Well, no. It sounds like another Russian ploy to convince the world that it owns the Arctic Circle. Ten new minerals a year are found there! Go Russia!
Everyone knows that the Arctic is useful only for its oil fields, but that doesn't mean you can't pretend to be interested in the Arctic for other reasons--like world-saving minerals only your scientists can find.
NetApp is a real life company that sells products. Sun tried to patent-bully NetApp and NetApp found out it had patents of its own that Sun was infringing.
The Eastern District of Texas was a popular place for IP litigation because of its so-called "rocket docket" that accelerated trials and Patent Local Rules that forced disclosure of relevant information by both parties. Discovery in a patent case is an expensive enterprise. Not only do you have to prove conception of the invention, you have to disclose all design documents relating to the products you claim embody the invention, and financial records to establish a base for damages. The rocket docket and the Patent Rules were meant to speed things up. Discovery is given very liberally here. However, the plaintiff could prepare all he wants before filing suit, and then force the defendant into taking the discovery defensive. The defendant starts out in a hole and never recovers. The plaintiff can also accuse as many of the defendant's products of infringement and get discovery about those products. There are cases where nearly 2000 products have been accused of infringement. They can drop products later but you can't recoup your discovery expenses.
The Western District of Texas recently taken up Local Patent Rules modeled after Judge Ward's Eastern District model. I bet Lufkin is in the W.D. Tex.
It's the new trend to be anti-authoritarian (ha!) but drunk driving kills. If the Founders did not walk off a boat filled with tobacco and wine, we would have banned smoking and drinking along with marijuana and cocaine. Even if you're just driving drunk and don't hit anyone, that's like shooting into a crowded street and not killing anyone. It's dangerous and reckless, and just because you didn't kill anyone this time doesn't make it all alright.
Of course, if the alcohol analyzer is wrong or inaccurate, it has to be fixed. But holding drunk driving laws in disdain is a ridiculous meme that should be eliminated as soon as practicable.
The Hubble images probably resolve fainter objects but the Lucky images are sharper. Sharpness means resolution of distinct objects is better. The Hubble may see more while the Lucky sees them sharper but misses out on faint objects. The big question for me is how good the Earth-based telescope is at picking up faint images, which appears to Hubble's strength. The Hubble Telescope can peer at an object for hours at a time with an open aperture. A ground-based telescope cannot because the Earth turns.
I am also going to guess the Hubble image was processed more heavily after the fact.
People die in real wars. And knocking out electronics sounds great, but if you fight a war with a country that owns the bears' share of your stock, and to whom you are indebted for billions each year, and which provides a lucrative potential market for your industry, that may not be good for the economy that keeps the war machine going.
Why do you think America is on good terms with Communist China--even bringing them into the WTO--while we have an embargo on Communist Cuba? Because China doesn't execute people and steal their organs? Or because China doesn't kill religious practitioners?
Be realistic. That Tom Clancy novel you read isn't accurate anymore. How are you going to fight against the guy who's cutting you checks to fight Iraq?
If you were a cop, and someone refused to show you the receipt, and refused to show you identification, deep down inside you would think that he had something to hide.
This said, I believe that most police officers are not sufficiently informed of the laws they are sworn to uphold. Cops are not lawyers. At best, they are college graduates. I'm not denigrating police in general, but if you have cops that barely got the 64 credits from a community college required to get a job, you're going to get a few who do not understand Constitutional rights and that police officers are not gods amongst men. They may very well be trying their best, but their best is limited by their limited understanding of the law.
I really have no workable solution to this problem, but I just wanted to point this out.
Ha! You must be kidding. You mean huge multi-national conglomerations were repaying all the victims of their accidents and torts such as Exxon Valdez or Love Canal without being sued?
When was the last time a company paid for the damage it caused without being sued? Name one example.
The scythe-shaped prop and the problem it was meant to fix, blade beat, has been known to the Russians since about the seventies. Sure, the exact shape may not have been disclosed by once you know of the problem, the solution follows easily. But again, the shape of the blade probably isn't the most secret thing about the blade.
The biggest secret about the prop, I would guess, is the metallurgy behind it and the methods used to shape it. The blade is spindly and perhaps the technology to make a blade of that shape strong enough to drive a sub at speed is tough. Or perhaps the machining or milling is difficult. The Russians had to buy the milling technology from Japan twenty years ago. One wonders if that technology is still relevant, or if Russia has obtained updated methods. Burrs on the blade, for example, may make it loud and prone to cavitation regardless of the design, and complex shapes are really hard to mill.
It's like making a nuclear bomb. You know how to filter uranium, and you know basically what a bomb has to do. The problem is doing it. Milling a plutonium or uranium chunk into the proper shape is the real secret to making a bomb.
It's always the "stupid" technologies that are hard to emulate. For example, the cool digital camouflage pattern worn by U.S. Marines was apparently too hard for the Canadian textile industry to make. See here.
Publishing the idea seems to be a good idea. It would serve your purpose while being much cheaper than obtaining a patent on it, which could cost thousands if you have to hire an attorney. Furthermore, it would help you build your resume.
A side effect is that your article would be prior art against any other later inventor who tries to patent the same idea. Of course, you have to try to get published in a popular journal that the Patent Office would think an average inventor would look at. (Not Slashdot.)
To respond to your OJ Simpson point, criminal law and civil law are completely different because the Constitution applies to the government. The government is not allowed to use evidence obtained in contravention of the Fourth Amendment against the person whose rights were violated. But the government can use illegally-seized evidence against persons who had no Fourth Amendment right against the seizure. For instance, if the cops searched my landlord's house illegally, and found evidence that incriminates me, that evidence can be used against me because my landlord's rights were violated.
Let me respond to your gun hypothetical. What happened here as that TorrentSpy sued using a very specific statute--the Wiretap Act. The analogue would be a thief stealing a gun from a his victim's locked house and selling it to a chump. Then the victim works with the thief to sue the chump for theft. Obviously, that's not going to work. Of course, the victim could sue the chump for restitution--"give me back that stolen gun of mine!" But that's not what happened here.
There is a difference between inducing, hiring, or causing someone to steal e-mail and buying the e-mails after he already had stolen it. The MPAA did not use the information to break the law. (As in the case of identity thieves who buy credit card numbers.) The Wiretap Act applies only against those who steal information, not against those who get it afterwards. The documents were not trade secret so there's really no other recourse available to TorrentSpy aside from perhaps getting the documents thrown out as not admissible.
TorrentSpy should have sued the former employee who stole the information from them. There's no proof that MPAA induced the employee to violate the law. They should have sued this guy out of house and home. Instead, they worked with him to file a lawsuit against the MPAA. In doing so, they sued a party against whom they had no recourse under the Act. It was a risky strategy that did not pay off.
There is lots of evidence that the rich are treated differently, but this isn't it.
This is ridiculous. You control the risks you can control and live with the risks you cannot. You don't quit moderating risks only because there are uncontrollable risks. You say that everyone can be easily framed and blackmailed, so why bother screening for things people can really be blackmailed about. But that's the same as saying, "Why bother with safety belts when you drive because there may be a fire that kills everyone anyway?"
The relevant question is, "Does NASA believe these background checks lower risk?," not "Does NASA believe these background checks eliminate risk?"
1. Lisa Nowak. 2. Sabotaging The Space Shuttle: Awesome Propaganda For Terrorists. 3. Military Aspects Of NASA's Work, Such As Launching Spy Satellites: Useful For Bad Guys
The space program represents the best of America to the world. When astronauts go nuts, it reflects poorly on our country. If there is a terrorist attack on the space program, it will be a direct attack against "America"--akin to blowing up the Statue of Liberty. And the American space program got its start from Warner Braun's military research, so it should be self-evident that infiltration by foreign spies is a big risk.
A person's sexual orientation, if it is secret, could be used to blackmail him. This is not to say homosexuals are untrustworthy, but rather society's condemnation and bigotry make them vulnerable to extortion. If you were secretly gay, married with children, perhaps, what wouldn't you do to keep that a secret? See Larry Craig.
The judge in that case was not an idiot. The defendant was trying to weasel out of discovery obligations that every other litigant in the federal courts had to bear -- you can't destroy evidence of ongoing liability during the pendency of a suit. If you had a general data destruction (oops, I meant data retention) policy before the suit, you have to suspend that destruction as to those systems most likely to hold responsive information to the suit. Otherwise, you could just destroy evidence that's relevant by waiting thirty days.
The failure to record the RAM data to a log is basically a conscientious data retention policy by the defendant. The judge saw through their hyper-technical arguments and followed the law.
Especially not if Sprint is administering the program for it.
Well, actually, that's not true. Sprint has pretty good technology, but plain suck at billing. But triple-billing the government isn't such a big problem.
Did you make your own tinfoil hat? Otherwise, the American Aluminum company might have rigged a brainwashing foil at the behest of the U.S. government.
The judge explicitly narrowed the ruling to apply only to a party to a litigation only for the pendency of the court action. Such a ruling is akin to the obligation parties to a litigation have to maintain relevant documents -- even suspending their document retention policies, if necessary. The entire rule of preservation is motivated by fair play.
If this turns out to be expensive, TorrentSpy can make the MPAA pay for it. I'm not going to guess how probable that would be, but the option is certainly there to have the MPAA pay a few bucks for worthless IP information.
Are you suggesting that no American company should be allowed to invest in China? I'm sure that would really punish the Chinese government. Removing a major source of employment in poor areas would really spite the regime! You know, like, it wouldn't just completely screw the poor foreigners who are now out of work and have to starve just so we can feel like we did *something* to oppose their oppressive regime.
The imagined problems you state have nothing to do with the legal system. It's our system of values that lead to the pitfalls of society. All cultures throughout the world have valued the rich and the powerful over the poor and the weak. Lawyers had nothing to do with it.
In fact, things were even worse before lawyers, and the Constitution. For example, lynchings were carried out extra-judicially, and while they didn't involve judges, juries -- or eeew -- lawyers, I doubt you think they were the epitome of justice.
Let's put it one more way. If you wanted anything in the world, would it be to be rich and powerful? Exactly.
American law does not apply in foreign jurisdictions. The Yahoo! disclosure in China was more than legal under Chinese law, it was illegal for Yahoo! to have ignored the request. Cast in another light, Slashdotters mostly thought that American copyright law should not have applied to allofmp3.com, which was based in Russia. It is sad that Chinese law is so horrible, but part of doing business in China is to follow the law there.
Imagine if the American subsidiary of a Swiss bank ignored a subpoena from the FBI for information about one of its clients, who was thought to have links with Al Qaeda. I would imagine the bank would get shut down by law enforcement. This is the same thing; America should not be able to force other countries to submit to its laws simply because it is a big country with lots of money.
Alberto Gonzalez took an oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States, and to serve the people of this country. Simply because the Attorney General serves at the will of the President does not mean that he should serve the will of the President. His dedication to President Bush instead of to the Constitution will be long-remembered in our history books.
This is perfectly correct. Employees who work to prevent disaster are good employees if no one ever thinks about how good they are. Pretend you're the security guy for a huge merchant, and you have to protect credit card information. If you do a good job, you'll have maybe a few projects a year to implement new card technologies and doing security scans of your system. But most of the time, you may be sitting on your ass. Yet you're much more valuable than the guy who lost a million credit card numbers and who has to work around the clock trying to figure out whodunnit.
This is idiotic dribble that ignores the inherent differences between television and the Internet. For example, if I set my browser to a different font that's easier for me to read, the author would argue that I'm infringing by creating an unauthorized work. This is without regard to whether I am vision-impaired or not.
The PCI guidelines forbid merchants from storing personal information with credit card numbers and the CVV2 (three digit number printed on the back of the card) at all. Encryption isn't supposed to be allowed at all, but hashing is.
I can't go into too much detail, but there are reasons a merchant would have to retain all of this information. The most significant one is fraud. Not only do you have to detect fraud, but you also have to be able to present evidence when you prosecute the criminals.
Slashdot Mirror
Is this entrapment? The cops leave their property on your car. You're not supposed to be able to find them. When you find them, you get in trouble.
I guess the cops weren't so hot on him selling them on eBay. I don't know what the difference would be, though. The cops literally gave it to him.
Well, no. It sounds like another Russian ploy to convince the world that it owns the Arctic Circle. Ten new minerals a year are found there! Go Russia!
Everyone knows that the Arctic is useful only for its oil fields, but that doesn't mean you can't pretend to be interested in the Arctic for other reasons--like world-saving minerals only your scientists can find.
I'm a cynic.
NetApp is a real life company that sells products. Sun tried to patent-bully NetApp and NetApp found out it had patents of its own that Sun was infringing.
The Eastern District of Texas was a popular place for IP litigation because of its so-called "rocket docket" that accelerated trials and Patent Local Rules that forced disclosure of relevant information by both parties. Discovery in a patent case is an expensive enterprise. Not only do you have to prove conception of the invention, you have to disclose all design documents relating to the products you claim embody the invention, and financial records to establish a base for damages. The rocket docket and the Patent Rules were meant to speed things up. Discovery is given very liberally here. However, the plaintiff could prepare all he wants before filing suit, and then force the defendant into taking the discovery defensive. The defendant starts out in a hole and never recovers. The plaintiff can also accuse as many of the defendant's products of infringement and get discovery about those products. There are cases where nearly 2000 products have been accused of infringement. They can drop products later but you can't recoup your discovery expenses.
The Western District of Texas recently taken up Local Patent Rules modeled after Judge Ward's Eastern District model. I bet Lufkin is in the W.D. Tex.
Sigh. The side with the best attorney will win.
It's the new trend to be anti-authoritarian (ha!) but drunk driving kills. If the Founders did not walk off a boat filled with tobacco and wine, we would have banned smoking and drinking along with marijuana and cocaine. Even if you're just driving drunk and don't hit anyone, that's like shooting into a crowded street and not killing anyone. It's dangerous and reckless, and just because you didn't kill anyone this time doesn't make it all alright.
Search Google News for "drunk driver kills" and you'll see.
Of course, if the alcohol analyzer is wrong or inaccurate, it has to be fixed. But holding drunk driving laws in disdain is a ridiculous meme that should be eliminated as soon as practicable.
This is all a guess.
The Hubble images probably resolve fainter objects but the Lucky images are sharper. Sharpness means resolution of distinct objects is better. The Hubble may see more while the Lucky sees them sharper but misses out on faint objects. The big question for me is how good the Earth-based telescope is at picking up faint images, which appears to Hubble's strength. The Hubble Telescope can peer at an object for hours at a time with an open aperture. A ground-based telescope cannot because the Earth turns.
I am also going to guess the Hubble image was processed more heavily after the fact.
People die in real wars. And knocking out electronics sounds great, but if you fight a war with a country that owns the bears' share of your stock, and to whom you are indebted for billions each year, and which provides a lucrative potential market for your industry, that may not be good for the economy that keeps the war machine going.
Why do you think America is on good terms with Communist China--even bringing them into the WTO--while we have an embargo on Communist Cuba? Because China doesn't execute people and steal their organs? Or because China doesn't kill religious practitioners?
Be realistic. That Tom Clancy novel you read isn't accurate anymore. How are you going to fight against the guy who's cutting you checks to fight Iraq?
If you were a cop, and someone refused to show you the receipt, and refused to show you identification, deep down inside you would think that he had something to hide.
This said, I believe that most police officers are not sufficiently informed of the laws they are sworn to uphold. Cops are not lawyers. At best, they are college graduates. I'm not denigrating police in general, but if you have cops that barely got the 64 credits from a community college required to get a job, you're going to get a few who do not understand Constitutional rights and that police officers are not gods amongst men. They may very well be trying their best, but their best is limited by their limited understanding of the law.
I really have no workable solution to this problem, but I just wanted to point this out.
Ha! You must be kidding. You mean huge multi-national conglomerations were repaying all the victims of their accidents and torts such as Exxon Valdez or Love Canal without being sued?
When was the last time a company paid for the damage it caused without being sued? Name one example.
The scythe-shaped prop and the problem it was meant to fix, blade beat, has been known to the Russians since about the seventies. Sure, the exact shape may not have been disclosed by once you know of the problem, the solution follows easily. But again, the shape of the blade probably isn't the most secret thing about the blade.
The biggest secret about the prop, I would guess, is the metallurgy behind it and the methods used to shape it. The blade is spindly and perhaps the technology to make a blade of that shape strong enough to drive a sub at speed is tough. Or perhaps the machining or milling is difficult. The Russians had to buy the milling technology from Japan twenty years ago. One wonders if that technology is still relevant, or if Russia has obtained updated methods. Burrs on the blade, for example, may make it loud and prone to cavitation regardless of the design, and complex shapes are really hard to mill.
It's like making a nuclear bomb. You know how to filter uranium, and you know basically what a bomb has to do. The problem is doing it. Milling a plutonium or uranium chunk into the proper shape is the real secret to making a bomb.
It's always the "stupid" technologies that are hard to emulate. For example, the cool digital camouflage pattern worn by U.S. Marines was apparently too hard for the Canadian textile industry to make. See here.
Publishing the idea seems to be a good idea. It would serve your purpose while being much cheaper than obtaining a patent on it, which could cost thousands if you have to hire an attorney. Furthermore, it would help you build your resume.
A side effect is that your article would be prior art against any other later inventor who tries to patent the same idea. Of course, you have to try to get published in a popular journal that the Patent Office would think an average inventor would look at. (Not Slashdot.)
To respond to your OJ Simpson point, criminal law and civil law are completely different because the Constitution applies to the government. The government is not allowed to use evidence obtained in contravention of the Fourth Amendment against the person whose rights were violated. But the government can use illegally-seized evidence against persons who had no Fourth Amendment right against the seizure. For instance, if the cops searched my landlord's house illegally, and found evidence that incriminates me, that evidence can be used against me because my landlord's rights were violated.
Let me respond to your gun hypothetical. What happened here as that TorrentSpy sued using a very specific statute--the Wiretap Act. The analogue would be a thief stealing a gun from a his victim's locked house and selling it to a chump. Then the victim works with the thief to sue the chump for theft. Obviously, that's not going to work. Of course, the victim could sue the chump for restitution--"give me back that stolen gun of mine!" But that's not what happened here.
There is a difference between inducing, hiring, or causing someone to steal e-mail and buying the e-mails after he already had stolen it. The MPAA did not use the information to break the law. (As in the case of identity thieves who buy credit card numbers.) The Wiretap Act applies only against those who steal information, not against those who get it afterwards. The documents were not trade secret so there's really no other recourse available to TorrentSpy aside from perhaps getting the documents thrown out as not admissible.
TorrentSpy should have sued the former employee who stole the information from them. There's no proof that MPAA induced the employee to violate the law. They should have sued this guy out of house and home. Instead, they worked with him to file a lawsuit against the MPAA. In doing so, they sued a party against whom they had no recourse under the Act. It was a risky strategy that did not pay off.
There is lots of evidence that the rich are treated differently, but this isn't it.
This is ridiculous. You control the risks you can control and live with the risks you cannot. You don't quit moderating risks only because there are uncontrollable risks. You say that everyone can be easily framed and blackmailed, so why bother screening for things people can really be blackmailed about. But that's the same as saying, "Why bother with safety belts when you drive because there may be a fire that kills everyone anyway?"
The relevant question is, "Does NASA believe these background checks lower risk?," not "Does NASA believe these background checks eliminate risk?"
Three points in defense of NASA.
1. Lisa Nowak.
2. Sabotaging The Space Shuttle: Awesome Propaganda For Terrorists.
3. Military Aspects Of NASA's Work, Such As Launching Spy Satellites: Useful For Bad Guys
The space program represents the best of America to the world. When astronauts go nuts, it reflects poorly on our country. If there is a terrorist attack on the space program, it will be a direct attack against "America"--akin to blowing up the Statue of Liberty. And the American space program got its start from Warner Braun's military research, so it should be self-evident that infiltration by foreign spies is a big risk.
A person's sexual orientation, if it is secret, could be used to blackmail him. This is not to say homosexuals are untrustworthy, but rather society's condemnation and bigotry make them vulnerable to extortion. If you were secretly gay, married with children, perhaps, what wouldn't you do to keep that a secret? See Larry Craig.
The judge in that case was not an idiot. The defendant was trying to weasel out of discovery obligations that every other litigant in the federal courts had to bear -- you can't destroy evidence of ongoing liability during the pendency of a suit. If you had a general data destruction (oops, I meant data retention) policy before the suit, you have to suspend that destruction as to those systems most likely to hold responsive information to the suit. Otherwise, you could just destroy evidence that's relevant by waiting thirty days.
The failure to record the RAM data to a log is basically a conscientious data retention policy by the defendant. The judge saw through their hyper-technical arguments and followed the law.
Especially not if Sprint is administering the program for it.
Well, actually, that's not true. Sprint has pretty good technology, but plain suck at billing. But triple-billing the government isn't such a big problem.
Did you make your own tinfoil hat? Otherwise, the American Aluminum company might have rigged a brainwashing foil at the behest of the U.S. government.
The judge explicitly narrowed the ruling to apply only to a party to a litigation only for the pendency of the court action. Such a ruling is akin to the obligation parties to a litigation have to maintain relevant documents -- even suspending their document retention policies, if necessary. The entire rule of preservation is motivated by fair play.
If this turns out to be expensive, TorrentSpy can make the MPAA pay for it. I'm not going to guess how probable that would be, but the option is certainly there to have the MPAA pay a few bucks for worthless IP information.
Are you suggesting that no American company should be allowed to invest in China? I'm sure that would really punish the Chinese government. Removing a major source of employment in poor areas would really spite the regime! You know, like, it wouldn't just completely screw the poor foreigners who are now out of work and have to starve just so we can feel like we did *something* to oppose their oppressive regime.
The imagined problems you state have nothing to do with the legal system. It's our system of values that lead to the pitfalls of society. All cultures throughout the world have valued the rich and the powerful over the poor and the weak. Lawyers had nothing to do with it.
In fact, things were even worse before lawyers, and the Constitution. For example, lynchings were carried out extra-judicially, and while they didn't involve judges, juries -- or eeew -- lawyers, I doubt you think they were the epitome of justice.
Let's put it one more way. If you wanted anything in the world, would it be to be rich and powerful? Exactly.
American law does not apply in foreign jurisdictions. The Yahoo! disclosure in China was more than legal under Chinese law, it was illegal for Yahoo! to have ignored the request. Cast in another light, Slashdotters mostly thought that American copyright law should not have applied to allofmp3.com, which was based in Russia. It is sad that Chinese law is so horrible, but part of doing business in China is to follow the law there.
Imagine if the American subsidiary of a Swiss bank ignored a subpoena from the FBI for information about one of its clients, who was thought to have links with Al Qaeda. I would imagine the bank would get shut down by law enforcement. This is the same thing; America should not be able to force other countries to submit to its laws simply because it is a big country with lots of money.
Alberto Gonzalez took an oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States, and to serve the people of this country. Simply because the Attorney General serves at the will of the President does not mean that he should serve the will of the President. His dedication to President Bush instead of to the Constitution will be long-remembered in our history books.
This is perfectly correct. Employees who work to prevent disaster are good employees if no one ever thinks about how good they are. Pretend you're the security guy for a huge merchant, and you have to protect credit card information. If you do a good job, you'll have maybe a few projects a year to implement new card technologies and doing security scans of your system. But most of the time, you may be sitting on your ass. Yet you're much more valuable than the guy who lost a million credit card numbers and who has to work around the clock trying to figure out whodunnit.
This is idiotic dribble that ignores the inherent differences between television and the Internet. For example, if I set my browser to a different font that's easier for me to read, the author would argue that I'm infringing by creating an unauthorized work. This is without regard to whether I am vision-impaired or not.
The PCI guidelines forbid merchants from storing personal information with credit card numbers and the CVV2 (three digit number printed on the back of the card) at all. Encryption isn't supposed to be allowed at all, but hashing is.
I can't go into too much detail, but there are reasons a merchant would have to retain all of this information. The most significant one is fraud. Not only do you have to detect fraud, but you also have to be able to present evidence when you prosecute the criminals.