Folks, the first article was about his house being raided by the pigs. This article is about his actual arrest. Although I can't read Norwegian, the Slashdot header seems to indicate that Jon is currently imprisoned for writing code.
If something's expensive to develop, and somebody's not going to get paid, it won't get developed. So you decide: Do you want software to be written, or not?
What he's describing is Free Software! I can almost taste the irony! The very phenomenon that he dismissed as an absurdity is the very phenomenon that is going to bring down his software empire: people writing code for fun in their spare time, and giving it away for free.
At that time, programmers were a rare and exotic breed. There simply weren't enough programmers to go around. Now we're reaching critical mass. There are millions of coders out there. And not just mercenaries like Gates. There are now enough people who enjoy writing code as a hobby that free software is starting to take flight.
Imagine a garage tinkerer. He comes up with something vaguely useful. For example, a higher fidelity audio speaker. It would cost him millions to produce this thing and share it with the world. But when a coder comes up with something interesting, he need only send word to freshmeat.net, and the world gets this innovation, at almost no cost to anyone.
Gates didn't grasp this idea at the time because he simply couldn't imagine someone coming home from work, and then writing code just for kicks. At least he couldn't imagine that happening on the scale we're seeing today. But then again, this is the guy who said that 128Kb RAM should be enough for anyone.
Take today's User Friendly for example. This time the joke is on tech support.
But seriously, these kinds of geek-strips are very cliquish and not at all funny to non-geek types. But think about this. Dog lovers probably think that Marmaduke is one damn funny cartoon. I think it's pointless. Kindergarten teachers love Family Circus. I think it's positively dreadful, maudlin, sentimental, Anne Geddes postcard tripe. Bloom County (and Outland) were for people bent enough to enjoy that kind of thing. Some people, I am told, didn't get it.
User Friendly and the others have found a niche. Nothing wrong with that.
Is there a larger organization (with deeper pockets and/or staff lawyers) that'd be willing to take a stand with Jon and/or Derek to fight for their rights? Perhaps we could get the FSF or the EFF interested. Probably the EFF more so than the FSF, but still do we wish to give up our rights simply because we're unwilling to fight for them?
I wonder what Red Hat thinks of this. If they could get DVD under Linux working well, it could be a big boost for their product. And they sure as hell have deep pockets. It might be in their best interests to jump in and defend this work.
Why are they surprised? They come up with some pansy-ass encryption scheme to protect their precious movies. They slobber all over Windows, but offer no support whatsoever to Linux. It's a bit daft, you know, giving drivers to the relatively non-technical Windows crowd, and leaving the Linux folks to figure it out for themselves. The lawyers and friends-of-lawyers make good points about the precise definition of copyright infringement, but this code didn't allow anyone to copy movies. It's been said before: The writable DVD's are too small and expensive. You could fit a movie on a hard disk, but, again, it's too expensive. You could download it from the net, but c'mon. Who among us has EVER downloaded 7 gigs in a sitting? And would you really rather do that and fill up a whole disk, or just go buy the damn DVD at Wal-Mart? Hell, I'm too lazy to download the newest Red Hat distribution, let alone a whole movie.
How the hell do they expect us to run DVD's if they won't give us the damn drivers, or at least some scheme whereby to write the drivers without stepping on their lawyers' toes?
And where did all this legal hooplah come from? Copy protection. Do you know the extent of copy protection on VHS? It's those little plastic tabs on the cassete. Break off the plastic tabs, and it's copy protected. Cover the resulting holes with tape, and it's unprotected. And you know what? Even with this easily broken copy protection, Steven Spielberg still manages to pay his electric bill. John Travolta gets three square meals a day. And Robert Downey Jr can still...well...you get the picture.
In short:
Dumb: Spend an assload of money on wimpy encryption and droves of lawyers. Dare the Linux community to break your encryption by offering ZERO support. Breed animosity and resentment.
Smart: Forget encryption. It WILL get broken sooner or later. Spend the money on better screenplays. Fire about half your lawyers. Spend the money on better screenplays. Offer good product support. Or don't. It won't matter if you don't get your legal panties in a bunch. Learn the power of good PR.
It seems that as we start thinking of molecules as bits, we're getting down near the theoretical limits of information and computing. So that brings me to a few questions that I hope some knowledgable person (someone with a background in physics and computation) might be able to answer:
1) How fast can a computation happen (in a physical system) in thoeory.
2) How fast could molecular gates and molecular bits effect a computation?
3) How do you estimate these numbers would translate into Teraflops?
I see a solution, but it would require cooperation from the big boys (Yahoo, Ebay, Amazon, etc). If the webservers of the free world would agree to block access to *.au domains, we could force the Australian government to back down, or face becoming a technologically third-world country.
But do you think any of the big sites would place principle over profit? I think we all know.
National elections over internet. Bad bad bad. It's a bad idea. Bad.
A national election costs a fortune. Can you imagine the expense involved in setting up the thousands of voting sites, staffing them, keeping track of all the votes, etc, etc.
Internet voting would simplify all of that and save untold millions. Until.
Until some wise-ass figures out how to crack a voting server and starts stuffing ballot boxes from San Diego to Bangor. If that happened, we'd have to spend a few weeks and millions of dollars to figure out how the crack was done, how to safeguard against it, fill out the appropriate paperwork in triplicate, and implement the security fix. Then the whole election would have to be restaged.
Hopefully, there would be no cracks of the next election. But who knows.
Folks, let's not forget that these are the LinuxWorld folks. In other words, we are their customers. I reccommend we all just write some nice polite (I'm serious) letters of protest.
Visit: IDG Expos, the people who bring you the LinuxWorld Conference. LinuxWorld, IDG Expos' sister company.
Be sure to mention that you heard about it on Slashdot. That'll grab their attention.
First off I wouldn't buy a "...f*r D*mm**s" book if my ass were on fire.:)
What this letter tells me is that IDG doesn't want the term "f*r d*mm**s" (I don't wanna get sued for using the real term) used in common conversation. The author was not selling a book called "SMART_HOST f*r D*mm**s". He was speaking over electronic device, and used the phrase. IDG wants to control the very mention of its product. I find this aggressive, intrusive, and hostile. In short, I don't like it.
If anything, the email was a sort of advertisement for those bloody books. I'm sure the good folks from "The C*mpl*t* Id**t's Guide..." book series would be glad to have that kind of name recognition.
If IDG doesn't want me using the name of their book series in conversation, I won't use it. And if I can't use the term, I can't reccommend their books to anyone, which suits me fine.
You know, Slashdot is very similar to one click shopping. I enter my username, password, moderation preferences, sidebar preferences, etc. Then when I go to Slashdot, I get information (which Amazon implicitly admits is a product, since it tried to patent it). I'm not charged for the information. But is that a big enough difference to actually warrant a patent. I could one-click-shop for info on Slashdot before Amazon was doing it.
A helpful lawyer gave some info on software patents. Does anyone know how one would go about trying to void a patent?
1) Chewie is popular, so people are interested in the notion of him getting killed. (Who would have cared if Lando bit the big one?)
2) Chewie never spoke a word of English and didn't have anything of a human face in the movies, so he doesn't seem so totally real that people will be seriously bummed out by his passing. (If Solo, for example, was killed, I'd more or less give up on the continuing adventures of the Star Wars universe).
3) Everyone loves Han Solo. This will put Solo in a very prominent position in this book, as well as in future books. He will surely feel the need to avenge Chewie, and there'll probably a lot of head-stuff going on with him for next couple books.
It's gonna happen, but it will creep in slowly. First, we genetics will be used to prevent some birth defects, Downs syndrome, dwarfism, Rett's syndrome, etc. What self-respecting parents would NOT take steps to see that their child was not born with Downs syndrome? What parents would be opposed to keeping their children free of birth defects.
And I argue that these are good and noble uses of genetics. This type of prevention could put an end to untold suffering. But after a while, we will see more imperfections that could be fixed up. Who would want their child to be diabetic? Or asthmatic? Or prone to breast cancer? Or prone to heart disease? Or deaf?
But then we start to make the jump from health problems to disorders that make life more difficult. Actually, it's not a jump at all. It's a very subtle grey area. What about dyslexia? Should we use genetics to prevent that? Sure, right? That's a learning disability. What about low-intelligence? That could be a learning disability too. What if we could keep a child from being weakly? He could be naturally athletic. That might help keep him healthy. Should we keep a child from having to be short? That could damage his self-image. It can be hard growing up as the shortest kid in class. Should we prevent children being ugly? That can certainly cause emotional problems. Or being flat-chested? That can be traumatic too.
And so we see that we don't go from birth defects straight to aesthetics, but we go through many shades in between. Where should we draw the line? What types of traits should be prevented, and what types of traits should be left to nature? The fact is that there is no clear line. I'm curious as to what will happen in the field of genetics in the next few years, but I know it'll be a bumpy ride.
It should be noted that this is a micro-guitar, and not a nano-guitar. Micrometer-scale are not horrifically difficult to fabricate using even conventional means. But nano-scale objects get down to the messy business of moving molecules around.
What we see here is a case of reverse piracy. Instead of the user violating the written rights of the software producer, the software producer is violating the written rights of the users.
I urge you all to report this case of piracy (in a businesslike and cool tone) to nopiracy@corel.com. According to their Anti-Piracy Initiative, Corel is staunchly opposed to such activities. As their own page states, "Software piracy is a crime."
I agree with the folks who are saying that the link to the National Security Administration is a weak one. NSA could stand for anything. But it is definitely a serious enough matter to warrant further investigation. How can we verify the nature of this key? Are there any MS or NSA contacts out there that know anything? Can we find any case of the NSA key having been used to compromise security? Can we find use of the NSA key anywhere in Windows code? Anyone thought of asking the big-wigs at MS to explain the meaning of the NSA key? Can we get this into the mainstream press, and force a statement from Microsoft?
When lossless compression is required, just use PNGs. PNG offers good compression, and it's lossless, and it's FREE.
GIF only offers better compression on small, simple images that require low (or zero) loss. That's rare. On these images, the difference in bandwidth between GIF and PNG would be slight.
Anyone have any idea what would be the feasability level of an OpenSource community boycott? By this I mean a boycott not only of the GIF format, but also all software that's licensed to use GIF.
We have GIMP. The only useful feature I can think of that JPEG doesn't have is transparency. Jpeg doesn't have animation, but no one in their right mind likes animated GIFs anyhow.
Personally, I'm already unofficially boycotting all Unisys licensed software by simply using GIMP, and creating JPEGs. How dificult would it be to convince the rest of the OpenSource community to stop buying Unisys licensed software?
Slashdot Mirror
Folks, the first article was about his house being raided by the pigs. This article is about his actual arrest. Although I can't read Norwegian, the Slashdot header seems to indicate that Jon is currently imprisoned for writing code.
If something's expensive to develop, and somebody's not going to get paid, it won't get developed. So you decide: Do you want software to be written, or not?
What he's describing is Free Software! I can almost taste the irony! The very phenomenon that he dismissed as an absurdity is the very phenomenon that is going to bring down his software empire: people writing code for fun in their spare time, and giving it away for free.
At that time, programmers were a rare and exotic breed. There simply weren't enough programmers to go around. Now we're reaching critical mass. There are millions of coders out there. And not just mercenaries like Gates. There are now enough people who enjoy writing code as a hobby that free software is starting to take flight.
Imagine a garage tinkerer. He comes up with something vaguely useful. For example, a higher fidelity audio speaker. It would cost him millions to produce this thing and share it with the world. But when a coder comes up with something interesting, he need only send word to freshmeat.net, and the world gets this innovation, at almost no cost to anyone.
Gates didn't grasp this idea at the time because he simply couldn't imagine someone coming home from work, and then writing code just for kicks. At least he couldn't imagine that happening on the scale we're seeing today. But then again, this is the guy who said that 128Kb RAM should be enough for anyone.
That's the last time I buy tickets to the fuckin' Buffalo policeman's ball.
Take today's User Friendly for example. This time the joke is on tech support.
But seriously, these kinds of geek-strips are very cliquish and not at all funny to non-geek types. But think about this. Dog lovers probably think that Marmaduke is one damn funny cartoon. I think it's pointless. Kindergarten teachers love Family Circus. I think it's positively dreadful, maudlin, sentimental, Anne Geddes postcard tripe. Bloom County (and Outland) were for people bent enough to enjoy that kind of thing. Some people, I am told, didn't get it.
User Friendly and the others have found a niche. Nothing wrong with that.
Is there a larger organization (with deeper pockets and/or staff lawyers) that'd be willing to take a stand with Jon and/or Derek to fight for their rights? Perhaps we could get the FSF or the EFF interested. Probably the EFF more so than the FSF, but still do we wish to give up our rights simply because we're unwilling to fight for them?
I wonder what Red Hat thinks of this. If they could get DVD under Linux working well, it could be a big boost for their product. And they sure as hell have deep pockets. It might be in their best interests to jump in and defend this work.
Just gotta rant.
Why are they surprised? They come up with some pansy-ass encryption scheme to protect their precious movies. They slobber all over Windows, but offer no support whatsoever to Linux. It's a bit daft, you know, giving drivers to the relatively non-technical Windows crowd, and leaving the Linux folks to figure it out for themselves. The lawyers and friends-of-lawyers make good points about the precise definition of copyright infringement, but this code didn't allow anyone to copy movies. It's been said before: The writable DVD's are too small and expensive. You could fit a movie on a hard disk, but, again, it's too expensive. You could download it from the net, but c'mon. Who among us has EVER downloaded 7 gigs in a sitting? And would you really rather do that and fill up a whole disk, or just go buy the damn DVD at Wal-Mart? Hell, I'm too lazy to download the newest Red Hat distribution, let alone a whole movie.
How the hell do they expect us to run DVD's if they won't give us the damn drivers, or at least some scheme whereby to write the drivers without stepping on their lawyers' toes?
And where did all this legal hooplah come from? Copy protection. Do you know the extent of copy protection on VHS? It's those little plastic tabs on the cassete. Break off the plastic tabs, and it's copy protected. Cover the resulting holes with tape, and it's unprotected. And you know what? Even with this easily broken copy protection, Steven Spielberg still manages to pay his electric bill. John Travolta gets three square meals a day. And Robert Downey Jr can still...well...you get the picture.
In short:
Dumb: Spend an assload of money on wimpy encryption and droves of lawyers. Dare the Linux community to break your encryption by offering ZERO support. Breed animosity and resentment.
Smart: Forget encryption. It WILL get broken sooner or later. Spend the money on better screenplays. Fire about half your lawyers. Spend the money on better screenplays. Offer good product support. Or don't. It won't matter if you don't get your legal panties in a bunch. Learn the power of good PR.
I've got it. Two bikini-clad penguins rubbing suntan lotion on Bob Young as he sips a margarita.
Does anyone know who we could slashd . . . er . . . um . . . contact to voice our disapproval of this behavior?
It seems that as we start thinking of molecules as bits, we're getting down near the theoretical limits of information and computing. So that brings me to a few questions that I hope some knowledgable person (someone with a background in physics and computation) might be able to answer:
1) How fast can a computation happen (in a physical system) in thoeory.
2) How fast could molecular gates and molecular bits effect a computation?
3) How do you estimate these numbers would translate into Teraflops?
I see a solution, but it would require cooperation from the big boys (Yahoo, Ebay, Amazon, etc). If the webservers of the free world would agree to block access to *.au domains, we could force the Australian government to back down, or face becoming a technologically third-world country.
But do you think any of the big sites would place principle over profit? I think we all know.
National elections over internet. Bad bad bad. It's a bad idea. Bad.
A national election costs a fortune. Can you imagine the expense involved in setting up the thousands of voting sites, staffing them, keeping track of all the votes, etc, etc.
Internet voting would simplify all of that and save untold millions. Until.
Until some wise-ass figures out how to crack a voting server and starts stuffing ballot boxes from San Diego to Bangor. If that happened, we'd have to spend a few weeks and millions of dollars to figure out how the crack was done, how to safeguard against it, fill out the appropriate paperwork in triplicate, and implement the security fix. Then the whole election would have to be restaged.
Hopefully, there would be no cracks of the next election. But who knows.
Unless that 'open-source' license is the GPL, I'll just stick with GNOME, thank you.
Beware non-free licenses.
Folks, let's not forget that these are the LinuxWorld folks. In other words, we are their customers. I reccommend we all just write some nice polite (I'm serious) letters of protest.
Visit:
IDG Expos, the people who bring you the LinuxWorld Conference.
LinuxWorld, IDG Expos' sister company.
Be sure to mention that you heard about it on Slashdot. That'll grab their attention.
Marlboro
First off I wouldn't buy a "...f*r D*mm**s" book if my ass were on fire. :)
What this letter tells me is that IDG doesn't want the term "f*r d*mm**s" (I don't wanna get sued for using the real term) used in common conversation. The author was not selling a book called "SMART_HOST f*r D*mm**s". He was speaking over electronic device, and used the phrase. IDG wants to control the very mention of its product. I find this aggressive, intrusive, and hostile. In short, I don't like it.
If anything, the email was a sort of advertisement for those bloody books. I'm sure the good folks from "The C*mpl*t* Id**t's Guide..." book series would be glad to have that kind of name recognition.
If IDG doesn't want me using the name of their book series in conversation, I won't use it. And if I can't use the term, I can't reccommend their books to anyone, which suits me fine.
Marlboro
You know, Slashdot is very similar to one click shopping. I enter my username, password, moderation preferences, sidebar preferences, etc. Then when I go to Slashdot, I get information (which Amazon implicitly admits is a product, since it tried to patent it). I'm not charged for the information. But is that a big enough difference to actually warrant a patent. I could one-click-shop for info on Slashdot before Amazon was doing it.
A helpful lawyer gave some info on software patents. Does anyone know how one would go about trying to void a patent?
This is a smart move for several reasons.
1) Chewie is popular, so people are interested in the notion of him getting killed. (Who would have cared if Lando bit the big one?)
2) Chewie never spoke a word of English and didn't have anything of a human face in the movies, so he doesn't seem so totally real that people will be seriously bummed out by his passing. (If Solo, for example, was killed, I'd more or less give up on the continuing adventures of the Star Wars universe).
3) Everyone loves Han Solo. This will put Solo in a very prominent position in this book, as well as in future books. He will surely feel the need to avenge Chewie, and there'll probably a lot of head-stuff going on with him for next couple books.
Marlboro
It's gonna happen, but it will creep in slowly. First, we genetics will be used to prevent some birth defects, Downs syndrome, dwarfism, Rett's syndrome, etc. What self-respecting parents would NOT take steps to see that their child was not born with Downs syndrome? What parents would be opposed to keeping their children free of birth defects.
And I argue that these are good and noble uses of genetics. This type of prevention could put an end to untold suffering. But after a while, we will see more imperfections that could be fixed up. Who would want their child to be diabetic? Or asthmatic? Or prone to breast cancer? Or prone to heart disease? Or deaf?
But then we start to make the jump from health problems to disorders that make life more difficult. Actually, it's not a jump at all. It's a very subtle grey area. What about dyslexia? Should we use genetics to prevent that? Sure, right? That's a learning disability. What about low-intelligence? That could be a learning disability too. What if we could keep a child from being weakly? He could be naturally athletic. That might help keep him healthy. Should we keep a child from having to be short? That could damage his self-image. It can be hard growing up as the shortest kid in class. Should we prevent children being ugly? That can certainly cause emotional problems. Or being flat-chested? That can be traumatic too.
And so we see that we don't go from birth defects straight to aesthetics, but we go through many shades in between. Where should we draw the line? What types of traits should be prevented, and what types of traits should be left to nature? The fact is that there is no clear line. I'm curious as to what will happen in the field of genetics in the next few years, but I know it'll be a bumpy ride.
You just recently GPLed Doom. Thanks a million for that. Do you have plans to GPL any of your other titles?
It should be noted that this is a micro-guitar, and not a nano-guitar. Micrometer-scale are not horrifically difficult to fabricate using even conventional means. But nano-scale objects get down to the messy business of moving molecules around.
I urge you all to report this case of piracy (in a businesslike and cool tone) to nopiracy@corel.com. According to their Anti-Piracy Initiative, Corel is staunchly opposed to such activities. As their own page states, "Software piracy is a crime."
> Of couse big brother is going to
> have a backdoor, and your chip ID
> is going to uniquely identify you
> on the internet.
Thank God for open-source software. As long as we can write the networking code ourselves, we can circumvent the chip id, no?
Contact all these companies! Be polite and businesslike. Let them know that you do not do business with supporters of censorship.
Does anyone have the time and wherewithall to post a list of good contact information for these companies?
I agree with the folks who are saying that the link to the National Security Administration is a weak one. NSA could stand for anything. But it is definitely a serious enough matter to warrant further investigation. How can we verify the nature of this key? Are there any MS or NSA contacts out there that know anything? Can we find any case of the NSA key having been used to compromise security? Can we find use of the NSA key anywhere in Windows code? Anyone thought of asking the big-wigs at MS to explain the meaning of the NSA key? Can we get this into the mainstream press, and force a statement from Microsoft?
When lossless compression is required, just use PNGs. PNG offers good compression, and it's lossless, and it's FREE.
GIF only offers better compression on small, simple images that require low (or zero) loss. That's rare. On these images, the difference in bandwidth between GIF and PNG would be slight.
Anyone have any idea what would be the feasability level of an OpenSource community boycott? By this I mean a boycott not only of the GIF format, but also all software that's licensed to use GIF.
We have GIMP. The only useful feature I can think of that JPEG doesn't have is transparency. Jpeg doesn't have animation, but no one in their right mind likes animated GIFs anyhow.
Personally, I'm already unofficially boycotting all Unisys licensed software by simply using GIMP, and creating JPEGs. How dificult would it be to convince the rest of the OpenSource community to stop buying Unisys licensed software?