It works the same today as it did when books had to be re-typeset by hand
That's exactly the problem I'm talking about.
Copyright is about protecting ideas - not about protecting physical objects
But it's currently implemented in terms of mapping to physical media. It controls copying the information from one instance of media to another. The problem is that computers with hard drives can instantly create thousands of these new copies, so attempting to regulate this action is almost impossible without taking away computers' general ability to copy.
If people want to protect ideas, they should come up with a scheme to do it that doesn't depend on keeping track of all the ephemeral copies that may be in computers. The costs of accounting for that (in terms of user restrictions, lost rights, government interference and abuse) aren't worth the economic benefits to content creators provided by tracking all those individual copies.
You can get on your high horse and say "The content belongs to the creator, so the current system must be preserved as-is". However, I can get on a higher horse and say that the current system is unfair because I can buy a physical copy and view it over and over again without the creator getting one more cent. In a perfect world, the creator would get compensated each time somebody enjoyed their work. The current system is a very crude approximation of what would really be fair. However, that ideal system is currently unworkable and unenforceable, so nobody attempts to impelement it, and we use the less fair current system. Well, the current system is rapidly becoming unimplementable, too. I'm saying that we should shift to another system not focused on the hopeless goal of managing countless billions of individual copies without ruining everyone's computer systems.
I'm sorry, but in order for the market to work and content to move into the digital age and away from physical media, there has to be DRM.
Not really. A more appropriate action would be to develop a different way to pay content creators than trying to map the analogy of physical items made out of molecules onto abstract concepts made from pure information.
This whole scheme was a kludge when it was invented a couple of centuries ago, but it worked OK so long as there were only a couple of printing presses in each city. It really started getting strained when technologies such as photocopiers and tape recorders became available to the public. It almost broke down totally with the availability of hard drives and the Internet to transmit copies. Now, with the world moving towards the sale of content with no media at all, the concept is becoming absurd. There's no physical media left at all on which to map the physical property analogy.
Trying to simulate the physical object mapping with pure encryption and software algorithms is like trying to hold together jello with rubber bands. It's not going to work unless the government takes away your right to own a general-purpose computing device without encrypted links to your monitor and speakers. I assert that the freedoms that give you the right to own unhindered computer hardware are more important than the economic benefits that content producers would get from unbreakable DRM schemes. I don't care if the amount of content created and the number of producers the economy supports would be significantly decreased. Locking down every information handling tool available to us is just not worth it because the same DRM tools that content creators use to ensure payment will undoubtedly also be used by governments and private parties to monitor, snoop and control all of the information that we use.
I'm amazed at the volume of posts here, defending the Chinese Communists
Most posts aren't defending the Chinese government. They're criticizing the fact the the US Congress continues to defend the Chinese government by virtue of granting Most Favored Nation trade status (as well as financing much of the US budget with funds loaned by the Chinese), and then hypocritically turns around and hounds individual companies over their trade activities with China.
It's the government's job to set policy, not individuals and companies. The problem here is that the government refuses to set the right policy, but then grandstands and criticizes private parties for acting according to the bad policies the government has put in place.
Scientists monitoring air quality in California are baffled by an alarming rise in the amount of bird dander in our atmosphere.
Re:Java's regexp support is yucky
on
Beyond Java
·
· Score: 1
And it all comes down to "hey, look at how few I use! Isn't it cool?" Software development is much more than that..
Did I say that? No.
But while we're on the subject, do you claim that Java's byzantine regex library is an example of a good API? Are you able to use it without having to refer to the documentation each and every time? There's more to software development than typing in and wading through the same redundant boilerplate code over and over again.
I'm a bit confused as to how it takes us longer to get to the moon now than it did in the 60s.
Back then, they only had to include about 50 kilobytes of software in the rocket. This time, there's probably going to be hundreds of megabytes of code. That's going to take a long time to write.
Re:Java's regexp support is yucky
on
Beyond Java
·
· Score: 1
I think that the main problem here isn't that RE's aren't built in to the syntax, but instead it's that Java sucks because it needs so much boilerplate to get anything done. For example, in Python it's also a 2-liner, but using a standard library instead of special syntax:
m = re.match(r'Email\s*:\s*([^\s]*).*?Name\s*:\s*([^\s ]*)', re.I)
email, name = m and m.groups() or ('nowhere', 'nobody')
I actually like this better because it doesn't use a bunch of hidden magic values like Perl creates for each RE definition, and because I can hold on to the match object if I want and use its functionality in a straightforward way.
Keep in mind that during Intel's entire history they've released one desktop processor that had a bug sufficient to require a recall.
You mean only one *major* recall. There have been other times where early steppings of their processors had to be swapped out. For example, the early versions of the 486 were horribly broken, and the virtual memory bus logic was barely functional. Most PC manufacturers ended up delaying shipments for a couple of quarters and had to put in a bunch of crazy waitstate logic into the bus controllers to avoid the bugs.
However, IBM had plans to hit the market really early with 486 piggyback board support that they designed into their 386 PS/2 systems. They shipped a bunch of these as soon as the 486s were out, but these all had to be recalled once the extent of the breakage became clear.
My Fedora system downloaded and installed *binary* patches for this problem last night. Just because this article mentions source patches doesn't necessarily mean that binary patches aren't available.
We don't have a Computing Device and Software Agency do we?
If drugs had the same failure rate as today's computer hardware and software, we'd all be dead by now.
Which means the following: The FDA labels a drug with ROYGB, red, orange, yellow, green, blue based on the amount of clinical data supporting the drug.
Your plan actually sounds ok to me. However, you're not advocating totally eliminating the FDA like the GP post was.
Are there private companies working on machines to try to capture these items? I'm sure it would be too expensive to ship back down to earth, but I wouldn't doubt that the raw materials might be worthy in a future moon or mars base.
Undoubtedly. All sorts of companies are vying to get in on the vast profits that will be generated by a moonbase. Sending paint chips and bolt fragments to the moon is going to be a veritable goldmine, and entrepreneurs are chomping at the bit to get in on the action.
Your approach to drug deregulation was tried in the 19th century, and it was an abysmal failure. Most drugs on the market were ineffective, dangerous, or even lethal.
Today, this unregulated approach continues with the "herbal remedy" market. Once again, most of these products are ineffective or dangerous.
Where do you get the idea that things would be any different if no approval were needed for real drugs today?
It's still nowhere near as bad as most proprietary EULAs, where you are forced to read a 10,000 words of all-caps legalese inside non-resizeable 2-inch by 2-inch scrolling text box.
It may not be entirely as sinister as you suggest. There are several open source licenses currently out there that already have patent retaliation terms like that. The GPL is currently incompatible with these licenses, and this would remove that conflict. (Removing such conflicts was one of the goals of this revision.)
No covered work constitutes part of an effective technological protection
measure: that is to say, distribution of a covered work as part of a system
to generate or access certain data constitutes general permission at least
for development, distribution and use, under this License, of other
software capable of accessing the same data.
It doesn't say that you can't make a DRM protection measure out of the GPL'd code. What it says is that if you redistribute the GPL'd code, then you agree not to use it as such a measure, because you agree to not try to prevent people accessing the data by other means. If you don't agree, that's fine, but then you have no right to redistribute the GPL'd code.
The WMF flaw was patched ahead of schedule and it works fine.
Indeed. Here's the original schedule, as found in the source to Windows 3.0:
/* * SATABORTPROC - Error Callback * * FIXME: Could this be a security issue? We really * need to get somebody to take a look at this sometime * within the next 20 years or so. XXX Need to recheck * around the 2007 timeframe. -AB 5/86 */
is it really wise to change the logo to something that has no inherent brand identification, and to drop the incredibly recognizable 'Pentium'?"
Yes, the brand is incredibly recognizeable.
Unfortunately, a lot of people have already placed that brand the same mental category that holds other well-known brands such as Jenn-Air, Caloric and Viking. Getting them to reassign the association may be harder than just dropping it and starting a new brand.
The simple answer is that the Saturn V was manned and there is only so fast you can accelerate before killing everyone onboard.
Simple, but wrong. The real answer is because they had to slow down again to enter the moon's orbit. Building up excess speed would just require a longer braking maneuver and more fuel mass to do it. The food and breathing oxygen for a couple of extra days weighed less than that fuel would have. This Pluto probe is not going to be making any kind of stop at the the earth's moon, so it can go full out for velocity.
And high speed and high acceleration aren't necessarily related. With a gentle enough acceleration, people could survive moving up to near lightspeed just fine.
This is because the design is based on the fact that a pressurized pop can can support far more weight than an unpressurized pop can.
The balloon tanks were cool, but they're not used on the Atlas V:
The newest version of Atlas, the Atlas V, is an Atlas in name alone as it contains little Atlas technology. It no longer uses balloon tanks nor 1.5 staging, but incorporates a rigid framework for its first stage booster much like the Titan family of vehicles.
Plug-in hybrids are a lame idea, especially in the US where electricity is more expensive than gasoline.
Electricity is often about 10 cents/KWh. A gallon of gasoline holds about 34 KWh, so at $2.50/gal that's 7.3 cents/KWh.
The deal is that most of the thermodynamic losses involved in creating electric power happen before you pay for it. You might get 80% of the electrical power you pay for delivered to your tires after battery and motor losses. With gasoline, your engine is lucky to extract only 25% of the fuel's energy as useful work. That would make your fuel costs for a gasoline powered car at least twice as expensive than an electrically powered one for the same amount of work done.
I don't know if you'd get any useful power out of this scheme, but one thing's for sure: you'd better invest in a quality surge protector before you try plugging your gear into a tree.
It's kind of funny how a 200MHz Pentium, a chip with performance in the same ballpark as a Cray-1 supercomputer, ended up being unusable even as a mere typewriter. I guess that's life in the wacky world of modern software.
Slashdot Mirror
That's exactly the problem I'm talking about.
Copyright is about protecting ideas - not about protecting physical objects
But it's currently implemented in terms of mapping to physical media. It controls copying the information from one instance of media to another. The problem is that computers with hard drives can instantly create thousands of these new copies, so attempting to regulate this action is almost impossible without taking away computers' general ability to copy.
If people want to protect ideas, they should come up with a scheme to do it that doesn't depend on keeping track of all the ephemeral copies that may be in computers. The costs of accounting for that (in terms of user restrictions, lost rights, government interference and abuse) aren't worth the economic benefits to content creators provided by tracking all those individual copies.
You can get on your high horse and say "The content belongs to the creator, so the current system must be preserved as-is". However, I can get on a higher horse and say that the current system is unfair because I can buy a physical copy and view it over and over again without the creator getting one more cent. In a perfect world, the creator would get compensated each time somebody enjoyed their work. The current system is a very crude approximation of what would really be fair. However, that ideal system is currently unworkable and unenforceable, so nobody attempts to impelement it, and we use the less fair current system. Well, the current system is rapidly becoming unimplementable, too. I'm saying that we should shift to another system not focused on the hopeless goal of managing countless billions of individual copies without ruining everyone's computer systems.
Not really. A more appropriate action would be to develop a different way to pay content creators than trying to map the analogy of physical items made out of molecules onto abstract concepts made from pure information.
This whole scheme was a kludge when it was invented a couple of centuries ago, but it worked OK so long as there were only a couple of printing presses in each city. It really started getting strained when technologies such as photocopiers and tape recorders became available to the public. It almost broke down totally with the availability of hard drives and the Internet to transmit copies. Now, with the world moving towards the sale of content with no media at all, the concept is becoming absurd. There's no physical media left at all on which to map the physical property analogy.
Trying to simulate the physical object mapping with pure encryption and software algorithms is like trying to hold together jello with rubber bands. It's not going to work unless the government takes away your right to own a general-purpose computing device without encrypted links to your monitor and speakers. I assert that the freedoms that give you the right to own unhindered computer hardware are more important than the economic benefits that content producers would get from unbreakable DRM schemes. I don't care if the amount of content created and the number of producers the economy supports would be significantly decreased. Locking down every information handling tool available to us is just not worth it because the same DRM tools that content creators use to ensure payment will undoubtedly also be used by governments and private parties to monitor, snoop and control all of the information that we use.
Most posts aren't defending the Chinese government. They're criticizing the fact the the US Congress continues to defend the Chinese government by virtue of granting Most Favored Nation trade status (as well as financing much of the US budget with funds loaned by the Chinese), and then hypocritically turns around and hounds individual companies over their trade activities with China.
It's the government's job to set policy, not individuals and companies. The problem here is that the government refuses to set the right policy, but then grandstands and criticizes private parties for acting according to the bad policies the government has put in place.
Scientists monitoring air quality in California are baffled by an alarming rise in the amount of bird dander in our atmosphere.
Did I say that? No.
But while we're on the subject, do you claim that Java's byzantine regex library is an example of a good API? Are you able to use it without having to refer to the documentation each and every time? There's more to software development than typing in and wading through the same redundant boilerplate code over and over again.
Back then, they only had to include about 50 kilobytes of software in the rocket. This time, there's probably going to be hundreds of megabytes of code. That's going to take a long time to write.
m = re.match(r'Email\s*:\s*([^\s]*).*?Name\s*:\s*([^\s ]*)', re.I)
email, name = m and m.groups() or ('nowhere', 'nobody')
I actually like this better because it doesn't use a bunch of hidden magic values like Perl creates for each RE definition, and because I can hold on to the match object if I want and use its functionality in a straightforward way.
Why of course it's WGN in Chicago, former home of Harry Caray and the most well-known incarnation of Bozo the Clown.
You mean only one *major* recall. There have been other times where early steppings of their processors had to be swapped out. For example, the early versions of the 486 were horribly broken, and the virtual memory bus logic was barely functional. Most PC manufacturers ended up delaying shipments for a couple of quarters and had to put in a bunch of crazy waitstate logic into the bus controllers to avoid the bugs.
However, IBM had plans to hit the market really early with 486 piggyback board support that they designed into their 386 PS/2 systems. They shipped a bunch of these as soon as the 486s were out, but these all had to be recalled once the extent of the breakage became clear.
My Fedora system downloaded and installed *binary* patches for this problem last night. Just because this article mentions source patches doesn't necessarily mean that binary patches aren't available.
If drugs had the same failure rate as today's computer hardware and software, we'd all be dead by now.
Which means the following: The FDA labels a drug with ROYGB, red, orange, yellow, green, blue based on the amount of clinical data supporting the drug.
Your plan actually sounds ok to me. However, you're not advocating totally eliminating the FDA like the GP post was.
Did that little detail deter the snakeoil salesmen? Nope.
Undoubtedly. All sorts of companies are vying to get in on the vast profits that will be generated by a moonbase. Sending paint chips and bolt fragments to the moon is going to be a veritable goldmine, and entrepreneurs are chomping at the bit to get in on the action.
Today, this unregulated approach continues with the "herbal remedy" market. Once again, most of these products are ineffective or dangerous.
Where do you get the idea that things would be any different if no approval were needed for real drugs today?
Only the Unix "wheel" group seems to qualify as DRM: Why GNU su does not support the `wheel' group
It's still nowhere near as bad as most proprietary EULAs, where you are forced to read a 10,000 words of all-caps legalese inside non-resizeable 2-inch by 2-inch scrolling text box.
It may not be entirely as sinister as you suggest. There are several open source licenses currently out there that already have patent retaliation terms like that. The GPL is currently incompatible with these licenses, and this would remove that conflict. (Removing such conflicts was one of the goals of this revision.)
Indeed. Here's the original schedule, as found in the source to Windows 3.0:
Yes, the brand is incredibly recognizeable.
Unfortunately, a lot of people have already placed that brand the same mental category that holds other well-known brands such as Jenn-Air, Caloric and Viking. Getting them to reassign the association may be harder than just dropping it and starting a new brand.
Simple, but wrong. The real answer is because they had to slow down again to enter the moon's orbit. Building up excess speed would just require a longer braking maneuver and more fuel mass to do it. The food and breathing oxygen for a couple of extra days weighed less than that fuel would have. This Pluto probe is not going to be making any kind of stop at the the earth's moon, so it can go full out for velocity.
And high speed and high acceleration aren't necessarily related. With a gentle enough acceleration, people could survive moving up to near lightspeed just fine.
The balloon tanks were cool, but they're not used on the Atlas V:
Electricity is often about 10 cents/KWh. A gallon of gasoline holds about 34 KWh, so at $2.50/gal that's 7.3 cents/KWh.
The deal is that most of the thermodynamic losses involved in creating electric power happen before you pay for it. You might get 80% of the electrical power you pay for delivered to your tires after battery and motor losses. With gasoline, your engine is lucky to extract only 25% of the fuel's energy as useful work. That would make your fuel costs for a gasoline powered car at least twice as expensive than an electrically powered one for the same amount of work done.
I don't know if you'd get any useful power out of this scheme, but one thing's for sure: you'd better invest in a quality surge protector before you try plugging your gear into a tree.
It's kind of funny how a 200MHz Pentium, a chip with performance in the same ballpark as a Cray-1 supercomputer, ended up being unusable even as a mere typewriter. I guess that's life in the wacky world of modern software.