First, you're confusing "the public" with the government.
Second, if you mean "Why would you assume that the government would have chosen nuclear war", then you're assuming the government would have understood the choices and their consequences, which if you study your cold war history you will find is incorrect.
In fact, I'd suggest brushing up on your history if you aren't aware of the substantial part of each government that was prepared to choose nuclear war. This is not "assumption"; it's documented history.
Here's a simpler question: if the secrecy weren't needed to make the missiles go away, then why didn't they go away (on the authority of those from whom the deals were kept secret) without the secret dealings?
"Destruction of one culture concurrent with the rise of another" is not what airport security is intended to defend against. People being killed is what airport security is intended to defend against. You need to get your fears of cultural assimilation out of the picture, as they have nothing to do with the topic of airport screenings.
If you don't want to draw a distinction between killing everyone who doesn't conform to your culture on one hand, vs. spreading your culture through various social and political means on the other, that's your problem; reforming bigoted radicals isn't my line of work.
Oh, and profiling is not and will not be effective. A brief look at recent history will demonstrate why:
When we put more scrutiny on shoes, did the total frequency of attempted attacks go down? No, the attackers just didn't bother trying another shoe bomb.
When we put more scrutiny on liquids, did the total frequency of attempted attacks go down? No, the attackers just didn't bother trying liquids.
So if you put more scrutiny on people who match your biggoted view of what a terrorist looks like, is the frequency of attempted attacks going to go down? No, the attackers will send bomb-carriers who don't fit your profile. You think they can't recruit such people, and they laugh.
And yet, WWI didn't end guns and bombs; it merely killed a lot of people. So you draw an analogy to this conflict, where the "weapons" are patents, and think the battle will put an end to the weapon?
This isn't the first, or the last, time that a group of large companies get into a mess where each alleges the other is infringing patents, and it's not the first, or the last, where all probably have some valid claims. If the MAD analogies that keep flying around were valid, and with the first shot fired, you might think the companies would all sink - and maybe you think Congress or the Court will see the effect of the current law as too damaging and step in. But none of those things will happen, because lawsuits have an option that nuclear war doesn't: settlement.
These companies have done nothing but move their standoff from a theoretical issue hidden in their file drawers to a practical matter in court filings. I predit they will reach an agreement where all are licensed to use all of the technology involved, maybe with payments from one to another if there seems to be an imbalance in overall contribution to the IP pool, and that will be that.
First of all, the Islamic faith is far from unique in its desire to displace conflicting cultural patterns. You might be familiar with another such religion - Christianity.
Second, there is a difference between cultural conflict and war. You need to learn to separate the two, and understand that just because the woman in a burka might want the other women around her to wear burkas does not mean that she's a terrorist. Having airport screeners harass members of one culture is not an appropriate weapon for use in a cultural conflict.
So, do you have particular insight into these patents to back your claim that they are invalid and worthless?
Or are you one of those people who really thinks patents shouldn't exist, but won't just admit it?
Or perhaps you think you get to stipulate the terms of how a patent must be used for it to be valid and have worth, even though the system of patent laws intentionally doesn't do so?
Yes, we all know that correlation isn't causation. The authors of the study didn't imply any such thing, and their tentative conclusions run along the lines that a common cause (parenting) could influence both texting and risky behaviors in a parallel manner.
Distribution is only one of many rights reserved by copyright, and again this has been true since the beginning.
The fact that it has become easier for "just anybody" to commit certain offenses does not mean that somehow they were originally meant to magically be exempt from the law if they did commit those offenses, which is what is implied by the idea that the laws "weren't meant to target" them.
Uh, yeah. Copyright historically has been a civil matter even for commercial infringement (and by all rights it still should be, but that's neither here nor there). That is in no way conflicting with what I said.
Ok... what I'm not seeing is why both sides would be motivated to settle after a ruling had been reached in the (2nd) trial. Why at that phase were there settlement talks; and if such talks broke down, why didn't the RIAA just say "fine, no settlement, pay the judgement".
Given the judge reduced the award, maybe that's the wrong question. Maybe the right question is, even if the RIAA thought "we can win a higher award again if we get a new trial", and even if Thompson thought "maybe this time I'll win or at least get a lower award"... why didn't the court just say "screw you both, this was the ruling, we're moving on down the docket"?
What I can't figure out from TFA is - where the hell did the 3rd trial come from?
The second trial occured because the judge ruled that he'd erred. That makes sense. Now where did the 3rd one come from? TFA says that she asked for either a reduction in damages or another trial; she got a reduction in damages... so why wasn't that the end of it?
Copyrights were never really meant to target individual citizens? Says who? I don't see any support for that claim in the Constitutional basis for copyright law; or in the first copyright act; or in any other subsequent copyright act that I've read...
In fact every copyright act I've read is explicitly not merely a regulation on business, as they specifically assign liability for infringement even if it isn't commercial in nature.
Perhaps you're mistaking how you'd like to see copyright used as somehow representing what it was "meant" to be used for?
Yes, I've heard the term "selection bias"; apparently one of us knows what it means, and you aren't the one.
I'm not "selecting" the cases I'm looking at. I'm looking at every case that has impacted me in any way, and suggesting that everyone else in the discussion do the same.
If that's a biased selection, then what you're really saying is "yes, class actions that affect people are crap, but that's not a fair sample" (apparently meaning that we have to include all the cases that don't affect anyone).
When I asked you for your view of what class action is, you responded in a way typical of those defending bad law: you gave me a technical description of the intent of the law, without reference to the reality of what the law does in practice. Laws and legal practices are not judged by their intent; they are judged by their effects.
You want your argument to matter, tie it to reality. So far all you've said is that we should ignore the fact that in most people's lives class action suits are nothing but an abuse, because in theory the law allows them to be used for other things.
"With several outstanding class action privacy suits against Facebook and Zynga, it is interesting to see Google set this precedent"
That is, of course, unless you know the first thing about the law. In that case, you are aware that one defendent deciding to settle doesn't set a precedent at all for other defendents in separate lawsuits (even if the nature of those suits is similar).
Between that, my lack of interest in suing Google over this matter, and my general antipathy toward class actions in practice, I find this terribly uninteresting.
"slashdot's consensus about what class action cases are is really, really off-base."
Really? So you claim you've done a handful of more-legitimate class actions, and you think that overturns the common view of what class-action cases "are"?
Tell you what: enlighten us. What are class actions? Then we can all dig through our records for records of class action settlements that affected us, and see what percentage conform to your description vs. the/. concensus. I can already tell you which one covers 100% of cases that have affected me.
There's a big difference between software that one company is using in-house, vs. software that a company is selling for others to use. Preserving trade secret protection on, say, the GIF encoding algorithms would've been pretty much impossible.
HFT is already pretty exclusionary, so I'm not sure that's the real issue.
Also, barring a screw-up at the PTO, you'd have to actually be ahead of the curve on HFT techniques and would only get a monopoly on those advances - not on anything necessary to doing HFT today.
And given the short expected lifetime of an HFT algorithm (particularly if one is optimistic enough to hope that the practice might become illegal in the near future) I'm not sure you'd want to invest in a patent, whereas protecting a trade secret is actually made easier if the time horizon is short.
I keep hearing that "anyone" can do this. Please point me to where I can sign up to collocate my server with the market computers - because that is actually necessary to set up an effective HFT system.
The ability of an elite few to buy access to information about the value of an item, when that information is unavailable to others with whom they will buy and sell that item, is a violation of free market premises.
Much of what the SEC regulations do is to produce a free market. This is what many political pundits fail to understand - the "free" in free market does not mean "unregulated". The best regulatory approach in the world would never create a 100% ideal free market - money will always be able to buy research - but there's a difference between "not being able to produce a perfectly flat playing field" vs. "allowing people to artificially create an information assymetry, with the express purpose of taking profits from those on the other side of the field, with an insanely high barrier to entry for those who want to join you". HFT is the latter.
HFT is a practice that should be regulated out of existence.
Why the person she's conversing with is invisible? Quick top 3 possibilities:
1) She's talking to herself 2) The person is behind her or otherwise out of view 3) She, and all the extras, are just wandering around chattering to produce the illusion of a background crowd, and it happens she moved into a position where the illusion breaks down if you focus on her
Some were, some weren't. Among those that were, sometimes the mouthpiece was built into the base of the phone, so you might or might not use your other hand.
Maybe it's not a cell phone as we know it. Maybe it allows communication through time. Maybe it isn't about time travel at all, but was an alien communicating with the mother ship.
Or maybe the story is bs, and either the video was manipulated, you're not seeing what you think you see, or the guy was immitating "talking on a phone" with a small, boxy object that happened to be in reach (either for reasons you'd have to be in his converation to know, or because he's nuts). For that matter, maybe he was holding something cold to a bruise on the side of his head while takling to the person next to him.
How do you know? Maybe without his involvement the Depression would've played out differently. Maybe he set events in motion that changed the outcome of WWII so that the Allies would win. Could've changed anything or everything; it's not like any of us would "remember" how it was "supposed to be".
Actually, if he was so open about using anachronistic technology that he got caught on film on a movie set, I'd say he did a pretty piss poor job with the whole 'leaving no trace' thing.
Web site access controls are not the same thing as DRM. For a web site to use DRM, it would need your browser's cooperation to control what you do with the content once you have access to it. A web site could use either, both, or neither. Traditionally you would expect/. to complain if a web site does use DRM; but it is not inconsistent for/. to complain if a web site expects to be paid when not using access controls.
(Under current law the web site may prevail, but that's a different issue.)
Some differences to think about between DRM and access controls:
1) DRM doesn't work. Access controls do, and in fact other news sites use them with considerable success. Yes, many of us avoid those sites in favor of free information sources when they are available; but that's a flaw with using access controls foolishly, not a flaw with the concept of access controls.
2) DRM often prevents you from doing things you should be allowed to do; it's hard to argue that about access controls.
3) Access controls can keep you from inadvertantly breaking rules; DRM rarely serves that purpose. This pertains to the current story, because if I write a deep link into these jerks' content, and you follow that link, it's your IP that's going to show up in their logs.
There are a lot of misconceptions about what's required for a contract; other posters have spelled out some of that.
However, the way this agreement is presented doesn't offer an opportunity to negotiate, so it could be a contract of adhesion (which would not be enforcable).
But then again, they're probably not resting on contract law; they're probably claiming that the agreement sets the terms of a license under copyright, and I don't need much of anything to hold you to a license under copyright. If you say "but I didn't agree", then I say "exactly, so you had no license; and yet you copied the materials illegally".
The problem IMO is that the law doesn't set intuitive standards for the licensing of materials published on the web. If I got to write the law, publishing material on the web without access controls would constitute a blanket license to view (but not necessarily save or print) said material to the extent the person publishing the material has the right or authorization to publish it. (Saving/printing wouldn't be authorized, but would probably fall under fair use.) This is the common expectation about the web today, but I'm not aware of any legal recognition of it, and unscrupulous sites could try to take advantage of that.
I have no real opinion on the "Internet kill switch" issue, but this kind of nonsense argument just can't go unchallenged, so...
Hey, you know, I bet you'd get a low rate of agreement on this one too:
"Do you support the president having the authority to launch nuclear missiles in response to unfavorable comments by foreign leaders?"
Oh, but both my question and yours are loaded with misleading and biasing rationales for granting the president authority, aren't they?
Could the President abuse "kill switch" authority? Sure, just like the president can abuse many of the powers he has. If he does, he should be punished accordingly; but that it could happen is not an automatic reason to avoid giving him authority. That is the nature of a position of trust.
And while I'm guessing you'll retort that you think the potential abuses really are the reason the government wants this authority, I highly doubt it. It's not very useful. Casual use of this power would lack plausible deniability and on a political scale would be right up there with nuking a political opponent.
Slashdot Mirror
First, you're confusing "the public" with the government.
Second, if you mean "Why would you assume that the government would have chosen nuclear war", then you're assuming the government would have understood the choices and their consequences, which if you study your cold war history you will find is incorrect.
In fact, I'd suggest brushing up on your history if you aren't aware of the substantial part of each government that was prepared to choose nuclear war. This is not "assumption"; it's documented history.
Here's a simpler question: if the secrecy weren't needed to make the missiles go away, then why didn't they go away (on the authority of those from whom the deals were kept secret) without the secret dealings?
"Destruction of one culture concurrent with the rise of another" is not what airport security is intended to defend against. People being killed is what airport security is intended to defend against. You need to get your fears of cultural assimilation out of the picture, as they have nothing to do with the topic of airport screenings.
If you don't want to draw a distinction between killing everyone who doesn't conform to your culture on one hand, vs. spreading your culture through various social and political means on the other, that's your problem; reforming bigoted radicals isn't my line of work.
Oh, and profiling is not and will not be effective. A brief look at recent history will demonstrate why:
When we put more scrutiny on shoes, did the total frequency of attempted attacks go down? No, the attackers just didn't bother trying another shoe bomb.
When we put more scrutiny on liquids, did the total frequency of attempted attacks go down? No, the attackers just didn't bother trying liquids.
So if you put more scrutiny on people who match your biggoted view of what a terrorist looks like, is the frequency of attempted attacks going to go down? No, the attackers will send bomb-carriers who don't fit your profile. You think they can't recruit such people, and they laugh.
And yet, WWI didn't end guns and bombs; it merely killed a lot of people. So you draw an analogy to this conflict, where the "weapons" are patents, and think the battle will put an end to the weapon?
This isn't the first, or the last, time that a group of large companies get into a mess where each alleges the other is infringing patents, and it's not the first, or the last, where all probably have some valid claims. If the MAD analogies that keep flying around were valid, and with the first shot fired, you might think the companies would all sink - and maybe you think Congress or the Court will see the effect of the current law as too damaging and step in. But none of those things will happen, because lawsuits have an option that nuclear war doesn't: settlement.
These companies have done nothing but move their standoff from a theoretical issue hidden in their file drawers to a practical matter in court filings. I predit they will reach an agreement where all are licensed to use all of the technology involved, maybe with payments from one to another if there seems to be an imbalance in overall contribution to the IP pool, and that will be that.
First of all, the Islamic faith is far from unique in its desire to displace conflicting cultural patterns. You might be familiar with another such religion - Christianity.
Second, there is a difference between cultural conflict and war. You need to learn to separate the two, and understand that just because the woman in a burka might want the other women around her to wear burkas does not mean that she's a terrorist. Having airport screeners harass members of one culture is not an appropriate weapon for use in a cultural conflict.
So, do you have particular insight into these patents to back your claim that they are invalid and worthless?
Or are you one of those people who really thinks patents shouldn't exist, but won't just admit it?
Or perhaps you think you get to stipulate the terms of how a patent must be used for it to be valid and have worth, even though the system of patent laws intentionally doesn't do so?
Hopefully I can save someone a bit of trouble:
Yes, we all know that correlation isn't causation. The authors of the study didn't imply any such thing, and their tentative conclusions run along the lines that a common cause (parenting) could influence both texting and risky behaviors in a parallel manner.
Distribution is only one of many rights reserved by copyright, and again this has been true since the beginning.
The fact that it has become easier for "just anybody" to commit certain offenses does not mean that somehow they were originally meant to magically be exempt from the law if they did commit those offenses, which is what is implied by the idea that the laws "weren't meant to target" them.
Uh, yeah. Copyright historically has been a civil matter even for commercial infringement (and by all rights it still should be, but that's neither here nor there). That is in no way conflicting with what I said.
I'm not ignorant; you're an asshat.
Ok... what I'm not seeing is why both sides would be motivated to settle after a ruling had been reached in the (2nd) trial. Why at that phase were there settlement talks; and if such talks broke down, why didn't the RIAA just say "fine, no settlement, pay the judgement".
Given the judge reduced the award, maybe that's the wrong question. Maybe the right question is, even if the RIAA thought "we can win a higher award again if we get a new trial", and even if Thompson thought "maybe this time I'll win or at least get a lower award"... why didn't the court just say "screw you both, this was the ruling, we're moving on down the docket"?
Yeah, I think we all get that.
What I can't figure out from TFA is - where the hell did the 3rd trial come from?
The second trial occured because the judge ruled that he'd erred. That makes sense. Now where did the 3rd one come from? TFA says that she asked for either a reduction in damages or another trial; she got a reduction in damages... so why wasn't that the end of it?
Copyrights were never really meant to target individual citizens? Says who? I don't see any support for that claim in the Constitutional basis for copyright law; or in the first copyright act; or in any other subsequent copyright act that I've read...
In fact every copyright act I've read is explicitly not merely a regulation on business, as they specifically assign liability for infringement even if it isn't commercial in nature.
Perhaps you're mistaking how you'd like to see copyright used as somehow representing what it was "meant" to be used for?
Yes, I've heard the term "selection bias"; apparently one of us knows what it means, and you aren't the one.
I'm not "selecting" the cases I'm looking at. I'm looking at every case that has impacted me in any way, and suggesting that everyone else in the discussion do the same.
If that's a biased selection, then what you're really saying is "yes, class actions that affect people are crap, but that's not a fair sample" (apparently meaning that we have to include all the cases that don't affect anyone).
When I asked you for your view of what class action is, you responded in a way typical of those defending bad law: you gave me a technical description of the intent of the law, without reference to the reality of what the law does in practice. Laws and legal practices are not judged by their intent; they are judged by their effects.
You want your argument to matter, tie it to reality. So far all you've said is that we should ignore the fact that in most people's lives class action suits are nothing but an abuse, because in theory the law allows them to be used for other things.
"With several outstanding class action privacy suits against Facebook and Zynga, it is interesting to see Google set this precedent"
That is, of course, unless you know the first thing about the law. In that case, you are aware that one defendent deciding to settle doesn't set a precedent at all for other defendents in separate lawsuits (even if the nature of those suits is similar).
Between that, my lack of interest in suing Google over this matter, and my general antipathy toward class actions in practice, I find this terribly uninteresting.
"slashdot's consensus about what class action cases are is really, really off-base."
Really? So you claim you've done a handful of more-legitimate class actions, and you think that overturns the common view of what class-action cases "are"?
Tell you what: enlighten us. What are class actions? Then we can all dig through our records for records of class action settlements that affected us, and see what percentage conform to your description vs. the /. concensus. I can already tell you which one covers 100% of cases that have affected me.
Nonsense. A settlement cannot bar one party from suing another for future misdeeds.
There's a big difference between software that one company is using in-house, vs. software that a company is selling for others to use. Preserving trade secret protection on, say, the GIF encoding algorithms would've been pretty much impossible.
HFT is already pretty exclusionary, so I'm not sure that's the real issue.
Also, barring a screw-up at the PTO, you'd have to actually be ahead of the curve on HFT techniques and would only get a monopoly on those advances - not on anything necessary to doing HFT today.
And given the short expected lifetime of an HFT algorithm (particularly if one is optimistic enough to hope that the practice might become illegal in the near future) I'm not sure you'd want to invest in a patent, whereas protecting a trade secret is actually made easier if the time horizon is short.
I keep hearing that "anyone" can do this. Please point me to where I can sign up to collocate my server with the market computers - because that is actually necessary to set up an effective HFT system.
The ability of an elite few to buy access to information about the value of an item, when that information is unavailable to others with whom they will buy and sell that item, is a violation of free market premises.
Much of what the SEC regulations do is to produce a free market. This is what many political pundits fail to understand - the "free" in free market does not mean "unregulated". The best regulatory approach in the world would never create a 100% ideal free market - money will always be able to buy research - but there's a difference between "not being able to produce a perfectly flat playing field" vs. "allowing people to artificially create an information assymetry, with the express purpose of taking profits from those on the other side of the field, with an insanely high barrier to entry for those who want to join you". HFT is the latter.
HFT is a practice that should be regulated out of existence.
Why the person she's conversing with is invisible? Quick top 3 possibilities:
1) She's talking to herself
2) The person is behind her or otherwise out of view
3) She, and all the extras, are just wandering around chattering to produce the illusion of a background crowd, and it happens she moved into a position where the illusion breaks down if you focus on her
Some were, some weren't. Among those that were, sometimes the mouthpiece was built into the base of the phone, so you might or might not use your other hand.
Maybe it's not a cell phone as we know it. Maybe it allows communication through time. Maybe it isn't about time travel at all, but was an alien communicating with the mother ship.
Or maybe the story is bs, and either the video was manipulated, you're not seeing what you think you see, or the guy was immitating "talking on a phone" with a small, boxy object that happened to be in reach (either for reasons you'd have to be in his converation to know, or because he's nuts). For that matter, maybe he was holding something cold to a bruise on the side of his head while takling to the person next to him.
Even for Idle this is silly.
How do you know? Maybe without his involvement the Depression would've played out differently. Maybe he set events in motion that changed the outcome of WWII so that the Allies would win. Could've changed anything or everything; it's not like any of us would "remember" how it was "supposed to be".
Actually, if he was so open about using anachronistic technology that he got caught on film on a movie set, I'd say he did a pretty piss poor job with the whole 'leaving no trace' thing.
Web site access controls are not the same thing as DRM. For a web site to use DRM, it would need your browser's cooperation to control what you do with the content once you have access to it. A web site could use either, both, or neither. Traditionally you would expect /. to complain if a web site does use DRM; but it is not inconsistent for /. to complain if a web site expects to be paid when not using access controls.
(Under current law the web site may prevail, but that's a different issue.)
Some differences to think about between DRM and access controls:
1) DRM doesn't work. Access controls do, and in fact other news sites use them with considerable success. Yes, many of us avoid those sites in favor of free information sources when they are available; but that's a flaw with using access controls foolishly, not a flaw with the concept of access controls.
2) DRM often prevents you from doing things you should be allowed to do; it's hard to argue that about access controls.
3) Access controls can keep you from inadvertantly breaking rules; DRM rarely serves that purpose. This pertains to the current story, because if I write a deep link into these jerks' content, and you follow that link, it's your IP that's going to show up in their logs.
There are a lot of misconceptions about what's required for a contract; other posters have spelled out some of that.
However, the way this agreement is presented doesn't offer an opportunity to negotiate, so it could be a contract of adhesion (which would not be enforcable).
But then again, they're probably not resting on contract law; they're probably claiming that the agreement sets the terms of a license under copyright, and I don't need much of anything to hold you to a license under copyright. If you say "but I didn't agree", then I say "exactly, so you had no license; and yet you copied the materials illegally".
The problem IMO is that the law doesn't set intuitive standards for the licensing of materials published on the web. If I got to write the law, publishing material on the web without access controls would constitute a blanket license to view (but not necessarily save or print) said material to the extent the person publishing the material has the right or authorization to publish it. (Saving/printing wouldn't be authorized, but would probably fall under fair use.) This is the common expectation about the web today, but I'm not aware of any legal recognition of it, and unscrupulous sites could try to take advantage of that.
But then IANAL.
I have no real opinion on the "Internet kill switch" issue, but this kind of nonsense argument just can't go unchallenged, so...
Hey, you know, I bet you'd get a low rate of agreement on this one too:
"Do you support the president having the authority to launch nuclear missiles in response to unfavorable comments by foreign leaders?"
Oh, but both my question and yours are loaded with misleading and biasing rationales for granting the president authority, aren't they?
Could the President abuse "kill switch" authority? Sure, just like the president can abuse many of the powers he has. If he does, he should be punished accordingly; but that it could happen is not an automatic reason to avoid giving him authority. That is the nature of a position of trust.
And while I'm guessing you'll retort that you think the potential abuses really are the reason the government wants this authority, I highly doubt it. It's not very useful. Casual use of this power would lack plausible deniability and on a political scale would be right up there with nuking a political opponent.