Ok, I admit it. I was just a front-man for the real fathers of Linux, the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus. (...) I've lived a life of subterfuge, always afraid that somebody would find out the truth. (...) I can now go back to my chosen profession, the exploration of the fascinating mating dance of the common newt.
The Kuiper belt is just too far away for us to get a decent view. We need to get out there and have a look before we can say anything about the region. And that won't be possible for another decade, at least. NASA's New Horizons probe, which will head out to Pluto and the Kuiper belt, is scheduled for launch in January 2006. It won't reach Pluto until 2015, so if you are looking for an explanation of the vast, empty gulf of the Kuiper cliff, watch this space.
Whether what we need to search through is a belt or a sphere (cf. a football), in any case it's got an inner radius of 30 AU where the "leather" is another 20 AU thick (1 AU = 93 million miles approx.). Haven't done the maths on whether we need to look for Planet X "only" in a belt (and even then it's one for a "waistline" of almost 100 AU !) or even a sphere (for who tells us it must be in the ecliptic, Pluto's orbit already being eccentric enough, and many other objects out there, e.g. including many of the comets that look around in our area from time to time, having quite a different orbital plane indeed), but at any rate something seems weird about the author's idea of simply "getting out there", since it looks like taking a lot more search effort than a quick glimpse from Pluto's vantage point!
another instrument, designed to identify organic molecules considered essential signs of life, found nothing.
The Soviets reportedly flew a similar instrument. One scientist had his doubts about the nice theories and plans, and insisted that it be dropped in the Kazakhian steppe for a trial run.
You may have guessed it, the findings were conclusively showing that there is no life on Earth, or at least in Kazakhstan (and no, they didn't use a previous and still hot nuke test site or something - the area being a steppe, the soil is even covered with higher life forms, i.e. herbs&bugs aplenty).
Looks like they've only been sure about the version numbering in the toolbar on the right: "CODE v2" Everywhere else, with the strange notation of "Code v.2" it looks like this is about trying to write a work that will never make it out of beta, stalling at v0.2... (which would be a strange kind of follow-up to a highly successful v1.0)
The televisions created at the Build-In are also computers, and they contain a TiVo-like device called a personal video recorder (PVR) - you can use them to pause a show, record it, sample it, and even save a copy to DVD. Using the TV she builds today, Brydon won't have any trouble loaning her friend a copy of Buffy.
Under the name of VDR, there is one GPLed code base for a range of hardware setups, with strong backing by a leading IT publisher and development centered in Europe (i.e. out of the reach of FCC policies, and yet still threatened by software patents as well) that is proven to work very well and has just celebrated its 5th anniversary - worth having a look.
Meanwhile, one of the Directive's key supporters, the German Federal Ministry of Justice, has reportedly received approximately 500 bananas, shipped in more than 150 parcels, from constituents appalled by what they consider "banana republic style" disrespect for the national and European parliaments.
Anyway, this probably wasn't Dvorak's Greatest Article Of All Time... For a much more entertaining take on the issue, have a look at this report in Wired, from a parallel universe where Linus has joined Microsoft, but now feels compelled to write yet another memo to BillG, complaining about Steve. Here's one highlight:
(...) I thought I was making some pretty outrageous demands. I was stunned when you agreed to accept the General Public License mandating that everything you added at the level of the new operating system would remain open. But you've been true to your side of the bargain, and you've won my respect. You never made me alter my goal, which was world domination for Linux. I'll never forget your line: "Come on, Linus, infect the mothership." I still believe that was the best recruiting pitch ever uttered. We both took a lot of criticism from our partisans, but look what we've accomplished. The world is using software that doesn't suck!
the idea of posting an ISO of the completed system is really the antithesis of the Gentoo concept.
Widely used throughout Europe, there are many precompiled distributions of the open source VDR (mostly ready-made on some flavor of Debian Linux), one of them maintained by what is probably Germany's most renowned IT publisher (c't etc.), as a CD-ROM ISO and also published every few months on approximately half a million magazine cover disks.
If you prefer to "compile a little longer", of course it works on Gentoo as well - which makes sense, since the goal for the living room should be an optimized, fanless PVR. (Of course, the ultimate challenge is porting this to a Mac mini with some USB or FireWire dongle receiver...)
Just try and get a compatible card, i.e. one with open source drivers.
An American VDR site can be found at HoochVDR (need to register to see the forums), while the bulk of the discussion goes on at the VDR Portal - much of it is in German, but scrolling down the page, the International (i.e. "English only") section is not hard to find...
Looking at the description and the name of the manufacturer, it is interesting to recall that in the history of early CD-ROM videogames, "Quantum Gate" was a "season" of so-called "interactive movies" (VirtualCinema by HyperBole Studios) featuring the idea of VR overlay being (ab)used to turn the actual "soft" targets into something ugly the soldiers would no longer hesitate to shoot.
Usenet archives etc. such as Google Groups (in part formerly known as DejaNews) merit similar considerations: While they are free and as complete an account of the recorded history as possible, the need for similar, alternative archives operating on public funding (to guarantee perpetuity) is not apparent - and therefore occurs only exceptionally (and hardly without constraints), as for websites in the case of the Wayback Machine.
As soon as there are only one or a few dominant commercial services left, the dangers become obvious (only when it is already too late) if these start to hide part of the messages (e.g. eMail addresses, controversial topics etc.), switch to fee-based or geographically restricted access, or simply discontinue service.
This may have severe implications not just for historians' access to material a few decades down the road, but also even today, as already shown by some recent cases, e.g. for demonstrating prior art against bogus patents.
If it actually works, the live data should probably <g> have shown a deviation giving several hours' advance notice of posting the story on the Slashdot, considering the well-known catastrophic impact of a few million geeks hitting the same server (and furiously debating the theory)...
From an earlier submission when the story first broke:
On the heels of Austin, Munich, Vienna and entire countries e.g. in South
America, LA City Councilmembers have unveiled plans for an extended transition to
FOSS in their
press release conspicuously labelled "FREE OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE MEANS MORE POLICE ON THE STREETS - COUNCIL BETS THAT OPEN SOURCE MOVEMENT CAN SAVE CITY MILLIONS".
Despite the telling omission of "AND" in its caption, the statement actually does look beyond the "...as in beer" part of the equation.
A spokesman also explained the project and its inspiration in greater detail to German heise
online news.
For Ballmer and Gates, the good news is that they won't have to travelquiteasfar any more to try and win back their latest defectors.
The "bad" news (for them!) can be summed up as "Tux ante portas": their arch-enemy and worst nightmare already knocking (or should we say: pecking?) right at their porch now.
Hey, everyones saying...
"oh i saw them on blogs", "i saw them on site x, y and z"....
No ones noticed that we have this ALL the time on slashdot? How do we fix it? We leave a warning for all, and then we ignore it. Simple (...)
The problem on Orkut (besides performing as if it was suffering from a ceaseless Slashdot effect) seems to be that the moderation is not working quite as well. Posts and people don't go to -1 and disappear into oblivion. Rather, those who feel offended have to refrain from reporting too many incidents to avoid being sent to "jail" themselves.
Although the model of Orkut depends on everyone being a real person (and an adult as well), release from jail seems to occur automatically even for fake accounts.
If you punish users for moderation rather than encourage it as/. does, and if you tolerate bogus identities in a social networking system (i.e. many miscreants don't get kicked out, as it does not really matter if they play by the same rules as everyone else), it becomes too easy for malicious participants to keep their hate speech visible on equal footing with honest, real people, while hiding behind forged profiles that are no better than anonymous avatars.
Actually, some apparent "fake users" have been allowed to exist for long enough on Orkut to see "fan" or "hate" communities being set up for "themselves".
In other words, on./ and in real life (or even Usenet for that matter), the simple rule is this: Whether you are using your true name or not, if you choose to be a troll, expect no better than to be treated as a troll.
On Orkut, everyone is expected to use their true identity and stand by their opinions, but because none of this is sufficiently well enforced, trolls have surprisingly little to fear.
There is no better way to undermine the moral standards in a community than allowing this to happen.
I don't think the "lever" should be bigger. The companies could overblow the time a lot. Say, they provide proof that origins of the idea appeared 20 years ago (and they were working on design ever since), and the "lever" is 100. 2000 years of patent protection? Thanks, no. If it was logarithmic scale, then okay, say, quadrupling the expenses doubles the protection time.
I actually called it a "lever" precisely to indicate that this "multiple" is referring to money (max_protected_earnings=expenses*lever) rather than time. For the duration of the monopoly, further extension beyond 20 years would be exaggerated indeed (yet "dynamics" or shortening are also hardly feasible in light of TRIPs and the difficulty of differentiating between certain fields of innovation or protected matter).
There's a small problem with that. What about the "Blinding Flash of Obvious Truth"?
Take post-it notes. (...)
The new system would protect the invention for 3 weeks, or until it gives $2000 (whichever comes first).
Some patents are too dumb nowadays. But sometimes really simple inventions are worth billions.
No, there's not. The precise figure of the proposed multiple (call it "lever";-)) is open to debate and probably ought to be several times higher than 20, but actually grandparent should be considered +5 Insightful (it hopefully already is by the time you read this).
As the patent system claims to exist only to incentivize innovation, it does not need (or rather, have!) to reward the proverbial "flash of genius" with a long-time monopoly - just because these ideas spontaneously occur irrespective of any such formal incentive (that would justifiably exist for considerable long-term investment in research).
In other words, "really simple inventions" are not supposed (deserving!) to be worth billions (and be protected from competition, and require follow-up inventors to try and negotiate a license - over decades!) if the patent system is true to its own stated aim.
Take the case of a small station or cable company retransmitting or "time-shifting" a show (that has already aired a gazillion times before) e.g. in one isolated breach of 17 U.S.C. 111, 501 et seq. - the law itself suggests that the award of damages (if anyone bothered to go to court over the issue at all) would be fairly minimal, and criminal prosecution highly unlikely, given the fact that an umpteenth re-broadcast watched by a few hundred viewers is of almost negligible impact on the rightholder.
On the other hand, demanding entirely overblown surveillance, censorship, damages and punishment, just for going after alleged one-time infringers sometimes not far from the borderline of fair use (excerpts on fan pages being taken down "at lawyerpoint" etc.), and even if the "suspects" happen to be minors, or 83 years old (let alone...deceased!), seems to appear perfectly adequate to many people if one sticks a label like "pirates" on such "bad" guys to mislead observers into believing someone else had actually been disposessed of an irreplacable piece of physical property merely by copying (part of) it. IIRC there used to be something they called the First Amendment...
Well, after her Vaio was so violently debilitated, and after being told by various experts that it would require nothing short of a complete (and very expensive) Windows system debugging and OS reinstall followed by a mandatory soak of the machine in a tub of bleach and then spraying it with a thick coat of road tar as she waved a burning effigy of Steve Ballmer over it while chanting the text of the Official Microsoft 'Screw You Sucker' Windows Troubleshooting Guide, she promptly dumped the useless hunk of sad landfill and bought herself a beautiful new iBook.
Well, we did. So let's download them, burn each of them to a CD-ROM, pick an appropriate pen to write the respective download URL and these words
Copy this and give it to your friends for free as well - it's Linux and it's legal!
And do bear in mind it will become even faster as soon as you install it to your hard drive...
on the disks, and spread them all across the campuses of our schools or companies. And of the one you like best, just make another dozen copies a day...
Then, next time you get that desperate call from someone claiming their computer is broken, and asking you to fix their Wintel, in most cases you'll be able to help them simply by saying...
Remember that disk I gave you? There's probably nothing wrong with your hardware at all... just boot this!
Europe has only had strict laws against junk communications for two years (Article 13 of Directive 2002/58/EC), they have only been in full force since November 2003 (and the provisions for criminal penalties are not even in place in each and every corner of the European Union yet) - but they mean pure and simple opt-in, and look how this continent's "spam output" already has become almost completely insignificant.
The U.S., I'm afraid to say, have put next to nothing in the way of these sociopaths: only a now-you-CAN-SPAM-more-than-ever Act that lives up to its name in the worst of ways, by legalizing most of the spam, enacting an unworkable opt-out onus on the users, and putting anti-spam warriors at the legal risk of interfering with (and being taken to court by the operators of) what is considered a legitimate "business model" except for some of the worst abuses - and for however little it is, all of this even an entire decade too late.
Reliance on technical solutions and minimal government intervention is just fine for many things - but it's failed in the fight against spam.
Here is how to do it:
Where the rights of the users and subscribers are not respected, national legislation should provide for judicial remedies. Penalties should be imposed on any person, whether governed by private or public law, who fails to comply with the national measures taken under this Directive. (...) "electronic mail" means any text, voice, sound or image message sent over a public communications network which can be stored in the network or in the recipient's terminal equipment until it is collected by the recipient. (...) The use of automated calling systems without human intervention (automatic calling machines), facsimile machines (fax) or electronic mail for the purposes of direct marketing may only be allowed in respect of subscribers who have given their prior consent. (...) In any event, the practice of sending electronic mail for purposes of direct marketing disguising or concealing the identity of the sender on whose behalf the communication is made, or without a valid address to which the recipient may send a request that such communications cease, shall be prohibited.
That's certainly nowhere near rocket science, and if the above looks a bit complicated, that's probably just because
a directive is a (binding) template for lawmakers in all of the European Union's member states
necessarily, the legal techniques as well as the "Legalese" itself vary between jurisdictions
this is a great one-ban-fits-all provision that outlaws each and every flavor of spam at once
"First Amendment" implications: zero (and yes, of course there is freedom of speech in this part of the world as well, and even more of that speech could be heard if it wasn't drowned out by American spam - some of which comes relayed thru Asia of course) - it only bars some people from "pissing in everyone else's pool", but certainly not from speaking their mind!
There is nothing wrong with following an example that works so well, even if it is from Europe...
Call your congresscritter now to outlaw unsolicited commercial communications, place a hefty fine and jail time on the offenders, and put an end to these abuses before they put an end to eMail itself.
Re^2: A plan and a profit, put to good use...
on
The Hundred-Buck PC
·
· Score: 1
An excellent idea, the more you mass produce them, the cheaper each one is to make. And while they're at it, make all the hardware open source as well and extremely hackable and upgradeable. Let it spawn a huge aftermarket add-on industry, as the original IBM PC did.
With the added benefit of the inevitable "immense popularity in the West as well" making it easier to convince developing countries that they are not getting "dumbed-down second best" equipment, and to let their software enrich the entire open source "noosphere" as well.
Of course, initiatives such as the Simputer should be part of the equation, to peacefully and beneficially co-exist with this larger "$100 PC"... much like the iPod and the Mac (or the PC and the Palmtop) can do today - and this device could truly become a kind of "Mac mini for the masses"...
Offering it in every corner of the world at the same time (albeit with a slightly higher price in well-off parts of the world) would also help fight the risk of certain governments reselling the "aid hardware" back to users in developed countries, instead of giving it to their own peoples.
A plan and a profit, put to good use...
on
The Hundred-Buck PC
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Sell it for $150-200 e.g. in the US & Europe as well (thus even further increasing the economies of scale), and use the extra proceeds to cross-subsidize massive, direct sales to the people in even higher numbers and well below $100 in the developing countries.
Hopefully a sufficiently large part of the value chain will also take place in these countries, so as not to overwhelm local manufacturers etc. there...
...and that consumers will win once... (the dollar, the weather, the aliens from outer space etc. - take your pick of conditions and excuses)
Wasn't the key tenet that we all stood to gain most from free rein for the IT industry (and low standards of protection against "hidden features" like these for the consumers?), free trade and globalisation, no matter what?
(Of course one could say "at least it's not anti-competitive", because with the manufacturers' de-facto monopolies on cartridges, competition in
printer supplies is insignificant anyway...)
The king of Linux DVRs is not MythTV, but VDR. VDR is a complete Tivo replacement, with built in simultaneously multichannel recording, TV guide, etc.
http://www.cadsoft.de/vdr/
... and a huge, very active and international user community at http://vdrportal.de/board/index.php, with the backing of what is probably Germany's most renowned IT publisher (c't etc.). However, quite possibly now there is a dreadful DRM specter looming for this project as for every other Linux TV device...
Slashdot Mirror
As Linus wrote last year:
Isn't that what Tesla kinda went nuts over?!
You may have guessed it, the findings were conclusively showing that there is no life on Earth, or at least in Kazakhstan (and no, they didn't use a previous and still hot nuke test site or something - the area being a steppe, the soil is even covered with higher life forms, i.e. herbs&bugs aplenty).
Looks like they've only been sure about the version numbering in the toolbar on the right: "CODE v2" ... (which would be a strange kind of follow-up to a highly successful v1.0)
Everywhere else, with the strange notation of "Code v.2" it looks like this is about trying to write a work that will never make it out of beta, stalling at v0.2
Meanwhile, one of the Directive's key supporters, the German Federal Ministry of Justice, has reportedly received approximately 500 bananas, shipped in more than 150 parcels, from constituents appalled by what they consider "banana republic style" disrespect for the national and European parliaments.
If you prefer to "compile a little longer", of course it works on Gentoo as well - which makes sense, since the goal for the living room should be an optimized, fanless PVR. (Of course, the ultimate challenge is porting this to a Mac mini with some USB or FireWire dongle receiver...)
So come July, (if the EU is spared from software patents - heed the call of your alpha geeks and join the campaign... Europeans now need all the help they can get to continue providing a refuge for otherwise patent-encumbered projects) chances are that the source is here to stay.
Just try and get a compatible card, i.e. one with open source drivers.
An American VDR site can be found at HoochVDR (need to register to see the forums), while the bulk of the discussion goes on at the VDR Portal - much of it is in German, but scrolling down the page, the International (i.e. "English only") section is not hard to find...
Looking at the description and the name of the manufacturer, it is interesting to recall that in the history of early CD-ROM videogames, "Quantum Gate" was a "season" of so-called "interactive movies" (VirtualCinema by HyperBole Studios) featuring the idea of VR overlay being (ab)used to turn the actual "soft" targets into something ugly the soldiers would no longer hesitate to shoot.
As soon as there are only one or a few dominant commercial services left, the dangers become obvious (only when it is already too late) if these start to hide part of the messages (e.g. eMail addresses, controversial topics etc.), switch to fee-based or geographically restricted access, or simply discontinue service.
This may have severe implications not just for historians' access to material a few decades down the road, but also even today, as already shown by some recent cases, e.g. for demonstrating prior art against bogus patents.
If it actually works, the live data should probably <g> have shown a deviation giving several hours' advance notice of posting the story on the Slashdot, considering the well-known catastrophic impact of a few million geeks hitting the same server (and furiously debating the theory)...
Although the model of Orkut depends on everyone being a real person (and an adult as well), release from jail seems to occur automatically even for fake accounts.
If you punish users for moderation rather than encourage it as /. does, and if you tolerate bogus identities in a social networking system (i.e. many miscreants don't get kicked out, as it does not really matter if they play by the same rules as everyone else), it becomes too easy for malicious participants to keep their hate speech visible on equal footing with honest, real people, while hiding behind forged profiles that are no better than anonymous avatars.
Actually, some apparent "fake users" have been allowed to exist for long enough on Orkut to see "fan" or "hate" communities being set up for "themselves".
In other words, on ./ and in real life (or even Usenet for that matter), the simple rule is this:
Whether you are using your true name or not, if you choose to be a troll, expect no better than to be treated as a troll.
On Orkut, everyone is expected to use their true identity and stand by their opinions, but because none of this is sufficiently well enforced, trolls have surprisingly little to fear.
There is no better way to undermine the moral standards in a community than allowing this to happen.
As the patent system claims to exist only to incentivize innovation, it does not need (or rather, have!) to reward the proverbial "flash of genius" with a long-time monopoly - just because these ideas spontaneously occur irrespective of any such formal incentive (that would justifiably exist for considerable long-term investment in research).
In other words, "really simple inventions" are not supposed (deserving!) to be worth billions (and be protected from competition, and require follow-up inventors to try and negotiate a license - over decades!) if the patent system is true to its own stated aim.
In related news, simultaneously Earthlink (in an anti-spam coalition with Microsoft) also announced filing numerous lawsuits to hopefully litigate some major spam operations into oblivion.
Winning these cases (and most importantly, many more) against the spammers would be much easier, of course, if the U.S. finally adopted an opt-in requirement as well, stating that there is no way you CAN SPAM, like in the EU where under a new agreement on anti-spam enforcement, one single complaint will now even suffice to send the authorities round to eradicate any remaining spammers' hideouts in 13 Member States at once.
Take the case of a small station or cable company retransmitting or "time-shifting" a show (that has already aired a gazillion times before) e.g. in one isolated breach of 17 U.S.C. 111, 501 et seq. - the law itself suggests that the award of damages (if anyone bothered to go to court over the issue at all) would be fairly minimal, and criminal prosecution highly unlikely, given the fact that an umpteenth re-broadcast watched by a few hundred viewers is of almost negligible impact on the rightholder.
On the other hand, demanding entirely overblown surveillance, censorship, damages and punishment, just for going after alleged one-time infringers sometimes not far from the borderline of fair use (excerpts on fan pages being taken down "at lawyerpoint" etc.), and even if the "suspects" happen to be minors, or 83 years old (let alone...deceased!), seems to appear perfectly adequate to many people if one sticks a label like "pirates" on such "bad" guys to mislead observers into believing someone else had actually been disposessed of an irreplacable piece of physical property merely by copying (part of) it.
IIRC there used to be something they called the First Amendment...
Must be the approaching Rhea M or something... ;-)
Well, we did. So let's download them, burn each of them to a CD-ROM, pick an appropriate pen to write the respective download URL and these words
on the disks, and spread them all across the campuses of our schools or companies. And of the one you like best, just make another dozen copies a day...Then, next time you get that desperate call from someone claiming their computer is broken, and asking you to fix their Wintel, in most cases you'll be able to help them simply by saying...
Just take a look at the statistics:
Europe has only had strict laws against junk communications for two years (Article 13 of Directive 2002/58/EC), they have only been in full force since November 2003 (and the provisions for criminal penalties are not even in place in each and every corner of the European Union yet) - but they mean pure and simple opt-in, and look how this continent's "spam output" already has become almost completely insignificant.
The U.S., I'm afraid to say, have put next to nothing in the way of these sociopaths: only a now-you-CAN-SPAM-more-than-ever Act that lives up to its name in the worst of ways, by legalizing most of the spam, enacting an unworkable opt-out onus on the users, and putting anti-spam warriors at the legal risk of interfering with (and being taken to court by the operators of) what is considered a legitimate "business model" except for some of the worst abuses - and for however little it is, all of this even an entire decade too late.
Reliance on technical solutions and minimal government intervention is just fine for many things - but it's failed in the fight against spam.
Here is how to do it:
That's certainly nowhere near rocket science, and if the above looks a bit complicated, that's probably just because- a directive is a (binding) template for lawmakers in all of the European Union's member states
- necessarily, the legal techniques as well as the "Legalese" itself vary between jurisdictions
- this is a great one-ban-fits-all provision that outlaws each and every flavor of spam at once
"First Amendment" implications: zero (and yes, of course there is freedom of speech in this part of the world as well, and even more of that speech could be heard if it wasn't drowned out by American spam - some of which comes relayed thru Asia of course) - it only bars some people from "pissing in everyone else's pool", but certainly not from speaking their mind!There is nothing wrong with following an example that works so well, even if it is from Europe...
Call your congresscritter now to outlaw unsolicited commercial communications, place a hefty fine and jail time on the offenders, and put an end to these abuses before they put an end to eMail itself.
Of course, initiatives such as the Simputer should be part of the equation, to peacefully and beneficially co-exist with this larger "$100 PC"... much like the iPod and the Mac (or the PC and the Palmtop) can do today - and this device could truly become a kind of "Mac mini for the masses"...
As I said before, when the Solar PC was discussed on /., ThinkGeek would be an ideal initial outlet to generate "a Slashdot effect in development funding".
Offering it in every corner of the world at the same time (albeit with a slightly higher price in well-off parts of the world) would also help fight the risk of certain governments reselling the "aid hardware" back to users in developed countries, instead of giving it to their own peoples.
Sell it for $150-200 e.g. in the US & Europe as well (thus even further increasing the economies of scale), and use the extra proceeds to cross-subsidize massive, direct sales to the people in even higher numbers and well below $100 in the developing countries. Hopefully a sufficiently large part of the value chain will also take place in these countries, so as not to overwhelm local manufacturers etc. there...
(Of course one could say "at least it's not anti-competitive", because with the manufacturers' de-facto monopolies on cartridges, competition in printer supplies is insignificant anyway...)