The issue here is a deep one. Our current legal paradigm is skewed exclusively towards Imperative programming. The public and judges and most lawyers understand no other. We try to prohibit side-effects that the legal system doesn't want by limits to functions that might compute them. The net result, since side-effects of functions are quite unpredictable, is the only way to enforce undesirable side-effects is to censor the functions in advance. This amounts to pre-censorship rather than the present unsuccessful post-censorship. It also drives attempts at defining, in advance, which functions are off-limits conceptually (by software patents).
This amounts to taking away the right to program an (approximation to) a universal computing device. To the extent this approach succeeds, it will be to the detriment of computational freedom generally.
The line of defense in the long run *must* be the freedom to compute anything. Computation is like thinking. You can't censor it in advance by rules.
The opinion is worth reading, especially the dissents. There is more going on than a tautology about "we'll arrest you for not complying with our order to comply". Sure, but that depends on whether they have the right to order you to comply, now doesn't it? There is, of course, no real different between "failing to comply" and "not complying".
Innocent until proven guilty is cool, but so is "not target of an investigation until targeted with probable cause". They must have wanted this one bad, because they turned a statute targeting criminal investigations into a Terry stop rule. What's a criminal investigation? You, until we're satisfied otherwise.
Get it? Who's a suspect? Everyone--unless we say otherwise. Now that's the big deal. What rights do suspects, as targets of what is, after all, an official interrogation in connection with a crime, have? The right to remain silent? Nope--the right not to incriminate themselves.
What's not incriminating? Well, for starters, your name. Lessee. We got our list of incriminating names here (yup), and our list of persons we can ask (everyone)--well, we're in business. You don't have anything to hide, do you? Honest people don't, you know.
So what happened here? We established a class of persons--everyone--who can be interrogated by the police, without probable cause (the old standard), or being charged (and read their rights), and who do not have the right to remain silent as long as the questions are the kind of thing any person can answer without self-incrimination.
In the other corner, we have a list of things that can't possibly be incriminating (names) that we check to deny people reasonable rights like boarding airplanes.
What do you get when you add "reasonable, non-incriminating questions you must answer" and "reasonable security precautions that have a small percentage of false positives"? Tyranny.
Very clear explanation by a Statistician (not an economist:) ) as to why the Jobless Recovery is occuring.
Short version: simultaneous inflation (of the money supply) and deflation (of price levels) are possible, when there is a large trade deficit and all the money expansion goes into credit underwritten by foreigners.
Thanks for the reference. One comment made there I thought immediately too--Syndication over IM is far more interesting. Every kid I know under 16 has given up email and uses IM file transfer instead.
Email and Browsers are probably dead technology for the next generation. HTTP/HTML will survive as a backwater because it is so useful for behavioral engineering. If you write a user interface, you can't use blue underlines because users will try to click them--very Pavlovian.
We will have to go back to what the various messaging protocols are for and re-engineer them. Projects like Jabber (or even Atom) have much more promise than a thin metadata protocol like RSS.
I bet this is just a media flash in the pan. Dave Winer and pals are trying to drum up business.
Sounds like an OK idea, but is it just me or does anyone else think that there is just a bit too much hype in the *media* about this. They don't usually pick up on good ideas and try to make them critical mass and the "next big thing".
Syndication is a great idea, I like RSS, (does BitTorrent even work under Linux?)--but why on earth all the *orchestrated* hype?
You get a license to distribute the works under very specific terms.
Public Domain is impossible to implement in practice without some legal mechanism, since the Berne convention makes "copyrighted" the default.
You can get "effectively in the Public Domain" if you give a relaxed license for your necessarily copyrighted work. *All* computer files whatsover are copyrighted implicitly (we think) by their creators, if not by upstream "IP rights".
PG -- freely redistributable for non-commercial use -- doesn't even come close.
Their purpose is free-as-in-beer literature for the masses, not free-as-in-freedom for computer files. Hence, a commercial PG2 has no conflict with PG as to purpose.
Michael Hart, owner fo the PG trademark, initiated the Eldred vs. Ashcroft case (Hart vs. Reno, it would have been), but fired Boies. Way good call, Michael.
(2) their not your texts.
PG texts are copyrighted (Berne convention) and distributed royalty free under license.
They texts were Public Domain before they were transcribed and formatted. After that, the ones done since the U.S. signed the Berne convention (if done in the U.S.) have an implicit copyright. Your right to distribute is based on the license they give you.
PG doesn't distribute "Public Domain" texts, but licensed texts. The reason is concern for legal liablity. Read the headers. If you want to do a PD distribution, you have to scrub the texts from all references from PG. Part way through the project, the "drop all references to PG" clause was dropped--at least I can't find it.
So, I'm afraid if you are looking for free ASCII base text released into the public domain (and hence available for commercial and non-commercial use), you haven't found it.
People who are saying PG and PG2 are evil now should look closer--by their standards of good and evil, PG was never good to begin with. One should be careful when judging others!
I spent a day, 11 years ago, discussing with Michael Hart his plans, at a conference I organized and also driving him from Chicago to Urbana-Champaign where he lived at the time. At the time, I was running a similar project aiming at creating freely distributable e-books.
You must remember that PG started before the Free Software movement and Open Source movements changed our ideas of commercial distribution.
Today, we take for granted that work that is under GPL or other open licensing will be distributed freely--not necessarily free as in beer, but free as in freedom.
Many people in the late 80s and early 90s were willing to contribute for free, but a number of variants were common. One of the most common was:
Free beer yes, free as in freedom no. There were any number of dual license schemes with various restrictions for commercial use. Free ASCII beer, but not Public Domain, not free as in freedom.
RMS and Linus created a revolution by *convincing* large numbers of persons that allowing others to "commercially exploit" their work was in fact a net gain for the community, because it increased the mobility (sharing) of software. What seems dogmatic doctrine today was Enlightenment for many in 1992-1993.
Michael Hart came out of the *DOS* tradition, not the *UNIX* tradition. Freeware binaries with enhanced versions for commercial use.
Read the PG headers. They are NOT public domain, but the text is licensed for non-commercial use. More specifically, this was not refined in the early versions of the header, which allow the header to be removed so the work would truely be public domain (if proven in court).
Michael Hart's concern was that putting work in the PD, even might leave HIM *liable* to copyright infringement charges, even if he made a innocent mistake. PG has a copyright vetting process and a license for this reason. Recent and future events may well prove him wise in that regard.
In any event, he is well aware that commercial use brings possible liability to a different level.
I would suggest, in looking at any of the views of Richard Stallman, Michael Hart, Linus Torvalds, Bruce Perens, Eric Raymond, or any other leader of the "free/open" movements, as well as innovators like Bill Gates (inventor of the "binary application") that you consider the totality of legal, social, and economic issues they work with.
Perhaps there is no single "right way". The PG way is maximum utility but not necessarily freedom for the non-paying masses, legal protection for the distributors, and a definite non-commodity commercial prospect.
Both the GPL and the PG license make a balance of rights, profits, and efficient distribution. The key is to learn that one must continually revisit the social and philosophical model underpinning any distribution method--Stallman very rightly guides us to the philosophical and social issues here.
It means it can only be used in a trusted environment--i.e. not on the internet with an MS or other proprietary operating system.
As soon as people figure out "trusted" means "I can't trust it to do what I want", we will see the end of the monopoly.
This is great news--a big gaping, unfixable hole for proprietary OSs. They just broke their business model for good.
Way to go!
=googol=
IP Law in two easy lessons: 1. Theft by value: you have something, I take it. 2. Theft by reference: you think of something, I think of the same thing.
We should stop saying "trusted" as it might confuse consumers. It means the computer has a deliberately insecurity so it can only be used in a trusted environment (like Linux or *BSD), and not an insecure one (like Windows).
It used to be (around 10 years ago) that there was something called the "internet" that was a wild frontier where something called the "world wide web" lived and individuals and businesses could meet with each other freely and anonymously.
We need to understand that the future has changed. There may indeed still be a free internet and free, standards based protocols like HTML and HTTP, but the captive experience delivered by proprietary browsers, ISPs, and asymmetric bandwidth is not that experience. It is, increasingly, a captive experice like AOL or CompuServe.
Of *course* a captive experience needs authentication and sign in by customers, er, I mean users. Why else would anyone pay good money unless the content were decent, the protections and security all in place?
Barbed wire? There is no fence--it melts in your mind. Just loose your illusion that when you dial in to an ISP, fire up your browser, and surf the wild web, that you are somehow more 'leet than an AOL newbie cash cow.
If you want freedom, don't pay for it. Build it yourself. The internet, the IP protocol, and real web are still there, if you don't mistake them for something they are not.
[[I feel EV1 is getting to much heat. I mean if a thug leans on some little guy and extorts money from him do you blame the little fellow or the thug?]]
This is war.
I feel for the little guy who runs away. We don't blame foot soldiers who desert--we shoot them.
or other released code. It should be possible to triangulate the source against existing released software, so at least we can know what exactly it is and whether this is a hoax or not.
Here is what their first program should be, I don't care what language is used or what book downloaded. A few more lines and you can download lots of interesting books, for learning lots of languages.
use LWP::UserAgent;
my $ua=LWP::UserAgent->new;
$ua->proxy(http=>'http://proxy.entp.attws.com:8080 ');
my $req=HTTP::Request->new(GET=>"http://savannah. ......nongnu.org/download/pgubook/ProgrammingGroun dUp-1-0-lettersize.pdf");
$req->header('Accept' => 'application/pdf');
my $assembly=$ua->request($req,"programming_book.pdf" );
print $assembly->status_line."\n";
I asked my daughter why she preferred IM to the old teenage standby -- hours on the phone. The answer surprised me. She could see who was online.
From her perspective it solved two problems
1. You knew in advance who was available to talk (lowered chance of rejection).
2. It avoided the unpleasant experience of having to mediate access through a parent ("he's not in", "he can't come to the phone", "he's been grounded and can't talk"). This is actually a variant of #1.
So it's all about saving face and managing rejection. IM provides lots of strategies and aids to do just that.
Given that it solves or mitigates two teenage problems (potential rejection by absence or parent, and parental control), I predict the first cellphone company to implement a usable buddy list wins.
Frame Languages then, not RDF
on
Practical RDF
·
· Score: 1
Protege Ontology Editor. If you think of the "four levels" I was talking about in database terms, metamodels are crucial for managing database schemas (models). Frame languages solve this problem by being lightweight, yet having enough expressiveness to build either objects or relational schemas without being fatally committed to either.
The real secret of RDF is that RDF Schema is one *example* of how frame languages, onotologies, and knowledge bases (logic programming) might be used in environments where message formats, business rules, and resource descriptions are constantly changing.
Slashdot Mirror
The issue here is a deep one. Our current legal paradigm is skewed exclusively towards Imperative programming. The public and judges and most lawyers understand no other. We try to prohibit side-effects that the legal system doesn't want by limits to functions that might compute them. The net result, since side-effects of functions are quite unpredictable, is the only way to enforce undesirable side-effects is to censor the functions in advance. This amounts to pre-censorship rather than the present unsuccessful post-censorship. It also drives attempts at defining, in advance, which functions are off-limits conceptually (by software patents).
This amounts to taking away the right to program an (approximation to) a universal computing device. To the extent this approach succeeds, it will be to the detriment of computational freedom generally.
The line of defense in the long run *must* be the freedom to compute anything. Computation is like thinking. You can't censor it in advance by rules.
The opinion is worth reading, especially the dissents. There is more going on than a tautology about "we'll arrest you for not complying with our order to comply". Sure, but that depends on whether they have the right to order you to comply, now doesn't it? There is, of course, no real different between "failing to comply" and "not complying".
Innocent until proven guilty is cool, but so is "not target of an investigation until targeted with probable cause". They must have wanted this one bad, because they turned a statute targeting criminal investigations into a Terry stop rule. What's a criminal investigation? You, until we're satisfied otherwise.
Get it? Who's a suspect? Everyone--unless we say otherwise. Now that's the big deal. What rights do suspects, as targets of what is, after all, an official interrogation in connection with a crime, have? The right to remain silent? Nope--the right not to incriminate themselves.
What's not incriminating? Well, for starters, your name. Lessee. We got our list of incriminating names here (yup), and our list of persons we can ask (everyone)--well, we're in business. You don't have anything to hide, do you? Honest people don't, you know.
So what happened here? We established a class of persons--everyone--who can be interrogated by the police, without probable cause (the old standard), or being charged (and read their rights), and who do not have the right to remain silent as long as the questions are the kind of thing any person can answer without self-incrimination.
In the other corner, we have a list of things that can't possibly be incriminating (names) that we check to deny people reasonable rights like boarding airplanes.
What do you get when you add "reasonable, non-incriminating questions you must answer" and "reasonable security precautions that have a small percentage of false positives"? Tyranny.
Very clear explanation by a Statistician (not an economist :) ) as to why the Jobless Recovery is occuring.
Short version: simultaneous inflation (of the money supply) and deflation (of price levels) are possible, when there is a large trade deficit and all the money expansion goes into credit underwritten by foreigners.
Sometimes Freedom is not convenient.
How dare they put virtual objects on my Geolocation. A man's home is his Intellectual Property.
In the right hand corner: Hackers Embrace P2P
Look at the GNUGK project (Gnu Gatekeeper). Think DNS-like routing of audio calls. BitTorrent Phone Home.
Thanks for the reference. One comment made there I thought immediately too--Syndication over IM is far more interesting. Every kid I know under 16 has given up email and uses IM file transfer instead.
Email and Browsers are probably dead technology for the next generation. HTTP/HTML will survive as a backwater because it is so useful for behavioral engineering. If you write a user interface, you can't use blue underlines because users will try to click them--very Pavlovian.
We will have to go back to what the various messaging protocols are for and re-engineer them. Projects like Jabber (or even Atom) have much more promise than a thin metadata protocol like RSS.
I bet this is just a media flash in the pan. Dave Winer and pals are trying to drum up business.
Sounds like an OK idea, but is it just me or does anyone else think that there is just a bit too much hype in the *media* about this. They don't usually pick up on good ideas and try to make them critical mass and the "next big thing".
Syndication is a great idea, I like RSS, (does BitTorrent even work under Linux?)--but why on earth all the *orchestrated* hype?
Enough to make me try Freenet again. Harrumph
Read the headers please.
You get a license to distribute the works under very specific terms.
Public Domain is impossible to implement in practice without some legal mechanism, since the Berne convention makes "copyrighted" the default.
You can get "effectively in the Public Domain" if you give a relaxed license for your necessarily copyrighted work. *All* computer files whatsover are copyrighted implicitly (we think) by their creators, if not by upstream "IP rights".
PG -- freely redistributable for non-commercial use -- doesn't even come close.
Their purpose is free-as-in-beer literature for the masses, not free-as-in-freedom for computer files. Hence, a commercial PG2 has no conflict with PG as to purpose.
Still a good call.
(1) you will get sued.
Michael Hart, owner fo the PG trademark, initiated the Eldred vs. Ashcroft case (Hart vs. Reno, it would have been), but fired Boies. Way good call, Michael.
(2) their not your texts.
PG texts are copyrighted (Berne convention) and distributed royalty free under license.
They texts were Public Domain before they were transcribed and formatted. After that, the ones done since the U.S. signed the Berne convention (if done in the U.S.) have an implicit copyright. Your right to distribute is based on the license they give you.
PG doesn't distribute "Public Domain" texts, but licensed texts. The reason is concern for legal liablity. Read the headers. If you want to do a PD distribution, you have to scrub the texts from all references from PG. Part way through the project, the "drop all references to PG" clause was dropped--at least I can't find it.
So, I'm afraid if you are looking for free ASCII base text released into the public domain (and hence available for commercial and non-commercial use), you haven't found it.
People who are saying PG and PG2 are evil now should look closer--by their standards of good and evil, PG was never good to begin with. One should be careful when judging others!
I spent a day, 11 years ago, discussing with Michael Hart his plans, at a conference I organized and also driving him from Chicago to Urbana-Champaign where he lived at the time. At the time, I was running a similar project aiming at creating freely distributable e-books.
You must remember that PG started before the Free Software movement and Open Source movements changed our ideas of commercial distribution.
Today, we take for granted that work that is under GPL or other open licensing will be distributed freely--not necessarily free as in beer, but free as in freedom.
Many people in the late 80s and early 90s were willing to contribute for free, but a number of variants were common. One of the most common was:
Free beer yes, free as in freedom no. There were any number of dual license schemes with various restrictions for commercial use. Free ASCII beer, but not Public Domain, not free as in freedom.
RMS and Linus created a revolution by *convincing* large numbers of persons that allowing others to "commercially exploit" their work was in fact a net gain for the community, because it increased the mobility (sharing) of software. What seems dogmatic doctrine today was Enlightenment for many in 1992-1993.
Michael Hart came out of the *DOS* tradition, not the *UNIX* tradition. Freeware binaries with enhanced versions for commercial use.
Read the PG headers. They are NOT public domain, but the text is licensed for non-commercial use. More specifically, this was not refined in the early versions of the header, which allow the header to be removed so the work would truely be public domain (if proven in court).
Michael Hart's concern was that putting work in the PD, even might leave HIM *liable* to copyright infringement charges, even if he made a innocent mistake. PG has a copyright vetting process and a license for this reason. Recent and future events may well prove him wise in that regard.
In any event, he is well aware that commercial use brings possible liability to a different level.
I would suggest, in looking at any of the views of Richard Stallman, Michael Hart, Linus Torvalds, Bruce Perens, Eric Raymond, or any other leader of the "free/open" movements, as well as innovators like Bill Gates (inventor of the "binary application") that you consider the totality of legal, social, and economic issues they work with.
Perhaps there is no single "right way". The PG way is maximum utility but not necessarily freedom for the non-paying masses, legal protection for the distributors, and a definite non-commodity commercial prospect.
Both the GPL and the PG license make a balance of rights, profits, and efficient distribution. The key is to learn that one must continually revisit the social and philosophical model underpinning any distribution method--Stallman very rightly guides us to the philosophical and social issues here.
It means it can only be used in a trusted environment--i.e. not on the internet with an MS or other proprietary operating system.
As soon as people figure out "trusted" means "I can't trust it to do what I want", we will see the end of the monopoly.
This is great news--a big gaping, unfixable hole for proprietary OSs. They just broke their business model for good.
Way to go!
=googol=
IP Law in two easy lessons:
1. Theft by value: you have something, I take it.
2. Theft by reference: you think of something, I think of the same thing.
We should stop saying "trusted" as it might confuse consumers. It means the computer has a deliberately insecurity so it can only be used in a trusted environment (like Linux or *BSD), and not an insecure one (like Windows).
"Planned Insecurity"--like planned obsolesence.
It used to be (around 10 years ago) that there was something called the "internet" that was a wild frontier where something called the "world wide web" lived and individuals and businesses could meet with each other freely and anonymously.
We need to understand that the future has changed. There may indeed still be a free internet and free, standards based protocols like HTML and HTTP, but the captive experience delivered by proprietary browsers, ISPs, and asymmetric bandwidth is not that experience. It is, increasingly, a captive experice like AOL or CompuServe.
Of *course* a captive experience needs authentication and sign in by customers, er, I mean users. Why else would anyone pay good money unless the content were decent, the protections and security all in place?
Barbed wire? There is no fence--it melts in your mind. Just loose your illusion that when you dial in to an ISP, fire up your browser, and surf the wild web, that you are somehow more 'leet than an AOL newbie cash cow.
If you want freedom, don't pay for it. Build it yourself. The internet, the IP protocol, and real web are still there, if you don't mistake them for something they are not.
[[I feel EV1 is getting to much heat. I mean if a thug leans on some little guy and extorts money from him do you blame the little fellow or the thug?]]
This is war.
I feel for the little guy who runs away. We don't blame foot soldiers who desert--we shoot them.
1. Never touch Microsoft
2. Never touch anything Microsoft has touched.
3. Never touch anything Microsfot is interested
in touching.
All clear?
or other released code. It should be possible to triangulate the source against existing released software, so at least we can know what exactly it is and whether this is a hoax or not.
Georgia Tech Swiki -- for high school/college age, after the target age 12-13 under discussion.
If they have a browser, the kiddies can get the Squeak plugin (Smalltalk), go to Squeakland and have a lot more fun. They can start much younger too.
Java? Sure, but let's see that 31 MB download over Mom and Dad's dialup line. Java is just Smalltalk anyway, with syntactic sugar. -- It's a joke OK?
I asked my daughter why she preferred IM to the old teenage standby -- hours on the phone. The answer surprised me. She could see who was online.
From her perspective it solved two problems
1. You knew in advance who was available to talk (lowered chance of rejection).
2. It avoided the unpleasant experience of having to mediate access through a parent ("he's not in", "he can't come to the phone", "he's been grounded and can't talk"). This is actually a variant of #1.
So it's all about saving face and managing rejection. IM provides lots of strategies and aids to do just that.
Given that it solves or mitigates two teenage problems (potential rejection by absence or parent, and parental control), I predict the first cellphone company to implement a usable buddy list wins.
The real secret of RDF is that RDF Schema is one *example* of how frame languages, onotologies, and knowledge bases (logic programming) might be used in environments where message formats, business rules, and resource descriptions are constantly changing.
=googol=