You realy mean you use LaTeX for important documents? You let someone else write your formatting macros for you? You don't even write your own TeX output routine? You don't use \shipout to have real control on how your document's pages realy look? By using preinstalled macros collections such as LaTeX instead of TeX primitives you are giving up some of your freedom!
There's no point logging "From" headers (or SMTP envelope=from) from the point of view of analyzing spam. They are meaningless. The only meaningful data in an SMTP transaction are the IP of the sending server (that is only theoretically forgable) and the envelope-to (rcpt) address, that needs to point to a real mailbox if the spam is expected to arrive at one.
I have reported thousands of spam messages using spamcop.net, and haven't seen even one coming from Hotmail servers. I've seen many with forged Hotmail return addresses.
Back to the new MSN service: the reporting service they put there is completely useless. You need to analyze the headers manually to know that their servers are the source before you go to their reporting service to report spam sent from them. Almost no one on this planet is going to do that. You can use spamcop.net to report spam to any service provider and you don't need to analyze headers manually to do that. You don't evan need to know anything about the sender in advance. Just paste the complete message in (or forward as attachment) and have a report automatically generated and sent to the right place.
Some time ago I suggested in another forum that email addresses can contain small scripts as handling instructions for the receiving server (such as for authentication, for filing, for expiry dates etc.) Now this law makes it illegal to send spam to these kinds of addresses. Make your email address something that can be considered "code" and this bill covers them because sending email to tsuch an address is actually causing code to be executed on your computer!
Finding prior art in a field that deal with abstract constructs is difficult. There is no way you can find it by searching for keywords. There's no reason that the same thing would be dexcribed using the same terms. Or that it would be described at all. It might have been implemented and that's it, if the implementor didn't think there's a need to describe it.
One thing that might help here is a sort of "open source" registry for "prior art". An open database were people can document whatever they know about processes etc. It can be used by someone who doesn't want to get the monopoly benefit of a patent (and pay for the patent) but that wants the protection of publication so that others would not be able to get a monopoly (patent) on the same thing. Of course there are many available ways to publicise inventions if one does not seek a patent. The point is that a reputable central repository would be more accessible, would then be used by patent eximiners before a patent is granted, resulting in less patents when prior art exists, and would also make it more cost effctive to find the information needed to prove that a patent shouldn't have been granted when a patent was already granted despite prior art. In addition, such a repository would have to provide the tools for anyone who has info about past prior art to record it with pointers (references) to evidnce supporting the info. Something in the line of Wikipedia, but with specialized tools to aid in locating technical info would do the job.
And now to a story: I said it is difficult to find "prior art" when dealing with abstract notions. I once attended a mathmatical seminar were a well known mathmatician suggested a "new" proof of a well known theorem that had several independent proofs already published. The proof seemed very familiar but the speaker didn't quote anyone or mention any refernces. I wasn't sure about it, and the speaker ws very reputable, so I didn't ask about it, but later I went to the library to check it, and it was exactly the same proof published about 15 years earlier by someone else. Only the terminology used in the "new" proof was newer and perhaps didn't exist when the proof was published for the same time. Now I'm sure the speaker didn't try to hide the fact that it was the same proof published by someone else. I'm quite sure he was simply not aware of the earlier proof. The person that published the first proof happened to be another professor on the same university as the speaker, and their offices are almost next to each other. The speaker was a leading figure in mathematics. If he can fail to find his nextdoor colleague's identical proof that can be found by searching for the theorem's well known name, than what should we expect from undertrained and underpaid patent examiners?
Let's assume for now that there is some possible damage from rediation. Will moving those towers out of town reduce the radiation people absorb? NO!
How do absorb this radiation? by holding the cell phone close to your body when taling. That phone is genrating radiation in high enough power that would reach the tower withj useful signal. If you double the distance to the tower, the cell phone would need to produce a signal 4 times stronger. If ypu triple the distance, it would need 9 times the power. Anyway, the phone would adjust the power to be a bit above the minimum needed to maintain communications, and If the tower is further away, the signal would be higher, with signal power proportional to the square of the distance. Further away means muchmore radiation absorbed by human tissue...
But then, it probably doesn't matter much. How many of those opposed to having cellphone towers near them are overweight smokers? Most wouldn't live to see the cancer they would get from their cellphones...
The problem is not that "Software" or "process" is patented. The problem is in the criteria that can be used to determine what is "obvious" or not. Criteria that were good for 19th cebtury industrial revolution or are good for biotech or pharmaceutical products are not necessarilly applicable to fields that involve routine solution of nontrivial math problems as the main process of creating new products.
Some patents are issued for straightforward solutions to problems. I say "straightforward" and not "obvious". Creating a process that works means solving mathematical problems. They are not always easy, and they might involve a lot of effort in their solutions, and even creative thinking. But then someone else who would approach the same problem would arrive at the same solution, perhaps after a lot of work, and it would be the same solution, simply because that is the correct solution, or that is the most suitable solution to the problem investigated. Now, why should the first one to solve it (or the first one to think about registering the solution with the patent office, as is suggested now) be allowed to have a monopoly on the solution. If students work their asses out on a problem, then all hand in their assignments with the same solution, should only one of them get credit, and the rest sent back to work because "their solution is not original"? That's about what's happenning with software patents. Their being awarded for things that are no more than undergrad cs homework. The only "innovation" in them is that they were given the assignment before other "students" have. That is: patents are being awarded to corporations not for solution of problems that many have tackled and were unable to solve. They are being awarded to companies who happen to consider a problem a few months before others have.
At the end of each working day, a retailer goes to the bank and deposits the profits. What the current patent system means is that the end of each working day a software writer would have to go and register all the solutions to all the problems solved, because each problem may be solved only once, and as it is suggested nowadays, the first one to register the solution would be awaeded a monopoly on the solution ("first one to regiter" just means doing away with "prior art").
So what makes somethink "unobvious". In math requiring more than just a bit of thinking is not a criterion for "nonobviousness". At least it shoudn't be for awarding a monopoly on the use of a solution to a problem. It can be a criterion for awarding credit (i.e., for reputation). The patent system is not equipped to handle this distiction. Most people practicing law are not equipped to handle this. Their world is the world of "citing cases". For many of them having flunked math in high school is something to brag about, and many of them have managed to survive math in high schools not by learning how math works, but by learning by heart the textbook solutions to many similar problems that we solve by learning one principle and applying it in different ways. Now I don't say that all lawyers/judges/legislators are like that. But you'll find many people in any area that does not involve solving math problems routinely that consider any sliht vatiation on a problem something entirely different. No go and try to prove in court that storing a bookstore's customer data is not different from storing a mainframe computer's user data.
In creating software, using creative thinking to solve problems is a routine process, and so shouldn't be used as a criterion to deternmine non-obviousness.
I can testify that it happens. Inteligent people do use the "junk mail" button expecting it would stop mailings they don't want anymore.
Specific incident: My wife subscribed to certain newsletters supplying info on Southern California when she planned our trip to San Diego. After we came back I noticed that she's still getting those on her Hotmail(TM) account, so I told her "you probably don't need these anymore" and she replied "right" and immediately clicked the "Junk Mail" button. She's not stupid (she's actually licensed to cut people up, though she's expected to stitch them up before they leave the OR if they don't die). But she's not aware of spam issues (she hardly gets any spam) and for her "junk mail" is just any commersial mail she gets. More than 99% of it is solicited. And she probably represents the majority of users.
You don't have to hold even one bit of conmtent of a 5GB video file in order to make its content available. Take the file. Xor it with a random 5GB string of bits. Computer A holds the random string. Computer B holds the result of the xor operation, that is also a perfectly random string of bits. Computer C holds the info on the locations of A and B. Computer A has absolutely no info on the contents of the original file. Not even one bit! It just has a string of random bits. So does Computer B. If the owners of computers A or B scan their file system for content, they will not find any info related to the original file. Computer C holds info on how to reconstruct the file, but it doesn't hold even one bit of the original file. If the owner of computer C scans her file system for content, she will not find even 1 bit of the content of the original file! So this is a case where 0+0=1 (the + here is on computer C, of course).
You might think that still each of A and B holds half the info, but they don't. If you get what's on A, you still need to get 5GB from B to reconstruct the file, and 5 GB is the whole file!
So, you don't need to pass the info through computers that need to refrain from scanning their files so they don't know what's in them. You just have to divide the info between several parties so that each party holds no info at all!
"Fair is foul, and foul is fair: / Hover through the fog and filthy air" (Macbeth, Act 1, Scene 1, By William Shakespeare.)
(I'm quite convinced I may quote that here. AFAIK as of now it is in the public domain. Slashdot operators: if copyrights are retroactively lengthened to say 500 years after the authors death, please temporarily remove this post until such time as it is once more in the public domain... However, even if it is in the public domain, I might still not be allowed to post it here, because I have used a functionality built into my (actually M$'s) OS specifically to infringe on copyrights, by simultaneously pressing both the ctrl key and the c key, and then simultaneously pressing both the ctrl key and the v key. I guess it is the same copyright infringing technology that was used by the guy who made the Walmart parody. It might be fair use to use the stuff for parody, but the DMCA specifically states that you cannot do it by using technology that might also be used to infringe on copyright! BTW, have you ever realized that you can do the public a favor by shortening the lives of authors? It would also shorten the term of the copyright on their works!)
Right now they argue about copyright infringement by individuals. But in the longrun, what worries them is competition: competition from independent artists that realize they don't have to sign slavery agreements. And competition from their own past (just like book authors complain now about competition from their own used books on Amazon). They would like to own the net and make the rules!
The assymetry between uplink and downlink bandwidth for the consumer means that only a tiny fraction of what is available on P2P networks can actually be transferred by the network. A single person sharing files is limited by uplink bandwidth, and cannot really supply more than a few minutes of music a day. What the recording "industry" (actually distributors) are doing when taking individuals to court is actually abusing existing law that was made for a world were infringers would typically be mass infringers that do it for profit. A single infringement means a huge fine, but it was made so by lawmakers in a world where a single infringement caught (a single copied CD)would represent mass infringement (a warehouse full of couterfit CDs somewhere). It is necessary because criminals hide a well as they can, and law enforcement needs to be able to use what evidence they can lay hands on. In P2P networks it's quite the opposite: file sharers don't hide. They make their collections available online for evryone to see without really trying to conceal who they are. Copyright holders can then find individuals offering thousands of tracks. But in reallity these are offered through a very narrow channel: you can see all, but you can only sample very little. But the law can still be used to fine them as if for every track they expose they have a truck full of copies and no constarint on distribution!
> It is returning the message to the SMTP server it arrived from...
It is not. Check the facts. What the program does is decribed quite well in its website. It uses some DNS hueristics to let some email that looks OK pass through. If the IP of the sender doesn't match the domain of the envelope-from address well enough a challenge email is sent: sent means to the envelope-from, not to the sender's IP. You cannot send to the sender's IP. You can only send to an email address, and the only available address is the envelope-from that was determined to be probably forged.
So what this program does is send a email message as a challenge to people that it setermined that are probably not really the senders. The developers claim it works great for them and they have to treat far less spam. But that is only because the manual treatment of the spam is passed to the innocent people whose addresses were used as forged "from" addresses. This system works for its users as long as they are few (just as any other challenge/response system). But it is not scalable. If Everyone used it, then it would become an annoyance equal to spam. You cannot have everybody sending challenges to everyone else all the time!
> Did Microsoft ever really promise people that > Media Player was just a "front end shell"...
If Media Player is just a front end, then what's the point in requiring MS to remove it? If the "front end" is not part of the OS, then the same argument can be made to make MS remove Explorer as a front end to the file system, and allow versions of Windows using other File system browsers. Or why not require MS do distribute Windows without the GUI so as not to use their monopoly in the OS market to crach "competitors in the GUI market"?
As I see it, the way operating systems are distributed today, the "front end", i.e. the looks' are part of what defines the OS. So if there's an argument for making MS take the media player of the OS distribution, it has to be its media playing functionality and not the "looks" functionality. The ability to play certain media types is certainly not a basic component of a computer operating system. The computer would work perfectly well without it, and the media playing capabilities can be left for others to provide. On the other hand, a front end for playing media that uses whatever tools are installed by the users to play it, that preserves the homogeneous look of the system is certainly part of the OS, and is certainly part of what MS are aiming to sell when they sell Windows: an environment in which a user doesn't have to learn a completely new environment for working with each new application.
So "removing Media Player" shouldn't mean removing the interface, but rather the media playing capabilities.
I am not a MS lover, but I am also not a MS hater. They make reasonable software that most people like to use (mostly because they do not know any alternative, and do not care to know).
> our parents, and even our grandparents, > got a better deal by purchasing the physical medium
They didn't really. After some years have passed the technology have changed, and most of the vynil people own is just vynil for them. They don't have the equipment they need to extract the content.
I have hundreds of LPs (vynil) and two turntables that don't work. So I cannot listen to any of them (unless I go get a new turntable and convince my wife to put the ugly thing in the living room). So infact, I've been "DRMed" (actually "ARMed" - A for analog;-) )
Changing the type of media used eventually "robbed" me from the right to listen to the music. I can go get the equipment to play it, but it's not the same as it has been 30 years ago: the department store down the street doesn't sell turntables. I can make an effort and get one. I can also make an effort and circumvent the fake copyright protection on "protected" digital music (I say "fake" because if it's so easily circuvented it's not really protection).
When I was younger I bought quite a lot of music on vynil. I collected, and making the collection "complete" in some ways (as in having all the Beatles albums, or at least all released songs) ws important to me. After the switch to CDs I realized there is no point in collecting music. I did buy a bit more than 100 CDs during the time that passed since they replaced LPs, but almost only when there were very good deals, i.e., only when the price was very low, or sometimes as gifts. Now that there are so many new formats and the mainstream distributors of music are doing their best to make me know that they will do whatever they can to limit my use of my music collection much more than was in the past, I don't buy any musuc at all. I just listen to FM radio.
So, perhaps are grandparents were in a better position than us, but that's only because the pace of technology was slower back then, and the format of vynil didn't change every five years...
Most people are not Slashdot users or spam activists. Most people have never spent a second trying to define spam. Anything that's promotional and they don't want is "junk".
My wife signed up in several places to receive info about San Diego before we visited the place last month. Now we're back, and just this week I noticed that she received one of those email newsletters from a tourist board or something similar. She said she really doesn't need them any more, so I suggested she unsubscribes, so she immediately clicked the "Junk Mail" button in the webmail interface.
What this shows is that eduated people such as my wife (she's a surgeon) don't understand a thing about spam. From her point of view she gets promotional email, and if she doesn't want it there's a button that's supposed to somehow make it so that she doesn't get future deliveries of the same stuff. She doesn't understand the consequences of this action (such as feeding incorrect info into the statistical tools that remove spam for all Hotmail users, or perhaps inclusion of the sender to blacklists that affects their communication woth other recipients). For her it's just mail she wants or mail she decided she doesn't want. (BTW, she gets almost no real spam in her Hotmail account. She gets lots of promotional stuff that she subscribed to, such as online bookstores she really buys from, and providers of professional information).
I described just one case, but I think this is the typical case: most people never spent a second thinking about what spam is, and this explains the 10% (or 3%) figures.
Copyright does limit using creativity no-trivially.
I could give you lots of examples, but Lawrence Lessig (http://lessig.org) does it much better then I can. See his free online book "Free Culture (http://www.free-culture.cc/). It's full of real examples of how current copyright laws constrain creativity. It also sketches the history of copyright and other "IP" laws, and is well written (and reading it is no doubt a better way to spend your time than browsing Slashdot;-)
If (you're reading my post) then {you SHOULD read that book}
Well, if you're not going to read it, at least I will quote here an excerpt from another book by Lessig:...What leads us to build a legal world where the advice
a successful director can give to a young artist is this:
"I would say to an 18-year-old artist, you're totally free
to do whatever you want. But-and then I would give him
a long list of all the things that he couldn't
include in his movie because they would not be cleared,
legally cleared. That he would have to pay for them.
[So freedom? Here's the freedom]: You're totally free
to make a movie in an empty room, with your two friends."
(from http://www.the-future-of-ideas.com/excerpts/index. shtml . Follow this link to learn WHY this laim is made)
The parent post is the closest to reality I read till now, and reality dictates that I stop browsing Slashdot and do something more useful (drive my son to his LOGO class).
The guy did nothing wrong, and doesn't really have to do anything to correct the situation. If the company wants to release the program under non-free license they can do it and they would be in violation of GPL, which would matter only if someone decides to do something about it. Does the GPL require someone to act against GPL violators?
Now about the IP agreement: I am not a lawyer, but it seems to be way too general, and probably is void in most countries: You cannot own all your worker's thoughts. Slavery was abolished some time ago! In this "agreement" the worker was the weakwer side that had to agree to whatever terms in order to get a job, and there are some conditions that cannot be imposed in these situations. It doesn't mean that he has to sue his employer. It just means that he probably has some good defences if in the future they want to sue him. And they probably should question their lawyers: they should have worked harder to produce a less restrictive agreement that would be more likely to be valid. As I see it by trying to impose too much this agreement might be totally void!
Again, I'm not a lawyer, and if there's a lawyer reading this I would be happy to hear (read) my argument torn apart. But I am a parent to a child that likes programming so we better be on our way to his LOGO class!
DRAPE is a free Windows program that allows a child to program without reading/writing: instead icons representing instructions are arranged in rows to make procedures. Despite its limitations it can be used to create quite nice things. My son and I created some games with it. It is less poerful than most versions of LOGO, but on the other hand easier to learn. Recommended also for big kids when the boss is not watching;-) http://www.cs.uu.nl.nyud.net:8090/people/markov/ki ds/drape.html
A version of Logo that is easy for little kids is r-logo (http://embry.epcs.com/rLogo/ that is Java-based and can be be used on-line (i.e., go to the website and play). My 4 years old son likes playing with it and watching the instructions he gives to the turtle using the control buttons being recorded in text.
My sister stays in California with her family this year, and I live in Israel. Phoning is not very expensive, but with Skype the families gather on both ends and everyone can speak and be heard by exeryone else, so it more like a family gathering! The kids love it!
So that makes Skype more than a phone to us. It's not just person to person (pun intended).
> I have no problems with DRM that > would enforce existing rights...
So a DRM system should for instance make it impossible to modify GPL licensed software without extending the license and the DRM enforcing of its terms to the derivative work!
I agree that anyone who sells a product (including selling a license) restricting some of the buyer's lawful rights should be sued to death. The problem is that those who do these things are stronger players in the courts. And they've already been using copyright as an excuse not to fix the products they sell you and at the same time to not make the info available that would enable you to fix it youself or hire someone to fix it for you. Can you imagine a situation where you cannot have your car fixed because the info needed to fix it is protected by copyright? (but of course you may upgrade to a new model!)
The legal heirs should have access to the info. Probably they should have just have a lawyer send the right kind of request to Yahoo, or get a court order. Of course Yahoo should not give them access just because they say the guy is dead. But through the correct legal channels they shoud be able to get access.
On Gmail you can have many email addresses using "plus addressing": if your Gmail address is aaa@gmail.com then you can use addresses like aaa+whatever@gmail.com. You can share with different people different addresses and you can easily block ones that are found by spammers (perhaps block for everyone except the people you gave the address to). That way losing an address to spammers is not a big problem, and you don't have to forever hate your friend that stupidly compromised your precious secret email address! One problem with this might be the limit on the number of filters a user can have(perhaps it is possile to block many addresses with an "or" operation?) Using randomly generated addresses would require a lot of work to maintain, so I think a better way is to decide on a naming scheme that would allow addresses to be grouped for filtering. Then perhaps one can filter on groups of addresses by matching substrings. Has anyone here tried to employ such a naming scheme?
The same thing can be done with other services, such as fastmail.fm that has a more flexible filtering system, or with addresses in one's own domain.
One problem with using this approach is that after many addresses that deliver to your account are found by spammers, a lot of spam is directed at them, and even if you don't get to see the spam because it's automatically erased, it might load your system too much. this depends on the stage at which the filter blocks: before or after email is received. Tools for blocking before an email is received are more limited.
Using randomly generated addresses is not very useful if you have to manually maintain them (they have to be written down on paper or to a file. They are useful if they are recorded an organized automatically such as in sneakemail.com. But if one wants to use multiple disposable addresses in one's own domain, or in one's subdomain provided by one's email provider, or just using plus-addressing, a naming scheme is needed. I have my own domain but I still use addresses supplied by sneakemail.com or spamgourmet.com because I cannot come up with a reasonabe naming scheme for addresses in subdomains of my own domain that would be flexible enough to allow many years of use despite many of them being lost to spammers. Does anyone have ideas for such naming schemes? (in spamgourmet I have a simple naming schemes prducing addresses like slashdot22dec04.post.hadaso@spamgourmet.com. But then on spamgourmet addresses self destruct so I don't worry too much about how to filter them in the future. The date part is just to ensure old addresses are not reused).
It is not a definition of spam. Just of "commercial email message". To define spam one must throw in the "bulk" nature of the mailing.
But I think the way most people think about spam is wrong. What really makes makes it spam is that it was not sent to you! People send email to people. Spammers send email to email addresses. They don't know if the email address is related to a real person, and they don't care. They would send spam to setA4@printer4.bldg3.example.com
An email address is not a person or the address of a person, but rather a routing instruction. And what anti-spam laws should try to do is to utilize the nature of issuing those routing instructions in bulk by senders who have no idea what they do. That is, if it is quite obvious that the sender didn't know the identity of the recipient, and it was not a mistake, then it's spam. If it was sent in bulk, and the sender cannot show a linkage between the email address lists and the identities of real people behind those lists then it is spam. And this applies equally well to all other kinds of spam, such phone spam, fax spam, SMS spam, IM spam...
I would expect an address that receives lots of "spam" due to agreeing to get ads many years ago to drop in spam level due to massive unsubscribing. I would say that most of the commercial email received on such an account may be considered solicited as probably the recipient has agreed many years ago that the adress be shared for this purpose (I still remember myself thinking many years ago: "cool, if I check this box I would get even more info on this from sources I don't know about!" - spam was not a problem back then).
So it might be that an address was shared with many senders of commercial email that are "legit" and would honor an unsubscribe request.
On the other hand, the behaviour of a single email account at a specific short time cannot serve as evidence for anything. I've seen great fuctuation in spam rates received at some of my accounts, with no technical changes on my side (including my provider). It seems more like the particular spammers that have my address. One week they have "good business" and send lots of spam. Another week they have "bad business" and send little spam. Spammers don't sell spam for free. They only send it if someone pays them to send something. If they don't have a customer that wants something to be sent, you don't get their spam! About unsubscribe links: I tried "unsubscribing" disposable addresses (usually of the form spammer19dec04.erase.hadaso@spamgourmet.com) and I never got any spam to any of these addresses. I only once got spam on an address I used to forward "funny stuff". I got many spam messages to addresses I posted on online forums or other online places. (and if you want to receive spam, the best way is to post it on slashdot. Much faster response than posting on "whois" for your domain, or any other online forum I tried. Don't do it to train your filters. every email address receives quite a different blend of spam, depending on the ways it was exposed, so to train your filter you better use only the spam and ham you receive on the account you want to protect, and if you can do it separately for email you receive at different addresses you should get better results).
Slashdot Mirror
You realy mean you use LaTeX for important documents?
You let someone else write your formatting macros for you?
You don't even write your own TeX output routine?
You don't use \shipout to have real control on how your document's pages realy look?
By using preinstalled macros collections such as LaTeX instead of TeX primitives you are giving up some of your freedom!
There's no point logging "From" headers (or SMTP envelope=from) from the point of view of analyzing spam. They are meaningless. The only meaningful data in an SMTP transaction are the IP of the sending server (that is only theoretically forgable) and the envelope-to (rcpt) address, that needs to point to a real mailbox if the spam is expected to arrive at one.
I have reported thousands of spam messages using spamcop.net, and haven't seen even one coming from Hotmail servers. I've seen many with forged Hotmail return addresses.
Back to the new MSN service: the reporting service they put there is completely useless. You need to analyze the headers manually to know that their servers are the source before you go to their reporting service to report spam sent from them. Almost no one on this planet is going to do that. You can use spamcop.net to report spam to any service provider and you don't need to analyze headers manually to do that. You don't evan need to know anything about the sender in advance. Just paste the complete message in (or forward as attachment) and have a report automatically generated and sent to the right place.
Some time ago I suggested in another forum that email addresses can contain small scripts as handling instructions for the receiving server (such as for authentication, for filing, for expiry dates etc.) Now this law makes it illegal to send spam to these kinds of addresses. Make your email address something that can be considered "code" and this bill covers them because sending email to tsuch an address is actually causing code to be executed on your computer!
Finding prior art in a field that deal with abstract constructs is difficult. There is no way you can find it by searching for keywords. There's no reason that the same thing would be dexcribed using the same terms. Or that it would be described at all. It might have been implemented and that's it, if the implementor didn't think there's a need to describe it.
One thing that might help here is a sort of "open source" registry for "prior art". An open database were people can document whatever they know about processes etc. It can be used by someone who doesn't want to get the monopoly benefit of a patent (and pay for the patent) but that wants the protection of publication so that others would not be able to get a monopoly (patent) on the same thing. Of course there are many available ways to publicise inventions if one does not seek a patent. The point is that a reputable central repository would be more accessible, would then be used by patent eximiners before a patent is granted, resulting in less patents when prior art exists, and would also make it more cost effctive to find the information needed to prove that a patent shouldn't have been granted when a patent was already granted despite prior art. In addition, such a repository would have to provide the tools for anyone who has info about past prior art to record it with pointers (references) to evidnce supporting the info. Something in the line of Wikipedia, but with specialized tools to aid in locating technical info would do the job.
And now to a story: I said it is difficult to find "prior art" when dealing with abstract notions.
I once attended a mathmatical seminar were a well known mathmatician suggested a "new" proof of a well known theorem that had several independent proofs already published. The proof seemed very familiar but the speaker didn't quote anyone or mention any refernces. I wasn't sure about it, and the speaker ws very reputable, so I didn't ask about it, but later I went to the library to check it, and it was exactly the same proof published about 15 years earlier by someone else. Only the terminology used in the "new" proof was newer and perhaps didn't exist when the proof was published for the same time. Now I'm sure the speaker didn't try to hide the fact that it was the same proof published by someone else. I'm quite sure he was simply not aware of the earlier proof. The person that published the first proof happened to be another professor on the same university as the speaker, and their offices are almost next to each other. The speaker was a leading figure in mathematics. If he can fail to find his nextdoor colleague's identical proof that can be found by searching for the theorem's well known name, than what should we expect from undertrained and underpaid patent examiners?
Let's assume for now that there is some possible damage from rediation. Will moving those towers out of town reduce the radiation people absorb? NO!
How do absorb this radiation? by holding the cell phone close to your body when taling. That phone is genrating radiation in high enough power that would reach the tower withj useful signal. If you double the distance to the tower, the cell phone would need to produce a signal 4 times stronger. If ypu triple the distance, it would need 9 times the power. Anyway, the phone would adjust the power to be a bit above the minimum needed to maintain communications, and If the tower is further away, the signal would be higher, with signal power proportional to the square of the distance. Further away means muchmore radiation absorbed by human tissue...
But then, it probably doesn't matter much. How many of those opposed to having cellphone towers near them are overweight smokers? Most wouldn't live to see the cancer they would get from their cellphones...
The problem is not that "Software" or "process" is patented. The problem is in the criteria that can be used to determine what is "obvious" or not. Criteria that were good for 19th cebtury industrial revolution or are good for biotech or pharmaceutical products are not necessarilly applicable to fields that involve routine solution of nontrivial math problems as the main process of creating new products.
Some patents are issued for straightforward solutions to problems. I say "straightforward" and not "obvious". Creating a process that works means solving mathematical problems. They are not always easy, and they might involve a lot of effort in their solutions, and even creative thinking. But then someone else who would approach the same problem would arrive at the same solution, perhaps after a lot of work, and it would be the same solution, simply because that is the correct solution, or that is the most suitable solution to the problem investigated. Now, why should the first one to solve it (or the first one to think about registering the solution with the patent office, as is suggested now) be allowed to have a monopoly on the solution. If students work their asses out on a problem, then all hand in their assignments with the same solution, should only one of them get credit, and the rest sent back to work because "their solution is not original"? That's about what's happenning with software patents. Their being awarded for things that are no more than undergrad cs homework. The only "innovation" in them is that they were given the assignment before other "students" have. That is: patents are being awarded to corporations not for solution of problems that many have tackled and were unable to solve. They are being awarded to companies who happen to consider a problem a few months before others have.
At the end of each working day, a retailer goes to the bank and deposits the profits. What the current patent system means is that the end of each working day a software writer would have to go and register all the solutions to all the problems solved, because each problem may be solved only once, and as it is suggested nowadays, the first one to register the solution would be awaeded a monopoly on the solution ("first one to regiter" just means doing away with "prior art").
So what makes somethink "unobvious". In math requiring more than just a bit of thinking is not a criterion for "nonobviousness". At least it shoudn't be for awarding a monopoly on the use of a solution to a problem. It can be a criterion for awarding credit (i.e., for reputation). The patent system is not equipped to handle this distiction. Most people practicing law are not equipped to handle this. Their world is the world of "citing cases". For many of them having flunked math in high school is something to brag about, and many of them have managed to survive math in high schools not by learning how math works, but by learning by heart the textbook solutions to many similar problems that we solve by learning one principle and applying it in different ways. Now I don't say that all lawyers/judges/legislators are like that. But you'll find many people in any area that does not involve solving math problems routinely that consider any sliht vatiation on a problem something entirely different. No go and try to prove in court that storing a bookstore's customer data is not different from storing a mainframe computer's user data.
In creating software, using creative thinking to solve problems is a routine process, and so shouldn't be used as a criterion to deternmine non-obviousness.
I can testify that it happens. Inteligent people do use the "junk mail" button expecting it would stop mailings they don't want anymore.
Specific incident: My wife subscribed to certain newsletters supplying info on Southern California when she planned our trip to San Diego. After we came back I noticed that she's still getting those on her Hotmail(TM) account, so I told her "you probably don't need these anymore" and she replied "right" and immediately clicked the "Junk Mail" button. She's not stupid (she's actually licensed to cut people up, though she's expected to stitch them up before they leave the OR if they don't die). But she's not aware of spam issues (she hardly gets any spam) and for her "junk mail" is just any commersial mail she gets. More than 99% of it is solicited. And she probably represents the majority of users.
You don't have to hold even one bit of conmtent of a 5GB video file in order to make its content available.
Take the file. Xor it with a random 5GB string of bits. Computer A holds the random string. Computer B holds the result of the xor operation, that is also a perfectly random string of bits. Computer C holds the info on the locations of A and B. Computer A has absolutely no info on the contents of the original file. Not even one bit! It just has a string of random bits. So does Computer B. If the owners of computers A or B scan their file system for content, they will not find any info related to the original file. Computer C holds info on how to reconstruct the file, but it doesn't hold even one bit of the original file. If the owner of computer C scans her file system for content, she will not find even 1 bit of the content of the original file! So this is a case where 0+0=1 (the + here is on computer C, of course).
You might think that still each of A and B holds half the info, but they don't. If you get what's on A, you still need to get 5GB from B to reconstruct the file, and 5 GB is the whole file!
So, you don't need to pass the info through computers that need to refrain from scanning their files so they don't know what's in them. You just have to divide the info between several parties so that each party holds no info at all!
"Fair is foul, and foul is fair: / Hover through the fog and filthy air" (Macbeth, Act 1, Scene 1, By William Shakespeare.)
(I'm quite convinced I may quote that here. AFAIK as of now it is in the public domain. Slashdot operators: if copyrights are retroactively lengthened to say 500 years after the authors death, please temporarily remove this post until such time as it is once more in the public domain... However, even if it is in the public domain, I might still not be allowed to post it here, because I have used a functionality built into my (actually M$'s) OS specifically to infringe on copyrights, by simultaneously pressing both the ctrl key and the c key, and then simultaneously pressing both the ctrl key and the v key. I guess it is the same copyright infringing technology that was used by the guy who made the Walmart parody. It might be fair use to use the stuff for parody, but the DMCA specifically states that you cannot do it by using technology that might also be used to infringe on copyright! BTW, have you ever realized that you can do the public a favor by shortening the lives of authors? It would also shorten the term of the copyright on their works!)
The assymetry between uplink and downlink bandwidth for the consumer means that only a tiny fraction of what is available on P2P networks can actually be transferred by the network. A single person sharing files is limited by uplink bandwidth, and cannot really supply more than a few minutes of music a day. What the recording "industry" (actually distributors) are doing when taking individuals to court is actually abusing existing law that was made for a world were infringers would typically be mass infringers that do it for profit. A single infringement means a huge fine, but it was made so by lawmakers in a world where a single infringement caught (a single copied CD)would represent mass infringement (a warehouse full of couterfit CDs somewhere). It is necessary because criminals hide a well as they can, and law enforcement needs to be able to use what evidence they can lay hands on. In P2P networks it's quite the opposite: file sharers don't hide. They make their collections available online for evryone to see without really trying to conceal who they are. Copyright holders can then find individuals offering thousands of tracks. But in reallity these are offered through a very narrow channel: you can see all, but you can only sample very little. But the law can still be used to fine them as if for every track they expose they have a truck full of copies and no constarint on distribution!
> It is returning the message to the SMTP server it arrived from ...
It is not. Check the facts. What the program does is decribed quite well in its website. It uses some DNS hueristics to let some email that looks OK pass through. If the IP of the sender doesn't match the domain of the envelope-from address well enough a challenge email is sent: sent means to the envelope-from, not to the sender's IP. You cannot send to the sender's IP. You can only send to an email address, and the only available address is the envelope-from that was determined to be probably forged.
So what this program does is send a email message as a challenge to people that it setermined that are probably not really the senders. The developers claim it works great for them and they have to treat far less spam. But that is only because the manual treatment of the spam is passed to the innocent people whose addresses were used as forged "from" addresses. This system works for its users as long as they are few (just as any other challenge/response system). But it is not scalable. If Everyone used it, then it would become an annoyance equal to spam. You cannot have everybody sending challenges to everyone else all the time!
> Did Microsoft ever really promise people that ...
> Media Player was just a "front end shell"
If Media Player is just a front end, then what's the point in requiring MS to remove it? If the "front end" is not part of the OS, then the same argument can be made to make MS remove Explorer as a front end to the file system, and allow versions of Windows using other File system browsers. Or why not require MS do distribute Windows without the GUI so as not to use their monopoly in the OS market to crach "competitors in the GUI market"?
As I see it, the way operating systems are distributed today, the "front end", i.e. the looks' are part of what defines the OS. So if there's an argument for making MS take the media player of the OS distribution, it has to be its media playing functionality and not the "looks" functionality. The ability to play certain media types is certainly not a basic component of a computer operating system. The computer would work perfectly well without it, and the media playing capabilities can be left for others to provide. On the other hand, a front end for playing media that uses whatever tools are installed by the users to play it, that preserves the homogeneous look of the system is certainly part of the OS, and is certainly part of what MS are aiming to sell when they sell Windows: an environment in which a user doesn't have to learn a completely new environment for working with each new application.
So "removing Media Player" shouldn't mean removing the interface, but rather the media playing capabilities.
I am not a MS lover, but I am also not a MS hater. They make reasonable software that most people like to use (mostly because they do not know any alternative, and do not care to know).
> our parents, and even our grandparents,
;-) )
> got a better deal by purchasing the physical medium
They didn't really. After some years have passed the technology have changed, and most of the vynil people own is just vynil for them. They don't have the equipment they need to extract the content.
I have hundreds of LPs (vynil) and two turntables that don't work. So I cannot listen to any of them (unless I go get a new turntable and convince my wife to put the ugly thing in the living room). So infact, I've been "DRMed" (actually "ARMed" - A for analog
Changing the type of media used eventually "robbed" me from the right to listen to the music. I can go get the equipment to play it, but it's not the same as it has been 30 years ago: the department store down the street doesn't sell turntables. I can make an effort and get one. I can also make an effort and circumvent the fake copyright protection on "protected" digital music (I say "fake" because if it's so easily circuvented it's not really protection).
When I was younger I bought quite a lot of music on vynil. I collected, and making the collection "complete" in some ways (as in having all the Beatles albums, or at least all released songs) ws important to me. After the switch to CDs I realized there is no point in collecting music. I did buy a bit more than 100 CDs during the time that passed since they replaced LPs, but almost only when there were very good deals, i.e., only when the price was very low, or sometimes as gifts. Now that there are so many new formats and the mainstream distributors of music are doing their best to make me know that they will do whatever they can to limit my use of my music collection much more than was in the past, I don't buy any musuc at all. I just listen to FM radio.
So, perhaps are grandparents were in a better position than us, but that's only because the pace of technology was slower back then, and the format of vynil didn't change every five years...
Most people are not Slashdot users or spam activists. Most people have never spent a second trying to define spam. Anything that's promotional and they don't want is "junk".
My wife signed up in several places to receive info about San Diego before we visited the place last month. Now we're back, and just this week I noticed that she received one of those email newsletters from a tourist board or something similar. She said she really doesn't need them any more, so I suggested she unsubscribes, so she immediately clicked the "Junk Mail" button in the webmail interface.
What this shows is that eduated people such as my wife (she's a surgeon) don't understand a thing about spam. From her point of view she gets promotional email, and if she doesn't want it there's a button that's supposed to somehow make it so that she doesn't get future deliveries of the same stuff. She doesn't understand the consequences of this action (such as feeding incorrect info into the statistical tools that remove spam for all Hotmail users, or perhaps inclusion of the sender to blacklists that affects their communication woth other recipients). For her it's just mail she wants or mail she decided she doesn't want. (BTW, she gets almost no real spam in her Hotmail account. She gets lots of promotional stuff that she subscribed to, such as online bookstores she really buys from, and providers of professional information).
I described just one case, but I think this is the typical case: most people never spent a second thinking about what spam is, and this explains the 10% (or 3%) figures.
Copyright does limit using creativity no-trivially.
;-)
...What leads us to build a legal world where the advice
. shtml . Follow this link to learn WHY this laim is made)
I could give you lots of examples, but Lawrence Lessig (http://lessig.org) does it much better then I can. See his free online book "Free Culture (http://www.free-culture.cc/). It's full of real examples of how current copyright laws constrain creativity. It also sketches the history of copyright and other "IP" laws, and is well written (and reading it is no doubt a better way to spend your time than browsing Slashdot
If (you're reading my post) then {you SHOULD read that book}
Well, if you're not going to read it, at least I will quote here an excerpt from another book by Lessig:
a successful director can give to a young artist is this:
"I would say to an 18-year-old artist, you're totally free
to do whatever you want. But-and then I would give him
a long list of all the things that he couldn't
include in his movie because they would not be cleared,
legally cleared. That he would have to pay for them.
[So freedom? Here's the freedom]: You're totally free
to make a movie in an empty room, with your two friends."
(from http://www.the-future-of-ideas.com/excerpts/index
The parent post is the closest to reality I read till now, and reality dictates that I stop browsing Slashdot and do something more useful (drive my son to his LOGO class).
The guy did nothing wrong, and doesn't really have to do anything to correct the situation. If the company wants to release the program under non-free license they can do it and they would be in violation of GPL, which would matter only if someone decides to do something about it. Does the GPL require someone to act against GPL violators?
Now about the IP agreement: I am not a lawyer, but it seems to be way too general, and probably is void in most countries: You cannot own all your worker's thoughts. Slavery was abolished some time ago! In this "agreement" the worker was the weakwer side that had to agree to whatever terms in order to get a job, and there are some conditions that cannot be imposed in these situations. It doesn't mean that he has to sue his employer. It just means that he probably has some good defences if in the future they want to sue him. And they probably should question their lawyers: they should have worked harder to produce a less restrictive agreement that would be more likely to be valid. As I see it by trying to impose too much this agreement might be totally void!
Again, I'm not a lawyer, and if there's a lawyer reading this I would be happy to hear (read) my argument torn apart. But I am a parent to a child that likes programming so we better be on our way to his LOGO class!
http://www.cs.uu.nl.nyud.net:8090/people/markov/k
A version of Logo that is easy for little kids is r-logo (http://embry.epcs.com/rLogo/ that is Java-based and can be be used on-line (i.e., go to the website and play). My 4 years old son likes playing with it and watching the instructions he gives to the turtle using the control buttons being recorded in text.
For LOGO software look here: http://el.media.mit.edu/logo-foundation/products/s oftware.html
MSWlogo has 3d. The turtle can "take of" using commands that act like airplane controls.
My 10 year old son uses several versions of Logo but prefers MSWlogo.
> It works
It more than works! And it's more than phone!
My sister stays in California with her family this year, and I live in Israel. Phoning is not very expensive, but with Skype the families gather on both ends and everyone can speak and be heard by exeryone else, so it more like a family gathering! The kids love it!
So that makes Skype more than a phone to us. It's not just person to person (pun intended).
> I have no problems with DRM that ...
> would enforce existing rights
So a DRM system should for instance make it impossible to modify GPL licensed software without extending the license and the DRM enforcing of its terms to the derivative work!
I agree that anyone who sells a product (including selling a license) restricting some of the buyer's lawful rights should be sued to death. The problem is that those who do these things are stronger players in the courts. And they've already been using copyright as an excuse not to fix the products they sell you and at the same time to not make the info available that would enable you to fix it youself or hire someone to fix it for you. Can you imagine a situation where you cannot have your car fixed because the info needed to fix it is protected by copyright? (but of course you may upgrade to a new model!)
The legal heirs should have access to the info. Probably they should have just have a lawyer send the right kind of request to Yahoo, or get a court order. Of course Yahoo should not give them access just because they say the guy is dead. But through the correct legal channels they shoud be able to get access.
On Gmail you can have many email addresses using "plus addressing": if your Gmail address is aaa@gmail.com then you can use addresses like aaa+whatever@gmail.com. You can share with different people different addresses and you can easily block ones that are found by spammers (perhaps block for everyone except the people you gave the address to). That way losing an address to spammers is not a big problem, and you don't have to forever hate your friend that stupidly compromised your precious secret email address! One problem with this might be the limit on the number of filters a user can have(perhaps it is possile to block many addresses with an "or" operation?) Using randomly generated addresses would require a lot of work to maintain, so I think a better way is to decide on a naming scheme that would allow addresses to be grouped for filtering. Then perhaps one can filter on groups of addresses by matching substrings. Has anyone here tried to employ such a naming scheme?
The same thing can be done with other services, such as fastmail.fm that has a more flexible filtering system, or with addresses in one's own domain.
One problem with using this approach is that after many addresses that deliver to your account are found by spammers, a lot of spam is directed at them, and even if you don't get to see the spam because it's automatically erased, it might load your system too much. this depends on the stage at which the filter blocks: before or after email is received. Tools for blocking before an email is received are more limited.
Using randomly generated addresses is not very useful if you have to manually maintain them (they have to be written down on paper or to a file. They are useful if they are recorded an organized automatically such as in sneakemail.com. But if one wants to use multiple disposable addresses in one's own domain, or in one's subdomain provided by one's email provider, or just using plus-addressing, a naming scheme is needed. I have my own domain but I still use addresses supplied by sneakemail.com or spamgourmet.com because I cannot come up with a reasonabe naming scheme for addresses in subdomains of my own domain that would be flexible enough to allow many years of use despite many of them being lost to spammers. Does anyone have ideas for such naming schemes? (in spamgourmet I have a simple naming schemes prducing addresses like slashdot22dec04.post.hadaso@spamgourmet.com. But then on spamgourmet addresses self destruct so I don't worry too much about how to filter them in the future. The date part is just to ensure old addresses are not reused).
It is not a definition of spam. Just of "commercial email message". To define spam one must throw in the "bulk" nature of the mailing.
But I think the way most people think about spam is wrong. What really makes makes it spam is that it was not sent to you! People send email to people. Spammers send email to email addresses. They don't know if the email address is related to a real person, and they don't care. They would send spam to setA4@printer4.bldg3.example.com
An email address is not a person or the address of a person, but rather a routing instruction. And what anti-spam laws should try to do is to utilize the nature of issuing those routing instructions in bulk by senders who have no idea what they do. That is, if it is quite obvious that the sender didn't know the identity of the recipient, and it was not a mistake, then it's spam. If it was sent in bulk, and the sender cannot show a linkage between the email address lists and the identities of real people behind those lists then it is spam. And this applies equally well to all other kinds of spam, such phone spam, fax spam, SMS spam, IM spam...
I would expect an address that receives lots of "spam" due to agreeing to get ads many years ago to drop in spam level due to massive unsubscribing. I would say that most of the commercial email received on such an account may be considered solicited as probably the recipient has agreed many years ago that the adress be shared for this purpose (I still remember myself thinking many years ago: "cool, if I check this box I would get even more info on this from sources I don't know about!" - spam was not a problem back then).
So it might be that an address was shared with many senders of commercial email that are "legit" and would honor an unsubscribe request.
On the other hand, the behaviour of a single email account at a specific short time cannot serve as evidence for anything. I've seen great fuctuation in spam rates received at some of my accounts, with no technical changes on my side (including my provider). It seems more like the particular spammers that have my address. One week they have "good business" and send lots of spam. Another week they have "bad business" and send little spam. Spammers don't sell spam for free. They only send it if someone pays them to send something. If they don't have a customer that wants something to be sent, you don't get their spam!
About unsubscribe links: I tried "unsubscribing" disposable addresses (usually of the form spammer19dec04.erase.hadaso@spamgourmet.com) and I never got any spam to any of these addresses. I only once got spam on an address I used to forward "funny stuff". I got many spam messages to addresses I posted on online forums or other online places. (and if you want to receive spam, the best way is to post it on slashdot. Much faster response than posting on "whois" for your domain, or any other online forum I tried. Don't do it to train your filters. every email address receives quite a different blend of spam, depending on the ways it was exposed, so to train your filter you better use only the spam and ham you receive on the account you want to protect, and if you can do it separately for email you receive at different addresses you should get better results).