Was Gallileo's extra-solar journey an accident? How about Voyager?
Are you thinking of Pioneer? Gallileo is still well within the Sol system, getting ready for a Ganymede fly-by.
While the Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft trajectories were planned to leave the system, it was never planned that they'd be at all operational at the time.
The posts Microsoft is objecting to do not contain any original opinions, thoughts or ideas , but rather a regurgitation of copyrighted material.
Material need not be original to be protected expression. Reading from the Bible, the US Constition, or the Principia Discordia would all be protected speech.
And often, expressing an opinion, thought, or idea that is a response to another one requires the one reguritate, partially or wholly, the target of your response. (As, for example, my quote of your post above.)
According to what I know of phylosophy the existence of god can not be disproven.
Depends on what sort of god(s) you mean. The Christian notion of an omnipotent, perfectly good being is easily dismissed by the problem of evil - even if we grant some mumbo-jumbo about "free will", such a being would still have to act to prevent suffering in natural disasters and the like. If you or I had the power to prevent deaths by flood, famine, and fire, and did not use it, we would certainly not be considered "good" human beings; if some supernatural being has such power, it is not using it, and I will not consider it "good".
This still leaves the possibilities of non-omnipotent gods, or of an omnipotent ones that is not perfectly good, but neither of these seem worth all the fuss.
A real scientist should never form a concrete opinion. One should say I see no proof of existence of god but I since their is no proof to the contrary I reserve judgment.
Hogwash. I see no proof of the existence of invisible alien Elvis clones on my roof, but there's no proof to the contrary either. Does this mean that I should seriously consider the possibility that invisible alien Elvis clones are there?
While I don't run Windows or IE, I'm a security-conscious geek, and I'd like to warn my friends and co-workers about this expoit. But my employer of the moment, in order to protect us from evil content, has installed CyberPatrol. As you may know, the fine folks at Peacefire have been having a field day by pointing out the foolishness of censorship programs, and the makers of censorware have (at least in the case of CyberPatrol) responded by adding Peacefire to their blocklists.
So, all you companies with CyberPatrol installed - your censorship has just made it more difficult for your employees to be informed about a serious security hole.
But, should Microsoft persist, I say fight. By any means necessary, short of tactical nukes. The most important thing is to not roll over at the threat of a lawsuit.
If this goes to court, I pledge at least $500 to the Slashdot Legal Defense Fund. Who's with me? Even $20 per geek would add up fast.
For example, there's not a great deal of interest in enforcing the right to modify music whereas allowing it for source code has helped creating great software.
Eh? Music gets modified all the time. It gets arranged differently by every artist that performs it, that's been happening forever. And in the past 15-20 years, recordings of performances have been frequently remixed and sampled to create derivative works, with no shortage of legal hoo-hah.
What about it? All they can get is the IP address of the attacker. If you're making a legitimate connection, you haver to supply your IP address so that the results can reach you! The only reasons to spoof an IP address are nefarious.
Even then, this can only trace packet floods, because a huge number of packets are needed for a trace to be effective. IIRC, the article says 100*n packets minimum, where n=number of hops, are required. If you figure 10 hops to get somewhere interesting, you need 1.5 MB incoming traffic to get a trace. FTP or HTTP requests don't generate that kind of traffic in any reasonable time.
I'd comment more about Vinge, but I haven't found a copy of True Names yet.
I'm surprised that True Names and Other Dangers is out of print. It also features Run, Bookworm, Run!, Long Shot, and a few other stories. Find it if you can.
According to Amazon.com, True Names: And the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier
A study of True Names, Vernor Vinge's critically acclaimed novella that invented the concept of cyberspace, features that complete text of the novella, as well as articles by Richard Stallman, John Markoff, Hans Moravec, Patricia Maes, Timothy May, and other cyberspace pioneers.
is coming soon to a bookstore near you. (Publication date is supposed to be April 2000, but it's not available yet.)
I checked Amazon for info, but since they're patent abusing bastards who should be first against the wall when the revolution comes I'll probably buy from Fatbrain or my local bookstore.
Heinlein, like every other science fiction writer than I know of (and nearly every other engineer, computer scientist, etc.) failed to predict the truly profound change in computer technology. The personal computer.
Try to find an anthology called War With the Robots, originally titled Machines that Think. It has a story from the 50's by Murry Leister(?) called "A Logic Named Joe" that not only features home computers - called "logics" in the story - but also the convergence of television, telephony, and computing.
The logics of the story are connected to a global data bank. The story deals with issues of access to that information - what happens when someone wants to use that knowledge to, say, plan the perfect bank heist? It's quite relevent to issues of net censorship today.
In any event, with all these changes, one has to wonder: is the banner ad on the way to "dead"?
Gods, one can only hope so.
The problem with banner ads isn't just that they're annoying and consume bandwidth. The real evil is that they put the web on the same "top-down" model as TV and radio, leading us to a situation where a handful of advertisers end up with a lot of control over content.
From the blatant self-promotion department: I'm working on a "bottom-up" system for supporting websites (or other activities) where readers would be able to pay to place sponsored links on a site. I call it the sponsorpool.
It works like this: a sponsor decides how much they're willing to pay , and registers their message and payment on a sponsorpool server. Then on every page load from a sponsored site, a sponsorship message is selected from the pool. The probability of a message being selected is the amount of sponsor's payment for that message, divided by the total amount of sponsorship for the month - the more you sponsor a site for, the more often your message appears, but even a few bucks will get you some impressions.
The hope is that rather than attracting big contributions from a handful of big sponsors, this will attrach many smaller contributions from average readers. (Would you pony up $20 one month for one in a thouand Slashdot page loads to display your message?) I believe this allows a more democratic and more free-market ap proach to site sponsorship that will be much less annoying than banner ads (the links are just text, though there's no technical reason why the system couldn't be expanded to handle images as well). It would benefit small sites and sites with controvertial content that can't attract banner ads.
In addition to supporting websites, I think this could be used to support other activities - a sort of generalized PayLars.com.
I've been hacking on this in my copious spare time for a month or two, and my proof-of-concept pre-alpha 0.0 version should be ready within another week or two. It's just a couple of PHP and shell scripts, and in this first version, payments are handled with PayPal; so anyone with PHP, PostgreSQL, and some time to puzzle over my poorly documented code will be able to set up a server. If anyone would like more info, drop me a line (drop "spambefuddler" from the address above) and I'll send you more information when it's ready. (Which will be Real Soon Now. Unless it's not.)
after all, all good socialist members of society should be the same...
Er, no, actually. Socialism just means an economic system based on labor rather than property. It has nothing to do with dragging down the more able to create some sort of twisted equality.
Here's a free hint: George Orwell, author of Animal Farm and 1984 - two of the 20th Century's greatest greatest warnings about authoritarianism - was a dedicated socialist.
The real value of solving problems is the insights gained along the way. We didn't gain any real insight when computers proved the 4-color therom by brute force.
The insights were gained in setting up the brute force computation - in finding the finite set of cases that map to all possibilities, and creating an algorithm to handle them.
The closed-development, selective patching nature of the project reminds me a LOT of the BSD and Apache style development model...So perhaps VA would do well to change the license on SourceForge from GPL to BSD-style.
Why, oh why, does such misunderstanding about the GPL persist?
There is NOTHING about the GPL that says anything about who you accept patches from, or how often. All the GPL says is that if I give you or sell you binaries, I have to offer to give you source, and if you give away or sell thoes binaries or modified ones, you have to also offer source. I don't have to set up an anonymous CVS tree, I don't even have to publish an e-mail address for patches or questions.
All I have to do under the GPL is make sure that you can use, copy, and modify the software, and that you preserve those rights for others.
Any programmer who doesn't understand all his own code is sloppy. That's why there are such things as/* #comments */.
Even well-commented code isn't fully understood immediately if you haven't looked at it for a few years. What well-written and well-commented code helps you do is get that understanding back rapidly when you pick it up again.
The best-commented code is where, just as the reader starts to ask, "What the heck is this?", there's a comment right there that answers the question. But the only way that there's not even a question is when the code is trivial.
Music is NOT information. The thing that bothers me most about the napster/mp3 craze of late is that people have started thinking of music as a commodity rather than the art it is.
The text of Hamlet is information, which can be digitally encoded in ASCII. Copies of Hamlet can be bought and sold; books are a commodity. Does that mean that great plays like Hamlet aren't art? Fsck no.
A recording of music is information, which can be digitally encoded in MP3 (or.wav, or whatever). Copies of the recording can be bought and sold; recordings are a commodity. The conclusion is left as an exercise for the reader.
If you could do anything in any language, there would only be one language.
Not necessarily. You can do the same things in any Turing-complete language (ignoring, for the moment, concerns about efficency); but that doesn't mean you can do the same things with the same amount of ease. Anything you do in LISP, you can do in C, and vice versa - but it might hurt a lot more one way.
Dynamically loaded object have nothing to do with SQL stored procedures!
That's like replying to "This C compiler doesn'r recognize functions that return a void *, how bogus!" with "No, d00d, it lets you do something better, load in FORTRAN modules!" It's an irrelevant non sequitor.
"They came for the pedophiles, and I didn't say anything. Next, they came for the rapists, and I didn't say a thing. Next they came for us serial killers... and there was no scum left to say anything."
Disclaimer: Just in case the following should confuse anyone with poor reading comprehension, I find pedophilia as repugnant as anyone else does, and firmly believe that people who sexually abuse children (or adults, for that matter) need to be removed from polite society.
That said, there is an important difference between pedophiles on the one hand and rapists and serial killers on the other. Pedophilia is a desire (a disgusting one, yes), where as rape and killing are actions. Not all pedophiles act on their desires.
While 99.9% of us may find their sexual fantasies abhorant, we cannot legitimately make desires crimes. And we should not make fictional portrayals of abhorant acts illegal.
It is a strange thing that if I had a videotape - real or faked - of two young teenagers who were having consensual sex (as consensual as immature people could have, anyway) and were discovered and grusomely murdered by some psychopath, the sex part of the tape would be contraband but the tape of the murders would be perfectly legal to own and view.
The ACLU is one of the most destructive organizations out there. It's goal is to break down every single difference in society.
What the fuck are you talking about??
The ACLU supports the right of the KKK to march, while at the same time they fight racial profiling by police. They support the rights of Chrstian streetcorner preachers, while supporting the rights of non-Christians to not be religiously indoctrinated in public schools. There is no greater force for the preservation of your legal freedoms of belief and expression than the ACLU.
They're not perfect (I wish they would take a postitive stand on the RKBA), but I'm damn proud to be a supporter.
I'm astounded at the leaps of logic in this post. I sincerely hope my sarcasm detector is broken, and you aren't wholly serious. In one paragraph you proclaim that copying is not illegal, and in this one, you switch sides, and state the exact opposite.
What's broken is not your sarcasm detector but your reading comprehension.
I never said that copying was not illegal, I said that it was not theft (because it doesn't take anything away from anyone else), not immoral, and that the laws against it are irrelevant because they're unenforcable (short of police state "War on Drugs" tactics, which fail anyway and get people killed in the process). I address this more is another post in this thread.
"Happy mother's day! Here's a bouquet I stole from the flower shop!"
But of course, if I steal flowers the shop no longer has them, whereas if I copy a song no one has any less than they had before.
If somewhere in my net.travels I came across a Barry Manillow bootleg, you bet I'd copy it for my mom. (You thought Deadheads were serious fans? Forget it. You ain't seen nothing until you've encountered Manillow fandom. It's scary.) In fact, come to think of it, if I can get my CD burner set up in the next few days, maybe I'll do a search and if I find anything interesting I'll burn her a disc for Mother's Day.
(Note to the copyright police: the above, of course, is strictly rhetorical fiction, so don't go raiding my mom's house looking for bootlegs.)
Also, you can't perform their material in public without paying royalties. Cover bands who pay their liscensing fees can tell you about that.
My understanding is that royalties are only necessary if someone's making money. I can sit in the park (a public place) and play my guitar and pay no royalties, but when I play a Dylan song at the open mic down at Leadbetter's, Bob gets a cut of the bar's take via BMI or ASCAP. I've got no problem with that idea (though the actual execution gets whacky sometimes), and I think that copying should be handled similarly - unrestricted, but if you're making money off it, pay the artist their share.
Incidently, that's another way that artists can make money when people copy their work - those copying it might play the song on the stereo at their bar, or learn and perform it, and cause perforance royalties to get paid. (Performance royalties are morally clearer and easier to enforce than copying restrictions.) This might apply less to MP3s than it does to guitar transcriptions like those at OLGA. OLGA also shows how ineffective these copyright enforcements are - when they were stomped, mirrors sprung up immediately.
The correct term is "copyright infringement", and yes, it's actually a crime.
Non sequitor. I didn't say it wasn't a crime. But so what? Underage drinking, driving 70mph on a clear highway, failure to reposrt the $20 your grandma gave you on your birthday on your income taxes, oral sex, and cursing (yes, we still have blasphemy laws on the books here) are all crimes around here. We're all criminals already, so why is someone who wants to make a copy of a song for his mom going to be stopped at the thought that he's breaking the law?
Like it or not, there are really only three ways to stop someone from doing something:
physical or technical impossibility
the use or threat of physical force
persuasion
Digital media and the net eliminate the first - making and distributing copies is trivial. And without police state tactics, the second is impossible - anti-copying laws can't be enforced when copying is so trivial.
That leaves persuasion. And rather than trying to persuade people not to make copies, we should be encouraging them to support creators of copied material. We need to come up with more and better ways for people to voluntarily support artists.
Quite obvious that you haven't produced much valuable Intellectual Property of your own - otherwise you might respect other's copyright a bit more.
I respect creativity and wish to see it rewarded, both in myself and others. I just realize that a government-backed pay-per-copy scheme isn't the way to do that any more (if it ever was).
Alright, then the napster users were "copying without permission" instead of "stealing".
Exactly. Once it's seen that this is not at all in the same category with theft, that it's nothing like stealing your TV or robbing a bank, maybe we can discuss it rationally.
"He stole my guitar!" would be recognized as a legitimate complaint in almost any human civilization of the past 6000 years - it's a clear case of harm. But "He copied a {book, song, program} I made!" would draw blank looks and shrugs in many cultures, past and present; in fact, it might be seen as a positive act. (Note that I am distinguishing between honest copying and representing a copy as your own work.)
Copyright is an artifact of the stage between oral tradition (where information has to be shared because that's the only way for data to survive) and digital tradition (where information will be shared because we're wired to want to do so and the cost of doing it is zero).
Words and meanings change over time.
True enough. But that doesn't mean that we should let one side of a debate redefine important terms to suit their arguments. Which is why the flap over "hacker/cracker" continues.
Equating unauthorized copying with armed maritime robbery is inaccurate and prejudicial. So I will continue to insist on "unauthorized copying" instead of "piracy".
Slashdot Mirror
I still find myself humming the theme music. And yeah, the Eagles were cool spaceships! I had a nifty toy one...
While the Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft trajectories were planned to leave the system, it was never planned that they'd be at all operational at the time.
Both missions have far exceeded their design parameters. Pioneer 10's mission ended in 1997, but it's still useful; its transmissions are being used to study chaos theory. (Pioneer 11 went dead years ago, when its RTG ran down.) And the Voyagers have been re-assigned to look for the heliopause boundary and study the interstellar environment.
And often, expressing an opinion, thought, or idea that is a response to another one requires the one reguritate, partially or wholly, the target of your response. (As, for example, my quote of your post above.)
This still leaves the possibilities of non-omnipotent gods, or of an omnipotent ones that is not perfectly good, but neither of these seem worth all the fuss.
Hogwash. I see no proof of the existence of invisible alien Elvis clones on my roof, but there's no proof to the contrary either. Does this mean that I should seriously consider the possibility that invisible alien Elvis clones are there?A bit offtopic...
While I don't run Windows or IE, I'm a security-conscious geek, and I'd like to warn my friends and co-workers about this expoit. But my employer of the moment, in order to protect us from evil content, has installed CyberPatrol. As you may know, the fine folks at Peacefire have been having a field day by pointing out the foolishness of censorship programs, and the makers of censorware have (at least in the case of CyberPatrol) responded by adding Peacefire to their blocklists.
So, all you companies with CyberPatrol installed - your censorship has just made it more difficult for your employees to be informed about a serious security hole.
Think of it as evolution in action.
Very nice reply by roblimo.
But, should Microsoft persist, I say fight. By any means necessary, short of tactical nukes. The most important thing is to not roll over at the threat of a lawsuit.
If this goes to court, I pledge at least $500 to the Slashdot Legal Defense Fund. Who's with me? Even $20 per geek would add up fast.
What about it? All they can get is the IP address of the attacker. If you're making a legitimate connection, you haver to supply your IP address so that the results can reach you! The only reasons to spoof an IP address are nefarious.
Even then, this can only trace packet floods, because a huge number of packets are needed for a trace to be effective. IIRC, the article says 100*n packets minimum, where n=number of hops, are required. If you figure 10 hops to get somewhere interesting, you need 1.5 MB incoming traffic to get a trace. FTP or HTTP requests don't generate that kind of traffic in any reasonable time.
I'm surprised that True Names and Other Dangers is out of print. It also features Run, Bookworm, Run!, Long Shot, and a few other stories. Find it if you can.
According to Amazon.com, True Names: And the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier
is coming soon to a bookstore near you. (Publication date is supposed to be April 2000, but it's not available yet.)I checked Amazon for info, but since they're patent abusing bastards who should be first against the wall when the revolution comes I'll probably buy from Fatbrain or my local bookstore.
The logics of the story are connected to a global data bank. The story deals with issues of access to that information - what happens when someone wants to use that knowledge to, say, plan the perfect bank heist? It's quite relevent to issues of net censorship today.
The problem with banner ads isn't just that they're annoying and consume bandwidth. The real evil is that they put the web on the same "top-down" model as TV and radio, leading us to a situation where a handful of advertisers end up with a lot of control over content.
From the blatant self-promotion department: I'm working on a "bottom-up" system for supporting websites (or other activities) where readers would be able to pay to place sponsored links on a site. I call it the sponsorpool.
It works like this: a sponsor decides how much they're willing to pay , and registers their message and payment on a sponsorpool server. Then on every page load from a sponsored site, a sponsorship message is selected from the pool. The probability of a message being selected is the amount of sponsor's payment for that message, divided by the total amount of sponsorship for the month - the more you sponsor a site for, the more often your message appears, but even a few bucks will get you some impressions.
The hope is that rather than attracting big contributions from a handful of big sponsors, this will attrach many smaller contributions from average readers. (Would you pony up $20 one month for one in a thouand Slashdot page loads to display your message?) I believe this allows a more democratic and more free-market ap proach to site sponsorship that will be much less annoying than banner ads (the links are just text, though there's no technical reason why the system couldn't be expanded to handle images as well). It would benefit small sites and sites with controvertial content that can't attract banner ads.
In addition to supporting websites, I think this could be used to support other activities - a sort of generalized PayLars.com.
I've been hacking on this in my copious spare time for a month or two, and my proof-of-concept pre-alpha 0.0 version should be ready within another week or two. It's just a couple of PHP and shell scripts, and in this first version, payments are handled with PayPal; so anyone with PHP, PostgreSQL, and some time to puzzle over my poorly documented code will be able to set up a server. If anyone would like more info, drop me a line (drop "spambefuddler" from the address above) and I'll send you more information when it's ready. (Which will be Real Soon Now. Unless it's not.)
Here's a free hint: George Orwell, author of Animal Farm and 1984 - two of the 20th Century's greatest greatest warnings about authoritarianism - was a dedicated socialist.
There is NOTHING about the GPL that says anything about who you accept patches from, or how often. All the GPL says is that if I give you or sell you binaries, I have to offer to give you source, and if you give away or sell thoes binaries or modified ones, you have to also offer source. I don't have to set up an anonymous CVS tree, I don't even have to publish an e-mail address for patches or questions.
All I have to do under the GPL is make sure that you can use, copy, and modify the software, and that you preserve those rights for others.
The best-commented code is where, just as the reader starts to ask, "What the heck is this?", there's a comment right there that answers the question. But the only way that there's not even a question is when the code is trivial.
A recording of music is information, which can be digitally encoded in MP3 (or .wav, or whatever). Copies of the recording can be bought and sold; recordings are a commodity. The conclusion is left as an exercise for the reader.
That's like replying to "This C compiler doesn'r recognize functions that return a void *, how bogus!" with "No, d00d, it lets you do something better, load in FORTRAN modules!" It's an irrelevant non sequitor.
Disclaimer: Just in case the following should confuse anyone with poor reading comprehension, I find pedophilia as repugnant as anyone else does, and firmly believe that people who sexually abuse children (or adults, for that matter) need to be removed from polite society.
That said, there is an important difference between pedophiles on the one hand and rapists and serial killers on the other. Pedophilia is a desire (a disgusting one, yes), where as rape and killing are actions. Not all pedophiles act on their desires.
While 99.9% of us may find their sexual fantasies abhorant, we cannot legitimately make desires crimes. And we should not make fictional portrayals of abhorant acts illegal.
It is a strange thing that if I had a videotape - real or faked - of two young teenagers who were having consensual sex (as consensual as immature people could have, anyway) and were discovered and grusomely murdered by some psychopath, the sex part of the tape would be contraband but the tape of the murders would be perfectly legal to own and view.
What the fuck are you talking about??
The ACLU supports the right of the KKK to march, while at the same time they fight racial profiling by police. They support the rights of Chrstian streetcorner preachers, while supporting the rights of non-Christians to not be religiously indoctrinated in public schools. There is no greater force for the preservation of your legal freedoms of belief and expression than the ACLU.
They're not perfect (I wish they would take a postitive stand on the RKBA), but I'm damn proud to be a supporter.
I never said that copying was not illegal, I said that it was not theft (because it doesn't take anything away from anyone else), not immoral, and that the laws against it are irrelevant because they're unenforcable (short of police state "War on Drugs" tactics, which fail anyway and get people killed in the process). I address this more is another post in this thread.
If somewhere in my net.travels I came across a Barry Manillow bootleg, you bet I'd copy it for my mom. (You thought Deadheads were serious fans? Forget it. You ain't seen nothing until you've encountered Manillow fandom. It's scary.) In fact, come to think of it, if I can get my CD burner set up in the next few days, maybe I'll do a search and if I find anything interesting I'll burn her a disc for Mother's Day.
(Note to the copyright police: the above, of course, is strictly rhetorical fiction, so don't go raiding my mom's house looking for bootlegs.)
Incidently, that's another way that artists can make money when people copy their work - those copying it might play the song on the stereo at their bar, or learn and perform it, and cause perforance royalties to get paid. (Performance royalties are morally clearer and easier to enforce than copying restrictions.) This might apply less to MP3s than it does to guitar transcriptions like those at OLGA. OLGA also shows how ineffective these copyright enforcements are - when they were stomped, mirrors sprung up immediately.
Like it or not, there are really only three ways to stop someone from doing something:
Digital media and the net eliminate the first - making and distributing copies is trivial. And without police state tactics, the second is impossible - anti-copying laws can't be enforced when copying is so trivial.
That leaves persuasion. And rather than trying to persuade people not to make copies, we should be encouraging them to support creators of copied material. We need to come up with more and better ways for people to voluntarily support artists.
I respect creativity and wish to see it rewarded, both in myself and others. I just realize that a government-backed pay-per-copy scheme isn't the way to do that any more (if it ever was)."He stole my guitar!" would be recognized as a legitimate complaint in almost any human civilization of the past 6000 years - it's a clear case of harm. But "He copied a {book, song, program} I made!" would draw blank looks and shrugs in many cultures, past and present; in fact, it might be seen as a positive act. (Note that I am distinguishing between honest copying and representing a copy as your own work.)
Copyright is an artifact of the stage between oral tradition (where information has to be shared because that's the only way for data to survive) and digital tradition (where information will be shared because we're wired to want to do so and the cost of doing it is zero).
True enough. But that doesn't mean that we should let one side of a debate redefine important terms to suit their arguments. Which is why the flap over "hacker/cracker" continues.Equating unauthorized copying with armed maritime robbery is inaccurate and prejudicial. So I will continue to insist on "unauthorized copying" instead of "piracy".