You haven't specified what sort of mechanism people are supposedly going to use to keep something out of the public domain.
That's easy, how about never releasing source, and only releasing binaries. It doesn't work for anything other than software, but we were talking about the GPL.
I disagree, in a world without copyright, the benefits of copyleft are impossible. If my ideas could be taken without a guarantee that the resulting work would remain in the public domain, I would be far less inclined to make my work open. I think the best evidence of this thinking is the use of GPL by most major open-source projects, especially since there are far less restrictive licenses available, such as the BSD license. Without copyright protection, I believe fewer people would open their source and take the risk that their ideas would be stolen.
Thanks for providing me with the best laugh I have had all day. I don't know what exactly possesses people to compare downloaded music to the US war of independence, but it never fails to amuse me. Then again, perhaps IHBT.
Casting this as a fight between rightousness [sic] and corruption, and of escaping a cultural stranglehold, is dubious at best. There are good reasons for copyright law to exist (remember, without copyright law, there can be no GPL). Most downloaders' motivation is to avoid paying for music, not to bring down a music empire. And most of the songs that are downloaded are the same cultural pap that is marketed by the RIAA.
If you're looking to feed your revolutionary tendencies with a bad law having actual, serious consequences, how about the Patriot act? Or the federal budget, which will lead to a trillion dollar increase in the federal debt over the next ten years? Everyone in the world -- American or not -- should be concerned by that, since if the US pulls an Argentina, nobody is safe. By comparison, the fight over file downloading is a childish spat between spoiled children.
The line of reasoning: "the founding fathers rebelled against laws they disagreed with; I am rebelling against laws I disagree with; therefire, my struggle is as noble as theirs" is as absurd as "they laughed at Einstein; they laughed at me; therefore, my ideas are as important as Einstein's".
I suppose you're going to argue that rampant viruses and a network crippled by p2p bandwidth hogging are a small price to pay to stick it to the man? Fight the power, etc.
I'm not so opposed to DRM as long as, like you say, I can go buy a non-DRM motherboard somewhere else.
Think about it. Putting aside copying issues, trusted computing is about designing hardware that everyone else can trust to behave responsibly.
As I cleaned a few hundred infected e-mails out of my inbox for the nth time, I have to admit that my trust in the average computer user to act responsibly is diminishing. For the average joe/jane who buys a computer from Dell, I'm all in favor of DRM if it means that he/she will be forced to operate that computer responsibly. Do these people need root access? Is it even safe to give it to them? I am forced to think that the answer is no. These are people who treat the computer like an appliance; after all, they don't need the schematics of their TV or toaster to use it properly.
In a lot of cases, putting your faith in the goodwill of the average, non-technically-literate person to keep their OS updated and virus-free is an absurd proposition. As long as I can have my linux, I say: bring on the DRM.
I really can't see anything positive coming out of this, people are going to be screwed (pay up because they can't afford the lawyer), the pblic won't care, and the RIAA will just gain more momentum.
That sounds pretty positive to me, as I'm on TD Waterhouse right now buying shares in Vivendi.
What you need is some sort of consumers' organization -- some sort of Ralph Nader type thing. There is a limit as to what one screwball can do, but a whole organization full of screwballs, all making noise... even Microsoft would have to pay attention.
Is there such a thing as a Software Consumers' Association? I couldn't find anything like that using a quick Google search.
Maybe because, for Google to work properly, their behavior has to be perceived to be absolutely neutral. Sure, they could have attempted to score political points through some childish strike at all "kazaa" queries, but they would have lost a lot of respect and made their site less useful, especially to researchers.
There are a lot of interesting links between Google and the news media. Both present a great deal of information to the public, and both have a moral obligation to present the facts without bias or favor, even when they may have personal issues with it. Once the perception of impartiality is lost, the user can no longer count on reliable searches. If Google had taken some drastic action to score political points, I would have been inclined to find an alternative search engine.
Anytime there's an article that whines about deep linking, a few dozen people post replies saying that the company could use the referer header to block all such requests. Now that a company is actually doing it, it's suddenly a bad idea. Which is it -- good technical solution or bad censorship?
I should also point out that some sites automatically block slashdot.org referers as a matter of self protection.
In fact this is exactly what happens in chip design.
Twenty years ago, a single company would design netlists, put them together in a chip design, and build the chip.
Ten years ago, one company would design the netlists and put them together as a chip, and another company would build the chip (in many cases, the chip building company was IBM, which is why they have their fingers in a lot of processors).
Now, different companies design the netlists, design chips, and build the chips. For example, say you want a high-speed wireless modem. You would buy some netlists from a company that specializes in communication algorithms, put them together on a chip, and ship it off to a manufacturer to build the chip.
This is a good thing, since it allows companies to specialize, and it speeds the introduction of good technologies to the market -- and it wouldn't happen without strong IP protection.
I think we can all agree that cracking is immoral. But put that aside for a second. The fact that cracking is simply possible means that someone will probably do it. Leaving your box open for attacks, which could in turn compromise other machines, simply because you're depending on the moral behaviour of someone else, is irresponsible.
Furthermore, I disagree that only damage can result. By assuming adverse behaviour, the result is a much stronger network, in which one malicious or malfunctioning node doesn't bring down service for everyone. Better understanding of network dynamics and network protection results from attacks, regardless of how much we hate them.
Huge tax cuts without requirements on how it should be spent = lost tax revenues that might not be spent at all or spent in ways that improve the economy. This is kinda like giving a total stranger $100K and expecting him to spend it in ways that help you while not giving him any expectations on how to spend it
Good point. The only solution is a 100 per cent flat tax rate. Clearly, the only organization that can spend money wisely is the government.
While we're at it, if we can't trust the people to spend money wisely, why can we trust them to pick the government? We should also close the "voting loophole".
Filling the gas tank is so much worse than filling the hydrogen tank?
In principle, you could drive your hydrogen-powered car home at night, filling the exhaust tank with water. You could then plug your car in to an electrical outlet, and the water would be electrolyzed to hydrogen and oxygen overnight, filling your fuel tank. Depending on how fast the electrolysis occurred, it probably wouldn't eliminate the need for filling the tank, but fillups could be less frequent under city driving.
Hydrogen is not that explosive. In many ways a hydrogen powered vehicle would be safer than a gasoline powered vehicle. Since hydrogen is a gas, it tends not to stick around in one place once it leaks. It also tends to be less volatile than gasoline. Check out this page.
Most people assume that hydrogen is disproportionately dangerous because of the Hindenburg disaster. The fact is that if gasoline powered engines were invented today, gasoline is volatile enough that they would be considered too unsafe to be approved.
Re:Might it work with the linux micro kernel?
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Yes, the binary is in the public domain, but nobody is compelling you to release source, which is the key provision of the GPL.
You haven't specified what sort of mechanism people are supposedly going to use to keep something out of the public domain.
That's easy, how about never releasing source, and only releasing binaries. It doesn't work for anything other than software, but we were talking about the GPL.
I disagree, in a world without copyright, the benefits of copyleft are impossible. If my ideas could be taken without a guarantee that the resulting work would remain in the public domain, I would be far less inclined to make my work open. I think the best evidence of this thinking is the use of GPL by most major open-source projects, especially since there are far less restrictive licenses available, such as the BSD license. Without copyright protection, I believe fewer people would open their source and take the risk that their ideas would be stolen.
Thanks for providing me with the best laugh I have had all day. I don't know what exactly possesses people to compare downloaded music to the US war of independence, but it never fails to amuse me. Then again, perhaps IHBT.
Casting this as a fight between rightousness [sic] and corruption, and of escaping a cultural stranglehold, is dubious at best. There are good reasons for copyright law to exist (remember, without copyright law, there can be no GPL). Most downloaders' motivation is to avoid paying for music, not to bring down a music empire. And most of the songs that are downloaded are the same cultural pap that is marketed by the RIAA.
If you're looking to feed your revolutionary tendencies with a bad law having actual, serious consequences, how about the Patriot act? Or the federal budget, which will lead to a trillion dollar increase in the federal debt over the next ten years? Everyone in the world -- American or not -- should be concerned by that, since if the US pulls an Argentina, nobody is safe. By comparison, the fight over file downloading is a childish spat between spoiled children.
The line of reasoning: "the founding fathers rebelled against laws they disagreed with; I am rebelling against laws I disagree with; therefire, my struggle is as noble as theirs" is as absurd as "they laughed at Einstein; they laughed at me; therefore, my ideas are as important as Einstein's".
I'll take Jeri Ryan (seven of nine) or Jolene Blalock (that Vulcan hottie on Enterprise) any day over Liv Tyler.
I suppose you're going to argue that rampant viruses and a network crippled by p2p bandwidth hogging are a small price to pay to stick it to the man? Fight the power, etc.
I'm not so opposed to DRM as long as, like you say, I can go buy a non-DRM motherboard somewhere else.
Think about it. Putting aside copying issues, trusted computing is about designing hardware that everyone else can trust to behave responsibly.
As I cleaned a few hundred infected e-mails out of my inbox for the nth time, I have to admit that my trust in the average computer user to act responsibly is diminishing. For the average joe/jane who buys a computer from Dell, I'm all in favor of DRM if it means that he/she will be forced to operate that computer responsibly. Do these people need root access? Is it even safe to give it to them? I am forced to think that the answer is no. These are people who treat the computer like an appliance; after all, they don't need the schematics of their TV or toaster to use it properly.
In a lot of cases, putting your faith in the goodwill of the average, non-technically-literate person to keep their OS updated and virus-free is an absurd proposition. As long as I can have my linux, I say: bring on the DRM.
I really can't see anything positive coming out of this, people are going to be screwed (pay up because they can't afford the lawyer), the pblic won't care, and the RIAA will just gain more momentum.
That sounds pretty positive to me, as I'm on TD Waterhouse right now buying shares in Vivendi.
damn, I liked my testicles.
You're a geek, it's not like you were using them.
As long as there is enough room under the door to shove a thin-crust pizza under it, I'm game.
Does anyone else get the irony of the above comment?
Welcome to the KDE Kontributor Konference!
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KKK? That's not good
But this is America. Consumer rights are secondary to business rights... ... and making things better is secondary to making smug, cynical statements.
What you need is some sort of consumers' organization -- some sort of Ralph Nader type thing. There is a limit as to what one screwball can do, but a whole organization full of screwballs, all making noise ... even Microsoft would have to pay attention.
Is there such a thing as a Software Consumers' Association? I couldn't find anything like that using a quick Google search.
Maybe because, for Google to work properly, their behavior has to be perceived to be absolutely neutral. Sure, they could have attempted to score political points through some childish strike at all "kazaa" queries, but they would have lost a lot of respect and made their site less useful, especially to researchers.
There are a lot of interesting links between Google and the news media. Both present a great deal of information to the public, and both have a moral obligation to present the facts without bias or favor, even when they may have personal issues with it. Once the perception of impartiality is lost, the user can no longer count on reliable searches. If Google had taken some drastic action to score political points, I would have been inclined to find an alternative search engine.
I'll be sure to make a note of that and have someone dock my "pay".
It's the Saturday of a long weekend, and as a grad student I'm spending my copious free time ... in the lab.
Anytime there's an article that whines about deep linking, a few dozen people post replies saying that the company could use the referer header to block all such requests. Now that a company is actually doing it, it's suddenly a bad idea. Which is it -- good technical solution or bad censorship?
I should also point out that some sites automatically block slashdot.org referers as a matter of self protection.
Dummy, everybody knows that the "0/1" thingy on the front of the computer is the international symbol for "any". That's the key you should press.
In fact this is exactly what happens in chip design.
Twenty years ago, a single company would design netlists, put them together in a chip design, and build the chip.
Ten years ago, one company would design the netlists and put them together as a chip, and another company would build the chip (in many cases, the chip building company was IBM, which is why they have their fingers in a lot of processors).
Now, different companies design the netlists, design chips, and build the chips. For example, say you want a high-speed wireless modem. You would buy some netlists from a company that specializes in communication algorithms, put them together on a chip, and ship it off to a manufacturer to build the chip.
This is a good thing, since it allows companies to specialize, and it speeds the introduction of good technologies to the market -- and it wouldn't happen without strong IP protection.
I think we can all agree that cracking is immoral. But put that aside for a second. The fact that cracking is simply possible means that someone will probably do it. Leaving your box open for attacks, which could in turn compromise other machines, simply because you're depending on the moral behaviour of someone else, is irresponsible.
Furthermore, I disagree that only damage can result. By assuming adverse behaviour, the result is a much stronger network, in which one malicious or malfunctioning node doesn't bring down service for everyone. Better understanding of network dynamics and network protection results from attacks, regardless of how much we hate them.
(Thick Australian accent) You slashdotted NASA!
(With apologies to The Dish.)
Huge tax cuts without requirements on how it should be spent = lost tax revenues that might not be spent at all or spent in ways that improve the economy. This is kinda like giving a total stranger $100K and expecting him to spend it in ways that help you while not giving him any expectations on how to spend it
Good point. The only solution is a 100 per cent flat tax rate. Clearly, the only organization that can spend money wisely is the government.
While we're at it, if we can't trust the people to spend money wisely, why can we trust them to pick the government? We should also close the "voting loophole".
Filling the gas tank is so much worse than filling the hydrogen tank?
In principle, you could drive your hydrogen-powered car home at night, filling the exhaust tank with water. You could then plug your car in to an electrical outlet, and the water would be electrolyzed to hydrogen and oxygen overnight, filling your fuel tank. Depending on how fast the electrolysis occurred, it probably wouldn't eliminate the need for filling the tank, but fillups could be less frequent under city driving.
Hydrogen is not that explosive. In many ways a hydrogen powered vehicle would be safer than a gasoline powered vehicle. Since hydrogen is a gas, it tends not to stick around in one place once it leaks. It also tends to be less volatile than gasoline. Check out this page.
Most people assume that hydrogen is disproportionately dangerous because of the Hindenburg disaster. The fact is that if gasoline powered engines were invented today, gasoline is volatile enough that they would be considered too unsafe to be approved.
Always be sure to mount a scratch monkey.