But what's a solution that will, first, protect the rights of the copyright holders, and secondly, protect the rights of the users.
That's backwards.
Copyright isn't a "right" in the sense of the "right" to free speech, or the "right" to bear arms. It is a artifical monooply granted by the state in order to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, not to protect some imagined "right" of an author to have absolute control over what other people do with something he wrote.
We're at the begining, and the minutia are yet to be worked out. but does anyone have potentially viable solutions?
Drop the notion of copyright entirely. Create a notion of right to royalties for commercial use of a work. This is, basically, the model used for performance of a musical work; I can sing "Dead Flowers" at home or at a party and not owe anyone a cent, but when I play it down at the bar (Leadbetters), Jagger and Richards get a cut (via BMI or ASCAP) of the evening's proceeds.
Copying a digital work is now just as easy as singing a song, and trying to prevent it requires the sort of intrusive police-state tactics it would take to make sure no one hums an unauthorized song.
The inoperability arguments really seem to be bunk most of the time....I have no problem running eudora on my game box it doesnt mess anything else up, Winamp runs fine too...what exactly is the problem?
Not "inoperability" - though that's certainly an issue when dealing with Windows - but "interoperability". Which means open data formats and open networking protocols that can work with software from many different vendors, or even roll-your-own software.
Closed data formats that rely on software from a single vendor who supports many different platforms (e.g., RealAudio) are closer to than closed data formats from a single vendor who only supports one, maybe two, different platforms - but not by much.
Interoperability is something Microsoft hates.
They want to use their hold on the desktop to make you use MS-only formats and protocols, so that other people have to use MS software to communicate with you.
So Eudora and WinAmp aren't problems, since SMTP/POP/IMAP and MP3 (modulo patent issues) are open. Outlook and Media Player are problems because they push you towards proprietary data formats and protocols.
Name one "bundled" feature of Windows that you dont find in the typical linux installs or osX? I cant think of one
The problem isn't really the bundling per se. It's the use of bundling to make interoperability with other systems more difficult.
The stuff you get with a Linux system all works on open standards, so it's easy to switch to something else. The stuff M$ wants to bundle is part of their "embrace and assimilate" strategy.
Couldn't you be "weightless" anywhere in such a ship, not just in the center? As long as you initially aren't touching any part of it, there's no way it can act on you. It isn't real gravity, so the ship won't pull you down, right? The rotating part will just zoom around you.
If you were inside the thing, not touching the inner surface, when it started to rotate, yes, it wouldn't affect you.
However, if you're on that surface, you pick up angular momentum. The surface keeps pushing against you, changing your direction so that you move in a circle with it, and that centripedal force is what you feel as "gravity".
If you were standing on that moving surface and junmped staright "up", your center-ward jumping vector added to your tangental momentum vector sum up to aim you right back at the wall, a little bit spinward from where you started. (Too lazy to do the math right now, but IIRC by the time you reached that point on the wall the spin would carry your starting point there to meet you.)
Just run against the rotation, until you are moving at the same speed, opposite direction, then push off a little. Presto!
You'd have to get running pretty darn fast. IIRC a = v^2 / r, so if you had a structure of radius 250 meters (half a klick across - huge) rotating fast enough to give 1g, the tangental velocity would be (scribble, scribble, call up xcalc) 50 m/s, or about 110 mph.
But don't forget that your Linux guru would probably cost you $50,000 a year (or more!) to keep on staff.
You don't keep him on staff. You bring him in as needed and pay him by the hour.
Think of a Unix sysadmin as being like a plumber. You don't need a plumber everyday, unless you're maintaining a skyscaper or an apartment complex. So those with big installations hire one full-time, while residental and small business users hire one as needed (and maybe for regularly scheduled maintenance) per hour.
The problem with this argument is that it assumes that a human can only learn one method of input.
It's not impossible, but it is very difficult when the two means are similar enough to interfere with one another. Prior knowledge can interfere with developing new skills; there's a term from psychology to describe the phenomenon but damned if I can remember what it is.
If Carnivore can stop someone from shooting up a school where my kid is, without ever having to look at my data, then I have no beef with Carnivore.
Ah. So Carnivore makes kids bulletproof, does it? Or does it stop guns from working on school grounds? (Which would be bad news if I saw a machete-wielding madman headed towards the middle school across the street and grabbed my revolver to go help...)
Yes, the thought of the Feds being able to snoop on your online data is scary, but it's the price we have to pay for safety.
Sometimes I think there are people who seriously think we should completely ban law enforcement because there might be some miniscule possibility of abuse.
"Miniscule"? Can I direct your attention to the history of the past few decades? From COINTELPRO to Rampart to the Abner Louima case to Waco to Carnivore, the one thing police forces have shown time and time again is that the probability of the abuse of power is anything but miniscule.
If I had enough of it I could come oven and excercise my flerbage on your car, bed, shower, TV, etc.
If you mess with my car, bed, etc., you mess with my ability to mess with them.
If you copy my software, music, poetry, etcetera, I still have my copies; your copying in no way deprives me of the use of my copies.
Flerbage is limited all around us. (just try running around your block several time naked and you will see what I mean)
It is; it doesn't mean it should be. Laws against nudity - the natural state of human existance - are surely amoung the stupidest on the books.
The simple fact is, that software costs money to develop, and developers need to recover their development costs...If you remove the mechanism which guarantees them revenue, developers stop developing
So, we need a new mechanism that allows developers of good and useful software to recover their development costs, but places minimum restriction on flerbage. Our current system ain't it.
If copyright was ended tomorrow, and developers stopped developing as a result, would the demand for software cease? Hardly.
Most of the interesting software out there is somewhat custom stuff that has little reliance on copyright for its profitabilty. Pricing models woulds have to change, but overall its production would hardly be affected by such a change.
As for shrinkwrapped COTS products, users who want new software could band together and hire developers to build it to spec.
We can - and eventually, we're going to have to - come up with models where authors, developersm musicians, and so on get paid, without restricting people's right to share information.
Funny how all the cultural fears of technology come from books and movies like Frankenstein, Brave New World...
Huh? Did you read the same Brave New World I did? I recall it as a commentary on social and cultural trends, not as a story of technology gone awry.
And it's hardly true that all of our concerns about misdirected or misused tech come from fiction. We have plenty of real-life exemplars, from the tragic to the trivial - the Titanic, Chernobyl, various examples of planes, trains, and rockets crashing due to software failures, any example of AVR hell you care to name ("You have selected regicide. If you know the name of the king or queen being murdered, press 1."), "the computer ate my dissertation", computerized accounting systems that demand checks for $0.00, and so on.
My dogs aren't engaging in a dialog about property rights when they bark at passers-by, They're being territorial.
Yes, territorial behavior - the need for a "space to call your own" - is a natural human drive, and one of the deeper things that a useful concept of property needs to support. That doesn't make land owership a primary value.
Indeed, even our current law recognizes that territoriality often trumps ownership; a renter - an occupier of the space - has basic rights to a space that a landlord - an owner - can't neglect.
The Linux kernel, sure. But the system as a whole?
The idea of a free (libre), Unix-oid system is and was the core of the GNU project. RMS was hacking on this before the Linux kernel was a gleam in Linus's eye - since 1984, for crying out loud.
Let's look at what RMS has to say:
The GNU Project's aim was to develop a complete free Unix-like system.
Many people have made major contributions to the free software in the system, and they all deserve credit. But the reason it is
a system--and not just a collection of useful programs--is because the GNU Project set out to make it one. We made a list
of the programs needed to make a complete free system, and we systematically found, wrote, or found people to write
everything on the list. We wrote essential but unexciting major components, such as the assembler and linker, because you
can't have a system without them. A complete system needs more than just programming tools; the Bourne Again SHell, the
PostScript interpreter Ghostscript, and the GNU C library are just as important.
By the early 90s we had put together the whole system aside from the kernel (and we were also working on a kernel, the
GNU Hurd, which runs on top of Mach). Developing this kernel has been a lot harder than we expected, and we are still
working on finishing it.
Fortunately, you don't have to wait for it, because Linux is working now. When Linus Torvalds wrote Linux, he filled the last
major gap. People could then put Linux together with the GNU system to make a complete free system: a Linux-based GNU
system (or GNU/Linux system, for short).
...
We use Linux-based GNU systems today for most of our work, and we hope you use them too. But please don't confuse the public by using the name ``Linux'' ambiguously. Linux is the kernel, one of the essential major components of the system. The
system as a whole is more or less the GNU system.
Linus didn't "borrow" from the GNU project. He fit the last piece into a puzzle that RMS and the GNU Project had been working on for over a decade. RMS would like this to be known and understood - perhaps for reasons of ego, perhaps for reasons of spreading the free software philosophy, perhaps both.
Either way, his request hardly makes his a raving loon.
Forcing anyone to give up
a means they use to provide for themself is theft.
Hmmm...so if you're a con man, forcing you to give up defrauding people is theft? If you're making sub-standard airplane parts and selling them to Boeing, forcing you to stop is theft? If you're a hit man, forcing you to stop engaging in assassination is theft?
Theft for the good of society is socialism.
No. Socialism. is an economic system where the workers - rather than an owning class - control capital ("the means of production").
"Information" doesn't have any wants, let alone "to be free."
Can I introduce you to the concept of metaphor? "Information wants to be free" is much snappier than "It is the nature of human beings to share information with each other, such that once a piece of data has been disclosed, attempting to
restrict its further disclosure is generally a futile task."
"Nature" doesn't abhor anything, yet "nature abhors a vacuum" is cliche.
As always, Eric S. Raymond's analysis hits the mark. Everyone should be allowed to act in their own self interest, so long as they don't take other people's stuff without consent.
ESR and you both miss the mark (the literal meaning of "sin", interestingly enough). How do you define what your stuff, what's mine, what's ours, and what's nobody's?
Ownership of any physical object arises utimately from the raw materials, which arises from land ownership, which arises from war, theft, invasion, and fraud - whoops! It's all stolen property!
Ownership of an idea is the silliest thing imaginable. "Hey! You! Stop thinking about that poem! That's a violation of the author's property rights!"
Property is a human invention meant to support other, deeper and more meaningful, values. It is not a first-class value in and of itself; the failure to realize this is what makes libertarian capitialism ultimately a sophmoric philosophy.
While I respect ESR, in this case he could not more perfectly fail to grasp the point.
Proprietary licenses, whereby a state-designated owner can use state power to declare some string of bits "property" and do nasty things to you if you copy them, are an infringement of "flerbage". (Or "freedom", if you prefer.)
Maximum "flerbage" would be the absense of copyright - not passing new restrictions on proprietary licences, but rather removing the exisitng restrictions that make proprietary licences possible.
(I'm not - for the present - arguing for or against such a change. Just arguing that outlawing certain uses of photocopiers, tape recorders, computers, etcetera, is not moving in the direction of maximum "flerbage".)
I'm disappointed that a self-described anarchist doesn't understand the difference.
Are you suggesting that computer games contain some form of relevant political speech?
Contrary to popular belief, the First Amendment does not contain the words "relevant political". Freedom of speech means all speech.
Computer games aren't speech. They are products, like cars.
Nonsense. Computer games are an artistic expression, and fall into the same category as speech or printed matter. The technology of expression is irrevelevant.
The engineer who installed my DSL connection claimed there is a better technology in the pipeline called the 'ATM - Asynchronous Transfer Mode'
ATM is hardly "in the pipeline" - it's been deployed for years.
If fact, some DSL networks are based on ATM - ATM is a circuit switching technology used to concentrate a bunch of DSL lines into one upstream link.
But, as far as I can figure out, ATM isn't a "last-mile" technology. The advantage of DSL and cable modems is that they use existing last-mile infrastructure to reach you.
But then, maybe that's what was being referred to, a way to use POTS lines to being ATM to your desktop. Anyone know more?
And you forgot to mention my favourite new feature [slashdot.org], the anti-goatse.cx mechanism. (Well, it doesn't show up in the preview, but you should see the link domain in square brackets after the link.)
I'm really befuddled by the claimed need for something like this. I put my mouse pointer over a link, I see the URL in the status window. Are there browsers that don't do this or something?
but why the hell are the planets generally round if such large objects have smashed into them...when two things smash into each other they generally don't come off as 2 round pieces
They do if they're liquid. Early on, the inner planets were big balls of molten rock. Irregular objects - like many of the smaller asteroids - are smashed-up bits of larger things that were round but cooled down before they got smashed.
Re:The word Fad is bad, as is the whole premise
on
Mob Software
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· Score: 1
The whole premise of the article is that the current system(s) in place don't work well. This is just plain false.
You think current development methodologies work well?
I want you to remember that statement the next time your machine crashes. The next time you get an e-mail containing a virus. The next time you can't get to a website because the server's down.
Go read the RISKS forum. Then tell me that current software methodologies work.
Re:so let me get this straight...
on
Mob Software
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· Score: 1
fewer people can develop more software faster than lots of people in most circumstances.
...within the very limited problem domains and development paradigms used so far in the short time we've been doing this.
The Mythical Man-Month is a good read. But it predates the widespread use of personal computers and the net.
How about you let me vandalize your stuff, and then let me know what you'd like to do to me. I'm sure that some defintion of "torture" would be met by your words.
If you damage my stuff, I want you to fix it or pay to have it fixed, and compensate me for the time I didn't have the use of it. If you keep it up, I want you placed under supervision to prevent your poor behavior...in the extreme, humanely incarcerated. None of which qualifies as "torture".
Slashdot Mirror
That's backwards.
Copyright isn't a "right" in the sense of the "right" to free speech, or the "right" to bear arms. It is a artifical monooply granted by the state in order to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts , not to protect some imagined "right" of an author to have absolute control over what other people do with something he wrote.
Drop the notion of copyright entirely. Create a notion of right to royalties for commercial use of a work. This is, basically, the model used for performance of a musical work; I can sing "Dead Flowers" at home or at a party and not owe anyone a cent, but when I play it down at the bar (Leadbetters), Jagger and Richards get a cut (via BMI or ASCAP) of the evening's proceeds.
Copying a digital work is now just as easy as singing a song, and trying to prevent it requires the sort of intrusive police-state tactics it would take to make sure no one hums an unauthorized song.
Not "inoperability" - though that's certainly an issue when dealing with Windows - but "interoperability". Which means open data formats and open networking protocols that can work with software from many different vendors, or even roll-your-own software.
Closed data formats that rely on software from a single vendor who supports many different platforms (e.g., RealAudio) are closer to than closed data formats from a single vendor who only supports one, maybe two, different platforms - but not by much.
Interoperability is something Microsoft hates.
They want to use their hold on the desktop to make you use MS-only formats and protocols, so that other people have to use MS software to communicate with you.
So Eudora and WinAmp aren't problems, since SMTP/POP/IMAP and MP3 (modulo patent issues) are open. Outlook and Media Player are problems because they push you towards proprietary data formats and protocols.
The problem isn't really the bundling per se. It's the use of bundling to make interoperability with other systems more difficult.
The stuff you get with a Linux system all works on open standards, so it's easy to switch to something else. The stuff M$ wants to bundle is part of their "embrace and assimilate" strategy.
If you were inside the thing, not touching the inner surface, when it started to rotate, yes, it wouldn't affect you.
However, if you're on that surface, you pick up angular momentum. The surface keeps pushing against you, changing your direction so that you move in a circle with it, and that centripedal force is what you feel as "gravity".
If you were standing on that moving surface and junmped staright "up", your center-ward jumping vector added to your tangental momentum vector sum up to aim you right back at the wall, a little bit spinward from where you started. (Too lazy to do the math right now, but IIRC by the time you reached that point on the wall the spin would carry your starting point there to meet you.)
You'd have to get running pretty darn fast. IIRC a = v^2 / r, so if you had a structure of radius 250 meters (half a klick across - huge) rotating fast enough to give 1g, the tangental velocity would be (scribble, scribble, call up xcalc) 50 m/s, or about 110 mph.You don't keep him on staff. You bring him in as needed and pay him by the hour.
Think of a Unix sysadmin as being like a plumber. You don't need a plumber everyday, unless you're maintaining a skyscaper or an apartment complex. So those with big installations hire one full-time, while residental and small business users hire one as needed (and maybe for regularly scheduled maintenance) per hour.
Hmmmm...I'm typing this from my den into a Netscape window displayed via X from a machine in my bedroom. 10BaseT network, no noticable latency.
The site seems /.ed, so I can't RTFA, but...thinnet? Haven't seen that since I was running a 25 Mhz 486. The horror...the horror. Go cat5!
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&client =googlet&q=liberty%2C+safety%2C+neither
And you beleived their answers? Sucker.
Never believe anything you are told by an employee of any "law enforcement" agency.
Not like me, friend. I got ethics, and working for a paramilitary law enforcement agency would be far outside 'em."Miniscule"? Can I direct your attention to the history of the past few decades? From COINTELPRO to Rampart to the Abner Louima case to Waco to Carnivore, the one thing police forces have shown time and time again is that the probability of the abuse of power is anything but miniscule.
In a sensible world, you could revoke their corporate charter. Existence as a corporation is supposed to be contingent on the public interest.
The law does provide for this, but it almost never happens.
If you mess with my car, bed, etc., you mess with my ability to mess with them.
If you copy my software, music, poetry, etcetera, I still have my copies; your copying in no way deprives me of the use of my copies.
It is; it doesn't mean it should be. Laws against nudity - the natural state of human existance - are surely amoung the stupidest on the books.
So, we need a new mechanism that allows developers of good and useful software to recover their development costs, but places minimum restriction on flerbage. Our current system ain't it.
If copyright was ended tomorrow, and developers stopped developing as a result, would the demand for software cease? Hardly.
Most of the interesting software out there is somewhat custom stuff that has little reliance on copyright for its profitabilty. Pricing models woulds have to change, but overall its production would hardly be affected by such a change.
As for shrinkwrapped COTS products, users who want new software could band together and hire developers to build it to spec.
We can - and eventually, we're going to have to - come up with models where authors, developersm musicians, and so on get paid, without restricting people's right to share information.
Huh? Did you read the same Brave New World I did? I recall it as a commentary on social and cultural trends, not as a story of technology gone awry.
And it's hardly true that all of our concerns about misdirected or misused tech come from fiction. We have plenty of real-life exemplars, from the tragic to the trivial - the Titanic, Chernobyl, various examples of planes, trains, and rockets crashing due to software failures, any example of AVR hell you care to name ("You have selected regicide. If you know the name of the king or queen being murdered, press 1."), "the computer ate my dissertation", computerized accounting systems that demand checks for $0.00, and so on.
My dogs aren't engaging in a dialog about property rights when they bark at passers-by, They're being territorial.
Yes, territorial behavior - the need for a "space to call your own" - is a natural human drive, and one of the deeper things that a useful concept of property needs to support. That doesn't make land owership a primary value.
Indeed, even our current law recognizes that territoriality often trumps ownership; a renter - an occupier of the space - has basic rights to a space that a landlord - an owner - can't neglect.
The Linux kernel, sure. But the system as a whole?
The idea of a free (libre), Unix-oid system is and was the core of the GNU project. RMS was hacking on this before the Linux kernel was a gleam in Linus's eye - since 1984, for crying out loud.
Let's look at what RMS has to say:
Linus didn't "borrow" from the GNU project. He fit the last piece into a puzzle that RMS and the GNU Project had been working on for over a decade. RMS would like this to be known and understood - perhaps for reasons of ego, perhaps for reasons of spreading the free software philosophy, perhaps both. Either way, his request hardly makes his a raving loon.
Can I introduce you to the concept of metaphor? "Information wants to be free" is much snappier than "It is the nature of human beings to share information with each other, such that once a piece of data has been disclosed, attempting to restrict its further disclosure is generally a futile task."
"Nature" doesn't abhor anything, yet "nature abhors a vacuum" is cliche.
ESR and you both miss the mark (the literal meaning of "sin", interestingly enough). How do you define what your stuff, what's mine, what's ours, and what's nobody's?
Ownership of any physical object arises utimately from the raw materials, which arises from land ownership, which arises from war, theft, invasion, and fraud - whoops! It's all stolen property!
Ownership of an idea is the silliest thing imaginable. "Hey! You! Stop thinking about that poem! That's a violation of the author's property rights!"
Property is a human invention meant to support other, deeper and more meaningful, values. It is not a first-class value in and of itself; the failure to realize this is what makes libertarian capitialism ultimately a sophmoric philosophy.
While I respect ESR, in this case he could not more perfectly fail to grasp the point.
Proprietary licenses, whereby a state-designated owner can use state power to declare some string of bits "property" and do nasty things to you if you copy them, are an infringement of "flerbage". (Or "freedom", if you prefer.)
Maximum "flerbage" would be the absense of copyright - not passing new restrictions on proprietary licences, but rather removing the exisitng restrictions that make proprietary licences possible.
(I'm not - for the present - arguing for or against such a change. Just arguing that outlawing certain uses of photocopiers, tape recorders, computers, etcetera, is not moving in the direction of maximum "flerbage".)
I'm disappointed that a self-described anarchist doesn't understand the difference.
ATM is hardly "in the pipeline" - it's been deployed for years.
If fact, some DSL networks are based on ATM - ATM is a circuit switching technology used to concentrate a bunch of DSL lines into one upstream link.
But, as far as I can figure out, ATM isn't a "last-mile" technology. The advantage of DSL and cable modems is that they use existing last-mile infrastructure to reach you.
But then, maybe that's what was being referred to, a way to use POTS lines to being ATM to your desktop. Anyone know more?
You think current development methodologies work well?
I want you to remember that statement the next time your machine crashes. The next time you get an e-mail containing a virus. The next time you can't get to a website because the server's down.
Go read the RISKS forum. Then tell me that current software methodologies work.
...within the very limited problem domains and development paradigms used so far in the short time we've been doing this.
The Mythical Man-Month is a good read. But it predates the widespread use of personal computers and the net.
If you damage my stuff, I want you to fix it or pay to have it fixed, and compensate me for the time I didn't have the use of it. If you keep it up, I want you placed under supervision to prevent your poor behavior...in the extreme, humanely incarcerated. None of which qualifies as "torture".