Actually, this is a pretty serious problem in some circles. In the case of music, imagine that you have a tune in your head, and wonder if it's covered by anyone's copyright. There is no database anywhere that lets you look up a tune and find out who owns the copyright. Abut all you can do if you think it's your original tune is perform (or record) it, and see if someone files suit.
The famous case of this was Gerge Harrison's song My Sweet Lord. And it's an ongoing problem for all musicians.
I've asked reps of several music publishers about this, and they told me with a straight face that they only thing I could do is buy everything they've published and go through it all looking for the tune. And do the same for every other publisher.
Alternatively, I suppose, in the US I could go to the Library of Congress, and spend several years scouring their collection. That's not guaranteed to be entirely successful, because they don't have everything that's covered by US copyright, but it would find most of the tune. It would take years, of course.
So most music is indeed protected by "secret copyright" that can only be discovered by waiting for someone to sue you.
I can't wait for these dinosaurs to kick off and shut the f*sk up.
People have been saying this for 30 years.
Actually, it's more like a century. Since the first recordings came out, there have been new technical advances in recording and playback equipment every few years. It's hard to find a single advance that didn't get this reaction from the companies making money from the older technology. Almost always, they try to ban the sale of new equipment to anyone except themselves. The idea of a government-enforced monopoly is nothing new, and that's what this proposed law really is.
Hollywood came into existence basically as a way of fighting Edison's controls. At the time, travel and communication were sufficiently slow that operations in California couldn't be controlled from the East Coast. If you set up shop there, you could produce something and make a bundle from it before the Big Guys could stomp on you, and you'd have the money to fight them. This helped turn California into the powerhouse that it is today.
The current rearguard action against new technology by big American corporations is only forcing innovation to move to places outside the reach of American law and its enforcers.
(BTW, there is some really good music being produced outside the US, often in countries that most Americans couldn't find on a map. Check it out.)
Automobile banned for violating historic customary use laws for the wheel.
Funny, yes, but also similar to a lot of real history.
In a lot of places, when autos started appearing, laws were passed that were attempts to ban them by making them useless. For example, there were laws limiting them to 4 or 5 mph, about horse speed. Some places had laws requiring that a motor vehicle be preceded by a rider on horseback.
Needless to say, these laws didn't last long (though it turns out that they are still on the books in some places). But for some years, they were a good way of collecting a bit of toll money in the form of fines from visitors.
Anyone have any good early anti-auto laws from your vicinity?
The "operating system" provides a runtime environment for application software.... This is something that technically clueless Linux users invented.
Oh, nonsense.
Fact is, the term "Operating System" is far older than linux, dating back to the 1950s. On almost every processor ever built, it has a precise definition. The definition is hardware based.
In the machine language, there's an opcode usually called SC (System Call). If you need to use a SC instruction to get to some subroutine, you're at the application level. If you don't need to call SC to get to that subroutine, you're in the operating system. It's as simple as that. (Well, except for a few machines with hardware support for multi-level OS security, by having multi-level SC opcodes.)
The idea that things like runtime libraries are part of the OS shows a profound lack of understanding of computer architecture.
NTTAWWT, of course. I don't expect the typical user to to understand the architecture of the machine they're using. But making claims about such architecture that are blatantly false doesn't convince anyone who knows even a little about the subject matter.
(A funny thing about the SC instruction is that in many processors, it isn't actually an implemented opcode. What happens when a program does a SC, is that an "unimplmented instruction" interrupt occurs. The interrupt routine looks at the opcode, and if it's the SC opcode, it jumps to the SC routine. Calling it "SC" is merely a promise to never implement anything for that opcode. But in some processors, it is an implemented opcode, which takes a tiny bit of real estate, but makes every SC slightly faster by eliminating that test.)
(And now I expect the assembly programmers here to fill this discussion with further detail of just how SC works on various processors present and past...;-)
The blank slate theory is a misguided attempt to pollute science with a bunch of feel-good egalitarian crap, and should be placed in the same category as Intelligent Design.
Well, yes and no. The strong form of the Blank Slate theory is of course bunk. If we are born with no wired behavior at all, we could never learn any, because learnin is a behavior. It's a prototypical infinite regress, and there's no way out: We have to be born knowing how to learn.
But there's a weak form of the Blank Slate theory that you often hear from biologists: One of the main differences between us humans and our relatives is that we've lost most of the common body of wired-in knowledge, aka instinct, and have replaced it with learning from the environment. We do have relics of instinct, but they are relatively weak, and we can even overcome them with a bit of thought and practice.
To extend the slate metaphor, we are born with the slate (or maybe a whiteboard these days), and a supply of chalk (or erasable markers), and we're born knowing how to use them. Not well, of course, but we can learn to learn and write better with aid and guidance.
Another metaphor that I've run across that is instructive: We have a cultural equivalent of instinct, in the form of religion and customs. These are behaviors that we do learn, but we learn them at a young age, without much thought or analysis. And, as with the species variations in instinct vs learning, we have wide variations in how much of our behavior is religio-cultural and how much is learned.
And, as the success of humans has shown the superiority of learning over instinct, the success of modern industry and science shows the superiority of conscious learning over religion and culture. This is assuming that these actually are superiorities, and this really hasn't been proved yet. Right now, we could very easily cause our own extinction using the tools that these abilities have given us.
But, as the Blank Slate needs a hard-wired learning instinct, we probably wouldn't survive without a culture to instill unanalyzed knowledge when we're too young to figure out that saber-tooth tigers or speeding automobiles are dangerous. On the other hand, our history seems to tell us that humans who rely solely on instincts or customs or religion are generally doomed to short, brutish lives. And they tend to take their neighbors with them when they go. So those of us capable of thoughtful learning, especially of the scientific sort, should be working on getting across what we've learned to the people who prefer not to learn.
Re:Total crap makes sense in time.
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Presumably you're referring to the Irish Potato Famine, which was mid-1800s. But the situation existed in the 1770s, when Franklin was doing his tour.
The problem wasn't really a crop failure. Ireland produced plenty of crops, a good surplus in fact. It was all owned by the mostly-English aristocracy, and most of it was sold over in England. The Irish were generally not permitted to own land (and neither were 3/4 of the English population, for that matter). They were merely laborers on the farms. The wages were so low that most of the Irish couldn't afford a nutritious diet.
Most of the workers were permitted to live on the farms, in tiny houses, the classical one-room thatch huts with a dirt floor. They were permitted tiny gardens for their own use. Since the commercial food wasn't affordable, they had to supplement their diet with whatever they coud grow in the gardens. Potatoes were introduced around 1600, and quickly turned into the highest-yield crop, so that was mostly what was grown in the garden plots. The workers were surrounded by, and worked in fields with lots of other crops, but they couldn't afford to buy those, so they ate mostly potatoes.
A 90%-potato diet is not very nutritious, and is lacking in a lot of nutrients. There were widespread health problems due to these deficiencies. But the owners didn't much care. They viewed the Irish as sub-human, uncivilized beasts, and paid them the minimum that would keep them alive enough to tend the fields. Nothing was wasted on education, which was mostly the job of the parish church (and paid for by the parishioners, not the government). And people suitable only for field labor weren't worth educating anyway.
Franklin managed to pick up on most of this in a few days of travel through the Irish countryside. And he presented it to people back in the Colonies as their likely future.
This system was stable in Ireland for several centuries, actually, until the potato fungus appeared in the 1840s. This pulled the rug out from under the whole setup, and people started dying in large numbers.
But historians have pointed out that during the famine, Ireland was still a major supplier of food to England. The crops were doing quite well, except for potatoes. The rulers never saw any reason to change what was for them a very profitable system. And, after all, they were ordained by God to rule over those uncivilized, uneducated brutes in Ireland who didn't have the intelligence to lift themselves by their own bootstraps.
Google finds 1/3 million hits for "Irish Potato Famine". There's lots of reading on the history, from all points of view. Some of them go into the social and economic situation. Ireland's history is not very pleasant reading. But that's what people are like.
Re:kinda crap but makes sense in the UK
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Here in the US, we had a low-key celebration of Ben Franklin's 300th birthday. In a couple of the history shows that I heard on the radio, they mentioned that in the 1750s or so, Franklin had extrapolated various data on population and the economy, and estimated that within a century the North American colonies would have more people and a larger economy than the UK. He predicted that the effective capitol of the Empire would then be in the Colonies, probably New York, rather than London.
But he changed his mind in the early 1770s. In 1771, he took a trip across the Pond and toured England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland. In Ireland, he hired a driver to take him out into the countryside, against the advice of the people in Dublin. When he got back home, he started telling people what he'd seen: The Irish were living in a state of poverty hardly distinguishable from slavery, ignorant and uneducated, with no possessions and not enough food, while all the produce of the Island went to benefit their English rulers.
He observed that Parliament was starting to impose laws and edicts on the Colonies much like what had been done to Ireland, and the end result would be the same: The people in the Colonies would be reduced to the same sorry state as the people in Ireland.
He had a good reputation by then, and a lot of people listened to him.
There is a ton of evidence that when you get a cold or whatever, then you touch something, and then somebody else touches it, that that is the most common way for colds to spread.
Indeed; and a number of medical studies have shown that the most effective way of cutting down on minor respiratory infections is frequent washing of hands. This is fairly standard medical advice.
And you shouldn't use anti-bacterial hand soaps; that's just a way of evolving resistant bacteria. It doesn't matter whether you believe in evolution or not; the bacteria seem to believe, and they keep evolving no matter what you and I may think.
(Just doing my part to trigger yet anther creationism flame fest here;-)
I've kept my laptop's surfaces clean by wiping them with plain water. But recently, I got an explanation of why the keyboard has slowly gotten somewhat flakey over the 2 years I've had it. Our conure one day decided to remove a few keys for toys when my back was turned. Underneath the keys, there was an impressive amount of what looked like pocket lint. I removed the lint and replaced the key caps (except the couple that she broke into little pieces), and they actually work better now.
But this is a lot of work, and a couple of the key caps don't quite sit straight. So I've checked into getting the keyboard replaced. And I'll try to remember not to leave the laptop open where the little darling can get at it.
I wonder if there's actually a way to clean out the stuff that collects under a laptop's keys, without damaging the keyboard.
An average toiletseat is apparently more hygienic than an average kitchencounter.
Generally. But maybe it's time to mention again the research reports starting in the mid 90s saying that wooden cutting boards are the most sterile surfaces.
These studies have now been repeated by a number of labs. You can find them by googling for "cutting-board bacteria", which right now gets 88,400 hits.
Some of the reports describe smearing a board with bacterial cultures, culturing them overnight in a warm, moist incubator, and in the morning finding all the bacteria dead. (But they don't recommend treating your cutting boards that way.)
There has been a bit of hypothesizing about this. One suggestion from botanists starts with the fact that plants don't have immune systems. The wood in a tree is dead and can't repair itself. So how does a tree manage to live for centuries without being devoured by bacteria? The idea is that woody plants have evolved ways of filling the dead wood cells with gunk that inactivates or kills bacteria and fungi. But further research is needed.
Anyway, one conclusion from this is that you are better off using dense woods for cutting boards and counter tops. The inevitable cracks and scratches will contain far fewer bacteria than surfaces of other tested materials.
What I wonder is why I haven't read any comparisons between wooden cutting boards and toilet seats. Maybe the toilet manufacturers have discovered a better bacteria- and fungus-killing material than maple wood.
What I want is a wooden keyboard, of nice maple or cherry wood. I wonder if anyone makes them? Hey, why not ask google? Yep - there are several manufacturers. Some of them look really pretty. Maybe I'll get one.
[I]f you said there are four billion locations, and then you say computers can do billions of things a second, why can't a computer search all locations in 4 seconds...?
Heh. What I'd do is just exlain that it takes more than one operation to do a search; there are several steps involved when a computer wants to connect to another computer. Sorta like it takes several motions to dial a phone number.
This is why, when you connect a Windows machine to the Internet, it sometimes takes as long as 5 minutes for one of the nasty sites to find your machine, connect to it, and send it an infection.
And if they ask why my linux or Mac boxes don't get infected, I just explain that they have immune systems.
Yeah; it's all nonsense. Most metaphors are. But it might convince people who don't want to really learn.
Yeah, and there are a few other places making duct-tape stuff, such as ducttapefashion.com, though they're not taking orders now due to the "onslaught" of Christmas orders. The best thing to do is just to google for "duct-tape" plus whatever you want. Matching for "duct-tape wallet" gets several sources. I like the duct-tape belts; I may have to order one.
Still, it's fun to find instructions on a site that belongs to the manufacturer. It's obvious that they're having a bit of fun with it.
The single Galileo satellite is not the only nav satellite up there. Its signals can be received by anyone with the right kind of antenna. And so can the GPS signals.
You aren't going to be seeing commercial devices that use it in any stores this week. But developers working on prototypes can use this test satellite. By comparing its data with data from 2 or 3 GPS satellites, they can test and debug their Galileo hardware and code.
Even if there were multiple Galileo satellites up, testers might still want to do it this way. You'd want your initial tests to be with just one Galileo satellite, with the GPS data on hand for error testing. Once you get that working, maybe there'll be more Galileo satellites up there, and you can do the multi-sat testing.
But you do want to make sure that your first products talk to both systems. Then you can have your products out the door before Galileo is fully up and running. You'll be the market leader, FWIW.
I'll second that. Also, people outside the US should note that we in the American computer industry are very aware of the problems caused by a "market" being dominated by a single giant corporation that can lock out competition. You can see all sorts of evidence here on slashdot.
Many of us are cheering the Galileo system on, for many of the same reasons that we're pushing that little upstart OS from Finland, along with players like Sun and Apple. We like innovation, and we've hardly ever seen it come from the market leader. A couple decades ago, we also enjoyed watching the Japanese auto industry reintroduce competition to the American market
And, of course, a lot of us are getting extremely nervous about the direction our government is headed. Some of us read history, and understand what all this is likely to lead to.
So we hope that the first Galileo satellite is followed by many more. It's for our good, as well as everyone else's.
(Since when was being a cowboy bad? They were supposed to be heroes, fearless enforcers of peace in a land of lawlessness)
Heh. No, actually they were hired laborers, mostly black and Mexican migrants, hired to watch herds of cattle and move them to the closest stockyards at harvest time. They were generally considered uncivilized ruffians by the inhabitants of the towns (where they generally weren't welcome).
The cowboys you're thinking of were a Hollywood invention, and their purpose was entertainment mixed with social propaganda. But they had nothing at all to do with the historic cowboys of the 1800s, or even the early 1900s.
This and not any claimed ethically or techincally superiority should be the primary argument for free/libre/open source software.
Yup. And note that this is the primary motivation behind the widespread top-level decisions to look seriously at open-source software. Both governments and corporations tend to be a bit paranoid about spying and sabotage, and there are enough case studies around now to convince even the thickest PHB that there's a potential problem.
So they listen with at least half an ear to their security guys, who keep saying "We shouldn't permit the use of any software unless we have all the source. We need to compile it ourselves. And we need teams of geeks to study the code and look for security problems."
The old "free" gimmick might make a few sales. But the "open source" part is what's really significant. Without the source, a chunk of software could have anything at all hidden inside, and you have no defense at all.
The Galileo system is an obvious extension of this. The GPS has become the world's primary navigation system. Billions of dollars worth of shipments and vehicles are using it at any given time. Of course, navigators will tell you that you should never depend on only one system. But in practice, you always have a primary system, with the others used for cross checks and sanity tests. More and more, the primary system is GPS, which is controlled by the US military and a few corporations.
Any manager with half a brain can see what this implies. It should be no surprise at all that the EU wants their own. Look for India and China to launch their own in a few years. They'd be fools not to.
Unless, that is, the EU open-sources it all. Then look to India and China to subcontract their systems to the EU's corporations, with Indian and Chinese companies in turn building the EU's civilian nav equipment. But we can't expect the EU bigwigs to have the brains to do this, so India and China will probaby have to roll their own.
1. Many, many government agencies use MS software for most of their operations. This story exposes the fact that MS has had a backdoor into all those agencies for some 15 years. Sure, they can close this door, and send all those agencies upgrades. But how does anyone outside MS verify that the upgrade isn't installing a new backdoor?
2. The US government now has a policy of unwarrented spying on citizens. A backdoor into the most common comuputer systems is tremendously useful to that government's investigative agencies. Closing such a backdoor in non-government systems would be a slap in the face to all such government agencies, and would certainly lead to retaliation. Unless, that is, an alternate entry to non-government systems is quietly provided. And this has the advantage for MS that, should the feds threaten antitrust action, MS can just mention that they can again expose the backdoor and distribute a patch that closes it, killing the government's spying operations that used the backdoor.
If you think this is paranoid, you have't read or watched enough spy thrillers.;-)
[T]he second ramification of the global internet: instant collaboration across national boundaries. When Linus released version 0.01 of the Linux kernel to the masses from FTP servers in Helsinki, it wasn't long until developers downloaded copies in cities outside of Helsinki and in lands far away from Finland. Users of software were able to take a copy, use it, and then report back to Linus much more quickly than ever before. Gone were the early days of the GNU project, when those that wished to use the software would order tapes and wait for them to arrive in the mail. Reporting bugs and usage issues and distributing patches back to the GNU project also was no small matter. Thus, the internet sped up development time by facilitating almost instant feedback from users regardless of location,...
This is in contrast to a current (non-Microsoft;-) issue in our house: In addition to a few linux boxes, my wife and I each have a Mac Powerbook. Last week, she decided it was time to upgrade to OSX 10.4, to get some new goodies for her iPod. She went to the local Apple store and got the upgrade. When she got home and I saw what she had, I asked if it was the "family" (multi-machine license) version. Oops! So a quick call, and back to the store - where it turned out they didn't have it. I'd have to order it online. They were very nice, and gave us a refund in the form of a gift card. I went home - and spent a full hour trying to persuade store.apple.com to apply the card to the purchase. I succeeded. So now it's six days later, and according to fedex.com, it's in transit somewhere on the continent, due tomorrow.
That's a full week. With RedHat or any linux distro, I can download the ISOs in under an hour. Burning them to CDs (on my Mac;-) is maybe 15 minutes at most. And we linux geeks complain that it's often too slow.
So why can't I download OSX ISOs? Why is it taking a week to do what with linux takes an hour or so?
The answer, of course, is their concern over piracy. So they need to make sure that access is strictly limited to licensed users, and they don't know how to do that over the Net.
Now, RedHat, Suse, et al are also commercial operations, making money by selling and supporting linux. But they have the sense to know that it's good business practice to let geeks like me just download their stuff via the Net. That way, I'm using it right away, I have a warm, fuzzy feeling about them, and I'll help them go about their business. I might even contribute code.
For all their cool, high-tech image, it's pretty clear that Apple doesn't understand (or disagrees with) all this. Like most businesses, they don't trust me, and take time-wasting precautions to block my unauthorized access to their stuff. Meanwhile, their upcoming competition is giving me fast, uncontrolled access, I can grab and learn their stuff easily, and I contribute bug reports and bug fixes.
Meanwhile, my wife is a bit pissed at the delay. She's not really a comuputer or internet geek, but she's getting used to downloading things. She has watched me download linux distros and install them in an evening. She loves Netflix, but is starting to ask why she has to wait a day or two for something that could just be downloaded in a few minutes.
I'll let others make the obvious inferences and predictions from all this.
There is no way to prove that it was intentional without seeing the source, so it makes more sense for Microsoft to just patch it and make no comment concerning its origins.
True. And it makes even more sense for the patch to block the current doorway by simply moving it. Then everyone with current knowledge of the exploit will be locked out, but certain select associates can be quietly notified of an "upgrade".
With proprietary, closed source, you and I have no defense against this.
There are many good business reasons for expecting this, not the least of which is a desire to remain immune from further antitrust prosecution.
This is why security experts have long been saying that, if you're seriously interested in security, your first rule is that you don't permit running any software unless you have all the source code and you've compiled it yourself. (And then they go into the long explanations of the ways you can be tricked even then.)
There's thousands of important files on a Windows system, and they don't need a rootkit to protect them. What's special about Norton files that make them extra-specially important?
Well, judging from the comments here, there are lots of owners of the machines that want to delete the Norton files. This isn't generally true of Windows' system files or the users' own files. Protecting files from a machine's owner does often require special tactics.;-)
I liked the one discovered a few years ago, termed the "Scottish reel" orbit by its discoverers, which was three approximately equal bodies in a stable figure-8-shaped orbit. Each body passes through the intersection in the middle about the same time that the other two reach the outermost points. Anyone who does Scottish or English country dancing knows the figure, known as a "reel" or a "hey".
Whether there are any actual examples of this isn't known. It would take rather special circumstances to initialize such an orbital configuration. The most likely place to find it in our solar system is at the Trojan points in Jupiter's or Saturn's orbits. I haven't read of any studies of these groups of Trojan asteroids, though, and it would take some careful study to map out the orbits of all the asteroids in each clump.
I see no reason why you couldn't have taken the same photographs with the same or better quality using digital, and spending less money and lugging around less weight in the process.
One reason is rapid focusing. I have a number of "action" pictures with the people out of focus, and background lines (edge of field, bleachers, power lines) nicely focused. I also have several pictures of fuzzy birds in bushes, with the foreground twigs sharply focused. A couple of months ago, while walking in a park I noticed a cute frog among the fallen leaves, so I walked over and took a picture (using the macro setting) before it hopped away; I have a picture of well-focused dead leaves, with a barely discernable image of a fuzzy frog looking up at the camera.
Yeah, I know the arcane motions needed to do manual focus. If I had 30 seconds to perform the incantation, I could get such pictures. All too often, you only have 1 or 2 seconds.
So far, every attempt to find a digital camera under $1500 that works with a lense with a focus ring has failed. I've called suppliers and been assured that model X would do it; further investigations have shown that they were lying to me, and that ring on the lense does zoom, not focus. Maybe you can get this with a $3000 digital camera; you can get it with a $200 film camera.
OTOH, an extreme example in the other direction: A couple of years ago, shortly before my wife's mother died, we took her on a short trip to the "old home town", and took along the film cameras that we had then. We took several rolls of her and her friends. When we went to pick up the prints from the developing lab, we got pictures of someone else's backyard party. We returned them, and I hope the right people got them, but we never got our pictures. My wife was livid. "OK; we're getting digital cameras."
Now we can do it all ourselves on our laptops, including taking a color printer with us and giving people prints within minutes if they want them. It's faster and cheaper. And we can repeat most kinds of photos if people want, until we get one that everyone likes.
But it doesn't get us back those missing pictures.
But I really want a digital with old-fashioned manual focus via the ring on the lense. And a short shutter lag time, something they never include in the specs.
Hmmm... It seems that some validation is possible. The hypothesis that replication is more effective than prosecution in "rehabilitating" an errant researcher does make testable predictions. It predicts that, if you could get significant data on the biographies of people subject to both, you'd find significantly more subsequently-validated scientific output from people who have had to retract published papers than you'd find from people who have been prosecuted and/or fired for "scientific fraud".
Actually, there are three possible outcomes, since it's entirely possible that the data you'd collect would show an insignificant difference, or the difference could be significant in either direction.
Collecting such data in a truly unbiased fashion might be difficult.
I'd agree that it's impossible to know about "perfect crimes", since they aren't known by definition. Some might actually become known, after the statute of limitations has passed, but that probably happens too rarely to be significant.
The issue of convicted innocents is currently interesting, because of the cases where DNA testing has made some determinations possible after the conviction. Here in the US, a bit of publicity has been made of the apparent fact that, in the (minority) of cases where this is feasible, more than half have proven innocence. This claim has some obvious qualifications. Thus, a convict will only press for such testing if they think the outcome will be favorable.
But there have been a few hundred such exonerations. It's enough of a story to trigger an interesting response from the authorities: In a news story a couple of years back, the first such exoneration in Texas was quickly followed by the destruction of preserved evidence in many other cases. The Texas authorities argued that the cases had been settled and appeals had been exhausted, so they were no longer required to preserve the evidence. Many people suspected that the real reason was that they knew what would happen if the evidence was tested using current DNA methods.
But it's true that we probably can't ever get good data on this issue. Thus, we've never yet had retesting of DNA after an execution. The authorities fight this with all their power, and so far they've managed to prevent all such tests. We may soon have the first such test, but a sample of one isn't statistically very meaningful.
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Sounds similar to "secret copyright protections".
Actually, this is a pretty serious problem in some circles. In the case of music, imagine that you have a tune in your head, and wonder if it's covered by anyone's copyright. There is no database anywhere that lets you look up a tune and find out who owns the copyright. Abut all you can do if you think it's your original tune is perform (or record) it, and see if someone files suit.
The famous case of this was Gerge Harrison's song My Sweet Lord. And it's an ongoing problem for all musicians.
I've asked reps of several music publishers about this, and they told me with a straight face that they only thing I could do is buy everything they've published and go through it all looking for the tune. And do the same for every other publisher.
Alternatively, I suppose, in the US I could go to the Library of Congress, and spend several years scouring their collection. That's not guaranteed to be entirely successful, because they don't have everything that's covered by US copyright, but it would find most of the tune. It would take years, of course.
So most music is indeed protected by "secret copyright" that can only be discovered by waiting for someone to sue you.
I can't wait for these dinosaurs to kick off and shut the f*sk up.
People have been saying this for 30 years.
Actually, it's more like a century. Since the first recordings came out, there have been new technical advances in recording and playback equipment every few years. It's hard to find a single advance that didn't get this reaction from the companies making money from the older technology. Almost always, they try to ban the sale of new equipment to anyone except themselves. The idea of a government-enforced monopoly is nothing new, and that's what this proposed law really is.
Hollywood came into existence basically as a way of fighting Edison's controls. At the time, travel and communication were sufficiently slow that operations in California couldn't be controlled from the East Coast. If you set up shop there, you could produce something and make a bundle from it before the Big Guys could stomp on you, and you'd have the money to fight them. This helped turn California into the powerhouse that it is today.
The current rearguard action against new technology by big American corporations is only forcing innovation to move to places outside the reach of American law and its enforcers.
(BTW, there is some really good music being produced outside the US, often in countries that most Americans couldn't find on a map. Check it out.)
Automobile banned for violating historic customary use laws for the wheel.
Funny, yes, but also similar to a lot of real history.
In a lot of places, when autos started appearing, laws were passed that were attempts to ban them by making them useless. For example, there were laws limiting them to 4 or 5 mph, about horse speed. Some places had laws requiring that a motor vehicle be preceded by a rider on horseback.
Needless to say, these laws didn't last long (though it turns out that they are still on the books in some places). But for some years, they were a good way of collecting a bit of toll money in the form of fines from visitors.
Anyone have any good early anti-auto laws from your vicinity?
The "operating system" provides a runtime environment for application software. ... This is something that technically clueless Linux users invented.
... ;-)
Oh, nonsense.
Fact is, the term "Operating System" is far older than linux, dating back to the 1950s. On almost every processor ever built, it has a precise definition. The definition is hardware based.
In the machine language, there's an opcode usually called SC (System Call). If you need to use a SC instruction to get to some subroutine, you're at the application level. If you don't need to call SC to get to that subroutine, you're in the operating system. It's as simple as that. (Well, except for a few machines with hardware support for multi-level OS security, by having multi-level SC opcodes.)
The idea that things like runtime libraries are part of the OS shows a profound lack of understanding of computer architecture.
NTTAWWT, of course. I don't expect the typical user to to understand the architecture of the machine they're using. But making claims about such architecture that are blatantly false doesn't convince anyone who knows even a little about the subject matter.
(A funny thing about the SC instruction is that in many processors, it isn't actually an implemented opcode. What happens when a program does a SC, is that an "unimplmented instruction" interrupt occurs. The interrupt routine looks at the opcode, and if it's the SC opcode, it jumps to the SC routine. Calling it "SC" is merely a promise to never implement anything for that opcode. But in some processors, it is an implemented opcode, which takes a tiny bit of real estate, but makes every SC slightly faster by eliminating that test.)
(And now I expect the assembly programmers here to fill this discussion with further detail of just how SC works on various processors present and past
The blank slate theory is a misguided attempt to pollute science with a bunch of feel-good egalitarian crap, and should be placed in the same category as Intelligent Design.
Well, yes and no. The strong form of the Blank Slate theory is of course bunk. If we are born with no wired behavior at all, we could never learn any, because learnin is a behavior. It's a prototypical infinite regress, and there's no way out: We have to be born knowing how to learn.
But there's a weak form of the Blank Slate theory that you often hear from biologists: One of the main differences between us humans and our relatives is that we've lost most of the common body of wired-in knowledge, aka instinct, and have replaced it with learning from the environment. We do have relics of instinct, but they are relatively weak, and we can even overcome them with a bit of thought and practice.
To extend the slate metaphor, we are born with the slate (or maybe a whiteboard these days), and a supply of chalk (or erasable markers), and we're born knowing how to use them. Not well, of course, but we can learn to learn and write better with aid and guidance.
Another metaphor that I've run across that is instructive: We have a cultural equivalent of instinct, in the form of religion and customs. These are behaviors that we do learn, but we learn them at a young age, without much thought or analysis. And, as with the species variations in instinct vs learning, we have wide variations in how much of our behavior is religio-cultural and how much is learned.
And, as the success of humans has shown the superiority of learning over instinct, the success of modern industry and science shows the superiority of conscious learning over religion and culture. This is assuming that these actually are superiorities, and this really hasn't been proved yet. Right now, we could very easily cause our own extinction using the tools that these abilities have given us.
But, as the Blank Slate needs a hard-wired learning instinct, we probably wouldn't survive without a culture to instill unanalyzed knowledge when we're too young to figure out that saber-tooth tigers or speeding automobiles are dangerous. On the other hand, our history seems to tell us that humans who rely solely on instincts or customs or religion are generally doomed to short, brutish lives. And they tend to take their neighbors with them when they go. So those of us capable of thoughtful learning, especially of the scientific sort, should be working on getting across what we've learned to the people who prefer not to learn.
Presumably you're referring to the Irish Potato Famine, which was mid-1800s. But the situation existed in the 1770s, when Franklin was doing his tour.
The problem wasn't really a crop failure. Ireland produced plenty of crops, a good surplus in fact. It was all owned by the mostly-English aristocracy, and most of it was sold over in England. The Irish were generally not permitted to own land (and neither were 3/4 of the English population, for that matter). They were merely laborers on the farms. The wages were so low that most of the Irish couldn't afford a nutritious diet.
Most of the workers were permitted to live on the farms, in tiny houses, the classical one-room thatch huts with a dirt floor. They were permitted tiny gardens for their own use. Since the commercial food wasn't affordable, they had to supplement their diet with whatever they coud grow in the gardens. Potatoes were introduced around 1600, and quickly turned into the highest-yield crop, so that was mostly what was grown in the garden plots. The workers were surrounded by, and worked in fields with lots of other crops, but they couldn't afford to buy those, so they ate mostly potatoes.
A 90%-potato diet is not very nutritious, and is lacking in a lot of nutrients. There were widespread health problems due to these deficiencies. But the owners didn't much care. They viewed the Irish as sub-human, uncivilized beasts, and paid them the minimum that would keep them alive enough to tend the fields. Nothing was wasted on education, which was mostly the job of the parish church (and paid for by the parishioners, not the government). And people suitable only for field labor weren't worth educating anyway.
Franklin managed to pick up on most of this in a few days of travel through the Irish countryside. And he presented it to people back in the Colonies as their likely future.
This system was stable in Ireland for several centuries, actually, until the potato fungus appeared in the 1840s. This pulled the rug out from under the whole setup, and people started dying in large numbers.
But historians have pointed out that during the famine, Ireland was still a major supplier of food to England. The crops were doing quite well, except for potatoes. The rulers never saw any reason to change what was for them a very profitable system. And, after all, they were ordained by God to rule over those uncivilized, uneducated brutes in Ireland who didn't have the intelligence to lift themselves by their own bootstraps.
Google finds 1/3 million hits for "Irish Potato Famine". There's lots of reading on the history, from all points of view. Some of them go into the social and economic situation. Ireland's history is not very pleasant reading. But that's what people are like.
Here in the US, we had a low-key celebration of Ben Franklin's 300th birthday. In a couple of the history shows that I heard on the radio, they mentioned that in the 1750s or so, Franklin had extrapolated various data on population and the economy, and estimated that within a century the North American colonies would have more people and a larger economy than the UK. He predicted that the effective capitol of the Empire would then be in the Colonies, probably New York, rather than London.
But he changed his mind in the early 1770s. In 1771, he took a trip across the Pond and toured England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland. In Ireland, he hired a driver to take him out into the countryside, against the advice of the people in Dublin. When he got back home, he started telling people what he'd seen: The Irish were living in a state of poverty hardly distinguishable from slavery, ignorant and uneducated, with no possessions and not enough food, while all the produce of the Island went to benefit their English rulers.
He observed that Parliament was starting to impose laws and edicts on the Colonies much like what had been done to Ireland, and the end result would be the same: The people in the Colonies would be reduced to the same sorry state as the people in Ireland.
He had a good reputation by then, and a lot of people listened to him.
There is a ton of evidence that when you get a cold or whatever, then you touch something, and then somebody else touches it, that that is the most common way for colds to spread.
;-)
Indeed; and a number of medical studies have shown that the most effective way of cutting down on minor respiratory infections is frequent washing of hands. This is fairly standard medical advice.
And you shouldn't use anti-bacterial hand soaps; that's just a way of evolving resistant bacteria. It doesn't matter whether you believe in evolution or not; the bacteria seem to believe, and they keep evolving no matter what you and I may think.
(Just doing my part to trigger yet anther creationism flame fest here
I've kept my laptop's surfaces clean by wiping them with plain water. But recently, I got an explanation of why the keyboard has slowly gotten somewhat flakey over the 2 years I've had it. Our conure one day decided to remove a few keys for toys when my back was turned. Underneath the keys, there was an impressive amount of what looked like pocket lint. I removed the lint and replaced the key caps (except the couple that she broke into little pieces), and they actually work better now.
But this is a lot of work, and a couple of the key caps don't quite sit straight. So I've checked into getting the keyboard replaced. And I'll try to remember not to leave the laptop open where the little darling can get at it.
I wonder if there's actually a way to clean out the stuff that collects under a laptop's keys, without damaging the keyboard.
An average toiletseat is apparently more hygienic than an average kitchencounter.
Generally. But maybe it's time to mention again the research reports starting in the mid 90s saying that wooden cutting boards are the most sterile surfaces.
These studies have now been repeated by a number of labs. You can find them by googling for "cutting-board bacteria", which right now gets 88,400 hits.
Some of the reports describe smearing a board with bacterial cultures, culturing them overnight in a warm, moist incubator, and in the morning finding all the bacteria dead. (But they don't recommend treating your cutting boards that way.)
There has been a bit of hypothesizing about this. One suggestion from botanists starts with the fact that plants don't have immune systems. The wood in a tree is dead and can't repair itself. So how does a tree manage to live for centuries without being devoured by bacteria? The idea is that woody plants have evolved ways of filling the dead wood cells with gunk that inactivates or kills bacteria and fungi. But further research is needed.
Anyway, one conclusion from this is that you are better off using dense woods for cutting boards and counter tops. The inevitable cracks and scratches will contain far fewer bacteria than surfaces of other tested materials.
What I wonder is why I haven't read any comparisons between wooden cutting boards and toilet seats. Maybe the toilet manufacturers have discovered a better bacteria- and fungus-killing material than maple wood.
What I want is a wooden keyboard, of nice maple or cherry wood. I wonder if anyone makes them? Hey, why not ask google? Yep - there are several manufacturers. Some of them look really pretty. Maybe I'll get one.
[I]f you said there are four billion locations, and then you say computers can do billions of things a second, why can't a computer search all locations in 4 seconds ...?
Heh. What I'd do is just exlain that it takes more than one operation to do a search; there are several steps involved when a computer wants to connect to another computer. Sorta like it takes several motions to dial a phone number.
This is why, when you connect a Windows machine to the Internet, it sometimes takes as long as 5 minutes for one of the nasty sites to find your machine, connect to it, and send it an infection.
And if they ask why my linux or Mac boxes don't get infected, I just explain that they have immune systems.
Yeah; it's all nonsense. Most metaphors are. But it might convince people who don't want to really learn.
The 'Net is a waste of time, and that's exactly what's right about it. - William Gibson
Great quote! I think I'll steal it.
Yeah, and there are a few other places making duct-tape stuff, such as ducttapefashion.com, though they're not taking orders now due to the "onslaught" of Christmas orders. The best thing to do is just to google for "duct-tape" plus whatever you want. Matching for "duct-tape wallet" gets several sources. I like the duct-tape belts; I may have to order one.
Still, it's fun to find instructions on a site that belongs to the manufacturer. It's obvious that they're having a bit of fun with it.
Here ya are.
/. should know about these things.
This has been around for a while. They have a number of other nice things you can make from duct tape.
Also, check out the duct-tape bandaid.
Everyone on
Well, yeah, but ...
The single Galileo satellite is not the only nav satellite up there. Its signals can be received by anyone with the right kind of antenna. And so can the GPS signals.
You aren't going to be seeing commercial devices that use it in any stores this week. But developers working on prototypes can use this test satellite. By comparing its data with data from 2 or 3 GPS satellites, they can test and debug their Galileo hardware and code.
Even if there were multiple Galileo satellites up, testers might still want to do it this way. You'd want your initial tests to be with just one Galileo satellite, with the GPS data on hand for error testing. Once you get that working, maybe there'll be more Galileo satellites up there, and you can do the multi-sat testing.
But you do want to make sure that your first products talk to both systems. Then you can have your products out the door before Galileo is fully up and running. You'll be the market leader, FWIW.
I'll second that. Also, people outside the US should note that we in the American computer industry are very aware of the problems caused by a "market" being dominated by a single giant corporation that can lock out competition. You can see all sorts of evidence here on slashdot.
Many of us are cheering the Galileo system on, for many of the same reasons that we're pushing that little upstart OS from Finland, along with players like Sun and Apple. We like innovation, and we've hardly ever seen it come from the market leader. A couple decades ago, we also enjoyed watching the Japanese auto industry reintroduce competition to the American market
And, of course, a lot of us are getting extremely nervous about the direction our government is headed. Some of us read history, and understand what all this is likely to lead to.
So we hope that the first Galileo satellite is followed by many more. It's for our good, as well as everyone else's.
(Since when was being a cowboy bad? They were supposed to be heroes, fearless enforcers of peace in a land of lawlessness)
Heh. No, actually they were hired laborers, mostly black and Mexican migrants, hired to watch herds of cattle and move them to the closest stockyards at harvest time. They were generally considered uncivilized ruffians by the inhabitants of the towns (where they generally weren't welcome).
The cowboys you're thinking of were a Hollywood invention, and their purpose was entertainment mixed with social propaganda. But they had nothing at all to do with the historic cowboys of the 1800s, or even the early 1900s.
This and not any claimed ethically or techincally superiority should be the primary argument for free/libre/open source software.
Yup. And note that this is the primary motivation behind the widespread top-level decisions to look seriously at open-source software. Both governments and corporations tend to be a bit paranoid about spying and sabotage, and there are enough case studies around now to convince even the thickest PHB that there's a potential problem.
So they listen with at least half an ear to their security guys, who keep saying "We shouldn't permit the use of any software unless we have all the source. We need to compile it ourselves. And we need teams of geeks to study the code and look for security problems."
The old "free" gimmick might make a few sales. But the "open source" part is what's really significant. Without the source, a chunk of software could have anything at all hidden inside, and you have no defense at all.
The Galileo system is an obvious extension of this. The GPS has become the world's primary navigation system. Billions of dollars worth of shipments and vehicles are using it at any given time. Of course, navigators will tell you that you should never depend on only one system. But in practice, you always have a primary system, with the others used for cross checks and sanity tests. More and more, the primary system is GPS, which is controlled by the US military and a few corporations.
Any manager with half a brain can see what this implies. It should be no surprise at all that the EU wants their own. Look for India and China to launch their own in a few years. They'd be fools not to.
Unless, that is, the EU open-sources it all. Then look to India and China to subcontract their systems to the EU's corporations, with Indian and Chinese companies in turn building the EU's civilian nav equipment. But we can't expect the EU bigwigs to have the brains to do this, so India and China will probaby have to roll their own.
Well a couple of random thouhts:
;-)
1. Many, many government agencies use MS software for most of their operations. This story exposes the fact that MS has had a backdoor into all those agencies for some 15 years. Sure, they can close this door, and send all those agencies upgrades. But how does anyone outside MS verify that the upgrade isn't installing a new backdoor?
2. The US government now has a policy of unwarrented spying on citizens. A backdoor into the most common comuputer systems is tremendously useful to that government's investigative agencies. Closing such a backdoor in non-government systems would be a slap in the face to all such government agencies, and would certainly lead to retaliation. Unless, that is, an alternate entry to non-government systems is quietly provided. And this has the advantage for MS that, should the feds threaten antitrust action, MS can just mention that they can again expose the backdoor and distribute a patch that closes it, killing the government's spying operations that used the backdoor.
If you think this is paranoid, you have't read or watched enough spy thrillers.
... that I noticed was
...
[T]he second ramification of the global internet: instant collaboration across national boundaries. When Linus released version 0.01 of the Linux kernel to the masses from FTP servers in Helsinki, it wasn't long until developers downloaded copies in cities outside of Helsinki and in lands far away from Finland. Users of software were able to take a copy, use it, and then report back to Linus much more quickly than ever before. Gone were the early days of the GNU project, when those that wished to use the software would order tapes and wait for them to arrive in the mail. Reporting bugs and usage issues and distributing patches back to the GNU project also was no small matter. Thus, the internet sped up development time by facilitating almost instant feedback from users regardless of location,
This is in contrast to a current (non-Microsoft;-) issue in our house: In addition to a few linux boxes, my wife and I each have a Mac Powerbook. Last week, she decided it was time to upgrade to OSX 10.4, to get some new goodies for her iPod. She went to the local Apple store and got the upgrade. When she got home and I saw what she had, I asked if it was the "family" (multi-machine license) version. Oops! So a quick call, and back to the store - where it turned out they didn't have it. I'd have to order it online. They were very nice, and gave us a refund in the form of a gift card. I went home - and spent a full hour trying to persuade store.apple.com to apply the card to the purchase. I succeeded. So now it's six days later, and according to fedex.com, it's in transit somewhere on the continent, due tomorrow.
That's a full week. With RedHat or any linux distro, I can download the ISOs in under an hour. Burning them to CDs (on my Mac;-) is maybe 15 minutes at most. And we linux geeks complain that it's often too slow.
So why can't I download OSX ISOs? Why is it taking a week to do what with linux takes an hour or so?
The answer, of course, is their concern over piracy. So they need to make sure that access is strictly limited to licensed users, and they don't know how to do that over the Net.
Now, RedHat, Suse, et al are also commercial operations, making money by selling and supporting linux. But they have the sense to know that it's good business practice to let geeks like me just download their stuff via the Net. That way, I'm using it right away, I have a warm, fuzzy feeling about them, and I'll help them go about their business. I might even contribute code.
For all their cool, high-tech image, it's pretty clear that Apple doesn't understand (or disagrees with) all this. Like most businesses, they don't trust me, and take time-wasting precautions to block my unauthorized access to their stuff. Meanwhile, their upcoming competition is giving me fast, uncontrolled access, I can grab and learn their stuff easily, and I contribute bug reports and bug fixes.
Meanwhile, my wife is a bit pissed at the delay. She's not really a comuputer or internet geek, but she's getting used to downloading things. She has watched me download linux distros and install them in an evening. She loves Netflix, but is starting to ask why she has to wait a day or two for something that could just be downloaded in a few minutes.
I'll let others make the obvious inferences and predictions from all this.
There is no way to prove that it was intentional without seeing the source, so it makes more sense for Microsoft to just patch it and make no comment concerning its origins.
;-]
True. And it makes even more sense for the patch to block the current doorway by simply moving it. Then everyone with current knowledge of the exploit will be locked out, but certain select associates can be quietly notified of an "upgrade".
With proprietary, closed source, you and I have no defense against this.
There are many good business reasons for expecting this, not the least of which is a desire to remain immune from further antitrust prosecution.
This is why security experts have long been saying that, if you're seriously interested in security, your first rule is that you don't permit running any software unless you have all the source code and you've compiled it yourself. (And then they go into the long explanations of the ways you can be tricked even then.)
[What, me paranoid?
There's thousands of important files on a Windows system, and they don't need a rootkit to protect them. What's special about Norton files that make them extra-specially important?
;-)
Well, judging from the comments here, there are lots of owners of the machines that want to delete the Norton files. This isn't generally true of Windows' system files or the users' own files. Protecting files from a machine's owner does often require special tactics.
I liked the one discovered a few years ago, termed the "Scottish reel" orbit by its discoverers, which was three approximately equal bodies in a stable figure-8-shaped orbit. Each body passes through the intersection in the middle about the same time that the other two reach the outermost points. Anyone who does Scottish or English country dancing knows the figure, known as a "reel" or a "hey".
Whether there are any actual examples of this isn't known. It would take rather special circumstances to initialize such an orbital configuration. The most likely place to find it in our solar system is at the Trojan points in Jupiter's or Saturn's orbits. I haven't read of any studies of these groups of Trojan asteroids, though, and it would take some careful study to map out the orbits of all the asteroids in each clump.
I see no reason why you couldn't have taken the same photographs with the same or better quality using digital, and spending less money and lugging around less weight in the process.
One reason is rapid focusing. I have a number of "action" pictures with the people out of focus, and background lines (edge of field, bleachers, power lines) nicely focused. I also have several pictures of fuzzy birds in bushes, with the foreground twigs sharply focused. A couple of months ago, while walking in a park I noticed a cute frog among the fallen leaves, so I walked over and took a picture (using the macro setting) before it hopped away; I have a picture of well-focused dead leaves, with a barely discernable image of a fuzzy frog looking up at the camera.
Yeah, I know the arcane motions needed to do manual focus. If I had 30 seconds to perform the incantation, I could get such pictures. All too often, you only have 1 or 2 seconds.
So far, every attempt to find a digital camera under $1500 that works with a lense with a focus ring has failed. I've called suppliers and been assured that model X would do it; further investigations have shown that they were lying to me, and that ring on the lense does zoom, not focus. Maybe you can get this with a $3000 digital camera; you can get it with a $200 film camera.
OTOH, an extreme example in the other direction: A couple of years ago, shortly before my wife's mother died, we took her on a short trip to the "old home town", and took along the film cameras that we had then. We took several rolls of her and her friends. When we went to pick up the prints from the developing lab, we got pictures of someone else's backyard party. We returned them, and I hope the right people got them, but we never got our pictures. My wife was livid. "OK; we're getting digital cameras."
Now we can do it all ourselves on our laptops, including taking a color printer with us and giving people prints within minutes if they want them. It's faster and cheaper. And we can repeat most kinds of photos if people want, until we get one that everyone likes.
But it doesn't get us back those missing pictures.
But I really want a digital with old-fashioned manual focus via the ring on the lense. And a short shutter lag time, something they never include in the specs.
Hmmm ... It seems that some validation is possible. The hypothesis that replication is more effective than prosecution in "rehabilitating" an errant researcher does make testable predictions. It predicts that, if you could get significant data on the biographies of people subject to both, you'd find significantly more subsequently-validated scientific output from people who have had to retract published papers than you'd find from people who have been prosecuted and/or fired for "scientific fraud".
Actually, there are three possible outcomes, since it's entirely possible that the data you'd collect would show an insignificant difference, or the difference could be significant in either direction.
Collecting such data in a truly unbiased fashion might be difficult.
I'd agree that it's impossible to know about "perfect crimes", since they aren't known by definition. Some might actually become known, after the statute of limitations has passed, but that probably happens too rarely to be significant.
The issue of convicted innocents is currently interesting, because of the cases where DNA testing has made some determinations possible after the conviction. Here in the US, a bit of publicity has been made of the apparent fact that, in the (minority) of cases where this is feasible, more than half have proven innocence. This claim has some obvious qualifications. Thus, a convict will only press for such testing if they think the outcome will be favorable.
But there have been a few hundred such exonerations. It's enough of a story to trigger an interesting response from the authorities: In a news story a couple of years back, the first such exoneration in Texas was quickly followed by the destruction of preserved evidence in many other cases. The Texas authorities argued that the cases had been settled and appeals had been exhausted, so they were no longer required to preserve the evidence. Many people suspected that the real reason was that they knew what would happen if the evidence was tested using current DNA methods.
But it's true that we probably can't ever get good data on this issue. Thus, we've never yet had retesting of DNA after an execution. The authorities fight this with all their power, and so far they've managed to prevent all such tests. We may soon have the first such test, but a sample of one isn't statistically very meaningful.