I think the RIAA is stealing from us as much as we from them but unfortunately their stealing is legal, and in any case two wrongs don't make a right.
Freeing slaves might be illegal, but it's still the right thing to do. I'm not saying that this situation is analogous, but it illustrates that taking illegal action in response to bad laws can be justifiable.
What widespread sharing really shows you is that the law may be out of step with what society wants, and that's a problem in a democracy.
In any case, I think civil disobedience in this case might consist of sharing something illegal that is obviously ridiculous, like an original recording of Glass's several minutes of silence.
The other way to make this sillines stop is to undermine the music industry's business model, to work on the political front, to set legal precedents, and to make recording companies and their artists simply look uncool (need I say Michael Jackson).
Copying somebody else's work against their wishes is also bad.
Copying somebody else's work against their wishes is NOT bad. In fact, the purpose of copyright law is exactly to make this happen.
Copyright law was a deal between the public and content producers that gave content producers the right to limit distribution for a limited time, in exchange for the requirement that their works fall into the public domain (i.e., can be copied against their wishes) after that period. The goal was to balance an economic incentive for content producers against the public's right to copy.
What has happened with copyright law is a perversion: content producers effectively have gotten copyright in perpetuity, through numerous technological and legal tricks. And, worse yet, people like you actually wrongly believe that people have some sort of basic right to control information after they have made it public.
If you don't want your ideas to be disseminated, keep them in your head; you have a right to do that, that works, and you need no goons to enforce it. People like you want the adoration and profit that comes along with sharing your ideas with others; if you want that, you should lose your ability to control your ideas after a short while.
Well, that's all just fine, except that Germans already pay up the wazoo to the music industry for their computer systems and blank digital media (even those that are used for other data). Even if the music industry didn't sell a single track in Germany, they'd still get huge amounts of money from German consumers.
What you haven't taken into account is that the hypervisor ensures that the work partition can only see the intranet and the personal partition can only see the internet. The two partitions cannot see each other on a network, and have no file shares in common.
That's not a consequence of using a hypervisor, that's a consequence of not permitting the corporate machine to be used for personal use. Many companies already have that policy in effect and it doesn't help.
Your implicit reasoning is something like this: a hypervisor makes it cheaper to have a separate personal machine in addition to the corporate machine, and therefore companies can do it more easily, and therefore, they are more secure. Trouble is: it's probably not cheaper, and people are unlikely to use it. And even if they do, an infected virtual personal machine can still wreak havoc on the corporate network.
Bottom line: this really does give you significant protection. Government folks doing classified computing use somewhat similar techniques. (Or so I'm told; I have no clearances.)
Systems with high security requirements have traditionally not used hypervisors, they have used time sharing systems that have additional ways of isolating users and data and have been particularly carefully tested.
Bottom line: I think what I've described deserves a more serious read.
No. It doesn't matter how many times you virtualize the machine, the virtual OS still behaves like a real OS on its virtual host. If it gets a virus, that virus can do the same kind of harm it would on a real machine: destroy data, propagate to other machines, disclose secret information, swamp the network, etc.
VMs have been used to enforce cross-partition security for years.
Yes, and when you do that, you go from the security of a timesharing system to the security of separate hosts on a network--which is what you started with.
Probably OOo will copy some of the new UI features. Even if the features are not a good idea, Microsoft users will expect the UI to look that way, so OOo will have to follow.
I don't see what problem anybody would have with that. Microsoft copied liberally from its competitors to create Microsoft Office; now that they have a near-monopoly, why should other people be prevented from copying from them?
That's a brilliant idea. That way, your essential corporate data will live in virtual Word documents and virtual Exchange databases, and it will only be disclosed to the outside world by virtual spyware running on a virtual machine.
Of course, the bad guys are still very real, as is the damage to your company.
You do not need to file a patent to prevent other people from filing a patent; disclosing the invention publicly (e.g., by publishing it in a journal) is sufficient and far cheaper.
So, when people go through the trouble and expense of filing a patent, it's for something else. A "defensive" patent is a patent you intend to use in a countersuit; but many such patents end up getting used for a primary suit anyway, since once the money has been spent creating them, why not use them to your advantage?
And it is quite common for patents derived from government funded work to end up getting licensed to just one company or a few companies, often in some way related to the inventor itself. Think of it as a perk or retirement plan.
That's great. Now, if only someone could reorganize the Linux kernel so that it would consist of multiple, smaller, independently managed and released subprojects as well.
When you report vulnerabilities for commercial products, you're basically giving the company free consulting time. Why would you do that?
Identify, report, and fix vulnerabilities in open source software; open source projects won't sue you for it, and you get to benefit from your reports without having to pay for them again.
(The same goes for any other bug report, actually.)
Conservatives stand for the ideas of the Founding Fathers.
"Conservative" is simply about what people want to preserve relative to the current time. You can be "conservative" and try cling to the legacy of the Founding Fathers, you can be "conservative" and try to cling to the legacy of McCarthy, or you can be "conservative" and try to cling to the legacy of the swinging 60's and 70's.
Of course, although we have much to be grateful for, the society of the Founding Fathers is not what we want to live in today, not even self-proclaimed "conservatives". People who are calling on the Founding Fathers to justify their political beliefs are simply abusing historical images in an attempt to justify modern ideas of restrictive social ideas.
Well, let's see, why do people wear clothes? Shrinkage. Brown and yellow stains on furniture. Getting pubic hair stuck. Seeing the US senate naked. I think those are excellent reasons. Yours may differ. If the US starts going all naked, I'm moving.
And that's why we have people like Clarence Thomas? And why Bush keeps proposing candidates that are judged to be marginal or unsuitable?
Two decisions can be identical on the case itself and still have very different biases and very different implications for future cases (e.g., a verbose, vague decision vs. a concise, clear decision). And most of the time, those biases are likely to be unconcscious.
seems pointless to me
on
Acme for Windows
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· Score: 5, Insightful
What's amazing about Plan 9 is the kernel, the file system, and the overall design.
The user land utilities, GUI, and GUI applications are applications only a mother could love; porting them to another platform seems pretty pointless. Note that the ideas behind acme really aren't all that original--they're derived from the equally unsuccessful Oberon interactive environment.
Putting a Linux userland on top of a Plan 9 kernel or implementing Plan 9 kernel features in Linux (either in the kernel or in userland) would seem useful to me, but porting the Plan 9 GUI?
It is nice that people are thinking about new interaction paradigms, but I just don't think this is a good one. If you want this kind of flexible, multi-purpose windowed environment aimed at expert users, Emacs is probably still your best bet.
Dumping at a value less than the cost of production (if you think coders' time is free, you're not much of a coder) isn't anticompetitive?
It can be. When Microsoft gives away IE for free, arguably, that's taking place: they were trying to, and succeeded at, driving a competitor out of business, and the results have been business advantages for them. Whether it's legally actionable depends on a bunch of more factors.
But that's not what's happening with free software. Free Software is essentially a co-op--something to which members contribute and from which members benefit. It is perfectly fine for co-ops to offer products cheaper than other commercial enterprises can; that's the whole point of a co-op.
Free software as a co-op is a little different from, say, your shopping co-op, because it doesn't require any joint ownership of physical property, and because it doesn't require any detailed accounting of contributions and benefits.
So, no, a coder's time isn't free, but people contribute to free software because they get benefits from doing so. In addition, dumping means a specific benefit: you undercut costs for the purpose of driving a competitor out of business, so that later you make more profit in the market. Microsoft is arguably doing this. But free software is not; free software coders may or may not desire that Microsoft goes out of business, but they aren't going to make any more money from their contributions by forcing Microsoft to go out of business.
Judges may not understand technology very well, but they do understand antitrust law. This judge is to be congratulated for his clear, logical, and apolitical judgement. Unfortunately, those are not necessarily the qualities that ensure advancement in the legal system.
In an introductory class, it's probably best neither to use the command line, nor to use a professional IDE, but instead to use an IDE designed for teaching. Such IDEs tend to have support for things like language levels, interactive experimentation, and additional style warnings.
Many of them also do not contain support for GUI builders (or let you turn it off), which I consider an advantage in an introductory class.
For Java, there is DrJava and BlueJ, and for Python, you can get DrPython. The best of the bunch is, in my opinion, DrScheme.
Which says about enough about them... They are quacks.
Or they are smart enough to have figured out that telling the patient "it's all in your head" or "this does not require treatment" or "there is nothing we can do about this" is not a good thing to do, and that sending them to a harmless practitioner of alternative medicine works. Besides, even if it is real, the placebo effect is strong and may heal it.
People actually look at this, you know. Generally, Apple tends to be comparable to the best PC vendors, not better and not worse. That's not surprising, since their prices are roughly comparable and since they are using the same manufacaturing facilities.
Occasionally, Apple gets a little too fancy for their own good and they will bring a real dud to market, but I think every vendor does, it's only that with Apple people notice more.
This post (excerpt) on Debian Legal explains it pretty well. The license is the usual two-pronged legal and PR strategy Sun has been using over the last few years: claim to support open standards and software in public, while burying ridiculous and dangerous terms in their legal licenses.
From: "Brian M. Carlson" <...> Date: Wed, 17 May 2006 12:02:34 +0000
[...] > Could someone please explain to me why paragraph 2(f) does not pose a > problem? I couldn't find ANY discussion about the license on Debian legal > which surprises me a little bit, but then maybe I just missed the > relevant parts of the license. Anyway, as a non-lawyer I'm surprised > that we seem to accept that we have to "defend and indemnify Sun".
Also, section 4 poses a major issue. If, for any reason, the Linux kernel doesn't do something that Java requires, then we are obligated to either fix it or inform everyone who has acquired Java from us.
Section 10 is not possible with our infrastructure. The ftp-master scripts merely remove the package from the tag database, not the archive (at least until there are no dependencies), and not from all of our mirrors.
Section 2(b) prohibits allowing people to develop software with Java that is to be run on another system.
Section 2(c) prohibits us from using the software in conjunction with C, C++, Perl, Python, or *any reasonable Turing-complete programming language*.
Section 12 requires that this software be in non-US/non-free. It is not, which is not only a violation of the license, but a violation of United States law.
This conflicts with other project policies and exposes Debian/SPI to major legal liabilities. I think that this should be removed from the archive as soon as possible, preferably before the next mirror pulse. [...]
Sun provides all information neccessary to build one.
Go read the license on the Java specs before you write such drivel.
If Java is to run on the OLPC computer, it needs a smaller, simpler implementation.
Well, funny you should say that, because that's what Sun's license specifically prohibits.
It's up to Red Hat or any one other than them to make it.
RedHat has been creating an implementation of Java--an excellent one. They have done so through cumbersome clean-room methods for the APIs because Sun's license doesn't allow them anything else, and the result will therefore never be fully compatible. That's Sun's fault, not RedHat's.
Your argument only goes to show what a rotten idea it is to let Sun control Java. If Java is supposed to be an open platform, then its specs should be open and independent of Sun, and multiple independent implementations of it must exist. If companies like RedHat need to worry about competing with the company that holds the rights to Java, then Java simply fails to be open.
The problem is that it is Sun that keeps claiming that Java is open-this and open-that, that it is Sun that apparently wants support from the open source community, that it is Sun that wants Linux to use more Java, and that Sun is involved in Linux and sells Linux stuff.
A second problem is that Sun has demonstrated repeatedly in their history that they are unable to execute a competent business strategy when it comes to these kinds of products, and Java looks just like what they did to some other similar products in the past.
In fact, one thing that upsets a lot of people about Sun is that they promised one thing (an open platform for applet and GUI development with third party implementations and an ANSI/ISO standard), and switched to a different one once they had gotten the community support (a de-facto single source implementation for server side development, a proprietary spec, and the JCP). After something like that, the company can't be trusted on anything as far as I'm concerned.
but last time I checked, Redhat's glee doesn't fill Sun's coffers
Are you sure? Where do you think a lot of Java enterprise apps run? Furthermore, where do you think Java would be today without the support and volunteer contributions of large numbers of open source proponents?
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I think the RIAA is stealing from us as much as we from them but unfortunately their stealing is legal, and in any case two wrongs don't make a right.
Freeing slaves might be illegal, but it's still the right thing to do. I'm not saying that this situation is analogous, but it illustrates that taking illegal action in response to bad laws can be justifiable.
What widespread sharing really shows you is that the law may be out of step with what society wants, and that's a problem in a democracy.
In any case, I think civil disobedience in this case might consist of sharing something illegal that is obviously ridiculous, like an original recording of Glass's several minutes of silence.
The other way to make this sillines stop is to undermine the music industry's business model, to work on the political front, to set legal precedents, and to make recording companies and their artists simply look uncool (need I say Michael Jackson).
Copying somebody else's work against their wishes is also bad.
Copying somebody else's work against their wishes is NOT bad. In fact, the purpose of copyright law is exactly to make this happen.
Copyright law was a deal between the public and content producers that gave content producers the right to limit distribution for a limited time, in exchange for the requirement that their works fall into the public domain (i.e., can be copied against their wishes) after that period. The goal was to balance an economic incentive for content producers against the public's right to copy.
What has happened with copyright law is a perversion: content producers effectively have gotten copyright in perpetuity, through numerous technological and legal tricks. And, worse yet, people like you actually wrongly believe that people have some sort of basic right to control information after they have made it public.
If you don't want your ideas to be disseminated, keep them in your head; you have a right to do that, that works, and you need no goons to enforce it. People like you want the adoration and profit that comes along with sharing your ideas with others; if you want that, you should lose your ability to control your ideas after a short while.
Well, that's all just fine, except that Germans already pay up the wazoo to the music industry for their computer systems and blank digital media (even those that are used for other data). Even if the music industry didn't sell a single track in Germany, they'd still get huge amounts of money from German consumers.
What you haven't taken into account is that the hypervisor ensures that the work partition can only see the intranet and the personal partition can only see the internet. The two partitions cannot see each other on a network, and have no file shares in common.
That's not a consequence of using a hypervisor, that's a consequence of not permitting the corporate machine to be used for personal use. Many companies already have that policy in effect and it doesn't help.
Your implicit reasoning is something like this: a hypervisor makes it cheaper to have a separate personal machine in addition to the corporate machine, and therefore companies can do it more easily, and therefore, they are more secure. Trouble is: it's probably not cheaper, and people are unlikely to use it. And even if they do, an infected virtual personal machine can still wreak havoc on the corporate network.
Bottom line: this really does give you significant protection. Government folks doing classified computing use somewhat similar techniques. (Or so I'm told; I have no clearances.)
Systems with high security requirements have traditionally not used hypervisors, they have used time sharing systems that have additional ways of isolating users and data and have been particularly carefully tested.
It's easy to predict what has happened thousands of times before. It's hard to predict the future.
Bottom line: I think what I've described deserves a more serious read.
No. It doesn't matter how many times you virtualize the machine, the virtual OS still behaves like a real OS on its virtual host. If it gets a virus, that virus can do the same kind of harm it would on a real machine: destroy data, propagate to other machines, disclose secret information, swamp the network, etc.
VMs have been used to enforce cross-partition security for years.
Yes, and when you do that, you go from the security of a timesharing system to the security of separate hosts on a network--which is what you started with.
Probably OOo will copy some of the new UI features. Even if the features are not a good idea, Microsoft users will expect the UI to look that way, so OOo will have to follow.
I don't see what problem anybody would have with that. Microsoft copied liberally from its competitors to create Microsoft Office; now that they have a near-monopoly, why should other people be prevented from copying from them?
That's a brilliant idea. That way, your essential corporate data will live in virtual Word documents and virtual Exchange databases, and it will only be disclosed to the outside world by virtual spyware running on a virtual machine.
Of course, the bad guys are still very real, as is the damage to your company.
You do not need to file a patent to prevent other people from filing a patent; disclosing the invention publicly (e.g., by publishing it in a journal) is sufficient and far cheaper.
So, when people go through the trouble and expense of filing a patent, it's for something else. A "defensive" patent is a patent you intend to use in a countersuit; but many such patents end up getting used for a primary suit anyway, since once the money has been spent creating them, why not use them to your advantage?
And it is quite common for patents derived from government funded work to end up getting licensed to just one company or a few companies, often in some way related to the inventor itself. Think of it as a perk or retirement plan.
That's great. Now, if only someone could reorganize the Linux kernel so that it would consist of multiple, smaller, independently managed and released subprojects as well.
When you report vulnerabilities for commercial products, you're basically giving the company free consulting time. Why would you do that?
Identify, report, and fix vulnerabilities in open source software; open source projects won't sue you for it, and you get to benefit from your reports without having to pay for them again.
(The same goes for any other bug report, actually.)
Conservatives stand for the ideas of the Founding Fathers.
"Conservative" is simply about what people want to preserve relative to the current time. You can be "conservative" and try cling to the legacy of the Founding Fathers, you can be "conservative" and try to cling to the legacy of McCarthy, or you can be "conservative" and try to cling to the legacy of the swinging 60's and 70's.
Of course, although we have much to be grateful for, the society of the Founding Fathers is not what we want to live in today, not even self-proclaimed "conservatives". People who are calling on the Founding Fathers to justify their political beliefs are simply abusing historical images in an attempt to justify modern ideas of restrictive social ideas.
Well, let's see, why do people wear clothes? Shrinkage. Brown and yellow stains on furniture. Getting pubic hair stuck. Seeing the US senate naked. I think those are excellent reasons. Yours may differ. If the US starts going all naked, I'm moving.
And that's why we have people like Clarence Thomas? And why Bush keeps proposing candidates that are judged to be marginal or unsuitable?
Two decisions can be identical on the case itself and still have very different biases and very different implications for future cases (e.g., a verbose, vague decision vs. a concise, clear decision). And most of the time, those biases are likely to be unconcscious.
Must suppress the Urge. :-)
What's amazing about Plan 9 is the kernel, the file system, and the overall design.
The user land utilities, GUI, and GUI applications are applications only a mother could love; porting them to another platform seems pretty pointless. Note that the ideas behind acme really aren't all that original--they're derived from the equally unsuccessful Oberon interactive environment.
Putting a Linux userland on top of a Plan 9 kernel or implementing Plan 9 kernel features in Linux (either in the kernel or in userland) would seem useful to me, but porting the Plan 9 GUI?
It is nice that people are thinking about new interaction paradigms, but I just don't think this is a good one. If you want this kind of flexible, multi-purpose windowed environment aimed at expert users, Emacs is probably still your best bet.
Dumping at a value less than the cost of production (if you think coders' time is free, you're not much of a coder) isn't anticompetitive?
It can be. When Microsoft gives away IE for free, arguably, that's taking place: they were trying to, and succeeded at, driving a competitor out of business, and the results have been business advantages for them. Whether it's legally actionable depends on a bunch of more factors.
But that's not what's happening with free software. Free Software is essentially a co-op--something to which members contribute and from which members benefit. It is perfectly fine for co-ops to offer products cheaper than other commercial enterprises can; that's the whole point of a co-op.
Free software as a co-op is a little different from, say, your shopping co-op, because it doesn't require any joint ownership of physical property, and because it doesn't require any detailed accounting of contributions and benefits.
So, no, a coder's time isn't free, but people contribute to free software because they get benefits from doing so. In addition, dumping means a specific benefit: you undercut costs for the purpose of driving a competitor out of business, so that later you make more profit in the market. Microsoft is arguably doing this. But free software is not; free software coders may or may not desire that Microsoft goes out of business, but they aren't going to make any more money from their contributions by forcing Microsoft to go out of business.
Judges may not understand technology very well, but they do understand antitrust law. This judge is to be congratulated for his clear, logical, and apolitical judgement. Unfortunately, those are not necessarily the qualities that ensure advancement in the legal system.
In an introductory class, it's probably best neither to use the command line, nor to use a professional IDE, but instead to use an IDE designed for teaching. Such IDEs tend to have support for things like language levels, interactive experimentation, and additional style warnings.
Many of them also do not contain support for GUI builders (or let you turn it off), which I consider an advantage in an introductory class.
For Java, there is DrJava and BlueJ, and for Python, you can get DrPython. The best of the bunch is, in my opinion, DrScheme.
Which says about enough about them... They are quacks.
Or they are smart enough to have figured out that telling the patient "it's all in your head" or "this does not require treatment" or "there is nothing we can do about this" is not a good thing to do, and that sending them to a harmless practitioner of alternative medicine works. Besides, even if it is real, the placebo effect is strong and may heal it.
People actually look at this, you know. Generally, Apple tends to be comparable to the best PC vendors, not better and not worse. That's not surprising, since their prices are roughly comparable and since they are using the same manufacaturing facilities.
Occasionally, Apple gets a little too fancy for their own good and they will bring a real dud to market, but I think every vendor does, it's only that with Apple people notice more.
Sun provides all information neccessary to build one.
Go read the license on the Java specs before you write such drivel.
If Java is to run on the OLPC computer, it needs a smaller, simpler implementation.
Well, funny you should say that, because that's what Sun's license specifically prohibits.
It's up to Red Hat or any one other than them to make it.
RedHat has been creating an implementation of Java--an excellent one. They have done so through cumbersome clean-room methods for the APIs because Sun's license doesn't allow them anything else, and the result will therefore never be fully compatible. That's Sun's fault, not RedHat's.
Your argument only goes to show what a rotten idea it is to let Sun control Java. If Java is supposed to be an open platform, then its specs should be open and independent of Sun, and multiple independent implementations of it must exist. If companies like RedHat need to worry about competing with the company that holds the rights to Java, then Java simply fails to be open.
Not a Charity.
Sun can do with Java whatever they want.
The problem is that it is Sun that keeps claiming that Java is open-this and open-that, that it is Sun that apparently wants support from the open source community, that it is Sun that wants Linux to use more Java, and that Sun is involved in Linux and sells Linux stuff.
A second problem is that Sun has demonstrated repeatedly in their history that they are unable to execute a competent business strategy when it comes to these kinds of products, and Java looks just like what they did to some other similar products in the past.
In fact, one thing that upsets a lot of people about Sun is that they promised one thing (an open platform for applet and GUI development with third party implementations and an ANSI/ISO standard), and switched to a different one once they had gotten the community support (a de-facto single source implementation for server side development, a proprietary spec, and the JCP). After something like that, the company can't be trusted on anything as far as I'm concerned.
but last time I checked, Redhat's glee doesn't fill Sun's coffers
Are you sure? Where do you think a lot of Java enterprise apps run? Furthermore, where do you think Java would be today without the support and volunteer contributions of large numbers of open source proponents?