Though if I remember correctly, the major concern with Carnivore was
not abuse of it, but that it would collect information it wasn't supposed to.
Is your domain PR.FBI.COM? (low blow, but I'm taking it, anyways). From what I can tell, the abuse that people were afraid of was precisely that Carnivore could collect information that it wasn't supposed to.
but it's a simple fact that in the United States, one cannot escape
surveillence. There is potential for abuse with any form of surveillence, and at least this is being directly monitored
and restricted by the government.
"Hi. I'm from the government. I'm here to help you
I remember that quote being listed right after "The cheque is in the mail", and "Yes, I'll respect you in the morning".
In any case, some people don't consider "bend over and take it like a man", to be an appropriate response to possible invasions of privacy -- by either government or corporate domains. --
The way that I read it was that Napster may have shelter under the DMCA, but it is far from a slam-dunk. It does, however, hold out at least some hope of success on that point.
I guess this means that I'm going to have to digitize all of my own records starting a few weeks hence (I still own more vinyl than CDs).
It's pretty clear that the Court of appeal essentially directed the lower court to slit Napster's throat with a scalpal, rather than an axe. The one bright light is that artists now have to explicitly say that they don't want their work copied. I think that it's entirely possible that some will decide to take that route.
My hope is that those companies/artists that decide not to have napster remove their files will find that their sales increase because they'll now stand out in a much smaller crowd.
One thing that I would like would be for Napster to explicitly say when something is blocked. That way, users will know what the problem is... (and can react appropriately).
--
Obviously, it would be better to have a listing of infections per capita (or IPM (Infections per Million)). Nontheless, Canada -- with 30+M people seems to have a surprisingly low infection rate. compared to some of the US states -- despite having a similar computer usage rate to the USA. --
This protocol essentially eats bandwidth. If you have 10GB of of storage available in 80Gbits of bandwidth on CA*net3, and you're using 5GB of storage, you're sucking 40Gbits of bandwidth across the whole network before you even start to count "normal" data on the network.
Granted, they mention making this bandwidth low priority, but you're still eating a LOT of bandwidth. Since it's across the whole network, it's actually more of a strain on the network than a 40GB point-to-point feed. This could, in some instances, affect the maximum burst bandwidth of the network for normal data and/or the data loss of 'normal' data when the saturation point is reached.
The time savings is very theoretical. In fact, it's statistical. Mostly, what you're going to save is the cost of injecting data into the network. Beyond that, the savings you get improve as the space between nodes increases.
example Let's take the example of a 100ms loop in Canada. The average delay for a piece of data in the loop is going to be 50ms.
I've got an ADSL link in Vancouver. My ping time to UBC is 20MS. My ping time to UMontreal is 100MS. My ping time to what I presume is Telus's backbone appears to be 14MS. I'm going to presume that the 14ms is overhead (my distance to the loop). This gives me an average access time of 50+14=64MS for data in the loop.
If my data originates in Montreal, then I'm going to save something like 100-64=36MS over calling the machine at Umontreal. directly. (this presumes that the Umontreal machine has the data in RAM).
If my data originates at UBC, we have 20-64= -44ms. In other words, I LOSE 44ms over directly contacting the UBC machine for the data. (note that reducing my distance to the loop doesn't change the savings/loss since it also reduces my distance to both UBC and UMontreal).
Mostly, where the savings lie are in the difference between sucking data out of the loop vs pulling it off of disk. You can also get some savings if the data is being essentially multicast. Those savings do not appear to be available to the current protocol which seems to remove a packet from the loop once a machine requests it. The data then needs to be re-injected for a second recipient. --
And here's a working link to an HTML version. Dunno what happened to the original HTML version. Looks like a possible typo in the domain name (or the machine may have gone down).
If that breaks, then you can try pulling it off my personal box.
This html translation was generated (blindly) by StarOffice.
--
I hadn't read his original article, so I read his comments, then the article that caused the original fuss. In the context that he provides in the second article, the first article seems quite reasonable. Even without the context that the second article provides, It would appear to me that some people went off half-cocked based more on keyword scanning than actually trying to understand what he was saying.
Oh migod, he's dissing {Unix/MacOs}!!!
No. He's suggesting that, given what we've learned since those two systems originally came out, the merger of them could/should have been far more powerful than what we're seeing in OS/X.
He seems disappointed with the lack of synergy from the merger of two different breakthough systems (Unix OS design, and MacOS user interface principles).
Given that he was at the heart of the design of one, and has used the other extensively, he seems to think (and I agree) that he should have at least some right to comment on the merger of the two. --
Because it has Linux in it? The
SMC might, too, but they are smart enough not to tell that to every hacker that might be looking for an exploit!
Only problem with that approach is that the GPL requires that you make the source code available to anybody who purchases the unit. If the source code is available then your security-by-obscurity is a pretty thin veil. --
Putting full Linux on a box like this (including cc, grep, awk, etc) might be overkill.
Putting a minimal working set on the box makes complete sense. It gives lots of freedom to add functionality without much cost. I'd liken it more to starting with a motercycle/sidecar pair and putting a windshell around them (then adding a stereo and heater).
Using a free OS can make a big difference to the final price. A $10/box license fee -- once it goes through distributer and retail markups -- is going to translate into a $30-90 price increase (on a $400 box).
Once you add Linux to a unit, you have to make the source available. For someone knowledgeable looking at the source, it's going to be pretty obvious that you're using linux. You might as well take advantage of the fact that your use of Linux is going to be obvious. No marketing guy in their right mind is going to turn down some free, positive PR. --
Westinghouse was using mostly Tesla's inventions. In fighting Westinghouse, Edison was in a proxy battle with Tesla. In the end, Tesla essentially gave his patents away to Westinghouse to keep them from going under. --
My understanding is that Tesla worked for Edison for a while. Apparently they had a falling out -- A big falling out. After that, Edison went out of his way to discredit Tesla -- especially his theories on AC current.
One story goes that Edison put a good deal of money into developing the electric chair as a AC-based device (as opposed to DC) to give people the impression that AC was dangerous. Apparently it took a good deal of work (hint: defibrilation paddles are AC based). From what I can tell, it would have been much easier with DC, but Edison would have nothing to do with a DC electric chair.
Once it became clear that AC was a far better solution to most electricity problems, Edison pretended that it was his idea all along, and has tried (mostly effectively) to wipe Tesla out of the history books as a serious inventor.
Given that Tesla was pretty much the god of AC, and radio depends on AC, I wouldn't be surprised to find that Tesla had a hand in early radio work.
It's ludicrous to have a small library force the opening of the source to a piece of software which may have taken ten programmers a year to create,
at company X's expense......
To which RMS would probably reply.....
BWAHAHAHAHAH!!!!!!! That's the WHOLE IDEA! BWAHAHAHAHAH!!!!!!!
This is a problem, because the Ball varios are certified by FAI as being acceptable as documentation of a world record flight. And one of FAI's
conditions for that certification is that the protocols for communicating with these devices may not be made public.>
Yep. This is where the Cost of free (as in speech) software is felt. The FAI wants secrecy (you could even argue that they have a valid reason for wanting secrecy). Unfortunately, secrecy is pretty much incompatible with the GPL.
One thing to consider is that, if it weren't for the GPL, chances are that you wouldn't have had that graphics code available to want in your code. If it had been written at all it would have probably been proprietary.
Another thing to consider is that you can take your case to the writers of the GPL code and ask for an exception. You might actually offer the following:
Have your varios software write the information in a well documented way. Dump the output into a file. Write
a completely separate program what reads the file, and produces the graphics. You can GPL that code, and people with other variometers can do the same thing, and use your code. This is as close to keeping consistent with the GPL as you can get. If it's not already within the confines of the GPL, I think you may have gotten close enough that the copyright holders would have an easy time giving you permission, under the circumstances.
If you need to have an encrypted/protected version of the data written, you can write that file too. No big deal. It would be an option for the vario driver software. You would really only need the protected version of the output for things like world record logging, anyways.
Can you see THIS OPTION as something of a win/win? You get to protect the Vario protocol. We get to see your really interesting code -- and use it with other veriometers. Problem solved. It should also be noted that the solution is proof of the bazzar concept. "To a thousand eyes, any problem is transparent". If you hadn't handed the problem to the hundreds of thousands of slashdot users, nobody would have come up with a solution that you could (presumably!) use.
I understand that copying and pasting somebody's code into your code is a bad thing.
There is nothing wrong with cutting and pasting GPL code into your own. That's part of the purpose of the GPL. (letting other people see, use and change the source).
The problems start if you try and release the resulting object code while keeping the source secret.
The basic rule of the GPL is that if you release the object code, you must release the source. --
The GPL is all about being a hypocrite.... I know that on the project I work on the licensing creates way too many headaches.
The GPL is about making source code available. If you're trying to write sometheing closed-source using GPL code, you can bet your sweet bottom line that it's going to cause headaches. That's the intent of the GPL.
If you're running into headaches trying to mix GPL code with proprietary code, chances are that you are violating the GPL (in spirit, if not in law). Your best approach is to either release the source (the preferred result of the GPL license), or don't use the code.
This is why RMS says that GPL is not about free (beer-like) source code. There is a real cost. The cost is that you can't keep your own code secret.
If you're not willing to pay the price, don't use GPL software.
Set the source code free! --
...if any large organisation decided to use GPL'ed code in their
products and refused to release the source code there's nothing that anyone could do about it!
So far, all violations have been handled out-of-court. Just because nobody's been sued for copyright violation on GPL code (yet) doesn't mean that it's not going to happen.
If you use GPL code and don't release the source to the result, you're violating copyright. All of the remedies available to a proprietary code owner whose copyright has been violated should be available to the GPL code copyright owner(s). As I remember it, the cost could be as high as $10K/copy plus actual damages. (IANAL).
It's rather like sex. Just because it's normally available for free doesn't mean that there aren't any conditions. If you start presuming that you can take it on your own terms, you may end up in jail. --
Watson simply corrected the (incorrect) proposition that (1) BSD ran on UFS, and (2) It's not a modern FS.
Other saying that BSD doesn't run UFS, he didn't make any comment on UFS. Specifically, I don't see any reference to FFS being "more" modern than UFS (or less).
Think of UFS as a {proprietary?} 'fork' of the FFS system. Both have been updated since then. In modern nomenclature, it should probably be refered to as FFS 5.23 (pick your favorite number). --
It could, in theory. Thankfully, though, electronic publishing has a much smaller upfront cost than dead-tree versions. If VA were to die, then it would easy enough to move slashdot's capabilities over to somewhere like Hemos' web page as a random example that most slashdotters could probably find with little difficulty.
Of course, peoples' Karma would be restarted from scratch and the old database of articles might have to be left behind. (is there any sort of GPLish license on the/. database?)
On a tangent,
This is actually one of the nicer things about Free Software and Open Source projects -- It's almost impossible to kill them via death from above. Corporations are very militaristic and heirarchical in nature. Some bean counter can kill corporate project with the stroke of a pen. Open source, on the other hand, is has a far more democratic base. As long as a couple of capable people are interested in keeping it alive, it'll keep crawling. --
I don't know much about Mac OS, but here's a shot: by "working system folder", you man a slim version of Mac OS, right? That'd be a violation of
copyright.
No. All you need is a "System Folder", but instead of MacOS, the file contains the boot process for Linux. By the time the CPU realizes the difference, it's too late. You've already got a penguin on the screen. --
The question isn't that far off the pale. There are a Lot of people who actually think like that. It's like the 'bigger gun' syndrome: If you don't like people running around with guns, get a bigger one, and then you'll be safe.
It only makes sense if you don't consider the possibility of your approach becomming the standard. When that happens, it's actually worse than the original situation, because now you've still got accidents with same-sized vehicles -- it's just that they're now bigger, heavier and less responsive. If you add pollution snf global warming effects to that, it starts to look like a really bad idea.
Unfortunately, most of the people who drive minitanks don't think that far past the PR output of your local car dealership. --
That price (heh, heh!) being $50,000 USD payable to each author for the source license, plus $5,000 USD payable to each author for
deployment of each binary copy of the software.
That was apparently the method originally used to make the sales of alcohol (and other drugs) illegal. Technically it was perfectly legal to sell the stuff --The Harrison Tax Act simply placed a massive tax (~$1k/serving?) tax on the stuff. That's why Al Capone was jailed for tax evasion. Technically it was his primary crime (that, and a couple dozen dead bodies).
Tne US government isn't technically allowed to make criminal laws -- that's reserved to the states. The national government is, however, allowed to impose taxes. (another example: when lynchings were treated with a blind eye by the states, (or in the case of the Rodney King beating), the federal charge is violation of civil rights, not murder.
It's also why drug sales were originally handled by the Treasury Department.
_________
In any case, I expect that a copyright suit is going to have to be launched at some point, against someone. In this case, I think that the suit could have been launched in the states (against the US sales of the product).
It's also possible (IANAL) that the 'actual damages' could be based on the price charged by the person selling the offending product. --
Slashdot Mirror
I remember that quote being listed right after "The cheque is in the mail", and "Yes, I'll respect you in the morning".
In any case, some people don't consider "bend over and take it like a man", to be an appropriate response to possible invasions of privacy -- by either government or corporate domains.
--
I guess this means that I'm going to have to digitize all of my own records starting a few weeks hence (I still own more vinyl than CDs).
It's pretty clear that the Court of appeal essentially directed the lower court to slit Napster's throat with a scalpal, rather than an axe. The one bright light is that artists now have to explicitly say that they don't want their work copied. I think that it's entirely possible that some will decide to take that route.
My hope is that those companies/artists that decide not to have napster remove their files will find that their sales increase because they'll now stand out in a much smaller crowd.
One thing that I would like would be for Napster to explicitly say when something is blocked. That way, users will know what the problem is... (and can react appropriately).
--
Obviously, it would be better to have a listing of infections per capita (or IPM (Infections per Million)). Nontheless, Canada -- with 30+M people seems to have a surprisingly low infection rate. compared to some of the US states -- despite having a similar computer usage rate to the USA.
--
--
This protocol essentially eats bandwidth. If you have 10GB of of storage available in 80Gbits of bandwidth on CA*net3, and you're using 5GB of storage, you're sucking 40Gbits of bandwidth across the whole network before you even start to count "normal" data on the network.
Granted, they mention making this bandwidth low priority, but you're still eating a LOT of bandwidth. Since it's across the whole network, it's actually more of a strain on the network than a 40GB point-to-point feed. This could, in some instances, affect the maximum burst bandwidth of the network for normal data and/or the data loss of 'normal' data when the saturation point is reached.
The time savings is very theoretical. In fact, it's statistical. Mostly, what you're going to save is the cost of injecting data into the network. Beyond that, the savings you get improve as the space between nodes increases.
example
Let's take the example of a 100ms loop in Canada. The average delay for a piece of data in the loop is going to be 50ms. I've got an ADSL link in Vancouver. My ping time to UBC is 20MS. My ping time to UMontreal is 100MS. My ping time to what I presume is Telus's backbone appears to be 14MS. I'm going to presume that the 14ms is overhead (my distance to the loop). This gives me an average access time of 50+14=64MS for data in the loop.
If my data originates in Montreal, then I'm going to save something like 100-64=36MS over calling the machine at Umontreal. directly. (this presumes that the Umontreal machine has the data in RAM).
If my data originates at UBC, we have 20-64= -44ms. In other words, I LOSE 44ms over directly contacting the UBC machine for the data. (note that reducing my distance to the loop doesn't change the savings/loss since it also reduces my distance to both UBC and UMontreal).
Mostly, where the savings lie are in the difference between sucking data out of the loop vs pulling it off of disk. You can also get some savings if the data is being essentially multicast. Those savings do not appear to be available to the current protocol which seems to remove a packet from the loop once a machine requests it. The data then needs to be re-injected for a second recipient.
--
If he was Canadian, he would have been Frozen Coward, not Anonymous Coward.
--
This html translation was generated (blindly) by StarOffice.
--
He seems disappointed with the lack of synergy from the merger of two different breakthough systems (Unix OS design, and MacOS user interface principles).
Given that he was at the heart of the design of one, and has used the other extensively, he seems to think (and I agree) that he should have at least some right to comment on the merger of the two.
--
Er, I'm Canadian, and Box2001 is definitely lost on me.
Please do explain.
--
--
Putting a minimal working set on the box makes complete sense. It gives lots of freedom to add functionality without much cost. I'd liken it more to starting with a motercycle/sidecar pair and putting a windshell around them (then adding a stereo and heater).
Using a free OS can make a big difference to the final price. A $10/box license fee -- once it goes through distributer and retail markups -- is going to translate into a $30-90 price increase (on a $400 box).
Once you add Linux to a unit, you have to make the source available. For someone knowledgeable looking at the source, it's going to be pretty obvious that you're using linux. You might as well take advantage of the fact that your use of Linux is going to be obvious. No marketing guy in their right mind is going to turn down some free, positive PR.
--
Westinghouse was using mostly Tesla's inventions. In fighting Westinghouse, Edison was in a proxy battle with Tesla. In the end, Tesla essentially gave his patents away to Westinghouse to keep them from going under.
--
One story goes that Edison put a good deal of money into developing the electric chair as a AC-based device (as opposed to DC) to give people the impression that AC was dangerous. Apparently it took a good deal of work (hint: defibrilation paddles are AC based). From what I can tell, it would have been much easier with DC, but Edison would have nothing to do with a DC electric chair.
Once it became clear that AC was a far better solution to most electricity problems, Edison pretended that it was his idea all along, and has tried (mostly effectively) to wipe Tesla out of the history books as a serious inventor.
Given that Tesla was pretty much the god of AC, and radio depends on AC, I wouldn't be surprised to find that Tesla had a hand in early radio work.
I think that http://www.concentric.net/~jwwagner/is the site that tells a lot about this story.
--
If the "child" is of age of consent, then I would expect that it would no longer be considered "child" porn -- Just (possibly) porn.
--
--
Yep. This is where the Cost of free (as in speech) software is felt. The FAI wants secrecy (you could even argue that they have a valid reason for wanting secrecy). Unfortunately, secrecy is pretty much incompatible with the GPL.
One thing to consider is that, if it weren't for the GPL, chances are that you wouldn't have had that graphics code available to want in your code. If it had been written at all it would have probably been proprietary.
Another thing to consider is that you can take your case to the writers of the GPL code and ask for an exception. You might actually offer the following:
Can you see THIS OPTION as something of a win/win? You get to protect the Vario protocol. We get to see your really interesting code -- and use it with other veriometers. Problem solved. It should also be noted that the solution is proof of the bazzar concept. "To a thousand eyes, any problem is transparent". If you hadn't handed the problem to the hundreds of thousands of slashdot users, nobody would have come up with a solution that you could (presumably!) use.Looking forward to seeing your code.
--
--
This is why RMS says that GPL is not about free (beer-like) source code. There is a real cost. The cost is that you can't keep your own code secret.
If you're not willing to pay the price, don't use GPL software.
Set the source code free!
--
If you use GPL code and don't release the source to the result, you're violating copyright. All of the remedies available to a proprietary code owner whose copyright has been violated should be available to the GPL code copyright owner(s). As I remember it, the cost could be as high as $10K/copy plus actual damages. (IANAL).
It's rather like sex. Just because it's normally available for free doesn't mean that there aren't any conditions. If you start presuming that you can take it on your own terms, you may end up in jail.
--
(1) BSD ran on UFS, and
(2) It's not a modern FS.
Other saying that BSD doesn't run UFS, he didn't make any comment on UFS. Specifically, I don't see any reference to FFS being "more" modern than UFS (or less).
Think of UFS as a {proprietary?} 'fork' of the FFS system. Both have been updated since then. In modern nomenclature, it should probably be refered to as FFS 5.23 (pick your favorite number).
--
Of course, peoples' Karma would be restarted from scratch and the old database of articles might have to be left behind. (is there any sort of GPLish license on the /. database?)
On a tangent, This is actually one of the nicer things about Free Software and Open Source projects -- It's almost impossible to kill them via death from above. Corporations are very militaristic and heirarchical in nature. Some bean counter can kill corporate project with the stroke of a pen. Open source, on the other hand, is has a far more democratic base. As long as a couple of capable people are interested in keeping it alive, it'll keep crawling.
--
--
It only makes sense if you don't consider the possibility of your approach becomming the standard. When that happens, it's actually worse than the original situation, because now you've still got accidents with same-sized vehicles -- it's just that they're now bigger, heavier and less responsive. If you add pollution snf global warming effects to that, it starts to look like a really bad idea.
Unfortunately, most of the people who drive minitanks don't think that far past the PR output of your local car dealership.
--
What was your attitude towards drunk driving (and minitanks) before the accident?
--
Tne US government isn't technically allowed to make criminal laws -- that's reserved to the states. The national government is, however, allowed to impose taxes. (another example: when lynchings were treated with a blind eye by the states, (or in the case of the Rodney King beating), the federal charge is violation of civil rights, not murder. It's also why drug sales were originally handled by the Treasury Department.
_________
In any case, I expect that a copyright suit is going to have to be launched at some point, against someone. In this case, I think that the suit could have been launched in the states (against the US sales of the product).
It's also possible (IANAL) that the 'actual damages' could be based on the price charged by the person selling the offending product.
--