It would be better to move their HQ elsewhere. Or at least announce to consider it. If they can make the point public that this bill is just forcing away business (and hence money) from Texas some people might reconsider.
Well, the NSA apparently felt the need for a secure operating system. They went about it in the only sensible way (i believe) with an open source system. If there was a sensible alternative out there the NSA wouldn't have felt the need to throw money at the problem. This means, that even the NSA feels that Microsoft products don't do their job securitywise, and even if they can look at the source (i think the NSA has the necessary influence to do this) they might find it too complicated, apparently it's easier to start over with Linux anyway. Now, if even the US american NSA doesn't consider windows in their search of a secure OS why should the German Bundeswehr, or any other country for that matter. I think an Open Sourced OS would be the cheapest solution (and even allow for some interoperability).
Also consider that MS' might build something into their OS so it can be switched off remotely (maybe if they think you didn't buy the licence, or you didn't update often enough). Also it becomes harder and harder to keep control over your computer once you installed an MS OS or MS applications. Already you have to turn off automatic updates. The system actively resists some tampering with system files (yeah, it's for the best of the user, but even someone who knows what he is doing can't turn it off). Well an obscure blackbox wich doesn't allow for tampering isn't what makes a happy security expert. He prefers a modular and well structured overseeable system (not an easy feat with todays OSes). I think a version of Linux would be a good start, but maybe some people at Siemens did some lobbying (that is to be expected, although american politicians call it bribery when it happens outside of the US, of course none of that happens in the US at all, and G. W. Bushs plans to distibute money to his rich friends are for the best of USA, but i digress...).
No, but may be "it's not going to the artists anyway but only to the greedy RIAA who'll just use the money to do more damage to consumers and artists rights" is. Obviously we need a way to cut the RIAA out of the loop and get the money to the artists on a more direct way. That can only work if the artists retain enough rights over their music that they are allowed to market it themselves. At the moment the RIAA plays both sides against the middle and is happily reaping the profit, establishing the old record labels as the only ones who may make a profit from music.
Think about it, by allowing the user full control over his computer it is virtually impossible to apply digital rights management mechanisms (as you lined out) even InTether (which obviously only works, because every application can tweak the Windows OS to it's hearts content) can not stop me from booting into Linux and start dissecting it, copying any files, restore my HD to any state i like, you name it.
Now let's look what happened to DeCSS: it allows you to convert CSS-protected content to a form you can watch on your linux box. What you then do with it, view it, copy it, send it to/dev/null... is yours to decide. But now the Media Industry wants to protect "files", simple chunks of data, from copying. This is obviously only possible by working with a crippled OS, since copying (from the network card to ram, ram to hd, hd to ram, ram to processor...) is what a computer does all the time, even more than computing (typical operation: Load OP a, Load OP b, Mul a*b -> a, Stor OP a; 3 copies, 1 compute) but now the OS has to trace all that copying, has to ensure it doesn't happen unauthorized, suddenly buffering becomes a major headache.
Now microsoft tells the would be Mediacontrollers: "Look here, we bend over your customers nicely, so you can screw them, all we want is a little share in the profit", and Linux, allowing all that free copying, suddenly becomes a copyright circumvention device.
Don't you think it might provoke a response on the same level? Some "Freedom Terrorists" or the like who simply go and shoot some RIAA executives in response to such an attack. And before you declare the forming of such a group absurd: note that there already exist terrorist groupings with idealistic aims (whatever underlying agendas there may be) and that they apparently manage to recruit people. Also note, that the RIAA (for an example) is highly vulnerable to Hacker attacks (hacktivism). There is no need to shoot their executives, when a skilled hacker can hit at them from the other side of the planet.
No, i don't think it would be wise of corporations to escalate the conflict to that level. Also those squads just *might* get caught (remember Rainbow Warrior and how it was smeared all over the French Government?) and even if not the public will make the connection (if someone sent a squad to destroy napsterservers everyone in the world would know who had an interest there).
I stumbled over the term 'fuckware' in the debian posting:
The PDF fuckware (Futile Unnatural Control Keeping Ware, credit to Oskar Sandberg for that) is on the same road as DVD CSS and HDTV.) As this term so nicely describes what big business tries more and more to establish (think also fuckhardware) and also how consumers rights (such as fair use) are treated (essentially the consumer is screwed) i think we all should try and establish this term where appropriate. It has also the advantage of brevity over "Software honouring digital rights management" or somesuch.
DVD drives and region encoding is a very good example. Even the employees of the stores know in which ones it can be turned off, small wonder, since customers are asking this. I even heared that some Manufacturers even advertised with this "feature" (now being able to turn off something becomes a feature...) in countries where they could get away with it. And the information how to disable regionencoding for a specific player is probably even leaked by the manufacturer himself.
What is different here though is: the copy protection mechanisms are in fact an additional feature. There will be software accessing these hardware functions which won't work with a HD without them. You can still use it as a normal HD but you can also use it to store special, copy protected, content, which you cannot store on an older HD (since the software handling that content will simply not allow that).
For the customer there is no immediate disadvantage: He can do everything he could do with the old HD, and if he ever intends to use aforementioned software he can do that. The problem then is, that once those new HDs are so widely distributed, that copyprotected content can be marketed (the software to do this probably comes for free) it will become harder to get the content in the unprotected form.
I don't know how exactly a V-chip works, but if it's just some software that you can switch 'on' or 'off' (maybe even with some nontrivial keycombination or even a password that can be set) then i think sooner or later the kid will figure it out (maybe find the note with the password) if it really wants to. I think the only thing that'd really work would be some kind of key, that can be removed (and that should be treated like a key, and not left lying next to the Box).
While i agree with above statement, i feel it should be added, that it's probably a good idea to explain to the kid why you don't want him to watch some movies or play some games, especially not unsupervised. That would avoid the kid regarding this as just another stupid rule or even a challenge.
I think that should be a perfect reason for returning the DVD or the VHS or both, since it probably isn't mentioned on the box, that this device doesn't work with the other. Return it to shop, and demand another product until u get it working. If they don't want to exchange it make a ruckus so everyone in the store gets the message. And by the way there should be enough organisations which would happily take up the issue and force the Manufacturers to print it on the outside of their box in big enough letters.
Then you only need to wait for the day when "Macrovision can be disabled" becomes a salesargument.
Since some of these Beasties are intended for sending copies of your mail elsewhere (when you forward something that's explicitly allowed to forward and add some comments) the law should come down pretty hard on those.
I don't need to copy/forward an email to complain about spam. And i *can* copy the headers, since they are not copyrighted by the author. I think copying the Subject falls under fair use. Also i can forward the message to the author himself. So i think there's still some options left to complain about spam.
Ok, i was always curious about that "How tough is Linux" banner ad, the colors are nice, the animation is funny, but not too flashy, and it made me a little curious. But my general rule is: "clicking on an ad brings you somewhere you don't want to be, so don't do it".
Now, maybe just to have a say in this thread i clicked on the ad. Where it got me was a page where i could subscribe to a magazine. The page promises it'll take only 5 minutes and it's free anyway, so what have i got to loose? Well, the answer is simple: time. I don't want to wade through a tediuos subscription process before i can even have a look at the content. The whole experience is analogous to being invited somewhere i'm not too willing to go anyway, and then run into a locked door.
I don't know if the site is interesting or not, maybe later someone tells me it's interesting and i'll subscribe. But after they got my attention so far that i "clicked through" why don't the make every effort to use that very short attention span the everyday websurfer has for anything he's not actively searching and present something that might catch my interest and draw me in?
And mind you, i don't find Linux Benchmarks (the main argument for subscribing) uninteresting at all, i'd just have liked to look at some before subscribing. I even bothered to look at that frontpage for something that would lead me to some examples at least (better would have been the possibility to view it without subscribing).
Other click-through experiences so far have been:
- The site that pops up 3 windows all over the screen, and whenever i kill one it spawns two more. (no more javascipt then, ok)
- The site that requires me to download a plugin before i can even start entering it, let alone navigating.
- The site that requires my undivided attention in terms of bandwidth to even load the front page for some minutes. (Ctrl+W)
- The site which has it's code so botched up, it crashes my Browser
- The site that decided this is the place i want to be and made itself a oneway road (disabling the back button)
- The site that enlarges my Browser window across the whole screen (Ctrl-W even before the content loads)
- The site that opens up in a new window (if i want that i'll do it myself, thank you)
- The site that has so many banners on it's front page i can't even find the way to the sites' content.
- The site that first requires a subscription before i may enter (and i thought you wanted me here, apparently not)
- The site i just can't figure out what it is for, or what it tries to sell, but it's flashy and tells me i should bookmark it
- The site that can only navigated by opening a new window for each klick
- The "under construction" site
- The "server not found" site
- The "404, page not found" site
Admittedly, sometimes i get someplace useful (freshmeat), but that place i would probably have stumbled over anyway even without a banner to click, either because friends tell me, or i find it in a search query, or it's linked from somewhere.
So after all these experiences with ad-clicking i wonder that people still click on ads at all, since more often than not it will just take some time to load, and if the Browser survived... Ctrl-W.
Sorry they don't need to give me the right, i already have the right to use any webbrowser i like, including ones that specifically blocks ads or ones that simply don't do fancy images (lynx). Just as i have the right to switch to another channel during a commercial break on TV. Also i didn't enter an agreement with the site owner to read advertisements for reading content. If he has 1.000.000 pagehits, but only 1.000 banners got accessed that is even more of a message than a friendly note. It simply says: the advertising on your site is too aggressive so we cut it out. Following your line of argumentation far enough we'll soon have TV's in every room of our homes we can't turn off. I have the right to ignore advertising. Even if i do that by technical means (filters). Maybe it's about time the advertisers rethink their strategy of "huge, blaring colours and loud" a little. I mean, the current way of advertising seems to be to annoy people into buying the product.
I don't know exactly why you don't own a TV, but for me it was just because the content to noise ratio went below zero. And when there is a Film worth watching the advertising is placed at the most annoying moment, is annoyingly loud and colourfull, and just plain too long. To summarize: the advertisement is annoying. At the moment advertising on most websites is not too annoying (as in "we own your Browser and pop up windows all over the place, and if you click one away it will spawn two new ones") but tolerable. Nevertheless i switched off javascript because of advertising.
Sorry, but when the advertisement gets too much of the "in your Face" type and the advertisers obviously don't care about my being annoyed, then i choose to flush their business modell down the toilet, and good riddance. And if the site can only survive by popping screenwide Banners in my face then it better dies fast, because i don't care anyway, i won't look at those ads, if that means i can't look at the site, then so be it. If the content is worth paying i'll pay.
Apparently web advertising works well enough as it is now, No need to have bigger ads. But no, it's not enough, The ads must become bigger, what next, sounds and happy jingles i'm forced to listen to?
... if Intel can't pull some legal tricks on Rambus for deliberately sabotaging RDRAM by annoying virtually every RAM Manufacturer out there with their royalty practices and hence hurt sales of Intel chipsets tied to RDRAM.
... was already grabbed by virtually everyone doing adertising out there (probably covering the grits down pants part too), and i really hope never to see the intellectual version of the goatse thing.
Well, there is no such thing as "absence of temperature (what you mean is probably "absence of energy" and there is no such thing either but for different reasons) but let's go for "negative temperature" (and let's not confuse temperature with "heat", "heat" is a form of Energy):
You can define Temperature by means of statistics: Let's say for a System of 100 spins in a magnetic field, so each can have high or low energy. Now you define temperature by looking at the statistics, by simply counting how many spins are in "high" state. Since "lowering the temperature" means "giving away energy" the lowest Temperature for the System is all spins in "low" state. At higher temperatures the spins are more evenly distributed over the possible states, the most "even" distribution being 50 spins "high", 50 "low". In that case the systems temperature is so high, that the energy difference ("high"-"low") doesn't matter anymore, but since a hotter system will always tend to cool down by giving energy to cooler systems (with a lower temperature) this system is likely to give away energy to (almost) any other system and cool down a bit, so the statistical most likely "even distribution" is compensated a little by the fact, that the System tends to lower it's temperature by giving away energy (so there are more spins in "low" state than in "high" state). Since an evenly distributed system would give away energy to any other system, regardless of that systems temperature (if it's not negative), we can think of such a system as having infinite temperature (since it must have a higher energy than all the other systems it gives energy to).
Now there is a situation you can not reach by simple heating (heating meaning here introducing more randomness), it's an "inversed" situation, where more spins are in "high" state than in "low" (now the more energy you put into the system the more ordered it becomes). In that case the Formulas give you "negative temperatures" (you can reach them by artificially pushing the spins to "high" state). This is confusing, since the system has higher energy than one with positive temperature, hence negative Temperatures are "above" negative temperatures, it makes much more sense if you look at 1/T since this goes from positive to negative continuously.
Normally you can create such systems only with a limited number of spins, (i think it might occur in pumped lasers too) but not in macroscopic systems. Now the problem with this example is, that thermodynamics is all about having a lot of statistics (it makes not much sense to talk about the temperature of a single spin), so fluctuations can be neglected. Hence a system with only 100 spins is already a little borderline, but by adding a few zeroes here and there that can be helped. For an experimentalist it's a little harder to add those zeroes though:-).
... when he says: ''Open source is an intellectual-property destroyer,'' Allchin said. ''I can't imagine something that could be worse than this for the software business and the intellectual-property business.'' but i think he confuses the American Way with the Microsoft way.
I can't put it better than Jon Gilmore when he says that content protection systems are a way of earning by creating an artifical scarcity. The same holds true for software too, Free Software, by means of providing not only free applications, but also free implementation of key routines (string handling, searching, sorting, indexing... you name it) paving the way for other applications. Now Microsoft would rather have it their way: patent efficient string handling algorithms and thus virtually stop all competition for word processing in it's tracks by forbidding them to use those algorithms.
But this is impossible for MS as long as much of the development they do is on grounds already covered by GPLd Software. There it's easy to see who did what first, many protocols are already established and, worst of all, there is no possibility to buy it all to lock it away.
Also, despite MS tries to ridicule it all, the synergy effects working for big corporations against small business (for example reusability of key routines, and a broad pool of talents/wisdom to draw from) works for free software too.
But i think the biggest danger for MS is something else at work: Free Software brings with it a new mindset: people appreciate the fact, that there is no need for artificial scarcity, and that it is easier to achieve something by sharing than by greedily keeping every innovation to oneself. It now becomes apparent, that you even can make a living from this. Well, open source surely limits corporate control over innovation! But that is not a problem of open source, it's a problem of Microsoft.
There is even an easy way for them to take part in it all, they simply can set some programmers to work on an open source project. Only they would have to release the results as open source again, and giving away control is surely not the Microsoft Way.
I asked myself the exact same question (without the perpetuum mobile part though, to get that you have to use the electricity for the light and also extract the coal from the Bacteria to burn again) but: the aim is to produce energy. To do this we use an inefficient Thermodynamic process (burn coal, create steam with the heat that in turn drives a generator) every physicist can tell you, that what you get in the end is only a small percentage of the energy stored in the coal (and the oxygen) at the beginning. Now we use bacteria to split up the CO2 again.
There are two obvious questions: what is the other final product of the process (what do the bacteria do with the C?) and what is done to it? And: where do the bacteria get the energy from to split up the CO2 again?
The second question is very interesting because if the energy we have to put in (in the form of Sunlight) equals the energy we got out of the coal then why not start with a solar plant and forget about the whole roundabout way with the coal?
The third question is: what will they do at night, when their bioreactor is in the dark (and probably even producing a little CO2).
If genetic "selection" by insurance companies isn't prohibited by laws then what? Next employers will want to know if an applicant is likely to develop alcoholism (just as an example) or any diseases that might disrupt their work. So a social underclass is created (Gattaca although it's all over the discussion is too good an example not to use), parents will demand that the genome of their children is scanned prenatally, so an abortion can be induced if a child is not "up to standard" (there are already cases in which this is done). Now where will you draw the line? Cancer? Bad Eyes? Tendencies to overweight? Wrong colour of eyes?
Now with a very sarcastic view of it all someone might say "Well, the human race needs a healthy dose of darwinism anyway". Well, they may well live among a race of superintelligent, beautiful and healthy people (until a disease sweeps it all away since none of them was resistant to it, there are some arguments in favor of a lare genetic pool), but i prefer that planet to be elsewhere, or if it must be earth then maybe in a hundred years time. Sadly we already had some of it in not too recent past, when a monstrous regime declared part of the population as "unfit for living" and set to work towards a "superior race". Well, i'm happy to live in a world where not everybody is blonde and has blue eyes.
As abortions as consequence of "genetic defects" are already happening the question is, where the line will be drawn, and where it will be shifted after that...
What next? will we be required do download the descrambling Software into the Brain? Well, i wont buy new Speakers to listen to some music, and no new soundcard either. It makes no sense anyway to make music so very secure if at the same time they sell it on CD.
Well, my reaction was not to the headline but more to "non-profit, industry funded organization". Well, i know a lot of these organisations, and most of the time i ask myself who is bought by which corporation. The more people are included in decision making the more formalized and obscure the process becomes and the more it gets slowed down. We will soon ask ourselves which people are bought by a certain redmont software giant to slow down Linux development to a grinding halt (conspiracy theories blooming everywhere), we will expect kernel 2.6 no earlier than 2010, and in general we will see so many interest groups feuding over the direction of kernel development that it won't be remotely funny anymore. This organisation may even take the US Patent Office's position as the organisation most hated by the internet community as a whole.
Apart from points mentioned elsewhere, like:
- should we really care about a million dollar Industry, if they want a piece of Linux it should be the other way round
- Linus' success in handling kernel development is demonstrated by the fact that there are no major forks
... theres also the fact that Linus' handling of the development process resulted in very fast decisions and rapid development. Also one of the major strengths of Linux lies in it's independence on industrial corporations. Had Linux been developped by something like Redhat then Microsoft would have bought it long ago.
The next thing is the philosophy behind it. When i read stuff like:
"In the early stages of open source, it was more of a charitable affair and developers didn't attach a fee," said George Weiss, an analyst at Gartner. "But the vendors are in it for financial success, and they'll think twice about being charitable while answering to their stockholders." i see some conflicts with the meaning of the GPL here. If they want to develop Linux we want them to do that under the GPL, meaning that anyone who wants can take all that work and fork it whereever he wants. if he finds enough people thinking he's doing a good thing and helping then what? Will all the stockholders ask them to please stop? Will some lawyers look for loopholes in the GPL?
I'm sorry, but i think if the Industry wants to take part in Linux i prefer them doing it at Linus' terms. If they want part in an OS controlled by a big corporation and saying in TV and newspapers all over the world "We're gonna stay forever" they can turn to Microsoft Windows. If they want part in Linux, they can take influence on the development, by setting some developpers to work and submit patches that plainly can't be ignored (and stop calling that "charitable", if intel sets some developpers to work on a kernel working better with their P4 it's surely not because they like Linus Thorwalds so much). But they should not just say "wow, that Linux is a fine thing, let's take it and make it ours".
Security-Enhanced Linux: http://www.nsa.gov/selinux/: - This isn't actually a distribution, but an add-on that facilitates "Flexible Support for Security Policies". Considering the source of this package, an American Intelligence Agency, careful consideration should be made before installing it on machines that store sensitive or proprietary information, at least until a rigorous code audit is done of it.
From a certain complexity on (let's say about 100 lines of code and about the 10th change) it gets near impossible to declare any program bugfree without resorting to very extensive reviewing (i once heard that for programs employed in nuclear plants (written in some ancient language) there is a 5 day review process for even one line of change). Not each bug will lead to a security hole, but in anything as complex as a modern OS you can't expect total security. You can install tools to make hacking harder, to limit the effects of certain types of breakins, to catch hackers who are dumb enough not to clean the logs, but the statement "this server is unhackable" is next to unprovable and very improbable.
What happened with DiabloII was probably some mixup of case-sensitive and case-insensitive distinguishing of characters (like when they check your new charactername against existing ones it's done case sensitive, but when you access a char it's case-insensitive, so you can create a char with the same name as one existing, only different case and such access the existing one (that's what i guess from characters apperaring twice in Highscore lists prior to the mischiev being done) there's probably a little more to it, i would guess some client side hacking to prevent the client from sending the charname in all lowercase or somesuch). Things like this will happen anywhere if more than one programmer is working on a project and apply slightly different rules how a certain thing should be done. There's numerous other things i can imagine, if you find a posibility to crash the serverside of a game before characters are saved, you get (for example with a buffer overflow) a cheap way of duplicating things...
To say that Linux, FreeBSD and Solaris are unhackable means complete ignorance of their past bug histories (and i don't believe that bug history will stop on 1/1/01) especially sendmail (which runs on many of those machines) showed numerous vulnerabilities. Discussion of bugs in open forums may lead to a short lifetime of those bugs once they become public, but every once in a while something is uncovered which was overlooked for a year or more, and not every admin installs all securitypatches the moment they are announced.
So instead of "every computer can be hacked" it'd be more correct to say like "99% of all computers on the internet can be hacked." or "The probability that (specific configuration) can be hacked is (something in the high nineties)%", but it sure has more credibility than saying "server xy is unhackable".
Now what does the author use to measure past innovations? Mainly two things, there's a long rant about how life expectancy doesn't double every fifty years (to calculate the population of earth in 200 years time is left as an exercise to the reader, hey 200 years would b your life expectancy anyways). But mainly "productivity" is employed to measure innovation. Ok then the assembly-line was the most important invention of the millennium and thats it.
I think we'll need the next fifty years or so to evaluate the inventions of the previous fifty years, their effect on our personal life and our society. It's like saying after the invention of the car "Ok, another way to move someone from point A to point B, so what's new? Trains do this already, and riding is only a bit slower..." yet the automobile brought some fundamental changes to our society. Note that this is not the combustion engine, but one of it's applications that made the change here. And it's effects on society were not predictable (or at least not foreseen) before.
Another example is telecommunicartions: it was used already for telegrams, and for sure there were some changes already, at least the news was faster, but what really affected most people was the advent of the telephone, the possibility to call aunt mary just to tell her what a horrible day it was.
In the same way we can't even begin to evaluate what effect the technology developped in the last fifty years will have on our society. What will be the paramount application of the internet making it's way into history books fifty years from now? The free exchange of opinions in forums such as this? The incredible new ways of marketing products via the internet? The "global village"? The total loss of privacy?
The real effects of semiconductor technology on society just begin to become obvious, about fifty years after its invention. And only a fool can expect to see the impact of the internet on our society a few years after it's available to a significant number of people worldwide. The possibilities inherent in genetics are barely recognizable right now. Even something less newsworthy right now, like solar energy, might bring fundamental changes fifty years from now by allowing "third world countries" to become "global players".
Slashdot Mirror
It would be better to move their HQ elsewhere. Or at least announce to consider it. If they can make the point public that this bill is just forcing away business (and hence money) from Texas some people might reconsider.
Well, the NSA apparently felt the need for a secure operating system. They went about it in the only sensible way (i believe) with an open source system. If there was a sensible alternative out there the NSA wouldn't have felt the need to throw money at the problem. This means, that even the NSA feels that Microsoft products don't do their job securitywise, and even if they can look at the source (i think the NSA has the necessary influence to do this) they might find it too complicated, apparently it's easier to start over with Linux anyway. Now, if even the US american NSA doesn't consider windows in their search of a secure OS why should the German Bundeswehr, or any other country for that matter. I think an Open Sourced OS would be the cheapest solution (and even allow for some interoperability).
...).
Also consider that MS' might build something into their OS so it can be switched off remotely (maybe if they think you didn't buy the licence, or you didn't update often enough). Also it becomes harder and harder to keep control over your computer once you installed an MS OS or MS applications. Already you have to turn off automatic updates. The system actively resists some tampering with system files (yeah, it's for the best of the user, but even someone who knows what he is doing can't turn it off). Well an obscure blackbox wich doesn't allow for tampering isn't what makes a happy security expert. He prefers a modular and well structured overseeable system (not an easy feat with todays OSes). I think a version of Linux would be a good start, but maybe some people at Siemens did some lobbying (that is to be expected, although american politicians call it bribery when it happens outside of the US, of course none of that happens in the US at all, and G. W. Bushs plans to distibute money to his rich friends are for the best of USA, but i digress
No, but may be "it's not going to the artists anyway but only to the greedy RIAA who'll just use the money to do more damage to consumers and artists rights" is. Obviously we need a way to cut the RIAA out of the loop and get the money to the artists on a more direct way. That can only work if the artists retain enough rights over their music that they are allowed to market it themselves. At the moment the RIAA plays both sides against the middle and is happily reaping the profit, establishing the old record labels as the only ones who may make a profit from music.
Think about it, by allowing the user full control over his computer it is virtually impossible to apply digital rights management mechanisms (as you lined out) even InTether (which obviously only works, because every application can tweak the Windows OS to it's hearts content) can not stop me from booting into Linux and start dissecting it, copying any files, restore my HD to any state i like, you name it.
/dev/null ... is yours to decide. But now the Media Industry wants to protect "files", simple chunks of data, from copying. This is obviously only possible by working with a crippled OS, since copying (from the network card to ram, ram to hd, hd to ram, ram to processor ...) is what a computer does all the time, even more than computing (typical operation: Load OP a, Load OP b, Mul a*b -> a, Stor OP a; 3 copies, 1 compute) but now the OS has to trace all that copying, has to ensure it doesn't happen unauthorized, suddenly buffering becomes a major headache.
Now let's look what happened to DeCSS: it allows you to convert CSS-protected content to a form you can watch on your linux box. What you then do with it, view it, copy it, send it to
Now microsoft tells the would be Mediacontrollers: "Look here, we bend over your customers nicely, so you can screw them, all we want is a little share in the profit", and Linux, allowing all that free copying, suddenly becomes a copyright circumvention device.
Don't you think it might provoke a response on the same level? Some "Freedom Terrorists" or the like who simply go and shoot some RIAA executives in response to such an attack. And before you declare the forming of such a group absurd: note that there already exist terrorist groupings with idealistic aims (whatever underlying agendas there may be) and that they apparently manage to recruit people. Also note, that the RIAA (for an example) is highly vulnerable to Hacker attacks (hacktivism). There is no need to shoot their executives, when a skilled hacker can hit at them from the other side of the planet.
No, i don't think it would be wise of corporations to escalate the conflict to that level. Also those squads just *might* get caught (remember Rainbow Warrior and how it was smeared all over the French Government?) and even if not the public will make the connection (if someone sent a squad to destroy napsterservers everyone in the world would know who had an interest there).
I stumbled over the term 'fuckware' in the debian posting:
The PDF fuckware (Futile Unnatural Control Keeping Ware, credit to Oskar Sandberg for that) is on the same road as DVD CSS and HDTV.)
As this term so nicely describes what big business tries more and more to establish (think also fuckhardware) and also how consumers rights (such as fair use) are treated (essentially the consumer is screwed) i think we all should try and establish this term where appropriate. It has also the advantage of brevity over "Software honouring digital rights management" or somesuch.
DVD drives and region encoding is a very good example. Even the employees of the stores know in which ones it can be turned off, small wonder, since customers are asking this. I even heared that some Manufacturers even advertised with this "feature" (now being able to turn off something becomes a feature ...) in countries where they could get away with it. And the information how to disable regionencoding for a specific player is probably even leaked by the manufacturer himself.
What is different here though is: the copy protection mechanisms are in fact an additional feature. There will be software accessing these hardware functions which won't work with a HD without them. You can still use it as a normal HD but you can also use it to store special, copy protected, content, which you cannot store on an older HD (since the software handling that content will simply not allow that).
For the customer there is no immediate disadvantage: He can do everything he could do with the old HD, and if he ever intends to use aforementioned software he can do that. The problem then is, that once those new HDs are so widely distributed, that copyprotected content can be marketed (the software to do this probably comes for free) it will become harder to get the content in the unprotected form.
I don't know how exactly a V-chip works, but if it's just some software that you can switch 'on' or 'off' (maybe even with some nontrivial keycombination or even a password that can be set) then i think sooner or later the kid will figure it out (maybe find the note with the password) if it really wants to. I think the only thing that'd really work would be some kind of key, that can be removed (and that should be treated like a key, and not left lying next to the Box).
While i agree with above statement, i feel it should be added, that it's probably a good idea to explain to the kid why you don't want him to watch some movies or play some games, especially not unsupervised. That would avoid the kid regarding this as just another stupid rule or even a challenge.
I think that should be a perfect reason for returning the DVD or the VHS or both, since it probably isn't mentioned on the box, that this device doesn't work with the other. Return it to shop, and demand another product until u get it working. If they don't want to exchange it make a ruckus so everyone in the store gets the message. And by the way there should be enough organisations which would happily take up the issue and force the Manufacturers to print it on the outside of their box in big enough letters.
Then you only need to wait for the day when "Macrovision can be disabled" becomes a salesargument.
Since some of these Beasties are intended for sending copies of your mail elsewhere (when you forward something that's explicitly allowed to forward and add some comments) the law should come down pretty hard on those.
I don't need to copy/forward an email to complain about spam. And i *can* copy the headers, since they are not copyrighted by the author. I think copying the Subject falls under fair use. Also i can forward the message to the author himself. So i think there's still some options left to complain about spam.
Ok, i was always curious about that "How tough is Linux" banner ad, the colors are nice, the animation is funny, but not too flashy, and it made me a little curious. But my general rule is: "clicking on an ad brings you somewhere you don't want to be, so don't do it".
... Ctrl-W.
Now, maybe just to have a say in this thread i clicked on the ad. Where it got me was a page where i could subscribe to a magazine. The page promises it'll take only 5 minutes and it's free anyway, so what have i got to loose? Well, the answer is simple: time. I don't want to wade through a tediuos subscription process before i can even have a look at the content. The whole experience is analogous to being invited somewhere i'm not too willing to go anyway, and then run into a locked door.
I don't know if the site is interesting or not, maybe later someone tells me it's interesting and i'll subscribe. But after they got my attention so far that i "clicked through" why don't the make every effort to use that very short attention span the everyday websurfer has for anything he's not actively searching and present something that might catch my interest and draw me in?
And mind you, i don't find Linux Benchmarks (the main argument for subscribing) uninteresting at all, i'd just have liked to look at some before subscribing. I even bothered to look at that frontpage for something that would lead me to some examples at least (better would have been the possibility to view it without subscribing).
Other click-through experiences so far have been:
- The site that pops up 3 windows all over the screen, and whenever i kill one it spawns two more. (no more javascipt then, ok)
- The site that requires me to download a plugin before i can even start entering it, let alone navigating.
- The site that requires my undivided attention in terms of bandwidth to even load the front page for some minutes. (Ctrl+W)
- The site which has it's code so botched up, it crashes my Browser
- The site that decided this is the place i want to be and made itself a oneway road (disabling the back button)
- The site that enlarges my Browser window across the whole screen (Ctrl-W even before the content loads)
- The site that opens up in a new window (if i want that i'll do it myself, thank you)
- The site that has so many banners on it's front page i can't even find the way to the sites' content.
- The site that first requires a subscription before i may enter (and i thought you wanted me here, apparently not)
- The site i just can't figure out what it is for, or what it tries to sell, but it's flashy and tells me i should bookmark it
- The site that can only navigated by opening a new window for each klick
- The "under construction" site
- The "server not found" site
- The "404, page not found" site
Admittedly, sometimes i get someplace useful (freshmeat), but that place i would probably have stumbled over anyway even without a banner to click, either because friends tell me, or i find it in a search query, or it's linked from somewhere.
So after all these experiences with ad-clicking i wonder that people still click on ads at all, since more often than not it will just take some time to load, and if the Browser survived
Sorry they don't need to give me the right, i already have the right to use any webbrowser i like, including ones that specifically blocks ads or ones that simply don't do fancy images (lynx). Just as i have the right to switch to another channel during a commercial break on TV. Also i didn't enter an agreement with the site owner to read advertisements for reading content. If he has 1.000.000 pagehits, but only 1.000 banners got accessed that is even more of a message than a friendly note. It simply says: the advertising on your site is too aggressive so we cut it out. Following your line of argumentation far enough we'll soon have TV's in every room of our homes we can't turn off. I have the right to ignore advertising. Even if i do that by technical means (filters). Maybe it's about time the advertisers rethink their strategy of "huge, blaring colours and loud" a little. I mean, the current way of advertising seems to be to annoy people into buying the product.
I don't know exactly why you don't own a TV, but for me it was just because the content to noise ratio went below zero. And when there is a Film worth watching the advertising is placed at the most annoying moment, is annoyingly loud and colourfull, and just plain too long. To summarize: the advertisement is annoying. At the moment advertising on most websites is not too annoying (as in "we own your Browser and pop up windows all over the place, and if you click one away it will spawn two new ones") but tolerable. Nevertheless i switched off javascript because of advertising.
Sorry, but when the advertisement gets too much of the "in your Face" type and the advertisers obviously don't care about my being annoyed, then i choose to flush their business modell down the toilet, and good riddance. And if the site can only survive by popping screenwide Banners in my face then it better dies fast, because i don't care anyway, i won't look at those ads, if that means i can't look at the site, then so be it. If the content is worth paying i'll pay.
Apparently web advertising works well enough as it is now, No need to have bigger ads. But no, it's not enough, The ads must become bigger, what next, sounds and happy jingles i'm forced to listen to?
... if Intel can't pull some legal tricks on Rambus for deliberately sabotaging RDRAM by annoying virtually every RAM Manufacturer out there with their royalty practices and hence hurt sales of Intel chipsets tied to RDRAM.
... was already grabbed by virtually everyone doing adertising out there (probably covering the grits down pants part too), and i really hope never to see the intellectual version of the goatse thing.
Well, there is no such thing as "absence of temperature (what you mean is probably "absence of energy" and there is no such thing either but for different reasons) but let's go for "negative temperature" (and let's not confuse temperature with "heat", "heat" is a form of Energy): :-).
You can define Temperature by means of statistics: Let's say for a System of 100 spins in a magnetic field, so each can have high or low energy. Now you define temperature by looking at the statistics, by simply counting how many spins are in "high" state. Since "lowering the temperature" means "giving away energy" the lowest Temperature for the System is all spins in "low" state. At higher temperatures the spins are more evenly distributed over the possible states, the most "even" distribution being 50 spins "high", 50 "low". In that case the systems temperature is so high, that the energy difference ("high"-"low") doesn't matter anymore, but since a hotter system will always tend to cool down by giving energy to cooler systems (with a lower temperature) this system is likely to give away energy to (almost) any other system and cool down a bit, so the statistical most likely "even distribution" is compensated a little by the fact, that the System tends to lower it's temperature by giving away energy (so there are more spins in "low" state than in "high" state). Since an evenly distributed system would give away energy to any other system, regardless of that systems temperature (if it's not negative), we can think of such a system as having infinite temperature (since it must have a higher energy than all the other systems it gives energy to).
Now there is a situation you can not reach by simple heating (heating meaning here introducing more randomness), it's an "inversed" situation, where more spins are in "high" state than in "low" (now the more energy you put into the system the more ordered it becomes). In that case the Formulas give you "negative temperatures" (you can reach them by artificially pushing the spins to "high" state). This is confusing, since the system has higher energy than one with positive temperature, hence negative Temperatures are "above" negative temperatures, it makes much more sense if you look at 1/T since this goes from positive to negative continuously.
Normally you can create such systems only with a limited number of spins, (i think it might occur in pumped lasers too) but not in macroscopic systems. Now the problem with this example is, that thermodynamics is all about having a lot of statistics (it makes not much sense to talk about the temperature of a single spin), so fluctuations can be neglected. Hence a system with only 100 spins is already a little borderline, but by adding a few zeroes here and there that can be helped. For an experimentalist it's a little harder to add those zeroes though
... when he says: ''Open source is an intellectual-property destroyer,'' Allchin said. ''I can't imagine something that could be worse than this for the software business and the intellectual-property business.'' but i think he confuses the American Way with the Microsoft way. ... you name it) paving the way for other applications. Now Microsoft would rather have it their way: patent efficient string handling algorithms and thus virtually stop all competition for word processing in it's tracks by forbidding them to use those algorithms.
I can't put it better than Jon Gilmore when he says that content protection systems are a way of earning by creating an artifical scarcity. The same holds true for software too, Free Software, by means of providing not only free applications, but also free implementation of key routines (string handling, searching, sorting, indexing
But this is impossible for MS as long as much of the development they do is on grounds already covered by GPLd Software. There it's easy to see who did what first, many protocols are already established and, worst of all, there is no possibility to buy it all to lock it away.
Also, despite MS tries to ridicule it all, the synergy effects working for big corporations against small business (for example reusability of key routines, and a broad pool of talents/wisdom to draw from) works for free software too.
But i think the biggest danger for MS is something else at work: Free Software brings with it a new mindset: people appreciate the fact, that there is no need for artificial scarcity, and that it is easier to achieve something by sharing than by greedily keeping every innovation to oneself. It now becomes apparent, that you even can make a living from this. Well, open source surely limits corporate control over innovation! But that is not a problem of open source, it's a problem of Microsoft.
There is even an easy way for them to take part in it all, they simply can set some programmers to work on an open source project. Only they would have to release the results as open source again, and giving away control is surely not the Microsoft Way.
I asked myself the exact same question (without the perpetuum mobile part though, to get that you have to use the electricity for the light and also extract the coal from the Bacteria to burn again) but: the aim is to produce energy. To do this we use an inefficient Thermodynamic process (burn coal, create steam with the heat that in turn drives a generator) every physicist can tell you, that what you get in the end is only a small percentage of the energy stored in the coal (and the oxygen) at the beginning. Now we use bacteria to split up the CO2 again.
There are two obvious questions: what is the other final product of the process (what do the bacteria do with the C?) and what is done to it? And: where do the bacteria get the energy from to split up the CO2 again?
The second question is very interesting because if the energy we have to put in (in the form of Sunlight) equals the energy we got out of the coal then why not start with a solar plant and forget about the whole roundabout way with the coal?
The third question is: what will they do at night, when their bioreactor is in the dark (and probably even producing a little CO2).
If genetic "selection" by insurance companies isn't prohibited by laws then what? Next employers will want to know if an applicant is likely to develop alcoholism (just as an example) or any diseases that might disrupt their work. So a social underclass is created (Gattaca although it's all over the discussion is too good an example not to use), parents will demand that the genome of their children is scanned prenatally, so an abortion can be induced if a child is not "up to standard" (there are already cases in which this is done). Now where will you draw the line? Cancer? Bad Eyes? Tendencies to overweight? Wrong colour of eyes?
...
Now with a very sarcastic view of it all someone might say "Well, the human race needs a healthy dose of darwinism anyway". Well, they may well live among a race of superintelligent, beautiful and healthy people (until a disease sweeps it all away since none of them was resistant to it, there are some arguments in favor of a lare genetic pool), but i prefer that planet to be elsewhere, or if it must be earth then maybe in a hundred years time. Sadly we already had some of it in not too recent past, when a monstrous regime declared part of the population as "unfit for living" and set to work towards a "superior race". Well, i'm happy to live in a world where not everybody is blonde and has blue eyes.
As abortions as consequence of "genetic defects" are already happening the question is, where the line will be drawn, and where it will be shifted after that
What next? will we be required do download the descrambling Software into the Brain? Well, i wont buy new Speakers to listen to some music, and no new soundcard either. It makes no sense anyway to make music so very secure if at the same time they sell it on CD.
Well, my reaction was not to the headline but more to "non-profit, industry funded organization". Well, i know a lot of these organisations, and most of the time i ask myself who is bought by which corporation. The more people are included in decision making the more formalized and obscure the process becomes and the more it gets slowed down. We will soon ask ourselves which people are bought by a certain redmont software giant to slow down Linux development to a grinding halt (conspiracy theories blooming everywhere), we will expect kernel 2.6 no earlier than 2010, and in general we will see so many interest groups feuding over the direction of kernel development that it won't be remotely funny anymore. This organisation may even take the US Patent Office's position as the organisation most hated by the internet community as a whole.
Apart from points mentioned elsewhere, like:
- should we really care about a million dollar Industry, if they want a piece of Linux it should be the other way round
- Linus' success in handling kernel development is demonstrated by the fact that there are no major forks
... theres also the fact that Linus' handling of the development process resulted in very fast decisions and rapid development. Also one of the major strengths of Linux lies in it's independence on industrial corporations. Had Linux been developped by something like Redhat then Microsoft would have bought it long ago.
The next thing is the philosophy behind it. When i read stuff like:
"In the early stages of open source, it was more of a charitable affair and developers didn't attach a fee," said George Weiss, an analyst at Gartner. "But the vendors are in it for financial success, and they'll think twice about being charitable while answering to their stockholders."
i see some conflicts with the meaning of the GPL here. If they want to develop Linux we want them to do that under the GPL, meaning that anyone who wants can take all that work and fork it whereever he wants. if he finds enough people thinking he's doing a good thing and helping then what? Will all the stockholders ask them to please stop? Will some lawyers look for loopholes in the GPL?
I'm sorry, but i think if the Industry wants to take part in Linux i prefer them doing it at Linus' terms. If they want part in an OS controlled by a big corporation and saying in TV and newspapers all over the world "We're gonna stay forever" they can turn to Microsoft Windows. If they want part in Linux, they can take influence on the development, by setting some developpers to work and submit patches that plainly can't be ignored (and stop calling that "charitable", if intel sets some developpers to work on a kernel working better with their P4 it's surely not because they like Linus Thorwalds so much). But they should not just say "wow, that Linux is a fine thing, let's take it and make it ours".
Security-Enhanced Linux: http://www.nsa.gov/selinux/: - This isn't actually a distribution, but an add-on that facilitates "Flexible Support for Security Policies". Considering the source of this package, an American Intelligence Agency, careful consideration should be made before installing it on machines that store sensitive or proprietary information, at least until a rigorous code audit is done of it.
...
That's the spirit
From a certain complexity on (let's say about 100 lines of code and about the 10th change) it gets near impossible to declare any program bugfree without resorting to very extensive reviewing (i once heard that for programs employed in nuclear plants (written in some ancient language) there is a 5 day review process for even one line of change). Not each bug will lead to a security hole, but in anything as complex as a modern OS you can't expect total security. You can install tools to make hacking harder, to limit the effects of certain types of breakins, to catch hackers who are dumb enough not to clean the logs, but the statement "this server is unhackable" is next to unprovable and very improbable.
...
What happened with DiabloII was probably some mixup of case-sensitive and case-insensitive distinguishing of characters (like when they check your new charactername against existing ones it's done case sensitive, but when you access a char it's case-insensitive, so you can create a char with the same name as one existing, only different case and such access the existing one (that's what i guess from characters apperaring twice in Highscore lists prior to the mischiev being done) there's probably a little more to it, i would guess some client side hacking to prevent the client from sending the charname in all lowercase or somesuch). Things like this will happen anywhere if more than one programmer is working on a project and apply slightly different rules how a certain thing should be done. There's numerous other things i can imagine, if you find a posibility to crash the serverside of a game before characters are saved, you get (for example with a buffer overflow) a cheap way of duplicating things
To say that Linux, FreeBSD and Solaris are unhackable means complete ignorance of their past bug histories (and i don't believe that bug history will stop on 1/1/01) especially sendmail (which runs on many of those machines) showed numerous vulnerabilities. Discussion of bugs in open forums may lead to a short lifetime of those bugs once they become public, but every once in a while something is uncovered which was overlooked for a year or more, and not every admin installs all securitypatches the moment they are announced.
So instead of "every computer can be hacked" it'd be more correct to say like "99% of all computers on the internet can be hacked." or "The probability that (specific configuration) can be hacked is (something in the high nineties)%", but it sure has more credibility than saying "server xy is unhackable".
Now what does the author use to measure past innovations? Mainly two things, there's a long rant about how life expectancy doesn't double every fifty years (to calculate the population of earth in 200 years time is left as an exercise to the reader, hey 200 years would b your life expectancy anyways). But mainly "productivity" is employed to measure innovation. Ok then the assembly-line was the most important invention of the millennium and thats it.
..." yet the automobile brought some fundamental changes to our society. Note that this is not the combustion engine, but one of it's applications that made the change here. And it's effects on society were not predictable (or at least not foreseen) before.
I think we'll need the next fifty years or so to evaluate the inventions of the previous fifty years, their effect on our personal life and our society. It's like saying after the invention of the car "Ok, another way to move someone from point A to point B, so what's new? Trains do this already, and riding is only a bit slower
Another example is telecommunicartions: it was used already for telegrams, and for sure there were some changes already, at least the news was faster, but what really affected most people was the advent of the telephone, the possibility to call aunt mary just to tell her what a horrible day it was.
In the same way we can't even begin to evaluate what effect the technology developped in the last fifty years will have on our society. What will be the paramount application of the internet making it's way into history books fifty years from now? The free exchange of opinions in forums such as this? The incredible new ways of marketing products via the internet? The "global village"? The total loss of privacy?
The real effects of semiconductor technology on society just begin to become obvious, about fifty years after its invention. And only a fool can expect to see the impact of the internet on our society a few years after it's available to a significant number of people worldwide. The possibilities inherent in genetics are barely recognizable right now. Even something less newsworthy right now, like solar energy, might bring fundamental changes fifty years from now by allowing "third world countries" to become "global players".