should be using open source software. Yeah Germany.
Without the source how can a government be sure that the software cannot be used to spy on them or to be used to attack them? Also governments hold onto inforation for a long time, such things as census data are held for a century before being relased. Wouldn't do much good if in the future it was a case of "Here's the 2011 census, but no-one had been able to read it since 2015"
Governments should be using software they can trust, and trust is earned, never gained.
This would tend to exclude proprietary software, especially propriatary software which does not originate from within their own nation. Without an ability to actually see the souce code you'd be in effect asking a government to put faith into a foreign commercial entity. Why should a (not corrupt) government even think of doing this?
The first DVD she bought was Buffy the Vampire Slayer season 1. (She's a big fan) I've only now begun to watch this series and am seriously hooked. So we spent a whole weekend watching Buffy Season 1, me asking a million questions trying to catch up, and when we watched all 12 episodes, we wanted MORE. But Buffy Season 2 on DVD doesnt come out until June.
Actually everything up to the end of season 5 is available on DVD. US produced TV series appear to in an odd situation where DVD releases are not always region 1 first...
But wait. Somewhere, locked and hidden away, some broadcaster has tapes of every Buffy episode to date, or TNG or Voyager. And I have a fast ass net connection. In fact, our cable provider gives us net access AND digital cable. So what's the fucken problem people?!?
Because cable companies simply provide a variation on broadcast television. Rather than providing video on demand.
Just because the earliest copyright laws were bad doesn't mean that copyright laws are bad in general.
It dosn't mean that current copyright laws are good. Especially since they look not unlike the oldest ones...
We fixed them a long time ago, not recently - at least as far back as the U.S. Constitution, no? We took a tyrannical system that supported the king and made it into one that provided incentive to the author.
Who's "we" the original version of US copyright law isn't that different from the "Queen Anne copyright statute" which certainly didn't originatate in the US.
The printing press is what created the business of being a writer. Before movable type, if you were a writer, you wrote your work in longhand. If you were very lucky, a scribe would spend months re-copying your text, and two copies would exist. There was no such thing as a professional writer before movable type. Writing was a labor of love, something done out of dedication to an ideal, be it religion, truth, or whatever.
The nearest you could have to a professional writer would be someone employed by a rich "patron". Who might well take an interest in the work (since they were paying for it.) Even today how many authors can live simply from writing alone?
That article talks of publishers being granted infinite-duration copyrights, even on the works of authors long dead, in return for their aid in implementing Government censorship.
It also talks of how our Founding Fathers wanted nothing to do with that type of copyright.
Thus it was written into the US constitution that such rights were assigned to the creator of the work and were for a limited duration A centuries later we have something which would have the "Founding Fathers" turning in their graves and US based corporate entites trying to force that model of "copyright" on the entire planet. Something has obviously gone badly wrong somewhere.
With the printing press came the idea of selling many copies, and eventually the authors demanded their piece of the pie, but it could have very well continued such that they sold their work up front and the publishers took the risks and made the money.
It's also perfectly possibly for the publisher to have control of the work. With the creator(s) still recieving royalties. Indeed the music, film & TV industries appear to work something like this.
I understand and grant that the companies that produce the media that consumers enjoy (music, TV, movies, etc.) must make a profit in order to stay in business and continue production. What I do not understand, is why these media producers feel that the correct course of action is to attack technologies that threaten their current business models.
Because if things get shaken up it is likely to be the middlemen, publishers, distributers, etc who will be most affected. They are happy with the current business models which earn them lots of money.
These companies pay their executives millions of dollars per year to create revenue streams and increase profit margins. Why can't those executives show some crativity and use the new technologies themselves?
How can they do this and ensure that they stay "top dog"? In the face of possible competition from people who only deal in the new technologies and don't have to also operate "legercy media."
I said streaming, not downloading. If the site stays up for long enough, then most people won't worry about finding a no commercials version. (If they do, it means the ads are too intrusive, and that's something the broadcast company can control.)
Though there is also the question of what proportion of time devoted to advertisment content would be viable. Especially considering that in some cases there might be more programme trailers than commercial advertisments.
make it impossible to separate the programming from the ads. The only way that I know of to do this is through product placement.
Product placement is rather restricted in application. It's one thing for Buffy Summers to be using things which happen to be on sale now in the US (and especially California) looks rather daft if Sub Commander T'Pol appears to do all her shopping by time machine...
The reason that you can't get a DVD is that it would kill the advertising value of reruns. Some shows go into reruns for decades, and the networks get paid for every showing.
A situation where DVD region codes might actually work against the US. Since reshowing programmes for decades is not the norm everywhere else.
How could television networks fight this? It's even simpler: Write more obvious product placements into the shows...
Product placement only works well for contempoary drama. For things such as historical or SF it just looks incredibly stupid.
Yeah, but make it a Diet Coke. Ya know, it tastes just as good, but only has 2 calories. Fitness eval is coming up next month and I have to drop a few pounds...
Then you have some of the audience going "what's Diet Coke?" (It isn't actually called that in some places.) Unless you make different edits of the programme for different places.
Most of the TV shows you find on programs like Morpheus have the commercials edited out. I can only speculate on the reasoning, but my guess is that they are edited out to make the download time shorter.
Another possible reason is that these downloads may well be going to someone who wouldn't otherwise get to see the programme for months, even years. The ads simply wouldn't be relevent to them anyway. What would be the point of someone in Europe or Australia watching ads from North America. (Possibly vice-versa towards the end of a series run.)
How could Television networks fight this? It's simple: Provide streaming content from their website. Let's say that UPN provided a streaming version of Enterprise, for example. They could release it 24 hours after the show is initially aired. (This way, the original broadcast still has commercial/timeslot value) The requirement is that I have to fill out information about myself so they can target ads to me. Then, what they do, is when the server streams down the show, it inserts in ads targeted to my demographic at the same time that the original broadcast aird commercials.
This may well be a different demographic breakdown from a TV broadcast. On the other hand they need to have advertising from all over the planet of sufficent quantity provide about 30% of the content. A "hour" programme made for the US market is only actually about 40 minutes long.
This provides an interesting new twist to the Ad model. Not only is the demographic more far reaching, but it's no longer tied to a time-slot. If somebody discovers Enterprise 2 years into the show's run, they'll likely go back and watch the first episodes to get up to speed. This means that those commercials get aired again.
Or more usefully they'd get current commercials rather that 2 year old commercials. What would be the point of showing commercials for products, promotions even companies which may no longer exist?
*IF* they comes with lessened restrictions -- such "premium" customers should be able to get fixed IPs and run servers as they wanted up to the limit of the contract.
Unless some kind of NAT is used every customer on a cable modem/ADSL needs at least one IP address. It may actually be more hassle and costly to emulate the kind of IP assignment you'd get on a dialup where IP's are assigned to each "modem". Also why does an ISP need to provide free webspace if the customer can run their own web server. They could sell space on their web servers as "premium"...
I have no problems with bandwidth caps that are in place to prevent abuse of the system.
Or even some kind of bandwidth throttling, which only comes into operation when use use of bandwidth is actually an issue.
Bandwidth hogs end up driving up the price for everyone but if the caps are in place to bleed every last nickel (American or otherwise) out of each user that doesn?t make sense.
It appears to make sense sort term. But long term could simply antagornise customers.
As for the Home to Business use comparison: The average business connection has a lot more users that spend a lot more time online.
It depends exactly what they are doing with the link. Things like peer-peer file sharing can burn up a lot more bandwidth than web browsing through a proxy or email.
Because then people who use their unlimited bandwidth accounts the way they were meant to be used will have to pay even more.
Then maybe the supplier shouldn't be selling the product as "unlimited". e.g. something more like "you have x amount of bandwidth, subject to availability and contention".
Rogers shouldn't be selling a service they can't provide.
Actually no one should be selling something they can't provide. Otherwise they will come unstuck when the customer expects (quite possibly with the full force of the civil courts behind them) to get whatever they have bought.
I wonder what would happen if the ISP decided that it cannot live up to its terms and just terminated the contract? So in essence, they change the terms and then say something to the effect that "we cannot provide you with unlimited bandwidth anymore.>
This would be a matter of the exact contracts involved and the relevent laws governing them. Service companies often appear to rely on customer ignorance of the law. Not infrequently using contract terms which are either questionable or bogus (in so much as applicable statute or case law to void the clausei existed before it was even written.) Indeed it's mot impossible that a court would take the view that a "contract" which allows one party to change things unilaterally (especially if it dosn't require any notification) does not mean the legal definition of a "contract" at all. Remember the story refers to a Canadian company, rather than a US one.
SecurityFocus.com has absolutely nothing on their site about this article.
Somehow this dosn't suprise me
I would find it at very best to be poor journalism to label an operating system more secure just based on the fact that it has less published vulnerabilities.
This isn't actually journalism it's a type of political properganda. Involving selectivly quoting an impartial third party...
His mathematics is pretty bad. To get the security problems for Linux, he adds all security announcements from each of the major distributions - completely ignoring that most of those announcements are for the same bug. The Linux number is thus about a factor 4 too high.
Wonder how impartial an entity called "wininformant" is likly to be in the first place?
Also, the Windows announcements are for the OS itself only, while the Linux announcements cover programs that do not count as OS stuff under Windows.
Even with Microsoft's creative definition of what makes up an "operating system".
An American patent lasts only 17 years, and if you allot a good seven years or so to get the thing out of the lab, then you're looking at a useful lifetime of maybe ten years. Copyrights, on the other hand, are really scary. Originally they were to last 75 years, but recent lobbying by the Hollywood crowd has resulted in legislation under which it is not clear that copyrights will ever expire.
Originally copyrights and patents in the US lasted about the same length of time. 75 years was already a huge extension of term.
Ontario was approached by the same company, asking for payments for all persons tested in the province. The request was (very) publicly rejected as an improper attempt to license a scientific discovery.
Maybe they didn't sue because Canadian judges appear to have a more common sense attitude to their job than their US peers.
Another problem is, that unlike music, films, books, software and whatnot life has it's own builtin copy-mechanism, in fact, once it's out it's sometimes hard to stop it from replicating or crossing borders.
Also remember that with quite a lot of crops the bit of the plant which is important is tied up with the plant's reproduction. All cereals are seeds, for example.
What will we see now? Genes with builtin DRM schemes (like if you don't spray your crop with a specific shortlived virus it won't survive the next month)?
They's have a tough time patenting this technique, Jurassic Park would qualify as "prior art". Also all this would do is mean that any plant which mutated not to need the virus symbiote would do well at spreading it's genes around.
One the other hand, if you take a piece of DNA and use it in a particlar process that is not naturally occuring, then you can patent the novel aspects of the process. DNA is just a chemical , and it is protected in exactly the same way as less complex chemicals.
The parts which make up DNA are not especially complex chemicals. They can be made fairly easily. DNA has the unusual property that it can be copied, duplicating the entire molecule. Also a slightly different type of copying of DNA creates mRNA. Stick DNA in the appropriate part of a biological organism and it will automatically be copied. This is the problem with attempting to apply patent laws to genetically modified organisms they simply don't make sense.
If the product of the research is easily reverse-engineered and copied companies won't be motivated to do GE research unless they are protected by patent.
If the product of the research is a complete organism then copying is very much taken for granted. A mitosis inhibited bacterium isn't that much use. Problem is that when patents were though up the idea of a self replicating "product". Also organisms tend to swap their genes around. Bacteria use plasmids. Many organisms (including those which biotech companies are often interested in) use meiosos and sexual reproduction to increase the genetic diversity of the species. Existing laws already lead to utter daftness where farmers who's crops are contaminated by GM crops are treated as stealing "IP". When the plants are just doing what comes naturally. In many cases the required crop is either a fruit or seed (sometimes a flower), so mess around with the plant's reproductive system and you don't have anything worth growing for agriculture in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
should be using open source software. Yeah Germany.
Without the source how can a government be sure that the software cannot be used to spy on them or to be used to attack them? Also governments hold onto inforation for a long time, such things as census data are held for a century before being relased. Wouldn't do much good if in the future it was a case of "Here's the 2011 census, but no-one had been able to read it since 2015"
Governments should be using software they can trust, and trust is earned, never gained.
This would tend to exclude proprietary software, especially propriatary software which does not originate from within their own nation.
Without an ability to actually see the souce code you'd be in effect asking a government to put faith into a foreign commercial entity. Why should a (not corrupt) government even think of doing this?
The first DVD she bought was Buffy the Vampire Slayer season 1. (She's a big fan) I've only now begun to watch this series and am seriously hooked. So we spent a whole weekend watching Buffy Season 1, me asking a million questions trying to catch up, and when we watched all 12 episodes, we wanted MORE. But Buffy Season 2 on DVD doesnt come out until June.
Actually everything up to the end of season 5 is available on DVD. US produced TV series appear to in an odd situation where DVD releases are not always region 1 first...
But wait. Somewhere, locked and hidden away, some broadcaster has tapes of every Buffy episode to date, or TNG or Voyager. And I have a fast ass net connection. In fact, our cable provider gives us net access AND digital cable. So what's the fucken problem people?!?
Because cable companies simply provide a variation on broadcast television. Rather than providing video on demand.
Just because the earliest copyright laws were bad doesn't mean that copyright laws are bad in general.
It dosn't mean that current copyright laws are good. Especially since they look not unlike the oldest ones...
We fixed them a long time ago, not recently - at least as far back as the U.S. Constitution, no? We took a tyrannical system that supported the king and made it into one that provided incentive to the author.
Who's "we" the original version of US copyright law isn't that different from the "Queen Anne copyright statute" which certainly didn't originatate in the US.
The printing press is what created the business of being a writer. Before movable type, if you were a writer, you wrote your work in longhand. If you were very lucky, a scribe would spend months re-copying your text, and two copies would exist. There was no such thing as a professional writer before movable type. Writing was a labor of love, something done out of dedication to an ideal, be it religion, truth, or whatever.
The nearest you could have to a professional writer would be someone employed by a rich "patron". Who might well take an interest in the work (since they were paying for it.) Even today how many authors can live simply from writing alone?
That article talks of publishers being granted infinite-duration copyrights, even on the works of authors long dead, in return for their aid in implementing Government censorship.
It also talks of how our Founding Fathers wanted nothing to do with that type of copyright.
Thus it was written into the US constitution that such rights were assigned to the creator of the work and were for a limited duration
A centuries later we have something which would have the "Founding Fathers" turning in their graves and US based corporate entites trying to force that model of "copyright" on the entire planet.
Something has obviously gone badly wrong somewhere.
With the printing press came the idea of selling many copies, and eventually the authors demanded their piece of the pie, but it could have very well continued such that they sold their work up front and the publishers took the risks and made the money.
It's also perfectly possibly for the publisher to have control of the work. With the creator(s) still recieving royalties.
Indeed the music, film & TV industries appear to work something like this.
I understand and grant that the companies that produce the media that consumers enjoy (music, TV, movies, etc.) must make a profit in order to stay in business and continue production. What I do not understand, is why these media producers feel that the correct course of action is to attack technologies that threaten their current business models.
Because if things get shaken up it is likely to be the middlemen, publishers, distributers, etc who will be most affected. They are happy with the current business models which earn them lots of money.
These companies pay their executives millions of dollars per year to create revenue streams and increase profit margins. Why can't those executives show some crativity and use the new technologies themselves?
How can they do this and ensure that they stay "top dog"? In the face of possible competition from people who only deal in the new technologies and don't have to also operate "legercy media."
I said streaming, not downloading. If the site stays up for long enough, then most people won't worry about finding a no commercials version. (If they do, it means the ads are too intrusive, and that's something the broadcast company can control.)
Though there is also the question of what proportion of time devoted to advertisment content would be viable. Especially considering that in some cases there might be more programme trailers than commercial advertisments.
make it impossible to separate the programming from the ads. The only way that I know of to do this is through product placement.
Product placement is rather restricted in application. It's one thing for Buffy Summers to be using things which happen to be on sale now in the US (and especially California) looks rather daft if Sub Commander T'Pol appears to do all her shopping by time machine...
The reason that you can't get a DVD is that it would kill the advertising value of reruns. Some shows go into reruns for decades, and the networks get paid for every showing.
A situation where DVD region codes might actually work against the US. Since reshowing programmes for decades is not the norm everywhere else.
How could television networks fight this? It's even simpler: Write more obvious product placements into the shows...
Product placement only works well for contempoary drama. For things such as historical or SF it just looks incredibly stupid.
Yeah, but make it a Diet Coke. Ya know, it tastes just as good, but only has 2 calories. Fitness eval is coming up next month and I have to drop a few pounds...
Then you have some of the audience going "what's Diet Coke?" (It isn't actually called that in some places.) Unless you make different edits of the programme for different places.
Most of the TV shows you find on programs like Morpheus have the commercials edited out. I can only speculate on the reasoning, but my guess is that they are edited out to make the download time shorter.
Another possible reason is that these downloads may well be going to someone who wouldn't otherwise get to see the programme for months, even years. The ads simply wouldn't be relevent to them anyway. What would be the point of someone in Europe or Australia watching ads from North America. (Possibly vice-versa towards the end of a series run.)
How could Television networks fight this? It's simple: Provide streaming content from their website. Let's say that UPN provided a streaming version of Enterprise, for example. They could release it 24 hours after the show is initially aired. (This way, the original broadcast still has commercial/timeslot value) The requirement is that I have to fill out information about myself so they can target ads to me. Then, what they do, is when the server streams down the show, it inserts in ads targeted to my demographic at the same time that the original broadcast aird commercials.
This may well be a different demographic breakdown from a TV broadcast. On the other hand they need to have advertising from all over the planet of sufficent quantity provide about 30% of the content. A "hour" programme made for the US market is only actually about 40 minutes long.
This provides an interesting new twist to the Ad model. Not only is the demographic more far reaching, but it's no longer tied to a time-slot. If somebody discovers Enterprise 2 years into the show's run, they'll likely go back and watch the first episodes to get up to speed. This means that those commercials get aired again.
Or more usefully they'd get current commercials rather that 2 year old commercials. What would be the point of showing commercials for products, promotions even companies which may no longer exist?
*IF* they comes with lessened restrictions -- such "premium" customers should be able to get fixed IPs and run servers as they wanted up to the limit of the contract.
Unless some kind of NAT is used every customer on a cable modem/ADSL needs at least one IP address. It may actually be more hassle and costly to emulate the kind of IP assignment you'd get on a dialup where IP's are assigned to each "modem".
Also why does an ISP need to provide free webspace if the customer can run their own web server. They could sell space on their web servers as "premium"...
I have no problems with bandwidth caps that are in place to prevent abuse of the system.
Or even some kind of bandwidth throttling, which only comes into operation when use use of bandwidth is actually an issue.
Bandwidth hogs end up driving up the price for everyone but if the caps are in place to bleed every last nickel (American or otherwise) out of each user that doesn?t make sense.
It appears to make sense sort term. But long term could simply antagornise customers.
As for the Home to Business use comparison: The average business connection has a lot more users that spend a lot more time online.
It depends exactly what they are doing with the link. Things like peer-peer file sharing can burn up a lot more bandwidth than web browsing through a proxy or email.
Because then people who use their unlimited bandwidth accounts the way they were meant to be used will have to pay even more.
Then maybe the supplier shouldn't be selling the product as "unlimited". e.g. something more like "you have x amount of bandwidth, subject to availability and contention".
Rogers shouldn't be selling a service they can't provide.
Actually no one should be selling something they can't provide. Otherwise they will come unstuck when the customer expects (quite possibly with the full force of the civil courts behind them) to get whatever they have bought.
I wonder what would happen if the ISP decided that it cannot live up to its terms and just terminated the contract? So in essence, they change the terms and then say something to the effect that "we cannot provide you with unlimited bandwidth anymore.>
This would be a matter of the exact contracts involved and the relevent laws governing them. Service companies often appear to rely on customer ignorance of the law. Not infrequently using contract terms which are either questionable or bogus (in so much as applicable statute or case law to void the clausei existed before it was even written.)
Indeed it's mot impossible that a court would take the view that a "contract" which allows one party to change things unilaterally (especially if it dosn't require any notification) does not mean the legal definition of a "contract" at all.
Remember the story refers to a Canadian company, rather than a US one.
SecurityFocus.com has absolutely nothing on their site about this article.
Somehow this dosn't suprise me
I would find it at very best to be poor journalism to label an operating system more secure just based on the fact that it has less published vulnerabilities.
This isn't actually journalism it's a type of political properganda.
Involving selectivly quoting an impartial third party...
His mathematics is pretty bad. To get the security problems for Linux, he adds all security announcements from each of the major distributions - completely ignoring that most of those announcements are for the same bug. The Linux number is thus about a factor 4 too high.
Wonder how impartial an entity called "wininformant" is likly to be in the first place?
Also, the Windows announcements are for the OS itself only, while the Linux announcements cover programs that do not count as OS stuff under Windows.
Even with Microsoft's creative definition of what makes up an "operating system".
An American patent lasts only 17 years, and if you allot a good seven years or so to get the thing out of the lab, then you're looking at a useful lifetime of maybe ten years.
Copyrights, on the other hand, are really scary. Originally they were to last 75 years, but recent lobbying by the Hollywood crowd has resulted in legislation under which it is not clear that copyrights will ever expire.
Originally copyrights and patents in the US lasted about the same length of time. 75 years was already a huge extension of term.
Ontario was approached by the same company, asking for payments for all persons tested in the province. The request was (very) publicly rejected as an improper attempt to license a scientific discovery.
Maybe they didn't sue because Canadian judges appear to have a more common sense attitude to their job than their US peers.
Another problem is, that unlike music, films, books, software and whatnot life has it's own builtin copy-mechanism, in fact, once it's out it's sometimes hard to stop it from replicating or crossing borders.
Also remember that with quite a lot of crops the bit of the plant which is important is tied up with the plant's reproduction. All cereals are seeds, for example.
What will we see now? Genes with builtin DRM schemes (like if you don't spray your crop with a specific shortlived virus it won't survive the next month)?
They's have a tough time patenting this technique, Jurassic Park would qualify as "prior art".
Also all this would do is mean that any plant which mutated not to need the virus symbiote would do well at spreading it's genes around.
One the other hand, if you take a piece of DNA and use it in a particlar process that is not naturally occuring, then you can patent the novel aspects of the process. DNA is just a chemical , and it is protected in exactly the same way as less complex chemicals.
The parts which make up DNA are not especially complex chemicals. They can be made fairly easily.
DNA has the unusual property that it can be copied, duplicating the entire molecule. Also a slightly different type of copying of DNA creates mRNA.
Stick DNA in the appropriate part of a biological organism and it will automatically be copied. This is the problem with attempting to apply patent laws to genetically modified organisms they simply don't make sense.
If the product of the research is easily reverse-engineered and copied companies won't be motivated to do GE research unless they are protected by patent.
If the product of the research is a complete organism then copying is very much taken for granted. A mitosis inhibited bacterium isn't that much use. Problem is that when patents were though up the idea of a self replicating "product". Also organisms tend to swap their genes around. Bacteria use plasmids. Many organisms (including those which biotech companies are often interested in) use meiosos and sexual reproduction to increase the genetic diversity of the species.
Existing laws already lead to utter daftness where farmers who's crops are contaminated by GM crops are treated as stealing "IP". When the plants are just doing what comes naturally. In many cases the required crop is either a fruit or seed (sometimes a flower), so mess around with the plant's reproductive system and you don't have anything worth growing for agriculture in the first place.