No, the real problem is health. In order to survive launch astronauts hhave to be in peak physical condition
Unless, of course, they avoid vertical launches altogether and instead offer flights on gradual lift vehicles like space planes. I can't imagine that the stresses would be too rough under those conditions.
We have long been in this horrible place that people have only started to worry about since 09/11/2001.
My girlfriend doesn't have a driver's license, and nobody much pesters her about it as long as she doesn't try to drive. For many years, I had a Vermont driver's license with no picture on it (you had to pay extra and drive to the state capitol to get a picture ID.)
Things have been changing for a while, but 9/11 is definitely going to speed up the pace.
However, it is not a crime for me to refuse to accept email from an open mail relay. My mail server is my property, and I may allow or refuse people access to it. By telling me which IP addresses harbor open mail relays, MAPS et al. are therefore not contributing to a crime, but rather helping me out with a perfectly legal act on my own property.
Incidentally, one of the people below pointed out that it's the ISP that's implementing the blocks, not you. Which might limit their ability to defend themselves against lawsuits dealing with what goes over their network.
IANAL. Obviously. (And even if I said I was, why in god's name would you believe me?)
I have no reason to believe that any of these lists are doing anything illegal, so all of this is just hypothetical. What I'm pointing out is that the 1st amendment does not provide absolute protection-- if you were accused of violating a law (of which there are many), you could find that your "speech rights" aren't as absolute as you might think. The courts might determine that you're partly responsible for the functional aspect of your speech (getting sites blocked), instead of supporting your analogy ("it's just a list that I'm publishing, and should therefore be protected.") This is partly because 1st amendment protections appear to be weaker when there's a functional component to your speech, as is the case in an RBL list.
MAPS, ORDB, ORBZ, and the other blackhole lists have every right to tell me that John Gilmore is running an open relay. John Gilmore has no right to gag the blackhole lists' truthful speech about him.
A lot of people would have made similar arguments for Napster. Turns out that there are a number of legal principles that override the "right to free speech" under various circumstances. I sincerely doubt that any of them come into play in this case, but don't imagine that the the 1st amendment provides MAPS or any other service with blanket protection.
Unfortunately, the only requirements I can see in the GPL regarding source code is that it be "machine-readable". There's a vague statement that "source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it", which could potentially spell trouble for your bosses... As the crap they intend to give out seems to be less than the preferred form for doing anything. But that's a slim chance.
I would imagine this'd be something to think about for the next version of the GPL.
Where in the GPL does it specify you have to send it to people who get your product indirectly? Doesn't it specifically state that the person doing the redistribution is also the one responsible for redistributing the source code? I'm pretty sure RedHat can't just tell people to go download from kernel.org.
You're allowed to point people to the upstream source, if: a) you're distributing for non-commercial reasons (Redhat and Morpheus don't apply, I would imagine)... and b) you haven't modified the code (presumably if you've modified the source, simply redirecting to the original, unmodified source would not be satisfactory... after all, the GPL requires you to distribute the source code to all your modifications.)
But IANAL. If you find fault with this explanation, please don't be shy... I'll quote the relavant section of the GPL below:
3. You may copy and distribute the Program (or a work based on it, under Section 2) in object code or executable form under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above provided that you also do one of the following:
a) Accompany it with the complete corresponding machine-readable source code, which must be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,
b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,
c) Accompany it with the information you received as to the offer to distribute corresponding source code. (This alternative is allowed only for noncommercial distribution and only if you received the program in object code or executable form with such an offer, in accord with Subsection b above.)
Actually, the funny part of the GPL is that you don't even have to post the source anywhere - just make it available to the party(ies) you sell it to!
Red Hat, Mandrake, Suse, and Morpheus are all being "nice guys" by making the source downloadable from their sites - there is NO REQUIREMENT that they do this.
If you don't proactively furnish the source code, you're required to do so, on request, to anyone who gets their hands on a copy of the executable (even if they receive it indirectly.) And you can't charge more for the service than the physical cost of distributing the code.
If you think about it, that could end up being pretty expensive. Suppose somebody gets annoyed with your failure to make the code easily available, and decides to initiate a mass campaign to request copies of the source. Suddenly your company has 20,000 individual requests to honor. Yuck. And if you fail to systematically address the requests, you're in violation of the license.
Most companies will gladly put the code up somewhere because it's much easier than worrying about such unexpected requests. If they don't do it right from the start, it probably only takes a handful of requests and gentle reminders of the license policy to encourage them to do so.
At Oberlin, I helped install Linux & BSD on all of our lab machines, and with a friend founded the our (still active) Oberlin Linux User's Group. But living in NY, I have seen the worth of C++, Linux System Administration and Perl skills go down while my friends who can hack Java and VB are always in demand.
I don't know about that. A good C++ programmer can still command a pretty decent salary around here. There's a glut of Java programmers, on the other hand, and even more coming out of school. Besides, if you know C++, how hard is it to program in Java? As far as VB is concerned, you might as well hire a 14-year-old kid.
Incidentally, I appreciated all of those Linux/BSD installs you did, and was depressed when the new generation of Java kids refused to boot into them anymore. I guess there was really no point with Java, when you could run your code under Windows and play games without rebooting.
MS is going to need to do some serious marketing
towards universites to get.NET out there,
and personally, I doubt it'll ever reach the level of adoption that Java as achived.
Yes and no. I remember the fickleness with which my school abandoned C in favor of Java (producing an entire class of students who were thunderstruck on the first day of Graphics.) I would imagine that a lot of profs will be just as happy to switch to C#, particularly if they feel that there's a major incentive (free educational software licenses).
This is not a zero-sum game, of course. Regulation can be beneficial to many industries, allowing them to avoid tragedy-of-the-commons scenarios, and to access certain resources that they might not otherwise be allowed to.
In the most basic case, simple law and contract enforcement is an example of government regulation at work. I don't know too many libertarians who argue that we'd be better off without these things. Instead we look to strike a balance between necessary, helpful regulation, and unnecessary, damaging regulation. That balance can be hard to strike sometime, but blanket anti-regulation sentiment often goes too far, and forgets about the need for an intelligent balance of regulation... in favor of "throw the baby out with the bathwater" scenarios.
The digital broadcasts done OTA are not compressed in any way...
I was under the impression that all OTA digital broadcasts were MPEG compressed. Perhaps at a higher bitrate than your local cable company, though. Am I mistaken?
Theorizing with non-existent technolgy, one might be able to create antimatter versions of say, iron, and keep it suspended inside a simple vacuum chamber surrounded by magnetic coils. Or some other solid material, relying on electrostatic force to keep it from touching the outsides.
It would have to be one hell of a magnetic bottle in order to be portable and avoid the possibility of material/chamber contact under the potentially extreme accelerations of the battlefield. In order to justify all the overhead of the containment equipment, a robot might want to carry enough ammunition to do significant damage. That'd require a significant amount of material. Multiply the power of one antimatter "bullet" by the number of bullets contained in an entire magazine. Now imagine if one of these robots was hit by fire from another robot-- its entire magazine could react at once. That'd be a hell of a blast.
There would probably have to be some tradeoff in balancing the number of shots one robot could fire against the size of the explosion that would occur if something went wrong. I imagine this would have some impact on the usefulness of the weapons, considering that you might wind up having to use many robots (each with their own containment equipment and all the other overhead).
What happens if that software is also copyrighted? Does the turning over to the public domain trump copyright?
No. Once the patent goes into the public domain, you're not forced to "turn over" your copyrighted implementation. Instead, it's simply as though you never had a patent. Your program's copyright remains in effect for as long as it normally would, but now other people can make their own versions without violating your patent (just as they would have been able to had you never filed a patent.)
A patent covers the general mechanisms that make your program function, while copyright covers your actual implementation (the source code or the executable). Having a patent on the idea simply gives you additional protection that nobody else will be able to write their own program that does the same thing as yours (or at least, not the patented bits.)
Patent: I'm Mr. Pfizer, and I invented Viagra. Here's my patent application, which shows you how to make your own
That's not exactly true, of course. A brief scan of patent applications, particularly those pertaining to more abstract concepts, will show you that it's pretty hard to "build your own" from the Patent application (even with a working "device" to take apart). That's why reverse engineering is still necessary to understand the workings of many patented products.
Or, even cranking up the frame rate.. how about a 60fps film. The motion blur at 24fps is horrible.
I think you'd be surprised at an audience's reaction to a higher frame rate. People have come to enjoy the soothing clunkiness of 24fps, even though the motion blur can sometimes be disorienting. Even watching TV, I notice a significant difference between 30fps shows and converted 24fps movies, that can't be attributed entirely to the superior image quality.
But hey, that's just me. The important thing to remember is that the theatre industry should be thinking about what distinguishes them from the TV-become-Home-Theatre. I recently installed a 1080 line rear-projection screen in my living room, and though the quality isn't quite perfect (it'd be better if they had HDTV DVDs), the screen size and shape make watching movies at home into a totally different experience. I can't imagine that theatres have anything to gain by moving closer to the experience that people can have in their homes.
Let's convert every movie theatre into the rough equivalent of what I can buy for my living room (or at worst, will be able to buy in a couple of years.) And while we're at it, let's toss in 5-10 minutes of unimaginative Pepsi and Toyota ads, just because we can. That way we can truly destroy the few unique properties that drag millions of Americans out of their homes to toss down $8-10/ticket + snacks.
Assuming crap like AotC doesn't destroy the industry first...
Big media is scrambling to come up with a way to re-implement the old physical limitations of ownership in this new medium, but the results are pretty weak. So in the meantime, it's legislate legislate legislate!
Problem is, it's no small coincidence that much of this legislation also significantly increases the media companies' potential profit. Even basic notions like the lending library go out the window under these new laws. People are either going to accept the new world order or they're going to infringe like crazy... and I'm not sure I blame them.
Also as far as CSS goes, I believe that the members of DVD-CCA (I believe they control CSS) are for the most part the patent holders of DVD technology. I'm sure some of the patents these guys control are those that govern the implementation of CSS.
I don't think that the specific implementation of CSS is patented, though I can't be sure. It's such a simple algorithm that I don't know if any of the concepts are really patentable. Certainly the code is copyrighted, and the "authorization" to decrypt CSS-scrambled DVDs comes as part of the license, so licensees don't need to worry about being sued under the DMCA or its ilk.
I don't know who owns DVD-CCA, but I would be dumbfounded if the studios did not have a controlling interest. They're the ones who produce the media, they're the ones who pushed for CSS. It would be unbelievable if they didn't have control of the licensing, etc.
Re:Review misplaces priorities
on
What is .NET?
·
· Score: 1
Or he'd rather be writing, "The JIT produces fast code, but sometimes crashes."? Or, ".NET is vaporware, still three to five years on the horizon."?
Yes, if Toyota introduces a reliable, functional vehicle with a top speed of 25 MPH, it's unreasonable to imply that they should have built a faster, less safe car.
On the other hand, it's decidedly reasonable to wonder why they couldn't build a functional vehicle that goes as fast as any of the other functional cars on the market.
Just 'cause Microsoft's new to the game doesn't mean their 1.0 products shouldn't be compared against whatever else is out there. Of course, given that there seems to be a strange understanding that.NET will be universally adopted no matter how good or bad it actually is, perhaps you're right that we should just be happy it doesn't catch fire...
Just coincidental that Windows XP drops default Java support.
First, Java works fine in XP -- you just have to (automatically) download the VM or get it from Sun.
I'm sorry, how does the first statement contradict the second one? If you need to download a VM to get Java support, then it certainly sounds like Java isn't supported by default.
It's tangential, but said download is quite time-consuming for those folks who don't have broadband.
Would the large corporate chain bookstores be willing to fight this battle?
Amazon.com is named in the article as having fought off a number of suits like this. I don't know too much about Amazon's policy, but their catalog seems to include a pretty broad array of "controversial" and "obscene" books.
I would bet that corporate chain stores might be willing to fight this battle, simply as a business matter. The investment required to fight for 1st amendment protection on book purchases might well serve the chains somewhere down the line. For instance, if you sell pornography (or intend to do some someday-- after all, it's big business) then you don't want your customers worried that their purchase records are available to the world. Legal protection for purchase records is a potential business opportunity not to be squandered lightly.
I think this article is more about how the rights are being successfully upheld rather than taken away.
Actually, it's about both. It mentions that the first (widely known) attempt to obtain customer records occurred as recently as 1998, when Ken Starr attempted to subpeona a bookstore in DC. A court agreed with the bookstore on 1st amendment grounds, but didn't quash the subpeona... Opening a gateway for a number of requests over the past few years-- requests that might not previously have been made.
Does that count as attempting to "take away" a right? I'd need to know a lot more about the case history to be precise, but on the surface, it seems that there's a definite movement to challenge something that's at very least an assumed right/protection.
Also notice that in a number of the cases mentioned, the courts did not actually find in favor of the bookstore. In a number of these cases, either the case was dropped, or the purchaser voluntarily cooperated. The Tattered Cover lawsuit is still on appeal to the Colorado Supreme Court, with the most recent decision still in favor of enforcing the subpeona. If you're forced to appeal to the State Supreme Court in order to have your rights upheld, then you clearly haven't had your rights successfully upheld by the rest of the legal system.
Slashdot Mirror
Unless, of course, they avoid vertical launches altogether and instead offer flights on gradual lift vehicles like space planes. I can't imagine that the stresses would be too rough under those conditions.
My girlfriend doesn't have a driver's license, and nobody much pesters her about it as long as she doesn't try to drive. For many years, I had a Vermont driver's license with no picture on it (you had to pay extra and drive to the state capitol to get a picture ID.)
Things have been changing for a while, but 9/11 is definitely going to speed up the pace.
Where do the keys come from?
Incidentally, one of the people below pointed out that it's the ISP that's implementing the blocks, not you. Which might limit their ability to defend themselves against lawsuits dealing with what goes over their network.
IANAL. Obviously. (And even if I said I was, why in god's name would you believe me?)
I have no reason to believe that any of these lists are doing anything illegal, so all of this is just hypothetical. What I'm pointing out is that the 1st amendment does not provide absolute protection-- if you were accused of violating a law (of which there are many), you could find that your "speech rights" aren't as absolute as you might think. The courts might determine that you're partly responsible for the functional aspect of your speech (getting sites blocked), instead of supporting your analogy ("it's just a list that I'm publishing, and should therefore be protected.") This is partly because 1st amendment protections appear to be weaker when there's a functional component to your speech, as is the case in an RBL list.
A lot of people would have made similar arguments for Napster. Turns out that there are a number of legal principles that override the "right to free speech" under various circumstances. I sincerely doubt that any of them come into play in this case, but don't imagine that the the 1st amendment provides MAPS or any other service with blanket protection.
I would imagine this'd be something to think about for the next version of the GPL.
Read the license.
You're allowed to point people to the upstream source, if: a) you're distributing for non-commercial reasons (Redhat and Morpheus don't apply, I would imagine)... and b) you haven't modified the code (presumably if you've modified the source, simply redirecting to the original, unmodified source would not be satisfactory... after all, the GPL requires you to distribute the source code to all your modifications.)
But IANAL. If you find fault with this explanation, please don't be shy... I'll quote the relavant section of the GPL below:
Red Hat, Mandrake, Suse, and Morpheus are all being "nice guys" by making the source downloadable from their sites - there is NO REQUIREMENT that they do this.
If you don't proactively furnish the source code, you're required to do so, on request, to anyone who gets their hands on a copy of the executable (even if they receive it indirectly.) And you can't charge more for the service than the physical cost of distributing the code.
If you think about it, that could end up being pretty expensive. Suppose somebody gets annoyed with your failure to make the code easily available, and decides to initiate a mass campaign to request copies of the source. Suddenly your company has 20,000 individual requests to honor. Yuck. And if you fail to systematically address the requests, you're in violation of the license.
Most companies will gladly put the code up somewhere because it's much easier than worrying about such unexpected requests. If they don't do it right from the start, it probably only takes a handful of requests and gentle reminders of the license policy to encourage them to do so.
I don't know about that. A good C++ programmer can still command a pretty decent salary around here. There's a glut of Java programmers, on the other hand, and even more coming out of school. Besides, if you know C++, how hard is it to program in Java? As far as VB is concerned, you might as well hire a 14-year-old kid.
Incidentally, I appreciated all of those Linux/BSD installs you did, and was depressed when the new generation of Java kids refused to boot into them anymore. I guess there was really no point with Java, when you could run your code under Windows and play games without rebooting.
Yes and no. I remember the fickleness with which my school abandoned C in favor of Java (producing an entire class of students who were thunderstruck on the first day of Graphics.) I would imagine that a lot of profs will be just as happy to switch to C#, particularly if they feel that there's a major incentive (free educational software licenses).
In the most basic case, simple law and contract enforcement is an example of government regulation at work. I don't know too many libertarians who argue that we'd be better off without these things. Instead we look to strike a balance between necessary, helpful regulation, and unnecessary, damaging regulation. That balance can be hard to strike sometime, but blanket anti-regulation sentiment often goes too far, and forgets about the need for an intelligent balance of regulation... in favor of "throw the baby out with the bathwater" scenarios.
I was under the impression that all OTA digital broadcasts were MPEG compressed. Perhaps at a higher bitrate than your local cable company, though. Am I mistaken?
It would have to be one hell of a magnetic bottle in order to be portable and avoid the possibility of material/chamber contact under the potentially extreme accelerations of the battlefield. In order to justify all the overhead of the containment equipment, a robot might want to carry enough ammunition to do significant damage. That'd require a significant amount of material. Multiply the power of one antimatter "bullet" by the number of bullets contained in an entire magazine. Now imagine if one of these robots was hit by fire from another robot-- its entire magazine could react at once. That'd be a hell of a blast.
There would probably have to be some tradeoff in balancing the number of shots one robot could fire against the size of the explosion that would occur if something went wrong. I imagine this would have some impact on the usefulness of the weapons, considering that you might wind up having to use many robots (each with their own containment equipment and all the other overhead).
Of course, the equipment needed to contain the anti-matter until it's used could conceivably negate any portability advantages.
No. Once the patent goes into the public domain, you're not forced to "turn over" your copyrighted implementation. Instead, it's simply as though you never had a patent. Your program's copyright remains in effect for as long as it normally would, but now other people can make their own versions without violating your patent (just as they would have been able to had you never filed a patent.)
A patent covers the general mechanisms that make your program function, while copyright covers your actual implementation (the source code or the executable). Having a patent on the idea simply gives you additional protection that nobody else will be able to write their own program that does the same thing as yours (or at least, not the patented bits.)
That's not exactly true, of course. A brief scan of patent applications, particularly those pertaining to more abstract concepts, will show you that it's pretty hard to "build your own" from the Patent application (even with a working "device" to take apart). That's why reverse engineering is still necessary to understand the workings of many patented products.
HDTV.
I think you'd be surprised at an audience's reaction to a higher frame rate. People have come to enjoy the soothing clunkiness of 24fps, even though the motion blur can sometimes be disorienting. Even watching TV, I notice a significant difference between 30fps shows and converted 24fps movies, that can't be attributed entirely to the superior image quality.
But hey, that's just me. The important thing to remember is that the theatre industry should be thinking about what distinguishes them from the TV-become-Home-Theatre. I recently installed a 1080 line rear-projection screen in my living room, and though the quality isn't quite perfect (it'd be better if they had HDTV DVDs), the screen size and shape make watching movies at home into a totally different experience. I can't imagine that theatres have anything to gain by moving closer to the experience that people can have in their homes.
Assuming crap like AotC doesn't destroy the industry first...
Problem is, it's no small coincidence that much of this legislation also significantly increases the media companies' potential profit. Even basic notions like the lending library go out the window under these new laws. People are either going to accept the new world order or they're going to infringe like crazy... and I'm not sure I blame them.
I don't think that the specific implementation of CSS is patented, though I can't be sure. It's such a simple algorithm that I don't know if any of the concepts are really patentable. Certainly the code is copyrighted, and the "authorization" to decrypt CSS-scrambled DVDs comes as part of the license, so licensees don't need to worry about being sued under the DMCA or its ilk.
I don't know who owns DVD-CCA, but I would be dumbfounded if the studios did not have a controlling interest. They're the ones who produce the media, they're the ones who pushed for CSS. It would be unbelievable if they didn't have control of the licensing, etc.
Yes, if Toyota introduces a reliable, functional vehicle with a top speed of 25 MPH, it's unreasonable to imply that they should have built a faster, less safe car.
On the other hand, it's decidedly reasonable to wonder why they couldn't build a functional vehicle that goes as fast as any of the other functional cars on the market.
Just 'cause Microsoft's new to the game doesn't mean their 1.0 products shouldn't be compared against whatever else is out there. Of course, given that there seems to be a strange understanding that .NET will be universally adopted no matter how good or bad it actually is, perhaps you're right that we should just be happy it doesn't catch fire...
I'm sorry, how does the first statement contradict the second one? If you need to download a VM to get Java support, then it certainly sounds like Java isn't supported by default.
It's tangential, but said download is quite time-consuming for those folks who don't have broadband.
Amazon.com is named in the article as having fought off a number of suits like this. I don't know too much about Amazon's policy, but their catalog seems to include a pretty broad array of "controversial" and "obscene" books.
I would bet that corporate chain stores might be willing to fight this battle, simply as a business matter. The investment required to fight for 1st amendment protection on book purchases might well serve the chains somewhere down the line. For instance, if you sell pornography (or intend to do some someday-- after all, it's big business) then you don't want your customers worried that their purchase records are available to the world. Legal protection for purchase records is a potential business opportunity not to be squandered lightly.
Actually, it's about both. It mentions that the first (widely known) attempt to obtain customer records occurred as recently as 1998, when Ken Starr attempted to subpeona a bookstore in DC. A court agreed with the bookstore on 1st amendment grounds, but didn't quash the subpeona... Opening a gateway for a number of requests over the past few years-- requests that might not previously have been made.
Does that count as attempting to "take away" a right? I'd need to know a lot more about the case history to be precise, but on the surface, it seems that there's a definite movement to challenge something that's at very least an assumed right/protection.
Also notice that in a number of the cases mentioned, the courts did not actually find in favor of the bookstore. In a number of these cases, either the case was dropped, or the purchaser voluntarily cooperated. The Tattered Cover lawsuit is still on appeal to the Colorado Supreme Court, with the most recent decision still in favor of enforcing the subpeona. If you're forced to appeal to the State Supreme Court in order to have your rights upheld, then you clearly haven't had your rights successfully upheld by the rest of the legal system.