The article notes that due to the size of both the processor and the potential chipsets it will be impossible to use the Athlon 4 in the "thin to light notebooks" category; instead, the target would appear to be notebooks in the "desktop replacement" category. As the area of increasing demand is in the "thin to light" segment and as prices are being cut for previous laptop models to clear out inventory, I am doubtful this initial launch of notebook Athlon 4's will have much impact.
I have seen several replies claiming that someone can just mirror the distribution. IANAL, but I am pretty sure this can't be done legally without permission. While individual parts of the distribution may be under the GPL, the aggregate distribution may be under a different copyright. If I recall correctly, OpenBSD CDs consist almost entirely of individual parts that are under copyrights that allow third party redistribution; however, the CDs themselves are copyrighted by Theo de Raadt. You therefore can't legally put up an copied image of an official OpenBSD CD up on a mirror without permission from Theo de Raadt. As long as one includes the source of the individual GPLed components in any download or CD and does not impose additional restrictions on modification or redistribution of the individual GPLed components in addition to those of the GPL, one has discharged the obligations of the GPL without having to have the entire work free to the world to mirror.
According to the Matrox driver status notes the G450 is prominent in its absence. According to the DRI User Guide "MGAHALlib.a is a binary library Matrox has provided for use under Linux to expose functionality for which they can not
provide documentation. (For example TV-Out requires MacroVision be enabled on the output.)" and "Currently the MGAHAL library is required for the G450 to work." A simple search of what remains of deja.com reveals many posts from people struggling to get their G450 cards to work with XFree86. Matrox has binary drivers, beta, unsupported, for XFree86 4.0.2 and Linux at their site.
Can someone shed more light on the status of the G450 and XFree86 support?
Instead of coming up with a novel linkage to PDAs and/or computers, a simpler explanation is that the people suffering memory loss are victims of sleep deprivation. Any number of factors could result in the loss of the crucial REM phase of sleep where memories are more permanently processed for retention. (For example, people might simply not be allocating enough sleep time to even reach the proper dream phase.) Notice that the observations were about a specific range of ages, people in their 20s and 30s. The only contribution of modern technology might be in the increased temptation to sacrifice sleep time for entertainment, a phenomena I suspect would hold true for television as much as for computers.
I urge everyone who thinks that DeCSS was reverse engineering to actually read materials such as the transcript of Johansen's testimony. There is simply no evidence that DeCSS was the product of legitimate reverse engineering. Not just once but twice anonymous information was contributed to crack the problem in a form that does not resemble what one would get from treating the system as a black box. Johansen testified: "Yes, I believe the CSS authentication had been posted anonymously in Assembler language on the Internet, and Derek Fawcus had picked that up and rewritten it in C language and posted it on his website." Note the word "Assembler". Johansen also testified that he was given further information from a complete stranger on IRC. On the Livid-dev mailing list on Saturday, October 02, 1999 Eric Smith had posted: "The specific issue WRT the CSS code is that the x86 code was apparently simply ripped out of a working commerical implementation (which was presumably copyrighted)" to which Derek Fawcus had replied "Well I guess it might have been, but I don't _know_ that." (Fawcus went on to explain how he had "worked to understand the algorithm underlying the x86 code.") Why the developers didn't run away as fast as they could once there were questions is something I cannot understand. Didn't anyone learn from previous examples such as Compaq's reverse engineering of the IBM PC BIOS? Compaq set up their reverse engineering effort so that at every stage they could prove the source of information using engineers whom they could assert did not have prior exposure to IBM IP.
Your example shows why it's not the absence of voice recognition software that is the problem, and why the addition will not make software for the average home user better. A query for the weather is by nature repetitive and fairly predictable. So why didn't the computer know in advance that you might be interested in the weather and have the information waiting for you? The reason as Alan Cooper points out in his book About Face: The Essentials of User Interface Design is that computers and software are stupid. The software is written to be stupid, it has no memory, and it has no intelligence. And that's not going to change anytime soon. What people are going to need for computers to become useful as assistants is for the computers to have intelligence approaching assistants. If you look at say the movie 2001, observe the sheer amount of information that HAL required for any of his functioning. Is there any effort for such information sharing in either the commercial or open source environments? No, such sharing is impossible under current licensing restrictions. So we aren't going to have a home computer that understands the simple concept of "weather", requiring any query about the weather to be explictly programmed. Sorry but PCs capable of functioning as information assistants are the flying cars of this generation.
Similar to other documents I've read, this interview with Jon Johansen states "encryption code wasn't in fact written by me, but written by the German member" and that he was keeping the names of his collaborators anonymous. (At the time of this interview he only knew these people by IRC nicks.) I would contend that the core of DeCSS is this encryption code. The account of DeCSS's creation given by the EFF in their brief is in my opinion intentionally misleading. Fortunately for the EFF and 2600 it does not appear that the MPAA has decided to use this distinction, for now. It is important because the DMCA from what I read authorizes "reverse engineering" only if the copyrighted materials were being used legally. If the ones who did the encryption code are anonymous, how can it be proven that the information used was obtained legally? Yes there is an account after the fact about how one could have obtained this information, but if the source is anonymous, how can this be proven? My objection to characterizing DeCSS as being written by a "boy" (EFF's word not mine) is that this is simply a misrepresentation of the events for emotional reasons. If we believe what Johansen has said, we have no idea what the ages of the other coders were. They could have been well into their thirties and beyond. And more troubling, there is nothing to rule out that they were industry insiders leaking trade secrets. This is not "reverse engineering" in any sense of what Compaq did when it legitimately reverse engineered the IBM BIOS with people it could prove did not have access to IBM IP.
I believe that on First Amendment grounds the Supreme Court will eventually rule to lift the injunction against 2600 for linking, but that the DeCSS code will be ruled to infringe the Constitutional DMCA. After all I believe in the Betamax case the Supreme Court ruled that Congress had to specify explicitly what were the limits of fair use. Congress has done so. So we'll get 2600 scoring a media victory while a Supreme Court case will set a long term precedent against fair use, one whose significence will be equal to Betamax. This I feel is madness for the EFF to pursue if it had the best interests of the community at heart. Find a better case.
Of course sheer corporate greed is probably more responsible, but the United States is raising energy prices considerably. I consider this one of those unspoken "done deals" similar to Clinton being the one who was left to implement NAFTA and Most Favorable Trade status for China. Regardless of which party is in power, regardless of side rhetoric meant to appease special interests, the proven method for encouraging conservation of raising prices dramatically is a reality for both the present and the future. Perhaps it is easier to slip it past the general public explaining it from Republican terms as "market forces" rather than for the Democrats to push for an "environmental tax".
A brief search on google revealed the following (admittedly old) link about spam and email. I'm curious whether the reasoning would apply to the present case.
Like clockwork an article is rolled out every few weeks to incite the usual replies about DeCSS. Reading the postings here one might get the impression there is a large constituency opposed to present DVD restrictions. However not long ago web sites, Usenet newsgroups etc. were mobilized not to publicize the shortcomings but to fight an all-out "war" of advocacy against laserdisc advocates. Far more resources were contributed on the Internet to promote the triumph of DVD, resources given freely by people unaffiliated with the major media powers. It is simply not true that the reason there is no public outcry over current restrictions is a conspiracy of silence imposed by these powers. The reason there is no outcry is that there is no constituency that wants to protest. People have already voted with their dollars and advocacy: At all cost their investment in DVD technology must not be invalidated. Consumers have made their bed, now they must lie in it. There was a clear tradeoff between consumers and industry to get content put on the superior and longer-lasting (compared to video tape) DVDs. Industry simply would not have signed off on putting their content onto DVDs without this legislation. For the average American consumer there has never been better choice in content, there has never been more accessible mass importation of foreign product such as Japanese anime. Overall, things got better.
As the code written by the project lead is all GPLed (not necessarily some contributed portions) wouldn't it make sense for the Pliant project to join GNU? The project would get some free publicity, mirrors everywhere, and an extra boost from the GNU brand. There might have to be reassignment of copyright, but on the other hand, in the long run it might be cleaner to have contributors reassigning to the trusty FSF.
Did anyone complaining about the deletion of mp3s follow the link to Half Price Hosting's web site? I now believe the author of the article was being somewhat misleading describing them as simply an ISP. The web site makes it clear this company is concentrating on offering low cost "unrestricted" data transfer web hosting. Under that business model there is simply no way for this company to allow certain popular types of content else they would not be able to afford the bandwidth. If people would read the other conditions in the terms of service, not only at mp3's banned, but so are pornographic materials or warez. Because this company's business is directly related to conserving bandwith, it seems to me that not only do they have a legal right to restrict service but they have a moral right as well.
This company appears to have no leverage in restricting competition or forcing customers to choose their service. Allowing such companies to offer different levels of service in exchange for lower prices as long as there are no barriers to competition seems to me to be the essence of the proper functioning of free markets. This seems to be another pointless flamewar where the usual suspects are trotted out.
Sorry but the people know enough about 2600 to know that 2600 are brats, and the people aren't going to care what happens to them. Anyone like 2600 whose main issue is Kevin Mittnick is going to be taken about as seriously as the the anti-gun controls activists who went off on a tangent about Waco.
If you want to mobilize the people to stand for civil rights, use a Rosa Parks. If you want to lose public sympathy go right ahead and push 2600 as representing the movement.
The ACLU does not defend every potential case. No one has the resources to do that. The secret is to put resources behind good cases and win precedent to leverage for other cases.
Unfortunately we have a situation where groups like 2600 and the EFF actually benefit from the situation worsening. 2600 benefits because that advances their idealogical agenda, the EFF benefits because they can increase fundraising. There is simply no incentive for either to choose the right fight at the right time. It is unfortunate that Judge Kaplan did not order 2600 to pay the plaintiffs' court costs, that would have made the defendents a little less nonchalent about taking the case eventually to the Supreme Court where a loss would be the ultimate disaster.
Note that even a win at the Supreme Court won't last for long. If one reads the decision to stay the injunction against Napster, the justices from the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals clearly said that Congress had the right to clarify the laws governing the interpretation around precedents such as the Sony Betamax ruling. 2600 will win the publicity battle only for an insignificent fringe sector of the electorate. The movement will be classified by the rest of the populace as extremists.
Note that in the current US Presidential, Congressional, Senate, or gubanatorial campaigns there has absolutely been zero public interest in the issues surrounding 2600 or Napster despite incessant articles on Internet and sometimes mainstream news outlets. The current EFF approach is hardly the one to create a civil rights movement as Martin Luther King Jr. did--it's the equivalent of the Nation of Islam and Louis Farrakan.
Python license--the real issue isn't the GPL
on
Post Apocalyptic
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· Score: 1
The new Python 1.6 and above license isn't a problem. Any non-GPL compatibility can be worked around. The real problem is Python 1.5.2.
Recently Tim Peters posted the following:
From: "Tim Peters"
To: python-list@python.org
Subject: RE: Public Domain Python
Date: Sat, 9 Sep 2000 15:31:06 -0400
Message-ID: LNBBLJKPBEHFEDALKOLCCECEHFAA.tim_one@email.msn.com
"Mine too, except that, if you read the CNRI License FAQ very carefully, you'll find repeated hints that CNRI believes they can *terminate* your "right" to use older versions of Python (from 1.3 up to but not including 1.6b1) anytime they feel like it, and without cause. The FAQ says they don't "intend" to try to do that, but you won't find anything promising they *won't*."
"When I collected the FAQ questions, I also suggested the answers I believed the Python community wanted to hear. The suggested answer to #4 was that CNRI would not take action against users of older Pythons, provided they were in conformance with the requirements of the old license. This is one of the few cases where the answer changed beyond recognition by the time CNRI finished editing it. So they were offered the chance to put people at ease about this, but went out of their way to keep it unclear."
I argue that Debian needs to clarify immediately with copyright holder CNRI the
licensing of Python 1.5.2--whether CNRI considers the 1.5.2 license to be valid and
whether CNRI intends for 1.5.2 to be distributed with that license.
1) It's the safe and prudent thing to do.
The copyright files in Python 1.5.2 list Guido van Rossum as the author, but he had
signed over copyright to CNRI when he started working for them.(1) The copyright files
only list the dates 1991-1995, a decision http://www.python.org/doc/Copyright.html says was "deliberate", and do not list CNRI as the copyright holder. Guido's
announcement of 1.6b1 includes the phrases "never placed a CNRI-specific license on the
software" and "clarify the licensing".(2)
Tim Peters has said "CNRI claims that the existing (CWI) Python license isn't a valid
license, and while that claim makes little sense to me I'm not a lawyer"(3) and
speculated "If CNRI claims they released software without a valid license, the legality
of using 1.5.2 and 1.6a2 is muddy... Since it seems very unlikely they'll agree to say that
the CWI license is valid, perhaps they could be persuaded to promise not to press any
claims based on the presumed invalidity of the CWI license excepting claims against BeOpen
PythonLabs."(4)
Guido van Rossum's announcements and Tim Peters postings could hardly have been
made in a more public manner, in Python's mailing lists and in Usenet's comp.lang.python.
I posted pointers and quotes to debian-legal about a week ago. Debian has said in the
past that releases are not made on a set schedule, they are made when the distribution
is "ready".
CNRI's opinion on these questions is simply unknown. Tim Peters has consistently
been advising in public writings that the copyright holder CNRI needs to be asked.
2) It's the right thing to do.
A policy of always asking the copyright holder when there is any doubt about the
intent of licensing builds trust between Debian and software creators and trust
between Debian and users. Debian's stance on including KDE was made despite the
extreme unlikelihood of any copyright holder suing Debian and despite other distributions'
judgment. Now we have a situation where the copyright holder CNRI has finished
detailed negotiations "to clarify the licensing" with BeOpen over a new license
for Python 1.6b1.
The license included with Python 1.5.2 states that: "Permission to use, copy,
modify, and distribute this software and its documentation for any purpose and without
fee is hereby granted" subject to certain easily met conditions such as retention of
original copyright notices. Yet Tim Peters has written: "The gripe here was that,
since they didn't believe the CWI license was valid, they-- as the copyright
holder --didn't believe we had the right to release a derivative work without a license
they *liked*. As things turned out, it appears the only license they like is the
one they wrote."(5) Now the context of what Tim was talking about was that BeOpen,
Guido van Rossum's new employer, wanted to cleanly get permission from CNRI, Guido van
Rossum's former employer, to avoid any chance of a lawsuit. The copyright holder
CNRI needs to be asked for the users' sake, so that users can know that the license of
software distributed by Debian truthfully reflects the will of the copyright holder.
(1) From: "Tim Peters" tim_one@email.msn.com
To: python-list@python.org
Subject: RE: Questions for Tim Peters
Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2000 02:12:02 -0400
Message-ID: LNBBLJKPBEHFEDALKOLCKELKGNAA.tim_one@email.msn.com Newsgroups: comp.lang.python
(2) From: Guido van Rossum guido@beopen.com
Subject: Python 1.6b1 is released!
Date: 05 Aug 2000 00:00:00 GMT
Message-ID: cpog381l62.fsf@cj20424-a.reston1.va.home.com
Newsgroups: comp.lang.python
(3) From: "Tim Peters" tim_one@email.msn.com
To: "Greg Ewing" see@my.signature
Cc: python-list@python.org
Subject: RE: The State of Python
Date: Mon, 31 Jul 2000 01:50:53 -0400
Message-ID: LNBBLJKPBEHFEDALKOLCOEBCGNAA.tim_one@email.msn.com
(4) From: "Tim Peters" tim_one@email.msn.com
To: python-list@python.org, "Guido van Rossum" guido@python.org
Subject: RE: Questions for Guido van Rossum (Was:...Tim Peters)
Date: Sat, 5 Aug 2000 22:25:23 -0400
Message-ID: LNBBLJKPBEHFEDALKOLCKEDCGOAA.tim_one@email.msn.com
(5) From: "Tim Peters" tim_one@email.msn.com
To: python-list@python.org
Subject: RE: Questions for Guido van Rossum
Date: Sun, 6 Aug 2000 02:14:24 -0400
Message-ID: LNBBLJKPBEHFEDALKOLCEEEBGOAA.tim_one@email.msn.com
All signs of sharing and cooperation are welcome. However, it seems to me that soon the Linux and BSD communities are headed to a de facto total divorce, although this will be denied for a while.
The instrument of this in my opinion will be the inclusion of ReiserFS as part of an official stable Linux kernel. From what I have read from various mailing lists such as those at http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=reiserfs&r=1&w=2 and Debian, ReiserFS will only be licensed for free operating systems under the GPL. In my opinion this means that ReiserFS will never be part of the base distributions of the free source BSDs.
I believe that in five years ReiserFS will be the default file system for most Linux distributions. Of course ordinarily with Unix associated filesystems the particular one does not matter all that much for data interchangeability, but ReiserFS is but a small part of Hans Reiser's rather persuasive and exciting vision http://devlinux.com/projects/reiserfs/whitepaper.h tml. True right now there are many statements about how there will be upward compatible migration paths for different filesystems and even operating systems, but I see no way to avoid eventual nonportability of information between ReiserFS and other filesystems.
And that's when the total break will occur. ReiserFS is getting support right now from some of the heavyweights such as SuSE, which means that there will be a high degree of integration between ReiserFS and the distributions. Conversely if ReiserFS isn't part of the base free source BSD distributions, it will not enjoy those communities' professional quality integration efforts.
In my opinion the free source community would have been better off a while ago adopting a common stance for open implementable standards regardless of GPL, BSD, or MIT X licensing, but that window of opportunity of probably past.
Once a company or group releases source code, it's hard for me to see why they should not GPL it. The key to making this work is to require copyright assignment for any patches. Then the company retains the right to reuse code in other projects or custom work under any conditions.
As the FSF itself requires copyright assignment, there is no community objection to such a practice. It just seems to me to be all gain and no pain.
And yet...music companies CD sales are increasing.
I think what will be transitory is the idea that hackers and the net can overcome hardware restrictions enough to make a dent in corporate profits. The Asian companies that used to have a stake in pushing technologies such as VCRs through legal hurdles including appeals all the way to the US Supreme Court are now partially content providers.
They've stonewalled cheap DVD blanks, recorders for HDTV, etc. It's only begun.
Sigh, yet another piece with highly intelligent and thought-provoking ideas that is ruined by unnecessary appeals to emotionalism. Can we get one opinion piece from an important writer of software that doesn't refer to the Unibomber, gun control, or evoke Godwin's Law?
If only debate could be structured somewhat like software interface, which ironically is one of Meyer's areas of enormous contribution. While it may seem cute to include a ranting against gun control and United States attitudes towards it, surely one can see that such appeals are strictly not needed. What is not needed should be pared away to avoid complication.
As I have gotten older I have come to the conclusion that it is completely impossible to discern true motives or morality of an individual. We simply can't know whether someone in his or her private life chooses to perform many random acts of kindness or is a monster who commits violent crimes. Actually, almost all people's lives are something of a mix of good and evil. (I just read on the news that Bill Gates's foundation is helping to pay for a cheap vaccine for AIDS for about the cost of a dollar per dose that is targetted towards helping desperately poor Third World countries.) Thus it has become more and more irrelevant to me whether someone professes a particular religion, creed, or political viewpoint. I just care whether they can bring the goods technically.
Unless you are able to program without using one's hands with say voice recognition software, I would advise not doing so on at least one day a week. A friend of mine is undergoing deterioration from RSI. Then again if voice recognition becomes the preferred means of interacting with computers, I think we'll have to take at least one day off from using that as well, as one's vocal cords can easily be overstressed.
I disagree with the interpretation of the UpsideToday article's "Like craft brewers, de Raadt and the OpenBSD development team prefer to let the software age a little, offering only two updates per year."
Two updates per year at fairly predictable times is quite fast for operating systems. Also this contrasts with the philosophy of no guarantees whatsoever about when releases will be made, a philosophy that I believe has been demonstrated to result in the longest aged software, for no good reason.
Looking at OpenBSD's current changelog, they are at least testing almost all of the important recently released software such as GCC's and Perl's.
I think UpsideToday has it 180 degrees backwards. OpenBSD's fairly regular releases means that users will get inspected and verified packages faster than if they used another operating system where there is no set schedule. I think OpenBSD simply has better management in this respect because they have a disciplined schedule. They're releasing and updating at the fastest rate possible.
I disagree with the use of the GNU Free Documentation License for a specification, in this case Microsoft's extensions of Kerberos. Wouldn't a specification tend to have the equivalent of header file information, interfaces, function calls, variables etc.? Now IANAL, but in order to implement a specification, a programmer might need to copy from the document the exact form of the interfaces, so wouldn't the program be a derived work of the GFDLed document, and thus be required to be released under the GFDL? Reading the GFDL, I am not even sure that source code GFDLed is compatible with GPLed source code.
With the current legal climate I think it would be unwise to rely on "fair use" defenses. Perhaps an amended form of the GFDL for specifications can explicitly permit derived source code, similar to how autoconf produced scripts are explicitly unencumbered.
From what I understand, the Norwegian 16 year old Johansen didn't actually do the reverse engineering--it's some anonymous person/people in Germany and Holland.
My reading of the DMCA is that reverse engineering is permitted only if the person doing it owns the product legally. As the authors are anonymous, it seems to me that it would be impossible to verify whether they had legal copies or not.
I just don't see the reverse engineering legal argument standing up in the US court system. As I said, I know nothing about the law, but the cases of reverse engineering that were upheld by the courts such as Compaq's reverse engineering the BIOS for the IBM PC seemed to involve a clear line of accountability for how the information was obtained and who coded. I don't know if the technology underlying DeCSS would have passed the standards for legal reverse engineering even before the DMCA.
In my uninformed opinion, with the growth of the Linux market, had DeCSS not been written, some company would have stepped up and paid the fees to produce closed source binary drivers, similar to the market for commercial X servers. I am wondering if the anonymous authorship will guarantee that at least in the US there will never be legal software for DVD playback.
Again I ask people to read Joy's article and see what he's advocating. Joy isn't really arguing the technology of the future is inherently more dangerous than say nuclear or biological weapons, he's saying what's dangerous is individuals having access. The solution that Joy sometimes implicitly and sometimes explicitly is advocating is to restrict individual access to information and technology. For example, Joy says that IP laws could be "strengthened" to prevent misusage of technology--a new class of thought crimes.
What bothers me almost as much as Joy's opinions are how he is advocating them. For someone with a doctorate, Joy shows a shocking lack of logical progression in his arguments. Joy brings up Ted Kaczynski merely to evoke emotions in the reader without acknowledging that Kaczynski refutes Joy's arguments about how individuals could misuse the technology of the future to inflict global harm. Joy doesn't even mention that a brilliant man like Kaczynski who is psychopathic would simply not have either the resources or the will to pursue the knowledge needed to inflict massive damage. Kaczynski once he left mathematics was starting from scratch as a bomb maker. Also since Kaczynski rejected technology all he had left was to fashion homemade bombs from simple materials. At no time was Ted Kaczynski capable of threatening global harm.
In fact for decades the popular media has reported many ways of threatening large populations such as attacks on the water supply or the air. The closest such incident that has happened was possibly a cult in Japan who were manufacturing poison gas.
I believe that any objective reading of history will show that whatever global threats existed in the last century came not from individuals but from governments. Organization and resources lie behind mass events. From the World Wars through the killing fields through Rwanda we have seen the death to millions that government sanctioned killing is capable of inflicting.
I find it very disturbing that one of the architects of Java is so strongly advocating restricting individual rights. I wonder what is the agenda behind advocating taking computing away from decentralized PCs and putting it back into centralized servers, of moving computing power away from general purpose user programmable PCs to dumb specialized appliances.
Slashdot Mirror
The article notes that due to the size of both the processor and the potential chipsets it will be impossible to use the Athlon 4 in the "thin to light notebooks" category; instead, the target would appear to be notebooks in the "desktop replacement" category. As the area of increasing demand is in the "thin to light" segment and as prices are being cut for previous laptop models to clear out inventory, I am doubtful this initial launch of notebook Athlon 4's will have much impact.
I have seen several replies claiming that someone can just mirror the distribution. IANAL, but I am pretty sure this can't be done legally without permission. While individual parts of the distribution may be under the GPL, the aggregate distribution may be under a different copyright. If I recall correctly, OpenBSD CDs consist almost entirely of individual parts that are under copyrights that allow third party redistribution; however, the CDs themselves are copyrighted by Theo de Raadt. You therefore can't legally put up an copied image of an official OpenBSD CD up on a mirror without permission from Theo de Raadt. As long as one includes the source of the individual GPLed components in any download or CD and does not impose additional restrictions on modification or redistribution of the individual GPLed components in addition to those of the GPL, one has discharged the obligations of the GPL without having to have the entire work free to the world to mirror.
Can someone shed more light on the status of the G450 and XFree86 support?
Instead of coming up with a novel linkage to PDAs and/or computers, a simpler explanation is that the people suffering memory loss are victims of sleep deprivation. Any number of factors could result in the loss of the crucial REM phase of sleep where memories are more permanently processed for retention. (For example, people might simply not be allocating enough sleep time to even reach the proper dream phase.) Notice that the observations were about a specific range of ages, people in their 20s and 30s. The only contribution of modern technology might be in the increased temptation to sacrifice sleep time for entertainment, a phenomena I suspect would hold true for television as much as for computers.
I urge everyone who thinks that DeCSS was reverse engineering to actually read materials such as the transcript of Johansen's testimony. There is simply no evidence that DeCSS was the product of legitimate reverse engineering. Not just once but twice anonymous information was contributed to crack the problem in a form that does not resemble what one would get from treating the system as a black box. Johansen testified: "Yes, I believe the CSS authentication had been posted anonymously in Assembler language on the Internet, and Derek Fawcus had picked that up and rewritten it in C language and posted it on his website." Note the word "Assembler". Johansen also testified that he was given further information from a complete stranger on IRC. On the Livid-dev mailing list on Saturday, October 02, 1999 Eric Smith had posted: "The specific issue WRT the CSS code is that the x86 code was apparently simply ripped out of a working commerical implementation (which was presumably copyrighted)" to which Derek Fawcus had replied "Well I guess it might have been, but I don't _know_ that." (Fawcus went on to explain how he had "worked to understand the algorithm underlying the x86 code.") Why the developers didn't run away as fast as they could once there were questions is something I cannot understand. Didn't anyone learn from previous examples such as Compaq's reverse engineering of the IBM PC BIOS? Compaq set up their reverse engineering effort so that at every stage they could prove the source of information using engineers whom they could assert did not have prior exposure to IBM IP.
Your example shows why it's not the absence of voice recognition software that is the problem, and why the addition will not make software for the average home user better. A query for the weather is by nature repetitive and fairly predictable. So why didn't the computer know in advance that you might be interested in the weather and have the information waiting for you? The reason as Alan Cooper points out in his book About Face: The Essentials of User Interface Design is that computers and software are stupid. The software is written to be stupid, it has no memory, and it has no intelligence. And that's not going to change anytime soon. What people are going to need for computers to become useful as assistants is for the computers to have intelligence approaching assistants. If you look at say the movie 2001, observe the sheer amount of information that HAL required for any of his functioning. Is there any effort for such information sharing in either the commercial or open source environments? No, such sharing is impossible under current licensing restrictions. So we aren't going to have a home computer that understands the simple concept of "weather", requiring any query about the weather to be explictly programmed. Sorry but PCs capable of functioning as information assistants are the flying cars of this generation.
I believe that on First Amendment grounds the Supreme Court will eventually rule to lift the injunction against 2600 for linking, but that the DeCSS code will be ruled to infringe the Constitutional DMCA. After all I believe in the Betamax case the Supreme Court ruled that Congress had to specify explicitly what were the limits of fair use. Congress has done so. So we'll get 2600 scoring a media victory while a Supreme Court case will set a long term precedent against fair use, one whose significence will be equal to Betamax. This I feel is madness for the EFF to pursue if it had the best interests of the community at heart. Find a better case.
Of course sheer corporate greed is probably more responsible, but the United States is raising energy prices considerably. I consider this one of those unspoken "done deals" similar to Clinton being the one who was left to implement NAFTA and Most Favorable Trade status for China. Regardless of which party is in power, regardless of side rhetoric meant to appease special interests, the proven method for encouraging conservation of raising prices dramatically is a reality for both the present and the future. Perhaps it is easier to slip it past the general public explaining it from Republican terms as "market forces" rather than for the Democrats to push for an "environmental tax".
A brief search on google revealed the following (admittedly old) link about spam and email. I'm curious whether the reasoning would apply to the present case.
Like clockwork an article is rolled out every few weeks to incite the usual replies about DeCSS. Reading the postings here one might get the impression there is a large constituency opposed to present DVD restrictions. However not long ago web sites, Usenet newsgroups etc. were mobilized not to publicize the shortcomings but to fight an all-out "war" of advocacy against laserdisc advocates. Far more resources were contributed on the Internet to promote the triumph of DVD, resources given freely by people unaffiliated with the major media powers. It is simply not true that the reason there is no public outcry over current restrictions is a conspiracy of silence imposed by these powers. The reason there is no outcry is that there is no constituency that wants to protest. People have already voted with their dollars and advocacy: At all cost their investment in DVD technology must not be invalidated. Consumers have made their bed, now they must lie in it. There was a clear tradeoff between consumers and industry to get content put on the superior and longer-lasting (compared to video tape) DVDs. Industry simply would not have signed off on putting their content onto DVDs without this legislation. For the average American consumer there has never been better choice in content, there has never been more accessible mass importation of foreign product such as Japanese anime. Overall, things got better.
As the code written by the project lead is all GPLed (not necessarily some contributed portions) wouldn't it make sense for the Pliant project to join GNU? The project would get some free publicity, mirrors everywhere, and an extra boost from the GNU brand. There might have to be reassignment of copyright, but on the other hand, in the long run it might be cleaner to have contributors reassigning to the trusty FSF.
Did anyone complaining about the deletion of mp3s follow the link to Half Price Hosting's web site? I now believe the author of the article was being somewhat misleading describing them as simply an ISP. The web site makes it clear this company is concentrating on offering low cost "unrestricted" data transfer web hosting. Under that business model there is simply no way for this company to allow certain popular types of content else they would not be able to afford the bandwidth. If people would read the other conditions in the terms of service, not only at mp3's banned, but so are pornographic materials or warez. Because this company's business is directly related to conserving bandwith, it seems to me that not only do they have a legal right to restrict service but they have a moral right as well.
This company appears to have no leverage in restricting competition or forcing customers to choose their service. Allowing such companies to offer different levels of service in exchange for lower prices as long as there are no barriers to competition seems to me to be the essence of the proper functioning of free markets. This seems to be another pointless flamewar where the usual suspects are trotted out.
Sorry but the people know enough about 2600 to know that 2600 are brats, and the people aren't going to care what happens to them. Anyone like 2600 whose main issue is Kevin Mittnick is going to be taken about as seriously as the the anti-gun controls activists who went off on a tangent about Waco.
If you want to mobilize the people to stand for civil rights, use a Rosa Parks. If you want to lose public sympathy go right ahead and push 2600 as representing the movement.
The ACLU does not defend every potential case. No one has the resources to do that. The secret is to put resources behind good cases and win precedent to leverage for other cases.
Unfortunately we have a situation where groups like 2600 and the EFF actually benefit from the situation worsening. 2600 benefits because that advances their idealogical agenda, the EFF benefits because they can increase fundraising. There is simply no incentive for either to choose the right fight at the right time. It is unfortunate that Judge Kaplan did not order 2600 to pay the plaintiffs' court costs, that would have made the defendents a little less nonchalent about taking the case eventually to the Supreme Court where a loss would be the ultimate disaster.
Note that even a win at the Supreme Court won't last for long. If one reads the decision to stay the injunction against Napster, the justices from the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals clearly said that Congress had the right to clarify the laws governing the interpretation around precedents such as the Sony Betamax ruling. 2600 will win the publicity battle only for an insignificent fringe sector of the electorate. The movement will be classified by the rest of the populace as extremists.
Note that in the current US Presidential, Congressional, Senate, or gubanatorial campaigns there has absolutely been zero public interest in the issues surrounding 2600 or Napster despite incessant articles on Internet and sometimes mainstream news outlets. The current EFF approach is hardly the one to create a civil rights movement as Martin Luther King Jr. did--it's the equivalent of the Nation of Islam and Louis Farrakan.
The new Python 1.6 and above license isn't a problem. Any non-GPL compatibility can be worked around. The real problem is Python 1.5.2.
m
Recently Tim Peters posted the following:
From: "Tim Peters"
To: python-list@python.org
Subject: RE: Public Domain Python
Date: Sat, 9 Sep 2000 15:31:06 -0400
Message-ID: LNBBLJKPBEHFEDALKOLCCECEHFAA.tim_one@email.msn.co
"Mine too, except that, if you read the CNRI License FAQ very carefully, you'll find repeated hints that CNRI believes they can *terminate* your "right" to use older versions of Python (from 1.3 up to but not including 1.6b1) anytime they feel like it, and without cause. The FAQ says they don't "intend" to try to do that, but you won't find anything promising they *won't*."
"When I collected the FAQ questions, I also suggested the answers I believed the Python community wanted to hear. The suggested answer to #4 was that CNRI would not take action against users of older Pythons, provided they were in conformance with the requirements of the old license. This is one of the few cases where the answer changed beyond recognition by the time CNRI finished editing it. So they were offered the chance to put people at ease about this, but went out of their way to keep it unclear."
(The following was posted to debian-devel.)
m
m
...Tim Peters)
m
m
I argue that Debian needs to clarify immediately with copyright holder CNRI the
licensing of Python 1.5.2--whether CNRI considers the 1.5.2 license to be valid and
whether CNRI intends for 1.5.2 to be distributed with that license.
1) It's the safe and prudent thing to do.
The copyright files in Python 1.5.2 list Guido van Rossum as the author, but he had
signed over copyright to CNRI when he started working for them.(1) The copyright files
only list the dates 1991-1995, a decision http://www.python.org/doc/Copyright.html
says was "deliberate", and do not list CNRI as the copyright holder. Guido's
announcement of 1.6b1 includes the phrases "never placed a CNRI-specific license on the
software" and "clarify the licensing".(2)
Tim Peters has said "CNRI claims that the existing (CWI) Python license isn't a valid
license, and while that claim makes little sense to me I'm not a lawyer"(3) and
speculated "If CNRI claims they released software without a valid license, the legality
of using 1.5.2 and 1.6a2 is muddy... Since it seems very unlikely they'll agree to say that
the CWI license is valid, perhaps they could be persuaded to promise not to press any
claims based on the presumed invalidity of the CWI license excepting claims against BeOpen
PythonLabs."(4)
Guido van Rossum's announcements and Tim Peters postings could hardly have been
made in a more public manner, in Python's mailing lists and in Usenet's comp.lang.python.
I posted pointers and quotes to debian-legal about a week ago. Debian has said in the
past that releases are not made on a set schedule, they are made when the distribution
is "ready".
CNRI's opinion on these questions is simply unknown. Tim Peters has consistently
been advising in public writings that the copyright holder CNRI needs to be asked.
2) It's the right thing to do.
A policy of always asking the copyright holder when there is any doubt about the
intent of licensing builds trust between Debian and software creators and trust
between Debian and users. Debian's stance on including KDE was made despite the
extreme unlikelihood of any copyright holder suing Debian and despite other distributions'
judgment. Now we have a situation where the copyright holder CNRI has finished
detailed negotiations "to clarify the licensing" with BeOpen over a new license
for Python 1.6b1.
The license included with Python 1.5.2 states that: "Permission to use, copy,
modify, and distribute this software and its documentation for any purpose and without
fee is hereby granted" subject to certain easily met conditions such as retention of
original copyright notices. Yet Tim Peters has written: "The gripe here was that,
since they didn't believe the CWI license was valid, they-- as the copyright
holder --didn't believe we had the right to release a derivative work without a license
they *liked*. As things turned out, it appears the only license they like is the
one they wrote."(5) Now the context of what Tim was talking about was that BeOpen,
Guido van Rossum's new employer, wanted to cleanly get permission from CNRI, Guido van
Rossum's former employer, to avoid any chance of a lawsuit. The copyright holder
CNRI needs to be asked for the users' sake, so that users can know that the license of
software distributed by Debian truthfully reflects the will of the copyright holder.
(1) From: "Tim Peters" tim_one@email.msn.com
To: python-list@python.org
Subject: RE: Questions for Tim Peters
Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2000 02:12:02 -0400
Message-ID: LNBBLJKPBEHFEDALKOLCKELKGNAA.tim_one@email.msn.co
Newsgroups: comp.lang.python
(2) From: Guido van Rossum guido@beopen.com
Subject: Python 1.6b1 is released!
Date: 05 Aug 2000 00:00:00 GMT
Message-ID: cpog381l62.fsf@cj20424-a.reston1.va.home.com
Newsgroups: comp.lang.python
(3) From: "Tim Peters" tim_one@email.msn.com
To: "Greg Ewing" see@my.signature
Cc: python-list@python.org
Subject: RE: The State of Python
Date: Mon, 31 Jul 2000 01:50:53 -0400
Message-ID: LNBBLJKPBEHFEDALKOLCOEBCGNAA.tim_one@email.msn.co
(4) From: "Tim Peters" tim_one@email.msn.com
To: python-list@python.org, "Guido van Rossum" guido@python.org
Subject: RE: Questions for Guido van Rossum (Was:
Date: Sat, 5 Aug 2000 22:25:23 -0400
Message-ID: LNBBLJKPBEHFEDALKOLCKEDCGOAA.tim_one@email.msn.co
(5) From: "Tim Peters" tim_one@email.msn.com
To: python-list@python.org
Subject: RE: Questions for Guido van Rossum
Date: Sun, 6 Aug 2000 02:14:24 -0400
Message-ID: LNBBLJKPBEHFEDALKOLCEEEBGOAA.tim_one@email.msn.co
Sincerely yours,
Henry Jones
All signs of sharing and cooperation are welcome. However, it seems to me that soon the Linux and BSD communities are headed to a de facto total divorce, although this will be denied for a while.
h tml. True right now there are many statements about how there will be upward compatible migration paths for different filesystems and even operating systems, but I see no way to avoid eventual nonportability of information between ReiserFS and other filesystems.
The instrument of this in my opinion will be the inclusion of ReiserFS as part of an official stable Linux kernel. From what I have read from various mailing lists such as those at http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=reiserfs&r=1&w=2 and Debian, ReiserFS will only be licensed for free operating systems under the GPL. In my opinion this means that ReiserFS will never be part of the base distributions of the free source BSDs.
I believe that in five years ReiserFS will be the default file system for most Linux distributions. Of course ordinarily with Unix associated filesystems the particular one does not matter all that much for data interchangeability, but ReiserFS is but a small part of Hans Reiser's rather persuasive and exciting vision http://devlinux.com/projects/reiserfs/whitepaper.
And that's when the total break will occur. ReiserFS is getting support right now from some of the heavyweights such as SuSE, which means that there will be a high degree of integration between ReiserFS and the distributions. Conversely if ReiserFS isn't part of the base free source BSD distributions, it will not enjoy those communities' professional quality integration efforts.
In my opinion the free source community would have been better off a while ago adopting a common stance for open implementable standards regardless of GPL, BSD, or MIT X licensing, but that window of opportunity of probably past.
Once a company or group releases source code, it's hard for me to see why they should not GPL it. The key to making this work is to require copyright assignment for any patches. Then the company retains the right to reuse code in other projects or custom work under any conditions.
As the FSF itself requires copyright assignment, there is no community objection to such a practice. It just seems to me to be all gain and no pain.
And yet...music companies CD sales are increasing.
I think what will be transitory is the idea that hackers and the net can overcome hardware restrictions enough to make a dent in corporate profits. The Asian companies that used to have a stake in pushing technologies such as VCRs through legal hurdles including appeals all the way to the US Supreme Court are now partially content providers.
They've stonewalled cheap DVD blanks, recorders for HDTV, etc. It's only begun.
Sigh, yet another piece with highly intelligent and thought-provoking ideas that is ruined by unnecessary appeals to emotionalism. Can we get one opinion piece from an important writer of software that doesn't refer to the Unibomber, gun control, or evoke Godwin's Law?
If only debate could be structured somewhat like software interface, which ironically is one of Meyer's areas of enormous contribution. While it may seem cute to include a ranting against gun control and United States attitudes towards it, surely one can see that such appeals are strictly not needed. What is not needed should be pared away to avoid complication.
As I have gotten older I have come to the conclusion that it is completely impossible to discern true motives or morality of an individual. We simply can't know whether someone in his or her private life chooses to perform many random acts of kindness or is a monster who commits violent crimes. Actually, almost all people's lives are something of a mix of good and evil. (I just read on the news that Bill Gates's foundation is helping to pay for a cheap vaccine for AIDS for about the cost of a dollar per dose that is targetted towards helping desperately poor Third World countries.) Thus it has become more and more irrelevant to me whether someone professes a particular religion, creed, or political viewpoint. I just care whether they can bring the goods technically.
Unless you are able to program without using one's hands with say voice recognition software, I would advise not doing so on at least one day a week. A friend of mine is undergoing deterioration from RSI. Then again if voice recognition becomes the preferred means of interacting with computers, I think we'll have to take at least one day off from using that as well, as one's vocal cords can easily be overstressed.
I disagree with the interpretation of the UpsideToday article's "Like craft brewers, de Raadt and the OpenBSD development team prefer to let the software age a little, offering only two updates per year."
Two updates per year at fairly predictable times is quite fast for operating systems. Also this contrasts with the philosophy of no guarantees whatsoever about when releases will be made, a philosophy that I believe has been demonstrated to result in the longest aged software, for no good reason.
Looking at OpenBSD's current changelog, they are at least testing almost all of the important recently released software such as GCC's and Perl's.
I think UpsideToday has it 180 degrees backwards. OpenBSD's fairly regular releases means that users will get inspected and verified packages faster than if they used another operating system where there is no set schedule. I think OpenBSD simply has better management in this respect because they have a disciplined schedule. They're releasing and updating at the fastest rate possible.
I disagree with the use of the GNU Free Documentation License for a specification, in this case Microsoft's extensions of Kerberos. Wouldn't a specification tend to have the equivalent of header file information, interfaces, function calls, variables etc.? Now IANAL, but in order to implement a specification, a programmer might need to copy from the document the exact form of the interfaces, so wouldn't the program be a derived work of the GFDLed document, and thus be required to be released under the GFDL? Reading the GFDL, I am not even sure that source code GFDLed is compatible with GPLed source code.
With the current legal climate I think it would be unwise to rely on "fair use" defenses. Perhaps an amended form of the GFDL for specifications can explicitly permit derived source code, similar to how autoconf produced scripts are explicitly unencumbered.
I am not a lawyer.
From what I understand, the Norwegian 16 year old Johansen didn't actually do the reverse engineering--it's some anonymous person/people in Germany and Holland.
My reading of the DMCA is that reverse engineering is permitted only if the person doing it owns the product legally. As the authors are anonymous, it seems to me that it would be impossible to verify whether they had legal copies or not.
I just don't see the reverse engineering legal argument standing up in the US court system. As I said, I know nothing about the law, but the cases of reverse engineering that were upheld by the courts such as Compaq's reverse engineering the BIOS for the IBM PC seemed to involve a clear line of accountability for how the information was obtained and who coded. I don't know if the technology underlying DeCSS would have passed the standards for legal reverse engineering even before the DMCA.
In my uninformed opinion, with the growth of the Linux market, had DeCSS not been written, some company would have stepped up and paid the fees to produce closed source binary drivers, similar to the market for commercial X servers. I am wondering if the anonymous authorship will guarantee that at least in the US there will never be legal software for DVD playback.
Again I ask people to read Joy's article and see what he's advocating. Joy isn't really arguing the technology of the future is inherently more dangerous than say nuclear or biological weapons, he's saying what's dangerous is individuals having access. The solution that Joy sometimes implicitly and sometimes explicitly is advocating is to restrict individual access to information and technology. For example, Joy says that IP laws could be "strengthened" to prevent misusage of technology--a new class of thought crimes.
What bothers me almost as much as Joy's opinions are how he is advocating them. For someone with a doctorate, Joy shows a shocking lack of logical progression in his arguments. Joy brings up Ted Kaczynski merely to evoke emotions in the reader without acknowledging that Kaczynski refutes Joy's arguments about how individuals could misuse the technology of the future to inflict global harm. Joy doesn't even mention that a brilliant man like Kaczynski who is psychopathic would simply not have either the resources or the will to pursue the knowledge needed to inflict massive damage. Kaczynski once he left mathematics was starting from scratch as a bomb maker. Also since Kaczynski rejected technology all he had left was to fashion homemade bombs from simple materials. At no time was Ted Kaczynski capable of threatening global harm.
In fact for decades the popular media has reported many ways of threatening large populations such as attacks on the water supply or the air. The closest such incident that has happened was possibly a cult in Japan who were manufacturing poison gas.
I believe that any objective reading of history will show that whatever global threats existed in the last century came not from individuals but from governments. Organization and resources lie behind mass events. From the World Wars through the killing fields through Rwanda we have seen the death to millions that government sanctioned killing is capable of inflicting.
I find it very disturbing that one of the architects of Java is so strongly advocating restricting individual rights. I wonder what is the agenda behind advocating taking computing away from decentralized PCs and putting it back into centralized servers, of moving computing power away from general purpose user programmable PCs to dumb specialized appliances.