"The long delay in brining the technology to market was due to the necessity of hiring thousands of new federal judges to rule on whether or not new uploads are fair use (parodies, short excerpts, etc) in real time. "
Oh, I'm a democratic socialist as well, and pretty emphatically not a free market fundamentalist. I'm just pointing out the synergies between the philosophy and the phenomena.
Open Source advocates are people who understand that OSS is a functional adaptation of the software marketplace to concentrated market control. For those interested in advocating free markets (in which competition is better for everyone than monopolization), using OSS to break abusive monopolies is a good deal.
So, to clarify, OSS advocates are actually free-market libertarians; Microsoft and Apple apologists are actually the commie fascists. I realize that's the opposite of the convention, but think about it.
If Free and Open Source Software is getting so trendy that evil corporations are actually releasing code under bona fide licenses that grant broad user and developer freedoms, I'd tend to say that the opposite: open ideals are forcing corporate greed to lose some of its horns.
Microsoft Shared Source? No. Mysql? Sure. Tivo? Partially (it's essentially a GPL kernel and FOSS OS on top of a proprietary BIOS and hardware design).
Don't compromise the licenses, and don't let anyone get away with branding themselves "open" short of the licenses, and we will continue to see sociopathic business interests kept to a modicum of user accountability.
In review of my last post about Steve Jobs' DRM position, I have distilled a better summary:
Steve Jobs has not called for an end to DRM. What he said was he'd cooperate if ALL of the major labels threw out the idea. Not just EMI, not 3 out 5, not so long as one holdout remains. In other words, in the end, Apple will be the only one left standing that still wants to use DRM. That's not exactly what I call leading the charge to ditch DRM. What he's saying is that he will be the last to give it up.
We'll have to peel it from his cold dead, fingers.
We already get free access to, oh, distribution package repositories. Red Hat already charges $5 a month for RHN.//and that's for genuine GPL, free software//. Debian, Ubuntu, Linspire, Fedora (OpenSuse?), etc., are all still wide open.
We're already running most of our Operating systems from the Internet. It's just that we have hard drives to operate as intermediary caches.
TFA: "Beyond cyberthreats, the XO laptop will have an anti-theft system designed to render stolen laptops useless. Each XO is assigned a "lease," secured by cryptography, that allows it to operate for a limited period of time. The laptop connects to the internet daily and checks in with a country-specific server to see if it's been reported stolen. If not, the lease is extended another few weeks.
If the lease expires, the XO's internet connectivity is turned off, and shortly thereafter the whole computer becomes a brick. In the case of an area without internet connectivity, a local school can extend the lease from its own server by Wi-Fi or with a USB dongle."
Wow. So someone else has the power to brick my machine remotely? I thought this was MY laptop? This sounds more like a loan than a gift. It sounds way to close to some DRM vendor's wet dream than a teaching tool.
Honestly, I don't see what you're talking about. Everybody's been taking a beating over DRM, as far as I can tell. In fact, Apple seems to be taking more of a beating tha Microsoft is, because while MS has released the occasional product with DRM, iTunes, FairPlay, and the iPod is really the textbook example of using it to abuse the marketplace (both consumers AND the labels - get that!).
Do you have any data for this? If spammers demonstrably go backwards, rather than simultaneously or randomly, then we might have something if we nolist a primary AND a tertiary MX, leaving the secondary as the working server.
An old big band tune finally made it into the public domain today, and put me into a nostalgic mood. So I went digging through my backup archives for an old disk image of some stuff I downloaded way back in 2010.
It was corrupted, unfortunately; I was so pissed off with it being broken the year after that I never bothered to repair it before I just said screw it and moved to another OS. So I finally get the thing booted, and I come to find out that the only thing that can play the music I bought is the Windows Media Player that came with it. WMP requires something called "WGA validation", that wanted to connect to Microsoft to get permission. Needless to say they went out of business YEARS ago, along with the company that bought them.
I know, I know - why don't I just crack the damn crypto with my phone, and be done with it? Well, I was on my work PC at this point, and they're monitored for illegal activities like that. DMCA violations aren't as easy to hide now as they were back then. I'll have to *cough*NOT try this at home tonight.
Private cracking and file-sharing will likely always be possible. But businesses can't operate in private - they have to offer services in public. So having the ability to sue and withhold licenses from competitors means that you have bigger shares of marketplace for whatever you're using DRM to encumber. Customers can't be stopped - but competition sure can. That's a real point, too.
Well, of course. If I want to use Amarok, I have to install KDE. If I want to use notepad.exe, I have to install Windows. That's a big if. Bigger than "if I want to use Ubuntu". All necessity is predicated on some condition or other.
Choice and freedom necessarily complicate things. Complications have the potential to confuse and frustrate users who want simplicity instead. Each user strikes their own balance (at least, when they're permitted to by the vendor).
I tend to think of it more as competing//boxes//, out of each of which the experience//is// consistent. Think of each distro as a separate OS, and you get the right idea.
Ubuntu users don't actually have to deal with KDE at all. Kubuntu users don't have to deal with Gnome, etc.
Freedom doesn't limit consistency by forcing choices on people. It just means the choices created by variety and the consistency of reducing confusion can be contributed by different parties, instead of a monolithic proprietary vendor.
I'm not sure I understand how people get away with thinking the DNS root servers comprise "THE INTERNETS". It's pretty trivial to configure most OSes to use any DNS resolution server you want, that resolves any domains you want. There are plenty of alternative roots out there that do just that. They even defer to the existing ICANN roots in most cases.
So why is it that all the press I hear - and most importantly, the political leaders they listen to - acts like they're completely unaware of this flexibility?
I know, I know, the ignorance of politicians should never surprise me.
Once again, the point of free and open source software is NOT USER BASE.
It's freedom.
That's why call it "Free Software" and not "Popular Software".
If user's don't pick up GNU or Linux, it is not because something is "wrong" with it. It just means that, well, freedom isn't popular. Too bad. Is this so hard to believe? Have you looked at what the White House has been doing lately?
Most people who come to and develop GNU/Linux do so because they want the freedom, not the popularity. There's a lot of work being done to make freedom function fully for non-geeks as well as the experienced. That's the direction.
So if you want take steps to change "the" direction of GNU/Linux to make it more popular, knock yourself out. You are free to do that. Unlike other platforms, we let you. Just don't expect to monopolize the whole "direction", or tell us our preferred priorities are "wrong" because they don't match an old-school commercial worldview that puts market domination on top of the stack, over user freedom.
I find it far more useful to look at an oracle's track record than at their predictions. don't you? Pending predictions are just there to go in the bin until you can tell whether or not they're actually accurate.
Some cursory searching yields no old wired predictions articles. Anybody else have better luck?
We need patents to recoup our investment in new drug research. Researching new drugs is expensive, ya know. Why the patent license fees for other drugs we need for the research alone comprise a big chunk of those costs!
"We all" aren't throwing up our hands about anything. I'm not really concerned about having one less vendor for support contracts I don't need to begin with, and I'm certainly not entertaining a big server migration away from Debian because of it.
Actually, "reporting" posts isn't that hard. The stuff in most blogs is already in public anyway - if the government wants to know what people post, all they have to do is visit the site like anybody else. Hell, have them scan the syndication feeds (although nto all blogs to syndicate their comments).
Of course, we should all be so lucky to have a federal government that can learn how to use the open standard protocols we designed for just this reason. "reporting" probably means filling out and mailing form for each comment. Good luck with that, Senator.
Physical property requires coercion to redistribute. The legal norm of propety developed as a simple extension of the physical norm.
But with intellectual property, the situation is reversed. Intellectual property requires coercion to retain.
Without a government enforcer, physical property cannot be redistributed, and is instead owned. But without a government enforcer, Intellectual property cannot be owned, and is instead redistributed.
Slashdot Mirror
What's the difference between an encryption system and a DRM system?
//directly//.
An encryption system is a way to deliver information securely, even through the hands of thieves.
A DRM system is a way to cut out the middleman, and deliver information securely into the hands of thieves
-
Confusing the thief for the customer is why DRM will never work.
Confusing the customer for the thief is why DRM will never sell.
From TFA:
"The long delay in brining the technology to market was due to the necessity of hiring thousands of new federal judges to rule on whether or not new uploads are fair use (parodies, short excerpts, etc) in real time. "
Oh, I'm a democratic socialist as well, and pretty emphatically not a free market fundamentalist. I'm just pointing out the synergies between the philosophy and the phenomena.
So much for stereotyping.
Makes sense to me.
Open Source advocates are people who understand that OSS is a functional adaptation of the software marketplace to concentrated market control. For those interested in advocating free markets (in which competition is better for everyone than monopolization), using OSS to break abusive monopolies is a good deal.
So, to clarify, OSS advocates are actually free-market libertarians; Microsoft and Apple apologists are actually the commie fascists. I realize that's the opposite of the convention, but think about it.
//Which is the better biological explanation for a belief in God -- evolutionary adaptation or neurological accident?//
How about the Inquisition?
We are talking about Western civilization, here, after all. No mention of Asian cultures in our use of the term "universal", here.
If Free and Open Source Software is getting so trendy that evil corporations are actually releasing code under bona fide licenses that grant broad user and developer freedoms, I'd tend to say that the opposite: open ideals are forcing corporate greed to lose some of its horns.
Microsoft Shared Source? No. Mysql? Sure. Tivo? Partially (it's essentially a GPL kernel and FOSS OS on top of a proprietary BIOS and hardware design).
Don't compromise the licenses, and don't let anyone get away with branding themselves "open" short of the licenses, and we will continue to see sociopathic business interests kept to a modicum of user accountability.
In review of my last post about Steve Jobs' DRM position, I have distilled a better summary:
Steve Jobs has not called for an end to DRM. What he said was he'd cooperate if ALL of the major labels threw out the idea. Not just EMI, not 3 out 5, not so long as one holdout remains. In other words, in the end, Apple will be the only one left standing that still wants to use DRM. That's not exactly what I call leading the charge to ditch DRM. What he's saying is that he will be the last to give it up.
We'll have to peel it from his cold dead, fingers.
We already get free access to, oh, distribution package repositories. Red Hat already charges $5 a month for RHN. //and that's for genuine GPL, free software//. Debian, Ubuntu, Linspire, Fedora (OpenSuse?), etc., are all still wide open.
We're already running most of our Operating systems from the Internet. It's just that we have hard drives to operate as intermediary caches.
TFA:
"Beyond cyberthreats, the XO laptop will have an anti-theft system designed to render stolen laptops useless. Each XO is assigned a "lease," secured by cryptography, that allows it to operate for a limited period of time. The laptop connects to the internet daily and checks in with a country-specific server to see if it's been reported stolen. If not, the lease is extended another few weeks.
If the lease expires, the XO's internet connectivity is turned off, and shortly thereafter the whole computer becomes a brick. In the case of an area without internet connectivity, a local school can extend the lease from its own server by Wi-Fi or with a USB dongle."
Wow. So someone else has the power to brick my machine remotely? I thought this was MY laptop? This sounds more like a loan than a gift. It sounds way to close to some DRM vendor's wet dream than a teaching tool.
Or we could just let MS hang themselves, and keep working on sharpening the quality of the open software stacks we already have.
"...and then seeing a post the very next day talking about how awesome Apple is?"
You mean this one?
Honestly, I don't see what you're talking about. Everybody's been taking a beating over DRM, as far as I can tell. In fact, Apple seems to be taking more of a beating tha Microsoft is, because while MS has released the occasional product with DRM, iTunes, FairPlay, and the iPod is really the textbook example of using it to abuse the marketplace (both consumers AND the labels - get that!).
How many Americans spend more time at work than with their SO?
That's it! Jobs are bad!
... work their way backwards
Do you have any data for this? If spammers demonstrably go backwards, rather than simultaneously or randomly, then we might have something if we nolist a primary AND a tertiary MX, leaving the secondary as the working server.
2053 01 18
Mood: Frustrated
An old big band tune finally made it into the public domain today, and put me into a nostalgic mood. So I went digging through my backup archives for an old disk image of some stuff I downloaded way back in 2010.
It was corrupted, unfortunately; I was so pissed off with it being broken the year after that I never bothered to repair it before I just said screw it and moved to another OS. So I finally get the thing booted, and I come to find out that the only thing that can play the music I bought is the Windows Media Player that came with it. WMP requires something called "WGA validation", that wanted to connect to Microsoft to get permission. Needless to say they went out of business YEARS ago, along with the company that bought them.
I know, I know - why don't I just crack the damn crypto with my phone, and be done with it? Well, I was on my work PC at this point, and they're monitored for illegal activities like that. DMCA violations aren't as easy to hide now as they were back then. I'll have to *cough*NOT try this at home tonight.
*sigh* so much for history...
Set the primary MX to 127.0.0.1 . That should keep those buggers busy for a few days. Have fun with those feedback loops, sucka!
;p
Of course, the same might be true of legitimate senders, as well....
Ed Felten had a good point about this last spring:
http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/?p=1007
Private cracking and file-sharing will likely always be possible. But businesses can't operate in private - they have to offer services in public. So having the ability to sue and withhold licenses from competitors means that you have bigger shares of marketplace for whatever you're using DRM to encumber. Customers can't be stopped - but competition sure can. That's a real point, too.
Well, of course. If I want to use Amarok, I have to install KDE. If I want to use notepad.exe, I have to install Windows. That's a big if. Bigger than "if I want to use Ubuntu". All necessity is predicated on some condition or other.
Choice and freedom necessarily complicate things. Complications have the potential to confuse and frustrate users who want simplicity instead. Each user strikes their own balance (at least, when they're permitted to by the vendor).
I tend to think of it more as competing //boxes//, out of each of which the experience //is// consistent. Think of each distro as a separate OS, and you get the right idea.
Ubuntu users don't actually have to deal with KDE at all. Kubuntu users don't have to deal with Gnome, etc.
Freedom doesn't limit consistency by forcing choices on people. It just means the choices created by variety and the consistency of reducing confusion can be contributed by different parties, instead of a monolithic proprietary vendor.
I'm not sure I understand how people get away with thinking the DNS root servers comprise "THE INTERNETS". It's pretty trivial to configure most OSes to use any DNS resolution server you want, that resolves any domains you want. There are plenty of alternative roots out there that do just that. They even defer to the existing ICANN roots in most cases.
So why is it that all the press I hear - and most importantly, the political leaders they listen to - acts like they're completely unaware of this flexibility?
I know, I know, the ignorance of politicians should never surprise me.
Once again, the point of free and open source software is NOT USER BASE.
It's freedom.
That's why call it "Free Software" and not "Popular Software".
If user's don't pick up GNU or Linux, it is not because something is "wrong" with it. It just means that, well, freedom isn't popular. Too bad. Is this so hard to believe? Have you looked at what the White House has been doing lately?
Most people who come to and develop GNU/Linux do so because they want the freedom, not the popularity. There's a lot of work being done to make freedom function fully for non-geeks as well as the experienced. That's the direction.
So if you want take steps to change "the" direction of GNU/Linux to make it more popular, knock yourself out. You are free to do that. Unlike other platforms, we let you. Just don't expect to monopolize the whole "direction", or tell us our preferred priorities are "wrong" because they don't match an old-school commercial worldview that puts market domination on top of the stack, over user freedom.
I find it far more useful to look at an oracle's track record than at their predictions. don't you? Pending predictions are just there to go in the bin until you can tell whether or not they're actually accurate.
Some cursory searching yields no old wired predictions articles. Anybody else have better luck?
We need patents to recoup our investment in new drug research. Researching new drugs is expensive, ya know. Why the patent license fees for other drugs we need for the research alone comprise a big chunk of those costs!
Unity Fallacy
"We all" aren't throwing up our hands about anything. I'm not really concerned about having one less vendor for support contracts I don't need to begin with, and I'm certainly not entertaining a big server migration away from Debian because of it.
Maybe I'm alone, but I really doubt it.
Actually, "reporting" posts isn't that hard. The stuff in most blogs is already in public anyway - if the government wants to know what people post, all they have to do is visit the site like anybody else. Hell, have them scan the syndication feeds (although nto all blogs to syndicate their comments).
Of course, we should all be so lucky to have a federal government that can learn how to use the open standard protocols we designed for just this reason. "reporting" probably means filling out and mailing form for each comment. Good luck with that, Senator.
Yes!
Physical property requires coercion to redistribute. The legal norm of propety developed as a simple extension of the physical norm.
But with intellectual property, the situation is reversed. Intellectual property requires coercion to retain.
Without a government enforcer, physical property cannot be redistributed, and is instead owned. But without a government enforcer, Intellectual property cannot be owned, and is instead redistributed.