers will have to demand security as a top priority before anything much happens here. That probably won't happen until we get a disaster that costs a lot of people a lot of money. There is not much you can do about ignorant users. You can educate some, but certainly not most. It is a matter of research to make OSes more secure, and this is something that the government and the military are very interested in.
Is it illegal to hand out pamphlets with the source code?
Is it illegal to say the code verbally?
Is it illegal to give a detailed explanation of how the code works?
Suppose, as a joke, I put a copy of the code on the back of our family's Xmas letter. Is that illegal?
According to this ruling, that is.
Recommend Simons and Auerbach
on
ICANN Elections
·
· Score: 2
I guess everybody is for democracy, so maybe we should look at qualifications. Of the many good candidates here, I recommend Barbara Simons and Karl Auerbach. They have the technical expertise, they both have a record working to make ICANN more democratic, and they will make themselves heard. For the record, I endorsed Simons because she also has a clear record for privacy and against DMCA and UCITA, and she recognizes that the current DNS is fundamentally flawed and has some suggestions to improve it.
If you want keep your bits from being freely available on the internet, then you'll have to keep them to yourself. Or use some cryptographic scheme to prevent distribution. Copyrighting a particular sequence of zeroes and ones will almost be a futile act, if not already. The one exception is if a big-enough business gets caught with an illegal copy. It will be too much trouble to track down individuals.
What I foresee is that the sequence of bits you pay for will be tailored to the particular players that you own. That is, each player has it own cryptographic key for recovering the information. At best this will make copying difficult though not impossible. However, it will take some time and marketing savvy for this kind of information player to get a big enough market to matter.
The problem with code reuse is the tradeoff between stability and functionality. We always want our code to be more functional (feature creep). However, to incorporate more functionality, the interface to the code might change with new versions. If the objects, components, libraries, or whatever are moving targets, they become undependable and people shy away from using them. Of course, without the changes, maybe the code won't have enough functionality to be useful to a lot of people. That is the tradeoff.
I don't see how a component architecture is going to especially help here, at least any more than any other object-oriented approach. The question is going to be whether it gives me the functionality I want and whether I can depend on the interface staying the same in new versions. In fact, it could hurt because in a component architecture, the interface is now defined by two separate entities, one for component communication and the other for component interpretation. Either one changes and you are in trouble.
I thought one of our mantras was that "Information wants to be free". There is no fundamental difference between information about you and information about any other subject. Once it has been made available, there is very little you can do.
Clearly, we can make some headway toward reducing availability, e.g., European privacy laws. However, it will be all but impossible to keep personal information private. If someone wants to find the dirt on you, they will find it. We need to have the laws (and the culture) in place so that when the information escapes, that it won't be used inappropriately, e.g., anti-discrimation laws.
Slashdot Mirror
Personally, I have no problem with filtering software provided it is implemented properly and openly, so that you could see what agenda was being pushed. In particular, I would like to see that the librarians have the capability of adding or removing any sites.
As for using a public resource any way you want, why don't you try that in a public park and find out how amused the police are?
Without thinking too hard about it, I think copyright protection will become a hotter issue. Clinton/Gore was a friend to copyright protectionists, but Bush will be even a better buddy. At some point, the two sides will square off, and civil disobedience will be the order of the day. The question is whether Bush will pursue those evil copyright protection violators as criminals, or just let the media sic their lawyers on them.
The problem is not that the information is known, but that it will be used for unethical discrimination. Medical information, sexual orientation, disabilities, race, etc., can all be used improperly. I don't think we will have much success trying to outlaw the transfer of this sort of information (privacy laws). After all, isn't "Information wants to be free." one of our mantras. Instead, we will have more success outlawing improper use of this information (discrimination laws). Complete success is unlikely given that it is all too often easy to make up an acceptable excuse for not hiring so-and-so. But I think will be a more successful approach than trying to bottle up information.
and a way to put the FAT on the fire.
Maybe there is no compromise between free and proprietary software, or perhaps between free and proprietary information in general. This proposal is just one more indication that the proprietary side simply wants total control over what you can read or see or hear and when you can do it.
Most of us, I would guess, just need the choice to boot Linux, Windows, and maybe something else. We don't need more features to mess up our system.
A better approach is to take some UG courses before you apply. If you can show that you can handle the upper-level UG courses, they will probably admit you with few conditions. Look at the core courses in the CS BS program, and take the junior and senior level courses. Where I teach, we look at Analysis of Algorithms, Computer Architecture, and Operating Systems. YMMV.
If you claim that is not easy to filter out, then you are running the risk of even more heavy-handed laws, because, after all, this is the only way to regulate "bad" stuff.
It seems to me that reasonable censorware should be easy for all the great open-source programmers that read Slashdot. Of course, filtering everything "bad" would be impossible, but filtering a substantial portion should be easy to do with very little of the dumb filtering we keep hearing about. A lot of people want reasonable censorware. Why not give it to them?
NAT will not save you if you are running an insecure server, but for insecure clients, it will save you from hackers trying to create a connection to the client. At least that is true if the NAT is properly set up.
Should we be in a "moral panic" because youth are wasting time on entertainment instead of doing to learning something useful? I would rate this a 4 on the panic scale. Youth have always tried to avoid being useful from time immemorial.
Should we be in a "moral panic" because youth are learning violent and sexually abusive behavior from games? I would rate this a 6 on the panic scale. I simply don't accept the argument that there is no effect if you view and (virtually) do this behavior over and over and over again. How else do you learn except by watching and practice?
Oh, that right. Some of you (probably the FSF communists) go to Burger King instead.
However, a DMCA protection mechanism effectively secures this right for an unlimited time.
Also, this clause provides for an exclusive right. If I innocently use a DMCA protection mechanism to record my "Writings and Discoveries", then if circumventing the mechanism becomes necessary to retrieve my "Writings and Discoveries", but is illegal (or effectively so), then I have lost my exclusive right.
In theory, software patents are good because they help to promote innovation. Companies won't do research if they have to give away the fruits of their research for free.
In theory, the death penalty is good because some crimes are so heinous and some criminals are so evil that the best thing to do is to kill the criminal.
In practice, the situation is a mess.
The patent office is incompetent at determining what is a true innovation. Patents given to non-innovations is unfair and discourages real research (and ignores real research). Companies spend too much effort to build up a fluff patent portfolio to defend themselves from other companies with fluff patent portfolios.
The criminal justice system is competent, but nowhere near perfect. Too many innocent people have been given a death penalty verdict. Death penalty cases are much more costly than life-in-prison verdicts. Not that life-in-prison is much fun, but there is more time for correcting mistakes.
The point is that, while there might be a theoretical benefit, the total benefit in practice is a minus. Many of us I think do not mind patents so much for algorithms like RSA and GIF compression. It might be a hassle if you want to use them, but at least they were innovative and precise. However, this is not what the patent office is doing, and it does not appear that the patent office will change anytime soon.
This seems unrealistic, at the very least. As long as some types of communication between license-incompatible program elements are allowed, there will be a GPL loophole. And the GPL cannot disallow all such communication because that would make everybody on the internet a GPL violator.
There are no utopias. What makes most of the messes in the world is one group imposing their utopia on another group. Instead, we need to provide enough constaints (laws, regulations, etc.) so that we and our descendants have the opportunity to lead full and productive lives.
However, we in the USA also expect insurance companies to perform a public service, and we view affordable insurance almost as a right. Well, if it is a right, then the government should provide for it. This is already partially true as insurance is heavily regulated. If it is not a right or we don't want the government involved, then we should quit our whining. Insurance companies are not in the business of losing money.
My view is that we (in the USA) have been and will continue to slowly move toward more government involvement. Social security and medicare are firmly in place. Some sort of child health care is on the horizon, I think. Genetic testing is another element that will result in more government involvement.
However, a lot of things are just not ready yet, in particular the 2.4 kernel, and just behind that, gcc 3.0. For me, KDE 2 is also coming soon, but that's probably not too important to you Gnomers.
Amazingly, the simple answer is to release Redhat 6.3 with stable versions of key software. When the 2.4 kernel and hopefully gcc 3.0 is ready, then do a Redhat 7.0. Presumably, that is just a couple of months away, and would be much more popular. The current Redhat 7.0, as any other new version, updates lots of packages, but the instability in key software is not a good thing.
Wasn't it also the intent of the GPL to prevent proprietary code from using the GPL code? In the KDE case, it is the opposite, the GPL code uses the proprietary code. Isn't this why the GPL has the OS exception?
Taking another poster's Java example. If you use a language like Java, you have no buffer overruns. But this is at the cost of checking array bounds.
Many of Microsoft's security problems is because MS wants to give you convenience and damn the security implications. Macros in Word files and email attachments as clickable applications are just two examples.
The problem of ignorance is twofold. One is that many users are not knowledgable system admins, and yet they will be on the Internet 24/7. The other is that the current OS model is just not security conscious. It take enormous work (e.g., OpenBSD) to get a semi-secure OS and even then, it is easy to slap on telnet, ftp, and every other insecure service. Combining ignorant users with inherently insecure OSes is a potent mix.
Dealing with cost and convenience is a social issue. Costumers will have to demand security as a top priority before anything much happens here. That probably won't happen until we get a disaster that costs a lot of people a lot of money. There is not much you can do about ignorant users. You can educate some, but certainly not most. It is a matter of research to make OSes more secure, and this is something that the government and the military are very interested in.
Is it illegal to say the code verbally?
Is it illegal to give a detailed explanation of how the code works?
Suppose, as a joke, I put a copy of the code on the back of our family's Xmas letter. Is that illegal?
According to this ruling, that is.
I guess everybody is for democracy, so maybe we should look at qualifications. Of the many good candidates here, I recommend Barbara Simons and Karl Auerbach. They have the technical expertise, they both have a record working to make ICANN more democratic, and they will make themselves heard. For the record, I endorsed Simons because she also has a clear record for privacy and against DMCA and UCITA, and she recognizes that the current DNS is fundamentally flawed and has some suggestions to improve it.
The ICANN page http://members.icann.org/nom.html at the beginning of this article has links to the self nominated candidates, too.
What I foresee is that the sequence of bits you pay for will be tailored to the particular players that you own. That is, each player has it own cryptographic key for recovering the information. At best this will make copying difficult though not impossible. However, it will take some time and marketing savvy for this kind of information player to get a big enough market to matter.
I don't see how a component architecture is going to especially help here, at least any more than any other object-oriented approach. The question is going to be whether it gives me the functionality I want and whether I can depend on the interface staying the same in new versions. In fact, it could hurt because in a component architecture, the interface is now defined by two separate entities, one for component communication and the other for component interpretation. Either one changes and you are in trouble.
Clearly, we can make some headway toward reducing availability, e.g., European privacy laws. However, it will be all but impossible to keep personal information private. If someone wants to find the dirt on you, they will find it. We need to have the laws (and the culture) in place so that when the information escapes, that it won't be used inappropriately, e.g., anti-discrimation laws.