With any Palladium system, you will be able to disable Palladium in BIOS, so it _doesn't matter_ if a system supports it or not.
That's a rather naive view, don't you think? Oh, sure, initially you'll be able to disable Palladium in the BIOS. Until Palladium-enabled OSes (i.e., the appropriate versions of Windows) are common enough that Microsoft can force hardware vendors to remove that option -- at which point you'll no longer be able to run a non-Palladium OS: you won't be able to run Linux.
Trust me, if Palladium isn't killed quickly then this will happen. Microsoft doesn't have those patents on Palladium for nothing, and remember that they want nothing less than the death of Free Software. Palladium is a means for Microsoft to achieve the dominance it craves. They wouldn't be pushing it otherwise.
So in the show, the entire world is a police state (something we're definitely headed towards), access to space is strictly controlled and monitored (an earthbound government would never jeapordize its power by allowing a group of people to form independent colonies in space when those same people could then lob huge rocks at the earth at will), huge corporations control the world government (it's because of them that we're headed towards a police state right now), technological development is essentially at a standstill because of worldwide enforcement of patents that last hundreds of years and because the government is the only allowed consumer of cutting-edge goodies, and the vast majority of people are members of the corporate slave class (we have that more or less right now, though it's not called that), right?
No? Well, then, I guess this show doesn't "realistically" portray the future.
Arrgh...hate to respond to my own message, but I did get one thing wrong: there is one major feature that MySQL has that PostgreSQL currently lacks, and it can make all the difference in the choice of what to use: replication.
That said, I believe there are a number of independent projects that deal with PostgreSQL replication in different ways. I'm pretty sure the core developers are also working on the problem, but I imagine they're trying to get the proper support structures in place first (they already implemented a transaction log, for instance).
Nevertheless, this is a major feature difference in MySQL's favor.
I basically agree with the spirit of your statements, but to me it all comes down to this:
If I have to choose between PostgreSQL and MySQL and I don't know ahead of time every detail of the project I'm choosing it for (including the actual future direction of the project -- and how many times have you seen the direction of your project change unexpectedly after you've made all your decisions?), I'll choose PostgreSQL. And the reason is very simple: its capabilities are a superset of MySQL's.
MySQL wins on only one major front, and as you've noted the degree to which it wins on that front seems to be diminishing: speed. There are some minor advantages (built-in full text indexing, if I'm not mistaken) that it has but speed is the reason people claim to prefer it.
I completely agree that you should always choose the right tool for the job. The problem is that the job quite often changes over time. And I can tell you from experience that switching major tools on a production system is not trivial at all.
It's fortunate that the MySQL guys are adding features, but the PostgreSQL guys are doing the same. Both database engines are improving quite rapidly. So there is some chance that future versions of MySQL will have the features you need even if your project requirements change over time. But there's no guarantee of that, so it seems to me that PostgreSQL remains an overall better choice for the typical project when there is any uncertainty about the nature or direction of the project.
Indeed, from what I've read here and elsewhere, the USPTO has actually occasionally issued patents against things that were already patented! It's probably very rare, but apparently it has happened.
The USPTO can grant a patent on anything, and has shown itself to be willing to do so. Prior art doesn't stop them. Obviousness doesn't stop them. And even prior patents haven't stopped them, either, apparently.
Much of the world would like America's prosperity and much of the world envies it. Well, these are the sorts of things you have to do if you want that prosperity.
I don't think so. The noncompete clauses in contracts are, I believe, a relatively recent invention. I don't believe they're more than 20 years old or so. I seriously doubt they existed back when the U.S. was becoming the power that it is today. Rather, it appears to me (having been around a little while) that the appearance and enforcement of noncompete clauses came about at roughly the same time that corporations started getting restrictive IP laws like the DMCA on the books. In other words, it looks to me like yet another symptom of the same disease.
Contrary to the rediuclous amount of conspiracy theorists, MS has publically stated that it is creating DRM as an OPTION for it's customers.
That might be the case right now. Think it'll remain the case? You'd have to be an idiot to believe that.
Despite any protestations to the contrary, DRM and Palladium are going to be tightly linked. Here's how:
Microsoft introduces a Palladium-enabled operating system that has DRM built-in. Call it PX. PX can run on any PC but has additional features that are enabled only when it's running on hardware that has Palladium enforcement enabled.
Over the period of a couple of years, PX becomes the defacto version of Windows. Most people now run it. Microsoft now changes the terms of its agreements with hardware vendors ("I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further."): hardware vendors which do not sell only Palladium-required hardware (that is, hardware which will boot only a Palladium-enabled OS) will be charged a much higher (e.g., 300%) price for PX. The price increase is much more than the difference between the cost of Palladium hardware and non-Palladium hardware. Big hardware vendors such as Dell will now only ship Palladium systems.
Another couple of years pass. Now almost all the hardware out there is Palladium-capable and most of that is Palladium-only. So the vast majority of systems are running PX. At this point, if there is a Palladium version of Linux, Microsoft now revokes its key (what, you think Microsoft isn't going to insist on being the only Palladium certificate authority around? And yes, they can get away with it because they have the Palladium patents). At this same time, they release an update (or new version, or whatever. By now they're all the same thing since at this point all OS updates are mandatory) permanently enabling DRM for everything. DRM is in the operating system, so even simple OS calls like the one to open files now make use of DRM.
And simple as that, the game is over. Microsoft wins. The RIAA and MPAA win. Everyone else loses.
This will happen unless we kill Palladium and any other similar "trusted computing platform" initiative dead.
refractive index of a vacuum 1.0
refractive index of air 1.0003
refractive index of ice 1.31
refractive index of a water 1.33
refractive index of glass 1.5
Look on the researcher's face when he realizes that he really can't bust the speed of light in a vacuum: priceless.
The article concludes by making the excellent point that if the United States chooses to cripple its technological development by the means of overly restrictive intellectual property licenses, it will eventually see the torch of intellectual leadership pass to other nations.
What makes you think there will be other such nations to begin with? The corporations behind these "intellectual property" licenses and laws are huge multinationals with a great deal of influence over many, if not most, of the governments in the "free world". It appears to me that the U.S. isn't alone in this endeavor, but rather that it's leading the rest of the world in the charge towards another dark age.
If you think this "intellectual property" nonsense is unrelated to the descent into police statehood that most of those same countries seem to be in, think again. A population that isn't allowed to innovate is one that doesn't have to think. A population that doesn't think is easier to control than one that does.
What we really need is a grassroots awareness of the issues. Democracy works fine if the people are aware of the issues and make sensible decisions.
Yeah, well, the free market works fine if people are aware of the products and make sensible decisions, too. But in reality, they don't make such decisions because they're too lazy to research things for themselves -- and the marketing guys take full advantage of that.
The problems with election of candidates are exactly the same as the problems with free market economics. Both sound good on paper, but both assume a rational population. That assumption is patently false.
My solution to this mess? Eliminate advertising entirely. If you're a candidate and you want to get your name known, then your methods should be limited to talking with people face to face. No gathering of crowds, no billboards, no posters, nothing. You give your name and address to the election office and they put it on a list along with the rest of the candidates, and publish it on the web and on handouts (failure on their part to do so subjects them to criminal penalties). If people want to find out what you're all about, they have to come to your office and speak with you face to face. No speaking through representatives: face to face contact only. Since not everyone will get that opportunity, you'll have to rely on word of mouth to gain recognition. You'll have to rely on real grassroots support from the people. The way it should be.
Yeah, it's a restraint on "free speech". It's the one exception that I think should be made: if you want the power that comes with political office, you have to sacrifice one of the most important rights people have in order to get it. Perhaps that will teach you the importance of rights and keep you from legislating stupidly.
I can't think of anything that would make an election a truly fair one without restraint on political speech: anything else allows the person with more inside contacts and/or more money to dominate. Perhaps others who are brighter than I can do better than me in thinking of a solution to this mess.
I believe ESR got booed off for two reasons. One, the new config required Python.
Yeah... we all know the kernel config process doesn't at any time rely on any language other than C. For instance, we know that doing a "make xconfig" won't invoke Tcl/Tk, right? Oh, wait...
Including a configuration option isn't a problem provided that it isn't the only configuration option. Right now there are at least three ways of configuring the kernel ("config", "menuconfig", and "xconfig"). As long as the simplest method remains as a fallback, it should be okay to include another config method, even if it depends on Python.
Like how do you know the configuration options used on the kernel you are running?
This one should be so simple to solve that I don't understand why it's an issue at all, namely: include a copy of the.config file in the kernel image and add a handler so that/proc/kconfig maps to it. On my system, the.config file is 36k in size -- small compared with the size of most running kernels these days.
Obviously that should be another configuration option, but it would certainly solve most of the problem, if not all of it.
The analysis is interesting, but it's not at all clear if it's correct.
There are two issues involved:
Are fonts copyrightable?
Do the flags in Truetype fonts "effectively control" (as per the DMCA) access to those fonts?
While the shapes themselves are not copyrightable, the fonts as a whole, which contain hinting information, etc., are. This, I believe, has long been established.
So that leaves the other question. Do advisory bits "effectively control" access to the copyrighted work? The obvious answer should be "no", but law is so convoluted and messed up that the obvious, sensible answer is often incorrect. I will say this: if the court rules that mere advisory bits "effectively control" access to a copyrighted work, we're all in big trouble.
As to the quote mentioned by another in this thread that goes "Resetting them by any means on fonts you created is not what DMCA tries to prevent.", the DMCA wasn't intended to prevent you from playing DVDs you buy on your Linux box, either, but that's the end result anyway. The DMCA as it is interpreted prevents many things that should be allowed, so don't be surprised if it effectively forbids you to make changes to works that you created yourself.
It seems that perhaps I didn't make one of my points (perhaps the most important one) very clear. Allow me to try again.
The problem with the system as it exists today isn't that findings don't get published. They clearly do, and they clearly get peer reviewed. The problem is that the researcher is restricted in how much collaboration he can engage in prior to publication. That restriction comes from the fact that for the researcher to gain "recognition" in the current system, he has to be the first to publish on the topic of the specific research. By publicly collaborating with others, the researcher might compromise his position: someone else might end up publishing first.
Now, it seems to me that in the past, getting there first wasn't as big a deal as it is now. You might not gain quite as much prestige as a result of collaborating with others but you might gain a great deal of insight (and so would your collaborators), and that would serve to advance science very nicely. But today corporations fund most of the research that happens and as I said, they want patents. Since getting a patent depends on you getting there first, collaboration to the degree I'm talking about can prevent you from getting the patent you (or, rather, the corporation that is bankrolling the research) are after. And that means that the corporation that is funding the research, and thus the university you're doing the research for, will naturally forbid you from collaborating with others until you're ready to publish.
Now, this is speculation on my part, but I would guess that science publishers, and the peer reviewers that work for them, sign nondisclosure agreements that forbid them from saying anything about the work being submitted until the work is published. Once the work is published, the clock starts ticking and the researcher has one year to file a patent. The published research acts as proof that the researcher got there first. If things really work as I suspect, then it follows that the corporation funding the research will insist on the researcher publishing through one of the science publishers precisely because they'll sign the NDA, and thus the clock for getting the patent won't start until the peer review process is complete and the research is published.
If the researcher instead published directly on the web, the peer review wouldn't begin until that point in time. But the clock for getting a patent would then start at the beginning of the peer review period and not the end, so the risk of being forced to obtain a patent on something that hasn't been fully peer-reviewed would be significantly greater. For instance, if the researcher publishes their findings on the web, and sufficient peer review on the web ends up taking an additional 10 months, that would leave only 2 months that the researcher could file for the patent. The corporation funding the research would obviously find that situation unacceptable.
This is why I think corporate-funded university research is a bad idea: it prevents researchers from collaborating as much as they're probably naturally inclined to (many, perhaps most, researchers aren't in the game for the patents, but are instead in it for the recognition and the advancement of their field), and it keeps the science publishers in their position as gatekeepers of research publication. Most importantly, it puts the goals of the corporation (making as much money as possible, no matter the means) above the goals of science.
Bear with me on this, please, and please correct any errors I might make here.
The whole point behind science, its entire reason to exist, is to provide us with a predictive explanation of the world around us. It needs the "many eyes" approach more than just about any other human endeavor, because the entire point is to model the real world and you can't do that without a lot of observation.
Of course, science has also proven to be useful, and that's been something of an anathema to it. The reason is that things which are useful are things which people (corporations in particular) want to capitalize on in an exclusive way. It seems to me that there was a time when everyone recognized the truth that public disclosure and widespread collaboration is necessary for science to advance.
That no longer seems to be the case from where I sit. Today, corporations fund a great deal of research at the university level, and there is a great deal of pressure from both corporations and from the universities themselves to keep ongoing research under wraps as much as possible, in order to maximize the chances not just of publishing but also of getting patents on the results (which are probably then transferred to the corporations that funded the research).
Those people in the scientific community that I've spoken to believe, to a man, in collaboration with their peers in order to further science. They're held up by the people that fund their research.
How does this relate to publishing on the web? Well, publishing on the web removes a lot of the exclusivity that currently exists, so there will naturally be opposition to it from those who benefit from the control they have over scientific publishing right now. And my cynical mind tells me that there's a good chance that those who fund research exert an additional level of control through the current publishers (it would make sense, right?). It's my hope that research over the web will help in reducing the amount of exclusivity that seems to exist currently in the scientific community. But then, that's probably wishful thinking.
As long as that level of exclusivity exists, our understanding of the universe won't advance as quickly as it might otherwise. Perhaps things have always been this way and I'm just pining for better days that have never existed. But if there's even a chance that publishing on the web will improve the amount of collaboration and peer review, I think it's worth doing.
But this proposal doesn't do much to help with that, because it still concentrates the power of peer review and publishing into the hands of a few. What prevents researchers from collaborating with each other, getting peer review from each other, and publishing on the web directly, instead of going through middlemen like they do now? Seems to me that they're being held up by those that fund the research. And unfortunately, this proposal wouldn't change that.
Yes, it's a step in the right direction, and the current scientific publishers need some competition. But it shouldn't be seen as the end goal.
Re:Its the turning point
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Want Freedom?
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· Score: 2
Many feel that ciivil liberties are being jepordized and many feel that the laws allow too much. To be honest the laws allow a bit too much. So now swing will be the other way, no more privacy, big brother watching and all that, and then the pendulum will start swinging the other way again.
No, it won't. That's because freedoms which are lost are regained only through violent revolution (from the inside or the outside). Violent revolution in the U.S. today isn't going to happen without support of the military, because the military has a firepower advantage over the citizenry of anywhere between thousands to one and millions to one. But the military is an arm of the government, not of the citizenry.
Once Big Brother happens in the U.S., it's all over. None of the entities (such as China) on the outside world that would have the balls, much less a reason, to invade and take over the U.S. are havens of liberty -- quite the opposite. And in any case the entire civilized world is descending towards police statehood anyway.
The U.K. has installed a bunch of monitoring equipment so it can spy on its citizens (such things are always said to be for some more noble purpose, but they are always abused in the end). The U.S. ("land of the free") has declared that it has the power to declare any person (citizen or not) an "enemy combatant" and detain them on a whim indefinitely. Germany and France place strict limits on what you can say and do (oh, sure, the "reason" is to prevent Naziism from gaining another foothold, but history is forgotten when living examples of it disappear), and they're not getting any better about it. Australia has crazy internet censorship laws on the books. Everyone in the "free world" participates in Echelon.
I don't think the evidence can be clearer than that. And once the entire world is a police state, there will be no outside force to topple it. It can be as corrupt as you can imagine on the inside, enough that even the smallest outside opposing force would cause it to crumble, and it would still stand because there would be no such force, because there would be no "outside".
With the monitoring and weapons technology we have today, a global police state would be a stable form of government, capable of lasting thousands of years.
A police state doesn't have to keep its citizens happy, it only has to make them believe that there isn't anything better to strive for. That's a question of controlling the past (the lesson of 1984). A police state with sufficient monitoring would whisk away dissenters before they could make any real trouble. Those left would be mindless sheep. There seem to be plenty of those in the U.S., even without the culling of the herd that a police state would do.
That's the direction we're headed, folks, and I don't see anything stopping it. If anything, the poll in question should make it clear that this is the direction the population wants it to go, which makes that result even more likely. Certainly the big corporations want it to happen, since the government in question would belong to those corporations, just as it does now. The only difference is that the global police state would have a great deal more control and power over the citizenry. The big corporations want that power and it looks to me like they're going to get it.
Remember Libertirians wnat to roll back all judgment and law precedents on many laws and the constitiutin to late 1700s....
Considering that the Supreme Court decision in the late 1800s, in which they ruled that corporations have the same rights as individuals (sans the right to vote), was directly responsible for the vast majority of the corporate ills we are forced to deal with today, I'd say that rolling back to the late 1700s wouldn't be an entirely bad thing. There are certain amendments to the Constitution, like the abolition of slavery and women's right to vote, that should remain. But others, like the income tax amendment, should probably go.
Nice setup the media corps have, isn't it? They "give" a lot of money to politicians, who then turn right around and give that money right back to the media corps so they can get their exposure.
So in the end, the media corps pay little to nothing and wind up with lots of politicians in their pockets. What a wonderful racket!
This brings up an interesting question. Who gets sued in this kind of situation?
Who gets sued in any situation? The people with the most money, of course!
Or, in certain situations, the targets of the suit are chosen based on the amount of damage the suit will end up doing (so Linus is an obvious target no matter how much money he may have).
I'm the author. And in half an hour I'll
go surfing the atlantic coast of france for
14 days. That's one of the reasons I didn't
announce the project more widely. I can't
give immedeate support.
Sorry, but you can't do that. Now that everyone knows about your project you'll just have to cancel your vacation and support the project, just in case anything goes wrong!
Or, at least, that would probably be the case if this were a product written for your U.S.-based employer. Fortunately, this is a free software project so you shouldn't have that problem here. Enjoy your vacation dude -- sounds like you're going to have some great fun! Wish more people out there in the working world, at least here in the U.S., could do the same...
Making the customer happy is their job...
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Napster Not To Blame
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· Score: 5, Insightful
...and that's something they've completely forgotten. Now their customers are telling them that they're not happy and the RIAA still isn't listening.
The customers' message to the RIAA will get louder and louder until they finally hear it or until they go under. Which one happens is ultimately the RIAA's choice.
The RIAA probably believes that because it's a monopoly (or oligopoly... same thing from an economic perspective) like Microsoft, that it can get away with the same market tactics that Microsoft does. But what they haven't figured out is that unlike Microsoft's products, which are essentially required to keep a business running (Openoffice and friends aside), the RIAA's products are not required, they are optional. Having a monopoly doesn't help you if your customers can get away with not buying your product -- and that's exactly what's happening now.
So my message to the RIAA is simple: you'd better figure this shit out, and fast, because your number is coming up.
What sucks the most is that the RIAA is going to do a hell of a lot of damage before they either finally learn or go under.
Either the ISPs are common carriers, and thus should be completely immune to the machinations of the RIAA and its ilk, or they're not.
The RIAA and friends claim that ISPs are not common carriers and have sued as such. Information Wave Technologies is showing exactly what happens when an ISP is not a common carrier. The RIAA can't have it both ways, and removing the common carrier status of ISPs has consequences that probably aren't desirable from the RIAA's point of view.
As a general policy, I agree that what Information Wave Technologies is doing might not be a good idea. But as a specific response to the situation, I think it's a wonderful idea (in fact, they need to go further and block all access, in and out, to all websites owned by any RIAA members).
Slashdot Mirror
That's a rather naive view, don't you think? Oh, sure, initially you'll be able to disable Palladium in the BIOS. Until Palladium-enabled OSes (i.e., the appropriate versions of Windows) are common enough that Microsoft can force hardware vendors to remove that option -- at which point you'll no longer be able to run a non-Palladium OS: you won't be able to run Linux.
Trust me, if Palladium isn't killed quickly then this will happen. Microsoft doesn't have those patents on Palladium for nothing, and remember that they want nothing less than the death of Free Software. Palladium is a means for Microsoft to achieve the dominance it craves. They wouldn't be pushing it otherwise.
No? Well, then, I guess this show doesn't "realistically" portray the future.
Might be a good show anyway, though. :-)
That said, I believe there are a number of independent projects that deal with PostgreSQL replication in different ways. I'm pretty sure the core developers are also working on the problem, but I imagine they're trying to get the proper support structures in place first (they already implemented a transaction log, for instance).
Nevertheless, this is a major feature difference in MySQL's favor.
If I have to choose between PostgreSQL and MySQL and I don't know ahead of time every detail of the project I'm choosing it for (including the actual future direction of the project -- and how many times have you seen the direction of your project change unexpectedly after you've made all your decisions?), I'll choose PostgreSQL. And the reason is very simple: its capabilities are a superset of MySQL's.
MySQL wins on only one major front, and as you've noted the degree to which it wins on that front seems to be diminishing: speed. There are some minor advantages (built-in full text indexing, if I'm not mistaken) that it has but speed is the reason people claim to prefer it.
I completely agree that you should always choose the right tool for the job. The problem is that the job quite often changes over time. And I can tell you from experience that switching major tools on a production system is not trivial at all.
It's fortunate that the MySQL guys are adding features, but the PostgreSQL guys are doing the same. Both database engines are improving quite rapidly. So there is some chance that future versions of MySQL will have the features you need even if your project requirements change over time. But there's no guarantee of that, so it seems to me that PostgreSQL remains an overall better choice for the typical project when there is any uncertainty about the nature or direction of the project.
Indeed, from what I've read here and elsewhere, the USPTO has actually occasionally issued patents against things that were already patented! It's probably very rare, but apparently it has happened.
The USPTO can grant a patent on anything, and has shown itself to be willing to do so. Prior art doesn't stop them. Obviousness doesn't stop them. And even prior patents haven't stopped them, either, apparently.
I don't think so. The noncompete clauses in contracts are, I believe, a relatively recent invention. I don't believe they're more than 20 years old or so. I seriously doubt they existed back when the U.S. was becoming the power that it is today. Rather, it appears to me (having been around a little while) that the appearance and enforcement of noncompete clauses came about at roughly the same time that corporations started getting restrictive IP laws like the DMCA on the books. In other words, it looks to me like yet another symptom of the same disease.
But, of course, I could be wrong...
That might be the case right now. Think it'll remain the case? You'd have to be an idiot to believe that.
Despite any protestations to the contrary, DRM and Palladium are going to be tightly linked. Here's how:
And simple as that, the game is over. Microsoft wins. The RIAA and MPAA win. Everyone else loses.
This will happen unless we kill Palladium and any other similar "trusted computing platform" initiative dead.
Look on the researcher's face when he realizes that he really can't bust the speed of light in a vacuum: priceless.
What makes you think there will be other such nations to begin with? The corporations behind these "intellectual property" licenses and laws are huge multinationals with a great deal of influence over many, if not most, of the governments in the "free world". It appears to me that the U.S. isn't alone in this endeavor, but rather that it's leading the rest of the world in the charge towards another dark age.
If you think this "intellectual property" nonsense is unrelated to the descent into police statehood that most of those same countries seem to be in, think again. A population that isn't allowed to innovate is one that doesn't have to think. A population that doesn't think is easier to control than one that does.
Yeah, well, the free market works fine if people are aware of the products and make sensible decisions, too. But in reality, they don't make such decisions because they're too lazy to research things for themselves -- and the marketing guys take full advantage of that.
The problems with election of candidates are exactly the same as the problems with free market economics. Both sound good on paper, but both assume a rational population. That assumption is patently false.
My solution to this mess? Eliminate advertising entirely. If you're a candidate and you want to get your name known, then your methods should be limited to talking with people face to face. No gathering of crowds, no billboards, no posters, nothing. You give your name and address to the election office and they put it on a list along with the rest of the candidates, and publish it on the web and on handouts (failure on their part to do so subjects them to criminal penalties). If people want to find out what you're all about, they have to come to your office and speak with you face to face. No speaking through representatives: face to face contact only. Since not everyone will get that opportunity, you'll have to rely on word of mouth to gain recognition. You'll have to rely on real grassroots support from the people. The way it should be.
Yeah, it's a restraint on "free speech". It's the one exception that I think should be made: if you want the power that comes with political office, you have to sacrifice one of the most important rights people have in order to get it. Perhaps that will teach you the importance of rights and keep you from legislating stupidly.
I can't think of anything that would make an election a truly fair one without restraint on political speech: anything else allows the person with more inside contacts and/or more money to dominate. Perhaps others who are brighter than I can do better than me in thinking of a solution to this mess.
Yeah ... we all know the kernel config process doesn't at any time rely on any language other than C. For instance, we know that doing a "make xconfig" won't invoke Tcl/Tk, right? Oh, wait...
Including a configuration option isn't a problem provided that it isn't the only configuration option. Right now there are at least three ways of configuring the kernel ("config", "menuconfig", and "xconfig"). As long as the simplest method remains as a fallback, it should be okay to include another config method, even if it depends on Python.
This one should be so simple to solve that I don't understand why it's an issue at all, namely: include a copy of the .config file in the kernel image and add a handler so that /proc/kconfig maps to it. On my system, the .config file is 36k in size -- small compared with the size of most running kernels these days.
Obviously that should be another configuration option, but it would certainly solve most of the problem, if not all of it.
Hmm...sounds like they started by trying to make some Canadian backbacon, eh?
Couldn't find any beer on their website, though...
There are two issues involved:
While the shapes themselves are not copyrightable, the fonts as a whole, which contain hinting information, etc., are. This, I believe, has long been established.
So that leaves the other question. Do advisory bits "effectively control" access to the copyrighted work? The obvious answer should be "no", but law is so convoluted and messed up that the obvious, sensible answer is often incorrect. I will say this: if the court rules that mere advisory bits "effectively control" access to a copyrighted work, we're all in big trouble.
As to the quote mentioned by another in this thread that goes "Resetting them by any means on fonts you created is not what DMCA tries to prevent.", the DMCA wasn't intended to prevent you from playing DVDs you buy on your Linux box, either, but that's the end result anyway. The DMCA as it is interpreted prevents many things that should be allowed, so don't be surprised if it effectively forbids you to make changes to works that you created yourself.
The problem with the system as it exists today isn't that findings don't get published. They clearly do, and they clearly get peer reviewed. The problem is that the researcher is restricted in how much collaboration he can engage in prior to publication. That restriction comes from the fact that for the researcher to gain "recognition" in the current system, he has to be the first to publish on the topic of the specific research. By publicly collaborating with others, the researcher might compromise his position: someone else might end up publishing first.
Now, it seems to me that in the past, getting there first wasn't as big a deal as it is now. You might not gain quite as much prestige as a result of collaborating with others but you might gain a great deal of insight (and so would your collaborators), and that would serve to advance science very nicely. But today corporations fund most of the research that happens and as I said, they want patents. Since getting a patent depends on you getting there first, collaboration to the degree I'm talking about can prevent you from getting the patent you (or, rather, the corporation that is bankrolling the research) are after. And that means that the corporation that is funding the research, and thus the university you're doing the research for, will naturally forbid you from collaborating with others until you're ready to publish.
Now, this is speculation on my part, but I would guess that science publishers, and the peer reviewers that work for them, sign nondisclosure agreements that forbid them from saying anything about the work being submitted until the work is published. Once the work is published, the clock starts ticking and the researcher has one year to file a patent. The published research acts as proof that the researcher got there first. If things really work as I suspect, then it follows that the corporation funding the research will insist on the researcher publishing through one of the science publishers precisely because they'll sign the NDA, and thus the clock for getting the patent won't start until the peer review process is complete and the research is published.
If the researcher instead published directly on the web, the peer review wouldn't begin until that point in time. But the clock for getting a patent would then start at the beginning of the peer review period and not the end, so the risk of being forced to obtain a patent on something that hasn't been fully peer-reviewed would be significantly greater. For instance, if the researcher publishes their findings on the web, and sufficient peer review on the web ends up taking an additional 10 months, that would leave only 2 months that the researcher could file for the patent. The corporation funding the research would obviously find that situation unacceptable.
This is why I think corporate-funded university research is a bad idea: it prevents researchers from collaborating as much as they're probably naturally inclined to (many, perhaps most, researchers aren't in the game for the patents, but are instead in it for the recognition and the advancement of their field), and it keeps the science publishers in their position as gatekeepers of research publication. Most importantly, it puts the goals of the corporation (making as much money as possible, no matter the means) above the goals of science.
I hope that clarifies things a bit...
The whole point behind science, its entire reason to exist, is to provide us with a predictive explanation of the world around us. It needs the "many eyes" approach more than just about any other human endeavor, because the entire point is to model the real world and you can't do that without a lot of observation.
Of course, science has also proven to be useful, and that's been something of an anathema to it. The reason is that things which are useful are things which people (corporations in particular) want to capitalize on in an exclusive way. It seems to me that there was a time when everyone recognized the truth that public disclosure and widespread collaboration is necessary for science to advance.
That no longer seems to be the case from where I sit. Today, corporations fund a great deal of research at the university level, and there is a great deal of pressure from both corporations and from the universities themselves to keep ongoing research under wraps as much as possible, in order to maximize the chances not just of publishing but also of getting patents on the results (which are probably then transferred to the corporations that funded the research).
Those people in the scientific community that I've spoken to believe, to a man, in collaboration with their peers in order to further science. They're held up by the people that fund their research.
How does this relate to publishing on the web? Well, publishing on the web removes a lot of the exclusivity that currently exists, so there will naturally be opposition to it from those who benefit from the control they have over scientific publishing right now. And my cynical mind tells me that there's a good chance that those who fund research exert an additional level of control through the current publishers (it would make sense, right?). It's my hope that research over the web will help in reducing the amount of exclusivity that seems to exist currently in the scientific community. But then, that's probably wishful thinking.
As long as that level of exclusivity exists, our understanding of the universe won't advance as quickly as it might otherwise. Perhaps things have always been this way and I'm just pining for better days that have never existed. But if there's even a chance that publishing on the web will improve the amount of collaboration and peer review, I think it's worth doing.
But this proposal doesn't do much to help with that, because it still concentrates the power of peer review and publishing into the hands of a few. What prevents researchers from collaborating with each other, getting peer review from each other, and publishing on the web directly, instead of going through middlemen like they do now? Seems to me that they're being held up by those that fund the research. And unfortunately, this proposal wouldn't change that.
Yes, it's a step in the right direction, and the current scientific publishers need some competition. But it shouldn't be seen as the end goal.
No, it won't. That's because freedoms which are lost are regained only through violent revolution (from the inside or the outside). Violent revolution in the U.S. today isn't going to happen without support of the military, because the military has a firepower advantage over the citizenry of anywhere between thousands to one and millions to one. But the military is an arm of the government, not of the citizenry.
Once Big Brother happens in the U.S., it's all over. None of the entities (such as China) on the outside world that would have the balls, much less a reason, to invade and take over the U.S. are havens of liberty -- quite the opposite. And in any case the entire civilized world is descending towards police statehood anyway.
The U.K. has installed a bunch of monitoring equipment so it can spy on its citizens (such things are always said to be for some more noble purpose, but they are always abused in the end). The U.S. ("land of the free") has declared that it has the power to declare any person (citizen or not) an "enemy combatant" and detain them on a whim indefinitely. Germany and France place strict limits on what you can say and do (oh, sure, the "reason" is to prevent Naziism from gaining another foothold, but history is forgotten when living examples of it disappear), and they're not getting any better about it. Australia has crazy internet censorship laws on the books. Everyone in the "free world" participates in Echelon.
I don't think the evidence can be clearer than that. And once the entire world is a police state, there will be no outside force to topple it. It can be as corrupt as you can imagine on the inside, enough that even the smallest outside opposing force would cause it to crumble, and it would still stand because there would be no such force, because there would be no "outside".
With the monitoring and weapons technology we have today, a global police state would be a stable form of government, capable of lasting thousands of years.
A police state doesn't have to keep its citizens happy, it only has to make them believe that there isn't anything better to strive for. That's a question of controlling the past (the lesson of 1984). A police state with sufficient monitoring would whisk away dissenters before they could make any real trouble. Those left would be mindless sheep. There seem to be plenty of those in the U.S., even without the culling of the herd that a police state would do.
That's the direction we're headed, folks, and I don't see anything stopping it. If anything, the poll in question should make it clear that this is the direction the population wants it to go, which makes that result even more likely. Certainly the big corporations want it to happen, since the government in question would belong to those corporations, just as it does now. The only difference is that the global police state would have a great deal more control and power over the citizenry. The big corporations want that power and it looks to me like they're going to get it.
I don't think so. Try again.
Considering that the Supreme Court decision in the late 1800s, in which they ruled that corporations have the same rights as individuals (sans the right to vote), was directly responsible for the vast majority of the corporate ills we are forced to deal with today, I'd say that rolling back to the late 1700s wouldn't be an entirely bad thing. There are certain amendments to the Constitution, like the abolition of slavery and women's right to vote, that should remain. But others, like the income tax amendment, should probably go.
So in the end, the media corps pay little to nothing and wind up with lots of politicians in their pockets. What a wonderful racket!
Who gets sued in any situation? The people with the most money, of course!
Or, in certain situations, the targets of the suit are chosen based on the amount of damage the suit will end up doing (so Linus is an obvious target no matter how much money he may have).
Sorry, but you can't do that. Now that everyone knows about your project you'll just have to cancel your vacation and support the project, just in case anything goes wrong!
Or, at least, that would probably be the case if this were a product written for your U.S.-based employer. Fortunately, this is a free software project so you shouldn't have that problem here. Enjoy your vacation dude -- sounds like you're going to have some great fun! Wish more people out there in the working world, at least here in the U.S., could do the same...
The customers' message to the RIAA will get louder and louder until they finally hear it or until they go under. Which one happens is ultimately the RIAA's choice.
The RIAA probably believes that because it's a monopoly (or oligopoly ... same thing from an economic perspective) like Microsoft, that it can get away with the same market tactics that Microsoft does. But what they haven't figured out is that unlike Microsoft's products, which are essentially required to keep a business running (Openoffice and friends aside), the RIAA's products are not required, they are optional. Having a monopoly doesn't help you if your customers can get away with not buying your product -- and that's exactly what's happening now.
So my message to the RIAA is simple: you'd better figure this shit out, and fast, because your number is coming up.
What sucks the most is that the RIAA is going to do a hell of a lot of damage before they either finally learn or go under.
It's only a matter of time. They're going slowly, step by step, hitting the small guys first and gradually increasing the size of their targets.
The RIAA and friends claim that ISPs are not common carriers and have sued as such. Information Wave Technologies is showing exactly what happens when an ISP is not a common carrier. The RIAA can't have it both ways, and removing the common carrier status of ISPs has consequences that probably aren't desirable from the RIAA's point of view.
As a general policy, I agree that what Information Wave Technologies is doing might not be a good idea. But as a specific response to the situation, I think it's a wonderful idea (in fact, they need to go further and block all access, in and out, to all websites owned by any RIAA members).