Okay. A slashdot article on the blu-ray spec posted at least a month ago (2 or three dvd-related threads ago) had a link to the spec, a pdf. A 15 minute skim of the paper scared me and I posted about it, then reiterated it in the last 2 related threads. Does anybody read the technical material? It's like/. is just a bunch of 12-year old wankers who don't even like programming or studying that much.
The encryption system uses a broad tree of keys and subkeys so that the player can disable an entire subset of media by denying decryption functionality for parts of the tree.
The player can be Internet connected but does not have to be. However the spec IIRC does allow executable code or related commands in part of the DVD, which seems to be protected with a different key.
The player is proposed to have a wireless LAN adapter which may be sold separately, presumably this would simultaneously serve media to clients in your home while providing a keyring and monitor to police usage across the LAN.
The spec as proposed appears to guarantee that there will be events from time to time triggered by media or net connection (or even from media or programs on another pc on the LAN) causing portions of the key tree to be disabled, enabled, or updated. The ultimate thermonuclear threat on this platform is to disable the entire tree which may either render the device unusable completely, or may just let you use DVDs that are unprotected (if any exist in that format).
It sounds like each player will have a unique ID as well. While disablings of keys may not discriminate between IDs in the beginning, it is entirely possible that hacking your player could even end up in your being blacklisted in some way, or "infecting" your entire network with commands destroying functionality.
Personally I despise this introduction of military-grade security into my home by big entertainment companies and will boycott and fight against this any way I can. I already do not buy CDs or DVDs outright and do not feel I suffer unduly. This initiative is sure to make your home a battleground for all kinds of cyberwarfare that make you nostalgic in 10 years for the cute and relatively limited and harmless spyware and spam threats of today.
I would like to ask a physicist in the room two questions.
1) It sounds like the diamond-nanotube composite material mentioned in a separate slashdot article today would include nanoscale diamond chunks, nice hard, heavy things, nanoiron seeds, and conductive nanotubes. Would this not be an interesting candidate for use in the testing of this theory of how gravity works at the nanometer scale?
2) I don't really understand the idea of a dimension only a nanometer wide, or the idea of dimensions being rolled up even though I've heard the same metaphor for a long time explaining it. For example if the universe is really 1 nanometer wide along the axis of the 5th dimension, then how thin is the visible universe? Or to tackle the other metaphor, if the 5th dimension is in fact rolled up at a scale far smaller than atoms, what does this mean in terms of real world physics we know? Maybe gravity gets sucked in there, what about electrons or magnetic fields? Is it impossible for an atom to see into the rolled up dimension of the atom next to it? etc.
Can't we use the metric system? I just can't figure out if this is linear or exponential.. 1 super ulra mega = 1 ultra mega mega = 1 mega mega mega So would it be mega x mega x mega, or mega^(mega ^ mega)?
This sounds a bit like a dupe or just old news, I've heard it before. Of course it really is *really* old news, but.. um.
Anyway it would be nice to project its path ahead to see what civs need bailing out. Then NASA's warp drive project has a goal! Maybe we should keep our scopes and neutrino detectors on that region of space to see if any other civs already have mounted a hypervelocity rescue effort? Note the star is seen 7000 years in the past, so it is actually 20 light years or so closer to its victims than it looks.
Thank you very much for the reply. It would be great if these discoveries lead us to being able to grow back joints like the mice in the lab did. Actually I'd like to grow back a knee joint like Pele's not the crappy knees I got.
Honestly, surfing at 4 and still nearly every post is brain dead, except the ones noting that the researcher is in the U.S., not Australia.
However it is at he University of Pennsylvania (U Penn), which I believe is a different school from Penn State which one person posted.
Google: Ellen Heber-Katz Wistar
You will note that a genome screen was conducted at some point in time finding genes on 5 different chromosomes involved in wound healing and regeneration. The regeneration takes place by a mass of cells forming at the wound site that can form into many different tissue types, i.e. like stem cells. Indeed it seems (from a cursory scan of a few links) that stem cells injected into other mice also work. And this facility can be inherited.
There is related research going on in different areas including observation of self-healing optical nerves, heart muscle, and even spinal cord once the scar tissue and scarring agents if that's what they are saying, are cleared away.
It is being reported at a conference in a week but already Nature and other publications seem to be involved at least in the past. Wistar is famous for vaccine development too.
If someone with real knowledge in the field could pop in now I'd sure appreciate it.
I can say one more thing. Humans can regenerate to a very limited extent already. I know because my mother chopped off the tip of her finger in a folding chair (shiver) when she was little. The tip grew back with the nail, though I'm not sure if a joint actually grew back the way these mice did.
The point is scientists never believed regeneration was possible even with such evidence, then views turned around, and now we have finally gotten to this amazing milestone. It is not an instantaneous thing. There is a paper cited about heart regeneration in the MRL mouse in 2002. They found the "healer" mouse in 1998. But it seems a milestone has obviously been met and it sounds like things are going to accelerate if more people can start working on the gene functions and biochemistry involved.
Heber Katz' talk
will be given on Sept. 7 at Queens' College in Cambridge, England. The whole conference sounds very interesting, it would be nice if someone with a brain and some training could report on it to slashdot.
Okay surfing at 3 and reading some of the articles I think I know what is going on but I still don't get it.
I find it misguided. The reasons I have heard so far do not make it sound like a good idea to do what the LMI is doing.
Put it this way. Is there any situation you can honestly imagine that makes what LMI is doing seem remotely useful? I can't. This is not going to promote quality, it is just going to annoy people and has already caused at least one person to stop providing a free service to the Linux community (thelinuxapprentice.com, now down).
It seems to me to go completely against the spirit of the GPL and ignores the contributions of the community.
I find it hard to believe that trademark law requires Linus Torvalds to hire someone who enjoys massive spam and threats of legal shark attacks, against people who are 99.99% doing great stuff with Linux.
The idea that this will maintain quality of linux purveyors, or that it will stop Microsoft from launching an offensive against Linux that could not be handled some other way or successfully ignored, is dumb.
So yes, unfortunately I come to the conclusion that while I thought Linus was really a smart dude, in this case I think he has been taken in by someone who does NOT have the best interests of the community at heart. And at least one person IS making a good living at sending out these threatening letters.
Why? BECAUSE SPAM PAYS.
Thank you Linus for giving us this economics lesson again. Now please cease and desist. My own business would do much better if there were more companies with Linux in their names. It's as if the Linux community is so incredibly stupid and masochistic, that just as the SCO saga is winding to an end, we have to CREATE ANOTHER BULLSHIT LEGAL CHARADE because we have nothing better to do! How about leaving it to someone who DOES have something better to do, and who will only lurch into action if that doomsday scenario comes to pass? Make the minimum $1 if you must but fund the hiring of the legal team for the doomsday scenario by asking industry to help, if they agree it is a problem. This proactive crap is not useful and has a CHILLING EFFECT.
I guess we are on the same wavelength, but you say it better. I wish some journalist would pick this up.
I can tell you that I LIKE reading books on the train, whether in print, on my pda or phone. I just built a little program that lets me read a document paged on my phone and it is quite useful.
I also think $25 for Harry Potter is a bit too much, at least who needs it in hardcover? They should sell an ascii version for a few bucks too. What is the breakdown after you cut away all the crap? Why not just download it from J.K. Rowling and pay her or her charity whatever she thinks is reasonable?
Put it this way, both movie distributors and book publishers these days are, if you believe the news, constantly about to go out of business, unless they get one or two massive hits each year. All that marketing, and still they are in the red?
This is bullshit. It isn't the way the public library used to work when I was little and IIRC libraries are actually a bit scarcer these days.
One idea I just had is that libraries could be useful if they act en masse, to develop their own delivery systems.
They can contact authors directly.
They can leverage their pull with younger people, students on campus, industry execs, etc.
They can set up high quality video communications areas over fiber or adsl, and offer community or nationwide talks with authors. (My mother does a chat on eBay each valentines day, why can't a library do it?)
They can centralize and promote annotation by readers and professors regarding specific titles or topics, promoting discourse, critical thinking, and dissemination of knowledge.
They can support open knowledge initiatives like those of MIT (OpenCourseware) and provide google-like searching of knowledge, but leveraging the practical knowledge of library science and intimate knowledge of publications and community needs that they have. Librarians are actually quite powerful, and I believe they are also interested and experiment with new technologies. I think they need a lot more money and a (bigger) army of open source developers.
Well, thank you very much. You may wish to read my other responses in this thread, two are a bit long.
Thank you very much for your response. Please see my two long replies in this thread of replies to me.
In response, a copy may be cheap to make but not if you place a premium on when it is made. That is my problem. I think some leeway should be built in, and a lot of thought should be put into how to remove rules based on physical scarcity while trying to make authorship a good way to make a living and maximizing readership.
I agree "the publisher doesn't have to give a shit" as you say. At least if they want to stay in business. As I mentioned they have to give a copy to the Library of Congress, and also there may be a way to make more money without such restricitive DRM, especially in specific markets, on campuses, in companies, etc. Libraries don't have to buy DRM either though, not yet.
Thank you very much for your comment. Please see my two lengthy responses to replies to my original post.
Basically I think libraries are there for multiple reasons but one important reason is as a protector of culture and to ensure that the community can access it. There is also a position that they should help people caught in the digital divide, etc.
I agree that they should not fight DRM solely "because it could be used to protect the copyright holders' rights". That would be a bit disingenuous.
However, they should be very careful about accepting DRM as part of their core policies, and in general I think DRM as it stands now is aimed at protecting the revenue streams of publishers and not necessarily supporting a mechanism that would jointly improve the lot of the author and the reader. Sorry this is not a great reply, I certainly agree about archival properties and proprietary encodings, so we are really in agreement. Please see my other posts above.
Anyway, I do recognize that if a library had everything Barnes and Noble's had for free, next door, it might cut into B&N's bottom line a little bit. Maybe what I want is to be able to read any book in existence and just have it taken penny by penny out of my monthly utility bill.
Thank you very much for your very interesting and detailed reply. I will try to respond to each of your points, but to save time please also see my response to the reply above yours.
As for how to do it without Internet access, If you had an e-book tablet like the librie but that works better, you could maybe have a lot of books in it and you could type access keys into it or synch them at the library.
The DRM should not suddenly cut off access, it should default to being openended or to perhaps twice the rental period. This is better for users and not a significant problem for publishers. DRM could automatically check if there are extra copies and let the user know the answer, but I believe people should be in the loop. In particular you are going to be getting children caught up in a mechanized big brother like system. What if they have a book report due, didn't realize the date, and suddenly access turns off? and so on. So I would prefer to have people in the loop, and I dislike having my own computer policing me. You may not mind..? Anyway I understand that the DRM has to act this way *in this DRM scheme implementation*. However it is just a recently built scheme and I do not treat it as a permanent part of the landscape like mountains, rivers, etc.
I think you should realize that most of the technological things we use fall into disuse pretty quickly and as such are not on a par with humans who outlive 8-track tapes and betamaxes. Hopefully I will outlive DRM but it's doubtful. As such I would appreciate it if you consider "what I wish to do" to be "what a user would like to do" and the idea that "the software has to do X" is simply an implementation of a scheme devised by a marketer at some publisher. In the scheme of things, it is in everyone's interest to get as many people reading things as possible, and it is the reponsibility of society to devise schemes that maximize that while rewarding authors and minimizing assaults on humanity's superiority to machines. I find acceptance of DRM in all it various guises to be quite bothering and have boycotted publishers using it.
About libraries being beholden to publishers. Well that is your opinion and I am not going to go so far as to say I know what a library thinks. But I do believe that libraries, as a group together, and considering how intimate they are with students, are extremely important. Also I believe that libraries and bookstores may grow more closely together in the eyes of publishers in the future. Anyway the Library of Congress is one library that is definitely not beholden to publishers, it's the other way around. That one copy in the LoC could be enough for the world, if it's digital.
In the end it will probably take a Google and a pro-education administration to advance this crazy idea of making it possible to integrate and compare texts in the comfort of your home without them evaporating on you.
As to whether publishers are willing to do something, I think it is a matter of do they make money at it, and what are their legal and social responsibilities. I also believe that current bookstores must have a major problem with profitability and the cost of real estate and personnel, because while there are always a lot of inane books and coffee table glossy covered books out in front to make money, there is not a huge selection in U.S. bookstores (though better than most) usually if you consider there is a whole English speaking world out there writing books. Same with video stores. Just talking about science fiction which I happen to like, there are not as many talented authors as I would like to see. Talented, but dead, authors are competing with them successfully. I think something should be done to make it possible for more talented authors to get works out there and there is a lot of unnecessary expense involved now. Anyway this is a long way of saying that if libraries offered publishers/authors an interesting way to do that I think there could be some interesting developments for al
Thank you very much for your detailed reply. Presumptuous though, as I've read the article at least twice and/. blurb and believe I have a pretty good handle on the tech. I will try to respond to most of your points.
Non-ascii text files of books is not good. Ask the Gutenberg Project. What if the patron got the content through a download to a memory stick, flash card or something like the ipod loans the article mentions. Internet is very useful but a library is meant to serve people who might not have an Internet connection, or a home for that manner. Also I don't want some software dialing out but if it is just a code to past from a browser fine.
As for the merits of the program, certainly there are lots which is why it works at least to this limited extent, for this type content.
With regard to your "refutations": In general number of copies etc. is something a publisher handles I believe in general. However I am not advocating breaking the law. I am saying that the concept philosophically is bogus. It is artificial and while one practical implementation of a book sharing program uses it, I do not believe it is optimal, for the reasons I provide. It is a silly idea that is a carryover from atom-based publishing. Start over please.
And I think libraries should consider the concept of a checkout period very seriously when talking about digital media. For example, how about allowing every high school student in a class to check out the same five books simultaneously for them to write a report using them at once? This is impossible with a period-based checkout system, and demands some more flexible kind of a system which can be invented publishers, manufacturers, independent free software developers, or the library association.
The library could perhaps purchase 50 digital copies, but other problems would likely turn up all based on scarcity when what you really want to do is make it very easy to use and disseminate books while rewarding the copyright holder and publisher so everyone is happy. I think period-based lending is not the best solution. The best solution will be better for all parties around than now - except well maybe any publishers who provide little value added.
The article does state how this is a very lucrative sounding idea to businesses which is why they are so darn happy about it. That's wonderful but it is too one-sided.
I think there is a major disconnect between what you and I think libraries are supposed to do. I believe providing access means in the digital age that you should 24 hours a day be able to access every title in the community/state/national/global library system for free, given that upkeep and acquisition fees are satisfactorily paid. It certainly couldn't cost more than a Gulf War, but my guess is it could actually be small enough to hide in municipal taxes. At this point the idea of access and copies is irrelevant. A "copy" just means a work is instantly accessible, unencumbered, portable to mobile platforms, etc.
The idea that libraries don't have to let the items leave the premises is alien to me. Why on earth would you think that is ideal? And why would it be necessary unless we are talking about sensitive, fragile, intensely curated, or some other kind of scarce documents? Of course if a library wants people to come because it has the only copy of something that is a different story.
Last point of yours and my last point as well. I think you are intentionally misreading my post and interpreting it based on the narrowest possible view whereas I am talking about the ideal, in consideration of present and future technology, incentives to increase quality authorship, recognition of the rights of individuals and communities both legally and in the sense of not having DRM solutions endlessly rammed down their throats. I do respect the rights of authors though it seems clear that the boilerplate in the front of most books about no electronic copying or storage is anachronisti
To posters who said this is why DRM is useful, consider what is the POINT of a library?
It is not a bookstore or cd/video rental shop. Patrons do not pay money each time they take a book out. They may be charged late fees due to scarcity issues, but the main idea is to enable the person to read the content.
The person can come back many times to take the book out again if he needs more time. But there is no point physically going to the library if it is a digital item on his drive.
In other words, even if the liscense required only a fixed number of people being able to view a title at a given time, it STILL would not make sense, because the DRM does not know if there are enough other copies to go around. It might be that nobody else is in fact interested in the file.
Therefore, the idea of a DRM "period" is bogus. At the very least, the user should be able to add another period if there are enough copies left in the stacks. It should not require an Internet line either, and it should be able to run on free software not some attackware that executes on my computer in a manner contrary to my wishes.
I have another point that may be unpopular with big business. It would be much better in my book if the library was able to purchase more items on a sliding scale as things got more popular, but not be bound to micromanage every copy on a user's hard drive.
You see, the point of the library is to ensure that everyone can get access to information, not just people with a lot of disposable income. You don't have to go buy the book or cd/dvd if your library has it. A library is not intended to be a marketing mechanism that makes you want to go buy the title. It is not intended to respond to the marketplace due to its competition with a bookstore/rental shop.
Considering that most people don't check the same book out of their library over and over again, a library normally wouldn't care if the user had a way to keep copies after returning them. The library has no responsibility for making sure that the user does not keep a copy on his drive even after the first time the user has read the copy, because it is there to promote access, not control access (except adult content maybe). If there is a good library nearby, you should never have to go to a store to get what you want.
Therefore, it stands to reason that:
DRM erasing files on your machine after a given period is WRONG. Lateness should engender late fees, so the person can balance opportunity cost at least.
You can't "lose" a file like you can lose or destroy a book, and books at least can be distributed for massively less money on cd or online. Such cost savings should be figured in when purchasing and when deciding on checkout policies.
Even if the library purchases titles with a maximum simultaneous readers clause in it, if enough copies are available it should extend the period so that late fees are waived.
The library should be able to calculate AVERAGE SIMULTANEOUS READERSHIP of a given title to maximize its investment and give readers some of the benefits of digital technology. In other words, it should allow a burst of MORE simultaneous users than contracted, and then balance that out by artificially reducing the number of titles that can be simultaneously read at a later date. This can be amortized over a Very Long Time (tm), which gives the library some time to consider buying more simultaneous liscenses when it really needs them.
Libraries should demand contracts with publishers which allow them to calculate average simultaneous readership to allow for readership bursts (say due to holidays or related news events). Libraries must also demand the option to easily purchase more liscenses at a later time based on an industry-wide open standard compliant form.
Libraries should fight tooth and nail against DRM that erases information and any other tools that undermine what a library is typically supposed to do.
I would like to mention two interesting points about common law trademarks and the GPL, but first..
IANAL. Also I personally believe this trademark initiative is wrong-headed, mainly because it has led to at least one tragedy (thelinuxapprentice.com, now down directly due to the scary dunning letters in Australia).
Also it has nothing to do with quality assurance, mainly it is a defensive tactic and as such *should* be maintained, but not by someone making a living at this, and not including calculations on how to maximize what the traffic will bear. The trademark should be sold for $1 or the minimum, regardless of whether it will make the trademark seem worthless, because of the innate reason the community needs defense and minimum burden.
The amount of money involved is very significant outside the U.S., and even in the U.S. a million dollar per year company could use the $10K to buy 20 $500 pcs, or hire a talented professor to do important research part time, etc. Where does it say they have a million bucks to burn?
It is also a barrier to entry to a market that has major distros with Linux in the name, and Linux has also become a generic term.
However I would submit that linux (with a lower case "l") or maybe vmlinuz? does talk about the kernel. So capitalized should be okay.
It does seem that the initiative violates Clause 1 of the GPL, though the later part of the GPL seems to suggest it might simply forbid you from using or distributing the otherwise unencumbered software.
Okay about common law trademark. Google it. I found this link and this link which look interesting. While perhaps not as strong in terms of protection, it would seem that if you have a popular program used in many states or countries online, it is already trademarked in a sense.
If true, this would mean that the idea of having to force people to purchase liscenses is bogus, since surely Linux is well known by now.
It also would render more transparent this unfortunate expedition of Linus' which as he says, was explicitly created so as to control how linux is used (what can be called linux).
I would have a little less problem if it was automatically accepted as long as you are really making something with the linux kernel in it, or even if it was not the linux kernel but it ran well-known "linux" applications, KDE, etc.
In this sense, there is no need for such a wide-ranging crusade for trademarks. All you need is for a nice-sized fund to be created to hire a lawyer in case somebody truly evil shows up and tries to destroy linux by FUD based on use of the linux name. Otherwise, I think they should just skip trademark enforcement, not worrying about so-called dilution. The POINT of linux is dilution in that you can use it to do anything you want! Why don't you just put something about that in the GPL and be done with it? If it isn't really linux, then tell people about it. How much money will it really cost per year to do a minimum reasonable job using inexpensive people? Anybody with a real answer? Any reason why it even has to be based in the first world?
Seriously if you are looking for a good project to work on it can't get much better than this, or something similar. If you can get a few people together - an expert each in hardware, analog/digital, software, and domain-specific industrial knowledge there are bound to be lots of ways you can change the world. The biggest problem with people who want to do good for the third world (as far as I have experienced and been told) is that you imagine everything can be fixed with the net, have no grip on higher priorities, etc. But this is a real case of something that is needed, and some experts could even make it a better project, saving the M$ tax being the least of it. How about figuring out a way to get a freescope to every hospital in Vietname or whatever country you pick (how about Cambodia?) Maybe someone reading this in Vietname would talk to the doctor about setting up a free endoscope construction online resource, starting with buying a scope and using windows with a faq but ultimately going full blown from scratch and with ways to hook in small/medium size manufacturers. This person in Vietname wouldn't have to do the entire project himself (but must be responsible to getting things done, or else they won't), but can ask for help from people on slashdot and they'll tell their friends, and so on.
I've helped a friend who created the Sihanouk hospital in Cambodia and that individual is a very resourceful retired journalist able to pull in all kinds of favors. Definitely not common. But one interesting project was telemedicine, getting links in to check with foreign hospitals for diagnosis. I also met someone who was using a pda and cheap sensors for very inexpensive testing and telemetry (Grenoble Hospital I believe, in France). The best is if you get a doctor who is also a whiz at every other necessary skill and doesn't have a lot of patients to worry about.. but as you can see it took this man 2 years and it's in his spare time. That is fine. Now can anybody else help him or people like him, who understand exactly what the need is and just need help to get it IMPLEMENTED? Run don't walk and find those key people. You can change the world.
Yes. And the sensors should be angled down, and be more sensitive and numerous.
However in the video, the older guy who bumps his head does not seem to be from the company that made it. He is the head of the company that brought the thing to the fair. He says that as a manufacturer that is looking at this midsized corporations tech fair (supposedly held at Big Sight in Tokyo but I couldn't find a reference to it on their calendar this or last month) they were talking to lots of people looking to see if there isn't anything interesting [to show a the fair] and this idea came up. The guy is CEO Tanaka of some place called the TAFM development group.
In Japanese, the incident goes like this: Reporter: Ah, looks like you got your head caught! Guy: Yeah, what's going on, wonder why it won't open? [inflection is a bit haughty]. Reporter: Yes, because it is still in a prototype stage. Guy: Well, I suppose you could say it opens but..
This is typical. These kids are not felons, they are creative, adolescent, possibly rebellious, quite curious and talented, and minors. They are to be applauded, supported and directed to positive study and not threatened or made criminals. When I was in school nobody stopped kids who picked on me daily, I had to do that after studying karate for a while. When I despaired of going to public highschool with kids who jumped me with a knife and the young laughing criminals that even the smart kids had turned into, I lucked out getting my ass into private school and that was the beginning of a wonderful transformation in my personality not to mention they had a great computer room - two, one with early word processors (I got onto the school newspaper team) and another general purpose one. Plus a Basic IV minicomputer for a data structures class I loved, don't think you'll see that in klutztown. Oh yeah we also went on to win the national championships in the american computer science league (no thanks to me, the junior member I guess I barely held my own but there were a few geniuses in the group). This sort of an incident is a very good way for parents to discover that their children are going to an inferior school, and that the values of their community are inferior too. Time to get elsewhere. The irony is that the (federal) administration undoubtedly has somebody somewhere who has a clue, and in order to nurture the next generation of scientists, computer whizzes, and army cyberdefenders, they need to put a stop to this kind of bullshit and protect the kids and discipline the idiots in charge. A mass firing would be useful.
The comment by the man from Ziff-Davis was really head on.
You are trying to do too many things, cover too many areas, and have too many links and distractions on your site.
Also it would have been nice to have something for people to buy when you got your slashdotting.:)
One thing I can tell you straight off is get rid of Cafe Press. I was in San Diego at ComicCon and there was a seminar about how individual artists could make money on the net. One said DON'T use Cafe Press because they will rape you etc. In general they said you should source things locally and try to get a good deal there. Not that I imagine t-shirts and Google ads are really valuable to anyone. I would say you should stop in your tracks and get someone with experience to do a serious analysis of your business, create a new approach designed to make you cashflow, and execute it continually.
Also I really think (as the poster quoted above does) that you should focus on one scientific area if you can and go very deep, making personal connections to various research institutions. I never heard of your site even after 10 years of reading science on the net, and though I did add you to my sea of bookmarks, I'm not sure what is the compelling proposition. If you had an insiders report that periodically covered advances by many labs that would be more interesting, but I really hate the "warmed over" news idea of many sites (/. too). I don't want to hear you talking about "submissions", that's bull.
If you consider yourself professional journalists and want to get paid like them, then how about doing some journalism. Scrap the entire site and provide a single great original story every week. Hell, get on a plane (or hire a pro in the vicinity) and get some deep interviews with those nanotube ribbon researchers. Talk to others about what they think about that and where else these things are going. If you just made a nanoribbon journal and made yourselves important to researchers and/or businesspeople I think you could make money, get sponsorship, and provide an eminently useful service to people who want to pay for it.
I don't understand how you can make everything you create free and then complain about not making any money. Why aren't you already bankrupt? Not to sound nasty, I may indeed go back to your site if I remember it on a slow slashdot day (though my firefox personal menu bar is quite full..).
Okay, I just opened the url again (now I've memorized it's trnmag.com, a good start). I saw a link to books and thought, great! This is like MIT's OpenCourseware right? NO. First it talks about how you "secure a space on the physical bookshelf" in your office. What the heck is that? Why do I care about a shelf in your office if I'm on the net, which can hold unlimited numbers of books? Okay, I clicked on the biomimicry book, sounds interesting. It just takes me to a page at the Amazon bookstore where I can buy it. Where is the review you said would be there? Turns out it is just a SCAM that Amazon is probably paying you for my traffic. Screw that! Did you say professional journalism?
Now I open the Classifieds section. What could that be I wonder? It's more scam bullshit! Delete that annoying crap!
Okay let's talk about ads. The comic guys talked about some very interesting things. For one thing, one moderately successful guy carefully vets companies that want to advertise on his site and turns down a lot that are not appropriate in his mind. Then he is even harsher about companies for whom he makes a customer banner and page, since it gives that company some of his cachet. You need to learn about that. There is at least one person though making upwards of $1M per year with an online comic. The story wasn't completely discussed but they said merchandise was big. If you must have free content and you can create a high-involvement brand (which you don't have) then that is a possibility I suppose. For now how about focusing on improving your product, scrapping the distractions, and selling some of it.
Okay I've had enough. If your site was blank except for articles I would read it. As it stands, I have enough of an immunological reaction against it that I doubt I'll visit your site again.
Before I get flamed I would like to note that I was mostly thinking about the case in which you make a new linux distro or fork a new one. And I see in the comments on the article's page, that this is indeed something major, in that "Linux" has come to be a generic term (i.e. "I'm running Linux." "Oh yeah? Which distro?") and encompasses the concept of GNU/Linux operating system, kernel, drivers, applications, X Windows, KDE/Gnome, etc.
Since it is very hard to even talk about linux systems without using the word linux, in fact I don't see why I should have to pay trademark fee for the linux trademark if I make a distro called say "Pine Tree Linux".
That said definitely I am not a lawyer. The cases mentioned in the Groklaw page as hideous possibilities sound like they could be covered by the Better Business Bureau, or just ignored, though in my book, Microsoft certainly has every right to make a Microsoft Linux. (and watch out when they do!) I do not know how much effort it takes to force a judgement in trademark law, but I do wonder if it couldn't be done more efficiently i.e. with a pre-prepared format that is mostly reused. Possibly costs could also be reduced by finding people or organizations in different countries that are willing to take on basic preparatory work in their country for trademark protection there. If it was needed. I'm not so convinced it is yet. Anyway if I'm making millions off of the linux trademark it wouldn't hurt me much but on the other hand I may be giving back to the community in some other way and this is one more hand being stuck out to be fed for something I didn't ask for.
It is not clear 1. why the individual spent 250,000 USD (?) of his own money, that's a lot 2. why not liscense for $1. 3. that GPL-liscensed software is still not free to sell if it has linux in the name, and whether any payment for a mark is passed on to forkers 4. why this was not sent through the community first. Linus may have started things and still have a hand in the kernel, but the value of the trademark is mostly I would imagine NOT due to him personally. 5. how exactly this protects quality of linux products. it's not like we get the source code or anything. 6. why something that started as a self-defense action now has to make enough money to pay for pricey executives 7. I'm a software developer too, what does this mean to me? Not that I was going to call anything I make linux but now I'm a little worried. What if I use something with linux in the name even? etc. 8. In general this sounds really boneheaded can you geek this down for me? Who asked this wonderful person to spend so much money of his own without telling anybody (or documenting it?) and now hold the world for ransom to pay for this expensive habit? (Profit!)
Basically if the money is not going to Linus then who is it going to, and likewise why does it have to go anywhere.
Perhaps first of this type. But I know someone who has a few patents on a liquid in plastic membrane lens which he developed after Nikon said it couldn't be done.. for cheap eyeglasses for the third world. A syringe for each lens is dialed to inject clear fluid into a round plastic pocket which bulges, changing focus. You dial until things look clear, once for each eye. Then a crimp is put in the tubes and you snip off the syringes. It is difficult to make non-circular lenses so same is probably true for this one as well.
Except for the librarian in question, for whom this is undoubtedly a stupid horror, this is just another high water mark that indicates the general stupidity of contemporary U.S. society, especially Florida which I'm sorry to say, may have a couple positive news stories but in general looks like an example of massive social deevolution.
Even IF the librarian had a written contract guaranteeing perfect surveillance and control of the Internet kiosks, it is most likely a minor footnote compared to all the good done for the community. Or to put it another way, the inability to restrain suspicious conduct by a felon was found to outweigh all other contributions. Maybe an accounting of the tasks that were done instead of policing the kiosks would be illuminating.
Possibly there is a secret war against sex offenders that requires the public library to be some kind of gauntlet the newly released offender has to run. Not sure if that wouldn't in fact count as entrapment but.. heck Florida doesn't think libraries and custodians of knowledge are that important so screw 'em! There's a limited number of slots in the Ivies and Big 10 schools anyway.
As noted in a comment I made a few weeks ago in the thread about the Blu-Ray spec, the thing is intended to control everything in your house that is wireless and compatible. Imagine an 802.11 mesh starting where your TV set is. Now I don't know how this stuff propagates on the electrical lines down the street but certainly in an apartment building if there is a LAN antenna in your box it could piggy back other players all the way to the evil ISP (tm).
Anybody notice the upper finger squashing the ball before tossing it back? Just how powerful are those finger things anyway? I and a coworker both noted it looked really creepy/scary in particular I got the shivers watching the fingers all fold up (reminded me of the send off gesture in Mars Attacks) and then open like a flower. I don't think you want to shake hands with anything that can stop a ball that fast, moving faster than you can see, and keep saying "Bring it on!"
Incidentally, a researcher in TFA amazingly denegrates it as "an engineering feat" saying there is no practical use for it. Until you realize that it would also be useful for a robot body or arm moving at 186 mph with respect to its environment, or another person. How about mounting this thing on one of those fast wheeled drones and using it to pluck guns out of insurgent's hands? I could also see this used in a tentacle that has circular cross sections that can individually rotate 180 degrees in 0.1 seconds, making for a spectacularly dangerous whiplike appendage. They should send a robotics researcher to film school, seriously.
Slashdot Mirror
Okay. A slashdot article on the blu-ray spec posted at least a month ago (2 or three dvd-related threads ago) had a link to the spec, a pdf. A 15 minute skim of the paper scared me and I posted about it, then reiterated it in the last 2 related threads. Does anybody read the technical material? It's like /. is just a bunch of 12-year old wankers who don't even like programming or studying that much.
The encryption system uses a broad tree of keys and subkeys so that the player can disable an entire subset of media by denying decryption functionality for parts of the tree.
The player can be Internet connected but does not have to be. However the spec IIRC does allow executable code or related commands in part of the DVD, which seems to be protected with a different key.
The player is proposed to have a wireless LAN adapter which may be sold separately, presumably this would simultaneously serve media to clients in your home while providing a keyring and monitor to police usage across the LAN.
The spec as proposed appears to guarantee that there will be events from time to time triggered by media or net connection (or even from media or programs on another pc on the LAN) causing portions of the key tree to be disabled, enabled, or updated. The ultimate thermonuclear threat on this platform is to disable the entire tree which may either render the device unusable completely, or may just let you use DVDs that are unprotected (if any exist in that format).
It sounds like each player will have a unique ID as well. While disablings of keys may not discriminate between IDs in the beginning, it is entirely possible that hacking your player could even end up in your being blacklisted in some way, or "infecting" your entire network with commands destroying functionality.
Personally I despise this introduction of military-grade security into my home by big entertainment companies and will boycott and fight against this any way I can. I already do not buy CDs or DVDs outright and do not feel I suffer unduly. This initiative is sure to make your home a battleground for all kinds of cyberwarfare that make you nostalgic in 10 years for the cute and relatively limited and harmless spyware and spam threats of today.
I would like to ask a physicist in the room two questions.
1) It sounds like the diamond-nanotube composite material mentioned in a separate slashdot article today would include nanoscale diamond chunks, nice hard, heavy things, nanoiron seeds, and conductive nanotubes. Would this not be an interesting candidate for use in the testing of this theory of how gravity works at the nanometer scale?
2) I don't really understand the idea of a dimension only a nanometer wide, or the idea of dimensions being rolled up even though I've heard the same metaphor for a long time explaining it. For example if the universe is really 1 nanometer wide along the axis of the 5th dimension, then how thin is the visible universe? Or to tackle the other metaphor, if the 5th dimension is in fact rolled up at a scale far smaller than atoms, what does this mean in terms of real world physics we know? Maybe gravity gets sucked in there, what about electrons or magnetic fields? Is it impossible for an atom to see into the rolled up dimension of the atom next to it? etc.
Can't we use the metric system?
I just can't figure out if this is linear or exponential..
1 super ulra mega
= 1 ultra mega mega
= 1 mega mega mega
So would it be mega x mega x mega, or
mega^(mega ^ mega)?
Glad we got all that cleared up.
This sounds a bit like a dupe or just old news, I've heard it before. Of course it really is *really* old news, but.. um.
Anyway it would be nice to project its path ahead to see what civs need bailing out. Then NASA's warp drive project has a goal! Maybe we should keep our scopes and neutrino detectors on that region of space to see if any other civs already have mounted a hypervelocity rescue effort? Note the star is seen 7000 years in the past, so it is actually 20 light years or so closer to its victims than it looks.
Thank you very much for the reply. It would be great if these discoveries lead us to being able to grow back joints like the mice in the lab did. Actually I'd like to grow back a knee joint like Pele's not the crappy knees I got.
Honestly, surfing at 4 and still nearly every post is brain dead, except the ones noting that the researcher is in the U.S., not Australia.
However it is at he University of Pennsylvania (U Penn), which I believe is a different school from Penn State which one person posted.
Google: Ellen Heber-Katz Wistar
You will note that a genome screen was conducted at some point in time finding genes on 5 different chromosomes involved in wound healing and regeneration. The regeneration takes place by a mass of cells forming at the wound site that can form into many different tissue types, i.e. like stem cells. Indeed it seems (from a cursory scan of a few links) that stem cells injected into other mice also work. And this facility can be inherited.
There is related research going on in different areas including observation of self-healing optical nerves, heart muscle, and even spinal cord once the scar tissue and scarring agents if that's what they are saying, are cleared away.
It is being reported at a conference in a week but already Nature and other publications seem to be involved at least in the past. Wistar is famous for vaccine development too.
If someone with real knowledge in the field could pop in now I'd sure appreciate it.
I can say one more thing. Humans can regenerate to a very limited extent already. I know because my mother chopped off the tip of her finger in a folding chair (shiver) when she was little. The tip grew back with the nail, though I'm not sure if a joint actually grew back the way these mice did.
The point is scientists never believed regeneration was possible even with such evidence, then views turned around, and now we have finally gotten to this amazing milestone. It is not an instantaneous thing. There is a paper cited about heart regeneration in the MRL mouse in 2002. They found the "healer" mouse in 1998. But it seems a milestone has obviously been met and it sounds like things are going to accelerate if more people can start working on the gene functions and biochemistry involved.
Heber Katz' talk
will be given on Sept. 7 at Queens' College in Cambridge, England. The whole conference sounds very interesting, it would be nice if someone with a brain and some training could report on it to slashdot.
Okay surfing at 3 and reading some of the articles I think I know what is going on but I still don't get it.
I find it misguided. The reasons I have heard so far do not make it sound like a good idea to do what the LMI is doing.
Put it this way. Is there any situation you can honestly imagine that makes what LMI is doing seem remotely useful? I can't. This is not going to promote quality, it is just going to annoy people and has already caused at least one person to stop providing a free service to the Linux community (thelinuxapprentice.com, now down).
It seems to me to go completely against the spirit of the GPL and ignores the contributions of the community.
I find it hard to believe that trademark law requires Linus Torvalds to hire someone who enjoys massive spam and threats of legal shark attacks, against people who are 99.99% doing great stuff with Linux.
The idea that this will maintain quality of linux purveyors, or that it will stop Microsoft from launching an offensive against Linux that could not be handled some other way or successfully ignored, is dumb.
So yes, unfortunately I come to the conclusion that while I thought Linus was really a smart dude, in this case I think he has been taken in by someone who does NOT have the best interests of the community at heart. And at least one person IS making a good living at sending out these threatening letters.
Why? BECAUSE SPAM PAYS.
Thank you Linus for giving us this economics lesson again. Now please cease and desist. My own business would do much better if there were more companies with Linux in their names. It's as if the Linux community is so incredibly stupid and masochistic, that just as the SCO saga is winding to an end, we have to CREATE ANOTHER BULLSHIT LEGAL CHARADE because we have nothing better to do! How about leaving it to someone who DOES have something better to do, and who will only lurch into action if that doomsday scenario comes to pass? Make the minimum $1 if you must but fund the hiring of the legal team for the doomsday scenario by asking industry to help, if they agree it is a problem. This proactive crap is not useful and has a CHILLING EFFECT.
Thank you very much for your comment. I'm glad you agree!
You may like to read my other responses, some are a bit long but the last one in particular has some ideas for libraries.
WOW! Thanks for the comment.
I guess we are on the same wavelength, but you say it better. I wish some journalist would pick this up.
I can tell you that I LIKE reading books on the train, whether in print, on my pda or phone. I just built a little program that lets me read a document paged on my phone and it is quite useful.
I also think $25 for Harry Potter is a bit too much, at least who needs it in hardcover? They should sell an ascii version for a few bucks too. What is the breakdown after you cut away all the crap? Why not just download it from J.K. Rowling and pay her or her charity whatever she thinks is reasonable?
Put it this way, both movie distributors and book publishers these days are, if you believe the news, constantly about to go out of business, unless they get one or two massive hits each year. All that marketing, and still they are in the red?
This is bullshit. It isn't the way the public library used to work when I was little and IIRC libraries are actually a bit scarcer these days.
One idea I just had is that libraries could be useful if they act en masse, to develop their own delivery systems.
They can contact authors directly.
They can leverage their pull with younger people, students on campus, industry execs, etc.
They can set up high quality video communications areas over fiber or adsl, and offer community or nationwide talks with authors. (My mother does a chat on eBay each valentines day, why can't a library do it?)
They can centralize and promote annotation by readers and professors regarding specific titles or topics, promoting discourse, critical thinking, and dissemination of knowledge.
They can support open knowledge initiatives like those of MIT (OpenCourseware) and provide google-like searching of knowledge, but leveraging the practical knowledge of library science and intimate knowledge of publications and community needs that they have. Librarians are actually quite powerful, and I believe they are also interested and experiment with new technologies. I think they need a lot more money and a (bigger) army of open source developers.
Well, thank you very much. You may wish to read my other responses in this thread, two are a bit long.
Thank you very much for your response. Please see my two long replies in this thread of replies to me.
In response, a copy may be cheap to make but not if you place a premium on when it is made. That is my problem. I think some leeway should be built in, and a lot of thought should be put into how to remove rules based on physical scarcity while trying to make authorship a good way to make a living and maximizing readership.
I agree "the publisher doesn't have to give a shit" as you say. At least if they want to stay in business. As I mentioned they have to give a copy to the Library of Congress, and also there may be a way to make more money without such restricitive DRM, especially in specific markets, on campuses, in companies, etc. Libraries don't have to buy DRM either though, not yet.
Thanks very much, please see my other responses.
Matt
Thank you very much for your comment. Please see my two lengthy responses to replies to my original post.
Basically I think libraries are there for multiple reasons but one important reason is as a protector of culture and to ensure that the community can access it. There is also a position that they should help people caught in the digital divide, etc.
I agree that they should not fight DRM solely "because it could be used to protect the copyright holders' rights". That would be a bit disingenuous.
However, they should be very careful about accepting DRM as part of their core policies, and in general I think DRM as it stands now is aimed at protecting the revenue streams of publishers and not necessarily supporting a mechanism that would jointly improve the lot of the author and the reader. Sorry this is not a great reply, I certainly agree about archival properties and proprietary encodings, so we are really in agreement. Please see my other posts above.
Anyway, I do recognize that if a library had everything Barnes and Noble's had for free, next door, it might cut into B&N's bottom line a little bit. Maybe what I want is to be able to read any book in existence and just have it taken penny by penny out of my monthly utility bill.
Thank you very much for your very interesting and detailed reply. I will try to respond to each of your points, but to save time please also see my response to the reply above yours.
As for how to do it without Internet access, If you had an e-book tablet like the librie but that works better, you could maybe have a lot of books in it and you could type access keys into it or synch them at the library.
The DRM should not suddenly cut off access, it should default to being openended or to perhaps twice the rental period. This is better for users and not a significant problem for publishers. DRM could automatically check if there are extra copies and let the user know the answer, but I believe people should be in the loop. In particular you are going to be getting children caught up in a mechanized big brother like system. What if they have a book report due, didn't realize the date, and suddenly access turns off? and so on. So I would prefer to have people in the loop, and I dislike having my own computer policing me. You may not mind..? Anyway I understand that the DRM has to act this way *in this DRM scheme implementation*. However it is just a recently built scheme and I do not treat it as a permanent part of the landscape like mountains, rivers, etc.
I think you should realize that most of the technological things we use fall into disuse pretty quickly and as such are not on a par with humans who outlive 8-track tapes and betamaxes. Hopefully I will outlive DRM but it's doubtful. As such I would appreciate it if you consider "what I wish to do" to be "what a user would like to do" and the idea that "the software has to do X" is simply an implementation of a scheme devised by a marketer at some publisher. In the scheme of things, it is in everyone's interest to get as many people reading things as possible, and it is the reponsibility of society to devise schemes that maximize that while rewarding authors and minimizing assaults on humanity's superiority to machines. I find acceptance of DRM in all it various guises to be quite bothering and have boycotted publishers using it.
About libraries being beholden to publishers. Well that is your opinion and I am not going to go so far as to say I know what a library thinks. But I do believe that libraries, as a group together, and considering how intimate they are with students, are extremely important. Also I believe that libraries and bookstores may grow more closely together in the eyes of publishers in the future. Anyway the Library of Congress is one library that is definitely not beholden to publishers, it's the other way around. That one copy in the LoC could be enough for the world, if it's digital.
In the end it will probably take a Google and a pro-education administration to advance this crazy idea of making it possible to integrate and compare texts in the comfort of your home without them evaporating on you.
As to whether publishers are willing to do something, I think it is a matter of do they make money at it, and what are their legal and social responsibilities. I also believe that current bookstores must have a major problem with profitability and the cost of real estate and personnel, because while there are always a lot of inane books and coffee table glossy covered books out in front to make money, there is not a huge selection in U.S. bookstores (though better than most) usually if you consider there is a whole English speaking world out there writing books. Same with video stores. Just talking about science fiction which I happen to like, there are not as many talented authors as I would like to see. Talented, but dead, authors are competing with them successfully. I think something should be done to make it possible for more talented authors to get works out there and there is a lot of unnecessary expense involved now. Anyway this is a long way of saying that if libraries offered publishers/authors an interesting way to do that I think there could be some interesting developments for al
Thank you very much for your detailed reply. Presumptuous though, as I've read the article at least twice and /. blurb and believe I have a pretty good handle on the tech. I will try to respond to most of your points.
Non-ascii text files of books is not good. Ask the Gutenberg Project.
What if the patron got the content through a download to a memory stick, flash card or something like the ipod loans the article mentions. Internet is very useful but a library is meant to serve people who might not have an Internet connection, or a home for that manner. Also I don't want some software dialing out but if it is just a code to past from a browser fine.
As for the merits of the program, certainly there are lots which is why it works at least to this limited extent, for this type content.
With regard to your "refutations":
In general number of copies etc. is something a publisher handles I believe in general. However I am not advocating breaking the law. I am saying that the concept philosophically is bogus. It is artificial and while one practical implementation of a book sharing program uses it, I do not believe it is optimal, for the reasons I provide. It is a silly idea that is a carryover from atom-based publishing. Start over please.
And I think libraries should consider the concept of a checkout period very seriously when talking about digital media. For example, how about allowing every high school student in a class to check out the same five books simultaneously for them to write a report using them at once? This is impossible with a period-based checkout system, and demands some more flexible kind of a system which can be invented publishers, manufacturers, independent free software developers, or the library association.
The library could perhaps purchase 50 digital copies, but other problems would likely turn up all based on scarcity when what you really want to do is make it very easy to use and disseminate books while rewarding the copyright holder and publisher so everyone is happy. I think period-based lending is not the best solution. The best solution will be better for all parties around than now - except well maybe any publishers who provide little value added.
The article does state how this is a very lucrative sounding idea to businesses which is why they are so darn happy about it. That's wonderful but it is too one-sided.
I think there is a major disconnect between what you and I think libraries are supposed to do. I believe providing access means in the digital age that you should 24 hours a day be able to access every title in the community/state/national/global library system for free, given that upkeep and acquisition fees are satisfactorily paid. It certainly couldn't cost more than a Gulf War, but my guess is it could actually be small enough to hide in municipal taxes.
At this point the idea of access and copies is irrelevant. A "copy" just means a work is instantly accessible, unencumbered, portable to mobile platforms, etc.
The idea that libraries don't have to let the items leave the premises is alien to me. Why on earth would you think that is ideal? And why would it be necessary unless we are talking about sensitive, fragile, intensely curated, or some other kind of scarce documents? Of course if a library wants people to come because it has the only copy of something that is a different story.
Last point of yours and my last point as well. I think you are intentionally misreading my post and interpreting it based on the narrowest possible view whereas I am talking about the ideal, in consideration of present and future technology, incentives to increase quality authorship, recognition of the rights of individuals and communities both legally and in the sense of not having DRM solutions endlessly rammed down their throats. I do respect the rights of authors though it seems clear that the boilerplate in the front of most books about no electronic copying or storage is anachronisti
It is not a bookstore or cd/video rental shop. Patrons do not pay money each time they take a book out. They may be charged late fees due to scarcity issues, but the main idea is to enable the person to read the content.
The person can come back many times to take the book out again if he needs more time. But there is no point physically going to the library if it is a digital item on his drive.
In other words, even if the liscense required only a fixed number of people being able to view a title at a given time, it STILL would not make sense, because the DRM does not know if there are enough other copies to go around. It might be that nobody else is in fact interested in the file.
Therefore, the idea of a DRM "period" is bogus. At the very least, the user should be able to add another period if there are enough copies left in the stacks. It should not require an Internet line either, and it should be able to run on free software not some attackware that executes on my computer in a manner contrary to my wishes.
I have another point that may be unpopular with big business. It would be much better in my book if the library was able to purchase more items on a sliding scale as things got more popular, but not be bound to micromanage every copy on a user's hard drive.
You see, the point of the library is to ensure that everyone can get access to information, not just people with a lot of disposable income. You don't have to go buy the book or cd/dvd if your library has it. A library is not intended to be a marketing mechanism that makes you want to go buy the title. It is not intended to respond to the marketplace due to its competition with a bookstore/rental shop.
Considering that most people don't check the same book out of their library over and over again, a library normally wouldn't care if the user had a way to keep copies after returning them. The library has no responsibility for making sure that the user does not keep a copy on his drive even after the first time the user has read the copy, because it is there to promote access, not control access (except adult content maybe). If there is a good library nearby, you should never have to go to a store to get what you want.
Therefore, it stands to reason that:
I would like to mention two interesting points about common law trademarks and the GPL, but first..
IANAL. Also I personally believe this trademark initiative is wrong-headed, mainly because it has led to at least one tragedy (thelinuxapprentice.com, now down directly due to the scary dunning letters in Australia).
Also it has nothing to do with quality assurance, mainly it is a defensive tactic and as such *should* be maintained, but not by someone making a living at this, and not including calculations on how to maximize what the traffic will bear. The trademark should be sold for $1 or the minimum, regardless of whether it will make the trademark seem worthless, because of the innate reason the community needs defense and minimum burden.
The amount of money involved is very significant outside the U.S., and even in the U.S. a million dollar per year company could use the $10K to buy 20 $500 pcs, or hire a talented professor to do important research part time, etc. Where does it say they have a million bucks to burn?
It is also a barrier to entry to a market that has major distros with Linux in the name, and Linux has also become a generic term.
However I would submit that linux (with a lower case "l") or maybe vmlinuz? does talk about the kernel. So capitalized should be okay.
It does seem that the initiative violates Clause 1 of the GPL,
though the later part of the GPL seems to suggest it might simply forbid you from using or distributing the otherwise unencumbered software.
Okay about common law trademark. Google it. I found this link and this link which look interesting. While perhaps not as strong in terms of protection, it would seem that if you have a popular program used in many states or countries online, it is already trademarked in a sense.
If true, this would mean that the idea of having to force people to purchase liscenses is bogus, since surely Linux is well known by now.
It also would render more transparent this unfortunate expedition of Linus' which as he says, was explicitly created so as to control how linux is used (what can be called linux).
I would have a little less problem if it was automatically accepted as long as you are really making something with the linux kernel in it, or even if it was not the linux kernel but it ran well-known "linux" applications, KDE, etc.
In this sense, there is no need for such a wide-ranging crusade for trademarks. All you need is for a nice-sized fund to be created to hire a lawyer in case somebody truly evil shows up and tries to destroy linux by FUD based on use of the linux name. Otherwise, I think they should just skip trademark enforcement, not worrying about so-called dilution. The POINT of linux is dilution in that you can use it to do anything you want! Why don't you just put something about that in the GPL and be done with it? If it isn't really linux, then tell people about it. How much money will it really cost per year to do a minimum reasonable job using inexpensive people? Anybody with a real answer? Any reason why it even has to be based in the first world?
Seriously if you are looking for a good project to work on it can't get much better than this, or something similar. If you can get a few people together - an expert each in hardware, analog/digital, software, and domain-specific industrial knowledge there are bound to be lots of ways you can change the world. The biggest problem with people who want to do good for the third world (as far as I have experienced and been told) is that you imagine everything can be fixed with the net, have no grip on higher priorities, etc. But this is a real case of something that is needed, and some experts could even make it a better project, saving the M$ tax being the least of it. How about figuring out a way to get a freescope to every hospital in Vietname or whatever country you pick (how about Cambodia?) Maybe someone reading this in Vietname would talk to the doctor about setting up a free endoscope construction online resource, starting with buying a scope and using windows with a faq but ultimately going full blown from scratch and with ways to hook in small/medium size manufacturers.
This person in Vietname wouldn't have to do the entire project himself (but must be responsible to getting things done, or else they won't), but can ask for help from people on slashdot and they'll tell their friends, and so on.
I've helped a friend who created the Sihanouk hospital in Cambodia and that individual is a very resourceful retired journalist able to pull in all kinds of favors. Definitely not common. But one interesting project was telemedicine, getting links in to check with foreign hospitals for diagnosis. I also met someone who was using a pda and cheap sensors for very inexpensive testing and telemetry (Grenoble Hospital I believe, in France). The best is if you get a doctor who is also a whiz at every other necessary skill and doesn't have a lot of patients to worry about.. but as you can see it took this man 2 years and it's in his spare time. That is fine. Now can anybody else help him or people like him, who understand exactly what the need is and just need help to get it IMPLEMENTED?
Run don't walk and find those key people. You can change the world.
Yes. And the sensors should be angled down, and be more sensitive and numerous.
However in the video, the older guy who bumps his head does not seem to be from the company that made it. He is the head of the company that brought the thing to the fair. He says that as a manufacturer that is looking at this midsized corporations tech fair (supposedly held at Big Sight in Tokyo but I couldn't find a reference to it on their calendar this or last month) they were talking to lots of people looking to see if there isn't anything interesting [to show a the fair] and this idea came up.
The guy is CEO Tanaka of some place called the TAFM development group.
In Japanese, the incident goes like this:
Reporter: Ah, looks like you got your head caught!
Guy: Yeah, what's going on, wonder why it won't open? [inflection is a bit haughty].
Reporter: Yes, because it is still in a prototype stage.
Guy: Well, I suppose you could say it opens but..
This is typical. These kids are not felons, they are creative, adolescent, possibly rebellious, quite curious and talented, and minors. They are to be applauded, supported and directed to positive study and not threatened or made criminals. When I was in school nobody stopped kids who picked on me daily, I had to do that after studying karate for a while. When I despaired of going to public highschool with kids who jumped me with a knife and the young laughing criminals that even the smart kids had turned into, I lucked out getting my ass into private school and that was the beginning of a wonderful transformation in my personality not to mention they had a great computer room - two, one with early word processors (I got onto the school newspaper team) and another general purpose one. Plus a Basic IV minicomputer for a data structures class I loved, don't think you'll see that in klutztown. Oh yeah we also went on to win the national championships in the american computer science league (no thanks to me, the junior member I guess I barely held my own but there were a few geniuses in the group). This sort of an incident is a very good way for parents to discover that their children are going to an inferior school, and that the values of their community are inferior too. Time to get elsewhere. The irony is that the (federal) administration undoubtedly has somebody somewhere who has a clue, and in order to nurture the next generation of scientists, computer whizzes, and army cyberdefenders, they need to put a stop to this kind of bullshit and protect the kids and discipline the idiots in charge. A mass firing would be useful.
The comment by the man from Ziff-Davis was really head on.
:)
You are trying to do too many things, cover too many areas, and have too many links and distractions on your site.
Also it would have been nice to have something for people to buy when you got your slashdotting.
One thing I can tell you straight off is get rid of Cafe Press. I was in San Diego at ComicCon and there was a seminar about how individual artists could make money on the net. One said DON'T use Cafe Press because they will rape you etc. In general they said you should source things locally and try to get a good deal there. Not that I imagine t-shirts and Google ads are really valuable to anyone. I would say you should stop in your tracks and get someone with experience to do a serious analysis of your business, create a new approach designed to make you cashflow, and execute it continually.
Also I really think (as the poster quoted above does) that you should focus on one scientific area if you can and go very deep, making personal connections to various research institutions. I never heard of your site even after 10 years of reading science on the net, and though I did add you to my sea of bookmarks, I'm not sure what is the compelling proposition. If you had an insiders report that periodically covered advances by many labs that would be more interesting, but I really hate the "warmed over" news idea of many sites (/. too). I don't want to hear you talking about "submissions", that's bull.
If you consider yourself professional journalists and want to get paid like them, then how about doing some journalism. Scrap the entire site and provide a single great original story every week. Hell, get on a plane (or hire a pro in the vicinity) and get some deep interviews with those nanotube ribbon researchers. Talk to others about what they think about that and where else these things are going. If you just made a nanoribbon journal and made yourselves important to researchers and/or businesspeople I think you could make money, get sponsorship, and provide an eminently useful service to people who want to pay for it.
I don't understand how you can make everything you create free and then complain about not making any money. Why aren't you already bankrupt? Not to sound nasty, I may indeed go back to your site if I remember it on a slow slashdot day (though my firefox personal menu bar is quite full..).
Okay, I just opened the url again (now I've memorized it's trnmag.com, a good start). I saw a link to books and thought, great! This is like MIT's OpenCourseware right? NO. First it talks about how you "secure a space on the physical bookshelf" in your office. What the heck is that? Why do I care about a shelf in your office if I'm on the net, which can hold unlimited numbers of books? Okay, I clicked on the biomimicry book, sounds interesting. It just takes me to a page at the Amazon bookstore where I can buy it. Where is the review you said would be there? Turns out it is just a SCAM that Amazon is probably paying you for my traffic. Screw that! Did you say professional journalism?
Now I open the Classifieds section. What could that be I wonder? It's more scam bullshit! Delete that annoying crap!
Okay let's talk about ads. The comic guys talked about some very interesting things. For one thing, one moderately successful guy carefully vets companies that want to advertise on his site and turns down a lot that are not appropriate in his mind. Then he is even harsher about companies for whom he makes a customer banner and page, since it gives that company some of his cachet. You need to learn about that. There is at least one person though making upwards of $1M per year with an online comic. The story wasn't completely discussed but they said merchandise was big. If you must have free content and you can create a high-involvement brand (which you don't have) then that is a possibility I suppose. For now how about focusing on improving your product, scrapping the distractions, and selling some of it.
Okay I've had enough. If your site was blank except for articles I would read it. As it stands, I have enough of an immunological reaction against it that I doubt I'll visit your site again.
Before I get flamed I would like to note that I was mostly thinking about the case in which you make a new linux distro or fork a new one. And I see in the comments on the article's page, that this is indeed something major, in that "Linux" has come to be a generic term (i.e. "I'm running Linux." "Oh yeah? Which distro?") and encompasses the concept of GNU/Linux operating system, kernel, drivers, applications, X Windows, KDE/Gnome, etc.
Since it is very hard to even talk about linux systems without using the word linux, in fact I don't see why I should have to pay trademark fee for the linux trademark if I make a distro called say "Pine Tree Linux".
That said definitely I am not a lawyer. The cases mentioned in the Groklaw page as hideous possibilities sound like they could be covered by the Better Business Bureau, or just ignored, though in my book, Microsoft certainly has every right to make a Microsoft Linux. (and watch out when they do!) I do not know how much effort it takes to force a judgement in trademark law, but I do wonder if it couldn't be done more efficiently i.e. with a pre-prepared format that is mostly reused. Possibly costs could also be reduced by finding people or organizations in different countries that are willing to take on basic preparatory work in their country for trademark protection there. If it was needed. I'm not so convinced it is yet. Anyway if I'm making millions off of the linux trademark it wouldn't hurt me much but on the other hand I may be giving back to the community in some other way and this is one more hand being stuck out to be fed for something I didn't ask for.
It is not clear
1. why the individual spent 250,000 USD (?) of his own money, that's a lot
2. why not liscense for $1.
3. that GPL-liscensed software is still not free to sell if it has linux in the name, and whether any payment for a mark is passed on to forkers
4. why this was not sent through the community first. Linus may have started things and still have a hand in the kernel, but the value of the trademark is mostly I would imagine NOT due to him personally.
5. how exactly this protects quality of linux products. it's not like we get the source code or anything.
6. why something that started as a self-defense action now has to make enough money to pay for pricey executives
7. I'm a software developer too, what does this mean to me? Not that I was going to call anything I make linux but now I'm a little worried. What if I use something with linux in the name even? etc.
8. In general this sounds really boneheaded can you geek this down for me? Who asked this wonderful person to spend so much money of his own without telling anybody (or documenting it?) and now hold the world for ransom to pay for this expensive habit? (Profit!)
Basically if the money is not going to Linus then who is it going to, and likewise why does it have to go anywhere.
Perhaps first of this type. But I know someone who has a few patents on a liquid in plastic membrane lens which he developed after Nikon said it couldn't be done.. for cheap eyeglasses for the third world. A syringe for each lens is dialed to inject clear fluid into a round plastic pocket which bulges, changing focus. You dial until things look clear, once for each eye. Then a crimp is put in the tubes and you snip off the syringes. It is difficult to make non-circular lenses so same is probably true for this one as well.
Except for the librarian in question, for whom this is undoubtedly a stupid horror, this is just another high water mark that indicates the general stupidity of contemporary U.S. society, especially Florida which I'm sorry to say, may have a couple positive news stories but in general looks like an example of massive social deevolution.
Even IF the librarian had a written contract guaranteeing perfect surveillance and control of the Internet kiosks, it is most likely a minor footnote compared to all the good done for the community. Or to put it another way, the inability to restrain suspicious conduct by a felon was found to outweigh all other contributions. Maybe an accounting of the tasks that were done instead of policing the kiosks would be illuminating.
Possibly there is a secret war against sex offenders that requires the public library to be some kind of gauntlet the newly released offender has to run. Not sure if that wouldn't in fact count as entrapment but.. heck Florida doesn't think libraries and custodians of knowledge are that important so screw 'em! There's a limited number of slots in the Ivies and Big 10 schools anyway.
As noted in a comment I made a few weeks ago in the thread about the Blu-Ray spec, the thing is intended to control everything in your house that is wireless and compatible. Imagine an 802.11 mesh starting where your TV set is. Now I don't know how this stuff propagates on the electrical lines down the street but certainly in an apartment building if there is a LAN antenna in your box it could piggy back other players all the way to the evil ISP (tm).
Anybody notice the upper finger squashing the ball before tossing it back? Just how powerful are those finger things anyway? I and a coworker both noted it looked really creepy/scary in particular I got the shivers watching the fingers all fold up (reminded me of the send off gesture in Mars Attacks) and then open like a flower. I don't think you want to shake hands with anything that can stop a ball that fast, moving faster than you can see, and keep saying "Bring it on!"
Incidentally, a researcher in TFA amazingly denegrates it as "an engineering feat" saying there is no practical use for it. Until you realize that it would also be useful for a robot body or arm moving at 186 mph with respect to its environment, or another person. How about mounting this thing on one of those fast wheeled drones and using it to pluck guns out of insurgent's hands? I could also see this used in a tentacle that has circular cross sections that can individually rotate 180 degrees in 0.1 seconds, making for a spectacularly dangerous whiplike appendage. They should send a robotics researcher to film school, seriously.