IMO even with no information provided to obtain the card, there is NO practical anonymity in the use of the card. You're carrying around with you a physical token indicating your purchase history. If a TLA decides that they don't like your purchase history, all they need to do is pop you leaving the store the next time you use the card...
It's also sort of like the words become self-describing - the meaning has been abstracted into the sytem by which they are constructed. A word has "reflection" methods that reveal information about it's meaning.:)
Agreed that what they are acting as though they have greater rights than a GPL-style license would imply.
I'm mainly wondering why they would think that they have such rights, unless they are specifically spelled out in the license agreement. I can't see that IBM would agree to such terms.
It's almost like you buy a 2000 Taurus from Ford, independently buy a heavy-duty alternator and put it in the car. It works. You independently buy a heavy-duty alternator for your 2003 Honda Civic and install it. Ford claims that you can't sell the Civic because the concept of car+heavy duty alternator is a derived work based upon a Taurus plus a heavy-duty alternator. It's a fallacy because the Civic + alternator is NOT derived from Ford. You might not be able to claim that the Ford isn't still a Ford, but the Civic still isn't a Ford...
There's something I'm not understanding about the issue... Why does SCO try to imply that they own the rights to derivative work (AIX) on code they own IP rights to, but licensed to IBM for exactly the purposes for which it was used? I could understand their argument better if the license to IBM had been some sort of GPL license, but I imagine it was not. It seems like they're trying to apply open-source licensing concepts to their own proprietary code and licensing, and I don't see the justification unless it is explicit in their licensing to IBM.
Is there some general precedent for derivative works on work licensed from others that is independent of the license terms? I know that copyright infringement can occur for unlicensed works that are judged as significantly derivative from copyrighted work. That just doens't seem the situation at all here.
6) Like this: You have a *very* long row to hoe here, and you could start with a proof not a charge, and start that be describing just what you think this 'modern Information Theory (IT)' is in your opinion. I've certainly never heared of it.
I directly can't see the original post, but from replies it seems he's asserting that information/organized structures cannot arise through "random" processes.
Complete and utter BS as far as I'm concerned. With an energy/entropy source, like, say, the sun, involved, meaningful structures can and do arise given seemingly random injection of energy. It happens all of the time. Inevitably. All of the fluid/heat transfer transport laws, describing meaningful structures formed from boundary conditions and energy sources can be derived from statistical (read random) mechanics and irreversible thermodynamics. (Read Prigozhine).
Heat up fluid particles in a broad flat pan. Random energy to random particles from the bottom of the pan. Raileigh (sp) convection will result, with formation of hexagonal cells of fluid motion.
Perturb damn near any "equilibrium" system with random energy/entropy and the result is formation of a meaningful structure. Don't give me that BS...
As we start to take advantage of network features, it will become impossible to rely on personal firewalls to curb outbound traffic - you want your CD player to send some ID to the CDDB so it can retrief the correct tracklisting for the CD you're playing, so you have to tell your personal firewall to allow your CD player to connect to the net. After that point, you are trusting the CD player to behave properly and not betray you.
Why is it necessary to grant a CD playing application full outgoing connection capabilities to any host? I have many programs that are allowed to connect only to particular sites of my choosing...
I've firewalled out doubleclick's stuff a long time ago, but I was wondering how they key the stuff in their database. Is it keyed by the cookie, or something more persistent on the client machine? I.e., if somebody runs Ad-Aware and deletes a doubleclick cookie, then receives another different one the next day on the same client machine, does it break doubleclick's correlation of the prior and later data? Somehow I'd be surprised if it does...
IMO the government should have forced the breakup of cable content provider functions from cable infrastructure provider functions before deregulation of cable.
The packaging/sales of content in cable is hindered in a lame and anti-competitive manner when provided solely by the single company providing the wire. Choices are severely limited, and realistic alternatives for a different infrastructure provider may not be available in some locations.
Don't forget, you might need to cash to avoid vagrancy, but you'd better not have too much for your appearance, else you might have to sacrifice it to civil forfeiture as potential drug money. You'll get to try to prove your innocence to get it back...:)
Your legal rights and practical rights sometimes differ on the street.
I was once detained by a group of six police officers on private property, having committed NO crime, with the basic choice given to me that I could either submit to what amounted to an illegal search, or be taken to jail pending proof of my innocence. (Remember that NO CRIME was ever committed)
The situation was one where I was working on my car stereo inside of an apartment parking garage, fairly late at night. (In a building I had lived in for over five years). I'm not sure what prompted them to barge into the garage. The bozos decided, despite some obvious appearances, that I must be trying to steal (my own) car, and performed pretty much a felony stop on me.
I complied with their requests for my id, keys, etc., but one officer did not like my indignance at being bothered and decided to handcuff me, after which he swung me toward the concrete walls a few times to let me know he could brain me if he wanted.
Despite having my identification that showed I lived in the building adjacent to the garage (same property), the keys to my car, and the temporary registration for my car, the police told me that I had the choice of being frog-marched into my apartment in handcuffs, past my neighbors, to retreive the bloody actual title for the vehicle (how many people actually even own the vehicle they drive?), or to be detained to the district substation until it could be proven I wasn't stealing the car.
All of this when no crime occurred... Don't think they don't know what they can accomplish practically.
I underwent the humiliation to minimize my problems. Seriously considered a lawsuit, but in the area of town where I live, the possibility of real-world paybacks from street-level police cannot be neglected...
You have a point... If hardware manufacturers are willing to knuckle under to the content paranoids, and crippled hardware becomes the only hardware available, at some point power users may need to have the knowledge necessary to modify or create unencumbered hardware to effectively maintain liberty. I'm sure such knowledge will always be available in the technical community, but disseminating knowledge and hardware could become risky...
What you perceive as "failures" might be considered as unplanned interrupts in some applications, that can occur quite frequently.
For example, in petroleum reservoir simulation, it is common to play out a scenario multiple times with user-driven data changes such as adding wells or changing other boundary parameters controllable by an engineer, seeking to get the best quality production from a field over its lifetime. The timestep at which a calculation might be interrupted to implement changes is unknown. Computation of a timestep is expensive and slow. Checkpointing clearly makes sense.
I guess I'd prefer the words "interrupted run" to failure...:)
Hmm... I understand where you are coming from in terms of the Windows gaming market, but I strongly disagree with your assessment of Windows as a development environment. The only reason I use Windows at all is to support the bloody Microsoft Office document formats for communications. All of the work I do of any meaning is through X.
"Windows tools crush linux, period. Anybody who disagrees hasn't used Visual C++". Whew - I'll let that one stand on its own. I know I'm not the only professional developer who has developed on more than one platform who does NOT prefer use of a coercive, proprietary IDE.
In my view, Linux is not yet mature enough in the eyes of corporate America as a whole as a deployment platform. Businesses are still willing to pay the premium to Sun, HP, IBM, etc. for a commercially supported flavor of Unix from a trusted vendor. As a desktop platform for Unix developers, though, Linux serves at least as well as Windows can.
I strongly hope that Microsoft continues to push an increasingly exclusive and proprietary O/S - development platform combination. Microsoft seems to be fading away in the world of enterprise business applications, and trying to force their control-oriented methodology on the development community will push things further in this direction.
In much of what I'm seeing in enterprise level development, Windows machines are treated pretty much as dumb terminals. All we expect from a wintel box is that it is capable of running some reasonable form of a web browser, and possibly to have some kind of Oracle/SQL TCP/IP support. MS SQL server is viewed as a joke relative to Oracle, and Oracle server is much better suited to *nix boxes than NT. The windows operating system has utility for us only so far as it can support simple client needs. The Citrix server capability of Win2K server provides pretty good performance for distribution of UI from a central source via browser, but such functionalities are available elsewhere.
If Microsoft were to break their browser's functionality with respect to support of Java functionality needed for Oracle's UI methods, our company would require our customers to migrate to a different browser or OS for terminal use.
It's been interesting to read a variety of responses to this issue from Australians, perhaps reflecting some more general social opinions.
Mr. Elz may be helped by a tendency in Australia (as in other British-dominated areas) to have a greater acceptance of an "orderly benevolent dictatorship" within which some rights are provided based upon good reason, but may not be strictly guaranteed - as long as things work within reason.
On the other hand, simultaneously there is a mistrust of the same kind of system. Social engineering efforts from England invited abuse and the "toadie prefect" sort of situation. Government bureaucracy won't be trusted/appreciated when authority is applied capriciously by a pointy-headed control-minded individual.:)
Mr. Elz is in the middle. He doesn't work for the government, but he is governing matters of some importance. Is he a benevolent dictator providing order? Or a pointy-headed control freak acting by whim? Depends who is answering...
I don't know much about Mr. Elz, but I feel that concentrating the actual decision-making of an entire nation on DNS issues in the hands of a single individual (at least without any review) may be unwise, as capricious behavior could not really be verified or prevented. OTOH he built something carefully which ought not be destroyed, and it seems crude to sieze it from him. Perhaps Australia should have another top level domain - not really fair though...
I strongly suggest choosing your ISP independently of your broadband wire provider if it is possible in your area. My DSL runs through the same ISP I've had for about six years now, and I have no complaints about the quality of my connection and service. Downtime is very minimal and backbone connectivity is good, the same things I looked for in a dial-up provider years ago. They let me run a static IP in bridging mode, and aren't heavy-handed about the reasonable use of servers.
As far as the ATM connection between myself and my ISP, I've never seen any bottleneck that I could attribute to that portion of my connection. It surprised me, as I figured oversubscription rates on the ATM cloud would introduce serious bottlenecks from time to time. Does not seem to be so.
I spent a couple of years working for a company which writes software for E&P (exploration and production) in the petroleum industry. I saw a little bit of the cyclic economy of the industry and learned a little about the way it operates.
Basically, the global energy situation is controlled by the perceived oversupply of available oil, primarily from the Middle Eastern producers, and especially the Saudis. The price of oil is somewhat related to the costs of recovery. (There are oil reserves controlled by western companies for which recovery costs are higher, but which could be brought into play in the event we were cut off from the Middle Eastern supply. Also, even though the Middle Eastern nations have the lowest recovery costs for the best oil, even they couldn't sell at a loss for too long.)
More or less, though, the dominating factor in the price of oil is the large and cheaply recoverable supply of the Middle Eastern countries. They are only able to keep the price up to the degree to which other countries will not pursue other recovery options under their control (which comes into play as the price rises) and to which they can agree with each other to limit production rather than seeking individual national gain by selling more at a cheaper price.
Oil has a lot of economic intertia, and is practically an energy bargain at this point in time. Business and Industry doesn't care so much about efficiency when there exists a cheap oversupply of the energy source. Development of alternative energy sources will be relatively stifled by neglect as long as this is the case.
Of course, the view is short-sighted as is often the case for business, which seems to operate on a quarterly outlook. The oil reserves, while still potentially vast, are ultimately non-renewable in any reasonable time scale. Business will refuse to acknowledge environmental costs until they are enforced upon it as a normal course of action. However, it appears that increasing use of fossil fuels has some risk with respect to significantly altering the atmosphere with unknown effects on an already complex situation.
Other than the environmental effects, I don't see much wrong with consuming petroleum resources. However, it seems like we've reached the point where we're going to need to change some social priorities in order to protect the environment against our current and growing level of consumption.
Slashdot Mirror
With the release of OSP competition mod, quake3 was the first game to introduce serious gamers to serioius tournaments.
I'd say that the original TF mod to Q1 might actually take this honor in terms of FPS...
IBM and OS/2 ??
IMO even with no information provided to obtain the card, there is NO practical anonymity in the use of the card. You're carrying around with you a physical token indicating your purchase history. If a TLA decides that they don't like your purchase history, all they need to do is pop you leaving the store the next time you use the card...
It's also sort of like the words become self-describing - the meaning has been abstracted into the sytem by which they are constructed. A word has "reflection" methods that reveal information about it's meaning. :)
I wonder if you could catch the originators by setting up a bogus PayPal account, getting a box infected, and tracing activity on the account...
Agreed that what they are acting as though they have greater rights than a GPL-style license would imply.
I'm mainly wondering why they would think that they have such rights, unless they are specifically spelled out in the license agreement. I can't see that IBM would agree to such terms.
It's almost like you buy a 2000 Taurus from Ford, independently buy a heavy-duty alternator and put it in the car. It works. You independently buy a heavy-duty alternator for your 2003 Honda Civic and install it. Ford claims that you can't sell the Civic because the concept of car+heavy duty alternator is a derived work based upon a Taurus plus a heavy-duty alternator. It's a fallacy because the Civic + alternator is NOT derived from Ford. You might not be able to claim that the Ford isn't still a Ford, but the Civic still isn't a Ford...
There's something I'm not understanding about the issue... Why does SCO try to imply that they own the rights to derivative work (AIX) on code they own IP rights to, but licensed to IBM for exactly the purposes for which it was used? I could understand their argument better if the license to IBM had been some sort of GPL license, but I imagine it was not. It seems like they're trying to apply open-source licensing concepts to their own proprietary code and licensing, and I don't see the justification unless it is explicit in their licensing to IBM.
Is there some general precedent for derivative works on work licensed from others that is independent of the license terms? I know that copyright infringement can occur for unlicensed works that are judged as significantly derivative from copyrighted work. That just doens't seem the situation at all here.
Nicely said. Limited self-modification capability is intrinsic to a mind.
Will this make it any more likely that an 850 kHz signal will be at all receivable inside an office environment overwhelmed with RF noise?
I directly can't see the original post, but from replies it seems he's asserting that information/organized structures cannot arise through "random" processes.
Complete and utter BS as far as I'm concerned. With an energy/entropy source, like, say, the sun, involved, meaningful structures can and do arise given seemingly random injection of energy. It happens all of the time. Inevitably. All of the fluid/heat transfer transport laws, describing meaningful structures formed from boundary conditions and energy sources can be derived from statistical (read random) mechanics and irreversible thermodynamics. (Read Prigozhine).
Heat up fluid particles in a broad flat pan. Random energy to random particles from the bottom of the pan. Raileigh (sp) convection will result, with formation of hexagonal cells of fluid motion.
Perturb damn near any "equilibrium" system with random energy/entropy and the result is formation of a meaningful structure. Don't give me that BS...
As we start to take advantage of network features, it will become impossible to rely on personal firewalls to curb outbound traffic - you want your CD player to send some ID to the CDDB so it can retrief the correct tracklisting for the CD you're playing, so you have to tell your personal firewall to allow your CD player to connect to the net. After that point, you are trusting the CD player to behave properly and not betray you.
Why is it necessary to grant a CD playing application full outgoing connection capabilities to any host? I have many programs that are allowed to connect only to particular sites of my choosing...
I've firewalled out doubleclick's stuff a long time ago, but I was wondering how they key the stuff in their database. Is it keyed by the cookie, or something more persistent on the client machine? I.e., if somebody runs Ad-Aware and deletes a doubleclick cookie, then receives another different one the next day on the same client machine, does it break doubleclick's correlation of the prior and later data? Somehow I'd be surprised if it does...
IMO the government should have forced the breakup of cable content provider functions from cable infrastructure provider functions before deregulation of cable.
The packaging/sales of content in cable is hindered in a lame and anti-competitive manner when provided solely by the single company providing the wire. Choices are severely limited, and realistic alternatives for a different infrastructure provider may not be available in some locations.
Don't forget, you might need to cash to avoid vagrancy, but you'd better not have too much for your appearance, else you might have to sacrifice it to civil forfeiture as potential drug money. You'll get to try to prove your innocence to get it back... :)
Your legal rights and practical rights sometimes differ on the street.
I was once detained by a group of six police officers on private property, having committed NO crime, with the basic choice given to me that I could either submit to what amounted to an illegal search, or be taken to jail pending proof of my innocence. (Remember that NO CRIME was ever committed)
The situation was one where I was working on my car stereo inside of an apartment parking garage, fairly late at night. (In a building I had lived in for over five years). I'm not sure what prompted them to barge into the garage. The bozos decided, despite some obvious appearances, that I must be trying to steal (my own) car, and performed pretty much a felony stop on me.
I complied with their requests for my id, keys, etc., but one officer did not like my indignance at being bothered and decided to handcuff me, after which he swung me toward the concrete walls a few times to let me know he could brain me if he wanted.
Despite having my identification that showed I lived in the building adjacent to the garage (same property), the keys to my car, and the temporary registration for my car, the police told me that I had the choice of being frog-marched into my apartment in handcuffs, past my neighbors, to retreive the bloody actual title for the vehicle (how many people actually even own the vehicle they drive?), or to be detained to the district substation until it could be proven I wasn't stealing the car.
All of this when no crime occurred... Don't think they don't know what they can accomplish practically.
I underwent the humiliation to minimize my problems. Seriously considered a lawsuit, but in the area of town where I live, the possibility of real-world paybacks from street-level police cannot be neglected...
This is already being worked on, particularly for military applications.
This should be modded up...
You have a point... If hardware manufacturers are willing to knuckle under to the content paranoids, and crippled hardware becomes the only hardware available, at some point power users may need to have the knowledge necessary to modify or create unencumbered hardware to effectively maintain liberty. I'm sure such knowledge will always be available in the technical community, but disseminating knowledge and hardware could become risky...
Points taken...
:)
What you perceive as "failures" might be considered as unplanned interrupts in some applications, that can occur quite frequently.
For example, in petroleum reservoir simulation, it is common to play out a scenario multiple times with user-driven data changes such as adding wells or changing other boundary parameters controllable by an engineer, seeking to get the best quality production from a field over its lifetime. The timestep at which a calculation might be interrupted to implement changes is unknown. Computation of a timestep is expensive and slow. Checkpointing clearly makes sense.
I guess I'd prefer the words "interrupted run" to failure...
Hmm... I understand where you are coming from in terms of the Windows gaming market, but I strongly disagree with your assessment of Windows as a development environment. The only reason I use Windows at all is to support the bloody Microsoft Office document formats for communications. All of the work I do of any meaning is through X.
"Windows tools crush linux, period. Anybody who disagrees hasn't used Visual C++". Whew - I'll let that one stand on its own. I know I'm not the only professional developer who has developed on more than one platform who does NOT prefer use of a coercive, proprietary IDE.
In my view, Linux is not yet mature enough in the eyes of corporate America as a whole as a deployment platform. Businesses are still willing to pay the premium to Sun, HP, IBM, etc. for a commercially supported flavor of Unix from a trusted vendor. As a desktop platform for Unix developers, though, Linux serves at least as well as Windows can.
And you prefer... ?
In much of what I'm seeing in enterprise level development, Windows machines are treated pretty much as dumb terminals. All we expect from a wintel box is that it is capable of running some reasonable form of a web browser, and possibly to have some kind of Oracle/SQL TCP/IP support. MS SQL server is viewed as a joke relative to Oracle, and Oracle server is much better suited to *nix boxes than NT. The windows operating system has utility for us only so far as it can support simple client needs. The Citrix server capability of Win2K server provides pretty good performance for distribution of UI from a central source via browser, but such functionalities are available elsewhere.
If Microsoft were to break their browser's functionality with respect to support of Java functionality needed for Oracle's UI methods, our company would require our customers to migrate to a different browser or OS for terminal use.
It's been interesting to read a variety of responses to this issue from Australians, perhaps reflecting some more general social opinions.
:)
Mr. Elz may be helped by a tendency in Australia (as in other British-dominated areas) to have a greater acceptance of an "orderly benevolent dictatorship" within which some rights are provided based upon good reason, but may not be strictly guaranteed - as long as things work within reason.
On the other hand, simultaneously there is a mistrust of the same kind of system. Social engineering efforts from England invited abuse and the "toadie prefect" sort of situation. Government bureaucracy won't be trusted/appreciated when authority is applied capriciously by a pointy-headed control-minded individual.
Mr. Elz is in the middle. He doesn't work for the government, but he is governing matters of some importance. Is he a benevolent dictator providing order? Or a pointy-headed control freak acting by whim? Depends who is answering...
I don't know much about Mr. Elz, but I feel that concentrating the actual decision-making of an entire nation on DNS issues in the hands of a single individual (at least without any review) may be unwise, as capricious behavior could not really be verified or prevented. OTOH he built something carefully which ought not be destroyed, and it seems crude to sieze it from him. Perhaps Australia should have another top level domain - not really fair though...
I strongly suggest choosing your ISP independently of your broadband wire provider if it is possible in your area. My DSL runs through the same ISP I've had for about six years now, and I have no complaints about the quality of my connection and service. Downtime is very minimal and backbone connectivity is good, the same things I looked for in a dial-up provider years ago. They let me run a static IP in bridging mode, and aren't heavy-handed about the reasonable use of servers.
As far as the ATM connection between myself and my ISP, I've never seen any bottleneck that I could attribute to that portion of my connection. It surprised me, as I figured oversubscription rates on the ATM cloud would introduce serious bottlenecks from time to time. Does not seem to be so.
Mryll
I spent a couple of years working for a company which writes software for E&P (exploration and production) in the petroleum industry. I saw a little bit of the cyclic economy of the industry and learned a little about the way it operates.
Basically, the global energy situation is controlled by the perceived oversupply of available oil, primarily from the Middle Eastern producers, and especially the Saudis. The price of oil is somewhat related to the costs of recovery. (There are oil reserves controlled by western companies for which recovery costs are higher, but which could be brought into play in the event we were cut off from the Middle Eastern supply. Also, even though the Middle Eastern nations have the lowest recovery costs for the best oil, even they couldn't sell at a loss for too long.)
More or less, though, the dominating factor in the price of oil is the large and cheaply recoverable supply of the Middle Eastern countries. They are only able to keep the price up to the degree to which other countries will not pursue other recovery options under their control (which comes into play as the price rises) and to which they can agree with each other to limit production rather than seeking individual national gain by selling more at a cheaper price.
Oil has a lot of economic intertia, and is practically an energy bargain at this point in time. Business and Industry doesn't care so much about efficiency when there exists a cheap oversupply of the energy source. Development of alternative energy sources will be relatively stifled by neglect as long as this is the case.
Of course, the view is short-sighted as is often the case for business, which seems to operate on a quarterly outlook. The oil reserves, while still potentially vast, are ultimately non-renewable in any reasonable time scale. Business will refuse to acknowledge environmental costs until they are enforced upon it as a normal course of action. However, it appears that increasing use of fossil fuels has some risk with respect to significantly altering the atmosphere with unknown effects on an already complex situation.
Other than the environmental effects, I don't see much wrong with consuming petroleum resources. However, it seems like we've reached the point where we're going to need to change some social priorities in order to protect the environment against our current and growing level of consumption.
Mryll