Customer: That's G-R-A-T-E Expectations, also by Edmund Wells.
Proprietor: (pause) Yes, well, in that case we don't have it. We don't have anything by Edmund Wells, actually. He's not very popular.
The standard contract said that AT&T has rights on any changes you make to your Unix code
But did the contract say that AT&T got exclusive rights to the changes
and additions?
More likely, the contract gave AT&T non-exclusive
rights but does not prevent the original developer
from using the code elsewhere.
Public institutions like Indiana University have to be sensitive to the First Amendment rights of the spammers.
There's no First Amendment right to spam! The First Amendment guarantees your right to speak,
but does not guarantee you the use of any particular venue for your speech, nor the right to make others pay for your speech, which is what spamming does. Courts have ruled that there is not a First Amendment right for a telemarketer to call you if you don't want to be called; it will be quite a surprise if courts decide otherwise for spam.
Is this a great way to reward people for being generous with their unused body parts -- or a scary flashback to how early 'subscription-only' fire departments worked?
Since I own my body, I should be able to donate the organs to whomever I want. Or refuse to donate them. I should be able to sell them for any agreed price to the party of my choice, or auction them off. While still alive, or upon my death as designated in my will.
Unfortunately U.S. law does not recognize the obvious fact that a person owns his or her own body. This should be fixed. Ownership of one's body should be recognized as one of the most inalienable rights. Maybe we need a constitutional amendment.
They're in full compliance with the BSD license only because the the UC Regents dropped the advertising clause. For many years Microsoft was flagrantly violating the license.
I don't believe we're really going to run out of IPv4 addresses in 2005. But claims that we need 100 per human being is very short-sighted. 100 each is more than enough for most people now, but as technology advances we will have much smaller and more ubiquitous devices.
Fortunately, the IPv6 address space can provide for a lot more than 100 per person. By many orders of magnitude.
That's even better than being paid not to grow crops, which I've been considering. I was going to try not growing five acres of corn, and if it worked out well, maybe expand to twenty acres. But it sounds like I'm better off getting paid not to install fiber.
They did that to me back when I had unsubscribed for a while, then tried to reactivate. They claimed that my smartcard (an H card) was "broken", and that I'd have to pay $75 for a new card (HU). I asked them how they new that my old card was broken, since at the time the receiver and smartcard had been powered off for months, and I still hadn't powered them up again.
They kept insisting that the card was broken. I suggested to them that the only way they could know it was broken was if they had deliberately "broken" it somehow. They finally conceded that there was nothing actually wrong with the card and agreed to send me the new card at no charge. They never admitted that the need for a new card was solely because of their own incompetence in making/buying poorly designed cards that are easy to crack.
I wonder if the contract(s) between DirecTV and News Datacom, their security provider, has any explicit guarantees about the level of security of the card. Certainly if I was a DirecTV shareholder, I'd be livid. Admittedly it is difficult and a lot of work to produce a reasonably secure system, but the News Datacom stuff has been absolutely laughable.
And to keep this on topic, I'm one of the zillion people who has at some point in time purchased a smart card reader/programmer. I purchased it for uses that have nothing to do with any sort of television reception, satellite or otherwise, but I did buy it from a company that seemed to cater to satellite cracking, so maybe I can expect a letter from DirecTV. I'd love to see them prove that I've done anything illegal with it, or that posession of a smart card reader/programmer is inherently illegal. Remember that the burden of proof is on them.
As a libertarian, I consider it to be the job of the consumer to look out for his or her own interests. However, realistically the country is full of idiots, and if the government doesn't impose at least some minimal requirements for truth in packaging, etc., there are a lot of people/companies/corporations that will use false or misleading packaging and advertising to screw the consumer.
I'm almost never a fan of increased legislation, but on this issue I'm only concerned with enforcement of existing laws. Products using DRM to restrict consumers rights should be labelled to distinguish them from unencumbered products, since they do not provide the same value to the consumer.
The military [...] created/funded/supported research in almost every major communications system/cypto system of the past two millennia.
Perhaps, but none of the commonly used crypto today came from the military, because the military doesn't want to share their crypto capabilities or research with the public. Think about DES, RSA, Diffie-Hellman, AES, etc.
There is no one line/security barrier: the only rational approach is a defense in depth
Absolutely true, and that's why I'm saying that this so-called "intrusion tolerance" isn't new.
Your front door and alarm system are still fundamentally guarding the same line. The so-called "intrusion-tolerant" systems are adding another line elsewhere, like your safe.
However, this is not intrusion-tolerant in any meaningful sense in that someone that picks the front door lock (or otherwise circumvents it) can still steal your VCR even though they won't get your jewelry. I don't know about you, but I'm not inclined to "tolerate" that.
My point was that having multiple levels of security (front door, safe) is not new, either in the "real world" or in computer security. And I certainly wouldn't call it "intrusion tolerant", since someone that circumvents the first line of defense still has intruded and can still do some things for which they don't have authorization.
To the extent that the papers also discuss multiple security measures at the same line of defense (door lock and alarm), that is even less original.
Putting your entire trust in one layer isn't very good security.
Putting your entire trust in one defense measure may not be good, but just because you have multiple measures doesn't mean that they need to be guarding a different line of defense. Depending on the specific threat model, having two security measures guarding a line of defense around two "valuables" may or may not be better than having two separate security measures each guarding one valuable. You don't leave your safe out on your front lawn, but you might keep your diamonds and your cash in the same safe. If you put them in separate safes, that may make you more secure against some safecracking techniques, but if you use smaller safes to do it, you are more subject to the theft of an entire safe.
All it's doing is moving the security barrier. You're creating a new line, and saying that it's OK for attackers to cross the old line, since that doesn't get them across the new line. But defending the new line is not fundamentally any easier than defending the original line.
What contract? Does the consumer sign a piece of paper agreeing to this? Or is it a shrink-wrap contract? If the latter, is the package well-marked so that the consumer knows that he or she is "agreeing" to these terms by opening the package or using the cartridge? Or is it buried in fine print somewhere? Do the stores actually carry the "full price cartridge" in addition to the ripoff ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H discount cartridge?
I've never seen these cartridges, but I tend to doubt that Lexmark has gone to any effort to educate consumers that they are entering into any sort of contract.
There's a major difference between making a product for sale by mutual consent, and demanding that someone give you money. The former is an activity that enjoys some legal protection in the form of laws banning restraint of trade.
What Lexmark is doing seems similar to what Sega
did with later versions of their Genesis game console. The Genesis refused to
run cartridges that didn't contain the trademarked word "SEGA" at a particular address. Sega apparently even has a patent on that security system (TMSS). When Accolade made cartridges containing that work, Sega sued. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that this violated the Lanham act, because Sega deliberately designed the Genesis to require that trademark to be present regardless of the actual manufacturer of the cartridge. Thus Sega was to blame for the abuse of their own trademark.
The Lexmark inkjet cartridge problem is based on abusing copyright rather than trademark, but it seems quite possible that a court would find that
because Lexmark has unnecessarily forced their competitors to use their copyright in order to make a compatible cartridge, they are to blame for the resulting copyright infringement.
Sure. Buy the unit and make a formal request in writing for the source code to the GPLed software that you have just purchased in binary form.
[...]
Until you have the binary, you have NO rights to request the source code under the GPL.
[...]
Have you even bothered to read and understand the GPL?
Have YOU even bothered to read and understand the GPL?
If they don't provide the source code with the product, then section 3b of the GPL requires them to provide the source code of the GPL'd software to ANY THIRD PARTY, not just those to whom they have distributed the object code. The written offer of source code only has to be provided to the party to whom they distributed the object code, but that offer must be valid for any third party.
In fact, technically if someone has made a commercial distribution of object code of GPL'd programs, and not accompanied it with either the source code (section 3a) or the offer to provide the source code (section 3b), they are already in violation of the GPL. For noncommercial distribution, there is a third option (section 3c), but that wouldn't apply here.
TV-Out cards (or video cards with TV-out) generally deinterlace the signal in the process of converting the signal to something that the TV can understand.
No, TV-Out cards must *interlace* the signal. Computer video output is normally NOT interlaced, but most standard-definition television sets require
interlace. Most HDTV sets can support both interlaced and progressive signals, although it is typical that they support 720p and 1080i but not 1080p.
If you use a TV capture card to view a standard-definition source (e.g., NTSC or PAL programming) on your computer monitor, the card (or software) has to deinterlace it (also known as line-doubling). Deinterlacing video is a tough problem with no single "correct" solution, so the quality of deinterlacing varies dramatically from one product to another and dependent on the program source.
In normal interlaced video, the two consecutively transmitted fields that make up an interlaced frame are not time-coincident. The two fields are captured at 1/60 second intervals, rather than capturing pairs of fields at 1/30 second intervals. This makes video appear smoother, so it is normally an advantage.
On the other hand, when film (24 FPS) is transferred to NTSC video, a "3:2 pulldown" process is used to produce the separated fields. In this case, even and odd fields are time-coincident, however some fields are repeated such that any given pair of consecutive fields are not necessarily time-coincident. However, each film frame does contribute do at least one even field and at least one odd field, so it is possible for the 3:2 pulldown to be reversed without loss or interpolation.
MPEG-2 video (as used in DVDs) is capable of encoding that a field is to be repeated, so most DVDs mastered from film do in fact only encode pairs of time-coincident fields. This allows DVD players with progressive scan outputs to avoid the need for any interpolation or filtering from such sources. They only need to do real deinterlacing if the source was a video camera rather than film, since the film gets deinterlaced during the MPEG-2 encoding process.
The Delta Clipper was not capable of orbit; not even close.
Aren't you confusing the scale prototype (DC-XA) with the full-scale design (Delta Clipper)? Only the prototype was built and tested, but it proved the viability of the basic concepts. The DC-XA was not designed to reach orbit, but rather to prove that a rocket vehicle could hover, perform precision maneuvers, and land vertically. The full-scale vehicle would have had a much better fuel fraction than the scale prototype, and should have had no trouble reaching orbit.
If I recall correctly, the Delta Clipper was going to use an engine with a plug nozzle (truncated aerospike) rather than the linear aerospike of the X-33. The design of the Delta Clipper would not have subjected the fuel tank to the temperature extremes that proved fatal for the X-33 design.
The Delta Clipper was a much better design, and as the article points out, was the only X-33 candidate that was based on proven technology. But NASA seems to have a preference for chosing completely new, unproven designs over the tried-and-true. As it turned out, even NASA couldn't afford enough unobtanium to build the Lockheed-Martin "VentureStar" X-33.
"Halfway to Anywhere" by G. Harry Stine should be required reading for anyone interested in new manned spacecraft design. It's out of print, but used copies are readily available.
I'm not trying to downplay this concern, but you should bear in mind that LEO is a very large place. Yes, you need to track objects, but that's definitely being done, and NASA is NOT the only one doing it. (Aren't they depending on the military for that anyhow?)
The major cause for concern is the objects that are in retrograde orbits. As far as I've heard, there's not much of this, but a collision with even a small object in retrograde orbit could ruin your whole day.
Even capitalism can break, as Standard Oil and Microsoft have shown us.
Capitalism works for commodities. I don't think anyone has ever claimed that it works when some or all parties are legally forbidden (by copyright or patents) from selling the same product, so SO or M$ don't prove that capitalism is "broken", only that it's not applicable.
Recently it's been determined that Standard Oil before its breakup was actually selling its products for fair prices, amazingly enough. It's not clear whether MS prices for Windows and Office are fair, but it's pretty clear that their price for IE (i.e., free) was unfair at the time.
Microsoft has been convicted of violating antitrust law, yet the court was unwilling to do anything about it. If you or I did something that hurt fewer people to a lesser extent, we'd be in jail. Sigh.
Actually, I've noticed that trailers seem to be getting less and less descriptive
That's not necessarily a bad thing. I'm glad the T3 and Matrix Revolutions trailers didn't give away
much in the way of plot.
On the other hand, for many of the trailers to which I'm subject in the theatre I can immediately tell that they put all the best material in the trailer and thus I don't need to see the movie.
Is the failure of conventional music sales reinforcement that the RIAA's business plan just doesn't work, or will it just provide them with more ammunition against the P2P crowd?
The answer to the second part of the question (provide more ammo against P2P) is true regardless of the answer to the first part (business plan doesn't work).
As far as huge software companies go, they're pretty benign in my view.
As compared to Microsoft, certainly. I don't buy or use Microsoft products either, when I can help it.
Photoshop is the best piece of software out there for image manipulation. Bar none.
Gimp may be nice, but it's not as easy to use and it doesn't have anywhere near the polish as its older brother.
No argument from me there. I'm not a graphic artist, so GIMP is adequate for my needs. I'm
not trying to convince anyone that absolutely needs Photoshop to drop it. But for those of us that can reasonably choose alternatives, I think it's worthwhile to do so.
PDF is wonderful. PDF is open.
I agree, and so I do use PDF. I don't use Adobe programs to deal with it, though. I use Ghostscript and Xpdf for producing and viewing PDF files, and my own program
tumble to make PDF files from monochrome TIFF files and greyscale or color JPEG files.
I mean, did John Warnock piss in your cornflakes or something?
By abusing the DMCA as they did, Adobe pissed in everyone's cornflakes. Adobe isn't unique in that regard; I won't do business with other companies that abuse the DMCA either.
IMHO, the DMCA is a terrible law, and most uses of it are "abuses". But using the DMCA to stifle fair use rights is
particularly nasty, especially since the DMCA explicitly contains an exemption that was supposed to protect fair use:
(c) Other Rights, Etc., Not Affected.--(1) Nothing in this section
shall affect rights, remedies, limitations, or defenses to copyright
infringement, including fair use, under this title
However, in at least some of the cases involving the DMCA, judges have been willing to completely ignore that exception.:-(
Slashdot Mirror
Customer: That's G-R-A-T-E Expectations, also by Edmund Wells.
Proprietor: (pause) Yes, well, in that case we don't have it. We don't have anything by Edmund Wells, actually. He's not very popular.
Unfortunately U.S. law does not recognize the obvious fact that a person owns his or her own body. This should be fixed. Ownership of one's body should be recognized as one of the most inalienable rights. Maybe we need a constitutional amendment.
They're in full compliance with the BSD license only because the the UC Regents dropped the advertising clause. For many years Microsoft was flagrantly violating the license.
If it's public domain, there's no copyright on it, and you can't enforce any license. Public domain means that there are no restrictions on it at all.
Fortunately, the IPv6 address space can provide for a lot more than 100 per person. By many orders of magnitude.
That's even better than being paid not to grow crops, which I've been considering. I was going to try not growing five acres of corn, and if it worked out well, maybe expand to twenty acres. But it sounds like I'm better off getting paid not to install fiber.
They kept insisting that the card was broken. I suggested to them that the only way they could know it was broken was if they had deliberately "broken" it somehow. They finally conceded that there was nothing actually wrong with the card and agreed to send me the new card at no charge. They never admitted that the need for a new card was solely because of their own incompetence in making/buying poorly designed cards that are easy to crack.
I wonder if the contract(s) between DirecTV and News Datacom, their security provider, has any explicit guarantees about the level of security of the card. Certainly if I was a DirecTV shareholder, I'd be livid. Admittedly it is difficult and a lot of work to produce a reasonably secure system, but the News Datacom stuff has been absolutely laughable.
And to keep this on topic, I'm one of the zillion people who has at some point in time purchased a smart card reader/programmer. I purchased it for uses that have nothing to do with any sort of television reception, satellite or otherwise, but I did buy it from a company that seemed to cater to satellite cracking, so maybe I can expect a letter from DirecTV. I'd love to see them prove that I've done anything illegal with it, or that posession of a smart card reader/programmer is inherently illegal. Remember that the burden of proof is on them.
I'm almost never a fan of increased legislation, but on this issue I'm only concerned with enforcement of existing laws. Products using DRM to restrict consumers rights should be labelled to distinguish them from unencumbered products, since they do not provide the same value to the consumer.
My point was that having multiple levels of security (front door, safe) is not new, either in the "real world" or in computer security. And I certainly wouldn't call it "intrusion tolerant", since someone that circumvents the first line of defense still has intruded and can still do some things for which they don't have authorization.
To the extent that the papers also discuss multiple security measures at the same line of defense (door lock and alarm), that is even less original.
Putting your entire trust in one defense measure may not be good, but just because you have multiple measures doesn't mean that they need to be guarding a different line of defense. Depending on the specific threat model, having two security measures guarding a line of defense around two "valuables" may or may not be better than having two separate security measures each guarding one valuable. You don't leave your safe out on your front lawn, but you might keep your diamonds and your cash in the same safe. If you put them in separate safes, that may make you more secure against some safecracking techniques, but if you use smaller safes to do it, you are more subject to the theft of an entire safe.All it's doing is moving the security barrier. You're creating a new line, and saying that it's OK for attackers to cross the old line, since that doesn't get them across the new line. But defending the new line is not fundamentally any easier than defending the original line.
I've never seen these cartridges, but I tend to doubt that Lexmark has gone to any effort to educate consumers that they are entering into any sort of contract.
There's a major difference between making a product for sale by mutual consent, and demanding that someone give you money. The former is an activity that enjoys some legal protection in the form of laws banning restraint of trade.
The Lexmark inkjet cartridge problem is based on abusing copyright rather than trademark, but it seems quite possible that a court would find that because Lexmark has unnecessarily forced their competitors to use their copyright in order to make a compatible cartridge, they are to blame for the resulting copyright infringement.
If they don't provide the source code with the product, then section 3b of the GPL requires them to provide the source code of the GPL'd software to ANY THIRD PARTY, not just those to whom they have distributed the object code. The written offer of source code only has to be provided to the party to whom they distributed the object code, but that offer must be valid for any third party.
In fact, technically if someone has made a commercial distribution of object code of GPL'd programs, and not accompanied it with either the source code (section 3a) or the offer to provide the source code (section 3b), they are already in violation of the GPL. For noncommercial distribution, there is a third option (section 3c), but that wouldn't apply here.
If you use a TV capture card to view a standard-definition source (e.g., NTSC or PAL programming) on your computer monitor, the card (or software) has to deinterlace it (also known as line-doubling). Deinterlacing video is a tough problem with no single "correct" solution, so the quality of deinterlacing varies dramatically from one product to another and dependent on the program source.
In normal interlaced video, the two consecutively transmitted fields that make up an interlaced frame are not time-coincident. The two fields are captured at 1/60 second intervals, rather than capturing pairs of fields at 1/30 second intervals. This makes video appear smoother, so it is normally an advantage.
On the other hand, when film (24 FPS) is transferred to NTSC video, a "3:2 pulldown" process is used to produce the separated fields. In this case, even and odd fields are time-coincident, however some fields are repeated such that any given pair of consecutive fields are not necessarily time-coincident. However, each film frame does contribute do at least one even field and at least one odd field, so it is possible for the 3:2 pulldown to be reversed without loss or interpolation.
MPEG-2 video (as used in DVDs) is capable of encoding that a field is to be repeated, so most DVDs mastered from film do in fact only encode pairs of time-coincident fields. This allows DVD players with progressive scan outputs to avoid the need for any interpolation or filtering from such sources. They only need to do real deinterlacing if the source was a video camera rather than film, since the film gets deinterlaced during the MPEG-2 encoding process.
If I recall correctly, the Delta Clipper was going to use an engine with a plug nozzle (truncated aerospike) rather than the linear aerospike of the X-33. The design of the Delta Clipper would not have subjected the fuel tank to the temperature extremes that proved fatal for the X-33 design.
"Halfway to Anywhere" by G. Harry Stine should be required reading for anyone interested in new manned spacecraft design. It's out of print, but used copies are readily available.
The major cause for concern is the objects that are in retrograde orbits. As far as I've heard, there's not much of this, but a collision with even a small object in retrograde orbit could ruin your whole day.
Recently it's been determined that Standard Oil before its breakup was actually selling its products for fair prices, amazingly enough. It's not clear whether MS prices for Windows and Office are fair, but it's pretty clear that their price for IE (i.e., free) was unfair at the time.
Microsoft has been convicted of violating antitrust law, yet the court was unwilling to do anything about it. If you or I did something that hurt fewer people to a lesser extent, we'd be in jail. Sigh.
On the other hand, for many of the trailers to which I'm subject in the theatre I can immediately tell that they put all the best material in the trailer and thus I don't need to see the movie.
IMHO, the DMCA is a terrible law, and most uses of it are "abuses". But using the DMCA to stifle fair use rights is particularly nasty, especially since the DMCA explicitly contains an exemption that was supposed to protect fair use:
However, in at least some of the cases involving the DMCA, judges have been willing to completely ignore that exception.