I'm in PRC now and today I had a politics exam (yes, Marxism and all). In order to prepare for it I looked for some material about the recent meetings of the Party, and it turned out that www.people.com.cn, a government-owned website that is about as official as People's Daily, was inaccessible unless with foreign proxies. Talk about the irony...
I think since DRM breaks the limited-time premise of copyright, copyright holders should lose the right to persecute people copying/cracking their DRMed works. It should be a free-for-all in the DRM world--if your DRM really works, then all right, but otherwise other people will no longer be prevented from copying your work in any way. Take your pick.
By remembering the hotkeys, I can type in MS Equation editor with similar speed (C-r C-f a + b TAB c + d). Of course, there is nothing resembling user-defined LaTeX macros in MS Equation Editor (or OO Math, for that matter), so some complex symbols (such as bold x with tilde) are painful to type repeatedly, and reformatting all equations, e.g. resizing them or make matrices appear in bold-italic instead of a bold font, also entails clicking over every one of them.
The difference is that making a good non-profit distro named FooBar Linux had been widely seen to be acceptable without paying anything, and now the maker probably have to pay up (or change the name) in order to stay legal. People do not like being forced to pay (and what if the fee is further raised in the next year?), nor do they like such policy changes. Besides, $200/yr may really be a significant chunk of money for some important members of the community.
This seems similar to the MP3 decoder situation, even though the latter is about patents. Everyone was made to think that open-source software MP3 decoders are legal without paying the patent owner, and then the patent owner suggested that this might not be the case, and everybody was pissed off.
I think the appearance Microsoft Linux would be no more harmful to the adoption of Linux than the MS FUD on high-profile business magazines---both can cause massive numbers of people shy away from adopting Linux, unless proper rebuttals are published by us in return. And we can not prevent MS from spreading FUD anyway. Moreover, even though Microsoft Linux may hurt the community, this poses no immediate danger in that someone in the community had to change what they are doing (in this case, change product names) or face immediate threat of lawsuit, while defending the Linux trademark like this would certain pose immediate problems to many something-Linux distros and user groups, most of which being the "good guys" in the community who should never be alienated.
If the use of the Linux trademark had been policed as strictly as other trademarked free software such as Apache and Mozilla, from the very beginning, that wouldn't be a very serious problem, since everyone can just adapt when naming their products. However, this is not the case, and everyone has always thought that non-fraudlent use of the Linux trademark is permissible in product names, especially for non-profit uses, and thus a lot people now use Linux in the product names, especially the distros and the user groups and good news sites like LWN, many of which are small and non-profit. It would be very bad if all these people, many of which had been the most active contributors to the community, would have to either pay up or change their long-established name. Besides, would you like to have many things that *should* have been called something-Linux to get some strange name that no ordinary people can tell their relationships to the true Linux? In short, I think this is similar to a marine patent, except that I think an offensive use of a non-marine patent is also wrong, while defending non-marine trademarks is okay to me.
BTW, I do think Linux has better not become a generic name, but only if this comes at a very low cost. $200/yr is too much for some non-profit Linux distros that call themselves something-Linux and for some user groups, etc., and IMHO it is not worth it to make some active community members to pay so much just to prevent the possibility that some sleazyballs would misuse the name (which would be about as serious as a GPL violation, which poses no immediate danger, unlike a SCO-style copyright or patent lawsuit). What I really care about is that no one else can register the trademark and attempting to charge everyone that wants to use it, like what had happened previously, and I don't think we need to go that far merely to prevent THIS.
Well, dot matrix printers are very loud and very slow, while a mono laser is (just slightly) less annoying and churns out pages at 15ppm most of the time--and even when my old HP LaserJet 1200 is slowly interpreting some complex PostScript, it is way faster than the ancient Epson LJ1600 dot matrix printer that has to do two passes for each line at 360dpi.
If you want programming examples, just buy a PostScript printer and download a PostScript manual from the Adobe website. As for quality, the text quality of my LaserJet1200 at a nominal 1200dpi, driven entirely by PostScript-based open source drivers, seems to be better than any 600dpi stuff I have ever seen.
Currently coal/gas/nuclear power plants all converts chemical/nuclear energy into heat then into electricity, and the latter step is quite inefficient and generates a lot of waste heat at the power plant site, where the heat is unneeded. If you just burn the fuel in your room with a gas heater, you have moved all these waste heat into your room, making it much more efficient. Of course, for ultimate heating efficiency, use a heat pump. You may run the heat pump on the power grid, or you may put a generator in your room and use it to run the heat pump, and which one is better depends on the efficiency of your generator, which for a given amount of fuel generates less electricity (thus less heat pumped from outside) but keeps the waste heat in the room, and it also depends on practical difficulties (noise, safety, etc.).
With electric energy you can run a heat pump, so e.g. you use 1kW of electricity to provide 3kW of heat to your room, 2kW of which coming from outside (i.e. it makes the outside even colder). Ordinary heaters are less efficient since they unnecessarily generate entropy by making heat flow from a high-temperature place (the heater) to a low temperature place (the rest of the room).
I know, I know, it is usually silly to try to produce a fire (I mean real flames) with electricity being the sole energy source. However, if I really want to do such a thing (possibly for decorative reasons), electrolysis seems to be a reasonably simple way to do it.
Well, I actually find the system you proposed entirely sensible, but if one want no government intervention, we might as well scrap the patent system altogether and have companies put these "valuable I.P." in trade secrets instead. In the light of current events this might not be such a bad thing after all, at least in certain fields:)
I say, d**n it, just hire the best people in each field and train them to be patent examiners. Pay them $100K a year (or whatever is needed) plus fat rewards for every application successfully rejected, and try to raise the various fees so that the applicants bear the extra cost. I don't care if small inventors can no longer afford to apply for a patent---much of the innovation seems to come from megacorps anyway, or from researchers that do not want to patent everything under the sun. If we can't have sensible patent laws we can at least limit its damage.
I guess such things would cost a ton of energy, especially in a military setting. Can reasonably-sized batteries last long enough for this? Or does every soldier need to carry around a few litres of gasoline, making them suicide bombs when hit by a bullet at the wrong place?::shudders::
There is a bug if the code does not always work the way its author intended (i.e. it would bomb out if some more assertions are inserted). Sometimes the code still happens to work in all cases, but it is still prudent for the kernel developers to fix the code so that it is kept clean.
Of course, if the bug is not exploitable, system admins might delay updating the kernel if a reboot is inconvenient, but for kernel developers, every bug should be fixed whenever possible.
The claimed "fivefold increase in bandwidth" is not that magical. The proposed systems use a lot of RF bandwidth, and in principle the 10Mbps or higher transmission rates can easily fit within that. However, multipath propagation (radio waves travelling in multiple paths from the source to the destination, often with significantly different delays) can distort the signal significantly. This is the same effect as what makes the stuff shown on non-cable TVs seem to have "shadows" beside them. By sending known signals once in a while, the receiver can have a reasonably good idea of how the signal had been distorted by the channel, and it can mostly undo the distortions at a usually slight cost in signal-to-noise ratio. The problem with previous systems is mostly that their solution (such as time-domain equalization) becomes too computationally expensive to be practical when the data rate is so high that the delay spread is many times the duration of the data symbol, for example the Nth data symbol of the last path reaching the receiver may coincide with the (N+20)th data symbol of the first path.
Now it is fairly obvious that it would be a good idea to split the data stream into a number of sub-streams, each transmitting on different frequencies (called subcarriers) at a lower rate. Since the data rate on each carrier is lower, the delay spread of the multiple paths will not be able to span that many data symbols, and equalization would be easy. This is just FDM and has been around forever, but ordinary FDM requires filters that filter out the signal of each subcarrier, which means having a lot of subcarriers is not very practical, and there has to be some bandgap between the frequency bands of neighboring subcarriers to account for non-ideal performance of filters, so some bandwidth waste is inevitable. Now the engineer ponders for a moment on the mathematical formula of the combined signal, and finds that the filters can simply be replaced with FFT and inverse FFT. Voila! OFDM is invented!
The rest of the patent combines OFDM with FEC, high-rate modulation (such as QAM), etc. These are insanely obvious to any EE student.
That's it. Of course there are subtle problem like frequency stability that are sometimes complex to solve well, but the main idea is not that magical. It is just good engineering with common sense. Personally I don't think it is fair for them to disallow others from using this general idea just because they do it first.
As for why no one thought of it earlier, probably there just isn't that much demand for 10+Mbps wireless data transmission before 1993. Also, however trivial an idea is, there just has to be someone who thought of it first and took the trouble of actually publishing and/or using it, and given the current climate there is a high probability that he will try to patent it, be him CSIRO or anyone else.
I think an important reason this patent is generally thought more "reasonable" here is because more people here can understand the details of software patents than those of other fields. It is usually prudent to assume that a new thing is ingenious until your knowledge says otherwise. That's why people like RMS and Knuth limit their anti-patent compaign to software, while some experts in other fields may oppose other kinds of patents.
I don't know why so many people here, quite a lot of which seem to be anti-patent in general, became pro-patent in this case (unless they are Australians, in which case I can understand). In my opinion, no single entity should be able to monopolize on an idea, whether it is a country or a company (the net effect is the same to us outsiders). Besides, I have read the patent in question, and the ideas there such as OFDM and FEC, etc. are actually not all that ingenious. Have a deep understand of real-world channel characteristics and you can also have similar ideas --- the problem is that there is hardly anyone in this field who has not heard about OFDM any more, so no one can demonstrate that to the patent office, even though I'm pretty sure that many of them are perfectly capable of coming up with that idea when it becomes useful.
If patents have some uses it should be used to prevent wholesale copying of complete designs, which is as impossible to accidentally reinvent as it is to write a novel only to find that someone has already written essentially the same thing. The broad patents are better struck down, and I oppose anyone who wants to use them offensively, whether it is big-company-to-small-company, small-company-to-big-company, or government-entity-to-big-company.
I think THAT would be the right punishment. The original admin must revise any change proposed by the offending student. If any further cracking incident happens, the student doing the auditing takes the blame. Of course, if the incident happens because of a backdoor inserted deliberately by the auditor, the admin would be fired and I don't care how hard you punish the auditor.
And then they found that there is no security hole at all... even though they can enter arbitrary SQL in some test page, the associated database user had all privileges revoked when the admin put the site into production. So they just wasted everybody's time over nothing.
My point is that it is sometimes difficult to make sure that a security problem exists without seeing anything you should not see --- at least not sure enough to file a lawsuit. I still think they had better not do any cracking, but this is not a easily made decision.
Assuming the students got the SSNs truly with the sole purpose of verifying the existence of the security flaw, then I think they deserve NO punishment. This is not a black-and-white issue, and the teacher should explain it to both the cracker and the other students very carefully. In this case the crack might do more harm than good, but if the school simply punishes the offending students hard without much explanation, the other students may easily extrapolate that to "don't do anything when you see something wrong", which is cold-blooded and wrong. If such people went into a company like Enron, they will not only cover up whatever seems wrong to them, they will lay the blame on the employee who reported the fraud when the company collapses and they lose their job.
As for someone here saying that they should report to the system admins first before testing the security, of course they should, but it is not always easy, and we should not expect these high school students to think that much. If you stumble into a page where you can enter arbitrary SQL, surely it looks very wrong, but there is still a possibility that the admin had simply revoked any privileges of that test account, instead of removing the test page, when the system went into production, therefore before you do a "SELECT * FROM students" and see something wrong, you cannot be sure that a security hole exists.
If I were the schoolmaster, I think I will explain to the students that, I understand the crackers' intentions are good, but what they are doing is still causing more harm than good, so they will receive neither praise nor punishment for this time, but they should swear that the SSN data are destroyed, and such action is strictly prohibited from now on. As for the website, if the school do lack the expertise to fix it, the system admins should publicly admit that the system has serious security problems, ask the students not to do such cracking again, and they should welcome any student who can and is willing to work with them to fix the problem.
In this case, what you actually need is an agreement that the companies that actually see your design do not disclose it or implement it without paying you money. You don't really need to restrict what other companies or people can or cannot do. What the law should have provided is something that makes such an agreement more enforcable. Instead, you have to get a patent, which causes (sometimes large) collateral damage to independent inventors (it is hard to say whether an idea is obvious until someone invents it independently), and is not that easy to enforce either, in case some company do see your design, reject it, then sell it without giving you anything.
In short, I think patents are highly inefficient in this case, and you just have to use that for now because of the broken law.
Science, such as the evolution theory, gives useful predictions of what you will observe in specific conditions. By contrast, creationism and other non-scientific theories do not give useful predictions --- it is just an explanation. It is not totally impossible that some god did create everything in 6 days 6000 years ago, but due to some reason our observed world appears differently, but we will probably never know for sure what actually happened, in the most absolute sense. Science does not really try to solve this problem, but it tries to make sense of what we do observe and makes some mostly reliable predictions of what we will observe, whenever possible, and for all practical purposes this is enough. Digging deeper probably will require some faith, and it will not result in anything useful in practice.
BTW, I think some people believe in the scientific method too much. Even though most scientists accept it, I guess many ordinary people will not admit that it is a more effective way of gaining knowledge than other, maybe less rigorous, methods. There is no use in explaining to people that the theory of evolution is better because it is derived using the scientific method, if the latter is more controversial than evolution itself.
I haven't look at the current linux kernel closely, but if the networking-related data structures are put into low memory (i.e. memory below one or a few gigabytes) on 32-bit architectures, you would run out of low memory with too many connections. That's if the connection count isn't limited by some other (sometimes artificial) factor. I guess Windows on 32-bit architectures have similar problems.
Last year I bought a very low-end cell phone, and I'm mostly satisfied with it except that it can only store 25 SMS messages and there is no easy way to move them into computers. With such a large storage (actually one megabyte would be enough for SMSs) I guess I'll never need to delete them again.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm in PRC now and today I had a politics exam (yes, Marxism and all). In order to prepare for it I looked for some material about the recent meetings of the Party, and it turned out that www.people.com.cn, a government-owned website that is about as official as People's Daily, was inaccessible unless with foreign proxies. Talk about the irony...
I think since DRM breaks the limited-time premise of copyright, copyright holders should lose the right to persecute people copying/cracking their DRMed works. It should be a free-for-all in the DRM world--if your DRM really works, then all right, but otherwise other people will no longer be prevented from copying your work in any way. Take your pick.
By remembering the hotkeys, I can type in MS Equation editor with similar speed (C-r C-f a + b TAB c + d). Of course, there is nothing resembling user-defined LaTeX macros in MS Equation Editor (or OO Math, for that matter), so some complex symbols (such as bold x with tilde) are painful to type repeatedly, and reformatting all equations, e.g. resizing them or make matrices appear in bold-italic instead of a bold font, also entails clicking over every one of them.
Assuming malicious intent in "most of you" is never acceptable.
This seems similar to the MP3 decoder situation, even though the latter is about patents. Everyone was made to think that open-source software MP3 decoders are legal without paying the patent owner, and then the patent owner suggested that this might not be the case, and everybody was pissed off.
I think the appearance Microsoft Linux would be no more harmful to the adoption of Linux than the MS FUD on high-profile business magazines---both can cause massive numbers of people shy away from adopting Linux, unless proper rebuttals are published by us in return. And we can not prevent MS from spreading FUD anyway. Moreover, even though Microsoft Linux may hurt the community, this poses no immediate danger in that someone in the community had to change what they are doing (in this case, change product names) or face immediate threat of lawsuit, while defending the Linux trademark like this would certain pose immediate problems to many something-Linux distros and user groups, most of which being the "good guys" in the community who should never be alienated.
BTW, I do think Linux has better not become a generic name, but only if this comes at a very low cost. $200/yr is too much for some non-profit Linux distros that call themselves something-Linux and for some user groups, etc., and IMHO it is not worth it to make some active community members to pay so much just to prevent the possibility that some sleazyballs would misuse the name (which would be about as serious as a GPL violation, which poses no immediate danger, unlike a SCO-style copyright or patent lawsuit). What I really care about is that no one else can register the trademark and attempting to charge everyone that wants to use it, like what had happened previously, and I don't think we need to go that far merely to prevent THIS.
If you want programming examples, just buy a PostScript printer and download a PostScript manual from the Adobe website. As for quality, the text quality of my LaserJet1200 at a nominal 1200dpi, driven entirely by PostScript-based open source drivers, seems to be better than any 600dpi stuff I have ever seen.
Currently coal/gas/nuclear power plants all converts chemical/nuclear energy into heat then into electricity, and the latter step is quite inefficient and generates a lot of waste heat at the power plant site, where the heat is unneeded. If you just burn the fuel in your room with a gas heater, you have moved all these waste heat into your room, making it much more efficient. Of course, for ultimate heating efficiency, use a heat pump. You may run the heat pump on the power grid, or you may put a generator in your room and use it to run the heat pump, and which one is better depends on the efficiency of your generator, which for a given amount of fuel generates less electricity (thus less heat pumped from outside) but keeps the waste heat in the room, and it also depends on practical difficulties (noise, safety, etc.).
With electric energy you can run a heat pump, so e.g. you use 1kW of electricity to provide 3kW of heat to your room, 2kW of which coming from outside (i.e. it makes the outside even colder). Ordinary heaters are less efficient since they unnecessarily generate entropy by making heat flow from a high-temperature place (the heater) to a low temperature place (the rest of the room).
I know, I know, it is usually silly to try to produce a fire (I mean real flames) with electricity being the sole energy source. However, if I really want to do such a thing (possibly for decorative reasons), electrolysis seems to be a reasonably simple way to do it.
Well, I actually find the system you proposed entirely sensible, but if one want no government intervention, we might as well scrap the patent system altogether and have companies put these "valuable I.P." in trade secrets instead. In the light of current events this might not be such a bad thing after all, at least in certain fields :)
I say, d**n it, just hire the best people in each field and train them to be patent examiners. Pay them $100K a year (or whatever is needed) plus fat rewards for every application successfully rejected, and try to raise the various fees so that the applicants bear the extra cost. I don't care if small inventors can no longer afford to apply for a patent---much of the innovation seems to come from megacorps anyway, or from researchers that do not want to patent everything under the sun. If we can't have sensible patent laws we can at least limit its damage.
I guess such things would cost a ton of energy, especially in a military setting. Can reasonably-sized batteries last long enough for this? Or does every soldier need to carry around a few litres of gasoline, making them suicide bombs when hit by a bullet at the wrong place? ::shudders::
Of course, if the bug is not exploitable, system admins might delay updating the kernel if a reboot is inconvenient, but for kernel developers, every bug should be fixed whenever possible.
Now it is fairly obvious that it would be a good idea to split the data stream into a number of sub-streams, each transmitting on different frequencies (called subcarriers) at a lower rate. Since the data rate on each carrier is lower, the delay spread of the multiple paths will not be able to span that many data symbols, and equalization would be easy. This is just FDM and has been around forever, but ordinary FDM requires filters that filter out the signal of each subcarrier, which means having a lot of subcarriers is not very practical, and there has to be some bandgap between the frequency bands of neighboring subcarriers to account for non-ideal performance of filters, so some bandwidth waste is inevitable. Now the engineer ponders for a moment on the mathematical formula of the combined signal, and finds that the filters can simply be replaced with FFT and inverse FFT. Voila! OFDM is invented!
The rest of the patent combines OFDM with FEC, high-rate modulation (such as QAM), etc. These are insanely obvious to any EE student.
That's it. Of course there are subtle problem like frequency stability that are sometimes complex to solve well, but the main idea is not that magical. It is just good engineering with common sense. Personally I don't think it is fair for them to disallow others from using this general idea just because they do it first.
As for why no one thought of it earlier, probably there just isn't that much demand for 10+Mbps wireless data transmission before 1993. Also, however trivial an idea is, there just has to be someone who thought of it first and took the trouble of actually publishing and/or using it, and given the current climate there is a high probability that he will try to patent it, be him CSIRO or anyone else.
I think an important reason this patent is generally thought more "reasonable" here is because more people here can understand the details of software patents than those of other fields. It is usually prudent to assume that a new thing is ingenious until your knowledge says otherwise. That's why people like RMS and Knuth limit their anti-patent compaign to software, while some experts in other fields may oppose other kinds of patents.
If patents have some uses it should be used to prevent wholesale copying of complete designs, which is as impossible to accidentally reinvent as it is to write a novel only to find that someone has already written essentially the same thing. The broad patents are better struck down, and I oppose anyone who wants to use them offensively, whether it is big-company-to-small-company, small-company-to-big-company, or government-entity-to-big-company.
I think THAT would be the right punishment. The original admin must revise any change proposed by the offending student. If any further cracking incident happens, the student doing the auditing takes the blame. Of course, if the incident happens because of a backdoor inserted deliberately by the auditor, the admin would be fired and I don't care how hard you punish the auditor.
My point is that it is sometimes difficult to make sure that a security problem exists without seeing anything you should not see --- at least not sure enough to file a lawsuit. I still think they had better not do any cracking, but this is not a easily made decision.
As for someone here saying that they should report to the system admins first before testing the security, of course they should, but it is not always easy, and we should not expect these high school students to think that much. If you stumble into a page where you can enter arbitrary SQL, surely it looks very wrong, but there is still a possibility that the admin had simply revoked any privileges of that test account, instead of removing the test page, when the system went into production, therefore before you do a "SELECT * FROM students" and see something wrong, you cannot be sure that a security hole exists.
If I were the schoolmaster, I think I will explain to the students that, I understand the crackers' intentions are good, but what they are doing is still causing more harm than good, so they will receive neither praise nor punishment for this time, but they should swear that the SSN data are destroyed, and such action is strictly prohibited from now on. As for the website, if the school do lack the expertise to fix it, the system admins should publicly admit that the system has serious security problems, ask the students not to do such cracking again, and they should welcome any student who can and is willing to work with them to fix the problem.
In short, I think patents are highly inefficient in this case, and you just have to use that for now because of the broken law.
BTW, I think some people believe in the scientific method too much. Even though most scientists accept it, I guess many ordinary people will not admit that it is a more effective way of gaining knowledge than other, maybe less rigorous, methods. There is no use in explaining to people that the theory of evolution is better because it is derived using the scientific method, if the latter is more controversial than evolution itself.
I haven't look at the current linux kernel closely, but if the networking-related data structures are put into low memory (i.e. memory below one or a few gigabytes) on 32-bit architectures, you would run out of low memory with too many connections. That's if the connection count isn't limited by some other (sometimes artificial) factor. I guess Windows on 32-bit architectures have similar problems.
Last year I bought a very low-end cell phone, and I'm mostly satisfied with it except that it can only store 25 SMS messages and there is no easy way to move them into computers. With such a large storage (actually one megabyte would be enough for SMSs) I guess I'll never need to delete them again.