So? A normal, well adjusted person will immediately disregard such a statement to be false. The fact that the suicide victim was not a normal well adjusted person is not the fault of Lori Drew
Suppose I purposefully throw a baseball at your head, hard enough to sting a normal person, but not hard enough to cause serious damage.
You happen to have an unusually thin skull, and die. It's not my fault you have a thin skull, so would you say I'm not responsible for your death?
What if I know you have a thin skull? Does that change anything?
Drew is not being blamed for the victim's depression. She is being blamed for taking actions that used that depression to kill the victim. Just like the hypothetical with my baseball and your thin skull, I would not be blamed for your thin skull--I would be blamed for throwing the baseball that killed you.
If you go around chucking baseballs at people's heads, you run the risk of running into someone with a thin skull, and then you have to pay the price. I don't see why tormenting teenage girls online should be any different. Drew wanted to harm the girl, and she happened to cause more harm then she may have intended. Too bad for Drew--that's the gamble she took, and she lost.
(The law will take into account the likelihood of a thin skull in the baseball example, so if thin skulls are so rare that a reasonable person would not consider them a possibility when deciding whether to go around chucking baseballs at people, then you might not face liability for the death. But depressed teenage girls aren't that rare, so that defense won't fly here).
A lot of people think "Fantastic Voyage" was an Asimov story that got made into a movie, but it was the other way around. Asimov was hired to do the novelization of the movie. Asimov wrote fast enough that the novelization was published quite a bit before the movie was released. Furthermore, as a condition of taking the job, he insisted that he be allowed to diverge from the script to fix plot holes. So, when the movie came out long after the book, and had plot holes and science errors that were not in the book, people assumed the book came first, and Hollywood botched adapting it!
As such, the test of sovereignty is quite simple: can you fight off any attempt to deny your sovereignty ? If yes, you're sovereign; if not, you're not.
By that test, most of the world's countries are not sovereign.
A more accurate test is this: you are sovereign if and only if (1) you can fight off any attempt to deny your sovereignty, or (2) those who you would not be able to fight off recognize you as sovereign, or are otherwise constrained to not fight you (e.g., Israel could wipe out Syria, but that would damage their relations with the US sufficiently that they will not, so Syria can still pass the sovereignty test).
Back in the mid '80s, a friend of mine at Caltech, Fritz Nordby, was planning on celebrating the 15th anniversary of Unix by designing a PDP-7 clone on a chip, and making a limited production run. He contacted Ken and DMR to see if he could get a copy of PDP-7 Unix, and they said they didn't have one, and as far as they knew, no copies existed, and that was the end of the commemorative PDP-7 clone idea.
If this collector really has a PDP-7 running original Unix, someone should make a copy and offer it to Ken and DMR. Or make it available on the net (after getting suitable permission). Maybe for the 40th anniversary of Unix, someone could make a PDP-7 simulator to run it. (Hell, you could probably do it in Javascript on a modern desktop machine and be faster than a real PDP-7!)
The problem with the "sell support" model, is that it gives the wrong incentive. You make the most money if your software is not too good.
I once worked at a company that wrote software that was sold at retail in stores, and included free support. Management was constantly urging us to raise quality, as every time we had to actually give support, we lost many times the profit we made on the sale to that customer. Our incentive as programmers was to produce the best code we could.
As a software user, I'd rather use software from people whose incentive is to write the best code they can, rather than people whose incentive is to write code just good enough to make paying for support less painful than switching to a competing product.
I still think there should be a new standard that would obviate the need for flash
Good standards come from standardizing existing, field tested, mature technology, not from creating some brand new technology and declaring it the standard.
Almost every good technology you currently use started as something that was non-standard, usually competing against an existing standard.
Why is he being voted down? He's right about Linux (and the same thing can be said about Windows, too, and OS X). None of them use a development process that includes formal verification of specifications or formal verification that the implementation matches the specification. Of course they are insecure.
Applet's JVM is buggy, poorly maintained and totally out of date. Sun plans on putting out Java 1.7 in a few months and Applet has yet to even release Java 1.6.
I don't know who this "Applet" you keep referring to is, but Apple has had Java 1.6 available for download for at least 6 months.
The EU doesn't want to reveal the documents that appear to have some sort of direct impact on me. So, wouldn't that amount to a secret law of some kind?
No, it would not.
You have failed to distinguish between an unratified treaty and a ratified treaty. They are negotiating the unratified treaty. It won't apply to you until it becomes a ratified treaty
If it actually starts down the path to ratification, it will not be secret. For example, in the EU, it will have to be submitted to the legislative bodies for approval. In the US, it has to be submitted to the Senate and receive a 2/3 vote and then be signed by the President. I don't know offhand how other counties deal with ratifying treaties--I'm sure you can find out if you look.
So what, the guy cant work in his professional field anymore? I get that you want to protect your IP, but not at the cost of a very highly qualified individual's livelyhood
Google has pretty completely fucked up in their handling of usenet archives. Some examples:
I was searching for a particular post by message ID. It was a post from someone who used Google to post the damn thing, for God's sake, and Google still could not find it. It was definitely there, because if I went into that newsgroup in Google's usenet reader, and manually found the thread, and expanded it, I could see it. It just could not be found by a message ID search.
I wanted to search for a post of mine. I did a search for my name, in quotes. It returned something like 6 posts. It used to return tens of thousands (I've been on usenet since 1984). I then searched for "bill gates". That returned a whopping 9 hits. I then tried some random troll's name, and got thousands of hits. It took several weeks before they fixed this, and "bill gates" and myself were back to a large number of hits.
Now it's broken again. I get about 2000 results for myself, 3000 for Bill Gates, 3000 for Linux. I haven't found anything that gives more than 3200 now.
The search display is almost completely worthless. They seem to be in the midst of changing this, so I will complain about both the old results and the new results. Old results first. Say a long thread has several posts that match. It shows one of the posts, and then shows indented other matches after that. Good. Except that it seems to do this for each matching posts. Net result is that many posts are displayed multiple times. I've seen cases where the first 10 pages of results are all from one thread, and there's no good way to skip that.
Lately, it's been just showing one result for the whole thread, which you can click on to get the thread. That's better, but there doesn't seem to be any good way to go to the specific posts that match. When you open the thread, it will have highlighted a particular post, but there's no apparent way to then repeat the search in the thread to find other matching posts.
If I find a post of mine, select options, and click the link to find more posts by this author, it is now only finding about 1000 posts. Similar results when I try this for other people's posts.
They've fucked up dealing with their authentication server. If you are logged into your Google account when you go to groups, it sometimes takes up to 20 seconds or so for the page to appear. If you aren't logged in, it appears instantaneously.
When you view the headers of a post, and click the "..." to expand the from address, it takes you to a page where you have to solve a CAPTCHA to get the full address. That used to work. Now after solving it, it just takes me back to where I was, without expanding the address.
They are very inconsistent. I've asked other people about some of the above problems, and the usual result is that some people will be getting them, and some will not. As the problems go away for some, they start for others. It looks like they have multiple servers, and some are working better than others.
We really need some competition for Google in this area. There's some very valuable stuff in the usenet archives, and that needs to be in competent hands.
and that's why we have the hords and hords of CDs with that noise known as classical music on them, or DVDs based off of ancient fables and stories because no one could possibly make money off of public domain works... (hint - the DVD reference is directly aimed at Disney...)
You should probably actually watch a Disney DVD or two before using them in your examples.
Let the film companies raise the money for them by getting it from customers... giving money gives you the right to own that movie on whatever formats you choose.
That only has a chance of working if the people who don't give money are not allowed to own the movie on whatever format they choose. This disallowal can either be by legal means (but then it's basically copyright, so you are right back with what you are trying to get rid of with this approach), or technical (DRM).
Warning: the following is from memory, so details may be off. The gist of it is correct.
There's a section in "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman" where he goes to see the collider at the new school he's just arrived at. The collider at the school he came from is state of the art, so he's expecting something even better at the new school, because they have been producing many remarkable, cutting edge, results.
The collider he finds is small, and far from state of the art, and almost held together by duct tape and chewing gum. He realizes that this is why it has produced such remarkable results--the scientists that work with it are very hands on, getting down and dirty with the experiments, coaxing every last bit out of them. The scientists using the shiny new state of the art collider are sitting back in their offices, just getting disembodied data that they haven't really connected with, and don't understand on a gut level like their colleagues using the "inferior" equipment do.
Feynman knew then he was going to happy at the new school.
For those less interested in theory, and more interested in choosing a lacing pattern and a good knot for their shoes, I recommend Ian's Shoelace Site.
You make a decent argument for blanket encryption on machines that have sensitive data.
HOWEVER, an effort should be made to limit the machines that have sensitive data in the first place. A policy of "fully encrypt every machine in the place" will lead to complacence. People will think of every machine as a safe place to store the sensitive data, and soon the sensitive data will be all over the place.
The _only_ practicable and moderately secure way to do an election is by pen and paper and manual counting. It's done all over the world and it works near flawlessly
Ah, that explains it. I'd always wondered why rigged elections and vote fraud never happened before the advent of modern voting machines.
I don't get it... If DRM works, it restricts what you do. If it restricts what you do, it's not inivisible.
In years of owning an iPod, which mostly contains DRM-free tracks I've ripped from CD, but which also does contain about 40 tracks with DRM I've purchased (and another 100 or so tracks with DRM I got for free), there has been absolutely no discernible difference in what I've been able to do with the DRM-free tracks and the tracks with DRM.
Your premise that DRM restricts what you want to do is flawed. You are assuming that everyone wants to do the things the DRM restricts. I want to use my music on all my computers, all my mobile devices, and occasionally loan songs to friends. The DRM has not prevented any of that, and hence has been invisible.
Other people might want to do other things, and they might find the DRM visible, of course. Apple's DRM, though, demonstrates that it is possible to have DRM that allows enough that the vast majority of people will not run into its restrictiions, and so will in fact be invisible to them.
Blogs shift power from broadcasters to individuals. Pull media empowers us all
At one time, I might have agreed with that.
Then I subscribed to a newspaper, and a weekly news magazine. (Don't worry--I subscribed in a geek way. I get them on my Kindle).
I found that I quickly became the most well-informed person in my circle of friends and acquaintances.
Blogs are on about the same level as talk radio when it comes to shifting power and empowering us. Entertaining, but whatever truth they convey is often conveyed in a way that is highly polarizing.
I would not be surprised if it turned out that the increasingly acrimonious tone of modern politics, and the decreasing cooperation among the different political parties, is in a significant part due to the decline of traditional, professionally edited, media.
I've measured the power consumption of my various devices, using a Kill-A-Watt meter.
Let's take computers first. My iMac (core duo, 20" LCD) uses 60 watts on average, with spikes up to 70 watts. When I am using the computer, I have the room lighting reduced. I'd use more power if I turned off the computer, and turned the lights up to a comfortable level for, say, reading.
My gaming PC (3 GHz Core 2 Duo, 8 gig of RAM, GeForce 9800 GT, 22" LCD display) uses 200 watts when running around in a war camp in Warhammer Online.
How about the TV? I've got a 61" DLP set, HD DVR cable box, surround sound receiver, plus a DVD player and a Wii. When watching TV, with the DVD player and Wii off but consuming standby power, the whole setup is consuming 300 watts.
I'm single, so that probably IS more power than I'd consumer if I were, say, reading, instead of watching TV. But the typical household has more than one person. Two or more people sharing a TV will probably be using less power than if they were off doing separate activities. E.g., two parents and two kids watching TV would be using less power than if Ward was in the den reading, June was in the living room sewing, and Wally and Beaver were in their room doing homework.
Slashdot Mirror
Suppose I purposefully throw a baseball at your head, hard enough to sting a normal person, but not hard enough to cause serious damage.
You happen to have an unusually thin skull, and die. It's not my fault you have a thin skull, so would you say I'm not responsible for your death?
What if I know you have a thin skull? Does that change anything?
Drew is not being blamed for the victim's depression. She is being blamed for taking actions that used that depression to kill the victim. Just like the hypothetical with my baseball and your thin skull, I would not be blamed for your thin skull--I would be blamed for throwing the baseball that killed you.
If you go around chucking baseballs at people's heads, you run the risk of running into someone with a thin skull, and then you have to pay the price. I don't see why tormenting teenage girls online should be any different. Drew wanted to harm the girl, and she happened to cause more harm then she may have intended. Too bad for Drew--that's the gamble she took, and she lost.
(The law will take into account the likelihood of a thin skull in the baseball example, so if thin skulls are so rare that a reasonable person would not consider them a possibility when deciding whether to go around chucking baseballs at people, then you might not face liability for the death. But depressed teenage girls aren't that rare, so that defense won't fly here).
A lot of people think "Fantastic Voyage" was an Asimov story that got made into a movie, but it was the other way around. Asimov was hired to do the novelization of the movie. Asimov wrote fast enough that the novelization was published quite a bit before the movie was released. Furthermore, as a condition of taking the job, he insisted that he be allowed to diverge from the script to fix plot holes. So, when the movie came out long after the book, and had plot holes and science errors that were not in the book, people assumed the book came first, and Hollywood botched adapting it!
That was Heinlein, not Asimov.
By that test, most of the world's countries are not sovereign.
A more accurate test is this: you are sovereign if and only if (1) you can fight off any attempt to deny your sovereignty, or (2) those who you would not be able to fight off recognize you as sovereign, or are otherwise constrained to not fight you (e.g., Israel could wipe out Syria, but that would damage their relations with the US sufficiently that they will not, so Syria can still pass the sovereignty test).
Back in the mid '80s, a friend of mine at Caltech, Fritz Nordby, was planning on celebrating the 15th anniversary of Unix by designing a PDP-7 clone on a chip, and making a limited production run. He contacted Ken and DMR to see if he could get a copy of PDP-7 Unix, and they said they didn't have one, and as far as they knew, no copies existed, and that was the end of the commemorative PDP-7 clone idea.
If this collector really has a PDP-7 running original Unix, someone should make a copy and offer it to Ken and DMR. Or make it available on the net (after getting suitable permission). Maybe for the 40th anniversary of Unix, someone could make a PDP-7 simulator to run it. (Hell, you could probably do it in Javascript on a modern desktop machine and be faster than a real PDP-7!)
The problem with the "sell support" model, is that it gives the wrong incentive. You make the most money if your software is not too good.
I once worked at a company that wrote software that was sold at retail in stores, and included free support. Management was constantly urging us to raise quality, as every time we had to actually give support, we lost many times the profit we made on the sale to that customer. Our incentive as programmers was to produce the best code we could.
As a software user, I'd rather use software from people whose incentive is to write the best code they can, rather than people whose incentive is to write code just good enough to make paying for support less painful than switching to a competing product.
Good standards come from standardizing existing, field tested, mature technology, not from creating some brand new technology and declaring it the standard.
Almost every good technology you currently use started as something that was non-standard, usually competing against an existing standard.
Why is he being voted down? He's right about Linux (and the same thing can be said about Windows, too, and OS X). None of them use a development process that includes formal verification of specifications or formal verification that the implementation matches the specification. Of course they are insecure.
I don't know who this "Applet" you keep referring to is, but Apple has had Java 1.6 available for download for at least 6 months.
No, it would not.
You have failed to distinguish between an unratified treaty and a ratified treaty. They are negotiating the unratified treaty. It won't apply to you until it becomes a ratified treaty
If it actually starts down the path to ratification, it will not be secret. For example, in the EU, it will have to be submitted to the legislative bodies for approval. In the US, it has to be submitted to the Senate and receive a 2/3 vote and then be signed by the President. I don't know offhand how other counties deal with ratifying treaties--I'm sure you can find out if you look.
RTFA
Google has pretty completely fucked up in their handling of usenet archives. Some examples:
We really need some competition for Google in this area. There's some very valuable stuff in the usenet archives, and that needs to be in competent hands.
You should probably actually watch a Disney DVD or two before using them in your examples.
That only has a chance of working if the people who don't give money are not allowed to own the movie on whatever format they choose. This disallowal can either be by legal means (but then it's basically copyright, so you are right back with what you are trying to get rid of with this approach), or technical (DRM).
Warning: the following is from memory, so details may be off. The gist of it is correct.
There's a section in "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman" where he goes to see the collider at the new school he's just arrived at. The collider at the school he came from is state of the art, so he's expecting something even better at the new school, because they have been producing many remarkable, cutting edge, results.
The collider he finds is small, and far from state of the art, and almost held together by duct tape and chewing gum. He realizes that this is why it has produced such remarkable results--the scientists that work with it are very hands on, getting down and dirty with the experiments, coaxing every last bit out of them. The scientists using the shiny new state of the art collider are sitting back in their offices, just getting disembodied data that they haven't really connected with, and don't understand on a gut level like their colleagues using the "inferior" equipment do.
Feynman knew then he was going to happy at the new school.
For those less interested in theory, and more interested in choosing a lacing pattern and a good knot for their shoes, I recommend Ian's Shoelace Site.
There are software patents in the UK.
That will draw major criticism from the "free software" people (as opposed to the "open source" people), as most of those technologies are patented.
You make a decent argument for blanket encryption on machines that have sensitive data.
HOWEVER, an effort should be made to limit the machines that have sensitive data in the first place. A policy of "fully encrypt every machine in the place" will lead to complacence. People will think of every machine as a safe place to store the sensitive data, and soon the sensitive data will be all over the place.
OK, that covers what, maybe a dozen books? What about all the rest?
Ah, that explains it. I'd always wondered why rigged elections and vote fraud never happened before the advent of modern voting machines.
In years of owning an iPod, which mostly contains DRM-free tracks I've ripped from CD, but which also does contain about 40 tracks with DRM I've purchased (and another 100 or so tracks with DRM I got for free), there has been absolutely no discernible difference in what I've been able to do with the DRM-free tracks and the tracks with DRM.
Your premise that DRM restricts what you want to do is flawed. You are assuming that everyone wants to do the things the DRM restricts. I want to use my music on all my computers, all my mobile devices, and occasionally loan songs to friends. The DRM has not prevented any of that, and hence has been invisible.
Other people might want to do other things, and they might find the DRM visible, of course. Apple's DRM, though, demonstrates that it is possible to have DRM that allows enough that the vast majority of people will not run into its restrictiions, and so will in fact be invisible to them.
At one time, I might have agreed with that.
Then I subscribed to a newspaper, and a weekly news magazine. (Don't worry--I subscribed in a geek way. I get them on my Kindle).
I found that I quickly became the most well-informed person in my circle of friends and acquaintances.
Blogs are on about the same level as talk radio when it comes to shifting power and empowering us. Entertaining, but whatever truth they convey is often conveyed in a way that is highly polarizing.
I would not be surprised if it turned out that the increasingly acrimonious tone of modern politics, and the decreasing cooperation among the different political parties, is in a significant part due to the decline of traditional, professionally edited, media.
I've measured the power consumption of my various devices, using a Kill-A-Watt meter.
Let's take computers first. My iMac (core duo, 20" LCD) uses 60 watts on average, with spikes up to 70 watts. When I am using the computer, I have the room lighting reduced. I'd use more power if I turned off the computer, and turned the lights up to a comfortable level for, say, reading.
My gaming PC (3 GHz Core 2 Duo, 8 gig of RAM, GeForce 9800 GT, 22" LCD display) uses 200 watts when running around in a war camp in Warhammer Online.
How about the TV? I've got a 61" DLP set, HD DVR cable box, surround sound receiver, plus a DVD player and a Wii. When watching TV, with the DVD player and Wii off but consuming standby power, the whole setup is consuming 300 watts.
I'm single, so that probably IS more power than I'd consumer if I were, say, reading, instead of watching TV. But the typical household has more than one person. Two or more people sharing a TV will probably be using less power than if they were off doing separate activities. E.g., two parents and two kids watching TV would be using less power than if Ward was in the den reading, June was in the living room sewing, and Wally and Beaver were in their room doing homework.
Nope. First sale prevents them from asserting a copyright claim for subsequent transfer of the unmodified items. That's all first sale prevents.