Software patents are going somewhere, they are going to the bit-bucket in the sky. Do you know who's going to send them there?
We are!
Yeah, right.
Just like we were able to defeat absurdly long copyright. Just like we were able to put the smackdown on Congress to keep them from extending copyright. Just like we managed to defeat the DMCA. Just like we we've been able to prevent warantless wiretapping, the incarceration of individuals without trial or even access to legal representation, the use of voting machines that leave no independently-verifiable audit trail, etc., etc., ad nauseum.
Wanna know what our score is versus the evils of the world? ZERO. We've won nothing. The only thing we've ever been able to do is keep evil from winning once in a while, and that's it.
So go on believing that we can and will make a permanent, significant difference. Everyone is allowed to dream, after all.
But don't be surprised, when you wake up, to find that the world is an oppressive, choking, hostile place, because that's exactly where we're headed and there's nothing anywhere in the world that looks like it can stop this headlong rush towards madness.
He can't have said that. GNU Emacs never fit in 640K.
Right. Instead, I think he said "$640K is more money than anyone will ever need" in response to Bill Gates saying "640K is more memory than anyone will ever need".
...but it probably won't make any difference in the long run...
I'm not convinced that the effort of making it easy to present free software code as prior art during USPTO examination would somehow diminish the efforts of fighting software patents in general. It's possible, but I'm not convinced of it.
No, I think the biggest problem here is that the USPTO does not take its role of patent gatekeeper seriously. It wantonly ignores prior art and grants patents on things which are obvious even to the average person. If I'm not mistaken, it has even granted patents on things for which an expired patent already existed! It completely ignores the tests the law requires it to perform and instead defers such judgement to the courts. And anyone who believes that it does so out of mere incompetence or simply by accident is a fool.
With a patent office that does nothing but rubber-stamp patents, of what use can the OSDL effort possibly be? The OSDL effort won't help, either, if the judge ignores prior art, as some have been known to do.
No, I think this, like so many other "IP" schemes, is controlled primarily by those who have big piles of cash, because it can only be changed from the top. As with the war against civil liberties, the encroaching fascism, etc., there's really no way to win, because the people who have the ability to change it want things to remain just the way they are.
What evidence do you have that supports the notion that Americans will get faster access if net neutrality is scuttled?
I'll go even further than that: scuttle net neutrality, and Americans will get slower overall access to the internet. The reason is that the telcos will be able to simultaneously advertise very high speeds (since the speed the customer gets for "preferred" traffic will be very fast) while also reducing (through traffic shaping) the bandwidth available to non-"preferred" traffic. The reason for that is to minimize the amount of additional infrastructure
So the question really is: what makes you (the original poster) think that the customer will be able to use the bandwidth he can get even if he does get FTTH? Once the ISPs violate net neutrality, they'll have no incentive at all to improve general internet service, and every incentive to reduce it.
It's entirely possible, if unlikely, that this guy is taking an independent stand on this particular issue.
In any case, the danger from electronic voting machines that lack a paper trail isn't hacking from the outside, though that's been the primary focus lately.
No, the real problem, and the real danger, is that the companies that make these machines will do so in such a way that they will automatically favor whatever candidate(s) the manufacturing companies prefer, and thus it simply becomes a matter of influencing the manufacturing companies to "prefer" a particular candidate, party, etc.
That's why Walden O'Dell's statement regarding delivering votes to the President was, and is, so troubling.
It's also why I believe the Republicans (to whom Diebold appears to have pledged their support, if O'Dell's statement has any weight at all) will win the upcoming election in most of the states that primarily use voting machines (except, of course, where it's obvious ahead of time that they shouldn't, and even then they might win a couple of those). It has nothing to do with being Republican so much as being the party that's in control right now and doing whatever it takes to stay there. You're a fool if you believe the Republican party isn't willing to do whatever it takes to stay in control.
Several major technology vendors have pledged not to enforce their patents against open source projects.
Such pledges aren't worth squat. While they may wind up in the record and thus could be used by open source projects as a defense in court, the bottom line is that one would still have to go to court to present that evidence. Against a well-financed corporation, that's likely to mean little, especially since some judges have even gone so far as to disregard prior art in order to uphold a patent claim.
The bottom line is that the court of law is not a rational venue, but instead seems to be a place to roll the dice, where the odds are stacked heavily in favor of whoever has the most cash.
That means that open source projects are going to be very vulnerable to patent lawsuits, even in the face of a "pledge" by the patentholders that they won't sue.
Re:CS Supports Al Queda
on
Brave New Ballot
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Election officials and those they work for don't want the voting machines to be secure, nor do they want them to generate an audit trail. They want to be able to silently steal elections. They want to become the New Ruling Class.
Real democracy brings instability to the government. It's the very nature of democracy. These people don't want instability -- they want stability, which means they want to be in charge and to remain in charge. They don't want to serve the people. They want to serve themselves.
I think it's likely they'll get what they wish. They have too much money, power, and control to be ousted now. That includes control over most of the "information" sources that people use to make their decisions, primarily the mass media. And they're willing to go to any lengths at all to maintain their control. I mean any lengths.
In the struggle for freedom and self-determination, we have lost. Time to enjoy what little we have left for however long we have it.
"Using an Xbox modified to run Linux, researchers have developed virtual reality hand exercises..."
Um, yeah. I guess you have to get the Xbox to run Linux first before you can use it to show your porn, um, I mean "virtual reality environment" in order to do your, um, "hand exercises"...
...at least in the first couple of screenshots in the "feature enhancements" section.
That's probably because of regressions or other bugs in the Freetype library. See, for instance, Debian bug #367593.
I've reverted back to 2.1.10-1 on my system for now, in order to avoid those issues. I can only hope that the API doesn't change before they fix the rendering issues...
The most successful sociopaths are excellent actors and quite charming. Ms. Dunn may have appeared to care about her employees and their personal lives, but did she really care? The only way to know that is to know what actions she took as a result of the concerns the employees aired to her.
It's also possible that how she interacts with and deals with subordinates is very different than how she interacts with and deals with her peers. People can be complicated and multifaceted.
Only by examining her actions and the context in which they were taken can you determine the kind of person she really is. Even so, her apparent actions on the board of HP don't inspire confidence.
The Republican party as a whole (including the Republican "centrists" of which I once counted myself) are going to pay over the next election or two.
Or, rather, they would, if they didn't control the voting machines. Expect a lot more of the same electioneering that happened in 2000 and 2004, enough to guarantee that the Republicans remain in control.
About 122 of 300 million came out to vote which isn't even half. To me, that shows disinterest.
Of course, that 300 million includes children, which comprise approximately a quarter of the population. So it's really more like 122 of 225 million.
Or, in other words, 54% of the eligible voting population. I'd say that's a reasonable turnout, considering that it counts all adults of all ages and all capacities.
He was quite upset when his son deleted his entire windows user profile and all the files associated with it -- including his accounting data and documents folders for his home based business-- when he needed more space to store music and picture files on his system.
That's what he gets for giving administrative privileges on his box to someone (his son, in this case) who doesn't need it and thus shouldn't have it.
His son should have had his own restricted account on the box, if even that much (since there was accounting data on the box, I'd argue that nobody else should have had access to that system). Admittedly, once you have local access to the box you can be compromised by someone determined enough, but at least it would take some effort.
Backups are no substitute for proper system administration techniques -- they are a part of them.
Doesn't it give someone entirely too much power to let a single Senator be able to block and entire bill indefinatly and anonymously?
Since most laws place restrictions on a person's freedom, I'd much rather there be as many mechanisms in place as possible to stall the passage of legislation as long as possible, or to prevent it entirely.
To be honest, one of the biggest mistakes this country's founders made was to set up a full-time legislative body. Instead, they should have set it up so that it congregated only on demand.
Not when I keep getting a new internet every few minutes. A whole internet every few minutes! Can you imagine how many libraries of congress that is? I don't know about you, but I'd have a lot of trouble stuffing an entire library of congress into one of those tubes! And since the library of congress is obviously a lot bigger than this storage computer, there's no way you could stuff it into it!
Until they come out with one of these that's bigger than the library of congress, I'm not buying!
- Senator Ted Stevens, computer guru extraordinaire
It is not so easy to get a total partisan hack or lap dog into the SCOTUS, and people change when they receive that lifetime, practically bulletproof appointment.
It is if said hack is made to understand that if they don't support the guys that got them there, there's a very high chance that they'll have an unfortunate "accident".
One should not underestimate the lengths to which those in power are willing to go in order to achieve total power.
Perhaps you missed part of my sentence, specifically the word 'if.'
I saw it. Since your argument was predicated on that "if", I think it was reasonable on my part to argue the point. Otherwise you'd have to argue that a revolution against a sitting government with a modern military can succeed when the revolution involves a small percentage of the population and lacks the backing of a major military power. That's an argument that I think you'd lose, given the massive firepower difference between the military and the civilians.
There's an Iraqi government now. Does it matter how long the government is there? Do the government officals gain a -2 to thier THACO?
The Iraqi government is there with the blessing of the major military power (the U.S.) in the area, not despite it. If the U.S. didn't want the Iraqi government in its present form to be there, I assure you it wouldn't be, just like Saddam Hussein's government is no longer there.
My basic argument, which you haven't managed to refute, is that a violent revolution against a sitting government which has the backing of a modern military basically cannot succeed without getting the support of either that military or another. In short, the civilians alone can't do the job anymore. This ain't the 1700s, where the most powerful weapon in the military's arsenal was a cannon that could take out perhaps 10 people if they were lucky. In the 1700s, civilians with hunting rifles really could stand up against a military force of roughly equal numbers because the military didn't have weapons that were terribly more effective than those the civilians possessed. That's not the case today. Even without considering nukes, the military has a many thousands to one advantage in firepower. If you don't believe me, ask yourself how the civilian population can take out a squadron of bombers flying along at 40,000 feet when the most powerful weapon they have easy access to is a semiautomatic rifle.
Some US military officals think civil war in Iraq is going to happen, even with US troops there. Does that statement also contracdict what you pointed out about the American Revolution?
No, it doesn't. The reason is that the primary military that the current Iraqi government relies on is not an Iraqi military, it's the U.S. military. I agree that civil war will happen in Iraq, but it won't really start until the U.S. military pulls out of the region. If the Iraqi government by that time has managed to build up a substantial, modern military, then the revolutionaries will fail unless they can somehow either get a large part of that military to side with them or get an outside military force to intervene.
I'm not arguing that a civilian revolution against a sitting government with a modern military won't be tried. I'm arguing that it can't succeed unless it gets a lot of high-firepower help.
I think if 150 million people decided to actively fight, they'd overcome,
When has 50+% of the population ever fought in a revolutionary war? That certainly didn't happen during the American Revolution. During the American Revolution, at most 10% of the population fought against the British (see here for the number of men who fought and here for the population figures).
It would take the participation of a lot more civilians to stand even the remotest of chances against a modern military. Remember: they can't just survive (as the Iraqi insurgents have), they have to defeat the sitting government. The latter is a much, much harder task.
For a revolution against a sitting government to succeed, the revolutionaries would have to get a large part of the government's military on their side.
Just look how quickly and effectively we put down the pan-Islamist uprising in Iraq.
Have the pan-Islamists managed to sieze control of the government? No?
Then the sitting government has, thus far, won.
The revolutionaries don't merely have to survive, they have to win in order to achieve their goal of seizing power from the sitting government. Anything less than that and the sitting government wins.
So the fact that the pan-Islamists haven't been wiped out is irrelevant, because at the moment the government they're fighting against remains in control, which means that thus far the pan-Islamists have lost, at least up until this point.
Things may be more expensive and/or more annoying for the sitting government with revolutionaries running around, but that's merely an inconvenience, nothing more. It's not a real threat until the revolutionaries have a real chance of winning. I assure you, with the firepower concentrated in the hands of the sitting government, they don't have such a chance.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, right.
Just like we were able to defeat absurdly long copyright. Just like we were able to put the smackdown on Congress to keep them from extending copyright. Just like we managed to defeat the DMCA. Just like we we've been able to prevent warantless wiretapping, the incarceration of individuals without trial or even access to legal representation, the use of voting machines that leave no independently-verifiable audit trail, etc., etc., ad nauseum.
Wanna know what our score is versus the evils of the world? ZERO . We've won nothing. The only thing we've ever been able to do is keep evil from winning once in a while, and that's it.
So go on believing that we can and will make a permanent, significant difference. Everyone is allowed to dream, after all.
But don't be surprised, when you wake up, to find that the world is an oppressive, choking, hostile place, because that's exactly where we're headed and there's nothing anywhere in the world that looks like it can stop this headlong rush towards madness.
Right. Instead, I think he said "$640K is more money than anyone will ever need" in response to Bill Gates saying "640K is more memory than anyone will ever need".
Or something like that...
I'm not convinced that the effort of making it easy to present free software code as prior art during USPTO examination would somehow diminish the efforts of fighting software patents in general. It's possible, but I'm not convinced of it.
No, I think the biggest problem here is that the USPTO does not take its role of patent gatekeeper seriously. It wantonly ignores prior art and grants patents on things which are obvious even to the average person. If I'm not mistaken, it has even granted patents on things for which an expired patent already existed! It completely ignores the tests the law requires it to perform and instead defers such judgement to the courts. And anyone who believes that it does so out of mere incompetence or simply by accident is a fool.
With a patent office that does nothing but rubber-stamp patents, of what use can the OSDL effort possibly be? The OSDL effort won't help, either, if the judge ignores prior art, as some have been known to do.
No, I think this, like so many other "IP" schemes, is controlled primarily by those who have big piles of cash, because it can only be changed from the top. As with the war against civil liberties, the encroaching fascism, etc., there's really no way to win, because the people who have the ability to change it want things to remain just the way they are.
I'll go even further than that: scuttle net neutrality, and Americans will get slower overall access to the internet. The reason is that the telcos will be able to simultaneously advertise very high speeds (since the speed the customer gets for "preferred" traffic will be very fast) while also reducing (through traffic shaping) the bandwidth available to non-"preferred" traffic. The reason for that is to minimize the amount of additional infrastructure
So the question really is: what makes you (the original poster) think that the customer will be able to use the bandwidth he can get even if he does get FTTH? Once the ISPs violate net neutrality, they'll have no incentive at all to improve general internet service, and every incentive to reduce it.
It's entirely possible, if unlikely, that this guy is taking an independent stand on this particular issue.
In any case, the danger from electronic voting machines that lack a paper trail isn't hacking from the outside, though that's been the primary focus lately.
No, the real problem, and the real danger, is that the companies that make these machines will do so in such a way that they will automatically favor whatever candidate(s) the manufacturing companies prefer, and thus it simply becomes a matter of influencing the manufacturing companies to "prefer" a particular candidate, party, etc.
That's why Walden O'Dell's statement regarding delivering votes to the President was, and is, so troubling.
It's also why I believe the Republicans (to whom Diebold appears to have pledged their support, if O'Dell's statement has any weight at all) will win the upcoming election in most of the states that primarily use voting machines (except, of course, where it's obvious ahead of time that they shouldn't, and even then they might win a couple of those). It has nothing to do with being Republican so much as being the party that's in control right now and doing whatever it takes to stay there. You're a fool if you believe the Republican party isn't willing to do whatever it takes to stay in control.
Such pledges aren't worth squat. While they may wind up in the record and thus could be used by open source projects as a defense in court, the bottom line is that one would still have to go to court to present that evidence. Against a well-financed corporation, that's likely to mean little, especially since some judges have even gone so far as to disregard prior art in order to uphold a patent claim.
The bottom line is that the court of law is not a rational venue, but instead seems to be a place to roll the dice, where the odds are stacked heavily in favor of whoever has the most cash.
That means that open source projects are going to be very vulnerable to patent lawsuits, even in the face of a "pledge" by the patentholders that they won't sue.
Election officials and those they work for don't want the voting machines to be secure, nor do they want them to generate an audit trail. They want to be able to silently steal elections. They want to become the New Ruling Class.
Real democracy brings instability to the government. It's the very nature of democracy. These people don't want instability -- they want stability, which means they want to be in charge and to remain in charge. They don't want to serve the people. They want to serve themselves.
I think it's likely they'll get what they wish. They have too much money, power, and control to be ousted now. That includes control over most of the "information" sources that people use to make their decisions, primarily the mass media. And they're willing to go to any lengths at all to maintain their control. I mean any lengths.
In the struggle for freedom and self-determination, we have lost. Time to enjoy what little we have left for however long we have it.
Um, yeah. I guess you have to get the Xbox to run Linux first before you can use it to show your porn, um, I mean "virtual reality environment" in order to do your, um, "hand exercises"...
Quite a few people are still nervous about Mono for that reason. I can't say I blame them.
That's probably because of regressions or other bugs in the Freetype library. See, for instance, Debian bug #367593.
I've reverted back to 2.1.10-1 on my system for now, in order to avoid those issues. I can only hope that the API doesn't change before they fix the rendering issues...
Dude, just look at the name. "Iron Python". So it's a statue. Duh.
Hmm...."former"...."security" strategist...
Uhuh. Sure. Whatever you say.
I think I'll grab a copy of the source code now...
*Dons tin foil hat*
The most successful sociopaths are excellent actors and quite charming. Ms. Dunn may have appeared to care about her employees and their personal lives, but did she really care? The only way to know that is to know what actions she took as a result of the concerns the employees aired to her.
It's also possible that how she interacts with and deals with subordinates is very different than how she interacts with and deals with her peers. People can be complicated and multifaceted.
Only by examining her actions and the context in which they were taken can you determine the kind of person she really is. Even so, her apparent actions on the board of HP don't inspire confidence.
Or, rather, they would, if they didn't control the voting machines. Expect a lot more of the same electioneering that happened in 2000 and 2004, enough to guarantee that the Republicans remain in control.
Of course, that 300 million includes children, which comprise approximately a quarter of the population. So it's really more like 122 of 225 million.
Or, in other words, 54% of the eligible voting population. I'd say that's a reasonable turnout, considering that it counts all adults of all ages and all capacities.
That's what he gets for giving administrative privileges on his box to someone (his son, in this case) who doesn't need it and thus shouldn't have it.
His son should have had his own restricted account on the box, if even that much (since there was accounting data on the box, I'd argue that nobody else should have had access to that system). Admittedly, once you have local access to the box you can be compromised by someone determined enough, but at least it would take some effort.
Backups are no substitute for proper system administration techniques -- they are a part of them.
Since most laws place restrictions on a person's freedom, I'd much rather there be as many mechanisms in place as possible to stall the passage of legislation as long as possible, or to prevent it entirely.
To be honest, one of the biggest mistakes this country's founders made was to set up a full-time legislative body. Instead, they should have set it up so that it congregated only on demand.
Not when I keep getting a new internet every few minutes. A whole internet every few minutes! Can you imagine how many libraries of congress that is? I don't know about you, but I'd have a lot of trouble stuffing an entire library of congress into one of those tubes! And since the library of congress is obviously a lot bigger than this storage computer, there's no way you could stuff it into it!
Until they come out with one of these that's bigger than the library of congress, I'm not buying!
- Senator Ted Stevens, computer guru extraordinaire
TFA doesn't say anything about whether or not the music in question is DRM-encumbered. I see no reason at all to believe that it won't be.
So while the music may be free as in beer, it'll likely only be free in the most limited sense of the word.
Thanks, but I'll pass.
It is if said hack is made to understand that if they don't support the guys that got them there, there's a very high chance that they'll have an unfortunate "accident".
One should not underestimate the lengths to which those in power are willing to go in order to achieve total power.
I saw it. Since your argument was predicated on that "if", I think it was reasonable on my part to argue the point. Otherwise you'd have to argue that a revolution against a sitting government with a modern military can succeed when the revolution involves a small percentage of the population and lacks the backing of a major military power. That's an argument that I think you'd lose, given the massive firepower difference between the military and the civilians.
The Iraqi government is there with the blessing of the major military power (the U.S.) in the area, not despite it. If the U.S. didn't want the Iraqi government in its present form to be there, I assure you it wouldn't be, just like Saddam Hussein's government is no longer there.
My basic argument, which you haven't managed to refute, is that a violent revolution against a sitting government which has the backing of a modern military basically cannot succeed without getting the support of either that military or another. In short, the civilians alone can't do the job anymore. This ain't the 1700s, where the most powerful weapon in the military's arsenal was a cannon that could take out perhaps 10 people if they were lucky. In the 1700s, civilians with hunting rifles really could stand up against a military force of roughly equal numbers because the military didn't have weapons that were terribly more effective than those the civilians possessed. That's not the case today. Even without considering nukes, the military has a many thousands to one advantage in firepower. If you don't believe me, ask yourself how the civilian population can take out a squadron of bombers flying along at 40,000 feet when the most powerful weapon they have easy access to is a semiautomatic rifle.
No, it doesn't. The reason is that the primary military that the current Iraqi government relies on is not an Iraqi military, it's the U.S. military. I agree that civil war will happen in Iraq, but it won't really start until the U.S. military pulls out of the region. If the Iraqi government by that time has managed to build up a substantial, modern military, then the revolutionaries will fail unless they can somehow either get a large part of that military to side with them or get an outside military force to intervene.
I'm not arguing that a civilian revolution against a sitting government with a modern military won't be tried. I'm arguing that it can't succeed unless it gets a lot of high-firepower help.
That second "here" (for the population figures) should be this: here
When has 50+% of the population ever fought in a revolutionary war? That certainly didn't happen during the American Revolution. During the American Revolution, at most 10% of the population fought against the British (see here for the number of men who fought and here for the population figures).
It would take the participation of a lot more civilians to stand even the remotest of chances against a modern military. Remember: they can't just survive (as the Iraqi insurgents have), they have to defeat the sitting government. The latter is a much, much harder task.
For a revolution against a sitting government to succeed, the revolutionaries would have to get a large part of the government's military on their side.
Have the pan-Islamists managed to sieze control of the government? No?
Then the sitting government has, thus far, won.
The revolutionaries don't merely have to survive, they have to win in order to achieve their goal of seizing power from the sitting government. Anything less than that and the sitting government wins.
So the fact that the pan-Islamists haven't been wiped out is irrelevant, because at the moment the government they're fighting against remains in control, which means that thus far the pan-Islamists have lost, at least up until this point.
Things may be more expensive and/or more annoying for the sitting government with revolutionaries running around, but that's merely an inconvenience, nothing more. It's not a real threat until the revolutionaries have a real chance of winning. I assure you, with the firepower concentrated in the hands of the sitting government, they don't have such a chance.
Er, it won't last.
Sigh...