Nor does it have a corporate personhood clause in it. Therefore, corporations are not granted any rights at all by the first amendment except insofar as the courts deem it appropriate to grant those rights to them.
When the reference count reaches zero, the object goes away immediately. Because the creation and destruction are solely under programmatic control, pure reference counting is not considered garbage collection. There's no garbage collector, no run-time functionality to speak of, no notion of scope, and nothing is done without explicit action by the caller. It fails to qualify as garbage collection in basically every way.
Admittedly, some reference counting schemes do qualify (e.g. the monstrosity that is Perl's GC), but reference counting schemes in general do not.
Actually TurboHecules is suing IBM in France under Anti-Trust laws hoping to force IBM to make its software available to all, regardless of where they buy the hardware. If it works TurboHerc's reasoning is that people will flock to their emulator so they can run the IBM software without forking over the cash IBM wants for their hardware.
That's a really important point. I'm rather surprised the patent pledge didn't include an exception for companies that sue IBM. Either way, when this company sued IBM, as far as I'm concerned, they became fair game. This isn't IBM suing an open source project. It's IBM counter-suing a company that sued them first.
Even if IBM can't use those two patents (and it's not clear if they can't, given that TurboHercules is not an open source project, but rather a company that appears to be leaching off of an open source project), it seems completely reasonable for them to use the other patents defensively in this way.
No, we don't. Not when those political advocacy groups are for-profit corporations or take money from for-profit corporations, anyway. Want to create a political advocacy group? Do it above board, as a 501c(3) non-profit, and accept contributions only from individuals. If Sierra Club wants to set up a separate fund for political advocacy and limit contributions to legitimate political advertising donations, that's fine. Short of that, they run too great a risk of being a corporate mouthpiece like most PACs are.
Free speech, including political speech, has never been absolute, and commercial speech is the least protected of all speech. As far as I'm concerned, commercial speech is commercial speech even if it happens to be about politics; it is still primarily intended to promote the interests of a business.
This is not really a free speech issue and never has been. Allowing corporations to pump money into specially-created PACs causes their voices to be heard disproportionately, drowning out the free speech rights of everyone else. In effect, McCain-Feingold protected free political speech, and the recent Supreme Court decision that overturned most of it did more harm to true freedom of speech than any decision in the court's history.
Not really. You get to not worry about memory leaks, perhaps, but the interface semantics should be largely unchanged. Something either allocates memory or it doesn't, and it's still important to know which is which even in a garbage collected environment because you take a substantial performance penalty if you're going around allocating and freeing memory when it isn't necessary.
And if a library function keeps a reference to something, the library routine should be using a reference-counted object anyway, which means the difference between GC and non-GC is an extra call to "release" or the equivalent in the function that allocated the object initially. (BTW, IMHO, all functions that use retain/release semantics should always return retained objects. The alternative is madness.)
And remember that as usual, by the time these things hit the market, hard drives will be comically larger. I commented on this problem way back when Blu-Ray came out. Basically, the comment was that 50 GB capacity would be great because I could back up my entire hard drive on just three or four discs, but that by the time they were actually available at a reasonable price, they would be worthless. They're still not affordable as a backup medium and at 50 GB apiece, it still would take nearly an entire 25-pack mini-spindle to back up my home machine (not to mention taking 12 hours with somebody swapping discs twice an hour).
It was the same story for DVD-Rs, and CD-Rs before that. The only difference in this case is that the format is already obsolete in terms of capacity and was just proposed. Anything short of a terabyte disc capacity at this point is a complete joke, and is a pretty clear signal that the optical media format is likely to fall further and further behind hard drives on the cost-capacity curve. In short, optical discs as currently designed are unlikely to ever be a viable backup medium. (Well, maybe holographic optical or something, but certainly not any optical discs that are remotely similar to what we have today.)
For anything other than distribution of fixed content (movies, computer games, etc.), optical media doesn't make sense, and those types of content really don't have much need for larger and larger capacities beyond a certain point.
The basic reflective light pipe design dates back to ancient Egypt, according to Wikipedia, but I doubt they used tracking mirrors back then. I mean ostensibly, but really, why bother when you can just use a bigger collector? It's not like they were building high density housing back then.
This has lots of interesting uses, but homes are not generally the primary market. Light pipes are most useful for businesses. You want to build a big office building to minimize cost, which means that not everybody can have a window office. So what do you do? You put in light pipes so that you can significantly reduce your energy costs and significantly improve worker health and morale.
Same principal applies to apartment buildings, hotels, etc. Imagine a sun deck with outdoor-style gardens at ground level in a 20-story hotel. Imagine cutting the lighting bill for an entire office building (including interior rooms) to zero almost every day. And so on.
Depends on what you mean. If you mean that you couldn't identify a honeypot for the purposes of actually getting them caught, you're probably right, but there are many easier ways to solve that part. If you mean that an average geek couldn't avoid the honeypots for the first two weeks, I disagree. The patterns are rather obvious after you've seen eight or ten slashdot stories about kiddie porn stings; the techniques that law enforcement use tend to involve one of the following:
Using chat rooms and enticing people to do something illegal,
Using email and enticing people to do something illegal,
Issuing subpoenas for server logs, or
Looking for downloaders from web servers or connections through Wi-Fi access points that are honeypots.
The first two are taken care of by just not doing those things.
The other two are largely unimportant. It takes time to get a subpoena, time to collect evidence, and time to get a search warrant. It's not like the FBI is going to come knocking on the person's door the day after he/she hits a honeypot site. That said, if you really needed to avoid #3 and #4, you could:
Use Tor to disguise the actual source of the request.
Get the illegal content from a suitably encrypted P2P system with onion routing (e.g. FreeNet).
Get the illegal content directly from a cache that has the content stored in it already. Query a Google image cache server (using carefully written HTTP queries), a random Squid proxy server (using ICP), a USENET server (using NNTP), etc.
None of those techniques are perfect---none would prevent detection by a determined enemy monitoring your every move---but they would keep your activity well outside the "low hanging fruit" territory that stings tend to go after, which should be sufficient to allow you to plant lots of evidence before you disclose the person to the authorities.
The hard part. of course, is figuring out a way to report it that will actually be successful in convincing people. One possibility would be to take over the person's email client and masquerade as that person, sending child porn out to a lot of people. Another possibility would be for your trojan to replace recently opened files on flash drives with custom versions of itself that contain the original files, much like the.ppt.exe file I suggested earlier. This could be very effective at compromising the target's work machine, which would allow you to plant evidence in more easily accessible places, making it far easier to drop an anonymous email message to an IT manager, for example.
Aren't you glad I'm not the sort of person who would try to frame someone?:-)
Except for those of us who find it funny. For us, Slashdot was stupid on the April 1st where they ran normal stories (two or three years ago, I forget).
Well, he still had to plant evidence. Otherwise, the wife would just inspect the computer, find nothing, and conclude that this guy was even more of a screwball than she already probably thought he was.
That said, if he had been a little bit better with computers, he would have given the person a flash drive with a file called "pictures.ppt.exe" that replaces itself with a file called pictures.ppt and launches PowerPoint, then installs a piece of code that runs automatically at startup and connects to a server somewhere, allowing him to control the other person's PC. Most people would be fooled by that, and as long as it doesn't contain known virus code as a starting point, no virus scanner will ever detect it. Failing that, he could break into that person's house without causing any damage, install the virus, and sneak back out, leaving no evidence of consequence.
So once he had control over the guy's computer, he could have downloaded as much kiddie porn as he wanted to onto the other person's computer over the course of weeks. For the first several weeks, he would go for sources of content that don't leave a significant trail, using Tor or other techniques if necessary. This would ensure that he got truckloads of material. Then, for one week, he would go to lots of sites that have all the hallmarks of an FBI sting (or that of the equivalent body in the country in question), then would send an anonymous tip to the authorities, delete all traces of the bot, and sit back and watch.
Not saying that this would get him the girl---chances are, it would just wreck the family's life and he'd still end up alone---but it would be a highly effective and almost completely undetectable way to frame an innocent person. The scary thing is that for all we know, this may have already happened.
Just FYI, the rest of the world didn't stop for one day every April, some of us still proceed normally with life and still wants to check for some real news today.
Your loss.
I tend to think that if the world were a little less uptight and could take a break once in a while to just laugh, we'd have a lot fewer wars, less terrorism, less crime, and a generally less miserable existence. IMHO, it's unfortunate that people don't take the opportunity to laugh at themselves more than once a year.
That's okay. They made up for it by occasionally disabling your backspace key, though it would have been better if they had inserted ^H, too. Or maybe that was just a random glitch.
Well, it's obvious on a lot of artists anyway---if you can't sing worth crap and it's shifting the pitch a long way, it sounds like crap even if you have Auto-Tune set to a slow response time.
If you turn off safe search I think you'll find the amount of illegal content does not significantly overshadow legal content on Google unless you put in very particular search terms. Also, the hit-rate of legal vs. illegal content on a typical search matters probably more than the actual amount indexed.
The DMCA provisions in question don't mention percentages, majority, or any other such terms. They protect search engines, period, provided that the provider:
a. does not have actual knowledge that the material or activity is infringing
b. in the absence of such actual knowledge, is not aware of facts or circumstances from which infringing activity is apparent; or
c. upon obtaining such knowledge or awareness, acts expeditiously to remove, or disable access to, the material;
does not receive a financial benefit directly attributable to the infringing activity, in a case in which the service provider has the right and ability to control such activity; and
upon notification of claimed infringement as described in subsection (c)(3), responds expeditiously to remove, or disable access to, the material that is claimed to be infringing or to be the subject of infringing activity, except that, for purposes of this paragraph, the information described in subsection (c)(3)(A)(iii) shall be identification of the reference or link, to material or activity claimed to be infringing, that is to be removed or access to which is to be disabled, and information reasonably sufficient to permit the service provider to locate that reference or link.
Besides, the percentages are due to the nature of.torrent files and the fact that this search engine limits its results to those files, which cannot be a copyright violation per se. If Google provided a separate torrent search area for searching for torrent files, they would have a 95% illegal content rate, too unless the MPAA members gave them a specific list of torrents to exclude.
In short, the case hinges on whether the people responsible for ISOHunt know or should have known that content was infringing. Yes, if you look at a specific infringing torrent file, one could argue that they should have know, but the same can be said about a Google search. In aggregate, one can reasonably argue that filtering or pre-screening such a large volume of hits is unreasonable, and as such, they cannot reasonably have been aware of infringement....
Flip side, although they are not the sole source of said legitimate content, they are a primary source. As an occasional Linux downloader, ISOHunt is where I've always gotten those ISO images. Admittedly, it takes a two second Google search to find another source, but the point is that it's the first place I and a lot of other people think of when they want to download a Linux ISO. Thus, clearly that constitutes substantial non-infringing use, regardless of what the MPAA lawyers might say.
I have a really hard time believing that this site doesn't fall under the 512(d) safe harbor. It seems pretty cut and dry unless they can prove not just that the ISOHunt folks had reason to believe that infringing content existed, but that they had reason to believe that at least one specific ISO was infringing, which is completely unprovable unless they can prove that a human inspects and approves or rejects a sizable percentage of torrents. This provision is there specifically to prevent lawsuits like this one from having any traction, and this case is a pretty clear indication that this safe harbor is not strong enough or sufficiently clearly worded, IMHO.
I couldn't agree more about Flash being awful. Flash causes nearly every Safari crash or hang I've ever seen, statistically speaking.
I don't think Java is the answer, though. Java on mobile devices is an even worse battery hog than Flash would be. Build one on top of the other, and there goes your battery life in one easy step.
The problems with client-side scripting have nothing to do with the language. Embedding another scripting language like Python would be unnecessarily confusing and would just add complexity where none is needed. What Flash provides that JavaScript does not are:
Possibly more powerful/flexible layout of text and images with greater control than the HTML DOM provides (but I'm not certain of this).
Animation, transition, and transform features that are compatible with the most popular browser (Internet Explorer).
A truckload of design tools for building up the content visually with a minimum of programming required.
Notice that none of these have anything to do with deficiencies in the programming language. Indeed, the language used in Flash, ActionScript, is based on ECMAScript, which is the same fundamental foundation as JavaScript. So for all practical purposes, from a language feature perspective, there is already close parity. I won't go so far as to say they are the same language, but... they're so close that all you have to do is squint a little.
Adding Python to a browser is just a recipe for magnifying the existing compatibility problems by splintering development into multiple camps. That's precisely the way to guarantee that Flash never goes away. Now, instead of focusing on tools for one language, you have to focus tools on two---one for Python in FireFox and maybe a couple of other browsers, and one to deal with JavaScript for all the browsers that won't ever support something like that (IE). To describe this as a terrible idea is insulting to terrible ideas.
But one would think that EMI wouldn't result in several cases of the exact same system failure.
Depends. It's entirely possible for EMI or other phenomena to cause reproducible errors if component tolerances are insufficient. If you have, for example, two signal lines in a processor that are really close together, you could have leakage from one line into the other that isn't enough to trigger a logic high on the other line, but a power surge caused by somebody shutting off the dome light at the right time could be enough to push it over the edge. In that case, you'd expect it to be highly clustered in a single signal line. A similar power surge could be caused by other things, too, like a nearby lightning strike, induction caused by driving under high tension lines, etc.
Their core sense of morality still existed---the desire to avoid causing harm to others---and even if that were your only moral tenet, assuming you were sufficiently intelligent to figure out what would and would not cause harm, that would be enough by itself. Thus, this in no way invalidates the concept of the soul as a repository of merit and demerit for actions.
What changed was not the sense of morality, but rather the ability to judge the intentions of other people, and more specifically, whether the participants tended to judge others based on their intentions or the actual outcome of their actions. More to the point, they were more critical of the morality of a situation when subjected to the field, not less. That's precisely the opposite of what the folks in this discussion thread are implying. It doesn't cause people to be less moral. It causes them to be more judgmental towards others (and possibly themselves) and less forgiving.
Second, by your logic, the very concept of a body as a repository of merit and demerit for individual actions is meaningless. If a magnetic field can cause a person to behave immorally, how then can we impose the death penalty? How, then can we even put people in prison? The answer, of course, is that magnetic fields (at least in this experiment) didn't cause people to be less moral, but rather the exact opposite.
May. May be held liable for civil damages. The rule is that if the car's driver should reasonably have seen you in time to stop, the driver is liable. Otherwise, even if you're in a crosswalk, it's your fault (unless you were crossing on a "walk" light or at a lighted crosswalk, in which case what matters is whether the driver should reasonably have seen the light in time to stop). For example:
If you cross the street at a crosswalk on a skateboard or bicycle like so many idiots do around here, you probably are at fault because it was only two seconds from the moment it became obvious that you were about to cross the road to the moment you got hit and the road is a 45 zone. Crosswalks are for walking. Walk your bike across the road if you're using a crosswalk where there isn't a cross street. And where there is a cross street, stop your bike at the stop sign. If you don't do this, you're breaking the law, and if you get hit, you are almost invariably at fault.
Even on foot, if you cross the street at a crosswalk, but the driver's vision is obstructed by a large vehicle so that the driver could not see you until you were eight feet off the curb and stepping out into the lane, you are probably at fault again, for failure to look for traffic that was too close to stop before stepping out into traffic.
Slashdot Mirror
Nor does it have a corporate personhood clause in it. Therefore, corporations are not granted any rights at all by the first amendment except insofar as the courts deem it appropriate to grant those rights to them.
Some garbage collection is based on reference counting, but reference counting by itself is most certainly not a form of GC.
Consider a basic reference counting design:
void *ref_alloc(size_t *size) {
void *tmp = malloc(size + 16);
uint64_t *count = (uint64_t *)tmp;
*count = 1;
return tmp+16;
}
void retain(void *obj) {
void *tmp = obj - 16;
uint64_t *count = (uint64_t *)tmp;
(*count)++;
}
void release(void *obj) {
void *tmp = obj - 16;
uint64_t *count = (uint64_t *)tmp;
if (--(*count)) return;
free(tmp);
}
When the reference count reaches zero, the object goes away immediately. Because the creation and destruction are solely under programmatic control, pure reference counting is not considered garbage collection. There's no garbage collector, no run-time functionality to speak of, no notion of scope, and nothing is done without explicit action by the caller. It fails to qualify as garbage collection in basically every way.
Admittedly, some reference counting schemes do qualify (e.g. the monstrosity that is Perl's GC), but reference counting schemes in general do not.
That's a really important point. I'm rather surprised the patent pledge didn't include an exception for companies that sue IBM. Either way, when this company sued IBM, as far as I'm concerned, they became fair game. This isn't IBM suing an open source project. It's IBM counter-suing a company that sued them first.
Even if IBM can't use those two patents (and it's not clear if they can't, given that TurboHercules is not an open source project, but rather a company that appears to be leaching off of an open source project), it seems completely reasonable for them to use the other patents defensively in this way.
No, we don't. Not when those political advocacy groups are for-profit corporations or take money from for-profit corporations, anyway. Want to create a political advocacy group? Do it above board, as a 501c(3) non-profit, and accept contributions only from individuals. If Sierra Club wants to set up a separate fund for political advocacy and limit contributions to legitimate political advertising donations, that's fine. Short of that, they run too great a risk of being a corporate mouthpiece like most PACs are.
Free speech, including political speech, has never been absolute, and commercial speech is the least protected of all speech. As far as I'm concerned, commercial speech is commercial speech even if it happens to be about politics; it is still primarily intended to promote the interests of a business.
This is not really a free speech issue and never has been. Allowing corporations to pump money into specially-created PACs causes their voices to be heard disproportionately, drowning out the free speech rights of everyone else. In effect, McCain-Feingold protected free political speech, and the recent Supreme Court decision that overturned most of it did more harm to true freedom of speech than any decision in the court's history.
Not really. You get to not worry about memory leaks, perhaps, but the interface semantics should be largely unchanged. Something either allocates memory or it doesn't, and it's still important to know which is which even in a garbage collected environment because you take a substantial performance penalty if you're going around allocating and freeing memory when it isn't necessary.
And if a library function keeps a reference to something, the library routine should be using a reference-counted object anyway, which means the difference between GC and non-GC is an extra call to "release" or the equivalent in the function that allocated the object initially. (BTW, IMHO, all functions that use retain/release semantics should always return retained objects. The alternative is madness.)
Double the overhead is not much worse?
And remember that as usual, by the time these things hit the market, hard drives will be comically larger. I commented on this problem way back when Blu-Ray came out. Basically, the comment was that 50 GB capacity would be great because I could back up my entire hard drive on just three or four discs, but that by the time they were actually available at a reasonable price, they would be worthless. They're still not affordable as a backup medium and at 50 GB apiece, it still would take nearly an entire 25-pack mini-spindle to back up my home machine (not to mention taking 12 hours with somebody swapping discs twice an hour).
It was the same story for DVD-Rs, and CD-Rs before that. The only difference in this case is that the format is already obsolete in terms of capacity and was just proposed. Anything short of a terabyte disc capacity at this point is a complete joke, and is a pretty clear signal that the optical media format is likely to fall further and further behind hard drives on the cost-capacity curve. In short, optical discs as currently designed are unlikely to ever be a viable backup medium. (Well, maybe holographic optical or something, but certainly not any optical discs that are remotely similar to what we have today.)
For anything other than distribution of fixed content (movies, computer games, etc.), optical media doesn't make sense, and those types of content really don't have much need for larger and larger capacities beyond a certain point.
Stick a fork in it. Optical is done.
The basic reflective light pipe design dates back to ancient Egypt, according to Wikipedia, but I doubt they used tracking mirrors back then. I mean ostensibly, but really, why bother when you can just use a bigger collector? It's not like they were building high density housing back then.
This has lots of interesting uses, but homes are not generally the primary market. Light pipes are most useful for businesses. You want to build a big office building to minimize cost, which means that not everybody can have a window office. So what do you do? You put in light pipes so that you can significantly reduce your energy costs and significantly improve worker health and morale.
Same principal applies to apartment buildings, hotels, etc. Imagine a sun deck with outdoor-style gardens at ground level in a 20-story hotel. Imagine cutting the lighting bill for an entire office building (including interior rooms) to zero almost every day. And so on.
Depends on what you mean. If you mean that you couldn't identify a honeypot for the purposes of actually getting them caught, you're probably right, but there are many easier ways to solve that part. If you mean that an average geek couldn't avoid the honeypots for the first two weeks, I disagree. The patterns are rather obvious after you've seen eight or ten slashdot stories about kiddie porn stings; the techniques that law enforcement use tend to involve one of the following:
The first two are taken care of by just not doing those things.
The other two are largely unimportant. It takes time to get a subpoena, time to collect evidence, and time to get a search warrant. It's not like the FBI is going to come knocking on the person's door the day after he/she hits a honeypot site. That said, if you really needed to avoid #3 and #4, you could:
None of those techniques are perfect---none would prevent detection by a determined enemy monitoring your every move---but they would keep your activity well outside the "low hanging fruit" territory that stings tend to go after, which should be sufficient to allow you to plant lots of evidence before you disclose the person to the authorities.
The hard part. of course, is figuring out a way to report it that will actually be successful in convincing people. One possibility would be to take over the person's email client and masquerade as that person, sending child porn out to a lot of people. Another possibility would be for your trojan to replace recently opened files on flash drives with custom versions of itself that contain the original files, much like the .ppt.exe file I suggested earlier. This could be very effective at compromising the target's work machine, which would allow you to plant evidence in more easily accessible places, making it far easier to drop an anonymous email message to an IT manager, for example.
Aren't you glad I'm not the sort of person who would try to frame someone? :-)
Except for those of us who find it funny. For us, Slashdot was stupid on the April 1st where they ran normal stories (two or three years ago, I forget).
Yes, the original blog post was, in fact, posted on April 1.
Well, he still had to plant evidence. Otherwise, the wife would just inspect the computer, find nothing, and conclude that this guy was even more of a screwball than she already probably thought he was.
That said, if he had been a little bit better with computers, he would have given the person a flash drive with a file called "pictures.ppt.exe" that replaces itself with a file called pictures.ppt and launches PowerPoint, then installs a piece of code that runs automatically at startup and connects to a server somewhere, allowing him to control the other person's PC. Most people would be fooled by that, and as long as it doesn't contain known virus code as a starting point, no virus scanner will ever detect it. Failing that, he could break into that person's house without causing any damage, install the virus, and sneak back out, leaving no evidence of consequence.
So once he had control over the guy's computer, he could have downloaded as much kiddie porn as he wanted to onto the other person's computer over the course of weeks. For the first several weeks, he would go for sources of content that don't leave a significant trail, using Tor or other techniques if necessary. This would ensure that he got truckloads of material. Then, for one week, he would go to lots of sites that have all the hallmarks of an FBI sting (or that of the equivalent body in the country in question), then would send an anonymous tip to the authorities, delete all traces of the bot, and sit back and watch.
Not saying that this would get him the girl---chances are, it would just wreck the family's life and he'd still end up alone---but it would be a highly effective and almost completely undetectable way to frame an innocent person. The scary thing is that for all we know, this may have already happened.
Your loss.
I tend to think that if the world were a little less uptight and could take a break once in a while to just laugh, we'd have a lot fewer wars, less terrorism, less crime, and a generally less miserable existence. IMHO, it's unfortunate that people don't take the opportunity to laugh at themselves more than once a year.
...beg for the King to spare the book and give it to the other party?
That's okay. They made up for it by occasionally disabling your backspace key, though it would have been better if they had inserted ^H, too. Or maybe that was just a random glitch.
Well, it's obvious on a lot of artists anyway---if you can't sing worth crap and it's shifting the pitch a long way, it sounds like crap even if you have Auto-Tune set to a slow response time.
The DMCA provisions in question don't mention percentages, majority, or any other such terms. They protect search engines, period, provided that the provider:
a. does not have actual knowledge that the material or activity is infringing
b. in the absence of such actual knowledge, is not aware of facts or circumstances from which infringing activity is apparent; or
c. upon obtaining such knowledge or awareness, acts expeditiously to remove, or disable access to, the material;
Besides, the percentages are due to the nature of .torrent files and the fact that this search engine limits its results to those files, which cannot be a copyright violation per se. If Google provided a separate torrent search area for searching for torrent files, they would have a 95% illegal content rate, too unless the MPAA members gave them a specific list of torrents to exclude.
In short, the case hinges on whether the people responsible for ISOHunt know or should have known that content was infringing. Yes, if you look at a specific infringing torrent file, one could argue that they should have know, but the same can be said about a Google search. In aggregate, one can reasonably argue that filtering or pre-screening such a large volume of hits is unreasonable, and as such, they cannot reasonably have been aware of infringement....
Flip side, although they are not the sole source of said legitimate content, they are a primary source. As an occasional Linux downloader, ISOHunt is where I've always gotten those ISO images. Admittedly, it takes a two second Google search to find another source, but the point is that it's the first place I and a lot of other people think of when they want to download a Linux ISO. Thus, clearly that constitutes substantial non-infringing use, regardless of what the MPAA lawyers might say.
I have a really hard time believing that this site doesn't fall under the 512(d) safe harbor. It seems pretty cut and dry unless they can prove not just that the ISOHunt folks had reason to believe that infringing content existed, but that they had reason to believe that at least one specific ISO was infringing, which is completely unprovable unless they can prove that a human inspects and approves or rejects a sizable percentage of torrents. This provision is there specifically to prevent lawsuits like this one from having any traction, and this case is a pretty clear indication that this safe harbor is not strong enough or sufficiently clearly worded, IMHO.
No disagreement here.
I couldn't agree more about Flash being awful. Flash causes nearly every Safari crash or hang I've ever seen, statistically speaking.
I don't think Java is the answer, though. Java on mobile devices is an even worse battery hog than Flash would be. Build one on top of the other, and there goes your battery life in one easy step.
The problems with client-side scripting have nothing to do with the language. Embedding another scripting language like Python would be unnecessarily confusing and would just add complexity where none is needed. What Flash provides that JavaScript does not are:
Notice that none of these have anything to do with deficiencies in the programming language. Indeed, the language used in Flash, ActionScript, is based on ECMAScript, which is the same fundamental foundation as JavaScript. So for all practical purposes, from a language feature perspective, there is already close parity. I won't go so far as to say they are the same language, but... they're so close that all you have to do is squint a little.
Adding Python to a browser is just a recipe for magnifying the existing compatibility problems by splintering development into multiple camps. That's precisely the way to guarantee that Flash never goes away. Now, instead of focusing on tools for one language, you have to focus tools on two---one for Python in FireFox and maybe a couple of other browsers, and one to deal with JavaScript for all the browsers that won't ever support something like that (IE). To describe this as a terrible idea is insulting to terrible ideas.
Depends. It's entirely possible for EMI or other phenomena to cause reproducible errors if component tolerances are insufficient. If you have, for example, two signal lines in a processor that are really close together, you could have leakage from one line into the other that isn't enough to trigger a logic high on the other line, but a power surge caused by somebody shutting off the dome light at the right time could be enough to push it over the edge. In that case, you'd expect it to be highly clustered in a single signal line. A similar power surge could be caused by other things, too, like a nearby lightning strike, induction caused by driving under high tension lines, etc.
Their core sense of morality still existed---the desire to avoid causing harm to others---and even if that were your only moral tenet, assuming you were sufficiently intelligent to figure out what would and would not cause harm, that would be enough by itself. Thus, this in no way invalidates the concept of the soul as a repository of merit and demerit for actions.
What changed was not the sense of morality, but rather the ability to judge the intentions of other people, and more specifically, whether the participants tended to judge others based on their intentions or the actual outcome of their actions. More to the point, they were more critical of the morality of a situation when subjected to the field, not less. That's precisely the opposite of what the folks in this discussion thread are implying. It doesn't cause people to be less moral. It causes them to be more judgmental towards others (and possibly themselves) and less forgiving.
Second, by your logic, the very concept of a body as a repository of merit and demerit for individual actions is meaningless. If a magnetic field can cause a person to behave immorally, how then can we impose the death penalty? How, then can we even put people in prison? The answer, of course, is that magnetic fields (at least in this experiment) didn't cause people to be less moral, but rather the exact opposite.
May. May be held liable for civil damages. The rule is that if the car's driver should reasonably have seen you in time to stop, the driver is liable. Otherwise, even if you're in a crosswalk, it's your fault (unless you were crossing on a "walk" light or at a lighted crosswalk, in which case what matters is whether the driver should reasonably have seen the light in time to stop). For example:
And so on.