2600 Was Well Reasoned
on
DMCA 2, Freedom 0
·
· Score: 2, Informative
IANAL, but I've been reading court decisions for a pretty long time. The appellate decision was extremely well written and well reasoned. We may not like it, but given the way they presented and analyzed the relevant arguments, I think this case will hold up on appeal to the Supreme Court. If I were the EFF, I'd drop it right now. As another poster pointed out, you have to choose your battles. The best thing that could happen would be to have the Supreme Court deny certiorari.
I found only one really serious legal error in the entire opinion. On page 64, the judges state in a footnote:
However, those who maintain the linked sites can
instantly make their protected material available
for linking by Corley by the simple expedient of deleting DeCSS from their web sites.
That's sophistry. Corley alleged that the prohibition infringed his freedom to link to other material on those people's sites. It is not incumbent on those site owners to choose whether Corley links, or to take action to make his linking possible. One might as well argue that a protestor wearing a prohibited obscene T-shirt should remove the offensive clothing to make it possible for a TV news show to carry footage of the protest.
We've been working on solid-state persistent
storage at UCLA for a couple of years. See
Andy Wang's home page for a paper on our work.
It turns out that it's more difficult to get it right than one would first think. A number of the ideas posted to this discussion have already been incorporated in Andy's system; he has also addressed a number of other issues that haven't been discussed. See his HotOS paper for a bit more information.
Disclaimer: I'm deeply involved in the project. So naturally I think it's cool.
People are getting so excited about ESR's libertarianism that they are missing the essential point of his article. To be blunt, he's calling RMS a power-mad control freak. Everything else is window dressing.
I happen to agree with Eric. Most of Stallman's actions boil down to forms of coercion. Read the GPL. The whole point is to enforce certain behaviors that RMS considers socially beneficiary. (Compare most other licenses, which primarily prohibit antisocial behaviors.) Review the history of the LGPL. Stallman tried, and failed, to force the GPL on anybody who used gcc. Look behind the scenes, study things like the glibc takeover.
Stallman wants to force his definition of freedom on you, whether you want it or not.
Stallman did the same thing in the early 90's with ispell. Briefly, a misunderstanding about licensing led him to conclude that I would never release ispell under a GPL-compatible license, so he decided to find an independent branch for release with the FSF stamp of approval. That part was fine, but he quite deliberately chose to call his version "ispell 4.0" in an attempt to fool people into converting from ispell 3.x. People weren't fooled, much screaming resulted, and ispell 4.0 eventually disappeared off the face of the earth after I switched ispell 3.x to the BSD license.
A more complete version of the tale can be found in the Contributors file in the ispell distribution. That narration bends over backwards to avoid starting a flame war, so it is quite generous in describing Stallman's actions. But I haven't forgotten his attempts to trick the general public into doing what he wanted (which continue to this day), nor the generally rude way in which he behaved.
I think somebody ought to submit every single "goto" in his book as a typo, and claim a few hundred bucks. I grew up on gotos, yet I find it astoundingly harder to comprehend an algorithm expressed in that fashion.
It's sad, really. Knuth has so much to teach us, if he would only deign to speak comprehensibly.
Back before the NMD, back before Star Wars, there
was the ABM: Anti-Ballistic Missile. Same idea,
same weaknesses, 70's technology. It's what eventually led to the ABM Treaty, which is what we would have to abrogate to deploy NMD. But that's not the story.
When ABM was being debated, the CS types were, as usual, pointing out that there needed to be a way to test and debug it. As a fresh-faced undergrad, I went to a lecture by Daniel D. McCracken, who at the time was well known for several good Fortran texts.
McCracken postulated a test scenario:
Tester: Hello, Ivan? This is Sam over in the U.S. We're ready to test our ABM. Could you please fire a missile at us? Only one, please. This our first test, so we want to keep it simple...Where? How about North Dakota? That's a nice easy target.
Several months pass...
Tester: Hello, Ivan? Sam again. Hey, thanks for helping us out with that last test. We think we've worked out the bugs from that one. This time we'd like to try it with two missiles at the same time...Yeah, that's right...Yeah, thanks...Oh, and one more thing. Could you shoot them at South Dakota this time? North Dakota's not there any more.
The GPL based on trust? Don't make me laugh. The
GPL is based on the assumption that people cannot be trusted. That's why it contains such explicit provisions saying that if you use GPL'ed code, you must behave in a certain way.
If we really trusted people, we would simply give them the code free of license and trust that they would do the right thing. Many licenses (the BSD license, the Artistic license, etc.) go much further in this direction than the GPL. But even those licenses exhibit a lack of trust, because the reality is that there are some untrustworthy folks out there.
I could talk about all the research that's been done on P2P systems in both the OS and the DB worlds. But this item about P2P in the Federal Government, which just came across ACM TechNews, seems to say everything anybody might want to communicate to the court:
If someone
handed you one and it looked real, would you call the university to verify that it was real? No, you'd say "wow, MIT!" and hire
him/her.
Not unless I were a pointy-haired boss. When I used to interview people I didn't check diplomas, but I found that it was very easy to separate the competent from the poseurs. "In your compiler class, did your compiler use register coloring?" "When you implemented that large database in your last job, how did you index it?"
As to borrowing or stealing work that he can pass off on his own, it doesn't fly in the real world. Generally, if you're good at finding existing stuff that fits the bill, it makes you a valuable employee because you save time and money. But most jobs require creating something innovative and different. Who's going to write the new database code for him? Certainly not his co-workers; they've got their own job to do. His only option is to change careers (the usual solution) or become a PHB (common only in companies I didn't work for -- IMHO one sign of competence is that you'll change jobs rather than tolerate horrible management).
...the papers could be excessively similar because they all draw phrases from the same sources.
Plagiarism detectors are only the first line of defense: they just point you at papers that need to be looked at more carefully. If the students are pulling the data from the same source and properly citing it, they will be exonerated by the hand review that must necessarily follow before a cheating case can be brought forth. The administration, which is not very computer-savvy, won't convict somebody based on "My program says he cheated." They want to see both papers with the similar passages highlighted.
When I run student programs through Moss, I always get hits. For example, there are only a few ways to write linked-list code. But when I look at them with an experienced eye, it's pretty easy to tell the cheaters from the non-cheaters -- and the people who just worked a bit too closely together can be differentiated from both.
My office temperature is already controlled from "corporate HQ" (i.e., the facilities office at the other end of campus). They deign to allow me a whopping +/- 2 degrees of personal control.
For two successive summers, I had to keep a long-sleeved wool shirt around. Repeated phone calls eventually revealed that my setpoint was 68 degrees, regardless of the time of year. I started having RSI problems from the cold. So they fixed it, but every time their Windows box crashed it would reset to the default setpoint of 68.
Thanks, but no thanks. I'd rather have an old bulletproof bimetal Honeywell. What it lacks in fanciness, it more than makes up by actually working and giving me personal control.
I seem to recall (from his TLD applications to ICANN) that Garrin makes his primary living selling cars, and is doing this name.space thing only as a sideline (although obviously he hopes to get wealthy from it).
I'm not sure I want to stake the future of the net on even new-car salesman.
Yes and no. The yes part is this: if you haven't been working on your proposal for a few weeks now, you don't stand a chance in hell of getting funded. Also, DARPA is indeed something of a clique.
The no part is that you don't have to have a months-long lead. In fact, the CHATS BAA came out only a few weeks ago. I could tell you the exact date if I weren't too lazy to check my mail logs.
DARPA projects tend to be big, on the order of $500K per year. That means that they expect an effort that involves several people. It also means that they expect fully thought out stuff.
(How do I know? I've participated in lots of DARPA submissions and research projects. I was involved in two potential responses to CHATS, one of which we dropped because we didn't like our own idea. I withdrew from the other because of reasons mildly related to the issue under discussion, mainly that if you get more than $50K per year from DARPA, you have to file a lot of paperwork that my college isn't set up to produce.)
What I find odd is the implicit claim that all taxpayer-funded software is released under the GPL. I'm sure the Regents of the University of California will be interested to learn this "fact".
What silliness. Let's make the unspoken assumptions explicit:
Two parents are better than one.
Exposure to parents of both genders is better than exposure to a parent or parents who are of only a single gender.
As to the first point, any parent, single or not, can agree. Kids are TIRING at times. If you have help, you are less tired, which generally translates into better parenting. There are lots of other advantages, too. But they're all second-order effects.
The second point is the interesting one. To start with, it assumes that a person is more likely to grow up happy, healthy, and well adjusted when extensively exposed to adults of both genders. Well, it sounds plausible. AFAIK, there's no real scientific evidence one way or the other, though it might be interesting to study.
The flaw, though, is the assumption that this extensive exposure isn't available to gay parents. False. It could come from a school, or from neighbors, or from grandparents, or from friends, or even from roommates. (AACK! Am I talking perversion? Oh, wait, lots of people live in multi-adult households. Worldwide, it's the norm. Rats. Reason intrudes on homophobia yet again.)
I have a friend who was a single mother. I served as the male role model for her daughter. It worked. I might someday do the same for lesbian friends.
P.S. I'm an adoptive parent, lucky to have a partner who seems to do more than her share of the work. Based on what I've seen, the issue of the number of parents, or their gender, is grossly secondary to the quality of the people involved. I suppose that, all other things being equal, one might be able to discern a difference, but all other things are never equal.
Oh, yeah. I don't know about Eric, but Kirk neither trumpets nor hides the fact that he's gay. It's in his bio when he gives talks, along with the fact that he has a fantastic wine cellar. Personally, I think the latter tidbit is vastly more interesting and important. Hey, Kirk, when can I have a taste?:-)
I'll believe in the viability of this project
when I see something that actually has a significant number of notes. Say, a Rossini
or Wagner opera.
The amount of effort involved in entering a single note of music, using any technology (including a pen), is 2-100 times the effort involved in entering a single character of text. (This is a gut estimate, based on having done a moderate amount of music transcription.) The lower number applies to simple situations such as writing a quarter note, the higher to complex ones that include things like beaming, expression marks, etc. Lilypond is, um, not the most efficient entry method.
I was impressed that a Mozart horn concerto is one of the works that was entered...until I downloaded it and found that it was only the solo part; the
orchestral score is missing.
Frankly, this whole thing seems like a bit of silliness to me. Enthusiasm is great, but so is intelligent application of resources. Why would anyone waste time entering stuff into Lilypond's clumsy 1960's-era notation when they could use something like Finale, which at least approaches the efficiency of Mozart and Rossini's scratchings with a quill pen?
Neural networks, like Slashdot first-post fanatics, are slow learners. I'd love a smart controller for my heater (regardless of the underlying implementation). But figuring that I'd press the bad/good button about 3 times a day, I'd probably be dead before it figured out my preferences.
Lemmee see...first I'll take a shot of empty ocean. Looking down. Then I'll take a shot of snow. I'll then post those two photos, together with a claim to have visited approximately 37,492 of the integer intersections. Who's to contradict me?
(Yes, I made up the number. This is too silly for me to waste time on a real calculation.)
The amount of misinformation and ignorance being posted is astounding. The people arguing about deregulation are, by and large, not well informed about the issues involved. I'm not going to get into that battle. But I want to clear up one point, namely about Christmas lights.
It's true that the little 40-watt strings aren't a big deal. But drive around and check out all the overdone displays with icicle lights, trees wrapped in lights, every window outlined, Santa on the roof, etc. Many of those people are pulling an extra kilowatt; some are drawing 10K! Even considering those who are pulling only 300 watts, that's 300 over their normal consumption. Aggregate it, and it's enough to push the state over the edge. As another poster pointed out, the shortage was only 500 MW, but if you're an interruptible power "victim", 500 MW is as good as infinity.
If you have been following the demand graphs (as we victims have been doing), you can see the daily increase as more and more people mount their Christmas lights. Drive around a residential neighborhood to verify that yes, there are more lights today than yesterday.
Then look at the graphs again. Power demand starts rising at 3 PM, when school kids and 7am-3pm shift workers get home and turn on the TV. It keeps rising as more people come home and hits a peak at about 6, when everybody's turning on microwaves, watching the evening news, playing Nintendo and stereos, etc. At about 8 it starts dropping off because kids and early risers are going to bed, and by 8:30 or so we're out of the daily shortage and the interruptible people can come back online.
Since Christmas lights are often on timers, they are set to come on around dusk, which is roughly in the 4:30-5 range depending on where in California you live. The non-timer ones come on as people get home. This all causes the upslope to be steeper and the peak to be higher. Q.E.D.
I reset our timer to keep the few lights we have off until 8:30. My wife called me a grinch, but I want to set an example for the neighborhood. How can I justify wasting power when my students can't turn in their homework or study for finals?
If you are getting something for free, I don't think you're in a very good position to complain when the donor cuts you off.
Lifetime e-mail portability just isn't that hard to find any more. Buy a domain, or join ACM or IEEE or Usenix, or go through you school's alumni association.
The problem is that there are only a few 802.11 bands (3, IIRC). My rooftop antenna is currently on order. But even without that, I've noticed that my in-home wireless LAN takes a hit when my fellow professor, who already has an antenna, does heavy things. We both take hits from people with wireless phones in the same band.
With a wired Ethernet, if the load gets too heavy we just split the subnet. With my DSL line, if my neighbor gets DSL I don't suffer. But I really don't want my neighbors to get 802.11 installations, because then my performance will drop -- both in-home and (once the rooftop arrives and I drop DSL) to the Internet in general.
This a fundamental problem with wireless. Highly directional antennas help, but it's expensive to narrow the beam to 1 house from a km away, and so our current installation has an omnidirectional antenna at the base.
As currently designed, sugarplum won't work for a
simple reason: it expects the spam crawlers to
identify themselves. (It looks for User-Agent
headers such as Cherrypicker, etc.). The spammers
will lose no time in figuring out that they just
have to identify themselves as Alta Vista.
The subject line says it all. The 432 was supposed to be Intel's be-all and end-all processor. 32 bits, CISC out the wazoo, etc., etc., it was going to make the 808x and 68000 obsolete. Yeah. It was the PL/I of CPUs. They shipped a few, but it performed like a dog.
I have to wonder whether the Itanium will follow the same path.
Slashdot Mirror
I found only one really serious legal error in the entire opinion. On page 64, the judges state in a footnote:
That's sophistry. Corley alleged that the prohibition infringed his freedom to link to other material on those people's sites. It is not incumbent on those site owners to choose whether Corley links, or to take action to make his linking possible. One might as well argue that a protestor wearing a prohibited obscene T-shirt should remove the offensive clothing to make it possible for a TV news show to carry footage of the protest.It turns out that it's more difficult to get it right than one would first think. A number of the ideas posted to this discussion have already been incorporated in Andy's system; he has also addressed a number of other issues that haven't been discussed. See his HotOS paper for a bit more information.
Disclaimer: I'm deeply involved in the project. So naturally I think it's cool.
"Socially beneficiary?" Ouch. I meant "socially beneficial", of course.
I happen to agree with Eric. Most of Stallman's actions boil down to forms of coercion. Read the GPL. The whole point is to enforce certain behaviors that RMS considers socially beneficiary. (Compare most other licenses, which primarily prohibit antisocial behaviors.) Review the history of the LGPL. Stallman tried, and failed, to force the GPL on anybody who used gcc. Look behind the scenes, study things like the glibc takeover.
Stallman wants to force his definition of freedom on you, whether you want it or not.
A more complete version of the tale can be found in the Contributors file in the ispell distribution. That narration bends over backwards to avoid starting a flame war, so it is quite generous in describing Stallman's actions. But I haven't forgotten his attempts to trick the general public into doing what he wanted (which continue to this day), nor the generally rude way in which he behaved.
It's sad, really. Knuth has so much to teach us, if he would only deign to speak comprehensibly.
Back before the NMD, back before Star Wars, there was the ABM: Anti-Ballistic Missile. Same idea, same weaknesses, 70's technology. It's what eventually led to the ABM Treaty, which is what we would have to abrogate to deploy NMD. But that's not the story.
When ABM was being debated, the CS types were, as usual, pointing out that there needed to be a way to test and debug it. As a fresh-faced undergrad, I went to a lecture by Daniel D. McCracken, who at the time was well known for several good Fortran texts.
McCracken postulated a test scenario:
If we really trusted people, we would simply give them the code free of license and trust that they would do the right thing. Many licenses (the BSD license, the Artistic license, etc.) go much further in this direction than the GPL. But even those licenses exhibit a lack of trust, because the reality is that there are some untrustworthy folks out there.
I could talk about all the research that's been done on P2P systems in both the OS and the DB worlds. But this item about P2P in the Federal Government, which just came across ACM TechNews, seems to say everything anybody might want to communicate to the court:
Not unless I were a pointy-haired boss. When I used to interview people I didn't check diplomas, but I found that it was very easy to separate the competent from the poseurs. "In your compiler class, did your compiler use register coloring?" "When you implemented that large database in your last job, how did you index it?"
As to borrowing or stealing work that he can pass off on his own, it doesn't fly in the real world. Generally, if you're good at finding existing stuff that fits the bill, it makes you a valuable employee because you save time and money. But most jobs require creating something innovative and different. Who's going to write the new database code for him? Certainly not his co-workers; they've got their own job to do. His only option is to change careers (the usual solution) or become a PHB (common only in companies I didn't work for -- IMHO one sign of competence is that you'll change jobs rather than tolerate horrible management).
Plagiarism detectors are only the first line of defense: they just point you at papers that need to be looked at more carefully. If the students are pulling the data from the same source and properly citing it, they will be exonerated by the hand review that must necessarily follow before a cheating case can be brought forth. The administration, which is not very computer-savvy, won't convict somebody based on "My program says he cheated." They want to see both papers with the similar passages highlighted.
When I run student programs through Moss, I always get hits. For example, there are only a few ways to write linked-list code. But when I look at them with an experienced eye, it's pretty easy to tell the cheaters from the non-cheaters -- and the people who just worked a bit too closely together can be differentiated from both.
For two successive summers, I had to keep a long-sleeved wool shirt around. Repeated phone calls eventually revealed that my setpoint was 68 degrees, regardless of the time of year. I started having RSI problems from the cold. So they fixed it, but every time their Windows box crashed it would reset to the default setpoint of 68.
Thanks, but no thanks. I'd rather have an old bulletproof bimetal Honeywell. What it lacks in fanciness, it more than makes up by actually working and giving me personal control.
I'm not sure I want to stake the future of the net on even new-car salesman.
The no part is that you don't have to have a months-long lead. In fact, the CHATS BAA came out only a few weeks ago. I could tell you the exact date if I weren't too lazy to check my mail logs.
DARPA projects tend to be big, on the order of $500K per year. That means that they expect an effort that involves several people. It also means that they expect fully thought out stuff.
(How do I know? I've participated in lots of DARPA submissions and research projects. I was involved in two potential responses to CHATS, one of which we dropped because we didn't like our own idea. I withdrew from the other because of reasons mildly related to the issue under discussion, mainly that if you get more than $50K per year from DARPA, you have to file a lot of paperwork that my college isn't set up to produce.)
What I find odd is the implicit claim that all taxpayer-funded software is released under the GPL. I'm sure the Regents of the University of California will be interested to learn this "fact".
As to the first point, any parent, single or not, can agree. Kids are TIRING at times. If you have help, you are less tired, which generally translates into better parenting. There are lots of other advantages, too. But they're all second-order effects.
The second point is the interesting one. To start with, it assumes that a person is more likely to grow up happy, healthy, and well adjusted when extensively exposed to adults of both genders. Well, it sounds plausible. AFAIK, there's no real scientific evidence one way or the other, though it might be interesting to study.
The flaw, though, is the assumption that this extensive exposure isn't available to gay parents. False. It could come from a school, or from neighbors, or from grandparents, or from friends, or even from roommates. (AACK! Am I talking perversion? Oh, wait, lots of people live in multi-adult households. Worldwide, it's the norm. Rats. Reason intrudes on homophobia yet again.)
I have a friend who was a single mother. I served as the male role model for her daughter. It worked. I might someday do the same for lesbian friends.
P.S. I'm an adoptive parent, lucky to have a partner who seems to do more than her share of the work. Based on what I've seen, the issue of the number of parents, or their gender, is grossly secondary to the quality of the people involved. I suppose that, all other things being equal, one might be able to discern a difference, but all other things are never equal.
Oh, yeah. I don't know about Eric, but Kirk neither trumpets nor hides the fact that he's gay. It's in his bio when he gives talks, along with the fact that he has a fantastic wine cellar. Personally, I think the latter tidbit is vastly more interesting and important. Hey, Kirk, when can I have a taste? :-)
The second thought is to wonder whether USB sockets are designed to take the tens of thousands of insertion cycles such an idea is likely to produce.
The amount of effort involved in entering a single note of music, using any technology (including a pen), is 2-100 times the effort involved in entering a single character of text. (This is a gut estimate, based on having done a moderate amount of music transcription.) The lower number applies to simple situations such as writing a quarter note, the higher to complex ones that include things like beaming, expression marks, etc. Lilypond is, um, not the most efficient entry method.
I was impressed that a Mozart horn concerto is one of the works that was entered...until I downloaded it and found that it was only the solo part; the orchestral score is missing.
Frankly, this whole thing seems like a bit of silliness to me. Enthusiasm is great, but so is intelligent application of resources. Why would anyone waste time entering stuff into Lilypond's clumsy 1960's-era notation when they could use something like Finale, which at least approaches the efficiency of Mozart and Rossini's scratchings with a quill pen?
Neural networks, like Slashdot first-post fanatics, are slow learners. I'd love a smart controller for my heater (regardless of the underlying implementation). But figuring that I'd press the bad/good button about 3 times a day, I'd probably be dead before it figured out my preferences.
(Yes, I made up the number. This is too silly for me to waste time on a real calculation.)
It's true that the little 40-watt strings aren't a big deal. But drive around and check out all the overdone displays with icicle lights, trees wrapped in lights, every window outlined, Santa on the roof, etc. Many of those people are pulling an extra kilowatt; some are drawing 10K! Even considering those who are pulling only 300 watts, that's 300 over their normal consumption. Aggregate it, and it's enough to push the state over the edge. As another poster pointed out, the shortage was only 500 MW, but if you're an interruptible power "victim", 500 MW is as good as infinity.
If you have been following the demand graphs (as we victims have been doing), you can see the daily increase as more and more people mount their Christmas lights. Drive around a residential neighborhood to verify that yes, there are more lights today than yesterday.
Then look at the graphs again. Power demand starts rising at 3 PM, when school kids and 7am-3pm shift workers get home and turn on the TV. It keeps rising as more people come home and hits a peak at about 6, when everybody's turning on microwaves, watching the evening news, playing Nintendo and stereos, etc. At about 8 it starts dropping off because kids and early risers are going to bed, and by 8:30 or so we're out of the daily shortage and the interruptible people can come back online.
Since Christmas lights are often on timers, they are set to come on around dusk, which is roughly in the 4:30-5 range depending on where in California you live. The non-timer ones come on as people get home. This all causes the upslope to be steeper and the peak to be higher. Q.E.D.
I reset our timer to keep the few lights we have off until 8:30. My wife called me a grinch, but I want to set an example for the neighborhood. How can I justify wasting power when my students can't turn in their homework or study for finals?
Lifetime e-mail portability just isn't that hard to find any more. Buy a domain, or join ACM or IEEE or Usenix, or go through you school's alumni association.
With a wired Ethernet, if the load gets too heavy we just split the subnet. With my DSL line, if my neighbor gets DSL I don't suffer. But I really don't want my neighbors to get 802.11 installations, because then my performance will drop -- both in-home and (once the rooftop arrives and I drop DSL) to the Internet in general.
This a fundamental problem with wireless. Highly directional antennas help, but it's expensive to narrow the beam to 1 house from a km away, and so our current installation has an omnidirectional antenna at the base.
As currently designed, sugarplum won't work for a simple reason: it expects the spam crawlers to identify themselves. (It looks for User-Agent headers such as Cherrypicker, etc.). The spammers will lose no time in figuring out that they just have to identify themselves as Alta Vista.
I have to wonder whether the Itanium will follow the same path.