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There are going to be a LOT of trilogies next year
on
Review: "Unbreakable"
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· Score: 1
. . . And the year after:
Think about it: Matrix II, The first part of Lord of the Rings, Starwars II, Unbreakable II (or whatever they are going to call it). Hollywood seems to have fallen in love with trilogies.
After all, you have a "comic book" story about a hero who does two heroic things in the whole movie. I understand that the movie would have been too rushed if Shyamalan had tried to put too much into the first film, but this film fealt entirely way too slow. 1-and-a-half hours of moody shots of Dunn skulking around trying to decide what he wants to do. Followed by one really disturbing "rescue" where Dunn really comes too late. I say too late because I just didn't get a very satisfied feeling from someone busting up the bad guy after the bad guy already kills and terrorizes his victims.
One thing I did decide after watching this movie was I'm glad I don't have Dunn's other ability, that is the ability too see whatever bad things a person has done recently, whenever he touched them. On a related note, I was rather disgusted at the way Shyamalan decided to have Dunn see a whole bunch of people's crap, but only decide that one was worth following up on. I guess it must be okay to smash Malt Liquor bottles on people's heads and rape girls who've passed out at parties. Or steal jewelery from jewelery stores. I say that because Dunn's character didn't decide to do anything about the guys that did that when he saw those memories. Why bother showing the audience that stuff unless Dunn is going to do something about it?
Anyhow, it was rather obvious to me that this movie was meant to be the first in a series (assuming it did well enough at the box office to keep the studios interested). After, the whole movie is about the creation, or discover, if you prefer, of a hero. But he hasn't particularly "fulfilled his destiny" yet, in this movie anyhow.
While watching this movie I kept rubbing my eyes, because all of the camera shots were real odd. I understand that Shamalyan (sp?) was trying to create a surreal, odd feeling, but come on. The way he attempted to do this was by constantly placing the optical perspective about 4 inches from characters faces or other objects. It feels like your talking to one of those annoying, overbearing people who insist on putting their face 4 inches from yours, and then step forward when you step back to get away from them.
Another annoying shot was when he would have something real close to the camera, but out of focus, and then have the main subject of the scene about 10 feet away, like in the comic book store scene (the comic book store not owned by Elijah, that is). The left third of the screen is filled by a giant, out-of-focus comic book rack and you keep wanting to focus your eyes on it, but can't. Drove me freakin' nuts.
Technically, only private Universities, and only some of them, are non-profit. There are for-profit Universities. Also, State-Funded Universities are not non-profit organizations, they are publically-funded (e.g. they are a part of the state government and therefore don't fall into the non-profit category)
While I agree with some of your statements, let's drop the Red Baiting act, shall we?
As far as this article goes, I agree with you that media companies are under no obligation (and shouldn't be) to give you a discount on a copy on different media. That said, however, it should be, and I believe is, perfectly legal for me to run a service whereby someone could bring in an old vinyl LP and I could digitize it and burn it to CD (or vice-versa, I suppose, but I don't know anyone with LP cutting equipment, or why anyone would want to make a record from a CD;-) for them.
So, the solution is just to transfer the IP from one media to another yourself, or hire someone to do it for you.
The easiest way, that I've found, to get the Java support for either windows or linux is to go to a page with a java applet on it (eg. java.sun.com). Mozilla will detect that there is a java applet and that you don't have java installed and will pop up a window with two buttons, labeled "Download Java for Windows" and "Download Java for Linux" respectively.
Click on the appropriate button and the JRE will download and install itself. You _may_ have to restart the browser (I think newer nightly builds don't even make you restart the browser, but not sure) to get Mozilla to use the JRE, but it will now be installed.
Really, my problem isn't with them adding that stuff to Mozilla (and I've already been trying out some of the nightly builds lately and they just keep getting better; really fantastic). My problem is when you go look at AOL/Netscape press releases, and the way NS6 is being presented in reviews on e.g. ZDNET, IDG, etc (which is highly influenced by the press releases), they sort of mention in an under the breath, un-important way "small, compact browser; support for web standards"
and then, in big, bold letters: "Re-designed User Interface; Built-in AOL Instant Messenger; What's Related; Shopping and Calender Tabs"
I mean, those are all, I suppose, things that someone likes, but are they compelling reasons for most people to get interested in looking at NS6? Not really, from what I can tell. The main reason I care about this is that I want to see the installed NS3 & NS4 user base disappear, because both those browsers suck to design pages for (css has a tendency to crash both browsers, even though, if the browser can't handle a given stylesheet it should ignore that stylesheet; do they ignore those stylesheets? No, they crash or put garbage on screen most of the time, which means that I can't put the styles in my page for the benefit of non-broken browsers [or I have to rely on browser-detection which is a P-I-T-A]). The NS4 users will probably not be such an obstacle to get them to upgrade, but getting NS3 users to upgrade means you have to give them a real compelling reason to upgrade (which, I believe, fast-modern-standards support is, but AIM is not), and you have to give them a browser that is small and fast enough that it works practically for them (most of the people I know who still use NS3 do so on older computers which can't handle the bloat of IE4/5 or NS4, a market which I'm hoping that Mozilla will be lightweight enough to handle.)
Well, I don't expect this to get moderated up, being mostly an agreement with things others have said, but I have to say it anyhow. AOL is killing a lot of the real potential of NS6, by incorporating a bunch of marketing BS, and more importantly, selling (in a marketing way, not literally for $$, of course) NS6 as a browser that is better because it incorporates new 'usability' features [my arse] such as built-in AIM, the ability to read AOL email, "my sidebar", and a bunch of other crap. Some of those things are decent (I ocassionally make use of the sidebars, they can be somewhat useful, though they aren't completely new or innovative seeing as IE has had "channels" (not the same, but similar concept) for a long time now. But the main thing is, is someone really going to download a new browser just to get built in AIM, when they could just as easily download the AIM client?
And the number one pisser, for me, is how when you download the NS6 preview releases (and I assume that this "feature" will be in the final releases as well), when you start the browser for the first time, or create a new profile, it opens up a window entitled "Netscape Activation" with a bunch of forms to fill out. Do you need to fill out this form to use the browser? No. Does this form add any functionality to the browser? Not a damn bit. What does it do? It signs you up for the my.netscape.com and netscape email services, among other things. It's just a bunch of very manipulative, deceptive marketing crap (can we expect any less from AOL) that is going to tick people off and make them say "screw it, I'll just use IE." (or whatever browser they are already using, or, for the very few, intelligent, inquisative few, might goad them on to look for other alternatives like Opera, et al).
The worst thing about this is that Mozilla really is a great browser when you use it, but most people will probably never see that because of all the marketing stupidity.
At the risk of going against slashdot popular sentiment, I have to say that, if done right, this could actually be useful and work beyond the flaw you mention. Let me explain: most of the links of most people will, as you say, be stuff that you could find through the major search engines. In fact, there's no way (well, I should say, I haven't heard of a way yet anyhow), aside from a hand edited directory, that you could feasibly create a search engine which wouldn't return at least some of the results that you would find using the "big search engines". But the point is, they are trying to find a creative way to find "isolated webs", which is to say, little pockets of the web that aren't currently in the link-chain of the web-at-large, or are in the link-chain only one or two places, and are missed by the big "crawler" type systems.
The fact is that some people will have some links in their bookmarks that the search engine would otherwise never have been able to find, or at least enable it to find those sites sooner.
Most people are disgruntled with voting because they just don't understand the art of it. What do I mean by this? When you go into the polling booth, you vote for more than just the president; you vote for senators and representatives and governors, etc.
The key to voting is to balance the views of the people you elect. That is, find the president who has a view that is most important to you and that you agree with and vote for that person for president. For example, I'm going to vote for Bush, just because I really don't like the social engineering tendencies in the liberal left that Al Gore strongly represents. See, I agree/like Bush more than Gore, but there is no, and there will never be, a presidential candidate that I agree with on all issues. I too think that Bush is mostly just pandering to the radical right on the issue of internet "violence" (I should say, I am conservative, but a progressive conservative who sees many good things about the net and doesn't believe in blatant censorship.)
Now, here's where the art comes in. I've voted (hypothetically) for Bush, but when I go to vote for my senator or representative, I'll try to find someone who will represent me against Bush in issues that I think Bush is wrong about. That's why I'll probably vote Democratic for my representative, to have a balancing effect in Congress.
All this is to say, the president can't do hardly anything without congressional approval/legislation. So you don't have to worry that it will be the end of the world, no matter who occupies the White House, as long as you have a congress which keeps the Chief Executive in balance.
So, if you understand the voting process and make it work for you, you can effectively cancel out the bad qualities of whoever you vote for president with your vote for congress. And you don't have to throw up your hands in disgust just because you can't find the "perfect" candidate; he/she doesn't exist.
is for companies to connect their physically wide-spread lans into a fast and cheap wan. That is, for internet access the bottleneck problem that you and everyone else are referring to is a real issue (although I'd still rather run my servers off a fiber than off a T1, especially for $1k/month).
But, let's say I run a small-ish company with, say, 3 locations in office buildings in major cities- let's say NYC, SF, and Atlanta. At each location I have, say, 300 employees. For 3k a month I can now connect all my locations with a very high speed WAN, since they are all on the "same" backbone (and probably running some sort of VPN on top of this backbone to minimize the effect of connecting your lans over a public backbone), and I have all the bandwidth I need for running public internet servers to boot. Sounds like a good deal to me. =)
That the internet has been Peer-to-Peer since its inception. The definition of a peer might change, but quothe the article:
Peer-to-peer computing is so new that no one is even attempting to define it. P2P could be servers talking to servers, servers talking to PCs, PCs talking to PCs, or WAP phones talking to all of them.
So, we have here a definition that makes servers talking to PC's a P2P relationship. . . hmm. . . don't ftp, and http, and nfs fall into this category? Of course they do. The truth of the matter is that the suits-and-ties-and-power-lunches-and-buzzword crowd are just now discovering the nature of the internet. . . That any computer can talk to any other computer (provided it has an assigned IP). So what all this P2P "buzz" is really about is just what high-level software protocol standards we'll use to facilitate peering different machines in a given situation. E.g. how will "my" e-commerce server talk to your credit-card validation service server to know that the customer can or can't purchase from me.
I do agree with you though that this is a lot of people spouting hot-air right now.
My goal is to keep free software free. If it turns out that all of the free software I write is used as a subroutine library for any proprietary software that cares to pick it up, what incentive would I have to write free software?
Well, uh, I write Free Software because I hope that people will find it useful, because I like programming, I secretly hope that I'll become famous because a lot of people will like my package, and because I like Free Software. I don't write Free Software just for the sake of writing Free Software.
I would love to see more and more software released under Open Source licenses. I acknowledge, however, that other people have the right to license their code under whatever license they want. In the case of them going in and modifying my source code (the actual code inside the functions; I don't really consider function calls to be part of the code of the program as they don't themselves do anything, [ok, technically they do, but that functionality is part of the compiler, not my source code] they are just a way to denote modularization of the code and logic.) I expect them to release the clearly derived work under the GPL.
In the case of them taking my program and making it into a library/server this is what I have to say: If they go to the effort to modularize it (and release the library/server under the GPL of course) so that they can separately license the code that they add to it, more power to them. Why? Because 1)Someone will probably find a good technical use for the componentized software _in_ another Free Software project. And 2) They have in no way shape or form made my code one bit less Free.
Let's consider the most extreme example. Some company takes my program, renames
"int main(int argc, char *argv[])"
to "int lib_main(int argc, char *argv[])"
compiles the program as a library and then writes a new main.c that consists of the following:
extern int lib_main(int, char **);
int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
return(lib_main(argc, argv));
}
They still would not have made my program any less free. Anyhow, in that case, I suppose you could even try to sue them, as you said, for copyright circumvention because they haven't made any program at all. But fundamentally, they haven't made my program any less free. People can still get my program from my site, or sourceforge, or metalab, or any other place I mirrored it. And honestly, if a company tried to do the above mentioned trick, and tried to charge people for it and put it under a standard commercial license, don't you think people would quickly find out that they could get the exact same program for free on the internet, legally, and say "get lost" to the scam artist?
The GPL tries to limit linking based on the assertion that linking creates a derivitave work, and you can limit derivitave works within a copyright permission.
Has this assertian ever been tested in court? Again, I'm all for free software (I'm working on a GPL'ed project right now as a matter of fact), but I really don't like the implications of calling software that links to other software a "derivative" work. Sure, it is dependent upon the other software for some of it's functionality, but part of the purpose of libraries is to create a logical division between two pieces of software. My program is my program, and your library is your library, and your library shouldn't be able to put copyright restrictions on my program. From a practical standpoint, if my program is dependent upon your library, I have to have gotten legal permission from you to distribute your library with my program (or the user has to get it independently, ala all the dynamically linked Motif apps out there that I can't use until I get Lesstif [off-topic: actually, the only Motif app I really use is Netscape, so I just get the statically linked version of that;-) ]).
Let me ask this: If I have a program that makes a call to, e.g.
execlp("someprogram", {"someprogram", "filename"});
Does that make my program a derivative of someprogram? I should think not. But the FSF plays semantic games and differentiates between calling a program with the exec family of functions and linking against a library. In both cases my code remains distinct from your code (unless you want to count the function names that I use in my code as being derivative of the library, but in that case you are just playing semantic games IMHO).
I might sound a little irate here, but it is not anti-free software. I just know that a sword can cut its wielder, and a gun can shoot the one who fires it. I do not want to see a precedent for people who hold copyright on a library to be able to say who can and who can't link against it. You can say who can and can't distribute the library, fine. But I hope that if a case of violation-by-linking ever goes to court, I hope that the GPL loses.
Please don't hate me for this. I just think giving copyright holders the power to call programs that link against libraries (or in this case modules) "derivative works" is very, very bad. Does microsoft hold copyright on every program that links against the standard windows libraries? Against DirectX? If the win32 versions of GNU software link against any windows libraries (win32 api anyone?), would that give Microsoft copyright to those versions of the GNU software? No, that's absurd, and so is the claim that linking against your library gives you copyright to my work! (Because if my program is a derivative of yours, that automatically gives you a claim to copyright, doesn't it?) The whole point of libraries is that other people are supposed to write programs that use them.
I just realized that I forgot to include, in my previous post, and explanation of why I'm discussing linking in the context of this story.
The reason is that the poster before me, and I also see Bruce Perens posted in another thread, stated that the GPL violation comes from the fact that you end up linking GPL'ed code (the driver module) with the Solaris x86 kernel which is not GPL'ed. The GPL makes this assertion (I think it's a nasty, and hard to defend legally assertion) that if you link GPL'ed code with something, that something automatically becomes a derivative work. And that is why my previous post is not off-topic. =)
Second, I would like to say I love the GPL and do not want to see it legally weakened. That is, in fact, the reason I have thought about this. Because if the GPL makes (what a court deems to be) over-broad claims, that would definitely weaken the GPL. So don't flame me;-)
But, I have been thinking for a long time that the GPL's claim to limit who can and can't link to GPL'd code might be tenuous. It is very easy, when I can point to a program and say "that program's source code contains my source code" to say that that code should therefore be GPL'ed. I can argue though, that a program that links to your library doesn't somehow become one program, it merely uses your code, and remains a separate entity that can be distributed under seperate copyrights. I think that one might find that a court might entertain the idea that linking code doesn't make it a derivative program.
To illustrate, let me argue it this way. Copyright, If I understand it correctly, allows you to specify terms upon which people can obtain a copy of your work, and make copies/derivatives; however, once someone _has_ a copy, I think, you can't really specify how they can use it(there are some exceptions, e.g. public performances, etc; and of course companies try to limit people's usage all the time, so I could be wrong here). So, if I have legally obtained a copy of your source-code, and this source-code is in the form of a library (or module in this case, which is similar), I might (I don't know, IANAL, and as far as I know no court has ever ruled on this) be able to make the case that "my" code (in this case sun's solaris x86 kernel; in the previous sentence, and for a bit following, when I say "my" I am speaking from the hypothetical standpoint of a defendant making a case in a GPL lawsuit) was distributed legally, and that the user got the GPL'ed code legally (assuming the module's/library's source code is included), and that the GPL cannot limit the user from using the two together.
Let's look at this another way: if a commercial software company said that their library X couldn't be linked against program Y, even though I paid for library X and got it legally, and paid for program Y and got it legally, because company Y hadn't paid a fee to the maker of library X, then we on slashdot would all be crying that this library distributor was making a draconian claim to rights that they didn't have: namely the claim that they could control how I used their software after I had gotten it legally. Why do we apply a double-standard to free-software?
Well, umm, for one thing, now that it's been posted on slashdot, every corporate security manager will quickly hear about this and start analyzing dns requests. It doesn't take a genious to figure out that a person who is making 5000 dns queries _per_second_ is using this tunnel. And as soon as they saw someone using such a tunnel that person would most likely be escorted out the door by Bob and Joe the "friendly", bored security gaurds.;-)
I had the idea, awhile back, while looking into ecommerce solutions, of having a system where the vendor never even sees the credit card information. It would work something like this (maybe the technical details would need to be tweaked, but this is the general idea): I go to your site, fill a shopping cart/order like normal, fill out a shipping information form, then get redirected to the credit card companies' site, where I fill out payment information, which would do the work of figuring out if I could be authorized, and then send me back to the vendors site with an authorization.
Viola! Vendors never see my card info, but get assurance of receiving payment.
You could, potentially, take it another step. Once I had gone to the credit card companies' verification site once, the card company could, maybe, store a cookie in my browser (which cookie would not contain any of my credit card info, but just an index to my database record from my last visit). In the future, when I was redirected to the card companies site for verification, they could check that cookie, ask for some sort of pass-phrase (obviously cookies aren't the most secure thing in the world), and ask me if I want to use the card info I've already submitted last time, or use another card.
Do you have any suggestions for books (or websites) that would be good tutorials on patterns and doing these pattern-analysis diagrams (or whatever they are)?
When Katz isn't talking about "Post-Columbine" geek repression, he's talking about how the "Corporate Republic" is ruining everybodies lives. Look back through his articles, that is another major topic of his writings.
I suppose to some extent I even agree with him in the general idea that some corporations are getting too much power aggregated by very small, non-democratic boards of directors and executive committees.
Yes, there is high speed packet. However, it wouldn't do a person on a boat a lick of good, because the radio frequencies that high-speed packet use are only good for point-to-point, line-of-sight communication. The distance it would work over water would be longer than over land, but I would think the signal would still only go about 40-50 miles max.
If you're a thousand miles off-shore, the only radio signal that will reach land would be a shortwave radio signal, and you are limited, by law, to only transmitting at something like 300 or 1200 baud on the amateur shortwave bands (if they didn't limit it, a small group of people could quickly use up the entire shortwave spectrum doing high-speed packet, leaving no frequencies left for anybody else to use for voice or code use).
The person in question would have to be willing to learn a little bit about electrical/radio theory, FCC rules and regulations, operating procedures, etc in order to take the Technician Class license exam, but they could have email almost anywhere in the world if they went to the trouble. (As a ham with a technician class license, I'd like to say the exam isn't really too hard, most people could get the license if they cared too).
Additionally, they would have to learn to understand Morse Code at a rate of 5 words per minute (in order to get Shortwave privileges, which would probably be necessary for getting email in the middle of the ocean).
So what your saying is that Microsoft doesn't need to adhere to standards because the rest of the world isn't compatible with Microsoft because Microsoft keeps breaking the standards?
Slashdot Mirror
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Think about it: Matrix II, The first part of Lord of the Rings, Starwars II, Unbreakable II (or whatever they are going to call it). Hollywood seems to have fallen in love with trilogies.
After all, you have a "comic book" story about a hero who does two heroic things in the whole movie. I understand that the movie would have been too rushed if Shyamalan had tried to put too much into the first film, but this film fealt entirely way too slow. 1-and-a-half hours of moody shots of Dunn skulking around trying to decide what he wants to do. Followed by one really disturbing "rescue" where Dunn really comes too late. I say too late because I just didn't get a very satisfied feeling from someone busting up the bad guy after the bad guy already kills and terrorizes his victims.
One thing I did decide after watching this movie was I'm glad I don't have Dunn's other ability, that is the ability too see whatever bad things a person has done recently, whenever he touched them. On a related note, I was rather disgusted at the way Shyamalan decided to have Dunn see a whole bunch of people's crap, but only decide that one was worth following up on. I guess it must be okay to smash Malt Liquor bottles on people's heads and rape girls who've passed out at parties. Or steal jewelery from jewelery stores. I say that because Dunn's character didn't decide to do anything about the guys that did that when he saw those memories. Why bother showing the audience that stuff unless Dunn is going to do something about it?
Anyhow, it was rather obvious to me that this movie was meant to be the first in a series (assuming it did well enough at the box office to keep the studios interested). After, the whole movie is about the creation, or discover, if you prefer, of a hero. But he hasn't particularly "fulfilled his destiny" yet, in this movie anyhow.
Another annoying shot was when he would have something real close to the camera, but out of focus, and then have the main subject of the scene about 10 feet away, like in the comic book store scene (the comic book store not owned by Elijah, that is). The left third of the screen is filled by a giant, out-of-focus comic book rack and you keep wanting to focus your eyes on it, but can't. Drove me freakin' nuts.
Technically, only private Universities, and only some of them, are non-profit. There are for-profit Universities. Also, State-Funded Universities are not non-profit organizations, they are publically-funded (e.g. they are a part of the state government and therefore don't fall into the non-profit category)
While I agree with some of your statements, let's drop the Red Baiting act, shall we?
As far as this article goes, I agree with you that media companies are under no obligation (and shouldn't be) to give you a discount on a copy on different media. That said, however, it should be, and I believe is, perfectly legal for me to run a service whereby someone could bring in an old vinyl LP and I could digitize it and burn it to CD (or vice-versa, I suppose, but I don't know anyone with LP cutting equipment, or why anyone would want to make a record from a CD ;-) for them.
So, the solution is just to transfer the IP from one media to another yourself, or hire someone to do it for you.
Click on the appropriate button and the JRE will download and install itself. You _may_ have to restart the browser (I think newer nightly builds don't even make you restart the browser, but not sure) to get Mozilla to use the JRE, but it will now be installed.
and then, in big, bold letters:
"Re-designed User Interface; Built-in AOL Instant Messenger; What's Related; Shopping and Calender Tabs"
I mean, those are all, I suppose, things that someone likes, but are they compelling reasons for most people to get interested in looking at NS6? Not really, from what I can tell. The main reason I care about this is that I want to see the installed NS3 & NS4 user base disappear, because both those browsers suck to design pages for (css has a tendency to crash both browsers, even though, if the browser can't handle a given stylesheet it should ignore that stylesheet; do they ignore those stylesheets? No, they crash or put garbage on screen most of the time, which means that I can't put the styles in my page for the benefit of non-broken browsers [or I have to rely on browser-detection which is a P-I-T-A]). The NS4 users will probably not be such an obstacle to get them to upgrade, but getting NS3 users to upgrade means you have to give them a real compelling reason to upgrade (which, I believe, fast-modern-standards support is, but AIM is not), and you have to give them a browser that is small and fast enough that it works practically for them (most of the people I know who still use NS3 do so on older computers which can't handle the bloat of IE4/5 or NS4, a market which I'm hoping that Mozilla will be lightweight enough to handle.)
And the number one pisser, for me, is how when you download the NS6 preview releases (and I assume that this "feature" will be in the final releases as well), when you start the browser for the first time, or create a new profile, it opens up a window entitled "Netscape Activation" with a bunch of forms to fill out. Do you need to fill out this form to use the browser? No. Does this form add any functionality to the browser? Not a damn bit. What does it do? It signs you up for the my.netscape.com and netscape email services, among other things. It's just a bunch of very manipulative, deceptive marketing crap (can we expect any less from AOL) that is going to tick people off and make them say "screw it, I'll just use IE." (or whatever browser they are already using, or, for the very few, intelligent, inquisative few, might goad them on to look for other alternatives like Opera, et al).
The worst thing about this is that Mozilla really is a great browser when you use it, but most people will probably never see that because of all the marketing stupidity.
The fact is that some people will have some links in their bookmarks that the search engine would otherwise never have been able to find, or at least enable it to find those sites sooner.
The key to voting is to balance the views of the people you elect. That is, find the president who has a view that is most important to you and that you agree with and vote for that person for president. For example, I'm going to vote for Bush, just because I really don't like the social engineering tendencies in the liberal left that Al Gore strongly represents. See, I agree/like Bush more than Gore, but there is no, and there will never be, a presidential candidate that I agree with on all issues. I too think that Bush is mostly just pandering to the radical right on the issue of internet "violence" (I should say, I am conservative, but a progressive conservative who sees many good things about the net and doesn't believe in blatant censorship.)
Now, here's where the art comes in. I've voted (hypothetically) for Bush, but when I go to vote for my senator or representative, I'll try to find someone who will represent me against Bush in issues that I think Bush is wrong about. That's why I'll probably vote Democratic for my representative, to have a balancing effect in Congress.
All this is to say, the president can't do hardly anything without congressional approval/legislation. So you don't have to worry that it will be the end of the world, no matter who occupies the White House, as long as you have a congress which keeps the Chief Executive in balance.
So, if you understand the voting process and make it work for you, you can effectively cancel out the bad qualities of whoever you vote for president with your vote for congress. And you don't have to throw up your hands in disgust just because you can't find the "perfect" candidate; he/she doesn't exist.
But, let's say I run a small-ish company with, say, 3 locations in office buildings in major cities- let's say NYC, SF, and Atlanta. At each location I have, say, 300 employees. For 3k a month I can now connect all my locations with a very high speed WAN, since they are all on the "same" backbone (and probably running some sort of VPN on top of this backbone to minimize the effect of connecting your lans over a public backbone), and I have all the bandwidth I need for running public internet servers to boot. Sounds like a good deal to me. =)
So, we have here a definition that makes servers talking to PC's a P2P relationship. . . hmm. . . don't ftp, and http, and nfs fall into this category? Of course they do. The truth of the matter is that the suits-and-ties-and-power-lunches-and-buzzword crowd are just now discovering the nature of the internet. . . That any computer can talk to any other computer (provided it has an assigned IP). So what all this P2P "buzz" is really about is just what high-level software protocol standards we'll use to facilitate peering different machines in a given situation. E.g. how will "my" e-commerce server talk to your credit-card validation service server to know that the customer can or can't purchase from me.
I do agree with you though that this is a lot of people spouting hot-air right now.
Well, uh, I write Free Software because I hope that people will find it useful, because I like programming, I secretly hope that I'll become famous because a lot of people will like my package, and because I like Free Software. I don't write Free Software just for the sake of writing Free Software.
I would love to see more and more software released under Open Source licenses. I acknowledge, however, that other people have the right to license their code under whatever license they want. In the case of them going in and modifying my source code (the actual code inside the functions; I don't really consider function calls to be part of the code of the program as they don't themselves do anything, [ok, technically they do, but that functionality is part of the compiler, not my source code] they are just a way to denote modularization of the code and logic.) I expect them to release the clearly derived work under the GPL.
In the case of them taking my program and making it into a library/server this is what I have to say: If they go to the effort to modularize it (and release the library/server under the GPL of course) so that they can separately license the code that they add to it, more power to them. Why? Because 1)Someone will probably find a good technical use for the componentized software _in_ another Free Software project. And 2) They have in no way shape or form made my code one bit less Free.
Let's consider the most extreme example. Some company takes my program, renames
"int main(int argc, char *argv[])"
to "int lib_main(int argc, char *argv[])"
compiles the program as a library and then writes a new main.c that consists of the following:
extern int lib_main(int, char **);
int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
return(lib_main(argc, argv));
}
They still would not have made my program any less free. Anyhow, in that case, I suppose you could even try to sue them, as you said, for copyright circumvention because they haven't made any program at all. But fundamentally, they haven't made my program any less free. People can still get my program from my site, or sourceforge, or metalab, or any other place I mirrored it. And honestly, if a company tried to do the above mentioned trick, and tried to charge people for it and put it under a standard commercial license, don't you think people would quickly find out that they could get the exact same program for free on the internet, legally, and say "get lost" to the scam artist?
The GPL tries to limit linking based on the assertion that linking creates a derivitave work, and you can limit derivitave works within a copyright permission.
Has this assertian ever been tested in court? Again, I'm all for free software (I'm working on a GPL'ed project right now as a matter of fact), but I really don't like the implications of calling software that links to other software a "derivative" work. Sure, it is dependent upon the other software for some of it's functionality, but part of the purpose of libraries is to create a logical division between two pieces of software. My program is my program, and your library is your library, and your library shouldn't be able to put copyright restrictions on my program. From a practical standpoint, if my program is dependent upon your library, I have to have gotten legal permission from you to distribute your library with my program (or the user has to get it independently, ala all the dynamically linked Motif apps out there that I can't use until I get Lesstif [off-topic: actually, the only Motif app I really use is Netscape, so I just get the statically linked version of that ;-) ]).
Let me ask this: If I have a program that makes a call to, e.g. execlp("someprogram", {"someprogram", "filename"});
Does that make my program a derivative of someprogram? I should think not. But the FSF plays semantic games and differentiates between calling a program with the exec family of functions and linking against a library. In both cases my code remains distinct from your code (unless you want to count the function names that I use in my code as being derivative of the library, but in that case you are just playing semantic games IMHO). I might sound a little irate here, but it is not anti-free software. I just know that a sword can cut its wielder, and a gun can shoot the one who fires it. I do not want to see a precedent for people who hold copyright on a library to be able to say who can and who can't link against it. You can say who can and can't distribute the library, fine. But I hope that if a case of violation-by-linking ever goes to court, I hope that the GPL loses.
Please don't hate me for this. I just think giving copyright holders the power to call programs that link against libraries (or in this case modules) "derivative works" is very, very bad. Does microsoft hold copyright on every program that links against the standard windows libraries? Against DirectX? If the win32 versions of GNU software link against any windows libraries (win32 api anyone?), would that give Microsoft copyright to those versions of the GNU software? No, that's absurd, and so is the claim that linking against your library gives you copyright to my work! (Because if my program is a derivative of yours, that automatically gives you a claim to copyright, doesn't it?) The whole point of libraries is that other people are supposed to write programs that use them.
I just realized that I forgot to include, in my previous post, and explanation of why I'm discussing linking in the context of this story. The reason is that the poster before me, and I also see Bruce Perens posted in another thread, stated that the GPL violation comes from the fact that you end up linking GPL'ed code (the driver module) with the Solaris x86 kernel which is not GPL'ed. The GPL makes this assertion (I think it's a nasty, and hard to defend legally assertion) that if you link GPL'ed code with something, that something automatically becomes a derivative work. And that is why my previous post is not off-topic. =)
Second, I would like to say I love the GPL and do not want to see it legally weakened. That is, in fact, the reason I have thought about this. Because if the GPL makes (what a court deems to be) over-broad claims, that would definitely weaken the GPL. So don't flame me ;-)
But, I have been thinking for a long time that the GPL's claim to limit who can and can't link to GPL'd code might be tenuous. It is very easy, when I can point to a program and say "that program's source code contains my source code" to say that that code should therefore be GPL'ed. I can argue though, that a program that links to your library doesn't somehow become one program, it merely uses your code, and remains a separate entity that can be distributed under seperate copyrights. I think that one might find that a court might entertain the idea that linking code doesn't make it a derivative program.
To illustrate, let me argue it this way. Copyright, If I understand it correctly, allows you to specify terms upon which people can obtain a copy of your work, and make copies/derivatives; however, once someone _has_ a copy, I think, you can't really specify how they can use it(there are some exceptions, e.g. public performances, etc; and of course companies try to limit people's usage all the time, so I could be wrong here). So, if I have legally obtained a copy of your source-code, and this source-code is in the form of a library (or module in this case, which is similar), I might (I don't know, IANAL, and as far as I know no court has ever ruled on this) be able to make the case that "my" code (in this case sun's solaris x86 kernel; in the previous sentence, and for a bit following, when I say "my" I am speaking from the hypothetical standpoint of a defendant making a case in a GPL lawsuit) was distributed legally, and that the user got the GPL'ed code legally (assuming the module's/library's source code is included), and that the GPL cannot limit the user from using the two together.
Let's look at this another way: if a commercial software company said that their library X couldn't be linked against program Y, even though I paid for library X and got it legally, and paid for program Y and got it legally, because company Y hadn't paid a fee to the maker of library X, then we on slashdot would all be crying that this library distributor was making a draconian claim to rights that they didn't have: namely the claim that they could control how I used their software after I had gotten it legally. Why do we apply a double-standard to free-software?
Well, umm, for one thing, now that it's been posted on slashdot, every corporate security manager will quickly hear about this and start analyzing dns requests. It doesn't take a genious to figure out that a person who is making 5000 dns queries _per_second_ is using this tunnel. And as soon as they saw someone using such a tunnel that person would most likely be escorted out the door by Bob and Joe the "friendly", bored security gaurds. ;-)
Viola! Vendors never see my card info, but get assurance of receiving payment.
You could, potentially, take it another step. Once I had gone to the credit card companies' verification site once, the card company could, maybe, store a cookie in my browser (which cookie would not contain any of my credit card info, but just an index to my database record from my last visit). In the future, when I was redirected to the card companies site for verification, they could check that cookie, ask for some sort of pass-phrase (obviously cookies aren't the most secure thing in the world), and ask me if I want to use the card info I've already submitted last time, or use another card.
You could also send back data that they are expecting, just corrupt it to be totally wrong, e.g. $address="18459 nowhere lane, nullville, OH 00000" ;-)
Do you have any suggestions for books (or websites) that would be good tutorials on patterns and doing these pattern-analysis diagrams (or whatever they are)?
When Katz isn't talking about "Post-Columbine" geek repression, he's talking about how the "Corporate Republic" is ruining everybodies lives. Look back through his articles, that is another major topic of his writings.
I suppose to some extent I even agree with him in the general idea that some corporations are getting too much power aggregated by very small, non-democratic boards of directors and executive committees.
If you're a thousand miles off-shore, the only radio signal that will reach land would be a shortwave radio signal, and you are limited, by law, to only transmitting at something like 300 or 1200 baud on the amateur shortwave bands (if they didn't limit it, a small group of people could quickly use up the entire shortwave spectrum doing high-speed packet, leaving no frequencies left for anybody else to use for voice or code use).
Additionally, they would have to learn to understand Morse Code at a rate of 5 words per minute (in order to get Shortwave privileges, which would probably be necessary for getting email in the middle of the ocean).
If you are interested in getting more information about becoming an amateur, go to:
http://www.arrl.org/hamradio.html
For information about digital wireless communication over amateur radio go to:
http://www.tapr.org/tapr/html/pktf.html
So what your saying is that Microsoft doesn't need to adhere to standards because the rest of the world isn't compatible with Microsoft because Microsoft keeps breaking the standards?