Remember, Pinochet seized power when the alternative was yet another brutal South-American style Communist dictatorship. I'd say Chile made out better than they could have expected under the circumstances (hence he was relatively benign.)
No, sorry. The regime that the CIA overthrew in Chile when they put Pinochet into power was not communist and was not a dictatorship. It was a democratically elected social democratic government, similar in its policies to those now in power in Britain, Germany and many other western European countries.
Remember, he called Pinochet a relatively benign dictator. He didn't say that Pinochet was benign on his own merit.
No, no, no. Pinochet wasn't a relatively benign anything. Thousands killed, tens of thousands tortured. Pinochet was one of the really top-level international criminals of the last century, not perhaps in the same bracket as Hitler, Stalin or Pol Pot, but certainly at the top of the second rank.
Stop trying to make excuses for your country's evil past. You have no excuse. Stop trying to say it wasn't your fault. It was your fault.
This is insightful?
Are you responsible for the slave trade? Are you responsible for the genocide against Native Americans? What is the moral distinction between genocide against Native Americans and genocide against Jews?
Every nation has in its history events of shocking and unforgivable inhumanity. But no-one now posting on Slashdot took part in the massacre at Wounded Knee; no-one now posting on Slashdot guarded the camp at Balsen.
The United States is guilty of genocide, yes. Germany is guilty of genocide, yes. Individual Americans and Germans posting to Slashdot today are not guilty of genocide.
This is a funny issue and I'm not sure where I stand on it. It's also seriously off-topic. I'm not trying to make an argument for one side or the other, just stating a few (weird) facts.
Guns are indeed banned in most countries of Europe. Here in Scotland, hand guns are totally banned following the Dunblane school massacre, and licences for sporting guns (shotguns and rifles) are extremely difficult to obtain. Carrying knives is also banned, even quite small pocket knives. Nevertheless, we still have a pretty serious problem with street violence and particularly with domestic violence, compared to other European countries.
In the US, of course, guns are not banned, and lots of people have them; and, not very surprisingly, the US has more gun crime than anywhere else in the developed world.
So, hey, more guns in people's hands means more gun crime? More weapons in people's hand means more violence?
Errr, no.
Right across the border from Germany there's Switzerland, and it's a very odd place populated by very odd people. Not saying anything against them... but they're odd. Every man is required to keep an automatic weapon in the house. You walk down a high street and there's weapon shop after weapon shop: not just firearms, but also swords, knives, crossbows, longbows, battle-axes - battle axes, I kid you not - Japanese ninja type things, armour, you name it they've got it. You could easily equip an expedition to Mordor in the streets of Geneva.
So do they have a problem with violence? Well sort of. They have more violence than they used to, more shootings than they used to. And they're getting worried about it. But they still have not only less violence but even less shootings than practically anywhere else in Europe.
And the majority of that traditional advertising is a simple "this program was made possible by a grant from the XYZ Corporation." It isn't in your face, it doesn't annoy anyone and doesn't turn an hour show into 35-40 minutes worth of crap.
The BBC is currently showing a US-made television drama called '24', shown in 24 episodes each of which supposedly encapsulates an hour of the day. This is screamingly announced as 'real time television', but each episode, as screened by the BBC, lasts only 45 minutes... so presumably you guys watched one minute of advertising for every three minutes of content. No wonder you have attention deficits!
I tend not to be as militant about privacy as most of the rest of you. Even so, I agree that this type of information should be anonymous if it is collected. Perhaps also an explicit opt-in. But even with those requirements, the data collected is still very useful and valuable. That data is worth a great deal of money to the PVR manufacturers . The broadcast industry had every reason to expect that SonicBlue was collecting this information; and, if not, that they will in the future. It's disingenuous of SonicBlue to act as if collecting that information is something that they don't do and would never consider doing. Frankly, that would be a stupid business decision.
The data may be worth a great deal, but as the Amici point out collecting it would be a federal criminal offence in the United States, and incidentally it would also be a criminal offence in every state in the European Community. Don't know the state of the law on privacy in Japan, but my guess is the only place you could do this legally would be a few obscure third world countries. So it was not reasonable for the broadcasters to assume SonicBLUE was collecting this information. They may have had the means to collect it, but they had no right to do so.
I'm damn well suggesting that a drive shouldn't fail when you put in something that is PHYSICALLY COMPATIBLE with a CD. Sure, I don't expect it to be able to handle a cheese sandwich or a sanding disc, but a correctly-sized piece of plastic should be fine.
The drive isn't failing. It's doing what it's suposed to do. It's reading the equivalent of the boot sector of the CD, and attempting to boot the software on the CD. The software on the CD is then doing deliberately malicious things to the computer. Any computer that's capable of booting or automatically running software from any media is vulnerable to attack from what is in effect a boot sector virus.
It does seem to me that Sony are sailing very close to some legal winds here. It would not seem to me to be so much a problem if the automatic-load-and-go program opened a window on the Mac screen saying 'this disc cannot be played on Macintosh computers', but this deliberate malicious damage seems to me quite serious.
Mind you, it's arguable that anyone who buys a Celine Dion record deserves all they get...
The patents appear to be United States Patent
6,289,319; US Patent 5,576,951; and US Patent 5,309,355; all registered in the name of Lawrence B. Lockwood, of 5935 Folsom Dr., La Jolla, CA 92037.
This entire paragraph is inconsistent and makes little sense yet the fact that it is currently at +4 insightful just goes to show that any anti-copyright rant no matter how incoherent will be well received on Slashdot. If there was no copyright then the incentive to write books would drop significantly. Currently writing a good book (both fiction and non-fiction) is a significant effort that requires research, perseverance and a large expendition of time.
Bollocks
Putting my money where my mouth is: you can read my novels here and here, and my short stories here. You can't buy them in a bookstore because I've never offered any of them to a publisher. People who write fiction write fiction because they want to write fiction. Of course, a great deal of what gets written is crap; but by no means everything that doesn't get published is crap, and the number of good unpublished novels gathering dust in people's attics far exceeds the number of novels in print.
Thos of us in the West live in a post-scarcity world. People are no longer driven to engage in economic activity every minute of every day. While a very few authors make a lot of money, most published authors make a pittance; for those people, getting read is more important than getting paid. My novels and stories on the Web do get read, and occasionally I do get feedback (not as often as I'd like). The number of books you can read is not limited by the number that are written. It's limited (just like music) by the number the distribution channels are prepared to promote. And just like music, once creators bypass the distribution channels by making their owrk available directly to the reader over the Web, the number of stories available to read goes up and the cost of reading them goes down. As to quality, you'll have to judge that for yourself - but over time we'll see a new value add service springing up reviewing and selecting texts that are available on the Web, so that you can use your chosen critic to read through texts and select for you the ones you will like to read.
So: does copyright increase or decrease the number of stories available to you? The answer is it's pretty neutral. People who want to write will write whether there's copyright or not. Personally I like it, because I have an ego and would like you to know that the sory you're enjoying is one I wrote (and I wouldn't like it if you copied it and claimed you had written it).
But does hardware content protection increase or decrease the number of texts available to you? Why, it certainly decreases them, because I'm not going to be able to afford the digital certification from the content protection monopolists, and so I won't be able to publish my stories anymore and you won't be able to read them.
Do not confuse 'content protection' with copyright. 'Content protection' does nothing to rotect the artist and everything to protect the distributor.
Acorn, the people who designed the ARM chip (ARM originally stood for 'Acorn RISC Machine', were the company which had previously built the BBC Micro, and were by a long way the best of the British micro computer makers. In 1988 or 89 they brought out their first RISC powered machines, the Acorn Archimedes, initially with an operating system called Arthur. In about 1990 RISC-OS was launched. It had co-operative rather than pre-emptive multi-tasking, but was extremely lightweight and high-performancs - font anti-aliasing was a standard feature from day one, and the user interface design was cleaner and more intuitive even than the Macintosh.
These were extremely high performance machines for their day - when I bought my first Archimedes, it could outperform every computer that the University where I then worked owned, and could run MS-DOS in a window under software emulation faster than many contemporary PCs. The architecture was entirely proprietary, with non PC compatible bus and expansion cards. The machines were moderately successful in the UK and Europe during the nineties - expensive, but you got a lot of bang for your buck. Towards the end, the 'RISC PC' was introduced which had PC-style components and had both Pentium and ARM processors.
Ultimately Acorn found they could no longer compete with the Microsoft hegemony and gave up manufacturing general purpose computers. A number of smaller UK companies are still manucaturing clones.
So, quick answers:
No, you can't walk into CompUSA and buy a machine that will run this stuff - and you probably never will be able to.
Sadly, the ARM as a mass market personal computer is now probably history.
The RISC-OS GUI was one of the best ever, certainly more intuitive that anything from Apple and than any X Window Manager; a project called ROX to build a RISC-OS like window manager is out there.
The last several big jobs I've done, I've agreed in advance with the customer that the software produced would be released under my copyright under BSD license. I've had no trouble getting big corporate customers to agree to this. The next negotiation, I shall try to get them to agree to GPL. It has some benefits for the customer: it guarantees that they have access to the codebase in perpetuity, whatever happens to me.
Funnily enough I just came across this article on ZDNet [zdnet.com] that talks about how Linux isn't a very good long term server solution
Yes, but note firstly that this article is making two different points, and secondly that at least one of them is clearly wrong and deliberatly misleading.
First the article claims that Linux on mainframes isn't price efficient compared to Linux on Intel, and that Intel boxes are emerging which have similar reliability to mainframes.
Possibly true; I don't know enough about mainframes to know, although I'm certainly not aware of these high-reliability Intel boxes.
Second, the article launches an ill-informed FUD assault on Linux, saying
'Linux vendors for requiring users to constantly update their software to fix errors'
'current Linux incarnations are relatively immature, as evidenced by the interminable list of errors/patches on Linux providers' Web sites'
'Linux isn't capable of running more complex, critical applications, such as e-mail notification systems'
Are any of those things true? What does that say about the rest of the article?
Arghh... remember to preview, remember to chack the links... actually the link goes to the right place but that should of course read http://www.law.lsu.edu and not law.lsu.com
I shall now go and stand in a corner wearing a dunces cap for half an hour
Flash intro screen, doesn't work on all browsers, alternative redirect doesn't work on all browsers..
Gaphics-heavy site, takes for ever to load.
No links to other web resources of use to students
All navigation is graphics without appropriate alt text, so unusable on text browsers or by visually disabled users
In other words, his is a reasonably competent, reasonably professional Web site, accurately describing the school, and theirs is an incompetent, unusable pile of dross.
I think that's what the quarrel is about, actually.
It's worth pointing out that because of the poor provision for disabled access, http://www.law.lsu.edu/ would be illegal in most of Europe.
What can we do to get OUR government to pass a bill like this? Any suggestions?
I've just sent my Member of Parliament an email with a brief summary of Dr Villanueva's argument and the URL of the letter. I suspect this letter - from a legislator, arguing the points from a legislators point of view - will be more persuasive to our legislators than anything we could write.
In short, if you have a Sun server, Solaris is the only OS that allows you to use it to its full potential. Linux is extremely useful in a wide variety of applications, but, when I last checked, the SPARC ports still didn't support the same scope of Sun hardware that Solaris does.
But that's not an advantage for Sun. On the contrary. If you have an IBM server, no matter how big, how powerful of how reliable (and IBM has bigger, more powerful and more reliable boxes in its range than Sun has), Linux will drive that box to its full potential. So Sun don't just lose the software spend - they lose the hardware spend as well.
But what would happens when (notice I didn't say if) MS changes the specs significantly to break the surrent implementation of SAMBA, but before doing this, they release the specs with similar restrictions to what they've just done) That is, no GPLed products? Where would the SAMBA teams stand when they upgrade their implementation?
Provided they didn't look at the Microsoft documents, but continued to reverse engineer and build a clean-room reimplementation (as they have up to now), they'
d be fine.
Dataplay discs are VERY small. That's the whole point. They are intended for digital cameras...
Hey, hey, listen to what you're saying. Are you going to put media with someone else's copy protection mechanism on it into your camera?
'Hal, make a copy of that photo I just took and mail it to my mother.'
'Sorry, Dave, I can't do that.'
I don't think so. I do think so. I think the camera buying public will take one look at that and laugh so hard you'll think the Marx Brothers are back in business.
There is a hidden cost, and I'm not sure that it has been paid yet. Once the fuel is consumed, it must be disposed of. At the moment, we're storing the spent fuel at the Nuke plant. This is a short term stopgap proceedure. We need a longer term solution. The current proposed solution in the US is very late, and way over budget. Since you must store the spent fuel for a million years, you must store it in a geologically benign place. Since a million years is a long time, I'd argue that no such place exists. So, you have to design it so that it is possible to move the fuel from time to time. This will provide us with an additional cost stream forever.
You've also got to pay people to guard it 24 hours a day 365.25 days a year for a million years. That's one heck of a wage bill; and you've got to guarantee those guards no matter what social or political upheaval happens in the next million years. Quite an interesting project.
There's much I sympathise with in this paper. The analysis seems to me largely correct. The synthesis, however, leaves me extremely sceptical. The authors say
...we recommend that an intensive, international study be started at once, with a mandate to propose detailed and meaningful paths for the Internet's development, operations, and management. The goal of this study would be to help guide the formation of purpose-built representative organisations and policies that would be beneficial both to established Internet stakeholders and to the wide variety of organizations and individuals who are effectively disenfranchised in the current Internet policy environment.
That sounds to me an exact description of the International Working Party on the White Paper, the consultation process which led to the setting up of ICANN (and, which, incidentally, I took part in in Geneva).
What worries me is that if we do the whole thing again in the same way,
There's a very high probability that we'll come up with something more or less exactly like ICANN;
If we go round this cycle often enough, Governments (plural) are going to get pissed off, and the functions will either be put into the hands of the ITU or a new, intergovermental (or UN) body will be set up to take over.
It's a shame Jon Postel went and died on us; we moaned enough about him during his lifetime, but he died this job far better than ICANN have. Short of finding another individual as unmoved by commercial pressures, and as essentially fair minded as Jon was, we are stuck with a bunch of extremely wealthy conflicting vested interests, and a lot of hungry looking lawyers. The horizon to windward looks stormy.
Slashdot Mirror
No, sorry. The regime that the CIA overthrew in Chile when they put Pinochet into power was not communist and was not a dictatorship. It was a democratically elected social democratic government, similar in its policies to those now in power in Britain, Germany and many other western European countries.
No, no, no. Pinochet wasn't a relatively benign anything. Thousands killed, tens of thousands tortured. Pinochet was one of the really top-level international criminals of the last century, not perhaps in the same bracket as Hitler, Stalin or Pol Pot, but certainly at the top of the second rank.
This is insightful?
Are you responsible for the slave trade? Are you responsible for the genocide against Native Americans? What is the moral distinction between genocide against Native Americans and genocide against Jews?
Every nation has in its history events of shocking and unforgivable inhumanity. But no-one now posting on Slashdot took part in the massacre at Wounded Knee; no-one now posting on Slashdot guarded the camp at Balsen.
The United States is guilty of genocide, yes. Germany is guilty of genocide, yes. Individual Americans and Germans posting to Slashdot today are not guilty of genocide.So it is not his fault.
This is a funny issue and I'm not sure where I stand on it. It's also seriously off-topic. I'm not trying to make an argument for one side or the other, just stating a few (weird) facts.
Guns are indeed banned in most countries of Europe. Here in Scotland, hand guns are totally banned following the Dunblane school massacre, and licences for sporting guns (shotguns and rifles) are extremely difficult to obtain. Carrying knives is also banned, even quite small pocket knives. Nevertheless, we still have a pretty serious problem with street violence and particularly with domestic violence, compared to other European countries.
In the US, of course, guns are not banned, and lots of people have them; and, not very surprisingly, the US has more gun crime than anywhere else in the developed world.
So, hey, more guns in people's hands means more gun crime? More weapons in people's hand means more violence?
Errr, no.
Right across the border from Germany there's Switzerland, and it's a very odd place populated by very odd people. Not saying anything against them... but they're odd. Every man is required to keep an automatic weapon in the house. You walk down a high street and there's weapon shop after weapon shop: not just firearms, but also swords, knives, crossbows, longbows, battle-axes - battle axes, I kid you not - Japanese ninja type things, armour, you name it they've got it. You could easily equip an expedition to Mordor in the streets of Geneva.
So do they have a problem with violence? Well sort of. They have more violence than they used to, more shootings than they used to. And they're getting worried about it. But they still have not only less violence but even less shootings than practically anywhere else in Europe.
Very odd.
The BBC is currently showing a US-made television drama called '24', shown in 24 episodes each of which supposedly encapsulates an hour of the day. This is screamingly announced as 'real time television', but each episode, as screened by the BBC, lasts only 45 minutes... so presumably you guys watched one minute of advertising for every three minutes of content. No wonder you have attention deficits!
The data may be worth a great deal, but as the Amici point out collecting it would be a federal criminal offence in the United States, and incidentally it would also be a criminal offence in every state in the European Community. Don't know the state of the law on privacy in Japan, but my guess is the only place you could do this legally would be a few obscure third world countries. So it was not reasonable for the broadcasters to assume SonicBLUE was collecting this information. They may have had the means to collect it, but they had no right to do so.
The drive isn't failing. It's doing what it's suposed to do. It's reading the equivalent of the boot sector of the CD, and attempting to boot the software on the CD. The software on the CD is then doing deliberately malicious things to the computer. Any computer that's capable of booting or automatically running software from any media is vulnerable to attack from what is in effect a boot sector virus.
It does seem to me that Sony are sailing very close to some legal winds here. It would not seem to me to be so much a problem if the automatic-load-and-go program opened a window on the Mac screen saying 'this disc cannot be played on Macintosh computers', but this deliberate malicious damage seems to me quite serious.
Mind you, it's arguable that anyone who buys a Celine Dion record deserves all they get...
The patents appear to be United States Patent 6,289,319; US Patent 5,576,951; and US Patent 5,309,355; all registered in the name of Lawrence B. Lockwood, of 5935 Folsom Dr., La Jolla, CA 92037.
Bollocks
Putting my money where my mouth is: you can read my novels here and here, and my short stories here. You can't buy them in a bookstore because I've never offered any of them to a publisher. People who write fiction write fiction because they want to write fiction. Of course, a great deal of what gets written is crap; but by no means everything that doesn't get published is crap, and the number of good unpublished novels gathering dust in people's attics far exceeds the number of novels in print.
Thos of us in the West live in a post-scarcity world. People are no longer driven to engage in economic activity every minute of every day. While a very few authors make a lot of money, most published authors make a pittance; for those people, getting read is more important than getting paid. My novels and stories on the Web do get read, and occasionally I do get feedback (not as often as I'd like). The number of books you can read is not limited by the number that are written. It's limited (just like music) by the number the distribution channels are prepared to promote. And just like music, once creators bypass the distribution channels by making their owrk available directly to the reader over the Web, the number of stories available to read goes up and the cost of reading them goes down. As to quality, you'll have to judge that for yourself - but over time we'll see a new value add service springing up reviewing and selecting texts that are available on the Web, so that you can use your chosen critic to read through texts and select for you the ones you will like to read.
So: does copyright increase or decrease the number of stories available to you? The answer is it's pretty neutral. People who want to write will write whether there's copyright or not. Personally I like it, because I have an ego and would like you to know that the sory you're enjoying is one I wrote (and I wouldn't like it if you copied it and claimed you had written it).
But does hardware content protection increase or decrease the number of texts available to you? Why, it certainly decreases them, because I'm not going to be able to afford the digital certification from the content protection monopolists, and so I won't be able to publish my stories anymore and you won't be able to read them.
Do not confuse 'content protection' with copyright. 'Content protection' does nothing to rotect the artist and everything to protect the distributor.
These were extremely high performance machines for their day - when I bought my first Archimedes, it could outperform every computer that the University where I then worked owned, and could run MS-DOS in a window under software emulation faster than many contemporary PCs. The architecture was entirely proprietary, with non PC compatible bus and expansion cards. The machines were moderately successful in the UK and Europe during the nineties - expensive, but you got a lot of bang for your buck. Towards the end, the 'RISC PC' was introduced which had PC-style components and had both Pentium and ARM processors.
Ultimately Acorn found they could no longer compete with the Microsoft hegemony and gave up manufacturing general purpose computers. A number of smaller UK companies are still manucaturing clones.
So, quick answers:
The last several big jobs I've done, I've agreed in advance with the customer that the software produced would be released under my copyright under BSD license. I've had no trouble getting big corporate customers to agree to this. The next negotiation, I shall try to get them to agree to GPL. It has some benefits for the customer: it guarantees that they have access to the codebase in perpetuity, whatever happens to me.
Yes, but note firstly that this article is making two different points, and secondly that at least one of them is clearly wrong and deliberatly misleading.
First the article claims that Linux on mainframes isn't price efficient compared to Linux on Intel, and that Intel boxes are emerging which have similar reliability to mainframes.
Possibly true; I don't know enough about mainframes to know, although I'm certainly not aware of these high-reliability Intel boxes.
Second, the article launches an ill-informed FUD assault on Linux, saying
- 'Linux vendors for requiring users to constantly update their software to fix errors'
- 'current Linux incarnations are relatively immature, as evidenced by the interminable list of errors/patches on Linux providers' Web sites'
- 'Linux isn't capable of running more complex, critical applications, such as e-mail notification systems'
Are any of those things true? What does that say about the rest of the article?I shall now go and stand in a corner wearing a dunces cap for half an hour
OK, let's do a quick comparison.
lsulaw.com- Clear layout, loads fast
- Consistent navigation
- Clearly labelled links to all major departments of the School
- Clearly labelled links to information about the school
- Clear links to other Web resources of use to law students
- Works well in all browsers including text browsers
law.lsu.comIn other words, his is a reasonably competent, reasonably professional Web site, accurately describing the school, and theirs is an incompetent, unusable pile of dross.
I think that's what the quarrel is about, actually.
It's worth pointing out that because of the poor provision for disabled access, http://www.law.lsu.edu/ would be illegal in most of Europe.
Not saying I was the first one to do it, but I did and I can prove it. That predates the patent by ten years.
But that's not an advantage for Sun. On the contrary. If you have an IBM server, no matter how big, how powerful of how reliable (and IBM has bigger, more powerful and more reliable boxes in its range than Sun has), Linux will drive that box to its full potential. So Sun don't just lose the software spend - they lose the hardware spend as well.
If you're holding Sun stock, offload it now.
Provided they didn't look at the Microsoft documents, but continued to reverse engineer and build a clean-room reimplementation (as they have up to now), they' d be fine.
I have a leased line into my home. It isn't high bandwidth, and it isn't cheap; but no-one controls what I publish (or what I mirror) except me.
Quick! We're inside, now! Pull up the drawbridge...
Can anyone spell hypocrisy, or is that too long a word for Hollywood?
'Hal, make a copy of that photo I just took and mail it to my mother.'
'Sorry, Dave, I can't do that.'
I don't think so. I do think so. I think the camera buying public will take one look at that and laugh so hard you'll think the Marx Brothers are back in business.
That's right, it's blank.
Now try it in Opera. What a surprise! That's blank too...
OK, try again. What about Mozilla? Blank again.
Last shot, let's try Dillo. No, that's blank too...
Wait a minute. Why hasn't any other Slashdot reader noticed this already? You can't all be using Internet Exploder, can you?
You've also got to pay people to guard it 24 hours a day 365.25 days a year for a million years. That's one heck of a wage bill; and you've got to guarantee those guards no matter what social or political upheaval happens in the next million years. Quite an interesting project.
That sounds to me an exact description of the International Working Party on the White Paper, the consultation process which led to the setting up of ICANN (and, which, incidentally, I took part in in Geneva).
What worries me is that if we do the whole thing again in the same way,
It's a shame Jon Postel went and died on us; we moaned enough about him during his lifetime, but he died this job far better than ICANN have. Short of finding another individual as unmoved by commercial pressures, and as essentially fair minded as Jon was, we are stuck with a bunch of extremely wealthy conflicting vested interests, and a lot of hungry looking lawyers. The horizon to windward looks stormy.