This will only be of use to open source developers of the Linux Kernel.
And only for the things they've already done. And only if those things were in the right stable kernel as of 25 May 2005. And only if those developers don't try to enforce any of their patents against Nokia.
So, ok, that last one doesn't seem so unreasonable. The first two restrictions make this whole thing a non-event. Before this, no one was undergoing a patent lawsuit from Nokia, though some might have worried about future lawsuits. After this, no one is undergoing a patent lawsuit from Nokia, though some might worry about future lawsuits.
Thanks, Nokia, but excuse me if I go back to sleep.
You can't take a routine from the kernel and use it in some other GPL'd program, because Nokia's Patent Statement would not apply. That sort of defeats one (at least one!) of the purposes of the GPL, doesn't it? What about code that starts out in some other GPL'd program, like emacs or kde? It's definitely not covered by their Patent Statement, unless it's already in the kernel, and then only for use in the kernel.
As for their reserving the right to enforce patents against future kernel features, I'm sure that boils down to something like this: ``If Linux starts to cut into our revenues, watch out!''
As I've said in another post, what we need from them is an irrevokable license to use their patents in any GPL'd program. This isn't that, but it costs us nothing, so we should say thanks, and get on with what we were doing, because nothing has changed.
Before the announcement, they weren't suing anyone, though they might have chosen to in the future. After the announcement, they aren't suing anyone, though they might choose to in the future. It is a nice goodwill gesture, but nothing has changed.
Nokia hereby commits not to assert any of its Patents (as defined herein below) against any Linux Kernel (as defined herein below) existing as of 25 May 2005.
How do you plan to reject that? Are you going to take them to court and try to force them to sue kernel developers or Linux users? Since there is no quid pro quo required, there in nothing to refuse.
As I said in another post, what we need from any company which wants to be ``Linux friendly'' is irrevokable permission to use their patents in any GPL'd software. This isn't close to that, it isn't much, and it really isn't even a good start, but it's more than they had to do, and we should thank them nicely and go back to ignoring them.
In short, Nokia says "we give you a new toy today, but we can always take it away from you later".
I think that's not quite true. I think that Nokia has declared that all current infringements are ok, but future infringements are going to be looked at case by case, with the expectation (no guarantees!) that they'll be ok'd.
Nokia hereby commits not to assert any of its Patents (as defined herein below) against any Linux Kernel (as defined herein below) existing as of 25 May 2005.
This is a long way from what we need, which is a non-revokable license for use in all GPL'd software. Still, the little they are giving us is non-revokable (I think), and it's more than they had to give us.
... neither Linus or anybody else should touch it...
There's really not much to touch. It boils down to: ``We won't sue Linus for anything he's done so far.'' There's no requirement for Linus (or anybody else) to reciprocate in any way.
#6) Never, ever log in root from a remote location.... If you must, have 2 computer systems at home. One secured off line, and the other on line.
All the other stuff is un-necessary if you can do this. If your computer is physically isolated, with no net connection, most of your problems are solved.
Any sensitive information should, in general, be separated from the internet by an airgap.
At home, I have a Windows box which my children use for educational software. It's never been cracked, and never gotten a virus or spyware. It's more secure than my online linux box. Why? The airgap. I've removed the modem and NIC from the Windows box.
To give an ecommerce example of security through air gap, take the order and credit card number via net, then write it to a csv file of orders which gets burned twice a day to cd and carried to the offline machine. On the online machine, keep only the name and last 4 digits of the card number, so next time that customer shows up, you can safely offer him the choice to use the same card. Safely, because even if the online machine gets cracked, the cracker gets only a name and 4 digits, without the expiration date and remaining digits. If the online machine gets cracked, only that orders placed since the last CD was burned can be compromised.
The offline machine stores the credit card numbers and prepares the orders for processing.
Of course, the credit card processing still has to be done online. Stick the CD of numbers, et cetera, into an online machine, and have it transmit numbers, amounts, et cetera, to Visa. If you want to be really serious about security, this machine could be reinstalled before each batch (via Ghost, or some Linux Live CD, or so).
This all sounds practical, but it's cheaper and easier to just do everything on the online machine, so it'll never happen.
Google Print should be scrapped, and instead, the spotlight shined on Project Gutenberg.
I have no objection to Google Print. I'd be happy to see them make Fair Use of copyrighted works. I agree with you, though, that they should use Gutenberg editions of things like The Canterbury Tales.
is there a way to fool Google about your IP though?
Your script would probably have to find and use a series of proxies?
Notice, also, that what you get is a series of images of the pages, rather than the text. You can't right-click to save the image, but it wasn't too hard to find: for page 4 (your first link), it was at.theimg { background-image:url("http://print.google.com/prin t?id=jQTc-sKxbt0C&pg=4&img=1&q=4&sig=9k-0YAfroJQ7w Mlf7H3xdelm_nw"
By the way, trying to change the page number in that link gives an image which says ``image not available''.
What you could do with the background images I'm not sure. Of course, you could use some sort of slideshow to read them, but that would have all the disadvantages of paper (e.g., no search), and all the disadvantages of electronic formats (e.g., have to read on screen).
Apparently for some people, the tactile (feel of the paper & book), auditory (sound of the pages turning) and olfactory (smell of the book) senses are all part of the "reading experience".
I'm one of those people. Having paper is important to me; so important, in fact, that I print and bind books from Project Gutenberg.
I'm also one who's very interested in reading on a small, high-resolution, low power, waterproof, portable, non-proprietary screen. Ideally, it'll have a large enough hard drive to hold Project Gutenberg, too. I'm planning to move onto a boat in a few years, and I'd like to take my library with me. Unfortunately, that's out of the question: affordable, practical boats are just too small to hold many hundreds of books. So, when someone finally comes out with a reader that fits that description, I'm ready to buy.
Have you ever heard somebody say, "Dude, you must read Am. J. Chem. Bio. pages 133-137!!!"?
My advisors said something like that many times. And ``must'' meant ``MUST''. I eventually subscribed to JEL, AER and JEP (the three American Economics Association rags), in part because of this.
I doubt it.
Believe it.
Personally, I've never heard of word of mouth (based on content) resulting in an institutional subscription.
That's the only way institutional subscriptions happen: some professor decides that he needs some journal to stay current in his field, so he recommends it to the librarian and lobbies his collegues to do the same.
That process starts when he hears (either from a collegue or through some service like Citeseer or google) about some important content in that journal.
I didn't try to go to all 400 pages, but I probably visited about 60. I noticed no gaps, and was never warned I viewed too many from my IP.
Oh, fortunate you! I tried reading Small Gods on line just now, and when I tried to look at page 8 (having already read 1-7), it told me:
Thank you for using Google Print.
You have either reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing limit for this book.
Google protects works that are under copyright by restricting access to certain pages and restricting the number of pages you can view. You may continue to take advantage of Google Print by clicking on About this Book. Thank you for using Google Print.
... I'm sure someone could easily write a script to do all those page visits in order and download the entire thing.
So, you probably could write such a script, but it won't be nearly as straight-forward as you imagined, and, if they're tracking IP rather than cookies (I allow cookies from Google), will be a big, fat nuisance.
Gates recently declared security to be ``Job One''.
Why wasn't it a high priority from the begining, and why haven't we seen any meaningful results?
The first part of that question is legitimate, and not flame bait.
The second part we can almost say that about: it would at least give them the chance to boast.
The stored numeric data cannot be used to reconstruct a fingerprint, West said, nor can it be cross-referenced with other fingerprint databases such as those kept by the FBI or the Illinois State Police.
If this is true, then it could actually give more privacy than logging in using your library card.
Using the library card, there is a record with your name attached to it. Using the fingerprint, there wouldn't have to be a name attached to the login. The system could just take the hash from your fingerprint, check it against its data base of kids whose parents have set up filtering (RTFA: that's what's driving this), and if it isn't found, log you on anonymously.
For the cops to prove that you were the one logged on to that machine when the dastardly deed occured, they'd have to log you into the system, and compare your hash to the perpetrator's. That's pretty good privacy.
I see a huge problem there, but this is not the solution. It's a parent's job to monitor his kids as needed. It's not acceptable to turn that over to a filter. The real problem is irresponsible parents. The secondary problem is a library staff which is enabling them, with a foolish technological non-solution to a social problem.
Yes, I'm a parent, and yes, I give my kids the supervision they need, even in the library.
Please include your personal counter suggestion with any criticisms.
The solution is to tell those parents to watch their own stinking kids.
How about making sure that the computers the kids use have big screens, clearly visible to all? That would go a long way to facilitate the parental monitoring.
Sorry, it's you who is wrong. Gates' family had a large fortune long before he built a giant fortune.
'Old Money' in the computer industry is a self-contradiction.
The Gates fortune came from banking, not computers, so I'm not arguing with this statement. They had money long before little Billy made his own pile. That's why he could afford to drop out of Harvard and start a business: he had mommy and daddy and a million dollar trust fund to back him up. If he hadn't had that, he would have ended up like these successful MIT graduates: a poor stiff.
If you can take it off without sending a signal, then they think they know where you are, but they don't. They have a false sense of security, and you have a perfect alibi.
From TFA:
Thus far, no inmates have attempted to escape or tamper with their bracelets in the jails where the system has been deployed, says Oester. Knowing that an alarm would be activated if the bracelet is removed or destroyed has been a deterrent for inmates,Oester says. The bracelet includes several built-in tamper-proof safeguards. The braided stainless steel wire that runs the length of the bracelet will cause the RFID tag to stop transmitting it is cut. The device also has a sensor that is designed to set off an alarm in 15 seconds if it loses contact to skin.
So, if you lose some weight, you could slip it off, pass it to your buddy who gets it in contact with his skin within 15 seconds, go do your crime, and get away with it.
How exactly are "crack, PCP, etc" automatically liabilities to others?
Take either of them for a couple of months. Better yet, take both for a couple of months. When you get out of the institutions, come back here and report any insights on how crack, PCP, etc are liabilities.
I've met several junkies and crackheads. They all agree that outlawing it doesn't help. They also agree that they wish it did help: they all wish they'd never started. Whether we're talking about heroin, crack, cocain, LSD or angle dust, all the heavy users (at least the ones who might, maybe, be called sane) agreed that their drug habit made them a liability to themselves and others. I've also met several people who thought they were merely recreational users, but the only person they were fooling was themselves.
Slashdot Mirror
And only for the things they've already done. And only if those things were in the right stable kernel as of 25 May 2005. And only if those developers don't try to enforce any of their patents against Nokia.
So, ok, that last one doesn't seem so unreasonable. The first two restrictions make this whole thing a non-event. Before this, no one was undergoing a patent lawsuit from Nokia, though some might have worried about future lawsuits. After this, no one is undergoing a patent lawsuit from Nokia, though some might worry about future lawsuits.
Thanks, Nokia, but excuse me if I go back to sleep.
You can't take a routine from the kernel and use it in some other GPL'd program, because Nokia's Patent Statement would not apply. That sort of defeats one (at least one!) of the purposes of the GPL, doesn't it? What about code that starts out in some other GPL'd program, like emacs or kde? It's definitely not covered by their Patent Statement, unless it's already in the kernel, and then only for use in the kernel.
As for their reserving the right to enforce patents against future kernel features, I'm sure that boils down to something like this: ``If Linux starts to cut into our revenues, watch out!''
As I've said in another post, what we need from them is an irrevokable license to use their patents in any GPL'd program. This isn't that, but it costs us nothing, so we should say thanks, and get on with what we were doing, because nothing has changed.
Before the announcement, they weren't suing anyone, though they might have chosen to in the future. After the announcement, they aren't suing anyone, though they might choose to in the future. It is a nice goodwill gesture, but nothing has changed.
From Nokia's IP statement:
How do you plan to reject that? Are you going to take them to court and try to force them to sue kernel developers or Linux users? Since there is no quid pro quo required, there in nothing to refuse.As I said in another post, what we need from any company which wants to be ``Linux friendly'' is irrevokable permission to use their patents in any GPL'd software. This isn't close to that, it isn't much, and it really isn't even a good start, but it's more than they had to do, and we should thank them nicely and go back to ignoring them.
I think that's not quite true. I think that Nokia has declared that all current infringements are ok, but future infringements are going to be looked at case by case, with the expectation (no guarantees!) that they'll be ok'd.
They lead off with:
This is a long way from what we need, which is a non-revokable license for use in all GPL'd software. Still, the little they are giving us is non-revokable (I think), and it's more than they had to give us.
There's really not much to touch. It boils down to: ``We won't sue Linus for anything he's done so far.'' There's no requirement for Linus (or anybody else) to reciprocate in any way.
- BUY PRIMER
- take off cap
- spray
- wait till it dries!
Here's where it gets really good:- Sell it as a keyboard which will make you type faster
- Profit!
- Develop new line of RSI products, for fast-typing geeks
- Profit more!
Wait, that's a lousy business plan: there's no ??? step before any of the Profit! steps.All the other stuff is un-necessary if you can do this. If your computer is physically isolated, with no net connection, most of your problems are solved. Any sensitive information should, in general, be separated from the internet by an airgap.
At home, I have a Windows box which my children use for educational software. It's never been cracked, and never gotten a virus or spyware. It's more secure than my online linux box. Why? The airgap. I've removed the modem and NIC from the Windows box.
To give an ecommerce example of security through air gap, take the order and credit card number via net, then write it to a csv file of orders which gets burned twice a day to cd and carried to the offline machine. On the online machine, keep only the name and last 4 digits of the card number, so next time that customer shows up, you can safely offer him the choice to use the same card. Safely, because even if the online machine gets cracked, the cracker gets only a name and 4 digits, without the expiration date and remaining digits. If the online machine gets cracked, only that orders placed since the last CD was burned can be compromised.
The offline machine stores the credit card numbers and prepares the orders for processing. Of course, the credit card processing still has to be done online. Stick the CD of numbers, et cetera, into an online machine, and have it transmit numbers, amounts, et cetera, to Visa. If you want to be really serious about security, this machine could be reinstalled before each batch (via Ghost, or some Linux Live CD, or so).
This all sounds practical, but it's cheaper and easier to just do everything on the online machine, so it'll never happen.
I have no objection to Google Print. I'd be happy to see them make Fair Use of copyrighted works. I agree with you, though, that they should use Gutenberg editions of things like The Canterbury Tales.
Your script would probably have to find and use a series of proxies?
Notice, also, that what you get is a series of images of the pages, rather than the text. You can't right-click to save the image, but it wasn't too hard to find: for page 4 (your first link), it was at .theimg { background-image:url("http://print.google.com/prin t?id=jQTc-sKxbt0C&pg=4&img=1&q=4&sig=9k-0YAfroJQ7w Mlf7H3xdelm_nw"
By the way, trying to change the page number in that link gives an image which says ``image not available''.
What you could do with the background images I'm not sure. Of course, you could use some sort of slideshow to read them, but that would have all the disadvantages of paper (e.g., no search), and all the disadvantages of electronic formats (e.g., have to read on screen).
I'm one of those people. Having paper is important to me; so important, in fact, that I print and bind books from Project Gutenberg.
I'm also one who's very interested in reading on a small, high-resolution, low power, waterproof, portable, non-proprietary screen. Ideally, it'll have a large enough hard drive to hold Project Gutenberg, too. I'm planning to move onto a boat in a few years, and I'd like to take my library with me. Unfortunately, that's out of the question: affordable, practical boats are just too small to hold many hundreds of books. So, when someone finally comes out with a reader that fits that description, I'm ready to buy.
My advisors said something like that many times. And ``must'' meant ``MUST''. I eventually subscribed to JEL, AER and JEP (the three American Economics Association rags), in part because of this.
I doubt it.
Believe it.
Personally, I've never heard of word of mouth (based on content) resulting in an institutional subscription.
That's the only way institutional subscriptions happen: some professor decides that he needs some journal to stay current in his field, so he recommends it to the librarian and lobbies his collegues to do the same. That process starts when he hears (either from a collegue or through some service like Citeseer or google) about some important content in that journal.
Oh, fortunate you! I tried reading Small Gods on line just now, and when I tried to look at page 8 (having already read 1-7), it told me:
So, you probably could write such a script, but it won't be nearly as straight-forward as you imagined, and, if they're tracking IP rather than cookies (I allow cookies from Google), will be a big, fat nuisance.
Even these guys should have been able to grasp that.
Maybe that should be the next Star Wars catchphrase: ``That $Star_Wars_fan is so dumb, he doesn't know to stop, drop and roll.
Where did you get your statistics, please?
Sold!
So, tell me about your immegration laws (the ones for folks who don't have Irish grandfathers).
The second part we can almost say that about: it would at least give them the chance to boast.
I predict we won't see an answer to either part.
If this is true, then it could actually give more privacy than logging in using your library card.
Using the library card, there is a record with your name attached to it. Using the fingerprint, there wouldn't have to be a name attached to the login. The system could just take the hash from your fingerprint, check it against its data base of kids whose parents have set up filtering (RTFA: that's what's driving this), and if it isn't found, log you on anonymously.
For the cops to prove that you were the one logged on to that machine when the dastardly deed occured, they'd have to log you into the system, and compare your hash to the perpetrator's. That's pretty good privacy.
I see a huge problem there, but this is not the solution. It's a parent's job to monitor his kids as needed. It's not acceptable to turn that over to a filter. The real problem is irresponsible parents. The secondary problem is a library staff which is enabling them, with a foolish technological non-solution to a social problem.
Yes, I'm a parent, and yes, I give my kids the supervision they need, even in the library.
Please include your personal counter suggestion with any criticisms.
The solution is to tell those parents to watch their own stinking kids.
How about making sure that the computers the kids use have big screens, clearly visible to all? That would go a long way to facilitate the parental monitoring.
Sorry, it's you who is wrong. Gates' family had a large fortune long before he built a giant fortune.
'Old Money' in the computer industry is a self-contradiction.
The Gates fortune came from banking, not computers, so I'm not arguing with this statement. They had money long before little Billy made his own pile. That's why he could afford to drop out of Harvard and start a business: he had mommy and daddy and a million dollar trust fund to back him up. If he hadn't had that, he would have ended up like these successful MIT graduates: a poor stiff.
Look at it this way: at least they won't fall afoul of the truth in advertising laws!
Q:
What happens when your head gets so far up your arse that it pops out your neck?
A:
You turn into a Klein bottle.
You make it sound as if MS will soon be a closed, non-orientable, boundary-free manifold.
From TFA:
So, if you lose some weight, you could slip it off, pass it to your buddy who gets it in contact with his skin within 15 seconds, go do your crime, and get away with it.Enough weather ballons and a lawn chair, and you could actually go there, or close enough.
The FSF, at least, is run by grownups, and I have no reason to doubt that there are grownups in charge at OO.org.
Given that, why would we be surprised that they looked for a constructive way to settle their differences?
Take either of them for a couple of months. Better yet, take both for a couple of months. When you get out of the institutions, come back here and report any insights on how crack, PCP, etc are liabilities.
I've met several junkies and crackheads. They all agree that outlawing it doesn't help. They also agree that they wish it did help: they all wish they'd never started. Whether we're talking about heroin, crack, cocain, LSD or angle dust, all the heavy users (at least the ones who might, maybe, be called sane) agreed that their drug habit made them a liability to themselves and others. I've also met several people who thought they were merely recreational users, but the only person they were fooling was themselves.
Three American wives? No wonder he hates us.