What this lawsuit says is that people who see a violent film and then commit a violent act are innocent. Is this reasonable?
Just to clarify, because it's easy to misread the message I'm replying to on a quick glance: The above quote is basically what the lawsuit implies, though I think they'd say (and to some extent I agree) that the responsibility is shared. The decision is basically reversing that and saying that the person committing an act is solely responsible, not the creator of material that might have provoked that action (note that "might").
I doubt that this would affect cases where there's clear evidence that said material provoked a crime - if I put up a site instructing people to commit a crime I'd expect to remain somewhat liable, just as I would if I promised some sort of reward (presumably any reward, personal, financial or spiritual). If this countered that, the there'd be no repercussions if someone (e.g. Matthew Hale, leader of the First Church of the Creator) put up a page saying "Go kill a Jew today for God" or if some disgruntled spouse put up a page saying "I'll give $10,000 to the first person who kills my husband/wife."
They're not doing anything that the FSF itself isn't doing - I can right now go to the FSF site and order a CD of the GNU source code for only $70. Sure I can download it as well, but they're charging me for the time to put it on a CD and mail it out. They're giving me a free ride on the download, but that's certainly not a requirement.
As has been pointed out by others, it's just fine to charge for transmission costs, whether that cost be time, materials & postage for a physical copy or bandwidth charges for a downloaded copy. Similarly, they're not saying you can't copy it and put it up yourself - if you have lots of available bandwidth that someone doesn't mind you using, go ahead, the licensing allows that.
I had one of those favorites too, but it was horrible for two-player games. Fortunately most of the time when I played it was with at least four people.
Red-Green-White, with four earthquakes, four hurricanes, some wild growth, some healing, some Gaea's Touch, a desert twister and tranquilities, etc. Heavy on the mana and able to get it out fast. For people who'd never seen it before it was devastating because it just looked like I had a bad shuffle with nothing but mana and a couple of COPs that I played instead of discarding them. Then the earthquakes came.
"I'll tap these ten lands and discard two Gaea's Touch for four more. One white into the COP:Red, one(two?) red to start the earthquake, twelve damage to all players and non-flying creatures."
As long as nobody could kill me by the next turn I was in great shape from then on, because by that point I usually had two or three more mass damage or healing cards in my hand. With one or two Gaea's Touches out I was also able to drop two or three lands in a turn, so I was all set by five or six turns in - not too long in a multiplayer game.
Go to your Preferences page here, then scroll down until you see "It's funny. Laugh." in the center column (Topics). There should be a checkbox next to it. Toggle that box to on/checked. You will no longer see Foot and Mouth articles.
He was almost certainly working to make it as cross-platform as possible. Somehow I suspect that he'll sell more Linux copies than Amiga ones no matter how nice a platform the Amiga was for graphics. No matter how many of either he sells, the Windows version is likely to be the biggest money maker unless it has some capabilities that far exceed what the GIMP can do.
Think of it like this - if you're developing a package that does a lot of internal data manipulation then displays the result, wouldn't you make an effort to separate the internals from the display? If after doing that you determined that the internal code that made up the bulk of your package was pretty much platform-independent would you consider building frontends for multiple platforms? Finally, when deciding on platforms what would you choose? The dominant desktop OS and the up-and-comer seem like reasonable choices to me.
It's painfully easy for Dell, Compaq, etc. to negotiate OEM licenses with Mattel, et al., to bundle a censorware product on their PCs at an oh-so-cheap price.
Right, but if I'm a corporate buyer and I'm having Dell prebuild my machines with my stock configuration, I don't want to be told that I can have my stock configuration only if it includes "this little extra bit of software that we're required by law to install." Note that last word too - it says install. That's different from just bundling it with the PC.
Expect this to die a quick death. Dell might be able to just move all of its assembly out of Texas to avoid it, but if not then they'd be better off moving than giving up the corporate sales that are their lifeblood.
The bus guy doesn't like this, understandably, and so he calls his friend the chief of police, and gets a bunch of uniforms out at the bus stop. Everyone who gets off the bus is asked where they're going, and if you say "to see the picture" you get put back on the bus.
"Excuse me Officer Smith, but why am I being detained?"
Perhaps it's barracks-lawyering, but would there be grounds for a library to filter so as to block access only to material that has been specifically ruled to be obscene in court? "Obscene" has specific legal meaning as I understand it, so presumably a government requirement to block obscene materials should utilize the government definition.
I suppose this is really a question about who has the authority to actually determine what is obscene or not. "Harmful to minors" is a greyer area, but if there's not a good definition then it also leaves quite a bit of leeway for local judgement.
Finally, for a passive-aggressive approach, libraries can put up signs with the names and addresses of their Senators and Representatives, along with a statement:
"Congress has required that we block access to a wide variety of material available on the Internet, including but not limited to sexually oriented material intended for adults. Other material that we are required to block includes [...] and any other items that the company manufacturing our filtering software disapproves of.
Information on precisely what is blocked is not available to us from the manufacturer, and we are prohibited by law from attempting to find out ourselves.
If you disagree with this requirement or need access to the blocked material, please contact Representative X at [...] and Senator Y at [...]."
For the list of blocked material, use whatever information is available, and specifically include any information such as "Holocaust history," "classical art," "youth-oriented websites," "women's health," "political discussion," etc.. I'm sure Peacefire as a frequently-blocked website can provide a nice list of inappropriately blocked material...
Well, I can't look at the actual TOS from behind my company's filtering proxy server, but does it say that you agree not to open the file or does it say that you agree not to open the file unless you have legal right to do so?
If it's the latter, then technically they shouldn't be in any more danger than Microsoft is for having file sharing available in Windows.
What happens is that the force applied is strong enough and even enough to push all the edges of the coin inward. Something has to give, so the rest of the coin starts to bulge.
To control against storing the first part of the file and using the decryption key on it (where "part" is large enough to avoid decryption blocksize & block shuffling problems), the file should either be double-encrypted or otherwise scrambled, with a reordering key located at a standard spot once the stream is decrypted. Having the reordering information scattered throughout the file before the encryption is done might also work.
>Allow each song to be copied once.
How? By forcing the original copy to self-destruct?
The same way Minidiscs do it. Tracks can be marked as protected/copyable, protected/uncopyable, and unprotected. When recording digital out/digital in, the bits are checked, and a protected/copyable is changed to protected/uncopyable on the duplicate. Digital copies from non-MD sources are also flagged, though I don't recall the details. There's no copy protection on analog copies, but because MDs do compression there'll be steady degradation in quality the further you get from the original.
What this means is that you can make as many first-generation copies as you like, but you can't make second-generation digital copies. When MDs came out, that was regarded as plenty of protection, because you don't have a growing number of usable sources for copying.
HIPAA isn't actually all that new - it's the "Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996," with additional data security regulations proposed in August of 1998 and privacy regulations proposed in November 1999. Both sets of added regulations were originally expected to be issued in final form by February 2000, but remained under review beyond that. The final regulations were released on December 28, 2000.
An interesting note from one of the sites below: "With the 1996 passage of HIPAA, Congress was granted 36 months to pass privacy legislation. In the event Congress failed to meet this deadline, HIPAA authorized DHHS to promulgate final regulations to protect patient privacy. DHHS published a NPRM for individually identifiable health information on November 3, 1999. After reviewing more than 50,000 comments, DHHS published the final regulations on December 28, 2000." The regulations are on hold because the Bush Administration put a stay on all regulations from the last two months of the Clinton Administration.
If you want to read the final regulations themselves or get information from the Department of Health and Human Services, you can go to http://aspe.os.dhhs.gov/admnsimp/.
most or the wireless mobile IP devices use CDPD because analog phone networks are almost everywhere
CDPD runs alongside AMPS, but that doesn't mean you can use it anywhere you have AMPS coverage. It requires additional hardware at the towers.
CDPD is 33Kbit
Actually, I think it's 19.2 not 33, though there may have been changes in the past couple of years that I'm not aware of. CDPD isn't something to plan on using long-term - I expect it to largely disappear by 2002 or 2003, because there are other options with higher capacity and lower costs. Once 3G is rolled out CDPD will sink like a rock except as a legacy system.
"Sorry folks for that wee bit of turbulence. I drank an extra cup of coffee today and I'm a little jittery"
That's an easy one to account for - it'd be standard to account for that sort of weak signal and damp it down so only stronger impulses get through. Or, put differently, if you look at an EKG readout what's important are the large peaks and valleys, not the minor jitter in the line.
It includes a 4-port 10/100 switch, a WAN-side Ethernet connection to go to the cable or DSL box, and a serial port that can be used to connect an external modem as a backup. It does NAT. It does DHCP. It firewalls. It includes three "groups" for different levels of port blocking. It includes a parallel port for printer sharing. It's web-configurable. It has beta IPSec support.
It's also cheap, with a list price of $200 and at least one place selling it for $150-160.
He should be very careful about this - legally he has to at least file a US tax return (assuming he's a US citizen), though he may not actually owe any taxes (there are some credits, see the IRS publications for details). His chances of getting caught are probably pretty low, but it's entirely possible that not filing at all for a couple of years will get him flagged for an audit next time he does file after he returns home.
I'll stay out of the politics of whether it's right or not for the government to tax you when you're working internationally beyond one comment: for a US citizen, even if you're out of the country there are advantages and services that are available to you (at embassies, etc.) because of your citizenship. Taxes pay for those even if you don't use them, the same way taxes pay for your local fire department's services even if you don't use them.
I'd like to see this happen at coffee shops as well.
Starbucks is working on this, and I'd assume they're going to use 802.11b though it's not specifically stated in the press release. The press release is on their web site (under About Us, Press Room) and is dated January 3, 2001.
Here's a quote from it:
The relationship combines Starbucks expertise in creating an inviting and relaxing coffeehouse experience with Microsoft's state-of-the-art technologies and MSN® content and services. MobileStar, a leading wireless broadband Internet service provider, will deploy the network infrastructure beginning in late spring, delivering an enhanced consumer experience for Starbucks customers. The planned technologies represent an early step in Microsoft's delivery on the.NET vision of software that empowers users any time, any place and on any device and Starbucks' desire to address the changing lifestyles of its customers.
Low power, low heat (iMacs, iBooks, and Cubes don't even have fans)
While it's true that the PowerPC consumes less power than comparable Intel and AMD processors, that's not the only reason the Macs don't use fans.
First, because Apple has complete control of the design they were able to design the motherboard and cases to maximize airflow driven by heat. Most x86 PCs don't have the same luxury of custom design for heat management, they're constrained by the form factors of earlier systems that produced less heat. There are people who've built cases with chimneys to suck air through without fans, but the internal case layout really isn't very good for this.
Second, what's the wattage of a Mac power supply? If you have very limited internal expansion, you can budget your power supply pretty tightly and make it weak enough to work fine without a fan. It's possible to get a PC power supply that will work fine with no fan, but standard AT and ATX supplies are generally not vented properly for that, nor are the cases that they're put in. What's the last PC case you saw that had vents in the top?
--
fencepost
Can I heat my home with one?
on
PDP-10 Revival
·
· Score: 1
If it won't pump out enough heat to warm up at least one room, why would I want one of these?
And why use a FPGA? Isn't there someone at Transmeta just panting to use their code morphing technology to emulate PDP processors?
Weren't there some cases recently where people were applying under the FOIA (in the US) to get access to web browser histories and/or firewall & proxy logs for government employees? I know there was one trying to get the logs of what sites students had been visiting.
If those were decided in favor of releasing histories, caches and other logs, you might throw something about that into your policy as well.
These aren't intended to replace your existing CDs, they're intended to be a cheaper, lighter, more convenient media for people to distribute things that don't need to be kept for very long.
I think the main use of these will be in areas that can be considered "promotion," but there's a huge amount of money spent there every year. Ignore the possibility of these being 50% of the cost - how much would AOL save each year by eliminating the postage on 80% of the CD's weight?
Say a CD weighs 0.5 oz (which is close), if they can find a way to get that down to 0.1 oz, they can probably get a little creative with the packaging and get a mailer that's below 1 oz (or 2, or any other integer up to 13). They're paying a bulk mailing rate rather than one-off first class rates, but if they paid the latter then going from 1.6 oz to 1.2 they'd have a real incentive to shave off that last 0.2 oz. Right now, standard first-class mail rates are $0.33 for the first ounce, plus $0.22 for each additional. If AOL sent 10 million CDs a year out at those rates, it could save them 2.2 million dollars a year on postage. Even if their savings would only be a quarter that amount, would they switch for a $550,000/year savings just on postage if it didn't have any adverse effect?
These things are also much more disposable - if you're producing something that you want people to be able to use for a month or two but you really don't care beyond that, then these are great - less cost to produce them, and by the time the breakage percentage gets up to areas that you'd be concerned about the material on the disks is out of date anyway. Heck, if they could I suspect there are companies who'd love to have CDs that would intentionally become unreadable after a short time, the problem is that it can't be anything that might muck up someone's CD-ROM drive.
As to the question of reliability, maybe they start to stress after a few hours of spin and become unreadable. So what? As long as they don't actually break apart, what's the problem if your disposable CD needs to be disposed of?
That Image Online Design has been passing out.web addresses for (apparently) years. ICANN can avoid giving them "official" recognition of the TLD by not allowing anyone to use it; if they assigned it to someone else then life would get ugly as the lawsuits flew over whether ICANN actually had any authority to assign TLDs.
Given the length of time over which IODesign has been passing these out, I'd expect that they'd have a reasonable chance of winning in a case, and that would pretty much gut ICANN, government mandate or no. Their site has a link to an interesting article by Brock Meeks that's been linked to before in an older thread; apparently NSI (through a cutout) also wants.web.
Slashdot Mirror
Just to clarify, because it's easy to misread the message I'm replying to on a quick glance: The above quote is basically what the lawsuit implies, though I think they'd say (and to some extent I agree) that the responsibility is shared. The decision is basically reversing that and saying that the person committing an act is solely responsible, not the creator of material that might have provoked that action (note that "might").
I doubt that this would affect cases where there's clear evidence that said material provoked a crime - if I put up a site instructing people to commit a crime I'd expect to remain somewhat liable, just as I would if I promised some sort of reward (presumably any reward, personal, financial or spiritual). If this countered that, the there'd be no repercussions if someone (e.g. Matthew Hale, leader of the First Church of the Creator) put up a page saying "Go kill a Jew today for God" or if some disgruntled spouse put up a page saying "I'll give $10,000 to the first person who kills my husband/wife."
-- fencepost
As has been pointed out by others, it's just fine to charge for transmission costs, whether that cost be time, materials & postage for a physical copy or bandwidth charges for a downloaded copy. Similarly, they're not saying you can't copy it and put it up yourself - if you have lots of available bandwidth that someone doesn't mind you using, go ahead, the licensing allows that.
-- fencepost
Red-Green-White, with four earthquakes, four hurricanes, some wild growth, some healing, some Gaea's Touch, a desert twister and tranquilities, etc. Heavy on the mana and able to get it out fast. For people who'd never seen it before it was devastating because it just looked like I had a bad shuffle with nothing but mana and a couple of COPs that I played instead of discarding them. Then the earthquakes came.
As long as nobody could kill me by the next turn I was in great shape from then on, because by that point I usually had two or three more mass damage or healing cards in my hand. With one or two Gaea's Touches out I was also able to drop two or three lands in a turn, so I was all set by five or six turns in - not too long in a multiplayer game.-- fencepost
Go to your Preferences page here, then scroll down until you see "It's funny. Laugh." in the center column (Topics). There should be a checkbox next to it. Toggle that box to on/checked. You will no longer see Foot and Mouth articles.
-- fencepost
Think of it like this - if you're developing a package that does a lot of internal data manipulation then displays the result, wouldn't you make an effort to separate the internals from the display? If after doing that you determined that the internal code that made up the bulk of your package was pretty much platform-independent would you consider building frontends for multiple platforms? Finally, when deciding on platforms what would you choose? The dominant desktop OS and the up-and-comer seem like reasonable choices to me.
-- fencepost
Right, but if I'm a corporate buyer and I'm having Dell prebuild my machines with my stock configuration, I don't want to be told that I can have my stock configuration only if it includes "this little extra bit of software that we're required by law to install." Note that last word too - it says install. That's different from just bundling it with the PC.
Expect this to die a quick death. Dell might be able to just move all of its assembly out of Texas to avoid it, but if not then they'd be better off moving than giving up the corporate sales that are their lifeblood.
-- fencepost
"Excuse me Officer Smith, but why am I being detained?"
ajm
-- fencepost
I suppose this is really a question about who has the authority to actually determine what is obscene or not. "Harmful to minors" is a greyer area, but if there's not a good definition then it also leaves quite a bit of leeway for local judgement.
Finally, for a passive-aggressive approach, libraries can put up signs with the names and addresses of their Senators and Representatives, along with a statement:
For the list of blocked material, use whatever information is available, and specifically include any information such as "Holocaust history," "classical art," "youth-oriented websites," "women's health," "political discussion," etc.. I'm sure Peacefire as a frequently-blocked website can provide a nice list of inappropriately blocked material...-- fencepost
Just to be sure nobody gets confused, the Red Cross hypothetical situation used as an example isn't going to happen, it's only an example.
-- fencepost
Well, I can't look at the actual TOS from behind my company's filtering proxy server, but does it say that you agree not to open the file or does it say that you agree not to open the file unless you have legal right to do so?
If it's the latter, then technically they shouldn't be in any more danger than Microsoft is for having file sharing available in Windows.
-- fencepost
So if they come out with an ultralight should they call it the Fairy or the Blue?
-- fencepost
-- fencepost
To control against storing the first part of the file and using the decryption key on it (where "part" is large enough to avoid decryption blocksize & block shuffling problems), the file should either be double-encrypted or otherwise scrambled, with a reordering key located at a standard spot once the stream is decrypted. Having the reordering information scattered throughout the file before the encryption is done might also work.
-- fencepost
How? By forcing the original copy to self-destruct?
The same way Minidiscs do it. Tracks can be marked as protected/copyable, protected/uncopyable, and unprotected. When recording digital out/digital in, the bits are checked, and a protected/copyable is changed to protected/uncopyable on the duplicate. Digital copies from non-MD sources are also flagged, though I don't recall the details. There's no copy protection on analog copies, but because MDs do compression there'll be steady degradation in quality the further you get from the original.
What this means is that you can make as many first-generation copies as you like, but you can't make second-generation digital copies. When MDs came out, that was regarded as plenty of protection, because you don't have a growing number of usable sources for copying.
-- fencepost
An interesting note from one of the sites below: "With the 1996 passage of HIPAA, Congress was granted 36 months to pass privacy legislation. In the event Congress failed to meet this deadline, HIPAA authorized DHHS to promulgate final regulations to protect patient privacy. DHHS published a NPRM for individually identifiable health information on November 3, 1999. After reviewing more than 50,000 comments, DHHS published the final regulations on December 28, 2000." The regulations are on hold because the Bush Administration put a stay on all regulations from the last two months of the Clinton Administration.
Good resources for more information include http://www.smed.com/hipaa/ from Siemens and http://www.hipaa-iq.com/ from QuadraMed.
If you want to read the final regulations themselves or get information from the Department of Health and Human Services, you can go to http://aspe.os.dhhs.gov/admnsimp/.
-- fencepost
CDPD runs alongside AMPS, but that doesn't mean you can use it anywhere you have AMPS coverage. It requires additional hardware at the towers.
CDPD is 33Kbit
Actually, I think it's 19.2 not 33, though there may have been changes in the past couple of years that I'm not aware of. CDPD isn't something to plan on using long-term - I expect it to largely disappear by 2002 or 2003, because there are other options with higher capacity and lower costs. Once 3G is rolled out CDPD will sink like a rock except as a legacy system.
-- fencepost
That's an easy one to account for - it'd be standard to account for that sort of weak signal and damp it down so only stronger impulses get through. Or, put differently, if you look at an EKG readout what's important are the large peaks and valleys, not the minor jitter in the line.
-- fencepost
It includes a 4-port 10/100 switch, a WAN-side Ethernet connection to go to the cable or DSL box, and a serial port that can be used to connect an external modem as a backup. It does NAT. It does DHCP. It firewalls. It includes three "groups" for different levels of port blocking. It includes a parallel port for printer sharing. It's web-configurable. It has beta IPSec support.
It's also cheap, with a list price of $200 and at least one place selling it for $150-160.
-- fencepost
He should be very careful about this - legally he has to at least file a US tax return (assuming he's a US citizen), though he may not actually owe any taxes (there are some credits, see the IRS publications for details). His chances of getting caught are probably pretty low, but it's entirely possible that not filing at all for a couple of years will get him flagged for an audit next time he does file after he returns home.
I'll stay out of the politics of whether it's right or not for the government to tax you when you're working internationally beyond one comment: for a US citizen, even if you're out of the country there are advantages and services that are available to you (at embassies, etc.) because of your citizenship. Taxes pay for those even if you don't use them, the same way taxes pay for your local fire department's services even if you don't use them.
The IRS FAQs for people working internationally are at http://www.irs.gov/tax_edu/faq/faq13.html.
-- fencepost
Starbucks is working on this, and I'd assume they're going to use 802.11b though it's not specifically stated in the press release. The press release is on their web site (under About Us, Press Room) and is dated January 3, 2001.
Here's a quote from it:
-- fencepost
While it's true that the PowerPC consumes less power than comparable Intel and AMD processors, that's not the only reason the Macs don't use fans.
First, because Apple has complete control of the design they were able to design the motherboard and cases to maximize airflow driven by heat. Most x86 PCs don't have the same luxury of custom design for heat management, they're constrained by the form factors of earlier systems that produced less heat. There are people who've built cases with chimneys to suck air through without fans, but the internal case layout really isn't very good for this.
Second, what's the wattage of a Mac power supply? If you have very limited internal expansion, you can budget your power supply pretty tightly and make it weak enough to work fine without a fan. It's possible to get a PC power supply that will work fine with no fan, but standard AT and ATX supplies are generally not vented properly for that, nor are the cases that they're put in. What's the last PC case you saw that had vents in the top?
-- fencepost
And why use a FPGA? Isn't there someone at Transmeta just panting to use their code morphing technology to emulate PDP processors?
-- fencepost
If those were decided in favor of releasing histories, caches and other logs, you might throw something about that into your policy as well.
-- fencepost
I think the main use of these will be in areas that can be considered "promotion," but there's a huge amount of money spent there every year. Ignore the possibility of these being 50% of the cost - how much would AOL save each year by eliminating the postage on 80% of the CD's weight?
Say a CD weighs 0.5 oz (which is close), if they can find a way to get that down to 0.1 oz, they can probably get a little creative with the packaging and get a mailer that's below 1 oz (or 2, or any other integer up to 13). They're paying a bulk mailing rate rather than one-off first class rates, but if they paid the latter then going from 1.6 oz to 1.2 they'd have a real incentive to shave off that last 0.2 oz. Right now, standard first-class mail rates are $0.33 for the first ounce, plus $0.22 for each additional. If AOL sent 10 million CDs a year out at those rates, it could save them 2.2 million dollars a year on postage. Even if their savings would only be a quarter that amount, would they switch for a $550,000/year savings just on postage if it didn't have any adverse effect?
These things are also much more disposable - if you're producing something that you want people to be able to use for a month or two but you really don't care beyond that, then these are great - less cost to produce them, and by the time the breakage percentage gets up to areas that you'd be concerned about the material on the disks is out of date anyway. Heck, if they could I suspect there are companies who'd love to have CDs that would intentionally become unreadable after a short time, the problem is that it can't be anything that might muck up someone's CD-ROM drive.
As to the question of reliability, maybe they start to stress after a few hours of spin and become unreadable. So what? As long as they don't actually break apart, what's the problem if your disposable CD needs to be disposed of?
-- fencepost
Given the length of time over which IODesign has been passing these out, I'd expect that they'd have a reasonable chance of winning in a case, and that would pretty much gut ICANN, government mandate or no. Their site has a link to an interesting article by Brock Meeks that's been linked to before in an older thread; apparently NSI (through a cutout) also wants .web.
-- fencepost