It depends a great deal on what kind of shop you're talking about, doesn't it. I'm guessing in the situations you're talking about, the computers were used as basically two things: a replacement for typewriters, pads of paper and filing cabinets; and as terminals for accessing big centralised business applications. This is still what business computing is for most people.
In that situation, you're not in the business of running a computer network, you're in the business of supplying electronic stationery. You could theoretically replace every machine with a green screen terminal linked in to a big ol' mainframe, and productivity would barely dip. (okay, in some graphics-intensive environments, such as engineering drawing, laying out newspapers, etc., maybe you'd have to use X terminals, or similar, but the effect is the same).
There are situations where the computers on desks aren't just document-editing dumb terminals, though. They are genuinely used by the employees who work with them as general purpose bits of hardware that help them solve problems. Research groups, software developers, tech support shops, labs, hell, even creative places like design studios, visual FX teams and so on. In shops like that, you're supplying every user with computer equipment to help them do their job. If they want to replace the OS to do their job better, woe betide any sysadmin standing in their way. If an ad agency's client wants a particular visual effect, and the cheapest way to do it is to install Linux, so you can run some bit of software off sourceforge, then you're not going to make yourself popular if your first reaction is to cut the guy's network access off mid download, and send down the two heaviest helpdesk guys to cart the computer away.
I worked for a long time in a company where I felt the sysadmins had a near impossible job. Half the staff in the company were running multi-boot systems with development Linux kernels, betas of MS operating systems, and running their own web servers, SMTP servers, hell, even setting up their own NT domains. If the sysadmins had stopped people from doing this, then the company's main activities would have come to a grinding halt. That the sysadmins managed to run a network that allowed this kind of anarchy on one level, while ensuring the email always got through and the finance guys could access their SAGE system, was a source of some amazement to me.
Not every company can treat the computers as dumb terminals and dictate how they're used from a helpdesk console in the sky.
I understood he ditched the wing before deploying the chute. Presumably bleeding off the horizontal speed wouldn't be much harder than it is for a normal skydiver... especially given that with a glider wing, you can trade speed for altitude fairly easily.
How fast is a sky diver usually going horizontally when they get out of a plane?
Like most computerised translation efforts, this ignores the fact that translation always requires context. The sentence 'fruit flies like an orange' is a classic example in the English language of a sentence which can be interpreted in two different ways - sentences can easily be constructed which have completely different meanings in different contexts.
'As a punishment, he was given a longer sentence'. Obviously, we're talking prison, right? Well, what if the preceding sentence was: 'The teacher had grown weary of his poor attempts at translation'?
A statistical system, even working with the entire phrase, won't be able to figure out which meaning of the word 'sentence' is intended there.
how about: 'The box was heavy. We had to put it down' 'The dog was ill. We had to put it down'
You need semantic understanding to be able to perform translation.
I think you've forgotten about the fact that skydivers usually wear parachutes.
Normal behavior for a skydiver is to fall out of a plane, accellerate up to terminal velocity, maintain that speed for a while, then open your parachute, which slows you down to a lower terminal velocity, then hit the ground and (hopefully) stop.
Adding horizontal displacement to the mix shouldn't change the nature of the problem too much....
Nobody's going to get far stirring up angry mobs by saying that pilots are coming over here to steal our jobs, or murder us in our sleep, or corrupt our religion, or rape our womenfolk, or scrounge off our welfare system, or whatever arguments have been used where you are against groups from a different ethnic background.
On the other hand, I have a feeling you could probably easily raise a pitchfork-wielding parade of yokels against the cyborg family who've moved in down the street with arguments along those lines...
English is a lot more complex than you give it credit for. Most verbs have three 'conjugations', actually - four if you count third person singular. Some have more. In some, two of them are the same, but by no means in all.
Also, I was going to craft an example that showed English does have a past future tense, but then realised it would be redundant, since I've just used one.
And English gets a lot more complex than that. I would have been going to illustrate that, but I was unable to come up with a good example that didn't sound convoluted. Oh, wait a minute, there's a conditional pluperfect past continuous future (or something like that) right now...
English's use of the verbs 'to be', 'to do', 'to have' and 'to go' as auxiliaries, plus its 'will', 'would', 'shall' and 'should' semi-modals, combine with the three 'conjugations' - the pretirite, past participle and present participle (gerund) of verbs ('went', 'gone', 'going' for example) - to make some tense constructions possible in English that simply don't exist in other languages.
Surprised, if you know three romance languages, that you didn't know that. And while you're about it, you might contemplate just what tense 'you didn't know' might be in, and consider that I know of no language other than English which can express precisely that meaning (as distinct from 'you knew not', 'you have not known' and 'you were not knowing' (oo, there's those three conjugations again)...
> you'd -still- have to be sure
that -all- the executables
were made from the final source,
using a compiler that's known not to contain any code that can generate unexpected code from the supplied input... okay, so we need an open source compiler...
but how do we know that the compiler was compiled using a compiler that doesn't inject malicious code that would mean that the compiler compromised the ballot software?
So you look at the disassembled binary code, and verify that it does what the sourcecode says, right? But then you have to trust that the chips do what the manufacturer tells you they do. Maybe you should dismantle the chips and get them under an electron microscope, verify that the gates and pathways all work according to spec... but what if the electron microscope is rigged to misrepresent certain images?
The thing is, you can't be certain that the intentions of sourcecode will be executed faithfully, without returning to first principles (basically the laws of physics), unless you start trusting some of the layers. And once you start trusting layers - say, the hardware layer, the compiler - why not extend that trust further up the stack? So, why is sourcecode access so crucial to trust?
What's important is that there be some external, verifiable proof that the machine results reflect the intentions of the voters. That means a system where the machine prints off a physical ballot paper, the voter checks it accurately reflects their vote, and deposits it in a secure ballot box. That way an audit trail exists that means that you can physically count the votes and ensure that the results are what the computer said they were. Source access isn't necessary to ensure this, just as access to electron microscopy of the chip surface isn't required.
Don't think of it as a fine for people who don't vote, then. Think of it as a tax break for those who do vote.
It's not like you're deprived of any other rights by the government if you choose not to vote - just a little money. And, judging from your other posts, you're fine with taxation.
So, given that people are paying taxes anyway, they just have to pay a little more if they choose not to be in a certain place at a certain time (when they are also given the opportunity to influence the government of their nation).
> The only canidate that made any sence was the Green Party canidate. As the Green Party is still treated like the lunitic fring by the media, the chance of one of their canidates rising above statistical noise is almost zero.
So you didn't vote for them, because it would have been a wasted vote - but then you wasted your vote anyway?
In the 1992 UK general election, there was a poll conducted by a national newspaper that revealed that 60% of the population would have seriously considered voting for the Liberal Democrats (the third party in the UK, typically gets 10-20% of the vote) if they thought they had a chance of winning.
If even people who think the green party candidate 'makes sense' refuse to vote for them because they won't win, there's little chance they'll ever be perceived as anything but a lunatic fringe...
> We actually get a reasonable representation of the opinion of the people.
Well, there have proven to be some flaws in the system. When candidates were listed on ballot papers in alphabetical order, it was statistically shown that there was a preponderance of elected officials whose names fell into the earlier part of the alphabet - the mandatory vote had led to many people ticking the first box on the paper, causing the statistical anomaly.
Randomising the order in which the names appear on each ballot is a fix for the symptom - but doesn't fix the problem that making disinterested people vote can lead to them placing votes for candidates who wouldn't otherwise receive their vote.
Still, I think mandatory voting, combined with a constitutionally required government-run 'you can always vote 'none of the above'' campaign, and a requirement that if 'none of the above' wins that the election nominations be reopened, is a lot better than nothing as a way to fight apathy...
I'm serious - DRM's just a tool - a cryptographic application. Why not stop seeing it as an enemy and absorb and adopt it as a tool? Just like strong crypto - we're less worried about how evil governments and corporations are able to communicate in secret because we can ALL communicate in secret.
Why not see if you can get a DRM system to digitally enforce GPL rights - making it impossible to distribute code incorporating GPL'd code without licensing it under the GPL? Why not use it to enforce protection of creative commons, and the contribution of works to the public domain?
DRM could actually be a mechanism for making consumers aware of precisely what rights a creator of a work is willing to grant them - creating a market where consumers can choose to consume freely licensed products.
Isn't DRM only as evil as the licenses it's used to enforce?
You know, I've heard this story before - many, many times. Not about Microsoft. And when it's about other companies, it's often not couched in such negative terms.
Here's one variant of it:
This guy was a small-time businessman, he'd dropped out of college to start a company with a few mates, and they were working on stuff they enjoyed. The product they were working on was pretty niche, and nobody really thought it would go anywhere, but they believed in it. An opportunity came along to work with a big player, and they signed up to the deal - not really knowing how to fulfil their end of the bargain, but knowing they could find some way to do it - that's just how small companies operate. In the end, they bought some obsolete equipment from some other company that couldn't really find a way to make money out of it, and then when the product took off, they ended up millionnaires...
It's all in how you tell it, isn't it?
It's easy to say 'Bill knew he had a multi-billion dollar business licensing DOS to IBM, and he cut out the poor saps he bought DOS from', but of course, hindsight's a wonderful thing; MS thought PCs might be big, but there was no guarantee (and until the clones came along, remember, MS was always at risk of IBM bringing out a new platform, or changing the deal). He took a business risk - licensing the software from a small business in Seattle who weren't willing or able to make a similar deal themselves. They charged what they thought it was worth. That they were proven to have grossly undercharged is their mistake - they didn't see its potential as a PC OS, or predict the PC market exploding the way it did - nobody could have. _Not_even_Bill_Gates_ knew it would work out.
My point is, somebody makes a ten grand investment and ends up in a strong position to take over what is going to be one of the biggest markets in the world - well done him. There's no point moaning about it - just learn from it, and realise that it means everybody else needs to try harder...
> Following your logic, it would be dangerous to regulate any SMTP traffic (whether opt-in, opt-out or whatever) because people can choose whether to receive messages or not.
Slightly different; when I make an HTTP request, I'm expecting an HTTP response. No web server sends out unsolicited HTTP responses to clients on the offchance they'll pick them up and set a cookie:)
HTTP responses are always solicited, including a Set-cookie header in there is not a huge burden on the client. SMTP servers are servers, obviously, so take a somewhat different role.
By having an open port 25, just like having an open port 80, you are inviting people to submit packets to you. So SMTP servers, just like web servers, should expect to receive requests. They may choose to reject those requests, or process them, in accordance with the various RFCs that exist, but they certainly can't expect to have any control over what requests they receive in the first place.
Legislation should only be about what people do with technology, not about technology itself. Legislating that web sites must obtain permission before using cookies is different to legislating that web sites must get permission before storing permanent records of a person's name and address. Similarly, legislating that you must have someone's explicit permission before sending them an email advert is fine; legislating that you must have their explicit permission before opening a connection to port 25 of their server is not.
This is where laws like the UK Data Protection Act come in. Legislation dealing with specifics, like 'consent for cookies', miss the bigger picture, and make using cookies for little, non-privacy-infringing tasks harder. The goal of the legislation should be to prevent privacy infringements - not cookies.
you said you wanted to avoid crooks, but didn't see why you ahould have to learn anything to do so. I was merely suggesting that ignorance in any field is a great way to become the victim of someone's malicious intent.
I can invade the privacy of web clients without using cookies. I can do it with cookies. I can also build legitimate applications using cookies. So, why make using cookies harder? Why not legislate for privacy?
The best way for legislation to protect you from crooks is not to ban their tools, which have legitimate uses, but to ban the activities they're engaged in. That way, a crook with a cookie is just a crook.
Read the RFCs. A Set-Cookie header is just a header. The behavior of the client is then covered by the RFC. It MAY choose to accept the cookie. It MAY choose to ask the user of the client whether to accept the header. It SHOULD have a facility to allow the user to reject all cookies. The RFC nowhere says MUST. In other words, the way the standard is framed, a Set-Cookie header is a request, not a demand.
> why should I learn to use my browser to avoid crooks?
The car had a lock on it? Well, blow me down - I wondered what that little keyhole under the door handle was. Well, I never. Still, you can't expect me to learn how to lock the car just to avoid crooks, can you?
I've said it before and I'll say it again - the terminology employed in internet law as it relates to internet standards is seriously screwed up.
What they're legislating here is that before a server transmits an HTTP response featuring a Set-Cookie header, they must send a prior (human readable) HTTP response to the client saying that they'll be sending a response with a Set-Cookie header along next if the client doesn't mind.
This is ridiculous - there's no law saying a client must obey set-cookie headers, there's no reason for Set-Cookie headers to have any more legal status than Cache-Control headers. Set-Cookie is just a suggestion from the server to the user agent that it would help the server if the user agent remembered the attached cookie data, and sent it back in a cookie header with any subsequent requests.
Set-Cookie is a request, not an order. If the client chooses to accept the cookie, that's the client's business. If the client chooses to ignore the cookie, so be it.
Legislation doesn't belong in this field. The protocol provides for the situation where the client has privacy concerns about the server. legislating to effectively override IETF standards is a dangerous direction to go in.
> you might as well call the process that took a wolf (a wild predator, beutyfully fit to savagly tear elks into tiny bits) and turned it into a chihuahua (a teeny little thing most suited to be put out of it's misery) for a natural selection.
How many wolves have you ever come across? Okay, how about chihuahuas?
So, who's to say the wolf is fitter?
The way I see it, the gene in ancient proto-dogs that said 'when a human being takes you in and feeds you, and occasionally asks you to have sex with another dog, just go along with it' has been a pretty darned successful gene.
Like it or not, human beings form a very large part of the competitive landscape for animals nowadays.
But what we're talking about here is poems, not animals, so your argument just falls right over and lies on the ground, twitching, anyway. The only fitness criterion to judge a poem by is whether it says something to the soul of a human being. You can't simulate it by quantitative measurement - it's a qualitative judgement based soleley on the human condition. So, selecting poems for survival based on their suitability for acceptance in the human mindscape by asking people to pick the one that speaks to them is the best fitness test they could use.
If it makes you feel better about the mechanism in use, consider the human readers as primitive predators, hunting down and killing the weaker poems, so only the strong survive to breeding age.
But, charging $100 for something you can go out and get for free is not likely to work for long, now, is it?
Note, of course, that - to quote the BSD license - "Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution."
Failure to comply with that is a plain and simple copyright breach. Given that you're claiming that they would have taken the source, unmodified, compiled it and distributed it, the copyright breach should be self evident, and easily proven.
If they do comply with that, then effectively they are required to announce to the world that the software they're charging $100 for is available free elsewhere.
Note that there's nothing economically wrong with their doing this - they may be providing technical support, or other services that mean that someone would be willing to pay them $100 to receive a binary copy of some BSD licensed code.
And while they wouldn't (necessarily) be providing the source code, the code would be available elsewhere for anybody who wants it, right - so, no harm done.
What's your objection to? That somebody else can make a business model out of your code if you distribute it under the BSD license? You do realise that nothing stops you from making a business model out of the code as well... and the code's getting used, which is the point, right?
Owning the copyright is not the same as owning the distribution rights - which is, after all, what publishing is. If you don't hand over the distribution rights to a third party, you'll find it a bit hard to get your book into stores (unless you want to print, sell and ship your own books).
So long as copyright is acknowledged, the holder of the distribution rights is generally free to sublicense those rights at will. that's what publishers do. that's how they get things like translations, e-books, and so on published.
So, if the publisher was smart enough to get right to distribute the work in all forms now known or subsequently developed (standard contract verbiage), they can distribute electronic copies of the work to Amazon without having to go back to the copyright owner.
In what way does improving the sales-potential of their book ride roughshod over the rights of the creator - who, presumably, got into bed with a publisher for a reason?
> Are Amazon obtaining each and every rights owners' permission to perform this duplication? I doubt it
Why do you doubt it? You do realise that Amazon has a direct business relationship with every publisher whose books it sells already, don't you? They don't buy their books from Barnes & Noble...
Amazon's book buyers will offer this facility to publishers (whose salespeople they already work with directly - many publishers will employ one person whose entire job is selling books to Amazon) as a marketing benefit - and charge them for the privilege, no doubt - just as they do today with their 'look inside' feature. In order to keep competitive, publishers will prepare and supply the text in the format Amazon wants. It's really not hard for Amazon to do this at all.
Crikey - you're right - I bet Amazon didn't think of that. We should get Jeff Bezos on the phone right now and tell him.
Oh no, hang on, it seems that they have thought of it. Thank goodness for that - no need for an eagle eyed Slashdot reader to point out the error of their ways.
It seems that, because Amazon has the entire publishing industry over a barrel nowadays, just a few quick calls from Amazon to their biggest suppliers, and a notice in publishers' weekly, and they can go ahead and do whatever they like with the content of the books they sell.
You know, in some music stores, you can go up to listening points and hear music, on demand, without paying for it. D'you think the RIAA should be told? I bet they'd be really keen to sue their key supply channel for this obvious copyright infringement...
Slashdot Mirror
It depends a great deal on what kind of shop you're talking about, doesn't it. I'm guessing in the situations you're talking about, the computers were used as basically two things: a replacement for typewriters, pads of paper and filing cabinets; and as terminals for accessing big centralised business applications. This is still what business computing is for most people.
In that situation, you're not in the business of running a computer network, you're in the business of supplying electronic stationery. You could theoretically replace every machine with a green screen terminal linked in to a big ol' mainframe, and productivity would barely dip. (okay, in some graphics-intensive environments, such as engineering drawing, laying out newspapers, etc., maybe you'd have to use X terminals, or similar, but the effect is the same).
There are situations where the computers on desks aren't just document-editing dumb terminals, though. They are genuinely used by the employees who work with them as general purpose bits of hardware that help them solve problems. Research groups, software developers, tech support shops, labs, hell, even creative places like design studios, visual FX teams and so on. In shops like that, you're supplying every user with computer equipment to help them do their job. If they want to replace the OS to do their job better, woe betide any sysadmin standing in their way. If an ad agency's client wants a particular visual effect, and the cheapest way to do it is to install Linux, so you can run some bit of software off sourceforge, then you're not going to make yourself popular if your first reaction is to cut the guy's network access off mid download, and send down the two heaviest helpdesk guys to cart the computer away.
I worked for a long time in a company where I felt the sysadmins had a near impossible job. Half the staff in the company were running multi-boot systems with development Linux kernels, betas of MS operating systems, and running their own web servers, SMTP servers, hell, even setting up their own NT domains. If the sysadmins had stopped people from doing this, then the company's main activities would have come to a grinding halt. That the sysadmins managed to run a network that allowed this kind of anarchy on one level, while ensuring the email always got through and the finance guys could access their SAGE system, was a source of some amazement to me.
Not every company can treat the computers as dumb terminals and dictate how they're used from a helpdesk console in the sky.
I understood he ditched the wing before deploying the chute. Presumably bleeding off the horizontal speed wouldn't be much harder than it is for a normal skydiver... especially given that with a glider wing, you can trade speed for altitude fairly easily.
How fast is a sky diver usually going horizontally when they get out of a plane?
Like most computerised translation efforts, this ignores the fact that translation always requires context. The sentence 'fruit flies like an orange' is a classic example in the English language of a sentence which can be interpreted in two different ways - sentences can easily be constructed which have completely different meanings in different contexts.
'As a punishment, he was given a longer sentence'. Obviously, we're talking prison, right? Well, what if the preceding sentence was:
'The teacher had grown weary of his poor attempts at translation'?
A statistical system, even working with the entire phrase, won't be able to figure out which meaning of the word 'sentence' is intended there.
how about:
'The box was heavy. We had to put it down'
'The dog was ill. We had to put it down'
You need semantic understanding to be able to perform translation.
I think you've forgotten about the fact that skydivers usually wear parachutes.
Normal behavior for a skydiver is to fall out of a plane, accellerate up to terminal velocity, maintain that speed for a while, then open your parachute, which slows you down to a lower terminal velocity, then hit the ground and (hopefully) stop.
Adding horizontal displacement to the mix shouldn't change the nature of the problem too much....
Nobody's going to get far stirring up angry mobs by saying that pilots are coming over here to steal our jobs, or murder us in our sleep, or corrupt our religion, or rape our womenfolk, or scrounge off our welfare system, or whatever arguments have been used where you are against groups from a different ethnic background.
On the other hand, I have a feeling you could probably easily raise a pitchfork-wielding parade of yokels against the cyborg family who've moved in down the street with arguments along those lines...
English is a lot more complex than you give it credit for. Most verbs have three 'conjugations', actually - four if you count third person singular. Some have more. In some, two of them are the same, but by no means in all.
Also, I was going to craft an example that showed English does have a past future tense, but then realised it would be redundant, since I've just used one.
And English gets a lot more complex than that. I would have been going to illustrate that, but I was unable to come up with a good example that didn't sound convoluted. Oh, wait a minute, there's a conditional pluperfect past continuous future (or something like that) right now...
English's use of the verbs 'to be', 'to do', 'to have' and 'to go' as auxiliaries, plus its 'will', 'would', 'shall' and 'should' semi-modals, combine with the three 'conjugations' - the pretirite, past participle and present participle (gerund) of verbs ('went', 'gone', 'going' for example) - to make some tense constructions possible in English that simply don't exist in other languages.
Surprised, if you know three romance languages, that you didn't know that. And while you're about it, you might contemplate just what tense 'you didn't know' might be in, and consider that I know of no language other than English which can express precisely that meaning (as distinct from 'you knew not', 'you have not known' and 'you were not knowing' (oo, there's those three conjugations again)...
> you'd -still- have to be sure
that -all- the executables
were made from the final source,
using a compiler that's known not to contain any code that can generate unexpected code from the supplied input... okay, so we need an open source compiler...
but how do we know that the compiler was compiled using a compiler that doesn't inject malicious code that would mean that the compiler compromised the ballot software?
You might want to check out this classic ACM paper
So you look at the disassembled binary code, and verify that it does what the sourcecode says, right? But then you have to trust that the chips do what the manufacturer tells you they do. Maybe you should dismantle the chips and get them under an electron microscope, verify that the gates and pathways all work according to spec... but what if the electron microscope is rigged to misrepresent certain images?
The thing is, you can't be certain that the intentions of sourcecode will be executed faithfully, without returning to first principles (basically the laws of physics), unless you start trusting some of the layers. And once you start trusting layers - say, the hardware layer, the compiler - why not extend that trust further up the stack? So, why is sourcecode access so crucial to trust?
What's important is that there be some external, verifiable proof that the machine results reflect the intentions of the voters. That means a system where the machine prints off a physical ballot paper, the voter checks it accurately reflects their vote, and deposits it in a secure ballot box. That way an audit trail exists that means that you can physically count the votes and ensure that the results are what the computer said they were. Source access isn't necessary to ensure this, just as access to electron microscopy of the chip surface isn't required.
At least in Australia you only banned from voting while you are in prison, not for life.
:)
Well, as a penal colony, if you stopped all former convicts voting you'd never get anwhere, would you?
Don't think of it as a fine for people who don't vote, then. Think of it as a tax break for those who do vote.
It's not like you're deprived of any other rights by the government if you choose not to vote - just a little money. And, judging from your other posts, you're fine with taxation.
So, given that people are paying taxes anyway, they just have to pay a little more if they choose not to be in a certain place at a certain time (when they are also given the opportunity to influence the government of their nation).
> The only canidate that made any sence was the Green Party canidate. As the Green Party is still treated like the lunitic fring by the media, the chance of one of their canidates rising above statistical noise is almost zero.
So you didn't vote for them, because it would have been a wasted vote - but then you wasted your vote anyway?
In the 1992 UK general election, there was a poll conducted by a national newspaper that revealed that 60% of the population would have seriously considered voting for the Liberal Democrats (the third party in the UK, typically gets 10-20% of the vote) if they thought they had a chance of winning.
If even people who think the green party candidate 'makes sense' refuse to vote for them because they won't win, there's little chance they'll ever be perceived as anything but a lunatic fringe...
> We actually get a reasonable representation of the opinion of the people.
Well, there have proven to be some flaws in the system. When candidates were listed on ballot papers in alphabetical order, it was statistically shown that there was a preponderance of elected officials whose names fell into the earlier part of the alphabet - the mandatory vote had led to many people ticking the first box on the paper, causing the statistical anomaly.
Randomising the order in which the names appear on each ballot is a fix for the symptom - but doesn't fix the problem that making disinterested people vote can lead to them placing votes for candidates who wouldn't otherwise receive their vote.
Still, I think mandatory voting, combined with a constitutionally required government-run 'you can always vote 'none of the above'' campaign, and a requirement that if 'none of the above' wins that the election nominations be reopened, is a lot better than nothing as a way to fight apathy...
So why does everybody want DRM to fail?
I'm serious - DRM's just a tool - a cryptographic application. Why not stop seeing it as an enemy and absorb and adopt it as a tool? Just like strong crypto - we're less worried about how evil governments and corporations are able to communicate in secret because we can ALL communicate in secret.
Why not see if you can get a DRM system to digitally enforce GPL rights - making it impossible to distribute code incorporating GPL'd code without licensing it under the GPL? Why not use it to enforce protection of creative commons, and the contribution of works to the public domain?
DRM could actually be a mechanism for making consumers aware of precisely what rights a creator of a work is willing to grant them - creating a market where consumers can choose to consume freely licensed products.
Isn't DRM only as evil as the licenses it's used to enforce?
You know, I've heard this story before - many, many times. Not about Microsoft. And when it's about other companies, it's often not couched in such negative terms.
Here's one variant of it:
This guy was a small-time businessman, he'd dropped out of college to start a company with a few mates, and they were working on stuff they enjoyed. The product they were working on was pretty niche, and nobody really thought it would go anywhere, but they believed in it. An opportunity came along to work with a big player, and they signed up to the deal - not really knowing how to fulfil their end of the bargain, but knowing they could find some way to do it - that's just how small companies operate. In the end, they bought some obsolete equipment from some other company that couldn't really find a way to make money out of it, and then when the product took off, they ended up millionnaires...
It's all in how you tell it, isn't it?
It's easy to say 'Bill knew he had a multi-billion dollar business licensing DOS to IBM, and he cut out the poor saps he bought DOS from', but of course, hindsight's a wonderful thing; MS thought PCs might be big, but there was no guarantee (and until the clones came along, remember, MS was always at risk of IBM bringing out a new platform, or changing the deal). He took a business risk - licensing the software from a small business in Seattle who weren't willing or able to make a similar deal themselves. They charged what they thought it was worth. That they were proven to have grossly undercharged is their mistake - they didn't see its potential as a PC OS, or predict the PC market exploding the way it did - nobody could have. _Not_even_Bill_Gates_ knew it would work out.
My point is, somebody makes a ten grand investment and ends up in a strong position to take over what is going to be one of the biggest markets in the world - well done him. There's no point moaning about it - just learn from it, and realise that it means everybody else needs to try harder...
> Following your logic, it would be dangerous to regulate any SMTP traffic (whether opt-in, opt-out or whatever) because people can choose whether to receive messages or not.
:)
Slightly different; when I make an HTTP request, I'm expecting an HTTP response. No web server sends out unsolicited HTTP responses to clients on the offchance they'll pick them up and set a cookie
HTTP responses are always solicited, including a Set-cookie header in there is not a huge burden on the client. SMTP servers are servers, obviously, so take a somewhat different role.
By having an open port 25, just like having an open port 80, you are inviting people to submit packets to you. So SMTP servers, just like web servers, should expect to receive requests. They may choose to reject those requests, or process them, in accordance with the various RFCs that exist, but they certainly can't expect to have any control over what requests they receive in the first place.
Legislation should only be about what people do with technology, not about technology itself. Legislating that web sites must obtain permission before using cookies is different to legislating that web sites must get permission before storing permanent records of a person's name and address. Similarly, legislating that you must have someone's explicit permission before sending them an email advert is fine; legislating that you must have their explicit permission before opening a connection to port 25 of their server is not.
I hope that clears up where I stand..
This is where laws like the UK Data Protection Act come in. Legislation dealing with specifics, like 'consent for cookies', miss the bigger picture, and make using cookies for little, non-privacy-infringing tasks harder. The goal of the legislation should be to prevent privacy infringements - not cookies.
you said you wanted to avoid crooks, but didn't see why you ahould have to learn anything to do so. I was merely suggesting that ignorance in any field is a great way to become the victim of someone's malicious intent.
I can invade the privacy of web clients without using cookies. I can do it with cookies. I can also build legitimate applications using cookies. So, why make using cookies harder? Why not legislate for privacy?
The best way for legislation to protect you from crooks is not to ban their tools, which have legitimate uses, but to ban the activities they're engaged in. That way, a crook with a cookie is just a crook.
Read the RFCs. A Set-Cookie header is just a header. The behavior of the client is then covered by the RFC. It MAY choose to accept the cookie. It MAY choose to ask the user of the client whether to accept the header. It SHOULD have a facility to allow the user to reject all cookies. The RFC nowhere says MUST. In other words, the way the standard is framed, a Set-Cookie header is a request, not a demand.
> why should I learn to use my browser to avoid crooks?
The car had a lock on it? Well, blow me down - I wondered what that little keyhole under the door handle was. Well, I never. Still, you can't expect me to learn how to lock the car just to avoid crooks, can you?
Oh, you can?
Oh.
I've said it before and I'll say it again - the terminology employed in internet law as it relates to internet standards is seriously screwed up.
What they're legislating here is that before a server transmits an HTTP response featuring a Set-Cookie header, they must send a prior (human readable) HTTP response to the client saying that they'll be sending a response with a Set-Cookie header along next if the client doesn't mind.
This is ridiculous - there's no law saying a client must obey set-cookie headers, there's no reason for Set-Cookie headers to have any more legal status than Cache-Control headers. Set-Cookie is just a suggestion from the server to the user agent that it would help the server if the user agent remembered the attached cookie data, and sent it back in a cookie header with any subsequent requests.
Set-Cookie is a request, not an order. If the client chooses to accept the cookie, that's the client's business. If the client chooses to ignore the cookie, so be it.
Legislation doesn't belong in this field. The protocol provides for the situation where the client has privacy concerns about the server. legislating to effectively override IETF standards is a dangerous direction to go in.
Well, to be fair, Muhammed and Jiang are two of the more common names in the world, simply by weight of population...
More interesting question: why is it never Amy, or Meiying, or Fatimah?
> you might as well call the process that took a wolf (a wild predator, beutyfully fit to savagly tear elks into tiny bits) and turned it into a chihuahua (a teeny little thing most suited to be put out of it's misery) for a natural selection.
How many wolves have you ever come across? Okay, how about chihuahuas?
So, who's to say the wolf is fitter?
The way I see it, the gene in ancient proto-dogs that said 'when a human being takes you in and feeds you, and occasionally asks you to have sex with another dog, just go along with it' has been a pretty darned successful gene.
Like it or not, human beings form a very large part of the competitive landscape for animals nowadays.
But what we're talking about here is poems, not animals, so your argument just falls right over and lies on the ground, twitching, anyway. The only fitness criterion to judge a poem by is whether it says something to the soul of a human being. You can't simulate it by quantitative measurement - it's a qualitative judgement based soleley on the human condition. So, selecting poems for survival based on their suitability for acceptance in the human mindscape by asking people to pick the one that speaks to them is the best fitness test they could use.
If it makes you feel better about the mechanism in use, consider the human readers as primitive predators, hunting down and killing the weaker poems, so only the strong survive to breeding age.
But, charging $100 for something you can go out and get for free is not likely to work for long, now, is it?
Note, of course, that - to quote the BSD license - "Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution."
Failure to comply with that is a plain and simple copyright breach. Given that you're claiming that they would have taken the source, unmodified, compiled it and distributed it, the copyright breach should be self evident, and easily proven.
If they do comply with that, then effectively they are required to announce to the world that the software they're charging $100 for is available free elsewhere.
Note that there's nothing economically wrong with their doing this - they may be providing technical support, or other services that mean that someone would be willing to pay them $100 to receive a binary copy of some BSD licensed code.
And while they wouldn't (necessarily) be providing the source code, the code would be available elsewhere for anybody who wants it, right - so, no harm done.
What's your objection to? That somebody else can make a business model out of your code if you distribute it under the BSD license? You do realise that nothing stops you from making a business model out of the code as well... and the code's getting used, which is the point, right?
So I don't see what the problem is...
Owning the copyright is not the same as owning the distribution rights - which is, after all, what publishing is. If you don't hand over the distribution rights to a third party, you'll find it a bit hard to get your book into stores (unless you want to print, sell and ship your own books).
So long as copyright is acknowledged, the holder of the distribution rights is generally free to sublicense those rights at will. that's what publishers do. that's how they get things like translations, e-books, and so on published.
So, if the publisher was smart enough to get right to distribute the work in all forms now known or subsequently developed (standard contract verbiage), they can distribute electronic copies of the work to Amazon without having to go back to the copyright owner.
In what way does improving the sales-potential of their book ride roughshod over the rights of the creator - who, presumably, got into bed with a publisher for a reason?
> Are Amazon obtaining each and every rights owners' permission to perform this duplication? I doubt it
Why do you doubt it? You do realise that Amazon has a direct business relationship with every publisher whose books it sells already, don't you? They don't buy their books from Barnes & Noble...
Amazon's book buyers will offer this facility to publishers (whose salespeople they already work with directly - many publishers will employ one person whose entire job is selling books to Amazon) as a marketing benefit - and charge them for the privilege, no doubt - just as they do today with their 'look inside' feature. In order to keep competitive, publishers will prepare and supply the text in the format Amazon wants. It's really not hard for Amazon to do this at all.
Crikey - you're right - I bet Amazon didn't think of that. We should get Jeff Bezos on the phone right now and tell him.
Oh no, hang on, it seems that they have thought of it. Thank goodness for that - no need for an eagle eyed Slashdot reader to point out the error of their ways.
It seems that, because Amazon has the entire publishing industry over a barrel nowadays, just a few quick calls from Amazon to their biggest suppliers, and a notice in publishers' weekly, and they can go ahead and do whatever they like with the content of the books they sell.
You know, in some music stores, you can go up to listening points and hear music, on demand, without paying for it. D'you think the RIAA should be told? I bet they'd be really keen to sue their key supply channel for this obvious copyright infringement...