Although the GPL doesn't allow linking non-GPL code with GPL libraries (which would create a Derivative Work based on two separate copyrighted works), copyright law does not actually prohibit that, as long as (1) the copyright holder of one of the Works which is the basis for the Derivative Work has given permission and (2) your use of the Derivative Work is Fair. If you're an end user, the creation of the Derivative Work is a Necessary Step, and you aren't distributing it, then no court in the land is going to say that it's anything but fair dealing / fair use. It's unlikely ever to get as far as a court, since it is hardly in any copyright holder's interest for the public to know exactly what constitutes fair dealing (hint: it's actually a lot more than you think).
Note that the instant you distribute your Derivative Work -- and by the same logic that says passing a spliff is drug-dealing, even copying it to another computer you own might be distribution -- you're exceeding Fair Dealing and so in violation of copyright.
No. More than half of what's in a typical "GNU/Linux" distribution, including some of the essential system stuff, is actually under some sort of BSD-ish licence (which includes Apache and X.org licences). Even the C library is under the LGPL.
There are distros that try to supply strictly Open Source software -- Fedora Core, Mandriva, OpenSuSE, Debian and Ubuntu, for example. Note though that you can install closed-source software (e.g. ATI and nVidia drivers, Java, Flash and Skype) on any of them, and they all maintain their own repositories for such closed-source software as they are allowed to redistribute (though they are disabled by default, and you must enable them manually after installation).
Only in the UK, where archaic laws about direct connections to the water main have created a national* dependence upon cisterns and ball valves, could you use something as slow as Java to control what Londoners laughingly call a shower. In other countries, where water heaters are fed straight from the main, you'd have no chance. Every postcard arriving in the South from abroad enthuses about the wonderful high-pressure showers, even if it does mention in the next sentence about how the locals could do with using them occasionally.....
* OK, it's not "national" -- it's only in the Thames Water area that you're not allowed to connect anything to the main. But as everyone knows, nothing outside of the M25 officially exists; hence, plumbing textbooks refer to the regulations in force in London as though they were in force nationwide. Here Up North, we are allowed to have flow heaters (as long as they draw combustion air from outside, or are electric -- 230V means you can get up to 11.5kW. Above 50 amps, you need stupidly thick cables, or else they start getting hotter than the heater) and combination boilers (a gas-fired central heating boiler with an integral expansion vessel and PSI meter for the primary circuit, and an additional heat exchanger to allow it to function as a flow heater; popular in the Outer UK and Italy). Mains-fed water storage heaters are very rare, usually only being found in industrial applications where heating several hundred litres of water at a time makes sense. Cistern-fed water storage heaters, either electric or indirectly heated by a central heating boiler, are common because they're cheap to install (at the low pressure provided by a cistern, 1 millibar per cm. of static head, they can be made from sub-millimetre copper); though the fuel used in heating hundreds of litres of water then to go cold will eventually outweigh the cost of a flow heater.
someone stealing £5 from a little old lady has committed a far more heinous crime than some teenager downloading several thousand songs at the expense of some fat record company
At last, someone gets it. Mod that person up.
If you steal £5 from a little old lady (assuming she is living on a basic old age pension and not a lottery winner or anything like that), that is two hot meals she is not going to eat -- or maybe a present that a great-grandchild is not going to get. If you download a few songs without paying the record company, nobody actually loses anything. Maybe you might have bought an album, and the band might have made a few pence per song out of it; but the fact of you downloading the stuff doesn't necessarily mean that you aren't going to buy the album, nor that you would have done so if you couldn't have downloaded the tracks.
But look at it this way. John Thomas wants a program to type a few letters and do a few simple sums. He doesn't know about OpenOffice.org, so as far as he is concerned his choices boil down to:
Buy Microsoft Office (which "everyone" uses) for £500.
Buy XYZsoft Cheap Office Suite (claims 95% compatibility with MS Office) for £50, saving £450 vs. buying MS Office.
Pirate Cheap Office Suite and save £50 vs. buying it.
Pirate MS Office, saving £500 vs. buying it.
Now, which is the best value for money?
There's a wonderful paradox here: XYZsoft can be put out of business, and truthfully state it was due to piracy, even without anybody ever having to pirate a single copy of Cheap Office Suite! If it wasn't possible to pirate MS Office, the next best thing would be to buy Cheap Office Suite and save £450..... but it is possible, so that's exactly what John Thomas and all his friends do. And Microsoft's competitors are the ones who lose out every time.
Here's an example: You can lower emissions by replacing and/or converting all vehicles to battery-electric.
No you can't. That electricity has to be generated by some sort of engine in the first place, and that one big engine still has to generate the same amount of electricity as all those little engines put together (slightly more, in real life, to account for losses in the battery charging process; try as you might, you can't bind up every electron, so some energy is bound to be wasted heating the electrolyte and decomposing water into hydrogen and oxygen). All you're really doing is shifting emissions from the tailpipes of vehicles to the chimneys of power stations. If power stations were any more efficient than vehicle engines, then there might be some merit in this. But they aren't. Also, we would need more power stations; there was a major powercut on the Continent at the weekend which brought trains to a standstill (except countries where a separate 16.7Hz power grid is used for the railways, which series-wound motors are better able to handle) and trapped people in lifts for hours. Power stations are being closed down faster than new ones are being opened, and it is only because people are currently replacing appliances with new, more energy-efficient ones that this situation appears sustainable. There's only so much of a saving to be made before things will level out again.
And then, of course, there's the small matter that you can't build new power stations using any fuel; no matter what you want to use, you'll get the greens (and/or people bothered about house prices) up in arms. You obviously can't use fossil fuels, and you can't use nuclear. But even if you try to build a wind farm, or a plant generating energy from burning non-recyclable solid waste that would otherwise have gone to landfill, you'll end up with protestors. Even biomass has its detractors: although the vegans claim that with good logistics, an area the size of Britain alone could feed the entire world on a raw vegan diet (which the greens will claim we should all be eating anyway, though coeliacs and nut allergy sufferers might well disagree), they will say in the next breath (did I mention that breath is CO2?) that it's immoral to grow plants for energy while people are going hungry (due mainly to poor logistics).
This might be what the market needs: something to make the consumers realise once and for all that DRM is no good.
So far, MP3 players are still a bit secondary, a bit gimmicky. Many people still use portable CD and cassette players, because you can buy CDs anywhere and cassettes are easy to replace if they get damaged. Minidisc has less of a following, but an my experience it's a loyal one -- everyone I know who has a minidisc recorder uses it all the time.
What I'm really surprised about is that nobody has yet made a set consisting of a portable CD player and MP3 player which can be used independently but fit together neatly, share a recharger/mains adaptor, and -- when plugged together -- allow you to create your own MP3s from CDs without a computer. You know, like the way you already can do with cassettes or minidiscs. Is MP3 encoding that much harder than decoding to implement on a low-power processor?
Well, broadcasting costs money, and someone's got to pay for it; either you have to pay to watch TV, or you have to pay to be on TV. Programme makers adopting the first model (i.e. the BBC, and to some extent some of the movie channels) are selling programmes to audiences. The programmes are the product and the viewers are the paying customers. Programme makers adopting the second model (i.e. ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5 and most of the satellite stations) are selling audiences to advertisers. The advertisers are the customers and the viewers are the product. Editorial content is just something that happens between advertisements, to get the viewers to watch them.
Although there are safeguards in place to prevent the advertisers from calling too many of the shots, these are being steadily eroded; for instance, programme sponsors are now allowed to be mentioned by name in "end-of-part-one" screens, and it's likely that the restriction on mentioning brand names within programmes will be relaxed soon (game shows made for satellite TV make a big show of mentioning who has supplied the prizes; soon there will be pressure for this on terrestrial TV). The BBC still make television programmes for their own sake, and ultimately are answerable to nobody except their own audience.
Running a computer program requires that a copy be made. However, even if the computer program is subject to copyright, the copy is automatically non-infringing since without it, the program is unusable for its rightful purpose. So you can run a copyrighted program without explicit permission, because it comes under Fair Dealing Exemption. A contract cannot take away your statutory rights even if you agree to it, and definitely not if you don't agree to it!
Yeah, but those in authority like being able to wield big sticks. Power means nothing if you don't get to remind your inferiors that they are your inferiors.
The UK is switching over to all-digital TV starting from 2008. What's crazy is that stores are still selling analogue-only TV sets -- and in all probability, still will be after the switchover. What's even crazier is that they haven't built in the facility to require a viewing card for some or all programmes.
If you needed a viewing card in your TV to watch any programmes, the same way as you need a SIM in your phone to make calls, there would be no need for TV detector vans and TV licence enforcement squads. No card == no picture. Simple, innit? Too simple for the licence people. The fact is, they enjoy intimidating people. They get a buzz out of sending poison-pen letters to people with no TV set accusing them of "theft" (actually, it's fraud; except it's not because they aren't doing anything illegal since they have no TV set). And they're probably spending more on enforcement than they are not getting because of non-payment. Of course, if they spent less, there would be more non-payers.
That's why people will still be able to watch TV in the UK without a licence, long after the technical justification is gone: to give them someone to go after.
I can attest to that. The cutest kitten in the world (i.e. mine! Every kitten is the cutest kitten in the world, just like every little girl is a princess, and if you don't agree then you have obviously never experienced the love of either), a ginger tabby DSH named Chico, has a propensity for helping me with my computer. However, his idea of helping me is to stand on the keyboard, pressing various keys, and sometimes to push my mouse away into the depths around my computer desk.
Beside which, if I am ever up in court, I will simply bring Chico with me, hold him up in the dock, stroke him a bit and say "But look at the cute fluffy little kitten!" And be summarily acquitted, as the jury reach a unanimous verdict that nobody who likes cute fluffy little kittens could be guilty of anything.....
Make sure that those Win98 machines are isolated from the Internet. Get an old box, fit two NICs and as much RAM you can find, and install Debian. Configure your IPTables to block everything in either direction. Add rules to allow through only whatever you really need and log the most suspicious stuff. If there's e-mail involved, use the Debian box (which will have the excellent Exim MTA installed by default) as an SMTP server -- set your ISP's real SMTP server, or your company's Microsoft Exchange server, as the smarthost (If your connection is on a static IP address, you needn't even bother with the smarthost, just have it send mail normally. But do install your own BIND). Block any other connections on port 25.
All the above can also be done (slightly differently) on OpenBSD, which is reckoned to be even better for security; but my experience is with Linux.
It's also possible that if you were compromised, anybody you ever e-mailed and who is running Windows will have been compromised. You could just deny everything and let them Find Out The Hard Way (aw shoot, looks like we were just a couple weeks too late with getting the new security kit installed.....) Hell, if you're running Windows 98 then there's a chance you caught it from a customer in the first place.
Just because you can verify your vote was counted correctly, says nothing about the anonymous abstainers (who typically outnumber voters by 3:1) in whose name votes may have been falsely cast by the cheating party but who by definition aren't going to check anything.
Receipts, if they are given and if they show for whom the holder voted, must be readily forgeable. Unless a person can with 100% plausibility pretend that they voted for a different candidate than for whom they really voted, a receipt provides an opportunity for voter coercion. (Even abstainers should be given a receipt, since an abstention is a valid vote. Compulsory voting only makes people vote along the wrong lines; a savvy party could win an election on compelled votes alone, by fielding a candidate with the right charismatic qualities.) Of course, this reduces a receipt to mere proof of having been entitled to vote; but with Universal Franchise, such proof is redundant anyway; since the holder -- by virtue of their existence -- is entitled to vote.
Voting receipts are a smokescreen. They mask the symptoms of a problem without addressing its root cause. As long as any technology is used in the process of an election which is beyond the comprehension of a school-leaver with passing grades, and as long as there are any secrets -- beside who voted for whom -- anywhere in the process, there will be unfair elections.
And there we have the real issue. The songs you have already downloaded via iTunes won't play on Zune (unless Microsoft get into bed with DVD Jon.....) so you're stuffed. Are Microsoft going to offer some sort of trade-in deal, where you send in all your old Apple-format tracks and receive Microsoft-format equivalents? Unlikely, but it'd be fun to hack with if they did!
We Slashdotters already understand the issue, but people think we're paranoid when we try to explain it -- they don't believe anyone could be that evil. Anybody ditching iPod for Zune might well be on course to find out the hard way just what this Digital Restrictions Management thing really means. (Some people think it stands for "Digital Rights Management" and are under the impression that it is something to do with protecting their rights.)
In the UK, the law still protects a person's right to earn an honest living (because it's generally better for all concerned than if they were earning a dishonest one). One of its consequences is that in cases of severe debt, anything considered a tool of your trade cannot be seized by bailiffs. Another is that you can only be fired without notice (at least one payment cycle i.e. month, fortnight or week depending how often you get paid) in cases of gross misconduct; and if there is reasonable doubt that gross misconduct has occurred, you must be suspended on full pay until an industrial tribunal can be convened to hear the case. The law is more about making sure workers get paid than making sure work gets done, so you can be offered a month's wages up front in lieu of a month's notice. You also can't -- or at any rate, until recently you couldn't -- be fired from your job for something you did whilst "off the clock".
On the Continent, it's even more difficult to fire an employee.
That's like my idea for putting the biggest, baddest-arsed, axe-wielding psycho-killer motherf**ker you can find in a flat on the top floor of a tower block. You can bet the lifts would always be in working order and never smell of piss.....
That won't work either, because there's no real choice for consumers anymore: in some market sectors, everything is Made In China. The Western Working Class -- you know, the ones whose jobs have been sold off to the lowest bidder -- are powerless to do anything about this. For once in the course of history, our Labour has no Value to the Ruling Class.
The only way it could work is if a rich country -- or group of countries -- decided to impose import restrictions like "goods must be manufactured under conditions which would be legal in the destination country".
Microsoft aren't making any money out of China what with rampant copying. But the copying won't stop if they pull out. The Chinese will just make copies of independently-imported Microsoft software, and it'll be Business As Usual.
There might be a small gain for Open Source, but it's kind of doubtful. "Not having to pay for it" isn't much of an advantage when you don't have to pay for anything else either.
MP3 isn't protected by patents in countries where software patents aren't allowed (such as the UK and the EU). Although the UK patent office has apparently already granted patents on software, you can't actually be sued for infringing them because UK law specifically disallows software patents; if they tried, you could use the defence of No Case to Answer and all software patents would be struck down. So nobody's going to sue you because they know it will never stick. Ignorance of the law is no defence, they say; but it's making a good job of defending the holders of bogus patents against people ignorant of their rights! If software patents ever do get allowed in those countries, patent holders will have to apply for new patents there; you can't apply a new law to an act that was done before the law came into force. Anything that would have violated those patents if they had existed before, will now become prior art that can be used to block those patents when they are re-applied for!
Microsoft are merely following a bandwagon. They won't jump on it, however, until they can be sure of overpowering the driver.
Back in the 19th century there was much heated debate over whether AC or DC would be better for power distribution. DC had all the big money behind it, but AC had the Laws of Nature behind it. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that most of what we know today about electronics, would never have been discovered if we were still trying to distribute DC power.
Edison and his cronies were so desperate to protect the money they had already invested in DC that they conducted a huge dirty tricks campaign to persuade the general public that alternating current was more dangerous than direct current. This isn't strictly true. You need to touch both wires to get a shock from DC, and it causes your muscles to contract so you cannot let go of the conductors. You are then at risk of serious burn damage. With AC, if one side of the power supply is earthed -- and it usually is -- you only need to touch one wire, because your body and the Earth act as the plates of a capacitor -- and AC can flow through a capacitor, as it repeatedly charges, discharges and recharges in the opposite polarity. But for the brief moments while the "capacitor" is fully charged, at the crest and the trough of each cycle, no current is flowing; your muscles relax and you can let go. Many stray dogs and cats were killed using AC in a series of rigged demonstrations at Edison's Menlo Park labs, and in spite of Edison's opposition to capital punishment -- nobody's all bad, I suppose -- it was one of his own employees who invented the electric chair. The globally-recognised symbol of "the best justice money can buy" was originally invented to cast Alternating Current in a bad light.
For sure the battle of the currents was a bloody and ugly one, but Mother Nature's favourite won out in the end. You might say that mortals get what they deserve when they argue with deities. The simple facts are that it's easier to change the voltage of AC than DC; and you want as high a voltage as possible on the distribution network, which has unavoidable losses. Losing 10V out of 33 000V isn't as bad as losing 10V out of 230V. You can minimise the voltage drop by using thicker cables, but at some point the amount you're spending on all that extra metal will outweigh the electricity being saved. Oh, and just to rub salt in the wound, it's easier to convert AC to DC than vice versa.
Closed source software is the direct current of the 21st century. As DC shew its limitations with the expansion of the electricity companies, so are the disadvantages of Closed Source going to become apparent as the developing world adopts computers. Closed source is inflexible, forcing people into a partucular mode of working instead of allowing them to work the way they always have done. Now the "wow" factor has worn off, people getting their first computer -- and there are going to be many of them -- won't stand for that. It can't be fixed if it goes wrong -- but field maintenance is a way of life in many parts of the world that haven't fallen for the "buy it, use it, throw it away" line. Someone who's used to stripping down engines isn't going to appreciate not having the source code to their operating system. The culture of dependency fostered by Closed Source is in diametric opposition to everything the West has been trying to tell the third world about becoming self-reliant.
Microsoft aren't stupid. They are proud. Once it becomes clear that the Closed Source is dead in the water and the Open Source model is the only serious way forward, Microsoft will be pretending they invented Open Source.
If that's the same as a Cadbury's dairy Milk with Caramel, then have I reverse-engineered one just for the h4x0r challenge factor. I think they're most probably made by injection-moulding the hollow "humps" upside-down (chocolate is a thermoplastic, so there's no reason why this process shouldn't work, and the shape of the humps is definitely injection-mouldable); withdrawing the internal part of the mould (the injection holes would be in this retractable "core", so the tell-tale "pip" which characterises injection moulding would be hidden on the inside); filling the humps with caramel; filling the rest of the mould with chocolate to create a base, and finally wrapping the whole thing with pre-printed aluminised polyester film from a roll (the wrappers have visible registration marks, suggesting that they are not being printed after wrapping). I'd also suspect that the production line uses LWIR radiant heating to create precise temperature zones for the moulding processes, because they can do it all without causing the fat and sugar to separate.
No, source code alone is not enough; but it's a bloody good start all the same. Even if you don't understand it yourself, you can always show it to someone who does.
The reason source code is not a sufficient condition for security is that the compiler (which you have to run as a binary) may produce binaries that do something other than the source code fed into it would suggest. If you use it to compile the source code for a compiler, it might produce a "dirty" compiler which similarly mungs any source code fed to it. You can get around that by writing a simple C interpreter in assembler, just able to run the C compiler interpretatively as it compiles itself. Even then, you can't be sure that, say, a MOV instruction will just move a value from one register to another. Beyond that, you really need to build your own processor from discrete components.
If you want me to run something on MY computer, I have a RIGHT to see the source code. If you don't want me to know what is in a cake you're baking, there's no way I'm going to let you bake it in MY kitchen.
By the way, evaluating Source Code with which you can show you have no association to determine its suitability for use (or otherwise) is a Service which may be considered to have Value.
There is exactly one way to know if a piece of software is safe to run:
READ THE SOURCE CODE.
If they won't let you read the source code, it's because there's something in there they don't want you to see. If they don't want you to see it, that means they're ashamed of it. Avoid it.
Slashdot Mirror
Everyone seems to get this wrong.
Although the GPL doesn't allow linking non-GPL code with GPL libraries (which would create a Derivative Work based on two separate copyrighted works), copyright law does not actually prohibit that, as long as (1) the copyright holder of one of the Works which is the basis for the Derivative Work has given permission and (2) your use of the Derivative Work is Fair. If you're an end user, the creation of the Derivative Work is a Necessary Step, and you aren't distributing it, then no court in the land is going to say that it's anything but fair dealing / fair use. It's unlikely ever to get as far as a court, since it is hardly in any copyright holder's interest for the public to know exactly what constitutes fair dealing (hint: it's actually a lot more than you think).
Note that the instant you distribute your Derivative Work -- and by the same logic that says passing a spliff is drug-dealing, even copying it to another computer you own might be distribution -- you're exceeding Fair Dealing and so in violation of copyright.
No. More than half of what's in a typical "GNU/Linux" distribution, including some of the essential system stuff, is actually under some sort of BSD-ish licence (which includes Apache and X.org licences). Even the C library is under the LGPL.
There are distros that try to supply strictly Open Source software -- Fedora Core, Mandriva, OpenSuSE, Debian and Ubuntu, for example. Note though that you can install closed-source software (e.g. ATI and nVidia drivers, Java, Flash and Skype) on any of them, and they all maintain their own repositories for such closed-source software as they are allowed to redistribute (though they are disabled by default, and you must enable them manually after installation).
Only in the UK, where archaic laws about direct connections to the water main have created a national* dependence upon cisterns and ball valves, could you use something as slow as Java to control what Londoners laughingly call a shower. In other countries, where water heaters are fed straight from the main, you'd have no chance. Every postcard arriving in the South from abroad enthuses about the wonderful high-pressure showers, even if it does mention in the next sentence about how the locals could do with using them occasionally .....
* OK, it's not "national" -- it's only in the Thames Water area that you're not allowed to connect anything to the main. But as everyone knows, nothing outside of the M25 officially exists; hence, plumbing textbooks refer to the regulations in force in London as though they were in force nationwide. Here Up North, we are allowed to have flow heaters (as long as they draw combustion air from outside, or are electric -- 230V means you can get up to 11.5kW. Above 50 amps, you need stupidly thick cables, or else they start getting hotter than the heater) and combination boilers (a gas-fired central heating boiler with an integral expansion vessel and PSI meter for the primary circuit, and an additional heat exchanger to allow it to function as a flow heater; popular in the Outer UK and Italy). Mains-fed water storage heaters are very rare, usually only being found in industrial applications where heating several hundred litres of water at a time makes sense. Cistern-fed water storage heaters, either electric or indirectly heated by a central heating boiler, are common because they're cheap to install (at the low pressure provided by a cistern, 1 millibar per cm. of static head, they can be made from sub-millimetre copper); though the fuel used in heating hundreds of litres of water then to go cold will eventually outweigh the cost of a flow heater.
If you steal £5 from a little old lady (assuming she is living on a basic old age pension and not a lottery winner or anything like that), that is two hot meals she is not going to eat -- or maybe a present that a great-grandchild is not going to get. If you download a few songs without paying the record company, nobody actually loses anything. Maybe you might have bought an album, and the band might have made a few pence per song out of it; but the fact of you downloading the stuff doesn't necessarily mean that you aren't going to buy the album, nor that you would have done so if you couldn't have downloaded the tracks.
- Buy Microsoft Office (which "everyone" uses) for £500.
- Buy XYZsoft Cheap Office Suite (claims 95% compatibility with MS Office) for £50, saving £450 vs. buying MS Office.
- Pirate Cheap Office Suite and save £50 vs. buying it.
- Pirate MS Office, saving £500 vs. buying it.
Now, which is the best value for money?There's a wonderful paradox here: XYZsoft can be put out of business, and truthfully state it was due to piracy, even without anybody ever having to pirate a single copy of Cheap Office Suite! If it wasn't possible to pirate MS Office, the next best thing would be to buy Cheap Office Suite and save £450
And then, of course, there's the small matter that you can't build new power stations using any fuel; no matter what you want to use, you'll get the greens (and/or people bothered about house prices) up in arms. You obviously can't use fossil fuels, and you can't use nuclear. But even if you try to build a wind farm, or a plant generating energy from burning non-recyclable solid waste that would otherwise have gone to landfill, you'll end up with protestors. Even biomass has its detractors: although the vegans claim that with good logistics, an area the size of Britain alone could feed the entire world on a raw vegan diet (which the greens will claim we should all be eating anyway, though coeliacs and nut allergy sufferers might well disagree), they will say in the next breath (did I mention that breath is CO2?) that it's immoral to grow plants for energy while people are going hungry (due mainly to poor logistics).
This might be what the market needs: something to make the consumers realise once and for all that DRM is no good.
So far, MP3 players are still a bit secondary, a bit gimmicky. Many people still use portable CD and cassette players, because you can buy CDs anywhere and cassettes are easy to replace if they get damaged. Minidisc has less of a following, but an my experience it's a loyal one -- everyone I know who has a minidisc recorder uses it all the time.
What I'm really surprised about is that nobody has yet made a set consisting of a portable CD player and MP3 player which can be used independently but fit together neatly, share a recharger/mains adaptor, and -- when plugged together -- allow you to create your own MP3s from CDs without a computer. You know, like the way you already can do with cassettes or minidiscs. Is MP3 encoding that much harder than decoding to implement on a low-power processor?
Well, broadcasting costs money, and someone's got to pay for it; either you have to pay to watch TV, or you have to pay to be on TV. Programme makers adopting the first model (i.e. the BBC, and to some extent some of the movie channels) are selling programmes to audiences. The programmes are the product and the viewers are the paying customers. Programme makers adopting the second model (i.e. ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5 and most of the satellite stations) are selling audiences to advertisers. The advertisers are the customers and the viewers are the product. Editorial content is just something that happens between advertisements, to get the viewers to watch them.
Although there are safeguards in place to prevent the advertisers from calling too many of the shots, these are being steadily eroded; for instance, programme sponsors are now allowed to be mentioned by name in "end-of-part-one" screens, and it's likely that the restriction on mentioning brand names within programmes will be relaxed soon (game shows made for satellite TV make a big show of mentioning who has supplied the prizes; soon there will be pressure for this on terrestrial TV). The BBC still make television programmes for their own sake, and ultimately are answerable to nobody except their own audience.
Running a computer program requires that a copy be made. However, even if the computer program is subject to copyright, the copy is automatically non-infringing since without it, the program is unusable for its rightful purpose. So you can run a copyrighted program without explicit permission, because it comes under Fair Dealing Exemption. A contract cannot take away your statutory rights even if you agree to it, and definitely not if you don't agree to it!
Yeah, but those in authority like being able to wield big sticks. Power means nothing if you don't get to remind your inferiors that they are your inferiors.
The UK is switching over to all-digital TV starting from 2008. What's crazy is that stores are still selling analogue-only TV sets -- and in all probability, still will be after the switchover. What's even crazier is that they haven't built in the facility to require a viewing card for some or all programmes.
If you needed a viewing card in your TV to watch any programmes, the same way as you need a SIM in your phone to make calls, there would be no need for TV detector vans and TV licence enforcement squads. No card == no picture. Simple, innit? Too simple for the licence people. The fact is, they enjoy intimidating people. They get a buzz out of sending poison-pen letters to people with no TV set accusing them of "theft" (actually, it's fraud; except it's not because they aren't doing anything illegal since they have no TV set). And they're probably spending more on enforcement than they are not getting because of non-payment. Of course, if they spent less, there would be more non-payers.
That's why people will still be able to watch TV in the UK without a licence, long after the technical justification is gone: to give them someone to go after.
No. You are wrong on that.
I can attest to that. The cutest kitten in the world (i.e. mine! Every kitten is the cutest kitten in the world, just like every little girl is a princess, and if you don't agree then you have obviously never experienced the love of either), a ginger tabby DSH named Chico, has a propensity for helping me with my computer. However, his idea of helping me is to stand on the keyboard, pressing various keys, and sometimes to push my mouse away into the depths around my computer desk.
.....
Beside which, if I am ever up in court, I will simply bring Chico with me, hold him up in the dock, stroke him a bit and say "But look at the cute fluffy little kitten!" And be summarily acquitted, as the jury reach a unanimous verdict that nobody who likes cute fluffy little kittens could be guilty of anything
Make sure that those Win98 machines are isolated from the Internet. Get an old box, fit two NICs and as much RAM you can find, and install Debian. Configure your IPTables to block everything in either direction. Add rules to allow through only whatever you really need and log the most suspicious stuff. If there's e-mail involved, use the Debian box (which will have the excellent Exim MTA installed by default) as an SMTP server -- set your ISP's real SMTP server, or your company's Microsoft Exchange server, as the smarthost (If your connection is on a static IP address, you needn't even bother with the smarthost, just have it send mail normally. But do install your own BIND). Block any other connections on port 25.
.....) Hell, if you're running Windows 98 then there's a chance you caught it from a customer in the first place.
All the above can also be done (slightly differently) on OpenBSD, which is reckoned to be even better for security; but my experience is with Linux.
It's also possible that if you were compromised, anybody you ever e-mailed and who is running Windows will have been compromised. You could just deny everything and let them Find Out The Hard Way (aw shoot, looks like we were just a couple weeks too late with getting the new security kit installed
Just because you can verify your vote was counted correctly, says nothing about the anonymous abstainers (who typically outnumber voters by 3:1) in whose name votes may have been falsely cast by the cheating party but who by definition aren't going to check anything.
Receipts, if they are given and if they show for whom the holder voted, must be readily forgeable. Unless a person can with 100% plausibility pretend that they voted for a different candidate than for whom they really voted, a receipt provides an opportunity for voter coercion. (Even abstainers should be given a receipt, since an abstention is a valid vote. Compulsory voting only makes people vote along the wrong lines; a savvy party could win an election on compelled votes alone, by fielding a candidate with the right charismatic qualities.) Of course, this reduces a receipt to mere proof of having been entitled to vote; but with Universal Franchise, such proof is redundant anyway; since the holder -- by virtue of their existence -- is entitled to vote.
Voting receipts are a smokescreen. They mask the symptoms of a problem without addressing its root cause. As long as any technology is used in the process of an election which is beyond the comprehension of a school-leaver with passing grades, and as long as there are any secrets -- beside who voted for whom -- anywhere in the process, there will be unfair elections.
And there we have the real issue. The songs you have already downloaded via iTunes won't play on Zune (unless Microsoft get into bed with DVD Jon .....) so you're stuffed. Are Microsoft going to offer some sort of trade-in deal, where you send in all your old Apple-format tracks and receive Microsoft-format equivalents? Unlikely, but it'd be fun to hack with if they did!
We Slashdotters already understand the issue, but people think we're paranoid when we try to explain it -- they don't believe anyone could be that evil. Anybody ditching iPod for Zune might well be on course to find out the hard way just what this Digital Restrictions Management thing really means. (Some people think it stands for "Digital Rights Management" and are under the impression that it is something to do with protecting their rights.)
This would only ever happen in the USA.
In the UK, the law still protects a person's right to earn an honest living (because it's generally better for all concerned than if they were earning a dishonest one). One of its consequences is that in cases of severe debt, anything considered a tool of your trade cannot be seized by bailiffs. Another is that you can only be fired without notice (at least one payment cycle i.e. month, fortnight or week depending how often you get paid) in cases of gross misconduct; and if there is reasonable doubt that gross misconduct has occurred, you must be suspended on full pay until an industrial tribunal can be convened to hear the case. The law is more about making sure workers get paid than making sure work gets done, so you can be offered a month's wages up front in lieu of a month's notice. You also can't -- or at any rate, until recently you couldn't -- be fired from your job for something you did whilst "off the clock".
On the Continent, it's even more difficult to fire an employee.
That's like my idea for putting the biggest, baddest-arsed, axe-wielding psycho-killer motherf**ker you can find in a flat on the top floor of a tower block. You can bet the lifts would always be in working order and never smell of piss .....
That won't work either, because there's no real choice for consumers anymore: in some market sectors, everything is Made In China. The Western Working Class -- you know, the ones whose jobs have been sold off to the lowest bidder -- are powerless to do anything about this. For once in the course of history, our Labour has no Value to the Ruling Class.
The only way it could work is if a rich country -- or group of countries -- decided to impose import restrictions like "goods must be manufactured under conditions which would be legal in the destination country".
Who cares?
Microsoft aren't making any money out of China what with rampant copying. But the copying won't stop if they pull out. The Chinese will just make copies of independently-imported Microsoft software, and it'll be Business As Usual.
There might be a small gain for Open Source, but it's kind of doubtful. "Not having to pay for it" isn't much of an advantage when you don't have to pay for anything else either.
You need a specifically-non-US distro.
MP3 isn't protected by patents in countries where software patents aren't allowed (such as the UK and the EU). Although the UK patent office has apparently already granted patents on software, you can't actually be sued for infringing them because UK law specifically disallows software patents; if they tried, you could use the defence of No Case to Answer and all software patents would be struck down. So nobody's going to sue you because they know it will never stick. Ignorance of the law is no defence, they say; but it's making a good job of defending the holders of bogus patents against people ignorant of their rights! If software patents ever do get allowed in those countries, patent holders will have to apply for new patents there; you can't apply a new law to an act that was done before the law came into force. Anything that would have violated those patents if they had existed before, will now become prior art that can be used to block those patents when they are re-applied for!
Microsoft are merely following a bandwagon. They won't jump on it, however, until they can be sure of overpowering the driver.
Back in the 19th century there was much heated debate over whether AC or DC would be better for power distribution. DC had all the big money behind it, but AC had the Laws of Nature behind it. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that most of what we know today about electronics, would never have been discovered if we were still trying to distribute DC power.
Edison and his cronies were so desperate to protect the money they had already invested in DC that they conducted a huge dirty tricks campaign to persuade the general public that alternating current was more dangerous than direct current. This isn't strictly true. You need to touch both wires to get a shock from DC, and it causes your muscles to contract so you cannot let go of the conductors. You are then at risk of serious burn damage. With AC, if one side of the power supply is earthed -- and it usually is -- you only need to touch one wire, because your body and the Earth act as the plates of a capacitor -- and AC can flow through a capacitor, as it repeatedly charges, discharges and recharges in the opposite polarity. But for the brief moments while the "capacitor" is fully charged, at the crest and the trough of each cycle, no current is flowing; your muscles relax and you can let go. Many stray dogs and cats were killed using AC in a series of rigged demonstrations at Edison's Menlo Park labs, and in spite of Edison's opposition to capital punishment -- nobody's all bad, I suppose -- it was one of his own employees who invented the electric chair. The globally-recognised symbol of "the best justice money can buy" was originally invented to cast Alternating Current in a bad light.
For sure the battle of the currents was a bloody and ugly one, but Mother Nature's favourite won out in the end. You might say that mortals get what they deserve when they argue with deities. The simple facts are that it's easier to change the voltage of AC than DC; and you want as high a voltage as possible on the distribution network, which has unavoidable losses. Losing 10V out of 33 000V isn't as bad as losing 10V out of 230V. You can minimise the voltage drop by using thicker cables, but at some point the amount you're spending on all that extra metal will outweigh the electricity being saved. Oh, and just to rub salt in the wound, it's easier to convert AC to DC than vice versa.
Closed source software is the direct current of the 21st century. As DC shew its limitations with the expansion of the electricity companies, so are the disadvantages of Closed Source going to become apparent as the developing world adopts computers. Closed source is inflexible, forcing people into a partucular mode of working instead of allowing them to work the way they always have done. Now the "wow" factor has worn off, people getting their first computer -- and there are going to be many of them -- won't stand for that. It can't be fixed if it goes wrong -- but field maintenance is a way of life in many parts of the world that haven't fallen for the "buy it, use it, throw it away" line. Someone who's used to stripping down engines isn't going to appreciate not having the source code to their operating system. The culture of dependency fostered by Closed Source is in diametric opposition to everything the West has been trying to tell the third world about becoming self-reliant.
Microsoft aren't stupid. They are proud. Once it becomes clear that the Closed Source is dead in the water and the Open Source model is the only serious way forward, Microsoft will be pretending they invented Open Source.
If that's the same as a Cadbury's dairy Milk with Caramel, then have I reverse-engineered one just for the h4x0r challenge factor. I think they're most probably made by injection-moulding the hollow "humps" upside-down (chocolate is a thermoplastic, so there's no reason why this process shouldn't work, and the shape of the humps is definitely injection-mouldable); withdrawing the internal part of the mould (the injection holes would be in this retractable "core", so the tell-tale "pip" which characterises injection moulding would be hidden on the inside); filling the humps with caramel; filling the rest of the mould with chocolate to create a base, and finally wrapping the whole thing with pre-printed aluminised polyester film from a roll (the wrappers have visible registration marks, suggesting that they are not being printed after wrapping). I'd also suspect that the production line uses LWIR radiant heating to create precise temperature zones for the moulding processes, because they can do it all without causing the fat and sugar to separate.
No, source code alone is not enough; but it's a bloody good start all the same. Even if you don't understand it yourself, you can always show it to someone who does.
The reason source code is not a sufficient condition for security is that the compiler (which you have to run as a binary) may produce binaries that do something other than the source code fed into it would suggest. If you use it to compile the source code for a compiler, it might produce a "dirty" compiler which similarly mungs any source code fed to it. You can get around that by writing a simple C interpreter in assembler, just able to run the C compiler interpretatively as it compiles itself. Even then, you can't be sure that, say, a MOV instruction will just move a value from one register to another. Beyond that, you really need to build your own processor from discrete components.
If you want me to run something on MY computer, I have a RIGHT to see the source code. If you don't want me to know what is in a cake you're baking, there's no way I'm going to let you bake it in MY kitchen.
By the way, evaluating Source Code with which you can show you have no association to determine its suitability for use (or otherwise) is a Service which may be considered to have Value.
There is exactly one way to know if a piece of software is safe to run:
READ THE SOURCE CODE.
If they won't let you read the source code, it's because there's something in there they don't want you to see. If they don't want you to see it, that means they're ashamed of it. Avoid it.