I see you haven't thought this through. When the OS contacts the authority, and asks if a given string of 1's and 0's is safe to run, how does it specify which string of 1's and 0's it is talking about? Does it rebroadcast the whole thing? Not enough bandwidth. Does it do some type of checksum? Can be fooled. Does it check for a signature or watermark in the binary? That's probably how MS will implement it, since that's the easiest way to do it, but that's the easiest method of the three to spoof.
This won't stop any viruses. A virus will simply contain a fake security certificate (or whatever other verification system they use -- the only way to truly certify something is to compare it byte to byte with the master copy; even that's vulnerable to man in the middle attacks).
What this will stop is any content that Microsoft doesn't like. Or anyone who refuses to pay the Microsoft tax.
Re:Local Warming != Global Warming
on
Baked Alaska
·
· Score: 2
Jon Thorharson wrote Eric's Saga in 1387. You've got a gap of several centuries of oral tradition there. Oral tradition is just another code word for 80% made up, of course.
I've read the same stuff. Yes they are boring. That doesn't make recitations of individual conversations from centuries back very accurate.
9 years? Yeah right, dumbass. Between 1124-26, Greenland became a diocese, for God's sake. We have written records all the way up to 1480-1500 where they disappeared (starved, we now know). That's 400 years of written records.
Re:No - !(Re:Local Warming != Global Warming)
on
Baked Alaska
·
· Score: 2
I agree with your first 8 paragraphs. In fact, they are built off of my first sentence that you quote. You assume, fallaciously, that it means something different to me than it does to you.
Your next three are you agreeing with me, so we can skip those.
Your next two, which make reference to a pattern are malarky. To say something follows a pattern is to say that there is some model out there, that if we were only smart enough to know what it is, would predict the weather for us. I think you misunderstand chaotic systems. In a chaotic system, seemingly insignificant changes can have large indeterminatable effects. Chaotic systems can resemble patterns, but they do not follow patterns.
The patterns are simply not present. To use the hoary old example: The mechanics of atmospheric physics are such that if we imagine two parallel universes that split as you drink your tea, one where you put sugar in your tea this morning, and another where you don't, are such that the two universes could have wildly different weather. One universe could have massive flooding this year, and the other could have drought.
The 5, 10, 100, year flood patterns are statistical patterns. Take a period of 1000 years. The top ten magnitude floods are 100 year floods. The top 100 are 10 year floods. The top 200 are 20 years floods. A twenty year flood doesn't come every 20 years, it simply has a 1/20 probability of occuring in a given year. In fact, you could go a century without a twenty year flood (though it would be more unlikely than 1/20 per year figure suggests, they aren't completely random).
I responded to the comments about Greenland in a post. The others are just quoting a common piece of misinformation. Climate change in Greenland is a fact. Eric the Red's saga has a number of tall tales.
I'm not saying that we can write off all unusual weather events. But they can only be taken in context. You have to have a statistically valid sample. Any individual local climate change is useless. You can't say what it could have been caused by. In fact, there are so many dependant variables, that talk of cause is almost silly. However, if you sample a thousand different local climate changes, then you have something to go on.
Let me sum up. A 30 degree increase in one area is not evidence of global warming. We've had 30 degree fluctuations of temperature since time began. However, 5 degree increases past average across 10,000 locations, now that means something.
I don't care what software package you are talking about, but I can find at least one bug in it. And I can set it up so that the bug in questions causes me some amount of damage. Then I just find a lawyer and sue. I could make quite a living. I just buy a new piece of software each week and manufacture another lawsuit.
Re:Local Warming != Global Warming
on
Baked Alaska
·
· Score: 2
What's up with all this BZZZing? Erik the Red's saga has a mythical explanation for the naming of Greenland. There are also alternate (even more mythical) explanations at other sources.
What we do know for sure is that the climate was once such that Greenland could support a number of Viking settlers. However, the climate worsened, and they all starved a few centuries back.
So, BZZZT y'all, bitches.
Local Warming != Global Warming
on
Baked Alaska
·
· Score: 0, Informative
Good god. Global Warming, if observed, will be an average change of a few degrees across the globe. It will be impossible to pinpoint local effects until it really gets out of hand. (It will have local effects, we just won't be able to say which are and are not natural.) Not every instance of local climate change is a symptom of global climate change. Local climate fluctuates wildly. Ever wonder why Greenland is called Greenland? Hint: it used to be a greener when they named it a few centuries back.
This is just like El Nino. Because it was causing some unusual weather patterns, every little rainstorm was blamed on it.
The photo made me do a double-take. I thought, no magnet in the world could lift a train that high! I figured slashdot was spoofed until I realized that it was the crane holding the train that far above the track.
Within the past five or six years, economists in particular have started to question the USPTO's practices, finding little correlation, if any, between patent proliferation and invention.
The article makes a number of good points. Now, I am generally in favor of patents, as long as there is good correlation between patents granted and invention.
According to the article, this is no longer the case because the nature of the USPTO has changed in the past couple of decades. If that is the case, fine. Reform the patent office.
But what if that is not the only factor? What if technology has gotten too advanced for any practical patent system to work anymore? What if genuinely new ideas can only be separated from the mass of old obvious ideas by the experts in the fields? It used to be that someone with a B.S. degree had a good chance of deciding whether or not a patent should be granted. If a doctorate is needed, can the USPTO sustain that? There is no way they could hire enough good people for every field. The people they would need are the people who should be out inventing. Maybe patents on IP have become impossible. Now there is a brave new world for you. I'm no rabid slashdot IP ranter either (you can be the judge though). I support a good patent system. But this article got me wondering if it is possible anymore.
I think that's a slightly different argument. It's not that congress keeps extending the thing every 10 years, but that 90 years is too long. I don't know. In order to overturn that, the Supreme Court will have to set a maximum limit for copyright. In other words, they will have to rule that they know what the founders meant by limited better than the legislative branch, to whom the founder gave the power to decide how limited things should be.
Yeah, I think 37x10^99 years would get overturned. But 90 years? Especially when everybody in Europe does the same thing.
You've convinced me that you are a reasonable person, who can understand my points without forcing me to be pedantic first. So I won't bother too much cleaning up my definitions. The exceptions you have brought up are all real exceptions, I believe.
I just had the idea for another exception. Know anyone interested in helping me out with a non-charitable open source software project? I was thinking of creating a P2P free proxy net to break China's internet censorship scheme. Could be useful for some other things as besides...
Your mistake is in thinking that public domain is not the natural order of IP.
It would be a mistake if I had either thought or said that. I'm not sure where you got that from my post.
As far as the extensions, I disagree. But I'm a fairly strict constructionist about the Constitution. The only power not granted to the Congress by the Constitution is making a law that extends copyright out to forever.
Doing the same by acts of legislature is not actually the same. Nobody in Congress has the control of future Congresses. And the people can always throw the bums out.
And what should the Supreme Court do? Does it write its own maximum time period for copyright law even though the founders didn't? Does it throw out the current law to be replaced by another act of Congress, which it has just found illegal?
I don't see our current copyright laws getting thrown out anytime soon.
Case 2 seems to be charity. That intangible benefit you talk about is one reason why a lot of people give to mainstream charities. Reputation. And sometimes people give to charity "for reasons of their own" as well. It's not your motivations. Charity is simply doing something for other people without being payed for it.
But software being what it is, Case 1 is hardly ever usable software. It's a garage hack. (See The Mythical Man Month. I think I mentioned it in a post you replied to a while back.) To get Case 1 into something usable often requires Case 2 work. And then you have charity.
Copyright law exists to make even more stuff public-domain, simply by giving authors an incentive to write more.
Copyright law exists to give authors an incentive to write more, correct. However, it is public domain agnostic. There isn't a large practical difference between information that remains under copyright forever, and information that remains under copyright for a period of a century. Copyright law exists to create a situation where the information is available, whether or not you must pay for it.
A world where everyone has to pay $15 to buy any book because Public Domain ceased to exist is a damn sight better than a world where those books don't exist.
However, balance is desired. All monopolies are harmful, even the the beneficial ones that we need. I support a copyright restriction to 20 years rather than the current century or so a copyright can get on average.
Of course, current US copyright laws don't say that, but then current US copyright laws are illegal.
U.S. copyright laws are illegal? Enlighten me. The DMCA is illegal. But the current copyright laws appear to obey the letter of the law. (The argument currently being made that the laws are not specifying a limited time because Congress will just extend it in the future is very shaky legally.)
Secondly, writing something without copyright attached is not "charity" any more than owning a home and not shooting any who approach it is "charity" -- copyright is a gift by the law which an author only need take if they intend to use their monopoly on distribution by attacking others who distribute it.
Owning a home and letting anyone come there to sleep is charity however.
Your gift argument is silly. Even in a world with no governments and no copyright law it would still be charity. You are working to create something that you give away to everyone. That is charity. Many books from the time period before copyright are charity. The authors made no profit, and we have benefitted immensely from their charity.
Lastly, free software does not exist to provide jobs, it does not exist to provide money, it exists to provide software.
I've been trying to convince the guy who owns the Chevrolet dealership across town that all his vehicles should be public domain, no go yet.
But seriously, copyright is a monopoly granted by the government in order to get people to spend the effort needed to create. Giving away copyrighted stuff to the public domain is charity. Simply charity. The entire free software system is built on the charity of a relatively few hardworking individuals. And while it's not problematic to make a living by leeching off of charity, it's damn hard to do it by provinding the stuff.
It takes a great deal of effort to program. If you haven't read it yet, take a look at the Mythical Man Month. A major point of that book is that the amount of time it takes to create a software project isn't directly related to the number of programmer hours invested. Unfortunately, programmer hours invested is the major benefit of open source. Organization and teamwork are second-rate when comparing open source projects to commercial projects.
To make a project work, you need one programmer investing 20 hours a week instead of (or in addition to) 100 programmers investing one hour a week. (All successful open source projects display this characteristic.)
Anybody can devote 1 hour a week to an open source project.
But the only way that we will get enough 20 hour a week programmers will be to find some way to recompense them.
It's a wide area network. Possesion is a rather meaningless concept to apply to it. Whoever owns the root servers has a great deal of possible control, which is a term that ofen equates to possesion. That control can only be excercised when you are the only game in town. But anyone can set up their own network. In fact, just about everybody does.
Despite that, the real reason America has so much say and will continue to have so much say, is that everyone wants to surf American web-sites. There is no one out there to set up a viable competing internet.
If South Africa had invented the internet, instead of our recent ex-Vice-President, America's response would have been to set up our own competing version called MicroNetSoft and muscle South Africa out of their niche. Americans wouldn't have been able to surf South African websites, but not many people would have cared. America would have suceeded too.
South Africa does not have the same option.
(I know what Gore's actual comment was, please don't quote it back to me.)
Slashdot Mirror
I see you haven't thought this through. When the OS contacts the authority, and asks if a given string of 1's and 0's is safe to run, how does it specify which string of 1's and 0's it is talking about? Does it rebroadcast the whole thing? Not enough bandwidth. Does it do some type of checksum? Can be fooled. Does it check for a signature or watermark in the binary? That's probably how MS will implement it, since that's the easiest way to do it, but that's the easiest method of the three to spoof.
This won't stop any viruses. A virus will simply contain a fake security certificate (or whatever other verification system they use -- the only way to truly certify something is to compare it byte to byte with the master copy; even that's vulnerable to man in the middle attacks).
What this will stop is any content that Microsoft doesn't like. Or anyone who refuses to pay the Microsoft tax.
Jon Thorharson wrote Eric's Saga in 1387. You've got a gap of several centuries of oral tradition there. Oral tradition is just another code word for 80% made up, of course.
I've read the same stuff. Yes they are boring. That doesn't make recitations of individual conversations from centuries back very accurate.
9 years? Yeah right, dumbass. Between 1124-26, Greenland became a diocese, for God's sake. We have written records all the way up to 1480-1500 where they disappeared (starved, we now know). That's 400 years of written records.
I agree with your first 8 paragraphs. In fact, they are built off of my first sentence that you quote. You assume, fallaciously, that it means something different to me than it does to you.
Your next three are you agreeing with me, so we can skip those.
Your next two, which make reference to a pattern are malarky. To say something follows a pattern is to say that there is some model out there, that if we were only smart enough to know what it is, would predict the weather for us. I think you misunderstand chaotic systems. In a chaotic system, seemingly insignificant changes can have large indeterminatable effects. Chaotic systems can resemble patterns, but they do not follow patterns.
The patterns are simply not present. To use the hoary old example: The mechanics of atmospheric physics are such that if we imagine two parallel universes that split as you drink your tea, one where you put sugar in your tea this morning, and another where you don't, are such that the two universes could have wildly different weather. One universe could have massive flooding this year, and the other could have drought.
The 5, 10, 100, year flood patterns are statistical patterns. Take a period of 1000 years. The top ten magnitude floods are 100 year floods. The top 100 are 10 year floods. The top 200 are 20 years floods. A twenty year flood doesn't come every 20 years, it simply has a 1/20 probability of occuring in a given year. In fact, you could go a century without a twenty year flood (though it would be more unlikely than 1/20 per year figure suggests, they aren't completely random).
I responded to the comments about Greenland in a post. The others are just quoting a common piece of misinformation. Climate change in Greenland is a fact. Eric the Red's saga has a number of tall tales.
I'm not saying that we can write off all unusual weather events. But they can only be taken in context. You have to have a statistically valid sample. Any individual local climate change is useless. You can't say what it could have been caused by. In fact, there are so many dependant variables, that talk of cause is almost silly. However, if you sample a thousand different local climate changes, then you have something to go on.
Let me sum up. A 30 degree increase in one area is not evidence of global warming. We've had 30 degree fluctuations of temperature since time began. However, 5 degree increases past average across 10,000 locations, now that means something.
I don't care what software package you are talking about, but I can find at least one bug in it. And I can set it up so that the bug in questions causes me some amount of damage. Then I just find a lawyer and sue. I could make quite a living. I just buy a new piece of software each week and manufacture another lawsuit.
What's up with all this BZZZing? Erik the Red's saga has a mythical explanation for the naming of Greenland. There are also alternate (even more mythical) explanations at other sources.
What we do know for sure is that the climate was once such that Greenland could support a number of Viking settlers. However, the climate worsened, and they all starved a few centuries back.
So, BZZZT y'all, bitches.
Good god. Global Warming, if observed, will be an average change of a few degrees across the globe. It will be impossible to pinpoint local effects until it really gets out of hand. (It will have local effects, we just won't be able to say which are and are not natural.) Not every instance of local climate change is a symptom of global climate change. Local climate fluctuates wildly. Ever wonder why Greenland is called Greenland? Hint: it used to be a greener when they named it a few centuries back.
This is just like El Nino. Because it was causing some unusual weather patterns, every little rainstorm was blamed on it.
The photo made me do a double-take. I thought, no magnet in the world could lift a train that high! I figured slashdot was spoofed until I realized that it was the crane holding the train that far above the track.
According to the article, this is no longer the case because the nature of the USPTO has changed in the past couple of decades. If that is the case, fine. Reform the patent office.
But what if that is not the only factor? What if technology has gotten too advanced for any practical patent system to work anymore? What if genuinely new ideas can only be separated from the mass of old obvious ideas by the experts in the fields? It used to be that someone with a B.S. degree had a good chance of deciding whether or not a patent should be granted. If a doctorate is needed, can the USPTO sustain that? There is no way they could hire enough good people for every field. The people they would need are the people who should be out inventing. Maybe patents on IP have become impossible. Now there is a brave new world for you. I'm no rabid slashdot IP ranter either (you can be the judge though). I support a good patent system. But this article got me wondering if it is possible anymore.
I think that's a slightly different argument. It's not that congress keeps extending the thing every 10 years, but that 90 years is too long. I don't know. In order to overturn that, the Supreme Court will have to set a maximum limit for copyright. In other words, they will have to rule that they know what the founders meant by limited better than the legislative branch, to whom the founder gave the power to decide how limited things should be.
Yeah, I think 37x10^99 years would get overturned. But 90 years? Especially when everybody in Europe does the same thing.
But what if I put it in a worm? Or Kazaa?
You've convinced me that you are a reasonable person, who can understand my points without forcing me to be pedantic first. So I won't bother too much cleaning up my definitions. The exceptions you have brought up are all real exceptions, I believe.
I just had the idea for another exception. Know anyone interested in helping me out with a non-charitable open source software project? I was thinking of creating a P2P free proxy net to break China's internet censorship scheme. Could be useful for some other things as besides...
As far as the extensions, I disagree. But I'm a fairly strict constructionist about the Constitution. The only power not granted to the Congress by the Constitution is making a law that extends copyright out to forever.
Doing the same by acts of legislature is not actually the same. Nobody in Congress has the control of future Congresses. And the people can always throw the bums out.
And what should the Supreme Court do? Does it write its own maximum time period for copyright law even though the founders didn't? Does it throw out the current law to be replaced by another act of Congress, which it has just found illegal?
I don't see our current copyright laws getting thrown out anytime soon.
I'll grant you that Case 1 isn't charity.
Case 2 seems to be charity. That intangible benefit you talk about is one reason why a lot of people give to mainstream charities. Reputation. And sometimes people give to charity "for reasons of their own" as well. It's not your motivations. Charity is simply doing something for other people without being payed for it.
But software being what it is, Case 1 is hardly ever usable software. It's a garage hack. (See The Mythical Man Month. I think I mentioned it in a post you replied to a while back.) To get Case 1 into something usable often requires Case 2 work. And then you have charity.
A world where everyone has to pay $15 to buy any book because Public Domain ceased to exist is a damn sight better than a world where those books don't exist.
However, balance is desired. All monopolies are harmful, even the the beneficial ones that we need. I support a copyright restriction to 20 years rather than the current century or so a copyright can get on average. U.S. copyright laws are illegal? Enlighten me. The DMCA is illegal. But the current copyright laws appear to obey the letter of the law. (The argument currently being made that the laws are not specifying a limited time because Congress will just extend it in the future is very shaky legally.) Owning a home and letting anyone come there to sleep is charity however.
Your gift argument is silly. Even in a world with no governments and no copyright law it would still be charity. You are working to create something that you give away to everyone. That is charity. Many books from the time period before copyright are charity. The authors made no profit, and we have benefitted immensely from their charity. Hence the charity angle.
I've been trying to convince the guy who owns the Chevrolet dealership across town that all his vehicles should be public domain, no go yet.
But seriously, copyright is a monopoly granted by the government in order to get people to spend the effort needed to create. Giving away copyrighted stuff to the public domain is charity. Simply charity. The entire free software system is built on the charity of a relatively few hardworking individuals. And while it's not problematic to make a living by leeching off of charity, it's damn hard to do it by provinding the stuff.
Cancel the flames. Tom Ridge says it is probably a misprint.
I don't know what you all are talking about. I thought it was very convincing.
And I'm a senator. My constituency trusts me to make decisions for them. Why else would Disney^H^H^H^H^H^Hthe people of South Carolina elect me?
Unless you have a really weird voice activated unicycle for a chair...
You mean like this fellow?
Though, I think his chair is saliva activated...But no argument about how much of his brain he's using.
This isn't real. The entertainment industry would never go for something like this in a million years. This must be some kind of joke.
Their version would put your eyes out with red-hot pokers.
I was surfing nytimes.com right before I clicked onto slashdot. I noticed this article about David Boies on the front page.
David Boies, you know, the famous lawyer who represented the government against Microsoft, and Al Gore versus Florida.
So when I read the blurb on slashdot, I figured that someone important had something logical.
My mistake.
You mean like this slashdot story from last week?
It takes a great deal of effort to program. If you haven't read it yet, take a look at the Mythical Man Month. A major point of that book is that the amount of time it takes to create a software project isn't directly related to the number of programmer hours invested. Unfortunately, programmer hours invested is the major benefit of open source. Organization and teamwork are second-rate when comparing open source projects to commercial projects.
To make a project work, you need one programmer investing 20 hours a week instead of (or in addition to) 100 programmers investing one hour a week. (All successful open source projects display this characteristic.)
Anybody can devote 1 hour a week to an open source project.
But the only way that we will get enough 20 hour a week programmers will be to find some way to recompense them.
Or pay them, in other words.
It's a wide area network. Possesion is a rather meaningless concept to apply to it. Whoever owns the root servers has a great deal of possible control, which is a term that ofen equates to possesion. That control can only be excercised when you are the only game in town. But anyone can set up their own network. In fact, just about everybody does.
Despite that, the real reason America has so much say and will continue to have so much say, is that everyone wants to surf American web-sites. There is no one out there to set up a viable competing internet.
If South Africa had invented the internet, instead of our recent ex-Vice-President, America's response would have been to set up our own competing version called MicroNetSoft and muscle South Africa out of their niche. Americans wouldn't have been able to surf South African websites, but not many people would have cared. America would have suceeded too.
South Africa does not have the same option.
(I know what Gore's actual comment was, please don't quote it back to me.)
Whoa. It does sound like this sort of thing could help you. How often do you need to do that sort of stuff?