Banning all non-backdoored encryption would force a lot of people to use backdoored encryption. This might very well allow the FBI to catch more criminals. It is not surprising that the FBI is in favor of it.
However, using the backdoors to monitor US citizens would not be constitutional (secure in our affairs) and enforcing the provision would require laws wich conflict with free-speech.
The solution to our problems is for all of us as citizens to become more responsible and civic-minded, not to relinquish more and more power and responsibility to the federal government. Terrorists cannot accomplish their goals if citizens stop them. Planes cannot be hijacked by knife-wielding assailants if they are swarmed by unarmed passengers. Better yet, let's equip pilots with guns (yes it is possible to design a round which will not pierce the skin of an airplane).
In fact, if every passenger had been *required* to carry a knife on the plane (instead of being nearly forbidden to do so), those terrorists wouldn't have gotten away with any of this!
I mean if officials can't keep knives out of prisons, how do they expect to keep them off of planes?
Anyway, that isn't what this post is about. I'm just venting because the approach our fearful leaders seem to be taking is all backwards. It is not reasonable to expect the government to protect us from all evil! That is partly our responsibility too.
My father, who has been pro-uSoft in a big way, said he will not upgrade to XP or any version of IE that doesn't have java. The reason he gave was that he doesn't like the licensing terms of XP, and he doens't like the lack of functionality in newer versions of IE.
Personally, I believe that XP is going to be a tough sell, even to corporations.
I think uSoft has certainly hit a zenith that it will never again surmount. I also think that they will work as hard as possible (that is, to an extent we have not yet seen) to make all things uSoft incompatible with java, Apache, Samba, and anything else that allows different architectures to work together seamlessly.
It is true that Microsoft could lower its prices and still make a decent profit. This might mean that only people who prefer open source to MS would use open source, which is fine.
However, if Microsoft does lower prices or make any improvements in its business practices or licensing terms as a result of competition from open souce projects, then open source has basically won.
Of course, microsoft will probably try to keep and increase its market share by becoming completely incopatible with everyone else (e.g., break Samba and try to force web developers into proprietary MS technologies that Apache can't use), but this never works in the long run. Sure, it could make people miserable for a few years, but it definitely won't work forever. Microsoft will have to compete or die, just like everyone else.
Meanwhile, I will use linux at home and whatever I have to use at work (which right now is win2k, solaris and linux.)
Since the encryption scheme is broken (as public key anyway) it is not likely to make a great deal of money for anyone, although it was certainly interesting to read about.
Furthermore, I think the father is right. Most children who get lots of money and or achieve lasting celebrity while they are still children have messed-up lives. I totally agree with the father's decision. Besides, smart as she is, she will most likely make money later in life if that is what she actually wants to do.
You won't find a bigger free-speach advocate than Jello Biafra. At least now that Frank Zappa and John Denver are dead. (No, I'm not kidding about John Denver. H really did come to the defense of the Dead Kennedys and Alternative Tentacle Records).
Step one:
National Referendum Now. Many states have the referendum, and while some of the resulting laws have been confusing or contradictory with other laws, it has by-and-large been a good thing.
What I would like to see is a paradigm shift in how we think about digital information and creative works. A world where
music, movies, software, etc. are entirely free and subsidized by the government could be a wonderful place to live.
Are you mad? All digital information and creative works subsidized (and therefore controlled) by the government? I mean, that is WAY too much temptation to put in front of mere mortals. I really will leave the country if anything remotely resembling that occurs.
Heh, heh. That is EXACTLY what my first thought was when I read this. Almost all of the people expressing outrage here are basing that outrage on an article at ONE site.
Intel appears to be essentially on the warpath against chipset makers. Well, there is at least one chipset maker which seems to have Intel's approval (maybe Intel is going to buy them. heh,heh), but it appears that Intel is refusing to license the P4 bus technology to all the others.
If this is not just some kind of posturing (which it probably is) it could lead to more complete polarization of the Intel architecture market into Intel and non-Intel camps. That is, the chipset vendors may have no choice but to put all their efforts into making AMD compatible products only. It seems kind of humorous that there could be a non-Intel Intel-Architecture camp.
It's a shame that Intel didn't patent the x86 instruction set, then they could have stopped AMD, cyrix and others from ever building processors at all.
Intel is not refusing to license the bus altogether. They are selectively licensing it to chipset vendors they approve of. IANAL, but could this be illegal anti-competitive behavior? Also, is it a coincidence that they waited until VIA and others (e.g., Micron) were nearly finished before they pulled this rabbit out of their hat? I mean, Intel surely knew about this for quite some time, and even provided these companies with secret Intel documents to facilitate development. All of a sudden now they say they won't license the technology? Does not compute.
My understanding is that Intel has patented the host bus (FSB) for the P4, and is licensing it selectively to chipset vendors it approves of (yes, there are some, e.g., Serverworks). I sort of thought such selective practices were illegal, but I certainly don't know.
Micron is having a similar problem to Via, where Intel is trying to stop a chipset of theirs which is currently under development.
Someone posted earlier that the C language specification is 500 pages, and C++'s is 750. In addition to all the syntax of C, there are numerous reqired library functions for hosted environments. There is a macro processor. You eventually have to link the code, too.
I guess you are right that a C compiler would be easier to implement than a java or C++ compiler, but I would hardly call it "fairly easy."
Note that a cross compiler is not a program wich translates source code from one programming language to another. A cross compiler is a program or group of programs which converts source code into an executable for a platform different from the one the program is running on. For example, gcc can be built on linux as a cross compiler for DOS. To make it work you have to use the djgpp libraries. Gcc can cross-compile to many platforms. The above is the only one I have personally done.
K & R 2 lists 32 reserved words in C. I think C99 may have added one or more additional key words.
I doubt that any ANSI compliant C++ compiler ever was made that used C as an intermediate step. If there was such a beast, it must have been an abomination.
Are you sure you are a programmer?
MM
--
At its heart, the transmeta chip is not an x86 processor. It reads x86 instructions and translates them to its own secret native instruction set. It optimizes as it translates. In principle, a transmeta chip could be ported to a new instruction set. It somehow keeps track of what it has already translated so that it won't have to translate it again if it has already translated it.
So this is just a little bit like what you are talking about. The I86 instructions then become a defacto standard, and the transmeta chip just compiles them into its own native machine code. If transmeta people thought another architecture was important, they could theoretically add support for that architecture too. I'm sure they would have already done it if they thought it would make them money.
MM
--
This is a U.S. centric post. I apologize to international readers.
People in the US have a right not to vote. The pre-glastnost Soviet Union may have had %100 voter turnout, but that doesn't mean people were pleased with their political system.
Some people believe that the political system in this country is a farce. In particular, I have heard a lot of people complain about the two-party system. If those people choose not to vote, I don't blame them and I feel that their refusal to vote is a valid and highly visible form of protest. For example, imagine if only 10% of eligible voters voted. That would, in effect, be a huge vote of no-confidence in the political system, and might even percipitate a crisis. But if people vote without conviction, then they are effectively propping-up a regime they don't support.
Also, all those pro-Gore people who blame Nader for "stealing" just enough votes away from Gore to let Bush win, I think you need to serisously consider what you are saying. First of all, Nader's campaign (like Perot's) ammounted to a form of dissent. By garnering votes, he showed that a significant portion of people are sick of the two-party system and would like to see other agendas discussed. By suggesting that people who believed in Nader's agenda should not vote for Nader or that Nader should have stepped down, you are essentially arguing that dissenters should keep their mouths shut. That is not really consistent with the American ideal (seldom realized) of tolerating dissent.
By the way, vacamike, I realize that the you are not proposing mandatory voting or anything of that nature. You just get tired of hearing lazy people complain in a totally unconstructive fashion. I feel that way too, so don't think I am giving you a hard time. I just saw an opportunity to express a viewpoint which I think has value.
Oh, and, personally, I vote. In fact, I voted for Gore, although if I had it to do over again, I probably would have voted for someone else. Maybe Perot.
"Good" is a slippery term when discussing capacitors. In rf circuits, good means high Q at the frequency of interest, so metal plates with an air-gap between them might be really excellent for some RF applications.
But the applications where tantalum caps are indispensible are those where very large capacitance with very low ESR is needed in a very small space. An example would be the capacitors used in high-current switching power supplies. Air core caps won't work because air has a low dielectric constant and a low dielectric breakdown voltage. Because air has these properties, air-core caps cannot be made small enough for microfarad range capacitors. Aluminum electrolytics are often used in this application, but when size is of the utmost importance, even aluminum electrolytics are too big. That's when tantalum cap's are used.
Teflon is an awesome dielectric material. It has low leakage, high breakdown voltage, and a fairly high dielectric constant. It also behaves pretty well at high frequencies. Still, to the best of my knowledge, there are no teflon capacitors available that can top tantalum when low ESR, small size, and high capacitance per unit volume at low voltages are all taken into account.
You must not have read the whole article. They spice up the lead like that to draw you in, but there was significant counterpoint brought in at the end.
Go back and read the last half of the article where people who actually live in the Congo speak there views.
You are a bit hasty in your pronouncement, and you obviously did not read the entire article either.
For example, consider this excerpt:
Terese Hart, an American botanist who helped create
the Okapi Faunal Reserve and has worked there since
the early 1980's, supports neither an embargo on coltan
nor a quick pullout of Ugandan forces from northeast
Congo.
''The world wants to intervene from a distance and pull
the strings on the puppet,'' said Hart, who works for the
Wildlife Conservation Society. ''The problem is that the
strings are not connected to anything. When outsiders
struggle to find solutions for Congo, they often assume
there is some kind of government. There is no
government. There is nothing.''
As for coltan mining, Hart said it is silly for the outside
world to try to squeeze one of the few ways for poor
people to make a bit of money.
''Outside the reserve, I think that coltan mining is the
lesser evil of the types of exploitation that occur when
there is no government,'' Hart said. ''I prefer mining to
logging. Cutting timber in the rain forest is part of an
irreversible ecological process. I don't think coltan
mining does as much permanent damage. The miner will
not get much, but at least he will continue to live.''
I design single-board computers for CompactPCI backplanes. For us there is no substitute for tantalum cap's. I am not saying that no substitute could possibly be produced by the companies that make capacitors, but as of now, there is no substitute.
Even if you are right, which I don't admit, it doesn't change the fact that there are some disturbing trends emerging. I agree with you with respect to the right to copy. But I take issue with the notion that you "never did buy copywritten content." In the past, because of the manner in which books and music and the like were distributed, there was a physical medium, and you could sell that or give it to a friend, or listen to it or read it as many times as you want. To suggest that the owner of the book or record would have to pay seperately for each viewing, or that he or she could not legally sell the medium would seem silly. Possesion of the medium was assumed to convey a right to use it in its normal fashion. This right was not practically, or, I think, legally revocable.
What is happening now, thanks to the DMCA, is that those who make money from distributing copyrighted content, are moving towards a pay-per-view or pay-per-use payment scheme for everything. The day may come when all television programming is pay per view, for example. Microsoft is reportedly planning on releasing its newest OS version on time-limited terms. After the initial licensing period expires, you will have to pay more money! Even some textual materials are being distributed under these sorts of terms. (For example, the IEEE puts a time limit on some of its technical materials and if the licensee doesn't want to pay additional fees, he or she is obliged to return the original and all copies made by any means.)
I, for one, don't like all this and don't want it. Especially when it comes to textual materials, I feel that for tradition's sake, if no other, textual materials should always be distributed on terms similar to those of a book. The notion of paying every time I read something is so abhorrent to me that I cannot adequately express it in words.
With a combination of legal and technical measures, it may be possible to transition to this pay-per-view, pay-per-use billing scheme, but I think that consumers need to decide if they wish to allow this to happen.
Also, since I am honest and don't "pirate" anything, I resent all intrusive anti-pirating technology and the blocking of technology which would allow me to engage in non-infringing uses of copyrighted works (deCSS).
This turned into more of a rant than a genuine response, but I'll just post it anyway.
Thank you for dis-mis-informing me. I got this mistaken notion from slashdot. I guess I should have known better than to believe it without checking up on it.
My understanding is this: according to legal precedent, if a patent holder does not vigorously enforce its patents with everyone, it looses the right to enforce them altogether.
It is entirely possible that Dolby will be willing to work out a sweetheart deal with the BSD folks.
Dolby is alleging patent infringement. This is completely different from MPAA and RIAA actions which have relied on the DMCA. The DMCA invokes criminal penalties for what amounts to reverse-engineering of unpatented scrambling techniques.
I am not saying this Dolby vs. BSD conflict is a good thing, but it is consistent with how I have always understood patents to work. It's nothing new.
And remember that if they don't enforce their patents, they lose them. Who knows, maybe they will work out a sweetheart deal with the BSD folks. Then Dobly won't loose their right to charge license fees to others who make commercial products.
Slashdot Mirror
Banning all non-backdoored encryption would force a lot of people to use backdoored encryption. This might very well allow the FBI to catch more criminals. It is not surprising that the FBI is in favor of it.
However, using the backdoors to monitor US citizens would not be constitutional (secure in our affairs) and enforcing the provision would require laws wich conflict with free-speech.
The solution to our problems is for all of us as citizens to become more responsible and civic-minded, not to relinquish more and more power and responsibility to the federal government. Terrorists cannot accomplish their goals if citizens stop them. Planes cannot be hijacked by knife-wielding assailants if they are swarmed by unarmed passengers. Better yet, let's equip pilots with guns (yes it is possible to design a round which will not pierce the skin of an airplane).
In fact, if every passenger had been *required* to carry a knife on the plane (instead of being nearly forbidden to do so), those terrorists wouldn't have gotten away with any of this!
I mean if officials can't keep knives out of prisons, how do they expect to keep them off of planes?
Anyway, that isn't what this post is about. I'm just venting because the approach our fearful leaders seem to be taking is all backwards. It is not reasonable to expect the government to protect us from all evil! That is partly our responsibility too.
MM
--
That was satire. Get over it.
MM
--
I think you are right.
My father, who has been pro-uSoft in a big way, said he will not upgrade to XP or any version of IE that doesn't have java. The reason he gave was that he doesn't like the licensing terms of XP, and he doens't like the lack of functionality in newer versions of IE.
Personally, I believe that XP is going to be a tough sell, even to corporations.
I think uSoft has certainly hit a zenith that it will never again surmount. I also think that they will work as hard as possible (that is, to an extent we have not yet seen) to make all things uSoft incompatible with java, Apache, Samba, and anything else that allows different architectures to work together seamlessly.
It will be fun to watch what happens now!
MM
--
This definitely sounds like MIT. Like the coke machine way back when.
MM
--
It is true that Microsoft could lower its prices and still make a decent profit. This might mean that only people who prefer open source to MS would use open source, which is fine.
However, if Microsoft does lower prices or make any improvements in its business practices or licensing terms as a result of competition from open souce projects, then open source has basically won.
Of course, microsoft will probably try to keep and increase its market share by becoming completely incopatible with everyone else (e.g., break Samba and try to force web developers into proprietary MS technologies that Apache can't use), but this never works in the long run. Sure, it could make people miserable for a few years, but it definitely won't work forever. Microsoft will have to compete or die, just like everyone else.
Meanwhile, I will use linux at home and whatever I have to use at work (which right now is win2k, solaris and linux.)
MM
--
Since the encryption scheme is broken (as public key anyway) it is not likely to make a great deal of money for anyone, although it was certainly interesting to read about.
Furthermore, I think the father is right. Most children who get lots of money and or achieve lasting celebrity while they are still children have messed-up lives. I totally agree with the father's decision. Besides, smart as she is, she will most likely make money later in life if that is what she actually wants to do.
MM
--
Mod this down (off-topic), it is a link to a close-up of a vagina. Yes, I clicked on it. So I am stupid. So what.
--
MM
You won't find a bigger free-speach advocate than Jello Biafra. At least now that Frank Zappa and John Denver are dead. (No, I'm not kidding about John Denver. H really did come to the defense of the Dead Kennedys and Alternative Tentacle Records).
MM
--
Step one:
National Referendum Now. Many states have the referendum, and while some of the resulting laws have been confusing or contradictory with other laws, it has by-and-large been a good thing.
MM
--
Are you mad? All digital information and creative works subsidized (and therefore controlled) by the government? I mean, that is WAY too much temptation to put in front of mere mortals. I really will leave the country if anything remotely resembling that occurs.
MM
--
Heh, heh. That is EXACTLY what my first thought was when I read this. Almost all of the people expressing outrage here are basing that outrage on an article at ONE site.
MM
--
VIA is not the only one.
Intel appears to be essentially on the warpath against chipset makers. Well, there is at least one chipset maker which seems to have Intel's approval (maybe Intel is going to buy them. heh,heh), but it appears that Intel is refusing to license the P4 bus technology to all the others.
If this is not just some kind of posturing (which it probably is) it could lead to more complete polarization of the Intel architecture market into Intel and non-Intel camps. That is, the chipset vendors may have no choice but to put all their efforts into making AMD compatible products only. It seems kind of humorous that there could be a non-Intel Intel-Architecture camp.
It's a shame that Intel didn't patent the x86 instruction set, then they could have stopped AMD, cyrix and others from ever building processors at all.
MM
--
Intel is not refusing to license the bus altogether. They are selectively licensing it to chipset vendors they approve of. IANAL, but could this be illegal anti-competitive behavior? Also, is it a coincidence that they waited until VIA and others (e.g., Micron) were nearly finished before they pulled this rabbit out of their hat? I mean, Intel surely knew about this for quite some time, and even provided these companies with secret Intel documents to facilitate development. All of a sudden now they say they won't license the technology? Does not compute.
MM
--
My understanding is that Intel has patented the host bus (FSB) for the P4, and is licensing it selectively to chipset vendors it approves of (yes, there are some, e.g., Serverworks). I sort of thought such selective practices were illegal, but I certainly don't know.
Micron is having a similar problem to Via, where Intel is trying to stop a chipset of theirs which is currently under development.
MM
--
Someone posted earlier that the C language specification is 500 pages, and C++'s is 750. In addition to all the syntax of C, there are numerous reqired library functions for hosted environments. There is a macro processor. You eventually have to link the code, too. I guess you are right that a C compiler would be easier to implement than a java or C++ compiler, but I would hardly call it "fairly easy." Note that a cross compiler is not a program wich translates source code from one programming language to another. A cross compiler is a program or group of programs which converts source code into an executable for a platform different from the one the program is running on. For example, gcc can be built on linux as a cross compiler for DOS. To make it work you have to use the djgpp libraries. Gcc can cross-compile to many platforms. The above is the only one I have personally done. K & R 2 lists 32 reserved words in C. I think C99 may have added one or more additional key words. I doubt that any ANSI compliant C++ compiler ever was made that used C as an intermediate step. If there was such a beast, it must have been an abomination. Are you sure you are a programmer? MM --
At its heart, the transmeta chip is not an x86 processor. It reads x86 instructions and translates them to its own secret native instruction set. It optimizes as it translates. In principle, a transmeta chip could be ported to a new instruction set. It somehow keeps track of what it has already translated so that it won't have to translate it again if it has already translated it. So this is just a little bit like what you are talking about. The I86 instructions then become a defacto standard, and the transmeta chip just compiles them into its own native machine code. If transmeta people thought another architecture was important, they could theoretically add support for that architecture too. I'm sure they would have already done it if they thought it would make them money. MM --
This is a U.S. centric post. I apologize to international readers.
People in the US have a right not to vote. The pre-glastnost Soviet Union may have had %100 voter turnout, but that doesn't mean people were pleased with their political system.
Some people believe that the political system in this country is a farce. In particular, I have heard a lot of people complain about the two-party system. If those people choose not to vote, I don't blame them and I feel that their refusal to vote is a valid and highly visible form of protest. For example, imagine if only 10% of eligible voters voted. That would, in effect, be a huge vote of no-confidence in the political system, and might even percipitate a crisis. But if people vote without conviction, then they are effectively propping-up a regime they don't support.
Also, all those pro-Gore people who blame Nader for "stealing" just enough votes away from Gore to let Bush win, I think you need to serisously consider what you are saying. First of all, Nader's campaign (like Perot's) ammounted to a form of dissent. By garnering votes, he showed that a significant portion of people are sick of the two-party system and would like to see other agendas discussed. By suggesting that people who believed in Nader's agenda should not vote for Nader or that Nader should have stepped down, you are essentially arguing that dissenters should keep their mouths shut. That is not really consistent with the American ideal (seldom realized) of tolerating dissent.
By the way, vacamike, I realize that the you are not proposing mandatory voting or anything of that nature. You just get tired of hearing lazy people complain in a totally unconstructive fashion. I feel that way too, so don't think I am giving you a hard time. I just saw an opportunity to express a viewpoint which I think has value.
Oh, and, personally, I vote. In fact, I voted for Gore, although if I had it to do over again, I probably would have voted for someone else. Maybe Perot.
MM
--
"Good" is a slippery term when discussing capacitors. In rf circuits, good means high Q at the frequency of interest, so metal plates with an air-gap between them might be really excellent for some RF applications.
But the applications where tantalum caps are indispensible are those where very large capacitance with very low ESR is needed in a very small space. An example would be the capacitors used in high-current switching power supplies. Air core caps won't work because air has a low dielectric constant and a low dielectric breakdown voltage. Because air has these properties, air-core caps cannot be made small enough for microfarad range capacitors. Aluminum electrolytics are often used in this application, but when size is of the utmost importance, even aluminum electrolytics are too big. That's when tantalum cap's are used.
Teflon is an awesome dielectric material. It has low leakage, high breakdown voltage, and a fairly high dielectric constant. It also behaves pretty well at high frequencies. Still, to the best of my knowledge, there are no teflon capacitors available that can top tantalum when low ESR, small size, and high capacitance per unit volume at low voltages are all taken into account.
MM
--
You must not have read the whole article. They spice up the lead like that to draw you in, but there was significant counterpoint brought in at the end.
Go back and read the last half of the article where people who actually live in the Congo speak there views.
MM
--
For example, consider this excerpt:
Hope that clears things up.
MM
--
I design single-board computers for CompactPCI backplanes. For us there is no substitute for tantalum cap's. I am not saying that no substitute could possibly be produced by the companies that make capacitors, but as of now, there is no substitute.
MM
----
Even if you are right, which I don't admit, it doesn't change the fact that there are some disturbing trends emerging. I agree with you with respect to the right to copy. But I take issue with the notion that you "never did buy copywritten content." In the past, because of the manner in which books and music and the like were distributed, there was a physical medium, and you could sell that or give it to a friend, or listen to it or read it as many times as you want. To suggest that the owner of the book or record would have to pay seperately for each viewing, or that he or she could not legally sell the medium would seem silly. Possesion of the medium was assumed to convey a right to use it in its normal fashion. This right was not practically, or, I think, legally revocable.
What is happening now, thanks to the DMCA, is that those who make money from distributing copyrighted content, are moving towards a pay-per-view or pay-per-use payment scheme for everything. The day may come when all television programming is pay per view, for example. Microsoft is reportedly planning on releasing its newest OS version on time-limited terms. After the initial licensing period expires, you will have to pay more money! Even some textual materials are being distributed under these sorts of terms. (For example, the IEEE puts a time limit on some of its technical materials and if the licensee doesn't want to pay additional fees, he or she is obliged to return the original and all copies made by any means.)
I, for one, don't like all this and don't want it. Especially when it comes to textual materials, I feel that for tradition's sake, if no other, textual materials should always be distributed on terms similar to those of a book. The notion of paying every time I read something is so abhorrent to me that I cannot adequately express it in words.
With a combination of legal and technical measures, it may be possible to transition to this pay-per-view, pay-per-use billing scheme, but I think that consumers need to decide if they wish to allow this to happen.
Also, since I am honest and don't "pirate" anything, I resent all intrusive anti-pirating technology and the blocking of technology which would allow me to engage in non-infringing uses of copyrighted works (deCSS).
This turned into more of a rant than a genuine response, but I'll just post it anyway.
MM
Thank you for dis-mis-informing me. I got this mistaken notion from slashdot. I guess I should have known better than to believe it without checking up on it.
MM
My understanding is this: according to legal precedent, if a patent holder does not vigorously enforce its patents with everyone, it looses the right to enforce them altogether.
It is entirely possible that Dolby will be willing to work out a sweetheart deal with the BSD folks.
MM
Dolby is alleging patent infringement. This is completely different from MPAA and RIAA actions which have relied on the DMCA. The DMCA invokes criminal penalties for what amounts to reverse-engineering of unpatented scrambling techniques.
I am not saying this Dolby vs. BSD conflict is a good thing, but it is consistent with how I have always understood patents to work. It's nothing new.
And remember that if they don't enforce their patents, they lose them. Who knows, maybe they will work out a sweetheart deal with the BSD folks. Then Dobly won't loose their right to charge license fees to others who make commercial products.
In short, I wouldn't panic yet.
MM