I know it's off topic but you have a TON to learn if you think the reason Bobby Fischer is being held has anything to do with 9/11.
He had been uncaught. Despite his occasionally popping up, he had been ignored. Had he been arrested, it's a pretty good bet that the number of supporters he has would have given him a very light penalty or even a pardon -- I mean, the man is considered a genius, a national hero, and now he's being condemned for playing a chess game. After years of being on the run from US authorities, he made some rather strong post-9/11 statements, and that simply does not go over well in the current atmosphere.
The presentation of something is also copyrightable, and is in and of itself a creative work -- a collection of poems in a particular order is copyrightable.
Radio stations can probably argue that they playlist that they have chosen is covered by copyright -- even if Microsoft removes the names of the radio stations, and just lifts th eplaylists.
Never have I heard of a more extraordinary law being made, and one severely violating the spirit of our Constitution, than laws preventing felons from voting while they are serving their sentence -- it's *easier* to locate felons for voting day than anyone else. Futhermore, a few states even prevent convicted felons from voting *after* they get out of jail.
Here's some discussion. Disallowing felons from voting is really primarily a Republican tool (since felons vote overwhelmingly Democrat). Isn't it a wonderful system? (Elected) Legislators get to decide what constitutes a felony, and then prevent people who violate laws that they pass from voting in future elections.
The only party I've heard say anything directly on the subject is an official in the Republican Party (though I'm sure both parties are working hard to work on voters). According to the gentleman, they have people standing out saying "Are you Republican or undecided?" If the person says that they're something else, they thank them and send them on their way, and if they say "Republican" or "undecided", they ask them if they'd like a voter registration card.
Insofar as I care at all about the long-past service record of either Bush or Kerry, Bush slipped out of Vietnam, and Kerry fought there. I don't think that the whole damn thing has much to do with my vote for the Presidency, in any event.
Now, can we concern ourselves with, y'know, the issues, rather than the silly character arguments that are composing the body of this election?
Such as: What, specifically, does *Kerry* intend to do differently in the War on Terror? He's criticized Bush's handling. How does he think four years with him be different?
Such as: Why is Bush pushing idiotic amendments to the Constitution when most people are against amending the Constitution to ban gay marriage?
Such as: Why, in the face of a global AIDS crisis, is Bush sacrificing lives (including non-Christian lives) to push a religious agenda?
Such as: How do either Bush or Kerry intend to fund (or to cut) Social Security?
Such as: What, specifically, are plans for alternative fuel research from each one? We've had nothing but vagaries from both.
Such as: What, specifically, are plans for NASA work from each one?
Such as: What, specifically, is policy towards tax law and privacy law online?
That's okay. I haven't seen Fahrenheit 9/11, and I have no idea what the Da Vinci Code is, so I'm pretty sure I'm safe.
I was basing what I said on later news reports after people started complaining about PATRIOT. If Moore included something from that into Fahrenheit 9/11, he might have used the same sources, though.
And how accessable is legalese? How many people can read and understand the legal codes that govern their lives? Our legal code is absolutely huge, even ignoring case law that forms the precedent portion of it. Hell, the PATRIOT Act didn't get read by the legislators responsible for passing it -- do you expect the *people* to do so?
Why are most of the posts here negatively directed at the US? After all, it was Austrailia that agreed to extradite this guy. Shouln't the negativity be directed there instead?
When the last superpower and your largest military ally requests that you do something, it's not just a matter of saying "piss off".
I agree that people should only be liable for crimes if their actions are crimes on their soil, though. To do otherwise is madness -- it's still vaguely doable with basic client-server systems, but start building P2P systems with transactions and operations that might easily span twenty countries, and you stand on the brink of a legal system breakdown. If I run a porn server and someone in China or Iran downloads some of my porn, am I subject to Chinese or Iranian law? After all, I did supply them with content in an illegal manner, just as this guy did. The United States should consider exactly what kind of floodgates it might be opening before it starts a precedent of remote accountability for crimes.
Granted, as a US citizen, if I were in such a situation, I probably would not be extradited to China, as the US would tell China to piss off if China asked for an extradition, just ignoring international law. That's not a really great state of affairs either, though.
Why should anyone be prohibited from copying and distributing any information that comes into his possession?
Because by granting legally-enforced limited time monopolies over redistribution of created works, we allow for a mechanism to fund the creation of such content.
There could be other mechanisms used to fund content creation, but I haven't seen anything particularly convincing yet.
Of course, one could say that the current copyright durations have nothing whatsoever to do with promoting the creation of content...
When it gets down to it-talking trade balances here-once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here-once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel-once the Invisible Hand has taken all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity-y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else:
music movies microcode (software) high-speed pizza delivery
You can do work on a computer without a fast Internet connection for just about every type of computer science research.
Just as with other fields, having the Internet available gives you a good source of resources available, a tool to provide inexpensive communication and entertainment, and so forth. But it's not really necessary to have a fast Internet connection to get a CS major. It isn't actually even necessary to be able to program to get a CS major at some places, though I'd say that it's probably nice.
Software's the same way. If people would actually say "Firefox Web Browser," it would be okay. Instead they say things like "SSH via PUTTY to your Fedore Core 2 box with SCREEN installed and pipe MAN to GREP." For Joe Not A UNIX Administrator, this is impossible to understand through context clues.
Who says this to Joe Not A UNIX Administrator, though?
If you are coming from a 0 knowledge perspective, which sounds better to you: Internet Information Server or Apache?
The problem is that if you have zero knowledge, neither is enough to get you going. "Internet Information Server"? I guess it's some person that brings information to people. It's not enough to let you identify what's going on from just the name. There's some data there, yes, but not enough to be particularly useful.
Even take much more easily described things...say, Adobe Illustrator. Just hearing the name lets you probably know that this piece of software has something to do with art -- but not enough to let you know whether or not you need to buy it.
No, if I had to choose characteristics for a name, I'd be much more interested in the following characteristics:
* Not sounding like anything else. Open Source has a bad history of this, especially with puns and takes on existing software packages.
* Being easy for an English-speaker to pronounce and derive a pronunciation from a spelling. GNU, PNG, and so forth -- there are a lot of difficult-to-pronounce or oddly-pronounced projects.
* Not relating to specific technical characteristics of the project. These things change. "Lightweight FTP Server" may not always be so lightweight, and the "Linux Sound Server" may not always only run on Linux.
* Not conflicting with a trademarked name. It just causes problems down the line, and there are tons of good names out there.
* Not using potentially offensive names. SATAN may be a great tool, but it's really hard to use in a data center without raising CIO eyebrows.
* Avoiding useless words. "Advanced" should never exist in a software package name.
If this is the beginning of the end for the traditional publication system (hopefully in *all* fields -- computer science has a large chunk of papers freely available, but not all fields, and not all are so lucky) I will be overjoyed. Free access to research data is *huge*.
Now, the possible spectre is if research journals can't make money by charging $200 to view a research paper, we might lose the existing mechanism supporting peer review. However, I'd much rather build a new one (The cost is in distribution and trust management, ne? We *love* designing new systems to manage these on the Internet! P2P + PGP + some idiot-proof front ends, and we're talking.)
This also means that cutting-edge knowlede spreads more quickly, and is available to people "outside the field" -- i.e. those that don't buy in to the expensive journals that mark you as being "in the field".
I am overjoyed. I'm not sure who initiated this policy shift, but they deserve major kudos.
Yeah, good point. People can't handle non-descriptive names. I should stop calling my buddy Dave "Dave" and go with "Balding Black-haired Jewish guy".
Let's be serious -- people are really good at handling names. And besides, you can only have so many "Notepads".
Besides which, I'd say the names there *are* pretty descripting:
* Apache. Okay, this one isn't, but if you use it, you know what it is.
* Firefox. Fair enough, but I think this has more to do with the name changing each week than with the actual name being difficult. I mean, the competition is, what, "Netscape Navigator" (Makes me think of a GPS package), "Opera" (Music software?), "Konqueror" (A video game, maybe?), Safari (Another video game?), and so forth.
* Mono -- Yeah, but is "Java" any more descriptive?
* BitTorrent -- Good *God*, man, that's about as descriptive as you can get.
* Grep -- Says what it does, and if you don't know what "global regular expression" means, you probably don't want to be using grep.
* PuTTY -- It's a virtual TTY program. What, "telnet" is more descriptive?
* Script-Fu -- a scripting system. I guess they could have called it Gimp-Script.
And come on -- nobody goes in for descriptive names. Are cars named descriptively? "Big Towncar", etc? We can cope.
Oh, and as for reasons that I don't like this particular implementation of a DB-based filesystem -- they add the idea of attributes, which is cutesy, kinda of like Nautilus did with emblems (grr...darn desktop-environment-level FS stuff), but then they overload the keyword namespace with attributes, which is just plain silly, and runs the risk of any app using attributes getting into name collisions.
Why you don't want a DB-based FS
on
Database File System
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I hate GNOME-VFS and KIOSlaves and all that stuff that people try to roll into a higher layer than they should. The idea of combining VFS functionality and a *desktop environment* is *stupid* and exactly the sort of fragmentation that hurts everyone. Want a userspace VFS layer (like, other than the existing transparent systems like LUFS and FUSE, which are much better if you can use them, because existing apps continue to work) Fine. Make one. Call it libvfs, and make KDE and GNOME bindings. But for the love of God, quit trying to roll filesystem functionality into desktop environments. It's ridiculous, and not where it belongs.
That being said, I'm still not a huge fan of this.
There are three main features that people seem to want with a DB-based FS:
* Transaction/views/high-level-DB functionality.
You don't want a FS that tries to do all this. DBMSes have worked for a long time to do this efficiently. If you want this, use a real DBMS, because it's going to smoke what someone tried to hack up into a filesystem.
* Automated index updates. Basically, locate but atomatically updated as changes occur.
Mac OS Classic had synchronous index updates as the filesystem ran. This makes the filesystem slow. It sucks for servers.
It's a much better idea to do asynchronous index updates, where the index approximates the filesystem quickly, but perhaps not right away -- you can do that without killing performance. Basically, you have the kernel notify a userspace daemon when changes occur, which rebuilds the part of the directory hierarchy (possibly waiting a while to see if it can use idle time). If a ton of changes occur to a small portion of the directory hierarchy, instead of trying to keep up with each change (say, a million changes to part of the directory hierarchy), the update daemon rolls all those queued up updates into a singled queued up full update of that entire portion of the directory hierarchy. It does a bit of extra indexing, but doesn't get backlogged.
This *could* be done under Linux, but there is one bit of kernel support that is missing -- currently, it is unusably inefficient for an app using Linux's existing dnotify() directory monitoring mechanism to deal with (a) changes to a directory containing many entries and (b) changes to directories anywhere on a filesystem (currently, dnotify() requires a FD for each directory to be monitored).
There *is* a enhanced dnotify patch out that would improve Linux's dnotify() mechanism to the point where people can write daemons with this, but Linus has not yet rolled it in. Once he does so, we can get the ball rolling on such daemons.
* Indexing of metadata.
People want to be able to search for their files using metadata. Again, this can just as easily be done using such a daemon. Existing apps continue to work, people can choose where to put something in a unique hirarchy so that they can reach it again, but files can also be addressed via metadata. If you want to provide, say, a tabbed file selector containing a tab for selecting files via metadata, that's quite feasible.
A major reasons why you don't want to provide a full DB-based interface is that you lose the existing hierarchical representation, and every app in the world stops working. You don't want people to just "save this file to a filesystem" and have to address it via metadata -- you want the user to give the thing some kind of unique identifier.
Awesome idea, could provide significant benefits... but unfortunately written in Java.
This sort of thing would be incredibly interesting if it were done in C or something else least-common-denominator that can be used in any piece of software.
Re:You have no "constitutional right" to avoid MSI
on
More Microsoft Patents
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· Score: 1
And just to clarify the above, even the establishment of such a system is a right, not a responsibility. Congress could just say "Nah, I don't think we need to use that right of ours", and throw out tha patent and trademark systems, if such a vote was made. They'd still be perfectly well within the bounds of the Constitution.
Re:You have no "constitutional right" to avoid MSI
on
More Microsoft Patents
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· Score: 1
There is no constitutional right to using a web browser of your choosing. But getting a patent is.
No, you do *not* have a "consitutional right" to get a patent. Congress has the consitutional right to grant monopolies to people to promote advances in the arts and sciences, and that's as far as they have to go. If they want to make only white, left-handed, college-educated people who can pay a $1M filing fee and drive a Beamer whose birthname begins with "Q" be able to apply for a patent, that's perfectly constitutional. If they want to say "you need to own MSIE to apply for a patent", then they are still in full consitutional compliance.
If, however, in order to get a patent you must use MSIE, then I believe my constitutional right is violated.
Okay. In this case, however, your belief is not correct.
You can argue that it is undesireable, and you can write your representatives to ask them to push for change, but you have no basis for claiming that it is unconsitutional.
If Microsoft hadn't done this, the broken, inflexible, and easily-exploited SPF would have spread around the world. (Well, it still technically could do so, but SPF tied itself to Microsoft, so folks would have to first extricate the SPF people from Microsoft.)
Yahoo's DomainKeys is only a marginally better solution.
A GPG-based system -- now *there's* the way to go.
Slashdot Mirror
I know it's off topic but you have a TON to learn if you think the reason Bobby Fischer is being held has anything to do with 9/11.
He had been uncaught. Despite his occasionally popping up, he had been ignored. Had he been arrested, it's a pretty good bet that the number of supporters he has would have given him a very light penalty or even a pardon -- I mean, the man is considered a genius, a national hero, and now he's being condemned for playing a chess game. After years of being on the run from US authorities, he made some rather strong post-9/11 statements, and that simply does not go over well in the current atmosphere.
The presentation of something is also copyrightable, and is in and of itself a creative work -- a collection of poems in a particular order is copyrightable.
Radio stations can probably argue that they playlist that they have chosen is covered by copyright -- even if Microsoft removes the names of the radio stations, and just lifts th eplaylists.
now you see how stupid it is to predict 20 yrs? i can make anything sound logical and acceptable. ...in Japan!
How about we let felons vote first?
Never have I heard of a more extraordinary law being made, and one severely violating the spirit of our Constitution, than laws preventing felons from voting while they are serving their sentence -- it's *easier* to locate felons for voting day than anyone else. Futhermore, a few states even prevent convicted felons from voting *after* they get out of jail.
Here's some discussion. Disallowing felons from voting is really primarily a Republican tool (since felons vote overwhelmingly Democrat). Isn't it a wonderful system? (Elected) Legislators get to decide what constitutes a felony, and then prevent people who violate laws that they pass from voting in future elections.
The only party I've heard say anything directly on the subject is an official in the Republican Party (though I'm sure both parties are working hard to work on voters). According to the gentleman, they have people standing out saying "Are you Republican or undecided?" If the person says that they're something else, they thank them and send them on their way, and if they say "Republican" or "undecided", they ask them if they'd like a voter registration card.
Stop. Wait. Think.
You are arguing about minutiae.
Insofar as I care at all about the long-past service record of either Bush or Kerry, Bush slipped out of Vietnam, and Kerry fought there. I don't think that the whole damn thing has much to do with my vote for the Presidency, in any event.
Now, can we concern ourselves with, y'know, the issues, rather than the silly character arguments that are composing the body of this election?
Such as: What, specifically, does *Kerry* intend to do differently in the War on Terror? He's criticized Bush's handling. How does he think four years with him be different?
Such as: Why is Bush pushing idiotic amendments to the Constitution when most people are against amending the Constitution to ban gay marriage?
Such as: Why, in the face of a global AIDS crisis, is Bush sacrificing lives (including non-Christian lives) to push a religious agenda?
Such as: How do either Bush or Kerry intend to fund (or to cut) Social Security?
Such as: What, specifically, are plans for alternative fuel research from each one? We've had nothing but vagaries from both.
Such as: What, specifically, are plans for NASA work from each one?
Such as: What, specifically, is policy towards tax law and privacy law online?
That's okay. I haven't seen Fahrenheit 9/11, and I have no idea what the Da Vinci Code is, so I'm pretty sure I'm safe.
I was basing what I said on later news reports after people started complaining about PATRIOT. If Moore included something from that into Fahrenheit 9/11, he might have used the same sources, though.
Nah. We just need a better trust system.
If this is a rural community, wouldn't it be more likely to support Rush than not?
And how accessable is legalese? How many people can read and understand the legal codes that govern their lives? Our legal code is absolutely huge, even ignoring case law that forms the precedent portion of it. Hell, the PATRIOT Act didn't get read by the legislators responsible for passing it -- do you expect the *people* to do so?
Why are most of the posts here negatively directed at the US? After all, it was Austrailia that agreed to extradite this guy. Shouln't the negativity be directed there instead?
When the last superpower and your largest military ally requests that you do something, it's not just a matter of saying "piss off".
I agree that people should only be liable for crimes if their actions are crimes on their soil, though. To do otherwise is madness -- it's still vaguely doable with basic client-server systems, but start building P2P systems with transactions and operations that might easily span twenty countries, and you stand on the brink of a legal system breakdown. If I run a porn server and someone in China or Iran downloads some of my porn, am I subject to Chinese or Iranian law? After all, I did supply them with content in an illegal manner, just as this guy did. The United States should consider exactly what kind of floodgates it might be opening before it starts a precedent of remote accountability for crimes.
Granted, as a US citizen, if I were in such a situation, I probably would not be extradited to China, as the US would tell China to piss off if China asked for an extradition, just ignoring international law. That's not a really great state of affairs either, though.
Why should anyone be prohibited from copying and distributing any information that comes into his possession?
Because by granting legally-enforced limited time monopolies over redistribution of created works, we allow for a mechanism to fund the creation of such content.
There could be other mechanisms used to fund content creation, but I haven't seen anything particularly convincing yet.
Of course, one could say that the current copyright durations have nothing whatsoever to do with promoting the creation of content...
When it gets down to it-talking trade balances here-once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here-once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel-once the Invisible Hand has taken all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity-y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else:
music
movies
microcode (software)
high-speed pizza delivery
-- Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash.
Feel free to point out the section of the Constitution that prohibits this.
You can do work on a computer without a fast Internet connection for just about every type of computer science research.
Just as with other fields, having the Internet available gives you a good source of resources available, a tool to provide inexpensive communication and entertainment, and so forth. But it's not really necessary to have a fast Internet connection to get a CS major. It isn't actually even necessary to be able to program to get a CS major at some places, though I'd say that it's probably nice.
Software's the same way. If people would actually say "Firefox Web Browser," it would be okay. Instead they say things like "SSH via PUTTY to your Fedore Core 2 box with SCREEN installed and pipe MAN to GREP." For Joe Not A UNIX Administrator, this is impossible to understand through context clues.
Who says this to Joe Not A UNIX Administrator, though?
If you are coming from a 0 knowledge perspective, which sounds better to you: Internet Information Server or Apache?
The problem is that if you have zero knowledge, neither is enough to get you going. "Internet Information Server"? I guess it's some person that brings information to people. It's not enough to let you identify what's going on from just the name. There's some data there, yes, but not enough to be particularly useful.
Even take much more easily described things...say, Adobe Illustrator. Just hearing the name lets you probably know that this piece of software has something to do with art -- but not enough to let you know whether or not you need to buy it.
No, if I had to choose characteristics for a name, I'd be much more interested in the following characteristics:
* Not sounding like anything else. Open Source has a bad history of this, especially with puns and takes on existing software packages.
* Being easy for an English-speaker to pronounce and derive a pronunciation from a spelling. GNU, PNG, and so forth -- there are a lot of difficult-to-pronounce or oddly-pronounced projects.
* Not relating to specific technical characteristics of the project. These things change. "Lightweight FTP Server" may not always be so lightweight, and the "Linux Sound Server" may not always only run on Linux.
* Not conflicting with a trademarked name. It just causes problems down the line, and there are tons of good names out there.
* Not using potentially offensive names. SATAN may be a great tool, but it's really hard to use in a data center without raising CIO eyebrows.
* Avoiding useless words. "Advanced" should never exist in a software package name.
If this is the beginning of the end for the traditional publication system (hopefully in *all* fields -- computer science has a large chunk of papers freely available, but not all fields, and not all are so lucky) I will be overjoyed. Free access to research data is *huge*.
Now, the possible spectre is if research journals can't make money by charging $200 to view a research paper, we might lose the existing mechanism supporting peer review. However, I'd much rather build a new one (The cost is in distribution and trust management, ne? We *love* designing new systems to manage these on the Internet! P2P + PGP + some idiot-proof front ends, and we're talking.)
This also means that cutting-edge knowlede spreads more quickly, and is available to people "outside the field" -- i.e. those that don't buy in to the expensive journals that mark you as being "in the field".
I am overjoyed. I'm not sure who initiated this policy shift, but they deserve major kudos.
Yeah, good point. People can't handle non-descriptive names. I should stop calling my buddy Dave "Dave" and go with "Balding Black-haired Jewish guy".
Let's be serious -- people are really good at handling names. And besides, you can only have so many "Notepads".
Besides which, I'd say the names there *are* pretty descripting:
* Apache. Okay, this one isn't, but if you use it, you know what it is.
* Firefox. Fair enough, but I think this has more to do with the name changing each week than with the actual name being difficult. I mean, the competition is, what, "Netscape Navigator" (Makes me think of a GPS package), "Opera" (Music software?), "Konqueror" (A video game, maybe?), Safari (Another video game?), and so forth.
* Mono -- Yeah, but is "Java" any more descriptive?
* BitTorrent -- Good *God*, man, that's about as descriptive as you can get.
* Grep -- Says what it does, and if you don't know what "global regular expression" means, you probably don't want to be using grep.
* PuTTY -- It's a virtual TTY program. What, "telnet" is more descriptive?
* Script-Fu -- a scripting system. I guess they could have called it Gimp-Script.
And come on -- nobody goes in for descriptive names. Are cars named descriptively? "Big Towncar", etc? We can cope.
Oh, and as for reasons that I don't like this particular implementation of a DB-based filesystem -- they add the idea of attributes, which is cutesy, kinda of like Nautilus did with emblems (grr...darn desktop-environment-level FS stuff), but then they overload the keyword namespace with attributes, which is just plain silly, and runs the risk of any app using attributes getting into name collisions.
I hate GNOME-VFS and KIOSlaves and all that stuff that people try to roll into a higher layer than they should. The idea of combining VFS functionality and a *desktop environment* is *stupid* and exactly the sort of fragmentation that hurts everyone. Want a userspace VFS layer (like, other than the existing transparent systems like LUFS and FUSE, which are much better if you can use them, because existing apps continue to work) Fine. Make one. Call it libvfs, and make KDE and GNOME bindings. But for the love of God, quit trying to roll filesystem functionality into desktop environments. It's ridiculous, and not where it belongs.
That being said, I'm still not a huge fan of this.
There are three main features that people seem to want with a DB-based FS:
* Transaction/views/high-level-DB functionality.
You don't want a FS that tries to do all this. DBMSes have worked for a long time to do this efficiently. If you want this, use a real DBMS, because it's going to smoke what someone tried to hack up into a filesystem.
* Automated index updates. Basically, locate but atomatically updated as changes occur.
Mac OS Classic had synchronous index updates as the filesystem ran. This makes the filesystem slow. It sucks for servers.
It's a much better idea to do asynchronous index updates, where the index approximates the filesystem quickly, but perhaps not right away -- you can do that without killing performance. Basically, you have the kernel notify a userspace daemon when changes occur, which rebuilds the part of the directory hierarchy (possibly waiting a while to see if it can use idle time). If a ton of changes occur to a small portion of the directory hierarchy, instead of trying to keep up with each change (say, a million changes to part of the directory hierarchy), the update daemon rolls all those queued up updates into a singled queued up full update of that entire portion of the directory hierarchy. It does a bit of extra indexing, but doesn't get backlogged.
This *could* be done under Linux, but there is one bit of kernel support that is missing -- currently, it is unusably inefficient for an app using Linux's existing dnotify() directory monitoring mechanism to deal with (a) changes to a directory containing many entries and (b) changes to directories anywhere on a filesystem (currently, dnotify() requires a FD for each directory to be monitored).
There *is* a enhanced dnotify patch out that would improve Linux's dnotify() mechanism to the point where people can write daemons with this, but Linus has not yet rolled it in. Once he does so, we can get the ball rolling on such daemons.
* Indexing of metadata.
People want to be able to search for their files using metadata. Again, this can just as easily be done using such a daemon. Existing apps continue to work, people can choose where to put something in a unique hirarchy so that they can reach it again, but files can also be addressed via metadata. If you want to provide, say, a tabbed file selector containing a tab for selecting files via metadata, that's quite feasible.
A major reasons why you don't want to provide a full DB-based interface is that you lose the existing hierarchical representation, and every app in the world stops working. You don't want people to just "save this file to a filesystem" and have to address it via metadata -- you want the user to give the thing some kind of unique identifier.
Awesome idea, could provide significant benefits ... but unfortunately written in Java.
This sort of thing would be incredibly interesting if it were done in C or something else least-common-denominator that can be used in any piece of software.
And just to clarify the above, even the establishment of such a system is a right, not a responsibility. Congress could just say "Nah, I don't think we need to use that right of ours", and throw out tha patent and trademark systems, if such a vote was made. They'd still be perfectly well within the bounds of the Constitution.
There is no constitutional right to using a web browser of your choosing. But getting a patent is.
No, you do *not* have a "consitutional right" to get a patent. Congress has the consitutional right to grant monopolies to people to promote advances in the arts and sciences, and that's as far as they have to go. If they want to make only white, left-handed, college-educated people who can pay a $1M filing fee and drive a Beamer whose birthname begins with "Q" be able to apply for a patent, that's perfectly constitutional. If they want to say "you need to own MSIE to apply for a patent", then they are still in full consitutional compliance.
If, however, in order to get a patent you must use MSIE, then I believe my constitutional right is violated.
Okay. In this case, however, your belief is not correct.
You can argue that it is undesireable, and you can write your representatives to ask them to push for change, but you have no basis for claiming that it is unconsitutional.
If Microsoft hadn't done this, the broken, inflexible, and easily-exploited SPF would have spread around the world. (Well, it still technically could do so, but SPF tied itself to Microsoft, so folks would have to first extricate the SPF people from Microsoft.)
Yahoo's DomainKeys is only a marginally better solution.
A GPG-based system -- now *there's* the way to go.
Or modems using LZW have the standard protocol in use.
Or SSL requre patents.
Or any number of other things.