Is it really the case that these two departments, with the hundreds, if not thousands of people they keep in employment, has yet to notice this?
You don't quite seem to understand how real life works. The issue for the courts is not "is this reasonable", the issue for the courts is "how can I clear my backlog of cases". Well, being able to say "this patent is vaild because the USPTO says so" is a very quick and simple way of getting a case off the table.
Judges, on the whole, operate no differently from hamburger flippers, assembly line workers, and people who clean your toilets: they want to spend the least amount of time and effort necessary to get their work done; without considerably more oversight than they have today, they're going to keep making the judgements that let them get back to playing golf as quickly as possible.
Disabled users may be helping the FOSS community, or at least a large part of it, to finally acknowledge a general attitude problem.
The "attitude problem" here is with people who think the FOSS community owes them anything.
Very likely, many office workers would like to sue, or at least to stop, any manager who told them, "next month you will have to use programs you never heard of before, with a different look and feel, because of some policy based on obscure theories about software engineering."
And very many office workers would like to sue, or at least stop, when they're told to use Windows. That's the way the cookie crumbles. If you don't like your work environment, you can always quit.
The only "obscure theory about software engineering" that comes along with FOSS is that you use it if you find it useful, and that you can change it if you don't like the way it works.
Disabled users have the actual legal weapons to do it.
Well, I'm sure Pietrosanti can cause trouble for FOSS in government: he's a politician and he likes Windows, and that kind of person always finds a way to rally people against FOSS. But I don't think Pietrosanti has actually made a convincing case. While specific environments in Linux (Gnome? OOo?) may still have some limitations when it comes to accessibility, other parts of Linux are actually better than Windows from an accessibility point of view.
In any case, if you are disabled and you are genuinely interested in making FOSS work for the disabled, there is only one way to make that happen: contribute your time, your skills, and/or your money. Legal threats won't make a big difference in the long run because there is really nobody to sue; at best, you may be able to hold up adoption of FOSS in some environments a little, until people manage to meet formal accessibility requirements nominally but in a way you probably won't like.
The solution to accessibility in FOSS is not to improve communications between the disabled and FOSS communities, it's for the disabled to become part of the FOSS community.
Are you trying to say that USENET and IRC is a private conversation?
Your reasoning didn't involve the notion of a private conversation.
A better analogy is whether you can expect your comments to be recorded when you make statements out loud in a public room.
Well, and whether you may or may not do that depends on the circumstances; there is no general right to do that.
Interesting question. I agree its not about what authors failed to prohibit. I would see the issue of whether authors' expectations are reasonable (or even applicable). And what is the state of the copyright on all this?
The state of copyright is being defined by the courts--that's what we're talking about.
I just think it's a sad state of affairs when big companies can take individual contributions to the web and republish them in perpetuity without explicit permission, while individuals can get into big trouble for using content in electronic form even for non-commercial purposes. I think copyright is out of balance and favors big companies too much.
So, what we have heard over the last few weeks out of Microsoft is that they are really serious about security now, that they are really serious about offering software as services on the web, and that they are really serious about competing with Microsoft by making Office even more of a central component of enterprise computing.
What this basically shows is that Microsoft talks big and promises a lot. But we know from past experience that they are only delivering on a fraction of what they are promising. So, don't plan your IT infrastructure around any of those promises just yet.
But to think that conversations are not being archived simply ignores the many ways it can (and is) being done.
Well, hey, by that reasoning, there is no problem people archiving your telephone conversations, right? I mean, there are so many way it can (and is) being done.
In any case, of course, some people were aware that this stuff ended up on backup tapes. But those same people assumed that copyright meant something and that people couldn't just republish it.
Being the suspicious kind, I assumed even in the early 1980's that anything I post would eventually end up on-line and searchable. And when people started publishing some of my USENET posts as magazine contributions without asking permission, it became equally clear that publishers and other big companies were willing to stomp all over copyright of individual authors.
None of that makes what DejaNews did right or desirable. Nor should people have to be as paranoid as I am in order to use an on-line forum. The real question is, in the end, not what USENET authors failed to prohibit, the real question is what the hell gives companies the right to copy content from the web and republish it in perpetuity from their own websites for commercial gain. And that's a question nobody has given a good answer to.
Perhaps we should apply a similar rule to physical communications. You know those letters your girlfriend sent you back in the '80s? I know you haven't seen her since you split up 20 years ago, but you'd better track her down and make sure she consents to your keeping them, and if you can't get her permission for whatever reason, you'd better shred them.
Excellent analogy! In most places, you are permitted to keep the physical letter, but you are not permitted to publish the letter, at least not for a long time.
You know, I'm glad past generations didn't think like you think, because the incidental, throwaway letters and diaries of the past, whose writers never thought for a moment that they would ever be read by anyone but their intended recipient, or kept for five minutes after they'd been read, have become today's invaluable insights into past ages.
That's no problem--in about a 150 years, Google may publish those archives, because the copyright has expired and the people involved are dead. They just shouldn't have a right to do it now.
First of all, it's irrelevant how many bad watermarking techniques there are since you only need one good one, and there are many good ones that are not "killed by simple diffs" and require much more effort to remove.
Second, even if you pick a bad watermarking technique, it doesn't matter: most people simply won't have multiple copies of a media file around to remove the watermark.
This isn't just a problem with Google--very few email service providers will guarantee that they actively remove deleted emails from all backup tapes. Getting secure, guaranteed, permanent deletion is a feature that you have to pay extra for. Some commercial mail service provides offer it to business as part of a package where they provide compliance with regulatory document retention requirements.
So in short, Google archives all Usenet posting where the author doesn't say that he doesn't want it archived.
That's a default that DejaNews set, without public debate, and simply unilaterally applied to the first 15 years of USENET postings.
And I think it's the wrong default. The proper fair use balance would be for web companies to be permitted short-term archiving (maybe up to 6 weeks) necessary to support indexing and web services, but not long-term archiving; permanent archiving and republication in full simply does not fall under "fair use" anymore. And web companies don't need it for providing search, data mining, or web services either.
I guess if the default would be changed, then the only difference would be that radio stations would start to explicitly say all the time that you may not rebroadcast their material. Which I don't consider an improvement over the current situation.
Well, so you recognize that radio stations and web companies have different defaults. The solution is not to change the default for radio stations, the solution is to change the default for web companies because permanent archiving and republication simply shouldn't fall under "fair use" in any medium.
You're missing the point. My point is that many USENET users used to post under the assumption that their postings would go away in a few weeks because that's what they did.
When DejaNews created a complete, non-expiring, searchable archive of USENET, that changed the way USENET was being used fundamentally, and I don't think for the better.
Because anything that gets posted to USENET (or posted on a web site) gets archived and remains around forever, people simply cannot have open, non-anonymous discussions anymore.
The fact that I'm "penguin-collective" and you are "jgardner100", with no E-mail and no real name attached, illustrates my point. In the 1980's, we would probably have debated on USENET under our real names. And I think it's a big shame that the world has changed in this way.
The solution would be for courts to respect individual copyright law and individual intent again; blanket, perpetual archiving of web and USENET content simply should not be permitted. Companies like Google could operate perfectly well if they were limited to archiving web pages for a couple of months under fair use provisions unless the page owner has opted in for a longer archival period.
Archiving was certainly never required, but conversely it was never forbidden, as far as I know.
I'm confused--are you trying to make a legal argument? A technical argument? Or what? Because I'm not.
I'm saying: USENET was used by its users with the expectation that it was an ephemeral medium. Regardless of what laws or RFCs allowed or didn't allow, that's the ground rules most people assumed and most people acted in accordance with. Now that it has become clear that it is being archived, that has changed the way users behave. Are you disputing that?
Debating fine legalistic points at this point is useless. The court has spoken. Clearly, companies have wide latitude in archiving, repurposing, and republishing anything individuals put on the web or on USENET, without the permission of those individuals. I think that's bad, but we'll have to live with the consequences.
This is typical for how scientists try to make the best out of bad experimental results. Yes, it's true that 80% of the cancer cells committed suicide, but that's because 80% of the mice themselves committed suicide when the capsaicin was "applied" to their prostates. You would, too.
Some of the mice hung themselves, while some others shot themselves; the scientists still haven't figured out where they got the ropes and guns, which only underlines how painful the treatment is.
Well, I generally like Google, but this is a disturbing asymmetry to me.
When an individual posts something to USENET, then apparently it's OK for companies like Google to archive and republish that stuff, even making money from it if they put advertising on the same page.
But how is that different from broadcasting? It seems to me that if what Google is doing is OK, then I should be able to record, archive, and republish any music or other programming broadcast over the Internet or airwaves.
Thankfully, we can all still read Usenet articles on Google as well as other archive services.
Web-based reading of USENET is fine; the problem is with archiving: USENET was originally not intended to be archived, and the fact that it is being archived has greatly changed it. Anybody who, these days, makes a controversial contribution to a USENET forum under his real name is a bloody fool. There is no point debating this anymore: unrestricted archiving of USENET news has become de-facto accepted. But that doesn't make it right or a good thing.
Watermarks are probably one of the less offensive DRM methods--they allow copying and playing, but make it possible to trace content back to you. And they don't have to be perfect to do that--it's sufficient that they are reasonably hard to remove, which they are.
Well, as long as you're strictly a one person shop, that works. As soon as you start having to collaborate with someone else, the "single spreadsheet" approach doesn't work anymore.
If HD DVDs come with all sorts of restrictions, people might as well just subscribe to flat-fee video-on-demand services. I know I will. DVDs will likely increasingly be used for special content (like pr0n), but even that will probably be played back through the computer, not a DVD player.
The way companies could make HD DVD a success at this point would be to get rid of all region coding and all DRM and lower prices a little; that way, people might be tempted to replace their current DVD libraries. But as it is, I'm not going to replace any of the DVDs I have with HD ones.
The right way of running Windows on Mac hardware is virtualized. Ditto for Linux. There is no reason to boot those and deal with drivers and other problems.
Actaully, that's not the last thing. The last thing you want is to have these laptops run Windows. And, frankly, even being in the first world, I'd prefer the $100 laptop to Microsoft's Origami, which is the usual brittle, sluggish, overpriced, short-lived crap companies like Microsoft like to put out.
OK, well, since you're claiming that you have an idea of "the relative quality of your products", why don't you actually provide some real comparison with CVS, subversion, darcs, monotone, git, and the GUIs available for those systems. You know, tell us why you think yours is better.
"Go download it and see for yourself" is a lame marketing pitch.
I dunno--people might be able to handle 2x gravity. Obese people can weigh twice what normal people weigh and are still getting by. It's not quite the same, but it's close.
Realistically, the source code isn't going to do them much good without any means of verifying that the code that's actually loaded into each of the embedded systems on that fighter corresponds to the source code they have. And that's a really hard problem.
It's bad PR that Microsoft isn't using it.NET more aggressively in Vista, but it's also good software engineering: it doesn't make sense to rewrite large amounts of mostly working code, in particular when a company is already years behind on its schedule. Still, it would make sense for them to start moving some services over to.NET, like personal web server, FTP, and a few others, not just to spread.NET, but also to make them more robust and secure.
None of this has any bearing on whether it's a good idea to use.NET for new services or applications--it is.
The primary market for.NET will initially be custom software development, where it has big advantages. That's the place where software like Cocoa started as well; it takes many years for a platform to become mainstream after such beginnings.
You are missing the point. [...] For web service developers, REST and SOAP are both good options
No, you're missing the point. Just because webmonkeys don't know any better doesn't make REST and SOAP good protocols for managing and moving data around. Storage is about efficiency and standardization of data storage operations, and WebDAV and rsync provide that; REST and SOAP don't.
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Is it really the case that these two departments, with the hundreds, if not thousands of people they keep in employment, has yet to notice this?
You don't quite seem to understand how real life works. The issue for the courts is not "is this reasonable", the issue for the courts is "how can I clear my backlog of cases". Well, being able to say "this patent is vaild because the USPTO says so" is a very quick and simple way of getting a case off the table.
Judges, on the whole, operate no differently from hamburger flippers, assembly line workers, and people who clean your toilets: they want to spend the least amount of time and effort necessary to get their work done; without considerably more oversight than they have today, they're going to keep making the judgements that let them get back to playing golf as quickly as possible.
Disabled users may be helping the FOSS community, or at least a large part of it, to finally acknowledge a general attitude problem.
The "attitude problem" here is with people who think the FOSS community owes them anything.
Very likely, many office workers would like to sue, or at least to stop, any manager who told them, "next month you will have to use programs you never heard of before, with a different look and feel, because of some policy based on obscure theories about software engineering."
And very many office workers would like to sue, or at least stop, when they're told to use Windows. That's the way the cookie crumbles. If you don't like your work environment, you can always quit.
The only "obscure theory about software engineering" that comes along with FOSS is that you use it if you find it useful, and that you can change it if you don't like the way it works.
Disabled users have the actual legal weapons to do it.
Well, I'm sure Pietrosanti can cause trouble for FOSS in government: he's a politician and he likes Windows, and that kind of person always finds a way to rally people against FOSS. But I don't think Pietrosanti has actually made a convincing case. While specific environments in Linux (Gnome? OOo?) may still have some limitations when it comes to accessibility, other parts of Linux are actually better than Windows from an accessibility point of view.
In any case, if you are disabled and you are genuinely interested in making FOSS work for the disabled, there is only one way to make that happen: contribute your time, your skills, and/or your money. Legal threats won't make a big difference in the long run because there is really nobody to sue; at best, you may be able to hold up adoption of FOSS in some environments a little, until people manage to meet formal accessibility requirements nominally but in a way you probably won't like.
The solution to accessibility in FOSS is not to improve communications between the disabled and FOSS communities, it's for the disabled to become part of the FOSS community.
Are you trying to say that USENET and IRC is a private conversation?
Your reasoning didn't involve the notion of a private conversation.
A better analogy is whether you can expect your comments to be recorded when you make statements out loud in a public room.
Well, and whether you may or may not do that depends on the circumstances; there is no general right to do that.
Interesting question. I agree its not about what authors failed to prohibit. I would see the issue of whether authors' expectations are reasonable (or even applicable). And what is the state of the copyright on all this?
The state of copyright is being defined by the courts--that's what we're talking about.
I just think it's a sad state of affairs when big companies can take individual contributions to the web and republish them in perpetuity without explicit permission, while individuals can get into big trouble for using content in electronic form even for non-commercial purposes. I think copyright is out of balance and favors big companies too much.
So, what we have heard over the last few weeks out of Microsoft is that they are really serious about security now, that they are really serious about offering software as services on the web, and that they are really serious about competing with Microsoft by making Office even more of a central component of enterprise computing.
What this basically shows is that Microsoft talks big and promises a lot. But we know from past experience that they are only delivering on a fraction of what they are promising. So, don't plan your IT infrastructure around any of those promises just yet.
But to think that conversations are not being archived simply ignores the many ways it can (and is) being done.
Well, hey, by that reasoning, there is no problem people archiving your telephone conversations, right? I mean, there are so many way it can (and is) being done.
In any case, of course, some people were aware that this stuff ended up on backup tapes. But those same people assumed that copyright meant something and that people couldn't just republish it.
Being the suspicious kind, I assumed even in the early 1980's that anything I post would eventually end up on-line and searchable. And when people started publishing some of my USENET posts as magazine contributions without asking permission, it became equally clear that publishers and other big companies were willing to stomp all over copyright of individual authors.
None of that makes what DejaNews did right or desirable. Nor should people have to be as paranoid as I am in order to use an on-line forum. The real question is, in the end, not what USENET authors failed to prohibit, the real question is what the hell gives companies the right to copy content from the web and republish it in perpetuity from their own websites for commercial gain. And that's a question nobody has given a good answer to.
Perhaps we should apply a similar rule to physical communications. You know those letters your girlfriend sent you back in the '80s? I know you haven't seen her since you split up 20 years ago, but you'd better track her down and make sure she consents to your keeping them, and if you can't get her permission for whatever reason, you'd better shred them.
Excellent analogy! In most places, you are permitted to keep the physical letter, but you are not permitted to publish the letter, at least not for a long time.
You know, I'm glad past generations didn't think like you think, because the incidental, throwaway letters and diaries of the past, whose writers never thought for a moment that they would ever be read by anyone but their intended recipient, or kept for five minutes after they'd been read, have become today's invaluable insights into past ages.
That's no problem--in about a 150 years, Google may publish those archives, because the copyright has expired and the people involved are dead. They just shouldn't have a right to do it now.
First of all, it's irrelevant how many bad watermarking techniques there are since you only need one good one, and there are many good ones that are not "killed by simple diffs" and require much more effort to remove.
Second, even if you pick a bad watermarking technique, it doesn't matter: most people simply won't have multiple copies of a media file around to remove the watermark.
This isn't just a problem with Google--very few email service providers will guarantee that they actively remove deleted emails from all backup tapes. Getting secure, guaranteed, permanent deletion is a feature that you have to pay extra for. Some commercial mail service provides offer it to business as part of a package where they provide compliance with regulatory document retention requirements.
So in short, Google archives all Usenet posting where the author doesn't say that he doesn't want it archived.
That's a default that DejaNews set, without public debate, and simply unilaterally applied to the first 15 years of USENET postings.
And I think it's the wrong default. The proper fair use balance would be for web companies to be permitted short-term archiving (maybe up to 6 weeks) necessary to support indexing and web services, but not long-term archiving; permanent archiving and republication in full simply does not fall under "fair use" anymore. And web companies don't need it for providing search, data mining, or web services either.
I guess if the default would be changed, then the only difference would be that radio stations would start to explicitly say all the time that you may not rebroadcast their material. Which I don't consider an improvement over the current situation.
Well, so you recognize that radio stations and web companies have different defaults. The solution is not to change the default for radio stations, the solution is to change the default for web companies because permanent archiving and republication simply shouldn't fall under "fair use" in any medium.
You're missing the point. My point is that many USENET users used to post under the assumption that their postings would go away in a few weeks because that's what they did.
When DejaNews created a complete, non-expiring, searchable archive of USENET, that changed the way USENET was being used fundamentally, and I don't think for the better.
Because anything that gets posted to USENET (or posted on a web site) gets archived and remains around forever, people simply cannot have open, non-anonymous discussions anymore.
The fact that I'm "penguin-collective" and you are "jgardner100", with no E-mail and no real name attached, illustrates my point. In the 1980's, we would probably have debated on USENET under our real names. And I think it's a big shame that the world has changed in this way.
The solution would be for courts to respect individual copyright law and individual intent again; blanket, perpetual archiving of web and USENET content simply should not be permitted. Companies like Google could operate perfectly well if they were limited to archiving web pages for a couple of months under fair use provisions unless the page owner has opted in for a longer archival period.
Archiving was certainly never required, but conversely it was never forbidden, as far as I know.
I'm confused--are you trying to make a legal argument? A technical argument? Or what? Because I'm not.
I'm saying: USENET was used by its users with the expectation that it was an ephemeral medium. Regardless of what laws or RFCs allowed or didn't allow, that's the ground rules most people assumed and most people acted in accordance with. Now that it has become clear that it is being archived, that has changed the way users behave. Are you disputing that?
Debating fine legalistic points at this point is useless. The court has spoken. Clearly, companies have wide latitude in archiving, repurposing, and republishing anything individuals put on the web or on USENET, without the permission of those individuals. I think that's bad, but we'll have to live with the consequences.
This is typical for how scientists try to make the best out of bad experimental results. Yes, it's true that 80% of the cancer cells committed suicide, but that's because 80% of the mice themselves committed suicide when the capsaicin was "applied" to their prostates. You would, too.
Some of the mice hung themselves, while some others shot themselves; the scientists still haven't figured out where they got the ropes and guns, which only underlines how painful the treatment is.
Well, I generally like Google, but this is a disturbing asymmetry to me.
When an individual posts something to USENET, then apparently it's OK for companies like Google to archive and republish that stuff, even making money from it if they put advertising on the same page.
But how is that different from broadcasting? It seems to me that if what Google is doing is OK, then I should be able to record, archive, and republish any music or other programming broadcast over the Internet or airwaves.
Thankfully, we can all still read Usenet articles on Google as well as other archive services.
Web-based reading of USENET is fine; the problem is with archiving: USENET was originally not intended to be archived, and the fact that it is being archived has greatly changed it. Anybody who, these days, makes a controversial contribution to a USENET forum under his real name is a bloody fool. There is no point debating this anymore: unrestricted archiving of USENET news has become de-facto accepted. But that doesn't make it right or a good thing.
Watermarks are probably one of the less offensive DRM methods--they allow copying and playing, but make it possible to trace content back to you. And they don't have to be perfect to do that--it's sufficient that they are reasonably hard to remove, which they are.
Well, as long as you're strictly a one person shop, that works. As soon as you start having to collaborate with someone else, the "single spreadsheet" approach doesn't work anymore.
If HD DVDs come with all sorts of restrictions, people might as well just subscribe to flat-fee video-on-demand services. I know I will. DVDs will likely increasingly be used for special content (like pr0n), but even that will probably be played back through the computer, not a DVD player.
The way companies could make HD DVD a success at this point would be to get rid of all region coding and all DRM and lower prices a little; that way, people might be tempted to replace their current DVD libraries. But as it is, I'm not going to replace any of the DVDs I have with HD ones.
The right way of running Windows on Mac hardware is virtualized. Ditto for Linux. There is no reason to boot those and deal with drivers and other problems.
Actaully, that's not the last thing. The last thing you want is to have these laptops run Windows. And, frankly, even being in the first world, I'd prefer the $100 laptop to Microsoft's Origami, which is the usual brittle, sluggish, overpriced, short-lived crap companies like Microsoft like to put out.
OK, well, since you're claiming that you have an idea of "the relative quality of your products", why don't you actually provide some real comparison with CVS, subversion, darcs, monotone, git, and the GUIs available for those systems. You know, tell us why you think yours is better.
"Go download it and see for yourself" is a lame marketing pitch.
I dunno--people might be able to handle 2x gravity. Obese people can weigh twice what normal people weigh and are still getting by. It's not quite the same, but it's close.
Realistically, the source code isn't going to do them much good without any means of verifying that the code that's actually loaded into each of the embedded systems on that fighter corresponds to the source code they have. And that's a really hard problem.
It's bad PR that Microsoft isn't using it .NET more aggressively in Vista, but it's also good software engineering: it doesn't make sense to rewrite large amounts of mostly working code, in particular when a company is already years behind on its schedule. Still, it would make sense for them to start moving some services over to .NET, like personal web server, FTP, and a few others, not just to spread .NET, but also to make them more robust and secure.
.NET for new services or applications--it is.
.NET will initially be custom software development, where it has big advantages. That's the place where software like Cocoa started as well; it takes many years for a platform to become mainstream after such beginnings.
None of this has any bearing on whether it's a good idea to use
The primary market for
Except Amazon doesn't seem to support rsync, which makes uploading to it a big pain. Fortunately, many other hosting plans do.
You are missing the point. [...] For web service developers, REST and SOAP are both good options
No, you're missing the point. Just because webmonkeys don't know any better doesn't make REST and SOAP good protocols for managing and moving data around. Storage is about efficiency and standardization of data storage operations, and WebDAV and rsync provide that; REST and SOAP don't.