Irrelevant. Kill the company, and there will be rogue meta-directory servers listing Napster clone servers and hundreds of Napster clone servers popping up everywhere. Hell, there are already a bunch of OpenNap servers that are great.
So basically, you missed the point of this article, which is that Napster is dead, long live Napster. And of course we all know about the pure peer-to-peer filesharing systems out there (Gnutella et. al.) that still have a lot of kinks to work out. Freenet and Gnutella are just starting to be noticed by the RIAA, Congress and others. The reaction is quadrupled fear of a completely unregulatable mechanism. Makes them realize playing nice with a regulatable, controllable service like Napster isn't such a bad idea after all.
The end result will be playing nice with Napster, if the RIAA wants to survive as a money making machine. If they can't adopt, the backlash of fully distributed filesharing will get people used to anonymous, unrestricted, p2p music sharing, and micropayment or subscription service fees for Napster-alikes will have died as a model, thereby killing off the music industy's attempts to ever get involved in digital music distribution.
The Internet to RIAA: Hello gentlemen! All your music are belong to us. You have no chance to survive make your time.
They may appear inelegant, but according to somebody who has a lot more right to say than I do (a PhD in Applied Mathematics from Brown who I work with) there are substantive reasons to believe that nonlocality and some corresponding violation of conservation of energy on quantum scales can provide a "more elegant" solution than the standard approach to quantum mechanics.
Note that I am not an expert in this area by any means and only have one (albeit very intelligent) person's expertise to argue from (and I know his position on this is not widely popular or accepted). I do know that EPR results in a paradox (I remember this much from my undergraduate degree in physics).
Wow. No, not at all. Quantum Mechanics is the set of physical sciences based entirely on the supposition that in fact atoms and subatomic particles actually behave probabilistically. Or rather, a series of observations in the early 20th century led physicists to no other reasonable explanation of what was happening in a wide variety of experiments - accepting into their theory base that in fact atomic events are basically probabilistic allowed the derivation of a wide variety of phenomena.
Macroscopic samples may contain a large set of items, depending on size and type of measurement may generally be on the quantum (probabilistic) or macroscopic (observably deterministic) scales. But the macroscopic statistics don't affect the fact that when you get down to the quantum level, to the best of modern science's ability to explain, things are not deterministic.
For the sake of edification, there are theories called hidden variable theories in quantum mechanics that attempt to remove probability from microscopic systems and posit that in fact we simply have insufficient knowledge about the way such systems really work. No such theories have been adequately proved to this point in time.
The speed problems I see are primarily in the GUI which is XUL based. An XML/JavaScript based GUI like this is likely to only ever work well on high end systems. The Gecko rendering engine is not too much of a resource hog though in and of itself, and Galeon and Kmeleon et. al are really on par with IE for resource utilization, once you factor out the hidden resource utilization of the stuff stuck in system DLLs that are autoloaded at system startup.
Completely uninformed. There is a lot of GPLed, LGPLed and BSD licensed code out there written in Java. Java is not a "closed language". Some of the implementations of some of the APIs that are released by Sun are licensed under varying degrees of closedness. Generally they are freely available, and nobody forces you to use them (they aren't part of "Java" per se, but libraries for Java, such as the J2EE APIs). There are free implementations of many of these as well, for example, look at (JBoss. It's an LGPLed implementation of the J2EE APIs.
Also, with respect to Java itself, there are free implementations of the Java compiler and the Java runtime environment as well. But using Sun's Java compiler and Java runtime IN NO WAY affects the licensing of code that has been compiled with it.
There is sometimes confusion over what "linking" and similar concepts referenced in some Free or Open Source licenses mean in the context of Java. I won't seek to open these arguments up here. I'm just pointing out that your points are completely off base and the two issues - Java bindings for KDE and Freeness are orthogonal to each other.
Ding, ding! You don't know what the fuck you're talking about. I know I shouldn't bother with a troll like this, but every single one of your comments is without basis.
1) Java removes so-called "powerful" functionality from C++ because while great for developing apps yourself those features generally result in morons shooting themselves in the foot. Have you ever built software applications in a large team environment with extremely tight deadlines and minimal time to track down bugs? No, I didn't think so.
2) Java has been massively successful because of the above. Think again. Primarily in backend server apps and web applications. Not in client applications or applets. This is an attempt to make it more viable in those areas because a fully cross platform library with graphically rendered widgets doesn't work well yet. If you think Java has failed you must not work in anything remotely related to enterprise software.
3) I love Gnome as much as the next guy. But it's neither clean, stable, nor intuitive. This gives away your troll because frankly KDE is generally more intuitive than Gnome, somewhat more stable (clean is arguable... and aesthetic, I think Gnome takes the cake).
How about you try helping yourself out for a change there in your third world country instead of wishing ill on those who have pulled themselves up from our uncivilized origins?
This may be moderated as flamebait, but Shoeboy is accurate. PKI does stand for phenylketonuria. Public Key Infrastructure is, well, somewhat silly anyway.
If we are doing something that is within our rights, even if it is unpopular, then it is still within our rights.
Sorry, but destroying other people's property isn't within your rights. Whether it's owned by a person or a commercial entity, be it a corporation, or a limited partnership, or an LLC, or a single proprietorship. Somebody worked hard to put that building/store/whatever there. Destroying it is not within your rights.
Now I'm not telling you we should all bend over for corporations. I just want honesty about what you ARE within your rights to do and what you AREN'T. Furthermore, the excuse about police provocation may be true sometimes, but that STILL doesn't excuse destroying somebody else's property or rioting. If a cop hits me, I'll fucking slam him over the head. But I won't burn some poor sod's car because a cop hit me over the head.
It just makes you into a mindless crowd follower if you get sucked into frenzied mob action. I find it utterly distasteful, and it polarizes me strongly again whatever bullshit thing a bunch of rioters are rioting over.
So basically what you're saying is that from the perspective of foreign countries, espionage is only partially used so that somebody set up us the bomb. The USA just wants to know that all your base are belong to us.
It's not a double standard. You don't seem to understand that foreign policy is not an ethical regime, because there is no general, ethical standard between nations with entirely different cultural standards. With nations we consider basically to be "allies" we are usually a little more lighthanded with our spying practices. With enemies more heavyhanded. The fact is, when you step into the world of espionage you are taking a pledge to represent your country's interests above all else. Failure to do that is presumed to be treason and to imply death. Remember that this man DIRECTLY caused the death of two others (enemy double agents - that's right, "bad guys" who were now working as "good guys" for us).
"Bad" is defined in this context as representing another nation's interests over our own, especially when that nation is considered a risk to our nation. That is basically the limit of moral considerations in espionage. Remember the goal here - to make sure that a nation that will use its power to do less evil unto the world than others maintains its edge. That, my friends, is the USA despite all the tripe you hear on Slashdot. As bad as some things the US Government does are, we are still a liberal democracy, and as such are far, far more beholden to the common interest than a converted Communist/Stalinist superpower like Russia with a chip on its shoulder about becoming a dominant player so it can help its buddies, like the Serbs, and sell arms to terrorists and rogue nations. Sounds great, huh?
So before you start blabbing about double standards understand the moral and ethical framework these people MUST operate in and realize that your life may depend on it (whether or not you are yourself an American citizen).
That's true, but remember that in this case Intellectual Property isn't being used just to maximize profits or hurt "consumers". It's being used to prevent crazy, non-democratic governments from nuking each other or us off the face of the earth. A lofty goal, and I'm willing to concede that National Secrets are worth protecting and keeping secret and differ quite a bit from general IP.
Frankly, sir, you are wrong. I am not misrepresenting the more-like-30% of the population that is anti-choice. They represent themselves quite clearly, I need do nothing to represent them in any way.
Both of these statements:
You will find the great majority of people interested in ending abortion motivated by the constitution, to which the right to not be killed is fundamental.
You will find the great majority of people interested in maintaining the rights to abortion motivated by the desire for a woman to be able to live her life as she desires.
I partially agree with. Both groups are mostly motivated by their own moral decisions more than legal obligation to the Constitution, IMHO.
But you missed the whole point of my post and replied with a complete sideline. The point of my post was that the Supreme Court protects the enligtened minority from the tyranny of the majority. My example issue was abortion. Obviously, I have an opinion on the issue, and most educated, intelligent people I meet agree with me. And if you listen to the raving luncatic morons who make up a large contingent of Congress, you would rapidly understand my concern that these idiots, elected by people in places like South Carolina, are supposed to protect our interests.
If you are really interested in being ruled by tyranny of the majority, then you must not have had to deal with too many stupid people in your life. The average human is a scary, scary thing to behold.
The judicial system protects those of us interested in liberty from those of us who aren't who seem to often make their way into the legislative and executive branches. A woman's Right to Choose would not exist if the Supreme Court weren't there to protect it. Why? There are lots of stupid, vocal Southern social conservatives in Congress. These people, who are as far from Libertarian as you can imagine, want things like creationism taught in schools and they want to return women to the kitchen and the bedroom.
I consider myself a Libertarian too, and I agree that the system by which Justices are appointed to the Supreme Court to be highly distasteful, but given how little I respect the ability of the masses to elect a president and Congress who will represent their own freedom and the common interest, i.e. how anti-Libertarian most of this country seems to be, I am glad that we at least have some rational, well-educated, highly intelligent people up there who debate and consider from a moral and legal viewpoint (they are not bound by strict precedent as the highest court in the land, although they are usually bound by Congressional directive). In other words, without these guys, we'd be even more fucked.
Actually, you misunderstood my post. The second paragraph was intended to qualify the first by saying that I don't think they could throw away the whole thing because there are too many companies and projects and individuals that depend on GPLed code they've been using from other projects. As the CTO of a software company I get to deal with patent and copyright law all the time. I recognize that there is a lot of leeway in interpretation. I intended to first set up a strict interpretation and then illustrate the couterpoint - that there is a large body of GPL software in use and that a legal decision that rendered all that code unusable would be extremely unlikely.
I actually think this is a MAJOR strategic flaw on the part of the FSF. It basically sets them up for failure, in that as you point out, a judge may throw away the restrictions without throwing away the permissions due to unenforceability of the restrictions (they are somehow contrary to established law or precedent) and the inability to revoke all code licensed under the GPL.
Strategically, somebody (the FSF really) should have forced a legal test of the GPL a long time ago. Although it could also be argued that common adherence to the GPL has resulted in a large body of code being issued under the GPL with the presumption that the terms would be enforced as they are generally respected. That's why it would seem _unlikely_ that a judge would want to make a ruling either way on this topic, since they would just set themselves up for failure - the legality of it may be questionable, but it affects a huge body of work and a lot of common interest. Revoking existing rights and common presumptions about usage is a grave, grave move to make and would seem _unlikely_. Nothing is impossible of course, but that's why we have appeals.
And again, like I said, if you were to rule that the licensing restriction of the GPL is unenforceable, you could probably expect people to use that precedent to argue that many of the restrictions imposed by shrinkwrap agreements for commercial software are equally unenforceable, when those are strongly entrenched as well. That's why you haven't really ever seen any clear ruling on them, there's no legal interest in making one because it would only piss somebody off and disturb a very delicate balance in one way or the other.
Unless the contract specifically states that the contract can be partially enforced, than an invalidation of the contract will invalidate the whole of the contract. In other words, if the contract (the GPL license) is unenforceable, there is no contract unless the contract is explicit about piecewise enforceability. The lack of any contract is not public domain. Rather the rights would properly revert to the copyright holder, presumably, since the license was ruled invalid. It's of course rather complicated, because what about instances of GPLed code where it had been integrated into another GPLed product? On the one hand the license was by definition irrevocable, and you can't take away the derivative work that contains, say 50% of the licensor's work. On the other hand, you can't just invalidate the clause of that stipulates the "payment" terms of the GPL, i.e. that in exchange for using the code in your own derivative work, you must distribute your derivative work under the terms of the GPL.
The body of work out there under the GPL is quite humongous and therefore I cannot believe that a court would just throw away the GPL since throwing away the GPL and ruling all GPLed code is public domain would basically say intellectual property has no meaning at all and you have no say over the use of your IP. It would pretty much by definition have to invalidate most of those shrink wrap licenses that companies live and die by since their terms are often more restrictive on what you can and cannot do with the products than the GPL terms are. Again, you use it, you should know what you're getting into. QED, fuck Microsoft and their whiny, code-stealing shit. They just want to pirate from GPLed code and disrespect the wishes of the copyright holders when they have no inherent rights to use that code anyway. They sure as fuck don't let anybody use their code. Fucking pot and the kettle.
Exactly. You can be racist and I don't have a problem with that. Well, actually I do, but I won't try to squelch you, rather I will argue with you rationally. But I cannot argue with a Holocaust denier who asserts that something factually true did not happen. In fact, arguing with them over it legitimizes what they have to say by acknowledging that it is a debatable point rather than historical fact.
If somebody wants to come out and tell me they don't have any sympathy for the Jews who were killed in the Holocaust, they are a racist, but they have a right to their opinion no matter how bigoted, and I have a right to refute or argue with their opinion. But we all have a shared cultural and social and human responsibility to be truthful about factual events that affect all of us. I don't know whether banning such factually false, intentionally destructive lies is the right answer, but we certainly don't have to allow Holocaust denial in schools and put that in the same category as honest discussion of race relations or even in the same category as uneducated opinions.
Uhh... This is not an unbreakable symmetric or assymmetric cipher. This is an unbreakable _cryptosystem_.
One Time Pad (OTP) is provably unbreakable. The weak links in an implementation may not be provably unbreakable, but an algorithm or a process most certainly _can_ be provably unbreakable, if that algorithm is reducible to an OTP encryption. Which is exactly what this is. I have no idea what Rabin's supposed "proof" contains in it, other than "proving" that distributing massive volumes of information makes storage over time unfeasible and therefore it is only probabilistically compromisable with vanishingly small probability (luck). If you can prove that your protocol reveals 0 bits of information about the message M and 0 bits of information about your One Time Pad, then you have just proved that you have an unbreakable _cryptosystem_, i.e. a protocol combined with an OTP system.
I invited Michael Rabin to dinner with me at a House dinner at Harvard last year. I (a physics student taking a class with Rabin) and a math major sitting across the table were listening to Rabin describe this exact cryptosystem at the time and we were going through the probabilistic analysis of this simultaneous, time synchronized OTP key distribution system (that's basically what this is). Frankly, we thought he had sort of, well, lost it a bit over the years if he thought this was a "real" cryptosystem. But we just kept nodding. What's interesting is that it modifies the difficulty of compromising the encryption scheme by moving it into space-domain rather than time-domain (it's storage space limited). And he knew this was provably secure a year ago, so I don't really think this is news (although perhaps he hadn't published or formally presented his results yet).
While I'm not really qualified to comment on the details or the proof or anything, it certainly sounds like there are some major applied/practical limitations in the scheme to me. But for a subset of current encryption practices, this could be very useful, in particular for a lot of current applications of public key cryptosystems.
Frankly, I think Rabin is just pissed that the public key cryptosystem that bears his name never achieved wide commercial use and instead RSA became the standard. Now he wants to supplant public key cryptosystems with something entirely different. His ego is rather huge, and not entirely unrightfully so.
That's basically what we are getting at work only it's a T1 with ISDN backup. Cable modem actually is reliable enough for a high usage residential link, in most areas where I've seen it (I have what was MediaOne and is now AT&T Broadband in the Boston area and the service is phenomenal, even their tech support isn't all bad, adding and removing MAC addresses to their DHCP tables and the like is usually easy). By contrast, even supposedly business grade DSL (the SDSL we have currently at work) goes down like a 2 dollar whore once every week or two for up to 3-4 hours at a time. And the ADSL I have from BellAtlantic/Verizon in New York is the worst excuse for high speed internet access I've ever seen. Wouldn't touch that shit again with a ten foot pole. Have had up to three straight weeks of down time with them. It still regularly goes down for an hour at a time (at least two to three times a week that I notice) and sometimes will be out for a whole day. Awful, awful service.
Actually, penny tags don't transmit at all. They are passively detected by the "scanner" device which emits a signal which resonates with the coils in the tags resulting in a slightly different frequency getting read back by the scanner (at a much lower power level obviously). These are very simple devices. The trick is being able to distinguish and read lots of signals at a modest range (10s of feet) given lots of different incidence angles and noise sources.
To clarify - I installed the Sun JDK 1.3.1 (I usually use the IBM JDK 1.3 for development work, but I had Sun 1.3.0 on my box as well). The javaplugin.so from 1.3.0 does _NOT_ work as a Mozilla plugin. BUT the JDK 1.3.1 has in the jre/plugins/ns600/ directory a libjavaplugin_oji.so file or something like that. Just symlink that file from your mozilla/plugins directory, and voila, reconstituted, working applet support. Oh, and delete the crap that the Netscape JRE 1.3 plugin stuck in the plugins/java dir since it doesn't work and isn't needed.
This is the kind of sign that indicates we've progressed past the laughing stage. It's *not* funny to these people anymore. Actually this kind of "Open Source is anti-American" FUD indicates some real fear brewing. Makes the blood rush through my veins. I love a good fight.
Slashdot Mirror
So basically, you missed the point of this article, which is that Napster is dead, long live Napster. And of course we all know about the pure peer-to-peer filesharing systems out there (Gnutella et. al.) that still have a lot of kinks to work out. Freenet and Gnutella are just starting to be noticed by the RIAA, Congress and others. The reaction is quadrupled fear of a completely unregulatable mechanism. Makes them realize playing nice with a regulatable, controllable service like Napster isn't such a bad idea after all.
The end result will be playing nice with Napster, if the RIAA wants to survive as a money making machine. If they can't adopt, the backlash of fully distributed filesharing will get people used to anonymous, unrestricted, p2p music sharing, and micropayment or subscription service fees for Napster-alikes will have died as a model, thereby killing off the music industy's attempts to ever get involved in digital music distribution.
The Internet to RIAA: Hello gentlemen! All your music are belong to us. You have no chance to survive make your time.
Yup, and they could have all 56kbps of his bandwidth! With that fat a pipe in Iraq, I'm sure at least 2 concurrent users could download mp3s!
Note that I am not an expert in this area by any means and only have one (albeit very intelligent) person's expertise to argue from (and I know his position on this is not widely popular or accepted). I do know that EPR results in a paradox (I remember this much from my undergraduate degree in physics).
Macroscopic samples may contain a large set of items, depending on size and type of measurement may generally be on the quantum (probabilistic) or macroscopic (observably deterministic) scales. But the macroscopic statistics don't affect the fact that when you get down to the quantum level, to the best of modern science's ability to explain, things are not deterministic.
For the sake of edification, there are theories called hidden variable theories in quantum mechanics that attempt to remove probability from microscopic systems and posit that in fact we simply have insufficient knowledge about the way such systems really work. No such theories have been adequately proved to this point in time.
The speed problems I see are primarily in the GUI which is XUL based. An XML/JavaScript based GUI like this is likely to only ever work well on high end systems. The Gecko rendering engine is not too much of a resource hog though in and of itself, and Galeon and Kmeleon et. al are really on par with IE for resource utilization, once you factor out the hidden resource utilization of the stuff stuck in system DLLs that are autoloaded at system startup.
Also, with respect to Java itself, there are free implementations of the Java compiler and the Java runtime environment as well. But using Sun's Java compiler and Java runtime IN NO WAY affects the licensing of code that has been compiled with it.
There is sometimes confusion over what "linking" and similar concepts referenced in some Free or Open Source licenses mean in the context of Java. I won't seek to open these arguments up here. I'm just pointing out that your points are completely off base and the two issues - Java bindings for KDE and Freeness are orthogonal to each other.
1) Java removes so-called "powerful" functionality from C++ because while great for developing apps yourself those features generally result in morons shooting themselves in the foot. Have you ever built software applications in a large team environment with extremely tight deadlines and minimal time to track down bugs? No, I didn't think so.
2) Java has been massively successful because of the above. Think again. Primarily in backend server apps and web applications. Not in client applications or applets. This is an attempt to make it more viable in those areas because a fully cross platform library with graphically rendered widgets doesn't work well yet. If you think Java has failed you must not work in anything remotely related to enterprise software.
3) I love Gnome as much as the next guy. But it's neither clean, stable, nor intuitive. This gives away your troll because frankly KDE is generally more intuitive than Gnome, somewhat more stable (clean is arguable... and aesthetic, I think Gnome takes the cake).
How about you try helping yourself out for a change there in your third world country instead of wishing ill on those who have pulled themselves up from our uncivilized origins?
This may be moderated as flamebait, but Shoeboy is accurate. PKI does stand for phenylketonuria. Public Key Infrastructure is, well, somewhat silly anyway.
If we are doing something that is within our rights, even if it is unpopular, then it is still within our rights.
Sorry, but destroying other people's property isn't within your rights. Whether it's owned by a person or a commercial entity, be it a corporation, or a limited partnership, or an LLC, or a single proprietorship. Somebody worked hard to put that building/store/whatever there. Destroying it is not within your rights.
Now I'm not telling you we should all bend over for corporations. I just want honesty about what you ARE within your rights to do and what you AREN'T. Furthermore, the excuse about police provocation may be true sometimes, but that STILL doesn't excuse destroying somebody else's property or rioting. If a cop hits me, I'll fucking slam him over the head. But I won't burn some poor sod's car because a cop hit me over the head.
It just makes you into a mindless crowd follower if you get sucked into frenzied mob action. I find it utterly distasteful, and it polarizes me strongly again whatever bullshit thing a bunch of rioters are rioting over.
Somebody set up us the bomb. All your base are belong to us.
So basically what you're saying is that from the perspective of foreign countries, espionage is only partially used so that somebody set up us the bomb. The USA just wants to know that all your base are belong to us.
"Bad" is defined in this context as representing another nation's interests over our own, especially when that nation is considered a risk to our nation. That is basically the limit of moral considerations in espionage. Remember the goal here - to make sure that a nation that will use its power to do less evil unto the world than others maintains its edge. That, my friends, is the USA despite all the tripe you hear on Slashdot. As bad as some things the US Government does are, we are still a liberal democracy, and as such are far, far more beholden to the common interest than a converted Communist/Stalinist superpower like Russia with a chip on its shoulder about becoming a dominant player so it can help its buddies, like the Serbs, and sell arms to terrorists and rogue nations. Sounds great, huh?
So before you start blabbing about double standards understand the moral and ethical framework these people MUST operate in and realize that your life may depend on it (whether or not you are yourself an American citizen).
That's true, but remember that in this case Intellectual Property isn't being used just to maximize profits or hurt "consumers". It's being used to prevent crazy, non-democratic governments from nuking each other or us off the face of the earth. A lofty goal, and I'm willing to concede that National Secrets are worth protecting and keeping secret and differ quite a bit from general IP.
Both of these statements: You will find the great majority of people interested in ending abortion motivated by the constitution, to which the right to not be killed is fundamental.
You will find the great majority of people interested in maintaining the rights to abortion motivated by the desire for a woman to be able to live her life as she desires.
I partially agree with. Both groups are mostly motivated by their own moral decisions more than legal obligation to the Constitution, IMHO.
But you missed the whole point of my post and replied with a complete sideline. The point of my post was that the Supreme Court protects the enligtened minority from the tyranny of the majority. My example issue was abortion. Obviously, I have an opinion on the issue, and most educated, intelligent people I meet agree with me. And if you listen to the raving luncatic morons who make up a large contingent of Congress, you would rapidly understand my concern that these idiots, elected by people in places like South Carolina, are supposed to protect our interests.
If you are really interested in being ruled by tyranny of the majority, then you must not have had to deal with too many stupid people in your life. The average human is a scary, scary thing to behold.
I consider myself a Libertarian too, and I agree that the system by which Justices are appointed to the Supreme Court to be highly distasteful, but given how little I respect the ability of the masses to elect a president and Congress who will represent their own freedom and the common interest, i.e. how anti-Libertarian most of this country seems to be, I am glad that we at least have some rational, well-educated, highly intelligent people up there who debate and consider from a moral and legal viewpoint (they are not bound by strict precedent as the highest court in the land, although they are usually bound by Congressional directive). In other words, without these guys, we'd be even more fucked.
I actually think this is a MAJOR strategic flaw on the part of the FSF. It basically sets them up for failure, in that as you point out, a judge may throw away the restrictions without throwing away the permissions due to unenforceability of the restrictions (they are somehow contrary to established law or precedent) and the inability to revoke all code licensed under the GPL.
Strategically, somebody (the FSF really) should have forced a legal test of the GPL a long time ago. Although it could also be argued that common adherence to the GPL has resulted in a large body of code being issued under the GPL with the presumption that the terms would be enforced as they are generally respected. That's why it would seem _unlikely_ that a judge would want to make a ruling either way on this topic, since they would just set themselves up for failure - the legality of it may be questionable, but it affects a huge body of work and a lot of common interest. Revoking existing rights and common presumptions about usage is a grave, grave move to make and would seem _unlikely_. Nothing is impossible of course, but that's why we have appeals.
And again, like I said, if you were to rule that the licensing restriction of the GPL is unenforceable, you could probably expect people to use that precedent to argue that many of the restrictions imposed by shrinkwrap agreements for commercial software are equally unenforceable, when those are strongly entrenched as well. That's why you haven't really ever seen any clear ruling on them, there's no legal interest in making one because it would only piss somebody off and disturb a very delicate balance in one way or the other.
The body of work out there under the GPL is quite humongous and therefore I cannot believe that a court would just throw away the GPL since throwing away the GPL and ruling all GPLed code is public domain would basically say intellectual property has no meaning at all and you have no say over the use of your IP. It would pretty much by definition have to invalidate most of those shrink wrap licenses that companies live and die by since their terms are often more restrictive on what you can and cannot do with the products than the GPL terms are. Again, you use it, you should know what you're getting into. QED, fuck Microsoft and their whiny, code-stealing shit. They just want to pirate from GPLed code and disrespect the wishes of the copyright holders when they have no inherent rights to use that code anyway. They sure as fuck don't let anybody use their code. Fucking pot and the kettle.
If somebody wants to come out and tell me they don't have any sympathy for the Jews who were killed in the Holocaust, they are a racist, but they have a right to their opinion no matter how bigoted, and I have a right to refute or argue with their opinion. But we all have a shared cultural and social and human responsibility to be truthful about factual events that affect all of us. I don't know whether banning such factually false, intentionally destructive lies is the right answer, but we certainly don't have to allow Holocaust denial in schools and put that in the same category as honest discussion of race relations or even in the same category as uneducated opinions.
One Time Pad (OTP) is provably unbreakable. The weak links in an implementation may not be provably unbreakable, but an algorithm or a process most certainly _can_ be provably unbreakable, if that algorithm is reducible to an OTP encryption. Which is exactly what this is. I have no idea what Rabin's supposed "proof" contains in it, other than "proving" that distributing massive volumes of information makes storage over time unfeasible and therefore it is only probabilistically compromisable with vanishingly small probability (luck). If you can prove that your protocol reveals 0 bits of information about the message M and 0 bits of information about your One Time Pad, then you have just proved that you have an unbreakable _cryptosystem_, i.e. a protocol combined with an OTP system.
While I'm not really qualified to comment on the details or the proof or anything, it certainly sounds like there are some major applied/practical limitations in the scheme to me. But for a subset of current encryption practices, this could be very useful, in particular for a lot of current applications of public key cryptosystems.
Frankly, I think Rabin is just pissed that the public key cryptosystem that bears his name never achieved wide commercial use and instead RSA became the standard. Now he wants to supplant public key cryptosystems with something entirely different. His ego is rather huge, and not entirely unrightfully so.
That's basically what we are getting at work only it's a T1 with ISDN backup. Cable modem actually is reliable enough for a high usage residential link, in most areas where I've seen it (I have what was MediaOne and is now AT&T Broadband in the Boston area and the service is phenomenal, even their tech support isn't all bad, adding and removing MAC addresses to their DHCP tables and the like is usually easy). By contrast, even supposedly business grade DSL (the SDSL we have currently at work) goes down like a 2 dollar whore once every week or two for up to 3-4 hours at a time. And the ADSL I have from BellAtlantic/Verizon in New York is the worst excuse for high speed internet access I've ever seen. Wouldn't touch that shit again with a ten foot pole. Have had up to three straight weeks of down time with them. It still regularly goes down for an hour at a time (at least two to three times a week that I notice) and sometimes will be out for a whole day. Awful, awful service.
Actually, penny tags don't transmit at all. They are passively detected by the "scanner" device which emits a signal which resonates with the coils in the tags resulting in a slightly different frequency getting read back by the scanner (at a much lower power level obviously). These are very simple devices. The trick is being able to distinguish and read lots of signals at a modest range (10s of feet) given lots of different incidence angles and noise sources.
To clarify - I installed the Sun JDK 1.3.1 (I usually use the IBM JDK 1.3 for development work, but I had Sun 1.3.0 on my box as well). The javaplugin.so from 1.3.0 does _NOT_ work as a Mozilla plugin. BUT the JDK 1.3.1 has in the jre/plugins/ns600/ directory a libjavaplugin_oji.so file or something like that. Just symlink that file from your mozilla/plugins directory, and voila, reconstituted, working applet support. Oh, and delete the crap that the Netscape JRE 1.3 plugin stuck in the plugins/java dir since it doesn't work and isn't needed.
This is the kind of sign that indicates we've progressed past the laughing stage. It's *not* funny to these people anymore. Actually this kind of "Open Source is anti-American" FUD indicates some real fear brewing. Makes the blood rush through my veins. I love a good fight.