How exactly is it "fair" for a state with 0.1% of the population to have 5 times its proportional say in who gets to be president? What does "fairness" between fictitious, constructed political entities mean? "Fair" would be much better applied to people than to state boundaries, don't you think?
I realize what the electoral college does, and I think it's a reasonable topic to debate: is it more important to have a government that represents a consensus of the breadth of opinions across the states of the union or is it more important to have a government that represents the majority of the people? Our founders apparently thought it was the first, or at least that was the only way they could get the small states to buy into the deal. These days, the small states can mostly use the power they get through our representational system to prevent serious change to this system. But let's not throw the word "fair" around without thinking about what it means.
College is a great experience to seriously challenge yourself intellectually in a way almost no job does in the real world, and to make connections with bright people who will help you out through the rest of your career. However, college is what you make of it like anything else in life. I have hired really great software developers who started but never finished college (and were brilliant people), and people with PhDs (some of whom were admittedly pedantic to just get the job done without writing an essay about it first).
I assume you must be hacking on web development projects or something comparable to have never hired or worked with software engineers with college degrees. If you worked at a real software shop with a mix of mostly degreed, some non-degreed, and some advanced-degreed people you'd realize that there is certainly value to people who know how to get the job done, work hard, and solve problems. Schooling is a reasonable proxy for some amount of real-world experience, and generally provides an assessment that this person is bright and hard-working enough to get into and then complete a degree program at a certain level of college. Incidentally, most of the best people I've worked with were graduates of Harvard, MIT and Brown (being in the Boston area). Just my personal experience, but I think it's worth something. And I think you should seriously re-examine your own attitude and absurd willingness to stereotype people based on one moron you once met.
The hardware I was discussing in the rest of my post was in fact a brand new, utterly mainstream NForce motherboard for an Athlon processor. I didn't say this particular fellow's hardware wasn't made or supported anymore, I said _IF_ a piece of hardware isn't made or supported anymore, you will have better luck with Linux than with Windows. This particular sentence was a response to several other posts in this thread discussing problems with older hardware, not a response to the article in particular.
Linux has it's flaws, but harping on the hardware compatibility thing is old, tired talk at this point. In my personal experience, an up-to-date Linux distro ISO usually does a much better job autodetecting recent hardware than an out-of-date version of Windows, and generally has more drivers for two or three generations back hardware, too. Trying to get Windows 98 to work on a modern motherboard, sound card, etc. (I needed it for backwards compatibility testing of an application I was working on) took a full day of work finding old drivers buried on random websites and the like. MEPIS works out of the box, Mandrake requires a bit of screwing around to get the NVIDIA drivers to work. Both were much easier to get working than Windows 98, and in the case of MEPIS, substantially easier than Win2k or WinXP on the exact same hardware.
And your sound card that worked fine with Windows 95 may not work at all with Windows XP either. Such are the breaks - if it's not made or supported anymore, that's not Linux's fault. Usually Linux is substantially better about supporting several generations back hardware out of the box than Windows is.
Unfortunately, you are wrong. There is a reason that the army in Turkey is charged with protecting democratic institutions by force if necessary. Left to their own devices and able to choose from all the candidates they want, many of the people in the country would vote in anti-democratic Islamic radical leaders. I recall on several occasions, the army has had to step in to the elections process to prevent this from happening.
What you mean to say is that well-educated people the world over realize that human liberty and freedom are in their interests. I'm sure the well-educated urban residents of Turkey don't want an Islamofascist government in power, but the uneducated, poor rural masses vote the way their local Mullah tells them to. After all, he couldn't be wrong, he speaks for Allah. And by no means is this kind of problem limited to Islamic countries - it's just tempered here in the West by a generally decent to mediocre educational system.
Look at the way people in New York City vote... now look at the way people in rural Alabama vote. Populist fear-mongering, religious zealotry and other anti-democratic forces exist in the US too, and they are part of our mainstream media and government as O'Reilly, Limbaugh, Ashcroft and so on. Leaders who think too much and analyze the details or specifics of a situation are derided as "wafflers".
Don't for a minute put too much trust in the forces of democracy. Democracy without education is just pure mob rule. Read Plato sometime - you'll realize the Greek word "tyrant" generally referred to a popularly chosen leader who exercised absolute power with the permission of the masses. Sometimes this was a good thing and sometimes it wasn't. It scares me that we accept democracy as an absolute good here in the US without realizing all the prerequisites required to make democracy a working system. And sometimes we forget that the majority isn't always right - just because people get what they want doesn't mean they get what's good for them.
I'm not sure if you're serious, but you are claiming that Earthlink's spyware removal tool includes spyware? I find this quite hard to believe, if only because that's not their business model, and for a major ISP, customer trust is worth more than spyware revenues. Care to provide links to back up this accusation?
But you forgot about the air-traffic control tower's super-secret override switch, which overrides the in-cabin override, restoring control to the tower. I guess the real question is where do you want the ultimate physical control of the aircraft to reside? Is it easier to secure the aircraft or the control tower, and what are the consequences of each approach?
If one aircraft is compromised and hijacked, there's only limited damage it can do. If an entire control tower were compromised, hijackers might be able to take down a whole bunch of aircraft before anybody even realized it. So now you need to worry about mechanisms to isolate and lockout an entire aircraft control tower and rapidly assign its responsibilities to other controllers in the region.
It seems to me like that it's harder to deal with all of that complexity than to have the buck stop with the pilot, and rely on good security to keep guns and explosives off of aircraft in the first place (forget about the razor blades and kitchen knives and shit, nobody is going to let their plane get hijacked with that shit anymore post 9-11).
Dude, if you have a girlfriend and she's only costing you $50 a month, consider yourself lucky. Where I come from, having a girlfriend costs a hell of a lot more than that. And I don't mean a hooker either - believe me, sometimes I think it would be cheaper to just get "hired help" one night a week (though definitely less gratifying, but then again, you get as much variety as you want).
Heh, well by American standards at least, that was the most laughable legal threat letter I've ever seen. You might be violating two vague laws in some country. Huh? Who the hell got paid to write that letter? Also wasn't it obvious to the people who ran Sarovar from day one that their site would end up being used as a haven from repressive American and European intellectual property laws for controversial Open Source and Free Software projects? Well now they've got what they wanted, and they buckled to a POS letter like that. Embarrassing.
Jail is an extremely harsh form of criminal punishment. I think you'd find a lot of Slashdotters don't object so strongly to pursuing civil cases based on copyright law. Furthermore, a modest financial penalty against a corporation is quite different from a large financial penalty, or a criminal penalty against an individual. A penalty of a portion of a companies revenues from an infringing product is quite different from a penalty of 10 or 20 times what an individual might earn in a year.
I would not object to people being ticketed a few hundred dollars or even a few thousand dollars for trading files they don't own copyright to, as a deterrent - I think it could be effective, and much less likely to get lots of negative attention for the RIAA/MPAA.
Can you point to where he discourages people from using non-FSF licenses, or tries to prevent people from licensing their code as they will? I generally think Lessig's arguments are pretty clear, and I am pretty sure he would acknowledge that code and speech are both different forms of expression, that deserve to be protected by *limited term* copyrights, and that authors should be allowed to make money off of their work, whether its code or books, with the caveat that they should also use licenses that contribute back to the community and to the public domain.
I don't think of Lessig as an absolutist like Stallman, he's an intellectual and academic, and academics generally spend too much time thinking and analyzing to have such a black-and-white view of the world. He's taken a stand to protect the very existence of concepts like the public domain. Yes, Creative Commons offers more flexibility in licensing format than the FSF offerings, but that's done in the domain that Lessig knows. I'd love to see the FSF become as warm and fuzzy and accepting as Creative Commons is, and I have no reason to believe that Lessig won't help with that process.
Newsflash: This program doesn't really let you do much you can't already do. You can already transcode to MP3, but iTunes makes it a pain in the ass with purchased (i.e. DRMed) music, since you have to burn to CD and then re-rip to MP3. This tool is first and foremost a timesaver. The ONLY thing this tool lets you do that you can't already do is generate an unprotected, digitally identical (rather than re-ripped) AAC or MP4 file you can transmit to other people. And there are other tools to get that that have been around for some time, though they were again not that user-friendly (QtFairUse).
I would be willing to bet that the majority of people who use this program are much more interested in fast, easy transcoding to MP3 than they are generating unprotected MP4s to give to others. Unfortunately, the DMCA doesn't care about the primary purpose of a tool, it only cares about whether or not a tool is designed to circumvent DRM measures. Since I don't think anybody around here believes the DMCA has any moral authority or is a legitimate law at all, I doubt you'll get much sympathy for the perspective of abiding by it or inconveniencing ourselves just to stay within the bounds of an annoying law when there are many other inconvenient, absurd or downright unconstitutional laws we break on a daily basis.
Honestly, nothing would please me more than getting prosecuted under the DMCA for using Playfair. Because I know that I wouldn't take the songs and distribute them - I'd only be using them on my MP3 playback devices. I can't imagine a better way to point out to the mass media the absurdity of a law that tries to ban the use of legally purchased media with legally purchased devices within your own private home.
They likely have a contractual agreement as part of the investment deal with Canopy that allows Canopy to appoint one representative to the BOD of TrollTech. They might be able to kick Ralph Yarro off or ask him to leave nicely if he were hurting their business actively, but Canopy would most likely have the right to replace him with somebody else of their choosing.
You generally can't do an after-the-fact renegotiation of your previous funding deals with respect to Board seats, though if they took more funding later, they could expand the board and thereby diminish Mr. Yarro's influence. Anyway, it's hard to say what his influence really is since TrollTech doesn't seem to publicize the makeup of their Board on their site. Probably at least 5 or 6 directors though, if not 10 or more, so it's unlikely Mr. Yarro could single-handedly direct strategy in any meaningful way. Though Canopy may own preferred shares and have certain extra rights with respect to executive appointments, mergers, acquisitions and so on, the common stock majority holders still usually have the ability to control the overall makeup of the board and the form and shape of the company well enough.
But yes, a lot of people would feel more comfortable if they could see the exact breakdown of the contracts signed with Canopy when they invested.
How does Microsoft benefit from that? Okay, given that Microsoft could have released.NET for Unix at any time, and given that Microsoft has apparently ported or at least considered porting most of their major apps (like Office) to Unix at various points in time but never had any desire to actually release them, what would make them change their mind now? What do they think they will win by eliminating the huge carrots they are using to lure people onto the Windows platform? Why do they need Sun to do this for them when they could easily do it themselves? I don't really see it.
Forked what? Does Microsoft need the code to write their own implementation? Not really. In fact, Microsoft DID write their own implementation, with J++ and the MS JVM, and then they morphed that into.NET, which cherry picked the features they wanted from Java. They aren't allowed to call it an implementation of "Java" unless it sticks to the Java specification, they have permission from Sun or whatever - but what's wrong with that? That's just a trademark issue, it has nothing to do with Open Source software or the licensing terms of the code itself.
Would the Sun/MS debacle have unfolded any differently if the source code for Java had been available under the GPL? Microsoft could have build their own stuff on top of it, but they would have had to keep it under the GPL - they would never have wanted that, so they would have had to do the exact same thing they did, which is write their own clean room version of it, or make a derivative design and have their own team implement to their own modified spec. If you can put forward a convincing argument that Sun GPLing the Java standard would have substantially changed the platform battle with Microsoft, I'd like to hear it.
That doesn't make sense. At the same time Sun is trying to recast itself as a software company. There was a Slashdot article from a few days that hinted as much. What platform are they going to be developing that software for, if it's not Java? Are you suggesting that Sun is taking their 2 billion dollars, rolling up and going back to the pure hardware platform business in this world of Linux and commodity hardware? What evidence supports that?
Sorry, but just so we're clear I made a typo there, which was obvious from the context of the post. I said "FairPlay" when I meant "PlayFair", the SourceForce project, not the copy protection technology from Apple.
In any case, assuming you still disagree with my premise, I'll continue. To quote from Section 1201b of the DMCA:
(2) No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that--
(A) is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title;
Is FairPlay an access control mechanism as defined by the DMCA? Yes, I think it's pretty reasonable to call it that, whether you agree with the principle behind it or not. Is it effective? Well, effective enough at it's goal of requiring license keys on the machines - beyond that, pretty debatable, but I'm not sure how relevant that really is here. Does PlayFair circumvent it? Yes, it does, though your reasons for doing so are most likely quite noble - being able to use your own music you've purchased the rights to with your MP3 player, for example. Is the only or primary reason for circumventing it copyright infringement? Absolutely not, but the DMCA doesn't put that hurdle up, so it's irrelevant to this question.
I am one of the biggest opponents of the DMCA you'll ever meet. I have been on the receiving end of these sorts of C&D letters myself. I wish the DMCA would go away. But the way the courts seem to interpret these terms like "effective access control", I think PlayFair would have a tough time arguing they don't meet that standard just because they require you to have an authorized key to do the unlocking of the AAC file yourself.
I know he worked at Id, but how many people who worked on Doom can you name? As for me, only two, John Carmack and American McGee. I am sure there were lots of others, but Carmack I know because he's famous, and McGee I know because of his ridiculous name. Why do you think he got promoted from a janitor anyway? What do you think made people take notice of him?
New Hampshire wouldn't do so fine if it weren't for the wealth and jobs created around the corner in good ole' Massachusetts, though. That's part of my point - a lot of people living in southern New Hampshire are from Massachusetts, were educated there, send their kids to college there, had or currently have jobs there, or don't live in New Hampshire at all, just keep second residences there. These people bring cash into the New Hampshire economy and keep it going, but that cash originates down the block in Massachusetts. And those liquor revenues - they definitely wouldn't be as nice if it weren't for all the people that drive across the border to buy booze. I don't think you can pretend that New Hampshire would be able to exist as a tax-free state in isolation. Also, you have to consider that many poor people won't stay in a state that provides no public services to them - they will come down across the border to Massachusetts.:)
I'm not clear how those sorts of license terms (license bound to not only a particular piece of hardware but also to a particular owner) complies with the first sale doctrine or would be ruled as a permissable sort of EULA in most, if not all, jurisdictions around the world.
I realize that unfortunately rulings on EULAs here in the US have been mixed, but this kind of restriction is not a reasonable one. I bought the hardware, I paid for it, the software comes with it, you can't tell me when I sell the hardware that I can't sell the software. That's as outrageous as telling me that when I sell my car I can't transfer the "license" to run the engine control software because there was an EULA in addition to the standard sale contract when I bought my car.
Just because the stuff behind the scenes is done by software and the software itself is protected by copyright law, doesn't mean that a person who bought it can't use it in the standard way it is intended to be used. This kind of use just plain old doesn't require accepting any license - mark my words, the first auto manufacturer that tries this shit will get torn to shreds by an angry mob, and I think it will take something like that to get the commoners to understand how they are being raped by companies like Microsoft.
Uh, you do realize the state owns and runs all the liquor stores in New Hampshire, right? The revenues New Hampshire loses from not having a sales or income tax it makes up in spades by taking all the profits on all liquor sold in the state, and by providing very convenient liquor stores right across the borders from Massachusetts and Vermont (and whatever other states you're adjacent to, I'm sure, I just happen to have lived in Mass. and Vermont so I know from experience).
Everyone who goes to college in Massachusetts eventually becomes familiar with the concept of a New Hampshire liquor run. Sure, they may card hard, and you pretty much need to bring a real 21+ buyer with you, but you save a lot of money for those large frat party-sized purchases.
Not such a bad system, honestly, but I don't think your assessment is fair since New Hampshire has no real urban areas or blight to deal with and just doesn't need a lot of the infrastructure that a "real" state (one with a more substantive population) requires. It's all well and good to poo-poo the need for those expensive welfare programs and the like when you have tons of residents who are essentially upper-class escapees from Massachusetts taxation, or part-time residents who declare full-time resident status to avoid taxes.
Again, not knocking you guys, I'm not one of these annoying holier-than-thou "I pay all my taxes and I'm proud of it" Slashdot engineer dorks. I do what I can to avoid paying too much to Taxachusetts. And someday when I can afford it, I'll probably be getting a house in New Hampshire to avoid paying taxes too. Just want to be honest about this stuff.
My friends and I have a theory about Simpson - his career as a technology writer and pundit is based primarily on the Memorable Name principle (also known as the "American McGee principle"). This phenomenon seems particularly common in the tech industry.
American McGee is, in my opinion, an emblematic case of this phenomenon. Why was his game called "American McGee's A.L.I.C.E."? Do you ever hear about "John Smith's BullshitGame 2003"? I think not (we won't get into whether or not the game here sucked, which I believe everybody can agree with). Why was Mr. McGee a speaker at so many industry conventions and trade shows? Was it because of his amazing intellect and insights? His colorful lively presentation style? The quality of his work in the gaming industry? No, it's because his fucking name is "American McGee".
Simpson Garfinkel is a pretty good tech writer. Certainly a lot more knowledgeable than some of the idjits out there. But first and foremost, his success and the attention he gets is because his name is eminently brandable and memorable due to its remarkable resemblence to "Simon and Garfunkle". This works at a subconscious level, from what I've observed, even when people don't immediately note the resemblence of his name - they note what a strange name it is, and they always seem to remember it later if they encounter it again.
I won't bother getting to all the other examples of this phenomenon at work - some of them are people I know personally who are great people but owe much of their success to this kind of clever branding ("Jennifer 8. Lee" anyone?). The power of this phenomenon is undeniable. We may all sit around and think we are above this kind of low-level marketing manipulation of our brains, but we need to face the facts: we are being manipulated by the Strange Name Mafia into their sick and twisted view of the technology industry.
Never mind, the Sourceforge policy does also address the DMCA in section 22 on Copyrights, and it clearly states what steps they will take to comply with DMCA-related requests. I am assuming they followed their own procedures in this case, unless you have evidence otherwise?
I also think Sourceforge should fix their policy since it doesn't make clear that they will comply with any and all DMCA-related cease-and-desist requests, which is essentially what they are now doing.
But to be fair to OSDN and Sourceforge, the Slashdot blurb linked to the wrong section of the Sourceforge policy. See instead this section on termination. Essentially, if they are required by law to disable an account or remove content, they will. I agree that they could have pushed back on a simple C&D letter and waited to get sued, but they didn't, and I don't think that's unreasonable given the way the DMCA works in the US.
I don't believe the DMCA is a good, just or constitutional law, and I believe that we are all justified in doing our fair share of civil disobedience against it. But the legal risk to a company here is pretty substantial, not like the mythical risk of standing up to the SCO bullies and their bullshit case - there is a real likelihood that FairPlay does violate the DMCA as it's worded even though the clearest purpose of it is to ensure continued rights to use of legally purchased material.
Maybe a good approach is to teach children to respect the opposite sex and to view sex as something special to share with one other person in their life, instead of something to watch on TV and the big screen.
Why? I mean, this is often spouted as a "moral" point of view, but I fail to see the morality in it. Usually it's just mindless parroting of biblical ideology. What is so special about sex that it should only be had with one person during your life? This is a tradition that evolved socially to prevent people from realizing that they are sexually more compatible with some folks than with others. I have been with women who were incredible sexually and those that were somewhere between mediocre and downright fucking boring. If I had followed your "moral" advice, my life might be a hell of a lot less rich, with a woman who I just wasn't physically compatible with and I didn't enjoy sex with.
I definitely don't advocate letting preteen children watch porn or anything with graphic sex, because they are too young to have this stuff explained to them properly. I don't think preventing a preteen boy from seeing a female breast makes any sense - didn't they suckle from a female breast for the first year or so of their life? Isn't that what all creatures do? And when your children DO reach the age of 15 or 16, trying to prevent them from getting at porn is a waste of time, since I'm quite sure they'll find a way anyway. You are better off spending your time explaining to them why it's such a bad idea for them to go knocking up their girlfriends or engaging in promiscuous sex. If you can't make a reasonable argument that a 16 year old will buy into, maybe you haven't thought your position out very well. I know if I were your kid and you told me what you just stuck in that post I'd be laughing my ass off - what the hell is so "special" about the arbitrary reproductive act of the human animal, and happens to be a rather fun and enjoyable act at that?
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I realize what the electoral college does, and I think it's a reasonable topic to debate: is it more important to have a government that represents a consensus of the breadth of opinions across the states of the union or is it more important to have a government that represents the majority of the people? Our founders apparently thought it was the first, or at least that was the only way they could get the small states to buy into the deal. These days, the small states can mostly use the power they get through our representational system to prevent serious change to this system. But let's not throw the word "fair" around without thinking about what it means.
I assume you must be hacking on web development projects or something comparable to have never hired or worked with software engineers with college degrees. If you worked at a real software shop with a mix of mostly degreed, some non-degreed, and some advanced-degreed people you'd realize that there is certainly value to people who know how to get the job done, work hard, and solve problems. Schooling is a reasonable proxy for some amount of real-world experience, and generally provides an assessment that this person is bright and hard-working enough to get into and then complete a degree program at a certain level of college. Incidentally, most of the best people I've worked with were graduates of Harvard, MIT and Brown (being in the Boston area). Just my personal experience, but I think it's worth something. And I think you should seriously re-examine your own attitude and absurd willingness to stereotype people based on one moron you once met.
The hardware I was discussing in the rest of my post was in fact a brand new, utterly mainstream NForce motherboard for an Athlon processor. I didn't say this particular fellow's hardware wasn't made or supported anymore, I said _IF_ a piece of hardware isn't made or supported anymore, you will have better luck with Linux than with Windows. This particular sentence was a response to several other posts in this thread discussing problems with older hardware, not a response to the article in particular.
And your sound card that worked fine with Windows 95 may not work at all with Windows XP either. Such are the breaks - if it's not made or supported anymore, that's not Linux's fault. Usually Linux is substantially better about supporting several generations back hardware out of the box than Windows is.
What you mean to say is that well-educated people the world over realize that human liberty and freedom are in their interests. I'm sure the well-educated urban residents of Turkey don't want an Islamofascist government in power, but the uneducated, poor rural masses vote the way their local Mullah tells them to. After all, he couldn't be wrong, he speaks for Allah. And by no means is this kind of problem limited to Islamic countries - it's just tempered here in the West by a generally decent to mediocre educational system.
Look at the way people in New York City vote... now look at the way people in rural Alabama vote. Populist fear-mongering, religious zealotry and other anti-democratic forces exist in the US too, and they are part of our mainstream media and government as O'Reilly, Limbaugh, Ashcroft and so on. Leaders who think too much and analyze the details or specifics of a situation are derided as "wafflers".
Don't for a minute put too much trust in the forces of democracy. Democracy without education is just pure mob rule. Read Plato sometime - you'll realize the Greek word "tyrant" generally referred to a popularly chosen leader who exercised absolute power with the permission of the masses. Sometimes this was a good thing and sometimes it wasn't. It scares me that we accept democracy as an absolute good here in the US without realizing all the prerequisites required to make democracy a working system. And sometimes we forget that the majority isn't always right - just because people get what they want doesn't mean they get what's good for them.
I'm not sure if you're serious, but you are claiming that Earthlink's spyware removal tool includes spyware? I find this quite hard to believe, if only because that's not their business model, and for a major ISP, customer trust is worth more than spyware revenues. Care to provide links to back up this accusation?
If one aircraft is compromised and hijacked, there's only limited damage it can do. If an entire control tower were compromised, hijackers might be able to take down a whole bunch of aircraft before anybody even realized it. So now you need to worry about mechanisms to isolate and lockout an entire aircraft control tower and rapidly assign its responsibilities to other controllers in the region.
It seems to me like that it's harder to deal with all of that complexity than to have the buck stop with the pilot, and rely on good security to keep guns and explosives off of aircraft in the first place (forget about the razor blades and kitchen knives and shit, nobody is going to let their plane get hijacked with that shit anymore post 9-11).
Dude, if you have a girlfriend and she's only costing you $50 a month, consider yourself lucky. Where I come from, having a girlfriend costs a hell of a lot more than that. And I don't mean a hooker either - believe me, sometimes I think it would be cheaper to just get "hired help" one night a week (though definitely less gratifying, but then again, you get as much variety as you want).
Heh, well by American standards at least, that was the most laughable legal threat letter I've ever seen. You might be violating two vague laws in some country. Huh? Who the hell got paid to write that letter? Also wasn't it obvious to the people who ran Sarovar from day one that their site would end up being used as a haven from repressive American and European intellectual property laws for controversial Open Source and Free Software projects? Well now they've got what they wanted, and they buckled to a POS letter like that. Embarrassing.
I would not object to people being ticketed a few hundred dollars or even a few thousand dollars for trading files they don't own copyright to, as a deterrent - I think it could be effective, and much less likely to get lots of negative attention for the RIAA/MPAA.
I don't think of Lessig as an absolutist like Stallman, he's an intellectual and academic, and academics generally spend too much time thinking and analyzing to have such a black-and-white view of the world. He's taken a stand to protect the very existence of concepts like the public domain. Yes, Creative Commons offers more flexibility in licensing format than the FSF offerings, but that's done in the domain that Lessig knows. I'd love to see the FSF become as warm and fuzzy and accepting as Creative Commons is, and I have no reason to believe that Lessig won't help with that process.
I would be willing to bet that the majority of people who use this program are much more interested in fast, easy transcoding to MP3 than they are generating unprotected MP4s to give to others. Unfortunately, the DMCA doesn't care about the primary purpose of a tool, it only cares about whether or not a tool is designed to circumvent DRM measures. Since I don't think anybody around here believes the DMCA has any moral authority or is a legitimate law at all, I doubt you'll get much sympathy for the perspective of abiding by it or inconveniencing ourselves just to stay within the bounds of an annoying law when there are many other inconvenient, absurd or downright unconstitutional laws we break on a daily basis.
Honestly, nothing would please me more than getting prosecuted under the DMCA for using Playfair. Because I know that I wouldn't take the songs and distribute them - I'd only be using them on my MP3 playback devices. I can't imagine a better way to point out to the mass media the absurdity of a law that tries to ban the use of legally purchased media with legally purchased devices within your own private home.
You generally can't do an after-the-fact renegotiation of your previous funding deals with respect to Board seats, though if they took more funding later, they could expand the board and thereby diminish Mr. Yarro's influence. Anyway, it's hard to say what his influence really is since TrollTech doesn't seem to publicize the makeup of their Board on their site. Probably at least 5 or 6 directors though, if not 10 or more, so it's unlikely Mr. Yarro could single-handedly direct strategy in any meaningful way. Though Canopy may own preferred shares and have certain extra rights with respect to executive appointments, mergers, acquisitions and so on, the common stock majority holders still usually have the ability to control the overall makeup of the board and the form and shape of the company well enough.
But yes, a lot of people would feel more comfortable if they could see the exact breakdown of the contracts signed with Canopy when they invested.
How does Microsoft benefit from that? Okay, given that Microsoft could have released .NET for Unix at any time, and given that Microsoft has apparently ported or at least considered porting most of their major apps (like Office) to Unix at various points in time but never had any desire to actually release them, what would make them change their mind now? What do they think they will win by eliminating the huge carrots they are using to lure people onto the Windows platform? Why do they need Sun to do this for them when they could easily do it themselves? I don't really see it.
Would the Sun/MS debacle have unfolded any differently if the source code for Java had been available under the GPL? Microsoft could have build their own stuff on top of it, but they would have had to keep it under the GPL - they would never have wanted that, so they would have had to do the exact same thing they did, which is write their own clean room version of it, or make a derivative design and have their own team implement to their own modified spec. If you can put forward a convincing argument that Sun GPLing the Java standard would have substantially changed the platform battle with Microsoft, I'd like to hear it.
That doesn't make sense. At the same time Sun is trying to recast itself as a software company. There was a Slashdot article from a few days that hinted as much. What platform are they going to be developing that software for, if it's not Java? Are you suggesting that Sun is taking their 2 billion dollars, rolling up and going back to the pure hardware platform business in this world of Linux and commodity hardware? What evidence supports that?
In any case, assuming you still disagree with my premise, I'll continue. To quote from Section 1201b of the DMCA:
(2) No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that--
(A) is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title;
Is FairPlay an access control mechanism as defined by the DMCA? Yes, I think it's pretty reasonable to call it that, whether you agree with the principle behind it or not. Is it effective? Well, effective enough at it's goal of requiring license keys on the machines - beyond that, pretty debatable, but I'm not sure how relevant that really is here. Does PlayFair circumvent it? Yes, it does, though your reasons for doing so are most likely quite noble - being able to use your own music you've purchased the rights to with your MP3 player, for example. Is the only or primary reason for circumventing it copyright infringement? Absolutely not, but the DMCA doesn't put that hurdle up, so it's irrelevant to this question.
I am one of the biggest opponents of the DMCA you'll ever meet. I have been on the receiving end of these sorts of C&D letters myself. I wish the DMCA would go away. But the way the courts seem to interpret these terms like "effective access control", I think PlayFair would have a tough time arguing they don't meet that standard just because they require you to have an authorized key to do the unlocking of the AAC file yourself.
I know he worked at Id, but how many people who worked on Doom can you name? As for me, only two, John Carmack and American McGee. I am sure there were lots of others, but Carmack I know because he's famous, and McGee I know because of his ridiculous name. Why do you think he got promoted from a janitor anyway? What do you think made people take notice of him?
New Hampshire wouldn't do so fine if it weren't for the wealth and jobs created around the corner in good ole' Massachusetts, though. That's part of my point - a lot of people living in southern New Hampshire are from Massachusetts, were educated there, send their kids to college there, had or currently have jobs there, or don't live in New Hampshire at all, just keep second residences there. These people bring cash into the New Hampshire economy and keep it going, but that cash originates down the block in Massachusetts. And those liquor revenues - they definitely wouldn't be as nice if it weren't for all the people that drive across the border to buy booze. I don't think you can pretend that New Hampshire would be able to exist as a tax-free state in isolation. Also, you have to consider that many poor people won't stay in a state that provides no public services to them - they will come down across the border to Massachusetts. :)
I realize that unfortunately rulings on EULAs here in the US have been mixed, but this kind of restriction is not a reasonable one. I bought the hardware, I paid for it, the software comes with it, you can't tell me when I sell the hardware that I can't sell the software. That's as outrageous as telling me that when I sell my car I can't transfer the "license" to run the engine control software because there was an EULA in addition to the standard sale contract when I bought my car.
Just because the stuff behind the scenes is done by software and the software itself is protected by copyright law, doesn't mean that a person who bought it can't use it in the standard way it is intended to be used. This kind of use just plain old doesn't require accepting any license - mark my words, the first auto manufacturer that tries this shit will get torn to shreds by an angry mob, and I think it will take something like that to get the commoners to understand how they are being raped by companies like Microsoft.
Everyone who goes to college in Massachusetts eventually becomes familiar with the concept of a New Hampshire liquor run. Sure, they may card hard, and you pretty much need to bring a real 21+ buyer with you, but you save a lot of money for those large frat party-sized purchases.
Not such a bad system, honestly, but I don't think your assessment is fair since New Hampshire has no real urban areas or blight to deal with and just doesn't need a lot of the infrastructure that a "real" state (one with a more substantive population) requires. It's all well and good to poo-poo the need for those expensive welfare programs and the like when you have tons of residents who are essentially upper-class escapees from Massachusetts taxation, or part-time residents who declare full-time resident status to avoid taxes.
Again, not knocking you guys, I'm not one of these annoying holier-than-thou "I pay all my taxes and I'm proud of it" Slashdot engineer dorks. I do what I can to avoid paying too much to Taxachusetts. And someday when I can afford it, I'll probably be getting a house in New Hampshire to avoid paying taxes too. Just want to be honest about this stuff.
American McGee is, in my opinion, an emblematic case of this phenomenon. Why was his game called "American McGee's A.L.I.C.E."? Do you ever hear about "John Smith's BullshitGame 2003"? I think not (we won't get into whether or not the game here sucked, which I believe everybody can agree with). Why was Mr. McGee a speaker at so many industry conventions and trade shows? Was it because of his amazing intellect and insights? His colorful lively presentation style? The quality of his work in the gaming industry? No, it's because his fucking name is "American McGee".
Simpson Garfinkel is a pretty good tech writer. Certainly a lot more knowledgeable than some of the idjits out there. But first and foremost, his success and the attention he gets is because his name is eminently brandable and memorable due to its remarkable resemblence to "Simon and Garfunkle". This works at a subconscious level, from what I've observed, even when people don't immediately note the resemblence of his name - they note what a strange name it is, and they always seem to remember it later if they encounter it again.
I won't bother getting to all the other examples of this phenomenon at work - some of them are people I know personally who are great people but owe much of their success to this kind of clever branding ("Jennifer 8. Lee" anyone?). The power of this phenomenon is undeniable. We may all sit around and think we are above this kind of low-level marketing manipulation of our brains, but we need to face the facts: we are being manipulated by the Strange Name Mafia into their sick and twisted view of the technology industry.
Boycott weird-named pundits. Err. Or something.
Never mind, the Sourceforge policy does also address the DMCA in section 22 on Copyrights, and it clearly states what steps they will take to comply with DMCA-related requests. I am assuming they followed their own procedures in this case, unless you have evidence otherwise?
But to be fair to OSDN and Sourceforge, the Slashdot blurb linked to the wrong section of the Sourceforge policy. See instead this section on termination. Essentially, if they are required by law to disable an account or remove content, they will. I agree that they could have pushed back on a simple C&D letter and waited to get sued, but they didn't, and I don't think that's unreasonable given the way the DMCA works in the US.
I don't believe the DMCA is a good, just or constitutional law, and I believe that we are all justified in doing our fair share of civil disobedience against it. But the legal risk to a company here is pretty substantial, not like the mythical risk of standing up to the SCO bullies and their bullshit case - there is a real likelihood that FairPlay does violate the DMCA as it's worded even though the clearest purpose of it is to ensure continued rights to use of legally purchased material.
Why? I mean, this is often spouted as a "moral" point of view, but I fail to see the morality in it. Usually it's just mindless parroting of biblical ideology. What is so special about sex that it should only be had with one person during your life? This is a tradition that evolved socially to prevent people from realizing that they are sexually more compatible with some folks than with others. I have been with women who were incredible sexually and those that were somewhere between mediocre and downright fucking boring. If I had followed your "moral" advice, my life might be a hell of a lot less rich, with a woman who I just wasn't physically compatible with and I didn't enjoy sex with.
I definitely don't advocate letting preteen children watch porn or anything with graphic sex, because they are too young to have this stuff explained to them properly. I don't think preventing a preteen boy from seeing a female breast makes any sense - didn't they suckle from a female breast for the first year or so of their life? Isn't that what all creatures do? And when your children DO reach the age of 15 or 16, trying to prevent them from getting at porn is a waste of time, since I'm quite sure they'll find a way anyway. You are better off spending your time explaining to them why it's such a bad idea for them to go knocking up their girlfriends or engaging in promiscuous sex. If you can't make a reasonable argument that a 16 year old will buy into, maybe you haven't thought your position out very well. I know if I were your kid and you told me what you just stuck in that post I'd be laughing my ass off - what the hell is so "special" about the arbitrary reproductive act of the human animal, and happens to be a rather fun and enjoyable act at that?