But contractors had balked, saying the phones were not proven reliable as an accounting system used for payment.
I'd believe this. I've worked with a few GPS gadgets, and all of them have the property that they lose their satellites so often that their record of your path is only useful on a statistical (or summary) basis.
When they lose their satellites, there are really only two things they can do. The simplest is to just report your last-known position until they get the satellites back. This can easily produce a record saying that you stopped for N minutes. Of course, when they get satellites again, they'll report a sudden jump in your position. But not always. Remember that under some conditions, the position can be off by 100 meters or so. If you're moving slowly (as a snowplow is likely to do), this could easily give a position very close to that place that you "stopped for N minutes).
The other thing some GPS gadgets do is to extrapolate your path through gaps in coverage. I've seen some pretty funny paths, showing a car suddenly leaving a bridge, driving around on a lake or river, and then suddenly jumping to a nearby road. I've also seen a path take a different fork than was actually taken, and continue on that road until they've diverged too far for the software to believe, at which point the path zips down some connecting street at high speed to get to the correct street. This only happens with GPS gadgets that have street maps, of course.
I'd bet that the admins in this case are attributing much greater accuracy to GPS than it delivers. Especially in urban settings. The reality is that GPS gadgets are often a source of humor for the goofy things they report. But it's not so funny if your paycheck depends on it.
One of the fun toys around our household is the new Garmin iQue, the Palm Pilot with builtin GPS. We took it cross-country on a trip recently, and we saw all of the above misbehaviors. A couple of times we had to pull over until we stopped laughing. It's a great toy. I'd recommend it to anyone who wants such a toy. But I'd probably not want my paycheck to depend on its report of my path.
Well, yes and no. I've worked on a number of open-source projects where I got paid. I'm doing this right now. The explanation is simple, and fairly typical in my experience.
What happened was that we needed something, and there was an open-source project that had already developed a good part of it. So we grabbed the source, did a bit of testing to find out what worked and what didn't, and started implementing the parts we needed that weren't there.
The GPL made it fairly easy to convince management that we had better give our improvements back to the open-source archive. But they didn't grumble too much about this. We would just point out that they had got a big portion of the software for free, and saved both money and time as a result. The only decent thing to do is to contribute our improvements, so we should do it even if we weren't bound by the GPL. And we are bound by the GPL, so we'd better give back our improvements. I don't recall any PHB really objecting to this.
The simplest argument to most management types is of the form "You're getting the work of N programmers, but you're only paying the salaries of M of them." And you're getting free testing of part of our product. You can occasionally reinforce management cooperation by casually mentioning "Hey, I just synced our changes to the FOO package, and found that someone else had just added the BAR portion that we were planning to do." This gives your management the warm, fuzzy feeling that they're getting something for nothing.
The only real problem is that you need to draw some fairly solid lines between the open-source portion of the code and the proprietary code that you're writing for the company. But in most cases, this is fairly straightforward. You just keep the source in separate directories, put your changes in the most appropriate place, and keep in touch with the rest of the open-source crowd to make sure that you're not starting a branch.
In many cases, of course, contributing to the open-source code wasn't in the original plan. The official plan was to just use a package from some archive. But sometimes we discover that the package doesn't quite do what we want. With open source, we can fix the problem. We give our fixes back, of course. Then we mention it to management, who invariably just shrug and go on with something more interesting. If there is any discussion, it can be cut short by saying something like "That package saved us several months of development time; spending a day fixing a problem and checking in the changes is a small price to pay for such a benefit."
Boo hoo. It would cost them $700 a year to buy a license...
A related story has popped up in a few folk-dance lists lately: The recording industry has discovered that there are folk-dance groups that are dancing to recorded (i.e., copyrighted) music, or to live bands that play traditional music. Some of those groups are being hit up for licenses.
In this case, we're talking about what are mostly small (a few dozen people) non-profit clubs. Their events mostly happen in school and church halls, because those places are cheap. Nobody much gets paid anything, because it's basically a hobby thing.
This sort of club will be shut down by such licensing. Recent reports from the UK have said that this has shut down a great many such events throughout the country in recent years.
But I suppose the commercial venues will view this as desirable. Those stupid folk-dance clubs are just free competition, y'know, taking customers away from what could be profitable businesses. What right do people have to get together to dance without paying someone?
There's wonderful stuff in the back catalogs--often stuff they have no interest in rereleasing.
You're right. And it's time to once again mention the old idea of an addendum to the copyright laws: Anything that has been out of print (or otherwise not available) for more than a year becomes public domain.
This would end the practice of using the copyright laws to destroy our history and culture.
How we would prevent them from destroying the masters is an open question...
But if they want to stop file sharing, they'll have to destroy the internet.
Yup. That's the goal. Or rather, to turn it into a clone of television, a purely marketing medium controlled by an oligopoly
So we have to destroy the recording industry first.
Especially important is to get across to younng musicians that they don't have to sign any recording contracts with anyone. People who know how to make good recordings should be getting across to musicians the idea that they can make much better recordings by themselves. In the US, it's now difficult to be more than 50 miles from a top-quality local recording studio that will do everything but play the music and then leave you in total control of the master. And doing the publicity yourself on the Internet will give you lower sales, maybe, but you'll get all the income from it. This is a lot better than ending up in debt to a recording company.
And in the long run, it's just as likely that stars will arise through blogs and special-purpose web sites than through the commercial music PR people.
Anyone who signs a recording contract these days is an utter fool.
Yeah, but the vehicle doesn't look at all like the critter, either the early version in Gould's book, or the more recent reconstructions based on a few more fossils.
... man oh man, do I like OS X - for exactly the reasons that Mr. Turner brings up.
Simply put: it works.
Well, alongside some linux and Windoze boxes at home, my wife and I each have Powerbooks. We like them a lot. But I'd dispute the "it works" generalization.
For example, we have an Airport Extreme, and we got a cute little portable Canon printer that Apple lists as compatible. I plugged it in, and tested it with my PB, and It Worked. So we tried it with my wife's PB and It Worked. Or so we thought.
Then one day it didn't work for her. Her Print Center showed no printers. I went to mine, checked it out, and the printer was fine. So we went back to hers - and it saw the printer.
This happened repeatedly, until we got enough evidence to understand the problem: Her PB can only see the printer when my PB is nearby and talking to the Airport. If I close my PB up or drive away with it somewhere, in a few minutes her PB loses the printer.
We've asked Apple Support, and all they did was mess up our Airport settings so that nothing worked. I spent most of two days learning enough about the undocumented parts of the Airport to fix it, with more than a little help from a couple of Usenet newsgroups.
But those newsgroups didn't come up with a fix for the problem, or an explanation of what's going on. It seems that there's some special relation between my PB and either the Airport or the printer, but we can't tell what. I can use the Airport Admin tool from either machine, so that's not it. I see the same information about the Airport and printer from both PBs, and there's no visible indication of anything special about my PB.
But when I carry my PB away or close it up, she can't use the printer.
This doesn't qualify as "It Works" in our opinion.
In the several months we've had these nice toys, we've found a good number of things that don't just work. One of these is calling Apple Support if you've plugged your Airport into anything other than your cable modem. If it's plugged into your LAN hub, they will insist that your linux firewall is the source of all your problems, and they won't help you until you get rid of all linux machines on the LAN. This was a deal killer when some people I'm working with were looking at wireless access to their (very mixed-vendor) internal network. I just told them of my experience with Apple Support, and they dropped all thought of using Airports as part of their infrastructure.
(OTOH, our use of our TV has dropped to nearly zero. My wife subscribes to Netflicks, and really likes being able to sit down with the Powerbook, slip in a DVD, and watch a movie. And since she became a mozilla user, she finds online news a lot more interesting that TV or radio, or even the dead-tree version of the Boston Globe. We're seriously thinking of seeing which local cable service will supply only Internet and phone service, and dropping the TV channels. That's 20th-century technology; who needs it now?;-)
voice data is passed via RTP, which uses UDP, not TCP.
Yeah; I've been wondering about that. RTP does seem like the better protocolfor such apps. But I've had difficulty using it. It doesn't seem to exist on many computers that I have access to. This puts some serious constraints on the prospects for using it in any software that you want to be at all portable. But it does seem like a good idea if your softare only needs to run on one platform.
In any case, it's not really all that accurate to say that RTP "uses UDP", any more than TCP does. They are more properly viewed as three protocols at the same level. Of course, TCP and RTP need most of UDP's packet-passing capabilities, so TCP and RTP headers contain fields that are very similar to those of UDP header fields. And any decent implementation is going to share code among all three. But viewing UDP as a lower-level protocol that is used by TCP and RCP is useful mostly as an initial teaching device. When you get into the implementation details, you discover that it's not really quite true.
A better model, if you want to understand an implementation, is of a "protocol module" with three entry points or operational modes. Or four, if you also count ICMP. Or five...
It seems to me that a problem with a large number of movements is that they are based first and foremost on an oppositional logic and rhetoric.
Um, read Linus Torvald's writing about the start of linux. He wasn't in opposition to anything. He wanted to learn about OSs, and he was smart enough to realize that the best way was to try building one. He had a small computer in his apartment, so he started working. And he let a few friends know about it...
A somewhat similar story is behind minix (which Linus used a bit when he was starting). Prof Tanenbaum wasn't opposed to unix. He wanted to use unix in his "systems" classes, but was having more and more problems getting licensing for his students to see the source. So he did the obvious thing: He started his own project to build his own unix-like OS. Now minix has a lot of uses as an embedded kernel. It wasn't developed in opposition to anything; it was a practical approach to teaching classes in the subject.
Similarly, over in Japan, Prof Sakamura developed the real-time iTron kernel partly for teaching purposes, due to problems with his students getting access to the code for commercial RT systems. So he put his student to work building a RT kernel with no legal restrictions on who could see the source. It has turned into what is probably the most widely-installed OS in the world, not from any oppositional stance, but because it's reliable and developers can easily get access to all the code.
In reality, people don't do things like this because of rhetoric or ideology. They do it because they have a need that existing products don't handle, and they see doing it themselves as the easiest path.
This is an excellent example of why I think that such rivalries are for the benefit of all of us.
Early on, I went with the vi side of this one. And I learned to look for the vi/emacs flames. Why? Because they were usually of the form "Emacs can do FOO; vi can't." The replies would often include a description from a vi expert of just how to do FOO. My reaction would be "Hey, I didn't know vi could do that; now I know how."
As with most software, both both vi and emacs have documentation that, quite frankly, sucks. Yeah, there is good stuff for the rank beginner. But the really powerful stuff is usually only mentioned in passing, if at all. The only good way to learn it is from other people who have somehow learned it (or stumbled onto it).
One of the disappointment in recent years has been the death of some of these flame wars. This means that newbies no longer have a good way of becoming power users of such tools.
Very often just asking how to do something doesn't work; you just get RTFM. But if you claim that tool X can do a job but Y can't, Y's supporters will try to tell you what an idiot you are, and in the process, some of them will answer the question. So you thank them and proceed to get your job done.
Sometimes you have to put up with offensive characters. There's an excellent example over in the perl community. One of the prime movers is Tom Christianson, who is known as a very abrasive and insulting character, especially to newbies. But, while being abrasive, he almost always answers the question. And usually with very good answers. So he is tolerated and respected for his contributions. (And the rest of us quietly send apologetic email to his victims.;-)
I've often sat watching people laboriously going through a document with some editor (occasionally emacs or vi), doing a lot of work for what to me would be a simple:g/RE/s//.../ command. Or laboriously moving stuff around in a file that could be done with a single:'a,'b!whatever command. Sometimes this can be painful to watch, and I'd really like to stop them and teach them a few tricks. But usually there's a fire to fight, so I don't unless they ask.
Anyway, in my mind, the public debates over such things are one of the real strengths of the hacker/OSS community in general. If you stifle this, you'll reduce our effectiveness to the primitive level of a corporate development environment.
... this is not theft because you have not actually lost anything.
On the contrary, this seems to be saying that after a corporation copies my stuff into their database, I can be sued for continuing to publish it myself. They can legally deny me the right to use information that I've put together. This seems to me to qualify as "theft".
There is precedent for this, of course. But in the past, it's been in the form of "work for hire". It's common for publishers to require a contract that says they own their writers' text. What's unusual about this new bill is that it seems to be saying that a corporation that I don't work for (and may not have heard of) can claim what I've written as their own merely by putting the same information into their own database. They can then deny my the right to publish it myself, although it was my work.
I wonder if a working writer could challenge this on 13th Ammendment grounds? After all, if I'm a writer, and my work can be claimed by a corporation without my consent, that sounds a lot like "involuntary servitude".
What about "hobby" data collections?
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Who Owns The Facts?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
There are quite a lot of online sites that are built by hobbyists who collect some sort of information. For example, there are many sites dedicated to old movies, old recordings, old books of various types, etc. Most of these are collected by the hobbyists via a lot of detective work.
Does this mean that some big corporation can come along and claim that all of such a site's data is in their private corporate database, and is thus in violation? In most cases, the hobbyists will have had no access to the corporate database, and likely won't even know that it exists. But in such cases, the data will almost certainly be very similar, because we're dealing with published historical data.
Note that this is the same sort of problem that SCO is bringing out. They claim that linux contains infringements of their private, secret code. Nobody is allowed access to their code, so it's impossible to avoid sometimes duplicating it. But they are successfully causing others to defend against infringement suits, which will be tremendously expensive (e.g. in lost sales) for the defendants even if they win.
How could I ever defend myself against the charge of infringing the data in a corporate database, when I have no access to it? This sort of suit would probably bankrupt me in one or two months.
Is my only option to never publish anything at all, until the time that I become a billionaire with the funds to defend myself?
does it have to be a corporation owning the database, or can it be a private individual?
Yeah, and also, what's a "database"?
To combine the two: I'm a human, not a corporation. If I put a lot of stuff on my web site, and some corporation downloads it into their Oracle database, am I suddenly (and unknowingly) a criminal for having a copy of their database?
From what I can tell, this permits open theft by corporations of any individual's information.
I wonder though, how much of the cost of developing the internet was recouped when the government sold off the NSF backbone.
Probably not nearly the entire development cost. Of course, the DoD did get something worth a lot: MilNet (with a lot of debugging by good academic hackers for free;-).
Also, though the official funding may have been almost entirely from the US military, the Arpa/Internet was recognize early on as valuable by the entire world's academic community, and they "funded" a lot of development as a side effect of other projects that used the growing network. Look at the involvement of astronomers for a good example. (And tracing the money becomes more difficult when you realize that the DoD has funded a fair amount of astronomical work.)
It would be more accurate to list the US military as the "prime mover" behind what is now the Internet, and its main source of funds for the first two decades. But in reality, the development was so widely distributed, and done as portions of so many other projects, that tracking the true costs is utterly impossible.
Of course, we can easily justify it all by observing that the Internet's value to academia and the world is "inestimable". In this case, both the literal and figurative meanings of that word are correct.
Of course you can decrease the amount the government extorts from you. Just give them proof that you're a multi-millionaire, and they'll decrease your taxes right away.
Can't the government just stay off these new industries long enough for them to get started?
Ummm... the US government supported the Internet (mostly as Arpanet) for two decades before the commercial world finally noticed it. All that time, the code and other technology was all available openly. The commercial guys could have grabbed it and set up a separate commercial network at any time, the same way the DoD set up a separate military network. This never happened. The way that the Internet went commercial was when the government-built academic Internet was opened up to commercial traffic.
There are a number of examples like this, where it took a long period of government subsidy to get an industry off the ground. Look at the history of the airline industry, for example. This is mostly because the commercial rarely starts anything new. Few companies are willing to invest in something until someone has shown that it has value. And the Internet didn't have commercial value until there were millions of users.
So if the government had stayed out, it would never have happened at all. And for most of the world, it still hasn't happened. The commercial Internet only exists in places where it's profitable to install it. This excludes most rural areas and the poor parts of many cities. Exceptions to this are mostly from government interference.
That still leaves open the possibility of pure voip to voip calls being undetectable (e.g. between different Vonage customers), but in the near term those sorts of calls are likely to still be in the minority.
I'd wonder about that. A news story that has been covered here is that, over the past couple years, the wireless phone system in Japan has gone almost entirely VoIP. It's cheaper, works better, and you can call anywhere in the world for the same price as a local call. If you have a fancy combined phone/PDA, HTTP works the way it's supposed to, unlike here in the US where my Kyocera "smartphone" takes 20 to 30 seconds to make a PPP link over a phone line before it can make a single TCP connection.
My wife and I have family in at least 10 states. This sounds enticing...
The reason the schools want computers in the classroom is the skills computer use at young ages bring.
Yeah, and do you remember when Ronald Reagan explained all this to us? Those kids playing shoot-em-up video games are training their reflexes. This is what will provide us with the next generation of fighter pilots.
Now, of course, that next generation is flying for George W. in the Middle East.
I wonder if anyone has actually compared the abilities of current fighter pilots with the amount of computerized game playing they did when they were supposed to be studying?
VoIP is just a TCP connection, right? So in general is it even feasible to regulate (i.e., tax) VoIP separately?
If so, this brings up the interesting question of regulating other kinds of TCP traffic. Given things like VPN and SSH, it can be exceedingly difficult to even discover what sort of traffic is carried on a TCP connection. If my employer requires that I set up a VPN link to work, and I happen to have a phone plugged into my computer that uses the VPN to make work calls, how do the regulators measure my use of VoIP. It's just some portion of those encrypted packets going over the VPN connection, but that packets also include my vi sessions, rsyncs, ftps, and all the other things that I do as part of my job. Does this proposal mean that I'll be paying voice-line rates for my all-day VPN connection to work?
You might think that a wireless VoIP phone would be an exception that's easy to regulate. But my current cellphone is also a Palm Pilot, and I can and do use it for web access. Currently, voice and http on this phone use different low-level protocols, so they can measure them separately. But with VoIP, the voice and http connections are just TCP. I also work with databases, and much of that work is voice-like in that it has bursts of data alternating in both directions. Will this have the characteristics of VoIP, and thus be regulated/taxed as phone usage?
One possibility is that we'll suddenly find that all TCP connections are considered "voice" and charged extra. But we can probably all imagine the outrage this would produce - especially from people running commercial web sites.
Anyway, it'd be interesting to hear how they're going to sort out the voice sessions from the data sessions, when they're all just TCP connections.
Right. And note that, without regulation, there would never have been telephone service in many rural areas (and in some parts of some cities).
We do have a similar situation with the Internet in the US. One of the effects of the government leaving it so unregulated is that it's only available in areas where it is profitable. Most of the rural US has no Internet service, and likely never will unless some government steps in and either mandates it or provides it. In some cases, local governments are setting it up.
Part of the value of both the phone system and the Internet is in making it reach everywhere. The more territory they cover, the more valuable they are to everyone. But the Market won't do this, because there's no incentive to supply service to marginal areas.
Here in Waltham, Massachusetts (USA), a local news story a few years back was about a young man who'd been in a bar, and as he left, took a piss in an alley. Unfortunately, a copy saw him and arrested him. The charge, indecent exposure, is a "sex crime", and he'll be in the police database now.
There was a bit of a fuss locally about their doing this to him, but the ways the laws are, there's nothing anyone can do about it. He's on record as having been convicted of a sex crime. To a lot of the vigilante types out there, that's all they need to know.
And there's also a proposal here to put a list of all the sex offenders online. His life may not be worth much in a couple more years.
How about Uncle Sam stays out of the web design business??
What does this have to do with the gummint? I've worked on projects at a lot of companies over the decades, and all of them have had "guidelines". These are never voluntary. In the corportate world, "guideline" is just a polysyllabic synonym for "rule".
In such matters, the government is really just another big corporation. it's no better or worse than your average corporate heirarchy. In fact, it's often marginally better. In governments, there are usually "guidelines" to how such things are developed, and they often involve a lot of participation from experts and users ("the public"). In corporations, guidelines are often laid down by PHBs with little or no understanding of what they're regulating, and no study of what might be effective guidelines.
Re:One weakness of both articles: free always wins
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Economics of File-Sharing
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On the contrary; there's a very good reason that I might be willing to pay. Umair did explain it: If a music service could consistently present me with music that I want to listen to more than once, it would save me a lot of search time. That's time that I could spend doing something else, such as listening to music that I really like. That's definitely worth some money to me, though I couldn't tell you how much until I see the service.
I've bought from iTunes, but I'm not impressed by it. Why not? Well, I tested it by taking some of my favorite CDs and looking them up on iTunes. I couldn't find any of them. My conclusion is that iTunes, good as it may be for others, just doesn't cater to people with my tastes.
I don't think that it matters what my tastes may be. When I look around me, I find a lot of really good musicians, who have never been recorded by any label, and never will be. When I mention this to other people, they always agree, though they give different examples. So I conclude that there is a lot of music in the world that I'd like if I could hear it, and I'd pay for recordings of it. But iTunes doesn't find it for me. Neither do any of the other commercial music suppliers.
OTOH, there are people who do find me the music that I like. And when they recommend a CD, I'll buy it without listening to it. But those people don't work for Apple, or for any of the labels. Some of them are online, and have web sites that include their own reviews of recordings plus links to the musicians' web sites. This works well, and I've bought a number of CDs this way.
What we need now is a good, systematic way for such reviewers to get a bit of pay for passing out such time-saving information.
This is all doing an end run around the traditional recording industry's distribution channels. But why should I care? That industry hasn't done a good job of supplying me with music. Now I can find good music by spending some time listening more or less at random, and by listening to the advice of others with tastes like mine. If someone can save me some of this time, I'll be willing to pay them. But I don'tsee the recording industry doing it any time soon.
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But contractors had balked, saying the phones were not proven reliable as an accounting system used for payment.
I'd believe this. I've worked with a few GPS gadgets, and all of them have the property that they lose their satellites so often that their record of your path is only useful on a statistical (or summary) basis.
When they lose their satellites, there are really only two things they can do. The simplest is to just report your last-known position until they get the satellites back. This can easily produce a record saying that you stopped for N minutes. Of course, when they get satellites again, they'll report a sudden jump in your position. But not always. Remember that under some conditions, the position can be off by 100 meters or so. If you're moving slowly (as a snowplow is likely to do), this could easily give a position very close to that place that you "stopped for N minutes).
The other thing some GPS gadgets do is to extrapolate your path through gaps in coverage. I've seen some pretty funny paths, showing a car suddenly leaving a bridge, driving around on a lake or river, and then suddenly jumping to a nearby road. I've also seen a path take a different fork than was actually taken, and continue on that road until they've diverged too far for the software to believe, at which point the path zips down some connecting street at high speed to get to the correct street. This only happens with GPS gadgets that have street maps, of course.
I'd bet that the admins in this case are attributing much greater accuracy to GPS than it delivers. Especially in urban settings. The reality is that GPS gadgets are often a source of humor for the goofy things they report. But it's not so funny if your paycheck depends on it.
One of the fun toys around our household is the new Garmin iQue, the Palm Pilot with builtin GPS. We took it cross-country on a trip recently, and we saw all of the above misbehaviors. A couple of times we had to pull over until we stopped laughing. It's a great toy. I'd recommend it to anyone who wants such a toy. But I'd probably not want my paycheck to depend on its report of my path.
if you are a developer, you don't get paid.
Well, yes and no. I've worked on a number of open-source projects where I got paid. I'm doing this right now. The explanation is simple, and fairly typical in my experience.
What happened was that we needed something, and there was an open-source project that had already developed a good part of it. So we grabbed the source, did a bit of testing to find out what worked and what didn't, and started implementing the parts we needed that weren't there.
The GPL made it fairly easy to convince management that we had better give our improvements back to the open-source archive. But they didn't grumble too much about this. We would just point out that they had got a big portion of the software for free, and saved both money and time as a result. The only decent thing to do is to contribute our improvements, so we should do it even if we weren't bound by the GPL. And we are bound by the GPL, so we'd better give back our improvements. I don't recall any PHB really objecting to this.
The simplest argument to most management types is of the form "You're getting the work of N programmers, but you're only paying the salaries of M of them." And you're getting free testing of part of our product. You can occasionally reinforce management cooperation by casually mentioning "Hey, I just synced our changes to the FOO package, and found that someone else had just added the BAR portion that we were planning to do." This gives your management the warm, fuzzy feeling that they're getting something for nothing.
The only real problem is that you need to draw some fairly solid lines between the open-source portion of the code and the proprietary code that you're writing for the company. But in most cases, this is fairly straightforward. You just keep the source in separate directories, put your changes in the most appropriate place, and keep in touch with the rest of the open-source crowd to make sure that you're not starting a branch.
In many cases, of course, contributing to the open-source code wasn't in the original plan. The official plan was to just use a package from some archive. But sometimes we discover that the package doesn't quite do what we want. With open source, we can fix the problem. We give our fixes back, of course. Then we mention it to management, who invariably just shrug and go on with something more interesting. If there is any discussion, it can be cut short by saying something like "That package saved us several months of development time; spending a day fixing a problem and checking in the changes is a small price to pay for such a benefit."
Even the dumbest PHB can understand this.
Boo hoo. It would cost them $700 a year to buy a license ...
A related story has popped up in a few folk-dance lists lately: The recording industry has discovered that there are folk-dance groups that are dancing to recorded (i.e., copyrighted) music, or to live bands that play traditional music. Some of those groups are being hit up for licenses.
In this case, we're talking about what are mostly small (a few dozen people) non-profit clubs. Their events mostly happen in school and church halls, because those places are cheap. Nobody much gets paid anything, because it's basically a hobby thing.
This sort of club will be shut down by such licensing. Recent reports from the UK have said that this has shut down a great many such events throughout the country in recent years.
But I suppose the commercial venues will view this as desirable. Those stupid folk-dance clubs are just free competition, y'know, taking customers away from what could be profitable businesses. What right do people have to get together to dance without paying someone?
There's wonderful stuff in the back catalogs--often stuff they have no interest in rereleasing.
...
You're right. And it's time to once again mention the old idea of an addendum to the copyright laws: Anything that has been out of print (or otherwise not available) for more than a year becomes public domain.
This would end the practice of using the copyright laws to destroy our history and culture.
How we would prevent them from destroying the masters is an open question
But if they want to stop file sharing, they'll have to destroy the internet.
Yup. That's the goal. Or rather, to turn it into a clone of television, a purely marketing medium controlled by an oligopoly
So we have to destroy the recording industry first.
Especially important is to get across to younng musicians that they don't have to sign any recording contracts with anyone. People who know how to make good recordings should be getting across to musicians the idea that they can make much better recordings by themselves. In the US, it's now difficult to be more than 50 miles from a top-quality local recording studio that will do everything but play the music and then leave you in total control of the master. And doing the publicity yourself on the Internet will give you lower sales, maybe, but you'll get all the income from it. This is a lot better than ending up in debt to a recording company.
And in the long run, it's just as likely that stars will arise through blogs and special-purpose web sites than through the commercial music PR people.
Anyone who signs a recording contract these days is an utter fool.
Nah; nothing has changed at all in this regard.
"Innocent until proven guilty" has never been much more than a slogan.
Yeah, but the vehicle doesn't look at all like the critter, either the early version in Gould's book, or the more recent reconstructions based on a few more fossils.
Maybe they just like the fossil (or the name).
... man oh man, do I like OS X - for exactly the reasons that Mr. Turner brings up.
;-)
Simply put: it works.
Well, alongside some linux and Windoze boxes at home, my wife and I each have Powerbooks. We like them a lot. But I'd dispute the "it works" generalization.
For example, we have an Airport Extreme, and we got a cute little portable Canon printer that Apple lists as compatible. I plugged it in, and tested it with my PB, and It Worked. So we tried it with my wife's PB and It Worked. Or so we thought.
Then one day it didn't work for her. Her Print Center showed no printers. I went to mine, checked it out, and the printer was fine. So we went back to hers - and it saw the printer.
This happened repeatedly, until we got enough evidence to understand the problem: Her PB can only see the printer when my PB is nearby and talking to the Airport. If I close my PB up or drive away with it somewhere, in a few minutes her PB loses the printer.
We've asked Apple Support, and all they did was mess up our Airport settings so that nothing worked. I spent most of two days learning enough about the undocumented parts of the Airport to fix it, with more than a little help from a couple of Usenet newsgroups.
But those newsgroups didn't come up with a fix for the problem, or an explanation of what's going on. It seems that there's some special relation between my PB and either the Airport or the printer, but we can't tell what. I can use the Airport Admin tool from either machine, so that's not it. I see the same information about the Airport and printer from both PBs, and there's no visible indication of anything special about my PB.
But when I carry my PB away or close it up, she can't use the printer.
This doesn't qualify as "It Works" in our opinion.
In the several months we've had these nice toys, we've found a good number of things that don't just work. One of these is calling Apple Support if you've plugged your Airport into anything other than your cable modem. If it's plugged into your LAN hub, they will insist that your linux firewall is the source of all your problems, and they won't help you until you get rid of all linux machines on the LAN. This was a deal killer when some people I'm working with were looking at wireless access to their (very mixed-vendor) internal network. I just told them of my experience with Apple Support, and they dropped all thought of using Airports as part of their infrastructure.
(OTOH, our use of our TV has dropped to nearly zero. My wife subscribes to Netflicks, and really likes being able to sit down with the Powerbook, slip in a DVD, and watch a movie. And since she became a mozilla user, she finds online news a lot more interesting that TV or radio, or even the dead-tree version of the Boston Globe. We're seriously thinking of seeing which local cable service will supply only Internet and phone service, and dropping the TV channels. That's 20th-century technology; who needs it now?
voice data is passed via RTP, which uses UDP, not TCP.
...
Yeah; I've been wondering about that. RTP does seem like the better protocolfor such apps. But I've had difficulty using it. It doesn't seem to exist on many computers that I have access to. This puts some serious constraints on the prospects for using it in any software that you want to be at all portable. But it does seem like a good idea if your softare only needs to run on one platform.
In any case, it's not really all that accurate to say that RTP "uses UDP", any more than TCP does. They are more properly viewed as three protocols at the same level. Of course, TCP and RTP need most of UDP's packet-passing capabilities, so TCP and RTP headers contain fields that are very similar to those of UDP header fields. And any decent implementation is going to share code among all three. But viewing UDP as a lower-level protocol that is used by TCP and RCP is useful mostly as an initial teaching device. When you get into the implementation details, you discover that it's not really quite true.
A better model, if you want to understand an implementation, is of a "protocol module" with three entry points or operational modes. Or four, if you also count ICMP. Or five
It seems to me that a problem with a large number of movements is that they are based first and foremost on an oppositional logic and rhetoric.
...
Um, read Linus Torvald's writing about the start of linux. He wasn't in opposition to anything. He wanted to learn about OSs, and he was smart enough to realize that the best way was to try building one. He had a small computer in his apartment, so he started working. And he let a few friends know about it
A somewhat similar story is behind minix (which Linus used a bit when he was starting). Prof Tanenbaum wasn't opposed to unix. He wanted to use unix in his "systems" classes, but was having more and more problems getting licensing for his students to see the source. So he did the obvious thing: He started his own project to build his own unix-like OS. Now minix has a lot of uses as an embedded kernel. It wasn't developed in opposition to anything; it was a practical approach to teaching classes in the subject.
Similarly, over in Japan, Prof Sakamura developed the real-time iTron kernel partly for teaching purposes, due to problems with his students getting access to the code for commercial RT systems. So he put his student to work building a RT kernel with no legal restrictions on who could see the source. It has turned into what is probably the most widely-installed OS in the world, not from any oppositional stance, but because it's reliable and developers can easily get access to all the code.
In reality, people don't do things like this because of rhetoric or ideology. They do it because they have a need that existing products don't handle, and they see doing it themselves as the easiest path.
Of course, Linus would also add that it's fun.
... the bitter rivalries over vi and emacs, ...
;-)
:g/RE/s//.../ command. Or laboriously moving stuff around in a file that could be done with a single :'a,'b!whatever command. Sometimes this can be painful to watch, and I'd really like to stop them and teach them a few tricks. But usually there's a fire to fight, so I don't unless they ask.
This is an excellent example of why I think that such rivalries are for the benefit of all of us.
Early on, I went with the vi side of this one. And I learned to look for the vi/emacs flames. Why? Because they were usually of the form "Emacs can do FOO; vi can't." The replies would often include a description from a vi expert of just how to do FOO. My reaction would be "Hey, I didn't know vi could do that; now I know how."
As with most software, both both vi and emacs have documentation that, quite frankly, sucks. Yeah, there is good stuff for the rank beginner. But the really powerful stuff is usually only mentioned in passing, if at all. The only good way to learn it is from other people who have somehow learned it (or stumbled onto it).
One of the disappointment in recent years has been the death of some of these flame wars. This means that newbies no longer have a good way of becoming power users of such tools.
Very often just asking how to do something doesn't work; you just get RTFM. But if you claim that tool X can do a job but Y can't, Y's supporters will try to tell you what an idiot you are, and in the process, some of them will answer the question. So you thank them and proceed to get your job done.
Sometimes you have to put up with offensive characters. There's an excellent example over in the perl community. One of the prime movers is Tom Christianson, who is known as a very abrasive and insulting character, especially to newbies. But, while being abrasive, he almost always answers the question. And usually with very good answers. So he is tolerated and respected for his contributions. (And the rest of us quietly send apologetic email to his victims.
I've often sat watching people laboriously going through a document with some editor (occasionally emacs or vi), doing a lot of work for what to me would be a simple
Anyway, in my mind, the public debates over such things are one of the real strengths of the hacker/OSS community in general. If you stifle this, you'll reduce our effectiveness to the primitive level of a corporate development environment.
It does help if you can learn a bit of tolerance.
... this is not theft because you have not actually lost anything.
On the contrary, this seems to be saying that after a corporation copies my stuff into their database, I can be sued for continuing to publish it myself. They can legally deny me the right to use information that I've put together. This seems to me to qualify as "theft".
There is precedent for this, of course. But in the past, it's been in the form of "work for hire". It's common for publishers to require a contract that says they own their writers' text. What's unusual about this new bill is that it seems to be saying that a corporation that I don't work for (and may not have heard of) can claim what I've written as their own merely by putting the same information into their own database. They can then deny my the right to publish it myself, although it was my work.
I wonder if a working writer could challenge this on 13th Ammendment grounds? After all, if I'm a writer, and my work can be claimed by a corporation without my consent, that sounds a lot like "involuntary servitude".
There are quite a lot of online sites that are built by hobbyists who collect some sort of information. For example, there are many sites dedicated to old movies, old recordings, old books of various types, etc. Most of these are collected by the hobbyists via a lot of detective work.
Does this mean that some big corporation can come along and claim that all of such a site's data is in their private corporate database, and is thus in violation? In most cases, the hobbyists will have had no access to the corporate database, and likely won't even know that it exists. But in such cases, the data will almost certainly be very similar, because we're dealing with published historical data.
Note that this is the same sort of problem that SCO is bringing out. They claim that linux contains infringements of their private, secret code. Nobody is allowed access to their code, so it's impossible to avoid sometimes duplicating it. But they are successfully causing others to defend against infringement suits, which will be tremendously expensive (e.g. in lost sales) for the defendants even if they win.
How could I ever defend myself against the charge of infringing the data in a corporate database, when I have no access to it? This sort of suit would probably bankrupt me in one or two months.
Is my only option to never publish anything at all, until the time that I become a billionaire with the funds to defend myself?
does it have to be a corporation owning the database, or can it be a private individual?
...
Yeah, and also, what's a "database"?
To combine the two: I'm a human, not a corporation. If I put a lot of stuff on my web site, and some corporation downloads it into their Oracle database, am I suddenly (and unknowingly) a criminal for having a copy of their database?
From what I can tell, this permits open theft by corporations of any individual's information.
What is there in the bill that says otherwise?
Maybe we must all incorporate
I wonder though, how much of the cost of developing the internet was recouped when the government sold off the NSF backbone.
;-).
Probably not nearly the entire development cost. Of course, the DoD did get something worth a lot: MilNet (with a lot of debugging by good academic hackers for free
Also, though the official funding may have been almost entirely from the US military, the Arpa/Internet was recognize early on as valuable by the entire world's academic community, and they "funded" a lot of development as a side effect of other projects that used the growing network. Look at the involvement of astronomers for a good example. (And tracing the money becomes more difficult when you realize that the DoD has funded a fair amount of astronomical work.)
It would be more accurate to list the US military as the "prime mover" behind what is now the Internet, and its main source of funds for the first two decades. But in reality, the development was so widely distributed, and done as portions of so many other projects, that tracking the true costs is utterly impossible.
Of course, we can easily justify it all by observing that the Internet's value to academia and the world is "inestimable". In this case, both the literal and figurative meanings of that word are correct.
You forgot to condemn SCO.
Of course you can decrease the amount the government extorts from you. Just give them proof that you're a multi-millionaire, and they'll decrease your taxes right away.
Can't the government just stay off these new industries long enough for them to get started?
... the US government supported the Internet (mostly as Arpanet) for two decades before the commercial world finally noticed it. All that time, the code and other technology was all available openly. The commercial guys could have grabbed it and set up a separate commercial network at any time, the same way the DoD set up a separate military network. This never happened. The way that the Internet went commercial was when the government-built academic Internet was opened up to commercial traffic.
Ummm
There are a number of examples like this, where it took a long period of government subsidy to get an industry off the ground. Look at the history of the airline industry, for example. This is mostly because the commercial rarely starts anything new. Few companies are willing to invest in something until someone has shown that it has value. And the Internet didn't have commercial value until there were millions of users.
So if the government had stayed out, it would never have happened at all. And for most of the world, it still hasn't happened. The commercial Internet only exists in places where it's profitable to install it. This excludes most rural areas and the poor parts of many cities. Exceptions to this are mostly from government interference.
That still leaves open the possibility of pure voip to voip calls being undetectable (e.g. between different Vonage customers), but in the near term those sorts of calls are likely to still be in the minority.
...
I'd wonder about that. A news story that has been covered here is that, over the past couple years, the wireless phone system in Japan has gone almost entirely VoIP. It's cheaper, works better, and you can call anywhere in the world for the same price as a local call. If you have a fancy combined phone/PDA, HTTP works the way it's supposed to, unlike here in the US where my Kyocera "smartphone" takes 20 to 30 seconds to make a PPP link over a phone line before it can make a single TCP connection.
My wife and I have family in at least 10 states. This sounds enticing
The reason the schools want computers in the classroom is the skills computer use at young ages bring.
Yeah, and do you remember when Ronald Reagan explained all this to us? Those kids playing shoot-em-up video games are training their reflexes. This is what will provide us with the next generation of fighter pilots.
Now, of course, that next generation is flying for George W. in the Middle East.
I wonder if anyone has actually compared the abilities of current fighter pilots with the amount of computerized game playing they did when they were supposed to be studying?
VoIP is just a TCP connection, right? So in general is it even feasible to regulate (i.e., tax) VoIP separately?
If so, this brings up the interesting question of regulating other kinds of TCP traffic. Given things like VPN and SSH, it can be exceedingly difficult to even discover what sort of traffic is carried on a TCP connection. If my employer requires that I set up a VPN link to work, and I happen to have a phone plugged into my computer that uses the VPN to make work calls, how do the regulators measure my use of VoIP. It's just some portion of those encrypted packets going over the VPN connection, but that packets also include my vi sessions, rsyncs, ftps, and all the other things that I do as part of my job. Does this proposal mean that I'll be paying voice-line rates for my all-day VPN connection to work?
You might think that a wireless VoIP phone would be an exception that's easy to regulate. But my current cellphone is also a Palm Pilot, and I can and do use it for web access. Currently, voice and http on this phone use different low-level protocols, so they can measure them separately. But with VoIP, the voice and http connections are just TCP. I also work with databases, and much of that work is voice-like in that it has bursts of data alternating in both directions. Will this have the characteristics of VoIP, and thus be regulated/taxed as phone usage?
One possibility is that we'll suddenly find that all TCP connections are considered "voice" and charged extra. But we can probably all imagine the outrage this would produce - especially from people running commercial web sites.
Anyway, it'd be interesting to hear how they're going to sort out the voice sessions from the data sessions, when they're all just TCP connections.
Right. And note that, without regulation, there would never have been telephone service in many rural areas (and in some parts of some cities).
We do have a similar situation with the Internet in the US. One of the effects of the government leaving it so unregulated is that it's only available in areas where it is profitable. Most of the rural US has no Internet service, and likely never will unless some government steps in and either mandates it or provides it. In some cases, local governments are setting it up.
Part of the value of both the phone system and the Internet is in making it reach everywhere. The more territory they cover, the more valuable they are to everyone. But the Market won't do this, because there's no incentive to supply service to marginal areas.
Here in Waltham, Massachusetts (USA), a local news story a few years back was about a young man who'd been in a bar, and as he left, took a piss in an alley. Unfortunately, a copy saw him and arrested him. The charge, indecent exposure, is a "sex crime", and he'll be in the police database now.
There was a bit of a fuss locally about their doing this to him, but the ways the laws are, there's nothing anyone can do about it. He's on record as having been convicted of a sex crime. To a lot of the vigilante types out there, that's all they need to know.
And there's also a proposal here to put a list of all the sex offenders online. His life may not be worth much in a couple more years.
How about Uncle Sam stays out of the web design business??
What does this have to do with the gummint? I've worked on projects at a lot of companies over the decades, and all of them have had "guidelines". These are never voluntary. In the corportate world, "guideline" is just a polysyllabic synonym for "rule".
In such matters, the government is really just another big corporation. it's no better or worse than your average corporate heirarchy. In fact, it's often marginally better. In governments, there are usually "guidelines" to how such things are developed, and they often involve a lot of participation from experts and users ("the public"). In corporations, guidelines are often laid down by PHBs with little or no understanding of what they're regulating, and no study of what might be effective guidelines.
On the contrary; there's a very good reason that I might be willing to pay. Umair did explain it: If a music service could consistently present me with music that I want to listen to more than once, it would save me a lot of search time. That's time that I could spend doing something else, such as listening to music that I really like. That's definitely worth some money to me, though I couldn't tell you how much until I see the service.
I've bought from iTunes, but I'm not impressed by it. Why not? Well, I tested it by taking some of my favorite CDs and looking them up on iTunes. I couldn't find any of them. My conclusion is that iTunes, good as it may be for others, just doesn't cater to people with my tastes.
I don't think that it matters what my tastes may be. When I look around me, I find a lot of really good musicians, who have never been recorded by any label, and never will be. When I mention this to other people, they always agree, though they give different examples. So I conclude that there is a lot of music in the world that I'd like if I could hear it, and I'd pay for recordings of it. But iTunes doesn't find it for me. Neither do any of the other commercial music suppliers.
OTOH, there are people who do find me the music that I like. And when they recommend a CD, I'll buy it without listening to it. But those people don't work for Apple, or for any of the labels. Some of them are online, and have web sites that include their own reviews of recordings plus links to the musicians' web sites. This works well, and I've bought a number of CDs this way.
What we need now is a good, systematic way for such reviewers to get a bit of pay for passing out such time-saving information.
This is all doing an end run around the traditional recording industry's distribution channels. But why should I care? That industry hasn't done a good job of supplying me with music. Now I can find good music by spending some time listening more or less at random, and by listening to the advice of others with tastes like mine. If someone can save me some of this time, I'll be willing to pay them. But I don'tsee the recording industry doing it any time soon.