The real kick in the ass came in 1824 when Andrew Jackson won a majority of both the popular and electoral vote yet still lost the election to John Quincy Adams.
(Neither man got a majority of the electoral votes, so the election was decided by the House of Representatives, which voted by state 13-7 for Adams with 3 going for William Crawford.)
For a couple of years now I've been arguing that ISPs ought to kick in for the maintenance of a Usenet archive in much the same manner that cable companies kick in to cover C-SPAN's costs. While some newsgroups are higher content than others, there's no denying that there is an absolute treasure-trove of information that passes through news servers every day. Since the entire online community benefits, the entire online community ought to pay to maintain an archive.
Just today I saw an online article that over half the households in the US are online in some capacity. According to the Census Bureau, that means around 50 million households are online. A buck a month per customer routed through ISPs and you're looking at six hundred million dollars a year -- enough to cover an archive without even asking the rest of the world to kick in. We could pay for it ourselves as a token gesture of reconciliation for "Americanizing" the rest of the net through brute force.
You run into the issue of censorship almost before the proposal hits paper. For every newsgroup there will almost certainly be someone or many someones who wants the content sifted or outright not in the archive. Beating these people into submission so that they will be silent forever will be difficult.
Just a notion, make of it what you will. I'm sure there's a vast array of technical issues that would have to be worked out up front, but I'm absolutely convinced that this could work. Further, I think this is the only way a Usenet archive _can_ work (barring some well-funded philanthropic gesture from a dead billionaire).
Actually, if you made a mouseover shopping site (and if Amazon's patent is upheld) then you are infringing. Sure, it's called "1 Click" but if you read the patent application itself it actually covers ANY SINGLE ACTION. Presumably this was Amazon's way of also wrapping up 1 Word shopping, 1 Stare shopping, and 1 PauseForAMoment shopping.
Read the patent app at USPTO or IBM. Read the whole thing. It'll send chills down your spine like you just _thought_ you'd experienced.
Gahh. Yeah, I blew the Cade reference...memory's not what it used to be. R3's claims of legitimacy to the throne are tainted somewhat by the fact that he snuffed or arranged to have snuffed the folks who sat between him and the throne.
Given that his failure to snuff Henry Tudor eventually led to the reign of Elizabeth I, "unfortunate" might not be the most appropriate descriptor. (Plus, the Yorks and Lancasters had become tired -- the time for Fresh Meat on the throne was due.)
For what it's worth, "let's kill all the lawyers" was a plan by Richard III to remain in power after overthrowing the rightful government by depriving others of their legal protections and recourses. The lawyers out there can thank their professional ancestry for turning "kill all the lawyers" from an evil act into a pretty darn good idea.
"[T]he story states that states are 'losing' money on taxes. This strikes me as funy because that money doesn't belong to the state, and never did. [T]hey aren't actually losing anything."
It's a matter of semantics: due to the tax moratorium the amount of revenue that states draw from sales taxes is falling (in many cases precipitously) but the states' residents aren't buying less. In that sense, the states _are_ losing money.
Don't get me wrong, I rage at the unconscionably high tax burden paid here (cue a European poster to sneer at typical American whining about taxes) but in my experience, the closer the taxing authority is to the voters the less likely it is to spend your money -- and it IS your money -- recklessly. Sure, some of the money collected by the state is wasted or spent in a manner that you'd not prefer, but a lot of it is spent maintaining bridges, roads, schools, environmental protection, social services and a host of things the Feds also kick in for -- and it's spent in your backyard.
I trust you are aware that RMS suffers from near-crippling RSI?
Whether you like his principles or not, whether you like his license or not, whether you like his hygiene or not: the man has literally destroyed his body developing software that he believed could and would change the world. That's a hell of a sacrifice and one which deserves a little more respect than a sneering "get back to coding."
RMS is most emphatically NOT an advocate of "open source". His cause is "free software" and there are many examples of software which meets the Open Source definition without being Free (the latest, apparently, being Python 1.6). Whether you agree with some of the stands he has taken in the past, honesty requires that you acknowledge he has never misled people about what his goals are and he has never cared what others thought of his methods.
The recent high-profile licensing flamewars have come about in part because of the success of RMS's cause. After many years trapped in universities and corporate basements, free software has become quite popular and its quality is recognized. ESR's "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" provided a stimulus in the form of demonstrating how users will improve software faster when they can provide more than just bug reports. As a result, the world has become fixed on the idea that releasing source means better software. There are two big problems with this success, though:
The first problem comes about through licensing schemes that provide source but little else to the user, the most egregious example I can think of being the SCSL abomination delivered by Sun. Licenses like these are little more than an attempt to get users to do your work for you while reserving all rights to that work to yourself. Stallman's attack on this particular license generated little flame because the Open Source crowd was also condemning it.
The second problem is a little more subtle and is best exemplified by the unending GPL vs. BSD bickering. A BSD-style license provides source and nearly unlimited rights to the user, but is little better than an SCSL in Stallman's view because it permits unscrupulous users to "take the code private", that is, to benefit from others' work without sharing their own. If you truly understand RMS's definition of free software as "I'll show you mine if you show me yours" then you will see how such a license is also unacceptable to Free Software advocates.
These second category licenses have enjoyed increasing popularity as an opportunity by developers to get their product in wider use. Many people misunderstand the requirements of a GPL-compatible license and think that anything they do using a GPL-comptaible product must be released -- don't laugh, I know one guy who refuses to write anything in Python because "then I'd have to give my code away." The question of people asking if they can release binaries compiled by GCC without having to release source demonstrates the prevalence of this miunderstanding. A quick way around that is to allow people to take the code private. Some like that, some don't. It's unfair to attack RMS for being just as insistent on free software now as he was before the great Open Source Revolution of the 1990s.
Normally I don't really get too worked up about how my posts are moderated; I'm here to express opinions, not rack up some kind of score.
But "Flamebait"?
Sneering contempt is what I was going for. To put it in a more-easily digestible form for the sarcasm-impaired person or persons who considered my original post "Flamebait":
It is obvious from the press release that RSA expects this to be a good PR move. I hope that people are not taken in by that, because releasing a patented algorithm into the public domain 16 years, 50 weeks into its 17-year patent is far from an act of generosity.
On another note, a re-read makes my original post look like I'd rather roll my own algorithms than use RSA -- no way, now how. I don't have anywhere near the crypto skills to produce anything more secure than ROT-13. What I meant was that since RSA has been so uptight about enforcing their patent, I (and the rest of the crypto-using folks out there) have had to find alternate methods (el-Gamal, etc.) of performing the tasks that RSA is used for. I see no reason to abandon those algorithms now that RSA has so generously released theirs.
Gosh...after almost 17 years, RSA (the company) decides to release RSA (the algorithm) into the public domain. And it's two whole weeks before the patent expires! Gosh! You guys are so swell! I'm going to use RSA in all my security products to support your selflessness and your generous to the world community!
Bah.
Setting aside one's beliefs on the idea behind being able to get a patent on math, there's the underlying assumption from RSA (the company) that we should be grateful because they've deigned to surrender their oh-so-valuable intellectual property after extracting only 99.77% of the life of the patent. Don't do me any favors, guys -- I'll find my own algorithms.
I would just like to wipe the tears of joy from my eyes and thank you for using the word "loose" as a verb properly -- unlike Mr. "would of [sic] caused us to loose[sic] our IP" from Digital Convergence.
"Why even encrypt with a key? They could have xor'd the content against a 16bit key, and sued just the same."
From my reading of the DMCA (yes, I've read the whole thing), they could have just NOT-ed the entire bitstream, called that an "access control" mechanism, and had all the legal protection of DMCA. The efficacy of the mechanism is irrelevant, merely its existence.
At UIUC, one of the hoops you jump through before they finally slap the degree on you is that you must -- yes, must -- sign the form granting UMI the right to keep a microfilm copy of your work, which they are allowed to sell. You retain copyright, but they get reproduction and some sales rights. If they sell more than 7 copies in a year, they must pay the author (that is, you) royalties of some fairly trivial amount.
I would expect that most institutions have a similar agreement with UMI and that most graduate students either don't care about the implications of the forced signature or (like me) figure that getting the PhD is a damn sight more important than having some guy pay a few bucks ten years down the road to see what a moldy dissertation about persistent neutron chains says.
The moon is not God. It is not Diana. It is not one of the shining buttocks of the four-assed space monkey. Deciding not to exploit its resources (or any other resources) out of concern for the spiritual beliefs of a population that still considers the bow and arrow to represent a great leap forward is Just Plain Dumb. I'm all for religious tolerance and respect, but when superstition slams into necessity then the church-going public is just going to have to give a little ground -- and I don't really care whether the topic is putting up a power station on the moon or establishing the Strip Mall of the Rock in Jerusalem.
I like to sit around a hypothesize about the future as much as the next guy (as long as the next guy likes to sit around and hypothesize about the future as much as I do) but I've come to believe that the words "quantum" and "nano" are dead-bang indicators of some silly-ass utopian "In the future we'll do everything instantly at no cost" delusion.
That may change, but for now those terms send up a big ol' red flag.
You know, I see this argument a lot and I just don't get it. Why do so many people when comparing product A and product B look at feature C and conclude some sort of superiority based on which product implemented it first?
The glaring example from this piece is CD automounting. Yes, Mac OS had it before Linux did. In what way does that make Mac OS superior to Linux? Do they not both have automounting? It cuts both ways, of course -- when Mac OS X comes out there will be an army of Linux fans sniggering at the Mac people who are geeked about being able to run 'top' or some such utility.
Jim's thought for the day: having a feature the other guy lacks is something to brag about. Bragging about having that feature longer is Just Plain Stupid.
No, he's not wrong. Napster was created to make MP3-trading easier, and we're not talking about people looking for tunes by the best garage band in Punxsatawney, PA. Fanning never pretended otherwise until he had a company faced with lawsuits on all sides. However, many people talk about "Napster" when they really ought to be talking about peer-to-peer file sharing and the like.
The problem is that because of Napster and its creation/use as a tool of/for copyright-violators, the rest of us are going to have to work very hard in what will probably be a losing battle to protect the legality of general file-sharing technologies.
It boils down to this: when Windows users buy a DVD-ROM drive, they get the software necessary to make that device work with their operating system of choice at no additional charge. Until the same can be said for Linux users who purchase DVD-ROM drives, I will have no use for the hardware.
I prefer free software, then open source software, then finally closed software -- but I'll be damned if I pay for a hardware driver with a little userland app built in. I'll never pay for anything that has a no-cost equivalent for Windows.
Did you or Ender _read_ the post or just Malda's self-pitying addendum? The guy is not grumbling about bugs -- he's grumbling about the fact that patches are not accepted or even acknowledged, the fact that the markedly inferior documentation is touted over the superior product done by volunteers, and that the maintainers essentially flushed everything without warning at one point.
This isn't a "shut up and code" issue -- the volunteers have BEEN coding; their efforts are going for nought because the maintainers seem to have no interest in working via the free software model.
Personally, I'd suggest that the original submitter do one of two things:
1) Work on some other project, or preferably
2) If others feel the way you do about SourceForge, take the code you had when VA ripped the rug out from under you, fork from there, and use the free software model to smoke their product.
Your postal mail analogy is flawed. What MP3.com was doing was not the equivalent of you mailing a copy to another place; it was the equivalent of them buying and scanning in books and letting you have a copy if you showed them a receipt for that book.
Yes, you can rip your CDs to MP3. Yes, you can upload those MP3s to a server to listen to anywhere in the world. Yes, MP3.com can do the hosting. No, they cannot do the ripping for you. It seems a little silly that they can't, since there is no functional difference between you ripping/uploading and them ripping and storing. So write your Congresscritters and ask for a change.
As a side note, the day this service went active, every lawyer I saw quoted said this was going to happen. It was the closest thing to a slam-dunk that the media companies have had. And if MP3.com had been willing to sit down with the media companies, explain the service, and sign a deal wherein they kicked a few bucks the RIAA's way, they'd probably have gotten the all-clear.
What cracks me up about this warning to Log Off Immediately (yadda yadda) is that for Unix-like machines, this message is delivered by/etc/issue before you've even logged _on_.
I suppose that's to be expected in these days of "Log onto our website at www.duhhhh.com"
Slashdot Mirror
The real kick in the ass came in 1824 when Andrew Jackson won a majority of both the popular and electoral vote yet still lost the election to John Quincy Adams.
(Neither man got a majority of the electoral votes, so the election was decided by the House of Representatives, which voted by state 13-7 for Adams with 3 going for William Crawford.)
For a couple of years now I've been arguing that ISPs ought to kick in for the maintenance of a Usenet archive in much the same manner that cable companies kick in to cover C-SPAN's costs. While some newsgroups are higher content than others, there's no denying that there is an absolute treasure-trove of information that passes through news servers every day. Since the entire online community benefits, the entire online community ought to pay to maintain an archive.
Just today I saw an online article that over half the households in the US are online in some capacity. According to the Census Bureau, that means around 50 million households are online. A buck a month per customer routed through ISPs and you're looking at six hundred million dollars a year -- enough to cover an archive without even asking the rest of the world to kick in. We could pay for it ourselves as a token gesture of reconciliation for "Americanizing" the rest of the net through brute force.
You run into the issue of censorship almost before the proposal hits paper. For every newsgroup there will almost certainly be someone or many someones who wants the content sifted or outright not in the archive. Beating these people into submission so that they will be silent forever will be difficult.
Just a notion, make of it what you will. I'm sure there's a vast array of technical issues that would have to be worked out up front, but I'm absolutely convinced that this could work. Further, I think this is the only way a Usenet archive _can_ work (barring some well-funded philanthropic gesture from a dead billionaire).
Comments?
Actually, if you made a mouseover shopping site (and if Amazon's patent is upheld) then you are infringing. Sure, it's called "1 Click" but if you read the patent application itself it actually covers ANY SINGLE ACTION. Presumably this was Amazon's way of also wrapping up 1 Word shopping, 1 Stare shopping, and 1 PauseForAMoment shopping.
Read the patent app at USPTO or IBM. Read the whole thing. It'll send chills down your spine like you just _thought_ you'd experienced.
Gahh. Yeah, I blew the Cade reference...memory's not what it used to be. R3's claims of legitimacy to the throne are tainted somewhat by the fact that he snuffed or arranged to have snuffed the folks who sat between him and the throne.
Given that his failure to snuff Henry Tudor eventually led to the reign of Elizabeth I, "unfortunate" might not be the most appropriate descriptor. (Plus, the Yorks and Lancasters had become tired -- the time for Fresh Meat on the throne was due.)
For what it's worth, "let's kill all the lawyers" was a plan by Richard III to remain in power after overthrowing the rightful government by depriving others of their legal protections and recourses. The lawyers out there can thank their professional ancestry for turning "kill all the lawyers" from an evil act into a pretty darn good idea.
"[T]he story states that states are 'losing' money on taxes. This strikes me as funy because that money doesn't belong to the state, and never did. [T]hey aren't actually losing anything."
It's a matter of semantics: due to the tax moratorium the amount of revenue that states draw from sales taxes is falling (in many cases precipitously) but the states' residents aren't buying less. In that sense, the states _are_ losing money.
Don't get me wrong, I rage at the unconscionably high tax burden paid here (cue a European poster to sneer at typical American whining about taxes) but in my experience, the closer the taxing authority is to the voters the less likely it is to spend your money -- and it IS your money -- recklessly. Sure, some of the money collected by the state is wasted or spent in a manner that you'd not prefer, but a lot of it is spent maintaining bridges, roads, schools, environmental protection, social services and a host of things the Feds also kick in for -- and it's spent in your backyard.
I trust you are aware that RMS suffers from near-crippling RSI?
Whether you like his principles or not, whether you like his license or not, whether you like his hygiene or not: the man has literally destroyed his body developing software that he believed could and would change the world. That's a hell of a sacrifice and one which deserves a little more respect than a sneering "get back to coding."
RMS is most emphatically NOT an advocate of "open source". His cause is "free software" and there are many examples of software which meets the Open Source definition without being Free (the latest, apparently, being Python 1.6). Whether you agree with some of the stands he has taken in the past, honesty requires that you acknowledge he has never misled people about what his goals are and he has never cared what others thought of his methods.
The recent high-profile licensing flamewars have come about in part because of the success of RMS's cause. After many years trapped in universities and corporate basements, free software has become quite popular and its quality is recognized. ESR's "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" provided a stimulus in the form of demonstrating how users will improve software faster when they can provide more than just bug reports. As a result, the world has become fixed on the idea that releasing source means better software. There are two big problems with this success, though:
The first problem comes about through licensing schemes that provide source but little else to the user, the most egregious example I can think of being the SCSL abomination delivered by Sun. Licenses like these are little more than an attempt to get users to do your work for you while reserving all rights to that work to yourself. Stallman's attack on this particular license generated little flame because the Open Source crowd was also condemning it.
The second problem is a little more subtle and is best exemplified by the unending GPL vs. BSD bickering. A BSD-style license provides source and nearly unlimited rights to the user, but is little better than an SCSL in Stallman's view because it permits unscrupulous users to "take the code private", that is, to benefit from others' work without sharing their own. If you truly understand RMS's definition of free software as "I'll show you mine if you show me yours" then you will see how such a license is also unacceptable to Free Software advocates.
These second category licenses have enjoyed increasing popularity as an opportunity by developers to get their product in wider use. Many people misunderstand the requirements of a GPL-compatible license and think that anything they do using a GPL-comptaible product must be released -- don't laugh, I know one guy who refuses to write anything in Python because "then I'd have to give my code away." The question of people asking if they can release binaries compiled by GCC without having to release source demonstrates the prevalence of this miunderstanding. A quick way around that is to allow people to take the code private. Some like that, some don't. It's unfair to attack RMS for being just as insistent on free software now as he was before the great Open Source Revolution of the 1990s.
Normally I don't really get too worked up about how my posts are moderated; I'm here to express opinions, not rack up some kind of score.
But "Flamebait"?
Sneering contempt is what I was going for. To put it in a more-easily digestible form for the sarcasm-impaired person or persons who considered my original post "Flamebait":
It is obvious from the press release that RSA expects this to be a good PR move. I hope that people are not taken in by that, because releasing a patented algorithm into the public domain 16 years, 50 weeks into its 17-year patent is far from an act of generosity.
On another note, a re-read makes my original post look like I'd rather roll my own algorithms than use RSA -- no way, now how. I don't have anywhere near the crypto skills to produce anything more secure than ROT-13. What I meant was that since RSA has been so uptight about enforcing their patent, I (and the rest of the crypto-using folks out there) have had to find alternate methods (el-Gamal, etc.) of performing the tasks that RSA is used for. I see no reason to abandon those algorithms now that RSA has so generously released theirs.
Gosh...after almost 17 years, RSA (the company) decides to release RSA (the algorithm) into the public domain. And it's two whole weeks before the patent expires! Gosh! You guys are so swell! I'm going to use RSA in all my security products to support your selflessness and your generous to the world community!
Bah.
Setting aside one's beliefs on the idea behind being able to get a patent on math, there's the underlying assumption from RSA (the company) that we should be grateful because they've deigned to surrender their oh-so-valuable intellectual property after extracting only 99.77% of the life of the patent. Don't do me any favors, guys -- I'll find my own algorithms.
"...CEOs loose their attack dogs..."
I would just like to wipe the tears of joy from my eyes and thank you for using the word "loose" as a verb properly -- unlike Mr. "would of [sic] caused us to loose[sic] our IP" from Digital Convergence.
"Why even encrypt with a key? They could have xor'd the content against a 16bit key, and sued just the same."
From my reading of the DMCA (yes, I've read the whole thing), they could have just NOT-ed the entire bitstream, called that an "access control" mechanism, and had all the legal protection of DMCA. The efficacy of the mechanism is irrelevant, merely its existence.
At UIUC, one of the hoops you jump through before they finally slap the degree on you is that you must -- yes, must -- sign the form granting UMI the right to keep a microfilm copy of your work, which they are allowed to sell. You retain copyright, but they get reproduction and some sales rights. If they sell more than 7 copies in a year, they must pay the author (that is, you) royalties of some fairly trivial amount.
I would expect that most institutions have a similar agreement with UMI and that most graduate students either don't care about the implications of the forced signature or (like me) figure that getting the PhD is a damn sight more important than having some guy pay a few bucks ten years down the road to see what a moldy dissertation about persistent neutron chains says.
The moon is not God. It is not Diana. It is not one of the shining buttocks of the four-assed space monkey. Deciding not to exploit its resources (or any other resources) out of concern for the spiritual beliefs of a population that still considers the bow and arrow to represent a great leap forward is Just Plain Dumb. I'm all for religious tolerance and respect, but when superstition slams into necessity then the church-going public is just going to have to give a little ground -- and I don't really care whether the topic is putting up a power station on the moon or establishing the Strip Mall of the Rock in Jerusalem.
"It would be great to go ssh only, but the client side issues are a pain in the neck because of the stupid RSA patent."
Just as a reminder, the patent on RSA runs out in a few months. I don't remember the exact date...
("beware, hostile .dk takeover on SlashDot!)"
Great....Danes.
Thank you! I'll be here all week! Try the veal! Tip your waitress!
You've got to be fuckin' kiddin' me!
Someone actually registered, paid for, and USES "mofo.com"?
I like to sit around a hypothesize about the future as much as the next guy (as long as the next guy likes to sit around and hypothesize about the future as much as I do) but I've come to believe that the words "quantum" and "nano" are dead-bang indicators of some silly-ass utopian "In the future we'll do everything instantly at no cost" delusion.
That may change, but for now those terms send up a big ol' red flag.
You know, I see this argument a lot and I just don't get it. Why do so many people when comparing product A and product B look at feature C and conclude some sort of superiority based on which product implemented it first?
The glaring example from this piece is CD automounting. Yes, Mac OS had it before Linux did. In what way does that make Mac OS superior to Linux? Do they not both have automounting? It cuts both ways, of course -- when Mac OS X comes out there will be an army of Linux fans sniggering at the Mac people who are geeked about being able to run 'top' or some such utility.
Jim's thought for the day: having a feature the other guy lacks is something to brag about. Bragging about having that feature longer is Just Plain Stupid.
No, he's not wrong. Napster was created to make MP3-trading easier, and we're not talking about people looking for tunes by the best garage band in Punxsatawney, PA. Fanning never pretended otherwise until he had a company faced with lawsuits on all sides. However, many people talk about "Napster" when they really ought to be talking about peer-to-peer file sharing and the like.
The problem is that because of Napster and its creation/use as a tool of/for copyright-violators, the rest of us are going to have to work very hard in what will probably be a losing battle to protect the legality of general file-sharing technologies.
It boils down to this: when Windows users buy a DVD-ROM drive, they get the software necessary to make that device work with their operating system of choice at no additional charge. Until the same can be said for Linux users who purchase DVD-ROM drives, I will have no use for the hardware.
I prefer free software, then open source software, then finally closed software -- but I'll be damned if I pay for a hardware driver with a little userland app built in. I'll never pay for anything that has a no-cost equivalent for Windows.
Did you or Ender _read_ the post or just Malda's self-pitying addendum? The guy is not grumbling about bugs -- he's grumbling about the fact that patches are not accepted or even acknowledged, the fact that the markedly inferior documentation is touted over the superior product done by volunteers, and that the maintainers essentially flushed everything without warning at one point.
This isn't a "shut up and code" issue -- the volunteers have BEEN coding; their efforts are going for nought because the maintainers seem to have no interest in working via the free software model.
Personally, I'd suggest that the original submitter do one of two things:
1) Work on some other project, or preferably
2) If others feel the way you do about SourceForge, take the code you had when VA ripped the rug out from under you, fork from there, and use the free software model to smoke their product.
Your postal mail analogy is flawed. What MP3.com was doing was not the equivalent of you mailing a copy to another place; it was the equivalent of them buying and scanning in books and letting you have a copy if you showed them a receipt for that book.
Yes, you can rip your CDs to MP3. Yes, you can upload those MP3s to a server to listen to anywhere in the world. Yes, MP3.com can do the hosting. No, they cannot do the ripping for you. It seems a little silly that they can't, since there is no functional difference between you ripping/uploading and them ripping and storing. So write your Congresscritters and ask for a change.
As a side note, the day this service went active, every lawyer I saw quoted said this was going to happen. It was the closest thing to a slam-dunk that the media companies have had. And if MP3.com had been willing to sit down with the media companies, explain the service, and sign a deal wherein they kicked a few bucks the RIAA's way, they'd probably have gotten the all-clear.
What cracks me up about this warning to Log Off Immediately (yadda yadda) is that for Unix-like machines, this message is delivered by /etc/issue before you've even logged _on_.
I suppose that's to be expected in these days of "Log onto our website at www.duhhhh.com"
If you want the pod race, rent "Ben Hur".