For the ones smart enough to bring a camera to work when their "print" button stops working, anyway. Sure, some CEOs might be taken in by the "DRM will protect your secret documents from everyone!" scam, but not all their underlings will buy it. And that combination works in whistleblowers' favor, as higher ups develop a false sense of security about how widely they can redistribute incriminating information.
Right now they have to assume that a word document is unaltered upon receipt from a client.
How to do this without DRM: digitally sign (or even just hash) the document.
They also need to control distribution of documents and readability.
How to do this without DRM: ask everybody you distribute the document to not to redistribute it. If they agree and you trust them, you don't need DRM. If they agree and you don't trust them, you probably want to ignore DRM and figure out some control method that can't be circumvented with a $6 "fun saver" camera.
Yup, he should...that's part of the social contract you sign up to when you decide to live in a society.
"You agreed to this, even if I don't have your signature and even if the conditions were not presented to you until after you already received the product" is how EULAs are supposed to work. What makes your contract any different?
Besides, Win2 boots some services in parallel, while in Linux we still boot all of them sequentially, waiting for [OK] string before starting the next one. The only way to paralelize the sequence is to track dependencies between services. In Gentoo there are some efforts to do the parallel boot.
How are they doing it?
I've often thought that we should be booting up our computers with a parallel invocation of "make". Then when adding a new service you would have none of this "what number between 0 and 100 should I assign?" foolishness: just write a three line makefile that includes all the dependencies that your service has on others.
SCO insiders have sold nearly $2.5 million in stock in the last two and a half months; if you have excess cash you want to stop them with you'd be better off setting it on fire and throwing it at them then buying their stock with it.
Re:I've said this before and I'll repeat myself...
on
P2P Spam?
·
· Score: 1
Tampering with real emails, inserting the spam message mixed with the real email.
Does that scare anyone? It makes a mockery of current technology for fighting spam.
Having someone with user-level access to my computer or my correspondants' computers, or with root-level access to our mail servers, would scare me regardless of what they did with that access. If they merely used that access to stick spam in our email that would almost be a relief.
It will take time for developers to start supporting the new format, which will leave end users wanting.
I expect I'll just do the same thing with qt4 that I did with qt3 (and gtk 2, etc.): install it, but keep older versions around until all the programs which use the library have been updated. This is the way libraries are supposed to work; you increment the major version when you've broken binary compatibility, you keep all the major versions installed that you need, and you uninstall them when you no longer need them.
If 32V were a BSD-derivative, it would presumably be subject to the same relicensing that Berkeley did for all the rest of it's software, and the new BSD license is sans advertising clause and GPL-compatible.
I seem to recall from college chemistry that the reason pumping works is due to evaporative cooling.
It sounds like he's just talking about straightforward refrigeration: pump a refrigerant to a low pressure, and it boils, absorbing heat from whatever you want cooled; then pump it back up to a high pressure, and it condenses, dumping the heat somewhere else. The refrigerant never actually gets used up unless there's a leak.
Do you have a link for that? I don't recall it happening.
I don't think it's necessarily important; the AT&T vs. BSD judge seemed pretty confident that Unix up to 32V was now public domain, but since the case never got so far as to make that an official ruling it would be nice to see another legitimate (particularly advertising clause-free) license of that code.
The prosecution in the case against DeCSS argued that it wasn't covered by the "reverse engineering for interoperability" exceptions in the DMCA, because the defense couldn't at that time point to a working Linux DVD player using DeCSS code and because they got a judge dumb enough to buy the idea that software should go from "0 lines of code" to "fully working application" instantly.
Now that the ported libcss is a component part of every Linux DVD player, it will be harder for anyone to try and prosecute DeCSS distributors as purveyors of just a "circumvention tool".
If I were to complete the analogy, I'd have to go back to pre-ISPs like Prodigy, which my family dropped because they were going to start charging us 25 cents per email/forum post. Sounds reasonable, doesn't it? After all, emails from one Prodigy user to another used entirely Prodigy bandwidth, and so it's only fair for Prodigy to charge for them. So why aren't we paying a quarter an email today?
The reason they thought they could do that was because in the beginning Prodigy's email (like Compuserves, AOLs, and all the other online services') was limited to their own private system and ran exclusively on their own private servers, just like instant messaging does now. It was only upon contact with the internet that they joined together to be part of a distributed email system where they each only bore the costs of one half of any inter-system email exchange, and where anyone who didn't like their prices could switch to another provider without losing the ability to email anyone.
So why isn't anyone but Jabber using a system like that today? Is it because Microsoft and AOL have some sort of engineering amnesia, and can't figure out how to develop a communications protocol that doesn't involve One Giant Server Room to coordinate everything? Of course not. It's because, like I said, Microsoft and AOL want to have everyone's communication dependent on their One Giant Server Room, because then they have a hook that they can use to force ads on you, make you pay for premium services, and generally squeeze from you whatever the market will bear.
The problem is that in a competitive market where you had as many IM servers to choose from as email servers, the cost of an ISP providing instant messaging services would be infintesimal (significantly less than providing NNTP services, for example), the price that users pay would be a fraction of their ISP subscription, and many of those ISP subscriptions would go to other companies. That's not a revenue source for Microsoft or AOL, so that's not how Microsoft and AOL are designing their IM systems.
For people who actually have a sense of self worth, I for one, would be devestated to see that someone wanted to replace my body with a machine.
"I" am not my body; "I" am a 3+ pound thought processor sitting inside a skull. My body is just a squishy thing that carries me around.
Hmmm... when I was thinking that paragraph, it sounded very transhumanist and philosophical; now that I've put it down in words it just sounds like I need to work out more.;-)
Just by spouting trash all this time will make you more relevant?
No, but it will give SCO grounds for it's next round of lawsuits, against the news media. Those press releases are SCO's intellectual property, you know!
Of course, the media's lawyers may bleat that the press releases came from SCO attached to terms that allowed redistribution, but that's just as stupid as the people who have copies of the Linux kernel from ftp.sco.com; just because you receive a license for SCO's IP directly from SCO doesn't mean they can't sue you for using it, you know!
That's like saying that an ISP is blocking you from using their bandwidth because you aren't a licensed user.
When I connect to a web server owned by another ISP or send email to a customer of another ISP, the ISP lets me connect and use their bandwidth without getting any sort of license at all. Similarly if a customer of the ISP wants to view my webpage or send me email.
One of the consequences of this is that there are lots and lots of ISPs in the world which people can freely choose between with few ill effects. Microsoft and AOL don't like this, because they have "the dream" where they are the only company in control of a network and so anyone who wants to use the service of that network has to become a revenue source for them. It's much too late for them to do that with email or the World Wide Web, but they still both feel they've got a chance with Instant Messaging.
Given that you undoubtedly agreed to allow the proprietary software to do a full body cavity search on you when you clicked through the EULA
No, I clicked through EULAs without agreeing to them. Where did they get the idea that they could tack restrictions on my right to click a button on a piece of software I've already purchased, anyway?
If they never had any real infringements, and they knew it, but they were just hoping to be paid off before anything went to trial, then now they need to demonstrate plausible deniability, and make their false accusations look like accidental stupidity instead of deliberate fraud.
I don't believe any of the above, mind you, since "they're dumb" seems to be the simplest explanation; this is the only alternative I can think of though.
Take a look at your numbers: you've got a majority of people preferring X to Y, a majority preferring Y to Z, and a majority preferring Z to X. In that sort of situation, you might as well roll a die to decide who gets elected.
It's easy to think of realistic failures of IRV, though. Here's one from electionmethods.org:
Consider the following vote count with four candidates {A,B,C,D}:
7: A,B,C
6: B,A,C
5: C,B,A
3: D,C,B
Applying the rules of IRV, candidate A wins. But suppose the three voters who voted (D,C,B) now promote A from last choice all the way up to first choice, without changing the relative order of the other candidates. Now B wins instead of A. So by promoting A from last to first choice, those voters caused A to lose instead of win. An election method that allows such nonsensical anomalies is erratic and should be rejected.
On the other hand, with Condorcet voting in that example, B would clearly win (since he would beat A by 14-7, C by 13-8, and D by 18-3), there would be no way for voters who preferred other candidates to B to falsify their votes to make the other candidate win, and there would be no way for voters who changed their minds and preferred B even more to accidentally "sabotage" his victory.
You realize that a third party that strong will never arise in American politics?
I'm sure that's impossible; the Whigs and the Federalists already have the government locked up!
But more seriously: one of the reasons why it's so difficult for a third party, independent candidate, or even more than one candidate from one of the two major parties to run in an election is because voters can't vote for a third candidate without "throwing their vote away" at best, or splitting the vote of their own ideology at worst. The motivation behind replacing the broken plurality system of voting is to change all that.
However, Instant Runoff Voting would do as much harm as good because most of the mathematical problems of plurality voting would also be present in IRV. Approval voting or Condorcet voting, on the other hand, would more accurately reflect the voters' wishes as well as weaken the control of party leadership on government policy.
antibiotic resistance need not come from mutation.
It does if you start your culture with only one bacterium. This is such an obvious experiment that surely someone has tried it at some point; does anyone happen to have any references?
After they've done a hundred or so revisions of an development kernel (like 2.5), they stop adding new features, they keep revising to try and work out any remaining bugs, and they eventually release the result with the next even number. After a dozen or so revisions of this stable kernel, they fork the code again, and the stable kernel (with a few exceptions) just gets new drivers and bugfixes while the new development kernel gets new features and major rewrites.
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For the ones smart enough to bring a camera to work when their "print" button stops working, anyway. Sure, some CEOs might be taken in by the "DRM will protect your secret documents from everyone!" scam, but not all their underlings will buy it. And that combination works in whistleblowers' favor, as higher ups develop a false sense of security about how widely they can redistribute incriminating information.
Right now they have to assume that a word document is unaltered upon receipt from a client.
How to do this without DRM: digitally sign (or even just hash) the document.
They also need to control distribution of documents and readability.
How to do this without DRM: ask everybody you distribute the document to not to redistribute it. If they agree and you trust them, you don't need DRM. If they agree and you don't trust them, you probably want to ignore DRM and figure out some control method that can't be circumvented with a $6 "fun saver" camera.
Yup, he should...that's part of the social contract you sign up to when you decide to live in a society.
"You agreed to this, even if I don't have your signature and even if the conditions were not presented to you until after you already received the product" is how EULAs are supposed to work. What makes your contract any different?
Besides, Win2 boots some services in parallel, while in Linux we still boot all of them sequentially, waiting for [OK] string before starting the next one. The only way to paralelize the sequence is to track dependencies between services. In Gentoo there are some efforts to do the parallel boot.
How are they doing it?
I've often thought that we should be booting up our computers with a parallel invocation of "make". Then when adding a new service you would have none of this "what number between 0 and 100 should I assign?" foolishness: just write a three line makefile that includes all the dependencies that your service has on others.
They act crazy, they say the have awesome weapons that will destroy their enemies,
And when they acquired the technology behind those weapons they swore it was only going to be used for peaceful purposes.
IMO, a much better strategy would be for everyone using Linux to start buying SCO stock
What, is Reginald Broughton posting on Slashdot now?
SCO insiders have sold nearly $2.5 million in stock in the last two and a half months; if you have excess cash you want to stop them with you'd be better off setting it on fire and throwing it at them then buying their stock with it.
Tampering with real emails, inserting the spam message mixed with the real email.
Does that scare anyone? It makes a mockery of current technology for fighting spam.
Having someone with user-level access to my computer or my correspondants' computers, or with root-level access to our mail servers, would scare me regardless of what they did with that access. If they merely used that access to stick spam in our email that would almost be a relief.
It will take time for developers to start supporting the new format, which will leave end users wanting.
I expect I'll just do the same thing with qt4 that I did with qt3 (and gtk 2, etc.): install it, but keep older versions around until all the programs which use the library have been updated. This is the way libraries are supposed to work; you increment the major version when you've broken binary compatibility, you keep all the major versions installed that you need, and you uninstall them when you no longer need them.
If 32V were a BSD-derivative, it would presumably be subject to the same relicensing that Berkeley did for all the rest of it's software, and the new BSD license is sans advertising clause and GPL-compatible.
I seem to recall from college chemistry that the reason pumping works is due to evaporative cooling.
It sounds like he's just talking about straightforward refrigeration: pump a refrigerant to a low pressure, and it boils, absorbing heat from whatever you want cooled; then pump it back up to a high pressure, and it condenses, dumping the heat somewhere else. The refrigerant never actually gets used up unless there's a leak.
Do you have a link for that? I don't recall it happening.
I don't think it's necessarily important; the AT&T vs. BSD judge seemed pretty confident that Unix up to 32V was now public domain, but since the case never got so far as to make that an official ruling it would be nice to see another legitimate (particularly advertising clause-free) license of that code.
The prosecution in the case against DeCSS argued that it wasn't covered by the "reverse engineering for interoperability" exceptions in the DMCA, because the defense couldn't at that time point to a working Linux DVD player using DeCSS code and because they got a judge dumb enough to buy the idea that software should go from "0 lines of code" to "fully working application" instantly.
Now that the ported libcss is a component part of every Linux DVD player, it will be harder for anyone to try and prosecute DeCSS distributors as purveyors of just a "circumvention tool".
We could even call is "The SCO Strategy".
Considering the inevitable consequences of the strategy, I'd rather refer to it as "SCOicide".
If I were to complete the analogy, I'd have to go back to pre-ISPs like Prodigy, which my family dropped because they were going to start charging us 25 cents per email/forum post. Sounds reasonable, doesn't it? After all, emails from one Prodigy user to another used entirely Prodigy bandwidth, and so it's only fair for Prodigy to charge for them. So why aren't we paying a quarter an email today?
The reason they thought they could do that was because in the beginning Prodigy's email (like Compuserves, AOLs, and all the other online services') was limited to their own private system and ran exclusively on their own private servers, just like instant messaging does now. It was only upon contact with the internet that they joined together to be part of a distributed email system where they each only bore the costs of one half of any inter-system email exchange, and where anyone who didn't like their prices could switch to another provider without losing the ability to email anyone.
So why isn't anyone but Jabber using a system like that today? Is it because Microsoft and AOL have some sort of engineering amnesia, and can't figure out how to develop a communications protocol that doesn't involve One Giant Server Room to coordinate everything? Of course not. It's because, like I said, Microsoft and AOL want to have everyone's communication dependent on their One Giant Server Room, because then they have a hook that they can use to force ads on you, make you pay for premium services, and generally squeeze from you whatever the market will bear.
The problem is that in a competitive market where you had as many IM servers to choose from as email servers, the cost of an ISP providing instant messaging services would be infintesimal (significantly less than providing NNTP services, for example), the price that users pay would be a fraction of their ISP subscription, and many of those ISP subscriptions would go to other companies. That's not a revenue source for Microsoft or AOL, so that's not how Microsoft and AOL are designing their IM systems.
For people who actually have a sense of self worth, I for one, would be devestated to see that someone wanted to replace my body with a machine.
;-)
"I" am not my body; "I" am a 3+ pound thought processor sitting inside a skull. My body is just a squishy thing that carries me around.
Hmmm... when I was thinking that paragraph, it sounded very transhumanist and philosophical; now that I've put it down in words it just sounds like I need to work out more.
Just by spouting trash all this time will make you more relevant?
No, but it will give SCO grounds for it's next round of lawsuits, against the news media. Those press releases are SCO's intellectual property, you know!
Of course, the media's lawyers may bleat that the press releases came from SCO attached to terms that allowed redistribution, but that's just as stupid as the people who have copies of the Linux kernel from ftp.sco.com; just because you receive a license for SCO's IP directly from SCO doesn't mean they can't sue you for using it, you know!
That's like saying that an ISP is blocking you from using their bandwidth because you aren't a licensed user.
When I connect to a web server owned by another ISP or send email to a customer of another ISP, the ISP lets me connect and use their bandwidth without getting any sort of license at all. Similarly if a customer of the ISP wants to view my webpage or send me email.
One of the consequences of this is that there are lots and lots of ISPs in the world which people can freely choose between with few ill effects. Microsoft and AOL don't like this, because they have "the dream" where they are the only company in control of a network and so anyone who wants to use the service of that network has to become a revenue source for them. It's much too late for them to do that with email or the World Wide Web, but they still both feel they've got a chance with Instant Messaging.
Given that you undoubtedly agreed to allow the proprietary software to do a full body cavity search on you when you clicked through the EULA
No, I clicked through EULAs without agreeing to them. Where did they get the idea that they could tack restrictions on my right to click a button on a piece of software I've already purchased, anyway?
What exactly would they gain though?
If they never had any real infringements, and they knew it, but they were just hoping to be paid off before anything went to trial, then now they need to demonstrate plausible deniability, and make their false accusations look like accidental stupidity instead of deliberate fraud.
I don't believe any of the above, mind you, since "they're dumb" seems to be the simplest explanation; this is the only alternative I can think of though.
For example, 90% of desktop CPU use could get by without floating point math
Well, except for games.
And anything that uses 3D.
And audio/video playback and work.
And image editing.
And some spreadsheets.
What's that leave, web surfing and word processing? No, even the web surfing is going to use the FPU as soon as you hit a Flash or Java applet.
They made an announcement about it less than a year ago. They don't say if they'll be doing anything special about heat problems, though.
Take a look at your numbers: you've got a majority of people preferring X to Y, a majority preferring Y to Z, and a majority preferring Z to X. In that sort of situation, you might as well roll a die to decide who gets elected.
It's easy to think of realistic failures of IRV, though. Here's one from electionmethods.org:
Consider the following vote count with four candidates {A,B,C,D}:
7: A,B,C
6: B,A,C
5: C,B,A
3: D,C,B
Applying the rules of IRV, candidate A wins. But suppose the three voters who voted (D,C,B) now promote A from last choice all the way up to first choice, without changing the relative order of the other candidates. Now B wins instead of A. So by promoting A from last to first choice, those voters caused A to lose instead of win. An election method that allows such nonsensical anomalies is erratic and should be rejected.
On the other hand, with Condorcet voting in that example, B would clearly win (since he would beat A by 14-7, C by 13-8, and D by 18-3), there would be no way for voters who preferred other candidates to B to falsify their votes to make the other candidate win, and there would be no way for voters who changed their minds and preferred B even more to accidentally "sabotage" his victory.
You realize that a third party that strong will never arise in American politics?
I'm sure that's impossible; the Whigs and the Federalists already have the government locked up!
But more seriously: one of the reasons why it's so difficult for a third party, independent candidate, or even more than one candidate from one of the two major parties to run in an election is because voters can't vote for a third candidate without "throwing their vote away" at best, or splitting the vote of their own ideology at worst. The motivation behind replacing the broken plurality system of voting is to change all that.
However, Instant Runoff Voting would do as much harm as good because most of the mathematical problems of plurality voting would also be present in IRV. Approval voting or Condorcet voting, on the other hand, would more accurately reflect the voters' wishes as well as weaken the control of party leadership on government policy.
antibiotic resistance need not come from mutation.
It does if you start your culture with only one bacterium. This is such an obvious experiment that surely someone has tried it at some point; does anyone happen to have any references?
After they've done a hundred or so revisions of an development kernel (like 2.5), they stop adding new features, they keep revising to try and work out any remaining bugs, and they eventually release the result with the next even number. After a dozen or so revisions of this stable kernel, they fork the code again, and the stable kernel (with a few exceptions) just gets new drivers and bugfixes while the new development kernel gets new features and major rewrites.