Well, one of the lessone that little Joey learns when he shares a tune with Billy is that some things can be shared without loss. Even if Billy trashes the tune, or mixes it with a bund of others and adds his own rant over the top, Joey still has his copy to listen to (or trash in his own way).
You can't do this with real-world toys, of course; if Joey lends a toy to Billy and Billy breaks it, Joey has lost a toy and it's Billy's fault. But with shared "IP", the giver loses nothing. This teaches both Joey and Billy that there are some things that adults insist as treating as equivalent that are actually very, very different. It's a good lesson in some of the stupid things that adults do. Maybe when they grow up, they'll understand a little better than the adults do now.
(And I'd like to thank Eric Raymond for the comparison with children sharing their toys. He may not have originated the metaphor, but he's the one I first heard it from. It's a fun way to frame the "IP" debate. It puts those silly adults in their places.;-)
Not only has this happened (several times), but some people have taken it far too far.
That article has links that will lead you to stories of several of the travelling garden gnomes.
I also read an article a while back about a gang that look for plastic flamingoes, and when the owners aren't home (or during the night), sneak into the yard and move the flamingoes around. I saw one photo of a plastic flamingo that was found perched in a nearby tree.
One thing that people are missing is how this undermines our school system. From the earliest age, teachers have universally emphasized the lesson "Share your toys with the others". Teachers understand that immature children are naturally selfish, and want everything for themselves but don't want to share with their friends (much less those awful kids that I don't like). But teachers have learned how to put a strong emphasis on sharing, to civilize the little beasts before they have to go out into the greater society.
But here we have a big, respected corporation selling a toy that does the opposite. What sort of message does this send the young minds? It says that the big, successful people encourage hoarding and not sharing. Is this really what we want our children to learn?
Sensible teachers would ban such anti-social toys from their schools. They would look for comparable toys that make it easy for the children to share the fun. And in this case, the electronic toy would be better than older "hardware" toys, because the child would learn that they can share something without losing it for themselves. In this case, sharing is done by copying, so you can share something fun as many times as you like and still have full use of it yourself. This is a valuable lesson for growing minds.
But apparently not if your toy comes from Microsoft.
Maybe we need to send their managers back to first grade.
Tons upon tons of people use [Windows] and like it.
Huh? In my experience, almost all Windows users hate it. They use it because they have no idea that there's a choice. They didn't buy "windows", they bought "a computer", and that mysterious thing called "Windows" came with it. From the name, they understand that "Windows" is the thing that draws the windows on the screen. All computers do that, so they all have "Windows", right? Even those who have heard of Apple tend to think that Macs run Windows, because you can look at the screen and see the windows.
An important reason for all this is that Microsoft has an advertising budget larger than the budgets of all their competitors combined. This simple situation is all you need to understand MS's market dominance. (Though their ability to lock out competitors via their contracts with retailers also helps.)
You realize, of course, that if this bill passes, you'll have to register for having contributed to this discussion.
What if you're not if in the US ?
That's easy: They'll haul you off to Guantanamo and hold you there until you confess to being a lobbyist and register as such.
Re:Don't freak out, little troll
on
Who won?
·
· Score: 1
... the real issue should be: Why is there any doubt at all about the election outcome? Shouldn't there be an election process that leaves no doubt whatsoever?
Of course, there should be such an election process. The reason there's so much doubt is that much of the current US election process leaves some very serious doubt. There's widespread use of unauditable electronic equipment, and much of this equipment has been shown to be quite easy to "hack" to deliver a fraudulent vote count. Those who know a bit about election history consider this a huge red flag, because if there's a way to secretly bias the vote, nearly every political group in existence will attempt to do so.
It's good to read of people looking at it with a properly jaundiced eye. It gives us at least a small hope that the obvious problems might be fixed. Political ranting and "Get over it" suggestions don't give one much hope, since they are aimed at perpetuating the problems, not fixing them.
Did they even bother to read the bill's text, which clearly states that you have to be paid by a client to make arguments for a specific action in Congress?
Well, to that first point, you might be surprised at what can be interpreted as "pay". For example, like a lot of computer geeks, I'm an amateur musician, and I play at a lot of local events that don't pay. But I do get into the event for free, and can hang out there as long as I like. I asked a tax expert about this once, and was assured that, yes, that free entrance to an event is legally payment for my performing, and I really should declare the ticket value as income. That's right, being allowed in free to an event where you're performing without pay is considered payment for your service. If you've ever done this, you are legally a professional musician, and because you were "paid" for performing.
So when you post here, do you read the other messages? (I know that many don't, but probably a lot of us do.;-) Given the above precedent, reading the discussions here could easily be considered "pay" for contributing to the discussions, especially if you make your living as a computer geek. But I don't know how you'd calculate the value for tax purposes.
they promised they would and we paid them $200 billion for it.
Ok, so they've got the money and there's no way we can get it back from them. Now why should they deliver unless we pay them again?
You don't understand how the comms business works. For another, clearer example: Every ISP sells you a service that includes things like 1.2 Mb/sec up, 0.5 Mb/sec down. It's right there in their ads. But if you're dumb enough to try using that bandwidth that you've paid for, you'll find your service cut off real fast. They don't even try to hide this bit of fraud, because they know quite well that no court would ever convict them.
Given that the government allows them to act this way, why would you ever expect them to deliver on a mere $200 billion pseudo-contract?
A lot of unix systems back in the 1980s and early 90s did this sort of trick with their multi-user capability. The login program had a limit to the number of simultaneously logged-in users, usually 2. If you paid for an "upgrade", you'd get a patch that removed the limit. This patch consisted of changing one byte in one binary config file. Which byte wasn't documented, of course, and there were reports that it moved around in different releases to make it difficult for users to find it and tell others.
I had a bit of fun with this when for various reasons, I wrote a new login program. The main motive was to add a lot of diagnostic capability, so you could learn why serial-port+modem connections to other systems were failing. I didn't include a login limit, and in several online discussions, I explained that this was because I didn't know where the login limit count was stored, but if the vendors or someone at AT&T would tell me where to find it, I'd be happy to add the "feature".
I never heard from them. And a lot of people told me that they downloaded my program so they wouldn't have to pay several hundred dollars for the bogus "upgrade". I kept hoping that some company's lawyers would contact me and make some sort of claim about "hacking" their system. It would have been fun to post their letters online.
Logins via serial port are now somewhat a dead issue, and I haven't used the program for years. And I haven't seen a unix system with a login limit for a while, either. I wonder why they gave up on it.
There was also the similar trick that Microsoft has used to sell a "server" system. Their TCP code in some configurations limits the number of simultaneous TCP connections. This effectively prevents users from using apache, since it limits the number of simultaneous clients to a very low number. The get rid of the limit by "upgrading" to IIS server. Then, if you prefer, you can switch to apache, but they'll have your money and you'll be listed as a satisfied IIS customer in their sales stats. That was a few years ago; I wonder if they still do this? And has anyone found where the limit is stored?
Lots of people have really wished there were some way to make this sort of crippling illegal. But I suppose there's no hope for that given the nature of most legislatures in this world.
It seems that this point hasn't been lost on many of the world's leaders. The US now has a widely-recognized history of attacking defenseless countries, while negotiating with those that have (or appear to have) serious weaponry. This is putting pressure on many governments to at least have the appearance of a "WMD" arsenal. The US government, and especially the current administration, has done a lot to encourage the rest of the world to arm themselves against an American attack.
After all, to most of the world, the American invasion of Iraq makes no sense at all. There was no visible provocation of any sort. All the charges of the US government were pretty much shown to be just PR (i.e., lies). Given such history, who in the world is safe? Well, North Korea and Iran seem to be safe, for the time being at least. So we should all emulate their strategy, right?
As an American, I find all this a bit unnerving. But I don't have any idea what I could do to change it. Voting didn't help. I guess I'll just have to face the fact that my government has become the Bad Guy to much of the rest of the world. But to put it in perspective, I guess this isn't an unusual situation for most of humanity. It's just that Americans are no longer an unusual case of people who can mostly support their own government's behavior.
2) a lot of people have been working on DRM for a long time.
Yeah, but have any of them actually produced valid, workable DRM software? I get the impression that most of them are invalidated (i.e., "cracked") within days of release. Either that, or like the Sony "rootkit DRM", the DRM was a fiasco that was quickly withdrawn due to its side-effects on customers' equipment.
Cox and RedHat can be making the claim that all previous DRM has been poorly-functioning and/or vaporware, and they're the first ones to have actually implemented it. If so, those who support DRM should support their patent. (Whether software should actually be patentable is an independent issue.)
There's a lot of precedent for patents for inventions that others have attempted. I recently read an interesting history of the invention of the zipper. Many people tried to invent such a mechanism in the 1800s. Their attempts generally worked for a while, but were fragile and required frequent replacement. Finally, someone came up with the zipper that we all know, which both worked and was sturdy enough to last for years in normal clothing. They got a patent on it, despite the fact that many other (poor) zipper mechanisms had already been invented. Theirs was slightly different from all the others, and it actually worked well.
There are many stories like this in the history of technology, with many false starts before someone comes up with a good solution to a problem.
There is another potential problem with this patent, however. It's the way that the US Patent Office now accepts patents without a working model. So it's entirely possible that Cox and RedHat are also patenting vaporware that they can't build. Do we know much about this question?
As a programmer, I come down instantly on the "objection due to practicality" side.
Copryright law isn't programmable. It's something that depends strongly on the decisions of legislatures and courts. Until we have a true artificial intelligence that's much more intelligent than any human, there's no hope whatsoever that this can be programmed.
So any software DRM is guaranteed not to agree with copyright case law in any jurisdiction.
And there's the additional question of multiple jurisdictions. Has any DRM software been written that takes into account different copyright law in different countries? I rest my case.
The question is a blatant "strawman" that presupposes something that can't possibly exist in our world. DRM will never agree with copyright case law. And given the commercial realities, it will generally be much more restrictive than copyright case law, whatever your jurisdiction.
So if one were interested in developing software for a truly portable "smart phone", what would be the best to buy now? And how would one get usable phone service from the companies that only want to allow their own locked devices? Are we stuck with carrying two devices, a non-phone PDA plus a cell phone that can be used as a modem?
I'd have to say that a lockdown like this is a deal killer. The main reason I'd get a "smart phone" rather than a dumb one is so I could write some of my own software for it. If I can't do that, I'll stick to a dumb phone.
This was why I never got involved much with Macs much before OSX. The pre-OSX Mac wasn't an computer (which is defined as a machine that's programmable); it was an appliance. When I played around with a few, and found that they didn't come with any compilers or interpreters that I could use, I quickly lost interest. Not that I criticised others for buying them; I understood why they'd be useful to a non-programmer. But I didn't personally want one until I could program it.
So for us weird software types (there's gotta be a few around here, right?), maybe we should be discussing more which handhelds are both programmable and have phone/network capability? To be portable, just wifi doesn't make it, at least here in the US where open access points cover maybe.001% of the land. It'd have to have cell-phone-type IP connectivity to be usable. There are a number of linux handhelds, but do any of them come with usable (GSM?) networking that works? Are there OSs other than linux that are actually programmable?
I did play around a bit with PalmOS a few years ago, but as an "outsider", I found it nearly impossible to find enough information to write useful programs for the things. I also played around with a Blackberry recently, and couldn't even get enough info to make a "Hello, world." program that worked. But I'd be interested in learning of any little thing that's actually usable by a programmer.
But I don't want to sign an expensive 2-year contract and find out that I can't write any software for the damned thing.
Hmmm... That was my question, too. So I read TFA. I still didn't have a clue. So I read most of the articles in this thread and a few others here. Still not much of a clue. I think it has something to do with businesses and customers and keeping data about customers so you can target them.
But somehow I don't yet think I'll be installing CRM on my home linux server.
Maybe if I understood what it was supposed to do for (to?) me...
Or promote the concept of the title "Software Engineer" requiring a professional certification, the way real engineering does.
Actually, this has been attempted repeatedly in the software business. It has always failed, for pretty much the same two reasons.
First, the only thing that the organizers (invariably software managers) can agree on is testing for knowledge of the mundane introductory-level details of IBM/Microsoft software. This means that in the more technical areas, where other (higher-quality) systems are used, there is no certification.
Second, even if the customer wants software that runs on IBM/Microsoft systems, they quickly realize that that "mundane introductory-level details" part can be rephrased as "It's a totally Mickey-Mouse certification", and the people who get certified tend to be the novices who think that a certification will get them the big bucks that their knowledge doesn't qualify them for.
So in software, "professional certification" always turns out to be a big joke. Everyone knows this, but pretends that a good certification program would help.
And no, I don't know how to make a non-joke certification program, either, despite several decades of building software. If I did, I certainly wouldn't be hired to take part in the committee that manages the certification program. (But I'm disqualified anyway, because I've worked too much on non-IBM, non-Microsoft systems to be considered for a position in a certification committee.;-)
I think it's a bad mistake to make your code secure. If you look at sales figures, you see that sales are inversely proportional to security. So customers don't want secure computer software. If they wanted that, they'd buy it. Clearly, what people want is the most insecure software they can get.
I say go with The Market, and write the most insecure software you can. Securing your software will only waste your time and decrease your sales.
You need to explain that visiting an unknown site with javascript (or any scripting) turned on is one of the most dangerous thing you can do with a browser. It's an open invitation for sites to run their software on your machine. Yes, it's a hassle. But dealing with a computer that has been taken over by nasty stuff is a much bigger hassle, for you and for everyone else.
If it were possible to enforce laws on the Internet, one law should be that no software should ever execute downloaded code without explicit permission from the human in charge. Software that runs code from another site without very clearly asking permission should be grounds for a serious fine imposed on the software's vendor and/or author.
Don't have children if you are not prepared to be responsible for them for a couple of decades.
HOW do you plan to make sure that every device that would be used to produce children has the label?
Well, here in the US, hospitals used to circumcise all newborn boys without asking the parents' permission. This has mostly stopped now, primarily because medical studies (and a few lawsuits) showed that it had no medical benefits but had a slight risk of infection. So hospitals are out the bit of money they used to get from this operation.
But this did set the legal precedence that they can make "recommended" modifications of newborns' genitals without asking the parents' permission. And charge for it. So what they should do is tattoo the suggested warning on all newborn boys' penises. This would be easy to justify, given the sorry state of the laws that we're discussing here, and would be another chargeable item on the hospital bill.
McDonald's had reports of injuries before this event; they even knew it was being served too hot to be consumed. McD's refuised to settle, and eventually lost to the tune of $500,000 - then they settled.
Indeed. And a number of articles on the case have pointed out that McDonald's also served hot chocolate at the same scalding temperature as their coffee. Hot chocolate is mostly drunk by children. McDonald's management knew this, had reports of injuries from both the coffee and the hot chocolate, but failed to lower the temperature. Endangering children like this is a level of irresponsibility that's a bit much for even the most rabid Social Darwinists.
Also, followups have pointed out that the lawsuit had the desired effect. McDonald's lowered their serving temperature for both coffee and hot chocolate to a more reasonable 140F (60C).
Another footnote was that most of the settlement went to pay the victim's lawyers; she reportedly got less money than her hospital bills.
[I tried to get a degree symbol into those temperatures, but none of the standard HTML "entity" encodings worked.;-]
1. Development of efficient compilers and high-end IDEs. Without having to see the mess that is x86 machine code, you can usually ignore it.
Yeah; that's a polite way to admit that "It's a crappy, ad-hoc misdesigned cpu, but we use it because it was chosen by IBM and Microsoft. But the cruft can be hidden behind a higher-level language so we can pretend that we're not using one of the worst designs ever." I've done a bit of assembly-language programming on x86* machines and a number of others. Intel's so-called "design" is the worst one that I've had the misfortune to use. If IBM hadn't annointed it and Microsoft hadn't sung its praises, nobody would have ever bought it. But purchase decisions are generally made by people who don't have a clue, so we're stuck with IBM's bad choice.
The die overhead for the compatibility and translation layers on modern processes is tiny, so why the hell not keep using it?
Because we'd rather use something that's a bit better designed? Unfortunately, the Market has told us that we must use the worst design. Well, at least we can (usually) hide the awfulness behind some higher-level languages. All we lose is some of our money and some of the performance that we could have had if we'd had the collective sense to thumb our collective noses at IBM and Microsoft.
Watching the industry standardize on Intel's crap has been a lot like watching a very slow-motion train wreck. And then watching people clean up the mess and stumble on while pretending that the whole catastrophe was planned and scheduled.
Yeah, but I just wanted to get in a gratuitous Saganism. What's a few dozen orders of magnitude when there's an obscure techno-literary reference at stake?
Of course, getting the number of molecules right strengthens the argument aginst ice-9, but doesn't help in the case of DNA. There's a whole lot less DNA on the planet than water. And with DNA you'd count the nucleotides, which are a lot bigger than a water molecule. And nucleotides don't bounce around, rearranging themselves on nanosecond time scales like liquid water does. So the chance of a random kill-all DNA sequence arising is many, many (how's that for precise?) orders of magnitude less than the chance of a random arrangement of a tiny ice seed crystal forming in the oceans. This leaves open the question of whether there's been enough time in our planet's history for such a mutation to arise.
It's more likely that such rogue actors do arise occasionally, but things like our immune system recognize and dismantle them because they're "foreign". Biological systems have evolved lots of defenses against attacks, especially attacks by small biological things.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, one of the lessone that little Joey learns when he shares a tune with Billy is that some things can be shared without loss. Even if Billy trashes the tune, or mixes it with a bund of others and adds his own rant over the top, Joey still has his copy to listen to (or trash in his own way).
;-)
You can't do this with real-world toys, of course; if Joey lends a toy to Billy and Billy breaks it, Joey has lost a toy and it's Billy's fault. But with shared "IP", the giver loses nothing. This teaches both Joey and Billy that there are some things that adults insist as treating as equivalent that are actually very, very different. It's a good lesson in some of the stupid things that adults do. Maybe when they grow up, they'll understand a little better than the adults do now.
(And I'd like to thank Eric Raymond for the comparison with children sharing their toys. He may not have originated the metaphor, but he's the one I first heard it from. It's a fun way to frame the "IP" debate. It puts those silly adults in their places.
Not only has this happened (several times), but some people have taken it far too far.
That article has links that will lead you to stories of several of the travelling garden gnomes.
I also read an article a while back about a gang that look for plastic flamingoes, and when the owners aren't home (or during the night), sneak into the yard and move the flamingoes around. I saw one photo of a plastic flamingo that was found perched in a nearby tree.
One thing that people are missing is how this undermines our school system. From the earliest age, teachers have universally emphasized the lesson "Share your toys with the others". Teachers understand that immature children are naturally selfish, and want everything for themselves but don't want to share with their friends (much less those awful kids that I don't like). But teachers have learned how to put a strong emphasis on sharing, to civilize the little beasts before they have to go out into the greater society.
But here we have a big, respected corporation selling a toy that does the opposite. What sort of message does this send the young minds? It says that the big, successful people encourage hoarding and not sharing. Is this really what we want our children to learn?
Sensible teachers would ban such anti-social toys from their schools. They would look for comparable toys that make it easy for the children to share the fun. And in this case, the electronic toy would be better than older "hardware" toys, because the child would learn that they can share something without losing it for themselves. In this case, sharing is done by copying, so you can share something fun as many times as you like and still have full use of it yourself. This is a valuable lesson for growing minds.
But apparently not if your toy comes from Microsoft.
Maybe we need to send their managers back to first grade.
Tons upon tons of people use [Windows] and like it.
Huh? In my experience, almost all Windows users hate it. They use it because they have no idea that there's a choice. They didn't buy "windows", they bought "a computer", and that mysterious thing called "Windows" came with it. From the name, they understand that "Windows" is the thing that draws the windows on the screen. All computers do that, so they all have "Windows", right? Even those who have heard of Apple tend to think that Macs run Windows, because you can look at the screen and see the windows.
An important reason for all this is that Microsoft has an advertising budget larger than the budgets of all their competitors combined. This simple situation is all you need to understand MS's market dominance. (Though their ability to lock out competitors via their contracts with retailers also helps.)
You realize, of course, that if this bill passes, you'll have to register for having contributed to this discussion.
What if you're not if in the US ?
That's easy: They'll haul you off to Guantanamo and hold you there until you confess to being a lobbyist and register as such.
... the real issue should be: Why is there any doubt at all about the election outcome? Shouldn't there be an election process that leaves no doubt whatsoever?
Of course, there should be such an election process. The reason there's so much doubt is that much of the current US election process leaves some very serious doubt. There's widespread use of unauditable electronic equipment, and much of this equipment has been shown to be quite easy to "hack" to deliver a fraudulent vote count. Those who know a bit about election history consider this a huge red flag, because if there's a way to secretly bias the vote, nearly every political group in existence will attempt to do so.
It's good to read of people looking at it with a properly jaundiced eye. It gives us at least a small hope that the obvious problems might be fixed. Political ranting and "Get over it" suggestions don't give one much hope, since they are aimed at perpetuating the problems, not fixing them.
Did they even bother to read the bill's text, which clearly states that you have to be paid by a client to make arguments for a specific action in Congress?
;-) Given the above precedent, reading the discussions here could easily be considered "pay" for contributing to the discussions, especially if you make your living as a computer geek. But I don't know how you'd calculate the value for tax purposes.
Well, to that first point, you might be surprised at what can be interpreted as "pay". For example, like a lot of computer geeks, I'm an amateur musician, and I play at a lot of local events that don't pay. But I do get into the event for free, and can hang out there as long as I like. I asked a tax expert about this once, and was assured that, yes, that free entrance to an event is legally payment for my performing, and I really should declare the ticket value as income. That's right, being allowed in free to an event where you're performing without pay is considered payment for your service. If you've ever done this, you are legally a professional musician, and because you were "paid" for performing.
So when you post here, do you read the other messages? (I know that many don't, but probably a lot of us do.
You realize, of course, that if this bill passes, you'll have to register for having contributed to this discussion.
they promised they would and we paid them $200 billion for it.
Ok, so they've got the money and there's no way we can get it back from them. Now why should they deliver unless we pay them again?
You don't understand how the comms business works. For another, clearer example: Every ISP sells you a service that includes things like 1.2 Mb/sec up, 0.5 Mb/sec down. It's right there in their ads. But if you're dumb enough to try using that bandwidth that you've paid for, you'll find your service cut off real fast. They don't even try to hide this bit of fraud, because they know quite well that no court would ever convict them.
Given that the government allows them to act this way, why would you ever expect them to deliver on a mere $200 billion pseudo-contract?
A lot of unix systems back in the 1980s and early 90s did this sort of trick with their multi-user capability. The login program had a limit to the number of simultaneously logged-in users, usually 2. If you paid for an "upgrade", you'd get a patch that removed the limit. This patch consisted of changing one byte in one binary config file. Which byte wasn't documented, of course, and there were reports that it moved around in different releases to make it difficult for users to find it and tell others.
I had a bit of fun with this when for various reasons, I wrote a new login program. The main motive was to add a lot of diagnostic capability, so you could learn why serial-port+modem connections to other systems were failing. I didn't include a login limit, and in several online discussions, I explained that this was because I didn't know where the login limit count was stored, but if the vendors or someone at AT&T would tell me where to find it, I'd be happy to add the "feature".
I never heard from them. And a lot of people told me that they downloaded my program so they wouldn't have to pay several hundred dollars for the bogus "upgrade". I kept hoping that some company's lawyers would contact me and make some sort of claim about "hacking" their system. It would have been fun to post their letters online.
Logins via serial port are now somewhat a dead issue, and I haven't used the program for years. And I haven't seen a unix system with a login limit for a while, either. I wonder why they gave up on it.
There was also the similar trick that Microsoft has used to sell a "server" system. Their TCP code in some configurations limits the number of simultaneous TCP connections. This effectively prevents users from using apache, since it limits the number of simultaneous clients to a very low number. The get rid of the limit by "upgrading" to IIS server. Then, if you prefer, you can switch to apache, but they'll have your money and you'll be listed as a satisfied IIS customer in their sales stats. That was a few years ago; I wonder if they still do this? And has anyone found where the limit is stored?
Lots of people have really wished there were some way to make this sort of crippling illegal. But I suppose there's no hope for that given the nature of most legislatures in this world.
Who'd we invade again?
It seems that this point hasn't been lost on many of the world's leaders. The US now has a widely-recognized history of attacking defenseless countries, while negotiating with those that have (or appear to have) serious weaponry. This is putting pressure on many governments to at least have the appearance of a "WMD" arsenal. The US government, and especially the current administration, has done a lot to encourage the rest of the world to arm themselves against an American attack.
After all, to most of the world, the American invasion of Iraq makes no sense at all. There was no visible provocation of any sort. All the charges of the US government were pretty much shown to be just PR (i.e., lies). Given such history, who in the world is safe? Well, North Korea and Iran seem to be safe, for the time being at least. So we should all emulate their strategy, right?
As an American, I find all this a bit unnerving. But I don't have any idea what I could do to change it. Voting didn't help. I guess I'll just have to face the fact that my government has become the Bad Guy to much of the rest of the world. But to put it in perspective, I guess this isn't an unusual situation for most of humanity. It's just that Americans are no longer an unusual case of people who can mostly support their own government's behavior.
2) a lot of people have been working on DRM for a long time.
Yeah, but have any of them actually produced valid, workable DRM software? I get the impression that most of them are invalidated (i.e., "cracked") within days of release. Either that, or like the Sony "rootkit DRM", the DRM was a fiasco that was quickly withdrawn due to its side-effects on customers' equipment.
Cox and RedHat can be making the claim that all previous DRM has been poorly-functioning and/or vaporware, and they're the first ones to have actually implemented it. If so, those who support DRM should support their patent. (Whether software should actually be patentable is an independent issue.)
There's a lot of precedent for patents for inventions that others have attempted. I recently read an interesting history of the invention of the zipper. Many people tried to invent such a mechanism in the 1800s. Their attempts generally worked for a while, but were fragile and required frequent replacement. Finally, someone came up with the zipper that we all know, which both worked and was sturdy enough to last for years in normal clothing. They got a patent on it, despite the fact that many other (poor) zipper mechanisms had already been invented. Theirs was slightly different from all the others, and it actually worked well.
There are many stories like this in the history of technology, with many false starts before someone comes up with a good solution to a problem.
There is another potential problem with this patent, however. It's the way that the US Patent Office now accepts patents without a working model. So it's entirely possible that Cox and RedHat are also patenting vaporware that they can't build. Do we know much about this question?
As a programmer, I come down instantly on the "objection due to practicality" side.
Copryright law isn't programmable. It's something that depends strongly on the decisions of legislatures and courts. Until we have a true artificial intelligence that's much more intelligent than any human, there's no hope whatsoever that this can be programmed.
So any software DRM is guaranteed not to agree with copyright case law in any jurisdiction.
And there's the additional question of multiple jurisdictions. Has any DRM software been written that takes into account different copyright law in different countries? I rest my case.
The question is a blatant "strawman" that presupposes something that can't possibly exist in our world. DRM will never agree with copyright case law. And given the commercial realities, it will generally be much more restrictive than copyright case law, whatever your jurisdiction.
Yeah; I had this image of Sojourner cuddling dejectedly next to Pathfinder, occasionally letting out a small electronic whimper.
I'll bet that we're not the only ones with such thoughts.
So if one were interested in developing software for a truly portable "smart phone", what would be the best to buy now? And how would one get usable phone service from the companies that only want to allow their own locked devices? Are we stuck with carrying two devices, a non-phone PDA plus a cell phone that can be used as a modem?
I'd have to say that a lockdown like this is a deal killer. The main reason I'd get a "smart phone" rather than a dumb one is so I could write some of my own software for it. If I can't do that, I'll stick to a dumb phone.
.001% of the land. It'd have to have cell-phone-type IP connectivity to be usable. There are a number of linux handhelds, but do any of them come with usable (GSM?) networking that works? Are there OSs other than linux that are actually programmable?
This was why I never got involved much with Macs much before OSX. The pre-OSX Mac wasn't an computer (which is defined as a machine that's programmable); it was an appliance. When I played around with a few, and found that they didn't come with any compilers or interpreters that I could use, I quickly lost interest. Not that I criticised others for buying them; I understood why they'd be useful to a non-programmer. But I didn't personally want one until I could program it.
So for us weird software types (there's gotta be a few around here, right?), maybe we should be discussing more which handhelds are both programmable and have phone/network capability? To be portable, just wifi doesn't make it, at least here in the US where open access points cover maybe
I did play around a bit with PalmOS a few years ago, but as an "outsider", I found it nearly impossible to find enough information to write useful programs for the things. I also played around with a Blackberry recently, and couldn't even get enough info to make a "Hello, world." program that worked. But I'd be interested in learning of any little thing that's actually usable by a programmer.
But I don't want to sign an expensive 2-year contract and find out that I can't write any software for the damned thing.
Hmmm ... That was my question, too. So I read TFA. I still didn't have a clue. So I read most of the articles in this thread and a few others here. Still not much of a clue. I think it has something to do with businesses and customers and keeping data about customers so you can target them.
...
But somehow I don't yet think I'll be installing CRM on my home linux server.
Maybe if I understood what it was supposed to do for (to?) me
Eric Schmidt said "if we merge the companies we can call it Applegoo."
Wrong, Eric; you should put your own company first.
The name should be "goopple".
Or promote the concept of the title "Software Engineer" requiring a professional certification, the way real engineering does.
;-)
Actually, this has been attempted repeatedly in the software business. It has always failed, for pretty much the same two reasons.
First, the only thing that the organizers (invariably software managers) can agree on is testing for knowledge of the mundane introductory-level details of IBM/Microsoft software. This means that in the more technical areas, where other (higher-quality) systems are used, there is no certification.
Second, even if the customer wants software that runs on IBM/Microsoft systems, they quickly realize that that "mundane introductory-level details" part can be rephrased as "It's a totally Mickey-Mouse certification", and the people who get certified tend to be the novices who think that a certification will get them the big bucks that their knowledge doesn't qualify them for.
So in software, "professional certification" always turns out to be a big joke. Everyone knows this, but pretends that a good certification program would help.
And no, I don't know how to make a non-joke certification program, either, despite several decades of building software. If I did, I certainly wouldn't be hired to take part in the committee that manages the certification program. (But I'm disqualified anyway, because I've worked too much on non-IBM, non-Microsoft systems to be considered for a position in a certification committee.
I think it's a bad mistake to make your code secure. If you look at sales figures, you see that sales are inversely proportional to security. So customers don't want secure computer software. If they wanted that, they'd buy it. Clearly, what people want is the most insecure software they can get.
I say go with The Market, and write the most insecure software you can. Securing your software will only waste your time and decrease your sales.
You need to explain that visiting an unknown site with javascript (or any scripting) turned on is one of the most dangerous thing you can do with a browser. It's an open invitation for sites to run their software on your machine. Yes, it's a hassle. But dealing with a computer that has been taken over by nasty stuff is a much bigger hassle, for you and for everyone else.
If it were possible to enforce laws on the Internet, one law should be that no software should ever execute downloaded code without explicit permission from the human in charge. Software that runs code from another site without very clearly asking permission should be grounds for a serious fine imposed on the software's vendor and/or author.
Too bad there's no way to enforce such a rule.
HOW do you plan to make sure that every device that would be used to produce children has the label?
Well, here in the US, hospitals used to circumcise all newborn boys without asking the parents' permission. This has mostly stopped now, primarily because medical studies (and a few lawsuits) showed that it had no medical benefits but had a slight risk of infection. So hospitals are out the bit of money they used to get from this operation.
But this did set the legal precedence that they can make "recommended" modifications of newborns' genitals without asking the parents' permission. And charge for it. So what they should do is tattoo the suggested warning on all newborn boys' penises. This would be easy to justify, given the sorry state of the laws that we're discussing here, and would be another chargeable item on the hospital bill.
McDonald's had reports of injuries before this event; they even knew it was being served too hot to be consumed. McD's refuised to settle, and eventually lost to the tune of $500,000 - then they settled.
;-]
Indeed. And a number of articles on the case have pointed out that McDonald's also served hot chocolate at the same scalding temperature as their coffee. Hot chocolate is mostly drunk by children. McDonald's management knew this, had reports of injuries from both the coffee and the hot chocolate, but failed to lower the temperature. Endangering children like this is a level of irresponsibility that's a bit much for even the most rabid Social Darwinists.
Also, followups have pointed out that the lawsuit had the desired effect. McDonald's lowered their serving temperature for both coffee and hot chocolate to a more reasonable 140F (60C).
Another footnote was that most of the settlement went to pay the victim's lawyers; she reportedly got less money than her hospital bills.
[I tried to get a degree symbol into those temperatures, but none of the standard HTML "entity" encodings worked.
1. Development of efficient compilers and high-end IDEs. Without having to see the mess that is x86 machine code, you can usually ignore it.
Yeah; that's a polite way to admit that "It's a crappy, ad-hoc misdesigned cpu, but we use it because it was chosen by IBM and Microsoft. But the cruft can be hidden behind a higher-level language so we can pretend that we're not using one of the worst designs ever." I've done a bit of assembly-language programming on x86* machines and a number of others. Intel's so-called "design" is the worst one that I've had the misfortune to use. If IBM hadn't annointed it and Microsoft hadn't sung its praises, nobody would have ever bought it. But purchase decisions are generally made by people who don't have a clue, so we're stuck with IBM's bad choice.
The die overhead for the compatibility and translation layers on modern processes is tiny, so why the hell not keep using it?
Because we'd rather use something that's a bit better designed? Unfortunately, the Market has told us that we must use the worst design. Well, at least we can (usually) hide the awfulness behind some higher-level languages. All we lose is some of our money and some of the performance that we could have had if we'd had the collective sense to thumb our collective noses at IBM and Microsoft.
Watching the industry standardize on Intel's crap has been a lot like watching a very slow-motion train wreck. And then watching people clean up the mess and stumble on while pretending that the whole catastrophe was planned and scheduled.
Yeah, but I just wanted to get in a gratuitous Saganism. What's a few dozen orders of magnitude when there's an obscure techno-literary reference at stake?
Of course, getting the number of molecules right strengthens the argument aginst ice-9, but doesn't help in the case of DNA. There's a whole lot less DNA on the planet than water. And with DNA you'd count the nucleotides, which are a lot bigger than a water molecule. And nucleotides don't bounce around, rearranging themselves on nanosecond time scales like liquid water does. So the chance of a random kill-all DNA sequence arising is many, many (how's that for precise?) orders of magnitude less than the chance of a random arrangement of a tiny ice seed crystal forming in the oceans. This leaves open the question of whether there's been enough time in our planet's history for such a mutation to arise.
It's more likely that such rogue actors do arise occasionally, but things like our immune system recognize and dismantle them because they're "foreign". Biological systems have evolved lots of defenses against attacks, especially attacks by small biological things.