Right now Richard Stallman is the first link in a Google search for RMS, that's going to take time and effort for Microsoft to change, and any astroturfing attempt on Microsoft's part would probably be met by a grassroots effort to keep Stallman at the top.
RMS himself, on the other hand, doesn't need to make much effort at all to take advantage of the situation. It would be easy for him to tack a short rant about DRM, TCPA, "Trusted computing", and all the other current buzzwords onto the top of the political "action items" on his home page, so that even more mainstream people looking for information on MS/RMS are directed to GNU/RMS instead. It would also be easy to make sure that his essay The Right to Read, which looked like a paranoid rant in 1997 and looks like a prescient description of DRM policies today, gets read by many of the MS/RMS websearchers who hit his site "by mistake".
I hope this isn't a coincidence; I hope some Microsoft exec intentionally chose "RMS" as a snide little poke at Stallman - that would make it sweeter when it backfired.
"My deadbeat roommate has pissed me off once too often. On a completely unrelated note, I'm looking for ways to attract lots of spam to an email address for... er... research. Yes, research sounds plausible."
I can find web pages about Apple MacIntosh and I can find pages about growing Apple MacIntoshes, but it's hard to separate the pages about computers from those about cookery.
Have you tried adding the words "computer" or "fruit" to your query?;-)
Anything that requires government intervention to protect is against the true principles of capitalism.
You appear to have confused capitalism with anarchy. In capitalism, we have a government which (at the bare minimum) recognizes and defends property rights: it's not capital if you can't own it, and it's not very effective capital if you can't own it without running your own police force to protect it.
But this isn't exactly biological evolution we're talking about here; if one worm "goes extinct" by wiping the hard drives on it's fifty million hosts, there will still be crackers waiting to use new code (or the same code patched for a new exploit) for the next worm.
And even if the theory that destructive worms wouldn't spread as fast as non-destructive worms is true, it's not an explanation for why we haven't been seeing non-destructive worms. It's not as if criminals initially tried to exploit the RPC hole with a destructive worm and failed; the non-destructive worm was the only one written to begin with. I'd be very curious to know why - system crackers with a conscience?
Your company's website does almost nothing to explain what it is your company does.
It plays games with stock and venture capital in order to cash in on scams like the current SCOX stock bubble. This does perform the economically useful activity of taking money out of the hands of incompetent people, but unfortunately it just puts the money into the hands of unethical people instead.
Of course, by "event horizon" I mean the point at which you can put all your money into a no-risk investment and live comfortably (if not luxuriously) off of the interest without doing any more work. Of course, you'll want to have a healthy wealth reserve in the bank if you plan on doing this, because there's always the slight risk of the government doing something (like taxing wealth instead of income, or paying off the debt instead of propping up interest rates) to lower the economic return of the occupation of "having money".
In computer science, a kilobyte 2^10 bits, a megabyte 2^20 etc. Always has been, always will be.
If you want to make up new, incompatible meanings for previously standard prefixes, well, I won't stop you. But don't you think making the use of the older, more standard meanings illegal might be going a bit too far?
Don't come crying to/. just because you can't use someone elses network with paying for it when I can't use your long distance service for free.
You're lucky that the rest of the world isn't so shortsighted. In a world where nobody at all cared whether or not networks were open, these attempts to entrap IM users would be penny-ante stuff - the real crooks would be purchasing the street in front of your house and charging you ten bucks every time you needed to go to work or buy groceries.
Ask yourself: "Am I 'stealing' from Microsoft or AOL when I send an email that goes through their servers? If not, why is IM any different, and are these differences unavoidable engineering constraints or deliberate decisions by companies hoping to trap users into their proprietary network?"
I don't know who first came up with, say, binary tree data structures or A* tree search algorithms. I don't know who first came up with code for virtual memory, case-insensitive string comparisons, hierarchical filesystems, or text string templating. But say that in each of these cases, the inventor had patented whatever application they had, and the patents were to include the algorithms... where would computers be today?
It's a shame not everybody sees it that way. Try to read this story in the mindset of a litigious businessman instead of a programmer for a minute, however, and the first thing you'll think is no longer "Thank God Eolas will be challenged on this" but rather "Ray Ozzie should have filed the patent instead so he could have earned half a billion dollars!"
No matter how obvious or broad a new idea is, somebody has to be the first to think of it, and whomever does has a chance to patent it, milk it for cash, and incidentally set the progress of software back 20 years in the process. Litigious individuals have a huge advantage over actual productive inventors in this process, too, because they can simply give a vague description of the idea while a productive person would be "wasting time" implementing it.
It's not that I don't think there should be any intellectual property laws surrouding software, just that the laws are sufficient without patents getting involved. You can't copyright a design for a particular gearbox or drill bit, so you have to patent it. And, once you've done so, your competitors are just prevented from copying that particular part, not from "using gears to transmit torque" or "drilling to reach oil". With software patents (at least of the egregious kind we see on Slashdot) nobody seems to care if the patent application is so unspecific or obvious that it wouldn't help anyone else to solve the problem at hadn, or even if it is so broad as to prevent people from solving related problems. I'm not sure why, either. Is it because mechanical engineering is so much older than software engineering that everything obvious has prior art which predates the current patent system? Is it because mechanical engineering seems more accessible to laymen and lawyers who are thus better equipped to throw the obvious ideas out?
From what I've head, a space elevator is a bad idea in the sense that the atmosphere has a singificant EMF gradient between the surface of the earth and far up in the atmomsphere. Completion of such a device would case the world's largest lightning bolt ever. You'd be basically creating the largest "short" ever.
If you want to stop the problem, you add a non-conductive section to the elevator every few dozen miles. This reduces your payload weight for a given size elevator (or equivalently requires a heavier elevator for a given size payload), but would let you keep the current flow in the sections between insulators low enough that it would just keep the elevator material warm.
If you want to exploit the opportunity, you put a battery in each of those insulator sections, and you use the voltage between one section and the next to recharge the battery, which in turn recharges the elevator cars as they pass it on the cable. At the least you could reduce the energy costs (which would still be several dollars per pound of payload) to run the system, and at best you could sell excess power at the base station.
I see goals for vehicles for Earth orbit-Moon orbit-Lagrange point trips, vehicles for Earth orbit-NEO trips, vehicles for Earth orbit-Mars orbit trips, and vehicles for Lunar and Martian landings...
But you know, it's not like we've got a whole city of astronauts in Earth orbit waiting to go places yet. At the moment if we actually wanted passengers on any of those manned vehicles, we'd need to send them up on the space shuttle for around $100M a person. That's just not going to cut it.
Rather than having NASA aim at a half dozen targets and design a half dozen vehicles we could barely use, I'd like to see them (and private contractors) designing a half dozen vehicles for just one target: getting people to orbit and back cheaply. Let one company prototype a lifting body and let another one stick reusable capsules on top of "big dumb boosters"; let one laboratory try to make the DC-X scale up to orbit, and let another try a VTHL with a flyback booster. And this time, instead of picking the X-33 proposal with the most neat-sounding untested technology, let's let every serious proposal be funded to the prototype stage; that way we can also make it clear this time that the response to "It's not working yet, can we have more money sooner?" will be "No, but we can give those excess funds to those of your competitors who could put something in the air."
So then if a majority thinks that it is ok to steal, we shouldn't have any laws making it illegal?
In a word, YES.
Governance must be with the consent of the governed, or it is tyranny.
So is the phrase "tyranny of the majority" an oxymoron to you? And was slavery just fine in any state where there were more pro-slavery whites than abolitionists and blacks?
If you're interested in consent, I might suggest that the consent of the people being stolen from is of more value than the consent of people stealing.
How about Mr/Ms codemonkey couldn't afford being unemployed?
Sure they could - they just need to start robbing large stores. It's no more ethical than what SCO's doing, but at least in that case insurance companies will spread the damage around a bit.
If you take a screenshot while running at 1280x1024, and it outputs a 1600x1200 picture, then it's providing "the highest available resolution". If you take a screenshot while running at 1280x1024, and it gives you the same size image but with all the ugly "trade visual quality for speed without the user's request" hacks turned off, then it's just lying.
why don't we go to the motherlode of great SF and Fantasy novels that have never been turned into film
Because you can't turn a 400 page novel into a movie without major changes which Hollywood will probably screw up, and because "The Puppet Masters" and "Starship Troopers" proved that even easily filmable stories lose a lot in the wrong hands. A good book is not a guarantee of a good script or a good movie, and I'd rather watch a bad movie with a new story than a bad movie that might infect my memories of a good old story.
The problem is, how do you trust someone who's just broken into your systems to tell the truth about how they did it? Or to tell you everything they did? You can't, so you must look over everything, and probably reinstall your systems.
Suppose they didn't break into your system, but just told you how they could have done so. Wouldn't you want to perform the exact same expensive actions in that case, even though the white hat never broke the law?
Sounds more like David Brin's Transparent Society. The difference is that here you are potentially watched by anyone at all, in 1984 you are potentially watched by a small group of people who control the cameras.
At least with the Puppet Masters movie the stuff they screwed up was unintentional: they were unable to convey any of the intellectual horror of having an alien rider (partly because that sort of thing is hard to portray without the first person perspective that a book can give you, and partly because they turned the aliens into comic objects from the first scene where one went "Indiana Jones" with it's tendril), and so they were left with a B horror movie.
With Starship Troopers, it was all intentional. The producer was one of those who thought the book is fascist, so he produced a parody of it. He must not have found it easy to parody, either, since he ended up having to present scenes and themes diametrically opposed to the book's messages to do so.
To be precise, she didn't really spill the coffee on herself either - the spill occurred during the transfer of the cup from the employee's hand to hers.
Do you have a reference for this? Every summary of the case I've seen has claimed that she spilled the coffee after she "placed the cup between her knees and attempted to remove the plastic lid from the cup."
Think for a moment what it would take for a BIOS at some date to "securely" allow loading an as-yet unwritten DRM OS a few years in the future, while not allowing an as-yet unwritten non-DRM OS to load. IMHO, keeping stored private keys just doesn't cut it, though maybe with enough lawyers.
How about keeping stored public keys? The private key never has to leave Microsoft's hands; it just has to sign the OS kernel (or a hash of it) so that the BIOS can verify that that kernel can be loaded.
That's not a perfect solution; as the XBox people have discovered it just takes one insecure kernel to let users regain control of their system. Finding such holes won't happen instantly, though, and enforcing years of delay between the time a Windows OS can use new hardware and the time Linux can use it would probably be good enough for MS.
A DRM-aware Linux OS would not prevent you from installing and running free software.
That depends on what the software does, doesn't it?
If your free software is a driver for your sound card or video card, then DRM Linux will have to prevent it from loading without being signed by some central authority (in practice: Microsoft) who has inspected it to make sure it can't be hacked to write output to a file instead of to your speakers or monitor.
If your free software is a debugger, then DRM Linux will have to prevent it from being used on any DRM applications or on the Linux kernel, because that might allow you to inspect secret encryption keys, to copy unencrypted versions of DRM data files, or to change variables to turn off DRM protections entirely.
If your free software is one of the many screensavers that takes X screenshots, it may die with an error because DRM Linux has decided that taking a screenshot of a paused DVD movie might be an attempt to copy the video one frame at a time.
If your free software is the software suspend capability in Linux 2.6, it may fail as the DRM module will have to protect chunks of it's own memory space from being read, even by other "untrusted" parts of the kernel.
Of course, the short-term solution to this problem is "leave DRM turned off and don't use any DRM media", but unless a whole lot of people accept that solution you may find yourself cut off from a growing chunk of the internet. Every web developer who currently traps right mouse button clicks with Javascript will jump at the chance to use a slightly-less-fake method of "securing" their content, and clicking Microsoft Frontpage's eventual "don't let viewers save or copy this page" checkbox will make it a whole lot easier for everyone else to join them.
I failed to get much benefit out of my 4th grade typing class, but I still managed to learn to type quite well in the 8th grade. If four years of hunt and peck typing isn't too much to overcome, is ten years really so implausible?
Without that exception in the amendment, you could e.g. not sentence people to community service, or to participate in drug/abuse/alcohol program or basicly anything else but imprisonment.
You could always sentence someone to military service. Being 18 and male has been a "crime" to that extent for nearly a century now.
Slashdot Mirror
Right now Richard Stallman is the first link in a Google search for RMS, that's going to take time and effort for Microsoft to change, and any astroturfing attempt on Microsoft's part would probably be met by a grassroots effort to keep Stallman at the top.
RMS himself, on the other hand, doesn't need to make much effort at all to take advantage of the situation. It would be easy for him to tack a short rant about DRM, TCPA, "Trusted computing", and all the other current buzzwords onto the top of the political "action items" on his home page, so that even more mainstream people looking for information on MS/RMS are directed to GNU/RMS instead. It would also be easy to make sure that his essay The Right to Read, which looked like a paranoid rant in 1997 and looks like a prescient description of DRM policies today, gets read by many of the MS/RMS websearchers who hit his site "by mistake".
I hope this isn't a coincidence; I hope some Microsoft exec intentionally chose "RMS" as a snide little poke at Stallman - that would make it sweeter when it backfired.
"My deadbeat roommate has pissed me off once too often. On a completely unrelated note, I'm looking for ways to attract lots of spam to an email address for... er... research. Yes, research sounds plausible."
I can find web pages about Apple MacIntosh and I can find pages about growing Apple MacIntoshes, but it's hard to separate the pages about computers from those about cookery.
;-)
Have you tried adding the words "computer" or "fruit" to your query?
Anything that requires government intervention to protect is against the true principles of capitalism.
You appear to have confused capitalism with anarchy. In capitalism, we have a government which (at the bare minimum) recognizes and defends property rights: it's not capital if you can't own it, and it's not very effective capital if you can't own it without running your own police force to protect it.
But this isn't exactly biological evolution we're talking about here; if one worm "goes extinct" by wiping the hard drives on it's fifty million hosts, there will still be crackers waiting to use new code (or the same code patched for a new exploit) for the next worm.
And even if the theory that destructive worms wouldn't spread as fast as non-destructive worms is true, it's not an explanation for why we haven't been seeing non-destructive worms. It's not as if criminals initially tried to exploit the RPC hole with a destructive worm and failed; the non-destructive worm was the only one written to begin with. I'd be very curious to know why - system crackers with a conscience?
Your company's website does almost nothing to explain what it is your company does.
It plays games with stock and venture capital in order to cash in on scams like the current SCOX stock bubble. This does perform the economically useful activity of taking money out of the hands of incompetent people, but unfortunately it just puts the money into the hands of unethical people instead.
Of course, by "event horizon" I mean the point at which you can put all your money into a no-risk investment and live comfortably (if not luxuriously) off of the interest without doing any more work. Of course, you'll want to have a healthy wealth reserve in the bank if you plan on doing this, because there's always the slight risk of the government doing something (like taxing wealth instead of income, or paying off the debt instead of propping up interest rates) to lower the economic return of the occupation of "having money".
I'm sure all the early Microsoft investors feel real "tricked" right now. If only they had put their money into a nice savings account instead!
In computer science, a kilobyte 2^10 bits, a megabyte 2^20 etc. Always has been, always will be.
If you want to make up new, incompatible meanings for previously standard prefixes, well, I won't stop you. But don't you think making the use of the older, more standard meanings illegal might be going a bit too far?
Don't come crying to /. just because you can't use someone elses network with paying for it when I can't use your long distance service for free.
You're lucky that the rest of the world isn't so shortsighted. In a world where nobody at all cared whether or not networks were open, these attempts to entrap IM users would be penny-ante stuff - the real crooks would be purchasing the street in front of your house and charging you ten bucks every time you needed to go to work or buy groceries.
Ask yourself: "Am I 'stealing' from Microsoft or AOL when I send an email that goes through their servers? If not, why is IM any different, and are these differences unavoidable engineering constraints or deliberate decisions by companies hoping to trap users into their proprietary network?"
I don't know who first came up with, say, binary tree data structures or A* tree search algorithms. I don't know who first came up with code for virtual memory, case-insensitive string comparisons, hierarchical filesystems, or text string templating. But say that in each of these cases, the inventor had patented whatever application they had, and the patents were to include the algorithms... where would computers be today?
It's a shame not everybody sees it that way. Try to read this story in the mindset of a litigious businessman instead of a programmer for a minute, however, and the first thing you'll think is no longer "Thank God Eolas will be challenged on this" but rather "Ray Ozzie should have filed the patent instead so he could have earned half a billion dollars!"
No matter how obvious or broad a new idea is, somebody has to be the first to think of it, and whomever does has a chance to patent it, milk it for cash, and incidentally set the progress of software back 20 years in the process. Litigious individuals have a huge advantage over actual productive inventors in this process, too, because they can simply give a vague description of the idea while a productive person would be "wasting time" implementing it.
It's not that I don't think there should be any intellectual property laws surrouding software, just that the laws are sufficient without patents getting involved. You can't copyright a design for a particular gearbox or drill bit, so you have to patent it. And, once you've done so, your competitors are just prevented from copying that particular part, not from "using gears to transmit torque" or "drilling to reach oil". With software patents (at least of the egregious kind we see on Slashdot) nobody seems to care if the patent application is so unspecific or obvious that it wouldn't help anyone else to solve the problem at hadn, or even if it is so broad as to prevent people from solving related problems. I'm not sure why, either. Is it because mechanical engineering is so much older than software engineering that everything obvious has prior art which predates the current patent system? Is it because mechanical engineering seems more accessible to laymen and lawyers who are thus better equipped to throw the obvious ideas out?
From what I've head, a space elevator is a bad idea in the sense that the atmosphere has a singificant EMF gradient between the surface of the earth and far up in the atmomsphere. Completion of such a device would case the world's largest lightning bolt ever. You'd be basically creating the largest "short" ever.
If you want to stop the problem, you add a non-conductive section to the elevator every few dozen miles. This reduces your payload weight for a given size elevator (or equivalently requires a heavier elevator for a given size payload), but would let you keep the current flow in the sections between insulators low enough that it would just keep the elevator material warm.
If you want to exploit the opportunity, you put a battery in each of those insulator sections, and you use the voltage between one section and the next to recharge the battery, which in turn recharges the elevator cars as they pass it on the cable. At the least you could reduce the energy costs (which would still be several dollars per pound of payload) to run the system, and at best you could sell excess power at the base station.
I see goals for vehicles for Earth orbit-Moon orbit-Lagrange point trips, vehicles for Earth orbit-NEO trips, vehicles for Earth orbit-Mars orbit trips, and vehicles for Lunar and Martian landings...
But you know, it's not like we've got a whole city of astronauts in Earth orbit waiting to go places yet. At the moment if we actually wanted passengers on any of those manned vehicles, we'd need to send them up on the space shuttle for around $100M a person. That's just not going to cut it.
Rather than having NASA aim at a half dozen targets and design a half dozen vehicles we could barely use, I'd like to see them (and private contractors) designing a half dozen vehicles for just one target: getting people to orbit and back cheaply. Let one company prototype a lifting body and let another one stick reusable capsules on top of "big dumb boosters"; let one laboratory try to make the DC-X scale up to orbit, and let another try a VTHL with a flyback booster. And this time, instead of picking the X-33 proposal with the most neat-sounding untested technology, let's let every serious proposal be funded to the prototype stage; that way we can also make it clear this time that the response to "It's not working yet, can we have more money sooner?" will be "No, but we can give those excess funds to those of your competitors who could put something in the air."
In a word, YES.
Governance must be with the consent of the governed, or it is tyranny.
So is the phrase "tyranny of the majority" an oxymoron to you? And was slavery just fine in any state where there were more pro-slavery whites than abolitionists and blacks?
If you're interested in consent, I might suggest that the consent of the people being stolen from is of more value than the consent of people stealing.
How about Mr/Ms codemonkey couldn't afford being unemployed?
Sure they could - they just need to start robbing large stores. It's no more ethical than what SCO's doing, but at least in that case insurance companies will spread the damage around a bit.
If you take a screenshot while running at 1280x1024, and it outputs a 1600x1200 picture, then it's providing "the highest available resolution". If you take a screenshot while running at 1280x1024, and it gives you the same size image but with all the ugly "trade visual quality for speed without the user's request" hacks turned off, then it's just lying.
why don't we go to the motherlode of great SF and Fantasy novels that have never been turned into film
Because you can't turn a 400 page novel into a movie without major changes which Hollywood will probably screw up, and because "The Puppet Masters" and "Starship Troopers" proved that even easily filmable stories lose a lot in the wrong hands. A good book is not a guarantee of a good script or a good movie, and I'd rather watch a bad movie with a new story than a bad movie that might infect my memories of a good old story.
The problem is, how do you trust someone who's just broken into your systems to tell the truth about how they did it? Or to tell you everything they did? You can't, so you must look over everything, and probably reinstall your systems.
Suppose they didn't break into your system, but just told you how they could have done so. Wouldn't you want to perform the exact same expensive actions in that case, even though the white hat never broke the law?
Sounds more like David Brin's Transparent Society. The difference is that here you are potentially watched by anyone at all, in 1984 you are potentially watched by a small group of people who control the cameras.
At least with the Puppet Masters movie the stuff they screwed up was unintentional: they were unable to convey any of the intellectual horror of having an alien rider (partly because that sort of thing is hard to portray without the first person perspective that a book can give you, and partly because they turned the aliens into comic objects from the first scene where one went "Indiana Jones" with it's tendril), and so they were left with a B horror movie.
With Starship Troopers, it was all intentional. The producer was one of those who thought the book is fascist, so he produced a parody of it. He must not have found it easy to parody, either, since he ended up having to present scenes and themes diametrically opposed to the book's messages to do so.
To be precise, she didn't really spill the coffee on herself either - the spill occurred during the transfer of the cup from the employee's hand to hers.
Do you have a reference for this? Every summary of the case I've seen has claimed that she spilled the coffee after she "placed the cup between her knees and attempted to remove the plastic lid from the cup."
Think for a moment what it would take for a BIOS at some date to "securely" allow loading an as-yet unwritten DRM OS a few years in the future, while not allowing an as-yet unwritten non-DRM OS to load. IMHO, keeping stored private keys just doesn't cut it, though maybe with enough lawyers.
How about keeping stored public keys? The private key never has to leave Microsoft's hands; it just has to sign the OS kernel (or a hash of it) so that the BIOS can verify that that kernel can be loaded.
That's not a perfect solution; as the XBox people have discovered it just takes one insecure kernel to let users regain control of their system. Finding such holes won't happen instantly, though, and enforcing years of delay between the time a Windows OS can use new hardware and the time Linux can use it would probably be good enough for MS.
A DRM-aware Linux OS would not prevent you from installing and running free software.
That depends on what the software does, doesn't it?
If your free software is a driver for your sound card or video card, then DRM Linux will have to prevent it from loading without being signed by some central authority (in practice: Microsoft) who has inspected it to make sure it can't be hacked to write output to a file instead of to your speakers or monitor.
If your free software is a debugger, then DRM Linux will have to prevent it from being used on any DRM applications or on the Linux kernel, because that might allow you to inspect secret encryption keys, to copy unencrypted versions of DRM data files, or to change variables to turn off DRM protections entirely.
If your free software is one of the many screensavers that takes X screenshots, it may die with an error because DRM Linux has decided that taking a screenshot of a paused DVD movie might be an attempt to copy the video one frame at a time.
If your free software is the software suspend capability in Linux 2.6, it may fail as the DRM module will have to protect chunks of it's own memory space from being read, even by other "untrusted" parts of the kernel.
Of course, the short-term solution to this problem is "leave DRM turned off and don't use any DRM media", but unless a whole lot of people accept that solution you may find yourself cut off from a growing chunk of the internet. Every web developer who currently traps right mouse button clicks with Javascript will jump at the chance to use a slightly-less-fake method of "securing" their content, and clicking Microsoft Frontpage's eventual "don't let viewers save or copy this page" checkbox will make it a whole lot easier for everyone else to join them.
I failed to get much benefit out of my 4th grade typing class, but I still managed to learn to type quite well in the 8th grade. If four years of hunt and peck typing isn't too much to overcome, is ten years really so implausible?
Without that exception in the amendment, you could e.g. not sentence people to community service, or to participate in drug/abuse/alcohol program or basicly anything else but imprisonment.
You could always sentence someone to military service. Being 18 and male has been a "crime" to that extent for nearly a century now.