There's plenty of frameworks out there specifically for separating content from layout. Just look in http://pear.php.net/.
I know nothing of ASP or its Master Pages, but when it comes to said separation, I favor HTML_Template_IT for its simplicity. For those who want a more "involved" templating system, there's things like Smarty, which I think doesn't quite have as strict a separation as I'd like.
Obviously older bands that still have reasonably good record sales (Led Zeppelin) aren't going on a lot of tours. I'm all for giving RIAA a good gut punch, I just don't want to screw over the musicians I love in the process.
I don't think bands need to be making money off of stuff they did 30 years ago. Led Zeppelin's last studio album was released in 1979. Why should they be expected to sit on their asses while the check comes to the door while everyone else has to work? Get a job! Limiting the copyrights to, say, 15 years gives them plenty of a cushion to enjoy life, and then by 1994, they probably should have been smart with those royalty checks and learned some skills.
Being able to live off of something you did 30 years ago is against the spirit of copyright, which is meant to foster innovation. If I create something and then just live off the royalties til I die, I've created one innovation. If my copyright expires in 15 years or so, I've got a nice cushion to create more wonderful little innovations while getting paid. If I fail to innovate by producing something new, I'll still need money after that mark, so maybe I'll get a job and help society that way.
In essence, my argument is that limiting the term of copyright is more likely to create an incentive for continued innovation, while perpetual copyright creates more of an incentive for intial innovation. And the former is probably what weeds out people who have good ideas versus people who want to sell ideas.
Not quite. Negligence is enough in most cases. All crimes fitting under the massive umbrella of manslaughter are characterized by negligence rather than intent. In this example of ATMs, you knew you got something different than what you ordered, and that it's probable that somebody just got screwed. IANAL, but this seems to fit well within the confines of existing law. The law doesn't support vigilante justice, so while you may feel justified in screwing a crappy bank, the law doesn't see it that way. Deal with it. Just my $.02
First of all, these things wouldn't be autonomous, as the summarization says. That's according to UberGizmo. That takes care of who to hold responsible for excessive use of force.
Secondly, I find it interesting that according to the official announcement from Taser International, this is coming about as part of a "strategic alliance" with iRobot, the company who's building robots for the military. According to Taser Int'l, "This combination of capabilities will allow law enforcement, federal, and military users to employ TASER technology from an iRobot® platform at a safe distance to engage, incapacitate, and control dangerous suspects without exposing those personnel, the suspect, or bystanders to unnecessary risks."
We have human police officers on the street because humans are the best able to determine what's going on with all their senses. If you take some guy sitting behind his desk and only give him a 90-degree-angled video feed and a cheap microphone to listen in with, that kills a large part of his effectiveness, and we end up with plenty more problems than we started with. Cops should be able to do their jobs better when they can judge situations with all of their senses.
And then, who needs reasonable suspicion when you don't have to physically taze someone? How could this NOT be a vehicle for the perversion of power? Somebody said earlier,
Anything that would make it easier for a cop to hurt someone without looking into the whites of their eyes would worry me and I couldn't agree more. And let's not even get into buggy software or hacking enabling these robots to go after children or bill collectors or something.
As a sidenote, let's compare these things to real cops: would disabling one of these things be tantamount to committing capital murder? If it calls for backup, is another RoboTaserCop going to come to its aid? How do these travel to the scene of a crime? If they're controlled remotely as the original announcement states, from where? A patrol car a few meters away, where any criminal who would be a threat to an actual officer can still shoot the officer from his car, or a desk kilometers away, requiring repeated tasing while an officer is sent to arrest? Is running away from one of these things considered evading arrest? I mean, it's a robot out to hurt you...
Most of the public doesn't know how an email goes from me to you. They don't get it, and it'd be hell to try to explain it to them.
Note the difference between ease of interception and expectation of non-interception. I can send you a letter in the mail, but all it takes is someone with a finger (maybe two) to open the letter, and we no longer have that privacy. However, we still regard snail-mail as having an expectation of privacy. Hell, you can even encrypt an email and someone can intercept it and break the encryption, but we still have the same expectation of privacy. When it comes to email, most people don't know anything about TCP/IP or how the internet works.
Whether or not they encrypt their email, or obfuscate messages or just leave it as plaintext, they expect that their email will make it to its destination in its entirety without anyone looking at it. Simple? Naive? Yes, but it's a reasonable assumption for a person with limited-to-no technological knowledge to make. And those are the people that the law is trying to protect.
I draw a parallel to phone conversations. In most states, phone conversations recorded without the knowledge of both parties are inadmissible in court. That's why customer support tells you up front. We, as phone users, know the technology is available to intercept phone calls, and that it could be used to record our phone conversations, but we have an expectation that we're just talking to someone without being recorded unless they tell us otherwise. We can dig through our TOS for any email account we have, and unless we see that our emails are being logged and stored, we expect them not to be. It's easy to do, but we just expect them not to do it.
Now, forget the technical specifications of this, why shouldn't a warrant be issued for something like this? That's the crux of the case. Why should a law enforcement officer be able to go through your stuff without your knowledge or consent if no warrant has been issued? I'm sick and tired of the government taking away my liberties for law enforcement or national security. Why am I not running for office? Because the American people are sheep; I'd be painted as weak on national security and lose in a landslide. So instead, I'm treating the government like a corporation, which it essentially is, and fighting with my wallet. I'm moving the hell out of here to a country which respects my rights and liberties.
But before I do, I'm voting for Ron Paul. I'm not a fan of the Republicans, but this guy is a libertarian at heart and thinks the federal government is overstepping its bounds on just about everything it does. Give him a shot.
Oh, so like Apple's thriving iPod market and the amazing interoperability it's known for, right? Fairplay is the biggest misnomer I've ever seen in my life!
I'd hesitate to call myself a "free market zealot," but I think the antitrust stuff against Microsoft have gone too far, generally. Not being able to include Media Player in Europe seems just stupid, when MS has made no effort to stop third-party media programs from working. By simply including it in the base install (from which it is removable anyway), they're apparently creating unfair competition? Since when should a company be liable for the laziness of its users to find viable alternatives? Is it anticompetitive to include Windows on a freshly-purchased PC?
What this boils down to is that MS bundled a search application with Vista and it directly competes with Google Desktop. Google wants a XP-N style victory from the courts that says MS can't make their products available in the base install.
Maybe it's just me, but I find that pretty stupid, and an abuse of the law. For all the talk about differing product realms and using one market monopoly to create another, people seem to be forgetting that applications and operating systems are both software. I could draw parallel analogies all over the place. Take, for instance, music. Bach has what could reasonably considered a monopoly on the trumpet market. It's not complete, but a very high percentage. Should they then be disallowed from making mouthpieces, mutes, valve oil, polishing cloths, or distributing music?
Since when is it a federal matter to ensure that Company Foo, which has a monopoly on Product Bar, cannot be successful in any other product? In fighting for the rule of law, you have to consider whether the spirit or letter of the law is more important. So long as they publish the APIs they use to create applications (which they don't, but that's not why Google's bitching, really), let them bundle whatever the hell they want. The federal government should not be their marketing board.
So this is where Facebook takes a stab at MySpace's success. People like MySpace because they can do whatever they want with it. Pink text on red background with four movies and three songs all going at once? Why not make the page blink, too? Yes, friends, it's all possible via MySpace.
Now, it looks as though Facebook wants in on the game, too. What I loved about Facebook was the simplicity of design that it keeps losing with every new feature and redesign. The site slows down and becomes less usable. Time will only tell if it stays clean and modular like the screenshot in the article shows, or if it's one more weapon in Facebook's arsenal of bloat.
At least Facebook still works, unlike the piece of crap they call MySpace. Seriously, Tom needs to learn how to make stuff that doesn't break without fail every time I try to use it. Until then, he's not my friend.
If you RTFA, it says 235, 352, and 253. How this article ever got published is beyond me. Apparently it's some number containing the digits 2, 3 and 5, so if you're a MS fanboi it's 235, and if you're a Linux fanboi it's 532. I would have thought someone bitching about RTFA would have RTFA themselves.
Sony pays people to find a way to have a perfectly good product not work. And they're not the only ones, either. Almost all the major movie and music industries are paying people to design a way to stop their products from working. Their goal is to redefine what "works" means by taking away all the innovation required to create such glorious things as DVDs or CDs and limiting everyone to a subset of the original features, and continuously do so until we forget that the original set existed.
Vote with your wallet, and your geek-conscience. Don't put people in power that support bullshit like the DMCA. See if you can find a candidate who thinks selling products that don't work should be illegal. Write letters to companies telling them WHY you're not buying products designed to not work. Fight the man!
Slashdot Mirror
Here's the first page: http://abcnews.go.com/2020/Health/Story?id=7880954&page=1
Umm, see Gulf of Tonkin and the USS Maine, just off the top of my head. Those weren't even ALLIES, they were our OWN!
There's plenty of frameworks out there specifically for separating content from layout. Just look in http://pear.php.net/.
I know nothing of ASP or its Master Pages, but when it comes to said separation, I favor HTML_Template_IT for its simplicity. For those who want a more "involved" templating system, there's things like Smarty, which I think doesn't quite have as strict a separation as I'd like.
I don't think bands need to be making money off of stuff they did 30 years ago. Led Zeppelin's last studio album was released in 1979. Why should they be expected to sit on their asses while the check comes to the door while everyone else has to work? Get a job! Limiting the copyrights to, say, 15 years gives them plenty of a cushion to enjoy life, and then by 1994, they probably should have been smart with those royalty checks and learned some skills.
Being able to live off of something you did 30 years ago is against the spirit of copyright, which is meant to foster innovation. If I create something and then just live off the royalties til I die, I've created one innovation. If my copyright expires in 15 years or so, I've got a nice cushion to create more wonderful little innovations while getting paid. If I fail to innovate by producing something new, I'll still need money after that mark, so maybe I'll get a job and help society that way.
In essence, my argument is that limiting the term of copyright is more likely to create an incentive for continued innovation, while perpetual copyright creates more of an incentive for intial innovation. And the former is probably what weeds out people who have good ideas versus people who want to sell ideas.
Not quite. Negligence is enough in most cases. All crimes fitting under the massive umbrella of manslaughter are characterized by negligence rather than intent. In this example of ATMs, you knew you got something different than what you ordered, and that it's probable that somebody just got screwed. IANAL, but this seems to fit well within the confines of existing law. The law doesn't support vigilante justice, so while you may feel justified in screwing a crappy bank, the law doesn't see it that way. Deal with it. Just my $.02
Secondly, I find it interesting that according to the official announcement from Taser International, this is coming about as part of a "strategic alliance" with iRobot, the company who's building robots for the military. According to Taser Int'l, "This combination of capabilities will allow law enforcement, federal, and military users to employ TASER technology from an iRobot® platform at a safe distance to engage, incapacitate, and control dangerous suspects without exposing those personnel, the suspect, or bystanders to unnecessary risks."
We have human police officers on the street because humans are the best able to determine what's going on with all their senses. If you take some guy sitting behind his desk and only give him a 90-degree-angled video feed and a cheap microphone to listen in with, that kills a large part of his effectiveness, and we end up with plenty more problems than we started with. Cops should be able to do their jobs better when they can judge situations with all of their senses.
And then, who needs reasonable suspicion when you don't have to physically taze someone? How could this NOT be a vehicle for the perversion of power? Somebody said earlier, Anything that would make it easier for a cop to hurt someone without looking into the whites of their eyes would worry me and I couldn't agree more. And let's not even get into buggy software or hacking enabling these robots to go after children or bill collectors or something.
As a sidenote, let's compare these things to real cops: would disabling one of these things be tantamount to committing capital murder? If it calls for backup, is another RoboTaserCop going to come to its aid? How do these travel to the scene of a crime? If they're controlled remotely as the original announcement states, from where? A patrol car a few meters away, where any criminal who would be a threat to an actual officer can still shoot the officer from his car, or a desk kilometers away, requiring repeated tasing while an officer is sent to arrest? Is running away from one of these things considered evading arrest? I mean, it's a robot out to hurt you...
Most of the public doesn't know how an email goes from me to you. They don't get it, and it'd be hell to try to explain it to them.
Note the difference between ease of interception and expectation of non-interception. I can send you a letter in the mail, but all it takes is someone with a finger (maybe two) to open the letter, and we no longer have that privacy. However, we still regard snail-mail as having an expectation of privacy. Hell, you can even encrypt an email and someone can intercept it and break the encryption, but we still have the same expectation of privacy. When it comes to email, most people don't know anything about TCP/IP or how the internet works.
Whether or not they encrypt their email, or obfuscate messages or just leave it as plaintext, they expect that their email will make it to its destination in its entirety without anyone looking at it. Simple? Naive? Yes, but it's a reasonable assumption for a person with limited-to-no technological knowledge to make. And those are the people that the law is trying to protect.
I draw a parallel to phone conversations. In most states, phone conversations recorded without the knowledge of both parties are inadmissible in court. That's why customer support tells you up front. We, as phone users, know the technology is available to intercept phone calls, and that it could be used to record our phone conversations, but we have an expectation that we're just talking to someone without being recorded unless they tell us otherwise. We can dig through our TOS for any email account we have, and unless we see that our emails are being logged and stored, we expect them not to be. It's easy to do, but we just expect them not to do it.
Now, forget the technical specifications of this, why shouldn't a warrant be issued for something like this? That's the crux of the case. Why should a law enforcement officer be able to go through your stuff without your knowledge or consent if no warrant has been issued? I'm sick and tired of the government taking away my liberties for law enforcement or national security. Why am I not running for office? Because the American people are sheep; I'd be painted as weak on national security and lose in a landslide. So instead, I'm treating the government like a corporation, which it essentially is, and fighting with my wallet. I'm moving the hell out of here to a country which respects my rights and liberties.
But before I do, I'm voting for Ron Paul. I'm not a fan of the Republicans, but this guy is a libertarian at heart and thinks the federal government is overstepping its bounds on just about everything it does. Give him a shot.
Oh, so like Apple's thriving iPod market and the amazing interoperability it's known for, right? Fairplay is the biggest misnomer I've ever seen in my life!
I'd hesitate to call myself a "free market zealot," but I think the antitrust stuff against Microsoft have gone too far, generally. Not being able to include Media Player in Europe seems just stupid, when MS has made no effort to stop third-party media programs from working. By simply including it in the base install (from which it is removable anyway), they're apparently creating unfair competition? Since when should a company be liable for the laziness of its users to find viable alternatives? Is it anticompetitive to include Windows on a freshly-purchased PC?
What this boils down to is that MS bundled a search application with Vista and it directly competes with Google Desktop. Google wants a XP-N style victory from the courts that says MS can't make their products available in the base install.
Maybe it's just me, but I find that pretty stupid, and an abuse of the law. For all the talk about differing product realms and using one market monopoly to create another, people seem to be forgetting that applications and operating systems are both software. I could draw parallel analogies all over the place. Take, for instance, music. Bach has what could reasonably considered a monopoly on the trumpet market. It's not complete, but a very high percentage. Should they then be disallowed from making mouthpieces, mutes, valve oil, polishing cloths, or distributing music?
Since when is it a federal matter to ensure that Company Foo, which has a monopoly on Product Bar, cannot be successful in any other product? In fighting for the rule of law, you have to consider whether the spirit or letter of the law is more important. So long as they publish the APIs they use to create applications (which they don't, but that's not why Google's bitching, really), let them bundle whatever the hell they want. The federal government should not be their marketing board.
So this is where Facebook takes a stab at MySpace's success. People like MySpace because they can do whatever they want with it. Pink text on red background with four movies and three songs all going at once? Why not make the page blink, too? Yes, friends, it's all possible via MySpace.
Now, it looks as though Facebook wants in on the game, too. What I loved about Facebook was the simplicity of design that it keeps losing with every new feature and redesign. The site slows down and becomes less usable. Time will only tell if it stays clean and modular like the screenshot in the article shows, or if it's one more weapon in Facebook's arsenal of bloat.
At least Facebook still works, unlike the piece of crap they call MySpace. Seriously, Tom needs to learn how to make stuff that doesn't break without fail every time I try to use it. Until then, he's not my friend.
If you RTFA, it says 235, 352, and 253. How this article ever got published is beyond me. Apparently it's some number containing the digits 2, 3 and 5, so if you're a MS fanboi it's 235, and if you're a Linux fanboi it's 532. I would have thought someone bitching about RTFA would have RTFA themselves.
Sony pays people to find a way to have a perfectly good product not work. And they're not the only ones, either. Almost all the major movie and music industries are paying people to design a way to stop their products from working. Their goal is to redefine what "works" means by taking away all the innovation required to create such glorious things as DVDs or CDs and limiting everyone to a subset of the original features, and continuously do so until we forget that the original set existed.
Vote with your wallet, and your geek-conscience. Don't put people in power that support bullshit like the DMCA. See if you can find a candidate who thinks selling products that don't work should be illegal. Write letters to companies telling them WHY you're not buying products designed to not work. Fight the man!