I would count automation as a form of "cheapening labor" -- you do not need to pay a salary or benefits for a robot. As for quality work, unfortunately most people tend to buy low quality/low cost imports rather than high quality domestic products, which is the cause of our trade deficit in the first place. The issue here is not really domestic jobs as much as it is resolving the deficit in trade, and copyrights/patents/trademarks/trade secrets are a large part of the US strategy for closing that gap.
Is that income stream significant enough that it wouldn't be offset by the new derivative works created from the vast influx of public domain source material that could be created by a significant reduction in term length?
Not when you are competing with derivative works from foreign markets, which may be legally imported. The goal here is to force other countries to trade: trade their labor for our entertainment and software.
That is really not what I was referring to. I really just want to stop a particular user from running setuid/setgid programs and from running programs in their home directory. With Fedora that is literally a matter of clicking on 3 things, or equivalently running three commands in a terminal. It is not even clear to me that the Mac parental controls feature actually prevents users from executing programs in their home directories (e.g. a program they downloaded from some website).
In any case, the real point here was that there is no reason to pay the Apple premium if your goal is to protect an unsophisticated user from malware.
No magic box is protected from stupid. This wasn't a drive by install, the users had to choose to install it.
A lot of places do not allow users to run programs in their home directories, to help mitigate this exact problem. This is not necessarily the best approach for home users, but it certainly is possible to provide some protection from user stupidity in certain contexts.
When your entire marketing approach is, "Everything we make JUST WORKS!" you really cannot have these kinds of malware floating around, and you certainly cannot try to charge people to fix things. It is not that I am criticizing Apple here, I am just saying that in their position, the only thing they could do is to erase the malware at no cost to their customers, or risk damage to their entire marketing machine.
My approach is cheaper: lock down the system. Install Fedora, give my mother a user that has type user_u in SELinux, and breath a little easier now that I know she cannot accidentally run some random program she downloaded. There are still vulnerabilities, but it would take a far more sophisticated attack than what one normally sees.
On the other hand, to even begin to satisfy the demands of the other side, the USA and Europe would need to seriously reform their economic policies. Copyrights, patents, and trademarks are a major export for these countries, and strengthening the laws around them helps to improve the value of those exports. If you want to stop strengthening the laws, then you need to start working on ways to increase exports from other areas of the economy. That means you need to compete with countries where labor is cheap -- and short of cheapening your own labor, I am not really sure how you do that.
Except that the bad guys have already been made aware of the vulnerability, since Stuxnet is out there for anyone to analyze. Do you think the Iranians have not been picking apart Stuxnet and trying to figure out how they can use it?
why should he get better service because he's using a more interactive protocol?
"Better service" has multiple definitions here. I would say that interactive sessions get "worse service" when the latency increases, perhaps because you have some huge download that is eating away at bandwidth that an interactive session could be using. Do you want your VoIP calls to get choppy, or do you want your downloads to be a few minutes faster?
Shaping traffic based on the protocol is generally a good thing, assuming you get it right (i.e. give the protocols that need priority priority). Shaping is compatible with network neutrality, as long as you are not using the address packets originate from or the payload as part of the shaping rule.
Unfortunately, I simply cannot trust that an ISP like Comcast will stick to shaping rules that only use the protocol. This is one of those cases where regulation is needed (particular given how many hand-outs large ISPs have gotten).
I would classify this as part of the more general category of "in band signalling." The telephone network learned the hard way why such a design is bad when people began to use blue boxes, but it still took decades for them to fix the problem. I suspect that it will be a while before we see a real fix to the SQL injection problem as well.
A well functioning app store is not what we object to. We object to the situation Apple has created with the iPhone/iPad/etc. were you are not allowed to install software that is not from the app store.
For Hollywood, copyright has one meaning: inflating their profits. Unfortunately, almost everyone in America has forgotten that copyright is supposed to exist to improve the people's access to works of art and science, not just to make money for copyright holders, and so Hollywood manages to get away with their abuse of our legal system.
Excuse me, but no, you do not have a right to profit. You have a right to try to profit, but if your business fails to compete then nobody is going to save you. At least, that is the theory; in practice, we go around bailing out corporations when they are "too big to fail" and attacking new technologies that might force industries to adapt or die.
The stipulation of the program not being able to offer services below cost doesn't even seem to be a bad idea.
So when a town decides to offer better service than other ISPs but charge the same amount, then what? They are suddenly offering service "below cost" (in an economic sense) and are force to wait until private companies decide to offer better service.
This bill is just a hand out to private ISPs, and does not actually help the people who live in towns with no broadband service or competition.
that they can't use the fact that it's run by local government to undercut private competition.
So, it is perfectly fine to deploy the service at whatever cost in regions where private companies refuse to operate, right? Oh, wait, the bill makes no distinction.
Who decides what is "below cost?" If I offer a service that costs the same amount per month as Comcast, but is twice as fast, has no bandwidth caps, doesn't interfere with Torrents, etc., am I offering "below cost" service?
Frankly nothing in the bill sounds reasonable. Why does it make sense for a town to separate the cost of operating an Internet connection from a school or library budget? Why should a town have to wait for a referendum to issue bonds for broadband operations, if they are not required to do so for roads or other utilities?
This bill is nothing more than a way to protect broadband monopolies from democratic processes. I would feel more sympathy for ISPs if they were actually providing quality service that was on par with the rest of the developed world. They are not, and we have waited far too long for them to get their act together; it is time to try another way, not to go on protecting the ISP monopolies that have underperformed so far.
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I would count automation as a form of "cheapening labor" -- you do not need to pay a salary or benefits for a robot. As for quality work, unfortunately most people tend to buy low quality/low cost imports rather than high quality domestic products, which is the cause of our trade deficit in the first place. The issue here is not really domestic jobs as much as it is resolving the deficit in trade, and copyrights/patents/trademarks/trade secrets are a large part of the US strategy for closing that gap.
Is that income stream significant enough that it wouldn't be offset by the new derivative works created from the vast influx of public domain source material that could be created by a significant reduction in term length?
Not when you are competing with derivative works from foreign markets, which may be legally imported. The goal here is to force other countries to trade: trade their labor for our entertainment and software.
That is really not what I was referring to. I really just want to stop a particular user from running setuid/setgid programs and from running programs in their home directory. With Fedora that is literally a matter of clicking on 3 things, or equivalently running three commands in a terminal. It is not even clear to me that the Mac parental controls feature actually prevents users from executing programs in their home directories (e.g. a program they downloaded from some website).
In any case, the real point here was that there is no reason to pay the Apple premium if your goal is to protect an unsophisticated user from malware.
No magic box is protected from stupid. This wasn't a drive by install, the users had to choose to install it.
A lot of places do not allow users to run programs in their home directories, to help mitigate this exact problem. This is not necessarily the best approach for home users, but it certainly is possible to provide some protection from user stupidity in certain contexts.
When your entire marketing approach is, "Everything we make JUST WORKS!" you really cannot have these kinds of malware floating around, and you certainly cannot try to charge people to fix things. It is not that I am criticizing Apple here, I am just saying that in their position, the only thing they could do is to erase the malware at no cost to their customers, or risk damage to their entire marketing machine.
My approach is cheaper: lock down the system. Install Fedora, give my mother a user that has type user_u in SELinux, and breath a little easier now that I know she cannot accidentally run some random program she downloaded. There are still vulnerabilities, but it would take a far more sophisticated attack than what one normally sees.
another side in this debate
On the other hand, to even begin to satisfy the demands of the other side, the USA and Europe would need to seriously reform their economic policies. Copyrights, patents, and trademarks are a major export for these countries, and strengthening the laws around them helps to improve the value of those exports. If you want to stop strengthening the laws, then you need to start working on ways to increase exports from other areas of the economy. That means you need to compete with countries where labor is cheap -- and short of cheapening your own labor, I am not really sure how you do that.
Except that the bad guys have already been made aware of the vulnerability, since Stuxnet is out there for anyone to analyze. Do you think the Iranians have not been picking apart Stuxnet and trying to figure out how they can use it?
why should he get better service because he's using a more interactive protocol?
"Better service" has multiple definitions here. I would say that interactive sessions get "worse service" when the latency increases, perhaps because you have some huge download that is eating away at bandwidth that an interactive session could be using. Do you want your VoIP calls to get choppy, or do you want your downloads to be a few minutes faster?
Shaping traffic based on the protocol is generally a good thing, assuming you get it right (i.e. give the protocols that need priority priority). Shaping is compatible with network neutrality, as long as you are not using the address packets originate from or the payload as part of the shaping rule.
Unfortunately, I simply cannot trust that an ISP like Comcast will stick to shaping rules that only use the protocol. This is one of those cases where regulation is needed (particular given how many hand-outs large ISPs have gotten).
That describes discretionary ACLs; my question was about mandatory ACLs e.g. SELinux, Windows Mandatory Integrity Control, TrustedBSD, etc.
Where do we find mandatory ACLs or MLS policies in Mac OS X? Or are these systems not being deployed in security sensitive environments?
I would classify this as part of the more general category of "in band signalling." The telephone network learned the hard way why such a design is bad when people began to use blue boxes, but it still took decades for them to fix the problem. I suspect that it will be a while before we see a real fix to the SQL injection problem as well.
Why would the OS respond to such a request?
For all the idiots that are going to complain about Google reneging on their openness promises this was obviously required by the content owners
How does that change the fact that Google is reneging on their promises?
We criticized Google for filtering search results in China, so why should we not be critical in this case?
How much of the predicate logic, probability theory, markov chains and simulation did I end up using? close to 0.
Then you are not working as a computer scientist; it sounds more like you are working as a programmer.
I expected to be taught something that I would actually USE in my career.
Then go to a trade school, where you will be taught just that.
A well functioning app store is not what we object to. We object to the situation Apple has created with the iPhone/iPad/etc. were you are not allowed to install software that is not from the app store.
For Hollywood, copyright has one meaning: inflating their profits. Unfortunately, almost everyone in America has forgotten that copyright is supposed to exist to improve the people's access to works of art and science, not just to make money for copyright holders, and so Hollywood manages to get away with their abuse of our legal system.
...because Apple is not evil enough already?
Excuse me, but no, you do not have a right to profit. You have a right to try to profit, but if your business fails to compete then nobody is going to save you. At least, that is the theory; in practice, we go around bailing out corporations when they are "too big to fail" and attacking new technologies that might force industries to adapt or die.
The stipulation of the program not being able to offer services below cost doesn't even seem to be a bad idea.
So when a town decides to offer better service than other ISPs but charge the same amount, then what? They are suddenly offering service "below cost" (in an economic sense) and are force to wait until private companies decide to offer better service.
This bill is just a hand out to private ISPs, and does not actually help the people who live in towns with no broadband service or competition.
that they can't use the fact that it's run by local government to undercut private competition.
So, it is perfectly fine to deploy the service at whatever cost in regions where private companies refuse to operate, right? Oh, wait, the bill makes no distinction.
it sounds quite reasonable.
This does not sound reasonable to me:
bar from them offering below cost services
Who decides what is "below cost?" If I offer a service that costs the same amount per month as Comcast, but is twice as fast, has no bandwidth caps, doesn't interfere with Torrents, etc., am I offering "below cost" service?
Frankly nothing in the bill sounds reasonable. Why does it make sense for a town to separate the cost of operating an Internet connection from a school or library budget? Why should a town have to wait for a referendum to issue bonds for broadband operations, if they are not required to do so for roads or other utilities?
This bill is nothing more than a way to protect broadband monopolies from democratic processes. I would feel more sympathy for ISPs if they were actually providing quality service that was on par with the rest of the developed world. They are not, and we have waited far too long for them to get their act together; it is time to try another way, not to go on protecting the ISP monopolies that have underperformed so far.
it is looking like a 555 timer won't make the high frequencies(24khz i think)
What sort of 555s are you using? Getting a 24kHz signal from a 555 should not be a difficult thing to do.