While I agree with you that fear was used in part to pass legislation (e.g. the Patriot Act, which itself has both valid and harmful aspects) and I am concerned about and wish to fix its harmful aspects, the legislators did not cause the terror, which is fundamental to the common notion of "terrorism".
At first glance, your definition of terrorism seems reasonable, when in fact it is ridiculously mild compared to the commonly accepted usage of the word. In common usage, terrorists cause terror through their heinous actions, not merely "use terror". i.e. merely taking advantage of people's fear is not commonly considered "terrorism"... at the very worst it is fraud, which, I hope you'll agree, is significantly different from mass murder.
e.g. In 1999, money was made by taking advantage of people's nebulous fear of what may happen in the year 2000. People bought generators and supplies. Was that fraud? Was that terrorism? Insurance companies make much of their money off of fear that something bad will happen, are they terrorists? There can be a fine line between substantiated risk assessment and unsubstantiated fear used to make a decision.
To reduce the meaning of an emotionally charged word such as "terrorist" and then apply it to a very select group is terribly misleading, since at first glance you are equating the US legislature (and Bush) to Bin Laden, when in actuality, your definition is probably applicable to most of the world.
In an albeit strange sense, it appears that you and the parent AC are trying to make the same point: in open-source, money is made through services (capturing water in basins in your analogy, or, more realistically, purification, storage, and transportation). However, I agree with the AC that your analogy is only vaguely applicable.
Your analogy breaks down because:
1) In order to survive, everyone must obtain drinkable water continuously. This largely explains the vastness of the water industry ($5 Billion?) and its "near zero" cost. In an equilibrium, any product of human effort which must be obtained by everyone is bound to be both inexpensive (it defines the lowest common denominator) and result in an enormous industry. I'm not sure how this can be applied to open-source since it is not a necessity.
2) The actual cost of drinkable water is highly variable, rarely near zero and cannot currently extend at a zero cost rate to infinity. Hence, I see no meaningful water analogy for the high cost of code creation and the near zero cost of infinite distribution.
- Capturing rain is limited by the quantity and availability of rain and a means of storage. Land is not free, therefore how could rain or even rivers be free? If you do not capture enough water on your land this week or it becomes contaminated (standing water), how will you get drinking water? how much will you pay for it? As another poster mentioned, water rights can be a big issue when a town upstream starts taking too much water (or diverts a river)... it is the same problem of scarcity on a much larger scale.
- Pollution makes zero-cost water even more rare as it contaminates the atmosphere (in which rain is produced), wells, rivers, lakes, etc., thereby necessitating more expensive purification.
Anyone who claims that there is money to made selling Open Source software is daft. Red Hat's market cap closed at $3.17 billion on Friday, up 304% for the year.
While superficially inflammatory, the AC's point (by deduction) is that Red Hat did not make its money by selling Open Source software, but rather by selling products and services related to that software.
In conclusion, please explain what particular insight your water analogy provides regarding how money can be made with open-source. As far as I can tell, the parent AC succinctly characterized all the sources of income related to open-source.
I agree. I really want to support my local independent computer builders / store, but after a few bad experiences (buying computers containing irreparably buggy or incompatible hardware), the lack of useful support, and average prices (at best) I've decided to avoid them as well (at least the ones I've already tried... though now I'm even skeptical of new ones).
It's a shame, really, since I'm willing to pay a little more for the convenience of having an honest, good, and knowledgeable builder near me.
Excellent point. Perhaps a more clever MPAA exec would have left cams alone, since (as you imply):
1) the MPAA can use cams as a source for FUD. 2) cams dilute the pool of good, high quality videos. 3) passing such ineffective laws (i.e. which at best removes poor quality videos from circulation) may annoy citizens (e.g. who may be carrying a camera for other purposes), which is a bad idea.
It may have been a misstep to get these laws passed.
(A)erobic (V)ehicle for (H)ypersonic (A)erospace (T)ransportation == AVATAR?
To what extent are we allowed to arbitrarily select letters to form a cool acronym? Maybe they felt that AVHAT was a little too close to "asshat"?
On the other hand, since "avatar" is derived from Sanskrit and can mean "the incarnation of a Hindu deity, especially Vishnu, in human or animal form"... and since Vishnu is the "protector and preserver of worlds", perhaps AVATAR is meaningful symbolically rather than acronymically (is that a word?... didn't think so).
Of course, in/. tradition, I've not yet read the article... I'm satisfied with just making fun of the summary.:)
genocide: "The systematic and planned extermination of an entire national, racial, political, or ethnic group."
The Holocaust is described as "the genocide of European Jews and others by the Nazis during World War II". Note that European Jews still exist, so "genocide" does not imply completion of the systematic and planned extermination.
Hence, the phrase "Genocide on a small scale" is a valid attempt to describe the actual extent of the extermination.
Ya know, I thought you made a mistake adding "reverse" to "defenestration", but I think I finally got your intent.
The word "defenestration" means "the act of throwing someone or something out of a window"... "de-" meaning "out of" and "fenestra" meaning "window".
At first I thought "reverse defenestration" might be like "not not x", which would result in "fenestration"... perhaps meaning "to make something windowed" or throwing something to the inside of a window, both of which would be contrary to your intended point.
But I see now that you are actually applying "reverse" to what is being thrown ("something" vs. "the window") rather than the direction it is being thrown (inside or outside the window... e.g. with the inside being representative of the computer).
Ha! very funny... hmmm... just like me to overanalyze a perfectly pleasant quip. Sorry.:)
On a couple occassions I've read that the human body absorbs significantly more chlorine from showers (through the skin and through inhalation of the chlorine vapors) than it does from drinking the same water... i.e. regarding chlorine, it is actually more important to filter the water you shower in.
I'm sorry I don't remember my source for this information, but here's a quick google link to some pages which mention it.
I believe another poster mentioned the negative side of drinking only distilled water... though I see you mention that you supplement your intake.
The cost of a license for commercial development is not a valid argument. If a company develops an application for sale, the cost of a license is a fraction of the overall cost to develop, market, and maintain a product.
I disagree:
1) Trolltech has to make a profit. The only way their product can be cheaper than creating it yourself is if they have a large enough userbase (as compared to your projected userbase) to account for their profit and then some.
2) UserLinux is not being created by a single company, nor for a single product. It is being created by a consortium for many products. IMHO, it is likely that the per-company expense is greater to maintain perpetual Qt licenses than to share in the improvement of a pre-existing solution.
That said, quality is also a key issue. If Qt is truly technically superior to GTK+ (and GTK+ is too damaged to "fix"), perhaps it would be in the consortium's best interest to buy Trolltech outright, re-licensing the code as they see fit.
Re:When does this quote get old...
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Why spin the disk faster? Why not just use multiple (split) lasers and multiple photo-sensors to read / write to the disk? I think I heard of something like this... TrueX by Kenwood?... I'm not sure what happened to it.
Taken to an extreme, the entire CD (or other medium) might be able to be read without moving it much or at all. Maybe good photosensors or lasers are really expensive?
Furthermore, irony, being defined as contrary to expectation, is subjective: what I expect may be different from what you expect. Therefore, I would say that every use of the word "irony" could in fact be accurate if the situation is contrary to what that particular person expects.
So, while I do not think it was ironic, I believe you did (i.e. it was contrary to your expectation, as erroneous as I feel that expectation may be:)), and therefore you used the word accurately.
In fact, I would expect it to be in an MS format since the document (I assume) is about _how_ to migrate from MS to Open Source. Putting it in some Open Source format would be ironic, because, then how could those using MS possibly read it and thereby learn how to migrate?
Irony occurs when the conveyed meaning is contrary to expectation or the literal meaning.
Ghostscript is cool. I don't know of a better way to view.ps files. While Ghostscript does load faster, it is much slower in rendering (at least comparing your typical bitmap font.ps and your typical vector font.pdf) and navigation can be annoying: ever try to search a.ps document?... it has to extract all the text first... I'm not sure how Acrobat does it so quickly. Hence, I like using Acrobat better when I can.
Also, unfortunately, converting from.ps to.pdf is usually troublesome since Acrobat doesn't render bitmapped fonts very well (which it seems a lot of.ps files use), so I get a very ugly and slowly rendered pages with those converted.pdf files. I wish I knew of an easy way to switch it to use vector fonts.
At this point, neither can Linus nor any other kernel developer that used BK, ever, ever work on anything that even smells like it came from the same planet as BitKeeper. For the rest of their lives!
Thank you for stressing that point. That is the most alarming point I took from McVoy's comments as well. Who knows how far the ideas of versioning that BK uses can be extended to apply to all sorts of systems?... some of which might already be unknowingly implemented within the Linux kernel, which could someday be used to compete with BK.
If that is in fact what the license says, then it is also rather ridiculous. So much so, in fact, that I would suspect that it is not legally enforceable. IANAL, but as I understand it, many EULAs are not enforceable because they are unreasonable. e.g. Your reading of my post means that you can never write a differing post on this subject.
Now, while many may say "The License be damned." or "The license does not appy in my country.", polluting any portion of Linux with such greedy, anticompetitive hogwash bodes nothing but trouble in Linux's future.
I agree, it would have been best to stay away from BK entirely... but as you point out, there are many people which have already become "contaminated" by this license (who, e.g., might not even be able to submit patches to another rcs). Furthermore, in so much as the license might not legally enforceable, it is legal to disobey it... which is not to say that it is moral to ignore a reasonable contract, even if it is legal.
Re:A lot of folks are missing the point completely
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All The Rave
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Actually, it might be more akin to buying the farmer's crops and planting the seeds to grow your own. And then giving away your crop. Is that immoral? What if the farmer doesn't want you to do that? Should that be illegal?
Forgive my absence and the lateness of this response. I enjoyed reading your comments: they're very clever and interesting.
I never said it was easy, but it is no where near impossible. You just chemically strip the chip layer by layer and map out the circutry with a high power microscope.
I have not investigated it in detail, but when I said "virging on impossible," in my mind I was thinking of hardware tamper-proofing (self-destruct) which could significantly increase the difficulty beyond simply analyzing wafers.
Furthermore, using a school's tools for such a venture might not only place the school in legal danger, but the tools would then be considered circumvention devices which are outlawed under the DMCA (part of the insanity that is DMCA), probably requiring all sorts of other new restrictions upon them...
Of course, part of the deviousness of the DMCA is that it cannot easily be invalidated because of the clause allowing a board to determine exceptions as time goes on. I believe academic research is a current exception, but I'm not positive, so it might be legally allowed.
I just had an amusing thought, I could use the TCPA system itself to give out these keys securely and anonymously.
It would be dependent upon the anonymity of newsgroups (relative to the capabilities of the government for tracking -- is my paranoia glaring?:)), but, yeah, that would be pretty funny.:)
I just had another thought. They are currently going to great effort stating that TCPA itself is not a DRM system. They sort of half-admit that DRM systems might be run on top of it.
That's a good point, but as you imply, I think they mean that TCPA is not merely for DRM (it is rather a superset, with one specific use being DRM). In this light, breaking TCPA breaks any DRM based upon TCPA, thereby entering the domain of the DMCA. Though I suppose it depends upon how broadly you define DRM (e.g. perhaps the right to privacy extends DRM to encompass all uses of TCPA).
If they admit TCPA is DRM it will help in the public relations fight against it. The other option, changing the law, isn't going to be so easy for them. They got the DMCA passed when no one was paying attention. Now that there is real and aware opposition.
I agree, and that correlates to the main point I wanted to get across in my previous post: The root problem is a legal one and not a technological one. I'm all for secure communication *under the control of the user*. It is the bad laws (and insane EULAs) that the TCPA is going to try to enforce which should be changed.
They are going to run into the exact same problem with Palladium and TCPA.
Aside from the *extreme* difficulties (virging on impossible) of hacking a bug-free hardware protection system (note that the current system is not hardware based and contains bugs), you are correct, which inevitably leads to the really scary fact that whatever hardware protection they implement, it *must* be accompanied by very harsh legal penalties for cracking it...
After all, suddenly, the same system that will control arbitrary usage and copy rights will also be responsible for protecting all exchange of money and information... our whole economic system could collapse if someone cracked it completely (i.e. beyond a single account).
The legal system and government is where the real problem lies, not in technical capability.
...wouldn't people pay for at least some of them to continue their R&D work? If not, then I would argue that they were not truly missed and their job of creating new and better designs was really not valueable enough to sustain.
Likewise, I believe that people are willing to give money in support of promoting good designs (e.g. software, music, video) even if they can be copied at zero cost.
I am a big proponent of self-motivated learning, so I'm very impressed with you (and your son's) approach. I think ideally, an interested beginner should be introduced to a very simple programming language with relatively instant gratification.
IMHO, part of the problem with modern programming systems is that it requires much work and planning to accomplish anything really significant... much less something significant to a youngster -- "ooo, I just made it say 'Hello World!', how exciting!":)... probably much the same reason your son started out with Inform rather than C.
I remember a game called Omega by Origin Systems for the Apple IIe from my youth. It was a "high-tech" tank simulation game wherein you programmed a very basic script for a tank and pit your tank against others on a battlefield in automated warfare. I thought it was awesome at the time and probably helped fuel my interest in programming. Once I mastered the basics, I started optimizing my tank scripts to figure out the best way to balance speed of execution with maximum features and intelligence.
A while ago I installed an emulator (AppleWin or ApplePC) and tried out the Omega game again (along with Taipan, Pirates, etc.:)... you can get Omega here.
By modern standards, the graphics are fairly sad, but all that needs to be done is to put a modern face on it... I think the basic idea of a simplified game language is an excellent beginning for learning to program and, perhaps more importantly, for cultivating interest in learning to program. -- Programmers do it with their 1s and 0s.
Thank you very much for your knowledgeable response... it was enlightening and concise. The smaller variable chunk sizes alone seems like a big improvement. I know that emule is working on incorporating tiger hashes into the protocol to protect against such poisoning of the md hash.
I read the very brief protocol spec and faq... it appears that at least some optimization is performed on the client side (tit for tat)... does the tracker just determine which sources to send out to effectively distribute the load? What's the max downloaders a tracker can handle (proportional to bandwidth)? Can multiple trackers exist for the same file? Can you download even if the tracker is no longer serving / tracking a particular file? With my newbie understanding, a tracker sounds a lot like an index server for a few select files, no?
Ah so many questions... maybe I'm better off looking for more docs?:) In any case, thanks again for the good info and for piquing my interest.
I'm still confused as to how this is meaningfully better than designs like ed2k or overnet (which have a common multi-source ftp, though with different indexing protocols).
eMule has had a credit system forever which favors people who upload, and being open-source, can be tailored to anyone's likings. Anyone can run an ed2k index server... plus, sources can be embedded within the ed2k links themselves, and with source sharing, all you need is a few valid sources to find most of the rest.
As far as I can tell, the only reason BT might seem faster is because there has been quite a few high upload capacity seeds for the files.
Can anyone explain to me the significance / usefulness of BitTorrent over these other designs?
:) I think it works... there are many companies which have products for this purpose. Do a google search for "digital audio watermark" to find examples (including technical papers on citeseer). What is termed "robust" watermarks (as opposed to "fragile") can survive the usual audio processes (D/A, A/D, dsp, lossy compression, etc.).
IANAExpert. In some cases, you may be correct: if the watermark detection can be reverse engineered, it *may* be possible to remove it... the only question is how much damage must be done to the audio to obscure the watermark, and I think this is where the research is being emphasized.
Also, I don't think it is as simple as your secret key analogy: detection of the watermark does not necessarily mean you can properly remove it. As I understand it, there are many possible sources within the audio which aid in re-constructing the watermark and various tolerances for their recombination (all depending upon the particular algorithm), so there may be a google of ways to remove the known watermark, but only a few of the ways actually maintain reasonable audio quality (as compared to the original).
e.g. in some aspects, the original audio might already contribute to the watermark's existence, and so no modification of that aspect must occur when embedding the watermark. Hence, when attempting to remove the watermark, it is difficult to determine whether that aspect was originally part of the song or whether it was added by the watermarking technique.
On a side note, the other interesting possibility is the existence of multiple watermarks, wherein a second watermark (which is not detected or required for playback) is an ID which is unique to each copy of the song released, potentially allowing the distributor to track a "pirated" song back to the "pirate" (e.g. if it was legally purchased they might track records of its sale, and if it wasn't legally purchased, they could at least track it back to the last known legal distributor).
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While I agree with you that fear was used in part to pass legislation (e.g. the Patriot Act, which itself has both valid and harmful aspects) and I am concerned about and wish to fix its harmful aspects, the legislators did not cause the terror, which is fundamental to the common notion of "terrorism".
At first glance, your definition of terrorism seems reasonable, when in fact it is ridiculously mild compared to the commonly accepted usage of the word. In common usage, terrorists cause terror through their heinous actions, not merely "use terror". i.e. merely taking advantage of people's fear is not commonly considered "terrorism"... at the very worst it is fraud, which, I hope you'll agree, is significantly different from mass murder.
e.g. In 1999, money was made by taking advantage of people's nebulous fear of what may happen in the year 2000. People bought generators and supplies. Was that fraud? Was that terrorism? Insurance companies make much of their money off of fear that something bad will happen, are they terrorists? There can be a fine line between substantiated risk assessment and unsubstantiated fear used to make a decision.
To reduce the meaning of an emotionally charged word such as "terrorist" and then apply it to a very select group is terribly misleading, since at first glance you are equating the US legislature (and Bush) to Bin Laden, when in actuality, your definition is probably applicable to most of the world.
Your analogy breaks down because:
1) In order to survive, everyone must obtain drinkable water continuously. This largely explains the vastness of the water industry ($5 Billion?) and its "near zero" cost. In an equilibrium, any product of human effort which must be obtained by everyone is bound to be both inexpensive (it defines the lowest common denominator) and result in an enormous industry. I'm not sure how this can be applied to open-source since it is not a necessity.
2) The actual cost of drinkable water is highly variable, rarely near zero and cannot currently extend at a zero cost rate to infinity. Hence, I see no meaningful water analogy for the high cost of code creation and the near zero cost of infinite distribution.
- Capturing rain is limited by the quantity and availability of rain and a means of storage. Land is not free, therefore how could rain or even rivers be free? If you do not capture enough water on your land this week or it becomes contaminated (standing water), how will you get drinking water? how much will you pay for it? As another poster mentioned, water rights can be a big issue when a town upstream starts taking too much water (or diverts a river)... it is the same problem of scarcity on a much larger scale.
- Pollution makes zero-cost water even more rare as it contaminates the atmosphere (in which rain is produced), wells, rivers, lakes, etc., thereby necessitating more expensive purification.
While superficially inflammatory, the AC's point (by deduction) is that Red Hat did not make its money by selling Open Source software, but rather by selling products and services related to that software.
In conclusion, please explain what particular insight your water analogy provides regarding how money can be made with open-source. As far as I can tell, the parent AC succinctly characterized all the sources of income related to open-source.
I agree. I really want to support my local independent computer builders / store, but after a few bad experiences (buying computers containing irreparably buggy or incompatible hardware), the lack of useful support, and average prices (at best) I've decided to avoid them as well (at least the ones I've already tried... though now I'm even skeptical of new ones).
It's a shame, really, since I'm willing to pay a little more for the convenience of having an honest, good, and knowledgeable builder near me.
Excellent point. Perhaps a more clever MPAA exec would have left cams alone, since (as you imply):
1) the MPAA can use cams as a source for FUD.
2) cams dilute the pool of good, high quality videos.
3) passing such ineffective laws (i.e. which at best removes poor quality videos from circulation) may annoy citizens (e.g. who may be carrying a camera for other purposes), which is a bad idea.
It may have been a misstep to get these laws passed.
What happens to people who don't show up at the polling station? (which I imagine would include registration of some sort, no?)
(A)erobic (V)ehicle for (H)ypersonic (A)erospace (T)ransportation == AVATAR?
/. tradition, I've not yet read the article... I'm satisfied with just making fun of the summary. :)
To what extent are we allowed to arbitrarily select letters to form a cool acronym?
Maybe they felt that AVHAT was a little too close to "asshat"?
On the other hand, since "avatar" is derived from Sanskrit and can mean "the incarnation of a Hindu deity, especially Vishnu, in human or animal form"... and since Vishnu is the "protector and preserver of worlds", perhaps AVATAR is meaningful symbolically rather than acronymically (is that a word?... didn't think so).
Of course, in
I disagree.
genocide: "The systematic and planned extermination of an entire national, racial, political, or ethnic group."
The Holocaust is described as "the genocide of European Jews and others by the Nazis during World War II". Note that European Jews still exist, so "genocide" does not imply completion of the systematic and planned extermination.
Hence, the phrase "Genocide on a small scale" is a valid attempt to describe the actual extent of the extermination.
Perhaps you are referring to instant runoff voting?
"Instant runoff voting (IRV) is a voting reform that asks the voter to rank the candidates in order of preference."
Ya know, I thought you made a mistake adding "reverse" to "defenestration", but I think I finally got your intent.
:)
The word "defenestration" means "the act of throwing someone or something out of a window"... "de-" meaning "out of" and "fenestra" meaning "window".
At first I thought "reverse defenestration" might be like "not not x", which would result in "fenestration"... perhaps meaning "to make something windowed" or throwing something to the inside of a window, both of which would be contrary to your intended point.
But I see now that you are actually applying "reverse" to what is being thrown ("something" vs. "the window") rather than the direction it is being thrown (inside or outside the window... e.g. with the inside being representative of the computer).
Ha! very funny... hmmm... just like me to overanalyze a perfectly pleasant quip. Sorry.
On a couple occassions I've read that the human body absorbs significantly more chlorine from showers (through the skin and through inhalation of the chlorine vapors) than it does from drinking the same water... i.e. regarding chlorine, it is actually more important to filter the water you shower in.
I'm sorry I don't remember my source for this information, but here's a quick google link to some pages which mention it.
I believe another poster mentioned the negative side of drinking only distilled water... though I see you mention that you supplement your intake.
The cost of a license for commercial development is not a valid argument. If a company develops an application for sale, the cost of a license is a fraction of the overall cost to develop, market, and maintain a product.
I disagree:
1) Trolltech has to make a profit. The only way their product can be cheaper than creating it yourself is if they have a large enough userbase (as compared to your projected userbase) to account for their profit and then some.
2) UserLinux is not being created by a single company, nor for a single product. It is being created by a consortium for many products. IMHO, it is likely that the per-company expense is greater to maintain perpetual Qt licenses than to share in the improvement of a pre-existing solution.
That said, quality is also a key issue. If Qt is truly technically superior to GTK+ (and GTK+ is too damaged to "fix"), perhaps it would be in the consortium's best interest to buy Trolltech outright, re-licensing the code as they see fit.
Why spin the disk faster? Why not just use multiple (split) lasers and multiple photo-sensors to read / write to the disk? I think I heard of something like this... TrueX by Kenwood?... I'm not sure what happened to it.
Taken to an extreme, the entire CD (or other medium) might be able to be read without moving it much or at all. Maybe good photosensors or lasers are really expensive?
Furthermore, irony, being defined as contrary to expectation, is subjective: what I expect may be different from what you expect. Therefore, I would say that every use of the word "irony" could in fact be accurate if the situation is contrary to what that particular person expects.
:)), and therefore you used the word accurately.
So, while I do not think it was ironic, I believe you did (i.e. it was contrary to your expectation, as erroneous as I feel that expectation may be
In fact, I would expect it to be in an MS format since the document (I assume) is about _how_ to migrate from MS to Open Source. Putting it in some Open Source format would be ironic, because, then how could those using MS possibly read it and thereby learn how to migrate?
Irony occurs when the conveyed meaning is contrary to expectation or the literal meaning.
Ghostscript is cool. I don't know of a better way to view .ps files. While Ghostscript does load faster, it is much slower in rendering (at least comparing your typical bitmap font .ps and your typical vector font .pdf) and navigation can be annoying: ever try to search a .ps document?... it has to extract all the text first... I'm not sure how Acrobat does it so quickly. Hence, I like using Acrobat better when I can.
.ps to .pdf is usually troublesome since Acrobat doesn't render bitmapped fonts very well (which it seems a lot of .ps files use), so I get a very ugly and slowly rendered pages with those converted .pdf files. I wish I knew of an easy way to switch it to use vector fonts.
Also, unfortunately, converting from
At this point, neither can Linus nor any other kernel developer that used BK, ever, ever work on anything that even smells like it came from the same planet as BitKeeper. For the rest of their lives!
Thank you for stressing that point. That is the most alarming point I took from McVoy's comments as well. Who knows how far the ideas of versioning that BK uses can be extended to apply to all sorts of systems?... some of which might already be unknowingly implemented within the Linux kernel, which could someday be used to compete with BK.
If that is in fact what the license says, then it is also rather ridiculous. So much so, in fact, that I would suspect that it is not legally enforceable. IANAL, but as I understand it, many EULAs are not enforceable because they are unreasonable. e.g. Your reading of my post means that you can never write a differing post on this subject.
Now, while many may say "The License be damned." or "The license does not appy in my country.", polluting any portion of Linux with such greedy, anticompetitive hogwash bodes nothing but trouble in Linux's future.
I agree, it would have been best to stay away from BK entirely... but as you point out, there are many people which have already become "contaminated" by this license (who, e.g., might not even be able to submit patches to another rcs). Furthermore, in so much as the license might not legally enforceable, it is legal to disobey it... which is not to say that it is moral to ignore a reasonable contract, even if it is legal.
Actually, it might be more akin to buying the farmer's crops and planting the seeds to grow your own. And then giving away your crop. Is that immoral? What if the farmer doesn't want you to do that? Should that be illegal?
Forgive my absence and the lateness of this response. I enjoyed reading your comments: they're very clever and interesting.
:)), but, yeah, that would be pretty funny. :)
I never said it was easy, but it is no where near impossible. You just chemically strip the chip layer by layer and map out the circutry with a high power microscope.
I have not investigated it in detail, but when I said "virging on impossible," in my mind I was thinking of hardware tamper-proofing (self-destruct) which could significantly increase the difficulty beyond simply analyzing wafers.
Furthermore, using a school's tools for such a venture might not only place the school in legal danger, but the tools would then be considered circumvention devices which are outlawed under the DMCA (part of the insanity that is DMCA), probably requiring all sorts of other new restrictions upon them...
Of course, part of the deviousness of the DMCA is that it cannot easily be invalidated because of the clause allowing a board to determine exceptions as time goes on. I believe academic research is a current exception, but I'm not positive, so it might be legally allowed.
I just had an amusing thought, I could use the TCPA system itself to give out these keys securely and anonymously.
It would be dependent upon the anonymity of newsgroups (relative to the capabilities of the government for tracking -- is my paranoia glaring?
I just had another thought. They are currently going to great effort stating that TCPA itself is not a DRM system. They sort of half-admit that DRM systems might be run on top of it.
That's a good point, but as you imply, I think they mean that TCPA is not merely for DRM (it is rather a superset, with one specific use being DRM). In this light, breaking TCPA breaks any DRM based upon TCPA, thereby entering the domain of the DMCA. Though I suppose it depends upon how broadly you define DRM (e.g. perhaps the right to privacy extends DRM to encompass all uses of TCPA).
If they admit TCPA is DRM it will help in the public relations fight against it. The other option, changing the law, isn't going to be so easy for them. They got the DMCA passed when no one was paying attention. Now that there is real and aware opposition.
I agree, and that correlates to the main point I wanted to get across in my previous post: The root problem is a legal one and not a technological one. I'm all for secure communication *under the control of the user*. It is the bad laws (and insane EULAs) that the TCPA is going to try to enforce which should be changed.
They are going to run into the exact same problem with Palladium and TCPA.
Aside from the *extreme* difficulties (virging on impossible) of hacking a bug-free hardware protection system (note that the current system is not hardware based and contains bugs), you are correct, which inevitably leads to the really scary fact that whatever hardware protection they implement, it *must* be accompanied by very harsh legal penalties for cracking it...
After all, suddenly, the same system that will control arbitrary usage and copy rights will also be responsible for protecting all exchange of money and information... our whole economic system could collapse if someone cracked it completely (i.e. beyond a single account).
The legal system and government is where the real problem lies, not in technical capability.
...wouldn't people pay for at least some of them to continue their R&D work? If not, then I would argue that they were not truly missed and their job of creating new and better designs was really not valueable enough to sustain.
Likewise, I believe that people are willing to give money in support of promoting good designs (e.g. software, music, video) even if they can be copied at zero cost.
I am a big proponent of self-motivated learning, so I'm very impressed with you (and your son's) approach. I think ideally, an interested beginner should be introduced to a very simple programming language with relatively instant gratification.
:)... probably much the same reason your son started out with Inform rather than C.
IMHO, part of the problem with modern programming systems is that it requires much work and planning to accomplish anything really significant... much less something significant to a youngster -- "ooo, I just made it say 'Hello World!', how exciting!"
I remember a game called Omega by Origin Systems for the Apple IIe from my youth. It was a "high-tech" tank simulation game wherein you programmed a very basic script for a tank and pit your tank against others on a battlefield in automated warfare. I thought it was awesome at the time and probably helped fuel my interest in programming. Once I mastered the basics, I started optimizing my tank scripts to figure out the best way to balance speed of execution with maximum features and intelligence.
A while ago I installed an emulator (AppleWin or ApplePC) and tried out the Omega game again (along with Taipan, Pirates, etc.:)... you can get Omega here.
By modern standards, the graphics are fairly sad, but all that needs to be done is to put a modern face on it... I think the basic idea of a simplified game language is an excellent beginning for learning to program and, perhaps more importantly, for cultivating interest in learning to program.
--
Programmers do it with their 1s and 0s.
Thank you very much for your knowledgeable response... it was enlightening and concise. The smaller variable chunk sizes alone seems like a big improvement. I know that emule is working on incorporating tiger hashes into the protocol to protect against such poisoning of the md hash.
:) In any case, thanks again for the good info and for piquing my interest.
I read the very brief protocol spec and faq... it appears that at least some optimization is performed on the client side (tit for tat)... does the tracker just determine which sources to send out to effectively distribute the load? What's the max downloaders a tracker can handle (proportional to bandwidth)? Can multiple trackers exist for the same file? Can you download even if the tracker is no longer serving / tracking a particular file? With my newbie understanding, a tracker sounds a lot like an index server for a few select files, no?
Ah so many questions... maybe I'm better off looking for more docs?
I'm still confused as to how this is meaningfully better than designs like ed2k or overnet (which have a common multi-source ftp, though with different indexing protocols).
eMule has had a credit system forever which favors people who upload, and being open-source, can be tailored to anyone's likings. Anyone can run an ed2k index server... plus, sources can be embedded within the ed2k links themselves, and with source sharing, all you need is a few valid sources to find most of the rest.
As far as I can tell, the only reason BT might seem faster is because there has been quite a few high upload capacity seeds for the files.
Can anyone explain to me the significance / usefulness of BitTorrent over these other designs?
:) I think it works... there are many companies which have products for this purpose. Do a google search for "digital audio watermark" to find examples (including technical papers on citeseer). What is termed "robust" watermarks (as opposed to "fragile") can survive the usual audio processes (D/A, A/D, dsp, lossy compression, etc.).
e.g.:
a press release
verance
Overview of Felten's Attack on SDMI
Template Matching
IANAExpert. In some cases, you may be correct: if the watermark detection can be reverse engineered, it *may* be possible to remove it... the only question is how much damage must be done to the audio to obscure the watermark, and I think this is where the research is being emphasized.
Also, I don't think it is as simple as your secret key analogy: detection of the watermark does not necessarily mean you can properly remove it. As I understand it, there are many possible sources within the audio which aid in re-constructing the watermark and various tolerances for their recombination (all depending upon the particular algorithm), so there may be a google of ways to remove the known watermark, but only a few of the ways actually maintain reasonable audio quality (as compared to the original).
e.g. in some aspects, the original audio might already contribute to the watermark's existence, and so no modification of that aspect must occur when embedding the watermark. Hence, when attempting to remove the watermark, it is difficult to determine whether that aspect was originally part of the song or whether it was added by the watermarking technique.
On a side note, the other interesting possibility is the existence of multiple watermarks, wherein a second watermark (which is not detected or required for playback) is an ID which is unique to each copy of the song released, potentially allowing the distributor to track a "pirated" song back to the "pirate" (e.g. if it was legally purchased they might track records of its sale, and if it wasn't legally purchased, they could at least track it back to the last known legal distributor).
A couple of simple and brief pages I found using google "digital audio watermark":
a press release
Overview of Felten's Attack on SDMI