Viewers, welcome to tonights show, and first let me summarise what this case is about: * Behold legally bought PC: (point to PC, and wave receipt) * Behold legally bought DVD Player: (point to player, and wave receipt) * Behold legally bought Operating system (point to (say) redhat box, and wave receipt) * Behold legally bought DVD: (point to DVD, and wave receipt)
(wave court order) This is an attempt to stop a person playing a legally bought DVD on a legally bought player using a legally bought operating system on a legally bought computer.
The alleged crime? Theft. Apperently some people wish it to be a crime to use your *own* equipment to play your *own* DVD, without "permission". I ask the viewers to consider which party that the "theft" tag is more appropiate to: A person trying to play legally bought DVD on his system, or, the company that's trying to stop people playing that same legal DVD.
This is the self same company that requires players to have built-in incompatibilties between DVD's. There may be those of you that remember getting videos from the USA, and paying money to convert them to european format. It was "one of those things" you said, different standards grew up. How annoyed would you be if when a new standard came out, with a chance to fix all that, those self same problems were deliberitly included. Forget about getting a gift of a DVD from your aunt in the states - to have the "priveledge" of viewing your birthday present, you'd have to pay more money to do so. And this is the company that call playing your own movies "theft"? "Physician, heal thyself."
IMO, this case is not about pirating, as the water muddiers would like you to believe. It's simply about control, money, and power. Some people want to control what you watch, charge you dearly for the priviledge, and take children to court if you don't like it. That sounds more like Long John Silver tatics than a move to "combat piracy".
This case is alleged to be a breech of copyright laws, but the plaintiffs seem to have forgotten the spirit as well as the words of that law. One of the things copyright law allows, no, actually *protects* is "fair use". Is playing a DVD on your own system "fair use"? I leave that up to our viewers to decide.
Another thing I have noticed recently is an increasing number of browsers that ignore the rules on accepting invalid cookies. There are a number of criteria that a cookie must fulfil, and if it's invalid, it must be rejected. I'm mainly thinking about the domain setting. From RFC2109: To prevent possible security or privacy iolations, a user agent rejects a cookie (shall not store its information) if any of the following is true:
The value for the Domain attribute contains no embedded dots or does not start with a dot.
The value for the request-host does not domain-match the Domain attribute.
The request-host is a FQDN (not IP address) and has the form HD, where D is the value of the Domain attribute, and H is a string that contains one or more dots.
Basically, 1 means you can't set a cookie for.com, 2 means you can't set a cookie for another site, and 3 means you can only set a cookie 'up' on domain (eg www.host.co.uk can't set a cookie for.co.uk)
However, I've seen the last one uses more and more by sites, hotmail being one example. One of Hotmail's servers lc2.law5.hotmail.passport.com sets a cookie for.passport.com, which is an invalid cookie, and by rights should be rejected. Of course, if your user agent is correct about cookies, then Hotmail will not work.
This may not seem a problem if you usually browse sites with.com etc, but a lot of countries have a sub division for commerical under the country name - eg.co.uk. I don't want a site to be able to set a cookie that is valid for the entire uk commerical network, but currently there are no user agents (bar lynx which alerted me to the problem) that will reject invalid cookies like this.
I still think the best solution is an adult TLD, maybe.adt. Block it with a browser setting, and any XXX material found outside a.adt site is prosecutable after a 24-hour warning
Nice idea, but here's some questions:
What classes as XXX material? Who judges it? The user? the sender? the state/country of the sender/reciever? At what ages do you become an adult? 16/18/21? Who is prosecutable and by whom, under which countries laws? What would be classed as "obscene" in one place, would be trivial in another.
To go off on a completely different track, did you ever wonder why porn sites (or spammers) go to such lengths to try and get to you look at pages? In short, to increase "hits" and click through, because for each page load they get paid, regardless of the relevent of the user reading it.
This, I believe is what needs to be addressed, and it's irrelevent if it's spammers, selling porn, or printer ink. If you get paid per page loads, you attempt to maximise page loads. If you on the other hand, get paid by inquiries, or some other more valid metric, the emphasis changes completly.
If you educate the businesses that "click though/page views" is not a valid payment model, and move to say, inquiries, a lot of the problems will disappear as the reasons for "dragging" people to sites will reduce.
In summary, businesses think lots of "page loads" = lots of customers, so pay for lots of page loads, resulting in spamming, page grabs, etc.
Remove the pay per page load model, and I believe a lot of the lower problems will also be solved. Plus, it's easy to takcle the model, as it has *nothing* to do with porn, persay, it's just a business model to refute.
Amazon's real bottom line is their share price. If the boycott is picked up as important by investors , *then* it will affect them. What would happen if: a) People with shares in AMZN tell their brokers to sell, and mention the boycott/reasons b) People with investment plans tell their fund managers that they don't want AMZN shares in their trust, and explain reasons.
Just imagine what the slashdot effect could have on a volatile internet share price?
I like the fact that Linus is employed by a company that has no immediate interest in the success or failure of Linux. It keeps Linus honest. Can we say the same for Alan?
Yes, you could be concerned (but shouldn't, IMO) that Alan is employed by Redhat so he may have a vested interest in keeping Redhat happy, but you can also flip it completely. Redhat employ Alan, so you could say that Redhat may have a vested interest in keeping Alan happy, so it keeps RedHat honest!
One of RedHats major selling points is that they are well regarded by the linux developers, and employ several of them. If the devolopers had cause to leave, Redhat would go rapidly downhill because of the two, Redhat would lose the most if ac and RHAT parted company.
This reminds me of a bank robbery that happened in Ireland.
What happened was this: A bank was robbed in the middle of the day, over a weekend, by a group who basically drilled in through the ceiling of the bank. How did they avoid detection, you may ask? Answer - they didn't! They acted naturally, chatted to the passer-bys, commented on how rough it was working over the w/e etc. Some local people offered them cups of tea, etc.
Sometimes the easiest place to hide is in plain sight.
Getting passwords wrong is "normal", but how many of you get an "alarm" to go off is someone gets it wrong several times? A web site receives connections daily, how many people have alerts to tell them when the connection rate is "strangely" busy? Your server uses CPU time all the time, but don't many people worry if the CPU is "unusually" high? People send emails all the time, but wouldn't warning bells go off if it exceeded "expected" usage?
In lots of cases, there are systems to detect "unusual" activity, so long as that is used as a *indication* of a potential problem, and not *concrete proof* of an actual problem, I see no problem with it.
IANAL, but it seems to me that any restriction Corel places on the original download of their distribution is legal
I'm not so sure - From the GPL (emphasis mine): "You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License"
Corel could refuse to sell their software to anyone other than Tibetan monks between the ages of 65 and 70. They just can't keep those monks from redistributing the GPLed portions.
Hold on, either Corel can add any restriction (like you said), or they can't. What if one of the restrictions was "You may not redistribute any of the enclosed software." Would you still regard that as legal?
If a precedent like this is set, what would stop a company trying to add "The program is covered by the GPL, but before we allow you to download it, you must agree to waive your GPL given-rights"?
Not as far fetched as you might think, and the thin edge of the wedge is always easier to stop, if you see it coming. --
Imagine a fearful picture of an MS-dominated world sometime in the would-have-been future, where not only we've Winmodems, but also Win-monitors, Win-keyboards, Win-harddrives, Win-CPUs... and all of them have proprietary interfaces which we cannot legally write GPL'd code for.
I don't have to imagine - just look at all that is happening with DVD players. DeCSS was one of the steps required to have a GPL DVD player, and look at what happened with it. How successful will Linux be in the market, if it can't fully support DVD?
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Posting order of Nerds and Geeks:
on
Geeks vs. Nerds
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· Score: 2
Nerds post first and think second ; Geeks think first and post second --
It would be nice to have a "tick" mark on sites that have some sort of standard, but I believe that, like in security, doing something badly is worse than not doing it at all, as the consumer then [wrongly] trusts it.
So, if you don't trust truste, the next time you see a site that you need to register for, and it has the trustee mark, email a nice note to the webmaster, saying that you'd love to register, but that the trustee mark in its current state is a *deterrant* rather than a attraction to the site, and you will not register until either a) the trustee mark means something, or b) they stop endorsing it.
If enough people did this, then trustee would either disappear, or start to actually mean something.
IMO, Patents, as a general concept, are a good idea. If done correctly, they reduce trade secrets, allow the inventors to profit from them, but after a while, everyone benefits. Patents were designed to promote free access to information, and the designers understood that businesses don't just give stuff away, they need a quid pro quo hence, the exclusive access for a time period.
However, the implementation has screwed up royally. It doesn't protect the small inventor, trying to challenge a granted patent, even if it is "obviously" wrong is expensive. They are now used as weapons, bargaining chips, and the time peroid in a fast moving industry is too long.
Many patents that get posted here for discussion on/. are torn to shreads, with prior art examples, obviousness, etc. But, at that stage, they are granted, it's too late. So, what about making all patent applications public upon filing? Then allow a time period where people can object, and send in examples of prior art etc. to the patent office. This would not require a court case to reverse the decision, and hopefully it would then make it less likely for stupid patents to get through. The PR for a company trying to patent obviously would also be harmful, acting as a deterrent.
Also it would eliminate the worst type (IMO) of patent - the submarine patent. Imagine what would happen if a new technology (eg XML) that was touted as "open" was massivly deployed, then it was discovered to be patented? Think of style sheets, and it's definitly a possibility.
Having equitable prices across the board would be a nice idea in practice, and it appears that the ability to charge different prices to different "nice" OEM's was one tatic, but I don't believe it would be workable. Consider:
Say MS had to fix the price for Windows, across the board: $50. So, instead, the start a deal, where if an OEM promotes IE, they pay them per promotion. (and you can't stop them advertising) The better they promote you, the more you pay. A "nice" OEM gets paid $20 per promotion - and lookie here, IE is with all copies of windows, so that $20 per copy of windows sold we owe you. Nett result: cost is not the same across the board. --
There are far more cryptologists working on and testing Open Source crypto tech than there are in the entire film industry
That may be true, but it's not relevent to the case on hand. Yes, Open Source, with its many eyes, will often make better crypto algorithims but it's not the algorithim that's relevent here, it's the encryption keys.
What use is a file encrpyted with 3DES if the keys are supplied in the open with it? It's irrelevent how strong the encrpytion is that you use, if you have the keys. Remember that the DVD player by necessity, must have all the information required to decrypt the data. That includes the necessary keys, and thus, if it's open source, all the keys are viewable, and the encryption worthless.
It's about the only situation where open source can never work.
If you look at the same facts in different ways, you can often get quite differering views. Consider this hypothetical situation of an employee of a company Options Unlimited: whose options vest after one year.
1990: Employee A Joins and is granted 100 options at current prices of $10. Company buys back 100x$10 shares. 1991: Employee A is granted 100 options at current prices of $15. Company buys back 100x$15 shares. Employee also excercises 1990 options at $10 1992: Employee A excercises 1991 options at $15 (current value $25) and leaves company.
Article viewpoint Look at the year 1991 - Company bought 100 shares at $15 and sold 100 shares to A at $10. Wow - look at that $500 loss!
Company cost viewpoint Cost: (1990) 100 x $10, (1991) 100 x $15 buybacks = $2500 Received: (1991) 100 x $10, (1992) 100 x $15 exercised = $2500 Nett cost to company = $0
Employee benefit viewpoint Cost: (1991) 100 x $10, (1992) 100 x $15 exercise = $2500 Recieved: (1991) 100 x $15, (1991) 100 x $25 = $4000 Nett gain to employee = $1500
balance sheet progression Beginning 1992: Contains 100 x stock worth $25, cash $0 (total $2500) End 1992: contains stock $0, cash $1500 (total $1500) Change over year $1000. (which is the same as the employee made on options over the year.
Summary Options, are just that, options, and accounting for them is difficult. How do you value the 100 shares that are earmarked for employee A? at strike price? at market price? If the employee exercises them, the balance sheet value will fall, so that might suggest the strike price. However, until the options are exercised, they are still owned by the company, so the market price would seem more accurate.
I think the point that is interesting is that options are currently in the balance sheet at market price, so there is potentially a unrealised decrease in the balance sheet bottom line. If, for example, the stock price started to fall or flatten, the following might happen: A) A lot of people might start to exercise their vestible options, resulting in balance sheet decrease. B) A flatter stock would result in people wanting higher salarys, as options aren't as attractive, resulting in higher costs, lower profits, lower stock price, and repeat.
IMO, any stock that has a lot of options must keep growing, or it has the potential to start the downward spiral shown above, and if that sprial really started, it would be damn near impossible to stop
There's a famous cryptogrophy code out there, I forget the name of it, but the story is this: someone discovered it (it came in three pieces), and supposedly cracked the second piece, which explained the first and third pieces of the code would tell him where some rich treasure was. The second piece of the code was coded by using numerical values standing for the number of letters into a document, in this case the document (he claimed he discovered) was the US Constitution (so, the 10th letter in "We the people of the United States..." would be 'l').
That's the beale cyphers you're talking about. There are three sections, saying where it was buried, what it was, and who it belonged to. To date, only the second has been solved, and it was based on the declaration of independence in the same way as this cyper. It is thought that the other two sections are based on similar documents or the same document in different ways. (Or they could be a hoax)
I thought that the GPL prohibited people from charging more than press and distrobution costs for a product
The GPL is primarly concerned with free as in freedom not price, but it does refer to the latter also, as they can have a knock on effect.
The GPL does allow you to charge for the distribution of the program ("You may charge a fee for the physical act of transferring a copy, and you may at your option offer warranty protection in exchange for a fee.") That is, I can legally sell any GPL program for $100,000. (Getting someone to buy it is another matter, and in any case, they can redistrubute it for free themselves)
What you may be thinking of is the charge for the distribution of the source. On distribution of the source, the GPL states you must offer "for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code".
The GPL is extremely well thought out, that it included this. Consider a situation of the GPL without this clause: Company takes GPL program. Company modified program. Company sells program. You ask for source. Company says, that costs $100,000,000. Without this explicit mention of cost, it would be possible to "close-source" GPL products in this way. You may be legally allowed to change/distribute the source, but if you can't access the source in the first place, you're toast. --
Considering what happened with style sheets: Microsoft appears to hold a patent on them, and this was only found out after W3.org adopted them as a internet standard. (W3.org statement)
If you excuse the pun, I have a sinking feeling about the possibility of a submarine patent on any "open" standard Microsoft suggest.
For humour value, use babelfish to "translate" "Slash dot" from english to french, then the result from french to english, and repeat for a few more languages. A sample run is as follows:
1) slash dot 2) point de barre de fraction 3) not bar of fraction 4) nicht Stab des Bruches 5) not staff of the break 6) não equipe de funcionários da ruptura 7) not team of employees of the rupture
So, Slash dot is not a team of employes of the rupture!
I'm Jewish, so I couldn't care less about it's offensive value or lack thereof, but it's pretty clear it's derogatory to Catholics
I'm not being argmentive, but did you actually ask any catholics before forming this view? For instance, I'm Catholic, and I didn't find it offensive at all. In fact, I thought it was stupid to oppose the display on religious grounds. If you refused to display something because it might offend someone, you'd end up displaying nothing. I ask you, would the Mayor have taken the same action, if it would have been offensive to say, islamics, hindu, or any other religion? I think not.
One of my favourite sayings is "Offence is taken, never given" Yes, many people say that "free speech doesn't mean we have to pay you to say it", and that is true - to an extent. But, would you regard it as a breach of free speech, if the government gave the use of halls rent free only to people who said nice things about them? If a public official refuses access to some "offensive" material, then he should by right, refuse access to it all. If a public official decides what it offensive or not, based on his private opinion, then that is censorship.
As an aside, it could be worse. A few years back the Monty Python film, "Life of Brian" was banned in Ireland.
In society, there are no absolute rights. All rights are relative to how they impact on each other member of society. You are "free" to do what you like, so long as your use of your "freedom" doesn't impact adversly other people's "freedom". Of course, there is always an impact, and society, as a whole, must decide where those lines are drawn.
To finish, a quote from the film Dead Poets Society "Only in dreams are men truly free ; 'twas always thus, and always thus will be"
If a program is licensed under the GPL and a distribution with that program on it ships overseas, if a person purchases the distribution but wants the source code to the encryption program, but can't download it because it's hosted in the US
It's quite simple. According to the GPL, if you can't distribute the source according to the GPL, then you can't distribute the program at all
From the GPL (section 7) If you cannot distribute so as to satisfy simultaneously your obligations under this License and any other pertinent obligations, then as a consequence you may not distribute the Program at all
So, in the case you laid out, if you are allowed by export laws to export crypto binarys (and not source) then, if that binary is covered by the GPL, then the GPL forbids any export distribution.
In short, under the GPL, if you can't distribute the source and binary, you can't distribute either.
Anyone case to therorise what would happen if someone ex-USA got a copy of a GPL crypto binary, and asked for the source? If they say yes, they are breaking export laws, if they say no, they are breeching the GPL. Quite a dilemma. --
Slashdot Mirror
Copyright law protects "fair use". Is playing your own DVD's fair use?
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Viewers, welcome to tonights show, and first let me summarise what this case is about:
* Behold legally bought PC: (point to PC, and wave receipt)
* Behold legally bought DVD Player: (point to player, and wave receipt)
* Behold legally bought Operating system (point to (say) redhat box, and wave receipt)
* Behold legally bought DVD: (point to DVD, and wave receipt)
(wave court order) This is an attempt to stop a person playing a legally bought DVD on a legally bought player using a legally bought operating system on a legally bought computer.
The alleged crime? Theft. Apperently some people wish it to be a crime to use your *own* equipment to play your *own* DVD, without "permission". I ask the viewers to consider which party that the "theft" tag is more appropiate to: A person trying to play legally bought DVD on his system, or, the company that's trying to stop people playing that same legal DVD.
This is the self same company that requires players to have built-in incompatibilties between DVD's. There may be those of you that remember getting videos from the USA, and paying money to convert them to european format. It was "one of those things" you said, different standards grew up. How annoyed would you be if when a new standard came out, with a chance to fix all that, those self same problems were deliberitly included. Forget about getting a gift of a DVD from your aunt in the states - to have the "priveledge" of viewing your birthday present, you'd have to pay more money to do so. And this is the company that call playing your own movies "theft"? "Physician, heal thyself."
IMO, this case is not about pirating, as the water muddiers would like you to believe. It's simply about control, money, and power. Some people want to control what you watch, charge you dearly for the priviledge, and take children to court if you don't like it. That sounds more like Long John Silver tatics than a move to "combat piracy".
This case is alleged to be a breech of copyright laws, but the plaintiffs seem to have forgotten the spirit as well as the words of that law. One of the things copyright law allows, no, actually *protects* is "fair use". Is playing a DVD on your own system "fair use"? I leave that up to our viewers to decide.
This is, A.N. Other, signing off.
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From RFC2109:
To prevent possible security or privacy iolations, a user agent rejects a cookie (shall not store its information) if any of the following is true:
- The value for the Domain attribute contains no embedded dots or does not start with a dot.
- The value for the request-host does not domain-match the Domain attribute.
- The request-host is a FQDN (not IP address) and has the form HD, where D is the value of the Domain attribute, and H is a string that contains one or more dots.
Basically, 1 means you can't set a cookie forHowever, I've seen the last one uses more and more by sites, hotmail being one example. One of Hotmail's servers lc2.law5.hotmail.passport.com sets a cookie for
This may not seem a problem if you usually browse sites with
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Surely you can't patent cloning, because there is always prior art! :)
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Personally I think a suitable "nominal" fee should be in the currency that Linux is best known for - good, solid, well-written code!
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What classes as XXX material? Who judges it? The user? the sender? the state/country of the sender/reciever? At what ages do you become an adult? 16/18/21? Who is prosecutable and by whom, under which countries laws? What would be classed as "obscene" in one place, would be trivial in another.
To go off on a completely different track, did you ever wonder why porn sites (or spammers) go to such lengths to try and get to you look at pages? In short, to increase "hits" and click through, because for each page load they get paid, regardless of the relevent of the user reading it.
This, I believe is what needs to be addressed, and it's irrelevent if it's spammers, selling porn, or printer ink. If you get paid per page loads, you attempt to maximise page loads. If you on the other hand, get paid by inquiries, or some other more valid metric, the emphasis changes completly.
If you educate the businesses that "click though/page views" is not a valid payment model, and move to say, inquiries, a lot of the problems will disappear as the reasons for "dragging" people to sites will reduce.
In summary, businesses think lots of "page loads" = lots of customers, so pay for lots of page loads, resulting in spamming, page grabs, etc.
Remove the pay per page load model, and I believe a lot of the lower problems will also be solved. Plus, it's easy to takcle the model, as it has *nothing* to do with porn, persay, it's just a business model to refute.
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Amazon's real bottom line is their share price. If the boycott is picked up as important by investors , *then* it will affect them.
What would happen if:
a) People with shares in AMZN tell their brokers to sell, and mention the boycott/reasons
b) People with investment plans tell their fund managers that they don't want AMZN shares in their trust, and explain reasons.
Just imagine what the slashdot effect could have on a volatile internet share price?
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One of RedHats major selling points is that they are well regarded by the linux developers, and employ several of them. If the devolopers had cause to leave, Redhat would go rapidly downhill because of the two, Redhat would lose the most if ac and RHAT parted company.
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This reminds me of a bank robbery that happened in Ireland.
What happened was this:
A bank was robbed in the middle of the day, over a weekend, by a group who basically drilled in through the ceiling of the bank. How did they avoid detection, you may ask? Answer - they didn't! They acted naturally, chatted to the passer-bys, commented on how rough it was working over the w/e etc. Some local people offered them cups of tea, etc.
Sometimes the easiest place to hide is in plain sight.
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And this is different to computer systems how?
Getting passwords wrong is "normal", but how many of you get an "alarm" to go off is someone gets it wrong several times?
A web site receives connections daily, how many people have alerts to tell them when the connection rate is "strangely" busy?
Your server uses CPU time all the time, but don't many people worry if the CPU is "unusually" high?
People send emails all the time, but wouldn't warning bells go off if it exceeded "expected" usage?
In lots of cases, there are systems to detect "unusual" activity, so long as that is used as a *indication* of a potential problem, and not *concrete proof* of an actual problem, I see no problem with it.
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Because now, in Korea, there are banks that will give you a mortgage to buy your domain name!
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I'm not so sure - From the GPL (emphasis mine):
"You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License"
Hold on, either Corel can add any restriction (like you said), or they can't. What if one of the restrictions was "You may not redistribute any of the enclosed software." Would you still regard that as legal?
If a precedent like this is set, what would stop a company trying to add "The program is covered by the GPL, but before we allow you to download it, you must agree to waive your GPL given-rights"?
Not as far fetched as you might think, and the thin edge of the wedge is always easier to stop, if you see it coming.
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Imagine a fearful picture of an MS-dominated world sometime in the would-have-been future, where not only we've Winmodems, but also Win-monitors, Win-keyboards, Win-harddrives, Win-CPUs... and all of them have proprietary interfaces which we cannot legally write GPL'd code for.
I don't have to imagine - just look at all that is happening with DVD players. DeCSS was one of the steps required to have a GPL DVD player, and look at what happened with it. How successful will Linux be in the market, if it can't fully support DVD?
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Nerds post first and think second ; Geeks think first and post second
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It would be nice to have a "tick" mark on sites that have some sort of standard, but I believe that, like in security, doing something badly is worse than not doing it at all, as the consumer then [wrongly] trusts it.
So, if you don't trust truste, the next time you see a site that you need to register for, and it has the trustee mark, email a nice note to the webmaster, saying that you'd love to register, but that the trustee mark in its current state is a *deterrant* rather than a attraction to the site, and you will not register until either a) the trustee mark means something, or b) they stop endorsing it.
If enough people did this, then trustee would either disappear, or start to actually mean something.
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IMO, Patents, as a general concept, are a good idea. If done correctly, they reduce trade secrets, allow the inventors to profit from them, but after a while, everyone benefits. Patents were designed to promote free access to information, and the designers understood that businesses don't just give stuff away, they need a quid pro quo hence, the exclusive access for a time period.
/. are torn to shreads, with prior art examples, obviousness, etc. But, at that stage, they are granted, it's too late. So, what about making all patent applications public upon filing? Then allow a time period where people can object, and send in examples of prior art etc. to the patent office. This would not require a court case to reverse the decision, and hopefully it would then make it less likely for stupid patents to get through. The PR for a company trying to patent obviously would also be harmful, acting as a deterrent.
However, the implementation has screwed up royally. It doesn't protect the small inventor, trying to challenge a granted patent, even if it is "obviously" wrong is expensive. They are now used as weapons, bargaining chips, and the time peroid in a fast moving industry is too long.
Many patents that get posted here for discussion on
Also it would eliminate the worst type (IMO) of patent - the submarine patent. Imagine what would happen if a new technology (eg XML) that was touted as "open" was massivly deployed, then it was discovered to be patented? Think of style sheets, and it's definitly a possibility.
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Having equitable prices across the board would be a nice idea in practice, and it appears that the ability to charge different prices to different "nice" OEM's was one tatic, but I don't believe it would be workable. Consider:
Say MS had to fix the price for Windows, across the board: $50. So, instead, the start a deal, where if an OEM promotes IE, they pay them per promotion. (and you can't stop them advertising) The better they promote you, the more you pay. A "nice" OEM gets paid $20 per promotion - and lookie here, IE is with all copies of windows, so that $20 per copy of windows sold we owe you. Nett result: cost is not the same across the board.
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There are far more cryptologists working on and testing Open Source crypto tech than there are in the entire film industry
That may be true, but it's not relevent to the case on hand. Yes, Open Source, with its many eyes, will often make better crypto algorithims but it's not the algorithim that's relevent here, it's the encryption keys.
What use is a file encrpyted with 3DES if the keys are supplied in the open with it? It's irrelevent how strong the encrpytion is that you use, if you have the keys. Remember that the DVD player by necessity, must have all the information required to decrypt the data. That includes the necessary keys, and thus, if it's open source, all the keys are viewable, and the encryption worthless.
It's about the only situation where open source can never work.
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If you look at the same facts in different ways, you can often get quite differering views. Consider this hypothetical situation of an employee of a company Options Unlimited: whose options vest after one year.
1990: Employee A Joins and is granted 100 options at current prices of $10. Company buys back 100x$10 shares.
1991: Employee A is granted 100 options at current prices of $15. Company buys back 100x$15 shares. Employee also excercises 1990 options at $10
1992: Employee A excercises 1991 options at $15 (current value $25) and leaves company.
Article viewpoint
Look at the year 1991 - Company bought 100 shares at $15 and sold 100 shares to A at $10. Wow - look at that $500 loss!
Company cost viewpoint
Cost: (1990) 100 x $10, (1991) 100 x $15 buybacks = $2500
Received: (1991) 100 x $10, (1992) 100 x $15 exercised = $2500
Nett cost to company = $0
Employee benefit viewpoint
Cost: (1991) 100 x $10, (1992) 100 x $15 exercise = $2500
Recieved: (1991) 100 x $15, (1991) 100 x $25 = $4000
Nett gain to employee = $1500
balance sheet progression
Beginning 1992: Contains 100 x stock worth $25, cash $0 (total $2500)
End 1992: contains stock $0, cash $1500 (total $1500)
Change over year $1000. (which is the same as the employee made on options over the year.
Summary
Options, are just that, options, and accounting for them is difficult. How do you value the 100 shares that are earmarked for employee A? at strike price? at market price? If the employee exercises them, the balance sheet value will fall, so that might suggest the strike price. However, until the options are exercised, they are still owned by the company, so the market price would seem more accurate.
I think the point that is interesting is that options are currently in the balance sheet at market price, so there is potentially a unrealised decrease in the balance sheet bottom line. If, for example, the stock price started to fall or flatten, the following might happen:
A) A lot of people might start to exercise their vestible options, resulting in balance sheet decrease.
B) A flatter stock would result in people wanting higher salarys, as options aren't as attractive, resulting in higher costs, lower profits, lower stock price, and repeat.
IMO, any stock that has a lot of options must keep growing, or it has the potential to start the downward spiral shown above, and if that sprial really started, it would be damn near impossible to stop
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That's the beale cyphers you're talking about. There are three sections, saying where it was buried, what it was, and who it belonged to. To date, only the second has been solved, and it was based on the declaration of independence in the same way as this cyper. It is thought that the other two sections are based on similar documents or the same document in different ways. (Or they could be a hoax)
A couple of URL's I found for it are:
http://einste in.et.tudelft.nl/~arlet/puzzles/sol.cgi/cryptolog
http://tre asurehunt.miningco.com/hobbies/pastimes/treasureh
They are also mentioned in the sci.crypt FAQ
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The GPL is primarly concerned with free as in freedom not price, but it does refer to the latter also, as they can have a knock on effect.
The GPL does allow you to charge for the distribution of the program ("You may charge a fee for the physical act of transferring a copy, and you may at your option offer warranty protection in exchange for a fee.") That is, I can legally sell any GPL program for $100,000. (Getting someone to buy it is another matter, and in any case, they can redistrubute it for free themselves)
What you may be thinking of is the charge for the distribution of the source. On distribution of the source, the GPL states you must offer "for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code".
The GPL is extremely well thought out, that it included this. Consider a situation of the GPL without this clause: Company takes GPL program. Company modified program. Company sells program. You ask for source. Company says, that costs $100,000,000. Without this explicit mention of cost, it would be possible to "close-source" GPL products in this way. You may be legally allowed to change/distribute the source, but if you can't access the source in the first place, you're toast.
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Considering what happened with style sheets:
Microsoft appears to hold a patent on them, and this was only found out after W3.org adopted them as a internet standard. (W3.org statement)
If you excuse the pun, I have a sinking feeling about the possibility of a submarine patent on any "open" standard Microsoft suggest.
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For humour value, use babelfish to "translate" "Slash dot" from english to french, then the result from french to english, and repeat for a few more languages. A sample run is as follows:
1) slash dot
2) point de barre de fraction
3) not bar of fraction
4) nicht Stab des Bruches
5) not staff of the break
6) não equipe de funcionários da ruptura
7) not team of employees of the rupture
So, Slash dot is not a team of employes of the rupture!
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I'm not being argmentive, but did you actually ask any catholics before forming this view? For instance, I'm Catholic, and I didn't find it offensive at all. In fact, I thought it was stupid to oppose the display on religious grounds. If you refused to display something because it might offend someone, you'd end up displaying nothing. I ask you, would the Mayor have taken the same action, if it would have been offensive to say, islamics, hindu, or any other religion? I think not.
One of my favourite sayings is "Offence is taken, never given" Yes, many people say that "free speech doesn't mean we have to pay you to say it", and that is true - to an extent. But, would you regard it as a breach of free speech, if the government gave the use of halls rent free only to people who said nice things about them? If a public official refuses access to some "offensive" material, then he should by right, refuse access to it all. If a public official decides what it offensive or not, based on his private opinion, then that is censorship.
As an aside, it could be worse. A few years back the Monty Python film, "Life of Brian" was banned in Ireland.
In society, there are no absolute rights. All rights are relative to how they impact on each other member of society. You are "free" to do what you like, so long as your use of your "freedom" doesn't impact adversly other people's "freedom". Of course, there is always an impact, and society, as a whole, must decide where those lines are drawn.
To finish, a quote from the film Dead Poets Society
"Only in dreams are men truly free ; 'twas always thus, and always thus will be"
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If a program is licensed under the GPL and a distribution with that program on it ships overseas, if a person purchases the distribution but wants the source code to the encryption program, but can't download it because it's hosted in the US
It's quite simple. According to the GPL, if you can't distribute the source according to the GPL, then you can't distribute the program at all
From the GPL (section 7)
If you cannot distribute so as to satisfy simultaneously your obligations under this License and any other pertinent obligations, then as a consequence you may not distribute the
Program at all
So, in the case you laid out, if you are allowed by export laws to export crypto binarys (and not source) then, if that binary is covered by the GPL, then the GPL forbids any export distribution.
In short, under the GPL, if you can't distribute the source and binary, you can't distribute either.
Anyone case to therorise what would happen if someone ex-USA got a copy of a GPL crypto binary, and asked for the source? If they say yes, they are breaking export laws, if they say no, they are breeching the GPL. Quite a dilemma.
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