There is no source that I know of for new, legal novels without DRM.
Here's one: WebScription.Net. They specialize in sci-fi and fantasy novels, all available in several DRM-free e-book formats, including MOBI, EPUB, and plain HTML.
There is no difference in a competitive market, over the long term. Not all functioning markets are competitive ones; for example, the demand many only support a small number of suppliers, in which case increasing competition by fiat would prevent the market from functioning efficiently.
Collusion isn't a major problem over the long term in the absence of other influences, as there is always an incentive for a new supplier to enter the market or for one of the existing suppliers to "cheat" by undercutting those it was formerly colluding with. Cartels tend not to endure unless backed up by force.
I believe their official position—prior to the rebranding—was that the "K" doesn't stand for anything. As written in the summary, KDE expands to "K Desktop Environment", which is not a recursive acronym.
If you shout on the bullhorn "FREE CANDY EVERYBODY RUSH INSIDE" the police are within their rights to ask you to use it to say "SORRY I WAS LYING" to calm them down.
[Citation needed.]
Why would anyone ever have the right to make someone speak against their will?
This caused fans to go berzerk [sic] and rush forward, breaking down barriers.
This is a severe mischaracterization. Nothing caused these fans to go berserk; they chose to do so themselves. The police are holding one person accountable for the free and willful actions of others, which is a complete miscarriage of justice.
If so then they're obviously misapplying it. Interference is a positive action. Refusal to act is not any kind of positive action, and cannot constitute interference.
Freedom of speech implies that the recipient wants to listen.
It does? Then it's not freedom of speech, it's freedom to hear.
On the contrary, it is freedom to speak—but it's not "freedom to make people listen" or "freedom to use other's property (involuntarily) to reach a broader audience". Freedom of speech means one can say whatever one wishes without interference or reprisal. It does not mean that others are forced to carry one's message, or that one can use deception (fraud) to trick them into doing so.
Stuffing mailboxes is the former; violating others' private property rights to carry one's message. Unsolicited bulk e-mail makes use of the latter, by falsifying source addresses and claiming non-existent prior business relationships. It also deliberately circumvents the target's e-mail filters, which can be classified as harassment—sending messages which are not only unsolicited, but are clearly known by the sender to be unwanted. Much of spam also violates private property rights through the use of botnets, masses of unsecured computers employed without their owner's knowledge or consent.
If you're going to attempt a car analogy at least make it an accurate one. The Internet equivalent of the highway system—the high-capacity lines spanning multiple states and event countries and continents—is working just fine. The problem is with the last-mile connections, particularly ones in rural areas. These connections are analogous to state and county roads, not highways. These local roads are not managed at the national level; they are primarily funded and maintained by the states, counties and sometimes even municipalities in which they reside. Quality and maintenance vary depending on local preferences; some are little more than bare dirt, while others exceed the qualify of some highways, in full accordance with their typical use and estimated value.
By this analogy, the federal government should stay out of Internet infrastructure matters entirely, and leave the last-mile problem to be dealt with at the local level, by those most affected by it.
I'm not sure that you can have worse service than no service. There are many areas that only allow one (or a few) providers. If that one provider chooses not to give service to a part of it's service area, those people are screwed.
They're not saying that there will be fewer providers; the number of providers can't become negative, after all. Rather, they're saying that forced line-sharing would increase the minimum price at which any provider would be willing to operate in that area, since they must anticipate an even lower profit-margin than they would currently receive without the line-sharing requirement.
Maximum innovation will come from maximum competition. It's called capitalism, but it always seemed to me that capitalists usually want the least amount of competition possible.
Find me anyone who likes dealing with competition—regardless of their ideology—and you might begin to have a point. High prices are just as much a product of competition (on the buyer's side) as low prices are a product of competition among sellers. What is important is the balance between supply and demand, a balance which is distorted whenever coercion is brought to bear on either side. It is just as harmful to manufacture competition through coercive regulations, subsidies, etc. as it is to inhibit competition through coercive monopolies. Moreover, the negative effects are cumulative; one does not cancel out the other.
By this measure, aren't all governments, throughout time, fascist?
Most governments (perhaps not quite all of them) have included at least some degree of fascism. It only makes sense to label them fascist, however, when these elements—business and politics—are unified to a significant degree. If politics are not dominated by business interests (and visa-versa) then the government in question may have traces of fascism without being a fascist government in any meaningful sense. The GP is making the argument that the U.S. government is, in fact, dominated by business interests, and thus fascist. I would tend to agree.
I don't know; what is the point of adding a layer? You can crop just find in the GIMP without adding any layers... just select the Crop tool, set the boundaries, and then click inside the area to indicate that you're done.
One might note that category-based filing would work much better if you could place a file into multiple categories simultaneously—as is actually possible when the files are digital.
Kilo and Mega are SI terms. The point of the prefix is it means the same thing no matter what it applies to.
So a megaplex is exactly 1000 "plexes", then? (Whatever a "plex" is...) And a microprocessor is exactly one millionth of a processor? And "nanotechnology" refers to something exactly one-billionth the scale of a "technology"? Face it, these prefixes both predate SI and have a long history of being used in ways other than that defined for SI units.
Electron-volt isn't an SI unit either, does that mean that keV and MeV should mean something other than 1000 and 1 million eV respectively?
They could, but precedence with regard to this specific unit argues for the use of SI prefixes. Precedence in the case of "bytes" argues otherwise.
And I don't know what your point is anyway - there's nothing "basic" about any of the SI base units, they're all arbitrary to some degree, and represent quantities not neatly represented by base-10 anything.
My point is simply this: would you rather discuss information as integer multiples of one bit, which has strong precedence in information theory, or standardize on "0.125 bytes" instead due to the what amounts to a historical accident? It only makes sense to talk about bytes when the bits are already organized into power-of-two groups, in which case it also makes sense to use powers of two for larger quantities (which are likewise organized into powers of two, for various reasons).
Computer technologists should have made up their own... prefix if they wanted something that meant 1024.
They did. Unfortunately they're particularly bad at choosing names, and came up with prefixes no one wants to use. ("Mebibyte"? Seriously?)
Come up with a better set of names and people might actually switch. In that event, of course, the historic terms ("megabyte" and the like) will probably have to be abandoned as too ambiguous for practical use, so it wouldn't really be a "win" for either side.
They have to serve some sort of DS record for DNSSEC to work at all beyond second-level domains. They could withhold DNSSEC support entirely, of course, but the concept of using one's own DNS servers for third-level and lower domains, or at least having them hosted by someone other than the registrar, is fairly well entrenched. I just don't see them successfully reversing that pattern or forcing such domains to remain unsecured.
You use SI prefixes with SI units. The 'byte' is not an SI unit; it's not even the most basic representation, being a group of eight bits. If you insist on using base-ten units in combination with bytes then you're essentially arguing for layering a base-ten system on top of a base-two one.
So far as I know there is no designated SI unit for information. Following the pattern of the other SI units, however, the best choice would be the bit. If you want base-ten measurements, then, you should use "kilobit", "megabit", etc., which unambiguously use the SI prefixes, official unit or not. The non-SI term "megabyte" will never unambiguously mean "10^6 bytes", and trying to make it so just renders the term useless for any purpose requiring precision.
This really seems like a ploy by VeriSign and friends to make ever more people and companies to purchase signed certificates at $100/year or whatever.
I don't see anything in the DNSSEC specs which would require any external chain-of-trust similar to the current CA system. You just need a secure way to update your resource records with your registrar, which includes your DS (designated signer) record, a public key of your choosing. There's no authentication involved beyond your credentials to update the domain. It's too early to be sure, but this should be included with the purchase of a domain. Once you have your DS record in place you can use it to designate signers for any subdomains.
You could even use it to sign a resource record containing your web server's public TLS key, which allows a real solution to the problem of encryption-only websites: a self-signed certificate which can be securely matched against the host domain, preventing the trivial MITM attacks which currently render such certificates useless. CA-signed certificates would still be useful for establishing real-world identity, of course.
Or at least delete them, if you can't be bothered to keep them up-to-date. It's better to have no comments than to have misleading ones. (The old comments are recorded in the repository, right? If so, you're not really losing anything.)
Who said anything about external references? You could just point to a separate file in the same source-code distribution. Most large project have a directory set aside for documentation; use it.
IDEs and source-code-oriented editors are nice, but in my opinion one should be able to read and edit source code in a pure plain-text editor (or web browser, e.g. for browsing SVN repositories online) without getting completely lost in embedded multi-page proofs only incidentally related to the code. Long explanations should go into separate files for much the same reasons that source modules are divided into separate files; among other things, long files are harder to navigate and search through, regardless of how advanced your editor may be.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
I know the language is imprecise, but it seems perfectly obvious to me that the first clause describes only the authors' goals, while the second part (starting from "and no Warrants shall issue...") describes how such security will be guaranteed—with the unstated assumption being that no searches or seizures will ever take place without a warrant, however "reasonable", thus making all searches and seizures subject to the need for probable cause, oath or affirmation, and specific predefined boundaries.
By that interpretation it wouldn't matter what the TSA (or anyone else) thinks is "reasonable"; they'd still need a specific warrant before performing any search or seizure.
Even better, if the server and the HTML both supply a content-type, the browser should block the plug-in unless the two content-types agree; neither should be ignored.
If torrent files are derivative works because they contain hashes of other works, then any work with a bibliography is a derivative of the works it references. Hashes merely identify the a work; they aren't a copy of it.
Moreover, to the best of my knowledge as a non-lawyer, if something wouldn't qualify for copyright on its own (and thus isn't a work at all) then it can't be a derivative work. Hashes certainly wouldn't qualify by themselves, and it's rather unlikely that any torrent file containing them would either.
The "aiding and abetting" argument would indeed be the most sound approach. To that end—if you wish to support copyright—then once the copyright holder has established in court that a given swarm (identified by hash) is infringing on their copyrights, or the court has granted them an injunction pending a final decision, then you should blacklist that particular hash. However, allowing the swarm to continue when its illegality has not been established in a court of law should never be considered "aiding and abetting", since the tracker doesn't have "knowledge that one of their torrents is being used to facilitate copyright infringement"; they only have the copyright holder's allegations to that effect.
Patents were made to spawn innovation - bypassing secretive guilds by incentivizing the opening of knowledge to public domain in exchange for a limited time monopoly. Projects and society are way too fluid now to keep many inane details secret anyway.
True. However, even if it were possible to keep these details secret, I would still say that secrets which you have a chance of learning or rediscovering are superior to public knowledge you're coercively prevented from using.
I'm opposed to all patents, but if they're going to exist anyway I wish the PTO would at least attempt to limit the rate at which they're granted. For one thing, it would reduce the difficulties they have enforcing the "non-obvious" requirement. My suggestion would be that they grant a specific number of patents each year; perhaps 100 or 500. All the patent applications would be accepted confidentially, and an impartial panel representing the PTO would periodically choose the applications whose publication represents the greatest present benefit to the PTO's constituents, the public, at expiration. The duration of the patent would be chosen by the applicant. Present benefit decreases the longer you have to wait, so a patent with a longer duration offers less present benefit than the same patent with a shorter duration and would be less likely to be accepted. Estimating the costs and benefits of each patent application remains a problem, but the current approach—simply assuming that benefits outweigh costs for every "non-obvious" patent—is even worse in this regard, as no cost/benefit analysis is even attempted.
The accepted applications would be published immediately, so that others know not to implement them, and would confer on their inventors the traditional transferable patent-monopoly privilege for the requested duration from acceptance, subject to invalidation based on prior art (or fraud). The rejected applications would be destroyed for confidentiality's sake, but could be resubmitted for the next session.
You don't need the full kernel source to build a module, just the header files. These are usually placed in a separate package. Is the kernel header package installed by default?
Slashdot Mirror
There is no source that I know of for new, legal novels without DRM.
Here's one: WebScription.Net. They specialize in sci-fi and fantasy novels, all available in several DRM-free e-book formats, including MOBI, EPUB, and plain HTML.
Not affiliated, just a happy customer.
There is no difference in a competitive market, over the long term. Not all functioning markets are competitive ones; for example, the demand many only support a small number of suppliers, in which case increasing competition by fiat would prevent the market from functioning efficiently.
Collusion isn't a major problem over the long term in the absence of other influences, as there is always an incentive for a new supplier to enter the market or for one of the existing suppliers to "cheat" by undercutting those it was formerly colluding with. Cartels tend not to endure unless backed up by force.
I believe their official position—prior to the rebranding—was that the "K" doesn't stand for anything. As written in the summary, KDE expands to "K Desktop Environment", which is not a recursive acronym.
If you shout on the bullhorn "FREE CANDY EVERYBODY RUSH INSIDE" the police are within their rights to ask you to use it to say "SORRY I WAS LYING" to calm them down.
[Citation needed.]
Why would anyone ever have the right to make someone speak against their will?
This caused fans to go berzerk [sic] and rush forward, breaking down barriers.
This is a severe mischaracterization. Nothing caused these fans to go berserk; they chose to do so themselves. The police are holding one person accountable for the free and willful actions of others, which is a complete miscarriage of justice.
If so then they're obviously misapplying it. Interference is a positive action. Refusal to act is not any kind of positive action, and cannot constitute interference.
Freedom of speech implies that the recipient wants to listen.
It does? Then it's not freedom of speech, it's freedom to hear.
On the contrary, it is freedom to speak—but it's not "freedom to make people listen" or "freedom to use other's property (involuntarily) to reach a broader audience". Freedom of speech means one can say whatever one wishes without interference or reprisal. It does not mean that others are forced to carry one's message, or that one can use deception (fraud) to trick them into doing so.
Stuffing mailboxes is the former; violating others' private property rights to carry one's message. Unsolicited bulk e-mail makes use of the latter, by falsifying source addresses and claiming non-existent prior business relationships. It also deliberately circumvents the target's e-mail filters, which can be classified as harassment—sending messages which are not only unsolicited, but are clearly known by the sender to be unwanted. Much of spam also violates private property rights through the use of botnets, masses of unsecured computers employed without their owner's knowledge or consent.
If you're going to attempt a car analogy at least make it an accurate one. The Internet equivalent of the highway system—the high-capacity lines spanning multiple states and event countries and continents—is working just fine. The problem is with the last-mile connections, particularly ones in rural areas. These connections are analogous to state and county roads, not highways. These local roads are not managed at the national level; they are primarily funded and maintained by the states, counties and sometimes even municipalities in which they reside. Quality and maintenance vary depending on local preferences; some are little more than bare dirt, while others exceed the qualify of some highways, in full accordance with their typical use and estimated value.
By this analogy, the federal government should stay out of Internet infrastructure matters entirely, and leave the last-mile problem to be dealt with at the local level, by those most affected by it.
I'm not sure that you can have worse service than no service. There are many areas that only allow one (or a few) providers. If that one provider chooses not to give service to a part of it's service area, those people are screwed.
They're not saying that there will be fewer providers; the number of providers can't become negative, after all. Rather, they're saying that forced line-sharing would increase the minimum price at which any provider would be willing to operate in that area, since they must anticipate an even lower profit-margin than they would currently receive without the line-sharing requirement.
Maximum innovation will come from maximum competition. It's called capitalism, but it always seemed to me that capitalists usually want the least amount of competition possible.
Find me anyone who likes dealing with competition—regardless of their ideology—and you might begin to have a point. High prices are just as much a product of competition (on the buyer's side) as low prices are a product of competition among sellers. What is important is the balance between supply and demand, a balance which is distorted whenever coercion is brought to bear on either side. It is just as harmful to manufacture competition through coercive regulations, subsidies, etc. as it is to inhibit competition through coercive monopolies. Moreover, the negative effects are cumulative; one does not cancel out the other.
By this measure, aren't all governments, throughout time, fascist?
Most governments (perhaps not quite all of them) have included at least some degree of fascism. It only makes sense to label them fascist, however, when these elements—business and politics—are unified to a significant degree. If politics are not dominated by business interests (and visa-versa) then the government in question may have traces of fascism without being a fascist government in any meaningful sense. The GP is making the argument that the U.S. government is, in fact, dominated by business interests, and thus fascist. I would tend to agree.
I don't know; what is the point of adding a layer? You can crop just find in the GIMP without adding any layers... just select the Crop tool, set the boundaries, and then click inside the area to indicate that you're done.
One might note that category-based filing would work much better if you could place a file into multiple categories simultaneously—as is actually possible when the files are digital.
You can always appoint someone else (a trustee) to manage the portfolio for you.
Kilo and Mega are SI terms. The point of the prefix is it means the same thing no matter what it applies to.
So a megaplex is exactly 1000 "plexes", then? (Whatever a "plex" is...) And a microprocessor is exactly one millionth of a processor? And "nanotechnology" refers to something exactly one-billionth the scale of a "technology"? Face it, these prefixes both predate SI and have a long history of being used in ways other than that defined for SI units.
Electron-volt isn't an SI unit either, does that mean that keV and MeV should mean something other than 1000 and 1 million eV respectively?
They could, but precedence with regard to this specific unit argues for the use of SI prefixes. Precedence in the case of "bytes" argues otherwise.
And I don't know what your point is anyway - there's nothing "basic" about any of the SI base units, they're all arbitrary to some degree, and represent quantities not neatly represented by base-10 anything.
My point is simply this: would you rather discuss information as integer multiples of one bit, which has strong precedence in information theory, or standardize on "0.125 bytes" instead due to the what amounts to a historical accident? It only makes sense to talk about bytes when the bits are already organized into power-of-two groups, in which case it also makes sense to use powers of two for larger quantities (which are likewise organized into powers of two, for various reasons).
Computer technologists should have made up their own ... prefix if they wanted something that meant 1024.
They did. Unfortunately they're particularly bad at choosing names, and came up with prefixes no one wants to use. ("Mebibyte"? Seriously?)
Come up with a better set of names and people might actually switch. In that event, of course, the historic terms ("megabyte" and the like) will probably have to be abandoned as too ambiguous for practical use, so it wouldn't really be a "win" for either side.
They have to serve some sort of DS record for DNSSEC to work at all beyond second-level domains. They could withhold DNSSEC support entirely, of course, but the concept of using one's own DNS servers for third-level and lower domains, or at least having them hosted by someone other than the registrar, is fairly well entrenched. I just don't see them successfully reversing that pattern or forcing such domains to remain unsecured.
You use SI prefixes with SI units. The 'byte' is not an SI unit; it's not even the most basic representation, being a group of eight bits. If you insist on using base-ten units in combination with bytes then you're essentially arguing for layering a base-ten system on top of a base-two one.
So far as I know there is no designated SI unit for information. Following the pattern of the other SI units, however, the best choice would be the bit. If you want base-ten measurements, then, you should use "kilobit", "megabit", etc., which unambiguously use the SI prefixes, official unit or not. The non-SI term "megabyte" will never unambiguously mean "10^6 bytes", and trying to make it so just renders the term useless for any purpose requiring precision.
This really seems like a ploy by VeriSign and friends to make ever more people and companies to purchase signed certificates at $100/year or whatever.
I don't see anything in the DNSSEC specs which would require any external chain-of-trust similar to the current CA system. You just need a secure way to update your resource records with your registrar, which includes your DS (designated signer) record, a public key of your choosing. There's no authentication involved beyond your credentials to update the domain. It's too early to be sure, but this should be included with the purchase of a domain. Once you have your DS record in place you can use it to designate signers for any subdomains.
You could even use it to sign a resource record containing your web server's public TLS key, which allows a real solution to the problem of encryption-only websites: a self-signed certificate which can be securely matched against the host domain, preventing the trivial MITM attacks which currently render such certificates useless. CA-signed certificates would still be useful for establishing real-world identity, of course.
If the code evolves, fix the comments.
Or at least delete them, if you can't be bothered to keep them up-to-date. It's better to have no comments than to have misleading ones. (The old comments are recorded in the repository, right? If so, you're not really losing anything.)
Who said anything about external references? You could just point to a separate file in the same source-code distribution. Most large project have a directory set aside for documentation; use it.
IDEs and source-code-oriented editors are nice, but in my opinion one should be able to read and edit source code in a pure plain-text editor (or web browser, e.g. for browsing SVN repositories online) without getting completely lost in embedded multi-page proofs only incidentally related to the code. Long explanations should go into separate files for much the same reasons that source modules are divided into separate files; among other things, long files are harder to navigate and search through, regardless of how advanced your editor may be.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
I know the language is imprecise, but it seems perfectly obvious to me that the first clause describes only the authors' goals, while the second part (starting from "and no Warrants shall issue...") describes how such security will be guaranteed—with the unstated assumption being that no searches or seizures will ever take place without a warrant, however "reasonable", thus making all searches and seizures subject to the need for probable cause, oath or affirmation, and specific predefined boundaries.
By that interpretation it wouldn't matter what the TSA (or anyone else) thinks is "reasonable"; they'd still need a specific warrant before performing any search or seizure.
Even better, if the server and the HTML both supply a content-type, the browser should block the plug-in unless the two content-types agree; neither should be ignored.
If torrent files are derivative works because they contain hashes of other works, then any work with a bibliography is a derivative of the works it references. Hashes merely identify the a work; they aren't a copy of it.
Moreover, to the best of my knowledge as a non-lawyer, if something wouldn't qualify for copyright on its own (and thus isn't a work at all) then it can't be a derivative work. Hashes certainly wouldn't qualify by themselves, and it's rather unlikely that any torrent file containing them would either.
The "aiding and abetting" argument would indeed be the most sound approach. To that end—if you wish to support copyright—then once the copyright holder has established in court that a given swarm (identified by hash) is infringing on their copyrights, or the court has granted them an injunction pending a final decision, then you should blacklist that particular hash. However, allowing the swarm to continue when its illegality has not been established in a court of law should never be considered "aiding and abetting", since the tracker doesn't have "knowledge that one of their torrents is being used to facilitate copyright infringement"; they only have the copyright holder's allegations to that effect.
... whose publication represents the greatest present benefit to the PTO's constituents, the public, at expiration.
I just realized that reordering certain phrases in this sentence "for clarity" completely changed the meaning. What I intended was:
... whose future publication following expiration represents the greatest present benefit to the PTO's constituents, the public.
Patents were made to spawn innovation - bypassing secretive guilds by incentivizing the opening of knowledge to public domain in exchange for a limited time monopoly. Projects and society are way too fluid now to keep many inane details secret anyway.
True. However, even if it were possible to keep these details secret, I would still say that secrets which you have a chance of learning or rediscovering are superior to public knowledge you're coercively prevented from using.
I'm opposed to all patents, but if they're going to exist anyway I wish the PTO would at least attempt to limit the rate at which they're granted. For one thing, it would reduce the difficulties they have enforcing the "non-obvious" requirement. My suggestion would be that they grant a specific number of patents each year; perhaps 100 or 500. All the patent applications would be accepted confidentially, and an impartial panel representing the PTO would periodically choose the applications whose publication represents the greatest present benefit to the PTO's constituents, the public, at expiration. The duration of the patent would be chosen by the applicant. Present benefit decreases the longer you have to wait, so a patent with a longer duration offers less present benefit than the same patent with a shorter duration and would be less likely to be accepted. Estimating the costs and benefits of each patent application remains a problem, but the current approach—simply assuming that benefits outweigh costs for every "non-obvious" patent—is even worse in this regard, as no cost/benefit analysis is even attempted.
The accepted applications would be published immediately, so that others know not to implement them, and would confer on their inventors the traditional transferable patent-monopoly privilege for the requested duration from acceptance, subject to invalidation based on prior art (or fraud). The rejected applications would be destroyed for confidentiality's sake, but could be resubmitted for the next session.
You don't need the full kernel source to build a module, just the header files. These are usually placed in a separate package. Is the kernel header package installed by default?