I would like to agree with you, but I can't. How many bots have you helped prevent by educating people--five, ten? Now how many worms have been shut down by this vigilantism? I'm willing to bet that it is more.
People are lazy and don't really want to "be educated" unless it provides them some sort of direct personal benefit. Trying to educate people about things that affect them indirectly, after time, or in the aggregate--such as bot nets, pollution, or AIDS prevention--never has and probably never will really do much good. There's no stick for failing to learn and no carrot for succeeding, and thus no incentive other than knowing you're probably doing the right thing.
The Clean Air Act and law enforcement had more effect on air pollution than a million teachers, and it will probably take a law and someone to enforce it to solve this problem as well. The flipside of vigilantes showing criminals where they need to do a better job is that they also show law enforcement where they need to do a better job.
Basically it depends on what you're comparing the GPL to:
Compared to standard copyright law, the GPL gives you more freedom.
Compared to something in the public domain, the GPL gives you less freedom.
People who say the GPL introduces restrictions are looking at it from the latter perspective, and people who say the GPL gives you freedom are looking at it from the former perspective; it's as simple as that. If a piece of software would be public domain if there were no GPL, then yes, it restricts your freedom, but I don't think that is the case for most GPLed software out there.
"So, in response to your query about the likelihood of changing the definition, my question is why you think it should be changed."
I don't really agree with your example; bark (tree) and bark (dog) are true homophones and not related to each other, but pirate (maritime crime) and pirate (small scale, questionably-legal copyright violation) is pretty plainly the result of someone trying to make a comparison between the common (and widely-tolerated) activity of downloading a few songs for personal enjoyment and robbing and murdering on the high seas. Referring to that as "music piracy" is sort of like calling jaywalking "right-of-way murder" or lying "fact abortion"--not a homophone, but a loaded term and implicit comparison.
Is there a need for more root servers? If 2/3rds of them can be taken out without anyone noticing, as seems to be the case, why would we want to set up and maintain more?
So it's okay to expropriate the work of anyone, as long as he learned from others and was funded by the government?
(Note: that was a reduction to absurdity, not an endorsement of either patents in general, or the patents described. Simmer down.)
Why not? If you create a copyrightable work as an agent of the government, be it a farm report, a chart of drought conditions, or whatever, it is (with some exceptions like secrets) released into the public domain because it was created with public monies. Should we not apply that standard to patents? If a drug company creates a new drug with public funding, it should be released to the public domain because it was paid for by the public. Drug companies that want to have their state-granted monopoly can spend their own money.
Reduction to absurdity only works if you end up with something absurd.;)
There's also Election Projection, who track house, senate, and governator races. It's kind of interesting the few differences between these sites--EP is projecting two independent senate wins (if you can consider Lieberman an independent), whereas E-V appears to only count Republicans and Democrats.
Mostly I was wondering, supposing they had a thousand tons of fertilizer, wouldn't it be better to use it to grow food for the starving, grass-eating people of North Korea?
In principle, you could probably construct a CCD that does this in much the same way we construct color sensors from CCDs (which only see photons and don't know about color). As you probably know, the way we get color from black and white CCD technology is to apply colored filters to the pixels in a matrix, like:
G R B G
and using 4 pixels to interpolate the color in that area. What if you did this with grey tinting? Say using 3 filters that block out 90%, 99%, and 99.9% of all light:
00.0 99.0 99.9 90.0
and interpolating the value from that.
Combining these approaches, you'd need 16 camera pixels to determine the value of one pixel in the final image (although good interpolation could probably reduce this). This would make a 48+ MP camera very useful.
Routine patches come out once a month; critical updates are released as soon as a patch has been developed and tested. Often, this is less than a month.;)
More than ten years ago, the Multnomah County Library in Oregon used to let you check out books and movies via their online library catalog, and they'd mail them to you in special envelopes, which you would just drop in the mailbox to return when they were due. Cost: $2 per item. Ten years earlier than that, the Seaside library a hundred miles west did the same thing. It looks like a lot of people came up with the idea independently--almost the definition of obvious.
"First to make a successful for-profit company using this business model" is not an acceptable metric for determining what is non-obvious.
When you have a baby boom followed by a baby bust, and the boomers retire en masse, this tends to drag on the economy because you end up with an even larger than normal mass of people who are consuming without producing. Retirees also tend to sell many of the assets they've saved for their retirement: stocks, bonds, gold, artwork, property; depressing the value of all of them.
Japan's 16-year depression that they're only now starting to emerge from was largely the result of the kind of age demographic change that the US is about to enter. Even future VPs like yourself should cast a wary eye at retiring boomers; executive salaries in Japan plummeted during the depression.
Would it be possible to develop a hashing algorithm that also contains information on the file's correct size? Perhaps by using it as a variable in the transformation matrix, so a given block of data would have an entirely different hash depending on what the total file size was.
(Of course collisions would still be possible, just more difficult--but that's true about any hash of any length less than file size, is it not?)
But unlike IE and ActiveX controls, you can only install Firefox extensions from sites on a whitelist (which by default includes only the local machine and the mozilla.org site), which means jrandomcrackerwebsite.com can't even ask you to install Comet Cursor Fx without either putting it up on a peer-reviewed site or making you jump through hoops ("please open up about:config in your browser and add our site to your whitelist").
I don't think having a simple, in-the-browser interface for installing browser extensions is inherently bad--just that having a simple, in-the-browser interface usable by any website out there for installing system extensions with administrative privileges is inherently bad.
Firefox has something like 10-15% of the browser market these days, doesn't it? How much Fx extension malware has there been?
The GPL exists to restrict your freedom to use software the way you want, but with the aim being to protect "greater freedoms" - such as right to modify derivatives.
I hear this said a lot, but it just isn't true--the GPL gives you more rights than standard copyright law does, which is the default "license" if you don't specifically say otherwise. Only in comparison to something in the public domain (or a less restrictive alternative license, like BSD) does the GPL "restrict" your rights.
I guess the $64,000 question is: without the GPL, do you believe most currently GPLed software would be released as public domain, or just not released?
I had the same reaction. Frankly, it scares me a little bit that we've reached the point where I'm *surprised* a judge was able to make the right decision. A part of me was expecting to see nothing whatsoever come of this lawsuit.
Now let's see if the government that ignores the constitution and rule of law will ignore the ruling of a judge as well.
It seems we all agree that we'll never outright abandon SMTP, but that doesn't mean we can't replace it incrementally.
How about this:
* We draft a replacement for SMTP that includes authentication, public key encryption, whatever. Make it an RFC standard. * We write BSD-licensed server and client programs (or plugins to existing clients) to process it. (Nothing against the GPL, but we -want- this to be ripped off by businesses to make the idea spread.) * The server program (or a concurrent program also run by the mail exchanger) manages the public keys of its users. User keys are tied to the domain, meaning that you cannot send an email with no domain name or only a subdomain. This should prevent spam from bot nets, and slow spam from spam domains (since they have to pay a new $10 every time people block their domain for spamming). * The new protocol will use a different port than SMTP. Whenever someone using the new protocol sends an email, the destination server is polled on the new port. If it's running a server capable of receiving email through the new protocol, it gets sent that way. Otherwise it sends it via old SMTP (possibly warning the sender that encryption and authentication are not available for this recipient). * The benefit to the sender is that the recipient knows they are who they say they are, that their message won't have to go through a big anti-spam filter and possibly be mis-marked as spam, and that nobody can eavesdrop on them. * The benefit to the receiver is less spam, fewer legit messages mis-marked spam, and authentication/encryption. * The benefit to the sysadmin is that they please their users (ha) and after a few years may be able to turn off SMTP and process less spam. * Mail to or from ISPs that have not upgraded degrade gracefully, and people don't have to change all at once.
GovTrack appears to be exactly what you asked for. You can look up past and present bills, see where they are within the system, monitor what your own representatives are doing, and even get email updates about the progress of a bill.
Try the public library.:) If you live in a decent-sized city, your local library will probably have a pretty good selection of DVDs, including new and popular titles, that you can reserve, pick up at your leisure, and keep for at least a week.
Slashdot Mirror
I would like to agree with you, but I can't. How many bots have you helped prevent by educating people--five, ten? Now how many worms have been shut down by this vigilantism? I'm willing to bet that it is more.
People are lazy and don't really want to "be educated" unless it provides them some sort of direct personal benefit. Trying to educate people about things that affect them indirectly, after time, or in the aggregate--such as bot nets, pollution, or AIDS prevention--never has and probably never will really do much good. There's no stick for failing to learn and no carrot for succeeding, and thus no incentive other than knowing you're probably doing the right thing.
The Clean Air Act and law enforcement had more effect on air pollution than a million teachers, and it will probably take a law and someone to enforce it to solve this problem as well. The flipside of vigilantes showing criminals where they need to do a better job is that they also show law enforcement where they need to do a better job.
Basically it depends on what you're comparing the GPL to:
Compared to standard copyright law, the GPL gives you more freedom.
Compared to something in the public domain, the GPL gives you less freedom.
People who say the GPL introduces restrictions are looking at it from the latter perspective, and people who say the GPL gives you freedom are looking at it from the former perspective; it's as simple as that. If a piece of software would be public domain if there were no GPL, then yes, it restricts your freedom, but I don't think that is the case for most GPLed software out there.
"So, in response to your query about the likelihood of changing the definition, my question is why you think it should be changed."
I don't really agree with your example; bark (tree) and bark (dog) are true homophones and not related to each other, but pirate (maritime crime) and pirate (small scale, questionably-legal copyright violation) is pretty plainly the result of someone trying to make a comparison between the common (and widely-tolerated) activity of downloading a few songs for personal enjoyment and robbing and murdering on the high seas. Referring to that as "music piracy" is sort of like calling jaywalking "right-of-way murder" or lying "fact abortion"--not a homophone, but a loaded term and implicit comparison.
Or emerge truecrypt on Gentoo; it apparently is suitable for amd64 as well.
Or as someone once put it, there is no cryptographic solution to the problem where the intended receiver and the attacker are the same entity.
Is there a need for more root servers? If 2/3rds of them can be taken out without anyone noticing, as seems to be the case, why would we want to set up and maintain more?
So it's okay to expropriate the work of anyone, as long as he learned from others and was funded by the government?
(Note: that was a reduction to absurdity, not an endorsement of either patents in general, or the patents described. Simmer down.)
Why not? If you create a copyrightable work as an agent of the government, be it a farm report, a chart of drought conditions, or whatever, it is (with some exceptions like secrets) released into the public domain because it was created with public monies. Should we not apply that standard to patents? If a drug company creates a new drug with public funding, it should be released to the public domain because it was paid for by the public. Drug companies that want to have their state-granted monopoly can spend their own money.
Reduction to absurdity only works if you end up with something absurd. ;)
There's also Election Projection, who track house, senate, and governator races. It's kind of interesting the few differences between these sites--EP is projecting two independent senate wins (if you can consider Lieberman an independent), whereas E-V appears to only count Republicans and Democrats.
Mostly I was wondering, supposing they had a thousand tons of fertilizer, wouldn't it be better to use it to grow food for the starving, grass-eating people of North Korea?
:)
Maybe I'm not cut out for politics.
In principle, you could probably construct a CCD that does this in much the same way we construct color sensors from CCDs (which only see photons and don't know about color). As you probably know, the way we get color from black and white CCD technology is to apply colored filters to the pixels in a matrix, like:
G R
B G
and using 4 pixels to interpolate the color in that area. What if you did this with grey tinting? Say using 3 filters that block out 90%, 99%, and 99.9% of all light:
00.0 99.0
99.9 90.0
and interpolating the value from that.
Combining these approaches, you'd need 16 camera pixels to determine the value of one pixel in the final image (although good interpolation could probably reduce this). This would make a 48+ MP camera very useful.
Routine patches come out once a month; critical updates are released as soon as a patch has been developed and tested. Often, this is less than a month. ;)
More than ten years ago, the Multnomah County Library in Oregon used to let you check out books and movies via their online library catalog, and they'd mail them to you in special envelopes, which you would just drop in the mailbox to return when they were due. Cost: $2 per item. Ten years earlier than that, the Seaside library a hundred miles west did the same thing. It looks like a lot of people came up with the idea independently--almost the definition of obvious.
"First to make a successful for-profit company using this business model" is not an acceptable metric for determining what is non-obvious.
When you have a baby boom followed by a baby bust, and the boomers retire en masse, this tends to drag on the economy because you end up with an even larger than normal mass of people who are consuming without producing. Retirees also tend to sell many of the assets they've saved for their retirement: stocks, bonds, gold, artwork, property; depressing the value of all of them.
Japan's 16-year depression that they're only now starting to emerge from was largely the result of the kind of age demographic change that the US is about to enter. Even future VPs like yourself should cast a wary eye at retiring boomers; executive salaries in Japan plummeted during the depression.
"screw", transitive verb: to defeat with trickery or deception, to place in a situation impossible to escape
Would it be possible to develop a hashing algorithm that also contains information on the file's correct size? Perhaps by using it as a variable in the transformation matrix, so a given block of data would have an entirely different hash depending on what the total file size was.
(Of course collisions would still be possible, just more difficult--but that's true about any hash of any length less than file size, is it not?)
But unlike IE and ActiveX controls, you can only install Firefox extensions from sites on a whitelist (which by default includes only the local machine and the mozilla.org site), which means jrandomcrackerwebsite.com can't even ask you to install Comet Cursor Fx without either putting it up on a peer-reviewed site or making you jump through hoops ("please open up about:config in your browser and add our site to your whitelist").
I don't think having a simple, in-the-browser interface for installing browser extensions is inherently bad--just that having a simple, in-the-browser interface usable by any website out there for installing system extensions with administrative privileges is inherently bad.
Firefox has something like 10-15% of the browser market these days, doesn't it? How much Fx extension malware has there been?
The GPL exists to restrict your freedom to use software the way you want, but with the aim being to protect "greater freedoms" - such as right to modify derivatives.
I hear this said a lot, but it just isn't true--the GPL gives you more rights than standard copyright law does, which is the default "license" if you don't specifically say otherwise. Only in comparison to something in the public domain (or a less restrictive alternative license, like BSD) does the GPL "restrict" your rights.
I guess the $64,000 question is: without the GPL, do you believe most currently GPLed software would be released as public domain, or just not released?
I had the same reaction. Frankly, it scares me a little bit that we've reached the point where I'm *surprised* a judge was able to make the right decision. A part of me was expecting to see nothing whatsoever come of this lawsuit.
Now let's see if the government that ignores the constitution and rule of law will ignore the ruling of a judge as well.
...which solves both the problem of inputting accent marks and having a caps lock key that sometimes gets in the way. :)
If I could use it to input kanji too, I'd be in input device heaven!
Or if you're using Wintoo:
emerge -avu internet-explorer
Remember, using Windows is all about choices--not everyone uses the same package manager. ;)
It seems we all agree that we'll never outright abandon SMTP, but that doesn't mean we can't replace it incrementally.
How about this:
* We draft a replacement for SMTP that includes authentication, public key encryption, whatever. Make it an RFC standard.
* We write BSD-licensed server and client programs (or plugins to existing clients) to process it. (Nothing against the GPL, but we -want- this to be ripped off by businesses to make the idea spread.)
* The server program (or a concurrent program also run by the mail exchanger) manages the public keys of its users. User keys are tied to the domain, meaning that you cannot send an email with no domain name or only a subdomain. This should prevent spam from bot nets, and slow spam from spam domains (since they have to pay a new $10 every time people block their domain for spamming).
* The new protocol will use a different port than SMTP. Whenever someone using the new protocol sends an email, the destination server is polled on the new port. If it's running a server capable of receiving email through the new protocol, it gets sent that way. Otherwise it sends it via old SMTP (possibly warning the sender that encryption and authentication are not available for this recipient).
* The benefit to the sender is that the recipient knows they are who they say they are, that their message won't have to go through a big anti-spam filter and possibly be mis-marked as spam, and that nobody can eavesdrop on them.
* The benefit to the receiver is less spam, fewer legit messages mis-marked spam, and authentication/encryption.
* The benefit to the sysadmin is that they please their users (ha) and after a few years may be able to turn off SMTP and process less spam.
* Mail to or from ISPs that have not upgraded degrade gracefully, and people don't have to change all at once.
GovTrack appears to be exactly what you asked for. You can look up past and present bills, see where they are within the system, monitor what your own representatives are doing, and even get email updates about the progress of a bill.
Try the public library. :) If you live in a decent-sized city, your local library will probably have a pretty good selection of DVDs, including new and popular titles, that you can reserve, pick up at your leisure, and keep for at least a week.
Or to make it a single result with a nifty flash anim, GoogleFight. :)
The backlighting in most LCD monitors is a mercury tube, though. :)
(LED backlighting is in the works, but such monitors currently cost several thousand dollars.)