such software will always err in favor of the consumer or the copyright holder (or both).
And since the copyright holders pays to get the software written (with money they will later recoup tenfold from us), guess who the software will err in favour of...
I think the soution isn't technical, but legal. Make copyright non transferable, and limit it to at most life+10. Preferably a lot less. This would make the field a bit more even between creators, consumers and the (now previous) copyright holders.
Lets face it, the current system has survived it's usefullness. It was created to protect creators from big business, but has through the years been perverted to the total opposite.
The fact that nothing falls into the public domain any more will create huge problems in the future. It will be really hard to create without infringing on anyones copyright. (most creative works draws heavily from the public domain, and in a few years you will have to look a century or more back to find stuff. It will be a poorer society for everyone.)
Well, if it really is opt-in it's not spam. At work I, for example, have Sun mailing me "spam" on a regular basis. Most I throw away, but sometimes there is an interesting lecture with free beer afterwards or somthing like that...
I mean, as a developer you actually want to know what certain companies are up to. So email marketing áctually has a few legitimate uses.
Not to mention the can-o'-whoopass count Dooku opens up on Obi One in AOTC. He survives not one, but two lightsabre slashes. And not only survives, he is not even maimed, lucking out with only superficial cuts. ...as opposed to a certain sith-lord-in-training who experience a sudden 10kg weight loss trying to save Obi Wan's ass.
My bet is that Anakin kills Dooku meaning to do good but ends up taking his place by Palpatines side. You know, the old "good intentions gone bad" plot... It would fit Palpatines caracter well too, remember that he later tries the same trick on Luke. Geting him to kill Anakin and take his place.
As for Windu, he will probably be killed of in a down and dirty backstabbing (maybe even physically by Palpatine himself), or die last in a glorious "last stand of the Jedi" against Palpatines clone troopers. Personally I would like the former better, but I don't think Lucas can resist the "last stand" cliche.
Joda will not kill anyone. It would be out of caracter for the "wise sensei"-type.
Remember, Lucas is big on classic story themes, and the three I mentioned are common. Just check out any Greek tragedy or Shakespear play. Just my 0.02 kr...
I don't blame them (except for propretorizing the data their users submitted in good faith, but I won't go into that now...) But since they are less usable to me then they used to be, I don't use them any more. To my knowledge there isn't one single selling point (to consumers) for Gracenote that doesn't go for freedb too.
The environment doesn't need to be hospitable to humans. But it probably needs to allow complex molecules to exist for life to form.
In other words, extreme heat or radiation is probably a bad thing. On the other hand, to little of the aforementioned and chemical processes grinds to an halt. That is bad news for any life, no matter how strange. Furthermore the environment needs to be reasonably stable, that is, no sudden unpredictable changes (drastic but predictable changes might be ok)
Anyway, even though this guy makes a few good points, I think he is overly pessimistic. The sheer number of possible locations for eart-like life to form is enough to convince me that it is out there somewhere. And probably lots of non-human like life too. But the environment has to mesure up to some baseline standard. If you breka up all organic molecules on regular intervals life will have a hard time getting anywhere...
The geek community at large has a awkward attitude at best towards women. A lot of my geek friends are either raving sexists in denial, view women as some kind of aliens, or ignore them altogether.
This makes a lot of girls hesitate to get into computers and that is truly a shame. Those are 51% of the potential braincells alive we are talking about! There might be dozens of potential female Linuses out there for all we know!
If nothing else, I bet more geek girls would make my male geek friends a lot less irritating... Am I the only male geek out there with 50%+ female friends?
You are right the internet doesn't exist in my country but their laws dont exist in my country either
Unfortunately, the rest of the world can't say the same thing. (ie Skylarow & The decss-kid) But pointless borderline US-bashing aside, this sets a really crappy precendent. I live a lot closer to Germany than you, and since Germany is a major player in the EU this may spill over on me. And if this becomes standard practice in the EU, there is a posibility it might eventually affect the US too.
And Germany is not the only country to set a crappy example. I regret to inform you that a major newspaper in my country (Sweden btw.) was recently convicted, and sentenced to pay fines for racist statments submitted to their public discussion forum.
In other words: A site like slashdot could concievably be shut down in parts of Europe! How is that not scary?
Help us fight it now, or some day they'll come for you too... The US may be strong on free speech today, but there are no guarantees for the future. I bet a lot of US corporations would like the right to SLAPP with impunity. ...and according to the postings on slashdot those are the ones that sets at least parts of the political agenda.
Those are all good arguments. But in practice the "preserving status quo" argument doesn't work (fortunately).
We have seven parties in the parliament, not just a few. In the nineties we've seen the rise (and fall) of a party from 0% to 10%.
Since the election system is more based on issues and less on advertising and baloons than in the US it's easier to get in without a huge budget. Again, this is not a perfect system. But anything that keeps them from whoring for corporations is fine by me. And I am ready to pay for it.
But you're right, there are lots of room for improvement.
Unfortunately, until the campaign financing laws are changed in our supposedly superior western democracies to prevent corporations or lobby groups from buying politicians (and legislation), we should not expect the politicians to act on our concerns.
Despite what you might think other western democracies doesn't share the US campaign finance system. Many european countries have have wildly different systems, as well as some cultural election differences. For example, in my country most of the parties expenses are paid with taxes. Now, don't scream: "Communists, I knew it!" just jet (we are not). The law guaranties the parties a pretty handsome budget if they get more than 4% of the votes. The more votes, the more cash. I'd argue that this is good because it reduces the need for the parties to whore for company money. Getting votes has a direct monetary reward attached to it! IMHO that is worth the extra taxes if it pays for a government that is more responsive to the people.
Of course this isn't an ideal system either. Of course, we still have our share of trouble and corrupt (or more commonly just plain incompetent) politicians.
However, it would be interesting to see what this kind of system would do to the US political system. ...though i realise this would probably be a hard sell in the US. What? Pay the darn politicians MORE money? Hell no!
I wonder what kind of effect it would have though...
The day it is made public that windows contains "pirated" code (which a system of that size, with closed source and that kind of growth pattern almost certainly do, to some extent) is the day I am breaking out the Champange.
Calling MS Access a database is kind of an overstatement. Besides, development on the JET engin (used in Access) has stopped, and Access itself is scheduled for a slow death.
It's only there for backwards compatibility, more or less...
This is very common, unfortunately. They probably because a) the soundtrack isn't done yet, or b) they want to keep the soundtrack a secret (since it's a part of the whole movie experience, and they don't want to take away too much of that experience with one ad).
Yeah, or Rage Against The Machine's "Bombtrack" intentionally making a return in this movie. IMHO it is a very fitting "theme" song for the matrix movies.
On the other hand, this song has made an appearance in countless movies. Guess it's just good for action.
But port 80 HTTP requests seem to be a lousy way to do this.
So do it on another protocol. Why is it everyone thinks web services are only meant to be HTTP?
SOAP is not dependent on any protocol except maybe ASCII.
Send it by SMTP, FTP or whatever you like. It's just an XML document following a certain schema agreed upon by all involved. This means that any way you can transmit plain text you can run a "web service".
I blame MS for this fixation on HTTP. ...Though I have actuallty read a paper by some ms developer complaining about how HTTP is not well suited for all SOAP requests (beeing a stateless protocol some things are hard to do...).
For a lot of companies HTTP is an exposed interface (for others it's disconnected from core data). This sounds like the same old "security on the internet" thing we've been hearing for years now.
Ehmm... Not really the same thing.
The good 'ol www is a machine <--> human interface. Web services on the other hand is primarily a machine <--> machine interface.
It has some uses since HTML and the www is not well suited for automated reading. (If you ever wrote a screen-scrape program and tried to keep it working for more than a few months you'd agree with me...)
Problem is, what you are really doing is exposing a api for server to server communication to the general public. Web services makes this an easy task, and chanses are people will forget to secure their apps. Any hole will be a remote hole...
Scary thought, huh? Might be the next outlook. ...or not
They have their flaws, but any standard way to connect systems in a platform-agnostic way without worrying about the n firewalls that may or may not block the way between them is bound to get some support from developers. Speed is not always critical, and a lot of times you don't know shit about your users infrastructure. In those cases web services help a lot. Besides, the typical business case for a web service is two servers talking to each other (HTTP, FTP, SMTP or other protocol). So there is usually no human client involved. (Of course there might be a browser in the other end, but if you buid a web service just for that you might as well just have a ordinary dynamic web page.)
Seems this is the way it's gonna be, whatever we think about it. With the support of MS and Sun and an ever increasing mindshare Web Services will be hard to avoid soon...
There are problems as well, we might be creating a really big pile of shit that is bound hit the fan in a few years. Time will tell, there really is no way to tell yet.
Lets just hope this won't be a new MS Outlook...
Anyway, your bashing on open protocols make me think you just might be a troll. So I guess I just been trolled. damn!
Slashdot Mirror
such software will always err in favor of the consumer or the copyright holder (or both).
And since the copyright holders pays to get the software written (with money they will later recoup tenfold from us), guess who the software will err in favour of...
I think the soution isn't technical, but legal. Make copyright non transferable, and limit it to at most life+10. Preferably a lot less.
This would make the field a bit more even between creators, consumers and the (now previous) copyright holders.
Lets face it, the current system has survived it's usefullness. It was created to protect creators from big business, but has through the years been perverted to the total opposite.
The fact that nothing falls into the public domain any more will create huge problems in the future. It will be really hard to create without infringing on anyones copyright. (most creative works draws heavily from the public domain, and in a few years you will have to look a century or more back to find stuff. It will be a poorer society for everyone.)
All this for a bloody mouse.
Thanks for the info, I am just a lowly programmer, and not into law very much. ;-)
What is your opinion of class action lawsuits? Will they change anything fundamental in the current system, and in what way?
Well, if it really is opt-in it's not spam. At work I, for example, have Sun mailing me "spam" on a regular basis.
Most I throw away, but sometimes there is an interesting lecture with free beer afterwards or somthing like that...
I mean, as a developer you actually want to know what certain companies are up to.
So email marketing áctually has a few legitimate uses.
I don't know about the rest of europe. But Sweden doesn't have class action lawsuits.
Not to mention the can-o'-whoopass count Dooku opens up on Obi One in AOTC.
He survives not one, but two lightsabre slashes. And not only survives, he is not even maimed, lucking out with only superficial cuts.
...as opposed to a certain sith-lord-in-training who experience a sudden 10kg weight loss trying to save Obi Wan's ass.
My bet is that Anakin kills Dooku meaning to do good but ends up taking his place by Palpatines side.
You know, the old "good intentions gone bad" plot...
It would fit Palpatines caracter well too, remember that he later tries the same trick on Luke. Geting him to kill Anakin and take his place.
As for Windu, he will probably be killed of in a down and dirty backstabbing (maybe even physically by Palpatine himself), or die last in a glorious "last stand of the Jedi" against Palpatines clone troopers. Personally I would like the former better, but I don't think Lucas can resist the "last stand" cliche.
Joda will not kill anyone. It would be out of caracter for the "wise sensei"-type.
Remember, Lucas is big on classic story themes, and the three I mentioned are common. Just check out any Greek tragedy or Shakespear play.
Just my 0.02 kr...
But slashdot has deleted content on at least one occasion.
When they got hit with the DMCA by the Scientologists...
I don't blame them (except for propretorizing the data their users submitted in good faith, but I won't go into that now...) But since they are less usable to me then they used to be, I don't use them any more.
To my knowledge there isn't one single selling point (to consumers) for Gracenote that doesn't go for freedb too.
The environment doesn't need to be hospitable to humans. But it probably needs to allow complex molecules to exist for life to form.
In other words, extreme heat or radiation is probably a bad thing.
On the other hand, to little of the aforementioned and chemical processes grinds to an halt. That is bad news for any life, no matter how strange.
Furthermore the environment needs to be reasonably stable, that is, no sudden unpredictable changes (drastic but predictable changes might be ok)
Anyway, even though this guy makes a few good points, I think he is overly pessimistic. The sheer number of possible locations for eart-like life to form is enough to convince me that it is out there somewhere.
And probably lots of non-human like life too.
But the environment has to mesure up to some baseline standard. If you breka up all organic molecules on regular intervals life will have a hard time getting anywhere...
- I am a boy.
- What you said needed to be said!
The geek community at large has a awkward attitude at best towards women. A lot of my geek friends are either raving sexists in denial, view women as some kind of aliens, or ignore them altogether.This makes a lot of girls hesitate to get into computers and that is truly a shame.
Those are 51% of the potential braincells alive we are talking about! There might be dozens of potential female Linuses out there for all we know!
If nothing else, I bet more geek girls would make my male geek friends a lot less irritating...
Am I the only male geek out there with 50%+ female friends?
In this case, it's simple. You are either for free speech, or not.
If you are opposed to free speech for your enemies you are not for free speech.
I think Voltaire said it best a few hundred years ago:
"I may disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
You are right the internet doesn't exist in my country but their laws dont exist in my country either
Unfortunately, the rest of the world can't say the same thing. (ie Skylarow & The decss-kid)
But pointless borderline US-bashing aside, this sets a really crappy precendent. I live a lot closer to Germany than you, and since Germany is a major player in the EU this may spill over on me.
And if this becomes standard practice in the EU, there is a posibility it might eventually affect the US too.
And Germany is not the only country to set a crappy example. I regret to inform you that a major newspaper in my country (Sweden btw.) was recently convicted, and sentenced to pay fines for racist statments submitted to their public discussion forum.
In other words: A site like slashdot could concievably be shut down in parts of Europe!
How is that not scary?
Help us fight it now, or some day they'll come for you too... The US may be strong on free speech today, but there are no guarantees for the future.
I bet a lot of US corporations would like the right to SLAPP with impunity.
...and according to the postings on slashdot those are the ones that sets at least parts of the political agenda.
You have been warned.
You can call RMS many things. But "not a real programmer" is not one of them.
The guy is a one mother of an überhacker for f**ks sake!
Humans are animal all right. ;-)
But some people would argue that mankind is the Microsoft of the ecosystem
Those are all good arguments.
But in practice the "preserving status quo" argument doesn't work (fortunately).
We have seven parties in the parliament, not just a few.
In the nineties we've seen the rise (and fall) of a party from 0% to 10%.
Since the election system is more based on issues and less on advertising and baloons than in the US it's easier to get in without a huge budget.
Again, this is not a perfect system. But anything that keeps them from whoring for corporations is fine by me.
And I am ready to pay for it.
But you're right, there are lots of room for improvement.
Unfortunately, until the campaign financing laws are changed in our supposedly superior western democracies to prevent corporations or lobby groups from buying politicians (and legislation), we should not expect the politicians to act on our concerns.
Despite what you might think other western democracies doesn't share the US campaign finance system. Many european countries have have wildly different systems, as well as some cultural election differences.
For example, in my country most of the parties expenses are paid with taxes. Now, don't scream: "Communists, I knew it!" just jet (we are not).
The law guaranties the parties a pretty handsome budget if they get more than 4% of the votes. The more votes, the more cash. I'd argue that this is good because it reduces the need for the parties to whore for company money. Getting votes has a direct monetary reward attached to it!
IMHO that is worth the extra taxes if it pays for a government that is more responsive to the people.
Of course this isn't an ideal system either. Of course, we still have our share of trouble and corrupt (or more commonly just plain incompetent) politicians.
However, it would be interesting to see what this kind of system would do to the US political system.
...though i realise this would probably be a hard sell in the US. What? Pay the darn politicians MORE money? Hell no!
I wonder what kind of effect it would have though...
The day it is made public that windows contains "pirated" code (which a system of that size, with closed source and that kind of growth pattern almost certainly do, to some extent) is the day I am breaking out the Champange.
I wish they could just behave sensible, though...
Calling MS Access a database is kind of an overstatement.
Besides, development on the JET engin (used in Access) has stopped, and Access itself is scheduled for a slow death.
It's only there for backwards compatibility, more or less...
Sorry, I stand corrected.
Ehm, no... that would be the northern ice cap.
This is very common, unfortunately. They probably because a) the soundtrack isn't done yet, or b) they want to keep the soundtrack a secret (since it's a part of the whole movie experience, and they don't want to take away too much of that experience with one ad).
Yeah, or Rage Against The Machine's "Bombtrack" intentionally making a return in this movie.
IMHO it is a very fitting "theme" song for the matrix movies.
On the other hand, this song has made an appearance in countless movies. Guess it's just good for action.
But port 80 HTTP requests seem to be a lousy way to do this.
So do it on another protocol.
Why is it everyone thinks web services are only meant to be HTTP?
SOAP is not dependent on any protocol except maybe ASCII.
Send it by SMTP, FTP or whatever you like. It's just an XML document following a certain schema agreed upon by all involved. This means that any way you can transmit plain text you can run a "web service".
I blame MS for this fixation on HTTP.
...Though I have actuallty read a paper by some ms developer complaining about how HTTP is not well suited for all SOAP requests (beeing a stateless protocol some things are hard to do...).
For a lot of companies HTTP is an exposed interface (for others it's disconnected from core data). This sounds like the same old "security on the internet" thing we've been hearing for years now.
Ehmm... Not really the same thing.
The good 'ol www is a machine <--> human interface.
Web services on the other hand is primarily a machine <--> machine interface.
It has some uses since HTML and the www is not well suited for automated reading. (If you ever wrote a screen-scrape program and tried to keep it working for more than a few months you'd agree with me...)
Problem is, what you are really doing is exposing a api for server to server communication to the general public.
Web services makes this an easy task, and chanses are people will forget to secure their apps.
Any hole will be a remote hole...
Scary thought, huh?
Might be the next outlook.
...or not
They have their flaws, but any standard way to connect systems in a platform-agnostic way without worrying about the n firewalls that may or may not block the way between them is bound to get some support from developers.
Speed is not always critical, and a lot of times you don't know shit about your users infrastructure. In those cases web services help a lot.
Besides, the typical business case for a web service is two servers talking to each other (HTTP, FTP, SMTP or other protocol). So there is usually no human client involved. (Of course there might be a browser in the other end, but if you buid a web service just for that you might as well just have a ordinary dynamic web page.)
Seems this is the way it's gonna be, whatever we think about it. With the support of MS and Sun and an ever increasing mindshare Web Services will be hard to avoid soon...
There are problems as well, we might be creating a really big pile of shit that is bound hit the fan in a few years.
Time will tell, there really is no way to tell yet.
Lets just hope this won't be a new MS Outlook...
Anyway, your bashing on open protocols make me think you just might be a troll. So I guess I just been trolled.
damn!