Lester Maddox earned a well-deserved reputation as an extreme far-right-KKK governor of Georgia. Surprisingly enough, however, one of his first acts as governor was an anti-(town-)government action relates to speed traps.
There was one of the small towns in south Georgia, on the route from Atlanta to Florida, which earned the most of its revenue from its speed traps -- speed limit 15MPH and all that sort of thing. I don't recall the name of the town at this instant; let's call it "X".
As one of his first acts as Governor, Maddox had billboards erected just outside the town limits:
You are now entering X, Georgia, famous for its speed traps.
Please drive carefully! -- Lester Maddox, Governor.
...in McIntyre vs Ohio: anonymous speech is a Constitutional right. The Austin police chief is trying to break the Law -- in particular, to break the Supreme Law of the Land.
It depends upon the task. If you're doing software development:
Linus Torvalds has said repeatedly that he really appreciates his
new development system from Intel, and it is the E-class Intel SSD
that really makes a difference for his system reponsiveness and
compile times.
But if you're doing large-transaction I/O (my environmental modeling
does lots of transactions for a 9000-cell-by-6000-cell modeling grid, at 200MB per transaction,
you also want a large striped disk array.
There are some interesting theorems here, many due to the Russian dynamical-systems mathematician Victor Arnold. One, from back in the Seventies, says that on an open ("big) set of initial conditions), if you model the planets as points the system is "stable forever" if and only if all of the set of pairwise orbital-period ratios are irrational (hence for any "stable" there are infinitely-close "unstable ICs, and vice versa). If the planets are modeled as spheres, the system is stable forever if and only if the ratios are a particular kind of irrational number related to the various sphere-radii.
Another theorem says that on this set of initial conditions, if you are given a power-threshold epsilon, and if you are sufficiently clever in your application of thrust at less than total power epsilon, you can force the system either into stability or out of it.
Note that "rational-vs-irrational-number" is inherently not a measurable phenomenon -- all measurements have a tolerance that includes both kinds of numbers.
Qualifications: I'm a software systems architect with over twenty years experience in environmental supercomputing. In that time, I've seen a lot of screwed-up code and screwed-up systems.
In that time, the worst screw-ups have been exclusively codes developed in bureaucratic organizations.
It seems to me there is a personality type that is in love with structure: it doesn't matter whether the structure is appropriate or not, just that it proliferate. This leads to codes that are not merely baroque, but positively rococo. And this is the personality type that flourishes in bureaucratic environments.
The first principle of software engineering is Occam's Razor, more flippantly stated nowadays as "Keep it Simple, Stupid."
My experience says that the lessons Kernighan and Pike teach in The Practice of Programming are de-valued in development-bureaucracies. And DeMarco was right-on in The Deadline about that subject, too.
In the United States, it is a part of the part of the law of the land, the constitution.
And when Steven Breyer on the left and Clarence Thomas on the right agree that current US copyright law is unConstitutional, then it means that Ruth Bader Ginsburg (who wrote the opinion) and those in the middle who agreed with her are despicable oath-breaking liars.
5-10% CPU degradation certainly qualifies as malware in my book. Sony should have been prosecuted for violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse statute -- there should be Sony execs doing multiple 5-year sentences in the Federal slammer. If DoJ had made a big deal of it, it would have served strongly to discourage other malware vendors...
If you're exchanging MS Office docs -- particularly ones going through multiple editions of MSWord, it is a commonplace for MS to claim the docs are corrupt and refuse to do anything. Frequently, OpenSource tools like OpenOffice.org or AbiWord read the files perfectly well, and then can save them un-corrupted in ".doc" form. My wife is an attorney, and she has to jump through that hoop all the time.
And if you're on natural gas, you don't run out of fuel.
In my experience, this is enough to power your entire house. The 8000W unit isn't. And if you home-office, it is an income adjustment as a business expense...
Given what looks like a systematic attempt to avoid informed consent about what will in fact be installed, and that it cannot be un-installed, and given a previous (ostensibly-expert) poster's
It has gotten bad enough that when a customer brings in a PC for
cleaning and repair I look for SecuROM and Starforce just like I
look for worms and trojans. Because the "virus free" computers that
are brought to me because they are screwing up always seem to have
either SecuROM or Starforce onthem,and its removal makes the problems
go away...
this looks to me like a case of unauthorized access under the (Federal) Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. And that this unauthorized access has caused serious economic damage -- PC repairmen are decidedly not free!
In my non-humble opinion, some Sony execs should be doing serious jail time for their rootkit exploits. If they had, EA might not have done this. In the absence of that (or in addition to it), EA execs should be put in the slammer--for five years per incident, as the law specifies.
DISCLAIMER: I'm in that minority that doesn't use my computer for playing music, and in the smaller minority that doesn't use it to play EA-style games (I play KPatience, sometimes), so the axe I'm grinding is purely my interests in legal behavior, individual freedom, and Constitutional restraint.
Which tool I use depends on what i am doing. Often GUIs can save time.
For dinky little tasks that you want to snoopervise manually. But when it comes to Real Computing® where you're manipulating tens of millions of objects, GUIs just don't scale.
Actually, the reason they laugh is that they're still stuck
in 1960's-vintage FORTRAN IV, and aren't willing even to
acknowledge the progress made for FORTRAN-77.
As an aside, going from "FORTRAN" to "Fortran" was a Fortran-90 change...
I have three long-standing email accounts: one with my ISP at home, one with the university at which I am an adjunct professor,
and one at work. Recently, my employer converted this last to a corporate gmail account (my email address is still of the form me.my-employer.com); this employer-email used to be resident on an ancient (~1994-vintage) Sun server.
I use the latest Mozilla (SeaMonkey) to deal with email, using imap.
I have had one university-server outage or failure in the last five years (server down for scheduled maintentance/replacement), and three ISP-server outages or failures. The old Sun imap-server used to have problems about once every three months (disk-space problem where my boss sent too many messages with huge Office-file attachments).
I now average more imap-failures per DAY with gmail than I had ever experienced per YEAR with the other systems!
IANAL, but... There is quite a bit of precedent here, and the general principle seems to be that such copyright claims are against public policy. Some commentary on a previous case (Oregon, also involving Justia and Carl Malamud) is as follows:
IMNHO, this kind of action, whether by California or Oregon, is an abomination, anathema to the idea of rule of law.
From Banks & Bros. v. West Pub. Co., 27 F. 50 (C.C.D. Minn. 1886):
[I]t is a maxim of universal application that every man is presumed to know the law, and it would seem inherent that freedom of access to the laws, or the official interpretation of those laws, should be co-extensive with the sweep of the maxim. Knowledge is the only just condition of obedience. The laws of Rome were written on tablets and posted, that all might read, and all were bound to obedience. The act of that emperor who caused his enactments to be written in small letters, on small tablets, and then posted the latter at such height that none could read the letters, and at the same time insisted upon the rule of obedience, outraging as it did the relations of governor and governed under his own system of government, has never been deemed consistent with or possible under ours... Each citizen is a ruler,--a lawmaker,--and as such has the right of access to the laws he joins in making and to any official interpretation thereof.
The EULA doesn't specify that an NDA is required for a refund, so Lenovo is trying to change the rules of the game in a way contrary to (US-style, anyway) contract law. Lenovo's action is unconscionable (and should be actionable, for that matter).
There go Lenovo's chances on my next laptop purchase.
Or in establishing the case and penalties in a RICO countersuit...
It seems to me that this lawlessness qualifies for RICO counteraction, against both MediaSentry and RIAA.
(and could it be a class action??)
Edwin F. Kalmus & Co, Inc. (http://www.kalmus-music.com/) has made a successful business of selling public domain music scores for many years. You may recall that they were one of the plaintiffs in Eldred vs. Reno...
As an aside, they are one of only three honest classical-music publishers I know (the other two being Novello and Oxford U Press, both British); all the others make a practice of claiming copyright for music written even before the American revolution.
I think that such fraudulent claim of copyright (as is the usual music-publishing practice) should be punished at least as severely as copyright infringement. Scaled by the number of copies sold. And (under the legal doctrine of assumed competence) counted as wilful infringement, so that the penalty is at least $750/copy. Many of them would have fines measured in the tens or hundreds of millions.
...is to engage in power games, independent of their actual Constitutional authority to do so.
Cases in point: they suppressed publication of research about
Aspirin treatment for heart attacks
Bacterial (H. Pylori) causation for ulcers.
In the first of these, the FDA was more murderous than the Vietnam War; in the second,
they were responsible for more torture than the Spanish Inquisition.
And their only use for altruism is to use it to try to whitewash their lust for power.
It's a license: permission to reproduce and distribute a work is a uniloateral action on the part of the author. Without a license, the Berne Treaty (of which your nation is a signatory) says you have no right to reproduce and distribute.
Contracts are bi- or multi-lateral actions in which every party gives up something in exchange for something else. Copyright license is not contract.
This is exactly the situation the judge's ruling doesn't cover: he said that if there's some kind of re-possession, it is a license; if not, it is a sale (and gave the relevant Ninth Circuit precedents).
Ceasing to work after the license-term amounts to re-possession; Autocad doesn't do that, so it was a sale.
Slashdot Mirror
...in McIntyre vs Ohio: anonymous speech is a Constitutional right. The Austin police chief is trying to break the Law -- in particular, to break the Supreme Law of the Land.
OCZ Vertex 250. NewEgg. $729. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227396
It depends upon the task. If you're doing software development: Linus Torvalds has said repeatedly that he really appreciates his new development system from Intel, and it is the E-class Intel SSD that really makes a difference for his system reponsiveness and compile times.
But if you're doing large-transaction I/O (my environmental modeling does lots of transactions for a 9000-cell-by-6000-cell modeling grid, at 200MB per transaction, you also want a large striped disk array.
FWIW
Another theorem says that on this set of initial conditions, if you are given a power-threshold epsilon, and if you are sufficiently clever in your application of thrust at less than total power epsilon, you can force the system either into stability or out of it.
Note that "rational-vs-irrational-number" is inherently not a measurable phenomenon -- all measurements have a tolerance that includes both kinds of numbers.
Sherman Antitrust Act
In that time, the worst screw-ups have been exclusively codes developed in bureaucratic organizations.
It seems to me there is a personality type that is in love with structure: it doesn't matter whether the structure is appropriate or not, just that it proliferate. This leads to codes that are not merely baroque, but positively rococo. And this is the personality type that flourishes in bureaucratic environments.
The first principle of software engineering is Occam's Razor, more flippantly stated nowadays as "Keep it Simple, Stupid."
My experience says that the lessons Kernighan and Pike teach in The Practice of Programming are de-valued in development-bureaucracies. And DeMarco was right-on in The Deadline about that subject, too.
And when Steven Breyer on the left and Clarence Thomas on the right agree that current US copyright law is unConstitutional, then it means that Ruth Bader Ginsburg (who wrote the opinion) and those in the middle who agreed with her are despicable oath-breaking liars.
FWIW
If you're exchanging MS Office docs -- particularly ones going through multiple editions of MSWord, it is a commonplace for MS to claim the docs are corrupt and refuse to do anything. Frequently, OpenSource tools like OpenOffice.org or AbiWord read the files perfectly well, and then can save them un-corrupted in ".doc" form. My wife is an attorney, and she has to jump through that hoop all the time.
And if you're on natural gas, you don't run out of fuel.
In my experience, this is enough to power your entire house. The 8000W unit isn't. And if you home-office, it is an income adjustment as a business expense...
In this case, make sure it's a copyright lawyer: the copyright-law definition of "work for hire" is very different from the patent-law version.
this looks to me like a case of unauthorized access under the (Federal) Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. And that this unauthorized access has caused serious economic damage -- PC repairmen are decidedly not free!
In my non-humble opinion, some Sony execs should be doing serious jail time for their rootkit exploits. If they had, EA might not have done this. In the absence of that (or in addition to it), EA execs should be put in the slammer--for five years per incident, as the law specifies.
DISCLAIMER: I'm in that minority that doesn't use my computer for playing music, and in the smaller minority that doesn't use it to play EA-style games (I play KPatience, sometimes), so the axe I'm grinding is purely my interests in legal behavior, individual freedom, and Constitutional restraint.
For dinky little tasks that you want to snoopervise manually. But when it comes to Real Computing® where you're manipulating tens of millions of objects, GUIs just don't scale.
As an aside, going from "FORTRAN" to "Fortran" was a Fortran-90 change...
You slipped a decimal point. That should be tens of thousands of bucks.
IANAL, but my wife IAL.
... the whole US is a Constitution-free zone.
I have had one university-server outage or failure in the last five years (server down for scheduled maintentance/replacement), and three ISP-server outages or failures. The old Sun imap-server used to have problems about once every three months (disk-space problem where my boss sent too many messages with huge Office-file attachments).
I now average more imap-failures per DAY with gmail than I had ever experienced per YEAR with the other systems!
gmail stinks!!
This was covered last April by William Patry (author of the text, Patry on Copyright), perhaps the most distinguished copyright attorney on the planet, see: http://williampatry.blogspot.com/2008/04/oregon-goes-wacka-wacka-huna-kuna.html
IMNHO, this kind of action, whether by California or Oregon, is an abomination, anathema to the idea of rule of law.
From Banks & Bros. v. West Pub. Co., 27 F. 50 (C.C.D. Minn. 1886):
There go Lenovo's chances on my next laptop purchase.
Or in establishing the case and penalties in a RICO countersuit... It seems to me that this lawlessness qualifies for RICO counteraction, against both MediaSentry and RIAA. (and could it be a class action??)
As an aside, they are one of only three honest classical-music publishers I know (the other two being Novello and Oxford U Press, both British); all the others make a practice of claiming copyright for music written even before the American revolution.
I think that such fraudulent claim of copyright (as is the usual music-publishing practice) should be punished at least as severely as copyright infringement. Scaled by the number of copies sold. And (under the legal doctrine of assumed competence) counted as wilful infringement, so that the penalty is at least $750/copy. Many of them would have fines measured in the tens or hundreds of millions.
Cases in point: they suppressed publication of research about
In the first of these, the FDA was more murderous than the Vietnam War; in the second, they were responsible for more torture than the Spanish Inquisition.
And their only use for altruism is to use it to try to whitewash their lust for power.
Contracts are bi- or multi-lateral actions in which every party gives up something in exchange for something else. Copyright license is not contract.