"Some people equate digital copying with analog copying, but the primary difference is the volume of piracy, and that's what they're scared of."
Bullshit. Sure, volume is why they went after Napster and will continue to go after other big pirate boards. They don't need new laws to do this. They definetely don't need to mandate that every digital device includes crippleware.
The primary thing they are scared of is not piracy, but change. In 1981, Jack Valenti claimed that VHS tapes would destroy the movie and television buisness. Now, when after-theatre revenue makes up the majority of a films sales, he says that digital copies are going to destroy the VHS/DVD market--the very market whose creation he vehemently opposed. In twenty years, watch him or his heir rant about how technology X is going to destroy the thriving Internet movie delivery buisness.
So you see, having several languages implemented for one back end, so that I can write my lexing routines in PERL, write my AST construction routines in Java, and my compiler in Scheme, ammounts basically to choosing the right tool for the job.
How isn't this appealing?
It's quite appealing, and the article doesn't make any sense when it talks about runtimes. Languages have been able to compile/interpret to common runtimes for decades. How do you think PERL can call out to C functions? C has a runtime--no stack, no heap, no game. What's "new" about the CLR is that it is a cross-platform and cross-language runtime, the first to be widely promoted as such. You can critize its design as a runtime, but it's hard to argue that it is a useful idea.
Actually, the judge seems to be basing her decision on sound legal principles. The sentence you qoute suggests otherwise, but it was written by the reporter at Wired. The quote about both sides being "dirty" probably refers to the doctrine of "Unclean Hands" which basically states that you can't benefit in a civil suit from illegal actions. In other words, if the record industry has illegally claimed copyright of songs that actually belong to artists, then they can't claim damages.
Re:But stackguard is an option.
on
.NETly News
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
"So it's perhaps wise to switch it ON in debug builds plus release builds that are tested, and switch it OFF in release builds that are deployed to customers."
Gotta disagree with you on this one. You can't do testing on a different program than you release, and something like StackGuard produces a different program. Stuff like that's great for debugging/development, but if your still using it in final testing you should ship with it and eat the preformance hit.
I would say this article is worth the read, but I have to disagree with its conclusion.
I fully agree that any material placed on publically accessible web servers should be referencable under the "fair use" doctrine. However, I think the court's descision is correct in light of this. Mr. Kozubik's main complaint seems to be that the behavior of browsers as regards linking are entirely arbitrary. He is correct. However, fair use is by its very nature a doctrine which will be interpreted on a case by case basis, respecting precedent.
Rather than fearing, as he does, that the court will constantly have to "revise" the decision as technology changes, I think courts will be able to read the intent and wisely apply it to many other decisions. After all, a court decision is not a law, defined by the precise wordings, but rather a carefully considered opinion on the burden of evidence. Future courts should be able to apply the same fundamental distinction--linking that is designed to automatically reproduce the work vs linking that is designed only to show the location of the work--irregardless of the precise technology involved.
I'm not sure that I'd be so eager to jump on the grad school bandwagon if I were still in school.
Lots of people seem to be doing it. That means that in a few years, the market is going to be flooded with graduate degrees. If you don't really have the motivation to learn more, you'll just have wasted your tims. Furthermore, if you get into a PhD program you might have to choose between abandoning your work or catching a rising tide early.
On the other hand, Clark makes a good point about EE jobs in general. I know a lot of people who consider a masters the minimum degree for a "real" EE job.
And to think people complained that garbage collection was inefficient! Actually, though, this is a huge step forward for Perl. Now, with just a few lines of code, you should be able to consume massive numbers of CPU cycles while still actually accomplishing something.
The module actually looks pretty cool. It says that some simplifying assumptions were made. Does anyone know if the simulation is reasonably accurate? That is, could you actually set up a quantum computer to behave exactly as the simulated one?
That's a really interesting summary of what looks like a talk I would have liked to have attended. Of course, a lot of the points were matters of opinion, and I disagree on some of them.
Fallacy 1 (Computing is Easy) I think is spot on. I shudder when I see some of the "For Dummies" titles out there now.
Fallacy 6 (Computers are Getting Faster), I would have to say I disagreed with him on. Sure, my desktop boots slower than my old 386 from 10 years ago. But my Handspring Visor has more memory and boots instantly. Web pages load faster with my DSL connection then they did over my modem (where could you get that 5 years ago?) Most of my compiles are shorter than they were 3 years ago. Sure, people tend to put bloat in, but Moore's law is still wining overall.
This ones really a quibble, but a subpoint of Fallacy 7 asks "How often do you need to do a Fourier transform?" I don't know if it's need per se, but I kind of like some of the music visualizations that use a whole bunch of frequency domain stuff.
One of the subpoints to Fallacy 13 (The Industry Knows where it's going) is
"There haven't been any new ideas in a decade"
My response
"There is no new thing under the sun"
--Ecclesiastes
That said, he certainly seemed to bring up a lot of food for thought. Do you think he'd be willing to do a Slashdot Interview?
"So we will stop being wolves and start being domestic dogs."
We are already domesticated. A key indicator of domestication is neotany--retaining the characteristics of youth. The flatter human face with the bulging skull makes us look much more like babies, and also giver room for a larger brain. The human jaw is shrinking, and canines becoming much blunter than in ape. (Generally--mine look like a baboons, which is a real pain if I bite my lip)
"Intelligence creates material success, which is a prize factor for breeding."
I'm going to have to disagree with you here. People who are wealthier tend to have fewer children, later, than people who aren't. True, this is a cultural trend, and will probably reverse itself. Otherwise we'll end up in Kornbluth's world of the _Marching Morons_.
"Human beings will continue to become... probably taller"
I could be wrong, but I don't think people are evolving to become taller. I believe that all the increases in height (fairly recent, and much to rapid to be evolutionary) are due to better diet. This is an environmental change allowing a fuller expression of genetic potential for height, not a genetic evolutionary change tht will be passed down to our descendents.
"Nahh, when a company tries to suspend the whole idea of free trade in a free society, I think its totally fair for the people harmed to revolt. They deserve not only their money back for the unused server time, but also the money back for their purchase of the game, IMHO. "
Except that this issue has nothing to do "free trade in a free society," it has to do with free trade in an entirely controlled artificial society. I don't know of any precedents in contract law that would prevent Mystic from controlling the transfer of game assets.
If you want to use a rental analogy, I would say it is much more akin to the provision in apartment rental contracts that prohibits you from subletting the property without the owner's permission.
Speaking of that, is the part where they claim* that the Defendents have "unclean hands" some legal term I'm not familar with or a joke? It sounds pretty odd, but then so do a number of actual terms.
Does the GPL allow the creator to grant liscense to certain commercial vendors? Otherwise, you wouldn't be able to GPL it. However, you can certainly release the source under some open liscense. What Google is doing is perfectly reasonable--if you create something based off their code, they are asking for the right to use it. It's similar to many liscenses already out there.
One thing I do wish was part of the rules was that if they used your code/algorithms, etc. that they notify you. After all, you may think your idea is great, but it would be a big endorsement if Google used it, even if you didn't win. If anyone in charge of this contest reads this, I'd urge doing that anyway--it would be a good cheap way to reward more talented programmers.
I never said that some flaws weren't harder to exploit than others, I just said that it is invalid to say that a system is secure because its flaws are "hard to exploit."
A hole that requires local access is less severe than one that does not, because it has a precondition. However, it is still serious, since it means that anyone who can compromise a local account can compromise the entire machine.
A hole that only occurs with a specific set of configuration options should not be counted as a distrubution/package hole unless those are the options it ships with. Issues like this are the reason for the big disclaimer on SecurityFocus about not using the numbers to draw conclusions about the security of operating system. Also, even given this, it's remarkably easy to write exploits. My home machine sees periodic queries that I'm pretty sure are testing to see if I'm vunerable to the SSH1 bug.
A heap-overflow attack can be executed repeatedly by a cron job, as can attacks that rely on modifying files created in the/tmp directory before they are used. Again, this is a less severe case because automated attempts like that are easier to detect, but it is still a security flaw that needs to be dealt with.
I agree that hardening your machine (for instance, removing the exec bit from stack pages) is a great idea. I think one of the reasons Linux _is_ more secure that Windows is that it is both by default more hardened and easier to harden.
I suppose part of this is a question of what is meant by "hard." If you mean (as I thought the first responder did) that "it is hard to create an exploit that could work" then I think that that is invalid. However, if you mean "the probability of a well-coded exploit succeding is reduced" then that does give you some measure of security. The second is the basis behind improving the randomness of sequence number generation in TCP, for instance.
A lot of the Linux "exploits" are very subtle, and very difficult to exploit.
I have to vehemently disagree. That "very difficult to exploit" line is a part of the standard Microsoft vunerability report. It's crap there, and it's crap here. Now matter how difficult something is to exploit, only one person has to figure out how to do it and script it. After that, it becomes easy.
Here is the link to Paul Thorrott's
response since I couldn't find it in the slashback.
I agree it's too bad he got a lot of "frothing" email. But I hardly think this response is a model of rationality either. He makes the point that compaines bet their future on Windows, and it wouldn't be true if it were "really so insecure." The same could be said about Linux. The fact that something is usuable does not mean it is more or less secure.
He states What I am trying to say is that Linux is not more secure than Windows. It's impossible.
That makes no sense. Of course it is possible for one system to be more secure than another. Maybe he means that you either are or aren't secure. OK, that's a valid point, but looking at the number of flaws discovered for a system in a given year gives you some idea of how likely it is that a new security flaw will be introduced in the future.
He also argues that fewer Linux vunerabilities are found because it is less widely deployed. I also think that this argument is invalid. Yes, fewer automated exploits are written against Linux vunerabilities because of this. Sure, this is why fewer Linux systems are broken into. However, I would argue that the communities of people who look for security vunerabilities on Windows and Linux are of comparable size, and large enough to find a comparable percentage of flaws.
The fact is, his original Short Take was simply blatantly incorrect in stating that for "the previous 5 years--for which the data is more complete--also shows that each year, Win2K and Windows NT had far fewer security vulnerabilities than Linux" The only way you can come up with that is by adding the numbers for each distrubution together, which is ridiculous (this same issue came up last summer).
Yes, the numbers show Win 2K beating RedHat last year. They also show a troubling increase in the number of Linux bugs in general. No, this issue shouldn't be dismissed out of hand. Yes, I'm sure a lot of people were offended by this article because they thought with their heart. However, I would hardly call putting out insultingly incorrect statements "thinking with your head"
"The phone companies don't charge for usage on local calls."
That's only if you buy the "unlimited local calling" plan, which is a fixed fee. The thing is almost everybody makes enough local calls to make it worthwhile to have. However, you _can_ save money by getting rid of it. For instance, if you have an extra line for a fax, and you mostly fax long distance, you can save $10-$15 a month by not getting unlimited local calling. Furthermore, long distance is the more appropriate analogy. Broadband providers have to negotiate with upstream backbone providers for their bandwith and pass that cost on to their customers.
"The other aspect, of course, is that Rogers customers have already signed a service agreement specifying one rate for uncapped access. How can the company legal justify unilaterally tearing up a signed contract without compensation to the other party?"
I would bet money that they aren't "tearing up the contract" but rather excercising the provision of the contract that allows them to change their terms of service with due notice. This is a standard item in contracts. If you've paid for service in advance, you might be able to get a refund on the remainder of the contract because they changed the terms, I'm not sure.
"The problem is that it's undemocratic to take matters into your own hands."
Yes. Does injustice pervade democracies? Yes. Does much get done about it? No, for the reasons you mention. Does violence get attention, can it catalyze change? Yes. Is it the right thing to do? Maybe. But most revolutions go sour. I know the United States was founded by a revolution, but it was a pretty gentle one, against a government that wasn't really established in the contested area.
I, personally, would rather have a democracy. That's at least partly because I'm an upper middle class white male. It is also because I'm convinced that in any revolution the Kerenskys would be pushed aside, and because in a society of revolution, "power flows from the barrel of a gun" (Chairman Mao).
"but if he gets a stricter sentance because of his anti-government views, then we have a problem."
He very well might get a harsher sentance because of his views, and because he sounds like an obnoxious, abrasive idiot. Is this a problem? Yeah, kinda, but there isn't much that can be done about it. Trials are conducted by a public jury, and judges have some leeway in sentencing. Sometimes this means they make bad descisions, but the alternative is a mechanical system that's going to make errors anyway.
It has always been important not to mix gratiutous criminal activity with social protest. That's why a lot of street marchers will do a drug check before they go out to protest--no point in getting busted for anything uneccessary.
"So how exactly do you train a monkey to think about doing something without doing it? I'm quite surprised that they were able to do that with the current level of communication between primates and humans."
It might work if you put the monkey in a straightjacket or other restraint--since it would be rewarded for touching the screen, you could see if the same neural pattern was invoked, I wouldn't be surprised if it was (along with the neural pattern for frustration). As they said, once they did the surgery and the monkey found it it could avoid moving, it prefered to just 'think' about it. This implies, as an interesting side note, that monkeys also have the capability to mentally plan/rehearse movements, just like humans do.
Overall, this seems like a really cool experiment. There have been some other work with non-invasive procedures, but those usually involve learning a new system of biofeedback. If they could actually get this to the point where they could train a paralyzed person to imagine touching controls to manipulate them, it would be a huge breakthrough.
Was that the one where at the end of one workgroup meeting a guy projected a slide of all the passwords he had captured--except those that were too close to the username?
"now I have no option but to buy the $100 software again"
See, that's why I said they had a "legitimate concern" about the backups. Sure, it sucks that they won't let you do it a different way, but hey. Actually, though, I thouht the last time I checked the software used to make the backups was still available, you just had to do it yourself.
"Encryption was brought about for a variety of reasons, but one of the reasons wasn't to make sure that a product was used in a specific way"
Yes, but the DMCA was designed so that products can only be used a certain way. A really really stupid, really really bad law, yes, but that's how it is.
As for Sony's original position, the Scientfic American article leaves out an important factor. Originally, the AiboPet site had backups of Sony's software, obtained through crecking the encryption, available for download. Sony had a legitimate concern that these would be used improperly. Sure, no other hardware platform will run the stuff now, but it does make it easier to make clones or illegal copies of the code. Once Sony turned the lawyers loose, I think they went overboard, basically demanding that the entire site be shut down, originally. After the protests, they moderated their position quite a bit, but the "backups" are still gone.
Slashdot Mirror
"Some people equate digital copying with analog copying, but the primary difference is the volume of piracy, and that's what they're scared of."
Bullshit. Sure, volume is why they went after Napster and will continue to go after other big pirate boards. They don't need new laws to do this. They definetely don't need to mandate that every digital device includes crippleware.
The primary thing they are scared of is not piracy, but change. In 1981, Jack Valenti claimed that VHS tapes would destroy the movie and television buisness. Now, when after-theatre revenue makes up the majority of a films sales, he says that digital copies are going to destroy the VHS/DVD market--the very market whose creation he vehemently opposed. In twenty years, watch him or his heir rant about how technology X is going to destroy the thriving Internet movie delivery buisness.
So you see, having several languages implemented for one back end, so that I can write my lexing routines in PERL, write my AST construction routines in Java, and my compiler in Scheme, ammounts basically to choosing the right tool for the job.
How isn't this appealing?
It's quite appealing, and the article doesn't make any sense when it talks about runtimes. Languages have been able to compile/interpret to common runtimes for decades. How do you think PERL can call out to C functions? C has a runtime--no stack, no heap, no game. What's "new" about the CLR is that it is a cross-platform and cross-language runtime, the first to be widely promoted as such. You can critize its design as a runtime, but it's hard to argue that it is a useful idea.
Actually, the judge seems to be basing her decision on sound legal principles. The sentence you qoute suggests otherwise, but it was written by the reporter at Wired. The quote about both sides being "dirty" probably refers to the doctrine of "Unclean Hands" which basically states that you can't benefit in a civil suit from illegal actions. In other words, if the record industry has illegally claimed copyright of songs that actually belong to artists, then they can't claim damages.
"So it's perhaps wise to switch it ON in debug builds plus release builds that are tested, and switch it OFF in release builds that are deployed to customers."
Gotta disagree with you on this one. You can't do testing on a different program than you release, and something like StackGuard produces a different program. Stuff like that's great for debugging/development, but if your still using it in final testing you should ship with it and eat the preformance hit.
I fully agree that any material placed on publically accessible web servers should be referencable under the "fair use" doctrine. However, I think the court's descision is correct in light of this. Mr. Kozubik's main complaint seems to be that the behavior of browsers as regards linking are entirely arbitrary. He is correct. However, fair use is by its very nature a doctrine which will be interpreted on a case by case basis, respecting precedent.
Rather than fearing, as he does, that the court will constantly have to "revise" the decision as technology changes, I think courts will be able to read the intent and wisely apply it to many other decisions. After all, a court decision is not a law, defined by the precise wordings, but rather a carefully considered opinion on the burden of evidence. Future courts should be able to apply the same fundamental distinction--linking that is designed to automatically reproduce the work vs linking that is designed only to show the location of the work--irregardless of the precise technology involved.
I'm not sure that I'd be so eager to jump on the grad school bandwagon if I were still in school.
Lots of people seem to be doing it. That means that in a few years, the market is going to be flooded with graduate degrees. If you don't really have the motivation to learn more, you'll just have wasted your tims. Furthermore, if you get into a PhD program you might have to choose between abandoning your work or catching a rising tide early.
On the other hand, Clark makes a good point about EE jobs in general. I know a lot of people who consider a masters the minimum degree for a "real" EE job.
And to think people complained that garbage collection was inefficient! Actually, though, this is a huge step forward for Perl. Now, with just a few lines of code, you should be able to consume massive numbers of CPU cycles while still actually accomplishing something.
The module actually looks pretty cool. It says that some simplifying assumptions were made. Does anyone know if the simulation is reasonably accurate? That is, could you actually set up a quantum computer to behave exactly as the simulated one?
That's a really interesting summary of what looks like a talk I would have liked to have attended. Of course, a lot of the points were matters of opinion, and I disagree on some of them.
Fallacy 1 (Computing is Easy) I think is spot on. I shudder when I see some of the "For Dummies" titles out there now.
Fallacy 6 (Computers are Getting Faster), I would have to say I disagreed with him on. Sure, my desktop boots slower than my old 386 from 10 years ago. But my Handspring Visor has more memory and boots instantly. Web pages load faster with my DSL connection then they did over my modem (where could you get that 5 years ago?) Most of my compiles are shorter than they were 3 years ago. Sure, people tend to put bloat in, but Moore's law is still wining overall.
This ones really a quibble, but a subpoint of Fallacy 7 asks "How often do you need to do a Fourier transform?" I don't know if it's need per se, but I kind of like some of the music visualizations that use a whole bunch of frequency domain stuff.
One of the subpoints to Fallacy 13 (The Industry Knows where it's going) is
"There haven't been any new ideas in a decade"
My response
"There is no new thing under the sun"
--Ecclesiastes
That said, he certainly seemed to bring up a lot of food for thought. Do you think he'd be willing to do a Slashdot Interview?
"So we will stop being wolves and start being domestic dogs."
... probably taller"
We are already domesticated. A key indicator of domestication is neotany--retaining the characteristics of youth. The flatter human face with the bulging skull makes us look much more like babies, and also giver room for a larger brain. The human jaw is shrinking, and canines becoming much blunter than in ape. (Generally--mine look like a baboons, which is a real pain if I bite my lip)
"Intelligence creates material success, which is a prize factor for breeding."
I'm going to have to disagree with you here. People who are wealthier tend to have fewer children, later, than people who aren't. True, this is a cultural trend, and will probably reverse itself. Otherwise we'll end up in Kornbluth's world of the _Marching Morons_.
"Human beings will continue to become
I could be wrong, but I don't think people are evolving to become taller. I believe that all the increases in height (fairly recent, and much to rapid to be evolutionary) are due to better diet. This is an environmental change allowing a fuller expression of genetic potential for height, not a genetic evolutionary change tht will be passed down to our descendents.
"Nahh, when a company tries to suspend the whole idea of free trade in a free society, I think its totally fair for the people harmed to revolt. They deserve not only their money back for the unused server time, but also the money back for their purchase of the game, IMHO. "
Except that this issue has nothing to do "free trade in a free society," it has to do with free trade in an entirely controlled artificial society. I don't know of any precedents in contract law that would prevent Mystic from controlling the transfer of game assets.
If you want to use a rental analogy, I would say it is much more akin to the provision in apartment rental contracts that prohibits you from subletting the property without the owner's permission.
Speaking of that, is the part where they claim* that the Defendents have "unclean hands" some legal term I'm not familar with or a joke? It sounds pretty odd, but then so do a number of actual terms.
*Page 6, part (5) of (23), First Claim for Relief
Does the GPL allow the creator to grant liscense to certain commercial vendors? Otherwise, you wouldn't be able to GPL it. However, you can certainly release the source under some open liscense. What Google is doing is perfectly reasonable--if you create something based off their code, they are asking for the right to use it. It's similar to many liscenses already out there.
One thing I do wish was part of the rules was that if they used your code/algorithms, etc. that they notify you. After all, you may think your idea is great, but it would be a big endorsement if Google used it, even if you didn't win. If anyone in charge of this contest reads this, I'd urge doing that anyway--it would be a good cheap way to reward more talented programmers.
I never said that some flaws weren't harder to exploit than others, I just said that it is invalid to say that a system is secure because its flaws are "hard to exploit."
/tmp directory before they are used. Again, this is a less severe case because automated attempts like that are easier to detect, but it is still a security flaw that needs to be dealt with.
A hole that requires local access is less severe than one that does not, because it has a precondition. However, it is still serious, since it means that anyone who can compromise a local account can compromise the entire machine.
A hole that only occurs with a specific set of configuration options should not be counted as a distrubution/package hole unless those are the options it ships with. Issues like this are the reason for the big disclaimer on SecurityFocus about not using the numbers to draw conclusions about the security of operating system. Also, even given this, it's remarkably easy to write exploits. My home machine sees periodic queries that I'm pretty sure are testing to see if I'm vunerable to the SSH1 bug.
A heap-overflow attack can be executed repeatedly by a cron job, as can attacks that rely on modifying files created in the
I agree that hardening your machine (for instance, removing the exec bit from stack pages) is a great idea. I think one of the reasons Linux _is_ more secure that Windows is that it is both by default more hardened and easier to harden.
I suppose part of this is a question of what is meant by "hard." If you mean (as I thought the first responder did) that "it is hard to create an exploit that could work" then I think that that is invalid. However, if you mean "the probability of a well-coded exploit succeding is reduced" then that does give you some measure of security. The second is the basis behind improving the randomness of sequence number generation in TCP, for instance.
I have to vehemently disagree. That "very difficult to exploit" line is a part of the standard Microsoft vunerability report. It's crap there, and it's crap here. Now matter how difficult something is to exploit, only one person has to figure out how to do it and script it. After that, it becomes easy.
I agree it's too bad he got a lot of "frothing" email. But I hardly think this response is a model of rationality either. He makes the point that compaines bet their future on Windows, and it wouldn't be true if it were "really so insecure." The same could be said about Linux. The fact that something is usuable does not mean it is more or less secure.
He states What I am trying to say is that Linux is not more secure than Windows. It's impossible.
That makes no sense. Of course it is possible for one system to be more secure than another. Maybe he means that you either are or aren't secure. OK, that's a valid point, but looking at the number of flaws discovered for a system in a given year gives you some idea of how likely it is that a new security flaw will be introduced in the future.
He also argues that fewer Linux vunerabilities are found because it is less widely deployed. I also think that this argument is invalid. Yes, fewer automated exploits are written against Linux vunerabilities because of this. Sure, this is why fewer Linux systems are broken into. However, I would argue that the communities of people who look for security vunerabilities on Windows and Linux are of comparable size, and large enough to find a comparable percentage of flaws.
The fact is, his original Short Take was simply blatantly incorrect in stating that for "the previous 5 years--for which the data is more complete--also shows that each year, Win2K and Windows NT had far fewer security vulnerabilities than Linux" The only way you can come up with that is by adding the numbers for each distrubution together, which is ridiculous (this same issue came up last summer).
Yes, the numbers show Win 2K beating RedHat last year. They also show a troubling increase in the number of Linux bugs in general. No, this issue shouldn't be dismissed out of hand. Yes, I'm sure a lot of people were offended by this article because they thought with their heart. However, I would hardly call putting out insultingly incorrect statements "thinking with your head"
"The phone companies don't charge for usage on local calls."
That's only if you buy the "unlimited local calling" plan, which is a fixed fee. The thing is almost everybody makes enough local calls to make it worthwhile to have. However, you _can_ save money by getting rid of it. For instance, if you have an extra line for a fax, and you mostly fax long distance, you can save $10-$15 a month by not getting unlimited local calling. Furthermore, long distance is the more appropriate analogy. Broadband providers have to negotiate with upstream backbone providers for their bandwith and pass that cost on to their customers.
"The other aspect, of course, is that Rogers customers have already signed a service agreement specifying one rate for uncapped access. How can the company legal justify unilaterally tearing up a signed contract without compensation to the other party?"
I would bet money that they aren't "tearing up the contract" but rather excercising the provision of the contract that allows them to change their terms of service with due notice. This is a standard item in contracts. If you've paid for service in advance, you might be able to get a refund on the remainder of the contract because they changed the terms, I'm not sure.
"the Model T to Napster's Model A"
The Model T came first. The Model A was afterwords.
"The problem is that it's undemocratic to take matters into your own hands."
Yes. Does injustice pervade democracies? Yes. Does much get done about it? No, for the reasons you mention. Does violence get attention, can it catalyze change? Yes. Is it the right thing to do? Maybe. But most revolutions go sour. I know the United States was founded by a revolution, but it was a pretty gentle one, against a government that wasn't really established in the contested area.
I, personally, would rather have a democracy. That's at least partly because I'm an upper middle class white male. It is also because I'm convinced that in any revolution the Kerenskys would be pushed aside, and because in a society of revolution, "power flows from the barrel of a gun" (Chairman Mao).
"but if he gets a stricter sentance because of his anti-government views, then we have a problem."
He very well might get a harsher sentance because of his views, and because he sounds like an obnoxious, abrasive idiot. Is this a problem? Yeah, kinda, but there isn't much that can be done about it. Trials are conducted by a public jury, and judges have some leeway in sentencing. Sometimes this means they make bad descisions, but the alternative is a mechanical system that's going to make errors anyway.
It has always been important not to mix gratiutous criminal activity with social protest. That's why a lot of street marchers will do a drug check before they go out to protest--no point in getting busted for anything uneccessary.
"So how exactly do you train a monkey to think about doing something without doing it? I'm quite surprised that they were able to do that with the current level of communication between primates and humans."
It might work if you put the monkey in a straightjacket or other restraint--since it would be rewarded for touching the screen, you could see if the same neural pattern was invoked, I wouldn't be surprised if it was (along with the neural pattern for frustration). As they said, once they did the surgery and the monkey found it it could avoid moving, it prefered to just 'think' about it. This implies, as an interesting side note, that monkeys also have the capability to mentally plan/rehearse movements, just like humans do.
Overall, this seems like a really cool experiment. There have been some other work with non-invasive procedures, but those usually involve learning a new system of biofeedback. If they could actually get this to the point where they could train a paralyzed person to imagine touching controls to manipulate them, it would be a huge breakthrough.
It's worse than that. I expect a lot of people, especially early posters, to not read the article.
But
A) A lot of them didn't even seem to read the little dept. blurb, which actually has more good info than most of the posts.
B) A lot of these assinine responses have been moded up as "informative"
Something is broken. Badly broken. Read it. It's interesting.
Was that the one where at the end of one workgroup meeting a guy projected a slide of all the passwords he had captured--except those that were too close to the username?
Pretty funny, really.
Actually, the second paragraph of the CNN story states that one of the arguments is that the law "should not apply to a Russian company"
"now I have no option but to buy the $100 software again"
See, that's why I said they had a "legitimate concern" about the backups. Sure, it sucks that they won't let you do it a different way, but hey. Actually, though, I thouht the last time I checked the software used to make the backups was still available, you just had to do it yourself.
"Encryption was brought about for a variety of reasons, but one of the reasons wasn't to make sure that a product was used in a specific way"
Yes, but the DMCA was designed so that products can only be used a certain way. A really really stupid, really really bad law, yes, but that's how it is.
As for Sony's original position, the Scientfic American article leaves out an important factor. Originally, the AiboPet site had backups of Sony's software, obtained through crecking the encryption, available for download. Sony had a legitimate concern that these would be used improperly. Sure, no other hardware platform will run the stuff now, but it does make it easier to make clones or illegal copies of the code. Once Sony turned the lawyers loose, I think they went overboard, basically demanding that the entire site be shut down, originally. After the protests, they moderated their position quite a bit, but the "backups" are still gone.