Well, actually there is the word of wisdom (Section 89 of the Doctrine and Covenants) that forbids the consumption of wine, tobacco, and "hot drinks" (usually interperated to mean coffee and tea). Though you could argue that it isn't opposing drug use, but only drug abuse, since the medical use of these is permitted.
In other words, where are the legal grounds for this War?
The legal grounds come from Article 1, Section 8:
The Congress shall have power... To regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes;
Or at least the legal excuse. Drug laws are all based on regulating commerce among the states. You would think that this would only apply to interstate commerce, but the loophole there is to say that intrastate commerce can affect interstate commerce (people buying/making drugs inside a state lowers the demand for drugs bought from another state, which can be regulated).
Every week several people win the lottery. In an average week, how many people are struck by lightning for the second time?
Ah... but he said "in your lifetime," not "in an average week." It makes quite a difference.
What is being compared is the chance that any single ticket will win on a particular week with the chance that you will be hit twice by lightning over 80 years. Not exactly a fair comparison. It would be more accurate to comare the chance of winning if you buy one ticket weekly for 80 years. Anyone want to get some real numbers?
Well that's easy enough to explain. The GBA is going to be usable as a controler for the cube, with its own little private screen. Think choosing a play for a sports game, and you'll get the idea.
My biggest problem with the GBA is the lack of a decent number of buttons, I mean 4 just isn't cutting it anymore. Oh well.
Why not release source for the client to the public, but sign each binary with a public key such that all encrypted data will only be decrypted by the signed binaries?
Ummm... excuse me if I'm missing something, but what is to prevent someone from simply modifing the client so it dosen't bother to check it's own signature before it decrypts the message?
Didn't the audio home recording act permit people to tape (record, whatever) whatever they wanted from TV and other broadcast media?
Doesn't that still apply?
Nope. As long as you slap a XOR on it (paying all required patent licencing fees for the XOR technology, of course) fair use and time shifted recording no longer exists, thanks to our friend the DMCA.
Might you be able to edit any ADK'ed keys and cut the ADK out? Since it is outside the signed area, this shouldn't prevent the normal decryption of the message, but would prevent the ADK owner from reading it.
Ummm... did you bother to read the article? Not all FLOPS are created equal. These things appear to be hard-coded pipelines, and as such even though FLOPs are being used, they are entirely contained inside the chip. The input of one is taken directly from the output of another, so you can't use them for anything else.
This whole thing sinks or swims on the trade secret argument.
Well... there is a little more to it than that... Microsoft is pulling this thing under the DMCA, and that deals more with the copyright on the document, rather than it's trade secrectness. The posting of a copywritten Microsoft document, regardless of it's availability, is still a violation of copyright.
Well, first of all I believe Metallica is going after the people who were sharing the music, not those who downloaded it anyway. Also, in the case of Napster, it is not possible to download a file without immediatley sharing it. And thirdly, I'm not so sure about the liability of the downloader of the music. It depends on how the courts would look at it. Is a copy created by the server when it sends the bits over the internet, by the client when it puts those bits on a disk, or both?
Surely you jest. If failing to read a license causes me not to be bound by it, then maybe I'll just download the Linux kernel code, ignore the license, and call it public domain. Then, if it's public domain (and no longer GPLed), I can compile it and distribute binaries without source.
The license exists, and not reading it has no effect on whether you are licensed or not.
But the difference is that in either case, you would not be able to re-distribute the document. Copyright law still applies, even though the license does not. In the case of GPL'd software, you can still read the source code and write an entirely new implementation of it, or compile and use the software without agreeing to the license. You would not be able to redistributed it however. The same would be true for the specification, you can not make a copy of it, but you certainly can read it, at least until UCTIA becomes law and says otherwise.
On the other hand, might the extraction of the.pdf from the.exe be considered "copying" it?
And another thing, wouldn't that make WinZip an illegal encryption bypassing device under DMCA?
IANAL, NDIPOOTV
Re:DeCSS & CPHack aren't illegal until October!
on
'Battling Censorware'
·
· Score: 1
What people are also missing is that DeCSS and CPHack were programed outside the US! How is it that American law would have any jurisdiction outside of US Boarders! Whether or not the DMCA comes into action until October, it still isn't enforcable in Canada or Sweden.
BUT, the use of the program, or the mirroring, or even the download of it anywhere inside the US is still illegal. Lawyers have a tendancy to ask for everything they could possibly have a cliam to, and are asking for the logs of all the people who downloaded the thing, probably in order to track down more people to target.
Well... you seem to be accurate in your analysis, but this device (if it even worked) would not actually send something faster than light. What it would do would be to create a shorter way of getting wherever the signal was going, then traveling through that at normal speed. The information would arrive before it would have if it had traveled at the speed of light through the normally-connected universe, instead of through the shortcut.
The way I see it, is that yes, patches can have licences applied to them, but only the patch itself. When you apply a patch with licence X to a piece of code with licence Y, you get a result that is a hybrid between X and Y. X still applies to the patched stuff, and Y to the unpatched stuff.
This means that what was done to LAME is valid, but you still can't use it commercially (including free distribution). You can still distribute the patch, and get the original from somewhere else. I don't see how this would be much of a danger to any of the big stuff like the Linux kernel because in order to remove the original licence from it you would have to completely rewrite the whole thing, which you could do anyway and change the licence. But I could see a commercial linux vendor making "changes" to the kernel and not sharing them back to the public this way. (but in order to work at all, it would still have to be visible source, if not open source)
great. yet another example of technology humanity is not mature enough for, yet keeps rushing into
Well, you are right of course, but we don't really have any choice. It is impossible to really suppress any technology, even technology that is yet to be developed.
If the well-meaning people of the world refuse to develop nanotechnology, the not-so-well-meaning people are going to go ahead and develop it anyway, for their own uses. It seems the natural state of humanity and technology is the arms race. It's unfortunate, and will probably get us all killed, but the alternative almost certainly will.
Here's a thought... Has anyone (company) out there tried to make an insanely cheap computer (same specs as this thing would work), require the $20/month connection, i.e. it's a service, not a computer, and just include the HD in the first place? Then just put all the word processing and stuff plain 'ol everyday non-nerds would need on it, perhaps some internet upgradability... Sounds like a good way to get some technophobes into Linux if you ask me...
(And no, this idea is not patent pending, but I bet it could be...)
Will it fly? I'm no lawyer, so dont quote me on it...
I doubt it. In order to do this you would have to demonstrate you made a "significant investment" in your mini-database, and I assume it will work something like copyright in that if someone else generates a similar database with the same data without ever looking at yours, their database will be legal.
I'm not a lawyer, and I'm making a fundamental flaw by attempting to apply common sense to the legislature and legal systems, so don't quote me either.
Collections of facts are ALREADY copyrighted and always have been. Even collections of uncopyright material are themselved copyrighted. For example, an encyclopedia, collection of recipies and a CD-ROM containing the files of Project Gutenberg are all copyright.
Ummm... yeah, collections of facts are copyrighted. But the facts themselves are currently not protected, you can legally re-use these facts in another work (assuming you don't actually copy anything verbatim or close to it). This would change all that.
This is not for the legistators to decide. This is a matter of individual University policy.
I agree with you on this point, but something the article neglected to mention was that this bill applies to the state-run and regulated universities. It may not apply to private universities, and as such they have more of a right to regulate what they are paying for. (Though it is still very annoying)
I am a new student at Arizona State University, and much of what goes on here politically is very confusing. One thing to understand though, there isn't really much behind these bills, they are just fodder for future political mudslinging... Banning co-ed dorms here would be entirely impossible because there is one dorm (the one I am currently in) that holds a huge majority of all on-campus residants, if it were to become male, or female only, there would be next to no other available space. There is very little chance of it actually occuring.
I also doubt the internet restrictions will pass, and suspect they are also just political manuvering. I wouldn't put it past the legislature here to do something like that though, but it isn't much of a concern as the dorms aren't wired anyway, the only place we have internet access is in the computer labs.
Well, there is always the option of dcypher.net's Gamma Flux project. This is basically ray-tracing of gamma rays through various types of storage containers with the idea of developing a better container for nuclear waste. In my opinion, it has a better chance of success than SETI, and since SETI has more computing power than data there is no real reason to join them.
Slashdot Mirror
comment.c:3: invalid lvalue in assignment
...it's L. Bob Rife! (Ok, ok, so it was lame)
Well, actually there is the word of wisdom (Section 89 of the Doctrine and Covenants) that forbids the consumption of wine, tobacco, and "hot drinks" (usually interperated to mean coffee and tea). Though you could argue that it isn't opposing drug use, but only drug abuse, since the medical use of these is permitted.
In other words, where are the legal grounds for this War?
The legal grounds come from Article 1, Section 8:
Or at least the legal excuse. Drug laws are all based on regulating commerce among the states. You would think that this would only apply to interstate commerce, but the loophole there is to say that intrastate commerce can affect interstate commerce (people buying/making drugs inside a state lowers the demand for drugs bought from another state, which can be regulated).
One thing congress has no shortage of is lawyers.
Ah... but he said "in your lifetime," not "in an average week." It makes quite a difference.
What is being compared is the chance that any single ticket will win on a particular week with the chance that you will be hit twice by lightning over 80 years. Not exactly a fair comparison. It would be more accurate to comare the chance of winning if you buy one ticket weekly for 80 years. Anyone want to get some real numbers?
Well that's easy enough to explain. The GBA is going to be usable as a controler for the cube, with its own little private screen. Think choosing a play for a sports game, and you'll get the idea.
My biggest problem with the GBA is the lack of a decent number of buttons, I mean 4 just isn't cutting it anymore. Oh well.
Now, if I only had a GPS transmitter, I might be able to take part in this. Ah well, anyone care to donate one?
Gah... sorry to nitpick, but if you had a GPS transmitter, you would be in orbit. What you want is a GPS receiver.
Why not release source for the client to the public, but sign each binary with a public key such that all encrypted data will only be decrypted by the signed binaries?
Ummm... excuse me if I'm missing something, but what is to prevent someone from simply modifing the client so it dosen't bother to check it's own signature before it decrypts the message?
Didn't the audio home recording act permit people to tape (record, whatever) whatever they wanted from TV and other broadcast media?
Doesn't that still apply?
Nope. As long as you slap a XOR on it (paying all required patent licencing fees for the XOR technology, of course) fair use and time shifted recording no longer exists, thanks to our friend the DMCA.
Might you be able to edit any ADK'ed keys and cut the ADK out? Since it is outside the signed area, this shouldn't prevent the normal decryption of the message, but would prevent the ADK owner from reading it.
100 petaflops??? I think you mean 100 teraflops.
Ummm... did you bother to read the article? Not all FLOPS are created equal. These things appear to be hard-coded pipelines, and as such even though FLOPs are being used, they are entirely contained inside the chip. The input of one is taken directly from the output of another, so you can't use them for anything else.
This whole thing sinks or swims on the trade secret argument.
Well... there is a little more to it than that... Microsoft is pulling this thing under the DMCA, and that deals more with the copyright on the document, rather than it's trade secrectness. The posting of a copywritten Microsoft document, regardless of it's availability, is still a violation of copyright.
Well, first of all I believe Metallica is going after the people who were sharing the music, not those who downloaded it anyway. Also, in the case of Napster, it is not possible to download a file without immediatley sharing it. And thirdly, I'm not so sure about the liability of the downloader of the music. It depends on how the courts would look at it. Is a copy created by the server when it sends the bits over the internet, by the client when it puts those bits on a disk, or both?
But the difference is that in either case, you would not be able to re-distribute the document. Copyright law still applies, even though the license does not. In the case of GPL'd software, you can still read the source code and write an entirely new implementation of it, or compile and use the software without agreeing to the license. You would not be able to redistributed it however. The same would be true for the specification, you can not make a copy of it, but you certainly can read it, at least until UCTIA becomes law and says otherwise.
On the other hand, might the extraction of the .pdf from the .exe be considered "copying" it?
And another thing, wouldn't that make WinZip an illegal encryption bypassing device under DMCA?
IANAL, NDIPOOTV
BUT, the use of the program, or the mirroring, or even the download of it anywhere inside the US is still illegal. Lawyers have a tendancy to ask for everything they could possibly have a cliam to, and are asking for the logs of all the people who downloaded the thing, probably in order to track down more people to target.
Well... you seem to be accurate in your analysis, but this device (if it even worked) would not actually send something faster than light. What it would do would be to create a shorter way of getting wherever the signal was going, then traveling through that at normal speed. The information would arrive before it would have if it had traveled at the speed of light through the normally-connected universe, instead of through the shortcut.
IANAL.
The way I see it, is that yes, patches can have licences applied to them, but only the patch itself. When you apply a patch with licence X to a piece of code with licence Y, you get a result that is a hybrid between X and Y. X still applies to the patched stuff, and Y to the unpatched stuff.
This means that what was done to LAME is valid, but you still can't use it commercially (including free distribution). You can still distribute the patch, and get the original from somewhere else. I don't see how this would be much of a danger to any of the big stuff like the Linux kernel because in order to remove the original licence from it you would have to completely rewrite the whole thing, which you could do anyway and change the licence. But I could see a commercial linux vendor making "changes" to the kernel and not sharing them back to the public this way. (but in order to work at all, it would still have to be visible source, if not open source)
great. yet another example of technology humanity is not mature enough for, yet keeps rushing into
Well, you are right of course, but we don't really have any choice. It is impossible to really suppress any technology, even technology that is yet to be developed.
If the well-meaning people of the world refuse to develop nanotechnology, the not-so-well-meaning people are going to go ahead and develop it anyway, for their own uses. It seems the natural state of humanity and technology is the arms race. It's unfortunate, and will probably get us all killed, but the alternative almost certainly will.
Here's a thought... Has anyone (company) out there tried to make an insanely cheap computer (same specs as this thing would work), require the $20/month connection, i.e. it's a service, not a computer, and just include the HD in the first place? Then just put all the word processing and stuff plain 'ol everyday non-nerds would need on it, perhaps some internet upgradability... Sounds like a good way to get some technophobes into Linux if you ask me...
(And no, this idea is not patent pending, but I bet it could be...)
Will it fly? I'm no lawyer, so dont quote me on it...
I doubt it. In order to do this you would have to demonstrate you made a "significant investment" in your mini-database, and I assume it will work something like copyright in that if someone else generates a similar database with the same data without ever looking at yours, their database will be legal.
I'm not a lawyer, and I'm making a fundamental flaw by attempting to apply common sense to the legislature and legal systems, so don't quote me either.
I am a new student at Arizona State University, and much of what goes on here politically is very confusing. One thing to understand though, there isn't really much behind these bills, they are just fodder for future political mudslinging... Banning co-ed dorms here would be entirely impossible because there is one dorm (the one I am currently in) that holds a huge majority of all on-campus residants, if it were to become male, or female only, there would be next to no other available space. There is very little chance of it actually occuring.
I also doubt the internet restrictions will pass, and suspect they are also just political manuvering. I wouldn't put it past the legislature here to do something like that though, but it isn't much of a concern as the dorms aren't wired anyway, the only place we have internet access is in the computer labs.
Well, there is always the option of dcypher.net's Gamma Flux project. This is basically ray-tracing of gamma rays through various types of storage containers with the idea of developing a better container for nuclear waste. In my opinion, it has a better chance of success than SETI, and since SETI has more computing power than data there is no real reason to join them.