I get a little board of "Bitcoin is rocketing" or "Bitcoin is crashing" headlines. Niether is true, and never was.
Bitcoin is in effect a (virtual) commodity, but with a much lower cap than others such as gold. This means that small things, like Brexit, or the fall of the Chinese Yuan, or the discontinuation of Indian cash bank notes and such will effect the price in a major way, with the inevitable exageration of the market by speculators, followed by the resulting corrections when these minor bubbles burst. This means Bitcoin value in effect goes up and down like a yo-yo.
However, bitcoin is sound. The commodity aspect is there and is secure, so it will never go back to zero or anything. The general movement of Bitcoin is up at a gradual pace with a few whooshes in either direction as described above. It is not, nor ever has been, a guaranteed wealth creator nor a crashing pudsey/pyramid scheme.
Should be easy enough to counter, all the casino needs to do is to place an artificial "drag and accelerator" magnetic or electro powered device on the wheel that varies it's speed every ten seconds or so controlled by a random number generator. This would make any predictive device like this useless as a factor will not be known to the punter or his computer. It would probably cost less than 1000 pounds per wheel too.
" Smith said that Microsoft will reinvest all of the money, after legal expenses, including $5 million that will go to increase Internet enforcement efforts and expand technical and investigative support to help law enforcers to address computer-related crimes."
Ah great! Spammers money being diverted to enforcing M$ proprietary email controls and DRM!
I guess everyone is getting the worst of ALL worlds.
Microsoft were responsible for the fall in price of the Operating System for the time - 1988 to 1995. We are talking MS-DOS then Windows 3.1 for the period. While UNIX's from (old) SCO and other OSs were costing 1000's at the time, you could buy Windows + Mouse for 50 UKP (here in the UK).
However, the office programs for most of the period was dominated by WordPerfect and Lotus (123). These were sold relatively cheaply too (when compared with equivalents for other platforms). To say MS was responsible for ALL software reductions at the time is a big exageration. They just were part of it.
It is worth noting that from 1995 onwards (MS era of Windows 95/98/ME then 2000/XP) though it has been others (including Linux and OpenOffice) that has been keeping software prices down. Not microsoft.
Comparing the RSA algorith to the IsNot operator is like comparing a motor car engine with a spoon. You can claim that both of those are the same because they are made out of metal or other material.
There are some that say all patents are bad. I am not one of them. It has been proven that patents (outside the software world) has, to a lesser or greater degree, encouraged inovation and publicizing of them and has made the world a better place.
However, the patent system is open to abuse, where over-generalized patents are granted and are used to stifle fair competition. Software patents are especially open to this, and I personally think that if the choice existed only between approving ALL software patents, or disallowing ALL of them, I would fall on the side of banning them on the basis that the unfair stifling of fair competition would outweigh the encouragement of inovation factor.
However, if there was a way to grant genuine software patents while rejecting the "land-grabbing" ones then that would be good. I am a mathematician and DO understand the RSA algorithm and how it encrypts data. To say it was "discovered" and not "invented" is silly, it is like saying the internal combustion engine was "discovered". Also it is not a set of computer instructions, it is a design of mathematical principals and procedures that enable public key cryptogrophy, in the same way the internal combustion engine invention is a design of metals and manufacturing procedures to produce a means of locomotion. However the IsNot patent (to say it is an algorithm is an insult to mathematics) is simply a comparison that, in reality, has been used one way or another by programmers since the invention of objects (or even pointers). It is the IT equivalent of a spoon.
Patents, on the whole, are good things IMHO. However, abuse of them is evil. It is important we stop and prevent the abuse, but do we really want to throw out the baby with the bathwater?
It all depends on what is to be patented. It is arguable that some software are legitimate inventions and should be patentable. Like the RSA algorithm (patent now expired). That is a legitimate invention and it is only fair that those who invented it should be awarded in the form of a 20 year exclusive ownership in return for making the algorithm publicly known.
However, things like the recent Microsoft "IsNot" patent should not be patentable. That is an attempt at a land grab. Also the patenting file formats in order to try and collect "tax" revenue from the internet should not be permitted.
I have not read the appropriate legislation being proposed, but I think it is wrong to criticize it before I do. So long as vague "landgrabbing" patents of concepts that are, in reality public knowledge, file formats (where no real invention exists) or broard patents over concepts already known by the public (the Microsoft virtual windows patent - remember?) and similar are not permitted then this may be a good(tm) thing.
Voting in the US is likely to be close again this time round as it was last. Whatever the preparations have been I think it is more or less a done deal that the lawsuits will fly in the states where the candidates come close.
I am trying to think of what the arguments will be...
Votes invalidated due to bogies on the touch screen causing incorrect readings
Mobile phones being left one while voting and the signal interfering with the computer
The electronic voting of military personel overseas invalidated because it did not have a Post Office postmark.
The process is confusing to people who think the election is a kingdom in Everquest
Election results unreliable because an armed police guard did not accompany the electric signals of the results to the capital
This is good news, both in respect of the defense of direct attacks against Linux that we are expecting, but also in increasing general confidence in the Open Source Model in general.
But there is a but...
Seeing is believing here. On a patent attack Novell will be tempted to cross license the issue, but for Novell customers only, not for Open Source users and distributers in general. It would be nice to see a company like Novell champion the defense of Open Source, and if they do it would be beneficial to the world in general, but how far will they go in a direction that will help competitors like RedHat as well as themselves?
Maybe RedHat and Novell will team up against attacks (RedHat already has a fund to protect Open Source over fraudulent copyright claims). That would really be beneficial, not least to RedHat and Novell!
This epitimizes the case against software patents. They are too open to abuse. The purpose of patents is to encourage inovation, I do not think this is the case with software ones. The vast majority of software is written by employees of non-software companies for those companies. Software patents are irrelevant there. Copyright performs as good a protection where needed regarding software as ever is required.
Even if you think patents are a good thing (as I do), there is no room for Software Patents. The only people they benefit are the Lawyer IP-Land-Grabbers. The vast amount of the proffessionals in the industry I know are against them (includiong me).
I believe you can achieve this in the current framework.
Java is trademarked. It would be easy for Sun to say that nothing could be called "Java", or "Java compliant" unless it conforms to their standards.
Also - Sun can release the code under dual license. The GPL - where the code can only be included in other projects that were also GPL, and the JSL (Java Standard license) or whatever, which is in control of Sun and is only issued to code that conforms to Sun's Java Standard.
Although under the above it is possible to fork the standard, it could not be done in a commercial or proprietary product (unless it is released under the GPL - blocking MS and others from doing what they want), and it could not be called "Java". Therefore, the above I think would satisfy all requirements.
I believe you are incorrect in saying there are larger routing tables.
The IP numbering allocation in IPv6 is hierarchal, which they are not in IPv4. The first 16 bits are the FP and Top Level Address (allocated to "trunk" cos like MCI), the next is a 32 byt "Next Level Addres" allocated to ISPs, and finally "Sight Level Address"es allocated to people like you and me.
At the moment many routing tables on the trunks have thousands of entries, increasing as allocation of IPv4 becomes more and more fragmented, significantly slowing down the trunks. IPv6 will mean considerably fewer routing table entries there, increasing performance.
Although the raw IPv6 header is larger than the minimum IPv4 header, a system of, in effect, encapsulating parts of the headers in the data packet that are not needed in routing exists where it does not in IPv4 (such as those needed in TCP). The savings there should more than make up for the degregation in increasing the minimum size of 20 to a fixed size of 40.
It is a misconception that IPv4 produces 4 billion IP addresses for the world to use. By the time all the university's Class A addresses and all the wasted IP addresses of those who have networks with machines missing are considered, all the network and bradcast addresses and so on are also considered you will be lucky to see 3 billion. In fact I would not be surprised if the figure was nearer 2. This may be enough for the Western World but not for Asia as well.
IPv6 is also neccessary to adopt the up and coming internet technologies, such as those that use MultiCast (IPv4 implementation of this will NEVER get adopted). I agree with you that it is the routers that are holding this back - but once an area is enjoying the benefits of IPv6 then I believe it will rapidly spread.
I remember once David Lean saying in an interview that once a picture of his was finished, then it was finished! It was a work of creation and no-one should change it retrospectively, not even him.
There is a scene in Lawrence of Arabia where you see a camel riding slowly towards O'Toole taking time to do it. This was the entrance of Omar Sherif. Afterwards David Lean said he got it wrong, and that that particular buildup ended too quickly, however, he did NOT change it for the reasons given.
Although George Lucas's modifications to the original Star Wars Trilogy may be making it more cinematically pleasing, and maybe even more to how he would have liked it to originally turn out, what he is doing could be interpreted as defacing. The original Star Wars Trilogy are works of art in themselves.
Everyone would have thought it ridiculous if Picasso took some of his earlier work back, and touched it up to make it more realistic, or in fashion. I think the same way about the Star Wars Films.
It is good to see X.Org succeed. XFree86 wupplied a good open product for a long time, but when finally the leadership broke down and you got this silly licensing incident it is good to see the Open Source Community in work and for X.Org to pick up the batton and continue running.
Expect to see more of this dual licensing stratergy, at least for now.
You can already see this in OpenOffice.Org and in MySQL. I am also attempting this in my EDL Language Project. I do not think it is a bad thing and will in the long term enrich free/open software.
Dual Licensing is a very good intermediatory from a proprietary to a free software environment.
Can anyone at NBC say "ssh tunelling"? I would have thought it would be better to try to get people to watch your TV stations by providing a better service than the one transmitted down braodband (I cannot believe that is difficult) rather than trying to block out competition (which by using proxy servers would be easy to circumvent anyway). What happened to good old fashioned US cpaitalist competition?
Ah well - another government screwing there own software industry I suppose having been convinced that Software Patents are the only way to get significant foreign IT investments, the convincer no doubt being Microsoft and the like... Lawyers agreeing to this as it means lining their pockets at the expense of everyone else - the cost? A generation not being able to take advantage of technical inovations without paying a tax to companies and entities that had nothing to do with it's development....
The way it is looking too unless something major can happen the UK and Europe are heading the same way....
This is ridiculous. Where is the beef in this? What exactly is the invention? It is like patenting the concept of advertising - or the concept of discounts ot bonuses. These are not inventions.
The USPO seem to be in the process of removing the freedoms of the US citizen that the constitution is designed to protect! I hope this silly patent frenzy is not exported any more to here in Europe, I hope the EU parliament will chuck out the concept of software/method patents (again).
When a portfolio company purchases patents from an R&D company they are contributing. In a very similar vein to putting up cash for research.
I would agree with you with that and most of what you say.
However, where it goes wrong is where these types of patents are submarine patents, and the owners (or purchasers) keep quiet and allow international standards to build around the concepts, and then attack companies complying to those standards.
In those cases, the research and development has been done by others as well as the patent holders (or the guys who the holders purchased it from), and all that is happening there is pure profiteering.
I do not know enough about RFID if the scenario here is like that, so maybe my post was over the top, but as they seem to have patented a standard, so it would not surprise me if it were.
Slashdot Mirror
I get a little board of "Bitcoin is rocketing" or "Bitcoin is crashing" headlines. Niether is true, and never was. Bitcoin is in effect a (virtual) commodity, but with a much lower cap than others such as gold. This means that small things, like Brexit, or the fall of the Chinese Yuan, or the discontinuation of Indian cash bank notes and such will effect the price in a major way, with the inevitable exageration of the market by speculators, followed by the resulting corrections when these minor bubbles burst. This means Bitcoin value in effect goes up and down like a yo-yo. However, bitcoin is sound. The commodity aspect is there and is secure, so it will never go back to zero or anything. The general movement of Bitcoin is up at a gradual pace with a few whooshes in either direction as described above. It is not, nor ever has been, a guaranteed wealth creator nor a crashing pudsey/pyramid scheme.
Free Software Movement is and FSM that is dead? Well - this FSM is ALIVE
Let the flamewars begin...
I think I have just discovered where the old Iraqi Information Minister has ended up....
Ah well, there goes my million....
Ah great! Spammers money being diverted to enforcing M$ proprietary email controls and DRM!
I guess everyone is getting the worst of ALL worlds.
It is worth noting that from 1995 onwards (MS era of Windows 95/98/ME then 2000/XP) though it has been others (including Linux and OpenOffice) that has been keeping software prices down. Not microsoft.
There are some that say all patents are bad. I am not one of them. It has been proven that patents (outside the software world) has, to a lesser or greater degree, encouraged inovation and publicizing of them and has made the world a better place.
However, the patent system is open to abuse, where over-generalized patents are granted and are used to stifle fair competition. Software patents are especially open to this, and I personally think that if the choice existed only between approving ALL software patents, or disallowing ALL of them, I would fall on the side of banning them on the basis that the unfair stifling of fair competition would outweigh the encouragement of inovation factor.
However, if there was a way to grant genuine software patents while rejecting the "land-grabbing" ones then that would be good. I am a mathematician and DO understand the RSA algorithm and how it encrypts data. To say it was "discovered" and not "invented" is silly, it is like saying the internal combustion engine was "discovered". Also it is not a set of computer instructions, it is a design of mathematical principals and procedures that enable public key cryptogrophy, in the same way the internal combustion engine invention is a design of metals and manufacturing procedures to produce a means of locomotion. However the IsNot patent (to say it is an algorithm is an insult to mathematics) is simply a comparison that, in reality, has been used one way or another by programmers since the invention of objects (or even pointers). It is the IT equivalent of a spoon.
Patents, on the whole, are good things IMHO. However, abuse of them is evil. It is important we stop and prevent the abuse, but do we really want to throw out the baby with the bathwater?
However, things like the recent Microsoft "IsNot" patent should not be patentable. That is an attempt at a land grab. Also the patenting file formats in order to try and collect "tax" revenue from the internet should not be permitted.
I have not read the appropriate legislation being proposed, but I think it is wrong to criticize it before I do. So long as vague "landgrabbing" patents of concepts that are, in reality public knowledge, file formats (where no real invention exists) or broard patents over concepts already known by the public (the Microsoft virtual windows patent - remember?) and similar are not permitted then this may be a good(tm) thing.
This would not be connected to the success of the Opie Project, would it?
Not that this has anything to do with delaying implementations of unpopular laws though....
I am trying to think of what the arguments will be...
But there is a but...
Seeing is believing here. On a patent attack Novell will be tempted to cross license the issue, but for Novell customers only, not for Open Source users and distributers in general. It would be nice to see a company like Novell champion the defense of Open Source, and if they do it would be beneficial to the world in general, but how far will they go in a direction that will help competitors like RedHat as well as themselves?
Maybe RedHat and Novell will team up against attacks (RedHat already has a fund to protect Open Source over fraudulent copyright claims). That would really be beneficial, not least to RedHat and Novell!
Even if you think patents are a good thing (as I do), there is no room for Software Patents. The only people they benefit are the Lawyer IP-Land-Grabbers. The vast amount of the proffessionals in the industry I know are against them (includiong me).
Java is trademarked. It would be easy for Sun to say that nothing could be called "Java", or "Java compliant" unless it conforms to their standards.
Also - Sun can release the code under dual license. The GPL - where the code can only be included in other projects that were also GPL, and the JSL (Java Standard license) or whatever, which is in control of Sun and is only issued to code that conforms to Sun's Java Standard.
Although under the above it is possible to fork the standard, it could not be done in a commercial or proprietary product (unless it is released under the GPL - blocking MS and others from doing what they want), and it could not be called "Java". Therefore, the above I think would satisfy all requirements.
The IP numbering allocation in IPv6 is hierarchal, which they are not in IPv4. The first 16 bits are the FP and Top Level Address (allocated to "trunk" cos like MCI), the next is a 32 byt "Next Level Addres" allocated to ISPs, and finally "Sight Level Address"es allocated to people like you and me.
At the moment many routing tables on the trunks have thousands of entries, increasing as allocation of IPv4 becomes more and more fragmented, significantly slowing down the trunks. IPv6 will mean considerably fewer routing table entries there, increasing performance.
Although the raw IPv6 header is larger than the minimum IPv4 header, a system of, in effect, encapsulating parts of the headers in the data packet that are not needed in routing exists where it does not in IPv4 (such as those needed in TCP). The savings there should more than make up for the degregation in increasing the minimum size of 20 to a fixed size of 40.
It is a misconception that IPv4 produces 4 billion IP addresses for the world to use. By the time all the university's Class A addresses and all the wasted IP addresses of those who have networks with machines missing are considered, all the network and bradcast addresses and so on are also considered you will be lucky to see 3 billion. In fact I would not be surprised if the figure was nearer 2. This may be enough for the Western World but not for Asia as well.
IPv6 is also neccessary to adopt the up and coming internet technologies, such as those that use MultiCast (IPv4 implementation of this will NEVER get adopted). I agree with you that it is the routers that are holding this back - but once an area is enjoying the benefits of IPv6 then I believe it will rapidly spread.
My 2c worth....
Ian Lyon
There is a scene in Lawrence of Arabia where you see a camel riding slowly towards O'Toole taking time to do it. This was the entrance of Omar Sherif. Afterwards David Lean said he got it wrong, and that that particular buildup ended too quickly, however, he did NOT change it for the reasons given.
Although George Lucas's modifications to the original Star Wars Trilogy may be making it more cinematically pleasing, and maybe even more to how he would have liked it to originally turn out, what he is doing could be interpreted as defacing. The original Star Wars Trilogy are works of art in themselves.
Everyone would have thought it ridiculous if Picasso took some of his earlier work back, and touched it up to make it more realistic, or in fashion. I think the same way about the Star Wars Films.
A good triumph for the Open Source Model.
It should not be too difficult to create an appropriate lufs fss module to do the trick.
You can already see this in OpenOffice.Org and in MySQL. I am also attempting this in my EDL Language Project. I do not think it is a bad thing and will in the long term enrich free/open software.
Dual Licensing is a very good intermediatory from a proprietary to a free software environment.
Can anyone at NBC say "ssh tunelling"? I would have thought it would be better to try to get people to watch your TV stations by providing a better service than the one transmitted down braodband (I cannot believe that is difficult) rather than trying to block out competition (which by using proxy servers would be easy to circumvent anyway). What happened to good old fashioned US cpaitalist competition?
The way it is looking too unless something major can happen the UK and Europe are heading the same way....
The USPO seem to be in the process of removing the freedoms of the US citizen that the constitution is designed to protect! I hope this silly patent frenzy is not exported any more to here in Europe, I hope the EU parliament will chuck out the concept of software/method patents (again).
I would agree with you with that and most of what you say.
However, where it goes wrong is where these types of patents are submarine patents, and the owners (or purchasers) keep quiet and allow international standards to build around the concepts, and then attack companies complying to those standards.
In those cases, the research and development has been done by others as well as the patent holders (or the guys who the holders purchased it from), and all that is happening there is pure profiteering.
I do not know enough about RFID if the scenario here is like that, so maybe my post was over the top, but as they seem to have patented a standard, so it would not surprise me if it were.