This was discussed last week in the technology and science subcommittee hearings on the love bug. See: CSPAN - Technology and Science, page, along with the Actual footage in Real Media (.rm) format. The subcommittee interviewed these witnessed:
Keith Rhodes, GAO
Harris Miller, Technology Association of America
Sandra England, McAfee, A Network Associates Company
Peter Tippett, ICSA.net
The level of outright lying regarding the security issues of Windows and Outlook, along with standard congressional grandstanding in front of cameras was just astonishing -- with only one representative taking Sandra England (and the rest of the witnesses) to task for misrepresenting that the love bug affected all computers -- and was not just a Windows/Outlook problem. At the end of that exchange Peter Tippet finally agreed that [paraphrase] 'OK, 97% of all computers were affected' and then pointed out that the very features that Microsoft just discontinued (embedded scripting in document data) was a critical necessity. The most frightening testimony came from Peter Tippet (who appeared the most technically savvy) who would not admit that the problem was client side security in Windows/Outlook and instead recommended draconian laws to resolve the issue. From memory:
Criminalizing the creation of all viruses or self replicating programs -- even for research purposes.
Making "hacking" a federal crime with severe punishments
criminalizing THE HIRING of "white hat hackers" so that anyone who has EVER been convicted of "hacking" will be permanently barred from employment in the computer industry.
Of course they recommended against any corporation hiring "hacker" security firms and recommended that these organizations be criminalized.
In whole, the entire subcommittee hearing appeared entirely designed to further the cause of McAffee Associates and Microsoft, while recommending insane laws plainly unnecessary to further the cause of Internet security -- but they certainly do benefit the witnesses.
I was most dismayed by Peter Tippet, who really did appear to understand the technical arguments and seemed to just be lying through his teeth to our congress critters.
Big radio is a waste of time; I won't even bother listening to commercial radio any longer. I live in the Boston area and we have a reasonable collection of college radio stations from BC, MIT, and Harvard. BC, under the call letters WZBC is the best college station I've ever heard... someone should arrange to netcast their "No Commercial Potential" program.
You must be near that Berkeley station that plays Negativland's weekly radio show... no?
Trean Reznor (The sum of NIN) has pioneered many areas of music, including the use of ecletic sound in his music, and being one of the forefathers of an entire genre of music (called industrial)
Jeesh... are you sure Trent Reznor pioneered industrial??? Hmmmph... and all along I thought the Industrial movement started way back in the '70's and early '80's from bands like Cabaret Voltaire, Throbbing Gristle, and Einstürzende Neubauten... you mean NiN isn't just some clone of Skinny Puppy and My Life with the Thrill Kill Cult, which were just clones of Cabaret Voltaire????
Hey, thanks for the link! I used to have a pretty good collection of Tackhead records, but they were swiped by a "friend" many years back. All I have left is the "alien cover" album sleeve... and for the life of me I can't find another copy in any record stores I've been trolling; it's pretty obscure stuff.
I've got a good collection of old Cabaret Voltaire, Throbbing Gristle, Zoviet France, Controlled Bleeding, Negativland (including the wallpaper sample album!), Nocturnal Emissions, Psychic TV, among others (oh wow I just found a Tackhead "Whats your mussion now?" EP... cool!). This stuff is just itching to get converted to mp3 -- I don't consider that so much a copyright violation as preserving history. Oh well, feel free to email me if you'd like to discuss this further.
PS- My next card will be a 3dfx or Matrox model if things continue.
I completely agree. Based on what I've read here, and from other articles in print, I'm convinced I prefer the NVidia GeoForce hardware over the Voodoo 5. However, there's no way I'll buy the GeoForce if NVidia doesn't document their hardware and release sample driver source. Never mind the politics of what's right, why should I buy something without documentation? I lose dramatic control over my hardware and gain nothing! Also, I notice hardware manufacturers rarely support hardware older than one (or possibly two) revisions(s) previous. I'd rather not be forced into buying and/or replacing on their release schedule; free drivers and documentation enables a handly resolution to such issues. It's in MY best interest as a consumer to have this information.
So 3DFX it is, unless NVidea responds to this consumer demand. Frankly, I would prefer to buy the best hardware. NVidea? Are you listening?...
How many other computer systems can you think of that have been running for the last twenty years? How many other systems have had the tens of thousands of hours of testing and, even more importantly, have worked flawlessly every time?
Believe it or not, but the PDP/LSI-11 series of computer is still in use in sheet metal and other factory floors even today. The damn thing is a workhorse which lives in production even after the death of Digital -- long after DEC stopped supporting the hardware.
Not that this diminishes the value of your point.:-)
OK, for the record you may republish any and all of my posts as long as you cite the author... please just be responsible and follow basic Open Content guidelines.
However, I think that if you're going to use our posts from a public forum, you ought to make the book freely available on the web. This only seems appropriate given how you obtained (at least some) of it's content, and considering how important some of that material might be for teens unable or unwilling to purchase the publication on paper.
rms, Are you willing to situate the FSF coding room in the William H. Gates building should MIT decide to shut down your building in Tech Sq. and offer the FSF another free office?
I've noticed a significant amount of construction in that area, with at least one of those buildings demolished, but I don't know about the plans for the building in which the AI lab (and the FSF coding offices) reside. So, would you move to downtown Boston, where your business office resides, or enjoy the -- considerable -- irony of locating at least part of the FSF in a building named after the founder of Microsoft?:-)
Score 5 (Insightful)... How about "Flamebait"?
on
RMS On eBooks
·
· Score: 5
Wow, here we go around the "rms is a communist" maypole again. Karzan tells rms to "shut up" instead of actually debating his points, and finally ends with some demogogary about us all working in coal mines. Riiiigggghhhhht. Next time you want to call rms a communist, why don't you read what he has to say on the issue and debate those specific points instead of flat out accusing him of being a communist. Oh, and calling people who disagree with your views on intellectual property law "anti-intellectual-property cronies" pretty much rules out informed and reasoned debate. IMO this post doesn't deserve a single moderation up... but today I'm no moderator.
So, let's deal with your assertions:
Ok, first of all, eBooks are NOT going to replace real books; people like paper books. Books are static information, and people like to have an object associated with that information, something with a smell and a feel that reminds them of the last time they read it, etc. I'm sure this has all been said before anyway.
What a ridiculous assumption. Paper is expensive to manufacture and dangerous to the environment, especially considering how much of it we throw into landfills after a single use (never mind the toxic waste released during manufacture). The limit to electronic print distribution is the initial cost of a reader plus the limited display technology of current readers on the market. Don't expect a Palm III to become the standard for electronic newspapers. But new display technology coming down the road makes your point moot:
Xerox PARC's Electronic Paper This technology takes two plastic sheets and immerses tiny beads, one side coated black the other white, inside a wax-like substrait sandwiched between the two sheets. With a small electric current any arbitrary ball twists in the substrait and thus changes it's color. This technology should allow for a flexible 8 1/2 x 11" sheet which can represent at least 300dpi... easily good enough for an electronic newspaper or book.
Then there's AT&T's eink, another technology which promises similar display capabilities.
Based on what I've read these two technologies aren't the only up and coming new display systems for electronic printing, but they do appear the most promising. They should be cheap to manufacture, they're flexible, and they provide reasonable display resolution for the task at hand: reading. If you could buy a re-usable reader like this for twenty, fifty, or even a hundred dollars why would you ever want to buy a printed paperback book, magazine, or newspaper?
Regarding rms's opinions on Copyright law... did you read the article he wrote? Did he say that all copyright law should be abolished? Did he say that all capitalism should be abolished? Did he suggest we would be better off working in Coal mines because that's real work? I sure didn't see anything like that in what he wrote.
Personally, given the DMCA and subsection 1201(a)(1) I'm seriously concerned that we're heading toward a society where even basic "fair use" rights for libraries, citizens conducting scholarly research, and the right to read an item multiple times are in serious jeopardy. Given the technical restrictions imposed by 1201(a)(1), a publisher could limit a reader to a specific city (just stick a GPS chip in that ebook reader), a specific user (just stick a fingerprint or retina scanner on the reader), and even have the publication wipe itself out upon first reading. As others (and myself in a previous post in this thread) point out, this could herald a real Orwellian world in which newspapers and publications could rewrite history after the fact; destroying the public historical record. And what happens if libraries, and their users, aren't exempt from paying a license fee for each access of an electronic publication?
And finally, where did Adam Smith ever claim that Capitalism depended on intellectual property law? That's a pretty ridiculous claim on the surface.
From what I read he's arguing that if he wraps the primary purpose of a GPL'd library around a tiny bit of code -- well, sure the program ought to be released under the GPL. But what if he derives a library from some GPL'd work and it's only a small part of a large whole? Why should he have to release under the GPL?
Because those are the licensing terms of the code he's re-using.Period. If he doesn't like that nifty bit of mp3 code he can re-implement from scratch... and if it's a small piece of the whole code-base it shouldn't cost a significant amount of time, in relation to the whole project, to code that bit up. Of course, if the original authors decide to grant him special rights to derive an LGPL'd library from their code-base in order to include it in his proprietary (or otherwise non-free license) application... well then, point moot.:-)
Who released a free cross platform C compiler which was required in order to build just about any other free software package? (hint -- where would the Linux kernel be without gcc?)
Who released an editor, elisp interpreter, and development environment for free?
Who released a plethora of tools such as a borne shell, file utilities, tar archiver, lex clone, etc etc etc? (all for free and functionaly superior to the originals)
Sooooo, when were those first released? It ain't just yesterday....
All of this is public record, but I remember seeing much of this in the late eighties and early nineties. rms and the FSF wrote (and continue to write) a HELL of a lot of useful software -- all of which they give away for free. This doesn't undermine the wonderful contributions of BSD, MIT, CMU, and the many other Open Source and Free Software contributors; I just wanted to point out that your assertion that rms wasn't writing software early on is completely bogus and contradicts my personal experience.
As for your rant on licensing... well, I disagree. And as for being trolled... naaaa, but sometimes I feel compelled to reply in order to set the record straight. hmmmm... guess that means I HAVE been trolled... uh oh, don't want to go there (we all must enjoy some measure of self-delusion...*cough!*)
It's very simple. Short of requesting a change of license from the author, if you decide to derive a library from someone else's GPL'd work you must meet the terms of the original license. Many libraries are released under the GPL... the LGPL now stands for "Lessor General Public License", and any reference it may have had to "Library" has been removed at rms's request. Please see the GNU Licensing page for details on the differences between the GPL and LGPL, as well as Project GNU's philosophy behind each.
Information isn't french toast either
on
RMS On eBooks
·
· Score: 5
The great thing with atom based economies was that the merchants had a monopoly on the manufacturing process. Consumers were incapable of reproducing the product at negligible or economical cost. I don't think this reader software really comes to grip with the problem, and I certainly don't think anyone really knows how, least of all Stallman who doesn't really need to care about making money in this environment.
First of all I want to say that fundamentally I disagree with your final point, but that I find this an insightful and well written comment. I'll repeat what I understand of your point so that we can find common ground upon which to debate:
The medium is not the information -- when information is tied to a physical medium it's possible to control copying the information by restricting access to manufacturing the medium.
By monopolizing the manufacturing process for mass distribution of any arbitrary information, a manufacturer (in this case publisher) could make money exploiting the considerable capitol expense of "tooling up." IOW: printing presses weren't cheap so for end users it made more sense just to pay for the service of mass printing.
This created a natural economic cycle of publisher producing a product and service for consumers which electronic copying breaks, because to copy electronically requires almost no capital expense (don't need to buy no expensive printing press).
Therefore, publishers need some form of legal regulation which limits copying and allows imposing some form of "per-use" fees so that publishers and artists can earn a living, or the economic incentive to create new works will dissipate -- along with said artistic expression.
Are we on the same wavelength here?
OK, so here's where I disagree given the DMCA that's currently our law:
While I think it's reasonable for publishers to require a fee for multiple use, the DMCA goes way too far. For example, I can accept that when I purchase an ebook I should have to pay twice if I want to display that ebook on two display devices at once; just like I should have to pay twice to run a program on two separate computers at once (or two separate instances of a program). Though I argue that an exception should be made for libraries -- readers who enter a library should have access to all the materials therein without the requirement for paying copying fees. But the DMCA, and specifically section 1201(a)(1) of the DMCA provides for Draconian copy protectionschemes. For example it would be possible to electronically limit a newspaper (eventhough there's an exception for newspapers in the DMCA the newspaper lobby is working hard to remove these exceptions; here's their reply comment to the US Copyright office regarding the DMCA and section 1201(a)(1) to this effect.) like so:
Wrap the newsprint in an encryption copy protection scheme in order to enact the 1201(a)(1) DMCA Circumvention of Copyright Protection Systems for access control technologies.
Now enact all sorts of draconian limits on per-use of copyrighted work through technical limitations in the electronic newsprint reader, such as: Install a GPS chip in the reader and limit reading the news paper to a single city, make it illegal to pass the reader to another person (use biometrics such as fingerprint on reader, retina scans, whatever or even legally prevent (though unenforceable) someone else reading over your shoulder.
This could have the chilling effect of destroying the history of newsprint -- creating just what Orwell prognosticated in 1984 with newspapers that were edited for "truthfullness" after the fact -- and no one could either legally stop, or even track such changes to the historical record.
The way 1201(a)(1) in the DMCA is worded could very possibly kill off libraries in this country if we go all electronic in the publishing industry. This is far more serious than just the DeCSS and Matel (CyberPatrol) cases, though they threaten to set legal precedent which could harm citizens liberties dramatically in the near future.
I think what most people are reacting to here is not that these companies want to earn money selling artistic works... fine by me. But that they plan on implementing a monopoly on distribution which could very well effect the rights of individuals to distribute their own copyrighted works. Just look at UCI TA (Infoworld article) and how the provisions in these state bills (and at least one law -- Virginia) derail basic "Fair Use" for legal reverse engineering, copying for archival, and even allow for remote disabling software on demand by publishers... this is not democratic, nor does it even meet the basic guidelines of original Copyright intent. What people fear is that big business, along with our congress critters, are getting together to forge new laws which will greatly undermine our basic civil liberties WRT information flow and copyright. They've shown themselves quite willing to trample all over our basic human rights set forth in the Constitution and Bill of Rights (War on Drugs -- government stealing property without due process, spraying protesters willy nilly with chemical pepper spray and limiting their right to hold signs of protest in Seattle, police killing innocent unarmed citizens and then releasing confidential juvenile records in defense, using electronic surveillance technologies to spy on the world for private corporate gain, illegally funding the Contra war in direct violation of congress... the list goes on and on). So citizens are rightly fearful of what kind of authority might be handed over to monopoly content distributors over the next several years.
I really DO fear the possibility of these outcomes. This is NOT grand conspiracy theory; it's reasonable prediction based on past events. When ya'll figure out it's the grays, those bug eyed alien fiends behind all this -- well then we can start arguing about grand conspiracies.:-)
Now for something entirely different: you seem happy with Corel Office. Can you use it with the binaries installed on your hypothetical NFS file server (we nfs-mount/usr/local to share common applications, for instance)? Can you even use documents that reside on NFS filesystems (/home in my case)? That at least seems a bug in winelib and did not work with Canvas, so I'm interested whether it works with Corel apps which use Wine, or whether it might be a problem that is related to autofs rather than NFS...
Nope, I don't own and have never used the Linux Corel Office. I do have Corel WordPerfect 8 and like it very much, however, I don't have any direct experience with C-Office and can't comment on your problem. There's an explanation as to why Corel chose the Wine Execution Environment over compiling natively with winelib in one of the comment threads above. But based on various print reviews I don't think I'll want to buy Corel Office until they resolve some speed and stability issues... especially considering how well StarOffice and WordPerfect 8 meets my needs.
Once those speed and stability issues of Corel Office are resolved I expect this will further the use of Linux in Law offices dramatically... and that's as good place to wedge open the desktop market as any. So far I like Corel as a company and can't really complain about their behavior... yet.
Well according to the AC score 5 post on this topic Corel's apps do use the Wine execution environment, while Canvas 7 is, in fact, compiled natively and linked against winelib.
I want to note one thing about wine: many system DLL's have been re-written from scratch by the Wine team. So, if your Windows application relies on DLL's which have already been re-written for Wine you should be able to cross compile the app to many platforms (again baring portability issues). Winelib is a highly cool thing which should ease ports of many popular Windows apps over to the Linux world dramatically.
And if you're bitching about how slow Corel Office is because it's a Windows app running under the Wine Execution environment... well, return the program and get your money back. Personally, I think it's a pretty good deal and thank Corel for the hard work they've put into their product and for releasing their changes to Wine back to the community. Wine is released under the BSD license -- Corel had NO LEGAL RESPONSIBILITY to release their Wine changes back to the community yet they did so anyway. I, for one, thank them for this generosity.
Of course it's x86 only. After all, Canvas (just as Corel's stuff) is based on WINE, with all the drawbacks this sort of 'port' has.
winelib is as portable as any other C code -- it's the wine execution environment which requires x86, simply because those Windows applications were originally compiled for x86. Think about it... just because someone uses winelib to port an application over from Windows, this doesn't exclude them from compiling winelib and their application to any $ARCH -- as long as they have the source for all of the application (portability issues aside).
Corel may be scoffed at by some people who don't like what they're doing with Linux, or their lisences that are questionable in terms of violating the GPL, but they are actually helping a great deal in making Linux usable as a desktop OS for non-programmers.
I don't know of any GPL violations in any of the code and/or products they've released. There has been some consternation between some Wine users (I haven't seen any developers complain) WRT: Corel's internal code fork of Wine for their product releases. Wine is under the BSD license and as such this is strictly allowed. I think some of the Debian people had an issue or two which wound up being resolved to everyone's satisfaction...
Can you substantiate the claim that they've broken the GPL with any of their product releases?
Government PSYOPS story from FAIR can be found here, and a second source from counterpunch can be found here. I also note that the PSYOPS officers were working in the CNN Newsroom during the Kosovo War. This does not bode well for objective reporting from conglomerate corporate sources during time of war.
[Sorry if this gets posted twice, I recieved an error on the first attempt]
I don't buy this for a second. How many sources of media and news did people then have compared to now? I would argue that they have _many_ more now.
Without a doubt many more publications under many new names are available to the consuming public today than previously. However, if one checks the corporate ownership of these various publications one notices a single fact about almost all: they are almost all owned by as few as nine media conglomerates, worldwide. From FAIR's webpage (Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting) here are several sources for this assertion:
This is only a few links from The Corporate Ownership page, which was itself a link from the primary Media Woes page, containing links to discussions on the limited range of acceptable debate (something Noam Chompsky wrote a whole book about, see: Manufacturing Consent), significant advertiser and corporate ownership influence, manipulation of debate by pressure groups, and PR as news (how simple corporate press releases get prime news coverage without even basic fact checking).
The news media is an absolute mess... and frankly if it were not for the net I think we should expect even greater limitations in the range of acceptable debate and discourse throughout society. The net threatens the media conglomerates because it allows individuals to shift the debate not only away from what's acceptable to the power elite, but even worse: away from advertising influence, which is the whole point behind a unified corporate media -- shove those ads down our throats and get us to buy crap we wouldn't otherwise even consider. For this reason it's reasonable to fear a Time Warner/AOL merger simply because it represents not just more media power consolidating into fewer conglomerate corporations, but because it represents the largest ISP merging with one of the largest Media Conglomerates. If they succeed in controlling the individual expression of users and content distributors while monopolizing Internet access they will succeed in stripping the Internet of it's primary benefit to society at large.
I note that without organizations like FAIR, and a free press unhindered by corporate pressure, advertising pressure, and government pressure no one would know about stories like this: Government Psychological Warfare operatives work as interns at CNN News, and thus no one would have forced CNN to explain themselves with this statement. That's right, our government had five PSYOPS personel working directly in CNN's Newsroom and NOT A SINGLE PRIMARY NEWS OUTLET HAS EVER PUBLISHED THIS STORY!
I understand why FSF wants/needs the copyright assigned to the FSF so that the efforts remains fairly unbastardized, but what did he mean by the M$ comment?
He's suggesting that many of the kernel coders are Microsoft employees hacking Linux on the side for fun. A side effect of this is that Microsoft probably owns any code written by an employee (even in their off hours) because of the non-compete contract they probably signed as a prerequisite of employment. If there is significant amounts of code written by MS employees (and MS forces employees to sign such contracts -- standard industry practice) then it's true that all said code is owned by Microsoft and they could revoke its license.
I doubt it's half the code base, however. Though I suspect it's probable that if certain employers found out they owned chunks of the Linux kernel because of this we might see some real legal battles in the near future... it's not just Microsoft that sees Linux as a threat to their market strategy.
Should we treat dogs/dolphins/chimpanzees/octopi as 'tools'?
If ever you wanted to study intelligent alien life here on earth, the Octopus is the one creature best suited for this goal. It's an invertebrate cephalopod, nothing like a mammal; meaning you're looking at a semi-sentient creature which diverged from our evolutionary line a good hundred million years past. Basically, you're looking at a very smart snail. They use copper to move oxygen within their blood. They can control multiple arms and hundreds of individual suckers at will without blinking an eye. They signal emotional states by changing skin color at will, also using this advantage as camouflage. They have excellent eyesight, long term and short term memory, they can solve complex problems and may even be able to logically reason if taught how.
All of the creatures you mention, as well as the elephant and parrot, deserve better treatment than we humans provide. These creatures are damn near sentient and could provide a wealth of information on how self-perception works in the real world. Plus it just seems wrong to me that we maintain this dichotomy between humans and other obviously self aware creatures simply because it's inconvenient.
You may believe that your God gave you all the planet to do with as humanity wishes, but frankly even if that were the case don't you think He would find our indifference to their plight both shocking and disgusting? And how is that different from mechanical consciousness?
Personally, I agree with the hard-AI community that self awareness is a computational process which can be replicated mechanically. From that perspective I must conclude that either we value those creatures which behave with some self determination and will by providing legal rights to them as we do to ourselves, or we might as well not value the sanctity of human life either.
While the Beowulf patches come out of NASA, there's a whole bunch of stuff out there which isn't written in the US at all. For example, the best session clustering technology for Linux is MOSIX which is put out by Hebrew University in Isreal. To my knowledge this isn't export restricted at all, and is released as a set of patches against the main kernel tree. Anyone with basic System Administration skills could set up a Mosix cluster pretty quickly.
If you're less interested in interactive clustering and need computational load balancing instead, there's a whole slew of batch queuing packages available from GNU QUEUE to the many derivatives of NQS out there. Here's the a href="http://www.cmpharm.ucsf.edu/~srp/batch/syste ms.html">Yahoo Batch Queuing Page" for a short list of many popular packages.
I don't think the US government could stop any nation from purchasing commodity hardware manufactured from around the world, installing a basic Linux or BSD distribution, and setting up a batch queue or other type of basic cluster. Never mind that a sufficiently serious government could just up and write their own... in my department at BBN (Speech and Natural Language Processing) we use an internally written batch manager which is surprisingly simple... all written in C.
$300 is chicken feed to save your career from a long term disability disaster. What do you stand to earn across a 30 year career, and how much would you stand to lose from a permanant RSI disability? If you're experiencing any minor hand pain now, it's time to plan for taking care of your hands for the future. Otherwise, plan instead for a McJob flipping burgers...
Slashdot Mirror
The subcommittee interviewed these witnessed:
- Keith Rhodes, GAO
- Harris Miller, Technology Association of America
- Sandra England, McAfee, A Network Associates Company
- Peter Tippett, ICSA.net
The level of outright lying regarding the security issues of Windows and Outlook, along with standard congressional grandstanding in front of cameras was just astonishing -- with only one representative taking Sandra England (and the rest of the witnesses) to task for misrepresenting that the love bug affected all computers -- and was not just a Windows/Outlook problem. At the end of that exchange Peter Tippet finally agreed that [paraphrase] 'OK, 97% of all computers were affected' and then pointed out that the very features that Microsoft just discontinued (embedded scripting in document data) was a critical necessity. The most frightening testimony came from Peter Tippet (who appeared the most technically savvy) who would not admit that the problem was client side security in Windows/Outlook and instead recommended draconian laws to resolve the issue. From memory:- Criminalizing the creation of all viruses or self replicating programs -- even for research purposes.
- Making "hacking" a federal crime with severe punishments
- criminalizing THE HIRING of "white hat hackers" so that anyone who has EVER been convicted of "hacking" will be permanently barred from employment in the computer industry.
- Of course they recommended against any corporation hiring "hacker" security firms and recommended that these organizations be criminalized.
In whole, the entire subcommittee hearing appeared entirely designed to further the cause of McAffee Associates and Microsoft, while recommending insane laws plainly unnecessary to further the cause of Internet security -- but they certainly do benefit the witnesses.I was most dismayed by Peter Tippet, who really did appear to understand the technical arguments and seemed to just be lying through his teeth to our congress critters.
SHAME ON YOU PETER TIPPET!
Big radio is a waste of time; I won't even bother listening to commercial radio any longer. I live in the Boston area and we have a reasonable collection of college radio stations from BC, MIT, and Harvard. BC, under the call letters WZBC is the best college station I've ever heard... someone should arrange to netcast their "No Commercial Potential" program.
You must be near that Berkeley station that plays Negativland's weekly radio show... no?
Just wondering...
Hey, thanks for the link! I used to have a pretty good collection of Tackhead records, but they were swiped by a "friend" many years back. All I have left is the "alien cover" album sleeve... and for the life of me I can't find another copy in any record stores I've been trolling; it's pretty obscure stuff.
I've got a good collection of old Cabaret Voltaire, Throbbing Gristle, Zoviet France, Controlled Bleeding, Negativland (including the wallpaper sample album!), Nocturnal Emissions, Psychic TV, among others (oh wow I just found a Tackhead "Whats your mussion now?" EP... cool!). This stuff is just itching to get converted to mp3 -- I don't consider that so much a copyright violation as preserving history. Oh well, feel free to email me if you'd like to discuss this further.
I'm refering to Gary Clail's early work; just wondering...
I just got hit with a $29.00 late fee for being one day late for a $35.00 renual payment. That's almost 100% of my yearly charge!
You have been warned...
So 3DFX it is, unless NVidea responds to this consumer demand. Frankly, I would prefer to buy the best hardware. NVidea? Are you listening?
How many other computer systems can you think of that have been running for the last twenty years? How many other systems have had the tens of thousands of hours of testing and, even more importantly, have worked flawlessly every time?
:-)
Believe it or not, but the PDP/LSI-11 series of computer is still in use in sheet metal and other factory floors even today. The damn thing is a workhorse which lives in production even after the death of Digital -- long after DEC stopped supporting the hardware.
Not that this diminishes the value of your point.
OK,
for the record you may republish any and all of my posts as long as you cite the author... please just be responsible and follow basic Open Content guidelines.
However, I think that if you're going to use our posts from a public forum, you ought to make the book freely available on the web. This only seems appropriate given how you obtained (at least some) of it's content, and considering how important some of that material might be for teens unable or unwilling to purchase the publication on paper.
rms,
:-)
Are you willing to situate the FSF coding room in the William H. Gates building should MIT decide to shut down your building in Tech Sq. and offer the FSF another free office?
I've noticed a significant amount of construction in that area, with at least one of those buildings demolished, but I don't know about the plans for the building in which the AI lab (and the FSF coding offices) reside. So, would you move to downtown Boston, where your business office resides, or enjoy the -- considerable -- irony of locating at least part of the FSF in a building named after the founder of Microsoft?
So, let's deal with your assertions:
What a ridiculous assumption. Paper is expensive to manufacture and dangerous to the environment, especially considering how much of it we throw into landfills after a single use (never mind the toxic waste released during manufacture). The limit to electronic print distribution is the initial cost of a reader plus the limited display technology of current readers on the market. Don't expect a Palm III to become the standard for electronic newspapers. But new display technology coming down the road makes your point moot:
- Xerox PARC's Electronic Paper This technology takes two plastic sheets and immerses tiny beads, one side coated black the other white, inside a wax-like substrait sandwiched between the two sheets. With a small electric current any arbitrary ball twists in the substrait and thus changes it's color. This technology should allow for a flexible 8 1/2 x 11" sheet which can represent at least 300dpi... easily good enough for an electronic newspaper or book.
- Then there's AT&T's eink, another technology which promises similar display capabilities.
Based on what I've read these two technologies aren't the only up and coming new display systems for electronic printing, but they do appear the most promising. They should be cheap to manufacture, they're flexible, and they provide reasonable display resolution for the task at hand: reading. If you could buy a re-usable reader like this for twenty, fifty, or even a hundred dollars why would you ever want to buy a printed paperback book, magazine, or newspaper?Regarding rms's opinions on Copyright law... did you read the article he wrote? Did he say that all copyright law should be abolished? Did he say that all capitalism should be abolished? Did he suggest we would be better off working in Coal mines because that's real work? I sure didn't see anything like that in what he wrote.
Personally, given the DMCA and subsection 1201(a)(1) I'm seriously concerned that we're heading toward a society where even basic "fair use" rights for libraries, citizens conducting scholarly research, and the right to read an item multiple times are in serious jeopardy. Given the technical restrictions imposed by 1201(a)(1), a publisher could limit a reader to a specific city (just stick a GPS chip in that ebook reader), a specific user (just stick a fingerprint or retina scanner on the reader), and even have the publication wipe itself out upon first reading. As others (and myself in a previous post in this thread) point out, this could herald a real Orwellian world in which newspapers and publications could rewrite history after the fact; destroying the public historical record. And what happens if libraries, and their users, aren't exempt from paying a license fee for each access of an electronic publication?
And finally, where did Adam Smith ever claim that Capitalism depended on intellectual property law? That's a pretty ridiculous claim on the surface.
From what I read he's arguing that if he wraps the primary purpose of a GPL'd library around a tiny bit of code -- well, sure the program ought to be released under the GPL. But what if he derives a library from some GPL'd work and it's only a small part of a large whole? Why should he have to release under the GPL?
:-)
Because those are the licensing terms of the code he's re-using. Period. If he doesn't like that nifty bit of mp3 code he can re-implement from scratch... and if it's a small piece of the whole code-base it shouldn't cost a significant amount of time, in relation to the whole project, to code that bit up. Of course, if the original authors decide to grant him special rights to derive an LGPL'd library from their code-base in order to include it in his proprietary (or otherwise non-free license) application... well then, point moot.
Sooooo, when were those first released? It ain't just yesterday....
All of this is public record, but I remember seeing much of this in the late eighties and early nineties. rms and the FSF wrote (and continue to write) a HELL of a lot of useful software -- all of which they give away for free. This doesn't undermine the wonderful contributions of BSD, MIT, CMU, and the many other Open Source and Free Software contributors; I just wanted to point out that your assertion that rms wasn't writing software early on is completely bogus and contradicts my personal experience.
As for your rant on licensing... well, I disagree. And as for being trolled... naaaa, but sometimes I feel compelled to reply in order to set the record straight. hmmmm... guess that means I HAVE been trolled... uh oh, don't want to go there (we all must enjoy some measure of self-delusion
It's very simple. Short of requesting a change of license from the author, if you decide to derive a library from someone else's GPL'd work you must meet the terms of the original license. Many libraries are released under the GPL... the LGPL now stands for "Lessor General Public License", and any reference it may have had to "Library" has been removed at rms's request. Please see the GNU Licensing page for details on the differences between the GPL and LGPL, as well as Project GNU's philosophy behind each.
First of all I want to say that fundamentally I disagree with your final point, but that I find this an insightful and well written comment. I'll repeat what I understand of your point so that we can find common ground upon which to debate:
- The medium is not the information -- when information is tied to a physical medium it's possible to control copying the information by restricting access to manufacturing the medium.
- By monopolizing the manufacturing process for mass distribution of any arbitrary information, a manufacturer (in this case publisher) could make money exploiting the considerable capitol expense of "tooling up." IOW: printing presses weren't cheap so for end users it made more sense just to pay for the service of mass printing.
- This created a natural economic cycle of publisher producing a product and service for consumers which electronic copying breaks, because to copy electronically requires almost no capital expense (don't need to buy no expensive printing press).
- Therefore, publishers need some form of legal regulation which limits copying and allows imposing some form of "per-use" fees so that publishers and artists can earn a living, or the economic incentive to create new works will dissipate -- along with said artistic expression.
Are we on the same wavelength here?OK, so here's where I disagree given the DMCA that's currently our law:
While I think it's reasonable for publishers to require a fee for multiple use, the DMCA goes way too far. For example, I can accept that when I purchase an ebook I should have to pay twice if I want to display that ebook on two display devices at once; just like I should have to pay twice to run a program on two separate computers at once (or two separate instances of a program). Though I argue that an exception should be made for libraries -- readers who enter a library should have access to all the materials therein without the requirement for paying copying fees. But the DMCA, and specifically section 1201(a)(1) of the DMCA provides for Draconian copy protectionschemes. For example it would be possible to electronically limit a newspaper (eventhough there's an exception for newspapers in the DMCA the newspaper lobby is working hard to remove these exceptions; here's their reply comment to the US Copyright office regarding the DMCA and section 1201(a)(1) to this effect.) like so:
This could have the chilling effect of destroying the history of newsprint -- creating just what Orwell prognosticated in 1984 with newspapers that were edited for "truthfullness" after the fact -- and no one could either legally stop, or even track such changes to the historical record.
The way 1201(a)(1) in the DMCA is worded could very possibly kill off libraries in this country if we go all electronic in the publishing industry. This is far more serious than just the DeCSS and Matel (CyberPatrol) cases, though they threaten to set legal precedent which could harm citizens liberties dramatically in the near future.
I think what most people are reacting to here is not that these companies want to earn money selling artistic works... fine by me. But that they plan on implementing a monopoly on distribution which could very well effect the rights of individuals to distribute their own copyrighted works. Just look at UCI TA (Infoworld article) and how the provisions in these state bills (and at least one law -- Virginia) derail basic "Fair Use" for legal reverse engineering, copying for archival, and even allow for remote disabling software on demand by publishers... this is not democratic, nor does it even meet the basic guidelines of original Copyright intent. What people fear is that big business, along with our congress critters, are getting together to forge new laws which will greatly undermine our basic civil liberties WRT information flow and copyright. They've shown themselves quite willing to trample all over our basic human rights set forth in the Constitution and Bill of Rights (War on Drugs -- government stealing property without due process, spraying protesters willy nilly with chemical pepper spray and limiting their right to hold signs of protest in Seattle, police killing innocent unarmed citizens and then releasing confidential juvenile records in defense, using electronic surveillance technologies to spy on the world for private corporate gain, illegally funding the Contra war in direct violation of congress... the list goes on and on). So citizens are rightly fearful of what kind of authority might be handed over to monopoly content distributors over the next several years.
I really DO fear the possibility of these outcomes. This is NOT grand conspiracy theory; it's reasonable prediction based on past events. When ya'll figure out it's the grays, those bug eyed alien fiends behind all this -- well then we can start arguing about grand conspiracies.
Now for something entirely different: you seem happy with Corel Office. Can you use it with the binaries installed on your hypothetical NFS file server (we nfs-mount /usr/local to share common applications, for instance)? Can you even use documents that reside on NFS filesystems (/home in my case)? That at least seems a bug in winelib and did not work with Canvas, so I'm interested whether it works with Corel apps which use Wine, or whether it might be a problem that is related to autofs rather than NFS ...
Nope, I don't own and have never used the Linux Corel Office. I do have Corel WordPerfect 8 and like it very much, however, I don't have any direct experience with C-Office and can't comment on your problem. There's an explanation as to why Corel chose the Wine Execution Environment over compiling natively with winelib in one of the comment threads above. But based on various print reviews I don't think I'll want to buy Corel Office until they resolve some speed and stability issues... especially considering how well StarOffice and WordPerfect 8 meets my needs.
Once those speed and stability issues of Corel Office are resolved I expect this will further the use of Linux in Law offices dramatically... and that's as good place to wedge open the desktop market as any. So far I like Corel as a company and can't really complain about their behavior... yet.
Well according to the AC score 5 post on this topic Corel's apps do use the Wine execution environment, while Canvas 7 is, in fact, compiled natively and linked against winelib.
I want to note one thing about wine: many system DLL's have been re-written from scratch by the Wine team. So, if your Windows application relies on DLL's which have already been re-written for Wine you should be able to cross compile the app to many platforms (again baring portability issues). Winelib is a highly cool thing which should ease ports of many popular Windows apps over to the Linux world dramatically.
And if you're bitching about how slow Corel Office is because it's a Windows app running under the Wine Execution environment... well, return the program and get your money back. Personally, I think it's a pretty good deal and thank Corel for the hard work they've put into their product and for releasing their changes to Wine back to the community. Wine is released under the BSD license -- Corel had NO LEGAL RESPONSIBILITY to release their Wine changes back to the community yet they did so anyway. I, for one, thank them for this generosity.
Of course it's x86 only. After all, Canvas (just as Corel's stuff) is based on WINE, with all the drawbacks this sort of 'port' has.
winelib is as portable as any other C code -- it's the wine execution environment which requires x86, simply because those Windows applications were originally compiled for x86. Think about it... just because someone uses winelib to port an application over from Windows, this doesn't exclude them from compiling winelib and their application to any $ARCH -- as long as they have the source for all of the application (portability issues aside).
Corel may be scoffed at by some people who don't like what they're doing with Linux, or their lisences that are questionable in terms of violating the GPL, but they are actually helping a great deal in making Linux usable as a desktop OS for non-programmers.
I don't know of any GPL violations in any of the code and/or products they've released. There has been some consternation between some Wine users (I haven't seen any developers complain) WRT: Corel's internal code fork of Wine for their product releases. Wine is under the BSD license and as such this is strictly allowed. I think some of the Debian people had an issue or two which wound up being resolved to everyone's satisfaction...
Can you substantiate the claim that they've broken the GPL with any of their product releases?
Sorry, looks like I messed up one of the links:
Government PSYOPS story from FAIR can be found here, and a second source from counterpunch can be found here. I also note that the PSYOPS officers were working in the CNN Newsroom during the Kosovo War. This does not bode well for objective reporting from conglomerate corporate sources during time of war.
I don't buy this for a second. How many sources of media and news did people then have compared to now? I would argue that they have _many_ more now.
Without a doubt many more publications under many new names are available to the consuming public today than previously. However, if one checks the corporate ownership of these various publications one notices a single fact about almost all: they are almost all owned by as few as nine media conglomerates, worldwide. From FAIR's webpage (Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting) here are several sources for this assertion:
- The Global Media Giants: The nine firms that dominate the world
- Corporate Ownership Matters: The Case of NBC"
- Media Monopoly: Long History, Short Memories -- ABC Was Born Out of Fear of Media Consolidation"
This is only a few links from The Corporate Ownership page, which was itself a link from the primary Media Woes page, containing links to discussions on the limited range of acceptable debate (something Noam Chompsky wrote a whole book about, see: Manufacturing Consent), significant advertiser and corporate ownership influence, manipulation of debate by pressure groups, and PR as news (how simple corporate press releases get prime news coverage without even basic fact checking).The news media is an absolute mess... and frankly if it were not for the net I think we should expect even greater limitations in the range of acceptable debate and discourse throughout society. The net threatens the media conglomerates because it allows individuals to shift the debate not only away from what's acceptable to the power elite, but even worse: away from advertising influence, which is the whole point behind a unified corporate media -- shove those ads down our throats and get us to buy crap we wouldn't otherwise even consider. For this reason it's reasonable to fear a Time Warner/AOL merger simply because it represents not just more media power consolidating into fewer conglomerate corporations, but because it represents the largest ISP merging with one of the largest Media Conglomerates. If they succeed in controlling the individual expression of users and content distributors while monopolizing Internet access they will succeed in stripping the Internet of it's primary benefit to society at large.
I note that without organizations like FAIR, and a free press unhindered by corporate pressure, advertising pressure, and government pressure no one would know about stories like this: Government Psychological Warfare operatives work as interns at CNN News, and thus no one would have forced CNN to explain themselves with this statement. That's right, our government had five PSYOPS personel working directly in CNN's Newsroom and NOT A SINGLE PRIMARY NEWS OUTLET HAS EVER PUBLISHED THIS STORY!
Pretty scary, huh?
I understand why FSF wants/needs the copyright assigned to the FSF so that the efforts remains fairly unbastardized, but what did he mean by the M$ comment?
He's suggesting that many of the kernel coders are Microsoft employees hacking Linux on the side for fun. A side effect of this is that Microsoft probably owns any code written by an employee (even in their off hours) because of the non-compete contract they probably signed as a prerequisite of employment. If there is significant amounts of code written by MS employees (and MS forces employees to sign such contracts -- standard industry practice) then it's true that all said code is owned by Microsoft and they could revoke its license.
I doubt it's half the code base, however. Though I suspect it's probable that if certain employers found out they owned chunks of the Linux kernel because of this we might see some real legal battles in the near future... it's not just Microsoft that sees Linux as a threat to their market strategy.
Should we treat dogs/dolphins/chimpanzees/octopi as 'tools'?
If ever you wanted to study intelligent alien life here on earth, the Octopus is the one creature best suited for this goal. It's an invertebrate cephalopod, nothing like a mammal; meaning you're looking at a semi-sentient creature which diverged from our evolutionary line a good hundred million years past. Basically, you're looking at a very smart snail. They use copper to move oxygen within their blood. They can control multiple arms and hundreds of individual suckers at will without blinking an eye. They signal emotional states by changing skin color at will, also using this advantage as camouflage. They have excellent eyesight, long term and short term memory, they can solve complex problems and may even be able to logically reason if taught how.
All of the creatures you mention, as well as the elephant and parrot, deserve better treatment than we humans provide. These creatures are damn near sentient and could provide a wealth of information on how self-perception works in the real world. Plus it just seems wrong to me that we maintain this dichotomy between humans and other obviously self aware creatures simply because it's inconvenient.
You may believe that your God gave you all the planet to do with as humanity wishes, but frankly even if that were the case don't you think He would find our indifference to their plight both shocking and disgusting? And how is that different from mechanical consciousness?
Personally, I agree with the hard-AI community that self awareness is a computational process which can be replicated mechanically. From that perspective I must conclude that either we value those creatures which behave with some self determination and will by providing legal rights to them as we do to ourselves, or we might as well not value the sanctity of human life either.
While the Beowulf patches come out of NASA, there's a whole bunch of stuff out there which isn't written in the US at all. For example, the best session clustering technology for Linux is MOSIX which is put out by Hebrew University in Isreal. To my knowledge this isn't export restricted at all, and is released as a set of patches against the main kernel tree. Anyone with basic System Administration skills could set up a Mosix cluster pretty quickly.
e ms.html">Yahoo Batch Queuing Page" for a short list of many popular packages.
If you're less interested in interactive clustering and need computational load balancing instead, there's a whole slew of batch queuing packages available from GNU QUEUE to the many derivatives of NQS out there. Here's the a href="http://www.cmpharm.ucsf.edu/~srp/batch/syst
I don't think the US government could stop any nation from purchasing commodity hardware manufactured from around the world, installing a basic Linux or BSD distribution, and setting up a batch queue or other type of basic cluster. Never mind that a sufficiently serious government could just up and write their own... in my department at BBN (Speech and Natural Language Processing) we use an internally written batch manager which is surprisingly simple... all written in C.
Alas, I don't have $300 to blow on a keyboard.
$300 is chicken feed to save your career from a long term disability disaster. What do you stand to earn across a 30 year career, and how much would you stand to lose from a permanant RSI disability? If you're experiencing any minor hand pain now, it's time to plan for taking care of your hands for the future. Otherwise, plan instead for a McJob flipping burgers...