Aigarius Blog (Posts about news)

I called it!

Aigars Mahinovs — Fri, 25 Aug 2006 23:08:05 GMT

Ryanair finally sued the UK government for 3 million pounds for the air traffic disruptions, just like I called it!
Now they only need to team up with British Airways (who demand their money from goverment's BAA) and all the other affected airlines, so that the court doesn't just dismiss it right away. Also it would be nice if Ryanair rallied the people to halp them - demonstration in front of the courthouse and bumper stickers saying "Keep Britain Flying!" and "Keep US Flying!" (along with t-shirts, umbrellas and sports style water bottles) would also help to rally public support.

Secure flying

Aigars Mahinovs — Thu, 17 Aug 2006 20:08:26 GMT

If one really wants to make international flying perfectly safe (at least safe from terrorists masquerading as passengers), it is in fact very simple and quite cheap:

* No carry-on or check-in luggage at all (all kinds of chemical, bacteriological or radioactive materials could be hidden there, for example it can be trivial to make a laptop burn up in flames mid-flight and make in in non-detectable way).

* No personal items of clothes (clothes can be soaked in certain chemicals to make them explosive).

* Secure passengers during the flight ( so that they can not actually do any terrorist activity).

So, the optimal way of securing air transportation would be to have people come in without any luggage at all, remove all items and clothing at check-in, dress in uniform one-time paper clothing where one can not hide anything, sedate them, feed them trough introspective inspection to detect in-body foreign objects and check the chemistry of skin and hair, pack them into the airplane on secured padded shelves, fly them to the destination, reverse the sedative and give them a standard set of clothes and essential personal items.

In addition to perfect security, this plan will also reduce the overall cost of air travel by allowing to pack more people into an airplane of the same size - the padded shelves can go from the bottom of the airplane to the very top with minimal spacing (all passengers are sedated - they will not walk around), no separate cargo hold will be needed (no luggage) and no in-flight entertainment or food will be required.

If the current security craze continues, we might reach this perfection by 2020. Congratulations!

Note: All software by that time will be Web-based, so there will be no sense in taking your "personal" laptop with you.

Cobert takes on Latvia (future, hopefull)

Aigars Mahinovs — Sat, 05 Aug 2006 21:08:02 GMT

I was just told that Steven Colbert is going to feature Latvia in it's new sketch "Meet an ally". On his show, he often does thematic multi-part sketches where he meets with all participants of some kind of group. The best example is his ongoing '434-part series' "Better know a district" that even earned a Wikipedia article for itself. After talking with the representative of Pilau to UN, he found out that only military force they had was one single patrol boat and that it's ambassador has barely any relation to the small island state from the Pacific. Hopefully we will look a bit better :)

P.S. Regarding spelling - I have found that it is still more convenient to use gnome-blog package then to use the Wordpress on-line spelling plugins.

F-word on BBC and shot Muslims

Aigars Mahinovs — Tue, 13 Jun 2006 21:06:55 GMT

Pre-story: In Forestgate in London police stormed inside a house, shot one man and arrested him and his brother. After 10 days it turned out that no evidence of any gilt to them was found in the raid and the raid is only based on some secret intelligence.

During the day when I was watching the news the brother that was shot was describing how policemen dragged him down the stairs shouting him to "Shut the f*** up!", the F-word was bleeped and that was ok. The real surprise to me was that it was not bleeped out when retransmitted in the evening news at 22:00. I am glad that UK's media are not as puritan as USA's.

P.S. I think that this incident with another innocent Muslim person being brutally shot by the police without any warning is the best thing that Al Quaeda could have organized. I just hope that this will get the same outcry internationally as here in UK and that will turn the tide from "war" to "freedom".

RMS Turin speech thoughts

Aigars Mahinovs — Thu, 30 Mar 2006 23:03:44 GMT

There is a transcript of RMS Turino speech up on Groklaw. So to follow up on my earlier thoughts about GPLv3 I will look at the transcript of RMS's speech in Turin and write down what I think about it here, so I can refer to it later and maybe so that other people can skip reading that huge piece of text on legal stuff, especially as there is nothing really new there.

First RMS goes on to his now tradition rant about "intellectual property" being a meaningless term that lumps together three completely unrelated laws with different rules. I fully agree on that and I have used the very same argumentation in my speeches for last couple years.

RMS summarises GPLv3 like this:

 And the overall effect of GPL version three will be basically the same as version two, protecting the same four freedoms, but doing it somewhat better, dealing with some problems which we've encountered and adapting better to various different laws around the world.

It is clearly visible trough the drafts of GPLv3 that it really is intended to protect the same freedoms, but better. People that do not want their freedoms protected, should not be using any version of GPL anyway - BSD or MIT licenses should be good enough for them. However, if we do want to protect our freedoms, then we should that as good as possible without restricting them.

RMS explains the new patent clause - it was implicitly assumed that distributor that distributes a program under a free software license implicitly promises not to sue users of that software for using it. With what is going on in the legal world (especially the SCO case) it is only natural that RMS would want to codify such implicit promises. He also raises a good point on a person having an exclusive patent license distributing GPL software that uses patented technologies that this license grants him the rights to use and distribute, but noone else. That goes very much against the spirit of GPL, so it had to be fixed in some way. I am not sure if the proposed fix by this specific revision of the patent clause is the best way, but that loophole must be closed in one way or another. (And no, eliminating software patents is not a satisfactory option - it is not soon enough and it does not depend on our decision alone)

Another controversial issue that RMS is going into more detail with is the DRM clause. The idea is quite simple - anyone who wishes to use GPL code in a DRM protection measure may do so without any problems, but he has to admit that because any user of his GPL-licensed DRM protection measure has the right (according to the GPL) to modify that protection measure, it is not an effective DRM protection measure and thus he can not use laws like the DMCA to disallow people changing his DRM software for any purpose. There is nothing unfair, draconian or even new about it - with a bit of luck the same thing could be proved in court the first time someone would try to enforce DRM on GPL software via DMCA. However simply clarifying that in the license is a much clearer way to achieve that and it will also save some legal costs along the way.

What I do not really support for 100% is the clause against Tivofication, the hardware key clause. Tivo has Linux inside, but the hardware will not allow you to run modified versions of the kernel. GPLv3 tries to close that loophole by demanding that along with the source of the software the distributor is obliged to also distribute all other components that are needed for modification and successful functionality of that software, for example, a key that would allow the hardware to run our version of the software. While I do not like what Tivo does with crippling the hardware they provide, but at the same time it is quite clear that it is quite within their rights to decide how do they want to provide you their service. The only way in my mind to insure that TC does not bite us in the ass is to make our software so good that no business would by some piece of general purpose computing hardware that would disallow them to run our software. Microsoft is tiny compared to all the companies using computers improve their primary business function. We must make it so that our users are our allies and if someone tries to go against us with TC tools, our users would vote against that with their wallets.

More clarifications followed about optional parts of GPL that were intended for extended compatibility with other software licenses. I think that is a very noble goal, but one must be careful not to make some sub-version of GPL being non-free like it happened with GNU FDL. However it is still not quite clear to me how the legal issues work when sharing code between projects with different compatible licenses and between projects with GPLv3 with different extension enabled. Could someone explain that in more detail with some examples?

In Q&A session RMS went quite a bit overboard with some anti-establishment rhetoric that in my opinion had no place at that event. If you want to praise Chavez, please do that in a private conversation at a cocktail party or rather do not do that at all - it is quite damaging to seriousness of your message and acceptability of it to our major allies in fight from freedom - business users.

On a funny note - a remark from RMS that we will have to replace him at some point got a round of applause :)

(Now I should really finish up the presentation for tomorrow :P)

Happy + sad + hectic all in one day

Aigars Mahinovs — Thu, 23 Mar 2006 07:03:25 GMT

Today is shaping up to be a very strange day indeed:

1. Today is my 23rd birthday and still I have no celebration planned as of now. Update: well now three separate parties that combine my bithday and my farewell parties together are planed all over this weekend. Fun.

2. Today my father had a surgery planned - he was diagnosed with cancer last week. Update: Today it became clear that it is incurable and that he only has a year or two left to live. Very sad and depressing. I am not good with those feelings - I tend to almost not feel them while it is processing in the back of my head. Then after a few weeks it hits me like a sledgehammer and in a day I am back to life again. Sad and strange. I wish he lives at least until I come back from UK.

3. And I have a list of 20+ things to do before moving to Cranfield, UK from which I hope to have 3-4 of those tasks completed today. On of those is buying a 160Gb hard drive for an USB enclusure I have to provide me some space for my data and photos in UK and a miniPCI Intel PRO/Wireless 2200 card so that I finally can use my notebooks wireless capabilities as they were ment to be used. Update: no such things in store - come tomorrow.

Hell of a day.

Moving to UK

Aigars Mahinovs — Wed, 15 Mar 2006 20:03:02 GMT

After less then a month of talks I have been awarded a studentship in Cranfield University, UK. I will spend one year starting on using AI and genetic programming to solve the issue of "Automated evolution of textual adverts" as my Masters in Research. The studies will start on 10th of April, so the next three weeks I will be spending in a constant state of accelerated bewilderment as I will be running around arranging all the things that I will need to take with me and all the paperwork that I will have to do before going off to Cranfield.

Wish me luck.

Note: I am still coming to Debconf6!

Oscars rant

Aigars Mahinovs — Mon, 06 Mar 2006 21:03:54 GMT

Blogging this week seem to be on a high wave for me. Which, as I previously noted, is correlated with my general level of activity. So this blob post is my braindump about 2006 Academy Awards ceremony a.k.a Oscars 2006.

First of all - I love John Steward and watch "The Daily Show" daily.

Opening was just hilarious. Everyone refuses to host and then John awakes from several dreams in bed with Clooney. LOL!

Collage of non-gay westerns - LOL! It is true - I will never will be able to watch old westerns without considering "maybe that guy is gay?"

About Best Animated feature: I really thought that "Howl's moving castle" was much better then that Wallace and Gromit thing, but they gave it to them because their props burned down.

Talking about howling, who let Dolly Parton in? That was just horrible - no voice, no show, all face pulled back into a bun in the back of her head. "We're all Gods children"? "Alleluia"? Please, let her die in piece.

March of the Penguins is the best, especially in Linux context :D

Now the second song (the one from "Crash") was much better in all possible ways - great show, good looking singer and a better voice too. The beginning was kinda shaky, but she calmed down soon after starting to sing. I was fascinated.

They should have given Steward more time to give some impromptu jokes.

I really loved the way they presented the original score from films - giving one man with a fiddle to play all the scores in succession was a brilliant move.

Pimp song - quite strange rap. Still better then the first song, but quite strange anyway. And they won the Oscar. Doh, man.

Best Actor - Philip Seymour Hoffman. Without any doubt. Congrats.

The most important part of the ceremony is also the most boring one for people that are not involved in the process. So I spent the most of the ceremony almost dozing off. As I said earlier, more John Steward could be useful there.

I really did not expect "Crash" to win the best film. Maybe I will have to see that. It is not played in Latvia and there are no plans to show it here. It is believed that it is so USA specific that it will not be interesting to audience here.

In any case, I love the tendency to go for love budget films - that is where the creativity is. Lets hope that one day a film is made in a free software manner that get an Oscar. That would be something.

Debian -- News -- Debian GNU/Linux 3.1 released

Aigars Mahinovs — Tue, 07 Jun 2005 05:06:00 GMT

Debian -- News -- Debian GNU/Linux 3.1 released

YAY!!!! The new chapter in the FLOSS history has been opened.

Ian Murdock’s Weblog » Open source and the commoditization of software

Aigars Mahinovs — Sun, 29 May 2005 15:05:00 GMT

Ian Murdock’s Weblog » Open source and the commoditization of software

Ian starts with a history of commodisation in computer industry and continues about how dangerouse is the tactic employed by RedHat (to redefine 'Linux' as a platform). In the end Ian describes the business model that is used at Progeny.

I must agree with Ian that usig the commodisation rather then fighting it is the best strategy in the long term, but the problem is in the short term - gaining the start-up advantage. Starting a business is a high risk in itself and starting it without a specific advantage is upping the risk above what venture capitalists would allow. In other words the question is - after you've spend your start-up funds and gained some customers, what will stop the previose encumberant of just repeating your business model, just using his resourses.

That kind brings me back to writing my master thesis about open and transitional software development business models. At least, now that I've taken an academic brake, I hace the time to consider it.