Now for that messy licensing thing - This idea is copyright Nick Campbeln, 2003, All Rights Reserved. Wanna use this idea? Cool! The license requires 5% of your annual profits off the system that utilizes this idea. Is your solution open source and given away freely to any government who wants it? Cool, 5% of $0 = $0.
You do realise that you patent ideas, (which takes years and money and lawyers) and copyright specific implementations of those ideas (which is free and automatic)?
So you've got two choices - either go to the patent office and register your above plan, and try and get it past prior art (better have a lawyer draft that patent application!), or write an entire system that does what you describe, which you will have copyright of; but then that doesn't stop anyone else using the same idea, but different code to implement it.
Hmm. Maybe I should go patent the 'try and make money by coming up with an idea that's totally impractical then try and charge people for using it without doing any work, except post it on a public forum'. I'd make millions.
Now, back to the idea. I can see several basic flaws. First, email is not a reliable medium, and you'd get corrupted votes that way. Also, what happens when people get viruses or spam that pretend to be vote confirmations, and people click and completely break the voting system with 'missing' votes?
Two, the live vote database exposed to the 'net, so it can be verified by a url? Very secure. Honest.
Three, it relies on an informed, electronically connected populace to verify their votes. Err, if we had that, we wouldn't be having this problem in the first place, as people would be demonstrating in their millions on the streets at what's being done.
Four, ever heard of voter anonymity? You've got a hash containing who someone voted for, tied to a valid email address. Not that any political party, or police state would love to get hold of such data.
(So Mr Anderson. We see you voted for the Legalise Pot Now party. Don't mind us looking in your trunk, do we?)
Well, the person who scanned and OCR'd the book in the first place presumably bought it.
Thing is, if you look at the Baen Free Library you'll see a number of arguments as to why free ebooks can actually increase sales, the main one of which is this:
If you download a free copy of something, it's probably because you didn't think it was worth the price being charged, or you couldn't afford it. The first type wouldn't buy it whether there's an illegal copy or not; the second will probably buy it at a later time in life.
Many an author (and recording artist) will tell you, it's getting promotion and recognition that's hard. Word of mouth is the best kind, and trying something out when you're young and broke is likely to lead to purchases and re-purchases when you're older and want 'proper' copies.
Good authors and artists have nothing to fear from copies of their work on the internet; in fact, for any but the already most mega-promoted, it's a boon to them.
People are used to free books and free music from the library and the radio; trying to put the genie back in the bottle now, even though technically in the right under copyright law, is going to prove impossible.
Debian specialises in old, but very stable packages. Gentoo 'stable' is a little bit back from bleeding edge; 'unstable' is bleeding edge, you can even easily use cvs versions as part of the package install system.
So if you like to install packages as part of the main portage tree, dependencies included, a day or two after release, gentoo is for you.
The user support community on the gentoo forums is the best I've seen for any distro, bar none.
Yes, compiling is involved for upgrades, but you just nice it and leave it in the background, and on a half decent machine (1 gig upwards) you don't even notice its running with modern kernel scheduling.
In the end of the day, if you want a very up to date setup, with the ability to easily tweak and fiddle (with lots of advice to backup), and have a reasonable machine, I'd recommend gentoo.
If you want a machine with a very long uptime, low memory/cpu/drive space footprint and a good binaries package system, stick with debian. Obviously Mandrake, redhat and suse etc also have their own niches.
You know, there's quite a lot of irony posting as an Anonymous Coward double plus gooding Big Brother, when the whole point of Big Brother watching you was that you couldn't be anonymous....
Well, the article doesn't specifically state that webservers are blocked, only 'servers'. Still, it's irrelevent, as the exactly the same arguments apply to p2p apps - i.e. legitimate uses will be blocked along with illegitimate uses.
This is however, a different argument than the one i was tackling, i.e. 'what right do they have to scan my files on my webserver and delete them'.
Anyway, on to this new argument. In YOUR OPINION it's stupid to block students running their own fileshare services. In mine, it's perfectly reasonable.
The university already has facilities to publish legitimate information, i.e. student webservers and email servers. If you had a specific need to publish something in a manner that wasn't already available, that had to be hosted off your personal box, I'm sure you could talk to the systems admins to find a way to do it. Icarus will certainly have a whitelist machine:port option.
85% cut in bandwidth traffic by blocking unauthorised p2p and virus connections is frankly worth the slight inconvenience to those few who have a legitimate need to publish from their own boxes as opposed to the main servers.
If by connecting my computer to the school's network constitutes being "a part" of that network, can Icarus search and destroy a list of abortion providers on my hard drive?
No. It scans ports. If you were running a publically accessible webserver, or a publically accessible windows share, it would warn you and turn off the connection etc. It does NO SCANS of content. If however you're mad enough to put your creed publically accessible with write permissions, someone else just might delete it. Or maybe one of the viruses which spread via network shares might.
Let me repeat that - it's content ignorant. The Uni don't care what you're serving, simply that you're not allowed to due to the legal/bandwidth issue.
The 4th Amendment limits the government's ability to search my computer, but if a college insists that
all freshmen live in the dorms,
They don't.
and that all computers in dorms be connected to the campus network,
They don't do that either.
and that all computers on the campus network be searched by Icarus,
The computers are not searched. They are port scanned for applications that share things. They are banned as part of the TOS.
can they turn over to the government what they find on my computer?
How? They don't look what's on your computer. Plus, I think you misunderstand the 4th amendment. No, the government can't come in an search your house without a warrant. However, if you were to put a big ass marijuana plant in your window, and stand by it smoking some, and offering to sell it to passers by, I don't think you have much expectation of the police ignoring you.
What are we more concerned about, a virus that might disable a few computers, some violation of copyright, or the right of free men and women to be secure in their privacy and the privacy of their thoughts as expressed on their magnetic media?
This always kills me. How can you expect privacy for the things you are publically sharing to everybody? It's like putting something on your website, and then suing people for looking at it and violating your privacy...
Well, perhaps you could point out the official icq, msn and yahoo clients I could be using on linux.
Oh thats right, there aren't any.
How about those open protocols so people can set up their own servers and take the load off, while still providing access to the main network?
Oh that's right, the main services don't do that either.
The result is simple, when people like MSN and Yahoo block third party clients, third party people stop using it. (I'm NOT switching to windows just so I can run multiple bloatware apps just to IM. That'd be like having to use a different email client for each ISP you wanted to talk to)
"So?" I hear you cry. "They're just leeches anyway."
Well. The entire value of using an IM system is that your friends also use it. If your friends can't use it because they're blocked, then the value of that IM system is reduced. Less value, less likely to use at all.
For example, I've already got three people to try out icq and jabber because I no longer use MSN or Yahoo because of crap like this. They've all switched to Trillian because it's a much, much better client than the one official one provided. Now, if they get blocked for long as well, then they will stick to using icq and jabber only.
Thus, by their actions, the IM companies will have DRIVEN OFF real users.
It's exactly the same as in trade. Slap high tarriffs on entry to your markets, you'll gain a short-term advantage. Then everybody does it, you can't sell your goods abroad either, and bingo, everybody suffers as the market splits into multiple small ponds. Isolationism damages everybody.
I've been bitten three times by windows security patch problems. The first was the NT4 sp6/sp6a debacle. The second, much more insidious, was the problem caused with the windows xp hotfix that caused a significant slowdown.
The last, and most problematic for me to track down, was not strictly a microsoft fault, but is still relevent.
We run a ~200 machine windows 2000 client network. We also run a couple of virtual CDROM servers. Upgrading to service pack 3 a while back seemed to work fine, when I rolled it out with ghost with a batch of other updates, everything seemed fine. After a few weeks though, I noticed there were a lot of problems being reported with the machines locking up periodically. After much digging and testing, it turns out the client software for the virtual CD's had a bug on SP3.
Yes, it was a bug in a third party application. But still, you can see why smart admins with big networks prefer to test patch rollouts rather than run every workstation with automatic updates enabled. Even if the patch doesn't break windows, it may well break something else that runs on it.
Still, patches need to be rolled out eventually. Laptops will happily infect any system relying on firewalls alone.
I still blame microsoft for writing code that so easily allows net-based root exploits though, that means we have to patch so damn much.
OK, I do feel somewhat of a twinge for the poor sods who have their hard work stolen, and used by someone for nothing. I've been in a similar situation myself.
The problem is, if a law is passed, it WILL be broad enough to allow other companies to twist it, and use to keep their customers in the dark about their product (remember the EULA clause from microsoft trying to prevent publishing benchmarks), or to stop their competition getting a foothold in the market.
The latter part is in fact why databases were decided not to be copyrightable in the first place. The phone companies sued third party phonebook creators for copyright infringement, and lost. Part of the judgment was that databases of fact were not copyrightable.
Basically, I agree with the judge - the cost of allowing lists of facts to copyrightable is too high.
The short answer is, these databases are composed of facts.
If the database is composed of copyrightable information; say, a web-based database of modern poems by various authors, where permission has been granted by the authors to publish in that format, gratis, then the database would be copyrighted, and the copyright would belong to the authors of the pieces. If it followed the music industry model, then copyright would be assigned to the database creator.
Either way, the contents of the database are copyrighted under current law. Think of a book anthology as a paper-based story database, and you get the idea.
On the other hand, almost all databases are actually composed of lists of facts, and that is what the original article is about; databases composed of publically available factual information. The individual facts are not copyrightable (that's what trademarks are for); there are good reasons why databases of such facts should not be copyrightable either.
The classic example is the phonebook. If a database of facts is copyrightable, how big does that database have to be? 200,000? 200? 2?
For example, your (small) company makes available its list of phone numbers in a flyer. The phonebook also contains those numbers. Who sues who for copyright infringement? The one who published it first is the winner, under copyright law.
How about a record companies list of artists and album names? Imagine, if every time you typed one of those in your email, you could be sued for copyright infringement - or if you publish a music newsletter for your school, every mention of artist or album name, you'd have to pay a licence fee to the record company involved.
Or, how about a real example. A website publishes lists of different prices for a product, culled from various companies sales flyers, thus allowing consumers to know where is selling what they want at the best price before they buy. That website posted scans of that information. Now imagine companies used the DMCA to force those scans to be taken down. The website was fatwallet.com, and the companies involved were numerous. (http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/ 11/20/17532 38&tid=98)
Now imagine if instead of just having to take down the sales flyers, they had to shut down the site altogether, because lists of prices were copyrightable.
The law as it stands is perfectly fine; unless you make your money from selling lists of existing facts, and your lunch is getting eaten by other people giving that information away for free.
What I say to such companies is this - That's called competition. Adapt or die. If you can't make your lists more valuable than the people giving it away (quality, up to date info, prestige - just ask the bottled water people), or find other ways of funding it (adverts, paid for listings) then frankly, tough. Don't screw up the law for the rest of us.
Does it handle gpg any better than it did before? Evolution users couldn't verify messages signed with thunderbird perviously.
Actually, I think that's a problem in Evolution. As I understand it, there are two ways of handling the gpg signature; one is to put it inline, the other adds it as a mime attachment.
The only client I know that uses mime attachments is evolution; all others I've used with GPG, do sigs inline. Evolution, for some unknown reason, can't/won't handle inline sigs. On the other hand, kmail has a plugin for gpg mime, and I think mozilla uses enigmail to handle both formats.
I'm afraid I use kmail myself, but in theory, you can configure enigmail to send sigs and attachments as pgp/mime, when sending to your evolution people. Of course, you'll annoy other gpg users and non-gpg users (unnecessary attachments) if you leave it on, but there you go.
It is a sale. If it's in a box, with a price on it, in a shop, and you pay for it and walk out with it, it's a sale, no question. and under first sale doctrine, a copyright holder cannot impose additional restrictions post sale.
However, what they try and do is this.
"By copying this product onto the hard-drive of your computer, or into memory at runtime, you are making a copy of our copyrighted work. This is illegal. However, we will allow you to do this, if you agree to this handy End User Licence Agreement. And it is a licence, as you need our ongoing permission every time you install or run our software."
This is very very iffy, legally. In the UK, for example, copyright law specifically allows people to make transient or permanent copies if such a copy is essential to use the software. Other countries in the EU specifically allow backups. Doesn't stop companies sticking EULAs in software sold in the UK though.
In effect, EULA's are an attempt to fool the gullible into giving up their rights. Clued engineers and lawyers won't be fooled, but the general public, when quoted from the legal agreement they 'signed', will fold.
It should be noted though, things like Terms of Service, where there is an ongoing purchase relationship with the customer, i.e. cable subscription, or virus updates, are significantly more enforceable. Generally, such 'contracts' can have aspects that are invalid, i.e. where they try and get you to void certain inalienable rights, but are still enforceable in part, as a rule.
Europe does not currently allow the patenting of software.
The protests are against a change in the law in the EU that will allow the patenting of software.
After what has happened in the US and elsewhere, such as the Amazon one-click patent, and many, many others, a lot people in the software business (and others) feel that allowing software patents in the EU is a bad idea.
So this is not trying to remove a law, nor is it trying to block patents; just stop a change in the law that we believe will have the following effects;
* Reduce innovation and increase monopolies in such a basic asset as software, thus harming consumers choice and value for money and depriving citizens of a healthy information society
* Undermine e-commerce by legalised extortion from patent holders
* Jeopardise basic freedom of creation and publication (a software patent holder could censor publication by the author of an original program)
* Cause legal uncertainty to copyright holders through patent inflation, since they won't know they are infringing someone else's patents until blackmailed or sued
* Endanger SMEs and professionals who do not have the resources for patent buildup and litigation, and currently concentrate most jobs and innovation in European IT
* Introduce a fundamental legal contradiction by using patents to monopolise information (software is only information) instead of its original purpose of dissemination of information on inventions
The irony is, your digital camera will probably work 'out of the box', assuming it's a usb camera, i.e. plug it in and an automount link for it should appear on the desktop.
It's annoying that you had to recompile the kernel to allow installation of the official nvidia drivers (there are built in nv drivers in X, but they don't do 3d). I'm a little surprised, as the commercial distro kernels are usually pretty flexible. A black mark, definitely.
Sound is... well, sound support is improving on linux. the problem is, the native support in 2.4 kernels is an old version of OSS, which isn't very flexible, and you end up having to buy the commercial OSS drivers to get support for quite a few soundcards, especially those which are embedded on the motherboard.
Fortunately, ALSA, a new Free sound system is the default in 2.6 kernels, which will make sound support in distros a damn sight easier in a few months time. In the meantime, check out
http://www.alsa-project.org/ - there's a matrix of supported soundcards, what drivers they use etc.
It may be worth using your free Suse install support to get sound working; failing that, suse support tends to revolve around the mailing lists.
I agree. However, Atheists make a counterclaim - "There is no form of divinity whatsoever." This claim should be treated as untrue unless you can get proof.
Some claim that they merely disbelieve in God, and are not claiming that God does not exist. I'm not entirely sure how you can "not believe" in something without recognizing a possibility that it exists. This link has an interesting view about it.
Ok. I'm one of those people who 'merely disbelieve in God'.
You cannot prove to me, at this time, using logic or any other scientic method, that (any) God exists. All arguments I have met so far basically devolve to the faith of the arguer or the faith of someone he quotes. That, or by pointing at a 'miracle' that cannot be explained due to lack of evidence as proof, beyond pure chance.
From your point of view, that would make me an agnostic, given two conflicting points of view.
However, I consider myself a humanist (a form of atheism). Why?
Well, let's use your 'invisible pink unicorn' example. You say that I should be agnostic about their existance. But as far as I'm concerned, you have to weigh the credibility of the source in as part of the evidence. Now, it's not a numbers game per se; science has shown that sheer weight of numbers is not proof (re: world is flat), so lack of supporting opinion is definitely not proof that something does not exist. In the absence of other proof however, I consider that credibility to be the tipping factor.
I.e. if you tell me you can see something, and nobody else can, then I take your lack of evidence, and weigh in with the proven fallibility of the human mind, along with the proven ability of man to lie to others, to come down upon the balance of probabilities that invisible pink unicorns do not exist.
However, I keep an open mind; if you are able to bring me evidence that pink unicorns exist, then I too, will agree that pink unicorns exist. Of course, it has to be verifiable, anonymously repeatable evidence.
Now, organised (and disorganised!) religion have a lot of followers. But, I weigh in with theories like this one. (long link, sorry). Basically, that we are hardwired for (a) God. Just looking at the sheer range of thing that people fervently believe , many of them that theirs is the one true God, and willing to kill those who don't believe in Him; that makes me think God is a part of the human mind.
Now, I do not believe in God. That is the scientifically standard option, given that there is no proof, and there is an acceptable theory for people believing in Him, i.e. a feature of the human brain.
However, I keep an open mind, and am willing to accept incontrovertible, independently verifiable proof that he does exist. Therefore I do not believe in God, but do not go so far as to say that a supranatural being cannot exist; merely that it up to believers to prove his existance.
Out of interest, given a lack of reliable positive evidence, why is it up to science to prove that God does not exist?
Science can prove a negative, (for proof in this whole article, read, theory that cannot reasonably be attacked with current evidence) by proving the opposite. I.e. I can prove the statement 'the moon is made of green cheese' false by reference to spectroscopy and moon rocks, for starters.
I cannot prove that God does not exist, as by definition, we have no natural tools to probe a supranatural being. The theists have taken the position that there is a being beyond all ability to see, touch or otherwise measure, then claim that it us up to ME to disprove he exists!
As far as the doesn't start immediately problem goes, I found you had to wait for the first 'batch' of tracks to download. Mind you, that was using version 0.1 as I couldn't find a link to download version 0.2.
One of these days I'll get round to creating an iRATE-cvs ebuild for gentoo.
Still, streams don't allow you to listen to the tracks offline, not away from the computer; which is one of the main irritations of DRM, i.e. it stops you listening on any device you choose.
I suppose you could record the stream to listen offline; but then you're back at square one regarding number of copies rapidly matching number of shared CD's.
No, you've missed the point. The users report what CD's they own to the snapster 2 database. They don't need to physically lock their CD's at all.
In effect, the snapster central server counts up all the CD's input by users, plus the ones snapster owns directly. Then the server allows copies of the tracks that it has available by 'borrowing' the track from a physical CD held by a user.
But the accounting is done purely virtually. Presumably, the users inputting CD's would have to sign a waiver saying that they wouldn't use the CD's they input while logged onto the system. When they log off, their tracks drop out of the central server's list of ones available (just like p2p at the moment)
There's no defence to all the users just uploading britney spear's CD's; but of course, that problem exists for conventional p2p. What will be available most, will be the tracks that most people listen to. But conversely, although there will only be few copies of the work that is not popular, they will only be wanted by a few people, thus it will still work.
The biggest downside I see is the lack of incentive for people to keep the number of copies in the system in line with the ones being borrowed; i.e. a physical CD needs to exist every time someone downloads a track. and the number of copies cannot exceed the number of CDs.
So what happens when all the physical CD's have already been 'borrowed'? No more copies can be made until more physical CD's are bought, and the penny per track would hardly encourage people to do that! It'll work if tracks 'leak' out of the system and are no longer recorded as in use - which would be illegal; or if tracks are deleted centrally or by the user after a period of time, neither of which would be popular.
The reason P2P works is it allows one to many; i.e. a limited number of physical CD's to be cloned to many people, including leechers; it's a top heavy system.
The only way I can see snapster 2 working in real life is if :
a) it streams tracks, rather than allows downloads - which I still think would be classified as a broadcast, thus nailed under the RIAA's royalty charges for net radio;
b) people can only download a number of tracks equal to the number they've made available to the system, thus turning it into a giant 'swapshop' rather than P2P in the classic sense. And the music industry will hardly be hurt, as a physical CD will have bought for every track that's in use. About the only major use would be to easily listen to music you haven't already heard, without having to pay for it. A worthwhile goal, but hardly industry shaking.
It's not up to them to prove it was you that was trading files; its up to you to prove that it was your open wifi connection being abused.
Unlike criminal prosecutions, where reasonable doubt is enough to get you off, civil cases are decided on balance of probabilities.
The RIAA would say 'this IP was used at this time to share this long list of files, and the ISP records show that this IP was used by this account, from this telephone number for this period of time, using this amount of bandwidth. Oh, and we downloaded them, and they are the same files as they are labelled.'
It's then up to you to demonstrate a more compelling case that it wasn't you using that account, it was your dastardly neighbour. Hope you have concrete evidence (i.e. logs) to prove that that's the sort of thing that happens...
Even assuming that you have compelling evidence that it wasn't you, you're still liable for contributory infringement, as by knowingly providing infrastructure for infringement, they'll get you the same way they got napster. Of course, you could apply for common carrier status, but then you need to show that you let your neighbours use your connection for anything they want, all the time.
Criminals can get guns in the UK; but the police armed response vehicles (i.e. cops with guns) have an unofficial shoot to kill policy, so if you try wielding a gun against the public or the police, you are running a serious risk of getting a bullet in the head.
As a result, gun crime is mostly restricted to gang-on-gang violence, specifically yardie turf wars in the drug business.
You may well be fully trained up on how to use a firearm - but the laws that allow you to carry a weapon also allow a yahoo who has no clue how to properly use that cannon in his bag about. So when a criminal comes in to rob the post office with a gun, and that yahoo starts shooting back, I get hit in the crossfire. Great. In the UK, he'd rob the place with a knife (or no weapon at all) and I get to walk out alive with no injuries.
Thanks all the same, but I'd prefer the people with guns to be incredibly well trained professionals only. How can there be a chalk line round my corpse if the criminals don't NEED to carry guns?
Have you considered that in the US the number of people who successfully defend themselves with a handgun are hugely outweighed by those who are injured or killed with their own weapon? In addition, it's a lot easier to accidentally shoot yourself or someone you know (especially if you're a child) if there are guns in the house. You don't hear much about people who were cleaning a knife and accidentally chop their own head off either.
Also, most people are assaulted or murder by people they already know. Although it's perfectly possibly to kill someone with a knife or bat, it's a lot easier to do it with a gun, especially in the heat of the moment.
Ultimately though, you view owning a gun as being a fundamental right, and this whole argument will make not the slightest difference to that. I used to be pro-guns; having seen what a mess a handgun can make of a human being, I'm now very glad that I live in a country where they are not common. So I guess we will agree to differ.
Well, there's several big differences that affect me that come from a kernel upgrade.
The first lot is better hardware support. AGP3 means your top-end graphics card gets used to its full potential. Native ALSA support makes getting your soundcard up and running a whole lot easier. Better support for IDE burners makes it easier to get your burner running well, and faster, in linux without having to sort out SCSI emulation.
The second chunk is scheduling algorithm improvements. What this means for me is, I can have a compile going in the background (using 100% cpu), xmms playing without skipping, xmule downloading things, and whatever I'm doing in the foreground, such as mozilla-firebird, isn't affected in the slightest. In fact, if I minimise the compile window, I can't even tell when it finishes any more, there's just no difference in responsiveness. And all of that achieved without having to use nice.
This is something that has been recently improved substantially in the 2.4.20 series, and apparently 2.6 holds up under even heavier loads.
In fact, the priority scheduling means that linux now responds better for me when i click stuff than windows does (you don't realise how often explorer sticks on the busy icon until you don't have to use it for a while)
Well, I'm not an accountant for the film or game or music industry, but staggering the funds is a standard reason given for varying release dates across regions.
If I was to hazard a guess (and it is literally a guess) I'd go for tax reasons.
To give you just one example of it being standard wisdom though, just look at this article in the washington post re decss.
"Even watching a movie outside the region it was released in can pose a financial threat, since the movie industry relies on the ability to issue movies on DVD at varying times around the world to recover the high costs of moviemaking. "
Slashdot Mirror
UKians? Jesus, what's wrong with 'British' ?
And besides, you're wrong - we managed to get our MEPs to change their minds the first time about patents, we'll do it this time as well.
Now for that messy licensing thing - This idea is copyright Nick Campbeln, 2003, All Rights Reserved. Wanna use this idea? Cool! The license requires 5% of your annual profits off the system that utilizes this idea. Is your solution open source and given away freely to any government who wants it? Cool, 5% of $0 = $0. You do realise that you patent ideas, (which takes years and money and lawyers) and copyright specific implementations of those ideas (which is free and automatic)? So you've got two choices - either go to the patent office and register your above plan, and try and get it past prior art (better have a lawyer draft that patent application!), or write an entire system that does what you describe, which you will have copyright of; but then that doesn't stop anyone else using the same idea, but different code to implement it. Hmm. Maybe I should go patent the 'try and make money by coming up with an idea that's totally impractical then try and charge people for using it without doing any work, except post it on a public forum'. I'd make millions. Now, back to the idea. I can see several basic flaws. First, email is not a reliable medium, and you'd get corrupted votes that way. Also, what happens when people get viruses or spam that pretend to be vote confirmations, and people click and completely break the voting system with 'missing' votes? Two, the live vote database exposed to the 'net, so it can be verified by a url? Very secure. Honest. Three, it relies on an informed, electronically connected populace to verify their votes. Err, if we had that, we wouldn't be having this problem in the first place, as people would be demonstrating in their millions on the streets at what's being done. Four, ever heard of voter anonymity? You've got a hash containing who someone voted for, tied to a valid email address. Not that any political party, or police state would love to get hold of such data. (So Mr Anderson. We see you voted for the Legalise Pot Now party. Don't mind us looking in your trunk, do we?)
Thing is, if you look at the Baen Free Library you'll see a number of arguments as to why free ebooks can actually increase sales, the main one of which is this:
If you download a free copy of something, it's probably because you didn't think it was worth the price being charged, or you couldn't afford it. The first type wouldn't buy it whether there's an illegal copy or not; the second will probably buy it at a later time in life.
Many an author (and recording artist) will tell you, it's getting promotion and recognition that's hard. Word of mouth is the best kind, and trying something out when you're young and broke is likely to lead to purchases and re-purchases when you're older and want 'proper' copies.
Good authors and artists have nothing to fear from copies of their work on the internet; in fact, for any but the already most mega-promoted, it's a boon to them.
People are used to free books and free music from the library and the radio; trying to put the genie back in the bottle now, even though technically in the right under copyright law, is going to prove impossible.
Debian specialises in old, but very stable packages.
Gentoo 'stable' is a little bit back from bleeding edge; 'unstable' is bleeding edge, you can even easily use cvs versions as part of the package install system.
So if you like to install packages as part of the main portage tree, dependencies included, a day or two after release, gentoo is for you.
The user support community on the gentoo forums is the best I've seen for any distro, bar none.
Yes, compiling is involved for upgrades, but you just nice it and leave it in the background, and on a half decent machine (1 gig upwards) you don't even notice its running with modern kernel scheduling.
In the end of the day, if you want a very up to date setup, with the ability to easily tweak and fiddle (with lots of advice to backup), and have a reasonable machine, I'd recommend gentoo.
If you want a machine with a very long uptime, low memory/cpu/drive space footprint and a good binaries package system, stick with debian. Obviously Mandrake, redhat and suse etc also have their own niches.
You know, there's quite a lot of irony posting as an Anonymous Coward double plus gooding Big Brother, when the whole point of Big Brother watching you was that you couldn't be anonymous....
Well, the article doesn't specifically state that webservers are blocked, only 'servers'. Still, it's irrelevent, as the exactly the same arguments apply to p2p apps - i.e. legitimate uses will be blocked along with illegitimate uses. This is however, a different argument than the one i was tackling, i.e. 'what right do they have to scan my files on my webserver and delete them'. Anyway, on to this new argument. In YOUR OPINION it's stupid to block students running their own fileshare services. In mine, it's perfectly reasonable. The university already has facilities to publish legitimate information, i.e. student webservers and email servers. If you had a specific need to publish something in a manner that wasn't already available, that had to be hosted off your personal box, I'm sure you could talk to the systems admins to find a way to do it. Icarus will certainly have a whitelist machine:port option. 85% cut in bandwidth traffic by blocking unauthorised p2p and virus connections is frankly worth the slight inconvenience to those few who have a legitimate need to publish from their own boxes as opposed to the main servers.
No. It scans ports. If you were running a publically accessible webserver, or a publically accessible windows share, it would warn you and turn off the connection etc. It does NO SCANS of content. If however you're mad enough to put your creed publically accessible with write permissions, someone else just might delete it. Or maybe one of the viruses which spread via network shares might.
Let me repeat that - it's content ignorant. The Uni don't care what you're serving, simply that you're not allowed to due to the legal/bandwidth issue.
The 4th Amendment limits the government's ability to search my computer, but if a college insists that all freshmen live in the dorms,
They don't.
and that all computers in dorms be connected to the campus network,
They don't do that either.
and that all computers on the campus network be searched by Icarus,
The computers are not searched. They are port scanned for applications that share things. They are banned as part of the TOS.
can they turn over to the government what they find on my computer?
How? They don't look what's on your computer. Plus, I think you misunderstand the 4th amendment. No, the government can't come in an search your house without a warrant. However, if you were to put a big ass marijuana plant in your window, and stand by it smoking some, and offering to sell it to passers by, I don't think you have much expectation of the police ignoring you.
What are we more concerned about, a virus that might disable a few computers, some violation of copyright, or the right of free men and women to be secure in their privacy and the privacy of their thoughts as expressed on their magnetic media?
This always kills me. How can you expect privacy for the things you are publically sharing to everybody? It's like putting something on your website, and then suing people for looking at it and violating your privacy...
Oh good. A binary RPM or DEB file only. Wake me when it's in a format I can actually install without breaking half my distro, like a good old tarball.
Well, perhaps you could point out the official icq, msn and yahoo clients I could be using on linux.
Oh thats right, there aren't any.
How about those open protocols so people can set up their own servers and take the load off, while still providing access to the main network?
Oh that's right, the main services don't do that either.
The result is simple, when people like MSN and Yahoo block third party clients, third party people stop using it. (I'm NOT switching to windows just so I can run multiple bloatware apps just to IM. That'd be like having to use a different email client for each ISP you wanted to talk to)
"So?" I hear you cry. "They're just leeches anyway."
Well. The entire value of using an IM system is that your friends also use it. If your friends can't use it because they're blocked, then the value of that IM system is reduced. Less value, less likely to use at all.
For example, I've already got three people to try out icq and jabber because I no longer use MSN or Yahoo because of crap like this. They've all switched to Trillian because it's a much, much better client than the one official one provided. Now, if they get blocked for long as well, then they will stick to using icq and jabber only.
Thus, by their actions, the IM companies will have DRIVEN OFF real users.
It's exactly the same as in trade. Slap high tarriffs on entry to your markets, you'll gain a short-term advantage. Then everybody does it, you can't sell your goods abroad either, and bingo, everybody suffers as the market splits into multiple small ponds. Isolationism damages everybody.
I've been bitten three times by windows security patch problems. The first was the NT4 sp6/sp6a debacle. The second, much more insidious, was the problem caused with the windows xp hotfix that caused a significant slowdown.
The last, and most problematic for me to track down, was not strictly a microsoft fault, but is still relevent.
We run a ~200 machine windows 2000 client network. We also run a couple of virtual CDROM servers. Upgrading to service pack 3 a while back seemed to work fine, when I rolled it out with ghost with a batch of other updates, everything seemed fine. After a few weeks though, I noticed there were a lot of problems being reported with the machines locking up periodically. After much digging and testing, it turns out the client software for the virtual CD's had a bug on SP3.
Yes, it was a bug in a third party application. But still, you can see why smart admins with big networks prefer to test patch rollouts rather than run every workstation with automatic updates enabled. Even if the patch doesn't break windows, it may well break something else that runs on it.
Still, patches need to be rolled out eventually. Laptops will happily infect any system relying on firewalls alone.
I still blame microsoft for writing code that so easily allows net-based root exploits though, that means we have to patch so damn much.
OK, I do feel somewhat of a twinge for the poor sods who have their hard work stolen, and used by someone for nothing. I've been in a similar situation myself.
The problem is, if a law is passed, it WILL be broad enough to allow other companies to twist it, and use to keep their customers in the dark about their product (remember the EULA clause from microsoft trying to prevent publishing benchmarks), or to stop their competition getting a foothold in the market.
The latter part is in fact why databases were decided not to be copyrightable in the first place. The phone companies sued third party phonebook creators for copyright infringement, and lost. Part of the judgment was that databases of fact were not copyrightable.
Basically, I agree with the judge - the cost of allowing lists of facts to copyrightable is too high.
The short answer is, these databases are composed of facts.
/ 11/20/17532 38&tid=98)
If the database is composed of copyrightable information; say, a web-based database of modern poems by various authors, where permission has been granted by the authors to publish in that format, gratis, then the database would be copyrighted, and the copyright would belong to the authors of the pieces. If it followed the music industry model, then copyright would be assigned to the database creator.
Either way, the contents of the database are copyrighted under current law. Think of a book anthology as a paper-based story database, and you get the idea.
On the other hand, almost all databases are actually composed of lists of facts, and that is what the original article is about; databases composed of publically available factual information. The individual facts are not copyrightable (that's what trademarks are for); there are good reasons why databases of such facts should not be copyrightable either.
The classic example is the phonebook. If a database of facts is copyrightable, how big does that database have to be? 200,000? 200? 2?
For example, your (small) company makes available its list of phone numbers in a flyer. The phonebook also contains those numbers. Who sues who for copyright infringement? The one who published it first is the winner, under copyright law.
How about a record companies list of artists and album names? Imagine, if every time you typed one of those in your email, you could be sued for copyright infringement - or if you publish a music newsletter for your school, every mention of artist or album name, you'd have to pay a licence fee to the record company involved.
Or, how about a real example. A website publishes lists of different prices for a product, culled from various companies sales flyers, thus allowing consumers to know where is selling what they want at the best price before they buy. That website posted scans of that information. Now imagine companies used the DMCA to force those scans to be taken down. The website was fatwallet.com, and the companies involved were numerous.
(http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02
Now imagine if instead of just having to take down the sales flyers, they had to shut down the site altogether, because lists of prices were copyrightable.
The law as it stands is perfectly fine; unless you make your money from selling lists of existing facts, and your lunch is getting eaten by other people giving that information away for free.
What I say to such companies is this - That's called competition. Adapt or die. If you can't make your lists more valuable than the people giving it away (quality, up to date info, prestige - just ask the bottled water people), or find other ways of funding it (adverts, paid for listings) then frankly, tough. Don't screw up the law for the rest of us.
Actually, I think that's a problem in Evolution. As I understand it, there are two ways of handling the gpg signature; one is to put it inline, the other adds it as a mime attachment.
The only client I know that uses mime attachments is evolution; all others I've used with GPG, do sigs inline. Evolution, for some unknown reason, can't/won't handle inline sigs. On the other hand, kmail has a plugin for gpg mime, and I think mozilla uses enigmail to handle both formats.
I'm afraid I use kmail myself, but in theory, you can configure enigmail to send sigs and attachments as pgp/mime, when sending to your evolution people. Of course, you'll annoy other gpg users and non-gpg users (unnecessary attachments) if you leave it on, but there you go.
It is a sale. If it's in a box, with a price on it, in a shop, and you pay for it and walk out with it, it's a sale, no question. and under first sale doctrine, a copyright holder cannot impose additional restrictions post sale.
However, what they try and do is this.
"By copying this product onto the hard-drive of your computer, or into memory at runtime, you are making a copy of our copyrighted work. This is illegal. However, we will allow you to do this, if you agree to this handy End User Licence Agreement. And it is a licence, as you need our ongoing permission every time you install or run our software."
This is very very iffy, legally. In the UK, for example, copyright law specifically allows people to make transient or permanent copies if such a copy is essential to use the software. Other countries in the EU specifically allow backups.
Doesn't stop companies sticking EULAs in software sold in the UK though.
In effect, EULA's are an attempt to fool the gullible into giving up their rights. Clued engineers and lawyers won't be fooled, but the general public, when quoted from the legal agreement they 'signed', will fold.
It should be noted though, things like Terms of Service, where there is an ongoing purchase relationship with the customer, i.e. cable subscription, or virus updates, are significantly more enforceable. Generally, such 'contracts' can have aspects that are invalid, i.e. where they try and get you to void certain inalienable rights, but are still enforceable in part, as a rule.
Europe does not currently allow the patenting of software.
The protests are against a change in the law in the EU that will allow the patenting of software.
After what has happened in the US and elsewhere, such as the Amazon one-click patent, and many, many others, a lot people in the software business (and others) feel that allowing software patents in the EU is a bad idea.
So this is not trying to remove a law, nor is it trying to block patents; just stop a change in the law that we believe will have the following effects;
* Reduce innovation and increase monopolies in such a basic asset as software, thus harming consumers choice and value for money and depriving citizens of a healthy information society
* Undermine e-commerce by legalised extortion from patent holders
* Jeopardise basic freedom of creation and publication (a software patent holder could censor publication by the author of an original program)
* Cause legal uncertainty to copyright holders through patent inflation, since they won't know they are infringing someone else's patents until blackmailed or sued
* Endanger SMEs and professionals who do not have the resources for patent buildup and litigation, and currently concentrate most jobs and innovation in European IT
* Introduce a fundamental legal contradiction by using patents to monopolise information (software is only information) instead of its original purpose of dissemination of information on inventions
(examples of effects from The Register)
The irony is, your digital camera will probably work 'out of the box', assuming it's a usb camera, i.e. plug it in and an automount link for it should appear on the desktop.
It's annoying that you had to recompile the kernel to allow installation of the official nvidia drivers (there are built in nv drivers in X, but they don't do 3d). I'm a little surprised, as the commercial distro kernels are usually pretty flexible. A black mark, definitely.
Sound is... well, sound support is improving on linux. the problem is, the native support in 2.4 kernels is an old version of OSS, which isn't very flexible, and you end up having to buy the commercial OSS drivers to get support for quite a few soundcards, especially those which are embedded on the motherboard.
Fortunately, ALSA, a new Free sound system is the default in 2.6 kernels, which will make sound support in distros a damn sight easier in a few months time. In the meantime, check out http://www.alsa-project.org/ - there's a matrix of supported soundcards, what drivers they use etc.
It may be worth using your free Suse install support to get sound working; failing that, suse support tends to revolve around the mailing lists.
Some claim that they merely disbelieve in God, and are not claiming that God does not exist. I'm not entirely sure how you can "not believe" in something without recognizing a possibility that it exists. This link has an interesting view about it. Ok. I'm one of those people who 'merely disbelieve in God'.
You cannot prove to me, at this time, using logic or any other scientic method, that (any) God exists. All arguments I have met so far basically devolve to the faith of the arguer or the faith of someone he quotes. That, or by pointing at a 'miracle' that cannot be explained due to lack of evidence as proof, beyond pure chance.
From your point of view, that would make me an agnostic, given two conflicting points of view.
However, I consider myself a humanist (a form of atheism). Why?
Well, let's use your 'invisible pink unicorn' example. You say that I should be agnostic about their existance. But as far as I'm concerned, you have to weigh the credibility of the source in as part of the evidence. Now, it's not a numbers game per se; science has shown that sheer weight of numbers is not proof (re: world is flat), so lack of supporting opinion is definitely not proof that something does not exist. In the absence of other proof however, I consider that credibility to be the tipping factor.
I.e. if you tell me you can see something, and nobody else can, then I take your lack of evidence, and weigh in with the proven fallibility of the human mind, along with the proven ability of man to lie to others, to come down upon the balance of probabilities that invisible pink unicorns do not exist.
However, I keep an open mind; if you are able to bring me evidence that pink unicorns exist, then I too, will agree that pink unicorns exist. Of course, it has to be verifiable, anonymously repeatable evidence.
Now, organised (and disorganised!) religion have a lot of followers. But, I weigh in with theories like this one. (long link, sorry). Basically, that we are hardwired for (a) God. Just looking at the sheer range of thing that people fervently believe , many of them that theirs is the one true God, and willing to kill those who don't believe in Him; that makes me think God is a part of the human mind.
Now, I do not believe in God. That is the scientifically standard option, given that there is no proof, and there is an acceptable theory for people believing in Him, i.e. a feature of the human brain.
However, I keep an open mind, and am willing to accept incontrovertible, independently verifiable proof that he does exist. Therefore I do not believe in God, but do not go so far as to say that a supranatural being cannot exist; merely that it up to believers to prove his existance.
Out of interest, given a lack of reliable positive evidence, why is it up to science to prove that God does not exist?
Science can prove a negative, (for proof in this whole article, read, theory that cannot reasonably be attacked with current evidence) by proving the opposite. I.e. I can prove the statement 'the moon is made of green cheese' false by reference to spectroscopy and moon rocks, for starters.
I cannot prove that God does not exist, as by definition, we have no natural tools to probe a supranatural being. The theists have taken the position that there is a being beyond all ability to see, touch or otherwise measure, then claim that it us up to ME to disprove he exists!
As far as the doesn't start immediately problem goes, I found you had to wait for the first 'batch' of tracks to download. Mind you, that was using version 0.1 as I couldn't find a link to download version 0.2. One of these days I'll get round to creating an iRATE-cvs ebuild for gentoo.
Still, streams don't allow you to listen to the tracks offline, not away from the computer; which is one of the main irritations of DRM, i.e. it stops you listening on any device you choose.
I suppose you could record the stream to listen offline; but then you're back at square one regarding number of copies rapidly matching number of shared CD's.
In effect, the snapster central server counts up all the CD's input by users, plus the ones snapster owns directly. Then the server allows copies of the tracks that it has available by 'borrowing' the track from a physical CD held by a user.
But the accounting is done purely virtually. Presumably, the users inputting CD's would have to sign a waiver saying that they wouldn't use the CD's they input while logged onto the system. When they log off, their tracks drop out of the central server's list of ones available (just like p2p at the moment)
There's no defence to all the users just uploading britney spear's CD's; but of course, that problem exists for conventional p2p. What will be available most, will be the tracks that most people listen to. But conversely, although there will only be few copies of the work that is not popular, they will only be wanted by a few people, thus it will still work.
The biggest downside I see is the lack of incentive for people to keep the number of copies in the system in line with the ones being borrowed; i.e. a physical CD needs to exist every time someone downloads a track. and the number of copies cannot exceed the number of CDs.
So what happens when all the physical CD's have already been 'borrowed'? No more copies can be made until more physical CD's are bought, and the penny per track would hardly encourage people to do that! It'll work if tracks 'leak' out of the system and are no longer recorded as in use - which would be illegal; or if tracks are deleted centrally or by the user after a period of time, neither of which would be popular.
The reason P2P works is it allows one to many; i.e. a limited number of physical CD's to be cloned to many people, including leechers; it's a top heavy system.
The only way I can see snapster 2 working in real life is if :
a) it streams tracks, rather than allows downloads - which I still think would be classified as a broadcast, thus nailed under the RIAA's royalty charges for net radio;
b) people can only download a number of tracks equal to the number they've made available to the system, thus turning it into a giant 'swapshop' rather than P2P in the classic sense. And the music industry will hardly be hurt, as a physical CD will have bought for every track that's in use. About the only major use would be to easily listen to music you haven't already heard, without having to pay for it. A worthwhile goal, but hardly industry shaking.
Unlike criminal prosecutions, where reasonable doubt is enough to get you off, civil cases are decided on balance of probabilities.
The RIAA would say 'this IP was used at this time to share this long list of files, and the ISP records show that this IP was used by this account, from this telephone number for this period of time, using this amount of bandwidth. Oh, and we downloaded them, and they are the same files as they are labelled.'
It's then up to you to demonstrate a more compelling case that it wasn't you using that account, it was your dastardly neighbour. Hope you have concrete evidence (i.e. logs) to prove that that's the sort of thing that happens...
Even assuming that you have compelling evidence that it wasn't you, you're still liable for contributory infringement, as by knowingly providing infrastructure for infringement, they'll get you the same way they got napster. Of course, you could apply for common carrier status, but then you need to show that you let your neighbours use your connection for anything they want, all the time.
Obviously, there are limits to how different you can make a curvy Q look :)
As a result, gun crime is mostly restricted to gang-on-gang violence, specifically yardie turf wars in the drug business.
You may well be fully trained up on how to use a firearm - but the laws that allow you to carry a weapon also allow a yahoo who has no clue how to properly use that cannon in his bag about. So when a criminal comes in to rob the post office with a gun, and that yahoo starts shooting back, I get hit in the crossfire. Great. In the UK, he'd rob the place with a knife (or no weapon at all) and I get to walk out alive with no injuries. Thanks all the same, but I'd prefer the people with guns to be incredibly well trained professionals only. How can there be a chalk line round my corpse if the criminals don't NEED to carry guns?
Have you considered that in the US the number of people who successfully defend themselves with a handgun are hugely outweighed by those who are injured or killed with their own weapon? In addition, it's a lot easier to accidentally shoot yourself or someone you know (especially if you're a child) if there are guns in the house. You don't hear much about people who were cleaning a knife and accidentally chop their own head off either.
Also, most people are assaulted or murder by people they already know. Although it's perfectly possibly to kill someone with a knife or bat, it's a lot easier to do it with a gun, especially in the heat of the moment.
Ultimately though, you view owning a gun as being a fundamental right, and this whole argument will make not the slightest difference to that. I used to be pro-guns; having seen what a mess a handgun can make of a human being, I'm now very glad that I live in a country where they are not common. So I guess we will agree to differ.
Well, there's several big differences that affect me that come from a kernel upgrade. The first lot is better hardware support. AGP3 means your top-end graphics card gets used to its full potential. Native ALSA support makes getting your soundcard up and running a whole lot easier. Better support for IDE burners makes it easier to get your burner running well, and faster, in linux without having to sort out SCSI emulation. The second chunk is scheduling algorithm improvements. What this means for me is, I can have a compile going in the background (using 100% cpu), xmms playing without skipping, xmule downloading things, and whatever I'm doing in the foreground, such as mozilla-firebird, isn't affected in the slightest. In fact, if I minimise the compile window, I can't even tell when it finishes any more, there's just no difference in responsiveness. And all of that achieved without having to use nice. This is something that has been recently improved substantially in the 2.4.20 series, and apparently 2.6 holds up under even heavier loads. In fact, the priority scheduling means that linux now responds better for me when i click stuff than windows does (you don't realise how often explorer sticks on the busy icon until you don't have to use it for a while)
If I was to hazard a guess (and it is literally a guess) I'd go for tax reasons.
To give you just one example of it being standard wisdom though, just look at this article in the washington post re decss.
"Even watching a movie outside the region it was released in can pose a financial threat, since the movie industry relies on the ability to issue movies on DVD at varying times around the world to recover the high costs of moviemaking. "
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A177 91-2003Jun20_2.html