* Posts by copsewood

519 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Jun 2009

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World pays tribute to Yuri Gagarin

copsewood

@Anton: coming at this one completely cold

I know next to nothing about the circumstances surrounding Yuri's death, and you may well know things I don't, but I need much better evidence than what you have stated above to make a conspiracy rather than a cock up theory fully credible. Cock ups are very common, especially amongst testosterone filled test pilots who are known not to be particularly risk averse by profession. His visit to Manchester a few months after his spaceflight was so well received in the UK that Gagarin must have been seen as a potentially useful ambassador for the Soviet regime in any case:

http://www.wcml.org.uk/contents/international/cold-war/yuri-gagarin-in-manchester/

Conspiratorial eliminations of inconvenient and popular figures seem likely, by their very nature, to leave evidence of the kind surrounding the Kennedy assassination (plenty of smoke and we have a saying "no smoke without fire", but still unproven):

a. Important suspects in the plot themselves being eliminated soon afterwards to prevent them from talking.

b. Other bits of evidence of a plot (e.g. witnesses hearing gunshots and seeing smoke somewhere [grassy knoll] not accepted as relevant within the official explanation.

c. Elaborate official explanations of gunshot trajectories stretching credibility, requiring bullets to have to have ricochetted in order to have penetrated the victim more than once.

Without better evidence than you have stated above, Occam's Razor tends to point to cockup (e.g. to normal human laziness in signing safety check boxes without people really checking) as opposed to conspiracy as being the simpler and more likely explanation.

Is there any evidence of dissenting views having been expressed by Gagarin ? If not then we are lacking a crucial factor to make any conspiracy theory credible: i.e. the need for a motive, for which in the case of Kennedy, as a charismatic, liberal and reforming US president, he was making enough enemies.

Sony buries hatchet with GeoHot in PS3 modding case

copsewood
Big Brother

Sony/Microsoft et al. haven't won this war

The war for freedom of programming speech goes on. George's case could have been strung out at considerable expense involving contributions via the EFF, but he's only 21 FFS, and some of George's actions were a little rash, to say the least, making these actions somewhat more difficult to defend in practice even if he was fully correct in principle. Maybe George was rightly persuaded by his lawyers that he's better off being able to continue hacking rather than being locked up like a martyr over a case where some of the principles at stake were not optimally arranged, due to the relative naivity of his prior actions in taking on Sony without using appropriate layers of anonymity or from within a country with better laws such as Jon Johansen's Norway.

There have to be better ways for a hopefully now somewhat wiser hacker to release keys and programming information for hacked consoles than to have this so personally attributable to a website run in a country with dictatorial DMCA laws which can evidently result in the gagging and locking up of dissidents.

It's also better for PR reasons, for political/legal cases like George's to be funded by activists within the country whose bad laws are being challenged in preference to through foreign money, so I didn't donate to this one. If a similar case had been in the UK (e.g. over RIPA forced key disclosure) and I'd donated to such a defence, then I'd only do so on the basis that the lawyers have to act in the best interests of the individual being defended, in preference to the longer term precedents set by the case. For a lawyer to act otherwise would bring their professional ethics into question in any situation.

Facebook twins lose court case

copsewood
Gates Halo

Years before Facebook existed

I spent some time in the late 90ies social networking on a very similar website called Addapt. The name of the programmer behind this one: Richard Persaud came to memory. Searching on his name just now resulted in Giff Constable's observation and recollection of the same site recorded (I guess based on US date notation) 10 Dec 2003 :

"In the late 90's I was part of an interesting web-based community (mostly Bay area people) called Addapt, built by Rich Persaud. It worked partly because it was well designed, but mostly because it was *small*, invitation-only, and had really interesting people."

Written by: Giff Constable | 12/10/2003 on http://www.ventureblog.com/2003/12/conserving-social-capital.html

So in my view the generic ideas behind Facebook are likely to have been invented many times over by different people, and if anyone deserves credit this must be Richard Persaud. Generic ideas are also not copyrightable. In any sane society software as such is also not patentable, see the 1991 quote by Bill Gates on software patents: “If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today’s ideas were invented and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete stand-still today."

What will we do with 600MHz?

copsewood
Go

Should go to those most serious about providing remote broadband

We don't need more crap TV channels, as if we haven't got enough crap TV already.

There still are too many places too far from their exchange to get a decent ADSL connection, which are also too expensive for fibre to the cabinet rollout. There's no way it will become economic to provide cable TV/Internet in such remote places. This adversely impacts local economic development and makes life in such places backward.

Bidders should have some background in Internet Service Provision and should succeed based on who wants to put the most money into accounts reserved for subsequent spending on installing transmitters, receivers, marketing and otherwise rolling out the service. The effect should be public revenue and tax neutral, in the sense that what the successful bidders pay up front can then be respent on their own rollout. This should get the maximum economic provision for net access for those least well provided and is a better alternative to proposed digital access schemes involving cross subsidies.

Wind power: Even worse than you thought

copsewood
Dead Vulture

@Andydaws: storage

An easily findable study: http://www.esru.strath.ac.uk/EandE/Web_sites/03-04/wind/content/storage%20available.html looking at the potential of uprating existing hydro dams with additional generating plant for storage purposes discovers 514 GWh potential storage capacity in Scotland, or about 50 Dinorwics, or the 300GWh you claim is needed plus a substantial margin. The same study suggests no storage is required in relation to variable wind until it meets more than 15% of UK electric demand. In practice, the cost of the storage required will depend upon how much you can afford to spend on avoiding industrial holidays based upon weather forecasting. Before you get into the really high expenditures of building new dam capacity the main additional cost is likely to be in adding additional generating plant at existing dams and in strengthening the regional and national grid in order to have sufficient capacity to take energy mainly stored in Scotland for demand mainly in England.

We need to do the sums on nuclear as well. Personally, based on the known and externalised costs (e.g. those currently experienced in Japan over failure of nuclear plant and concerning long term waste storage) I find it difficult to justify relying for nuclear on more than 25% of UK electric demand or for more than 1 final generation of nuclear build. If it is important enough to get C02 down over the next 30 years and beyond then we'll need both renewables and nuclear in the near term. Nuclear is useless for peak demand anyway - it is most suited for baseload.

Given another 20 years of wind development at current growth rates and taking wave, tidal and solar heating from where these now are to where these can reasonably be expected to be in 20 years, I'd be very surprised if nuclear can achieve similar cost reductions over the same period while retaining acceptable safety margins in relation to geological and extreme weather caused risk. But the time to decide whether the next generation of nuclear plant should be the last will be then and not now.

copsewood

Lewis ignores most of the reservoir capacity which already exists

Current pumped capacity involves having 2 reservoirs with a height difference between them. If you uprate the generating capacity on existing hydro power dams and allow the water level to vary more, rather than have these compete with nuclear for baseload suppy, then you won't need as much new pumped capacity to balance wind and tidal electric output. Then there is the question of whether or not water supply reserviors could be dual purposed during times of low wind but adequate rainfall.

Intermittent wind electricity can also be stored as carbon neutral fuel by using the Fischer Tropsh process, once captured biofuel carbon can be used for the C02. There's probably no other realistic way you can achieve sustainable air transport anyway, because you certainly can't fly commercial aircraft using batteries or nuclear generators.

Banana-bender beer boffins drop drops for science

copsewood
Joke

brewing beer in zero G sounds tricky

I guess the problem of continuously separating the fermentation bubbles from the beer is solvable, by brewing inside a slow centrifuge in order to simulate gravity.

Malware baddies crank up Trojan production

copsewood
Linux

End of antivirus

No way can any security business intelligently analyse this number of new threats per day. I expect the leading firms have automated difference detectors using numerous virtual machines to check samples out. As to the quality of signatures generated by such means when this malware morphs at that kind of frequency, well that's anyone's guess.

There has to be a better way of protecting systems than being able to detect everything that might be bad. How about having a group of people sign a large and useful enough collection of software known to be good ? Put this signed code into a repository, making it so your operating system can easily install from tens of thousands of such signed applications which meet all likely needs and making it so only relatively expert users find it easy to install anything else ? Now where did I hear about this approach before ?

US House votes to bar FCC net neut rules

copsewood
Boffin

@LazLong - OK but what does "net neutrality" mean ?

"How anyone can be against 'net neutrality is beyond me" .

That depends upon your value for net neutrality. I'm not convinced an ISP should try to offer the same latency or throughput for a large file download as they should for a VOIP connection for example, given that they can make both types of connection work better if they are prioritised in different ways. Similarly if they sell smaller and larger GB/month caps prior to throttling based on their marketing we can expect them to throttle the cheaper customers sooner than the more expensive ones. If ISPs do nothing to control spam emanating from compromised customer machines they are likely to find wanted email being sent from their network getting blocked along with the spam.

So everyone agrees on the need for net neutrality when it comes to conflicts of interest, as with the classic case of a railway company which owns a steel mill prioritising their own steel traffic over their competitors. But I don't think anyone who understands these issues as they affect ISPs expect the ISPs not to manage their networks.

Canonical kills free Ubuntu CD program

copsewood
Linux

Job for your local LUG

There are Linux User Groups all over the world where a useful promotion event is to run a stand at a local event and burn CDs for those interested enough to try it. My local LUG in Coventry does this annually. But I think increasingly people will buy computers with Ubuntu preinstalled or get a friend to help them install it. Also every 6 months or so you'll find the latest Ubuntu on a magazine cover disk. Best for Canonical to spend their money where they get the best return and I think the season for this particular means of promotion is successfully over.

copsewood
Linux

You can still download the ISOs

and burn your own CD/DVDs.

Anonymous hacks Sony PS3 sites

copsewood
Big Brother

@Badvok: IP isn't property the way you understand it

Neither Bakunin's anarchist definition of property as theft, nor the 7th commandment: "though shalt not steal", extends to intellectual property, because in both cases copying something doesn't deprive the original owner of the use of the original property. To the extent ownership of property can be considered a human right this is only in the limited sense that the owner is disadvantaged through becoming deprived of the use of original property which making new copies does not do.

The idea that Sony owns license conditions over a customer (who currently denies having accepted these conditions), and that this gives Sony the right to restrict this individual's actions and have them dragged thousands of miles across the US to be sued is vindictive and absurd. But that seems to be the basis of Sony's civil action against George Hotz, see http://www.zeropaid.com/bbs/showthread.php/61469-Hotz-Ably-Fights-for-His-Motion-to-Dismiss-%28Groklaw%29 .

So your assertion that when corporations kick customers around like this that they are exercising "human rights" is contemptible and sick. Copyright term extensions can be purchased by interested corporations such as Disney through congressional campaign contributions. The kind of "property" that results is not the fundamental basis of human rights.

Sony had this one coming to them. The further they pursue this case the greater the cost will be in damage to reputation and loss of sales. The timely warning Anonymous are giving Sony should be considered by Sony's shareholders as a favour, because the more Sony's incompetent management succeed in bullying George Hotz and other tinkerers and hobbyist customers, the greater will be the negative publicity this case will cause them, and the greater the losses of sales which will result.

copsewood
Big Brother

modding a console

And telling others how to do it is freedom of expression. You won't find copyright in any bill of rights or convention on human rights. Clearly Sony imagine their intellectual property rights override computer misuse criminal law as with the rootkit, and constitutional law as with their use of the DMCA to suppress information about modification. Once I buy some electronics gear as far as I'm concerned I can do whatever I like with it and tell others what I have learned.

Facebook Comments kill web freedom

copsewood
FAIL

Facebook is probably just a passing fad

Geocities was sold for $3.57 billion in January 1999 and was switched off in October 2009 ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geocities ).

The idea that a single corp can be morally trusted or considered technically competent to provide for the entire planet's social networking requirements will probably seem very silly one viewed with the benefit of hindsight.

Baby Googles: The answer to the Chocolate Factory dominance?

copsewood
Big Brother

Destroy all monopolies

Oh dear, where to start. Clearly we'll need to dismember Microsoft, Google and Facebook. And then we can get rid of copyrights and patents. Then there is the issue of land ownership, given that they've stopped making land. Then we have roads and other utitilies where natural monopolies exist because people won't pay to have half a dozen companies lay water/gas/electricity pipes to your front door. All examples of what economists call "rent seeking activity". And don't get me started on the requirement for legal tender taxation.

But it seems more self interested than principled, if not downright hypocritical, that Andrew keeps on about the Google monopoly which he sees as unfair while he's so clearly in favour of promoting the copyright monopoly which protects his journalism, regardless of the fact that this goes far beyond the terms needed to encourage creative output.

Big brother icon because that is how the Mandelson's Digital Economy Act is proposing to enforce copyright.

Natty Narwhal with Unity: Worst Ubuntu beta ever

copsewood
Linux

Plenty of options

I've used Unity on Ubuntu Netbook remix for 6 months. It's been better than Gnome desktop there, due to less memory and CPU speed than on your typical desktop, though I'm really not sure about this being ready for prime time on the desktop.

Which still leaves 3 options:

a. apt-get install unbuntu-desktop

b. choose classic at the login screen

c. stay with the 10.04 LTS release until the 12.04 LTS comes out and more of the Unity bugs have been shaken out.

Digital player maker 'incited consumers to break the law', says ASA

copsewood
Pirate

copying is what computers and electronics do

From the tone of this article, it seems either that the ASA have taken their propaganda pills or they have been leaned on. Either way they seem more interested in the law being used to prop up copyright interests than in those who manufacture equipment or provide services with potentially infringing uses having freedom of speech to market their products.

Middle England chokes on Nice Baps

copsewood
WTF?

Facebook denies Middle England is a place

It's where I live, but Facebook won't let me claim Middle England as my place of residence.

FBI asks for help to crack mystery code in 12-year-old murder case

copsewood
Boffin

security by obscurity (SBO) better for an individual than a general cipher

Here is a code which captures the thoughts of a single individual for their own purposes, which seems unlikely to be usable as a general purpose cipher (GPC). The fact of insufficient obscurity with GPCs by definition, typically due to the kind of progressive leakage of secrets which is inevitable with a GPC, doesn't prevent SBO applying to an individual thought encoding system which an individual has developed and optimised for their own purposes since childhood.

The problem cryptanalysts will have is that there is probably no way of knowing at what level (words, ideas, concepts, characters, messages etc.) the symbols in his cipher refer to. So without the right lateral thinking idea it is difficult to see how and where they are going to start. Many interested eyeballs seem more likely to come up with a solution which depends initially upon a lateral thinking idea beyond the apparent capacity of the cryptanalysts who have worked on this so far.

Beyond $1bn: Why Red Hat is a one off

copsewood
Boffin

Most open source business is through mixed as opposed to pure plays

I suspect the business done by selling open source support is a small fraction of the business done where software is a cost centre as opposed to a profit centre. E.G. hardware vendors don't sell hardware without software, and for bespoke software and service contracts it is cheaper to reuse existing available software than create what is needed for the customer and contract entirely from scratch. Open source software is by definition more readily reusable than closed source, due to contractual and transaction costs and licensing impediments.

IBM does many times the business done by Red Hat on the back of open source software. But IBM has a much more diverse business than Red Hat. Both IBM and Red Hat have excellent reputations as free software community code contributors.

Nokia deal to 'rocket Windows Phone 7 past iPhone'

copsewood
Gates Horns

developing for Android first

According to this link: http://jordanopensource.org/freeplanet/article/microsoft-bans-open-source-windows-phone-7-marketplace people who have Win 7 phones and who want to run my Android developed applications won't be able to port the open source code, they'll have to cleanroom reverse engineer it from scratch and jump through whatever other absurd and expensive hurdles Microsoft choose to impose on developers. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot. In the meantime I'll have to tell potential users of my applications not to buy Win 7 phones, or if they have these to upgrade them to something more sensible when their contracts run out. Frankly I'd much prefer my code to be portable to run on all platforms, but I'm not willing to have my code included within proprietary programs unless these are freed on the same terms as I distribute my software, so offering my software to Win phone users based upon licensing which allows for this kind of IP theft isn't an option.

Praying for meltdown: The media and the nukes

copsewood
Dead Vulture

economic arguments and tilting at windmills

Andrew's last article on the energy subject: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/28/osbourne_new_green_elite/ was to do with the extent of the subsidy to wind energy. To correct the appearance of a pro-nuclear bias, we need a proper cost calculation of the nuclear insurance, cleanup, cost of evacuating a population within a 20km radius and long term waste management if we are to make a sensible comparison. These nuclear predictable and accidental costs are actual and someone has to pay for them, regardless of the safety hype which sells newsprint and TV advertising.

In practice we can't put all our energy eggs in one basket anyway. It is equally silly looking at the economics of wind without compatible uprated or pumped hydro energy storage to cover low wind periods, as it would be to look at the economics of nuclear electricity for peak demand purposes as an argument against nuclear.

Google's 'clean' Linux headers: Are they really that dirty?

copsewood
Linux

copyright doesn't extend to APIs

Even if an API has to contain small amounts of code (macros, in-line functions) there is a long standing principle that copyright doesn't obstruct manufacture of parts compatible with an intentionally defined interface between systems or subsystems. This is why you can buy a cheap exhaust pipe for your car and don't have to buy the genuine but expensive original manufacturer part, even though there is only 1 shape the exhaust pipe can be to clear the underside of the car.

Ubuntu board rejects slippery Flash installs

copsewood
Linux

Windows doesn't work out of the box

After installing Windows you then have to install a functional office suite (easier to download OOffice than to buy MSOffice), compressed archive decompressing tools, install printer drives from CD which Ubuntu generally autoinstalls over the Net unless you've bought a stupid printer, then download and install Firefox if you want a half way decent browser, programming languages if you have any software developed using Perl, Python etc. On Windows all of this has to be downloaded & installed from 3rd party sites where the typical Windows user has no way of knowing whether it includes malware.

All of this stuff comes standard with Ubuntu/Fedora etc. If you then need to run media which isn't natively supported, one or 2 very simple checkboxes or following a dialogue requiring minimal attention from the user is usually all that is required.

If you do need further add-ons on Linux, everything you are likely to want you can easily install using Synaptic/whatever and comes with a cryptographically signed trust path built into the installation method, so your probability of infection is kept extremely low. Yes it does take a higher level of knowledge to install 3rd party apps on Linux which are not in the very extensive distribution repositories, but from a trust point of view in the sense the installer is also likely to be capable of making an informed judgment on security issues, this isn't such a bad thing.

Facebook traffic mysteriously passes through Chinese ISP

copsewood
Go

HTTPS everywhere

I'm running this plugin from my home PC and it generally works quite well. In practice I had to make exceptions for one or 2 services, including Facebook, due to slower than acceptable performance over HTTPS. Adding exceptions to HTTPS everwhere reverts the connection to the unencrypted plain HTTP version of the service.

Still better to encrypt opportunistically when you can, same reason I prefer envelopes over postcards for snail mail.

Programmer gets 8 years for theft of stock trading software

copsewood
Boffin

Tobin tax

Good way to deal with social ripoff by any high speed trading system. Take a very small tax slice automatically from every trade and those making these are then more likely to be forced to think about whether there is any real, as opposed to just short-term speculative value involved.

Stamp duty has a similar effect on the UK housing market. This forces home buyers to have a genuine business or accomodation purpose before buying and selling, and it reduces the risk of speculative leeches parasiting the rest of us over short term instabilities which they would otherwise be incentivised to generate.

copsewood
Flame

legalised theft

"No doubt the same may be said of all professions. They are all conspiracies against the laity"

George Bernard Shaw, The Doctor's dilemma,

http://ije.oxfordjournals.org/content/32/6/910.full?ijkey=9021b5aa65b1527abae86cbfdff1f28df9c693ad&keytype2=tf_ipsecsha

The greatest thieves are those who write the laws which make their thieving from the general population legal. None more so than the bankers. That isn't to say we don't need a competitive banking system. But I for one have moved my account to a mutual building society, which operates as a non profit making entity, and which is large enough to avoid threat of corporate canibalism and small enough that the taxpayer isn't obliged to bail use on the grounds we are too large to be allowed to fail.

Fukushima one week on: Situation 'stable', says IAEA

copsewood
FAIL

Strontium and Ceasium float well enough

They floated well enough into the high altitude weather systems above Chernobyl to make some sheepmeat unfit for human consumption in the UK decades later. Almost anything will when carried high enough by a strong enough fire in small enough particles. Radioactive ceasium and strontium also have half lives of around 30 years, short enough to create an ongoing radiation hazard and long enough to be around for 300 years before decaying to 0.1% of the original level.

Moving to Windows 7: Is it worth it?

copsewood
Gates Horns

hardware that XP doesn't like

"and I'm not aware of much hardware that Windows XP doesn't like"

I certainly am. My partner bought a new PC with Windows 7 about a year ago. She was intending to use Windows for a single legacy desktop publishing application as most of her work uses Linux Ubuntu. She previously used a dual boot Linux/XP system.

Unfortunately her legacy application didn't run on Windows 7. So, having installed Linux on it as a dual boot I thought an XP downgrade installed onto the Windows 7 partition would solve this problem. Like hell it did.

Result, entire Windows 7 and Linux system blown away, all partitions destroyed and beyond my understanding or capacity to recover them. Attempting to do a clean XP install on the now bare hardware failed, I think due to incompatibilities between XP and modern partition tables and BIOS. I've installed dual boot setups dozens of times previously, and never seen such a complete mess. Just as well we keep good backups...

When I finally got her system working as intended this involved using Linux as her main system, with Windows XP running as a virtual machine using VirtualBox and Samba to share some disk space between the 2 OSs. She much prefers not having to reboot in order to use her Windows applications. As she does all of her networking on Linux, Windows insecurity problems don't affect her which saves on the cost of antivirus.

Site-saving workers evacuated from Japanese reactor disaster

copsewood
Boffin

alternatives or complements to nuclear

'What are these "economically and technologically better or equivalent solutions that would probably solve energy needs more effectively."?'

For the UK, proven renewable resources are mainly wind electricity load-balanced using uprated hydro. Most building heating and hot water through improved insulation, heat pumps and passive solar thermal.

Basically if you overprovision wind as the main electricity generation source by a factor of 2-3 , you can handle fluctuations by holding back water in high dams (much of the dam capacity needed already exists) for when not enough wind is blowing fast enough over a large enough area for this otherwise to be a problem. Getting rid of bank holidays and replacing these with wind holidays based on weather forcasting reduces the extent of overprovision or gas turbine backup needed (fueled using Fischer Tropsch synthetic hydrocarbons if you really need an abosolute zero carbon footprint and are prepared to pay a bit more to obtain this). This is all proven in the sense we can work out what this all costs and plan it starting now once we decide we can afford it.

Whether this is more "economical" than nuclear depends upon historical cost reduction with expansion, remembering that nuclear is later in its cost reduction exponential curve than wind (meaning nuclear won't get much cheaper with expansion but wind will). Another factor affecting computation of "economical" depends upon better understanding the subsidies provided to both renewables and to nuclear. Subsidy is currently provided to renewables through feed in tariffs and to nuclear through the taxpayer underwriting the accident insurance (e.g. the cost of having to evacuate the population at a radius of 20km around a nuclear plant ).

In relation to currently unproven resources, tidal has good potential but needs lengthy but relatively cheap research, as with solar voltaic - our poor UK sunshine requires research to improve this technology before it becomes cost effective in the UK compared to combined wind/hydro . Solar thermal sited in the empty deserts of North Africa and the Middle East also holds promise, but this requires high voltage continental DC transmission and greater political stability in the generating regions.

To avoid putting all our eggs into one basket what we are likely to see in practice is all of the above, including one final generation of new nuclear reactors probably adequate to maintain 15-20% of current UK elecricity demand for another 20-30 years, following a careful review of siting with respect to coastal and flooding risks. The UK is likely to experience minor earthquakes, flooding and tsunami events ( e.g. as with the which also risks catastrophic failure of both nuclear plants and hydro load balancing or water supply dams e.g. see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bristol_Channel_floods,_1607 ).

Even with the 80% C02 reduction in relation to UK economy by 2050 which the above combination of approaches could theoretically achieve, the cost of climate damage caused by C02 here is likely to be much greater than the costs all of the above would amount to. When deciding what is "economic" we should account climate damage as a subsidy and therefore part of the total cost of fossil fuel use.

copsewood
Alert

highly variable

Because most of the radiation leakage is due to steam venting and explosions, the resulting radiation levels around the various damaged reactors and facilities are going to be highly variable, probably for the next several days.

copsewood
Flame

More balanced article

The last couple of articles I read about this unfolding event left me wondering whether Lewis has been taking his medication. Fire icon to represent internal state of cooling ponds/reactors.

EU copyright database could help reform the laws on orphan works

copsewood
Pirate

monopoly via copyright is a privilege

If law theoretically in the interests of all of us is to grant the monopoly we call copyright, this should reasonably come with obligations on the part of the beneficiaries. One of these should be to identify and register ownership so this can be cheaply and quickly discovered by interested parties. Another obligation should be to establish that the owner continues to be interested.

If we don't create such an obligation on the beneficiaries of copyright, artists who may be treading upon unknown cultural toes have no way of knowing whether this is safe, leaving too few places left to walk when creating new works which may arguably infringe upon old ones.

If the purpose of granting this monopoly isn't to incentivise creation of new work then what on earth is it for ? Most owners of this particular kind of property lose interest in it after a short while. The exceptions should have to put a little money where their mouth is to recompense the rest of society for the privilege they obtain by denying the public domain earlier access. So I'm all in favour of a default copyright period of a few years without the owner having to pay to establish this, but where copyright owners intend extending copyright beyond a few years they have to pay a small fee to keep the work registered in copyright for longer.

European parliament loves the Tobin tax

copsewood
Thumb Up

All in favour of it

Sad that John Maynard-Keynes was so far ahead of the envelope that so many people who claim to be able to interpret the dismal science for the rest of us have not yet caught up with his better ideas. If you want to understand his long view, his short and accessible “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf gives useful clues as to our current or near future need for an economy in which human scale values begin to outweigh the need for growth at all costs including by rewarding excessive greed wherever this is found. And then we have Schumacher's "Small is beautiful", a guide to economics based on the radical idea that human scale values actually matter.

Suffice to say that Tobin's tax ideas would lead to a world much more in keeping with Keynes and Shumacher's visions. Yes its a tax Virginia, and taxes are inherently unpopular, but once we can rid ourselves of knee jerk reactions of the Daily Mail tabloid kind and accept that taxes are needed for us to have services we need such as health and education, then taxes have to be collected somehow, and every civilised society will spend a proportion of its collective income on things which are financed through taxation.

Having the foreign exchange dealer having to spend a higher proportion of what he earns on taxes and the woman who cleans his office floor having to spend a lower proportion of what she earns on taxes would be the outcome, so in many ways, professor Tobin's tax proposal makes very good sense.

Obama to overhaul heinous US patent system

copsewood
Stop

money good, patents bad

Monopolies are inherently an economic ill with relatively few exceptions and where exceptions exist these require careful and accountable regulation in the interests of the public at large. In the case of patents, such regulation as currently exists is like having the foxes (patent lawyers and officers) in charge of the henhouse, where the hens represent the public interest.

Money is not inherently an economic ill. It is a mechanism which enables decisions about production and consumption to be decentralised to a much greater extent than any alternative known system for making these decisions.

copsewood
Boffin

patent == monopoly, generally evil

In an efficient economy, monopolies would not be sold by the state without much better reason.

The theoretical justification for granting patents is that this brings knowledge about inventions otherwise likely to stay secret and die with the inventor into the public domain. If most patents were any good, reading these would be compulsory education for an engineer working in this field. But engineers don't normally read patents, partly because the inventive steps these claim are obvious to anyone who works in the field, partly because the legalese these are written in is deliberately obscure and partly because prior knowledge of a patent which you are later claimed to be in infringement of leads to higher awards being made against you.

Nearly all of the millions of patents granted are bad, partly because the system is so heavily controlled by lawyers who make money by making the obvious unreadable to anyone who isn't an experienced patent lawyer. As far as patent officers are concerned, if you were one of these would you prefer a system which pays for empires to be built in your chosen career, or one which grants monopolies only where there is a genuine public benefit in doing so, resulting in the employment of very few patent examiners ?

So neither of these gatekeeper professions can be trusted. Both groups, the lawyers and the patent officers, have vested interests in this system going from bad to worse. Any reform which doesn't destroy the financial incentives these leeches have in the current crooked system is rearranging the deckchairs on a sinking ship.

IPv6 intro creates spam-filtering nightmare

copsewood
Boffin

SPF tries to do too much

SPF ended up far too complex, so after some initial enthusiasm several years ago relatively few admins maintained the relevant DNS records for it. It failed to be a useful blacklisting criteria, though some recipients use it to assist with whitelisting.

CSV is a much simpler proposal in the sense that it only asserts the responsible relaying domain and doesn't try to make any claims about the original sender or the routing the originating sender is allowed to use. The receiving server only really wants reputation knowledge concerning its directly connecting and sending client anyway. CSV is much easier to implement in software than SPF.

http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-marid-csv-dna-02

If you want a more heavyweight originator signing scheme use DKIM.

With any of these domain based verification schemes you will need a means of establishing domain reputation as well, e.g. by using a RHSBL or DNA, see:

http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/R/RHSBL.html

copsewood
Boffin

Don't accept unsigned IPV6 email

Once it starts to make sense to accept IPV6 email it will make sense to accept it much more selectively than for IPV4 email. The problem with technologies similar to DNA/CSV or DKIM is that you can't reject on the basis of non adoption in IPV4 world and because of this there is too little incentive for admins to adopt these sender verification technologies. As IPV6 email adoption is so small anyway, it costs you very few false positives if you have a much more stringent acceptance criteria for IPV6 email.

That means that admins with enough of a clue to implement IPV6 have no reason not to DKIM sign all outgoing messages and install the relevant DNS records. Those who implement IPV6 without DKIM or something equally good for establishing the responsible domain will learn the hard way not to do this by having all or enough outgoing rejected.

Then you can accept/reject/defer reliably enough based upon domain reputation and simply ignore the client IPV6 address.

Once better spam accept/reject decisions are made using IPV6 email the other kind will die rather quickly.

copsewood

bad reputation and timeout

Software which compiles blacklists is likely to generate too many false positives if bad reputation resulting from ancient spam doesn't time out. It's easy enough to maintain a real time record of timestamped spamtrap hits for the IP address in question and remove it from the blacklist unless it has generated enough recent bad email.

New 'supercritical' generators to boost nuclear output by 50%

copsewood
Stop

laws of thermodynamics

Given knowledge of hot and cold source temperatures, the laws of thermodynamics will tell you the maximum percentage of heat energy which can be extracted. The colder your cold sink and the hotter your hot source relative to how far above absolute zero your cold source is, the closer to 100% energy conversion you can theoretically get.

Large fossil fuel plant efficiencies are constrained due to the need to avoid melting known materials for heat exchangers and because cold sinks have to be a few hundred C above absolute zero.

Last time I looked at these numbers for nuclear, these were running at much lower thermodynamic efficiencies than fossil plants, due to the obvious reason that you don't want to run the reactor too hot for its safety. Of course in the fossil case, you could use the waste heat for district heating, but people generally prefer a larger distance between their hot water pipes and the nearest nuclear power plant.

So how does this unsupported claim of a 50% improvement change these constraints, or is Lewis really just having yet another tilt at windmills ?

WD works on hybrid drives

copsewood
Black Helicopters

Hard drives with flash likely to leak data

I can see the reason why flash hybrid drives offer better capacity than flash alone with better speed and cacheing than rotating alone.

But what happens at end of life when you figure that you can't both cheaply and reliably erase all data prior to disposal, due to the way wear leveling works, without taking the thing apart and incinerating the flash chips or grinding these to dust ?

Until the storage industry provides secure overwriting of blocks marked bad as an intergral design feature, these devices carry hidden lifecycle costs for purchasers likely to lead either to leakage of confidential data or much higher secure data removal costs.

Amazon outlines Android bill of rights

copsewood
Pirate

@Ryan Kendall

"Once again its because of the few people who pirate eveyone else has to suffer with DRM."

If only a few people acted in breach of copyright the very high cost of developing and maintaining DRM would not be commercially justified through the small loss of revenue, so we would not have to put up with DRM. The reason we are made to suffer with DRM is because a few people stand to make a lot of money by being in a position to control use by very many people of saleable packages of information.

So if you don't want to have to suffer with DRM you are better off not buying content protected in this manner or equipment programmed in the interests of those who stand to make money by controlling what you can and can't do with it. Your alternatives are then using unlicensed content and risking civil action or using licensed programming and content exclusively DRM free.

Wales calls on ICANN to unleash .cymru

copsewood
FAIL

ISO is a rich mens club

"Proper countries get a two-letter TLD already. It's their ISO3166 country code. "

ISO may have done a fair job allocating these 2 letter codes. But they don't represent any _legitimacy_ as far as global naming is concerned, when countries which don't have their own standards defining organisations and which are consequently not members of ISO object to who gets which letters. As to what is and what is not a "proper country" just read the discussion below concerning conflicting views as to the status of Wales to see what chance there is of that being resolved through consensus organised through a forum rigged up by a private company.

So when it comes to non country domains and ICANN being in a position to authorise itself to flog off the best names to the highest bidders, I'd rather have a process with some claim to legitimacy, even if this does mean it has to go through the ITU, (potentially reformed as part of the treaty agreement which grants it this authority). The ITU has exercised this responsibilitiy reasonably well when it comes to the very similar exercise of allocating international dialling prexes to phone numbers.

The alternative to some kind of legitimacy is fragmentation where I operate my root zone to suit my preferences and you operate yours to suit yours, there are many competing root zones all different, and most of the world gets to use the Microsoft or Google versions or the one provided by whichever ISP configures their recursive DNS resolver and the agendas that go with any one of these. I'm sure flogging off unused TLD names within these private directories would be very profitable. As another commenter has pointed out, excluding large areas of the namespace does have certain security benefits ... at the expense of false positives.

Lets face it the root zone file is small enough that anyone competent in DNS content server administration is capable of evaluating most of it and replicating the bits they want in half a day or so. But I think standardisation of this is better for the end users than fragmentation of it where names can change based upon the profit and whim of a private corporation and are not constant between multiple versions of it.

copsewood
Boffin

Job for the ITU

The ITU is probably the only world organisation which should have legitimate authority over which TLD names should be allocated to which nations. I can see justification for some international recognised organisations e.g. .olympics or .fifa for sporting organisations to have TLDs, again such decisions should come under the auspices of an organisation with a UN mandate and not that of a private company. I Don't think such global naming rights should extend to private corporations.

That doesn't make the ITU competent to handle DNSSEC root zone signing or similar technical issues, so a treaty giving the ITU authority over the namespace allocations should require delegation of technical implementation responsibility of these naming decisions to a competent technical company or collection of such to enforce fair competition.

Council busts breast milk ice cream parlour

copsewood

no more green top

I bought this from the farm gate in my childhood once or twice. And very nice. But I think because there were always a very few getting tuberculosis by this route that's why you can no longer sell or buy it unpasteurised.

ECJ gender ruling 'could throw insurance into turmoil'

copsewood
FAIL

discriminating insurance is good for society at large

Ban discrimination against my advanced age and you will end the affordability of life insurance for younger parents of younger children who need this much more than I do. Banning discrimination against men like me who earn more than average women earnings forces low earning women to pay more expensive driving insurance. So women drivers are less likely to be able to afford to drive and so will have to work from home more and earn even less. This doesn't reduce overall gender discrimination it increases it by increasing the pay gap between men and women, so these effect of the stupid equality law behind this ruling is to increase inequality overall.

As an older male I want insurance to discriminate against me in these 2 risk assessment respects because accurate insurance premiums are clearly better for society at large. Having very expensive insurance for young males likely to have too much testosterone encourages them to have to drive much less powerful cars until they have learned how to drive more safely, which is a social good for everyone around them. This daft ruling will clearly increase the injuries and deaths caused by irresponsible young male drivers, with most of the victims being in other social groups.

copsewood
Flame

might as well end all insurance assessment

Because every question they can ask on a form is likely to result in some kind of discrimination and inequality. That is the whole reason they ask questions on insurance, i.e. to assess risk factors. And when they have ended discrimination against any kind of risk differentiator, no-one will have any incentive to try to avoid accidents in future because nanny insurance will cover it, so we don't have to act responsibly any more. But by then insurance will be too expensive to obtain.

Lets face it asking how old you are or how experienced a driver you are is ageist. Asking whether you have had any recent claims discriminates against the unfortunate. When it comes to life insurance, healthy 20 somethings would have to pay the same premiums for the same cover as 90 year old cancer patients. Narcoleptic smokers can burn their houses down and we all have to pay the cost, if we're fools enough to subsidise them by buying more expensive fire cover for ourselves that is. As those who need life insurance will no longer be able to afford it, we may as well get rid of insurance altogether and the social possibilities of mutual risk cover this industry once provided.

Cyber cops and domain name registrars meet to tackle net crooks

copsewood
Boffin

P2P DNS doesn't work

Unless you want site names which look like random strings, and long ones at that, because that's what these would have to be to avoid collisions and contention. These names would have to be too long and with no properties making these easy to remember. You might as well use IP addresses - but bear in mind that IPV6 addresses will be more difficult to remember than IPV4 ones and that IPV4 addresses with meaningful and constant dynamic DNS names change frequently.

If you want memorable site names such that a name such as example.com belongs to someone and others can't easily take this over, then having a delegated namespace is the only known way to do this.

That doesn't mean there is only 1 governance model possible, or that the many server operators for TLD domains couldn't collectively agree amongst themselves to get the root zone managed by a more acceptable (to them) authority.

Reactions to iiNet's copyright win

copsewood
Big Brother

A common carrier is not responsible for content carried

It isn't the responsibility of the postman if he or she delivers illegally copied CDs in brown paper envelopes. It should never be the job of ISPs to inspect packets traversing the network either, despite Mandelson's law claiming otherwise.

Severe bug deadlocks BIND

copsewood
Boffin

Why use IXFR ?

Can't really see the need to use a DNS specific protocol to transfer zone file changes between masters and slaves. Why on earth not use Rsync over SSH ? A more general purpose data transfer approach has the benefit of being maintained by a larger user community.

This all just makes Bind more complex and buggy than it needs to be.

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