No amount of dam-erection adds any energy to the system. All the energy in the system was put there by flowing water following the laws of fluid dynamics under the influence of gravity, and all of that energy will be released via flooding. You might change the timing (or location), but you'll have no effect on the total energy released over time.
Interested readers can have more fun by adapting the same incomprehensible pseudologic to phenomena like sinkholes and nuclear fission.
My BS was in Physics & Math and one thing I noticed was that, if you had the knack (and, just as importantly, the background), even topics like quantum mechanics were not all that difficult. That wasn't a huge surprise, although the converse was: Students who weren't suited for the field, even those who had done well in high-school and Freshman college science course, could not, under any circumstances brute-force their way through the more advance courses. Study all day & night, hire tutors, do everything you can think of, if you're not a physicist or a mathematician by temperament, you can't truly know the material. FWIW.
When I went to law school decades later, it was deja vu all over again. If you've got an aptitude for legal reasoning, almost any law school can give you a deep understanding how legal systems work. But if you're at the other end of the spectrum, then no matter how much you work, no matter how much you spend on study aids, the best you can ever hope for is a sad existence posting snarky, unintentionally funny, comments about patent law on Slashdot.
We should all "tolerate people who have other opinions"? "Crazy Tea Party members deserve tolerance" Good grief. How is that the issue?
Think about it: If a businessman uses the profits he derives from his business to actively work to deny another person his legal rights, that other person is certainly justified in refusing to contribute to that businessman's source of revenue. If the businessman's profits enable him to pursue activities that a second person finds repulsive, that second person is justified in refusing to purchase that businessman's products and to urge others to do the same, in order to weaken the businessman's ability to pursue those repulsive activities.
Card doesn't merely have a "different opinion." He used his celebrity and his financial resources to support legal initiatives that would strip gays of existing legal rights, deny them new rights rooted in the doctrine of equal protection, and to promote anti-gay hate groups and lobbyists that justify their agendas with press releases that describe gay people as "sh*t-eating, child-molesting deviants." Screw him and screw you too if you think it's a good idea to enable this guy because he "deserves tolerance." He's consciously acted to make himself a high-profile enemy of gay people and, unlike Disney or Henry Ford, supporting his professional work can still help him hurt real people today.
And the fact that he's now whining about "tolerance" is hypcritical to the point of being sickening. How would he have responded two years ago if a gay person had asked him for to cease his anti-gay activities out of "tolerance" of gay people's "sh*t-eating"? When Card issues a credible apology and promise to stop participating in activities that injure gay people, then I'd consider rethinking my position. But he went out of his way *not* to make such statements in EW, instead justifying his call for gay support with idiotic claims that "gays have already won; there is no more issue." Holy jumpin jeezus, if you're gonna try to BS me, at least have enough respect for my intelligence to come up with a rationalization not aimed at cretins.
Unfortunately, based on some of the opinions posted here, it looks like we don't have to worry about a shortage of rationalizations. Or cretins.
You see, the thing that I think most of these happy-go-lucky creepy-ass hackers don't realize is the ramifications of the fact that they're performing military or, at least, paramilitary functions or state-mandated police actions. Depending on context, they may be disrupting high-value activities of organizations and individuals that run the gamut from badass foreign counterintelligence agencies and fundamentalist radicals to Columbian drug lords. So what happens next? Well, just pick a season of "Breaking Bad."
In this line of work, it is scary easy to identify someone in this line of work, especially one who is unprofessional enough to grant an interview to a trade pub (and to do little to further mask his identity). I attended a recent seminar in this field in which panelists debated this very question: Is it ethical to assassinate young, stupid "cyberwarriors" if their work has the potential to disrupt or destabilize mission-critical operations? The bottom line was that most think it is, on the ground that these guys are civilian operatives acting as military "cyberwarfare" "combatants" -- not much of a terminology stretch in a world of "enhanced interrogation techniques."
So what I'm saying is that it may not be long until (and I wouldn't be surprised if it's already happening in places like Israel & Palestine) guys like this interviewee, and their families, are routinely targeted by hit men, suicide bombers, drones, seals, whatever. If they're performing military functions -- think Iranian centrifuges -- why wouldn't they be fair game?
And when that happens, how does this social dynamic change? Does our dopey Season 1 Walter White hackercracker immediately transition to Season 5?
>Again: there is a very big difference between information simply being "public", and a systematic collection of that information. The courts have recognized this.
I think you're making this up; and the burden to support such a statement is obviously on you. So, since you're claiming to be citing case law, let's have the citation to a Supreme Court case, or at least cases that comprise a majority of the Circuits, that is both on point and still good law. I'd bet that, even if you could finagle something on Google, I could distinguish your search results.
And, just to be sure that you know who you're talking to, let me point out a landmark S.Ct. 4th Amendment case, which any first-year law student is aware of, that pretty much exposes your statement a baloney, and, further, is right on point (i.e., referring to the NSA-like systemic collection of "envelope" phone-call information by a government agency). That would be Smith v. Maryland, 442 U.S. 735 (1979) (holding that there's no expectation of privacy in phone records in part because a caller has already agreed to disclose the tracked call information to third parties).
Yikes. Ya gotta love the I-ANAL conversations here. You got Wile E. Coyote experts on both sides yapping away, each lecturing the other about what "the law" states and neither citing a reference because, quite obvoiusly, neither "expert" appears to have a clue. I hate to be an enabler, but maybe this will help: CLUE #1: criminal law, including homicide law and the rules governing criminal defenses, although generally sharing common principles, vary greatly from state to state. Even if you understand how the law works in California, that doesn't mean you have an idea about how it works in Texas, New York, Hawaii, or, most definitely, in an outlier state like Florida. So continue debating your navels if you like, but cite some code to support your conclusory statements -- and to prove that you're not just some YOU-ANAL enthusiastic about convincing somebody (daddy? mommy?) that you're the smartest person in the room, but too lazy to spend five minutes to look up a primary reference.
Well, the issue with pen registers was that a caller has no expectation of privacy regarding the duration, length, identification of the other party, etc., because the caller has already surrendered that information, both to the called party and to the phone company. This was consistent with a lot of law that existed when the SUpreme Court heard the case in the 1980s and here in NYS, for example, a person is in fact legally able to record any conversation of which that person is a part.
In reality, people of course have expectatoins of privacy in electronic communications, but the question is whether such an expectation is "reasonable" simply because it's rooted in ignorance. I'd thing that, in a post-Snowden world, it will be tougher than ever to argue that we have reasonable expectations of privacy in any kind of computer-related transaction.
That's the world we're inheriting and, to be honest, despite the tendency to whine like b's about it now, we're all at fault. This didn't happen overnight and if it's reached the point where it's too late to do anything about it -- which probably happened 35 years ago -- it's in part because too many of us have been too absorbed in non-issues like whether Apple is as evil as Microsoft, while the really important stuff just slipped on by...
They might try. But IMO, it sure would be smarmy. There's a tradition in this country of states providing "full faith and credit" to the laws of other jurisdictions. If the age of consent in Alabama is 12 and is 16 in New York, New York would recognize an Alabama marriage that involved a 14-year-old girl if that married couple moved to New York. Same-gender marriage is the only example I can think of where some states do not recognize marriages legally consummated in other states. That may begin to change.
"So, we’ve constructed the patent system: people have a 17 year exclusive right to such public goods. . .."
OK, false alarm. For a second there, I thought we were going to hear something intelligent from an expert on U.S. patent law. But this guy is apparently just another self-important Internet Wiley E. Coyote with an opinion, who can't be bothered to learn basic facts about his subject matter. It's the old "Rush Limbaugh" Rule: You don't have to have any idea what you're talking about; you just have to sound like you know more than your audience. And this is Slashdot, after all!
It would have been interesting, too, had this guy actually had some credibility, (and, further useful if else somebody figures out how to build a real graph that does what this one purports to), to provide a scaling reference. For example, the AIA certainly weakened patent protection in significant ways. For comparison, where would the pre-AIA patent system fall on this graph relative to the current system? Such a before-and-after would certainly help readers put the curve's seemingly arbitrary scales into perspective.
Actually, no. I can think of no way that the PRISM program violates the Fourth Amendment, although I do understand the allure of being able to make conclusory statements to the opposite.
The information tracked by the PRISM program -- essentially carrier pen registers -- does not fall within the Fourth Amendment's warrant requirement because, as the Supreme Court held over 30 years ago, there's no expectation of privacy in pen registers. I personally was a bit horrified by the decision and am dismayed that it's still considered to be settled law. But I'm just as disappointed by the know-nothing peanut gallery of commenters who are "horrified" by the NSA program, but couldn't be bothered to perform even a modicum of research until their noses were wiped in the Bill of Rights. So you guys can whine all you want. This ship sailed long ago, and you guys are little more than enablers who don't even know what you don't know.
FWIW, see Smith v. Maryland, 442 U.S. 735 (1979) for the S.Ct.'s holding that accessing the contents of a pen register is not a "search" within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment.
Sorry if I come across as testy about all this, but I raised these issues for years in the 1980s & 1990s and was roundly ignored. Nobody cared. Now, when it's too late to do anything about it, everybody's screaming "fire!" If you really care about your privacy, cancel your Facebook & Twitter accounts & stop posting anything that you wouldn't want somebody else's lawyer to read. Otherwise, please just STFU and spend more time reading than talking.
>The result wasn't that bad, but the real question is "Why the fuck was this ever even an issue in the first place"?
Because, among other things, there was an unresolved question about how closely DNA products might follow the same rules as other types of subject matter. Naturally occurring adrenaline, e.g., can't be patented because it's a product of nature. But extracted and concentrated adrenaline is, famously, patentable, as are methods for creating such a concentration. If there's a chance that a manufacturer can obtain patent protection for a high-value product that falls into even the periphery of a gray area, it may be justifiable to at least try to push the envelope.
So now we have more clearly defined boundaries, which is a win for everybody. Including Myriad, apparently.
Actually, from the perspective of someone who works in the legal profession, the only stupid question being asked here is the one cited above.
But wait, there's more. The Supreme Court expressly stated that there is no expectation of privacy in pen registers, what,15 years ago? These issues were settled and these freedoms were taken away a very long time ago, and you're pissed because you just found out? Oh friggin' well. Try reading Wired.
Seriously, this is news? There were court cases in the 90s that clearly indicated that there was no expectation of privacy in voice-carrier pen registers. Furthermore, anybody who read Wired's lengthy feature about the new NSA facility being built at Fort Williams, UT, (or even readers of the NYT or USA Today) knows that this type of surveillance has been occurring almost routinely since 9/11.
So please spare us the whining and shock. If this is a surprise to you, you're part of the problem. If you gleefully expose every aspect of your private life on Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter (and Slashdot), then you have nobody to blame but yourselves if your privacy is "violated." This is the way the world works today and that's not going to change.
If you want 1970s-class "privacy," then close your Facebook, Amazon, eBay, PayPal, & Twitter accounts, encrypt all your online communications (although that probably won't make much difference), and never say anything online that might someday be used against you in any context by any entity. Or even better, just stay off the Internet and the cellular networks completely. Otherwise, just shut up and continue to enjoy the conveniences you've already agreed to surrender in exchange for Fourth Amendment protection.
As Larry Ellison is reputed to have said in the late 90s, "Privacy? That ship sailed long ago."
No, code is not "math" in the sense that is relevant here. The Federal Circuit has been clear, even emphatic, about that fact. Although it may be a subtle distinction for an I-ANAL, one can only state that "mathematics is not patentable, and code is mathematics" if the word "mathematics" is used to mean two different things. It is certainly possible to patent a computer algorithm, so long as it is tied in some way to a physically tangible element. This fact (or its pre-computer analog) has been inherent in our patent system since Jefferson wrote the first U.S. Patent Law, which, like every iteration that followed, expressly defines a "process" or "method" as statutory subject matter.
...I wish that the ostensible news items here would avoid links to faux legal sites like Groklaw. Sigh. Why not cite Bill O'Reilly while you're at it? At least the other link here identified the more credible Patently-O blog and, while the Groklaw link reads a bit like a Carol Burnett piece from The Enquirer (maybe I'm dating myself, but anybody with training in IP will recognize the reference), Crouch at least correctly states the legal issues. Anybody who reads the latter would't dream of asserting that Jefferson never intended to patent algorithms.
Interesting, but what do you mean when you say that the virtual particles are "black holes"? Stellar black holes have a heckuva lot of unusual characteristics -- which ones do you reference here?
FWIW, I think "content creation" here refers also -- and I'd wager primarily -- to things like creating documents with a word processor, presentation software, or spreadsheet application. Still on a heckuva lot of people's radar.
This is hardly news, but it underscores the validity of the proposition that religious beliefs make people feel better and helps explain why humans have always created religions.
i) The parents' reactions are *all* on iPhones. Unlikely. Possibly the same phone.
ii) The syntax & punctuation of the parents' comments are too similar and too tied to a single age group. And they're apparently redacted (i.e., Photoshopped).
iii) Feldman has a history of gleefully committing clumsy frauds upon more gullible members of the public. The burden of proof to establish authenticity for anything that involves this guy should be exceptionally high, and nothing here meets that burden.
Seriously, who is dumb enough to propagate this stuff?
Slashdot Mirror
Interested readers can have more fun by adapting the same incomprehensible pseudologic to phenomena like sinkholes and nuclear fission.
When I went to law school decades later, it was deja vu all over again. If you've got an aptitude for legal reasoning, almost any law school can give you a deep understanding how legal systems work. But if you're at the other end of the spectrum, then no matter how much you work, no matter how much you spend on study aids, the best you can ever hope for is a sad existence posting snarky, unintentionally funny, comments about patent law on Slashdot.
(Sorry, couldn't resist!)
Think about it: If a businessman uses the profits he derives from his business to actively work to deny another person his legal rights, that other person is certainly justified in refusing to contribute to that businessman's source of revenue. If the businessman's profits enable him to pursue activities that a second person finds repulsive, that second person is justified in refusing to purchase that businessman's products and to urge others to do the same, in order to weaken the businessman's ability to pursue those repulsive activities.
Card doesn't merely have a "different opinion." He used his celebrity and his financial resources to support legal initiatives that would strip gays of existing legal rights, deny them new rights rooted in the doctrine of equal protection, and to promote anti-gay hate groups and lobbyists that justify their agendas with press releases that describe gay people as "sh*t-eating, child-molesting deviants." Screw him and screw you too if you think it's a good idea to enable this guy because he "deserves tolerance." He's consciously acted to make himself a high-profile enemy of gay people and, unlike Disney or Henry Ford, supporting his professional work can still help him hurt real people today.
And the fact that he's now whining about "tolerance" is hypcritical to the point of being sickening. How would he have responded two years ago if a gay person had asked him for to cease his anti-gay activities out of "tolerance" of gay people's "sh*t-eating"? When Card issues a credible apology and promise to stop participating in activities that injure gay people, then I'd consider rethinking my position. But he went out of his way *not* to make such statements in EW, instead justifying his call for gay support with idiotic claims that "gays have already won; there is no more issue." Holy jumpin jeezus, if you're gonna try to BS me, at least have enough respect for my intelligence to come up with a rationalization not aimed at cretins.
Unfortunately, based on some of the opinions posted here, it looks like we don't have to worry about a shortage of rationalizations. Or cretins.
In this line of work, it is scary easy to identify someone in this line of work, especially one who is unprofessional enough to grant an interview to a trade pub (and to do little to further mask his identity). I attended a recent seminar in this field in which panelists debated this very question: Is it ethical to assassinate young, stupid "cyberwarriors" if their work has the potential to disrupt or destabilize mission-critical operations? The bottom line was that most think it is, on the ground that these guys are civilian operatives acting as military "cyberwarfare" "combatants" -- not much of a terminology stretch in a world of "enhanced interrogation techniques."
So what I'm saying is that it may not be long until (and I wouldn't be surprised if it's already happening in places like Israel & Palestine) guys like this interviewee, and their families, are routinely targeted by hit men, suicide bombers, drones, seals, whatever. If they're performing military functions -- think Iranian centrifuges -- why wouldn't they be fair game?
And when that happens, how does this social dynamic change? Does our dopey Season 1 Walter White hackercracker immediately transition to Season 5?
(Leonardo's performance is interesting, btw.)
I think you're making this up; and the burden to support such a statement is obviously on you. So, since you're claiming to be citing case law, let's have the citation to a Supreme Court case, or at least cases that comprise a majority of the Circuits, that is both on point and still good law. I'd bet that, even if you could finagle something on Google, I could distinguish your search results.
And, just to be sure that you know who you're talking to, let me point out a landmark S.Ct. 4th Amendment case, which any first-year law student is aware of, that pretty much exposes your statement a baloney, and, further, is right on point (i.e., referring to the NSA-like systemic collection of "envelope" phone-call information by a government agency). That would be Smith v. Maryland, 442 U.S. 735 (1979) (holding that there's no expectation of privacy in phone records in part because a caller has already agreed to disclose the tracked call information to third parties).
OK, so what have you got, legal beagle?
Snarl.
Well, the issue with pen registers was that a caller has no expectation of privacy regarding the duration, length, identification of the other party, etc., because the caller has already surrendered that information, both to the called party and to the phone company. This was consistent with a lot of law that existed when the SUpreme Court heard the case in the 1980s and here in NYS, for example, a person is in fact legally able to record any conversation of which that person is a part. In reality, people of course have expectatoins of privacy in electronic communications, but the question is whether such an expectation is "reasonable" simply because it's rooted in ignorance. I'd thing that, in a post-Snowden world, it will be tougher than ever to argue that we have reasonable expectations of privacy in any kind of computer-related transaction. That's the world we're inheriting and, to be honest, despite the tendency to whine like b's about it now, we're all at fault. This didn't happen overnight and if it's reached the point where it's too late to do anything about it -- which probably happened 35 years ago -- it's in part because too many of us have been too absorbed in non-issues like whether Apple is as evil as Microsoft, while the really important stuff just slipped on by...
i) Windows is not, never has been, and never will be as innovative, well-designed, or coherent as the Mac OS; and
ii) Microsoft has failed to innovate, simply copying so many features of the Mac OS into Windows that the two have become indistinguishable.
(I hope I don't have to remind people to think before they hit "Reply.")
They might try. But IMO, it sure would be smarmy. There's a tradition in this country of states providing "full faith and credit" to the laws of other jurisdictions. If the age of consent in Alabama is 12 and is 16 in New York, New York would recognize an Alabama marriage that involved a 14-year-old girl if that married couple moved to New York. Same-gender marriage is the only example I can think of where some states do not recognize marriages legally consummated in other states. That may begin to change.
At least this week.
OK, false alarm. For a second there, I thought we were going to hear something intelligent from an expert on U.S. patent law. But this guy is apparently just another self-important Internet Wiley E. Coyote with an opinion, who can't be bothered to learn basic facts about his subject matter. It's the old "Rush Limbaugh" Rule: You don't have to have any idea what you're talking about; you just have to sound like you know more than your audience. And this is Slashdot, after all!
It would have been interesting, too, had this guy actually had some credibility, (and, further useful if else somebody figures out how to build a real graph that does what this one purports to), to provide a scaling reference. For example, the AIA certainly weakened patent protection in significant ways. For comparison, where would the pre-AIA patent system fall on this graph relative to the current system? Such a before-and-after would certainly help readers put the curve's seemingly arbitrary scales into perspective.
The information tracked by the PRISM program -- essentially carrier pen registers -- does not fall within the Fourth Amendment's warrant requirement because, as the Supreme Court held over 30 years ago, there's no expectation of privacy in pen registers. I personally was a bit horrified by the decision and am dismayed that it's still considered to be settled law. But I'm just as disappointed by the know-nothing peanut gallery of commenters who are "horrified" by the NSA program, but couldn't be bothered to perform even a modicum of research until their noses were wiped in the Bill of Rights. So you guys can whine all you want. This ship sailed long ago, and you guys are little more than enablers who don't even know what you don't know.
FWIW, see Smith v. Maryland, 442 U.S. 735 (1979) for the S.Ct.'s holding that accessing the contents of a pen register is not a "search" within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment.
Sorry if I come across as testy about all this, but I raised these issues for years in the 1980s & 1990s and was roundly ignored. Nobody cared. Now, when it's too late to do anything about it, everybody's screaming "fire!" If you really care about your privacy, cancel your Facebook & Twitter accounts & stop posting anything that you wouldn't want somebody else's lawyer to read. Otherwise, please just STFU and spend more time reading than talking.
Because, among other things, there was an unresolved question about how closely DNA products might follow the same rules as other types of subject matter. Naturally occurring adrenaline, e.g., can't be patented because it's a product of nature. But extracted and concentrated adrenaline is, famously, patentable, as are methods for creating such a concentration. If there's a chance that a manufacturer can obtain patent protection for a high-value product that falls into even the periphery of a gray area, it may be justifiable to at least try to push the envelope.
So now we have more clearly defined boundaries, which is a win for everybody. Including Myriad, apparently.
Actually, from the perspective of someone who works in the legal profession, the only stupid question being asked here is the one cited above.
Just kidding. There are no stupid questions.
But wait, there's more. The Supreme Court expressly stated that there is no expectation of privacy in pen registers, what,15 years ago? These issues were settled and these freedoms were taken away a very long time ago, and you're pissed because you just found out? Oh friggin' well. Try reading Wired.
Other than the (obvious & legally important) fact that Manning was sworn to uphold the Military Code of Justice.
So please spare us the whining and shock. If this is a surprise to you, you're part of the problem. If you gleefully expose every aspect of your private life on Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter (and Slashdot), then you have nobody to blame but yourselves if your privacy is "violated." This is the way the world works today and that's not going to change.
If you want 1970s-class "privacy," then close your Facebook, Amazon, eBay, PayPal, & Twitter accounts, encrypt all your online communications (although that probably won't make much difference), and never say anything online that might someday be used against you in any context by any entity. Or even better, just stay off the Internet and the cellular networks completely. Otherwise, just shut up and continue to enjoy the conveniences you've already agreed to surrender in exchange for Fourth Amendment protection.
As Larry Ellison is reputed to have said in the late 90s, "Privacy? That ship sailed long ago."
Here's the actual announcement, no paywall: http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/06/04/fact-sheet-white-house-task-force-high-tech-patent-issues
No, code is not "math" in the sense that is relevant here. The Federal Circuit has been clear, even emphatic, about that fact. Although it may be a subtle distinction for an I-ANAL, one can only state that "mathematics is not patentable, and code is mathematics" if the word "mathematics" is used to mean two different things. It is certainly possible to patent a computer algorithm, so long as it is tied in some way to a physically tangible element. This fact (or its pre-computer analog) has been inherent in our patent system since Jefferson wrote the first U.S. Patent Law, which, like every iteration that followed, expressly defines a "process" or "method" as statutory subject matter.
In this country, the concept of patenting "processes" goes back to Jefferson.
...I wish that the ostensible news items here would avoid links to faux legal sites like Groklaw. Sigh. Why not cite Bill O'Reilly while you're at it? At least the other link here identified the more credible Patently-O blog and, while the Groklaw link reads a bit like a Carol Burnett piece from The Enquirer (maybe I'm dating myself, but anybody with training in IP will recognize the reference), Crouch at least correctly states the legal issues. Anybody who reads the latter would't dream of asserting that Jefferson never intended to patent algorithms.
Interesting, but what do you mean when you say that the virtual particles are "black holes"? Stellar black holes have a heckuva lot of unusual characteristics -- which ones do you reference here?
FWIW, I think "content creation" here refers also -- and I'd wager primarily -- to things like creating documents with a word processor, presentation software, or spreadsheet application. Still on a heckuva lot of people's radar.
But, again, hardly late-breaking. Read Jung.
i) The parents' reactions are *all* on iPhones. Unlikely. Possibly the same phone. ii) The syntax & punctuation of the parents' comments are too similar and too tied to a single age group. And they're apparently redacted (i.e., Photoshopped). iii) Feldman has a history of gleefully committing clumsy frauds upon more gullible members of the public. The burden of proof to establish authenticity for anything that involves this guy should be exceptionally high, and nothing here meets that burden. Seriously, who is dumb enough to propagate this stuff?