Re:it really doesn't beg that question.
on
The DRM Scorecard
·
· Score: 1
A CD is in general not DRM-encumbered, so CD sales don't count. We're talking about DRM here, if you remember. Compare a DRM-laden music track with the same one obtained though illicit means. You have no restrictions on what you can do with the illicitly-obtained track, whereas the same track bought with iTunes restricts (or rather, tries to restrict) many things that would otherwise be possible, such as copying it onto another storage medium, and so forth. The point is that DRM is a negative value-add as far as the customer is concerned. Supporting it means more complex software and hardware, all of which are actively working against the customer, and treating them as though they were criminals. And so people don't bother getting the stuff legitimately in the first place. May not be what they intend, but it is what their actions tell their customers they want to happen.
Re:it really doesn't beg that question.
on
The DRM Scorecard
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
They're trying to make DRM that's just annoying enough so that the majority of users don't go to the trouble of buying the product legitimately in the first place. There, fixed it for you. This is a fine line these benighted fools must walk, as they are engaged in marketing a product that is inferior to and which can be more easily and cheaply obtained from illegitimate sources.
Pretty much in the vein of Napster of Puppets... "Napster, Napster, where's the songs that I've been after? Napster, Napster, show me where it lies..."
Basic research is probably what is meant here. Without this sort of research, many bits of technology we take for granted today might never have been invented. The laser, to give one simple example (yes, from AT&T Bell Labs no less), was in the beginning a technology that had no useful application. If we had none of this kind of pure/basic research, and only research based on finding stuff that could be immediately productized, the laser might never have been discovered, or delayed for decades or more. Many other things we take for granted nowadays are similar: based on physical phenomena whose possible practical applications are not always immediately obvious, and might not be realized for decades after the phenomenon has been described and studied.
The demise of so many of the great corporate research labs such as the T.J. Watson, Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, and now MERL, just goes to show that probably the private sector isn't the best way to rely on this sort of research getting done. That seems more like the domain of the university, non-profit foundation, or government.
Back in this third world backwater where I live, someone has tried to do exactly that. There used to be two major mobile carriers in this country, and a few years ago a third one has appeared, which offered flat rate call and text all you can service for a very low monthly rate. It does seem that they're able to do this while at the same time still turning up a profit, which puts to the lie what the old duopoly has been saying for years, but it still does remain to be seen whether this upstart competitor with their disruptive pricing model will be able to change the duopoly's pricing ways. Interesting indeed, but most of us around here actually keep two (sometimes even three) handsets to allow us to take advantage of these preferential rates.
4 watts per cubic centimeter is their projected power density. 1 cm^3 is awfully big, about the size of the tip of your pinky. I imagine that the generator they're talking about is a helluvalot smaller than that; a generator of that size hardly deserves the epithet of 'nano', and would probably only fit in major arteries and larger blood vessels. More like cubic millimeters. They're still talking about half a volt and something of the order of micro-amperes of current. Remember some basic electricity: volts times amperes is watts. If they wanted 4 watts straight out, they would be talking about a whopping 8 amperes of current at 0.5 volts, or if you want it the other way, 1 micro-ampere of current would require something like 4 million volts (!) to make 4 watts of power! They're thinking low-power biosensors and other similar things that require only small amounts of power.
They're talking microamperes and like 0.5 volts so that makes it about microwatts of power; one microwatt of power over the course of one day is something 0.0864 joules, or 0.021 calories, and those are normal calories, not the food calories (which are really kilocalories). Doesn't look like a whole lot, compared to the energy an average person consumes in a day (2000 kcal, that's two million calories!).
Well, in the absence of grant money the possibility for anyone making it from research idea to actual product that is anywhere close to the promises and predictions become zero, as opposed to merely remote.
Next time you go there, go to Akihabara, the legendary geek district of Tokyo. Near the JR-Yamanote line station there are a couple of multi-story sex shops there, and after entering one and doing a bit of exploration (which I must say is an experience that shook me to the core!), inside one of these I did manage to see one of these legendary vending machines that sell soiled schoolgirl panties. I even saw a guy in the act of buying something from it that time, and true enough, it contained the goods. I imagine that such vending machines are not exactly common (the one I got to see was inside a sex shop, not even out on the street), but they are most certainly not apocryphal.
By the way, sex shops aside, Akihabara is a place well worth visiting if you're a geek of any stripe. The place is loaded with electronic gadgets and computer equipment, anime, manga, and the like. It has credible claim to being the geek capital of the world.
Well, there are at least few counterexamples that show that the government is capable of keeping secrets of this size for a long time if they really wanted to. Take for example the World War II cryptanalysis efforts (Ultra) that broke the Enigma and other Axis ciphers. There were minimal leaks about the truth behind this in the years following World War II, up until 1974 when the British government lifted the ban.
Perhaps what is being discussed is the theme of Ellen Ullman's series "The Dumbing Down of Programming" (here and here). The point is that many of today's so-called programmers have lost touch with what the fundamentals of what it really means to program, having been too deeply insulated from it by the tools they use. Windows development does this isolation to an extreme degree, under GNU/Linux this is far less so, and likely to remain that way.
2. Can I statically link the code with Linux libraries? (My own experience shows that dynamic linking is too much to bear.)
AFAIK, no. Static linking is incorporating code directly. If you link dynamically then any library that is LGPL (not GPL) is fine, but for static linking I believe you need to have an open license on your own code as well.
Well, actually it IS legally possible to statically link a proprietary program against LGPLed libraries. The only thing you have to do in this case is provide a means to allow the user to relink the program against a modified version of the library you're linking against, e.g. provide.o files as well as a final executable, so that the.o files can be linked again to produce a new executable statically linked with a modified version of the LGPL library. For example, if the poster's project consists of three modules foo.o, bar.o, and baz.o, and the final program is quux, linked against the LGPL libary libc.a, he or she must, in addition to distributing the supported binary quux, should also distribute foo.o, bar.o, and baz.o to allow a user to relink the program against a changed version of libc.a (possibly voiding support).
4. Not unless a court says. Obviously if you violate the GPL you are taking a major risk of somebody finding out and forcing your code out into the open.
Violating the GPL does NOT force anyone to open their code! A GPL violation is a copyright infringement, and the worst that can happen is that you get convicted for that and wind up being prevented from distributing your proprietary program altogether, and probably being ordered by the court to pay punitive damages to the FSF or whoever holds the copyright to the GPLed code that was thus violated. Of course, the FSF has been known to negotiate with such violators to change their ways and become compliant with the license, but they cannot really compel anyone to do this, as you are asserting, i.e. it will never be a punitive measure imposed by a court. If you choose not to, you can always just take the route of copyright infringement conviction and what that entails, but you are never forced to open your code.
E.g., I can't actually just plug the USB cable in and drag-and-drop the music files on it, you actually need Creative's software for that.
And you can just plug in the USB cable for an iPod and drag and drop music files on it without having Apple's software or (under GNU/Linux) miscellaneous third-party software specifically designed to rebuild the proprietary file structures on the iPod installed on your computer? The last Creative music player I had access to, from what I remember, did not require any special software. It plugged into my Gentoo-based laptop and I was able to copy music files to and from it using nothing other than Linux's USB storage driver, as though it were an ordinary USB thumb drive. Can't remember the actual model (the device didn't belong to me, but to a friend whom I don't see all that often), but it was definitely a Creative, and probably 2003-2004 vintage.
Not only that, the proliferation of CIDR has resulted in an explosion of the number of core BGP routes, and it has been only through valiant efforts at route aggregation that the routing tables have been reduced to a manageable size. Lately, however, increased demand for multihoming has increased the number of BGP routes again, and now the number of core BGP routes is over 200,000 and rising. A shift to IPv6 would render all of these messy routes unnecessary.
But they aren't pretending to be Google, and Google isn't pretending to be the trademark holder by indexing their files... The situation described by the GGGP poster describes a site that places the logo in a prominent spot, probably with the intent to deceive people into believing that the site is somehow affiliated with Google.
More properly, use of Google's logo in the way the GP describes would amount to trademark infringement, and that would probably be much easier for Google's sharks to prosecute in a court of law.
Dark matter is special in that it is capable of interacting with other matter generally only via either the weak nuclear force or gravity. These types of matter cannot interact via electromagnetism, meaning they really can't radiate any form of light, and given that the weak and gravitational interactions are so, ahem, weak, they are extremely difficult to detect, and their interactions with baryonic matter such as stars, planets, and you and me is extremely limited, and their interactions correspondingly feeble. Dark matter of some kind falling into a star or some similar object would probably influence the nuclear reactions only very slightly. Neutrinos are one example of dark matter, and they are the only type that has ever been directly observed to date. It would take lead shielding one light year thick to block off half of the neutrinos emitted by the sun. That should give you an idea of the level of interaction that dark matter has with "ordinary" matter such as that which makes up you and me (actually, it is "ordinary" baryonic matter which is actually extraordinary in the universe, given that dark matter probably makes up at least 85% of the matter in the universe!)
I think you might also want to add to the list one thing: shorter copyright term lengths, not the repeated copyright term extensions, of which the most recent is the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (famously opposed in Eldred v. Ashcroft). This serves to create a horizon at 1923 where no works created more recently than that ever enter the public domain. I personally think that long copyright terms represent a true theft of creative work from future generations, as it removes the incentive for the author of a highly popular work to make more work, as a long copyright term would allow them to rest on their laurels. It also destroys the public domain, preventing future authors from building on their work. If copyright did last forever as Disney and the corporations like them seem to want, Disney would never have been able to make stuff like The Hunchback of Notre Dame without Victor Hugo's estate suing them or gouging them for royalties. A glaringly large number of their animated movies to date appear to be based on similar public domain stories...
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe something like this?
A CD is in general not DRM-encumbered, so CD sales don't count. We're talking about DRM here, if you remember. Compare a DRM-laden music track with the same one obtained though illicit means. You have no restrictions on what you can do with the illicitly-obtained track, whereas the same track bought with iTunes restricts (or rather, tries to restrict) many things that would otherwise be possible, such as copying it onto another storage medium, and so forth. The point is that DRM is a negative value-add as far as the customer is concerned. Supporting it means more complex software and hardware, all of which are actively working against the customer, and treating them as though they were criminals. And so people don't bother getting the stuff legitimately in the first place. May not be what they intend, but it is what their actions tell their customers they want to happen.
They're trying to make DRM that's just annoying enough so that the majority of users don't go to the trouble of buying the product legitimately in the first place. There, fixed it for you. This is a fine line these benighted fools must walk, as they are engaged in marketing a product that is inferior to and which can be more easily and cheaply obtained from illegitimate sources.
Pretty much in the vein of Napster of Puppets... "Napster, Napster, where's the songs that I've been after? Napster, Napster, show me where it lies..."
Basic research is probably what is meant here. Without this sort of research, many bits of technology we take for granted today might never have been invented. The laser, to give one simple example (yes, from AT&T Bell Labs no less), was in the beginning a technology that had no useful application. If we had none of this kind of pure/basic research, and only research based on finding stuff that could be immediately productized, the laser might never have been discovered, or delayed for decades or more. Many other things we take for granted nowadays are similar: based on physical phenomena whose possible practical applications are not always immediately obvious, and might not be realized for decades after the phenomenon has been described and studied.
The demise of so many of the great corporate research labs such as the T.J. Watson, Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, and now MERL, just goes to show that probably the private sector isn't the best way to rely on this sort of research getting done. That seems more like the domain of the university, non-profit foundation, or government.
Music from Meatloaf? Lots of prior, art on that one!
Back in this third world backwater where I live, someone has tried to do exactly that. There used to be two major mobile carriers in this country, and a few years ago a third one has appeared, which offered flat rate call and text all you can service for a very low monthly rate. It does seem that they're able to do this while at the same time still turning up a profit, which puts to the lie what the old duopoly has been saying for years, but it still does remain to be seen whether this upstart competitor with their disruptive pricing model will be able to change the duopoly's pricing ways. Interesting indeed, but most of us around here actually keep two (sometimes even three) handsets to allow us to take advantage of these preferential rates.
4 watts per cubic centimeter is their projected power density. 1 cm^3 is awfully big, about the size of the tip of your pinky. I imagine that the generator they're talking about is a helluvalot smaller than that; a generator of that size hardly deserves the epithet of 'nano', and would probably only fit in major arteries and larger blood vessels. More like cubic millimeters. They're still talking about half a volt and something of the order of micro-amperes of current. Remember some basic electricity: volts times amperes is watts. If they wanted 4 watts straight out, they would be talking about a whopping 8 amperes of current at 0.5 volts, or if you want it the other way, 1 micro-ampere of current would require something like 4 million volts (!) to make 4 watts of power! They're thinking low-power biosensors and other similar things that require only small amounts of power.
They're talking microamperes and like 0.5 volts so that makes it about microwatts of power; one microwatt of power over the course of one day is something 0.0864 joules, or 0.021 calories, and those are normal calories, not the food calories (which are really kilocalories). Doesn't look like a whole lot, compared to the energy an average person consumes in a day (2000 kcal, that's two million calories!).
Well, in the absence of grant money the possibility for anyone making it from research idea to actual product that is anywhere close to the promises and predictions become zero, as opposed to merely remote.
Writing VB code is not stressful. Maintaining VB code is generally far more stressful than writing and maintaining C++ code put together.
Next time you go there, go to Akihabara, the legendary geek district of Tokyo. Near the JR-Yamanote line station there are a couple of multi-story sex shops there, and after entering one and doing a bit of exploration (which I must say is an experience that shook me to the core!), inside one of these I did manage to see one of these legendary vending machines that sell soiled schoolgirl panties. I even saw a guy in the act of buying something from it that time, and true enough, it contained the goods. I imagine that such vending machines are not exactly common (the one I got to see was inside a sex shop, not even out on the street), but they are most certainly not apocryphal.
By the way, sex shops aside, Akihabara is a place well worth visiting if you're a geek of any stripe. The place is loaded with electronic gadgets and computer equipment, anime, manga, and the like. It has credible claim to being the geek capital of the world.
Well, there are at least few counterexamples that show that the government is capable of keeping secrets of this size for a long time if they really wanted to. Take for example the World War II cryptanalysis efforts (Ultra) that broke the Enigma and other Axis ciphers. There were minimal leaks about the truth behind this in the years following World War II, up until 1974 when the British government lifted the ban.
Perhaps what is being discussed is the theme of Ellen Ullman's series "The Dumbing Down of Programming" (here and here). The point is that many of today's so-called programmers have lost touch with what the fundamentals of what it really means to program, having been too deeply insulated from it by the tools they use. Windows development does this isolation to an extreme degree, under GNU/Linux this is far less so, and likely to remain that way.
Booze? I don't know about you, but coding while alcohol-intoxicated has a distinctly negative effect on quality of code for me...
Well, actually it IS legally possible to statically link a proprietary program against LGPLed libraries. The only thing you have to do in this case is provide a means to allow the user to relink the program against a modified version of the library you're linking against, e.g. provide .o files as well as a final executable, so that the .o files can be linked again to produce a new executable statically linked with a modified version of the LGPL library. For example, if the poster's project consists of three modules foo.o, bar.o, and baz.o, and the final program is quux, linked against the LGPL libary libc.a, he or she must, in addition to distributing the supported binary quux, should also distribute foo.o, bar.o, and baz.o to allow a user to relink the program against a changed version of libc.a (possibly voiding support).
Violating the GPL does NOT force anyone to open their code! A GPL violation is a copyright infringement, and the worst that can happen is that you get convicted for that and wind up being prevented from distributing your proprietary program altogether, and probably being ordered by the court to pay punitive damages to the FSF or whoever holds the copyright to the GPLed code that was thus violated. Of course, the FSF has been known to negotiate with such violators to change their ways and become compliant with the license, but they cannot really compel anyone to do this, as you are asserting, i.e. it will never be a punitive measure imposed by a court. If you choose not to, you can always just take the route of copyright infringement conviction and what that entails, but you are never forced to open your code.
And you can just plug in the USB cable for an iPod and drag and drop music files on it without having Apple's software or (under GNU/Linux) miscellaneous third-party software specifically designed to rebuild the proprietary file structures on the iPod installed on your computer? The last Creative music player I had access to, from what I remember, did not require any special software. It plugged into my Gentoo-based laptop and I was able to copy music files to and from it using nothing other than Linux's USB storage driver, as though it were an ordinary USB thumb drive. Can't remember the actual model (the device didn't belong to me, but to a friend whom I don't see all that often), but it was definitely a Creative, and probably 2003-2004 vintage.
Not only that, the proliferation of CIDR has resulted in an explosion of the number of core BGP routes, and it has been only through valiant efforts at route aggregation that the routing tables have been reduced to a manageable size. Lately, however, increased demand for multihoming has increased the number of BGP routes again, and now the number of core BGP routes is over 200,000 and rising. A shift to IPv6 would render all of these messy routes unnecessary.
So taking this same line of reasoning, the degree of freedom for society as a whole has been decreased by eliminating the freedom to own slaves.
But they aren't pretending to be Google, and Google isn't pretending to be the trademark holder by indexing their files... The situation described by the GGGP poster describes a site that places the logo in a prominent spot, probably with the intent to deceive people into believing that the site is somehow affiliated with Google.
More properly, use of Google's logo in the way the GP describes would amount to trademark infringement, and that would probably be much easier for Google's sharks to prosecute in a court of law.
If you've seen how Britney's been looking lately, I don't think you'd be very happy getting your wish...
Dark matter is special in that it is capable of interacting with other matter generally only via either the weak nuclear force or gravity. These types of matter cannot interact via electromagnetism, meaning they really can't radiate any form of light, and given that the weak and gravitational interactions are so, ahem, weak, they are extremely difficult to detect, and their interactions with baryonic matter such as stars, planets, and you and me is extremely limited, and their interactions correspondingly feeble. Dark matter of some kind falling into a star or some similar object would probably influence the nuclear reactions only very slightly. Neutrinos are one example of dark matter, and they are the only type that has ever been directly observed to date. It would take lead shielding one light year thick to block off half of the neutrinos emitted by the sun. That should give you an idea of the level of interaction that dark matter has with "ordinary" matter such as that which makes up you and me (actually, it is "ordinary" baryonic matter which is actually extraordinary in the universe, given that dark matter probably makes up at least 85% of the matter in the universe!)
I think you might also want to add to the list one thing: shorter copyright term lengths, not the repeated copyright term extensions, of which the most recent is the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (famously opposed in Eldred v. Ashcroft). This serves to create a horizon at 1923 where no works created more recently than that ever enter the public domain. I personally think that long copyright terms represent a true theft of creative work from future generations, as it removes the incentive for the author of a highly popular work to make more work, as a long copyright term would allow them to rest on their laurels. It also destroys the public domain, preventing future authors from building on their work. If copyright did last forever as Disney and the corporations like them seem to want, Disney would never have been able to make stuff like The Hunchback of Notre Dame without Victor Hugo's estate suing them or gouging them for royalties. A glaringly large number of their animated movies to date appear to be based on similar public domain stories...