Considering how little that has to do with the conversation, I can only assume you saw a bit of knowledge you think is obscure on the History Channel and just couldn't wait for an excuse to share it. (And BTW, it's not that obscure.)
Public roads, maintained by state and local governments, predate the Interstate system by many, many years. I specifically didn't base my argument on, or even mention, the Interstate system (which, by the way, would be Federal involvement in transportation, not state or local) because I figured someone would try to claim it's uniquely justified by military needs.
Reality check. The government has been involved in transportation for as long as there have been public roads.
I don't know the details of this program. I have definite preferences for how I'd like to see something like this structured, and depending on the details I might or might not support it.
But to claim its a new expansion of government power just doesn't make sense. State and local governments in major cities always have their hands in public transportation in one way or another; it's true for bus, light rail, subway, etc.; so what's so special about bikes?
Besides that, it would be quite a jump to extrapolate from "any old minor expansion of the government's function" to "restriction of personal liberties" and "population control". Can you propose a theory as to how this program contributes, even as a "tip of the wedge", to the surrendering of personal liberty to the government?
I'm surprised the Connecticut laws woudln't apply to face-to-face conversations; most states' intercept laws apply equally to any conversation.
In any case, this ruling doesn't really change anything. The court's finding is taken almost verbatim from the statute, so it's pretty much nonsense that a federal lawsuit - much less a federal appeal - was ever filed in the first place.
This is not a case where federal law can be used to "trump" state law. If the U.S. Congress passed a law that said "it is legal to record any conversation to which you are a party", then that might trump state all-party consent laws; but the current statute doesn't say that. It only says that recording a conversation to which you're a party isn't a violation of that specific title of the federal statutes. This is not in direct conflict with a state law of which such a recording is a violation.
I believe there are 12 all-party consent states, and some of them claim jurisdiction even for interstate phone calls if one party is in their state. Given the reality of modern telecommunication (cell phones), this ought to be unified under federal statute IMO, and I'd be quite happy to see a universal 1-party consent system.
...but I'm going to go ahead and argue that they are not "performing supercomputing on a phone", because that kind of marketing doesn't belong in research.
Yes, it could be very useful; I have no doubt it's just as useful as they claim. And yes, it allows someone in practice to solve a problem "in the field" with a phone, when otherwise a supercomputer might have to be used.
But the supercomputing was done on a supercomputer in advance, when the reduced model was calculated. Its just that instead of giving one specific answer for one specific input, the supercomputer is returning an algorithm that will approximate the answer within known error bounds for a specified domain of inputs. Executing the algorithm isn't supercomputing (if it were, you couldn't do it in a few seconds on a phone); it's using the fruits of the earlier supercomputing that produced the algorithm.
And by the same argument, a lead weight is indistinguishable from a light ray, because it's all just energy.
The fact that a key is bits and an (implementation of an) algorithm is bits does not mean that the two are indistinguishable from a security perspective when treated as a secret. I could start by quibbling about the size of the secret, but the more fundamental issue is how widely applicable is the secret (or, somewhat equivalently, how widely distributed is evidence of the secret).
In short, you're conflating the ideas of "secret" and "obscure". Perhaps everything obscure is kept secret, but not everything kept secret can be described as "obscure". Something is obscure if it is widely applicable but not widely known.
In PGP encryption, the algorithms apply universally to every message to and from every user of the system. The fingerprints of the algorithm are on every computer capable of sending and receiving such messages. Trying to keep such a widely-applicable thing secret would be reliance on security through obscurity.
My private key, though, is totally unavailable to almost everyone. The most direct point is, if I start using a new key tomorrow, I can safely say that Evil Hackers, Inc. hasn't spent decades of effort making progress towards knowing what that key is - and even if they crack it, that only compromises the messages I sent using that key, not the entire system, because that particular key is applicable to nothing else.
The lock on my door at home requires a key, and you don't know the corret shape; but if you do a little research, you do have a good guess at the basic mechanics of the lock. To the extent that such knowledge leads to insights about how to defeat my (or anyone's) lock, the design is weak. The fact that having my key in hand would give you access to my house is unrelated to that fact.
I suspect the variable you're leaving out is, in a binary computer context "floating point math" usually means IEEE floating point, which is a very different animal than the abstract concept that comes to mind when you say "floating point math". Even when it doesn't mean IEEE floating point, every binary floating point implementation is a compromise with some combination of limited performance, limited range, and limited precision.
Consdier that IEEE floating point has no exact representation of numbers like 0.1; this may not matter if its the final answer, because you're likely to limit the significant figures diaplayed sufficiently that the computer will appear to have reached exactly the right answer; but if that value is a variable in the middle of a long, complex chain of calculations, errors may accumulate and you may not be so happy with the result.
For some problems, analog computers are and always have been better at performing the required calculations. That, in and of itself, is nothing new.
If you mean to say that wikileaks's mission is not aligned with the core political principles of the Pirate Party, you might have a point; I don't know their overall platform well enough to say.
But to claim that wikileaks is, or ever could be, anything other than a political issue just strikes me as silly.
I started out wanting to point out the internal contradiction in the perspective presented by the summary (who seems to support Foursquare, yet describes the very-similar service provided by Facebook in negative-sounding terms). Then I considered a general rant on what I think of Foursquare as a service in the first place; but I decided this might be an opportunity to address a broader question:
The majority around here seem to believe software should be outside the scope of patents. Even if we allow for software patents, I'm not sure what about Foursquare you would patent - but there might be something. If you exclude patents, there is nothing of value you could protect as intellectual property - i.e. nothing stoppnig a big player in the "social networking" space, such as Facebook, from doing exactly this to any new company that provides a unique service somehow related to social networking. You can copyright the code (though as I've posted before I think that's a bad retrofit of copyright law), but I don't need your code to implement a service. You can trademark various things, but I don't need them either.
So the submitter seems to think the innovation at Foursquare should be worth something, and that FB shouldn't get to swoop in and eat their lunch. Is it? If so, how should that be enforced?
Seriously, folks, mentioning 1984 in response to every bad idea is not mandatory.
Never out of hearing of marketing? So just because the FM chip is there, you're incapable of leaving the receiver turned off?
Also, if there's nowhere you ever go without your cell phone, you're probably already so buried in marketing that this would make no difference at all in that regard, even if you did always have the FM receiver turned on.
It's a bad idea because it reduces the range of possible products available, drives up costs throughout the chain from manufacturer to consumer, and reduces consumer choice in spite of industry rhetoric to the contrary. It ignores the fact that the market could already have this if it were wanted. In short, it's a bad deal commercially.
Why you feel the need to imagine grand social woes to go along with that is beyond me.
Trademarks aren't enforced on a word-by-word basis. The issue would be the similarity of the logo as a whole.
The trademark claim may be invalid since the priest is not selling electronics or technical support, and presumably isn't using it in a commercial context at all. On the other hand, I'm not sure you could rule out a claim of dillution.
I'm not a user or developer of Android apps, so this is just my assumption, but... The question is, how should it be known what permissions to request?
In a desktop or server setting, typically the permission is requested when it is needed; but in cases where the user will be asked if the request is ok, is that really a good idea? If you're half-way through doing something cool with your new app, and get a message that the app wants permission to do such-and-such, don't you have an unbalanced incentive to say yes (since the cool thing you're doing will otherwise be stopped cold)? For that matter, if you have an app that's going to ask for inappropriate permissions, isn't that a red flag you'd like to see before the app has gotten the chance to do anything at all?
It makes sense to me that the user should get any "will you let the app do X, Y, and Z" type messages at install time; or at the very latest when the app launches for the first time. But you can't know at that point everything the app is going to try to do; so instead you make the app tell you everything it might want permission to do (and if it tries to do anything else, it can't).
If that is the environment, it doesn't seem odd at all. If you declare that you might do X, even if you never actually do X, then of course the user is asked if it's ok for you to do X - because the only knowledge on which the decision to ask can be based is whether you said you might do X.
Solution: if you never do anything, don't declare that you might do anything.
If it seems easy to avoid debris, then I suggest you think through the problem again.
First, in orbit you can't move freely. Most of your movement is governed by gravity. Every time you want to deviate from that path, you must spend fuel. You only have so much fuel, you must reserve enough to get home, and you must ensure at the end of each burn that you're still in orbit. You can't just carry more fuel, because fuel takes up launch weight.
The debris is, of course, also moving in an orbit governed by gravity; but it's not following a mission plan. When you just don't care, a lot of different orbits can intersect the same point at the same time with very different velocities.
And, you aren't just "passing through" the debris field. You have to avoid debris for the duration of your time in orbit. If you could project the orbits of all the debris for the duration of your mission, you'd still have to account for a lot of variables (including launch and landing windows) to pick out an orbit suitable for your mission that will be debris-free.
Even for relatively short missions, you can't do that perfectly; and then there are long missions (like satelites and space stations) that are essentially sitting ducks. So to an extent you leave it up to chance; and you think "well, 19,000 pieces of debris in all of the orbital space doesn't sound so bad", but with every minute you spend in orbit the odds that you eventually have an incident increase mercilessly.
If you do notice that you're in the path of a piece of debris, can you dodge it? Depends what you're driving, but I'm pretty sure it's been done. Now, what if you don't see it coming (e.g. because it isn't a piece of debris we're tracking)?
Many good points, but wrong (at least in MO) on this count: "or if you really weren't the one driving your vehicle"
When camera-enforcement is installed, the authorities are almost always interested in not having to prove who is the driver. Hence, camera-enforced tickets are typically categorized as non-moving violations. Yes, I know the obvious semantic problem with this; go ahead and argue that with the judge if you want to annoy him or her.
The thing about a non-moving violation is, it doesn't matter who was driving. It doesn't even matter whether anyone was driving; non-moving violations are typically things like parking tickets. The ticket is issued against the vehicle, and the owner pays. Your kid takes the car out, and lets his buddy drive, and his buddy runs a camera-enforced red light? You will receive and be liable for the ticket.
I decided to thumb through the statute in hopes of proving you wrong... and found that you are actually correct, except perhaps in one regard.
You say it's unclear whether you can legally distribute tools to help others with circumvention; but actually, if I understand the structure of the statute correctly, it looks to me like Title 17, Chapter 12, sec 1201 subsec (a) par (1) subpar (E) makes it clear that it is still illegal to distribute such tools. From the statute:
(E) Neither the exception under subparagraph (B) from the applicability of the prohibition contained in subparagraph (A), nor any determination made in a rulemaking conducted under subparagraph (C), may be used as a defense in any action to enforce any provision of this title other than this paragraph.
Subparagraphs (B) and (C) describe the 3-year exemptions in question. "This paragraph" should mean 1201 (a) (10; it includes the direct prohibition on circumvention, but a separate paragraph talks about distribution of circumvention tools.
First, there isn't an inherant conflict in the law between fair use and anti-circumvention. Even before the DMCA, fair use only meant "it isn't infringement to do X, Y, and Z"; it never meant that content providers were required to make it easy for you to do X, Y, and Z, nor that other provisions of law couldn't make it harder to do X, Y, and Z. Anti-circumvention under the DMCA makes it harder to do X, Y, and Z; but that doesn't conflict in a legal sense with X, Y, and Z not being copyright infringement.
Second, while it would be legitimate for the courts to resolve conflicts in the statutes, they still are supposed to do so in a way that doesn't render either of the conflicting clauses moot. Basically, they are interpreting; they get to figure out what they think Congress meant, but one of the rules is that they have to assume Congress meant something in every instance.
Yeah, I remember reading about that ruling. I remember my first thought being "ok, if that's applied universally then what does the anti-circumvention clause actually mean?" So far I haven't been able to find a solid answer to that question, so I wouldn't be surprised to see that particular ruilng overturned sooner or later. I don't know how it is in the lower courts, but the Supreme Court isn't supposed to allow an interpretation that renders part of the statute meaningless.
Don't get me wrong, I'd like to see anti-circumvention struck down entirely; but barring a constitutional problem that would have to come from the legislature, not the courts.
Yeah, this isn't about the deaf being able to hear music.
This is about every citizen having equal access to government, for example.
If you don't know the difference, then I think I've figured out what your particular disability is.
Your insinuation that everyone gets their "fair share" of harship and that this is no different for, say, a blind person than anyone else... yeah, that's nothing short of laughable.
Now it woudl be easy to assume that you have no physical disability based on your comment. Alternately its possible that you have some (most likely minor) issue that your extremely proud of overcoming "on your own", in which case I guarantee there are ways you haven't even thought of that your daily life is affected. Either way, I'm willing to bet you have at least pretty good use of your eyes, ears, and arms.
So try this: if I'm right that you have use of your eyes, go through one day wearing a blindfold. All day. No peaking, for any reason. Now imagine doing that every day of your life.
If you don't have use of your eyes, then instead try going through a day having immobilized your writing-hand arm in a sling. Again, no use of that arm for any reason.
Then we can haev a conversation about your "fair share" of hardship.
The most common form of colorblindness is inability to distinguish red from green. Most other forms of colorblindness likewise involve specific pairs of colors being indistinguishable. From your comment it sounds like you see only shades of grey; that would be an extremely rare condition and is far from what is typically meant by the word "colorblind".
Yes, but even that blinking red on green text was conveyed to your browser in a format easy for a screen-reader to pick up. Today I've seen companies in the healthcare industry (i.e. who should expect to deal with a lot of older people with deteriorating vision) use white-on-light-blue raster images to display text. (No, they didn't use alt tags. Yes, it would be retarded even if they had.)
More likely there will be a wave of tools to facilitate making two versions of a web site and maintaining them in parallel. The marketing drones aren't likely to release their stranglehold on the web and let its original concept breath any time soon.
Do I correctly understand that you're claiming 1st Ammendment "freedom of the press" should stand to overturn any state wiretap law as applied to someone acting in the capacity of "the press"?
If you do take that position, I assume the same would apply to single-party consent rules (if not, why not?); so is it ok for someone "acting as the press" to tap your phone without your knowledge and record your conversations with others?
The point is, where does it end? "Freedom of the press" doesn't mean "freedom of anyone who calls himself 'the press' to do whatever he wants". If you want to stand the 1st Ammendment up against wiretap laws, I suggest starting wtih a little detailed research into what this "freedom of the press" that can't be infringed really is.
Hmm... so by posting a ilnk to a single instance of a medical device on which testing was not sufficient, the point to which you're drawing attention is that no bug has ever escaped the scrutiny that goes with an open source philosophy?
No significant system can be guaranteed bug free, regardless of the number of eyes on the source code. There are defined standards for safety of medical equipment. Would the overall safety be greater if you added "many eyeballs" to the testing already required? Maybe, maybe not; but - to GP's point - it's not a compelling argument. If it were a compelling argument, the safety standards would be tighter.
I've noticed quite often of late, that the only people using the phrase "by that logic" are people busily engaged in twisting anothers' words to try to "prove" a nonsense point.
Just because a lot of people do something does not necessarily mean that you cannot reasonably expect them not to. People expose themselves at St. Louis Mardis Gras all the time; yet it's still technically indecent exposure and (depending on the authorities' mood any given year) there are usually a few arrests.
I'm not familiar enough with the wording of appilcable laws to know why they would, or wouldn't, apply to an Internet chat session. If they would, beware: in the U.S. indecent exposure can land you on the sex offender registry.
You're conflating "data that contains some noise" with "data that isn't valuable".
I'm also not sure there'll be that much noise, really. I don't know about you, but when I read I usually put my mouse where I'm sure it will be out of the way while I scroll around. For me, usually that's whitespace in the left margin. Even if I cast the cursor aside randomly, what are the odds it lands on an ad-sensitive link?
Slashdot Mirror
Considering how little that has to do with the conversation, I can only assume you saw a bit of knowledge you think is obscure on the History Channel and just couldn't wait for an excuse to share it. (And BTW, it's not that obscure.)
Public roads, maintained by state and local governments, predate the Interstate system by many, many years. I specifically didn't base my argument on, or even mention, the Interstate system (which, by the way, would be Federal involvement in transportation, not state or local) because I figured someone would try to claim it's uniquely justified by military needs.
Reality check. The government has been involved in transportation for as long as there have been public roads.
I don't know the details of this program. I have definite preferences for how I'd like to see something like this structured, and depending on the details I might or might not support it.
But to claim its a new expansion of government power just doesn't make sense. State and local governments in major cities always have their hands in public transportation in one way or another; it's true for bus, light rail, subway, etc.; so what's so special about bikes?
Besides that, it would be quite a jump to extrapolate from "any old minor expansion of the government's function" to "restriction of personal liberties" and "population control". Can you propose a theory as to how this program contributes, even as a "tip of the wedge", to the surrendering of personal liberty to the government?
I'm surprised the Connecticut laws woudln't apply to face-to-face conversations; most states' intercept laws apply equally to any conversation.
In any case, this ruling doesn't really change anything. The court's finding is taken almost verbatim from the statute, so it's pretty much nonsense that a federal lawsuit - much less a federal appeal - was ever filed in the first place.
This is not a case where federal law can be used to "trump" state law. If the U.S. Congress passed a law that said "it is legal to record any conversation to which you are a party", then that might trump state all-party consent laws; but the current statute doesn't say that. It only says that recording a conversation to which you're a party isn't a violation of that specific title of the federal statutes. This is not in direct conflict with a state law of which such a recording is a violation.
I believe there are 12 all-party consent states, and some of them claim jurisdiction even for interstate phone calls if one party is in their state. Given the reality of modern telecommunication (cell phones), this ought to be unified under federal statute IMO, and I'd be quite happy to see a universal 1-party consent system.
...but I'm going to go ahead and argue that they are not "performing supercomputing on a phone", because that kind of marketing doesn't belong in research.
Yes, it could be very useful; I have no doubt it's just as useful as they claim. And yes, it allows someone in practice to solve a problem "in the field" with a phone, when otherwise a supercomputer might have to be used.
But the supercomputing was done on a supercomputer in advance, when the reduced model was calculated. Its just that instead of giving one specific answer for one specific input, the supercomputer is returning an algorithm that will approximate the answer within known error bounds for a specified domain of inputs. Executing the algorithm isn't supercomputing (if it were, you couldn't do it in a few seconds on a phone); it's using the fruits of the earlier supercomputing that produced the algorithm.
And by the same argument, a lead weight is indistinguishable from a light ray, because it's all just energy.
The fact that a key is bits and an (implementation of an) algorithm is bits does not mean that the two are indistinguishable from a security perspective when treated as a secret. I could start by quibbling about the size of the secret, but the more fundamental issue is how widely applicable is the secret (or, somewhat equivalently, how widely distributed is evidence of the secret).
In short, you're conflating the ideas of "secret" and "obscure". Perhaps everything obscure is kept secret, but not everything kept secret can be described as "obscure". Something is obscure if it is widely applicable but not widely known.
In PGP encryption, the algorithms apply universally to every message to and from every user of the system. The fingerprints of the algorithm are on every computer capable of sending and receiving such messages. Trying to keep such a widely-applicable thing secret would be reliance on security through obscurity.
My private key, though, is totally unavailable to almost everyone. The most direct point is, if I start using a new key tomorrow, I can safely say that Evil Hackers, Inc. hasn't spent decades of effort making progress towards knowing what that key is - and even if they crack it, that only compromises the messages I sent using that key, not the entire system, because that particular key is applicable to nothing else.
The lock on my door at home requires a key, and you don't know the corret shape; but if you do a little research, you do have a good guess at the basic mechanics of the lock. To the extent that such knowledge leads to insights about how to defeat my (or anyone's) lock, the design is weak. The fact that having my key in hand would give you access to my house is unrelated to that fact.
I suspect the variable you're leaving out is, in a binary computer context "floating point math" usually means IEEE floating point, which is a very different animal than the abstract concept that comes to mind when you say "floating point math". Even when it doesn't mean IEEE floating point, every binary floating point implementation is a compromise with some combination of limited performance, limited range, and limited precision.
Consdier that IEEE floating point has no exact representation of numbers like 0.1; this may not matter if its the final answer, because you're likely to limit the significant figures diaplayed sufficiently that the computer will appear to have reached exactly the right answer; but if that value is a variable in the middle of a long, complex chain of calculations, errors may accumulate and you may not be so happy with the result.
For some problems, analog computers are and always have been better at performing the required calculations. That, in and of itself, is nothing new.
If you mean to say that wikileaks's mission is not aligned with the core political principles of the Pirate Party, you might have a point; I don't know their overall platform well enough to say.
But to claim that wikileaks is, or ever could be, anything other than a political issue just strikes me as silly.
I started out wanting to point out the internal contradiction in the perspective presented by the summary (who seems to support Foursquare, yet describes the very-similar service provided by Facebook in negative-sounding terms). Then I considered a general rant on what I think of Foursquare as a service in the first place; but I decided this might be an opportunity to address a broader question:
The majority around here seem to believe software should be outside the scope of patents. Even if we allow for software patents, I'm not sure what about Foursquare you would patent - but there might be something. If you exclude patents, there is nothing of value you could protect as intellectual property - i.e. nothing stoppnig a big player in the "social networking" space, such as Facebook, from doing exactly this to any new company that provides a unique service somehow related to social networking. You can copyright the code (though as I've posted before I think that's a bad retrofit of copyright law), but I don't need your code to implement a service. You can trademark various things, but I don't need them either.
So the submitter seems to think the innovation at Foursquare should be worth something, and that FB shouldn't get to swoop in and eat their lunch. Is it? If so, how should that be enforced?
Seriously, folks, mentioning 1984 in response to every bad idea is not mandatory.
Never out of hearing of marketing? So just because the FM chip is there, you're incapable of leaving the receiver turned off?
Also, if there's nowhere you ever go without your cell phone, you're probably already so buried in marketing that this would make no difference at all in that regard, even if you did always have the FM receiver turned on.
It's a bad idea because it reduces the range of possible products available, drives up costs throughout the chain from manufacturer to consumer, and reduces consumer choice in spite of industry rhetoric to the contrary. It ignores the fact that the market could already have this if it were wanted. In short, it's a bad deal commercially.
Why you feel the need to imagine grand social woes to go along with that is beyond me.
Trademarks aren't enforced on a word-by-word basis. The issue would be the similarity of the logo as a whole.
The trademark claim may be invalid since the priest is not selling electronics or technical support, and presumably isn't using it in a commercial context at all. On the other hand, I'm not sure you could rule out a claim of dillution.
I'm not a user or developer of Android apps, so this is just my assumption, but... The question is, how should it be known what permissions to request?
In a desktop or server setting, typically the permission is requested when it is needed; but in cases where the user will be asked if the request is ok, is that really a good idea? If you're half-way through doing something cool with your new app, and get a message that the app wants permission to do such-and-such, don't you have an unbalanced incentive to say yes (since the cool thing you're doing will otherwise be stopped cold)? For that matter, if you have an app that's going to ask for inappropriate permissions, isn't that a red flag you'd like to see before the app has gotten the chance to do anything at all?
It makes sense to me that the user should get any "will you let the app do X, Y, and Z" type messages at install time; or at the very latest when the app launches for the first time. But you can't know at that point everything the app is going to try to do; so instead you make the app tell you everything it might want permission to do (and if it tries to do anything else, it can't).
If that is the environment, it doesn't seem odd at all. If you declare that you might do X, even if you never actually do X, then of course the user is asked if it's ok for you to do X - because the only knowledge on which the decision to ask can be based is whether you said you might do X.
Solution: if you never do anything, don't declare that you might do anything.
If it seems easy to avoid debris, then I suggest you think through the problem again.
First, in orbit you can't move freely. Most of your movement is governed by gravity. Every time you want to deviate from that path, you must spend fuel. You only have so much fuel, you must reserve enough to get home, and you must ensure at the end of each burn that you're still in orbit. You can't just carry more fuel, because fuel takes up launch weight.
The debris is, of course, also moving in an orbit governed by gravity; but it's not following a mission plan. When you just don't care, a lot of different orbits can intersect the same point at the same time with very different velocities.
And, you aren't just "passing through" the debris field. You have to avoid debris for the duration of your time in orbit. If you could project the orbits of all the debris for the duration of your mission, you'd still have to account for a lot of variables (including launch and landing windows) to pick out an orbit suitable for your mission that will be debris-free.
Even for relatively short missions, you can't do that perfectly; and then there are long missions (like satelites and space stations) that are essentially sitting ducks. So to an extent you leave it up to chance; and you think "well, 19,000 pieces of debris in all of the orbital space doesn't sound so bad", but with every minute you spend in orbit the odds that you eventually have an incident increase mercilessly.
If you do notice that you're in the path of a piece of debris, can you dodge it? Depends what you're driving, but I'm pretty sure it's been done. Now, what if you don't see it coming (e.g. because it isn't a piece of debris we're tracking)?
Yes, it is really a problem.
Many good points, but wrong (at least in MO) on this count: "or if you really weren't the one driving your vehicle"
When camera-enforcement is installed, the authorities are almost always interested in not having to prove who is the driver. Hence, camera-enforced tickets are typically categorized as non-moving violations. Yes, I know the obvious semantic problem with this; go ahead and argue that with the judge if you want to annoy him or her.
The thing about a non-moving violation is, it doesn't matter who was driving. It doesn't even matter whether anyone was driving; non-moving violations are typically things like parking tickets. The ticket is issued against the vehicle, and the owner pays. Your kid takes the car out, and lets his buddy drive, and his buddy runs a camera-enforced red light? You will receive and be liable for the ticket.
I decided to thumb through the statute in hopes of proving you wrong... and found that you are actually correct, except perhaps in one regard.
You say it's unclear whether you can legally distribute tools to help others with circumvention; but actually, if I understand the structure of the statute correctly, it looks to me like Title 17, Chapter 12, sec 1201 subsec (a) par (1) subpar (E) makes it clear that it is still illegal to distribute such tools. From the statute:
(E) Neither the exception under subparagraph (B) from the applicability of the prohibition contained in subparagraph (A), nor any determination made in a rulemaking conducted under subparagraph (C), may be used as a defense in any action to enforce any provision of this title other than this paragraph.
Subparagraphs (B) and (C) describe the 3-year exemptions in question. "This paragraph" should mean 1201 (a) (10; it includes the direct prohibition on circumvention, but a separate paragraph talks about distribution of circumvention tools.
Two things:
First, there isn't an inherant conflict in the law between fair use and anti-circumvention. Even before the DMCA, fair use only meant "it isn't infringement to do X, Y, and Z"; it never meant that content providers were required to make it easy for you to do X, Y, and Z, nor that other provisions of law couldn't make it harder to do X, Y, and Z. Anti-circumvention under the DMCA makes it harder to do X, Y, and Z; but that doesn't conflict in a legal sense with X, Y, and Z not being copyright infringement.
Second, while it would be legitimate for the courts to resolve conflicts in the statutes, they still are supposed to do so in a way that doesn't render either of the conflicting clauses moot. Basically, they are interpreting; they get to figure out what they think Congress meant, but one of the rules is that they have to assume Congress meant something in every instance.
Yeah, I remember reading about that ruling. I remember my first thought being "ok, if that's applied universally then what does the anti-circumvention clause actually mean?" So far I haven't been able to find a solid answer to that question, so I wouldn't be surprised to see that particular ruilng overturned sooner or later. I don't know how it is in the lower courts, but the Supreme Court isn't supposed to allow an interpretation that renders part of the statute meaningless.
Don't get me wrong, I'd like to see anti-circumvention struck down entirely; but barring a constitutional problem that would have to come from the legislature, not the courts.
Yeah, this isn't about the deaf being able to hear music.
This is about every citizen having equal access to government, for example.
If you don't know the difference, then I think I've figured out what your particular disability is.
Your insinuation that everyone gets their "fair share" of harship and that this is no different for, say, a blind person than anyone else... yeah, that's nothing short of laughable.
Now it woudl be easy to assume that you have no physical disability based on your comment. Alternately its possible that you have some (most likely minor) issue that your extremely proud of overcoming "on your own", in which case I guarantee there are ways you haven't even thought of that your daily life is affected. Either way, I'm willing to bet you have at least pretty good use of your eyes, ears, and arms.
So try this: if I'm right that you have use of your eyes, go through one day wearing a blindfold. All day. No peaking, for any reason. Now imagine doing that every day of your life.
If you don't have use of your eyes, then instead try going through a day having immobilized your writing-hand arm in a sling. Again, no use of that arm for any reason.
Then we can haev a conversation about your "fair share" of hardship.
The most common form of colorblindness is inability to distinguish red from green. Most other forms of colorblindness likewise involve specific pairs of colors being indistinguishable. From your comment it sounds like you see only shades of grey; that would be an extremely rare condition and is far from what is typically meant by the word "colorblind".
Yes, but even that blinking red on green text was conveyed to your browser in a format easy for a screen-reader to pick up. Today I've seen companies in the healthcare industry (i.e. who should expect to deal with a lot of older people with deteriorating vision) use white-on-light-blue raster images to display text. (No, they didn't use alt tags. Yes, it would be retarded even if they had.)
More likely there will be a wave of tools to facilitate making two versions of a web site and maintaining them in parallel. The marketing drones aren't likely to release their stranglehold on the web and let its original concept breath any time soon.
Yeah, right. Next you'll tell us that Windows 7 was your idea.
Do I correctly understand that you're claiming 1st Ammendment "freedom of the press" should stand to overturn any state wiretap law as applied to someone acting in the capacity of "the press"?
If you do take that position, I assume the same would apply to single-party consent rules (if not, why not?); so is it ok for someone "acting as the press" to tap your phone without your knowledge and record your conversations with others?
The point is, where does it end? "Freedom of the press" doesn't mean "freedom of anyone who calls himself 'the press' to do whatever he wants". If you want to stand the 1st Ammendment up against wiretap laws, I suggest starting wtih a little detailed research into what this "freedom of the press" that can't be infringed really is.
Hmm... so by posting a ilnk to a single instance of a medical device on which testing was not sufficient, the point to which you're drawing attention is that no bug has ever escaped the scrutiny that goes with an open source philosophy?
No significant system can be guaranteed bug free, regardless of the number of eyes on the source code. There are defined standards for safety of medical equipment. Would the overall safety be greater if you added "many eyeballs" to the testing already required? Maybe, maybe not; but - to GP's point - it's not a compelling argument. If it were a compelling argument, the safety standards would be tighter.
I've noticed quite often of late, that the only people using the phrase "by that logic" are people busily engaged in twisting anothers' words to try to "prove" a nonsense point.
Just because a lot of people do something does not necessarily mean that you cannot reasonably expect them not to. People expose themselves at St. Louis Mardis Gras all the time; yet it's still technically indecent exposure and (depending on the authorities' mood any given year) there are usually a few arrests.
I'm not familiar enough with the wording of appilcable laws to know why they would, or wouldn't, apply to an Internet chat session. If they would, beware: in the U.S. indecent exposure can land you on the sex offender registry.
You're conflating "data that contains some noise" with "data that isn't valuable".
I'm also not sure there'll be that much noise, really. I don't know about you, but when I read I usually put my mouse where I'm sure it will be out of the way while I scroll around. For me, usually that's whitespace in the left margin. Even if I cast the cursor aside randomly, what are the odds it lands on an ad-sensitive link?