The only things that need to be accessible is a list of the "namespaces" (i.e. the second-level bits). For example, it'll say that the "ddc" namespace is run by the Dewey Decimal Society (or whatever) and give their contact information. It won't resolve these URIs into resources, they way that a browser resolves a URL into a web page. (Though in some cases it may point to a resolver mechanism.)
Don't expect to type these into your browser and view the results. This system is more for tagging and identification, not resolution.
There will be ONE new top-level scheme, "info". It will have (presumably a small-ish number of) second-level "namespaces". Each namespace will be a well-defined system run by some organization. So you could imagine an ISBN namespace, so a URI might look like "info:isbn:0465026567".
The "info" scheme, and therefore the list of namespaces, will be controlled by an existing standards body called NISO. It's their job to impose the discipline on these URIs. End-users won't get to create their own - only NISO-approved bodies with a well-run namespace can add to this system. Sounds like a good idea to me. I can rely on the fact that any legitimate "info" URI will be well-organized and sensible, I hope.
When I bought my Nintendo 64, I paid $30 for a warranty like that. They said I could drive over it and still get a replacement heh.
The clerk probably said that but the actual warranty probably did not. When I bought a boom box several years ago the sales guy of course tried to sell me the extended warranty, and said that it covered everything. I asked if I accidentally dropped it from the roof would it be covered, he said yes. Then I looked at the actual warranty, and of course it excluded damage due to negligence on the part of the owner. I would guess that if you tried to return the product that you had dropped off the roof or run over in your car, they'd say that you were negligent and refuse coverage.
I'm confused... "It seems they had kept me in their catalog on a contract clause that had been overlooked when the contract was signed back in 1999." Overlooked by who, you or them? I interpret this as meaning that you were under contract with them but didn't know it, so they did have the right to sell your music, but then they graciously terminated the contract when you asked them to. Is this right?
Uh... I think you're describing some existing FILM camera that Ritz has, not these new ones. You can't delete an exposure from a camera with film in it. Plus, the article says that these new cameras are $10.99 including processing (because presumably Ritz can then re-use the digital camera).
To go after creators for not making their inventions only useful for "good" things is like going after them for not doing enough idiot-proofing.
I completely agree. Just because something *could* be used for bad, doesn't make it bad. But my point is that just because something *could* be used for good, doesn't make it good. That seems to be the argument that Ian was making, and I think it's wrong. You have to look at the good and the bad uses, and see how often and how good or bad those uses are, and then decide.
I'm not sure I completely follow you. Which organization are you talking about? In any case, some random points that seem relevent:
- Porn is not dissident speech here, but kiddie porn is. Is it wrong to censor kiddie porn?
- On a different note, the Supreme Court recognizes that there are different types of speech, and they should be given different levels of protection, and I pretty much agree with that. Political speech is the most important and the most protected. Personal expression is important and should be protected, but can be somewhat regulated (e.g. can't swear in public). Commercial speech is a notch lower, thus things like truth-in-advertising laws. Most porn is indecent, which is still lower, but still protected. So you can ban strip clubs from being within a certain distance of a school, I think. Really objectionable porn is obscene speech, which can be banned.
- Spreading knowledge is good. Getting free art without compensating the artists is bad. Reconciling the two is hard.
That's kind of a nice, feel-good answer, but it's wrong. There's not actually anything that is worth infinitely more than anything else. Human lives should be worth more than anything else, right? Yet we allow people to drive cars that kill 100 people a day in the U.S. So we as a society feel that the ability to get around easily (to work, the movies, etc.) is worth more than 30,000 human lives a year. That kind of negates any kind of feel-good comments you can make about how much a human life is worth, at least.
Some people feel that widespread, unstoppable file-sharing may significantly reduce the amount of art that's produced (music, movies, books, articles, analysis, etc.) That's a pretty serious consequence. Another one might be the unstoppable untraceable distribution of child pornography. On the other hand, if we have Freenet, we might have more open political speech in some repressed countries. That's a pretty significant benefit. I personally think it's pretty hard to weigh those factors against each other. It's not an easy win for Freenet.
News.com: Is it moral to create a general-purpose, anonymity-preserving tool--a file-swapping system that can be used for good (publishing political tracts) and ill (trading copyrighted music)?
Clarke: If it is moral to make guns, knives or anything else that can be used for both good and ill, then it is certainly moral to create something which tries to guarantee a freedom that is essential to democracy.
Doesn't it seem a little silly to divide everything in the world into exactly 3 categories: those that can only be used for good, those that can only be used for bad, and those that could be used for either? Doesn't it make sense to say that there are some things that are much more often used for good than for bad (e.g. knives), so they're fine? And some, such as guns, where the trade-off is a lot more questionable? (So in most countries they are significantly regulated.)
Freenet may eventually contain a political treatise from the oppressed citizens of a dictatorship, but it will probably contain copyrighted songs, movies, porn, etc. by a factor of a hundred thousand to one. Supporting anonymous political speech is more good than illegal copying is bad, but by a factor of 100,000?
Clarke: Matt seems to misunderstand Judge Posner's quote. Posner was referring to those involved in the likely "shady dealings"--not the creators of the tools they are using. To use his own analogy, the manufacturers of a mask used in a bank robbery are certainly not responsible for the criminal behavior of the bank robbers. This notion was reaffirmed by Judge (Stephen) Wilson earlier this year in his ruling in the Grokster case as it pertains to P2P networks saying, "Grokster and Streamcast are not significantly different from companies that sell home video recorders or copy machines, both of which can be and are used to infringe copyrights."
Well that's still not a perfect analogy. For example, if the company added a feature to the ski mask that made it harder to pull off, and advertised this feature for use in bank robberies, they'd probably be held liable for its use in a robbery. Or if they didn't advertise it, but did know that the new feature's overwhelming use would be in bank robberies, then they might also be liable. You could make a similar statement for VCR and copy machine manufacturers.
I think Freenet's a really cool technical problem, and I'd get involved in it, except for these kinds of problems. Even with all its positive uses, the idea of working on what turns out to be an ideal tool for distributing kiddie-porn just gives me the willies. I personally don't feel comfortable in this gray area of providing complete anonymity. A system that had the same benefits of distributed publishing (to avoid the Slashdot effect) without the encryption, I'd be interested in contributing to.
Since these laws are being proposed in order to prevent people from sharing their internet connection without tell their ISP, I would imagine it would be fine to do so in this case since you're telling (and paying) your ISP.
But for applets, where it's most needed, this check is done at runtime too, so they're safe. Class-file verification (which does the checking) is always turned on for applets, but by default is turned off when running local code, because local code is assumed to be trusted. The probably only comes when you've got a local app that can download and run untrusted code. (Then you need to turn on -Xfuture or -Xverify:all. A future version of Java might have this turned on for all apps.)
... but man do I hate the enhanced for-loop syntax. At some point you have to give up perfect backwards-compatibility for readability. One or two new keywords would do a world of good.
for (TimerTask task : c)
task.cancel();
becomes
foreach (TimerTask task in c)
task.cancel();
"Automakers promote SUVs because they are more profitable than econoboxes. The government cooperates, keeping oil prices low. Individuals buy what they are led to believe they need, and what they can afford."
The US government "cooperates" mostly by not taxing the hell out of oil and gas, like in Europe. However many people feel that we should highly tax them because they cause pollution. Maybe "the government" doesn't do this because of "big corporations" or whatever you want to blame it on, but I think more likely they don't do because they'll get voted out of office, because people like cheap gas. Especially in the West (or actually anywhere outside the Northeast) where they rely on cars much more than anywhere else in the world.
I can't get to the second image (I guess you slashdotted it). But I can't see anything in the first picture that makes me think it's a fake. As to some of the comments that have been posted:
He certainly has a shadow - I can see the shadow cast by both of his legs, it looks very believable.
I don't see any rubber-stamped areas, unless you're talking about the huge obvious areas of something that looks like tread. I think that's just some part of the tank. If not, that's a pretty poor Photoshop job huh?
The dark patches around the boy do look a little weird, but they could very well just be the coloration of that part of the tank. E.g. look at the gun barrel, you can see some areas that are darker than others for no particular reason, that's just how they are. I guess my argument is, if someone could fake the shadow so well, would he have left those big dark patches? I'm no Photoshop guru, but even I could've avoided that part.
One thing that it's important to realize is that the DMCA (and other laws of the same stripe) not only have no effect at all on piracy, they were never really intended to address piracy, regardless of all the lip service provided in that direction.
I don't know where you get that from. I think the DMCA was exactly intended to counter the piracy of Kazaa and its relatives. The content industry is hoping to retain complete control over how its files get copied, through technical means, and it needs the DMCA to prevent people from breaking those locks.
Although I'm sympathetic to the industry's problems (how to make money creating content when anyone can share it for free), I think that the solution (the DMCA etc) are worse that the problem they try to fix. But, it's weird to argue that the DMCA is completely unrelated to this problem...
The vast majority of piracy can be addressed by directly targeting the major pirating organizations that distribute in a mass production fashion.
What are you talking about? The vast majority of piracy is via P2P file sharing networks, which are as popular as ever, despite all the lawsuits.
In addition to the above posts, there are also times when the science in question isn't represented as being good or bad - it's not a new invention. In the article, one of the questionable assertions was that a particular medicine caused birth defects. You can't say whether or not this would be "too good to be true", that doesn't even apply here.
When you search on an Overture site like Altavista or Lycos, the paid matches show up at the top, but they are labeled as "sponsored matches". When you search Google, the paid matches show up on the right, and are labeled "sponsored links". I guess that's a little different, but not by a whole lot. So why is one "pay-for-placement" and the other isn't?
Actually I was talking about the poster's theory that nobody would upload songs if they could be bought inexpensively, not whether a company could make money in the face of song swapping.
People who use file sharing networks constantly complain about the large percentage of poor quality files. Legitimate providers could very easily make money by charging a decent amount for the promise that the technical quality of the recording will be high.
If they did start to sell high-quality, unrestricted song files, then I imagine the quality of the files on the file-sharing networks would go up too, right? (They'd be the same files.)
Slashdot Mirror
The only things that need to be accessible is a list of the "namespaces" (i.e. the second-level bits). For example, it'll say that the "ddc" namespace is run by the Dewey Decimal Society (or whatever) and give their contact information. It won't resolve these URIs into resources, they way that a browser resolves a URL into a web page. (Though in some cases it may point to a resolver mechanism.)
Don't expect to type these into your browser and view the results. This system is more for tagging and identification, not resolution.
Arbitrary key names are now URIs?
Uh no.
There will be ONE new top-level scheme, "info". It will have (presumably a small-ish number of) second-level "namespaces". Each namespace will be a well-defined system run by some organization. So you could imagine an ISBN namespace, so a URI might look like "info:isbn:0465026567".
The "info" scheme, and therefore the list of namespaces, will be controlled by an existing standards body called NISO. It's their job to impose the discipline on these URIs. End-users won't get to create their own - only NISO-approved bodies with a well-run namespace can add to this system. Sounds like a good idea to me. I can rely on the fact that any legitimate "info" URI will be well-organized and sensible, I hope.
They released the MX 2004 versions of all their tools a week or so ago.
http://www.macromedia.com/software/mx2004/
For example Dreamweaver now supports CSS Layout.
When I bought my Nintendo 64, I paid $30 for a warranty like that. They said I could drive over it and still get a replacement heh.
The clerk probably said that but the actual warranty probably did not. When I bought a boom box several years ago the sales guy of course tried to sell me the extended warranty, and said that it covered everything. I asked if I accidentally dropped it from the roof would it be covered, he said yes. Then I looked at the actual warranty, and of course it excluded damage due to negligence on the part of the owner. I would guess that if you tried to return the product that you had dropped off the roof or run over in your car, they'd say that you were negligent and refuse coverage.
I'm confused... "It seems they had kept me in their catalog on a contract clause that had been overlooked when the contract was signed back in 1999." Overlooked by who, you or them? I interpret this as meaning that you were under contract with them but didn't know it, so they did have the right to sell your music, but then they graciously terminated the contract when you asked them to. Is this right?
Did you look at his picture? Who knew that the creepy guy from 6 Feet Under worked at HavenCo?
Uh... I think you're describing some existing FILM camera that Ritz has, not these new ones. You can't delete an exposure from a camera with film in it. Plus, the article says that these new cameras are $10.99 including processing (because presumably Ritz can then re-use the digital camera).
To go after creators for not making their inventions only useful for "good" things is like going after them for not doing enough idiot-proofing.
I completely agree. Just because something *could* be used for bad, doesn't make it bad. But my point is that just because something *could* be used for good, doesn't make it good. That seems to be the argument that Ian was making, and I think it's wrong. You have to look at the good and the bad uses, and see how often and how good or bad those uses are, and then decide.
I'm not sure I completely follow you. Which organization are you talking about? In any case, some random points that seem relevent:
- Porn is not dissident speech here, but kiddie porn is. Is it wrong to censor kiddie porn?
- On a different note, the Supreme Court recognizes that there are different types of speech, and they should be given different levels of protection, and I pretty much agree with that. Political speech is the most important and the most protected. Personal expression is important and should be protected, but can be somewhat regulated (e.g. can't swear in public). Commercial speech is a notch lower, thus things like truth-in-advertising laws. Most porn is indecent, which is still lower, but still protected. So you can ban strip clubs from being within a certain distance of a school, I think. Really objectionable porn is obscene speech, which can be banned.
- Spreading knowledge is good. Getting free art without compensating the artists is bad. Reconciling the two is hard.
That's kind of a nice, feel-good answer, but it's wrong. There's not actually anything that is worth infinitely more than anything else. Human lives should be worth more than anything else, right? Yet we allow people to drive cars that kill 100 people a day in the U.S. So we as a society feel that the ability to get around easily (to work, the movies, etc.) is worth more than 30,000 human lives a year. That kind of negates any kind of feel-good comments you can make about how much a human life is worth, at least.
Some people feel that widespread, unstoppable file-sharing may significantly reduce the amount of art that's produced (music, movies, books, articles, analysis, etc.) That's a pretty serious consequence. Another one might be the unstoppable untraceable distribution of child pornography. On the other hand, if we have Freenet, we might have more open political speech in some repressed countries. That's a pretty significant benefit. I personally think it's pretty hard to weigh those factors against each other. It's not an easy win for Freenet.
News.com: Is it moral to create a general-purpose, anonymity-preserving tool--a file-swapping system that can be used for good (publishing political tracts) and ill (trading copyrighted music)?
Clarke: If it is moral to make guns, knives or anything else that can be used for both good and ill, then it is certainly moral to create something which tries to guarantee a freedom that is essential to democracy.
Doesn't it seem a little silly to divide everything in the world into exactly 3 categories: those that can only be used for good, those that can only be used for bad, and those that could be used for either? Doesn't it make sense to say that there are some things that are much more often used for good than for bad (e.g. knives), so they're fine? And some, such as guns, where the trade-off is a lot more questionable? (So in most countries they are significantly regulated.)
Freenet may eventually contain a political treatise from the oppressed citizens of a dictatorship, but it will probably contain copyrighted songs, movies, porn, etc. by a factor of a hundred thousand to one. Supporting anonymous political speech is more good than illegal copying is bad, but by a factor of 100,000?
Clarke: Matt seems to misunderstand Judge Posner's quote. Posner was referring to those involved in the likely "shady dealings"--not the creators of the tools they are using. To use his own analogy, the manufacturers of a mask used in a bank robbery are certainly not responsible for the criminal behavior of the bank robbers. This notion was reaffirmed by Judge (Stephen) Wilson earlier this year in his ruling in the Grokster case as it pertains to P2P networks saying, "Grokster and Streamcast are not significantly different from companies that sell home video recorders or copy machines, both of which can be and are used to infringe copyrights."
Well that's still not a perfect analogy. For example, if the company added a feature to the ski mask that made it harder to pull off, and advertised this feature for use in bank robberies, they'd probably be held liable for its use in a robbery. Or if they didn't advertise it, but did know that the new feature's overwhelming use would be in bank robberies, then they might also be liable. You could make a similar statement for VCR and copy machine manufacturers.
I think Freenet's a really cool technical problem, and I'd get involved in it, except for these kinds of problems. Even with all its positive uses, the idea of working on what turns out to be an ideal tool for distributing kiddie-porn just gives me the willies. I personally don't feel comfortable in this gray area of providing complete anonymity. A system that had the same benefits of distributed publishing (to avoid the Slashdot effect) without the encryption, I'd be interested in contributing to.
Since these laws are being proposed in order to prevent people from sharing their internet connection without tell their ISP, I would imagine it would be fine to do so in this case since you're telling (and paying) your ISP.
But for applets, where it's most needed, this check is done at runtime too, so they're safe. Class-file verification (which does the checking) is always turned on for applets, but by default is turned off when running local code, because local code is assumed to be trusted. The probably only comes when you've got a local app that can download and run untrusted code. (Then you need to turn on -Xfuture or -Xverify:all. A future version of Java might have this turned on for all apps.)
o ns .html
http://www.cafeaulait.org/reports/accessviolati
... but man do I hate the enhanced for-loop syntax. At some point you have to give up perfect backwards-compatibility for readability. One or two new keywords would do a world of good.
for (TimerTask task : c)
task.cancel();
becomes
foreach (TimerTask task in c)
task.cancel();
Let's see, I've heard of ONE of those artists...
Generally insightful comments. However,
"Automakers promote SUVs because they are more profitable than econoboxes. The government cooperates, keeping oil prices low. Individuals buy what they are led to believe they need, and what they can afford."
The US government "cooperates" mostly by not taxing the hell out of oil and gas, like in Europe. However many people feel that we should highly tax them because they cause pollution. Maybe "the government" doesn't do this because of "big corporations" or whatever you want to blame it on, but I think more likely they don't do because they'll get voted out of office, because people like cheap gas. Especially in the West (or actually anywhere outside the Northeast) where they rely on cars much more than anywhere else in the world.
I can't get to the second image (I guess you slashdotted it). But I can't see anything in the first picture that makes me think it's a fake. As to some of the comments that have been posted:
He certainly has a shadow - I can see the shadow cast by both of his legs, it looks very believable.
I don't see any rubber-stamped areas, unless you're talking about the huge obvious areas of something that looks like tread. I think that's just some part of the tank. If not, that's a pretty poor Photoshop job huh?
The dark patches around the boy do look a little weird, but they could very well just be the coloration of that part of the tank. E.g. look at the gun barrel, you can see some areas that are darker than others for no particular reason, that's just how they are. I guess my argument is, if someone could fake the shadow so well, would he have left those big dark patches? I'm no Photoshop guru, but even I could've avoided that part.
Q: When do you think the company will earn its first net quarterly profit?
A: Sprint PCS became operating-positive last year, and we expect to be free-cash-flow-positive in 2003 and net-income-profitable next year.
Can anyone explain what the difference is between these three things? And, does any of them actually mean "profitable"? I can't tell.
Perhaps, but it'll cost us 100 or 1000 times more to get him there and back. Is it worth it?
The Congresswoman's own page is pretty inconsistent about the capitalization....
One thing that it's important to realize is that the DMCA (and other laws of the same stripe) not only have no effect at all on piracy, they were never really intended to address piracy, regardless of all the lip service provided in that direction.
I don't know where you get that from. I think the DMCA was exactly intended to counter the piracy of Kazaa and its relatives. The content industry is hoping to retain complete control over how its files get copied, through technical means, and it needs the DMCA to prevent people from breaking those locks.
Although I'm sympathetic to the industry's problems (how to make money creating content when anyone can share it for free), I think that the solution (the DMCA etc) are worse that the problem they try to fix. But, it's weird to argue that the DMCA is completely unrelated to this problem...
The vast majority of piracy can be addressed by directly targeting the major pirating organizations that distribute in a mass production fashion.
What are you talking about? The vast majority of piracy is via P2P file sharing networks, which are as popular as ever, despite all the lawsuits.
In addition to the above posts, there are also times when the science in question isn't represented as being good or bad - it's not a new invention. In the article, one of the questionable assertions was that a particular medicine caused birth defects. You can't say whether or not this would be "too good to be true", that doesn't even apply here.
When you search on an Overture site like Altavista or Lycos, the paid matches show up at the top, but they are labeled as "sponsored matches". When you search Google, the paid matches show up on the right, and are labeled "sponsored links". I guess that's a little different, but not by a whole lot. So why is one "pay-for-placement" and the other isn't?
Actually I was talking about the poster's theory that nobody would upload songs if they could be bought inexpensively, not whether a company could make money in the face of song swapping.
People who use file sharing networks constantly complain about the large percentage of poor quality files. Legitimate providers could very easily make money by charging a decent amount for the promise that the technical quality of the recording will be high.
If they did start to sell high-quality, unrestricted song files, then I imagine the quality of the files on the file-sharing networks would go up too, right? (They'd be the same files.)