Logging and debugging. I haven't delved into the likes of Firebug to see how it works...
Delve! Firebug has crazy things like the ability to set breakpoints in code currently running in the page, and then when you hit the breakpoint, run code from the context of the line you stopped at. And lots lots more. As someone who's been out of web programming for a few years, it blew my mind.
I too have a law degree and haven't taken the bar, so we're even.:)
I'm not sure about your dismissal of the contract theory. A contract technically is just "an agreement that the law will enforce." Naturally an area of law based on such a squishy foundation does not follow strict rules. Sometimes consideration is required, sometimes it isn't.
In this case, absent some definitive statute or supreme court case, EULAs will be enforced as contracts if judges think they ought to be -- which comes down to, if the economy would benefit.
For example, in pre-Mapquest days, a judge enforced the EULA requiring personal use only on a $50 mapping package, because the company's bread and butter was $50,000 bulk licenses, and if they couldn't have the EULA, they wouldn't offer a retail package at all. The judge thought the retail package ought to exist, so the EULA was valid.
Similarly, here, the Apple EULA will be upheld if Apple successfully argues that the world without it would be worse for everyone -- a question that's hard to predict.
That would be the dictionary definition. The legal definition of "prurient" requires it to be "shameful or morbid" as well. Which just goes to show what a stupid test it is.
Does this mean that prior art can no longer invalidate a patent if the creator of the prior art never filed for one?
No, because to get a patent you have to prove the technique hasn't been previously published by someone else. This will just mean that if two people who can each prove that element file for the same patent, they won't have to argue about who kept it secret for longer.
Thanks for the links -- I hadn't read either of those. Illinois Tool Works doesn't give us anything about inherent limitations on licenses that limit copyright, right? It looks like it's just about limitations on bundling where a party controls the market. While Microsoft surely does, there isn't any bundling going on here, is there?
Eldred is interesting, and you're right that my argument probably won't work with the current court, but it doesn't totally close the door:
"Congress passed the CTEA in light of demographic, economic, and technological changes, and rationally credited projections that longer terms would encourage copyright holders to invest in the restoration and public distribution of their works [...] In sum, we find that the CTEA is a rational enactment; we are not at liberty to second-guess congressional determinations and policy judgments of this order, however debatable or arguably unwise they may be."
Basically, the court can only perform rational basis review, since there isn't something wrong with the way Congress passed the law. Eldred hoped that the "limited time" dodge would make the extension for existing works per se invalid, and so didn't really get into the "is it rational?" argument. If the issue comes up again, I would go straight for the heart of it: there's just no way this law rationally serves its purpose.
Actually, I stole that idea from Lawrence Lessig.:) "HL: In your argument before the Supreme Court, Justice Kennedy asks you for empirical evidence that extending copyright has impeded cultural progress. You keep the focus on a point of Constitutional law, though you now regret not citing such evidence. If you could do it over again, what empirical evidence would you give Justice Kennedy and the Court?"
The problem is, the server easily could be programmed to return different pages, depending on whether or not the correct form value was submitted. I believe PHP does that easily, and there are doubtless other scripting methods. Instead, someone at Microsoft coded it quick-lazy-sloppy. (Why on Earth was I suprised at that?) I'd give the counter analogy that this is like a vending machine that asks you to put in money, but gives out the candy when you push the "dispense" button without checking that any money was put in.
Yeah, it's not a bad point, but again, it's all about equity -- here, Microsoft was arguably negligent in writing the script, while you would be knowingly taking advantage of that negligence to reach a bargain you know Microsoft never intended. Courts like to come out for the less culpable party. In your version of the vending machine analogy, someone who really thought it was a free candy machine might be allowed to keep the candy, but someone who found a hidden "free dispense" button, and knew they weren't intended to use it, would not.
As for equity, I'd be more interested in an opinion on the "license to read" aspect, since it effectively protection more than is constitutionally allowed under copyright law.
This is a little beyond my reach, but in general a voluntary contract between two parties is enforceable unless there's some specific reason it shouldn't be -- being more restrictive than the copyright law wouldn't be such a reason. I'm not sure what would happen if you gave the contents of the file to someone who had no idea about the license, though -- the license might punish you for doing it, but I bet only copyright law would reach the third party.
(On a side note, in my opinion copyright law itself isn't constitutional right now -- Congress is granted the power to establish copyrights to promote the advancement of science and the arts, and it seems clear to me they're doing the opposite. Unfortunately no one's asking my opinion yet...)
Hey, I'm not a lawyer, but I am in law school. As a rule of thumb, you should remember that laws aren't evaluated by computers -- they're evaluated by humans. Especially in contract law, which is all about equity, the judge is going to do whatever he thinks is common sense, with an eye towards making the market work.
So, you know it's a loophole, Microsoft knows it's a loophole -- I bet the judge will know too, and shoot it down. I don't really know the answer, but I suspect that you would stand up and say, "your honor, I read the html, and found a way to respond that would trick the machine into giving me the benefit of the contract without sending back the exact text I was supposed to." Microsoft would stand up and say, "your honor, this is like figuring out a way to get a vending machine to give you candy without putting in any money. What would happen if that was legal?"
I'm not a lawyer yet, but I can take a stab. In order for MS to give up its cause of action, it would have to agree to a contract that said so. Silence is (practically) never taken as agreement to a contract; estoppel would only apply if MS made an affirmative promise that was otherwise unenforceable, knowing that ReactOS would act in reliance on the promise.
Are there really that many people, even on Slashdot, that think stealing intellectual property is not wrong?
Stealing intellectual property is when you claim you own a copyright, trademark, or patent that you do not own. Recording studios do it all the time, as do software companies, and you're right that most people on Slashdot think it's wrong.
What you're talking about is infringement, but if you insist on using physical metaphors, it would be more accurate to call it 'trespassing'. Do many people on Slashdot think trespassing on intellectual property is sometimes ok? Sure they do. Trespassing is usually harmless -- I bet you've done it yourself, in real life.
I could keep black people, hispanic people, white people, blind left-handed people, or people who voted for Bush off of my private property...
By definition, if you're talking about an area where you can exclude people arbitrarily, that's also an area where you can arrest those people for trespassing. If the problem was teens coming into my *home*, I wouldn't need a mosquito box. This device has its only substantial use in places where you *cannot* call the police and forcibly remove people you don't like. In places like that, discrimination laws (often) apply.
Of course, I have no idea if age is a protected class in the first place...
When you sign up to use the system, they scan all 10 of your fingers. You assign one (one per hand?) of them as the proper finger(s), and the remaining fingers serve as ALERT fingers.
That strike me as 1) an easy secret to steal 2) difficult technology to implement 3) pretty likely to yield false positives, either by misreading or by user error 4) way harder than just using a credit card.
Sorry, I think I'm actually talking about the whole system here. Carry on...
Sorry, I hope it was clear that I am in complete agreement with you -- I don't think that either of those *rules* should be legal to enforce in implicit contracts.
We have a problem here with two overlapping rules: not allowing other companies to manufacture ink cartridges for your printer, and not allowing you to refill the cartridges your manufacturer sells. I don't think either should be legal, but they're particularly dangerous together: If the policy is written on the ink cartridge refill, and your decision about which cartridges you can buy is made (unbeknownst to you) when you buy the printer, then you won't even find out about the policy until long after you've made your choice.
At a start, I would find your observation more comforting if the printer had to come with a consumer-obvious label like, "Installing refill cartridges that are not made by Lexmark, or manually refilling your Lexmark cartridges, constitutes a violation of blah blah blah." At that point, we can let the free market do its work...
Logic is not an obscure technical field of some kind, it's an absolutely necessary core function for a free human being.
Please don't confuse arcane, badly translated latin with logic. The phrase "begs the question" is useful primarily in *obscuring* the field of logic, not illuminating it.
'Begs' is never used in English to mean 'demands' although it can be used as an antonym for demands, among other senses.
'Begs' and 'demands' are antonyms in that they are opposite ways to forcefully ask -- 'asks' is neutral, 'begs' implies pleading and 'demands' implies force. If we were to say that the existence of a particular fact 'asks' us to pose a question, which is poetic but reasonable, either 'begs' or 'demands' would be appropriate substitutions.
Every person who read the article summary understood its meaning. It's important to remember here that the entire non-formal-logic-educated population didn't suddenly agree on a new meaning for the phrase at random. Rather, most native English speakers understand it the way I propose, as "begs [us to ask] the question." If you can't see where they're coming from, you might try taking a course in empathy -- which is another core function for a free human being.
I hear what you're saying, and I admire your willingness to ignore a pet peeve, but I do want to offer a third reason someone might say it: our brains pick up patterns of words and repeat them to represent certain ideas. Someone heard "begs the question" used in context as a reasonable contraction of "begs [us to ask] the question", and that construction stuck with them as a way to say that thing. Every single phrase you use was learned the same way -- to hear something and repeat it doesn't have to be pretentious.
"Begs the question" is a term of art in logic and debate. It's also pretty simple English, meaning "demands that we ask." To insist that *only* the term of art can be used, and the plain, simple English meaning is off-limits, is just annoying -- especially when the plain English meaning makes so much sense, and the term of art is a terrible way to describe what you mean. Besides getting to make fun of people who don't know the phrase, there's just no reason to name the logical fallacy that way.
Re:Limit rate of account creation too
on
Defeating Captcha
·
· Score: 1
By the time a single IP address has generated enough hashcash to create ten new accounts..
Sure, but that technique applies whether you're using hashcash or captcha or neither (my, what annoying names). It doesn't say anything about which of *them* we should use to deter bots, if we've found that setting a reasonable IP limit doesn't work.
Another good example: captcha is often used to stop bots in online computer games. In this example, hashcash and IP filtering would be useless -- only a functional test of real-humanness will have the desired effect.
Hashcash is useful, perhaps, in stopping spam, which is only worthwhile when sent in the millions. Things protected by CAPTCHA systems, like new email accounts and slashdot posts, tend to be worthwhile to the attacker in thousands instead. The maximum I'm going to tolerate as a user is about one minute of hashing, which works out to 1440 solutions per day...
Do you think yahoo mail will be happy if a particular blackhat box only registers 1440 new accounts per day? Will you and I be happy if a particular slashdot troll only posts 1440 comments per day? Will an average user prefer sitting there doing nothing for 60 seconds, instead of typing in a few letters in a picture?
I must admit I've seen most of Buffy and liked it, but Firefly is in a whole other class as far as I'm concerned. My roommate, 20ish geekish sort of guy, doesn't like Buffy, and after he saw the first episode of Firefly he watched the rest of the episodes in one (10 hour?) marathon.
There's always people on these threads who weren't into it, so obviously YMMV. I'm betting if you're into sci-fi at all it's well worth the $40, though.
I wonder what google thinks they're going to add to chat services?
It's a bit of a toss-up... google maps and gmail changed the whole landscape for those services, and I wouldn't have thought there was much to add there. Google groups and froogle, on the other hand, didn't change much of anything. I'm reserving judgement, because they're smarter than me and that seems safest.
The only thing I can think of, since it uses your gmail account as a login, is integration with your gmail address book -- but then yahoo and MS chat services do the same thing with their mail services, and that didn't exactly change my life.
The trouble is, right now, the sunnier it is the harder it is to see my display. Solar-powered laptops will probably come along about 2 weeks after laptops with reflective displays that get easier instead of harder to read in bright light.
yeah it's the shit that made your box BSOD, sorry about that
When you pay for a Mac, you expect device drivers *not* to kill your system, and you expect the software to work the first time out. Microsoft is gradually approaching that condition, but the reason is that they pour huge resources into supporting everything whether or not the manufacturer pays someone like you to do it. This even goes so far as to hack APIs around bugs in specific device drivers.
I'm sure that there *would* be increased manufacturer support for Macs if the software picked up market share -- but manufacturer support isn't all it takes to get this kind of user experience. Just ask Microsoft.
I haven't used Ruby, but here's the advantages I can think of for PHP. How does Ruby stack up?
1) PHP is the most common. I don't care what the Slashdot summary says, I like being able to find code snippets that have already solved the problem I have.
2) Corollary, PHP runs everywhere. Whatever the hell webhost the client went with, it probably already has PHP installed.
3) PHP is blindingly simple. If you're coming into web programming from desktop programming, you already speak C, and PHP is like C with anything remotely complicated taken out.
Like I said, I'm in no position to say PHP wins on any of those points -- are they still true?
Slashdot Mirror
Logging and debugging. I haven't delved into the likes of Firebug to see how it works ...
Delve! Firebug has crazy things like the ability to set breakpoints in code currently running in the page, and then when you hit the breakpoint, run code from the context of the line you stopped at. And lots lots more. As someone who's been out of web programming for a few years, it blew my mind.
I too have a law degree and haven't taken the bar, so we're even. :)
I'm not sure about your dismissal of the contract theory. A contract technically is just "an agreement that the law will enforce." Naturally an area of law based on such a squishy foundation does not follow strict rules. Sometimes consideration is required, sometimes it isn't.
In this case, absent some definitive statute or supreme court case, EULAs will be enforced as contracts if judges think they ought to be -- which comes down to, if the economy would benefit.
For example, in pre-Mapquest days, a judge enforced the EULA requiring personal use only on a $50 mapping package, because the company's bread and butter was $50,000 bulk licenses, and if they couldn't have the EULA, they wouldn't offer a retail package at all. The judge thought the retail package ought to exist, so the EULA was valid.
Similarly, here, the Apple EULA will be upheld if Apple successfully argues that the world without it would be worse for everyone -- a question that's hard to predict.
That would be the dictionary definition. The legal definition of "prurient" requires it to be "shameful or morbid" as well. Which just goes to show what a stupid test it is.
Does this mean that prior art can no longer invalidate a patent if the creator of the prior art never filed for one?
No, because to get a patent you have to prove the technique hasn't been previously published by someone else. This will just mean that if two people who can each prove that element file for the same patent, they won't have to argue about who kept it secret for longer.
Thanks for the links -- I hadn't read either of those. Illinois Tool Works doesn't give us anything about inherent limitations on licenses that limit copyright, right? It looks like it's just about limitations on bundling where a party controls the market. While Microsoft surely does, there isn't any bundling going on here, is there?
:) "HL: In your argument before the Supreme Court, Justice Kennedy asks you for empirical evidence that extending copyright has impeded cultural progress. You keep the focus on a point of Constitutional law, though you now regret not citing such evidence. If you could do it over again, what empirical evidence would you give Justice Kennedy and the Court?"
d _life.html
Eldred is interesting, and you're right that my argument probably won't work with the current court, but it doesn't totally close the door:
"Congress passed the CTEA in light of demographic, economic, and technological changes, and rationally credited projections that longer terms would encourage copyright holders to invest in the restoration and public distribution of their works [...] In sum, we find that the CTEA is a rational enactment; we are not at liberty to second-guess congressional determinations and policy judgments of this order, however debatable or arguably unwise they may be."
Basically, the court can only perform rational basis review, since there isn't something wrong with the way Congress passed the law. Eldred hoped that the "limited time" dodge would make the extension for existing works per se invalid, and so didn't really get into the "is it rational?" argument. If the issue comes up again, I would go straight for the heart of it: there's just no way this law rationally serves its purpose.
Actually, I stole that idea from Lawrence Lessig.
Etc: http://secondlife.blogs.com/nwn/2006/01/the_secon
The problem is, the server easily could be programmed to return different pages, depending on whether or not the correct form value was submitted. I believe PHP does that easily, and there are doubtless other scripting methods. Instead, someone at Microsoft coded it quick-lazy-sloppy. (Why on Earth was I suprised at that?) I'd give the counter analogy that this is like a vending machine that asks you to put in money, but gives out the candy when you push the "dispense" button without checking that any money was put in.
...)
Yeah, it's not a bad point, but again, it's all about equity -- here, Microsoft was arguably negligent in writing the script, while you would be knowingly taking advantage of that negligence to reach a bargain you know Microsoft never intended. Courts like to come out for the less culpable party. In your version of the vending machine analogy, someone who really thought it was a free candy machine might be allowed to keep the candy, but someone who found a hidden "free dispense" button, and knew they weren't intended to use it, would not.
As for equity, I'd be more interested in an opinion on the "license to read" aspect, since it effectively protection more than is constitutionally allowed under copyright law.
This is a little beyond my reach, but in general a voluntary contract between two parties is enforceable unless there's some specific reason it shouldn't be -- being more restrictive than the copyright law wouldn't be such a reason. I'm not sure what would happen if you gave the contents of the file to someone who had no idea about the license, though -- the license might punish you for doing it, but I bet only copyright law would reach the third party.
(On a side note, in my opinion copyright law itself isn't constitutional right now -- Congress is granted the power to establish copyrights to promote the advancement of science and the arts, and it seems clear to me they're doing the opposite. Unfortunately no one's asking my opinion yet
Hey, I'm not a lawyer, but I am in law school. As a rule of thumb, you should remember that laws aren't evaluated by computers -- they're evaluated by humans. Especially in contract law, which is all about equity, the judge is going to do whatever he thinks is common sense, with an eye towards making the market work.
So, you know it's a loophole, Microsoft knows it's a loophole -- I bet the judge will know too, and shoot it down. I don't really know the answer, but I suspect that you would stand up and say, "your honor, I read the html, and found a way to respond that would trick the machine into giving me the benefit of the contract without sending back the exact text I was supposed to." Microsoft would stand up and say, "your honor, this is like figuring out a way to get a vending machine to give you candy without putting in any money. What would happen if that was legal?"
I'm not a lawyer yet, but I can take a stab. In order for MS to give up its cause of action, it would have to agree to a contract that said so. Silence is (practically) never taken as agreement to a contract; estoppel would only apply if MS made an affirmative promise that was otherwise unenforceable, knowing that ReactOS would act in reliance on the promise.
Are there really that many people, even on Slashdot, that think stealing intellectual property is not wrong?
Stealing intellectual property is when you claim you own a copyright, trademark, or patent that you do not own. Recording studios do it all the time, as do software companies, and you're right that most people on Slashdot think it's wrong.
What you're talking about is infringement, but if you insist on using physical metaphors, it would be more accurate to call it 'trespassing'. Do many people on Slashdot think trespassing on intellectual property is sometimes ok? Sure they do. Trespassing is usually harmless -- I bet you've done it yourself, in real life.
I could keep black people, hispanic people, white people, blind left-handed people, or people who voted for Bush off of my private property ...
...
By definition, if you're talking about an area where you can exclude people arbitrarily, that's also an area where you can arrest those people for trespassing. If the problem was teens coming into my *home*, I wouldn't need a mosquito box. This device has its only substantial use in places where you *cannot* call the police and forcibly remove people you don't like. In places like that, discrimination laws (often) apply.
Of course, I have no idea if age is a protected class in the first place
When you sign up to use the system, they scan all 10 of your fingers. You assign one (one per hand?) of them as the proper finger(s), and the remaining fingers serve as ALERT fingers.
...
That strike me as 1) an easy secret to steal 2) difficult technology to implement 3) pretty likely to yield false positives, either by misreading or by user error 4) way harder than just using a credit card.
Sorry, I think I'm actually talking about the whole system here. Carry on
Sorry, I hope it was clear that I am in complete agreement with you -- I don't think that either of those *rules* should be legal to enforce in implicit contracts.
We have a problem here with two overlapping rules: not allowing other companies to manufacture ink cartridges for your printer, and not allowing you to refill the cartridges your manufacturer sells. I don't think either should be legal, but they're particularly dangerous together: If the policy is written on the ink cartridge refill, and your decision about which cartridges you can buy is made (unbeknownst to you) when you buy the printer, then you won't even find out about the policy until long after you've made your choice.
...
At a start, I would find your observation more comforting if the printer had to come with a consumer-obvious label like, "Installing refill cartridges that are not made by Lexmark, or manually refilling your Lexmark cartridges, constitutes a violation of blah blah blah." At that point, we can let the free market do its work
This is serious stuff. He basically made a death threat to the Google CEO.
... are you suggesting Balmer is Buffy The Vampire Slayer? Or what?
Balmer: "I'm going to f***ing bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again."
If that's a death threat, then
Your response invites the retort that it is devoid of any rebuttal. But thanks for the complement.
Logic is not an obscure technical field of some kind, it's an absolutely necessary core function for a free human being.
Please don't confuse arcane, badly translated latin with logic. The phrase "begs the question" is useful primarily in *obscuring* the field of logic, not illuminating it.
'Begs' is never used in English to mean 'demands' although it can be used as an antonym for demands, among other senses.
'Begs' and 'demands' are antonyms in that they are opposite ways to forcefully ask -- 'asks' is neutral, 'begs' implies pleading and 'demands' implies force. If we were to say that the existence of a particular fact 'asks' us to pose a question, which is poetic but reasonable, either 'begs' or 'demands' would be appropriate substitutions.
Every person who read the article summary understood its meaning. It's important to remember here that the entire non-formal-logic-educated population didn't suddenly agree on a new meaning for the phrase at random. Rather, most native English speakers understand it the way I propose, as "begs [us to ask] the question." If you can't see where they're coming from, you might try taking a course in empathy -- which is another core function for a free human being.
I hear what you're saying, and I admire your willingness to ignore a pet peeve, but I do want to offer a third reason someone might say it: our brains pick up patterns of words and repeat them to represent certain ideas. Someone heard "begs the question" used in context as a reasonable contraction of "begs [us to ask] the question", and that construction stuck with them as a way to say that thing. Every single phrase you use was learned the same way -- to hear something and repeat it doesn't have to be pretentious.
"Begs the question" is a term of art in logic and debate. It's also pretty simple English, meaning "demands that we ask." To insist that *only* the term of art can be used, and the plain, simple English meaning is off-limits, is just annoying -- especially when the plain English meaning makes so much sense, and the term of art is a terrible way to describe what you mean. Besides getting to make fun of people who don't know the phrase, there's just no reason to name the logical fallacy that way.
By the time a single IP address has generated enough hashcash to create ten new accounts ..
Sure, but that technique applies whether you're using hashcash or captcha or neither (my, what annoying names). It doesn't say anything about which of *them* we should use to deter bots, if we've found that setting a reasonable IP limit doesn't work.
Another good example: captcha is often used to stop bots in online computer games. In this example, hashcash and IP filtering would be useless -- only a functional test of real-humanness will have the desired effect.
Hashcash is useful, perhaps, in stopping spam, which is only worthwhile when sent in the millions. Things protected by CAPTCHA systems, like new email accounts and slashdot posts, tend to be worthwhile to the attacker in thousands instead. The maximum I'm going to tolerate as a user is about one minute of hashing, which works out to 1440 solutions per day ...
Do you think yahoo mail will be happy if a particular blackhat box only registers 1440 new accounts per day? Will you and I be happy if a particular slashdot troll only posts 1440 comments per day? Will an average user prefer sitting there doing nothing for 60 seconds, instead of typing in a few letters in a picture?
I must admit I've seen most of Buffy and liked it, but Firefly is in a whole other class as far as I'm concerned. My roommate, 20ish geekish sort of guy, doesn't like Buffy, and after he saw the first episode of Firefly he watched the rest of the episodes in one (10 hour?) marathon.
There's always people on these threads who weren't into it, so obviously YMMV. I'm betting if you're into sci-fi at all it's well worth the $40, though.
I wonder what google thinks they're going to add to chat services?
... google maps and gmail changed the whole landscape for those services, and I wouldn't have thought there was much to add there. Google groups and froogle, on the other hand, didn't change much of anything. I'm reserving judgement, because they're smarter than me and that seems safest.
It's a bit of a toss-up
The only thing I can think of, since it uses your gmail account as a login, is integration with your gmail address book -- but then yahoo and MS chat services do the same thing with their mail services, and that didn't exactly change my life.
The trouble is, right now, the sunnier it is the harder it is to see my display. Solar-powered laptops will probably come along about 2 weeks after laptops with reflective displays that get easier instead of harder to read in bright light.
yeah it's the shit that made your box BSOD, sorry about that
When you pay for a Mac, you expect device drivers *not* to kill your system, and you expect the software to work the first time out. Microsoft is gradually approaching that condition, but the reason is that they pour huge resources into supporting everything whether or not the manufacturer pays someone like you to do it. This even goes so far as to hack APIs around bugs in specific device drivers.
I'm sure that there *would* be increased manufacturer support for Macs if the software picked up market share -- but manufacturer support isn't all it takes to get this kind of user experience. Just ask Microsoft.
I haven't used Ruby, but here's the advantages I can think of for PHP. How does Ruby stack up?
1) PHP is the most common. I don't care what the Slashdot summary says, I like being able to find code snippets that have already solved the problem I have.
2) Corollary, PHP runs everywhere. Whatever the hell webhost the client went with, it probably already has PHP installed.
3) PHP is blindingly simple. If you're coming into web programming from desktop programming, you already speak C, and PHP is like C with anything remotely complicated taken out.
Like I said, I'm in no position to say PHP wins on any of those points -- are they still true?