First, I think that could be made much simpler simply by giving the mailing list your GPG public key and having it encrypt and, more importantly, sign the messages. I think the problem with that approach is that it requires the newsletter sender to do significant additional processing for every additional recipient. Actually, a more reasonable approach may be to simply sign the e-mail with the newsletter owner's private key and then there would only be one version of the newsletter to send out. Your spam filter could either accept all signed e-mails or you could have a list of public keys that you always accept e-mail from.
Going off the last option, you have a far simpler solution: have a list of e-mail address which you always accept e-mail from, which I believe most spam filters support. I know sites which ask for an e-mail address often request that you add them to your address book to ensure your spam filter does not mark their e-mail as spam. Obviously e-mail addresses can be faked, but how many spam messages do you get labeled as from a newsletter you are signed up for?
Would it be allowable to release a program with mixed GPLv2 and GPLv3 code as long as one was clear on which parts were which (possibly simply offering a link to the GPLv2 upstream) and having them licensed differently? Or does that not work?
Correct me if I am wrong, but I assume chemical process patents explain how to perform the given chemical process well enough that an expert in the field could reproduce the process (given sufficient funds/equipment). As I understand it, software patents just say what the software does, not how it does it. Is this just misinformation from other Slashdot posters or is there a clear difference between the two?
BTW, why are you still listening to NPR? It really isn't "public" media anymore, and the political slant is about as right wing as fox news. Pro-war, pro-religion, pro-corporatism. "Nationalist Public Radio" perhaps? "National Pentagon Radio"?
I admit have not listened to NPR very often in the past year or so, but this comment surprises me. Could you provide links to articles showing this? Generally it is pretty easy to find a news report you heard on the air on their website.
Gah, misclicked on moderating parent (hit "redundant" instead of "insightful"). Replying to cancel moderation.
It would be interesting to see the people's reaction to that. I suspect most people would not really notice. Possibly they would just be confused that they could convert some files and not others, probably in the way of iTunes can put some of them on their iPod, but not all of them. It would probably get some anti-DRM feedback, though, and, if the BBC is able to do that, then they should.
I have seen this mentioned a few times. Although not optimal, would it be possible for a group to simply read the docs, reimplement ZFS, and release the result as GPL-compatible code? The real question here is one of how open the docs are.
I do recommend Firefox to people, and offer Opera as an alternative if they do not like Firefox as IE is just that bad, but the difference between MS Office vs. OpenOffice. is not the same. Put simply: MS Office is a perfectly fine office suite, which most people buy with their computers. There is no good reason to switch, and OpenOffice's GUI feels unfinished. If OpenOffice gets to the point where its GUI is actually as usable as MS Office's, then I will start recommending it as opposed to simply mentioning it as a free alternative. Until then, MS Office is not going anywhere.
Strange, you trust your mail server, the recipient's mail server, and all of the mail relays in between? The only way to have private e-mails is to encrypt the e-mail itself. Then the transport protocol is irrelevant to your privacy.
You make a good point about derivative works often taking a while to be produced. It is reasonable for an author of a recent book (like Harry Potter) to get paid for movie rights. When considering that case, five years is too short. Perhaps 10 or 20 years would make more sense, but at 100 years... well, the point of public domain is supposed to be that works are created and go into public domain once the author has profited from them so that the culture is free to make derivative creative works. Otherwise, copyright would be stifling creativity instead of encouraging it. Remember the Grey Album?
The point of copyright is not to protect the author and guarantee them money and creative control. The point is to encourage authors to create by giving a sufficient incentive of money and creative control for a limited time.
In general, it seems like books are always the outlier when discussing reasonable copyright lengths. Movies and music tend to get sold quickly. Software usually becomes out of date within a few years. For those, a five year copyright term is plenty long. But books can take years to become popular and then have additional movie deals and sequels related to them.
I think the idea behind patenting genetic sequences was to protect the innovations of biotech companies. I do not know much about the issue, so I will leave it to Wikipedia: Biological patent and Gene patents.
You are forgetting about an important competitor: ReactOS. They expect to have a beta (usable system) ready by 2008, if not later this year. At the same time, the Wine is advancing in compatibility. Vista is definitely is a serious competitor, but the open source options are rapidly maturing.
You are forgetting something: ReactOS will be in beta by then according to their roadmap, "meaning a system which is suitable for every day use." At which point, users wanting to get off an aging OS will be able to move to ReactOS instead of Vista. Even if ReactOS moves slower than their roadmap predicts, it will be ready well before XP extended support ends in 2014. (You left out Linux, so I assume we are talking about Windows-like OSes. Significant improvements in WINE and the Linux desktop experience could nullify the necessity for a Windows-like OS, but that could be a long way off.)
I was just talking about capitalism vs. communism with a friend the other day and he pointed out an amusing point of view: in communism, the government controls everything, only the government has to get corrupt for everything to go bad; in capitalism, the power is shared among the government and various corporations, sometimes the work together, but sometimes they work against each other, so they are a bit less effective at making trouble for the populace.-
He means a VPN between your laptop/other wireless clients and the router/wired section of your network. That way everything wireless is encrypted, but the VPN stays within your local network. It does seem a bit ridiculous to use a VPN at that range, but it does seem to be a pretty good way to handle the wireless encryption problem.
If you are using swap then, yes, you have way too little memory. I have a desktop with 1.5GB of RAM, and it never swaps unless I leave an ISO in tmpfs for a few days. On the other hand, under Windows XP it would swap regularly. There is no reason for a normal computer user to be using swap regularly, and if you doing something fancy (ex. DB server) you are probably going to get a lot of memory so you will still not be using swap.
Care to explain why accomodating for people who want to watch violence on tv should be more important than accomodating for people who want to let their children watch TV without constant surveilance?
Seriously, this should not be a problem. The V-chip allows both sides to have what they want: the parents can just setup the V-chip to block violent content they do not want their kids to see, and such content can be left on TV for those who do want to see it.
In 12-24 months time Windows XP like Windows 2000 before it will seem very old and outdated,
Uh, Win2k? You mean that OS that a lot of people still think is more stable than WinXP? Anyway, there are alternatives to upgrading from XP to Vista: OS X, Linux, *BSD,...
Huh? NTFS encryption is not trivial to break. If a user has a password and uses encryption, then the easiest way to get at the files is probably to guess their password/use a password cracker on the hash.
They would only be revoking keys used by software players. Eventually someone will probably go through the effort to get keys out of a hardware player, but it is a lot more work to do so.
Slashdot Mirror
First, I think that could be made much simpler simply by giving the mailing list your GPG public key and having it encrypt and, more importantly, sign the messages. I think the problem with that approach is that it requires the newsletter sender to do significant additional processing for every additional recipient. Actually, a more reasonable approach may be to simply sign the e-mail with the newsletter owner's private key and then there would only be one version of the newsletter to send out. Your spam filter could either accept all signed e-mails or you could have a list of public keys that you always accept e-mail from.
Going off the last option, you have a far simpler solution: have a list of e-mail address which you always accept e-mail from, which I believe most spam filters support. I know sites which ask for an e-mail address often request that you add them to your address book to ensure your spam filter does not mark their e-mail as spam. Obviously e-mail addresses can be faked, but how many spam messages do you get labeled as from a newsletter you are signed up for?
Would it be allowable to release a program with mixed GPLv2 and GPLv3 code as long as one was clear on which parts were which (possibly simply offering a link to the GPLv2 upstream) and having them licensed differently? Or does that not work?
Correct me if I am wrong, but I assume chemical process patents explain how to perform the given chemical process well enough that an expert in the field could reproduce the process (given sufficient funds/equipment). As I understand it, software patents just say what the software does, not how it does it. Is this just misinformation from other Slashdot posters or is there a clear difference between the two?
I admit have not listened to NPR very often in the past year or so, but this comment surprises me. Could you provide links to articles showing this? Generally it is pretty easy to find a news report you heard on the air on their website.
Gah, misclicked on moderating parent (hit "redundant" instead of "insightful"). Replying to cancel moderation.
It would be interesting to see the people's reaction to that. I suspect most people would not really notice. Possibly they would just be confused that they could convert some files and not others, probably in the way of iTunes can put some of them on their iPod, but not all of them. It would probably get some anti-DRM feedback, though, and, if the BBC is able to do that, then they should.
I have seen this mentioned a few times. Although not optimal, would it be possible for a group to simply read the docs, reimplement ZFS, and release the result as GPL-compatible code? The real question here is one of how open the docs are.
... which were kept completely separate.
I do recommend Firefox to people, and offer Opera as an alternative if they do not like Firefox as IE is just that bad, but the difference between MS Office vs. OpenOffice. is not the same. Put simply: MS Office is a perfectly fine office suite, which most people buy with their computers. There is no good reason to switch, and OpenOffice's GUI feels unfinished. If OpenOffice gets to the point where its GUI is actually as usable as MS Office's, then I will start recommending it as opposed to simply mentioning it as a free alternative. Until then, MS Office is not going anywhere.
Strange, you trust your mail server, the recipient's mail server, and all of the mail relays in between? The only way to have private e-mails is to encrypt the e-mail itself. Then the transport protocol is irrelevant to your privacy.
You make a good point about derivative works often taking a while to be produced. It is reasonable for an author of a recent book (like Harry Potter) to get paid for movie rights. When considering that case, five years is too short. Perhaps 10 or 20 years would make more sense, but at 100 years... well, the point of public domain is supposed to be that works are created and go into public domain once the author has profited from them so that the culture is free to make derivative creative works. Otherwise, copyright would be stifling creativity instead of encouraging it. Remember the Grey Album?
The point of copyright is not to protect the author and guarantee them money and creative control. The point is to encourage authors to create by giving a sufficient incentive of money and creative control for a limited time.
In general, it seems like books are always the outlier when discussing reasonable copyright lengths. Movies and music tend to get sold quickly. Software usually becomes out of date within a few years. For those, a five year copyright term is plenty long. But books can take years to become popular and then have additional movie deals and sequels related to them.
I think the idea behind patenting genetic sequences was to protect the innovations of biotech companies. I do not know much about the issue, so I will leave it to Wikipedia: Biological patent and Gene patents.
You are forgetting about an important competitor: ReactOS. They expect to have a beta (usable system) ready by 2008, if not later this year. At the same time, the Wine is advancing in compatibility. Vista is definitely is a serious competitor, but the open source options are rapidly maturing.
You are forgetting something: ReactOS will be in beta by then according to their roadmap, "meaning a system which is suitable for every day use." At which point, users wanting to get off an aging OS will be able to move to ReactOS instead of Vista. Even if ReactOS moves slower than their roadmap predicts, it will be ready well before XP extended support ends in 2014. (You left out Linux, so I assume we are talking about Windows-like OSes. Significant improvements in WINE and the Linux desktop experience could nullify the necessity for a Windows-like OS, but that could be a long way off.)
I was just talking about capitalism vs. communism with a friend the other day and he pointed out an amusing point of view: in communism, the government controls everything, only the government has to get corrupt for everything to go bad; in capitalism, the power is shared among the government and various corporations, sometimes the work together, but sometimes they work against each other, so they are a bit less effective at making trouble for the populace.-
Just use VLC? (The Windows binary includes decss.)
Do you have a source or are you just trolling?
He means a VPN between your laptop/other wireless clients and the router/wired section of your network. That way everything wireless is encrypted, but the VPN stays within your local network. It does seem a bit ridiculous to use a VPN at that range, but it does seem to be a pretty good way to handle the wireless encryption problem.
Interesting, I do a lot of communication over the internet through e-mails. Maybe every internet user does not have exactly the same usage pattern.
If you are using swap then, yes, you have way too little memory. I have a desktop with 1.5GB of RAM, and it never swaps unless I leave an ISO in tmpfs for a few days. On the other hand, under Windows XP it would swap regularly. There is no reason for a normal computer user to be using swap regularly, and if you doing something fancy (ex. DB server) you are probably going to get a lot of memory so you will still not be using swap.
Yeah, right near the top of this page.
Seriously, this should not be a problem. The V-chip allows both sides to have what they want: the parents can just setup the V-chip to block violent content they do not want their kids to see, and such content can be left on TV for those who do want to see it.
Such a 3D printer is being worked on, but they do not seem to have a way to actually make electronics with a 3D printer yet.
Uh, Win2k? You mean that OS that a lot of people still think is more stable than WinXP? Anyway, there are alternatives to upgrading from XP to Vista: OS X, Linux, *BSD, ...
Huh? NTFS encryption is not trivial to break. If a user has a password and uses encryption, then the easiest way to get at the files is probably to guess their password/use a password cracker on the hash.
Uh, what's with the two Miguel nicks?
They would only be revoking keys used by software players. Eventually someone will probably go through the effort to get keys out of a hardware player, but it is a lot more work to do so.