Unless... unless the original data was stored on DVD in the first place and you just took those DVDs with you. Then you'd save some time since the other method (Route B, let's say) would require you to copy the data off the old DVDs and to destroy the original DVDs (so the sender wouldn't have them anymore, just as he doesn't with Route A)! An even greater savings of time would be gained in cases where the data at the far end was going to be stored on DVD anyway! In fact, since it doesn't involve copying any data to or from the DVD at all, the MPAA could not have any problem with Method A, despite the fact that it could be used to transmit huge amounts of copyrighted data!
Of course, the Teamsters might induce outages if they weren't involved in the transport layer of Route A...
...
Anyway, I'm guessing the original example is not really a serious proposal as much as a useful illustration of the relationship between "bandwidth" and "latency" and what we would consider the speed of a transfer method. So, maybe you really shouldn't feel you need to overanalyze it as if it was a serious networking proposal. Still, I had fun... hope you did, too.
Do they really sell the frequencies (in certain areas) or do they just sell the permission to use them? If they actually sold them, the buyer would presumably be free to sell it to another later under whatever terms they liked. That might actually make it worth it to explore tech that would make more use of the freq. If you could buy the freq once and then later sell it multiple times (and have each "piece" work, of course;-) ), then that's a huge incentive to have the tech in place that would make that possible.
When I saw those links I thought... "Oh man, people have been wrong about Gore saying he invented the Internet." I followed the links thinking I should learn the info there in case I needed to pass it on when someone brings it up in the future. I just want to thank you for wasting my time.
Let's see. According to the first link, Al Gore said:
During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country's economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system.
So... Al Gore never said he invented the Internet... he really said that he took the initiative to create the Internet. In fact, those are the exact words that appeared in the Wired story that was apparently among the first to start making fun of the claim. I see. Perhaps that interviewee BS phraseology was hard for people to remember. Maybe that's why they don't quote Gore saying, "I took the initiative in creating the Internet," they just say, accurately enough, that "Gore said he invented the Internet", without quoting his exact words. That's actually unfortunate for people who aren't big fans of Al Gore since the original manages to be more embarrassing in its awkwardness. Oh well, too bad for them.
According to the second link, Vint Cerf (who is presumed to know who invented the Internet) said:
VP Gore was the first or surely among the first of the members of Congress to become a strong supporter of advanced networking while he served as Senator. As far back as 1986, he was holding hearings on this subject (supercomputing, fiber networks...) and asking about their promise and what could be done to realize them. Bob Kahn, with whom I worked to develop the Internet design in 1973, participated in several hearings held by then-Senator Gore and I recall that Bob introduced the term ``information infrastructure'' in one hearing in 1986. It was clear that as a Senator and now as Vice President, Gore has made it a point to be as well-informed as possible on technology and issues that surround it.
So... he goes out of his way to point out that he and Bob Kahn developed the Internet design in 1973. He says they also were at hearings that Al Gore's committee held when he started showing interest in the Internet some 13 years later. It also seems that the term "information superhighway" may have been based on a term Bob Kahn brought to Gore's attention in 1986.
Well, gee, you really debunked that one and earned the right to tell someone else to shut up. Tool.
To be honest, I'm mainly just pissed off at myself that I wasted this time following and reading your links since I thought you actually had something there. Grrrr
This is so tech-elitist... "The users are the problem!"
This is true... to be more consistent we should be more misanthropic than tech-elitist: "Everything is better without people in it (except for Soylent Green)!"
The thing that is kind of silly about these is that they attack your encrypted password even though the system has access to your plaintext password whenever you enter it. On top of that, you have had the bad password on the system already and you get to deal with people who have disabled accounts because they were away when they got the warning, etc.
It's a lot more effective to just check the password when the user is actually setting it. You take the plaintext password and apply it against the plaintext that your password guessing algorithms would produce. If you are at least somewhat efficient about it the whole thing will take a second or so and you'll be able to apply much more extensive tests than you would bother to use if you were going to spend the system time encrypting each guess (Just don't apply the "up to 1000 8-bit-characters exhaustion" test. Sure, it's fast since you just automatically fail them, but it kind of defeats the purpose). The first time I did this I had to write my own and fiddle the passwd program to use it, but nowadays you can just stick in an off-the-shelf pam module to do it with little muss or fuss. If they fail, they have to come up with one that passes, so the system never has the bad one on it.
On a different tack, we were discussing the use of high-ascii or 8-bit characters in a password.
I set someone's password to something like that once as a joke. Worked fine in my test...but didn't work so well over telnet at the time... oops.:-P Even today, using ^U wouldn't be a great choice on many systems...;-)
I don't know what your business was, but when I was at the ISP we would get free subscriptions to all kinds of magazines, including ones that nothing to do computer tech, like Road & Track and Sports Illustrated. I had just assumed the magazine business was mysterious...
I kind of miss the Road & Track one, actually. In fact, come to think of it, the noncomputer ones were the most-read... we had online sources we used for the computer news and info.
I apologize in advance for being in a sarcastic mood... I promise to regret it later.
The internet is not free. You pay for it somehow. Someone, somewhere pays for the content you are reading.
Well, thank God the cost is covered anyway. I was worried that some of these folks might be incurring out-of-pocket expenses. Somehow we always manage to pay for it, though. Excellent.
Pop unders make some of the content available to you at no charge.
But... but you said... you said it isn't free. You said we pay for it somehow. Oh, I don't know what to believe anymore...
Options? Let's all go back to lynx and use the internet for academic pursuits.
Yeah, like we all used to use lynx. Back then we dreamed of having a text-based web browser. We didn't even have your fancy H-T-T-P protocol back then... had to get some guy named Tim to come up with the first version of it! No, we used F-T-P and we liked it, just fine, thank you.
Better yet... let's go to micropayments. We can each pay a thousandth of a cent to read these posts.
Oh, were these posts being paid for by pop-unders? Darn... this is more nuanced than I ever realized. If you can come up with a micropayment scheme you should patent it... assuming the idea hasn't been patented already, of course. Hint: If you can make it transparent to The Browsing Experience, people probably won't hate it as much as the much-mailigned pop-under ad.
It takes less than a second to close a pop under. Now, if they spawn more and more pop unders we have a problem...
It takes a few more seconds to tell your web browser to ignore javascript that pops up windows, but it saves you time in the long run.
Of course, if your browser doesn't support that option it will take longer. Get one that supports tabbed browsing, too, while you are at it.
Wouldn't it be funny if, just when they get the patent approved, no one is using them anymore since all the browsers turn off that feature? Oh, did I say funny? I meant sad.... so sad. boo hoo. Maybe they should try to patent turning off window.open() in the browser...
I wish I could patent the idea of patenting things that everyone has already been doing for a long time without my even having to have told them about it but, unfortunately, there's way too much prior art for me to get away with it--errr... I mean, to make my claim good. Curses!
I wonder what they coded the compiler with? Are you suggesting that if they did it while in X that it somehow makes a difference? Does it mean that gcc wouldn't exist it it wasn't for X? Every instance of gcc that I used to run on all those SunOS machines way back when was initially compiled using the cc that shipped with SunOS. Does that mean that gcc depends on nonfree software? Let's face it, what it really means is that the distinction you are making is pointless. Still it would be fun in a sick way to trace it all the way back. What OS was X developed on? etc., etc. Let's make a complete list so we can decide what is really part of the Debian OS that is running on my laptop here. Wheeee!
There are GNU parts integral to the operation of this system (such as glibc)... that provides a much stronger claim to having the result called GNU/Linux than the likelihood that GNU tools were involved in the preparation of the kernel. That's why Debian calls it GNU/Linux, in fact (at least if their website is to be believed).
I was with when I was reading some of your posts earlier in the thread, but now it seems like you've got some "issues".
> There is no mandate that I have to LIKE RMS. > There is no mandate that I have to give ONE iota of respect to RMS. > There is no mandate that I have to USE his software. > There is no mandate anywhere that says "Thou shalt name your software after RMS." > None. > Zero. > Zilch.
Given that, what option does RMS have if he wants, for whatever reason, to see Linux referred to as GNU/Linux? I guess that convincing people is all that's left to him. Oh, and I suppose that he could also not make appearances at places that don't use the naming scheme he prefers.
Isn't that all he is doing? What's with this stuff you are posting about mandates and whether or not you have the Right to use your software as you see fit? AFAICT RMS isn't saying that you don't have that Right... he's trying to convince you that it isn't right (in the small-r sense) to use it in certain ways he doesn't approve of. How does that threaten your capital-R Rights exactly?
Do whatever you see fit with your code. In the meantime, there will be people trying to convince you to do particular things with that code which may or may not coincide with what you currently see as fit. Just ignore them if it bothers you. Then again, if it bothers you a lot, you may want to wonder why it's getting under your skin to that extent. Maybe you will change your mind, maybe you won't. In the meantime I'll be doing what I see fit with mine. That's all there is to it. Nobody is talking about mandates and capital-R rights but you.
I had to ride a rickety coaster at a small amusement park twice in a row to appease my kids. Looking at the rusty supports it was hard not to imagine the thing collapsing, and somehow it didn't occur to me to take comfort from the fact that the fall would only be at 1G...;-)
It may be to early to tell what all the ramifications of this are, but you bring up a good point.
There does seem to be a certain tendency to forget that things like this are often just education issues... that the company is temporarily without clue since they were new to this particular scene. Instead, it's treated more like a deal with the Devil... once you sell your soul, that's it, it's gone! That may be a function of the kind of "30-second hate" stuff that goes around thile the company is still wearing a black hat. Sometimes folks get so worked up that they forget what the purpose of the criticism was in the first place. Look at the way some folks continued to go on about KDE after the QT license was changed... that they were "tainted" by a history of nonfreeness, etc., etc.
There's little incentive for companies to turn the black hat in for a white one if you are going to continue to boycott/villify them even after the switch.
I think it's pretty silly to imagine that the solution to spam will be through technology. It would be very hard to differentiate spam and legitimate mailing lists.
The point of redesigning the delivery system is to make that question irrelevant. For instance, some proposals try to add a concept of trust between mail servers. Under the current model, every mail server trusts every other mail server by default. Admins at sites will occasionally block mail from certain sites, or from all dialups, or from all dynamic IP addresses. That is a very crude form of a trust system. In the first case, the lack of trust is based on some evidence of abuse. In the latter two cases it isn't based on actual abuse so much as a history of abuse. Some have proposed more precise trust mechanisms that would be used between mail servers (using signatures, etc. for the identification). The default case could either be trust or no trust (depending on whether the solution uses whitelists or blacklists)... the point is that abuse from a site that isn't dealt with would cost you the status of a trusted server. That essentially moves you away from the whole per-message differentiation problem. The end user, after all, can tell the difference between spam and legitimate mailing lists. The devil in the details in this case is who maintains the lists and what sort of mechanism is involved in getting on and off them. Presumably there would be many (much like the choice you have in NoCeM lists for Usenet) and, if so, that might make the question less critical.
And of course a legal solution can work...to the extent that other laws work and are enforceable. Many forms of mail fraud are illegal, but that doesn't mean you won't get mail scams and such sent to you. However it severely reduces the amount that you receive and also determines a path for you or the goverment to prosecute offenders.
Unfortunately, the legal approach has it's own pitfalls. For one thing, there is a big question of jurisdiction. We sort of wink at the question when it is used to go after spammers because we don't like spam, but do we really want to establish the idea that a local gov't can impose it's particular laws and mores on the net? There are also technical problems. It's easy to identify the relay that the spam was sent through. If they provide contact information in the spam (kind of useless without it, unless it's one of those advocacy spams) you have that, as well. But that, in just about every case, doesn't identify an individual. Let's say they used a throwaway Yahoo! account. Well, we just read that Yahoo! doesn't have any way of identifying who the account holder is. As for the relay, I don't know how common my case is, but most of the spam I get is relayed from foreign countries.
So does the actual payoff of a legislative solution in terms of spam reduction make up for the precedence it establishes for local gov'ts to legislate net activities? FWIW, I get more spam than ever now (although, thanks to SpamAssassin, I don't see as much of it as I used to).
If anonymity disappeared from the web, "a lot of the problems would go away," he said.
That's especially true if you equate users with problems;-)
But he dismissed legal solutions altogether, saying that measures like anti-spam legislation are completely ineffective. "This has to be solved technically, not legally," he warned. "If we can't solve these problems, we'll see less and less services."
That's a point that is occasionally debated in anti-spam circles. The problem there is that the Internet mail delivery system was designed for the kinds of users we had 25 years ago. Heck, it wasn't until somewhat over 5 years ago that all the MTAs [that mattered] would ship with relaying turned off by default. Looked at from that perspective, it seems like a technical problem... change the delivery system and you make the abuse irrelevant. The problem is, how do you implement such a change? It's not so much a question of designing a new system... I've seen a number of proposals that looked fine. The problem is, how do you get all the mail servers on the net to switch over?
At that point in the debate is where the division usually comes in. Some folks will propose various systems for gradual adoption of new systems (essentially having two delivery systems in place until the new one is widely adopted enough to drop the old), while others pull back at that point. They'll say that spam is a social problem and, as a result, it can't be solved technically. Usually those folks will go on to pursue legislative attempts at a solution. The problem is, the track record of using legislation to solve social problems is nothing to write home about.
If he can come up with a technical solution for Yahoo!, of course, then he is all set. The problem, as he said, was that you only have so much identification information available to you at the server end. That makes it nontrivial to reliably separate the valid users from the rest. The thing is, just how much personal identification information are you comfortable giving to Yahoo! to get a mailbox...?
Government coercion is a sufficient but not a necessary requirement. Cabals and monopolies can exert coercive force on a market with no help from the government at all. Just look at the licensing shenanigans that Microsoft uses on OEMs.
From my perspective, however, I would look at that example as excellent proof of my point concerning the relative abilities to coerce. The projections people are making about the CBDTPA involve an inescapable application of DRM circuitry. They say it would be directly enforced by the US gov't here and, soon, by the EU in Europe. They claim, and point to historical examples to support their claim, that it would next be forced down the throats of other gov'ts by the US (and EU?).
That's a far cry from the tepid coercion that you describe. For example, I was a happy computer user for over ten years before I ever touched an MS product in the late 90's. That wasn't because I hated MS... I never thought much about MS at all. The other platforms I already used took care of all my computing needs so it was never an issue. The only reason I eventually set up a windows machine was that I had helped found an ISP and I wanted to have a machine around so I could walk customers through support problems. We also set up a Mac for the same reason. They weren't even powered on most of the time since all the real work was done on Debian Linux boxes, except for one SunOS desktop. For all the supposed coercive power of MS licensing, about the only thing I use a Windows machine for even today is playing games. I actually got rid of the Windows partition on my dual-boot at home since it became obvious that my wife was never going to boot out of Linux anyway.
Now, am I saying that MS doesn't want to coerce others or that they haven't tried to coerce others? Certainly not. I'm just saying that this kind of pathetic coercion is, apparently, easily avoided by anyone who actually wants to avoid it. Much easier than say, getting phone service that doesn't have FBI wiretapping built in at the CO. Or [legally] having a different first-class mail provider than the USPS. It's even a hell of a lot easier than avoiding having your children subjected to the latest education fad.
Even if the CBDTPA or some variant never gets passed, we can still be screwed. You are unlikely to find anyone manufacturing non-crippled hardware if MS stipulates that Windows may only be licensed to run on systems with DRM ciruitry.
That's certainly a possibility since people can voluntarily screw themselves, but a comparatively remote one for anything but new tech like, say, DVD drives. First, there would have to be a lot in it for MS for them to even try such a thing... they've been getting too many PR black eyes of late to do little Hollywood any expensive favors. Hell, even if MS agreed to it and succeeded, all it would take for it to collapse would be for a mobo/CPU/whatever manufacturer to see a source of profit that doesn't depend on MS. That gets more common all the time... and that's not even counting sales in countries that aren't sticklers for legal installations of MS software. MS couldn't do anything about that without the help of the US gov't either.
Let's face it, if it was so easy to coerce without gov't, would all all those corporations be so eager to line up and fill the pockets of our august statesmen? A powerful gov't is a gov't that has a lot of power to rent out. And humans seem to be wired in such a way that there has never been a shortage of rentors...
In the end, you can come up with all kinds of scenarios that don't involve gov't which might be possible, but the fact is that it is only through the use of gov't that it is ever likely to happen. That's all I am saying, and I don't think that's really a radical point to make.
I see the toolbox isn't available for MacOS/X. Somehow, this doesn't bother me. Oh yeah, it's because I haven't had enough free time for games in three years.:P
Maybe it's because you spend too much time following/. threads about things you have no interest in?;-)
Anyway, I kind of agree with you since no game seems to really provide the satisfaction I hope it will, but I am still in the "hope springs eternal" stage with NWN. As an added plus, the much-and-oft-delayed release schedule has allowed me to live in this hopeful state far longer than previous game releases ever did!
before the libertarians mouth off, please not that this is private industry pushing hollings for this law.
While I am less inclined than yourself to speak for all libertarians, I am intrigued by how close you come to the nub of the issue without actually getting it. I don't assume that private industry is good and gov't is bad... after all, they both have humans in them (and we know how they can be;-) ). The reason I prefer private solutions in general is that private entities have a much harder time coercing people than gov't ones do. They undoubtably want to coerce just as much as the humans in gov't do, they just have a much harder time. Your next statement illustrates that... what they are proposing to force on others could never be accomplished without the apparatus of gov't coercion.
bad gov't typically gets bought by "free enterprise" when people don't pay any fucking attention to their gov't.
I don't think there is "bad gov't" insofar as that would seem to imply the existence of a good one somewhere, and there's been no evidence of that. The problem here is the ability to coerce that's built into gov't. We allow the gov't to force people into doing things even though we would never allow any private individuals that same ability. Now I'm not debating in this post whether that is a good thing or not, I'm just pointing out that it is a fact. And, whenever we give the gov't new powers, we also increase the scope and strength of that ability to coerce. That's why I have a problem with immediately assuming there has to be a "gov't solution" to every problem that comes up. It's not that I think private entites are saints, it's just that the private devils are inherently weaker than gov't ones.
maybe they should get off their ass and vote a better one in.
...after all, the fact that it has never solved anything before doesn't mean it won't this time. Anyway, voting isn't our only option. We can also try to get interested folks to pay "fucking attention" to attempts at gov't coercion that are beyond even your ability to rationalize away. That what the BusinessWeek article, and this thread, are all about. Your attacks against your imagined views of libertarians are just a distraction from that goal.
Slashdot Mirror
Unless... unless the original data was stored on DVD in the first place and you just took those DVDs with you. Then you'd save some time since the other method (Route B, let's say) would require you to copy the data off the old DVDs and to destroy the original DVDs (so the sender wouldn't have them anymore, just as he doesn't with Route A)! An even greater savings of time would be gained in cases where the data at the far end was going to be stored on DVD anyway! In fact, since it doesn't involve copying any data to or from the DVD at all, the MPAA could not have any problem with Method A, despite the fact that it could be used to transmit huge amounts of copyrighted data!
Of course, the Teamsters might induce outages if they weren't involved in the transport layer of Route A...
...
Anyway, I'm guessing the original example is not really a serious proposal as much as a useful illustration of the relationship between "bandwidth" and "latency" and what we would consider the speed of a transfer method. So, maybe you really shouldn't feel you need to overanalyze it as if it was a serious networking proposal. Still, I had fun... hope you did, too.
Do they really sell the frequencies (in certain areas) or do they just sell the permission to use them? If they actually sold them, the buyer would presumably be free to sell it to another later under whatever terms they liked. That might actually make it worth it to explore tech that would make more use of the freq. If you could buy the freq once and then later sell it multiple times (and have each "piece" work, of course ;-) ), then that's a huge incentive to have the tech in place that would make that possible.
When I saw those links I thought... "Oh man, people have been wrong about Gore saying he invented the Internet." I followed the links thinking I should learn the info there in case I needed to pass it on when someone brings it up in the future. I just want to thank you for wasting my time.
Let's see. According to the first link, Al Gore said:
So... Al Gore never said he invented the Internet... he really said that he took the initiative to create the Internet. In fact, those are the exact words that appeared in the Wired story that was apparently among the first to start making fun of the claim. I see. Perhaps that interviewee BS phraseology was hard for people to remember. Maybe that's why they don't quote Gore saying, "I took the initiative in creating the Internet," they just say, accurately enough, that "Gore said he invented the Internet", without quoting his exact words. That's actually unfortunate for people who aren't big fans of Al Gore since the original manages to be more embarrassing in its awkwardness. Oh well, too bad for them.
According to the second link, Vint Cerf (who is presumed to know who invented the Internet) said:
So... he goes out of his way to point out that he and Bob Kahn developed the Internet design in 1973. He says they also were at hearings that Al Gore's committee held when he started showing interest in the Internet some 13 years later. It also seems that the term "information superhighway" may have been based on a term Bob Kahn brought to Gore's attention in 1986.
Well, gee, you really debunked that one and earned the right to tell someone else to shut up. Tool.
To be honest, I'm mainly just pissed off at myself that I wasted this time following and reading your links since I thought you actually had something there. Grrrr
This is so tech-elitist... "The users are the problem!"
This is true... to be more consistent we should be more misanthropic than tech-elitist: "Everything is better without people in it (except for Soylent Green)!"
The thing that is kind of silly about these is that they attack your encrypted password even though the system has access to your plaintext password whenever you enter it. On top of that, you have had the bad password on the system already and you get to deal with people who have disabled accounts because they were away when they got the warning, etc.
It's a lot more effective to just check the password when the user is actually setting it. You take the plaintext password and apply it against the plaintext that your password guessing algorithms would produce. If you are at least somewhat efficient about it the whole thing will take a second or so and you'll be able to apply much more extensive tests than you would bother to use if you were going to spend the system time encrypting each guess (Just don't apply the "up to 1000 8-bit-characters exhaustion" test. Sure, it's fast since you just automatically fail them, but it kind of defeats the purpose). The first time I did this I had to write my own and fiddle the passwd program to use it, but nowadays you can just stick in an off-the-shelf pam module to do it with little muss or fuss. If they fail, they have to come up with one that passes, so the system never has the bad one on it.
On a different tack, we were discussing the use of high-ascii or 8-bit characters in a password.
I set someone's password to something like that once as a joke. Worked fine in my test ...but didn't work so well over telnet at the time... oops. :-P Even today, using ^U wouldn't be a great choice on many systems... ;-)
I don't know what your business was, but when I was at the ISP we would get free subscriptions to all kinds of magazines, including ones that nothing to do computer tech, like Road & Track and Sports Illustrated. I had just assumed the magazine business was mysterious...
I kind of miss the Road & Track one, actually. In fact, come to think of it, the noncomputer ones were the most-read... we had online sources we used for the computer news and info.
I apologize in advance for being in a sarcastic mood... I promise to regret it later.
The internet is not free. You pay for it somehow. Someone, somewhere pays for the content you are reading.
Well, thank God the cost is covered anyway. I was worried that some of these folks might be incurring out-of-pocket expenses. Somehow we always manage to pay for it, though. Excellent.Pop unders make some of the content available to you at no charge.
But... but you said... you said it isn't free. You said we pay for it somehow. Oh, I don't know what to believe anymore...
Options? Let's all go back to lynx and use the internet for academic pursuits.
Yeah, like we all used to use lynx. Back then we dreamed of having a text-based web browser. We didn't even have your fancy H-T-T-P protocol back then... had to get some guy named Tim to come up with the first version of it! No, we used F-T-P and we liked it, just fine, thank you.
Better yet ... let's go to micropayments. We can each pay a thousandth of a cent to read these posts.
Oh, were these posts being paid for by pop-unders? Darn... this is more nuanced than I ever realized. If you can come up with a micropayment scheme you should patent it... assuming the idea hasn't been patented already, of course. Hint: If you can make it transparent to The Browsing Experience, people probably won't hate it as much as the much-mailigned pop-under ad.
It takes less than a second to close a pop under. Now, if they spawn more and more pop unders we have a problem ...
It takes a few more seconds to tell your web browser to ignore javascript that pops up windows, but it saves you time in the long run.
Of course, if your browser doesn't support that option it will take longer. Get one that supports tabbed browsing, too, while you are at it.
Wouldn't it be funny if, just when they get the patent approved, no one is using them anymore since all the browsers turn off that feature? Oh, did I say funny? I meant sad.... so sad. boo hoo. Maybe they should try to patent turning off window.open() in the browser...
I wish I could patent the idea of patenting things that everyone has already been doing for a long time without my even having to have told them about it but, unfortunately, there's way too much prior art for me to get away with it--errr... I mean, to make my claim good. Curses!
As you might imagine, those single-molecule transistors are very easy to misplace... ;-)
:-P
Of course, anyone who has seen how a company can fake a nonworking demo is probaby content to wait for the outside review anyway...
You should buy more! After all, it can't go any lower than this... err
I wonder what they compiled the kernel with?
I wonder what they coded the compiler with? Are you suggesting that if they did it while in X that it somehow makes a difference? Does it mean that gcc wouldn't exist it it wasn't for X? Every instance of gcc that I used to run on all those SunOS machines way back when was initially compiled using the cc that shipped with SunOS. Does that mean that gcc depends on nonfree software? Let's face it, what it really means is that the distinction you are making is pointless. Still it would be fun in a sick way to trace it all the way back. What OS was X developed on? etc., etc. Let's make a complete list so we can decide what is really part of the Debian OS that is running on my laptop here. Wheeee!
There are GNU parts integral to the operation of this system (such as glibc)... that provides a much stronger claim to having the result called GNU/Linux than the likelihood that GNU tools were involved in the preparation of the kernel. That's why Debian calls it GNU/Linux, in fact (at least if their website is to be believed).
I was with when I was reading some of your posts earlier in the thread, but now it seems like you've got some "issues".
> There is no mandate that I have to LIKE RMS.
> There is no mandate that I have to give ONE iota of respect to RMS.
> There is no mandate that I have to USE his software.
> There is no mandate anywhere that says "Thou shalt name your software after RMS."
> None.
> Zero.
> Zilch.
Given that, what option does RMS have if he wants, for whatever reason, to see Linux referred to as GNU/Linux? I guess that convincing people is all that's left to him. Oh, and I suppose that he could also not make appearances at places that don't use the naming scheme he prefers.
Isn't that all he is doing? What's with this stuff you are posting about mandates and whether or not you have the Right to use your software as you see fit? AFAICT RMS isn't saying that you don't have that Right... he's trying to convince you that it isn't right (in the small-r sense) to use it in certain ways he doesn't approve of. How does that threaten your capital-R Rights exactly?
Do whatever you see fit with your code. In the meantime, there will be people trying to convince you to do particular things with that code which may or may not coincide with what you currently see as fit. Just ignore them if it bothers you. Then again, if it bothers you a lot, you may want to wonder why it's getting under your skin to that extent. Maybe you will change your mind, maybe you won't. In the meantime I'll be doing what I see fit with mine. That's all there is to it. Nobody is talking about mandates and capital-R rights but you.
I had to ride a rickety coaster at a small amusement park twice in a row to appease my kids. Looking at the rusty supports it was hard not to imagine the thing collapsing, and somehow it didn't occur to me to take comfort from the fact that the fall would only be at 1G... ;-)
It may be to early to tell what all the ramifications of this are, but you bring up a good point.
There does seem to be a certain tendency to forget that things like this are often just education issues... that the company is temporarily without clue since they were new to this particular scene. Instead, it's treated more like a deal with the Devil... once you sell your soul, that's it, it's gone! That may be a function of the kind of "30-second hate" stuff that goes around thile the company is still wearing a black hat. Sometimes folks get so worked up that they forget what the purpose of the criticism was in the first place. Look at the way some folks continued to go on about KDE after the QT license was changed... that they were "tainted" by a history of nonfreeness, etc., etc.
There's little incentive for companies to turn the black hat in for a white one if you are going to continue to boycott/villify them even after the switch.
I think it's pretty silly to imagine that the solution to spam will be through technology. It would be very hard to differentiate spam and legitimate mailing lists.
The point of redesigning the delivery system is to make that question irrelevant. For instance, some proposals try to add a concept of trust between mail servers. Under the current model, every mail server trusts every other mail server by default. Admins at sites will occasionally block mail from certain sites, or from all dialups, or from all dynamic IP addresses. That is a very crude form of a trust system. In the first case, the lack of trust is based on some evidence of abuse. In the latter two cases it isn't based on actual abuse so much as a history of abuse. Some have proposed more precise trust mechanisms that would be used between mail servers (using signatures, etc. for the identification). The default case could either be trust or no trust (depending on whether the solution uses whitelists or blacklists)... the point is that abuse from a site that isn't dealt with would cost you the status of a trusted server. That essentially moves you away from the whole per-message differentiation problem. The end user, after all, can tell the difference between spam and legitimate mailing lists. The devil in the details in this case is who maintains the lists and what sort of mechanism is involved in getting on and off them. Presumably there would be many (much like the choice you have in NoCeM lists for Usenet) and, if so, that might make the question less critical.
And of course a legal solution can work...to the extent that other laws work and are enforceable. Many forms of mail fraud are illegal, but that doesn't mean you won't get mail scams and such sent to you. However it severely reduces the amount that you receive and also determines a path for you or the goverment to prosecute offenders.
Unfortunately, the legal approach has it's own pitfalls. For one thing, there is a big question of jurisdiction. We sort of wink at the question when it is used to go after spammers because we don't like spam, but do we really want to establish the idea that a local gov't can impose it's particular laws and mores on the net? There are also technical problems. It's easy to identify the relay that the spam was sent through. If they provide contact information in the spam (kind of useless without it, unless it's one of those advocacy spams) you have that, as well. But that, in just about every case, doesn't identify an individual. Let's say they used a throwaway Yahoo! account. Well, we just read that Yahoo! doesn't have any way of identifying who the account holder is. As for the relay, I don't know how common my case is, but most of the spam I get is relayed from foreign countries.
So does the actual payoff of a legislative solution in terms of spam reduction make up for the precedence it establishes for local gov'ts to legislate net activities? FWIW, I get more spam than ever now (although, thanks to SpamAssassin, I don't see as much of it as I used to).
If anonymity disappeared from the web, "a lot of the problems would go away," he said.
That's especially true if you equate users with problems ;-)
But he dismissed legal solutions altogether, saying that measures like anti-spam legislation are completely ineffective. "This has to be solved technically, not legally," he warned. "If we can't solve these problems, we'll see less and less services."
That's a point that is occasionally debated in anti-spam circles. The problem there is that the Internet mail delivery system was designed for the kinds of users we had 25 years ago. Heck, it wasn't until somewhat over 5 years ago that all the MTAs [that mattered] would ship with relaying turned off by default. Looked at from that perspective, it seems like a technical problem... change the delivery system and you make the abuse irrelevant. The problem is, how do you implement such a change? It's not so much a question of designing a new system... I've seen a number of proposals that looked fine. The problem is, how do you get all the mail servers on the net to switch over?
At that point in the debate is where the division usually comes in. Some folks will propose various systems for gradual adoption of new systems (essentially having two delivery systems in place until the new one is widely adopted enough to drop the old), while others pull back at that point. They'll say that spam is a social problem and, as a result, it can't be solved technically. Usually those folks will go on to pursue legislative attempts at a solution. The problem is, the track record of using legislation to solve social problems is nothing to write home about.
If he can come up with a technical solution for Yahoo!, of course, then he is all set. The problem, as he said, was that you only have so much identification information available to you at the server end. That makes it nontrivial to reliably separate the valid users from the rest. The thing is, just how much personal identification information are you comfortable giving to Yahoo! to get a mailbox...?
Government coercion is a sufficient but not a necessary requirement. Cabals and monopolies can exert coercive force on a market with no help from the government at all. Just look at the licensing shenanigans that Microsoft uses on OEMs.
From my perspective, however, I would look at that example as excellent proof of my point concerning the relative abilities to coerce. The projections people are making about the CBDTPA involve an inescapable application of DRM circuitry. They say it would be directly enforced by the US gov't here and, soon, by the EU in Europe. They claim, and point to historical examples to support their claim, that it would next be forced down the throats of other gov'ts by the US (and EU?).
That's a far cry from the tepid coercion that you describe. For example, I was a happy computer user for over ten years before I ever touched an MS product in the late 90's. That wasn't because I hated MS... I never thought much about MS at all. The other platforms I already used took care of all my computing needs so it was never an issue. The only reason I eventually set up a windows machine was that I had helped found an ISP and I wanted to have a machine around so I could walk customers through support problems. We also set up a Mac for the same reason. They weren't even powered on most of the time since all the real work was done on Debian Linux boxes, except for one SunOS desktop. For all the supposed coercive power of MS licensing, about the only thing I use a Windows machine for even today is playing games. I actually got rid of the Windows partition on my dual-boot at home since it became obvious that my wife was never going to boot out of Linux anyway.
Now, am I saying that MS doesn't want to coerce others or that they haven't tried to coerce others? Certainly not. I'm just saying that this kind of pathetic coercion is, apparently, easily avoided by anyone who actually wants to avoid it. Much easier than say, getting phone service that doesn't have FBI wiretapping built in at the CO. Or [legally] having a different first-class mail provider than the USPS. It's even a hell of a lot easier than avoiding having your children subjected to the latest education fad.
Even if the CBDTPA or some variant never gets passed, we can still be screwed. You are unlikely to find anyone manufacturing non-crippled hardware if MS stipulates that Windows may only be licensed to run on systems with DRM ciruitry.
That's certainly a possibility since people can voluntarily screw themselves, but a comparatively remote one for anything but new tech like, say, DVD drives. First, there would have to be a lot in it for MS for them to even try such a thing... they've been getting too many PR black eyes of late to do little Hollywood any expensive favors. Hell, even if MS agreed to it and succeeded, all it would take for it to collapse would be for a mobo/CPU/whatever manufacturer to see a source of profit that doesn't depend on MS. That gets more common all the time... and that's not even counting sales in countries that aren't sticklers for legal installations of MS software. MS couldn't do anything about that without the help of the US gov't either.
Let's face it, if it was so easy to coerce without gov't, would all all those corporations be so eager to line up and fill the pockets of our august statesmen? A powerful gov't is a gov't that has a lot of power to rent out. And humans seem to be wired in such a way that there has never been a shortage of rentors...
In the end, you can come up with all kinds of scenarios that don't involve gov't which might be possible, but the fact is that it is only through the use of gov't that it is ever likely to happen. That's all I am saying, and I don't think that's really a radical point to make.
I see the toolbox isn't available for MacOS/X. Somehow, this doesn't bother me. Oh yeah, it's because I haven't had enough free time for games in three years. :P
Maybe it's because you spend too much time following /. threads about things you have no interest in? ;-)
Anyway, I kind of agree with you since no game seems to really provide the satisfaction I hope it will, but I am still in the "hope springs eternal" stage with NWN. As an added plus, the much-and-oft-delayed release schedule has allowed me to live in this hopeful state far longer than previous game releases ever did!
before the libertarians mouth off, please not that this is private industry pushing hollings for this law.
While I am less inclined than yourself to speak for all libertarians, I am intrigued by how close you come to the nub of the issue without actually getting it. I don't assume that private industry is good and gov't is bad... after all, they both have humans in them (and we know how they can be ;-) ). The reason I prefer private solutions in general is that private entities have a much harder time coercing people than gov't ones do. They undoubtably want to coerce just as much as the humans in gov't do, they just have a much harder time. Your next statement illustrates that... what they are proposing to force on others could never be accomplished without the apparatus of gov't coercion.
bad gov't typically gets bought by "free enterprise" when people don't pay any fucking attention to their gov't.
I don't think there is "bad gov't" insofar as that would seem to imply the existence of a good one somewhere, and there's been no evidence of that. The problem here is the ability to coerce that's built into gov't. We allow the gov't to force people into doing things even though we would never allow any private individuals that same ability. Now I'm not debating in this post whether that is a good thing or not, I'm just pointing out that it is a fact. And, whenever we give the gov't new powers, we also increase the scope and strength of that ability to coerce. That's why I have a problem with immediately assuming there has to be a "gov't solution" to every problem that comes up. It's not that I think private entites are saints, it's just that the private devils are inherently weaker than gov't ones.
maybe they should get off their ass and vote a better one in.
...after all, the fact that it has never solved anything before doesn't mean it won't this time. Anyway, voting isn't our only option. We can also try to get interested folks to pay "fucking attention" to attempts at gov't coercion that are beyond even your ability to rationalize away. That what the BusinessWeek article, and this thread, are all about. Your attacks against your imagined views of libertarians are just a distraction from that goal.