USB was designed for low speed, low bandwidth devices like mice, keyboards, printers etc
A modern printer is the last thing you want a low bandwidth interface on. The original version of USB was much too slow to excel at printing complex graphics. Better than a parallel port, but not much.
The killer application for USB was removable storage, where the ridiculously slow speed of USB 1.0 was an even greater problem. No wonder why no one wanted any USB peripherals at first. With the speeds it originally shipped at it was a solution in search of a problem.
Unless you sign a long term contract, the implied contract lasts all the way to the end of the month. At that point either you or they can walk away, or make any other change in the agreement not prohibited by law. If you make the next month's payment, you renew the contract under the new terms for another month.
On the contrary, the FCC made a Title I determination and the Supreme Court upheld it against a challenge in the Brand X decision. The Supreme Court did not mandate that ISPs be classified as Title I carriers. What they held was that "The Commission's conclusion that broadband cable modem companies are exempt from mandatory common-carrier regulation is a lawful construction of the Communications Act under Chevron and the Administrative Procedure Act"
That does not prohibit the FCC from coming to a different conclusion, as long as the change is not arbitrary and capricious. Of course this is all the FCC's fault anyway. Their previous determination is a model of specious logic. The basic function of an internet access provider is to transmit packets, not process, store, or transform them.
The reason why service providers can change terms every month is because their customers are on a month to month contract. It is like the difference between renting and leasing. If you signed up for a long term contract, then arbitrary changes to the service during that term would be restricted. Beyond that it takes a law to override the terms of a contract, unless the terms are clearly unconscionable.
Most monthly service contracts come with a clause that say we reserve the right to change terms - service, prices, options, etc at will. If you pay one month in advance, your implied contract lasts one month.
So until Congress passes an ISP appropriate law to allow the FCC to regulate a handful of critical issues like traffic interception and rewriting, the FCC's only option is to attempt to reclassify ISPs as a Title II "telecommunications service" providers, subject to all the fun regulations that telephone companies are subject to, good, bad and ugly.
In the long run, that is probably a good thing, although I doubt the FCC will be successful without an act of Congress requiring such a change, and making appropriate provisions for ISPs.
Apple was first to deploy USB, but they didn't develop it, Intel did (primarily). Do you imagine the latter would have bothered if the Mac was the only target market? Apple wasn't even a member of the original USB consortium. Beyond keyboards and mice, Apple was far more interested in Firewire (which they developed) in any case, and for good reason.
I'll give Apple credit for bringing GUIs to the home user in 1984
The Macintosh was so expensive in the beginning that home users were few and far between. Atari and Commodore brought modern GUIs to far more users with the Atari ST and the Amiga soon after that. And both of them ran circles around the Macintosh until the Mac II was released. The Amiga in some respects for years after that. The Mac didn't even have cooperative multitasking until 1991, and finally acquired preemptive multitasking about fourteen years after the Amiga, which had it from the start. For the first few years it was basically a very nice GUI toolkit with a disk driver.
The justices' initial debates in the case make it clear that Stevens was the only one of the nine who believed that the 'fair use' doctrine gave consumers a right to make personal copies of copyrighted content for home use
That is a bit of an overstatement, don't you think? Recording an over the air broadcast for later viewing is not quite the same thing as exchanging bootleg copies of Photoshop, etc. There doesn't appear to be any indication that Justice Stevens endorsed the latter.
Re:Why not bring back Amiga OS?
on
Is OS/2 Coming Back?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
The Amiga had proper co-operative multitasking around a decade(!) before Windows
Amiga multitasking was pre-emptive, not cooperative. Much better. Windows multi-tasking was cooperative (if that) until Windows NT/95. Pre-emptive multitasking was where Amiga OS had a ten year advantage over common versions of Windows. The Mac didn't get co-operative multitasking until System 7, and pre-emptive multitasking on the Mac didn't come until Mac OS X.
The main problem with AmigaOS was that there was no security or process isolation to speak of. That made it _extremely_ fast, but also rather vulnerable to a variety of problems.
You mean like UTOPIA? Municipal fiber / Ethernet infrastructure. Multiple ISPs, telephone, and video providers run on different VLANs. World class bandwidth at affordable prices. The sticking point is the deployment cost. $3K per connected home / business must be funded one way or another, and it takes a long time to recover an investment like that.
None of those protections exist for Windows or Mac users which is why they can get 0wned with one bad click.
Not true. On Windows XP (for example), if you run as a limited user, nothing you run can take over the system, because you don't have privileges to do so.
You can't patent an idea, you can only patent an implementation of an idea.
That is the rhetoric, but in actual practice the raison d'etre of patent attorneys is to make the patents they write so broad that they encompass entire classifications of inventions. A land grab, more or less.
If an "implementation" were all that was at issue, in the field of software copyright would be more than adequate. Instead we get patents granted for the entire field of social networking implemented using the industry standard technology that has been around for decades. Or purchasing things on a web browser with one click. Or any conceivable copy on write filesystem, etc.
The ethical status of doing all this notwithstanding, and especially _knowingly_ relying on it as part of one's business plan, it would appear that Youtube had safe harbor to do all this under the online copyright liability limitations enacted as part of the DMCA.
No. The government lent ~$200 billion dollars to U.S. banks, many of which were required to take the money even though they did not want it. Nearly all that money will be paid back, with interest.
$40 billion to AIG, an insurance company, which is probably worthless. $20 billion to GM / Chrysler, who are probably good for it. ~$200 billion to Fannie Mae, now a de facto government agency, which we might get back.
The other (mostly) TARP money is authorized but unspent.
I know about the limits. I just assume people with more than $100K in their deposit accounts are the exception that proves the rule. Per person would be a great idea.
If the stock market is any indication, people think that the commercial banks actually have net asset value. If not, well I guess we own all those underwater loans anyway. There is no way around it.
If we insure commercial bank deposits, we are responsible to make sure the banks follow rational lending policies because we are on the hook for all the deposits if they do not. If the banks were really insolvent, we were just bailing out ourselves.
Now of course there is a significant issue about pricing deposit insurance correctly, to cover for the risk of an incident such as this. If the FDIC itself requires a bailout then we know that insurance has been underpriced and needs to be raised in the future.
What really makes me angry though is the bailout of AIG, which should have been left to crater in the dust. The idea that we are going to bailout any organization that we do not explicitly insure (and charge insurance premiums to) is perverse.
In cash flow terms, none of the commercial banks were insolvent. If the market asset valuation is a temporary anomaly, and the the loans will cure that anomaly, they are an extremely good risk, especially compared to the wreckage which would ensue if most of the banks in the country fail, and of course have to be wound down by the FDIC and all the depositors made whole.
That is not to say that I am a big fan of fiat currency, and even less of fractional reserve banking. FRB only works when the government insures bank deposits. That insurance dramatically changes the calculus of the rationality of offering loans to banks during a financial crisis.
Sort of, but not quite. HTTP Authentication of any type is sufficiently inflexible and user unfriendly that it is almost _never_ used outside of a Intranet environment. It is so bad that it is essentially hopeless. Login screen, what login screen? Web server control over what gets displayed on authentication failure? etc.
Not only that, HTTP Authentication is based on the idea that at least initially both the user and the server know what the plaintext password is. The fact that is hashed in transit or hashed in storage on the server side after that is immaterial. The web server operator _knows_ what your plain text password is.
In order to fix the second problem, at a minimum HTTP Authentication would require a mode for _establishing_ a user password such that the hash is transmitted rather than the plain text password. But making such a change would be a waste because HTTP authentication is almost useless anyway, for the reasons mentioned above.
So what I suggest is that the HTML standard be amended with an option such that password entry fields (input type="password") do not transmit the entered text to the server, but rather the entered text hashed with the server domain name. This hash would be sent both when the user initially enters his/her password, and when he or she re-enters it to authenticate later.
That would make it computationally difficult for a web server operator to ever know what the plain text password of the user actually was. Of course the hash would need to be kept secure, encrypted in transit, etc., in any non trivial application, because stealing the hash would be like stealing the password - with regard to that particular site only, not all the other sites where the user uses the same plain text password.
No bank in America has been "given" a dime. They have to pay it back. Unless they fail, that is a virtual certainty.
The allocations we have to worry about are when the government buys its way into operations that may never recover, like AIG, or will likely remain on life support for all eternity, like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. One has to be a little concerned about whether GM will make it in the long run as well.
If HTTP was designed correctly, web sites would never have a copy of a password you typed into a password entry field, ever. Secure hashing would be trivial, for example, making it a practical impossibility for a web site to determine what the original password was. All that would be stored would be a hash that was only good for logging into that web site.
"predicted the internet"? That takes a lot of talent. The idea that there would be something like the Internet was obvious the day packet oriented networking was invented.
Ted Nelson coined the term "hypertext" in 1965, when Gelernter was ten. The combination of the two (i.e. "the web") is certainly not beyond the capacity of someone having ordinary skill in the art. It is simply a matter of economics.
just trying to carve out a privileged position for your work
No carve out necessary. If there is no contract, or the contract is not specific on the subject, the copyright stays with the contractor. Of course, if a client's business model depends on having the rights associated with copyright, it would be unethical not to alert them to that fact.
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USB was designed for low speed, low bandwidth devices like mice, keyboards, printers etc
A modern printer is the last thing you want a low bandwidth interface on. The original version of USB was much too slow to excel at printing complex graphics. Better than a parallel port, but not much.
The killer application for USB was removable storage, where the ridiculously slow speed of USB 1.0 was an even greater problem. No wonder why no one wanted any USB peripherals at first. With the speeds it originally shipped at it was a solution in search of a problem.
The original assertion was "Without Apple we would still be using floppy disks and parallel ports". A rather unlikely proposition, to put it mildly.
Unless you sign a long term contract, the implied contract lasts all the way to the end of the month. At that point either you or they can walk away, or make any other change in the agreement not prohibited by law. If you make the next month's payment, you renew the contract under the new terms for another month.
On the contrary, the FCC made a Title I determination and the Supreme Court upheld it against a challenge in the Brand X decision. The Supreme Court did not mandate that ISPs be classified as Title I carriers. What they held was that "The Commission's conclusion that broadband cable modem companies are exempt from mandatory common-carrier regulation is a lawful construction of the Communications Act under Chevron and the Administrative Procedure Act"
That does not prohibit the FCC from coming to a different conclusion, as long as the change is not arbitrary and capricious. Of course this is all the FCC's fault anyway. Their previous determination is a model of specious logic. The basic function of an internet access provider is to transmit packets, not process, store, or transform them.
The reason why service providers can change terms every month is because their customers are on a month to month contract. It is like the difference between renting and leasing. If you signed up for a long term contract, then arbitrary changes to the service during that term would be restricted. Beyond that it takes a law to override the terms of a contract, unless the terms are clearly unconscionable.
Most monthly service contracts come with a clause that say we reserve the right to change terms - service, prices, options, etc at will. If you pay one month in advance, your implied contract lasts one month.
So until Congress passes an ISP appropriate law to allow the FCC to regulate a handful of critical issues like traffic interception and rewriting, the FCC's only option is to attempt to reclassify ISPs as a Title II "telecommunications service" providers, subject to all the fun regulations that telephone companies are subject to, good, bad and ugly.
In the long run, that is probably a good thing, although I doubt the FCC will be successful without an act of Congress requiring such a change, and making appropriate provisions for ISPs.
Ever heard of post hoc ergo propter hoc?
Apple was first to deploy USB, but they didn't develop it, Intel did (primarily). Do you imagine the latter would have bothered if the Mac was the only target market? Apple wasn't even a member of the original USB consortium. Beyond keyboards and mice, Apple was far more interested in Firewire (which they developed) in any case, and for good reason.
I'll give Apple credit for bringing GUIs to the home user in 1984
The Macintosh was so expensive in the beginning that home users were few and far between. Atari and Commodore brought modern GUIs to far more users with the Atari ST and the Amiga soon after that. And both of them ran circles around the Macintosh until the Mac II was released. The Amiga in some respects for years after that. The Mac didn't even have cooperative multitasking until 1991, and finally acquired preemptive multitasking about fourteen years after the Amiga, which had it from the start. For the first few years it was basically a very nice GUI toolkit with a disk driver.
The justices' initial debates in the case make it clear that Stevens was the only one of the nine who believed that the 'fair use' doctrine gave consumers a right to make personal copies of copyrighted content for home use
That is a bit of an overstatement, don't you think? Recording an over the air broadcast for later viewing is not quite the same thing as exchanging bootleg copies of Photoshop, etc. There doesn't appear to be any indication that Justice Stevens endorsed the latter.
The Amiga had proper co-operative multitasking around a decade(!) before Windows
Amiga multitasking was pre-emptive, not cooperative. Much better. Windows multi-tasking was cooperative (if that) until Windows NT/95. Pre-emptive multitasking was where Amiga OS had a ten year advantage over common versions of Windows. The Mac didn't get co-operative multitasking until System 7, and pre-emptive multitasking on the Mac didn't come until Mac OS X.
The main problem with AmigaOS was that there was no security or process isolation to speak of. That made it _extremely_ fast, but also rather vulnerable to a variety of problems.
You mean like UTOPIA? Municipal fiber / Ethernet infrastructure. Multiple ISPs, telephone, and video providers run on different VLANs. World class bandwidth at affordable prices. The sticking point is the deployment cost. $3K per connected home / business must be funded one way or another, and it takes a long time to recover an investment like that.
None of those protections exist for Windows or Mac users which is why they can get 0wned with one bad click.
Not true. On Windows XP (for example), if you run as a limited user, nothing you run can take over the system, because you don't have privileges to do so.
You can't patent an idea, you can only patent an implementation of an idea.
That is the rhetoric, but in actual practice the raison d'etre of patent attorneys is to make the patents they write so broad that they encompass entire classifications of inventions. A land grab, more or less.
If an "implementation" were all that was at issue, in the field of software copyright would be more than adequate. Instead we get patents granted for the entire field of social networking implemented using the industry standard technology that has been around for decades. Or purchasing things on a web browser with one click. Or any conceivable copy on write filesystem, etc.
All my 5 cent transistors are solid gold.
Ah yes, but silver is so much better.
The ethical status of doing all this notwithstanding, and especially _knowingly_ relying on it as part of one's business plan, it would appear that Youtube had safe harbor to do all this under the online copyright liability limitations enacted as part of the DMCA.
No. The government lent ~$200 billion dollars to U.S. banks, many of which were required to take the money even though they did not want it. Nearly all that money will be paid back, with interest.
$40 billion to AIG, an insurance company, which is probably worthless. $20 billion to GM / Chrysler, who are probably good for it. ~$200 billion to Fannie Mae, now a de facto government agency, which we might get back.
The other (mostly) TARP money is authorized but unspent.
As I am sure you are aware, there is hardly a DSL "modem" on the planet that isn't actually a router. Calling it a "modem" is a marketing gimmick.
I know about the limits. I just assume people with more than $100K in their deposit accounts are the exception that proves the rule. Per person would be a great idea.
If the stock market is any indication, people think that the commercial banks actually have net asset value. If not, well I guess we own all those underwater loans anyway. There is no way around it.
If we insure commercial bank deposits, we are responsible to make sure the banks follow rational lending policies because we are on the hook for all the deposits if they do not. If the banks were really insolvent, we were just bailing out ourselves.
Now of course there is a significant issue about pricing deposit insurance correctly, to cover for the risk of an incident such as this. If the FDIC itself requires a bailout then we know that insurance has been underpriced and needs to be raised in the future.
What really makes me angry though is the bailout of AIG, which should have been left to crater in the dust. The idea that we are going to bailout any organization that we do not explicitly insure (and charge insurance premiums to) is perverse.
In cash flow terms, none of the commercial banks were insolvent. If the market asset valuation is a temporary anomaly, and the the loans will cure that anomaly, they are an extremely good risk, especially compared to the wreckage which would ensue if most of the banks in the country fail, and of course have to be wound down by the FDIC and all the depositors made whole.
That is not to say that I am a big fan of fiat currency, and even less of fractional reserve banking. FRB only works when the government insures bank deposits. That insurance dramatically changes the calculus of the rationality of offering loans to banks during a financial crisis.
Sort of, but not quite. HTTP Authentication of any type is sufficiently inflexible and user unfriendly that it is almost _never_ used outside of a Intranet environment. It is so bad that it is essentially hopeless. Login screen, what login screen? Web server control over what gets displayed on authentication failure? etc.
Not only that, HTTP Authentication is based on the idea that at least initially both the user and the server know what the plaintext password is. The fact that is hashed in transit or hashed in storage on the server side after that is immaterial. The web server operator _knows_ what your plain text password is.
In order to fix the second problem, at a minimum HTTP Authentication would require a mode for _establishing_ a user password such that the hash is transmitted rather than the plain text password. But making such a change would be a waste because HTTP authentication is almost useless anyway, for the reasons mentioned above.
So what I suggest is that the HTML standard be amended with an option such that password entry fields (input type="password") do not transmit the entered text to the server, but rather the entered text hashed with the server domain name. This hash would be sent both when the user initially enters his/her password, and when he or she re-enters it to authenticate later.
That would make it computationally difficult for a web server operator to ever know what the plain text password of the user actually was. Of course the hash would need to be kept secure, encrypted in transit, etc., in any non trivial application, because stealing the hash would be like stealing the password - with regard to that particular site only, not all the other sites where the user uses the same plain text password.
No bank in America has been "given" a dime. They have to pay it back. Unless they fail, that is a virtual certainty.
The allocations we have to worry about are when the government buys its way into operations that may never recover, like AIG, or will likely remain on life support for all eternity, like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. One has to be a little concerned about whether GM will make it in the long run as well.
If HTTP was designed correctly, web sites would never have a copy of a password you typed into a password entry field, ever. Secure hashing would be trivial, for example, making it a practical impossibility for a web site to determine what the original password was. All that would be stored would be a hash that was only good for logging into that web site.
"predicted the internet"? That takes a lot of talent. The idea that there would be something like the Internet was obvious the day packet oriented networking was invented.
Ted Nelson coined the term "hypertext" in 1965, when Gelernter was ten. The combination of the two (i.e. "the web") is certainly not beyond the capacity of someone having ordinary skill in the art. It is simply a matter of economics.
just trying to carve out a privileged position for your work
No carve out necessary. If there is no contract, or the contract is not specific on the subject, the copyright stays with the contractor. Of course, if a client's business model depends on having the rights associated with copyright, it would be unethical not to alert them to that fact.
As nice as this is, I would be so much more excited if the owners of rights to Popular Electronics did this.