While this interview has some semi-interesting info about BIOS business and architecture, it answeres NONE of the questions that it promised to answer.
The promise was to explain why TCPA is not effectively going to stop open source. The answer amounts to little beyond "read the specs". We all understand that TPM maybe be turned off in some cases. We all understand that a linux distro can theoretically be certified and run as a trusted OS. This doesn't mean, however, that wide spread of TPM wouldn't be the end of open source. If future cohort of Windows machines know to ignore any files produced on something that is not certified to be Windows, turning off TPM isn't going to be much of a solution. If you can't compile and certify your own software, how will certified HP Linux be practically different Windows?
I am extremely disappointed with this interview. If Brian is not qualified to talk about the implications of TCPA, as he himself admits, he shouldn't have volunteered to talk about it.
Many people have complained about the fact that the posted XHTML response looks "ugly". I don't see how you can blame XHTML for this. I thought Slashdot editors would have figured out how to slap 3 lines of CSS on top of Joe Clark's XHTML, which would make it fit with Slashdot style while preserving 100% of accessibility. That's what the separation of content and presentation is all about.
Instead, they left it anadourned so that it clashes with the rest of the site and provides them with a pathetic excuse for continuing using font and table tags instead of semantic markup. Whatever.
Ridiculous. If this center "just opened", then it definitely is not "one of the first". Not even one of the first ten, not even one of the first hundred. Perhaps one of the first thousand...
Here are a just a few others off top on my head (all of those have existed for several years):
A more 'toothful' modification of this idea would be to require all files to include some DMCA-protected text, like DeCSS.
Or, maybe, a "licence":
By making this File available on the Network, directly or through an Agent, the Distributor hereby
gives up any and all Rights to its Content, as well as any other Works of Art matching this File in name.
Having distributed content together with such licenses (or hired someone to do so), it might be a bit harder for the labels to defend copyright claims for individual songs.
I got curious exactly how much money is being made in TV ads right now, wondering if this might be a drop in the ocean. According to TVB "TV Facts", TV ad revenues are at $10 billion per quarter.
I couldn't find how what percentage of total revenues ads make up for large companies like CBS, but note that total quarterly revenues for AOLTW are at $10 billion (i.e. the same as total ad revenue accross the industry). Fox made something like $2,5 billion, Disney made $6 billion.
The bottom line: if anyone doubts (like I did) that TV ads are a very important source of revenue, it appears that the sums are quire significant.
This decision has nothing to do with anonymous SMS. It only waives the requirement that a political message tells who paid for it.
The first paragraph of the article:
"A decision by federal election regulators to exempt text-based wireless ads from campaign disclosure rules has critics warning that consumers could find their mobile phones subject to a flood of political spam as campaign 2002 kicks into high gear."
They are selling a 1GHz Celeron with 128MB for $399. I bought a new 900MHz Celeron with 128MB + CDRW for $399 from Fry's yesterday - basically the same configuration. But that included Win XP.
"Linux will prevail because I really hope it will". What great logic. While the title of the article presents a claim about linux will prevail, all the arguments are essentially about why it should.
Also, the claim that "No one would buy a car with a welded-shut hood" is much further from the truth than the author imagines. I bought a new car last year, and when i brought it to the dealer a month later for the first check up, it turned out that the hood latch was defective, and hood wouldn't open! Guess what - i didn't notice it, because i hadn't tried opening the hood, and in fact i have tried never opening it since! I just preferred to trust the mechanic that there was a problem with the hood and that they fixed it.
And most people I know who own new cars treat them exactly the same way: let the mechanic worry what's inside and focus on driving. Though as a geek I have different expectations of software, I understand that most people use software the way I use my car. So, for linux to prevail on the desktop, it is not sufficient to argue that proprietory software doesn't let you know what's inside. Joe User doesn't care. They do care, however, about how much it costs and how well it works.
I think you misread the article. Indianapolis required that children would only be able to play those games if they have their parents written concent. I.e., the idea was exactly that parents should have full control. At home, the parents can excercise direct control, but they have less control of what they kids do in public arcades. Given this, it seems that the law was in perfect agreement with your sentiments.
Tumbleweed applied for the pattent in early 1997. I believe US patent law allows you a year to prepare your patent application, which means that prior art would have to be before early 1996. I don't think BlueMountain was around then.
However, this is NOT what is important!
Somehow slashdot readers like to get worked up about each _specific_ case of stupid patent being granted. However, there is little discussion of the underlying legislation. People like to think that it is all just due to stupidity in the patent office. However, with many "stupid patents" the patent office does exactly what it is supposed to do according to the law, yet the result is just as ridiculous.
Does it really matter whether Tumbleweed actually was the first to document this idea? Would this condition make this patent fare or good for the society?
I think it would be good for all of us to spend less time getting excited about the specific cases and more time looking at this topic in a broader way.
The quote from Jefferson actually goes the other way around: "The society that will trade a little liberty for a little order...". If the quote was as you cited it, it would imply that order is more important than freedom - not something that we can easily imagine Jefferson saying.
It seems to me that what MS has in mind is a bit different from the NC as it was discussed a few years ago. Original NC assumed that the applications are running on the server, while the client does only the most basic work presenting the UI to the user. Since clients role is so simple, it can be done on any platform easily.
It seems to me that what MS has in mind is different: data is stored on the server, yet the applications largely still run on the client side. This requires that all the clients are have the necessary MS software. I.e., you will be able to access your Word documents on any PC, assuming that PC has Word 200x installed.
When i look at the content of ftp.exe on windows 98 i see the line "Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved." However, if i right-click on the file and look select "Properties", it says "Copyright (C) Microsoft Corp. 1981-1997". I.e., the credits to UC is there for geeks to enjoy, but are replaced with credits to MS for the casual user.
The question of whether an american will pay $82 for a square watermelon is plain silly. The main reason why they cost $82 in Japan is not because they are square, but because everything is freaking expensive in Japan. By the same token, will an american pay $25 for a regular watermelon?
The correct question to ask is whether square watermelons would be popular in the States if they were sold for $15 a piece (4 times the price of regular watermelon). And then the answer is a definite "maybe".
From the page you linked:
"Registrations are not currently open for new domains directly under id.au. You must register in an existing subdomain of id.au."
You must pick one of the existing subdomains. It looks like there are less than a dozen of those.
But does this really create copyright issues? If lynx presents a website as plain HTML, stripping off all most of the formatting, does this too count as derivative work? If a browser presents visited links different from not visited without any explicit request from the author, does this count as derivative work? What if the browser underlines links (which i never explicitely asked for)? And how about a browser (horror!) displaying popup menues associated with a link that i, the author, have no control over?
I think it would be hard to nail MS on the copyright issues, unless smarttags are confusingly similar to normal links, and even then it might not be easy.
Not to mention the fact that he is compairing the results of 600 impressions on Google with 30000 impessions on Robot Wisdom. More impressions result in more click-throughs. Wow.
How did this article get posted on/. in the first place?
A lot of people are talking about it as if all the OSI-opproved licenses were there to replace GPL. I don't think this is their intention. Apple does not expect you to write something completely new and release it under their licence. Rather, Apple is releasing some code and they want to have some special rights to any derived work. (Specifically, the want to be able to "to use, reproduce, display, perform, modify or have modified (for Apple and/or its subsidiaries), sublicense and distribute Your Modifications, in any form, through multiple tiers of distribution" - without the limitations of the license, which would apply to any third-parties using your modifications).
Slashdot Mirror
While this interview has some semi-interesting info about BIOS business and architecture, it answeres NONE of the questions that it promised to answer.
The promise was to explain why TCPA is not effectively going to stop open source. The answer amounts to little beyond "read the specs". We all understand that TPM maybe be turned off in some cases. We all understand that a linux distro can theoretically be certified and run as a trusted OS. This doesn't mean, however, that wide spread of TPM wouldn't be the end of open source. If future cohort of Windows machines know to ignore any files produced on something that is not certified to be Windows, turning off TPM isn't going to be much of a solution. If you can't compile and certify your own software, how will certified HP Linux be practically different Windows?
I am extremely disappointed with this interview. If Brian is not qualified to talk about the implications of TCPA, as he himself admits, he shouldn't have volunteered to talk about it.
Instead, they left it anadourned so that it clashes with the rest of the site and provides them with a pathetic excuse for continuing using font and table tags instead of semantic markup. Whatever.
Here are a just a few others off top on my head (all of those have existed for several years):
- U. of Toronto's NetLab
- U. of Michigan School of Information
- Berkeley Center for Globalization and Information Technology
- Berkeley Center for Information Technology and Marketplace Transformation
This by no means is a complete list - I am just too lazy to paste more links. Also, a number of books have been published on the subjects, e.g. The Internet in Everyday Life, The Control Revolution, etc.Or, maybe, a "licence":
Having distributed content together with such licenses (or hired someone to do so), it might be a bit harder for the labels to defend copyright claims for individual songs.
I got curious exactly how much money is being made in TV ads right now, wondering if this might be a drop in the ocean. According to TVB "TV Facts", TV ad revenues are at $10 billion per quarter.
I couldn't find how what percentage of total revenues ads make up for large companies like CBS, but note that total quarterly revenues for AOLTW are at $10 billion (i.e. the same as total ad revenue accross the industry). Fox made something like $2,5 billion, Disney made $6 billion.
The bottom line: if anyone doubts (like I did) that TV ads are a very important source of revenue, it appears that the sums are quire significant.
This decision has nothing to do with anonymous SMS. It only waives the requirement that a political message tells who paid for it.
The first paragraph of the article:
"A decision by federal election regulators to exempt text-based wireless ads from campaign disclosure rules has critics warning that consumers could find their mobile phones subject to a flood of political spam as campaign 2002 kicks into high gear."
They are selling a 1GHz Celeron with 128MB for $399. I bought a new 900MHz Celeron with 128MB + CDRW for $399 from Fry's yesterday - basically the same configuration. But that included Win XP.
Also, the claim that "No one would buy a car with a welded-shut hood" is much further from the truth than the author imagines. I bought a new car last year, and when i brought it to the dealer a month later for the first check up, it turned out that the hood latch was defective, and hood wouldn't open! Guess what - i didn't notice it, because i hadn't tried opening the hood, and in fact i have tried never opening it since! I just preferred to trust the mechanic that there was a problem with the hood and that they fixed it.
And most people I know who own new cars treat them exactly the same way: let the mechanic worry what's inside and focus on driving. Though as a geek I have different expectations of software, I understand that most people use software the way I use my car. So, for linux to prevail on the desktop, it is not sufficient to argue that proprietory software doesn't let you know what's inside. Joe User doesn't care. They do care, however, about how much it costs and how well it works.
People who can't learn a new syntax, probably shouldn't be coding anyway...
From the article:
The law would have required minors to show parental consent before playing violent or sexually explicit video games in public arcades.
I think you misread the article. Indianapolis required that children would only be able to play those games if they have their parents written concent. I.e., the idea was exactly that parents should have full control. At home, the parents can excercise direct control, but they have less control of what they kids do in public arcades. Given this, it seems that the law was in perfect agreement with your sentiments.
Tumbleweed applied for the pattent in early 1997. I believe US patent law allows you a year to prepare your patent application, which means that prior art would have to be before early 1996. I don't think BlueMountain was around then.
However, this is NOT what is important!
Somehow slashdot readers like to get worked up about each _specific_ case of stupid patent being granted. However, there is little discussion of the underlying legislation. People like to think that it is all just due to stupidity in the patent office. However, with many "stupid patents" the patent office does exactly what it is supposed to do according to the law, yet the result is just as ridiculous.
Does it really matter whether Tumbleweed actually was the first to document this idea? Would this condition make this patent fare or good for the society?
I think it would be good for all of us to spend less time getting excited about the specific cases and more time looking at this topic in a broader way.
The quote from Jefferson actually goes the other way around: "The society that will trade a little liberty for a little order...". If the quote was as you cited it, it would imply that order is more important than freedom - not something that we can easily imagine Jefferson saying.
What does it mean for a meteor to be compact-car size if it never landed on the ground?
It seems to me that what MS has in mind is different: data is stored on the server, yet the applications largely still run on the client side. This requires that all the clients are have the necessary MS software. I.e., you will be able to access your Word documents on any PC, assuming that PC has Word 200x installed.
Or is that wrong understanding of .NET?
When i look at the content of ftp.exe on windows 98 i see the line "Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved." However, if i right-click on the file and look select "Properties", it says "Copyright (C) Microsoft Corp. 1981-1997". I.e., the credits to UC is there for geeks to enjoy, but are replaced with credits to MS for the casual user.
The correct question to ask is whether square watermelons would be popular in the States if they were sold for $15 a piece (4 times the price of regular watermelon). And then the answer is a definite "maybe".
From the page you linked: "Registrations are not currently open for new domains directly under id.au. You must register in an existing subdomain of id.au." You must pick one of the existing subdomains. It looks like there are less than a dozen of those.
But does this really create copyright issues? If lynx presents a website as plain HTML, stripping off all most of the formatting, does this too count as derivative work? If a browser presents visited links different from not visited without any explicit request from the author, does this count as derivative work? What if the browser underlines links (which i never explicitely asked for)? And how about a browser (horror!) displaying popup menues associated with a link that i, the author, have no control over? I think it would be hard to nail MS on the copyright issues, unless smarttags are confusingly similar to normal links, and even then it might not be easy.
Not to mention the fact that he is compairing the results of 600 impressions on Google with 30000 impessions on Robot Wisdom. More impressions result in more click-throughs. Wow. How did this article get posted on /. in the first place?
A lot of people are talking about it as if all the OSI-opproved licenses were there to replace GPL. I don't think this is their intention. Apple does not expect you to write something completely new and release it under their licence. Rather, Apple is releasing some code and they want to have some special rights to any derived work. (Specifically, the want to be able to "to use, reproduce, display, perform, modify or have modified (for Apple and/or its subsidiaries), sublicense and distribute Your Modifications, in any form, through multiple tiers of distribution" - without the limitations of the license, which would apply to any third-parties using your modifications).