So, maybe it was novel 9 years ago. But today, every engineer, even one who never heard about TiVo or All-in-Wonder cards could easily devise a solution for this task.
Patents should awarded for ingenious solutions, not for first posts.
Even one well-trained and armed security guard on each plane - preferably incognito - would be sufficient to make such an attack very difficult, if not impossible. Also pilots need to be able to defend themselves.
If the airlines can pay for 10 flight attendants, then paying for one extra person shouldn't make a huge difference to their operating costs.
Given that screening does not work, it's the only thing to do.
On the contrary: Usenet will very soon be useful only as a file-transferring medium.
Discussions are moving rapidly away from usenet and onto the web. That is a natural and unstoppable trend, because web-based forums such as slashdot offer much better functionality than newsgroups. Already today the number of web-based forums greatly exceeds the number of active newsgroups.
On the other hand, usenet is wonderful for people with good connections who like to download stuff and don't mind paying 10 bucks per month for the privilege. Usenet provider Newsguy has some statistics on their website. It appears that 99% of usenet traffic is binary nowadays, and the volume is doubling every year
Don't be surprised if the IP industry will soon make a push to outlaw usenet altogether.
But is an injunction desirable? My guess is that it would cause an outcry by users looking forward to it, which in turn could help MS to win the case in the end.
I would much prefer to suffer for another year or two and then reach a conclusion that actually breaks up the monopoly.
This is obviously a hoax, for the following reason:
Bacteria from outer space would be easy to distinguish from our own. If you don't believe this, let me tell you that biologist can tell from which Galapagos island a species comes by looking at its genes. Surely it must be easier to distinguish between planets!
Raymond states his ethical commitment as "increase ferblage". I wish to argue that flerbage is an ill-conceived term.
My Ferblage, he defines, consists of three req's
1. Nobody shall kill me
2. Nobody shall rob me of my physical property
3. Nobody shall take my time without my consent.
Let us investigate whether these axioms are necessary and sufficient.
Obviously 1. and 2. are necessary and everybody will agree. However, 3. is quite difficult to enforce. Demonstrations cause traffic jams, traffic jams rob my time, should demonstrations be outlawed? Should the police be disallowed to question suspects and witnesses in a murder case, because it is taking up their time? Can we require citizens to wait at traffic lights? What about the draft?
Conclusion: Not being robbed of my time is very desirable, but hardly a necessary right.
Now for completeness. It seems to me that ERS should be quite happy living, for example, in China. They have some good facilities (e.g. Apple) where he could work. Freedom of speech, usage of the internet, freedom of movement, freedom to buy what you like all don't seem to matter to him. After all, these have nothing to do with flerbage.
Surely Raymond would not consider that his ferblage is reduced when he gets jailed for amusingly mangling the chairman's name. It would be his own fault, just like it would be my own fault if I got jailed for not properly licensing my software.
The FSF has never advocated the passing of additional laws that regulate what programmers can or cannot do. On the contrary the FSF has specifically asked for the removal of a law, namely copyright for programs.
Please realise that Eric Raymond is just plain lying. He suggests that Stallman asks for new laws that could put software developers into jail. The opposite is true: Stallman ask that copyright for programs be abolished, period. One law less, fewer people that will go to jail.
Programmers can still do whatever they will, the state just won't help them enforce their copyright.
The article contains more untruths. One is, that the existence of proprietary software does not restrict user's freedom, beacause he does not have to use it. The fact is, that people are ordered to use software by their employer and thus bound by the licenses if they like it or not.
Other example: Game developers are forced to spend their time helping MS since if they develop for Linux instead, they will not survive.
(They might choose to help Sony or Nintendo instead, but that is not much better).
Yes, quite right. One more point: Because of their small size, Ebooks are even harder to exterminate than mp3s - once a book gets on the net it stays on the net.
I have downloaded about 1500 ebooks from usenet and I only take those from authors I know or which otherwise strike my fancy. My estimate is that at least 10.000 titles (not counting Gutenberg) are in circulation and all of these get posted on Usenet regularly.
Admittedly, many of them are not proofread and/or poorly formatted.
On the other hand, I see hardly any cracked commercial ebooks. There are a few dozen people out there who scan and convert books as a hobby. These people make a difference. The ebook companies don't matter.
Everything should cost and noone should have to pay
Let me explain:
Content providers can meter access and charge as much as they want.
At the end of the month you get a bill detailing what you owe to everybody. You decide who to pay, and who to ignore. Maybe you can partially pay some. You might decide not to pay anyone at all.
The providers, of course, may retaliate. If you haven't paid enough, they might serve ads, lock you out of certain pages or throttle your bandwidth.
Such a system would be installed and supervised by government (like government supervises money). Capitalism will do the rest.
Some thought will be necessary to preserve a degree of privacy.
According to german law, a trademark only protects against commercial use. Writing freeware programs under the GNU license is hardly commercial. Maybe Adobe can prove that the author in some way did profit from this software, but it is doubtful.
PGP is wonderful software for people who exchange sensitive information. They can make a little effort to install it properly, exchange keys in a safe way and type in their passphrase before reading a mail.
PGP is totally unsuitable for Joe AOL-user who likes his privacy but neither knows nor wants to know anything about the difference between a key and a passphrase.
The simple people need a mechanism that never asks any questions and is generally invisible. So, what the crypto people ought to think about is not "how can we make it as totally safe as possible" but "what is the best we can do without requiring any help from users".
One simple solution is that the email program automatically generates a key pair and appends the public key to every outgoing mail. It also collects public keys from incoming mails and automatically encrypts all outgoing mails for which it knows a key.
Such a simple scheme is open to certain attacks. But it would be much, much better than no encryption at all, which is what a vast majority of email and IM users have today.
Consider AOL and ICQ. Adding some encryption and automatic key exchange to ICQ would have been sooo easy. Tons of people have asked for it. It doesn't happen. The only explanation is: AOL does not want it to.
Without any recourse to conspiracy theories, this is easy to explain. Encrypted nessaging and email makes it easier and safer to swap copyrighted content. AOL is not about to help you with this, as you can see from their stance on gnutella and aimster.
The same goes for MS, only more so. MS will not openly resist email encryption, that would look bad and is not even necessary. But they won't do anything to make it easier, either.
GPL'ed code is avalable to everyone in the same sense that a public library is available to everyone. For example, MS is as welcome to use emacs as everyone else. So is the Apache foundation.
Libraries do have rules about what you can with their books. Different libraries have different rules.
In the same way, the GPL is a set of rules aimed at protecting the value of programs.
If the government pays a programmer to created a GPL'ed program then that's money well spent - everybody can use the product that has been created for free.
As a matter of fact, government does fund lots of code that is not free at all. For example, many university professors create programs, in government-paid time, and distribute it in binary-only form. (Here in Germany all professors are paid by government).
German software company TopWare (noted for games like Earth 2150 and Moon Project) went out of business after losing a lawsuit against Deutsche Telekom, because they had published a phonebook CD.
Well, Leslie Lamport designed a similar system for presenting and structuring proofs, called TLA (Temporal Logic of Actions). I had the doubtful pleasure to review one of his papers once. Let me only say that reading proofs presented in TLA is a major pain. Give me a textbook any time.
Actually, Lamport's work is not primarily about making maths easier to understand, but about making proofs easier to verify.
This is the crux of the discussion. People read proofs to learn something, to increase their understanding. A well-written proof appeals to the readers thought processes to make this understanding as painless as possible. No mechanical system is helpful here any more than it is helpful for writing novels. Spellchecking, ok, but that's it.
What formal notations do help with is rigorousness. They tend to be applied in situations where the proof is too boring to be read but too important not to be read, for example in formal hardware verification.
None of the answers so far has given a satisfactory answer to the question "why can't the government outlaw freenet?".
It's probably already illegal in France. They have a law that nobody may make available any content unless they can produce, upon request, the name of the person responsible. Freenet users do make stuff available, but don't know where it came from.
I predict, freenet is going to be outlawed in all countries where the constitution allows it. Or, make that all countries. Same for Mojonation.
Our only chance is to push it so hard and fast that legislators will not dare touch it. In the beginning german authorities were very critical of ebay (because of fraud and lack of consumer protection) but not anymore.
I gotta admit that the RIAA/MPAA are in their right to go after the individual. On the other hand they ought to respect the innocent until proven guilty principle. In a democracy only a judge and/or a jury is allowed to make this decision, and then only after hearing both parties. Withdrawing an essential service on grounds of suspicion is a violation of what should be a basic civil right.
If it so happens that this requirement makes it impossible to enforce copyright, then so be it. Civil Rights come first.
this debate seems truly strange. In Germany, for example, it is simply illegal to publicly encourage acts of violence, whether or not anybody acts on them. This is not a law which worries people and hardly anybody ever tries to break it. I consider myself an extreme liberal, but I see no problem here.
On the other hand, if Bob cries 'Kill Joe' and Henry actually does it, then Joe's relatives cannot sue Bob for damages. Everybody is responsible for their own actions only.
I wonder, if it would be legal in the US to shout for the death of all (insert any racial/cultural minority here) followed by a list of addresses? This would certainly land you behind bars for several years in any European country.
Slashdot Mirror
Furthermore, we should make no distinction between the pirates who copy these files, and those who harbor the software enabling them.
Patents should awarded for ingenious solutions, not for first posts.
Cryogenes
"Do such and such and the terrorists win"
What nonsense. The terrorists do not wish to reform America's crypto policy. They wish to subject the world to Allah's will.
Also, keep in mind that the objective is to avoid losing (or at least, to minimize losses), not to prevent the other side from winning.
Even one well-trained and armed security guard on each plane - preferably incognito - would be sufficient to make such an attack very difficult, if not impossible. Also pilots need to be able to defend themselves.
If the airlines can pay for 10 flight attendants, then paying for one extra person shouldn't make a huge difference to their operating costs.
Given that screening does not work, it's the only thing to do.
On the other hand, usenet is wonderful for people with good connections who like to download stuff and don't mind paying 10 bucks per month for the privilege. Usenet provider Newsguy has some statistics on their website. It appears that 99% of usenet traffic is binary nowadays, and the volume is doubling every year
Don't be surprised if the IP industry will soon make a push to outlaw usenet altogether.
But is an injunction desirable? My guess is that it would cause an outcry by users looking forward to it, which in turn could help MS to win the case in the end.
I would much prefer to suffer for another year or two and then reach a conclusion that actually breaks up the monopoly.
This is obviously a hoax, for the following reason:
Bacteria from outer space would be easy to distinguish from our own. If you don't believe this, let me tell you that biologist can tell from which Galapagos island a species comes by looking at its genes. Surely it must be easier to distinguish between planets!
Raymond states his ethical commitment as "increase ferblage". I wish to argue that flerbage is an ill-conceived term.
My Ferblage, he defines, consists of three req's
1. Nobody shall kill me
2. Nobody shall rob me of my physical property
3. Nobody shall take my time without my consent.
Let us investigate whether these axioms are necessary and sufficient.
Obviously 1. and 2. are necessary and everybody will agree. However, 3. is quite difficult to enforce. Demonstrations cause traffic jams, traffic jams rob my time, should demonstrations be outlawed? Should the police be disallowed to question suspects and witnesses in a murder case, because it is taking up their time? Can we require citizens to wait at traffic lights? What about the draft?
Conclusion: Not being robbed of my time is very desirable, but hardly a necessary right.
Now for completeness. It seems to me that ERS should be quite happy living, for example, in China. They have some good facilities (e.g. Apple) where he could work. Freedom of speech, usage of the internet, freedom of movement, freedom to buy what you like all don't seem to matter to him. After all, these have nothing to do with flerbage.
Surely Raymond would not consider that his ferblage is reduced when he gets jailed for amusingly mangling the chairman's name. It would be his own fault, just like it would be my own fault if I got jailed for not properly licensing my software.
The FSF has never advocated the passing of additional laws that regulate what programmers can or cannot do. On the contrary the FSF has specifically asked for the removal of a law, namely copyright for programs.
Please realise that Eric Raymond is just plain lying. He suggests that Stallman asks for new laws that could put software developers into jail. The opposite is true: Stallman ask that copyright for programs be abolished, period. One law less, fewer people that will go to jail.
Programmers can still do whatever they will, the state just won't help them enforce their copyright.
The article contains more untruths. One is, that the existence of proprietary software does not restrict user's freedom, beacause he does not have to use it. The fact is, that people are ordered to use software by their employer and thus bound by the licenses if they like it or not.
Other example: Game developers are forced to spend their time helping MS since if they develop for Linux instead, they will not survive.
(They might choose to help Sony or Nintendo instead, but that is not much better).
Yes, quite right. One more point: Because of their small size, Ebooks are even harder to exterminate than mp3s - once a book gets on the net it stays on the net.
I have downloaded about 1500 ebooks from usenet and I only take those from authors I know or which otherwise strike my fancy. My estimate is that at least 10.000 titles (not counting Gutenberg) are in circulation and all of these get posted on Usenet regularly.
Admittedly, many of them are not proofread and/or poorly formatted.
On the other hand, I see hardly any cracked commercial ebooks. There are a few dozen people out there who scan and convert books as a hobby. These people make a difference. The ebook companies don't matter.
Everything should cost and noone should have to pay
Let me explain:
Content providers can meter access and charge as much as they want.
At the end of the month you get a bill detailing what you owe to everybody. You decide who to pay, and who to ignore. Maybe you can partially pay some. You might decide not to pay anyone at all.
The providers, of course, may retaliate. If you haven't paid enough, they might serve ads, lock you out of certain pages or throttle your bandwidth.
Such a system would be installed and supervised by government (like government supervises money). Capitalism will do the rest.
Some thought will be necessary to preserve a degree of privacy.
According to german law, a trademark only protects against commercial use. Writing freeware programs under the GNU license is hardly commercial. Maybe Adobe can prove that the author in some way did profit from this software, but it is doubtful.
It is non-profit, that's how it is different
PGP is wonderful software for people who exchange sensitive information. They can make a little effort to install it properly, exchange keys in a safe way and type in their passphrase before reading a mail.
PGP is totally unsuitable for Joe AOL-user who likes his privacy but neither knows nor wants to know anything about the difference between a key and a passphrase.
The simple people need a mechanism that never asks any questions and is generally invisible. So, what the crypto people ought to think about is not "how can we make it as totally safe as possible" but "what is the best we can do without requiring any help from users".
One simple solution is that the email program automatically generates a key pair and appends the public key to every outgoing mail. It also collects public keys from incoming mails and automatically encrypts all outgoing mails for which it knows a key.
Such a simple scheme is open to certain attacks. But it would be much, much better than no encryption at all, which is what a vast majority of email and IM users have today.
Consider AOL and ICQ. Adding some encryption and automatic key exchange to ICQ would have been sooo easy. Tons of people have asked for it. It doesn't happen. The only explanation is: AOL does not want it to.
Without any recourse to conspiracy theories, this is easy to explain. Encrypted nessaging and email makes it easier and safer to swap copyrighted content. AOL is not about to help you with this, as you can see from their stance on gnutella and aimster.
The same goes for MS, only more so. MS will not openly resist email encryption, that would look bad and is not even necessary. But they won't do anything to make it easier, either.
GPL'ed code is avalable to everyone in the same sense that a public library is available to everyone. For example, MS is as welcome to use emacs as everyone else. So is the Apache foundation.
Libraries do have rules about what you can with their books. Different libraries have different rules.
In the same way, the GPL is a set of rules aimed at protecting the value of programs.
If the government pays a programmer to created a GPL'ed program then that's money well spent - everybody can use the product that has been created for free.
As a matter of fact, government does fund lots of code that is not free at all. For example, many university professors create programs, in government-paid time, and distribute it in binary-only form. (Here in Germany all professors are paid by government).
Depends on where you are.
German software company TopWare (noted for games like Earth 2150 and Moon Project) went out of business after losing a lawsuit against Deutsche Telekom, because they had published a phonebook CD.
Maybe you should order from Germany then. An 80 min cdr costs 0,70 DM at www.snogard.de.
Well, Leslie Lamport designed a similar system for presenting and structuring proofs, called TLA (Temporal Logic of Actions). I had the doubtful pleasure to review one of his papers once. Let me only say that reading proofs presented in TLA is a major pain. Give me a textbook any time. Actually, Lamport's work is not primarily about making maths easier to understand, but about making proofs easier to verify. This is the crux of the discussion. People read proofs to learn something, to increase their understanding. A well-written proof appeals to the readers thought processes to make this understanding as painless as possible. No mechanical system is helpful here any more than it is helpful for writing novels. Spellchecking, ok, but that's it. What formal notations do help with is rigorousness. They tend to be applied in situations where the proof is too boring to be read but too important not to be read, for example in formal hardware verification.
None of the answers so far has given a satisfactory answer to the question "why can't the government outlaw freenet?". It's probably already illegal in France. They have a law that nobody may make available any content unless they can produce, upon request, the name of the person responsible. Freenet users do make stuff available, but don't know where it came from. I predict, freenet is going to be outlawed in all countries where the constitution allows it. Or, make that all countries. Same for Mojonation. Our only chance is to push it so hard and fast that legislators will not dare touch it. In the beginning german authorities were very critical of ebay (because of fraud and lack of consumer protection) but not anymore.
I gotta admit that the RIAA/MPAA are in their right to go after the individual. On the other hand they ought to respect the innocent until proven guilty principle. In a democracy only a judge and/or a jury is allowed to make this decision, and then only after hearing both parties. Withdrawing an essential service on grounds of suspicion is a violation of what should be a basic civil right.
If it so happens that this requirement makes it impossible to enforce copyright, then so be it. Civil Rights come first.
> It is stealing... read copyright laws, will ya!
I did. Nowhere did I find the words "steal" or "theft" in it.
this debate seems truly strange. In Germany, for example, it is simply illegal to publicly encourage acts of violence, whether or not anybody acts on them. This is not a law which worries people and hardly anybody ever tries to break it. I consider myself an extreme liberal, but I see no problem here. On the other hand, if Bob cries 'Kill Joe' and Henry actually does it, then Joe's relatives cannot sue Bob for damages. Everybody is responsible for their own actions only. I wonder, if it would be legal in the US to shout for the death of all (insert any racial/cultural minority here) followed by a list of addresses? This would certainly land you behind bars for several years in any European country.
because anything exponential in size is necessarily also exponential in time.