Almost all of the US cable channels just do reruns, while the BBC produces a huge amount of original programming. And with about five times the population of the UK, similar funding levels could pay for five times the programming, all other things being equal.
Whoops, I hit the wrong button and posted this one before proofreading. I meant to say "This is why the term 'intellectual property' should be avoided". Sorry about that.
This is whythe term "intellectual property": it causes people to be confused into thinking that copyrights are the same thing as patents, when they are very different.
Did you know, for example, that many patents are invalid? That is, most patents are known by their owners to be so flawed that they carefully ask for just enough royalty so it's cheaper to pay than to go to court, but even so, about half the time a patent makes it to court get tossed out?
We've been happily married for 12.5 years, so it worked out fine. She picked out the ring. Result: a nice ring for a couple of hundred instead of a few thousand. I would have been willing to spring for a diamond if it was really important to her, but it wasn't.
It worked out this way because we were already living together, were on grad student "salaries" and any money spent would be, in effect, our money not my money.
Yes, gcc is not as good as it should be in its support of 64-bit integers on 32-bit platforms, but Itanium is a 64-bit platform, so none of that applies. Also, perfectionist that he is, Linus often tosses around words like "broken" where others would say "suboptimal".
Here are some of GCC's issues with 64-bit ints on 32-bit platforms:
The register allocator wants to use specific register pairs for a given 64-bit object. This hurts on register-poor platforms like ix86, it is a much smaller problem on RISC platforms.
Some 64-bit operations will generate library calls (for example, 64-bit multiplication). The kernel folks don't like this.
Older GCC's have had some other code generation problems, and even though these are largely fixed,
the kernel hackers want to support older GCC's as well as the latest, inhibiting them from using 64-bit ints heavily.
There's no contradiction. US-style libertarians believe that the elected government should be severely limited, but that there should be no limitation whatsoever on the power of corporations to make law, and they elevate property rights over all other rights. Further, the dimmer bulbs among them don't understand any distinction between copyrights and physical property.
(Now, to be fair, thanks to the efforts of folks like Lessig, some folks I know who used to think that all would be sweetness if there were just no rules have waken up a bit -- "no rules" just means Bill Gates makes the rules).
In that sense, the Berman bill could be seen as a nartual outcome of libertarianism: set the movie studios free to hack away at the P2P folks, with no fear of prosecution. It means less government. How can a libertarian object?
Mind you, an anarcho-libertarian would object, but the propertarian types and Rand followers would go for it (they are the same folks who attacked the concept that the government should do anything about Microsoft's monopoly).
Magnetic disk storage hasn't gone away because the researchers have consistently beat Moore's Law: magnetic storage has been improving faster than silicon, just killing every proposed competitor.
But these guys get no publicity because magnetic disks, for some reason, are seen as boring.
In fact, IBM just sold off the lab with the world's leading magnetic disk storage researchers to Hitachi.
Some day we'll run into the superparamagnetic limit and run out of
tricks for working around it, but there still appear to be a few more generations worth of gas in magnetic disk storage.
There's no question that government has the power to do this (though whether it should is of course another matter).
The Constitution gives the Congress power to regulate interstate commerce. If Congress says you can't sell an analog TV, you can't sell an analog TV. Congress explicitly passed a bill mandating a transition to digital TV, ordering the FCC to handle the details.
They who pay for the film and own the rights can do what they want with it. Everyone else involved were just employees.
This is the traditional American concept, but it is not true in most European countries, where there is a legally recognized "moral right" that cannot be sold, but that always remains with the creator of the work.
For example, no matter how much money you pay in France for a classic work of art, you still can't deface it against the will of its original creator.
In "Galapagos", Vonnegut traces all the problems of humanity to our "great brains", and he makes a good case that they are an evolutionary mistake. He wrote it before the Internet bubble, but he would have put that down as another example of a destructive delusion supportable only because our brains are too big.
The assumption that all these folks seem to be making is that we'll solve all our problems if we can only become more intelligent. What if our intelligence itself is part of the problem? If we just put more intelligence at the service of our raw emotional drives, like our need for sex, power, and to destroy those we don't like, we might just wind up destroying each other more efficiently, or (at best) create our own little mental masturbation worlds.
My favorite Dilbert strip goes something like this:
All progress is driven by technology and male hormones. So, when realistic virtual reality is invented, civilization will collapse.
The current RIAA racket works well for the less than one percent of professional musicians who are "stars". You won't hear a star speak out against the system that made them rich.
If the RIAA loses power, if we kill the restrictions that are killing Internet radio, most of the 99% of working musicians who may not be household names but do have a small following, or who are interesting enough to have a following if only the right people could hear them, will be better off.
This is not quite correct; TiVo users do watch some commercials. During the Super Bowl, TiVo users played some of the commercials over and over again.
Not only that, but TiVo collects every click on the remote control that the user makes, meaning that they know to the second when you flipped the channel and when you fast-forwarded. That info will be used to sell you stuff: advertisers will respond by trying to make highly entertaining commercials that people will want to watch. The approach of getting you to remember the product's name by annoying you to death will die out (we can only hope).
If the Gnucleus author is tolerant of violations to his license, he is in effect allowing the violations. Only the copyright owner has standing to sue.
However, if Gnucleus contains any GPLed software owned by someone else, then that someone else could sue NeoNapster.
Only the copyright holder has standing to sue. If the FSF is not the copyright owner, all they can do is give advice to the copyright owner on how to proceed.
Take it to court and maybe lose, even if any sane reading of the Bill of Rights suggests otherwise.
Unfortunately, the courts are full of judges in their 60s with superstitious beliefs about computers and terror of hackers. The government lawyers will smear these guys up one side and down the other, exploiting every error they made, like calling their exploit "warez", a term commonly used for "stolen" code.
It was legitimate for you to cooperate with HP's valid concern that, as a "deep pockets" organization it would be too risky for them to let you challenge the DMCA. I understood that.
But now it appears that you work for a company that is using the DMCA as a club to suppress discussion of security flaws. It doesn't seem that the two hats you wear (your HP role and your open source leadership role) are compatible unless you can persuade HP to back off.
It is possible, of course, that the DMCA threat is coming from one manager who is shooting his mouth off. If so, we need a clarification from higher management: is it the policy of HP to use the DMCA to suppress discussion of their security flaws, or not?
The problem is in packages that are "fully featured". If a package provides several programs, some of which need X and some of which don't, it should be split into two packages, to avoid problems such as the one you describe.
I've used Purify for nearly a decade, and have been banging on valgrind for several months as well. I think that two of your three criticisms of valgrind are off base.
valgrind copes with static libraries.
The only requirement is that the executable be linked to at least one dynamic library, and glibc will do. This is needed to allow valgrind to get control. Since for Purify you need to have the.o files so you can link, in the analogous situation with valgrind you can always link dynamically with the C library.
Valgrind has a suppression file that is much like that of Purify.
The only point you raise that is completely valid is that valgrind is x86-only. Those who really care might want to work on a port to other architectures, though it's a big job: you need a complete virtual processor.
Purify's GUI can be quite useful, but it would be preferable, if someone wants to do the same for valgrind, to implement any GUI as a completely separate program. That way the KDE and Gnome people can assure that there are at least two of them.:-)
Finally, to be fair I suspect that a Purify'd executable is faster. But then, you don't have to do a special, expensive link step, so the compile-debug-recompile flow feels faster with valgrind.
I occasionally review technical papers, and people are increasingly using URLs as references. Trouble is, in a large number of cases the URLs are dead links by the time I do the review; by the time of publication it's completely dead.
At least dead trees don't have the habit of disappearing from existence without warning.
Free software folks should applaud the BSA's efforts to do draconian enforcement of their "intellectual property". Since most users who "pirate" proprietary software can't afford to pay, strict enforcement will drive them to Linux and other free software. In areas where it is not good enough, folks in the third world have brains and more time than money, so they will be highly motivated to help make it better.
The fact that you don't see such points made that often on Slashdot suggests to me that most of the Slashdot crowd is more interested in the "free beer" aspect than the "free speech" aspect of
free software/open source.
You are wrong in your claim that publishing a document on how to circumvent macrovision is exempt.
If you sell the document, you are selling a service.
Similarly, charging people money at a tech conference and teaching them at that conference how to circumvent copy protection is a service.
Of course, the fact that the DMCA in effect prohibits certain speech may be unconstitutional.
Sony's application is videoconferencing. It may be the case that the patent only applies to the use of JPEG in the case of video, as opposed to the case of a single still image.
In any case, it's too early to tell, and the free software world shouldn't panic yet.
Slashdot Mirror
Almost all of the US cable channels just do reruns, while the BBC produces a huge amount of original programming. And with about five times the population of the UK, similar funding levels could pay for five times the programming, all other things being equal.
Whoops, I hit the wrong button and posted this one before proofreading. I meant to say "This is why the term 'intellectual property' should be avoided". Sorry about that.
This is whythe term "intellectual property": it causes people to be confused into thinking that copyrights are the same thing as patents, when they are very different.
Did you know, for example, that many patents are invalid? That is, most patents are known by their owners to be so flawed that they carefully ask for just enough royalty so it's cheaper to pay than to go to court, but even so, about half the time a patent makes it to court get tossed out?
We've been happily married for 12.5 years, so it worked out fine. She picked out the ring. Result: a nice ring for a couple of hundred instead of a few thousand. I would have been willing to spring for a diamond if it was really important to her, but it wasn't.
It worked out this way because we were already living together, were on grad student "salaries" and any money spent would be, in effect, our money not my money.
There seems to be some confusion here.
Yes, gcc is not as good as it should be in its support of 64-bit integers on 32-bit platforms, but Itanium is a 64-bit platform, so none of that applies. Also, perfectionist that he is, Linus often tosses around words like "broken" where others would say "suboptimal".
Here are some of GCC's issues with 64-bit ints on 32-bit platforms:
We'll have an actual digital character when no voiceover actor is used, and they can go straight from a script to a performance.
There's no contradiction. US-style libertarians believe that the elected government should be severely limited, but that there should be no limitation whatsoever on the power of corporations to make law, and they elevate property rights over all other rights. Further, the dimmer bulbs among them don't understand any distinction between copyrights and physical property.
(Now, to be fair, thanks to the efforts of folks like Lessig, some folks I know who used to think that all would be sweetness if there were just no rules have waken up a bit -- "no rules" just means Bill Gates makes the rules).
In that sense, the Berman bill could be seen as a nartual outcome of libertarianism: set the movie studios free to hack away at the P2P folks, with no fear of prosecution. It means less government. How can a libertarian object?
Mind you, an anarcho-libertarian would object, but the propertarian types and Rand followers would go for it (they are the same folks who attacked the concept that the government should do anything about Microsoft's monopoly).
Magnetic disk storage hasn't gone away because the researchers have consistently beat Moore's Law: magnetic storage has been improving faster than silicon, just killing every proposed competitor. But these guys get no publicity because magnetic disks, for some reason, are seen as boring. In fact, IBM just sold off the lab with the world's leading magnetic disk storage researchers to Hitachi.
Some day we'll run into the superparamagnetic limit and run out of tricks for working around it, but there still appear to be a few more generations worth of gas in magnetic disk storage.
There's no question that government has the power to do this (though whether it should is of course another matter). The Constitution gives the Congress power to regulate interstate commerce. If Congress says you can't sell an analog TV, you can't sell an analog TV. Congress explicitly passed a bill mandating a transition to digital TV, ordering the FCC to handle the details.
This is the traditional American concept, but it is not true in most European countries, where there is a legally recognized "moral right" that cannot be sold, but that always remains with the creator of the work. For example, no matter how much money you pay in France for a classic work of art, you still can't deface it against the will of its original creator.
In "Galapagos", Vonnegut traces all the problems of humanity to our "great brains", and he makes a good case that they are an evolutionary mistake. He wrote it before the Internet bubble, but he would have put that down as another example of a destructive delusion supportable only because our brains are too big.
The assumption that all these folks seem to be making is that we'll solve all our problems if we can only become more intelligent. What if our intelligence itself is part of the problem? If we just put more intelligence at the service of our raw emotional drives, like our need for sex, power, and to destroy those we don't like, we might just wind up destroying each other more efficiently, or (at best) create our own little mental masturbation worlds.
My favorite Dilbert strip goes something like this:
All progress is driven by technology and male hormones. So, when realistic virtual reality is invented, civilization will collapse.
"Where's Dilbert?"
"He's been in the holodeck since March."
The current RIAA racket works well for the less than one percent of professional musicians who are "stars". You won't hear a star speak out against the system that made them rich.
If the RIAA loses power, if we kill the restrictions that are killing Internet radio, most of the 99% of working musicians who may not be household names but do have a small following, or who are interesting enough to have a following if only the right people could hear them, will be better off.
This is not quite correct; TiVo users do watch some commercials. During the Super Bowl, TiVo users played some of the commercials over and over again. Not only that, but TiVo collects every click on the remote control that the user makes, meaning that they know to the second when you flipped the channel and when you fast-forwarded. That info will be used to sell you stuff: advertisers will respond by trying to make highly entertaining commercials that people will want to watch. The approach of getting you to remember the product's name by annoying you to death will die out (we can only hope).
If the Gnucleus author is tolerant of violations to his license, he is in effect allowing the violations. Only the copyright owner has standing to sue.
However, if Gnucleus contains any GPLed software owned by someone else, then that someone else could sue NeoNapster.
Only the copyright holder has standing to sue. If the FSF is not the copyright owner, all they can do is give advice to the copyright owner on how to proceed.
I thought that Ben Franklin, not James Madison, started the first US free lending library.
Take it to court and maybe lose, even if any sane reading of the Bill of Rights suggests otherwise.
Unfortunately, the courts are full of judges in their 60s with superstitious beliefs about computers and terror of hackers. The government lawyers will smear these guys up one side and down the other, exploiting every error they made, like calling their exploit "warez", a term commonly used for "stolen" code.
It was legitimate for you to cooperate with HP's valid concern that, as a "deep pockets" organization it would be too risky for them to let you challenge the DMCA. I understood that.
But now it appears that you work for a company that is using the DMCA as a club to suppress discussion of security flaws. It doesn't seem that the two hats you wear (your HP role and your open source leadership role) are compatible unless you can persuade HP to back off.
It is possible, of course, that the DMCA threat is coming from one manager who is shooting his mouth off. If so, we need a clarification from higher management: is it the policy of HP to use the DMCA to suppress discussion of their security flaws, or not?
The problem is in packages that are "fully featured". If a package provides several programs, some of which need X and some of which don't, it should be split into two packages, to avoid problems such as the one you describe.
valgrind isn't just a GC, it detects use of unitialized variables as well, and that is, if anything, more important.
I've used Purify for nearly a decade, and have been banging on valgrind for several months as well. I think that two of your three criticisms of valgrind are off base.
valgrind copes with static libraries. The only requirement is that the executable be linked to at least one dynamic library, and glibc will do. This is needed to allow valgrind to get control. Since for Purify you need to have the .o files so you can link, in the analogous situation with valgrind you can always link dynamically with the C library.
Valgrind has a suppression file that is much like that of Purify.
The only point you raise that is completely valid is that valgrind is x86-only. Those who really care might want to work on a port to other architectures, though it's a big job: you need a complete virtual processor.
Purify's GUI can be quite useful, but it would be preferable, if someone wants to do the same for valgrind, to implement any GUI as a completely separate program. That way the KDE and Gnome people can assure that there are at least two of them. :-)
Finally, to be fair I suspect that a Purify'd executable is faster. But then, you don't have to do a special, expensive link step, so the compile-debug-recompile flow feels faster with valgrind.
I occasionally review technical papers, and people are increasingly using URLs as references. Trouble is, in a large number of cases the URLs are dead links by the time I do the review; by the time of publication it's completely dead.
At least dead trees don't have the habit of disappearing from existence without warning.
Free software folks should applaud the BSA's efforts to do draconian enforcement of their "intellectual property". Since most users who "pirate" proprietary software can't afford to pay, strict enforcement will drive them to Linux and other free software. In areas where it is not good enough, folks in the third world have brains and more time than money, so they will be highly motivated to help make it better.
The fact that you don't see such points made that often on Slashdot suggests to me that most of the Slashdot crowd is more interested in the "free beer" aspect than the "free speech" aspect of free software/open source.
You are wrong in your claim that publishing a document on how to circumvent macrovision is exempt. If you sell the document, you are selling a service. Similarly, charging people money at a tech conference and teaching them at that conference how to circumvent copy protection is a service.
Of course, the fact that the DMCA in effect prohibits certain speech may be unconstitutional.
Sony's application is videoconferencing. It may be the case that the patent only applies to the use of JPEG in the case of video, as opposed to the case of a single still image.
In any case, it's too early to tell, and the free software world shouldn't panic yet.