If you intend to kill me for self defense (I will shoot you if you don't shoot me first) and you miss and kill my brother, then you would not be put to trial.
Reversing everything written with LTR directionality to RTL is not difficult in web pages (there are dir=rtl attributes and CSS2 also supports "direction:rtl") and webmasters can easily apply these to whole documents or elements within them.
Email is another issue: I know in Hebrew directionality is often wrong in email I receive, and the charset is often not specified correctly, resulting in garbled display. I see lots of postings from Hebrew email users about these problems, but I don't see much Arab postings. Is the situation similar in Arabic? What might be reasons that I don't see as much Arabic speakers complaining about encoding or directionality issues (in international forums)? Are arab speakers aware of these problems or just accept them as "reality" (as most Hebrew users of email including corporate users do)?
There is no way to specify rtl directionality in plain text, and certainly not "per paragraph" (except for embeding special Unicode characters that alter the bidi algorithm behaviour). That makes plain text email quite unusable in RTL languages, except for short notes. HTML mail is almost a "must" in composing RTL email, but even then many people don't do it right, and lots of people use webmail clients that don't allow specifying rtl directionality (Gmail, Yahoo. FastMail.FM is an exeption in actually willing to spend money on full bidi support http://www.emailaddresses.com/forum/showthread.php ?postid=362403#post362403 ) Others mistake right alignment for RTL directionality. Another problem is with webmail providers such as Yahoo that claim they send us-ascii only but actually accepting any character input and marking it as iso-8859-1 (latin-1) and not what it actually is). I see lots of email in Hebrew that is sent with wrong MIME headers (with respect to charset encoding) that makes standards compliant email viewers show the email garbled. Mainly because there is a slight difference in the interpretation of "Content-type" headers in MIME and in HTTP (in HTTP no charset specified means just that. In MIME it means MUST use us-ascii to render. Many newletters are sent with no charset in MIME header and tag in the html and are then correctly displayed as garbled text rendered in us-ascii).
Default deny doesn't have to be used exclusively to work.
One address can be "whitelist only", while another can be "accept all".
If "mybank@mydomain" can whitelist only my bank while "firstname@mydomain" can be open to anything. Mail "from" my bank sent to my "public" address obviously is not from my bank.
For clueless users (most users) there need to be automated systems for doing this so they can avoid thinking. These would blacklist the bank on all addresses except the one that has only the bank whitelisted, and would apply additional tests to determine that mail claimed to come from the bank actually originated from the bank's servers (e.g. VarA http://wiki.outboundindex.net/VarA)
> how do you reconcile IMAP with the GMail's way of creating "folders" (labels)?
Labels can be implemented using IMAP flags. A Gmail account is like an IMAP account with one mailbox. Labels are like custom (user defined) IMAP flags. The "archive" function in Gmail is like a "Deleted" flag in IMAP and "purge" is not available.
The only problem in reconciling IMAP with GMail's labels is getting IMAP clients to treat them consistently, i.e., to create a standard way for IMAP clients to treat labels/keywords implemented through flags (the difference between keywords and labels is that keywords are fixed strings and labels can be renamed).
IMAP users tend to use lots of folders to classify their own personal mail. I doubt if this is what the original designers of the protocol had in mind. IMAP has a method of organizing folders in a hirarchy, but they are actually not called folders. They are called mailboxes. And it seems to me that the original purpose was to enable administrators to organize users' mailboxes and allow easy maintenance of shared mailboxes. Not to allow individuals to use mailboxes as folders. For instance IMAP does not define cross-mailbox search. To me using one or just a few mailboxes with labels or keywords seems a better way to organize a personal email archive (not that I don't have many email folders. But I do wish I had the option to mark my email using keywords in a standard way and then reduce the number of folders). A tree structure is too limited for classifying personal mail.
If you submit your address, then you'd get all your old viagra mail coming from China/Korea/Brazil/wherever or just the zombie PC next door, and in addition you will get "legitimate" marketing email that is "fully CAN-SPAM compliant" advertising all sorts of things that "you might want your parents to buy you".
But you know that this kind of spam is OK because they CAN-SPAM you! (so say both state and federal governments)
> Cameras, on the other hand, have to save their images in a structured way...
Forgive me if I'm wrong, but I thought the M$ patent was about the "long filename" method, not the organization of the more than 25 years old file system. All Cameras I've seen so far use the old 8+3 characters format and that's not patented.
A different issue is support for long filenames under open source OSes. That would not be possible without patent violation, so perhaps a solution is to use another method of doing them under FAT (M$ has a patent on one method, not on the concept of using strings longer than 8 characters as filenames) and portray the method used under DOS/Windows as a limitation of that system (that is, create a FOSS utility for DOS/Windows that converts the proprietary FAT system to an "open" one that is compatible with all systems except for long filenames on "unpatched" Windows systems. It would still be compatible with the basic "shortname FAT" and would probably work with long filenames with the same issues that about 90% of the world population deals with anyway when moving files that are named with some characters between different systems (or differnt drives on the same system, or between compressed archive and file system, etc.)
Google desktop could incorporate such a "patch"...
>Nation-states have killed over 1 million people a year for the past 100 years
There are more than six billion people on this planet. Guess what: THEY ARE ALL GONNA DIE!!!
> I don't let the torturers read my email.
But then they'll have to torture you to get you to tell them the truth. Isn't it easier to let them have it by reading your boring mail? (or they can get it the way they used to: by monitoring your phone).
When you're offline you cannot send and receive, but you can compose or reply or forward mail that has already been received, "send" it, and it will be sent when the connection is resumed (assuming the client is configured to do it).
You cannot do that with webmail.
Personnaly I don't use a locally based client, even though I use only one PC almost exclusively. I use FastMail.FM's webmail client and I don't know a locally based client that can duplicate the functionality I use on that webmail client (but then, I haven't thoroughly checked). If email was a critical application for me I would certainly use an offline client. (Actually I do use a sort of client: I use FastCheck that is a very thin IMAP client that does only incoming email alerts for FastMail.FM accounts using IMAP IDLE extension. And I also have several email clients configured to access my account but I hardly ever use them, so they don't have local copies of recent files. Those clients are OE, ThunderBird, ImapSize and an expired trial of Mulberry that I'm too lazy to uninstall).
What he probably should have done is agree that Microsoft has rights to the name EXCEPT in the context of software that protexts a user's Windows system from threats (or: "except for products with the same or similar functionality of his product". A good lawyer is required to choose the correct wording). A good contract would have a paragraph stating that the agreement becomes void in this case. Anyway, he should certainly have put a condition that the software he already created can keep its name. Now he might face a requirement from microsoft to rename it, or remove all references to it. At least, if he doesn't intend to work on it anymore, he needs protection from having to rename it retroactively (or risking having to act to stop its distribution under the original name by a third party if it was released with a license that allows redistribution).
MicroSoft had no rights in the name: what they market as "Windows" is a multi-purpose platform, and they do it with the intention that third parties would create products based on that platform. That alone means that htey intend that people make product whose name assert that they are "doing something related to Windows(R). An additional fact is that there are plenty of pruducts of this nature and MS does not go after them for including the name Windows(R) in the product's name.
The "poor guy" that lost the name of his product probably made the right decision because this was a closed chapter in his history: he didn't want to work on this project anymore. But from MS point of view, I think that they sould have offered something of value, even if he didn't ask for it. The cost in public image for them is probably higher than covering the Guy's expenses during Graduate school or something similar.
Re: if it sucks...why are people downloading it?
on
RIAA Sues a Child
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· Score: 1
> But if it sucks so bad, why are people downloading it in the first place.
For the same reason men would **** a woman that they would not consider marrying...
>... there will be a de facto requirement that all files come > with some sort of license attached...
As another reply stated, every file does come with "some sort of license attached": the "default license" assumed by the law almost anywhere around the world is "do not copy". So if code (as in software) can be used to induce people to consider a non default license such as a Creative Commons license it would be a good effect. It would educate people about the meaning of copyright. It would teach people about using permisions to promote the distribution of their own work. Another plus is that it would induce software developers to create tools that allows easy marking of works as distributable.
The negative effect that this "attached license" requirement might induce is that some people might learn how to attach a "redistribution allowed" license to copyrighted work they have no permision to distribute. If this happens, it can cause great trouble to the creative commons initiative. If too many such files would float around it would be impossible to tell what is sharable and what not. Imagine if someone distibuted lots of components of MSWINDOWS or MSOFFICE under the GPL (without permission, of course). How would you tell then what GPLed software is legal and what's illegal? There's a need for standard authentication to be employed together with these licensing schemes, to make it hard to abuse this system.
The problem is not with software trying to enforce copyright law. The problem is with copyright law itself, that has a chilling effect in that anything unmarked is assumed unusable. This chilling effect was unnoticable when it was hard to enforce, but now the internet provides the tools to the copyright merchants to easily scan the network for every little infringement and sue the whole world. The law that assumes "no marking" equals "no permission" was created in a different world. Nowadays it means that the costs of protecting the revenue stream of the few who profit from trafficing in copyrights is transferred to the many aho don't.
Copyright law is a by-product of mass media. Mass media was created with Gutenberg's invention of the printing press (actually the invention of typesetting). Lessig's book "Free Culture" tells a bit about the history of copyright law.
I have an electric company transformer exactly two floors under me. It supplies the elecricity for at least our building and one other nearby building (about 30 apartments). A friend of the family that operates a gaussmeter for a living came over and made some measurements around the transformer and in my home and said I had nothing to worry about and the radiation from that transformer is extremely low. When I asked him what does this "low" means practically, he asked if I have some transformer. I plugged in one little 1000mA general purpose transformer I bought at Ace, and the radiation it produced was more than a thousand times more than that produced by the electric company transformer.
So perhaps "cheap" produces more radiation than "powerful"...
Approach them using a browser pop-up window telling the user that her system is insecure and and that she needs to click the pop-up to fix it. Then take the user to a website where she has to fill in some data (such as Credit Card number + security code + billing address ) name etc. Then, just to convince her that her system really is insecure, you might choose to make some random purchases with that info. You might use it to purchase some mailing lists that you can then use to send buisness offers to select customers (selected by whoever composed that mailing list) If she entered her ISP username and password that is required so you can fix her network problem then you can use it to mail your offers. You should check first if this buisness model is not patented. I've seen it used in the past (though I have not clicked on the pop-up so my network is still insecure...
> Why? Whats the hurry? Would it really be the end of the world > if we didn't get back to the Moon by 2020?
It would not be the end of the world. But since the "estimated" time of having a working space elevator is about 2020, it's a sensible target time for sending humans to the moon. This way you have both systems for sending humans and for sending cargo working at about the same time.
Once a telemarketer called exactly at the time I was reading my kids their bedtime story. So I I let her join in. She listened for about 2 or 3 minutes before realizing I was not talking to her about whatever she was trying to sell.
Another thing I do with those recorded calls if I don't need the phone (I don't. work communication is done by email) is that I put it on the speaker and whenever they finish and say something like "dial 1 for a representative, dial 2 to replay" I dial 2. That way I waste their time, and they cannot call someone else on that line. Then when I get tired of the game I might dial 1 to make the human work a little bit (I mean, if the human works the human gets paid?). If there's a 1-800 number I write it down and then if I have time I call it several times and hang up after it is answered (no need to talk. It's just to waste their resources a bit).
If more people would think about wasting the telemarketers resources it would make this business less profitable.
But what I do most of the time is just hang up immediately (or let the call die when the telemarketer realizes there's no one to talk to on my side). The downside is that once I immediately disconnected and then I realized that it was my ISP that was calling me...
If phone caller ID is as freely editable as email headers (for the same legitimate reason, i.e., making the caleer ID refer to a person and not a machine), then we need something like SPF for filtering those calls we do not want to receive.
> Of course, there will still be people publishing things in unrestricted format...
But will they be playable in the future? Will you be able to play anything that is not DRMed? remember that files with DRM illegally removed would be in unrestricted formats. After they manage to make DRMed formats the standard, then they would make sure that whatever the public can buy that plays DRMed files cannot play "pirated content". The only way to disable all pirated content would be to disallow unrestricted formats, at least on those gadgets that are sold to play restricted formats.
>... I don't want to burn CDs.... I don't want to have to go through > some complicated process like burning to CDs first then ripping the CDs,...
I wonder if the process cannot be simulated. After all, when we want a PDF file we print to a "virtual printer" that saves the printout as a PDF file. The program that initiates the printout isn't aware of that. It just asks the OS to print this data using this printer, and the OS just asks the device driver to do it (or perhaps I'm simplifying things?) Anyway, why can't we have a device driver that looks to the OS as a driver for a CD burner, but actually just pipes the data to another program? (can create an ISO, or saves the tracks as wav or mp3 or whatever. Anything is possible after the data is piped, and the DRM software only sees one CD "being burnt").
Is it possible? Do we have software that does it already? If it's not possible, what am I missing? Would this kind of device driver be violating the DMCA? (And if so, is Adobe pdf distiller breaking the DMCA by fooling copyright control systems that think they can count printouts into thinking a reprintable pdf copy made is just one hardcopy?)
BTW, the EFF article links to another article about DRM on CDs. Apparently one method used is including an autorun program that asks the user to install a program and ejects the CD if the DRM program is not installed. I guess that in this case holding the shift button down while inserting those CDs would be violating the DMCA... (and M$ is violating the DMCA by distributing an OS that allows a users to change the default setting so that a CD does not trigger autorun... I guess they'll fix this security issue in a future patch...)
Software IS data! A computer is a gadget that takes a list of instructions and performs them (and they need to be in a form that the particular computer can process). That's the whole point of having a computer: Turing proved that there are universal processes that can mimick all other processes if a description (what we call software today) is supplied as input. Then a few years later gadgets capable of performing such universal processes were invented and called digital computers.
... Parents do their best to teach kids right and wrong and to give them that moral compass,... that moral compass isn't sufficiently complex to cover... copyright.
Here's a bedtime story I invented a few days ago because I was too lazy to get a book to read to my five years old Jonatan:
The Child and the Goldfish - bedtime story
A child wanted to draw a picture of the sea and wanted a nice fish in the picture. So the child typed the word "fish" in Google® and then clicked "images", and then he saw the picture of the nicest Goldfish he ever saw. It was exactly the fish he wanted in his drawing. He was so happy! He enlarged the picture and prepared to copy the picture just like he does with all the other images he finds in Google, but suddenly the fish started talking through the computer's speakers: "please don't copy me! I don't want you to copy me! Please! I will grant you three wishes if you don't copy me!"
The Child hesitated. He said to the fish: "But I do want to draw a picture of the sea, and I really like you!". Then the child thought for a moment and said: "OK. I promise. I want a sperm whale in my drawing. Can you get me a sperm whale?". "Sure!" said the fish. The fish extended a fin out of the screen and typed the words "sperm whale" in Google, then hit [enter], and an image of a sperm whale appeared. The child hit control-C, then control-V in Paint®, and continued working on his drawing.
Later the child wanted a dolphin. He remembered what the Goldfish promised, so he came back to Google, typed "fish", hit [enter], and there was this fish on the screen! How he wanted to copy the fish into his drawing. But he remembered what he promised. He asked the fish: "Can you find me a really nice dolphin?". "Sure!" replied the fish, and immediately extended one fin all the way to the keyboard, typed "dolphin", and there was this dolphin, exactly the one the child had in mind. The child hit control-C and then control-V and continued with his drawing.
But the child was not really happy with his drawing. It wasn't the drawing he wanted. He wanted that goldfish. It was exactly the fish he went looking for in Google in the first place. The child went back to Google, typed "fish" and then [enter], and there was the Goldfish again. The Goldfish asked "How is your drawing turning out?" and the child said "I don't really like it" in a very sad voice. The fish looked in the other window and said "but it's a really very nice drawing. I really like it!". The child said "I really wanted you in the picture, but I can't copy you... I promised". Then the fish said: "sure you can't copy me. But I can!" The fish extended one fin out of the screen all the way to the keyboard, hit control-C, then control-V, and there he was in the child's drawing!
The child was so happy! And the fish was happy too! The fish set his new home as the desktop wallpaper on the child's PC, and they lived happily ever after.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.aa419.org/fake-banks/fakebankslist.php
U.S. Patent 000,000,001: "Method for incorporating a teenage girl in a bed."
...
This might generate a lot of income in licensing fees
(though they might be some published prior art...)
If you intend to kill me for self defense (I will shoot you if you don't shoot me first) and you miss and kill my brother, then you would not be put to trial.
Reversing everything written with LTR directionality to RTL is not difficult in web pages (there are dir=rtl attributes and CSS2 also supports "direction:rtl") and webmasters can easily apply these to whole documents or elements within them.
p ?postid=362403#post362403 ) Others mistake right alignment for RTL directionality. Another problem is with webmail providers such as Yahoo that claim they send us-ascii only but actually accepting any character input and marking it as iso-8859-1 (latin-1) and not what it actually is).
Email is another issue:
I know in Hebrew directionality is often wrong in email I receive, and the charset is often not specified correctly, resulting in garbled display. I see lots of postings from Hebrew email users about these problems, but I don't see much Arab postings. Is the situation similar in Arabic? What might be reasons that I don't see as much Arabic speakers complaining about encoding or directionality issues (in international forums)? Are arab speakers aware of these problems or just accept them as "reality" (as most Hebrew users of email including corporate users do)?
There is no way to specify rtl directionality in plain text, and certainly not "per paragraph" (except for embeding special Unicode characters that alter the bidi algorithm behaviour). That makes plain text email quite unusable in RTL languages, except for short notes.
HTML mail is almost a "must" in composing RTL email, but even then many people don't do it right, and lots of people use webmail clients that don't allow specifying rtl directionality (Gmail, Yahoo. FastMail.FM is an exeption in actually willing to spend money on full bidi support http://www.emailaddresses.com/forum/showthread.ph
I see lots of email in Hebrew that is sent with wrong MIME headers (with respect to charset encoding) that makes standards compliant email viewers show the email garbled. Mainly because there is a slight difference in the interpretation of "Content-type" headers in MIME and in HTTP (in HTTP no charset specified means just that. In MIME it means MUST use us-ascii to render. Many newletters are sent with no charset in MIME header and tag in the html and are then correctly displayed as garbled text rendered in us-ascii).
RSA encryption should not be used by Emma Thompson when purchasing on the web...
It is (partially) an Israeli technology!
Default deny doesn't have to be used exclusively to work.
One address can be "whitelist only", while another can be "accept all".
If "mybank@mydomain" can whitelist only my bank while "firstname@mydomain" can be open to anything. Mail "from" my bank sent to my "public" address obviously is not from my bank.
For clueless users (most users) there need to be automated systems for doing this so they can avoid thinking. These would blacklist the bank on all addresses except the one that has only the bank whitelisted, and would apply additional tests to determine that mail claimed to come from the bank actually originated from the bank's servers (e.g. VarA http://wiki.outboundindex.net/VarA)
> how do you reconcile IMAP with the GMail's way of creating "folders" (labels)?
Labels can be implemented using IMAP flags. A Gmail account is like an IMAP account with one mailbox. Labels are like custom (user defined) IMAP flags. The "archive" function in Gmail is like a "Deleted" flag in IMAP and "purge" is not available.
The only problem in reconciling IMAP with GMail's labels is getting IMAP clients to treat them consistently, i.e., to create a standard way for IMAP clients to treat labels/keywords implemented through flags (the difference between keywords and labels is that keywords are fixed strings and labels can be renamed).
IMAP users tend to use lots of folders to classify their own personal mail. I doubt if this is what the original designers of the protocol had in mind. IMAP has a method of organizing folders in a hirarchy, but they are actually not called folders. They are called mailboxes. And it seems to me that the original purpose was to enable administrators to organize users' mailboxes and allow easy maintenance of shared mailboxes. Not to allow individuals to use mailboxes as folders. For instance IMAP does not define cross-mailbox search. To me using one or just a few mailboxes with labels or keywords seems a better way to organize a personal email archive (not that I don't have many email folders. But I do wish I had the option to mark my email using keywords in a standard way and then reduce the number of folders). A tree structure is too limited for classifying personal mail.
If you submit your address, then you'd get all your old viagra mail coming from China/Korea/Brazil/wherever or just the zombie PC next door, and in addition you will get "legitimate" marketing email that is "fully CAN-SPAM compliant" advertising all sorts of things that "you might want your parents to buy you".
But you know that this kind of spam is OK because they CAN-SPAM you! (so say both state and federal governments)
> Cameras, on the other hand, have to save their images in a structured way ...
Forgive me if I'm wrong, but I thought the M$ patent was about the "long filename" method, not the organization of the more than 25 years old file system. All Cameras I've seen so far use the old 8+3 characters format and that's not patented.
A different issue is support for long filenames under open source OSes. That would not be possible without patent violation, so perhaps a solution is to use another method of doing them under FAT (M$ has a patent on one method, not on the concept of using strings longer than 8 characters as filenames) and portray the method used under DOS/Windows as a limitation of that system (that is, create a FOSS utility for DOS/Windows that converts the proprietary FAT system to an "open" one that is compatible with all systems except for long filenames on "unpatched" Windows systems. It would still be compatible with the basic "shortname FAT" and would probably work with long filenames with the same issues that about 90% of the world population deals with anyway when moving files that are named with some characters between different systems (or differnt drives on the same system, or between compressed archive and file system, etc.)
Google desktop could incorporate such a "patch"...
SO: Why isn't there FOSS source scanning tools? Or are there?
(And why cannot SlashDot users use the subject line a bit more creatively than "Re: Re: Reply: Re: irrelevant"???)
<shout>
MOD PARENTS UP!!!
MOD PARENTS UP!!!
MOD PARENTS UP!!!
</shout>
>Nation-states have killed over 1 million people a year for the past 100 years
There are more than six billion people on this planet. Guess what: THEY ARE ALL GONNA DIE!!!
> I don't let the torturers read my email.
But then they'll have to torture you to get you to tell them the truth. Isn't it easier to let them have it by reading your boring mail? (or they can get it the way they used to: by monitoring your phone).
When you're offline you cannot send and receive, but you can compose or reply or forward mail that has already been received, "send" it, and it will be sent when the connection is resumed (assuming the client is configured to do it).
You cannot do that with webmail.
Personnaly I don't use a locally based client, even though I use only one PC almost exclusively. I use FastMail.FM's webmail client and I don't know a locally based client that can duplicate the functionality I use on that webmail client (but then, I haven't thoroughly checked). If email was a critical application for me I would certainly use an offline client. (Actually I do use a sort of client: I use FastCheck that is a very thin IMAP client that does only incoming email alerts for FastMail.FM accounts using IMAP IDLE extension. And I also have several email clients configured to access my account but I hardly ever use them, so they don't have local copies of recent files. Those clients are OE, ThunderBird, ImapSize and an expired trial of Mulberry that I'm too lazy to uninstall).
What he probably should have done is agree that Microsoft has rights to the name EXCEPT in the context of software that protexts a user's Windows system from threats (or: "except for products with the same or similar functionality of his product". A good lawyer is required to choose the correct wording). A good contract would have a paragraph stating that the agreement becomes void in this case. Anyway, he should certainly have put a condition that the software he already created can keep its name. Now he might face a requirement from microsoft to rename it, or remove all references to it. At least, if he doesn't intend to work on it anymore, he needs protection from having to rename it retroactively (or risking having to act to stop its distribution under the original name by a third party if it was released with a license that allows redistribution).
MicroSoft had no rights in the name: what they market as "Windows" is a multi-purpose platform, and they do it with the intention that third parties would create products based on that platform. That alone means that htey intend that people make product whose name assert that they are "doing something related to Windows(R). An additional fact is that there are plenty of pruducts of this nature and MS does not go after them for including the name Windows(R) in the product's name.
The "poor guy" that lost the name of his product probably made the right decision because this was a closed chapter in his history: he didn't want to work on this project anymore. But from MS point of view, I think that they sould have offered something of value, even if he didn't ask for it. The cost in public image for them is probably higher than covering the Guy's expenses during Graduate school or something similar.
> But if it sucks so bad, why are people downloading it in the first place.
...
For the same reason men would **** a woman that they would not consider marrying
> ... there will be a de facto requirement that all files come ...
> with some sort of license attached
As another reply stated, every file does come with "some sort of license attached": the "default license" assumed by the law almost anywhere around the world is "do not copy". So if code (as in software) can be used to induce people to consider a non default license such as a Creative Commons license it would be a good effect. It would educate people about the meaning of copyright. It would teach people about using permisions to promote the distribution of their own work. Another plus is that it would induce software developers to create tools that allows easy marking of works as distributable.
The negative effect that this "attached license" requirement might induce is that some people might learn how to attach a "redistribution allowed" license to copyrighted work they have no permision to distribute. If this happens, it can cause great trouble to the creative commons initiative. If too many such files would float around it would be impossible to tell what is sharable and what not. Imagine if someone distibuted lots of components of MSWINDOWS or MSOFFICE under the GPL (without permission, of course). How would you tell then what GPLed software is legal and what's illegal? There's a need for standard authentication to be employed together with these licensing schemes, to make it hard to abuse this system.
The problem is not with software trying to enforce copyright law. The problem is with copyright law itself, that has a chilling effect in that anything unmarked is assumed unusable. This chilling effect was unnoticable when it was hard to enforce, but now the internet provides the tools to the copyright merchants to easily scan the network for every little infringement and sue the whole world. The law that assumes "no marking" equals "no permission" was created in a different world. Nowadays it means that the costs of protecting the revenue stream of the few who profit from trafficing in copyrights is transferred to the many aho don't.
Copyright law is a by-product of mass media. Mass media was created with Gutenberg's invention of the printing press (actually the invention of typesetting). Lessig's book "Free Culture" tells a bit about the history of copyright law.
I have an electric company transformer exactly two floors under me. It supplies the elecricity for at least our building and one other nearby building (about 30 apartments). A friend of the family that operates a gaussmeter for a living came over and made some measurements around the transformer and in my home and said I had nothing to worry about and the radiation from that transformer is extremely low. When I asked him what does this "low" means practically, he asked if I have some transformer. I plugged in one little 1000mA general purpose transformer I bought at Ace, and the radiation it produced was more than a thousand times more than that produced by the electric company transformer.
So perhaps "cheap" produces more radiation than "powerful"...
Approach them using a browser pop-up window telling the user that her system is insecure and and that she needs to click the pop-up to fix it. Then take the user to a website where she has to fill in some data (such as Credit Card number + security code + billing address ) name etc. Then, just to convince her that her system really is insecure, you might choose to make some random purchases with that info. You might use it to purchase some mailing lists that you can then use to send buisness offers to select customers (selected by whoever composed that mailing list) If she entered her ISP username and password that is required so you can fix her network problem then you can use it to mail your offers. You should check first if this buisness model is not patented. I've seen it used in the past (though I have not clicked on the pop-up so my network is still insecure...
> Why? Whats the hurry? Would it really be the end of the world
> if we didn't get back to the Moon by 2020?
It would not be the end of the world. But since the "estimated" time of having a working space elevator is about 2020, it's a sensible target time for sending humans to the moon. This way you have both systems for sending humans and for sending cargo working at about the same time.
Once a telemarketer called exactly at the time I was reading my kids their bedtime story. So I I let her join in. She listened for about 2 or 3 minutes before realizing I was not talking to her about whatever she was trying to sell.
Another thing I do with those recorded calls if I don't need the phone (I don't. work communication is done by email) is that I put it on the speaker and whenever they finish and say something like "dial 1 for a representative, dial 2 to replay" I dial 2. That way I waste their time, and they cannot call someone else on that line. Then when I get tired of the game I might dial 1 to make the human work a little bit (I mean, if the human works the human gets paid?). If there's a 1-800 number I write it down and then if I have time I call it several times and hang up after it is answered (no need to talk. It's just to waste their resources a bit).
If more people would think about wasting the telemarketers resources it would make this business less profitable.
But what I do most of the time is just hang up immediately (or let the call die when the telemarketer realizes there's no one to talk to on my side). The downside is that once I immediately disconnected and then I realized that it was my ISP that was calling me...
If phone caller ID is as freely editable as email headers (for the same legitimate reason, i.e., making the caleer ID refer to a person and not a machine), then we need something like SPF for filtering those calls we do not want to receive.
> Of course, there will still be people publishing things in unrestricted format ...
But will they be playable in the future? Will you be able to play anything that is not DRMed? remember that files with DRM illegally removed would be in unrestricted formats. After they manage to make DRMed formats the standard, then they would make sure that whatever the public can buy that plays DRMed files cannot play "pirated content". The only way to disable all pirated content would be to disallow unrestricted formats, at least on those gadgets that are sold to play restricted formats.
> ... I don't want to burn CDs. ... I don't want to have to go through ...
> some complicated process like burning to CDs first then ripping the CDs,
I wonder if the process cannot be simulated. After all, when we want a PDF file we print to a "virtual printer" that saves the printout as a PDF file. The program that initiates the printout isn't aware of that. It just asks the OS to print this data using this printer, and the OS just asks the device driver to do it (or perhaps I'm simplifying things?) Anyway, why can't we have a device driver that looks to the OS as a driver for a CD burner, but actually just pipes the data to another program? (can create an ISO, or saves the tracks as wav or mp3 or whatever. Anything is possible after the data is piped, and the DRM software only sees one CD "being burnt").
Is it possible? Do we have software that does it already? If it's not possible, what am I missing?
Would this kind of device driver be violating the DMCA? (And if so, is Adobe pdf distiller breaking the DMCA by fooling copyright control systems that think they can count printouts into thinking a reprintable pdf copy made is just one hardcopy?)
BTW, the EFF article links to another article about DRM on CDs. Apparently one method used is including an autorun program that asks the user to install a program and ejects the CD if the DRM program is not installed. I guess that in this case holding the shift button down while inserting those CDs would be violating the DMCA... (and M$ is violating the DMCA by distributing an OS that allows a users to change the default setting so that a CD does not trigger autorun... I guess they'll fix this security issue in a future patch...)
Software IS data! A computer is a gadget that takes a list of instructions and performs them (and they need to be in a form that the particular computer can process). That's the whole point of having a computer: Turing proved that there are universal processes that can mimick all other processes if a description (what we call software today) is supplied as input. Then a few years later gadgets capable of performing such universal processes were invented and called digital computers.
Here's a bedtime story I invented a few days ago because I was too lazy to get a book to read to my five years old Jonatan:
The Child and the Goldfish - bedtime story
A child wanted to draw a picture of the sea and wanted a nice fish in the picture. So the child typed the word "fish" in Google® and then clicked "images", and then he saw the picture of the nicest Goldfish he ever saw. It was exactly the fish he wanted in his drawing. He was so happy! He enlarged the picture and prepared to copy the picture just like he does with all the other images he finds in Google, but suddenly the fish started talking through the computer's speakers: "please don't copy me! I don't want you to copy me! Please! I will grant you three wishes if you don't copy me!"
The Child hesitated. He said to the fish: "But I do want to draw a picture of the sea, and I really like you!". Then the child thought for a moment and said: "OK. I promise. I want a sperm whale in my drawing. Can you get me a sperm whale?". "Sure!" said the fish. The fish extended a fin out of the screen and typed the words "sperm whale" in Google, then hit [enter], and an image of a sperm whale appeared. The child hit control-C, then control-V in Paint®, and continued working on his drawing.
Later the child wanted a dolphin. He remembered what the Goldfish promised, so he came back to Google, typed "fish", hit [enter], and there was this fish on the screen! How he wanted to copy the fish into his drawing. But he remembered what he promised. He asked the fish: "Can you find me a really nice dolphin?". "Sure!" replied the fish, and immediately extended one fin all the way to the keyboard, typed "dolphin", and there was this dolphin, exactly the one the child had in mind. The child hit control-C and then control-V and continued with his drawing.
But the child was not really happy with his drawing. It wasn't the drawing he wanted. He wanted that goldfish. It was exactly the fish he went looking for in Google in the first place. The child went back to Google, typed "fish" and then [enter], and there was the Goldfish again. The Goldfish asked "How is your drawing turning out?" and the child said "I don't really like it" in a very sad voice. The fish looked in the other window and said "but it's a really very nice drawing. I really like it!". The child said "I really wanted you in the picture, but I can't copy you... I promised". Then the fish said: "sure you can't copy me. But I can!" The fish extended one fin out of the screen all the way to the keyboard, hit control-C, then control-V, and there he was in the child's drawing!
The child was so happy! And the fish was happy too! The fish set his new home as the desktop wallpaper on the child's PC, and they lived happily ever after.
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.
Author and copyright holder: Ofer Hadas (aka hadaso in cyberspace)