This is no worse than the current system of debit cards with mag stripes on the back that are trivial to duplicate with not much more equipment.
Perhaps, but fingerprints aren't much better. How many credit cards leave imprints all over your front doorknob? And PIN numbers are lousy protection. Think the customer behind you has never caught your PIN?
Given how vulnerable this fingerprinting scheme is (you can make a fake print without ever seeing the original finger!) you're better off with something like a watch, cellphone or PDA with a private/public key on a smartchip. If it never leaves your possession, you're better off.
Minidisc isn't big in the general consumer market but is way more successful than DAT in the low end audio recording community.
But I imagine that's because it's a low-end technology. DAT tapes can store way more information, and DAT machines are relatively expensive to build (they require decent D/As, etc.) It's far more surprising that Minidisc couldn't make it in the market than it is that DAT couldn't.
And the music industry clamped down hard to prevent it from becoming a consumer product.
Neither the DAT tax or the copy-protection systems are what killed DAT. It was just an expensive tape-based technology that didn't catch on with consumers. You could just as easily blame something else for the relative flop that is Minidisc.
DAT's wonderful for studio work, though, and even better for bootlegging concerts (I don't actually do this, but if I did, I'd use DAT.)
I'm just asking what % of criminals are going to have access to a "manual probing station"?
What % of car thieves have access to a fully-functional chop shop? The point is, if there's money in it, somebody will put together the resources necessary to break these things in quantity, and the pickpockets will just go to them.
Libertarians would let you decide for yourself what to charge for your services and products.
So if you believe that the government should enforce laws that limit what you do with words and ideas, then you're not an authoritarian. But if you think that such laws are bunk, you're some sort of fascist? I'd suggest that the truth is a little more complicated than that.
Imagine that there was a law requiring people to spend at least $40 on long-distance every month. If somebody opposed that law, would you call them an authoritarian for "preventing the long distance companies decide how much long distance people should buy?"
You can buy a similar product here. I'm not sure exactly sure if the white bulb is an LED, but it's bright as hell and it's lasted me a couple of years on a single watch battery (with no signs of fading.)
They also make an IR version, for those of you with night vision goggles. And no, I don't work for the company, but I'm really impressed with their product.
Reading this, I couldn't help but think of the lead character's obsession with business cards [mediacircus.net] in American Psycho. For professionals, a personal website today serves much of the role that business cards served in the 1980s.
I think they misjudge their target market. The folks in American Psycho were investment bankers, not doctors, lawyers or accountants. In other words, they didn't have as much of a starchy reputation to uphold to the rest of the world. Have you ever seen a doctor with a terribly flashy business card? I don't think it'd go over well. Lawyers, maybe occasionally. Accountants, quite possibly.
All three of the.pro groups may want to show off to their buddies, but a) I'm not sure that they want to associate themselves with the other professions, and b).pro doesn't really help you if your website is mainly for clients.
I do think there's a market for.md and.law domains, but.pro just seems like a basically useless categorization. I mean, just because your mother wanted you to be a "professional" doesn't mean that you want to spend the rest of your life lumped into that category of tradesperson..pro doesn't tell people that you're a doctor, a lawyer, or an accountant. It just tells them that you're one of the three, and the degree on your wall looked real enough to convince some idiot in a domain registry company. It also probably confuses clients. "You're a pro? Pro bono? What are you talking about?"
If we consider that Thawte is selling their 128-but SuperCerts [thawte.com] at the price of US $300 per year, which is not even the highest price on the market (Verisign, $348 [verisign.com], then:
it is completely understandable that the price is similar, as they are supposed to go into similar actions to verify the authentity of the registrant
Of course, it's amusing that they charge much higher prices for for 128-bit certificates than for the lower models. What, they spend less time verifying your identity if you plan to use weak encryption?
How would you feel if the gov't decided to restrict.com sales to one company, and allow that company to charge $500/year? I mean, you could say "well, clearly there are lots of other good TLDs I can use."
Except, of course, it probably wouldn't go down so well, because most people feel that.com has a certain value over.net and.org because it's easily remembered. They're also used to the fact that there is competition in the sale of.com names, so they'd think it was pretty strange if suddenly only one company was allowed to sell them.
The fact is, this company is selling a public resource, not a brand. There's no reason they should have a monopoly on it.
You've got problems with p2p users and virus idiots? Just block all the relevant p2p ports and blame it on a computer virus. Then sit back and watch the two groups destroy each other.
Personally, I'd love to see a label split into two parts: a distribution channel and an advertising agency. But it'll never happen. The distribution chain only works because the advertising makes the demand.
Calling it "advertising" slightly obscures what really goes on. Record labels pay radio stations to play their stuff. This is illegal, of course, so their do through a very weak chain of indirection.
If you could just end that practice, we'd be a lot better off.
The reason people are hungry is not unequal distribution of wealth, it's because of unequal distribution of capitalism and freedom
Well, hell. Then let's get some of that Capitalism and Freedom down to Alabama and up to rural New Hampshire. 'Cause there are hungry folks there, too.
Maybe the problem is simply that Capitalism and Freedom just don't do a very good job of distributing themselves...
No one would ever pay for a stock that has no potential to ever pay a dividend
Most solvent companies have the potential to pay a dividend, somewhere down the line. However, investors are often willing to forgo the dividend in exchange for a high rate of growth. Presuming, I suppose, that if the growth ever reaches its limits, the company will start paying dividends to maintain the stock price.
However, I think the definition of "potential" can be pretty weak. After all, how many ridiculous stocks were kicked up to astronomical heights by overzealous investors? People don't always behave rationally.
I'm a bit confused -- you seem to have quoted my first point and replied to the second.
Me too. I have no idea how I managed to do that. Oh well.
Anyway, the FAQ says that an organization can use a modified version internally without releasing it outside the organization. That's nice, but jsse's MSCE is concerned about what might happen if another department would release it to the public
Let me ask two questions:
1. What would happen if another department released a copy of, say, a Microsoft product to the public? Your company would have committed a copyright violation, plain and simple, right? Let's pretend nobody ever agreed to the EULA, to keep things simple.
2. What would happen if some member of your organization grabbed an internal copy of your company's proprietary software package, slapped a copy of the GPL on it, and sent it out to the public? I assume that license wouldn't be valid, unless the corporation (which actually holds the copyright) signed off on it, correct?
It seems that your hypothetical case is a mixture of these two actions. For one, just because some other department releases a copy of an internal, modified GPLed software package doesn't mean the company signed off on it (after all, it owns the copyright). The requirements of the GPL would not have been satisfied. Therefore the package released would contain unlicensed bits of copyrighted code, and would not be freely distributable by the folks downstream.
If the company simply stated that it did not agree to the license, they (or the employee who performed the release) would be in some trouble for violating copyright. But like I said, the same situation could arise if an employee redistributed a piece of 3rd party proprietary code. Companies should seek to prevent their employees from redistributing copyrighted code without permission, whether it's GPLed code or extra copies of Oracle.
I imagine that it would be helpful to take the GPL headers off of any GPL code being used internally, and mark it "DO NOT REDISTRIBUTE" to make it absolutely clear to everybody that the code is not considered proprietary and not redistributable. But ultimately, some rogue decision to release a modified GPL package would be no more valid than a rogue decision to hand out the company's proprietary software product.
It should never be "wrong" for someone to assert their moral beliefs, regardless of how crazy it is.
If you're saying that everyone should have the RIGHT to assert their moral beliefs, then I'm 100% with you.
That doesn't mean I'm not allowed to believe that they're wrong, that their whole argument is wrong, and that they're wrong for making it. And to express my feelings vocally...
Even if it was, who is to critisize them for fighting for even a ludicrous law?
I am. And you are. Anyone is allowed to criticize the crap out of someone who fights for a ludicrous law. This is why I disagreed with your post.
You seemed to imply that I shouldn't be criticizing them for fighting for what I believe is a stupid law, and your reasoning was that if I believe in any kind of law, then I've got no moral right to criticize someone else for proposing one. Sounded a little like you were telling I shouldn't be expressing myself at all under those circumstances, not like you were just protecting the other side's right to express their opinion.
If it's silly or stupid and obviously bogus, then it doesn't get taken seriously and won't ever make it into the newspaper, let alone supreme court.
And again, sometimes people don't realize how silly, stupid and bogus an idea is unless you criticize it. Sometimes people don't realize how silly an entire mindset is until you examine and criticize it.
I can't help but look at the wall my music collection takes up, and think about all the money it represents.
And the sheer mass of it. My girlfriend's CD collection lives in one of those tall IKEA CD-holders. It nearly killed me last year when the jewel-boxes fell out as I moved it to take a furniture delivery.
Sorry to double-post. Let me just make the point again, in a much simpler way. In your previous post, you said:
But to critique someone for fighting for their moral beliefs is hypocritcal if you believe that certain moral standards (eg: rape is bad) should be upheld by government.
The point is that you can insert almost any sort of moral belief into this template, and by your argument it would be hypocritical of me to criticize it. Slaughtering three-year-olds, throwing women into a volcano, etc.
Now if you accept that hypocracy is sometimes a sweet, wonderful thing, then I accept your argument. But the implication seemed to be that it's wrong to be a hypocrite.
So you've just made an argument that might, in theory, brand me as a nasty hypocrite for criticizing a plan to use toddlers as fertilizer. When your line of reasoning can produce such bogus results, don't you think that it might have some flaws?
All of your other points make sense, but this one's really out there.
"You support restrictive legislation to outlaw things like robbery and rape, don't you? Then you shouldn't critique the religious right for seeking this particular piece of restrictive legislation. And if you do, you're being a hypocrite."
So where do you draw the line?
And the point is, I don't have to say where I'll draw the line. But I won't draw it in such a way that I'm wrong to criticize what I consider to be stupid law.
If the religious right (or anyone else) wants to come right back at me and criticize the fact that I support laws against arson and insurance fraud, let 'em. They have that right. They even have the right to dislike me intensely if they feel that I'm imposing my views on them.
Course, something tells me that my views will be a lot less controversial to their camp (and the rest of America) than their views will. I also think that my views will naturally be supported by most Americans, and I won't have to resort to political bomb-throwing and quick-fix legislation in order to impose them on a public that (according to polls) doesn't necessarily agree.
This is true, but you can't keep the people you've given it to from giving it to other people. (At least not under the GPL -- you'd have to add some further restriction, which might conflict with your original right to use the GPL'd code at all.)
This is exactly the opposite interpretation given in the GPL FAQ. According to them, "internal use" within an organization does not count as redistribution. As with any license, you might want to double-check this with a lawyer, of course, but it's done regularly by large companies with very stringent rules about legal examinations.
but it's also "if you use our stuff with your stuff in certian ways, your stuff becomes our stuff". This is the scary part to many companies.
Well, no. It's "if you redistribute our stuff with your stuff in certain ways (all of which are clearly defined in a one of the most readable license documents you'll ever see), you won't be covered by this license. In which case, you'll have to explain to a judge why you violated our copyright."
After all, users are never forced to sign any kind of agreement to the GPL. If you didn't sign a license, nobody can force you to agree that you were bound by the contract. But without the license to redistribute granted by the contract, you may pay a penalty for violating the authors' copyright.
Anyway, if your legal staff can't figure out the terms of the GPL, then god help you with the proprietary licenses you're dealing with.
That says a lot. Cool imagery -- I see archaeologists sifting through our records, determining that "They Sacrificed animals and babies to this God called Science.
In return, this God gave them Wisdom."
Gosh, I hope not. Those archeologists creep me out a lot more than anyone on either side of this debate.
But to critique someone for fighting for their moral beliefs is hypocritcal if you believe that certain moral standards (eg: rape is bad) should be upheld by government.
I don't think it's wrong to critique somebody for trying to impose what you see as unwarranted regulations upon your behavior. That seems like a no-brainer to me, and a good starting point.
I think you're just overdoing your argument. You're saying, essentially, that if you impose any sort of standards on others, then it's hypocritical of you to criticize anybody else for trying to impose their standards on you. The implication is not only that you're a hypocrite, but that such hypocrisy is a BAD thing, and you're being UNREASONABLE by criticizing them.
Imagine that group X was trying (with some success) to pass a law that required you to keep your children locked up in small boxes until they turned 18 years old. The average non-anarchist would now be not only a hypocrite, but a BAD, UNFAIR person for speaking up to criticize the campaign. Pretty messed up where that sort of logic can lead, isn't it?
In some strict logical sense, what you say may be true. But to accept your argument would completely devalue the meaning of the word "hypocrisy". Either we need to get used to most of our actions being somewhat hypocritical by some standard or other-- OR we'd need to agree on less-absolute standards for judging hypocrisy (with all of the subjective baggage that would be required.)
The point is that logic can be a silly thing if used in the wrong way. Nothing says it better than that old Emerson saw: "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds..."
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Perhaps, but fingerprints aren't much better. How many credit cards leave imprints all over your front doorknob? And PIN numbers are lousy protection. Think the customer behind you has never caught your PIN?
Given how vulnerable this fingerprinting scheme is (you can make a fake print without ever seeing the original finger!) you're better off with something like a watch, cellphone or PDA with a private/public key on a smartchip. If it never leaves your possession, you're better off.
But I imagine that's because it's a low-end technology. DAT tapes can store way more information, and DAT machines are relatively expensive to build (they require decent D/As, etc.) It's far more surprising that Minidisc couldn't make it in the market than it is that DAT couldn't.
How many of us are going to go to AoTC just to catch the Matrix trailer, then walk out?
Neither the DAT tax or the copy-protection systems are what killed DAT. It was just an expensive tape-based technology that didn't catch on with consumers. You could just as easily blame something else for the relative flop that is Minidisc.
DAT's wonderful for studio work, though, and even better for bootlegging concerts (I don't actually do this, but if I did, I'd use DAT.)
What % of car thieves have access to a fully-functional chop shop? The point is, if there's money in it, somebody will put together the resources necessary to break these things in quantity, and the pickpockets will just go to them.
So if you believe that the government should enforce laws that limit what you do with words and ideas, then you're not an authoritarian. But if you think that such laws are bunk, you're some sort of fascist? I'd suggest that the truth is a little more complicated than that.
Imagine that there was a law requiring people to spend at least $40 on long-distance every month. If somebody opposed that law, would you call them an authoritarian for "preventing the long distance companies decide how much long distance people should buy?"
They also make an IR version, for those of you with night vision goggles. And no, I don't work for the company, but I'm really impressed with their product.
I have a picture of hundreds of scientists storming an outhouse in rural Maine.
Seriously, if people don't want this technology, they don't have to install it.
I think they misjudge their target market. The folks in American Psycho were investment bankers, not doctors, lawyers or accountants. In other words, they didn't have as much of a starchy reputation to uphold to the rest of the world. Have you ever seen a doctor with a terribly flashy business card? I don't think it'd go over well. Lawyers, maybe occasionally. Accountants, quite possibly.
All three of the .pro groups may want to show off to their buddies, but a) I'm not sure that they want to associate themselves with the other professions, and b) .pro doesn't really help you if your website is mainly for clients.
I do think there's a market for .md and .law domains, but .pro just seems like a basically useless categorization. I mean, just because your mother wanted you to be a "professional" doesn't mean that you want to spend the rest of your life lumped into that category of tradesperson. .pro doesn't tell people that you're a doctor, a lawyer, or an accountant. It just tells them that you're one of the three, and the degree on your wall looked real enough to convince some idiot in a domain registry company. It also probably confuses clients. "You're a pro? Pro bono? What are you talking about?"
Of course, it's amusing that they charge much higher prices for for 128-bit certificates than for the lower models. What, they spend less time verifying your identity if you plan to use weak encryption?
Except, of course, it probably wouldn't go down so well, because most people feel that .com has a certain value over .net and .org because it's easily remembered. They're also used to the fact that there is competition in the sale of .com names, so they'd think it was pretty strange if suddenly only one company was allowed to sell them.
The fact is, this company is selling a public resource, not a brand. There's no reason they should have a monopoly on it.
You've got problems with p2p users and virus idiots? Just block all the relevant p2p ports and blame it on a computer virus. Then sit back and watch the two groups destroy each other.
Calling it "advertising" slightly obscures what really goes on. Record labels pay radio stations to play their stuff. This is illegal, of course, so their do through a very weak chain of indirection.
If you could just end that practice, we'd be a lot better off.
Well, hell. Then let's get some of that Capitalism and Freedom down to Alabama and up to rural New Hampshire. 'Cause there are hungry folks there, too.
Maybe the problem is simply that Capitalism and Freedom just don't do a very good job of distributing themselves...
Most solvent companies have the potential to pay a dividend, somewhere down the line. However, investors are often willing to forgo the dividend in exchange for a high rate of growth. Presuming, I suppose, that if the growth ever reaches its limits, the company will start paying dividends to maintain the stock price.
However, I think the definition of "potential" can be pretty weak. After all, how many ridiculous stocks were kicked up to astronomical heights by overzealous investors? People don't always behave rationally.
In many jurisdictions, they're dropping the length of the yellow light to increase ticket revenue. Now that's sickening.
Me too. I have no idea how I managed to do that. Oh well.
Anyway, the FAQ says that an organization can use a modified version internally without releasing it outside the organization. That's nice, but jsse's MSCE is concerned about what might happen if another department would release it to the public
Let me ask two questions:
1. What would happen if another department released a copy of, say, a Microsoft product to the public? Your company would have committed a copyright violation, plain and simple, right? Let's pretend nobody ever agreed to the EULA, to keep things simple.
2. What would happen if some member of your organization grabbed an internal copy of your company's proprietary software package, slapped a copy of the GPL on it, and sent it out to the public? I assume that license wouldn't be valid, unless the corporation (which actually holds the copyright) signed off on it, correct?
It seems that your hypothetical case is a mixture of these two actions. For one, just because some other department releases a copy of an internal, modified GPLed software package doesn't mean the company signed off on it (after all, it owns the copyright). The requirements of the GPL would not have been satisfied. Therefore the package released would contain unlicensed bits of copyrighted code, and would not be freely distributable by the folks downstream.
If the company simply stated that it did not agree to the license, they (or the employee who performed the release) would be in some trouble for violating copyright. But like I said, the same situation could arise if an employee redistributed a piece of 3rd party proprietary code. Companies should seek to prevent their employees from redistributing copyrighted code without permission, whether it's GPLed code or extra copies of Oracle.
I imagine that it would be helpful to take the GPL headers off of any GPL code being used internally, and mark it "DO NOT REDISTRIBUTE" to make it absolutely clear to everybody that the code is not considered proprietary and not redistributable. But ultimately, some rogue decision to release a modified GPL package would be no more valid than a rogue decision to hand out the company's proprietary software product.
Am I missing anything here?
If you're saying that everyone should have the RIGHT to assert their moral beliefs, then I'm 100% with you.
That doesn't mean I'm not allowed to believe that they're wrong, that their whole argument is wrong, and that they're wrong for making it. And to express my feelings vocally...
Even if it was, who is to critisize them for fighting for even a ludicrous law?
I am. And you are. Anyone is allowed to criticize the crap out of someone who fights for a ludicrous law. This is why I disagreed with your post.
You seemed to imply that I shouldn't be criticizing them for fighting for what I believe is a stupid law, and your reasoning was that if I believe in any kind of law, then I've got no moral right to criticize someone else for proposing one. Sounded a little like you were telling I shouldn't be expressing myself at all under those circumstances, not like you were just protecting the other side's right to express their opinion.
If it's silly or stupid and obviously bogus, then it doesn't get taken seriously and won't ever make it into the newspaper, let alone supreme court.
And again, sometimes people don't realize how silly, stupid and bogus an idea is unless you criticize it. Sometimes people don't realize how silly an entire mindset is until you examine and criticize it.
And the sheer mass of it. My girlfriend's CD collection lives in one of those tall IKEA CD-holders. It nearly killed me last year when the jewel-boxes fell out as I moved it to take a furniture delivery.
Now if you accept that hypocracy is sometimes a sweet, wonderful thing, then I accept your argument. But the implication seemed to be that it's wrong to be a hypocrite.
So you've just made an argument that might, in theory, brand me as a nasty hypocrite for criticizing a plan to use toddlers as fertilizer. When your line of reasoning can produce such bogus results, don't you think that it might have some flaws?
All of your other points make sense, but this one's really out there.
This is my impression of your previous point:
"You support restrictive legislation to outlaw things like robbery and rape, don't you? Then you shouldn't critique the religious right for seeking this particular piece of restrictive legislation. And if you do, you're being a hypocrite."
So where do you draw the line?
And the point is, I don't have to say where I'll draw the line. But I won't draw it in such a way that I'm wrong to criticize what I consider to be stupid law.
If the religious right (or anyone else) wants to come right back at me and criticize the fact that I support laws against arson and insurance fraud, let 'em. They have that right. They even have the right to dislike me intensely if they feel that I'm imposing my views on them.
Course, something tells me that my views will be a lot less controversial to their camp (and the rest of America) than their views will. I also think that my views will naturally be supported by most Americans, and I won't have to resort to political bomb-throwing and quick-fix legislation in order to impose them on a public that (according to polls) doesn't necessarily agree.
This is exactly the opposite interpretation given in the GPL FAQ. According to them, "internal use" within an organization does not count as redistribution. As with any license, you might want to double-check this with a lawyer, of course, but it's done regularly by large companies with very stringent rules about legal examinations.
Well, no. It's "if you redistribute our stuff with your stuff in certain ways (all of which are clearly defined in a one of the most readable license documents you'll ever see), you won't be covered by this license. In which case, you'll have to explain to a judge why you violated our copyright."
After all, users are never forced to sign any kind of agreement to the GPL. If you didn't sign a license, nobody can force you to agree that you were bound by the contract. But without the license to redistribute granted by the contract, you may pay a penalty for violating the authors' copyright.
Anyway, if your legal staff can't figure out the terms of the GPL, then god help you with the proprietary licenses you're dealing with.
In return, this God gave them Wisdom."
Gosh, I hope not. Those archeologists creep me out a lot more than anyone on either side of this debate.
I don't think it's wrong to critique somebody for trying to impose what you see as unwarranted regulations upon your behavior. That seems like a no-brainer to me, and a good starting point.
I think you're just overdoing your argument. You're saying, essentially, that if you impose any sort of standards on others, then it's hypocritical of you to criticize anybody else for trying to impose their standards on you. The implication is not only that you're a hypocrite, but that such hypocrisy is a BAD thing, and you're being UNREASONABLE by criticizing them.
Imagine that group X was trying (with some success) to pass a law that required you to keep your children locked up in small boxes until they turned 18 years old. The average non-anarchist would now be not only a hypocrite, but a BAD, UNFAIR person for speaking up to criticize the campaign. Pretty messed up where that sort of logic can lead, isn't it?
In some strict logical sense, what you say may be true. But to accept your argument would completely devalue the meaning of the word "hypocrisy". Either we need to get used to most of our actions being somewhat hypocritical by some standard or other-- OR we'd need to agree on less-absolute standards for judging hypocrisy (with all of the subjective baggage that would be required.)
The point is that logic can be a silly thing if used in the wrong way. Nothing says it better than that old Emerson saw: "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds..."