It isn't possible to make a secure form of media distribution unless you control the playback devices as well. If you control the playback devices, you are telling people what they're allowed to do with things they own - in other words, you must drop the pretense that you're selling music at all, and admit that you're doing something more akin to renting it. This opens the doors to per-play fees, limits on the number of people allowed in the room with your stereo, banning people with perfect music memories, and all kinds of ugliness. More immediately, it stomps all over fair use rights. In other words, forget it.
The only correct solution that I can see is to allow people to copy digital information. Go back to a tip-based society, make money on live performances and tangible goods, or something. A variety of solutions have been suggested by people more knowledgable than me.
Trying to impose a false cost of reproduction on something that can in reality be reproduced for free will hurt us in ways that we're only beginning to see. If making music isn't a viable way to make money, so be it! It sucks, but it sucks less than the alternative. And perhaps only people who care about music will become musicians!
I wonder if Stallman believes that developers should be free to choose not to write software at all. Forcing "freedom" on people is also a form of power...
Ick. I thought that a nice condition of Afghanistan's surrender might be that they'd have to provide unfiltered internet access in public schools and libraries everywhere (yeah, that means we'd have to help them build such institutions. Which wouldn't suck). That'd do more to reduce terrorism than anything else I can think of. Seems that my views are not the views of my duly elected officials. As usual.
It's only censorship if someone is telling you not to say something. Usually that's the government, but it could be your employer, your girlfriend, or anyone else with power over you.
More people voted for Gore than for Bush. It's only because of the state representation system that Bush won. And it's quite likely that he wouldn't have even won that way were it not for some awfully shady mucking around. So, as he said, we have an unelected president.
It's true that nothing is to be gained in Stallman's letter by pointing it out. But I don't see why anything is lost by it. I thought it was funny.
Do you really think that 8 months is an easy sentence? Especially at that age? Just because US courts are so fond of handing out sentences that will destroy a life, don't think that anything less than 5 years is barely a sentence. Not so good for sending warnings to others, perhaps, but if the stated goal of punishment is correction (and at that age it's not unreasonable) then the sentence will hurt a hell of a lot without completely destroying his chance of having a normal life.
Think there'll ever be a law against emailing large random numbers wrapped in GPG-like headers
around? If we start to flood the 'net with such beasts, then anyone can credibly plead that his message was random and law enforcement can't accuse him of using unbreakable crypto. A cron job should do it.
I'm sure this isn't a new idea, as it seems pretty obvious, but if things get really ugly, would it help?
Lawyers are tearing this country apart. When you can't help anyone or have any interaction without exposing yourself to a lawsuit, what's going to happen? We need big changes, very soon. This particular problem could be solved with a law stating that anything you don't pay for has no warranty (UCICA be damned), but a better solution would be to kill all the lawyers. I suspect that they wouldn't go along with that, so does anyone have anything that would be both helpful and practical?
Say we could decide on what changes are needed. How many slashdotters would be willing and able to spend some time in Washington?
They say that they were testing viability of a similar wing to work in the atmosphere of Mars. I'm thinking a few thoughts about that:
First, this thing is BIG! Getting it to auto-assemble there would be quite a trick, even if we could get it there with the current space-exploration-is-interesting-and-therefore-un- American climate.
Secondly, the sun is less than half as bright there as here - obviously it's quite efficient so it could run on other fuels (especially given the weight savings of taking off all those solar panels) but it couldn't run forever. A solar-powered version would have a hard time unless solar cells got lots more efficient, or they made it lots bigger, or something. It's not fast enough to chase the sun, is it? Does Mars happen to rotate really, really slowly?
All quite possible, but I'd love to know how far off such improvements are. Are we there already? Another 5 years?
These things scare me. They're going to make it impossible to just get away. I try to go hiking in the mountains for a week, away from motors and noise. I succeed because there are very few vehicles that can get to the places that I can walk to. These would put an end to solitude - hike as far as you like, you're still within reach of a yuppie punk and his flying machine.
They'd better revoke "indecent exposure" laws when these things come out!
{
Censorware usually just pisses kids off and makes them become much better with circumvention than they otherwise would have been.
}
What a great idea! This one sentence has completely changed me from a censorware-hater to someone who will install all kinds of "parental controls" as soon as I have kids.
I'm not sure if I can approve of BountyQuest. To what extent does locating prior art, and attacking patents based on it, simply encourage the precedent of patenting everything that you do? These patents should be attacked not because someone's done the same thing before, but because they're obvious.
If I create an equilateral polygon with 42387 sides, and through some quirk (surprised?) I can patent it, should I? If no-one's ever created the shape before, should the patent stand?
Yes, I know, obviousness is much harder to prove. But it's the Right Thing, if it can be pulled off. Isn't it?
BountyQuest is a wonderful project, and I support it, but I'd like to know what others think about this: is BountyQuest encouraging a dangerous precedent?
At least, the way I play it. It's about building and cooperating and stuff, and scoring it is even more counter-productive than usual because you can't end up with a winner, just a loser. I don't know what the instructions say...
How about sex? Or is that more of a recreational sport?
I sailed across the Atlantic in 1994, and I can say that a container ship moving at 20 knots is damn scary when you're going 7. So stay clear of the shipping lanes, you say? Yes, that's usually a good idea, but it can be a pretty big detour. We showed up on radar, but at sea when "there's no-one out there", very often the crews of ships will get lazy. We saw a few ships, and only managed to raise a third or so of them on radio. Why pay attention to the unchanging sea?
There's a water-jet catamaran ferry between, I think, Portland and Yarmouth, that goes something like 40 knots. Most ships hit whales from time to time, but this one doesn't give the whales a fighting chance. And the crew are so accustomed to the occasional thump of hitting a whale that when they ran down a fishing boat one day in a thick fog, they didn't even notice. Of course, no-one has any business fishing on the Grand Banks these days anyway, but still...
It's hard to dodge icebergs at 50 knots, too. Unlike any half-sane boat, ice absolutely doesn't show up on radar.
Yes, it'd be a nice trip, but I would have to question whether they'll find anyone whom I'd trust with such a dangerous vehicle.
The patent wouldn't even apply without prior art. Here's why:
In their patent, the first part is descriptive and the second part is a pointer. In a URL, the first part is the pointer. They're very, very emphatic about the order.
The link has to be selected with a keyboard. Only Lynx users need pay royalties.
If you're using a terminal, you must needs connect with a modem. If a computer, the link needs to be on the same computer.
The main thing for us would be Palm Pilot support. There is already an ical extension to allow it to talk to palms, but ical and the palm calendar have such vastly different capabilities that they really don't talk. Shared calendaring is very good, but it's less important to us than good palm support. Get both, and we'll switch immediately!
Why is 3 weeks of holiday per year considered generous? It's ridiculous. Half of that will disappear in random little things (take a day off to do errands, a couple of long weekends to go hiking, etc). One thing that companies here just don't seem to get is that time off is really nice. Give your employees 6 weeks off. DON'T pay them extra if they go a year without using it: force them to take it. Make sure that they can work from noon 'til midnight, or whatever hours they want. Making sure that your employees have plenty of time to enjoy the best part of their lives is virtually unheard of in the US, but once they're used to it, other companies will have a very hard time luring them away.
(0)diverge@/net/tmp242% rpm -q -a | grep e2
e2fsprogs-1.18-5
(0)diverge@/net/tmp242% rpm -q glibc
glibc-2.1.3-15
(0)diverge@/net/tmp242% uname -a
Linux diverge 2.4.0-test5 #14 Wed Sep 27 17:05:35 EDT 2000 i686 unknown
(0)diverge@/net/tmp242% ll ~/bigfile
-rw-r--r-- 1 ben ben 3480223744 Oct 2 14:10/home/ben/bigfile
...and it was still quite happily going. I don't know about seeking, though. gzip said the file was too large, and emacs said "file not readable". Tar works beeeautifully, though.
Try addall, otherwise known as bookarea. Checks about 32 online book dealers, adds shipping, subtracts current coupons, and lists all prices for your perusal. Wonderful service!
Are you allowed to wipe your butt with a USA flag? I can't remember whether you're allowed to burn it or not, but if not I expect the same law would apply. Look on the bright side, though: at least it's not exactly a corporation telling you you can't (well, sort of).
The problem isn't that people are out there inventing things and then not patenting them. It's that people are out there doing stuff that seems too obvious to patent, and then some idiot company patents it. Who would have antipatented one-click shopping? Or selling music on the 'net? Anyway, you can already get a patent for something that you don't want to make money off: I forget what it's called, but someone here knows.
This on the same day that my NVidia-based Guillemot 3d prophet DDR-DVI and my IBM T86D arrive. I'm using them at this very moment, and loving it. I'll have to get a Matrox G400 and DVI daughtercard now, just for comparison:)
Just because some paradims do change in the way we think about Academia, does that mean that it's all wrong? Until recently (relatively speaking), slavery was right [...] Capatalism has long been accepted as the best model for the development of society - universally since the fall of Communism.
So are you saying that when a lot of people accept something, they can be wrong? Or not? Methinks they can. Obviously, any system has problems, and there's always a trade-off. Capitalism is good for some things, and horrible for others, which is why it's important not to take it too far and make everything 100% capitalistic.
The point of research is to develop technology for the good of society, right?
To many of the best scientists, it's to amuse themselves. Society should support that because maybe something will come out of it that will benefit society.
So what's wrong with combining that with capatalism?
Look at the medical system in the USA. Doctors are so well-paid that medicine attracts not the people who want to cure people, but those who want to get rich quick. So? You get doctors who want to process as many patients as they can, suboptimally, and recommend more treatment than is reasonable just to make a buck. To get an idea of who is treating you, look at how many honest med students there are. They're out there, for sure, but they're hard to find!
The same goes for all things capitalistic. When your ultimate goal is to make money, "doing the right thing" isn't an issue. You become amoral. Or you redefine morality in terms of money, and try to become very moral indeed.
We have systems that prevent abuses of the market - Microsoft, for instance. Our judicial system decides on these.
Not a great example. Look at how much harm Microsoft did, and it isn't over yet. Look at what the judicial system spends most of its time doing: turning the US into a mandatory and strict daycare center, while encouraging huge "campaign donations" from the rich.
It fosters intellectual growth, and encourages new product development.
Yes, it does encourage new product development, but I don't think that it necessarily fosters the right kind of intellectual growth. It helps technology, not science, and ultimately makes it harder for scientists to work, because they will have to compete, not cooperate, with technologists who make money for the universities. If your research has a smaller than average chance of making a buck Real Soon Now, kiss it goodbye. So much for astronomy, evolutionary biology, geology that isn't related to oil... While "contributing to the literature" isn't a perfect motivation, it's better than having to contribute to the coffers.
And I really don't want to think about the arts!
The early Free Market pioneers were economists who wanted growth at all costs. They didn't care about anything but money, and so they made a system that is very good at what it was designed for. But that doesn't make it the best system for everything.
Slashdot Mirror
It isn't possible to make a secure form of media distribution unless you control the playback devices as well. If you control the playback devices, you are telling people what they're allowed to do with things they own - in other words, you must drop the pretense that you're selling music at all, and admit that you're doing something more akin to renting it. This opens the doors to per-play fees, limits on the number of people allowed in the room with your stereo, banning people with perfect music memories, and all kinds of ugliness. More immediately, it stomps all over fair use rights. In other words, forget it.
The only correct solution that I can see is to allow people to copy digital information. Go back to a tip-based society, make money on live performances and tangible goods, or something. A variety of solutions have been suggested by people more knowledgable than me.
Trying to impose a false cost of reproduction on something that can in reality be reproduced for free will hurt us in ways that we're only beginning to see. If making music isn't a viable way to make money, so be it! It sucks, but it sucks less than the alternative. And perhaps only people who care about music will become musicians!
I wonder if Stallman believes that developers should be free to choose not to write software at all. Forcing "freedom" on people is also a form of power...
Ick. I thought that a nice condition of Afghanistan's surrender might be that they'd have to provide unfiltered internet access in public schools and libraries everywhere (yeah, that means we'd have to help them build such institutions. Which wouldn't suck). That'd do more to reduce terrorism than anything else I can think of. Seems that my views are not the views of my duly elected officials. As usual.
All computers these days have audio, so why aren't they called KVMA switches? It wouldn't exactly make things more complicated.
It's only censorship if someone is telling you not to say something. Usually that's the government, but it could be your employer, your girlfriend, or anyone else with power over you.
Choosing not to say something is not censorship.
More people voted for Gore than for Bush. It's only because of the state representation system that Bush won. And it's quite likely that he wouldn't have even won that way were it not for some awfully shady mucking around. So, as he said, we have an unelected president.
It's true that nothing is to be gained in Stallman's letter by pointing it out. But I don't see why anything is lost by it. I thought it was funny.
Do you really think that 8 months is an easy sentence? Especially at that age? Just because US courts are so fond of handing out sentences that will destroy a life, don't think that anything less than 5 years is barely a sentence. Not so good for sending warnings to others, perhaps, but if the stated goal of punishment is correction (and at that age it's not unreasonable) then the sentence will hurt a hell of a lot without completely destroying his chance of having a normal life.
Think there'll ever be a law against emailing large random numbers wrapped in GPG-like headers
around? If we start to flood the 'net with such beasts, then anyone can credibly plead that his message was random and law enforcement can't accuse him of using unbreakable crypto. A cron job should do it.
I'm sure this isn't a new idea, as it seems pretty obvious, but if things get really ugly, would it help?
Lawyers are tearing this country apart. When you can't help anyone or have any interaction without exposing yourself to a lawsuit, what's going to happen? We need big changes, very soon. This particular problem could be solved with a law stating that anything you don't pay for has no warranty (UCICA be damned), but a better solution would be to kill all the lawyers. I suspect that they wouldn't go along with that, so does anyone have anything that would be both helpful and practical?
Say we could decide on what changes are needed. How many slashdotters would be willing and able to spend some time in Washington?
They say that they were testing viability of a similar wing to work in the atmosphere of Mars. I'm thinking a few thoughts about that:
- American climate.
First, this thing is BIG! Getting it to auto-assemble there would be quite a trick, even if we could get it there with the current space-exploration-is-interesting-and-therefore-un
Secondly, the sun is less than half as bright there as here - obviously it's quite efficient so it could run on other fuels (especially given the weight savings of taking off all those solar panels) but it couldn't run forever. A solar-powered version would have a hard time unless solar cells got lots more efficient, or they made it lots bigger, or something. It's not fast enough to chase the sun, is it? Does Mars happen to rotate really, really slowly?
All quite possible, but I'd love to know how far off such improvements are. Are we there already? Another 5 years?
These things scare me. They're going to make it impossible to just get away. I try to go hiking in the mountains for a week, away from motors and noise. I succeed because there are very few vehicles that can get to the places that I can walk to. These would put an end to solitude - hike as far as you like, you're still within reach of a yuppie punk and his flying machine.
They'd better revoke "indecent exposure" laws when these things come out!
{
Censorware usually just pisses kids off and makes them become much better with circumvention than they otherwise would have been.
}
What a great idea! This one sentence has completely changed me from a censorware-hater to someone who will install all kinds of "parental controls" as soon as I have kids.
I'm not sure if I can approve of BountyQuest. To what extent does locating prior art, and attacking patents based on it, simply encourage the precedent of patenting everything that you do? These patents should be attacked not because someone's done the same thing before, but because they're obvious.
If I create an equilateral polygon with 42387 sides, and through some quirk (surprised?) I can patent it, should I? If no-one's ever created the shape before, should the patent stand?
Yes, I know, obviousness is much harder to prove. But it's the Right Thing, if it can be pulled off. Isn't it?
BountyQuest is a wonderful project, and I support it, but I'd like to know what others think about this: is BountyQuest encouraging a dangerous precedent?
At least, the way I play it. It's about building and cooperating and stuff, and scoring it is even more counter-productive than usual because you can't end up with a winner, just a loser. I don't know what the instructions say...
How about sex? Or is that more of a recreational sport?
I sailed across the Atlantic in 1994, and I can say that a container ship moving at 20 knots is damn scary when you're going 7. So stay clear of the shipping lanes, you say? Yes, that's usually a good idea, but it can be a pretty big detour. We showed up on radar, but at sea when "there's no-one out there", very often the crews of ships will get lazy. We saw a few ships, and only managed to raise a third or so of them on radio. Why pay attention to the unchanging sea?
There's a water-jet catamaran ferry between, I think, Portland and Yarmouth, that goes something like 40 knots. Most ships hit whales from time to time, but this one doesn't give the whales a fighting chance. And the crew are so accustomed to the occasional thump of hitting a whale that when they ran down a fishing boat one day in a thick fog, they didn't even notice. Of course, no-one has any business fishing on the Grand Banks these days anyway, but still...
It's hard to dodge icebergs at 50 knots, too. Unlike any half-sane boat, ice absolutely doesn't show up on radar.
Yes, it'd be a nice trip, but I would have to question whether they'll find anyone whom I'd trust with such a dangerous vehicle.
- In their patent, the first part is descriptive and the second part is a pointer. In a URL, the first part is the pointer. They're very, very emphatic about the order.
- The link has to be selected with a keyboard. Only Lynx users need pay royalties.
- If you're using a terminal, you must needs connect with a modem. If a computer, the link needs to be on the same computer.
Have fun!The main thing for us would be Palm Pilot support. There is already an ical extension to allow it to talk to palms, but ical and the palm calendar have such vastly different capabilities that they really don't talk. Shared calendaring is very good, but it's less important to us than good palm support. Get both, and we'll switch immediately!
...vaues time rather less than I do.
Why is 3 weeks of holiday per year considered generous? It's ridiculous. Half of that will disappear in random little things (take a day off to do errands, a couple of long weekends to go hiking, etc). One thing that companies here just don't seem to get is that time off is really nice. Give your employees 6 weeks off. DON'T pay them extra if they go a year without using it: force them to take it. Make sure that they can work from noon 'til midnight, or whatever hours they want. Making sure that your employees have plenty of time to enjoy the best part of their lives is virtually unheard of in the US, but once they're used to it, other companies will have a very hard time luring them away.
(0)diverge@/net/tmp242% rpm -q -a | grep e2 /home/ben/bigfile
e2fsprogs-1.18-5
(0)diverge@/net/tmp242% rpm -q glibc
glibc-2.1.3-15
(0)diverge@/net/tmp242% uname -a
Linux diverge 2.4.0-test5 #14 Wed Sep 27 17:05:35 EDT 2000 i686 unknown
(0)diverge@/net/tmp242% ll ~/bigfile
-rw-r--r-- 1 ben ben 3480223744 Oct 2 14:10
...and it was still quite happily going. I don't know about seeking, though. gzip said the file was too large, and emacs said "file not readable". Tar works beeeautifully, though.
Try addall, otherwise known as bookarea. Checks about 32 online book dealers, adds shipping, subtracts current coupons, and lists all prices for your perusal. Wonderful service!
Are you allowed to wipe your butt with a USA flag? I can't remember whether you're allowed to burn it or not, but if not I expect the same law would apply. Look on the bright side, though: at least it's not exactly a corporation telling you you can't (well, sort of).
The problem isn't that people are out there inventing things and then not patenting them. It's that people are out there doing stuff that seems too obvious to patent, and then some idiot company patents it. Who would have antipatented one-click shopping? Or selling music on the 'net? Anyway, you can already get a patent for something that you don't want to make money off: I forget what it's called, but someone here knows.
This on the same day that my NVidia-based Guillemot 3d prophet DDR-DVI and my IBM T86D arrive. I'm using them at this very moment, and loving it. I'll have to get a Matrox G400 and DVI daughtercard now, just for comparison :)
So are you saying that when a lot of people accept something, they can be wrong? Or not? Methinks they can. Obviously, any system has problems, and there's always a trade-off. Capitalism is good for some things, and horrible for others, which is why it's important not to take it too far and make everything 100% capitalistic.
The point of research is to develop technology for the good of society, right?
To many of the best scientists, it's to amuse themselves. Society should support that because maybe something will come out of it that will benefit society.
So what's wrong with combining that with capatalism?
Look at the medical system in the USA. Doctors are so well-paid that medicine attracts not the people who want to cure people, but those who want to get rich quick. So? You get doctors who want to process as many patients as they can, suboptimally, and recommend more treatment than is reasonable just to make a buck. To get an idea of who is treating you, look at how many honest med students there are. They're out there, for sure, but they're hard to find!
The same goes for all things capitalistic. When your ultimate goal is to make money, "doing the right thing" isn't an issue. You become amoral. Or you redefine morality in terms of money, and try to become very moral indeed.
We have systems that prevent abuses of the market - Microsoft, for instance. Our judicial system decides on these.
Not a great example. Look at how much harm Microsoft did, and it isn't over yet. Look at what the judicial system spends most of its time doing: turning the US into a mandatory and strict daycare center, while encouraging huge "campaign donations" from the rich.
It fosters intellectual growth, and encourages new product development.
Yes, it does encourage new product development, but I don't think that it necessarily fosters the right kind of intellectual growth. It helps technology, not science, and ultimately makes it harder for scientists to work, because they will have to compete, not cooperate, with technologists who make money for the universities. If your research has a smaller than average chance of making a buck Real Soon Now, kiss it goodbye. So much for astronomy, evolutionary biology, geology that isn't related to oil... While "contributing to the literature" isn't a perfect motivation, it's better than having to contribute to the coffers.
And I really don't want to think about the arts!
The early Free Market pioneers were economists who wanted growth at all costs. They didn't care about anything but money, and so they made a system that is very good at what it was designed for. But that doesn't make it the best system for everything.