I don't see a problem either. If the Chinese really needed to, they could just build their own hardware & write their own software.
We could compare this situation with export restrictions of military technology from the U.S. to various countries over the years. Export restrictions against countries like Iran or Cuba have stopped them from using American military technology (Iran's F-14s don't fly anymore, etc.) but the target countries seem to do OK with substitutes. Same thing would happen here.
I've always wondered about the supposed lack of "FOSS" at DoD. Aside from SE Linux, there are other quite public acknowledgements of support for open source software. From the back of the OpenBSD 3.1 CD case:
"This effort sponsored in part by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and Air Force Research Laboratory, Air Force Material Command, USAF, under agreement number F30602-01-2-0537"
Kind of a big hint that someone somewhere in DoD thinks highly of OpenBSD.
Of course, this support may have since been reduced or eliminated due to the same pressure that the NSA faced with SE Linux.
I've not seen a flat panel that can pass the toddler test:
1) Find a 2 year old. 2) Give them a random hard, pointy object such as a ball-point pen. (This step is optional, toddlers can create such objects out of thin air. You just have more control this way.) 3) Put said toddler within 6 feet of flat panel monitor with a pretty screen saver being displayed.
The problem with an LCD is that you don't hear the "ting ting ting" warning bell that a CRT gives you when a toddler is too close.
"So after a few weeks, it might be 70/30 instead of 90/ 10 - but lots of people already saw the movie by then.)"
So, loyal slashdotters who want to see the movie on the big screen, but don't want to put more money than absolutely necessary in the MPAA's pocket should wait two or three weeks before seeing a movie.
Sounds good to me.
'course, that means giving up potential karma when you can't post spoilers about the newest flick. Steep price for some, but be brave!
"One benefit that you might not be considering is that for a large organization such as a company, campus or government office having all traffic run over ONE network is much cheaper and easier to maintain."
Right up until a backhoe digs up the cable.
Seriously -
Where I live there are power outages fairly often - at least 3 or 4 times per year. When that happens, all of the VOIP stuff is dead. It is just too expensive to provide decent battery backup for every device in the chain. (Same goes for the office PBX systems, too.)
However an old style phone - the ones with just a number pad & no need to plug into the wall - draws so little power that the telco's battery backup can keep entire neighborhoods running through very long power outages. You can still communicate, which is handy.
There are certain advantages to keeping older technology around on seperate networks.
In fact it seems as if universities & colleges have been going out of their way to reduce the impact P2P has had on their networks. Bandwidth is money, and at least in the US universities don't have an unlimited supply of cash.
Actually, that might be of interest to a few slashdotters, depending on what patents are involved. Hardware is one thing, but software or other "IP" is another.
Since JPL will be selling licenses to people who will presumably want to profit from their new purchase, we (the U.S. taxpaying public) will be paying for the technology twice. Once with our tax dollars to develop the technology, and once again to purchase it from the licensee.
Oh well. You can't download Tang. I guess a lot of the space program stuff just doesn't lend itself to open source.
Whoops. Sorry - looks like it needs i386 to run the exploit, but compiles it's own code on the system.
(So, if you rename gcc to something else and put a dummy gcc in its place, you'll get a copy of the worm's source code?)
"The worm uses a Linux shell code exploit which will run only on Intel systems. This code requires the presence of the shell command/bin/sh in order to execute properly. The worm encodes its own source code named ".bugtraq.c" (thus only a "ls -a" command will show the file) with UU encoding, sends it over to the remote system and decodes the file. After this it compiles the file using gcc and runs the binary which will be called ".bugtraq". These file are placed in the/tmp directory."
I follow the link to the site, where Apple tells me that I need to download Quicktime 5 to watch the commercial. OK, so I download the installer. I agree to the license, tell it where to install Quicktime & which version I want and it starts to download - kind of. The first installer tells me that it isn't the right installer because there is another newer installer, which downloads. And then I agree to the license, tell it where to instal Quicktime & which version I want and it starts to download. Why didn't they just put a link to the second installer instead of the first?
A hypothetical "apt-get install quicktime" would be a lot less bothersome.
IIRC Yahoo was ordered by a French judge to limit access by French citizens/residents to offensive material, based on the location of that person at the time (in France), in order to comply with French law. Yahoo exists as a legal entity in both the US and France, so must pay attention to the laws of both countries.
Does this mean that Yahoo.fr has to work out patent issues (royalties) with Liquid Audio to comply with French law?
Should the US bring China before the WTO and complain that the Chinese government is violating Liquid Audio's patent on filtering internet content based on nationality/geographic location?
"Other members suggested that the technology be adopted as an optional extension, but this could lead to fragmentation of the standard."
It might fragment the standard in such a way that non-Microsoft users don't notice unless they also use Windows. If there is a "Windows OpenGL" that uses Microsoft proprietary extensions and an "OpenGL" that can be used on Linux/BSD without them - well, that may be the price we have to pay to keep Microsoft at a distance.
I suppose the *best* solution would be to simply not use any technology that had these sorts of IP restrictions. Sort of an ogg vorbis model, where the standard is specifically open and royalty free.
However given that the hardware manufacturers and major software players such as Microsoft are necessarily involved, and might not want to support such a scheme it is not the most *realistic* solution.
"Once Palladium is in a certain percentage of computers they can start making people suffer if they don't have it."
Of course this is a potential gold mine for a company that wants to corner the Linux/BSD (or non-windows) market. Their marketing could simply be a "Palladium Free" sticker on the case and a banner ad or two on/.
Since AMD and Intel have both been mentioned as being potential Palladium partners, perhaps another player will end up being the darling of the Linux crowd and the future will hold more alternative architecture boxes like the old IBM RS/6000 PowerPC series of workstations, and you'll have to search for a Linux distribution that still supports Intel processors.
It will be interesting to see just how the market reacts. Will we be strong enough to keep our freedom through the marketplace, or will everyone just roll over and accept remote control from Redmond?
If I were the CIO of a large bank, HMO, legal office, or any other company that is required by law to maintain accurate records for a long period of time I know that I would rather not have *any* DRM decisions on my systems made by Microsoft or AMD/Intel. Then I could potentially be held legally responsible for any "mistakes" that Redmond makes that alters, destroys, or accidentally exposes data when Palladium decides that my data files are really pirated MP3s. I am sure that their EULA will hold them blameless in such an event. However I'm not a CIO, and not likely to become one either.:( Hopefully they browse/. on slow Sunday afternoons...
Sorry. The "sitting in your parents basement" comment coming from someone who apparently just turned 20 (assuming the information on his web page is accurate) put me into lecture mode. Condescending? In this case, you're absolutely right.
The fact remains that most people don't care, don't understand the issues or the implications, and never will. Our politicians understand this, which is why we have the DMCA and proposed legislation such as the CBDTPA.
"But the music piracy is mostly due to the same people you are deriding."
I don't think that the music piracy crowd is the same demographic as the used CD crowd. Sure there is some overlap, but a large percentage of people who buy used CDs do so because they view new CDs as a luxury - these are people who would look at a $299 Walmart PC as an extravagant purchase if they even considered buying one in the first place. And I am speaking of adults who earn their own money as opposed to rich teenagers trying to stretch their allowance.
"Have you talk to Joe and Jane six pack about fair use and copyrights?"
Well I don't go door to door with leaflets, but yes I have. Or I should say I've tried to. The glassy eyed look comes pretty quickly, and the conversation turns to the latest sports scores. People who work in the tech industry have a handle on the issue because of bills like CBDTPA may affect their livelihood (and they read/.). Non techies don't seem to have heard much about the issue at all and are certainly not concerned about it, and for the blue collar community there is essentially NO issue. Remember, the only people that would complain about this are criminals! After all it is in the newspaper, you know.
Have YOU talked to "Joe and Jane six pack" about fair use & intellectual property?
You mean the customers, right? I don't think the average consumer would notice, or care. They'd just chalk any price increase up to inflation.
It seems to me that concepts like fair use and owning something you pay for are beyond the ability of much (most?) of the US population to comprehend. All the music industry needs to do is have some nice lawyer type in a button up shirt and tie get on late-night or Sunday Morning and explain how only a criminal would ever want take money away from Britney, and suddenly the masses all go "ohh, those music pirates are bad." Failing that, getting a few newspaper articles is just as good since there are a lot of people who are smart enough to read, but not smart enough to read between the lines when they read a "news" paper.
Did you see how used CD sales was linked to online piracy of music? Link used CDs to a Known Evil (TM) like online piracy, and the public opinion front is already won. Anyone who complains about it can be branded a criminal who just wants to download free music so that Britney will starve, someone else who profits off of other people downloading free music, or some nuthead that Just Doesn't Get It (and probably uses Linux too, which is un-American and vaguely communist - and we know how THEY turned out).
Sigh.
Re:What's goose for the girl is good for the gande
on
Data Quality Act
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· Score: 1
This is a good point. The post refers to environmental numbers on government sites - but wait until other well funded, lawyer approved organizations get into the act. Then the battles won't be between Organization X and the US Government, but between Organization X and Organization Y, with the US Government trapped in the middle. One group will sue to have the information taken down, and another will sue to have it restored.
Eventually you're going to see massive legal battles between groups such as Handgun Control, Inc. and the NRA over the numbers put on various government sites such as the Centers for Disease Control. There's lots to fight over there, from the raw numbers and how much estimation is going on, to the definition of the word "child" (doing research for a school paper I found one CDC definition for children that included 25 year olds - they probably meant to say "young adults and children" but now it becomes a legal point you can sue over).
IMHO this is a big mistake. Pick *any* government study, from the National Park Service research papers [think Glacier Bay & commercial fishing] to the FBI crime reports [think gun control]. You'll find two well funded opponents for just about anything published, and they'll soon have the green light to take every little issue to court.
Lovely. What a wonderful use of government staff time - chasing down details for opposing lawyers in endless lawsuits and counter-suits.
Isn't this the SAME Sony that is pushing "copy protected" CD look-a-likes in an effort to eliminate your fair use rights? And you purchase their products? Doesn't that just tell them that what they're doing is OK?
Or is that Sony an evil twin from the mirror universe?
"The BSA version of GASP® is a suite of programs designed to help you identify and track licensed and unlicensed software and other files installed on your company's computer systems"
And other files? Is it going to check every student paper for plagiarism? Ensure every digital art project is an original work? Ensure the student's private academic records haven't been copied from another university's files?
Well, "Inuit" isn't exactly proper for all groups either (see the AFN site). The Alaskan "Natives who are not Aleuts or American Indians" would be Alutiiq, Inupiaq or Yupik. Not Inuit. Why would you want to impose the word Inuit on them when that's not what they call their own people?
Thanks for the tip about Access. Word and Excel 97/2000 have lots of compatible programs (OpenOffice.org, StarOffice, Gnumeric, etc., etc.)
Access is the one application I have trouble working with while using Linux, and is the one application that *all* of my day to day data needs are kept on. Access is sitting at just about the right balance point between ease of use and available power for small business use - Linux doesn't have a competitor.
Now if they can just duplicate that g$%#*mn IIS "Windows Authentication" so I can access my company intranet web sites with a Linux box...
Any tech boom that comes along in the US will come to a screeching halt if Senators Hollings and Stevens can get the CBDTPA passed, and anything that includes a "digital interactive device" becomes both unuseable and prohibitively expensive (someone will have to pay the R&D costs - and it will be you). The entire tech industry will move overseas.
But hey! CBDTPA will create it's own tech booms in Europe and places like India so it's not all bad. (Don't know about Mexico & Canada - they're too close to our Senators from Disney.)
Slashdot Mirror
But does it run NetBSD?
I don't see a problem either. If the Chinese really needed to, they could just build their own hardware & write their own software.
We could compare this situation with export restrictions of military technology from the U.S. to various countries over the years. Export restrictions against countries like Iran or Cuba have stopped them from using American military technology (Iran's F-14s don't fly anymore, etc.) but the target countries seem to do OK with substitutes. Same thing would happen here.
I've always wondered about the supposed lack of "FOSS" at DoD. Aside from SE Linux, there are other quite public acknowledgements of support for open source software. From the back of the OpenBSD 3.1 CD case:
"This effort sponsored in part by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and Air Force Research Laboratory, Air Force Material Command, USAF, under agreement number F30602-01-2-0537"
Kind of a big hint that someone somewhere in DoD thinks highly of OpenBSD.
Of course, this support may have since been reduced or eliminated due to the same pressure that the NSA faced with SE Linux.
I've not seen a flat panel that can pass the toddler test:
1) Find a 2 year old.
2) Give them a random hard, pointy object such as a ball-point pen. (This step is optional, toddlers can create such objects out of thin air. You just have more control this way.)
3) Put said toddler within 6 feet of flat panel monitor with a pretty screen saver being displayed.
The problem with an LCD is that you don't hear the "ting ting ting" warning bell that a CRT gives you when a toddler is too close.
"So after a few weeks, it might be 70/30 instead of 90/ 10 - but lots of people already saw the movie by then.)"
So, loyal slashdotters who want to see the movie on the big screen, but don't want to put more money than absolutely necessary in the MPAA's pocket should wait two or three weeks before seeing a movie.
Sounds good to me.
'course, that means giving up potential karma when you can't post spoilers about the newest flick. Steep price for some, but be brave!
"One benefit that you might not be considering is that for a large organization such as a company, campus or government office having all traffic run over ONE network is much cheaper and easier to maintain."
Right up until a backhoe digs up the cable.
Seriously -
Where I live there are power outages fairly often - at least 3 or 4 times per year. When that happens, all of the VOIP stuff is dead. It is just too expensive to provide decent battery backup for every device in the chain. (Same goes for the office PBX systems, too.)
However an old style phone - the ones with just a number pad & no need to plug into the wall - draws so little power that the telco's battery backup can keep entire neighborhoods running through very long power outages. You can still communicate, which is handy.
There are certain advantages to keeping older technology around on seperate networks.
In fact it seems as if universities & colleges have been going out of their way to reduce the impact P2P has had on their networks. Bandwidth is money, and at least in the US universities don't have an unlimited supply of cash.
They sent the letter to the wrong people.
Actually, that might be of interest to a few slashdotters, depending on what patents are involved. Hardware is one thing, but software or other "IP" is another.
Since JPL will be selling licenses to people who will presumably want to profit from their new purchase, we (the U.S. taxpaying public) will be paying for the technology twice. Once with our tax dollars to develop the technology, and once again to purchase it from the licensee.
Oh well. You can't download Tang. I guess a lot of the space program stuff just doesn't lend itself to open source.
Whoops. Sorry - looks like it needs i386 to run the exploit, but compiles it's own code on the system.
/bin/sh in order to execute properly. The worm encodes its own source code named ".bugtraq.c" (thus only a "ls -a" command will show the file) with UU encoding, sends it over to the remote system and decodes the file. After this it compiles the file using gcc and runs the binary which will be called ".bugtraq". These file are placed in the /tmp directory."
(So, if you rename gcc to something else and put a dummy gcc in its place, you'll get a copy of the worm's source code?)
"The worm uses a Linux shell code exploit which will run only on Intel systems. This code requires the presence of the shell command
The worm probably has pre-compiled binary elements that are compiled for i386 only. (Maybe it replaces system utilities like ps.)
*&&**#@!#!
I follow the link to the site, where Apple tells me that I need to download Quicktime 5 to watch the commercial. OK, so I download the installer. I agree to the license, tell it where to install Quicktime & which version I want and it starts to download - kind of. The first installer tells me that it isn't the right installer because there is another newer installer, which downloads. And then I agree to the license, tell it where to instal Quicktime & which version I want and it starts to download. Why didn't they just put a link to the second installer instead of the first?
A hypothetical "apt-get install quicktime" would be a lot less bothersome.
IIRC Yahoo was ordered by a French judge to limit access by French citizens/residents to offensive material, based on the location of that person at the time (in France), in order to comply with French law. Yahoo exists as a legal entity in both the US and France, so must pay attention to the laws of both countries.
Does this mean that Yahoo.fr has to work out patent issues (royalties) with Liquid Audio to comply with French law?
Should the US bring China before the WTO and complain that the Chinese government is violating Liquid Audio's patent on filtering internet content based on nationality/geographic location?
"Other members suggested that the technology be adopted as an optional extension, but this could lead to fragmentation of the standard."
It might fragment the standard in such a way that non-Microsoft users don't notice unless they also use Windows. If there is a "Windows OpenGL" that uses Microsoft proprietary extensions and an "OpenGL" that can be used on Linux/BSD without them - well, that may be the price we have to pay to keep Microsoft at a distance.
I suppose the *best* solution would be to simply not use any technology that had these sorts of IP restrictions. Sort of an ogg vorbis model, where the standard is specifically open and royalty free.
However given that the hardware manufacturers and major software players such as Microsoft are necessarily involved, and might not want to support such a scheme it is not the most *realistic* solution.
Oh well. Who needs 3D anyway, right?
"Once Palladium is in a certain percentage of computers they can start making people suffer if they don't have it."
/.
:( Hopefully they browse /. on slow Sunday afternoons...
Of course this is a potential gold mine for a company that wants to corner the Linux/BSD (or non-windows) market. Their marketing could simply be a "Palladium Free" sticker on the case and a banner ad or two on
Since AMD and Intel have both been mentioned as being potential Palladium partners, perhaps another player will end up being the darling of the Linux crowd and the future will hold more alternative architecture boxes like the old IBM RS/6000 PowerPC series of workstations, and you'll have to search for a Linux distribution that still supports Intel processors.
It will be interesting to see just how the market reacts. Will we be strong enough to keep our freedom through the marketplace, or will everyone just roll over and accept remote control from Redmond?
If I were the CIO of a large bank, HMO, legal office, or any other company that is required by law to maintain accurate records for a long period of time I know that I would rather not have *any* DRM decisions on my systems made by Microsoft or AMD/Intel. Then I could potentially be held legally responsible for any "mistakes" that Redmond makes that alters, destroys, or accidentally exposes data when Palladium decides that my data files are really pirated MP3s. I am sure that their EULA will hold them blameless in such an event. However I'm not a CIO, and not likely to become one either.
Sorry. The "sitting in your parents basement" comment coming from someone who apparently just turned 20 (assuming the information on his web page is accurate) put me into lecture mode. Condescending? In this case, you're absolutely right.
The fact remains that most people don't care, don't understand the issues or the implications, and never will. Our politicians understand this, which is why we have the DMCA and proposed legislation such as the CBDTPA.
"But the music piracy is mostly due to the same people you are deriding."
/.). Non techies don't seem to have heard much about the issue at all and are certainly not concerned about it, and for the blue collar community there is essentially NO issue. Remember, the only people that would complain about this are criminals! After all it is in the newspaper, you know.
I don't think that the music piracy crowd is the same demographic as the used CD crowd. Sure there is some overlap, but a large percentage of people who buy used CDs do so because they view new CDs as a luxury - these are people who would look at a $299 Walmart PC as an extravagant purchase if they even considered buying one in the first place. And I am speaking of adults who earn their own money as opposed to rich teenagers trying to stretch their allowance.
"Have you talk to Joe and Jane six pack about fair use and copyrights?"
Well I don't go door to door with leaflets, but yes I have. Or I should say I've tried to. The glassy eyed look comes pretty quickly, and the conversation turns to the latest sports scores. People who work in the tech industry have a handle on the issue because of bills like CBDTPA may affect their livelihood (and they read
Have YOU talked to "Joe and Jane six pack" about fair use & intellectual property?
"Not that they seem to give a damn."
You mean the customers, right? I don't think the average consumer would notice, or care. They'd just chalk any price increase up to inflation.
It seems to me that concepts like fair use and owning something you pay for are beyond the ability of much (most?) of the US population to comprehend. All the music industry needs to do is have some nice lawyer type in a button up shirt and tie get on late-night or Sunday Morning and explain how only a criminal would ever want take money away from Britney, and suddenly the masses all go "ohh, those music pirates are bad." Failing that, getting a few newspaper articles is just as good since there are a lot of people who are smart enough to read, but not smart enough to read between the lines when they read a "news" paper.
Did you see how used CD sales was linked to online piracy of music? Link used CDs to a Known Evil (TM) like online piracy, and the public opinion front is already won. Anyone who complains about it can be branded a criminal who just wants to download free music so that Britney will starve, someone else who profits off of other people downloading free music, or some nuthead that Just Doesn't Get It (and probably uses Linux too, which is un-American and vaguely communist - and we know how THEY turned out).
Sigh.
This is a good point. The post refers to environmental numbers on government sites - but wait until other well funded, lawyer approved organizations get into the act. Then the battles won't be between Organization X and the US Government, but between Organization X and Organization Y, with the US Government trapped in the middle. One group will sue to have the information taken down, and another will sue to have it restored.
Eventually you're going to see massive legal battles between groups such as Handgun Control, Inc. and the NRA over the numbers put on various government sites such as the Centers for Disease Control. There's lots to fight over there, from the raw numbers and how much estimation is going on, to the definition of the word "child" (doing research for a school paper I found one CDC definition for children that included 25 year olds - they probably meant to say "young adults and children" but now it becomes a legal point you can sue over).
IMHO this is a big mistake. Pick *any* government study, from the National Park Service research papers [think Glacier Bay & commercial fishing] to the FBI crime reports [think gun control]. You'll find two well funded opponents for just about anything published, and they'll soon have the green light to take every little issue to court.
Lovely. What a wonderful use of government staff time - chasing down details for opposing lawyers in endless lawsuits and counter-suits.
Er, apparently I didn't enter the URL correctly.
t ml
It is here:
http://fifaworldcup.yahoo.com/en/020522/1/jdy.h
Potentially quite a bit. Obviously the World Cup has a similar system in place to predict the outcome of matches as seen in this quote:
"Portugal's first game in the World Cup finals will be a Group D tie against the United States on June 5."
Of course now sports loving Portuguese and US hackers get to fight over turning a tie into a win...
Isn't this the SAME Sony that is pushing "copy protected" CD look-a-likes in an effort to eliminate your fair use rights? And you purchase their products? Doesn't that just tell them that what they're doing is OK?
Or is that Sony an evil twin from the mirror universe?
From the link:
"The BSA version of GASP® is a suite of programs designed to help you identify and track licensed and unlicensed software and other files installed on your company's computer systems"
And other files? Is it going to check every student paper for plagiarism? Ensure every digital art project is an original work? Ensure the student's private academic records haven't been copied from another university's files?
Wow.
Well, "Inuit" isn't exactly proper for all groups either (see the AFN site). The Alaskan "Natives who are not Aleuts or American Indians" would be Alutiiq, Inupiaq or Yupik. Not Inuit. Why would you want to impose the word Inuit on them when that's not what they call their own people?
Thanks for the tip about Access. Word and Excel 97/2000 have lots of compatible programs (OpenOffice.org, StarOffice, Gnumeric, etc., etc.)
Access is the one application I have trouble working with while using Linux, and is the one application that *all* of my day to day data needs are kept on. Access is sitting at just about the right balance point between ease of use and available power for small business use - Linux doesn't have a competitor.
Now if they can just duplicate that g$%#*mn IIS "Windows Authentication" so I can access my company intranet web sites with a Linux box...
Any tech boom that comes along in the US will come to a screeching halt if Senators Hollings and Stevens can get the CBDTPA passed, and anything that includes a "digital interactive device" becomes both unuseable and prohibitively expensive (someone will have to pay the R&D costs - and it will be you). The entire tech industry will move overseas.
But hey! CBDTPA will create it's own tech booms in Europe and places like India so it's not all bad. (Don't know about Mexico & Canada - they're too close to our Senators from Disney.)
Yeah, I know - off topic.