All property is a legal construction. The natural state of all property is that is belongs to the guy with the biggest stick and the strongest arms.
Well, that rather proves the point. If I have a fish, I have it. If I give it to you, I don't have it anymore. If you steal it, I don't have it anymore. Hence, there is a very natural idea to physical property.
Contrast this with intellectual property. If I give it to you, I still have it. You can give it to others and I still have it. The only way I can maintain my exclusivity is to not share it with you.
Intellectual property has never been just like other property rights in the history of the U.S. Our constitution says that the government may not take your property, but grants you a monopoly on your intellectual "property" for a limited time.
Interestingly enough, if you replace the words "spectrum" in this argument with "intellectual property", you get another valid argument. Ideas and expressions are not exclusive: the only reason that they are considered property is because the law grants them some of the same attributes as real property. These attributes however are entirely a function of legal construction, not of objective reality. The conclusion that spectrum could be better managed if access to it were granted more freely applies in a very similar and natural way to copyrighted intellectual works. There is little reason to believe that granting infinite terms to copyrighted works is enhances the useful arts and sciences, and considerable reason to believe it inhibits them.
But when the p2p networks cannot be used to trade copyrighted material for free, then that vacuum, that demand for free movies, documentaries, sitcoms will be filled by "amateurs". And ya know what? With a little practice, and using cheap digital cameras and editing software, and free music, amateur actors, we leftists can crank out entertainment with leftist, bottom-up memes, anti-corporate sentiment, and toss it out on the p2p networks at very little cost.
I'm left with only one question: what is stopping you from doing this now? Why do you have to wait for corporations to take away all their media before you work on constructing your own?
Once Apple cannot guarantee that the music is protected from "theft" then the RIAA will pull the plug on our "cheap" downloading.
This is absurd. Apple can't make any such guarantee, since it is obviously false. Pretending otherwise is just silly. If copy protection worked, we would not need laws to make breaking it illegal.
But beyond that, this hack has nothing to do with copy protection. Using this hack you can only encode streams for playback on the Airport Express, not decrypt them. It doesn't give you any power to remove copy protection from music which has been encrypted. It would seem that any DMCA challenge to its legality would be expensive to fight, but ultimately doomed.
There simply isn't enough information presented in the story as to whether the parties on either side have broken any laws or behaved unethically. It is possible that legally you may be prevented from taking a job with a competitor. Whether that is the case depends in no small part upon what the laws are in your state and what contract you signed when you began employment. It's entirely possible that legally and ethically he cannot take a job with his competitor (at least for a limited time). It is also entirely possible that he can and should be allowed to. Given the scanty information provided, it's simply not possible to decide.
Re:Sensible design for its purpose
on
Ready, Aim, HACK!
·
· Score: 2, Informative
The "rifle" design with a scope actually makes sense. If there's a moving target at a decent enough distance, all you have to do it keep them in the sights while you communicate with the device. Otherwise, a yagi on a stick without sights is probably a little harder to aim precisely, especially if your target is far away.
Well, it doesn't make that much sense. A 14dbi Yagi has a beamwidth of about 30 degrees or so. A 4x sniper scope probably has a field of 10 degrees or so, an 8x scope, more like 7 degrees. You simply don't need to aim it that accurately. A simple peep sight would work just fine, and probably draw less attention.
A book which was recommended to me during a skirmish over similar issues was Who owns what is in your head?. It brings up many issues that a talented engineer should understand before signing an employment contract.
We know from our experience in bringing suits against customers like Daimler-Chrysler that we are unlikely to reach settlements which generate cash for SCO. We are unwilling however to fold our cards on other corporate lawsuits, having tossed so much money into the pot. After all, the judge could show up drunk. _pause_. Hey, go order a case of schnapps and send it to the judge with our compliments.
Here's a kooky idea: why not use such a setup to promote knowledge of copyrights and the public domain? Show films that are in the public domain, and include a short bit to explain why such showings are legal, while showing other films is not. Besides showing good classic movies, or providing an opportunity for impromptu MST3K participation, you could actually educate people and make them more aware of how intellectual property issues affect them.
Just an idea.
The promise of e-books is simple: they have the promise of using Moore's law to lower costs. Try going to Project Gutenberg. You can download a DVD image that contains 9400 books. It fits in 4GB, which is the capacity of one of those mini iPods. If you could go through one book a day, it would take you twenty five years to go through the contents. And Project Gutenberg is able to process more books every year. It's clear you could never catch up.
What's nifty about this is that any place which has even a modest computer and/or internet link can now be a library. Many classics are available for discussion, distribution, adaptation and just general enjoyment.
The one problem: sometimes you really want a book. Something with a small convenient form factor. That you can slip into your pocket. Read on the bus. Read in your bed. In sunlight. In dim light. Something you can scribble in. Fold the corners over. And something cheap enough that if you lost it, you might feel bad, but it wouldn't be a catastrophe.
Luckily Moore's law will eventually provide a solution to this too. If we set the ultimate price of an e-book to be the cost of a hardcover book, then low-end PDAs are already within a factor of two. Eventually, e-books will be cost effective.
I've taken a circuitous route, but here's the rub: while there is plenty to read, not everything you want to read will be available. The reason? DRM. Sanford writes:
We'll need a great eBook reader with trendy clout and not just livable, but convenient, DRM to really break open the market.
The problem is that there is no such thing as convenient DRM. DRM is always inconvenient. It exists only to prevent the consumer from doing something he might want to do, and gives absolutely no benefit to the consumer. You can look at one person's experience, and imagine it multiplied a million times over.
I'm not paying for that headache, thank you very much.
Now all I have to do is figure out how to store all these dead trees.
What I find really funny is just what a threat a paranoid public is to liberty and freedom of all Americans.
I'm frankly somewhat comforted by the fact that we have pictures coming out of Iraq that have not been filtered through the military censors and government spin doctors. I think it's good that we find out about Abu Ghraib. There is a fine line between keeping information secret to promote security and keeping information secret to deny culpability.
You can't put the genie back in the bottle: people want digital cameras, internets and camera phones. People will take pictures of things and share them with others. For the most part, I think more is gained than more is lost. The worst thing that can happen is for people to lose sight of what their government and military are doing. Are some images disturbing? Yes. Do they force us to uncomfortable conclusions about our government? Probably. But what is the alternative: to go on as if such things simply didn't happen? I hope we are braver than that.
Could anyone on the know tell the rest of us why is it that digital cameras choose JPG as the compressed format instead of PNG ? Looks to me like PNG would typically provide better image resolution for a similar filesize. Maybe I am wrong.
What would happen if John Carmack decided to program an operating system from scratch? Is his specialty 3D engines, or does he have the talent required to build an OS?
The guy writes control systems for rockets part time while working on Doom 3. I'd say he's fairly talented.
College isn't high school. Nobody is going to care very much if you fail, with the possible exception of you.
There is no difference between having talents which you cannot use effectively and not having talents at all.
There will always be people with more talent than you. There will also always be people with less talent who succeed where you do not because they simply try harder.
Nobody is ever really good at a job that they hate.
and I *hate* alton. yes, there is a lot of chemistry and science in cooking, and it is very interesting, and a lot of it can be boiled down to quantifiable, deterministic values - but ultimately, COOKING IS AN ART. if it wasn't, any regular joe could pick up a copy of the Joy of Cooking and be running a four-star restaurant in a week.
My, aren't we impressed with ourselves?
Your statement presumes that "regular joes" can't do art. They can and in fact do. You might argue that 99% of all the food people prepare in their homes is crap. But guess what: 95% of what I've eaten is restaurants is the same hum drum level.
The reason that you can't pick up Joy of Cooking and run a four star restaurant (or even get palateable meals) is that the Joy of Cooking doesn't teach you what you need to know to make good meals. If you want to make a good flat iron steak, or some decent onion soup, or a decent cheesecake, there are a few things you need to get right, and if you get those few technical things right, you get MUCH better results. Is there some art beyond that? Of course, but most people just want their meals to taste better, they don't aspire to creating lasting works of art.
Cooking is mostly a craft, and like most crafts, it is helped by learning proper technique and by practice. Alton Brown encourages both in a relatively accessable way. I thank him for the many tasty meals he's inspired in my kitchen.
I'm a[nother] Linux user, and I wanted a good reason to use FreeBSD. I've installed it twice, but after realizing that I didn't have a good reason to keep using it, as its maintenance was too time-consuming, I ended up removing it.
First of all, if you are happy running Debian or whatever, why bother seeking other alternatives? If your time is as precious as you say, then why are you considering other alternatives? Honestly, if you can't think of a reason to use FreeBSD, then you probably don't need to run FreeBSD.
You are right, FreeBSD relies on the ports system and building from source to a greater degree than your typical Linux system. I usually cvsup the kernel about once a month and rebuild the world and kernel. It virtually always works exactly as advertised, and maybe takes ten minutes of my attention. I'm have modest desktop requirements (I don't use Gnome or KDE, in large part because they have large numbers of requirements and are frequently updated with little effect on my overall productivity). I mostly keep up to date on Python, Apache and a few assorted Python modules. The rest, I simply don't worry about keeping up to date on.
Finallly, f you are really in the mood for binary packages, you should learn about "pkg_add -r".
Can someone please explain why this is "stuff that matters"? There may be a more irrelevant and useless project in the world, or one more doomed financially, but I can't think of it.
A couple of months ago, Linux Journal covered the Bass Station, a converted monster ghetto blaster that is used to stream audio and video to anyone within range of its WiFi antenna. The owners use it as a kind of a mobile Internet block party.
I found it inspiring. They used the Mini-ITX motherboards, and with the upcoming Nano-ITX
boards, even smaller and more portable mobile access points can be constructed.
Ham Radio will interfere with it severely, and there won't be a damn thing the provider can do because it's under FCC part 15, which must accept any harmful interference, especially from PROPERLY LICENSED services.
Since hams are only licensed for modes which consume narrow bandwidths under 30mhz, it's highly unlikely that any amount of activity by hams could result in disruption of
broadband service delivered over phone lines, at least any legal activity.
I'd also work on your rhetoric: there are a heck of a lot more people out there who want broadband than want to become hams. When push comes to shove, the FCC is likely to take their benefit (and frankly, the dollars that the resulting market signfies) over those of the tiny minority that are hams.
Frankly, I hope this dies as well, because there are undoubtably far more creative uses for HF
spectrum than to allow it to be merely sapped as
an incidental casualty, but I think the case for
ham radio as a "creative use" falls a bit short.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, that rather proves the point. If I have a fish, I have it. If I give it to you, I don't have it anymore. If you steal it, I don't have it anymore. Hence, there is a very natural idea to physical property.
Contrast this with intellectual property. If I give it to you, I still have it. You can give it to others and I still have it. The only way I can maintain my exclusivity is to not share it with you.
Intellectual property has never been just like other property rights in the history of the U.S. Our constitution says that the government may not take your property, but grants you a monopoly on your intellectual "property" for a limited time.
Interestingly enough, if you replace the words "spectrum" in this argument with "intellectual property", you get another valid argument. Ideas and expressions are not exclusive: the only reason that they are considered property is because the law grants them some of the same attributes as real property. These attributes however are entirely a function of legal construction, not of objective reality. The conclusion that spectrum could be better managed if access to it were granted more freely applies in a very similar and natural way to copyrighted intellectual works. There is little reason to believe that granting infinite terms to copyrighted works is enhances the useful arts and sciences, and considerable reason to believe it inhibits them.
I'm left with only one question: what is stopping you from doing this now? Why do you have to wait for corporations to take away all their media before you work on constructing your own?
Consider it a challenge.
This is absurd. Apple can't make any such guarantee, since it is obviously false. Pretending otherwise is just silly. If copy protection worked, we would not need laws to make breaking it illegal.
But beyond that, this hack has nothing to do with copy protection. Using this hack you can only encode streams for playback on the Airport Express, not decrypt them. It doesn't give you any power to remove copy protection from music which has been encrypted. It would seem that any DMCA challenge to its legality would be expensive to fight, but ultimately doomed.
There simply isn't enough information presented in the story as to whether the parties on either side have broken any laws or behaved unethically. It is possible that legally you may be prevented from taking a job with a competitor. Whether that is the case depends in no small part upon what the laws are in your state and what contract you signed when you began employment. It's entirely possible that legally and ethically he cannot take a job with his competitor (at least for a limited time). It is also entirely possible that he can and should be allowed to. Given the scanty information provided, it's simply not possible to decide.
The "rifle" design with a scope actually makes sense. If there's a moving target at a decent enough distance, all you have to do it keep them in the sights while you communicate with the device. Otherwise, a yagi on a stick without sights is probably a little harder to aim precisely, especially if your target is far away. Well, it doesn't make that much sense. A 14dbi Yagi has a beamwidth of about 30 degrees or so. A 4x sniper scope probably has a field of 10 degrees or so, an 8x scope, more like 7 degrees. You simply don't need to aim it that accurately. A simple peep sight would work just fine, and probably draw less attention.
A book which was recommended to me during a skirmish over similar issues was Who owns what is in your head?. It brings up many issues that a talented engineer should understand before signing an employment contract.
TRANSLATOR ENGAGED:
Here's a kooky idea: why not use such a setup to promote knowledge of copyrights and the public domain? Show films that are in the public domain, and include a short bit to explain why such showings are legal, while showing other films is not. Besides showing good classic movies, or providing an opportunity for impromptu MST3K participation, you could actually educate people and make them more aware of how intellectual property issues affect them. Just an idea.
The promise of e-books is simple: they have the promise of using Moore's law to lower costs. Try going to Project Gutenberg. You can download a DVD image that contains 9400 books. It fits in 4GB, which is the capacity of one of those mini iPods. If you could go through one book a day, it would take you twenty five years to go through the contents. And Project Gutenberg is able to process more books every year. It's clear you could never catch up.
What's nifty about this is that any place which has even a modest computer and/or internet link can now be a library. Many classics are available for discussion, distribution, adaptation and just general enjoyment.
The one problem: sometimes you really want a book. Something with a small convenient form factor. That you can slip into your pocket. Read on the bus. Read in your bed. In sunlight. In dim light. Something you can scribble in. Fold the corners over. And something cheap enough that if you lost it, you might feel bad, but it wouldn't be a catastrophe.
Luckily Moore's law will eventually provide a solution to this too. If we set the ultimate price of an e-book to be the cost of a hardcover book, then low-end PDAs are already within a factor of two. Eventually, e-books will be cost effective.
I've taken a circuitous route, but here's the rub: while there is plenty to read, not everything you want to read will be available. The reason? DRM. Sanford writes:
The problem is that there is no such thing as convenient DRM. DRM is always inconvenient. It exists only to prevent the consumer from doing something he might want to do, and gives absolutely no benefit to the consumer. You can look at one person's experience, and imagine it multiplied a million times over.
I'm not paying for that headache, thank you very much.
Now all I have to do is figure out how to store all these dead trees.
What I find really funny is just what a threat a paranoid public is to liberty and freedom of all Americans.
I'm frankly somewhat comforted by the fact that we have pictures coming out of Iraq that have not been filtered through the military censors and government spin doctors. I think it's good that we find out about Abu Ghraib. There is a fine line between keeping information secret to promote security and keeping information secret to deny culpability.
You can't put the genie back in the bottle: people want digital cameras, internets and camera phones. People will take pictures of things and share them with others. For the most part, I think more is gained than more is lost. The worst thing that can happen is for people to lose sight of what their government and military are doing. Are some images disturbing? Yes. Do they force us to uncomfortable conclusions about our government? Probably. But what is the alternative: to go on as if such things simply didn't happen? I hope we are braver than that.
If you take a $10 item, and modify it to replace a $1000 item, that's probably a good hack.
If you take a $1000 item, and modify it to replace a $10 item, that's not a good hack. That's just stupidity.
It takes no cleverness to waste money.
There is much pleasure in useless information.Yep. You're wrong.
The problem of course is that besides being a poorly designed way to stream video, it also isn't open source. It's not even properly specified.
Except a human has this neat thing called intuition.
Your intuition can tell you things that will take you hours and hours to prove on paper. Or even in your head, following logic.
Indeed. Once in a great, great while, your intuition may even tell you something which turns out to actually be true.
The guy writes control systems for rockets part time while working on Doom 3. I'd say he's fairly talented.
It must use some real alchemy to be able to change the plastic body of the Digital Rebel into the magnesium alloy of the 10D!
Not everything is just a simple matter of programming.
My, aren't we impressed with ourselves?
Your statement presumes that "regular joes" can't do art. They can and in fact do. You might argue that 99% of all the food people prepare in their homes is crap. But guess what: 95% of what I've eaten is restaurants is the same hum drum level.
The reason that you can't pick up Joy of Cooking and run a four star restaurant (or even get palateable meals) is that the Joy of Cooking doesn't teach you what you need to know to make good meals. If you want to make a good flat iron steak, or some decent onion soup, or a decent cheesecake, there are a few things you need to get right, and if you get those few technical things right, you get MUCH better results. Is there some art beyond that? Of course, but most people just want their meals to taste better, they don't aspire to creating lasting works of art.
Cooking is mostly a craft, and like most crafts, it is helped by learning proper technique and by practice. Alton Brown encourages both in a relatively accessable way. I thank him for the many tasty meals he's inspired in my kitchen.
First of all, if you are happy running Debian or whatever, why bother seeking other alternatives? If your time is as precious as you say, then why are you considering other alternatives? Honestly, if you can't think of a reason to use FreeBSD, then you probably don't need to run FreeBSD.
You are right, FreeBSD relies on the ports system and building from source to a greater degree than your typical Linux system. I usually cvsup the kernel about once a month and rebuild the world and kernel. It virtually always works exactly as advertised, and maybe takes ten minutes of my attention. I'm have modest desktop requirements (I don't use Gnome or KDE, in large part because they have large numbers of requirements and are frequently updated with little effect on my overall productivity). I mostly keep up to date on Python, Apache and a few assorted Python modules. The rest, I simply don't worry about keeping up to date on.
Finallly, f you are really in the mood for binary packages, you should learn about "pkg_add -r".
Most books make crappy movies, why would video games be any better?
Addendum: Hollywood may be in a serious rut with relatively few new ideas, but it is absolutely revolutionary compared to the game industry.
Can someone please explain why this is "stuff that matters"? There may be a more irrelevant and useless project in the world, or one more doomed financially, but I can't think of it.
A couple of months ago, Linux Journal covered the Bass Station, a converted monster ghetto blaster that is used to stream audio and video to anyone within range of its WiFi antenna. The owners use it as a kind of a mobile Internet block party.
I found it inspiring. They used the Mini-ITX motherboards, and with the upcoming Nano-ITX boards, even smaller and more portable mobile access points can be constructed.
Glenn was born in 1921, which makes him 83 now.
Since hams are only licensed for modes which consume narrow bandwidths under 30mhz, it's highly unlikely that any amount of activity by hams could result in disruption of broadband service delivered over phone lines, at least any legal activity.
I'd also work on your rhetoric: there are a heck of a lot more people out there who want broadband than want to become hams. When push comes to shove, the FCC is likely to take their benefit (and frankly, the dollars that the resulting market signfies) over those of the tiny minority that are hams.
Frankly, I hope this dies as well, because there are undoubtably far more creative uses for HF spectrum than to allow it to be merely sapped as an incidental casualty, but I think the case for ham radio as a "creative use" falls a bit short.