I've been using a trick since the ext2 days to reduce fsck times by a lot.. Reduce the inode count. I seem to recall EXT3 allocates 1 inode for every 16kb of diskspace by default. This means 20 million inodes on a 300gb partitian. 2.5gb scanned, on every fsck! A lot of the time, this is overkill. I generally run my parititians with 1/5 to 1/20 this number of inodes. I don't have any partitians formatted under the defaults to compare this to, but a mostly full 300gb partitian, with 1M inodes and 50k files, fsck's in under 10 minutes.
One reason Ext4 has faster fsck times because it tracks which inode groups are totally unused, and it avoids scanning them.
If they did not license a copy of libarc from the author, Sony committed copyright infringement and might be subject to statuatory damages of up to 150k per copy of the game sold. Can you register for copyright after an infringement occurs to sue for damages? Or maybe $1000, if we go by the Sony/RIAA 'pricing' for music sharing and minimum statuatory damages.
Sony can not retroactively satisfy the terms of the GPL. Releasing the source code (or a written offer for the source code) would only avoid compounding the infringement on future copies Sony distributes. Past copies they distributed were not conforming to the GPL, therefore unlicensed, therefore committing copyright infringement. They can't say 'oops' just because it took 6 years for their 'THEFT' to be noticed. This is no different than someone sued by the Sony/RIAA for music sharing. As it took so long for the infringement to be noticed, there's not much point in libarc's author going for an injunction to prevent future damages/infringement by stopping the sale of the game and/or destruction of unsold copies.
Now of course, the author of libarc might relent and compromise on your choices #1 or #2. Get a payoff and agree to forgo pursuing copyright infringement damages, or forgive it upon release of the source code.
I am not a lawyer, but this is how I think copyright and GPL applies to a hypothetical situation of Sony distributing a game containing an unlicensed copy of libarc. Any connection to the real world is accidental.
And we use a Post-it on the same door to remember the combination.
This dangerous, because it gives a false sense of security. Its an easy way to make full disk encryption have zero security benefit. Its might a feature that this feature is so obscure enough that security neophytes won't shoot their foot off. I'd be happiest if the feature automatically deleted the decryption key during the reboot. Thats enough to let IT do an unattended reboot and simultaneously discourage people from misusing the feature.
Given that he was born 100 years ago, and has been dead for 20, his kids would be about 70 and grandkids 40. Everyone has heirs who need money. Why, I'll have you know that my grandfather put the plumbing in the demolished building across the street, and I could certainly use money.
This was already ruled upon in the US Supreme court. Feist vs Rural Telephone Company (over a telephone book). They rejected any argument that right t of control (copyright) would be granted based on 'sweat of the brow' or the hard work in creating an uncreative or unorigional work.
They explicitly said that creativity is required to grant copyright. As alphabetizing names and putting them into a book is not creative, the result was not copyrightable, despite the amount of effort put into producing the telephone directory. Creativity may apply in the selection or the arrangement, but not in the facts themselves.
Now, of course, in an attempt to end-run around this ruling, there are occasional rumblings of creating a 'database copyright', that may forbid the duplication of a database of facts.
The public domain is the natural state of things. You have it reversed.
Copyright is a right, granted by the government, to enter into my house or my business and forbid me from copying a work for a friend or creating a derivative work. Generally in american jurisprudence, we frown upon the government infringing into people's private homes and businesses unless the government has an overriding interest otherwise.
You are perfectly free to leave a piece of beautiful music unrecorded, but you won't convince me that the natural state of things includes the ability to, with the power of the government, coercively forbid me from transcribing that overheard music. Of course, copyright does give you the right to enter my private home or business to enforce your will, because public policy has judged that the public benefit --- the production of creative works --- justifies the infringement on personal liberties.
And how much do foreign states have to fear from the US, for the most part, unless most of their foreign trade is counterfeit US currency [North Korea], threatening an ally with being 'wiped off of the map' [Iran], kidnapping our diplomats for a year [Iran], being a haven for terrorists [Afganistan], threatening our national interests [Iraq, oil, for the first gulf war]. Seems to me that each of these states has done more than a little interfering with the US and its interests.
And if we round out the other major wars done by the US, there's Iraq convincing us that you have WMD (even though he didn't, he wanted others to believe he did) [Iraq, second gulf war], or being subject to a humanitarian disaster [Haiti, Somalia], and the drug war [Panama]. Some of these are a little bit harder to defend.
So far, it seems you're 0/3 right. What biased media did you get your view of the US from?
Bald eagles were reportedly threatened with extinction in 1921 -- 25 years before widespread use of DDT.
[Van Name, WG. 1921. Ecology 2:76]
No significant correlation between DDE residues and shell thickness was reported in a large series of bald eagle eggs.
[Postupalsky, S. 1971. (DDE residues and shell thickness). Canadian Wildlife Service manuscript, April 8, 1971]
#
The bald eagle had vanished from New England by 1937.
[Bent, AC. 1937. Raptorial Birds of America. US National Museum Bull 167:321-349]
#
After 15 years of heavy and widespread usage of DDT, Audubon Society ornithologists counted 25 percent more eagles per observer in 1960 than during the pre-DDT 1941 bird census.
[Marvin, PH. 1964 Birds on the rise. Bull Entomol Soc Amer 10(3):184-186; Wurster, CF. 1969 Congressional Record S4599, May 5, 1969; Anon. 1942. The 42nd Annual Christmas Bird Census. Audubon Magazine 44:1-75 (Jan/Feb 1942; Cruickshank, AD (Editor). 1961. The 61st Annual Christmas Bird Census. Audubon Field Notes 15(2):84-300; White-Stevens, R.. 1972. Statistical analyses of Audubon Christmas Bird censuses. Letter to New York Times, August 15, 1972]
Feeding primates more than 33,000 times the average daily human exposure to DDT (as estimated in 1969 and 1972) was "inconclusive with respect to a carcinogenic effect of DDT in nonhuman primates."
Most compression programs uses a very limited context. gzip cannot identify and exploit redundancy if it occurs more than 32kb or 64kb apart. bzip2 uses a blocksize of 900kb, and it too cannot identify redundancy more than 900kb apart. rzip however uses a context of 900MB, so it can exploit redundancy within a file, even if it occurs hundreds of megabytes apart.
Although its not for every file, some times, this can be a huge win. In my case, backing up 60 versions of a 700kb XML file, I get 500:1 compression, 30 times better than what bzip2 gives me. Anytime you have a file where you know that it will have redundancy across more than 900kb, but less than 900mb, rzip can win big.
It sounds that this company's program is a variation of this idea, designed with backups in mind and identify redundancy across tens or hundreds of gigabytes.
A heat pump uses a small amount of energy to 'push' a larger amount of heat. For instance, a toaster that uses 1000J will create 1000J of heat. A heat pump --- say, the outside part of a window A/C unit, generates 4000J of heat, using 1000J of electricity and pumping 3000J interior heat from the inside.
Basic thermodynamics.
Got any specific references for your claims that cold fusion occurs everywhere? Ones that you've read yourself and found convincing?
Enigma has a fatal flaw: No letter could be encyphered to itself. This is an artifact of the 'reflector disc' at the end this means that a known plaintext, or crib, can be ruled out for a particular offset, if any letter of it matches a letter in the cyphertext. This, combined with message statistics, allows for powerful cryptographic techniques to be used. These techniques were unavailable in WW2, but they exploit fundamental weaknesses in the design.
Of course, in WW2, it was the misuse of enigma that made it particularily easy to break --- It might only take one weather report to learn the daily subkey. Had Enigma been properly used, it would probably have been nearly unbreakable with WW2 era technology.
''why is it my job to exert more effort because you have a brittle, unyeilding mind?''
Your laziness causes more work for me, and all other slashdot readers. I hate *myself* having to waste my time because of your self-centered laziness. If you make it sufficiently difficult to read, I won't even bother reading. Reading shouldn't be a process of puzzling out what the author really meant.
Tell me which kind of writing you find easier to read? Well written language or ambigious IM-speak? Run a test! Take a book from the Gutenberg project and try reading a page with its puncutation and capitalization, and compare the ease of reading with another page where the 'superflouis and unnecessary' punctuation and caplitalization has been removed. (I suggest using tr(1).) Which do you prefer to read? Run the test and report your response.
When you write, you already know what you mean, so its obvious that you, as the reader, will have no difficulty reading it. The challenge is reading something where the reader does not know what is meant. The poor writing is a badge of shame, not a badge of pride.
There is no contract with the purchase of a DVD. All there is is copyright law restricting the rights of public exhibition, duplication and a few others. If I wanted to do something with the DVD beyond copyright law, only THEN would any license be necessary. However, in the typical case, there is no license necessary --- because legitimate use of the DVD like playing it in linux, backing it up, playing an import, is already legal. I own the DVD, I own the DVD player. I don't own the copyright, but none of the above requires posessing the copyright.
DRM attempts to enforces a superset of restrictiosn above and beyond copyright law: That I can't play a DVD in an 'unauthorized player', that my DVD player refuses to activate its high-quality digital outputs, that I cannot fast-forward past commercials. That my DVD player refuses to play dvd's purchased on vacation. And then the DMCA makes it illegal to bypass these controls.
Worse, there is no limit as to what other controls may be applied by DRM, controls far above and beyond what copyright law allows.
Does that mean that buggy manufacturers should have sued Ford for creating a cheap horseless carraige and 'stealing' all of their revenues?
Does that mean if I don't get a job, I can sue the person who did for 'stealing' the job from me?
Does that mean I can get sued for aiding and abetting computer if I put up a 'dell-sucks.com' website and dell's revenues drop?
Your definition is way too overgeneral --- to a point that even though I think I think similiarily to you, I cannot agree. Nobody is obligated to a revenue stream.
Copyright is is a power where party A is allowed to shut down party B's press. The very first copyrights in England were designed for censorship by the crown. This has morphed into censorship by the author but it remains censorship. Any way this is cut, it is evil. Society has chosen to accept this censorship, this evil, a tiny amount ---- and with limitations ---- because it encourages the creation of new works. This is a faustian bargain.
Technology changes and where before this bargain only affected publishers, now, with the internet and computers, this endorsed censorship places a heavy hand on everyone. Do we want technological or legal enforcement mechanisms to pretend this hasn't changed, to take away or restrict these presses. To me, the instantaneous ability to reach millions of people is something that should be celebrated by all, rather than reviled by those who were fortunate to have access to the press in the past.
I recognize this heavy boot upon my face as a participant in society. I also notice that this jackboot has gotten heavier and more onerous, with copyright term extensions and the DMCA --- as at the very same time copyright which affected publishers now directly affects virtually every internet-using person.
The goal of copyright was never to reward creators, it was to infringe the right of free speech the minimum amount, to have the minimum number of censored works and to have the largest public domain. This isn't helped when copyright terms exceed a century, when works are allowed to molder away, unarchived, or when the IA is forbidden to save our epherial culture.
Quantitavily, the cost of disseminating information has gone down by 6 orders of magnitude --- thats a communication revolution on-par with the invention of the printing press. The printing press revolutionized society and created censorship and copyright. The invention of the internet will likely have a greater impact on our society, which must reassess what this means.
It encourages cuthroat competetion, encouraging people with cellphones to not self-delude themselves into thinking that most calls are incoming. (By definition, for every minute of outgoing call, there must be a minute of incoming.) This encourages businesses to keep prices very low.
Also, adding on a special billing infrastructure for sender-pays, even for local calls, would have been a hard sale when the cellphones were first being produced. Since local calls are free in the US. Making it cost the caller to call early-adoptors on a cellphone is going to be a non-starter --- especially when the value of the cellphone is for the recipient.
Besides, why use a cellphone over a landline unless it has more value for you --- ergo, worth paying to both receive and send calls.
And all of those are dealt with with copyright law
Making copies: Check.
Making and selling/giving away copies: Check
Modifying the program and distributing it: Check
The laws already existed for this. the 'license agreement' is a powergrab --- to stop people from, eg, giving negative reviews. or choosing to wallpaper their room with AOL CD's.
The monopoly granted by copyright has its benefits as you so eloquently note. It also has its costs. In particular, because it is a legal monopoly, it encourages 'rent seeking behavior', as existing holders will attempt to extend the range and depth of their monopoly and attempt to exploit it to obtain regular income with no work. A classic example of this is Disney or the Milne family.
Copyright must remain a balance between these two evils.
Personally, I think the current situation with both hugely inflated copyrights and peer-to-peer may be the worst of both worlds. Copyright terms are long and restrictive so that old works cannot be reused, built upon, and reinterpreted in new ways and at the same time P2P filesharing may eventually put a huge dent into copyright revenue. People don't think, socially, p2p is that wrong because they see the insane extent of copyright law.
How about this alternative?
Let the term be, say, 30 years, but with strong enforcement. That means that people who want cheap stuff have a legitimate public domain source. Infringing copyright would become less socially acceptable. Old works that have procurred virtually all of their value (at 30 years) are available to be reinterpreted and built upon.
And then it continues with ''Well, we have a new program that does the same thing. That will be $89.99''
One unique property that software, fiction, nonfiction, and other creative works have is that they *NEVER WEAR OUT*. Thus, old creations are direct economic competetiors to recent creations. Thus, the cheap availability of old creations in the public domain would affect and depress the market of recent creations. The copyright feudalists have done their best to keep this from happening by keeping old creations far away from the public.
Thus, copying old artistic works/abandonware could be detrimental to current creation. For instance, if copyright law was 42 years, most black&white film archives would be out of copyright --- I'd expect a lot of reruns of those instead of recent creations on TV.
Unfortunately, keeping old creations far from the public and rotting away is also destroying our cultural largess to our descendents. Under the current law, our cultural heritage will be lost. How many 80's arcade games are already lost forever? How many would have been lost forever by now without MAME?
To me, the preservation of our culture for the future is more important than an argument that the professional creation of modern cultural works would suffer a minor economic decline. Personally, I think the availability of more culture in the public domain would lead to a bit less professional creativity, but VASTLY more total creativity.
Strange. That was the same argument that the paperback publisher used 50 years ago.... you know, in that court case where the doctrine of first sale was created.
The publisher tried a 'license' that disallowed resale of the paperbacks below a particular price.
Didn't work then. and I pray it doesn't work this time.
The whole notion of software 'license' was created under a doctrine that you needed the explicit permission of the copyright holder (a 'license') to create a temporary copy of a software in RAM as needed to run it. In return for permission to create that copy, you contractually give up rights . Unfortunately, this whole house of cards fell over 10 years ago when copyright law was rewritten to explicitly say that such a temporary copy does *not* require the explicit permission of the copyright holder. Ergo, no 'license' is necessary to run it, and there's no need to agree to the contract.
It is true that some courts have interpreted that clause very narrowly, and accepting that EULA's as 'standard practice'. IANAL, but AFAIK, EULA's still don't have any legal doctrine surrounding them making them legal contracts except that 'its been that way for 20 years'.
IANAIL, but AFAIK, I do *not* need some seperate license from a copyright holder to use the software. I bought it, and it is within my rights under copyright law to make the appropriate temporary copies in RAM and on the HD to install it. (In the particular case of steam, the quid pro quo could be the additional ability to access the online servers and multiplayer mode. However nothing in copyright law says that you shouldn't be able to make your own multiplayer servers. This may change --- we have to see how the bnetd case turns out.)
The solution to this is a little white lie. When you recieve those messages, report them to Schwab that you believe that they are fraudulent and attempting to obtain your account details.
When they reply saying that 'these are legitimate emails', ask them how you are supposed to tell that they're legitimate. If they give a good answer, your problem is solved. If they are unable to give a good answer, hopefully they'll realize the point that you're trying to make.
Lather rinse and repeat on any other vendor that sends emails that can be easily mistaken for phishing.
I use
this (open source) program to bidirectionally sync/replicate my laptop and my desktop machines. As long as I modify different parts of both replicas, it'll move changes bidirectionally. If I modify the same part of both replicas, I can use the GUI to examine the conflicts and resolve it manually. The GUI also shows a summary of the changes the program wishes to make. It even runs under windows and can sync windows directories with unix directories!
It makes my desktop and laptop machines virtually indistinguishable from each other. This means I can and do interchangably use as many as 4 different machines. At the next sync, whatever I was working on gets moved to the other machines. (Unison only supports pairwise syncs, so I sync pairs A&B, A&C, A&D.) One of these machines is in a seperate building.
Since I sync machines with each other regularily, as a byproduct, each is an hours to days old backup of the others. A great freebie offered by a valuable program. I don't worry about dataloss nearly as much as I used to.
Anyone who uses more than one machine regularily should look into this program.
TCPA is an enabling technology to implement hardware-level digital control technology (DRM). The idea being that the'trusted platform module' has the ability to create locked boxes that the user of the computer can choose to run or to not run, but any code in that locked box cannot be modified by the user. (well, it can, but if it is, the platform module will refuse to relinquish decryption keys so it'll end up being nonfunctional.)
If I want to enforce a control technology on your computer, I need some way to keep users from modifying the very program enforcing my policy choices, I need TCPA or some other hardware control technology that keeps my program from being modified.
In one sense, this is security, I know that any sowftware runnign under TCPA/Palladium won't be changed by any virus and will only be given decryption keys only if its unmodified by any virus or worm. But at another level, it is *the* enabling technology to let anyone install *arbitrary* digital control technology, creating *arbitrary* hoops for me to go through on my computer before I can access the data it controls access to.
Only right now might 'fairplay' offer more features than other digital control schemes. But it is implemented in mutable and upgradable software. Will the next version--- a forced upgrade --- include more restrictive controls in a year?
You are bargaining from a position of weakness, after giving their software full control over your music collection. If you don't think they've been tempted to exploit that, you're a fool.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been using a trick since the ext2 days to reduce fsck times by a lot.. Reduce the inode count. I seem to recall EXT3 allocates 1 inode for every 16kb of diskspace by default. This means 20 million inodes on a 300gb partitian. 2.5gb scanned, on every fsck! A lot of the time, this is overkill. I generally run my parititians with 1/5 to 1/20 this number of inodes. I don't have any partitians formatted under the defaults to compare this to, but a mostly full 300gb partitian, with 1M inodes and 50k files, fsck's in under 10 minutes.
One reason Ext4 has faster fsck times because it tracks which inode groups are totally unused, and it avoids scanning them.
If they did not license a copy of libarc from the author, Sony committed copyright infringement and might be subject to statuatory damages of up to 150k per copy of the game sold. Can you register for copyright after an infringement occurs to sue for damages? Or maybe $1000, if we go by the Sony/RIAA 'pricing' for music sharing and minimum statuatory damages.
Sony can not retroactively satisfy the terms of the GPL. Releasing the source code (or a written offer for the source code) would only avoid compounding the infringement on future copies Sony distributes. Past copies they distributed were not conforming to the GPL, therefore unlicensed, therefore committing copyright infringement. They can't say 'oops' just because it took 6 years for their 'THEFT' to be noticed. This is no different than someone sued by the Sony/RIAA for music sharing. As it took so long for the infringement to be noticed, there's not much point in libarc's author going for an injunction to prevent future damages/infringement by stopping the sale of the game and/or destruction of unsold copies.
Now of course, the author of libarc might relent and compromise on your choices #1 or #2. Get a payoff and agree to forgo pursuing copyright infringement damages, or forgive it upon release of the source code.
I am not a lawyer, but this is how I think copyright and GPL applies to a hypothetical situation of Sony distributing a game containing an unlicensed copy of libarc. Any connection to the real world is accidental.
And we use a Post-it on the same door to remember the combination.
This dangerous, because it gives a false sense of security. Its an easy way to make full disk encryption have zero security benefit. Its might a feature that this feature is so obscure enough that security neophytes won't shoot their foot off. I'd be happiest if the feature automatically deleted the decryption key during the reboot. Thats enough to let IT do an unattended reboot and simultaneously discourage people from misusing the feature.
Given that he was born 100 years ago, and has been dead for 20, his kids would be about 70 and grandkids 40. Everyone has heirs who need money. Why, I'll have you know that my grandfather put the plumbing in the demolished building across the street, and I could certainly use money.
http://www.law.cornell.edu/copyright/cases/499_US_ 340.htm
This was already ruled upon in the US Supreme court. Feist vs Rural Telephone Company (over a telephone book). They rejected any argument that right t of control (copyright) would be granted based on 'sweat of the brow' or the hard work in creating an uncreative or unorigional work.
They explicitly said that creativity is required to grant copyright. As alphabetizing names and putting them into a book is not creative, the result was not copyrightable, despite the amount of effort put into producing the telephone directory. Creativity may apply in the selection or the arrangement, but not in the facts themselves.
Now, of course, in an attempt to end-run around this ruling, there are occasional rumblings of creating a 'database copyright', that may forbid the duplication of a database of facts.
The public domain is the natural state of things. You have it reversed.
Copyright is a right, granted by the government, to enter into my house or my business and forbid me from copying a work for a friend or creating a derivative work. Generally in american jurisprudence, we frown upon the government infringing into people's private homes and businesses unless the government has an overriding interest otherwise.
You are perfectly free to leave a piece of beautiful music unrecorded, but you won't convince me that the natural state of things includes the ability to, with the power of the government, coercively forbid me from transcribing that overheard music. Of course, copyright does give you the right to enter my private home or business to enforce your will, because public policy has judged that the public benefit --- the production of creative works --- justifies the infringement on personal liberties.
And how much do foreign states have to fear from the US, for the most part, unless most of their foreign trade is counterfeit US currency [North Korea], threatening an ally with being 'wiped off of the map' [Iran], kidnapping our diplomats for a year [Iran], being a haven for terrorists [Afganistan], threatening our national interests [Iraq, oil, for the first gulf war]. Seems to me that each of these states has done more than a little interfering with the US and its interests.
And if we round out the other major wars done by the US, there's Iraq convincing us that you have WMD (even though he didn't, he wanted others to believe he did) [Iraq, second gulf war], or being subject to a humanitarian disaster [Haiti, Somalia], and the drug war [Panama]. Some of these are a little bit harder to defend.
So far, it seems you're 0/3 right. What biased media did you get your view of the US from?
From the DDT FAQ, a very fascinating read:
http://www.junkscience.com/ddtfaq.htm
Bald eagles were reportedly threatened with extinction in 1921 -- 25 years before widespread use of DDT.
[Van Name, WG. 1921. Ecology 2:76]
No significant correlation between DDE residues and shell thickness was reported in a large series of bald eagle eggs.
[Postupalsky, S. 1971. (DDE residues and shell thickness). Canadian Wildlife Service manuscript, April 8, 1971]
#
The bald eagle had vanished from New England by 1937.
[Bent, AC. 1937. Raptorial Birds of America. US National Museum Bull 167:321-349]
#
After 15 years of heavy and widespread usage of DDT, Audubon Society ornithologists counted 25 percent more eagles per observer in 1960 than during the pre-DDT 1941 bird census.
[Marvin, PH. 1964 Birds on the rise. Bull Entomol Soc Amer 10(3):184-186; Wurster, CF. 1969 Congressional Record S4599, May 5, 1969; Anon. 1942. The 42nd Annual Christmas Bird Census. Audubon Magazine 44:1-75 (Jan/Feb 1942; Cruickshank, AD (Editor). 1961. The 61st Annual Christmas Bird Census. Audubon Field Notes 15(2):84-300; White-Stevens, R.. 1972. Statistical analyses of Audubon Christmas Bird censuses. Letter to New York Times, August 15, 1972]
Feeding primates more than 33,000 times the average daily human exposure to DDT (as estimated in 1969 and 1972) was "inconclusive with respect to a carcinogenic effect of DDT in nonhuman primates."
[J Cancer Res Clin Oncol 1999;125(3-4):219-25]
Although its not for every file, some times, this can be a huge win. In my case, backing up 60 versions of a 700kb XML file, I get 500:1 compression, 30 times better than what bzip2 gives me. Anytime you have a file where you know that it will have redundancy across more than 900kb, but less than 900mb, rzip can win big.
It sounds that this company's program is a variation of this idea, designed with backups in mind and identify redundancy across tens or hundreds of gigabytes.
A heat pump uses a small amount of energy to 'push' a larger amount of heat. For instance, a toaster that uses 1000J will create 1000J of heat. A heat pump --- say, the outside part of a window A/C unit, generates 4000J of heat, using 1000J of electricity and pumping 3000J interior heat from the inside.
Basic thermodynamics.
Got any specific references for your claims that cold fusion occurs everywhere? Ones that you've read yourself and found convincing?
Of course, in WW2, it was the misuse of enigma that made it particularily easy to break --- It might only take one weather report to learn the daily subkey. Had Enigma been properly used, it would probably have been nearly unbreakable with WW2 era technology.
''why is it my job to exert more effort because you have a brittle, unyeilding mind?''
Your laziness causes more work for me, and all other slashdot readers. I hate *myself* having to waste my time because of your self-centered laziness. If you make it sufficiently difficult to read, I won't even bother reading. Reading shouldn't be a process of puzzling out what the author really meant.
Tell me which kind of writing you find easier to read? Well written language or ambigious IM-speak? Run a test! Take a book from the Gutenberg project and try reading a page with its puncutation and capitalization, and compare the ease of reading with another page where the 'superflouis and unnecessary' punctuation and caplitalization has been removed. (I suggest using tr(1).) Which do you prefer to read? Run the test and report your response.
When you write, you already know what you mean, so its obvious that you, as the reader, will have no difficulty reading it. The challenge is reading something where the reader does not know what is meant. The poor writing is a badge of shame, not a badge of pride.
There is no contract with the purchase of a DVD. All there is is copyright law restricting the rights of public exhibition, duplication and a few others. If I wanted to do something with the DVD beyond copyright law, only THEN would any license be necessary. However, in the typical case, there is no license necessary --- because legitimate use of the DVD like playing it in linux, backing it up, playing an import, is already legal. I own the DVD, I own the DVD player. I don't own the copyright, but none of the above requires posessing the copyright.
DRM attempts to enforces a superset of restrictiosn above and beyond copyright law: That I can't play a DVD in an 'unauthorized player', that my DVD player refuses to activate its high-quality digital outputs, that I cannot fast-forward past commercials. That my DVD player refuses to play dvd's purchased on vacation. And then the DMCA makes it illegal to bypass these controls.
Worse, there is no limit as to what other controls may be applied by DRM, controls far above and beyond what copyright law allows.
Does that mean that buggy manufacturers should have sued Ford for creating a cheap horseless carraige and 'stealing' all of their revenues?
Does that mean if I don't get a job, I can sue the person who did for 'stealing' the job from me?
Does that mean I can get sued for aiding and abetting computer if I put up a 'dell-sucks.com' website and dell's revenues drop?
Your definition is way too overgeneral --- to a point that even though I think I think similiarily to you, I cannot agree. Nobody is obligated to a revenue stream.
Copyright is is a power where party A is allowed to shut down party B's press. The very first copyrights in England were designed for censorship by the crown. This has morphed into censorship by the author but it remains censorship. Any way this is cut, it is evil. Society has chosen to accept this censorship, this evil, a tiny amount ---- and with limitations ---- because it encourages the creation of new works. This is a faustian bargain.
Technology changes and where before this bargain only affected publishers, now, with the internet and computers, this endorsed censorship places a heavy hand on everyone. Do we want technological or legal enforcement mechanisms to pretend this hasn't changed, to take away or restrict these presses. To me, the instantaneous ability to reach millions of people is something that should be celebrated by all, rather than reviled by those who were fortunate to have access to the press in the past.
I recognize this heavy boot upon my face as a participant in society. I also notice that this jackboot has gotten heavier and more onerous, with copyright term extensions and the DMCA --- as at the very same time copyright which affected publishers now directly affects virtually every internet-using person.
The goal of copyright was never to reward creators, it was to infringe the right of free speech the minimum amount, to have the minimum number of censored works and to have the largest public domain. This isn't helped when copyright terms exceed a century, when works are allowed to molder away, unarchived, or when the IA is forbidden to save our epherial culture.
Quantitavily, the cost of disseminating information has gone down by 6 orders of magnitude --- thats a communication revolution on-par with the invention of the printing press. The printing press revolutionized society and created censorship and copyright. The invention of the internet will likely have a greater impact on our society, which must reassess what this means.
From an Athlon XP 2500 running 'openssl speed aes':
The 'numbers' are in 1000s of bytes per second processed.
type 16 bytes 64 bytes 256 bytes 1024 bytes 8192 bytes
aes-128 cbc 40374.59k 41316.13k 42083.38k 41993.47k 42237.07k
aes-192 cbc 35109.10k 36010.80k 36434.73k 36583.09k 36474.95k
aes-256 cbc 31374.07k 31896.19k 32164.51k 32317.72k 32333.49k
At 4mb per song, my desktop machine has a raw encryption rate more than suitable for a million songs a day.
It encourages cuthroat competetion, encouraging people with cellphones to not self-delude themselves into thinking that most calls are incoming. (By definition, for every minute of outgoing call, there must be a minute of incoming.) This encourages businesses to keep prices very low.
Also, adding on a special billing infrastructure for sender-pays, even for local calls, would have been a hard sale when the cellphones were first being produced. Since local calls are free in the US. Making it cost the caller to call early-adoptors on a cellphone is going to be a non-starter --- especially when the value of the cellphone is for the recipient.
Besides, why use a cellphone over a landline unless it has more value for you --- ergo, worth paying to both receive and send calls.
And all of those are dealt with with copyright law
Making copies: Check.
Making and selling/giving away copies: Check
Modifying the program and distributing it: Check
The laws already existed for this. the 'license agreement' is a powergrab --- to stop people from, eg, giving negative reviews. or choosing to wallpaper their room with AOL CD's.
... a little at a time.
The monopoly granted by copyright has its benefits as you so eloquently note. It also has its costs. In particular, because it is a legal monopoly, it encourages 'rent seeking behavior', as existing holders will attempt to extend the range and depth of their monopoly and attempt to exploit it to obtain regular income with no work. A classic example of this is Disney or the Milne family.
Copyright must remain a balance between these two evils.
Personally, I think the current situation with both hugely inflated copyrights and peer-to-peer may be the worst of both worlds. Copyright terms are long and restrictive so that old works cannot be reused, built upon, and reinterpreted in new ways and at the same time P2P filesharing may eventually put a huge dent into copyright revenue. People don't think, socially, p2p is that wrong because they see the insane extent of copyright law.
How about this alternative?
Let the term be, say, 30 years, but with strong enforcement. That means that people who want cheap stuff have a legitimate public domain source. Infringing copyright would become less socially acceptable. Old works that have procurred virtually all of their value (at 30 years) are available to be reinterpreted and built upon.
And then it continues with ''Well, we have a new program that does the same thing. That will be $89.99''
One unique property that software, fiction, nonfiction, and other creative works have is that they *NEVER WEAR OUT*. Thus, old creations are direct economic competetiors to recent creations. Thus, the cheap availability of old creations in the public domain would affect and depress the market of recent creations. The copyright feudalists have done their best to keep this from happening by keeping old creations far away from the public.
Thus, copying old artistic works/abandonware could be detrimental to current creation. For instance, if copyright law was 42 years, most black&white film archives would be out of copyright --- I'd expect a lot of reruns of those instead of recent creations on TV.
Unfortunately, keeping old creations far from the public and rotting away is also destroying our cultural largess to our descendents. Under the current law, our cultural heritage will be lost. How many 80's arcade games are already lost forever? How many would have been lost forever by now without MAME?
To me, the preservation of our culture for the future is more important than an argument that the professional creation of modern cultural works would suffer a minor economic decline. Personally, I think the availability of more culture in the public domain would lead to a bit less professional creativity, but VASTLY more total creativity.
Strange. That was the same argument that the paperback publisher used 50 years ago.... you know, in that court case where the doctrine of first sale was created.
The publisher tried a 'license' that disallowed resale of the paperbacks below a particular price.
Didn't work then. and I pray it doesn't work this time.
The whole notion of software 'license' was created under a doctrine that you needed the explicit permission of the copyright holder (a 'license') to create a temporary copy of a software in RAM as needed to run it. In return for permission to create that copy, you contractually give up rights . Unfortunately, this whole house of cards fell over 10 years ago when copyright law was rewritten to explicitly say that such a temporary copy does *not* require the explicit permission of the copyright holder. Ergo, no 'license' is necessary to run it, and there's no need to agree to the contract.
It is true that some courts have interpreted that clause very narrowly, and accepting that EULA's as 'standard practice'. IANAL, but AFAIK, EULA's still don't have any legal doctrine surrounding them making them legal contracts except that 'its been that way for 20 years'.
IANAIL, but AFAIK, I do *not* need some seperate license from a copyright holder to use the software. I bought it, and it is within my rights under copyright law to make the appropriate temporary copies in RAM and on the HD to install it. (In the particular case of steam, the quid pro quo could be the additional ability to access the online servers and multiplayer mode. However nothing in copyright law says that you shouldn't be able to make your own multiplayer servers. This may change --- we have to see how the bnetd case turns out.)
The solution to this is a little white lie. When you recieve those messages, report them to Schwab that you believe that they are fraudulent and attempting to obtain your account details.
When they reply saying that 'these are legitimate emails', ask them how you are supposed to tell that they're legitimate. If they give a good answer, your problem is solved. If they are unable to give a good answer, hopefully they'll realize the point that you're trying to make.
Lather rinse and repeat on any other vendor that sends emails that can be easily mistaken for phishing.
I use this (open source) program to bidirectionally sync/replicate my laptop and my desktop machines. As long as I modify different parts of both replicas, it'll move changes bidirectionally. If I modify the same part of both replicas, I can use the GUI to examine the conflicts and resolve it manually. The GUI also shows a summary of the changes the program wishes to make. It even runs under windows and can sync windows directories with unix directories!
It makes my desktop and laptop machines virtually indistinguishable from each other. This means I can and do interchangably use as many as 4 different machines. At the next sync, whatever I was working on gets moved to the other machines. (Unison only supports pairwise syncs, so I sync pairs A&B, A&C, A&D.) One of these machines is in a seperate building.
Since I sync machines with each other regularily, as a byproduct, each is an hours to days old backup of the others. A great freebie offered by a valuable program. I don't worry about dataloss nearly as much as I used to.
Anyone who uses more than one machine regularily should look into this program.
TCPA is an enabling technology to implement hardware-level digital control technology (DRM). The idea being that the'trusted platform module' has the ability to create locked boxes that the user of the computer can choose to run or to not run, but any code in that locked box cannot be modified by the user. (well, it can, but if it is, the platform module will refuse to relinquish decryption keys so it'll end up being nonfunctional.)
If I want to enforce a control technology on your computer, I need some way to keep users from modifying the very program enforcing my policy choices, I need TCPA or some other hardware control technology that keeps my program from being modified.
In one sense, this is security, I know that any sowftware runnign under TCPA/Palladium won't be changed by any virus and will only be given decryption keys only if its unmodified by any virus or worm. But at another level, it is *the* enabling technology to let anyone install *arbitrary* digital control technology, creating *arbitrary* hoops for me to go through on my computer before I can access the data it controls access to.
Can you say ripe for abuse?
Only right now might 'fairplay' offer more features than other digital control schemes. But it is implemented in mutable and upgradable software. Will the next version--- a forced upgrade --- include more restrictive controls in a year?
You are bargaining from a position of weakness, after giving their software full control over your music collection. If you don't think they've been tempted to exploit that, you're a fool.