Interesting theory. Apparently the "Christians" you spoke to didn't take any philosophy and morality classes. Most "sinful" activities have logical, non-religious arguments against them, especially when taken in context of the times a religious constraint was enacted by a religion's leadership.
I suggest the atheist in such cases is actually more moral than the religious faithful. They're consciously thinking about what they're doing, the ramifications and impacts, and choosing their actions instead of blindly following rules.
Interestingly enough, that was one of the goals of Christ's teaching in a Jewish community. Get people to think about and live their faith instead of blindly following checklist rules. Without honest effort and intent, an act is not "good", it's just an act.
If I hire someone to build an addition to my house, it is my addition, I pay the extra taxes, I own the property. There is no question that the subcontractor is doing the work as a service to me.
The same applies to transcoding or archiving of material that I own. This is the key point -- the purchasers are receiving original copies of the media transcoded and downloaded to their player,not pirated copies.
This has never been tested before. All prior cases involved media that was transcoded and downloaded to multiple "customers" without authorization; this case involves nothing more than a transcoding service that comes with the purchase of hardware.
If an employee needs regular access to sensitive data and password entries with TrueCrypt or encfs are too much work, the company could always spend a few hundred extra on laptops preconfigured to use drive encryption, with or without biometric drive security. Several companies including IBM/Lenovo sell such hardware.
The point is that the usual excuse of budget constraints don't wash -- there are free options that require little work.
I stand corrected on the Clinton signing of the DMCA. It makes the law no more reasonable.
Copyright law allows you to make copies of media for backups and personal use with print and magnetic media. That precedent has not been overturned in Canada, and has not been tested in the US. Every case taken to court has been over piracy, not over personal use that was repeatedly defined for cassettes used to tape radio, VCRs used to tape TV, personal duplication of cassettes, and recording of vinyl records to cassette.
Instead the DMCA straw dog is painted as a vicious defender of XOR bit masking and insecure encryption algorithms, and both *AAs try to claim victory over a battle that precedent says they cannot win.
Because they're selling the customer the original DVDs as well, the only thing in question is whether it's legal to transform the content for playback on your own device. The fact that someone else was hired to perform the service of transformation does not change the ownership of the media.
The DMCA defense is a farce. Yet another Bush-approved kickback law in the post-9/11 panic that needs to be very intently reviewed by the Supreme Court, Congress, and the Senate now that people aren't all in panic mode. Scared people make mistakes; smart people try to correct them.
There is no "fission trigger" to a fusion power generation device.
They're cool to watch in action. Purple-pink plasma flares in the magring with the lights down looks really, really science-fiction, but it was lab-real back in the '80s. Nothing like seeing half-inch copper cables twitch and flex like muscles due to the massive currents being fed to maintain the magring bottle.:)
The main thing that's changes is nowadays there have been several energy-positive fusion tests, while back then they were just hoping to get to the point where it wouldn't take more energy to produce the fusion burst than they could get back.
What I don't understand is why he isn't trying to get a few million to rebuild the prototype, instead of shooting for the full $200M. A running prototype would probably make it fairly easy to acquire far more funding than $200M.
There are many promises being made for TCM/DRM, yet there was apparently an unsigned driver wedged into a Vista system before the OS was even declared RTM. I am in no hurry to presume DRM/TCM will be as effective as some claim. It's theoretical protection capabilities are being advertised, the factual failures of previous attempts such as the XBox security chips are being conveniently "forgotten".
To claim anything is "immune" from infection ignores three fundamental truths:
The best lock, electronic or otherwise, is only a polite "stay out" request to a professional thief or "black" security operative. Even "hard" encryption is vulnerable to a big enough compute budget.
No matter how well thought out a solution is to a problem like security, some cracker or hacker will think far enough outside the box to find a situation the solution wasn't designed to cover, and poke at it.
No matter how thorough the code reviews and analysis, bugs will happen, including in the DRM/TCM code.
Aside from that, the concept of infecting devices instead of the core system is not new. I'd heard of a skilled engineer who wrote a "virus" for mainframe devices almost 20 years ago. It would wedge itself into the "smart" controllers of the mainframe slaves (e.g. drive arrays, tape managers, etc.), and as long as any one device wasn't cleaned before power was restored, the whole system would end up infected again. At least it was fairly innocuous -- it would print up "I want a cookie" or some such. Type in the word it wanted at the console and it would let the machine keep running.
Anything with a EEPROM, FLASH, or other means of updating the firmware could theoretically be infected in this fashion.
I don't know whether it's urban myth or truth, but it's certainly possible.
Why was the information on the laptop not encrypted?
That is the one question that doesn't step on internal business processes, data, or procedures.
With free "hard" encryption tools out there such as TrueCrypt and encfs, there is no excuse whatsoever for customer data to leave the data center without an encryption envelope/container.
What is it about monopolists that they end up thinking no one else could possibly be as good as them and their team, that no one could possibly compete, that no one could come up with an idea on their own?
Why do monopolists assume they own the world when their fragment is a paltry slice compared to the whole?
Why would someone whose anti-trust investigation mysteriously evaporated shortly after the Bush election be flapping their gums when the Democrats are on the rise and looking into any and all events for influence, connections, and blame? Instead of worrying about Linux, Ballmer should be worrying about the spectre of renewed anti-trust investigations.
The Linux code is up for public review. The straw-dog SCO attempt to tear it down is all but done. Let Microsoft publish their code and identify the purported IP conflicts. They don't and won't because they can't, and they know it.
My understanding is that media is provided with copyright text specifying your license rights to the content of the media.
Some media such as audio CDs have specific government legislated license requirements, others do not. Some rights are inferred from the precedence of video recorders and audio CDs, others have not been clarified in law.
People won't be "fooled into buying licenses to view content", they have been buying such licenses for years. The media companies just need to stop interfering with customers accessing the media they've purchased with the device or format of their choice. Their only concern should be the initial delivery format and license grant, not the specifics of how a consumer uses the media.
I see the media company's interest in consumer use of the media as an infringement of the human right to privacy.
The minister shows a fundamental misunderstanding about what the legal term "public domain" means.
Anyone can use it and all your ideas become public domain.
The copyright text of a scientific journal, magazine, software source code, or other document specifies what rights are granted, if any. Documents have to be specifically assigned to the public domain to qualify as such, otherwise they remain under the copyright of the publisher or creator, as specified in the copyright text.
It is a mistake to presume that you are free and clear to use code fragments from a textbook without authorization. You need to check the rights granted to the public by the copyright text, and may be required to contact the copyright owner for permission or a license.
"Public Domain" has very specific legal meaning. Publicly Visible != Public Domain.
Actually MS Access was the primary product Microsoft lobbed at Borland's market share. SQL Server was much too expensive to win Borland's customer base -- until it was pitched as an "upgrade" to customers who bought into MS Access. By then it was too late to go back.
Of course if you want real scalability, it's pretty easy to migrate from SQL Server to Sybase ASE, but I'm betting you don't hear that from MS developer shops trying to deal with performance issues.
Corporations, government, and other large organizations put together a matrix of hardware, O/S, third-party products, and in-house software to build a production system. Once it's been tested and certified for production, you do not touch it except to apply critical security patches.
When you buy a new box for upgraded OS and products, you go through the effort again.
Even if the APIs are 100% compatible on an OS upgrade, you still need to recertify the combination of products.
Only nickle-and-diming PHBs that understand a bit of IT think backwards compatability matters; those who are completely clueless leave it up to the techs. The other segment of people who care about compatability are those who have a healthy chunk of change invested in office automation, games, and other software who buy a new PC with a new OS.
While I sympathize with the fact that an OS upgrade usually means an "upgrade everything" cost, business realizes that, and factors it in to the decision whether and when to upgrade.
It started out as a university research project. 2-3 users on a VAX 11/780 would bring it to it's knees, but PostgreSQL has been around much, much longer than you seem to think. Almost 20 years.
Never mind your time, the whole approach neglects the outrageous fees some telcos associate with data vs voice traffic. At the rate I get billed for data transfers, it would be far, far cheaper to buy a cell phone every six month than it would be to pay for the data transfers of advertising.
If by "suitable for Linux" you mean that you can now start hacking the JVM to your heart's content, you may be right. But I interpret "suitable" as referring to stability, performance, security, and reliability, not whether I can personally hack the code.
Aside from that, if people start hacking Java itself, they'll end up with versions that won't pass the compatability tests and break the very commercial apps you mention.
I see no benefit to a GPL Java over the existing licenses from Sun at all, unless you're trying to integrate it at a low level into something like PostgreSQL or MySQL as a trigger/stored proc language.
I think Apple has done a very smart thing for a CSL (customer source license) by specifically limiting the use in such ways.
I would be more restrictive -- the source is available for debugging purposes only, and may only be modified through it's core project. I view using/linking CSL code as a variant on LGPL -- I don't care about the specifics of how code is linked (static, DLL, dynamic, whatever), just that any and all changes to such code must be submitted to the core project regardless of where someone deploys the changes.
i.e. No GPL escape clause of "internal use only" that lets weasels try to lawyer their way out of releasing changes by hiding apps behind web interfaces (the equivalent of screen scrapers IMNSHO.)
99% of commercial applications that can pay your rent and put bread-and-butter on the table use Oracle, Sybase, DB/2, or SQLServer/Sybase10.
100% of applications that I'd trust with any personal data like credit cards run under the first three of those databases.
For applications that don't have such stringent requirements, you might want to pull your head out of the smelly sphincter of non-standard MySQL syntax and try working with something that can handle joins of more than 5-7 tables without crumbling. Firebird happens to be one -- it's the open sourced version of Borland's database engine, which has kicked MSAccess around the block on performance and standards compliance long before it was open sourced.
With a couple years of additional development, I expect the new version probably does an even better job of supporting ANSI92 SQL and common language drivers.
What I can't understand is why everyone still goes ga-ga over MySQL. It doesn't follow standards for syntax, it doesn't scale for statement complexity, and it's reputation for reliability and recoverability is deservedly bad.
Don't get me wrong. Use what works. But there are so many application profile variants that it's quite narrow minded to presume one database fits all, especially when you try to pick the weakest runt in the litter as your panacea.
I'm a Canadian. The political party that pushes such policies is named "The Liberal Party of Canada."
It has nothing to do with the left-right US interpretation of the word.
Shame is simply one of the negative reinforcements of life. Avoiding it is to claim some moral, intellectual, or physical superiority that protects you from ever making an error. Not to say that embarassment should stop you from learning from the mistake and moving forward -- that's the "dealing with failure" that kids aren't learning.
Are you suggesting the buttons and tally counters of a voting machine react according to some probabality curve such as stochastic?
Somehow that flies in the face of digital accuracy, code predictability, database integrity, system security, and application reliability, doesn't it?
We're talking about straight-forward button-press counting systems here, not some sort of complex interest accruals or tax filing analysis. There are no heuristics, there are no inference engines, and there is so little code required it would take a COMPLETE FREAKIN' MORON to field a computer program that can't count to 80 without screwing up!
Use webmail or forms to take customer requests, complaints, etc. instead of public email addys. When someone is assigned to handle the request, they can provide their email address for followup. That way none of the company email addresses are "public", and you can still have a full contact directory.
Such forms require the customer to provide a reply-to address, which you can then add to a whitelist.
Spam is a nuisance, but it's not worthwhile to make it hard for customers just to avoid address harvesting.
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting theory. Apparently the "Christians" you spoke to didn't take any philosophy and morality classes. Most "sinful" activities have logical, non-religious arguments against them, especially when taken in context of the times a religious constraint was enacted by a religion's leadership.
I suggest the atheist in such cases is actually more moral than the religious faithful. They're consciously thinking about what they're doing, the ramifications and impacts, and choosing their actions instead of blindly following rules.
Interestingly enough, that was one of the goals of Christ's teaching in a Jewish community. Get people to think about and live their faith instead of blindly following checklist rules. Without honest effort and intent, an act is not "good", it's just an act.
I disagree completely.
If I hire someone to build an addition to my house, it is my addition, I pay the extra taxes, I own the property. There is no question that the subcontractor is doing the work as a service to me.
The same applies to transcoding or archiving of material that I own. This is the key point -- the purchasers are receiving original copies of the media transcoded and downloaded to their player, not pirated copies.
This has never been tested before. All prior cases involved media that was transcoded and downloaded to multiple "customers" without authorization; this case involves nothing more than a transcoding service that comes with the purchase of hardware.
If an employee needs regular access to sensitive data and password entries with TrueCrypt or encfs are too much work, the company could always spend a few hundred extra on laptops preconfigured to use drive encryption, with or without biometric drive security. Several companies including IBM/Lenovo sell such hardware.
The point is that the usual excuse of budget constraints don't wash -- there are free options that require little work.
Double click TrueCrypt container. Select virtual drive letter. Click mount. Enter password.
Dismount when done working.
Simple.
I stand corrected on the Clinton signing of the DMCA. It makes the law no more reasonable.
Copyright law allows you to make copies of media for backups and personal use with print and magnetic media. That precedent has not been overturned in Canada, and has not been tested in the US. Every case taken to court has been over piracy, not over personal use that was repeatedly defined for cassettes used to tape radio, VCRs used to tape TV, personal duplication of cassettes, and recording of vinyl records to cassette.
Instead the DMCA straw dog is painted as a vicious defender of XOR bit masking and insecure encryption algorithms, and both *AAs try to claim victory over a battle that precedent says they cannot win.
Because they're selling the customer the original DVDs as well, the only thing in question is whether it's legal to transform the content for playback on your own device. The fact that someone else was hired to perform the service of transformation does not change the ownership of the media.
The DMCA defense is a farce. Yet another Bush-approved kickback law in the post-9/11 panic that needs to be very intently reviewed by the Supreme Court, Congress, and the Senate now that people aren't all in panic mode. Scared people make mistakes; smart people try to correct them.
There is no "fission trigger" to a fusion power generation device.
They're cool to watch in action. Purple-pink plasma flares in the magring with the lights down looks really, really science-fiction, but it was lab-real back in the '80s. Nothing like seeing half-inch copper cables twitch and flex like muscles due to the massive currents being fed to maintain the magring bottle. :)
The main thing that's changes is nowadays there have been several energy-positive fusion tests, while back then they were just hoping to get to the point where it wouldn't take more energy to produce the fusion burst than they could get back.
What I don't understand is why he isn't trying to get a few million to rebuild the prototype, instead of shooting for the full $200M. A running prototype would probably make it fairly easy to acquire far more funding than $200M.
There are many promises being made for TCM/DRM, yet there was apparently an unsigned driver wedged into a Vista system before the OS was even declared RTM. I am in no hurry to presume DRM/TCM will be as effective as some claim. It's theoretical protection capabilities are being advertised, the factual failures of previous attempts such as the XBox security chips are being conveniently "forgotten".
To claim anything is "immune" from infection ignores three fundamental truths:
Aside from that, the concept of infecting devices instead of the core system is not new. I'd heard of a skilled engineer who wrote a "virus" for mainframe devices almost 20 years ago. It would wedge itself into the "smart" controllers of the mainframe slaves (e.g. drive arrays, tape managers, etc.), and as long as any one device wasn't cleaned before power was restored, the whole system would end up infected again. At least it was fairly innocuous -- it would print up "I want a cookie" or some such. Type in the word it wanted at the console and it would let the machine keep running.
Anything with a EEPROM, FLASH, or other means of updating the firmware could theoretically be infected in this fashion.
I don't know whether it's urban myth or truth, but it's certainly possible.
That is the one question that doesn't step on internal business processes, data, or procedures.
With free "hard" encryption tools out there such as TrueCrypt and encfs, there is no excuse whatsoever for customer data to leave the data center without an encryption envelope/container.
Is a 70,000 node cluster capable of real-time brute-force decryption of monitored AES256/Rjindael streams?
What is it about monopolists that they end up thinking no one else could possibly be as good as them and their team, that no one could possibly compete, that no one could come up with an idea on their own?
Why do monopolists assume they own the world when their fragment is a paltry slice compared to the whole?
Why would someone whose anti-trust investigation mysteriously evaporated shortly after the Bush election be flapping their gums when the Democrats are on the rise and looking into any and all events for influence, connections, and blame? Instead of worrying about Linux, Ballmer should be worrying about the spectre of renewed anti-trust investigations.
The Linux code is up for public review. The straw-dog SCO attempt to tear it down is all but done. Let Microsoft publish their code and identify the purported IP conflicts. They don't and won't because they can't, and they know it.
My understanding is that media is provided with copyright text specifying your license rights to the content of the media.
Some media such as audio CDs have specific government legislated license requirements, others do not. Some rights are inferred from the precedence of video recorders and audio CDs, others have not been clarified in law.
People won't be "fooled into buying licenses to view content", they have been buying such licenses for years. The media companies just need to stop interfering with customers accessing the media they've purchased with the device or format of their choice. Their only concern should be the initial delivery format and license grant, not the specifics of how a consumer uses the media.
I see the media company's interest in consumer use of the media as an infringement of the human right to privacy.
The minister shows a fundamental misunderstanding about what the legal term "public domain" means.
The copyright text of a scientific journal, magazine, software source code, or other document specifies what rights are granted, if any. Documents have to be specifically assigned to the public domain to qualify as such, otherwise they remain under the copyright of the publisher or creator, as specified in the copyright text.
It is a mistake to presume that you are free and clear to use code fragments from a textbook without authorization. You need to check the rights granted to the public by the copyright text, and may be required to contact the copyright owner for permission or a license.
"Public Domain" has very specific legal meaning. Publicly Visible != Public Domain.
Before DivX pr0n there was MJPEG pr0n.
Before MJPEG pr0n there was JPEG pr0n.
Before JPEG pr0n there was bitmap pr0n.
Before bitmap pr0n there was ASCII art pr0n.
Before that, some weirdo was convinced that two LED's looked like nipples...
*g*
Sure there was bloatware -- so people upgraded to the 8080.
Actually MS Access was the primary product Microsoft lobbed at Borland's market share. SQL Server was much too expensive to win Borland's customer base -- until it was pitched as an "upgrade" to customers who bought into MS Access. By then it was too late to go back.
Of course if you want real scalability, it's pretty easy to migrate from SQL Server to Sybase ASE, but I'm betting you don't hear that from MS developer shops trying to deal with performance issues.
Corporations, government, and other large organizations put together a matrix of hardware, O/S, third-party products, and in-house software to build a production system. Once it's been tested and certified for production, you do not touch it except to apply critical security patches.
When you buy a new box for upgraded OS and products, you go through the effort again.
Even if the APIs are 100% compatible on an OS upgrade, you still need to recertify the combination of products.
Only nickle-and-diming PHBs that understand a bit of IT think backwards compatability matters; those who are completely clueless leave it up to the techs. The other segment of people who care about compatability are those who have a healthy chunk of change invested in office automation, games, and other software who buy a new PC with a new OS.
While I sympathize with the fact that an OS upgrade usually means an "upgrade everything" cost, business realizes that, and factors it in to the decision whether and when to upgrade.
I can't say I miss the days of the nibble and CPUs measured in kilohertz.
It started out as a university research project. 2-3 users on a VAX 11/780 would bring it to it's knees, but PostgreSQL has been around much, much longer than you seem to think. Almost 20 years.
Never mind your time, the whole approach neglects the outrageous fees some telcos associate with data vs voice traffic. At the rate I get billed for data transfers, it would be far, far cheaper to buy a cell phone every six month than it would be to pay for the data transfers of advertising.
Especially if it goes beyond SMS ads.
If by "suitable for Linux" you mean that you can now start hacking the JVM to your heart's content, you may be right. But I interpret "suitable" as referring to stability, performance, security, and reliability, not whether I can personally hack the code.
Aside from that, if people start hacking Java itself, they'll end up with versions that won't pass the compatability tests and break the very commercial apps you mention.
I see no benefit to a GPL Java over the existing licenses from Sun at all, unless you're trying to integrate it at a low level into something like PostgreSQL or MySQL as a trigger/stored proc language.
I think Apple has done a very smart thing for a CSL (customer source license) by specifically limiting the use in such ways.
I would be more restrictive -- the source is available for debugging purposes only, and may only be modified through it's core project. I view using/linking CSL code as a variant on LGPL -- I don't care about the specifics of how code is linked (static, DLL, dynamic, whatever), just that any and all changes to such code must be submitted to the core project regardless of where someone deploys the changes.
i.e. No GPL escape clause of "internal use only" that lets weasels try to lawyer their way out of releasing changes by hiding apps behind web interfaces (the equivalent of screen scrapers IMNSHO.)
99% of commercial applications that can pay your rent and put bread-and-butter on the table use Oracle, Sybase, DB/2, or SQLServer/Sybase10.
100% of applications that I'd trust with any personal data like credit cards run under the first three of those databases.
For applications that don't have such stringent requirements, you might want to pull your head out of the smelly sphincter of non-standard MySQL syntax and try working with something that can handle joins of more than 5-7 tables without crumbling. Firebird happens to be one -- it's the open sourced version of Borland's database engine, which has kicked MSAccess around the block on performance and standards compliance long before it was open sourced.
With a couple years of additional development, I expect the new version probably does an even better job of supporting ANSI92 SQL and common language drivers.
What I can't understand is why everyone still goes ga-ga over MySQL. It doesn't follow standards for syntax, it doesn't scale for statement complexity, and it's reputation for reliability and recoverability is deservedly bad.
Don't get me wrong. Use what works. But there are so many application profile variants that it's quite narrow minded to presume one database fits all, especially when you try to pick the weakest runt in the litter as your panacea.
I'm a Canadian. The political party that pushes such policies is named "The Liberal Party of Canada."
It has nothing to do with the left-right US interpretation of the word.
Shame is simply one of the negative reinforcements of life. Avoiding it is to claim some moral, intellectual, or physical superiority that protects you from ever making an error. Not to say that embarassment should stop you from learning from the mistake and moving forward -- that's the "dealing with failure" that kids aren't learning.
Are you suggesting the buttons and tally counters of a voting machine react according to some probabality curve such as stochastic?
Somehow that flies in the face of digital accuracy, code predictability, database integrity, system security, and application reliability, doesn't it?
We're talking about straight-forward button-press counting systems here, not some sort of complex interest accruals or tax filing analysis. There are no heuristics, there are no inference engines, and there is so little code required it would take a COMPLETE FREAKIN' MORON to field a computer program that can't count to 80 without screwing up!
Use webmail or forms to take customer requests, complaints, etc. instead of public email addys. When someone is assigned to handle the request, they can provide their email address for followup. That way none of the company email addresses are "public", and you can still have a full contact directory.
Such forms require the customer to provide a reply-to address, which you can then add to a whitelist.
Spam is a nuisance, but it's not worthwhile to make it hard for customers just to avoid address harvesting.