The PROBLEM is that people treat 'IP' as one sort of entity, it's not the solution at all. The solution is to recognize that the laws are designed to do different things, they aren't some amorphous blob that makes the ownership of ideas legal.
And, FYI, the only law that protects you from counterfeiters (and is designed to protect the purchaser) is trademark.
See what happens when you start lumping them together? Copyright doesn't protect the customer, and neither do patents...they hurt the customer by causing higher prices, by creating an uneven playing field. Of course, the uneven playing field is exactly the intended effect, to reward the creator, but the point is that you're sprouting gibberish, as are most people who start talking about 'IP'.
And the laws don't 'aim' to limit what you can do based on what someone else has done in the past. Copyright and patent aim to reward creators and inventors for making their stuff public, trade secret laws aim to punish people more in line with their crimes (Stealing a piece of paper with Coke's formula on it vs. a black piece of paper.), and trademark laws are just part of the whole concept of anti-fraud.
If they had the cash, they could have three satellites circling north to south, and have internet connectivity all the time.
Of course, all research stations at the south pole are forever broke, unless they're secretly investigating an ancient civilization under the ice or something.
No, you're wrong. The title of a book is neither trademarked or copyrighted. The title of a book can never be copyrighted, it's too short, and can only be trademarked when it's part of a book series, like 'Harry Potter and the...' or '...for Dummies'.
It's perfectly legal for you to start selling a book called 'I, Robot'. What stops the specific example you said is libel laws...claiming that Isaac Asimov wrote your book is harmful to his reputation, and truth-in-advertising laws, which prohibit you from selling something as something else it is not.
And by 'use it', you mean 'stab them'. Waaaay too many people think you can slash people with a knife. It's not a frickin sword, people. Don't hold it next to your head like you're going to club them with the blade, or swish it back and forth. If you hit them like that, you might cut them, depending on how sharp the knife is...and you will lose your knife. So you've given the guy a flesh wound and really pissed him off.
However, there is a valid attack of holding it with the blade next to your thumb...when you're in very close quarters, and stabbing upwards into their stomach.
Under no circumstances should you ever threaten someone with a knife. There's a reason cops don't let people get in arm's reach when they're holding a gun on them...and to use a knife you have to be in arms reach. At which point anything in your hand can be taken away.
The only things you should threaten people with are things you can use from farther away than they can hit you, like guns and baseball bats and swords.
That's what confuses me. There is no 'licensed' use of Wifi bands...duh, that's why it's called 'unlicensed spectrum'.
So I'm not exactly sure what the complaint would be: I can't use this spectrum I don't have any specific right to use, because he's got a big-ass antenna. Even though he obviously could just get a legal wifi card with a directional antenna and broadcast gibberish at me, I am complaining anyway.
It's not exactly like radio stations where someone else has leased the spectrum. It would be more like complaining that someone parked halfway in your space at the mall. Even if they only took up a single space, it's not your space that would be freed, it's just a space.
And you got that list from where? Because some of those clearly don't have anything to do with ELF. Look at the first one: 'Dynamic firmware image creation from an object file stored in a reserved area of a data storage device of a redundant array of independent disks (RAID) system'. ELF doesn't have anything to do with firmware or reserved areas of RAID systems.
Only about a few of those actually appear to possibly have anything to do with ELF, based on their name: 6,704,928; 6,687,899; 6,684,394; 6,077,315; and 5,805,899. At least, they impliment something that ELF does, I have no idea if they do it the same way.
This looks like a standards committee patent list, where members are asked to list any patents that may have anything to do with the technology at hand, and it's much better to list anything that even vaguely could apply than leave stuff out. I mean, look at the last one! It's for a user interface to analysis IPC.
Unless you have some evidence that these patents actually apply to some part of ELF, you're SOL.
Okay, even ignoring the fact that the old SCO helped write the public domain document, this is a new level of crackheadedness even for SCO...because you can't 'own' standards like that.
There are three ways of 'owning' a standard:
The first is patents. For example, something about Betamax tapes were patented, and thus people had to license the standard from the owner, Sony. SCO has no patents, so can't possibly have one over ELF, so let's move on.
The second is trademarks. For example, Firewire is trademarked by Apple. This doesn't stop anyone from making Firewire ports on their laptop, but it does stop them from calling them Firewire ports, without paying a fee. Likewise, anyone can impliment ISO-9001, but you have to get certified if you want to call yourself that. (Technically, I don't think these are trademarks, they're 'seal of approval' marks, but they're under trademark law somewhere.)
The third is ownership of the copyright of the standards document. Quite a few standards organizations make their money this way.
While I know SCO does not have a trademark on ELF, and I doubt they somehow have copyright on the standards document that someone else released into the public domain before they were born, the important thing to remember is that only patents can stop someone from implimenting a standard.
I can sit here without having pay any money to Phillips for their standards documentation or their trademark and build a CD player. I can't call it a 'CD' player without getting their approval, and I'll have a hell of a time building it without looking at their documenation, but as all patents on basic CD players obviously expired already (Yeah, it's been 20 years.), I can build one, and even sell it.
As there never were any ELF patents, there has never been anything to prevent anyone else from implimenting it, period. Even if TISC trademarked 'ELF' and sold the standards documentation, it's still perfectly legal for someone to use that document, or in fact any way of figuring out the format they want, and impliment a system that uses ELF, even if they have to call it 'HOBBIT' or something. (Remember, reverse engineering for compatiblity reasons is still legal.)
(For everyone still paying attention, there is standard information in the format, and I can just hear everyone thinking 'what about copyright on those bytes?'. Well, no go. It's been explicitly ruled that, since copyright is only on creative works, and as information required by a standard is not 'creative', but 'factual', thus, you can't copyright it.)
Um, no. I don't know if you're a troll or honestly ignorant, but that SCO isn't this SCO. The first, real, SCO participated in making the standard. Then, years later, sold their Unix licensing business (Which is all they had, Novell still owns Unix, it still gets 95% of the revenue from all licensing.), to a company called Caldera, which likes to pretend it is SCO, so much that it changed its name to 'The SCO Group', aka, 'SCOG', its stock symbol. SCO, meanwhile, changed its name to Tartatella or something.
If SCOG thought it had purchased the ELF format from SCO, it certainly might have a case...against the old SCO. Of course, those documents have been mysteriously lost, so who knows what Caldera thought it was buying...but it certainly couldn't have actually bought ELF, regardless of how much it might have been mislead into thinking so.
A better known example: Swinging on a swingset. Sure, you push against the ground to get going, but at a certain point, you can't. At that point, you're generating movement from your leg alone.
EULAs don't have anything to do with it...I didn't agree to any EULA on DVDs. The DMCA applies regardless. (Although it would be funny as hell to have an EULA with a virus...just wait till they're installing another program, and pop up a window that looks like that specific installer program (There are only about five.) with an EULA for your virus. Spyware, of course, already figured this out.)
And, yes, someone should write a short bit of copyrighted work (I suggest a hiaku or limerick...those are definately protected under copyright law, and fairly small.), and encrypt it into a virus. If they ever get caught, possibly they can sue antivirus companies, because the antivirus company would probably admit to decoding their virus before they realized it was a trick.
An even funnier gag would be to store the poem, unencrypted, on the hard drive, and have the virus prevent you from accessing it. Ergo, removing the virus is circumventing a access control device, and all antivirus software that does so is illegal.
Yes, yes, the software could delete the poem, also, but we all know that deleting a file doesn't make it go away. (If deleting a file does count, someone should write a program that decodes DVDs, rips the MPEGs, and then just deletes them, so you have to go and immediately undelete them.) You could always recover it from the hard drive using undelete tools. So basically, they'd have to secure erase the poem...and I'm willing to bet no antivirus software has that built in, so if they realized what was going, at the very least you'd have forced an upgrade.
And it's entirely likely that no one will realize what's going on. So if the virus writer ever gets caught, he can take the antivirus companies down with him by suing their pants off for distributing an access control circumvention device for his stuff.
God, I love the DMCA. It's so monumentally stupid.
That's why you make the test non-obvious. You don't stick a check and jump in there, you have a check earlier that make an overload on a certain instruction which makes another instruction do something slightly different which makes another, perfectly normal check exit. If you know your instruction set well, you can do all sorts of crazy tricks like exploiting bugs people might not be aware of, because their assembler normally hides them. Eventually, of course, anything can be figured out (tntil we get DRM viruses), but it can take time.
Which is why I seriously doubt this had anything to do with 'sloppy code'. First of all, no one 'accidently' leaves code in to exit under a debugger...no one writes code like that except on purpose.
Second, if this was an internal check written just to keep this guy from infecting himself, the check would be very obvious and easy to bypass. As it wasn't, duh, obviously it was delibrately obfusticated.
Um, dumbass, Congress explictedly gave Bush the power to invade Afghanistan.
There were millions of issues under international law with attacking Iraq, and a few with attacking Afghanistan. (Luckily, no else in the world liked Afghanistan, so no one made an issue of it. No one likes people who harbor terrorists.)
And we should have declared war on Iraq. Why we didn't? Because declaring war gives the President all sorts of extra powers.
But there were absolutely no issues with the President sending the military into Afghanistan, considering Congress fucking gave him a mandate to use the military to do that. Yes, the ability for a president to haphazardly invade other countries without a declaration of war from Congress is stupid and evil, but Congress, despite not formally declaring war, gave its okay.
So, basically, you're claiming that in order for Congress to tell the president to use the military in any way, it has to formally declare war on someone? That's possibly the stupidest arguement I've ever heard. By that argument, not only are all UN peacekeeping missions illegal, a military salute at a funeral is illegal, and the posse comitatus act not only wasn't needed, but it, itself, was possibly illegal, because Congress cannot boss the military around without a formal declaration of war.
It's all well and good to argue that the president shouldn't invade other countries without congressional approval, but saying it has to be a magical formal declaration of war is not supported by any reasoning.
In fact, broadcasters are paying the government to broadcast, which directly lowers your taxes.
The only way broadcasters negatively affect people is by stopping them from being able to broadcast on the same channel...but there's plenty of unregulated spectrum.
They're basically purchasing, from the government, something of which a tiny share you own, but don't need and can't use, and is completely renewable. Claiming this harms you in some way is absurd.
I'm replying to your totally offtopic post in another post, because, frankly, I don't want people trying to lump it in with my previous post. And I agree 100% with the whole gay marriage. I'm appalled we're fucking discussing the issue, much less having our president trying to 'save' marriage.
The response should have been: Ha, silly us. The law doesn't let gay people marry. Also, you have to walk in front of a car ringing a bell and carrying a lantern. We better fix that marriage thing. And, look, you can't have a elephant in the city limits. Man, who wrote some of these laws? Anyway, gay marriage approved by voice vote, what's next? Anyone want to fix the elephant thing?
Luckily, when my kids come flying in from school on their hover-bus, and ask me why people in our time tried to stop homosexuals from getting married, I will point them at Toshiba Microsoft/Spaulding-Time Warner Groups which got the Usenet archive when they purchased Google from GE, and show them what I thought on the issue, although I may have to explain what 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' is, what a 'newsgroup' is, and what a 'TV' is. Look, offtopic discussion can come in handy.
That, at least, will certainly be easier than it was to explain what kids did all day before Despind was invented, or trying to figure out exactly why everyone under 15 are calling each other 'selpet' and what the hell that 'word' could possibly mean.
You know, that's a perfect analogy. The Communists were a real threat back in the fifties. Sure, they're a joke now, and our collective memory seems to be stuck at six years or so, so they seem to have always been a joke, but from 1950 to 1980 or so they were an actual threat, horribly menacing this nation and leaving people afraid that at any moment, sudden attacks could basically destroy our nation.
And so we got perfectly sane and rational people acting in completely irrational ways, harming freedom, destroying good people, and not doing a bit of good, during the McCarthy era. And, yes, The Man is doing exactly the same thing now, and it's rather amazing.
This time, though, things have changed a bit. One old and one new.
The old: We remember the 60s, in fact, we're distant enough that the cop who was beating up longhairs in his 20s now has long hair and some illegally downloaded Janis Joplin on his computer, and tried pot and coke back in the 80s, and just quit the coke. Hippies are remembered as rather naive idealists, instead of scum trying to destroy the fabric of society.
And we remember that not every war ends well, and not every war should exist. We cheer the outcast, the underdog, the guy babbling in the corner. It's not hip to be square. And no matter how short our collective memory is, everyone remembers Watergate, and the government always has a secret agenda in every movie, even when they're the good guys.
And the new: The Internet, which lets us speak totally uncensored with anyone, anywhere, anytime. Which has rather obvious implications when Government stupidity, Government falsehoods, and Government bending of the Constitution happen.
Yeah, that sounds like a good idea, pretend that the high prices for land in California are due somehow to California having less freedom, instead of it being simple supply and demand. (1)
Basically, high land prices are a good argument not to live there, but don't have anything to do with freedom, anymore than saying you shouldn't live in North Dakota because it gets really cold up there doesn't have anything to with freedom. And high prices apply just as much to New York(2) or Boston or Atlanta. If you want cheap land, live in the country, duh.
And, no, the rest of that is completely made up. People don't go around having to get 'environmental impact statements' for random plots of land. No one pays 20k to cut down trees, and I seriously doubt building permits cost 10k dollars for single story buildings. (3)
The only thing not made up is, apparently, you need a license to operate a dog kennel in CA, which frankly I'm glad for. You're keeping living creatures for other people, you should be required to have some training. I doubt it takes six months, though. (I noticed you said six months of classes, not six months of manditory classes.)
And one thing you left off, because, I presume, you have to do it in Idaho also...you usually have to rezone the land. Which, interestingly enough for something you left off, is usually the hardest parts of building a dog kennel, because no one wants a dog kennel anywhere near them.
1) Of course, if California did price-control property, you could then make an example of how you can't sell your property for any price, and, thus, California is unfree. Nice catch-22 there.
2)BTW, speaking of New York and price controls, guess who has rent control, and you could actually make an argument that, thusly, it is less free? But that wouldn't help your 'California is a liberal hellhole' argument, would it? It's too bad, you're missing a great argument, because in New York, 'liberal' rent control is actually resulting to harm to everyone, because landlords are required to rent so low they can't make a profit, and thus they simply don't rent out the building, so everyone loses.
3) OTOH, if you're willing to pay a million dollars for land, I don't know why you're whining about paying 10k to build on it. Hell, if I was in charge of setting the price of building permits, I think the fairest way would be to base it off the estimated increase of the value of the land after the building is done. So you could add an outbuilding for 50 dollars but someone building a skyscraper will pay 50,000 dollars for a permit. Or, hell, do away with charging for the permit and just make them pay the property tax increase, retroactive for six months, before they start. There are problems there with homestead exemptions, though.
Rewrite that as: Does the Windows API spec state "you can safely pass any URI from the Internet to Windows and be assured that the system will not be compromised"? Because, of course, this isn't some badly formatted string error, it's a perfectly valid URI, although obviously not standard. (Yes, 'URI', not URL. A URL is a URI that specifics a location, usually by having a server and a path. This does not include things like email: or news:, which are not locations per se.)
And, yes, of course it does. You are supposed to be able to type any URI in a run box (Which does exactly the same thing, call a URI handler) or an address bar in IE (Which does the same thing, call a URI handler) and not have your system comprimised, unless you have installed a URI handler that will do something bad, like a bad email client or a some insecure p2p application.
Any application can add handlers in Windows, and this is on purpose. If there's some fancy new superemail: protocol, a program can tell Windows it handles it, and whenever you click a superemail: link in any web browser or normal email program or run box or whatever, that program can look at it, go, 'What the hell is that?' and ask Windows what it should do, and Windows will tell it what program to run. This is normally a good thing...when AIM wanted to invent an aim: protocol, they just went ahead and did so. If you have AIM, aim:blah magically works. And Trillian or whatever other programs can impliment it also.
Now, to recap what happened: Windows came up with a nice extendable URI handler, designed to handle URIs from random sources, about Win 95 or thereabouts, and it worked fine. In 2000, MS inexplicably added a shell: protocol which was completely insecure, and then later claimed to have fixed that...but they didn't.
Blaming that on Mozilla is just stupid. Mozilla can't see the future. What if tomorrow MS adds shell2:, or even_less_secure_shell:? Mozilla is not in charge of outguessing MS's stupidity. You can say it shouldn't trust any of them, but then you're locked into the standard URIs that Mozilla already knows about. Unlike MS, Mozilla does not regularely send out updates to end users, and can't keep that list up to date. And even then, Mozilla would still have to ask windows, unless you want it to maintain an entirely seperate registry of handlers, which you have to go in and change when you install a new mail program.
I do, however, like Mozilla's fix...sometimes the registered URI handlers are not the correct ones, as anyone who normally uses webmail is probably aware of. It would be nice to say 'No, that's wrong, don't ever open Outlook when I accidently click on a mailto:'.
In the end, Mozilla is forced to handle URIs the same way it handles file extensions... fob the responsiblity off on the user because Windows can't seem to get its act together and treats data files as programs and vis versa, except this is even more insecure, because this is Windows treating pointers to remote resources as programs.
You've forgetton one thing...the damage this has done to the concept of international law, a concept we came up with and promoted for the last 70 years or so, since the League of Nations. It didn't really work until after WWII, when we tried again.
So we had rules we invented that made war illegal. We made it illegal to invade another country unless they had attacked you, or were about to attack you, or with the consent of the UN.
Yes, yes, other countries didn't play fair, and there was a lot of technicalities about countries other countries already 'possessed', like Tibet and Timor, and there were proxy wars like Vietnam, where we'd start 'supporting' one side and the Soviets another, and it was all okay because it was 'really' a civil war and we were just 'helping'...
But on the whole, and with the fall of the Soviets, we really had a handle on the world...there were Acceptable Behaviours, and Unacceptable Behaviours. There was no actual police force, we were all just people with big sticks, but we had the biggest stick (And half the economy) and we said you can't go around hitting people with your stick to get their lunch money. If they attack, you can hit them, and if we all agree they're Bad, you can hit them. Otherwise, we hit you.
Then, of course, three years ago, we got attacked by someone's trained dog, and we took our stick, and everyone else took their stick, and we beat the crap out of them and their dog. All well and good.
And then two years ago, we took our stick, and made wild accusations about another guy who suspiciously has a lot of lunch money, claiming he was working with the guy who had the dog, and he had illegal sticks, and then after we lost the vote to hit them, we went and beat the crap out of them anyway. And it turns out he didn't really have any of that stuff.
Words can't even express how much Bush fucked up our last half century of peace efforts.
Specifically, a 'check' is a specific type of draft on a bank account. (It also, oddly enough, can be used as a promissary note, which I don't really understand the point of.)
There are other types of drafts, for example money orders are drafts too, they're just drafts on some generic account that whoever issued them holds. And you, of course, paid the isssuer cash. (At least, I think they're on one account per company. It's possibly each money order has its own, fictional account.)
But, yes, banks are supposed to honor any draft on an account in any form, assuming it appears valid, and the money is there.
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The PROBLEM is that people treat 'IP' as one sort of entity, it's not the solution at all. The solution is to recognize that the laws are designed to do different things, they aren't some amorphous blob that makes the ownership of ideas legal.
And, FYI, the only law that protects you from counterfeiters (and is designed to protect the purchaser) is trademark.
See what happens when you start lumping them together? Copyright doesn't protect the customer, and neither do patents...they hurt the customer by causing higher prices, by creating an uneven playing field. Of course, the uneven playing field is exactly the intended effect, to reward the creator, but the point is that you're sprouting gibberish, as are most people who start talking about 'IP'.
And the laws don't 'aim' to limit what you can do based on what someone else has done in the past. Copyright and patent aim to reward creators and inventors for making their stuff public, trade secret laws aim to punish people more in line with their crimes (Stealing a piece of paper with Coke's formula on it vs. a black piece of paper.), and trademark laws are just part of the whole concept of anti-fraud.
Of course, all research stations at the south pole are forever broke, unless they're secretly investigating an ancient civilization under the ice or something.
It's perfectly legal for you to start selling a book called 'I, Robot'. What stops the specific example you said is libel laws...claiming that Isaac Asimov wrote your book is harmful to his reputation, and truth-in-advertising laws, which prohibit you from selling something as something else it is not.
Because we know it's impossible to carry around an open pocketknife in your pocket, or, hell, a butcher knife.
However, there is a valid attack of holding it with the blade next to your thumb...when you're in very close quarters, and stabbing upwards into their stomach.
Under no circumstances should you ever threaten someone with a knife. There's a reason cops don't let people get in arm's reach when they're holding a gun on them...and to use a knife you have to be in arms reach. At which point anything in your hand can be taken away.
The only things you should threaten people with are things you can use from farther away than they can hit you, like guns and baseball bats and swords.
So I'm not exactly sure what the complaint would be: I can't use this spectrum I don't have any specific right to use, because he's got a big-ass antenna. Even though he obviously could just get a legal wifi card with a directional antenna and broadcast gibberish at me, I am complaining anyway.
It's not exactly like radio stations where someone else has leased the spectrum. It would be more like complaining that someone parked halfway in your space at the mall. Even if they only took up a single space, it's not your space that would be freed, it's just a space.
Only about a few of those actually appear to possibly have anything to do with ELF, based on their name: 6,704,928; 6,687,899; 6,684,394; 6,077,315; and 5,805,899. At least, they impliment something that ELF does, I have no idea if they do it the same way.
This looks like a standards committee patent list, where members are asked to list any patents that may have anything to do with the technology at hand, and it's much better to list anything that even vaguely could apply than leave stuff out. I mean, look at the last one! It's for a user interface to analysis IPC.
Unless you have some evidence that these patents actually apply to some part of ELF, you're SOL.
And, of course, SCO has none of them, regardless.
There are three ways of 'owning' a standard:
The first is patents. For example, something about Betamax tapes were patented, and thus people had to license the standard from the owner, Sony. SCO has no patents, so can't possibly have one over ELF, so let's move on.
The second is trademarks. For example, Firewire is trademarked by Apple. This doesn't stop anyone from making Firewire ports on their laptop, but it does stop them from calling them Firewire ports, without paying a fee. Likewise, anyone can impliment ISO-9001, but you have to get certified if you want to call yourself that. (Technically, I don't think these are trademarks, they're 'seal of approval' marks, but they're under trademark law somewhere.)
The third is ownership of the copyright of the standards document. Quite a few standards organizations make their money this way.
While I know SCO does not have a trademark on ELF, and I doubt they somehow have copyright on the standards document that someone else released into the public domain before they were born, the important thing to remember is that only patents can stop someone from implimenting a standard.
I can sit here without having pay any money to Phillips for their standards documentation or their trademark and build a CD player. I can't call it a 'CD' player without getting their approval, and I'll have a hell of a time building it without looking at their documenation, but as all patents on basic CD players obviously expired already (Yeah, it's been 20 years.), I can build one, and even sell it.
As there never were any ELF patents, there has never been anything to prevent anyone else from implimenting it, period. Even if TISC trademarked 'ELF' and sold the standards documentation, it's still perfectly legal for someone to use that document, or in fact any way of figuring out the format they want, and impliment a system that uses ELF, even if they have to call it 'HOBBIT' or something. (Remember, reverse engineering for compatiblity reasons is still legal.)
(For everyone still paying attention, there is standard information in the format, and I can just hear everyone thinking 'what about copyright on those bytes?'. Well, no go. It's been explicitly ruled that, since copyright is only on creative works, and as information required by a standard is not 'creative', but 'factual', thus, you can't copyright it.)
If SCOG thought it had purchased the ELF format from SCO, it certainly might have a case...against the old SCO. Of course, those documents have been mysteriously lost, so who knows what Caldera thought it was buying...but it certainly couldn't have actually bought ELF, regardless of how much it might have been mislead into thinking so.
Maybe I just had a stupid cat. ;)
A better known example: Swinging on a swingset. Sure, you push against the ground to get going, but at a certain point, you can't. At that point, you're generating movement from your leg alone.
Strange but true.
And, yes, someone should write a short bit of copyrighted work (I suggest a hiaku or limerick...those are definately protected under copyright law, and fairly small.), and encrypt it into a virus. If they ever get caught, possibly they can sue antivirus companies, because the antivirus company would probably admit to decoding their virus before they realized it was a trick.
An even funnier gag would be to store the poem, unencrypted, on the hard drive, and have the virus prevent you from accessing it. Ergo, removing the virus is circumventing a access control device, and all antivirus software that does so is illegal.
Yes, yes, the software could delete the poem, also, but we all know that deleting a file doesn't make it go away. (If deleting a file does count, someone should write a program that decodes DVDs, rips the MPEGs, and then just deletes them, so you have to go and immediately undelete them.) You could always recover it from the hard drive using undelete tools. So basically, they'd have to secure erase the poem...and I'm willing to bet no antivirus software has that built in, so if they realized what was going, at the very least you'd have forced an upgrade.
And it's entirely likely that no one will realize what's going on. So if the virus writer ever gets caught, he can take the antivirus companies down with him by suing their pants off for distributing an access control circumvention device for his stuff.
God, I love the DMCA. It's so monumentally stupid.
Which is why I seriously doubt this had anything to do with 'sloppy code'. First of all, no one 'accidently' leaves code in to exit under a debugger...no one writes code like that except on purpose.
Second, if this was an internal check written just to keep this guy from infecting himself, the check would be very obvious and easy to bypass. As it wasn't, duh, obviously it was delibrately obfusticated.
Specifically, it's called a trojan horse.
My God! That's almost two dollars of my tax money!
There were millions of issues under international law with attacking Iraq, and a few with attacking Afghanistan. (Luckily, no else in the world liked Afghanistan, so no one made an issue of it. No one likes people who harbor terrorists.)
And we should have declared war on Iraq. Why we didn't? Because declaring war gives the President all sorts of extra powers.
But there were absolutely no issues with the President sending the military into Afghanistan, considering Congress fucking gave him a mandate to use the military to do that. Yes, the ability for a president to haphazardly invade other countries without a declaration of war from Congress is stupid and evil, but Congress, despite not formally declaring war, gave its okay.
So, basically, you're claiming that in order for Congress to tell the president to use the military in any way, it has to formally declare war on someone? That's possibly the stupidest arguement I've ever heard. By that argument, not only are all UN peacekeeping missions illegal, a military salute at a funeral is illegal, and the posse comitatus act not only wasn't needed, but it, itself, was possibly illegal, because Congress cannot boss the military around without a formal declaration of war.
It's all well and good to argue that the president shouldn't invade other countries without congressional approval, but saying it has to be a magical formal declaration of war is not supported by any reasoning.
The only way broadcasters negatively affect people is by stopping them from being able to broadcast on the same channel...but there's plenty of unregulated spectrum.
They're basically purchasing, from the government, something of which a tiny share you own, but don't need and can't use, and is completely renewable. Claiming this harms you in some way is absurd.
The response should have been: Ha, silly us. The law doesn't let gay people marry. Also, you have to walk in front of a car ringing a bell and carrying a lantern. We better fix that marriage thing. And, look, you can't have a elephant in the city limits. Man, who wrote some of these laws? Anyway, gay marriage approved by voice vote, what's next? Anyone want to fix the elephant thing?
Luckily, when my kids come flying in from school on their hover-bus, and ask me why people in our time tried to stop homosexuals from getting married, I will point them at Toshiba Microsoft/Spaulding-Time Warner Groups which got the Usenet archive when they purchased Google from GE, and show them what I thought on the issue, although I may have to explain what 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' is, what a 'newsgroup' is, and what a 'TV' is. Look, offtopic discussion can come in handy.
That, at least, will certainly be easier than it was to explain what kids did all day before Despind was invented, or trying to figure out exactly why everyone under 15 are calling each other 'selpet' and what the hell that 'word' could possibly mean.
And, yes, I WAS COOL WHEN I WAS YOUR AGE!!
And so we got perfectly sane and rational people acting in completely irrational ways, harming freedom, destroying good people, and not doing a bit of good, during the McCarthy era. And, yes, The Man is doing exactly the same thing now, and it's rather amazing.
This time, though, things have changed a bit. One old and one new.
The old: We remember the 60s, in fact, we're distant enough that the cop who was beating up longhairs in his 20s now has long hair and some illegally downloaded Janis Joplin on his computer, and tried pot and coke back in the 80s, and just quit the coke. Hippies are remembered as rather naive idealists, instead of scum trying to destroy the fabric of society.
And we remember that not every war ends well, and not every war should exist. We cheer the outcast, the underdog, the guy babbling in the corner. It's not hip to be square. And no matter how short our collective memory is, everyone remembers Watergate, and the government always has a secret agenda in every movie, even when they're the good guys.
And the new: The Internet, which lets us speak totally uncensored with anyone, anywhere, anytime. Which has rather obvious implications when Government stupidity, Government falsehoods, and Government bending of the Constitution happen.
Basically, high land prices are a good argument not to live there, but don't have anything to do with freedom, anymore than saying you shouldn't live in North Dakota because it gets really cold up there doesn't have anything to with freedom. And high prices apply just as much to New York(2) or Boston or Atlanta. If you want cheap land, live in the country, duh.
And, no, the rest of that is completely made up. People don't go around having to get 'environmental impact statements' for random plots of land. No one pays 20k to cut down trees, and I seriously doubt building permits cost 10k dollars for single story buildings. (3)
The only thing not made up is, apparently, you need a license to operate a dog kennel in CA, which frankly I'm glad for. You're keeping living creatures for other people, you should be required to have some training. I doubt it takes six months, though. (I noticed you said six months of classes, not six months of manditory classes.)
And one thing you left off, because, I presume, you have to do it in Idaho also...you usually have to rezone the land. Which, interestingly enough for something you left off, is usually the hardest parts of building a dog kennel, because no one wants a dog kennel anywhere near them.
1) Of course, if California did price-control property, you could then make an example of how you can't sell your property for any price, and, thus, California is unfree. Nice catch-22 there.
2)BTW, speaking of New York and price controls, guess who has rent control, and you could actually make an argument that, thusly, it is less free? But that wouldn't help your 'California is a liberal hellhole' argument, would it? It's too bad, you're missing a great argument, because in New York, 'liberal' rent control is actually resulting to harm to everyone, because landlords are required to rent so low they can't make a profit, and thus they simply don't rent out the building, so everyone loses.
3) OTOH, if you're willing to pay a million dollars for land, I don't know why you're whining about paying 10k to build on it. Hell, if I was in charge of setting the price of building permits, I think the fairest way would be to base it off the estimated increase of the value of the land after the building is done. So you could add an outbuilding for 50 dollars but someone building a skyscraper will pay 50,000 dollars for a permit. Or, hell, do away with charging for the permit and just make them pay the property tax increase, retroactive for six months, before they start. There are problems there with homestead exemptions, though.
...which is why spamfighters go after whoever's hosting the domain name, too.
And, yes, of course it does. You are supposed to be able to type any URI in a run box (Which does exactly the same thing, call a URI handler) or an address bar in IE (Which does the same thing, call a URI handler) and not have your system comprimised, unless you have installed a URI handler that will do something bad, like a bad email client or a some insecure p2p application.
Any application can add handlers in Windows, and this is on purpose. If there's some fancy new superemail: protocol, a program can tell Windows it handles it, and whenever you click a superemail: link in any web browser or normal email program or run box or whatever, that program can look at it, go, 'What the hell is that?' and ask Windows what it should do, and Windows will tell it what program to run. This is normally a good thing...when AIM wanted to invent an aim: protocol, they just went ahead and did so. If you have AIM, aim:blah magically works. And Trillian or whatever other programs can impliment it also.
Now, to recap what happened: Windows came up with a nice extendable URI handler, designed to handle URIs from random sources, about Win 95 or thereabouts, and it worked fine. In 2000, MS inexplicably added a shell: protocol which was completely insecure, and then later claimed to have fixed that...but they didn't.
Blaming that on Mozilla is just stupid. Mozilla can't see the future. What if tomorrow MS adds shell2:, or even_less_secure_shell:? Mozilla is not in charge of outguessing MS's stupidity. You can say it shouldn't trust any of them, but then you're locked into the standard URIs that Mozilla already knows about. Unlike MS, Mozilla does not regularely send out updates to end users, and can't keep that list up to date. And even then, Mozilla would still have to ask windows, unless you want it to maintain an entirely seperate registry of handlers, which you have to go in and change when you install a new mail program.
I do, however, like Mozilla's fix...sometimes the registered URI handlers are not the correct ones, as anyone who normally uses webmail is probably aware of. It would be nice to say 'No, that's wrong, don't ever open Outlook when I accidently click on a mailto:'.
In the end, Mozilla is forced to handle URIs the same way it handles file extensions... fob the responsiblity off on the user because Windows can't seem to get its act together and treats data files as programs and vis versa, except this is even more insecure, because this is Windows treating pointers to remote resources as programs.
So we had rules we invented that made war illegal. We made it illegal to invade another country unless they had attacked you, or were about to attack you, or with the consent of the UN.
Yes, yes, other countries didn't play fair, and there was a lot of technicalities about countries other countries already 'possessed', like Tibet and Timor, and there were proxy wars like Vietnam, where we'd start 'supporting' one side and the Soviets another, and it was all okay because it was 'really' a civil war and we were just 'helping'...
But on the whole, and with the fall of the Soviets, we really had a handle on the world...there were Acceptable Behaviours, and Unacceptable Behaviours. There was no actual police force, we were all just people with big sticks, but we had the biggest stick (And half the economy) and we said you can't go around hitting people with your stick to get their lunch money. If they attack, you can hit them, and if we all agree they're Bad, you can hit them. Otherwise, we hit you.
Then, of course, three years ago, we got attacked by someone's trained dog, and we took our stick, and everyone else took their stick, and we beat the crap out of them and their dog. All well and good.
And then two years ago, we took our stick, and made wild accusations about another guy who suspiciously has a lot of lunch money, claiming he was working with the guy who had the dog, and he had illegal sticks, and then after we lost the vote to hit them, we went and beat the crap out of them anyway. And it turns out he didn't really have any of that stuff.
Words can't even express how much Bush fucked up our last half century of peace efforts.
Specifically, a 'check' is a specific type of draft on a bank account. (It also, oddly enough, can be used as a promissary note, which I don't really understand the point of.)
There are other types of drafts, for example money orders are drafts too, they're just drafts on some generic account that whoever issued them holds. And you, of course, paid the isssuer cash. (At least, I think they're on one account per company. It's possibly each money order has its own, fictional account.)
But, yes, banks are supposed to honor any draft on an account in any form, assuming it appears valid, and the money is there.