Well, I'm one of those poor slobs working for the Man to pay off my ridiculously-large student loans, and I still have more money than time; meaning I give myself a little $30 allowance twice a month when I get paid (you'll have to ask my wife how the rest is parceled out because I have no idea). That's humongous compared to my free time (which is just enough to post a comment on/. on occasion).
As for technical expertise, once upon a time I designed a simple RISC processor for an undergrad class, but I probably couldn't set up a RAID without a manual.
Well, I guess to the extent that murdering somebody is considered "transforming matter" under Bilski, you could patent the murder process. But I don't know that there's a good way to claim solving a crime under Bilski, unless you're claiming some specific technique like DNA analysis, which I'm sure was patented at some point.
But can you use "sovereign immunity" to override the rights guaranteed in the constitution
Absolutely not. Sovereign immunity does not mean you get to infringe your citizens' rights with impunity. In fact, violations of civil rights is one of the cases where the United States has waived sovereign immunity, so you can sue the government. See 42 U.S.C. section 1983.
I suspect the other guy was using the term "democracy" in a broad, sloppy sense to mean "a free government representative of the governed" and responded as such. We can argue political systems, but that's not really the point since, like I said, I'm not aware of any government that does not have sovereign immunity. In any case, we thought Great Britain was "democratic" (or "free" or whatever) enough that we modeled our own government heavily after it. Much of the Bill of Rights just codified British common law rights; in fact, the argument against it was that we shouldn't have to spell those rights out because we inherited them from British common law.
We don't respect our own Constitution and freely ignore it when it gets in the way of precioussss state secrets.
Or our judges' policy preferences. So if by Oligarchy, you mean judicial oligarchy, I'll stand right up with you in complaining about the 9 Little Dictators. And by the way, that still doesn't mean state secrets are anathema to whatever you want to call our government. The Constitution does not prohibit them. It's only when we violate the Constitution to protect them that it's a problem. So I'll agree with you; yeah, when we do that, it's a problem.
Ah, well that explains a lot. Those dark-skinned folks who were originally worth 3/5ths of a person would like to talk with you.
Fortunately, those brilliant Framers were humble enough to realize that, while the Constitution was truly awesome, they were not perfect, so they gave us a process for amending the thing, so that it could adapt to our evolving needs and understanding. And once we realized it was stupid to treat black people like 3/5 humans, we amended it. We also added this wicked-cool 14th Amendment that says states can't deny them, or anybody else, the protections of the Bill of Rights. Unfortunately, conservative judges do their own activist things, so the states-rights guys decided they didn't like that and substituted the "fundamental rights" doctrine instead (Scalia is one of them, and I couldn't disagree with him more). But give Scalia some credit where credit's due. Do you like your 6th Amendment right to confront your accusers? You can think Scalia for pulling that one out of the muck it was wallowing in. And in Hamdi, it was Scalia (joined by Sevens(!)) who dissented from the "moderates" and said that Hamdi absolutely must be given due process unless Congress suspends habeas corpus (which they have the constitutional right to do under certain circumstances). See, I'm all for civil liberties that are actually in the Constitution (that's why I personally sway more Hugo Black than Antonin Scalia). I'm just not down with this Right to Sue the Sovereign and Right to Post Military Operational Details on Youtube that somebody on/. made up, because they don't exist.
That's kind of a different issue though. You're talking about your ability to not agree to the contract. I absolutely agree that if you read the contract, say "Decline," and don't install, you can't be bound by it, and you should be entitled to a refund of your purchase price. Perhaps some day we'll get there. But I was talking about being held to the EULA after you click "I Agree" and install the software. In that case, most cases have held that you've agreed to whatever it says.
A "oppressive, dictatorial democracy" is not a democracy at all; it's a totalitarian state masquerading as a democracy for PR purposes.
Some people with dark skin who lived in a certain antebellum representative democracy would like to have a talk with you.
Again, no. We did not inherit from "other democracies" because democracies do not have such laws. We inherited this law from a monarchy, which itself stole the idea from the Pope. The "Sovereign" in question was the pope or king before the idea was expanded to include the whole government.
I don't think you really understand what sovereign immunity is, and judging from the comments here, many of the other posters don't either. It does not mean that the President can do anything he wants without consequences. It doesn't mean the President, or any member of the government, is "above the law." It does mean you can't sue the state for running over your cat, unless sovereign immunity has been waived. There is a whole line of Supreme Court cases that define the scope and limits of sovereign immunity. It is a very old concept, and I am not aware of any government anywhere that does not have sovereign immunity. If there is one, perhaps you could point me to it. I'd honestly be interested in knowing how it works out. In the meantime, remember that we inherited most of our law from England, which had a legislature when we broke from them. Our gripe was that we weren't represented there to our satisfaction.
I don't think we have to put our military secrets up on Facebook to be a more transparent and democratic country.
Neither do I. You're arguing for balance. I was responding to a very broad, extreme argument that sovereign immunity and state secrets are somehow anathema to democracy per se, despite the fact that they have historically been a part of pretty much every government I've ever seen or heard of. You'll notice I said both can be abused. They can.
If you have problems with the philosophy of freedom our forefather's embraced, might I suggest that you move to a different country? This country is for people who want to continue the democratic experiment. If that frightens you, why not move to the UK.... or the DPRK?
Whoa, slow down there sparky. Remember, I'm the one arguing that we should respect the government the Framers set up, since these things have always been there. For example, have you read the 11th Amendment? Do you know it's history? We ratified it pretty quickly after we formed our nation because the Supreme Court held that sovereign immunity did not apply to citizens of other sovereign states (e.g., some guy from MA could sue the state of NH, even though, duh, everybody knows a guy from NH can't sue NH). This was a loophole in sovereign immunity, and people decided that was a really bad idea, so we passed the 11th Amendment to close the loophole. As far as actually respecting the Constitution our framers gave us, you'll find me slightly to the right of Antonin Scalia.
Why not? Should we post all of our military strategies on Facebook, just to ensure transparency? That would just make us vulnerable, and vulnerable democracies get conquered. And we've always had sovereign immunity. We inherited it from other democracies. Without it, we ALL get to pay every time somebody sues the government for damages, and the government would be crippled as the Congress and Executive would have to fight a wave of preliminary injunctions every time they took an action that some minority group doesn't agree with. Yes, both can be abused, and we should hold our elected politicians to the fire when they do so. But the democracy you envision is crippled, weak, and ineffective. A crippled, weak, and ineffective democracy will fail, just as surely as an over-reaching, oppressive, dictatorial democracy.
Google ProCD from the 7th Circuit. A lot of other cases cite to it. And while copyright is federal, meaning these cases will often be in federal court, contract law is state law, meaning SCOTUS would be bound to follow the law of the state.
Show me the law that makes installing a purchased copy of Microsoft Office on more than one computer illegal.
Ummmm... How about Title 17 of the United States Code? 17 U.S.C. s.106 grants the copyright holder the exclusive right to make copies. Section 501 says violating any of the exclusive rights of a copyright holder (including section 106) is a copyright infringement. Installing a copy of Microsoft Office on your hard drive is making a copy of the program (in fact, even just loading it into RAM is making a copy), so you can only do that with a license from Microsoft. Microsoft granted you a license to install it on one computer. So installing it on more than one computer is an infringement of their copyright.
And no, section 117 won't save you here. That only permits additional copies for archival purposes, or copying into RAM as an essential step in running the program. It doesn't grant you the right to install on more than one computer.
write your state representative and senator and get them to support Representative Dawnna Duke's economic incentive bill.
Or you could just let them succeed or fail on their own merits like every other industr...
Never mind. Apparently, that's not how we do things anymore in America (or Texas). So yeah, give 'em a handout. Just make sure it's tied to some venue tax in Austin, so I don't have to pay for it.
But didn't you watch the excellent, well-researched, highly-factual, non-fear-mongering Jane Fonda documentary "The China Syndrome"? When Three-Mile Island blew up, the nuclear waste melted straight through the earth's core and came out in China, and there was a huge government coverup of the whole thing. Really. Jane Fonda told me so.
No, it's time dilation and space contraction. If you're traveling at 0.9c relative to earth, your gamma is something like.44. So if you travel one light year, an observer on earth will see you go one light year in about 1.1 years. But from your perspective, you will have traveled only about.44 light years, and it would take something like.48 years. If you travel fast enough, you can reach even distant stars in very short times from your perspective. But you won't get a nice, tidy Galactic Federation, because people on earth will be getting very old very fast. That's the real problem with relativity. It's not that you can't get somewhere fast. Tell me where you want to go and how fast you want to get there, and we can calculate how fast you need to go (relative to the earth) to make it in that time, and it will be less than c.
In other words, we could (in theory) colonize all of the habitable planets in the galaxy in a fairly short time. But the colonies would all basically be cut off from each other. Even sending a radio message to another colony would take prohibitively long. And forget about "rescue" or "supply" ships.
While lauded on Slashdot, Lessig only wants to restore copyright to the original length instead of abolishing it completely
Well now, that's just crazy talk. Restoring copyright to a reasonable term? Madness, I say. It's not far down that slippery slope before we get to the point where we give Congress the right to promote the progress of science and useful arts by granting time-limited monopolies to authors and inventors. How far we have fallen from the purity of our true common law roots! We must re-enthrone the true constitutional principle, embodied in the 32nd Amendment, that "Congress shall make no law abridging the right of the people to keep and bear w4r3z w00t!"
True story: I worked for a government contractor in 1999. Our customer maintained an old DOS program that talked to little boxes on military aircraft. The program had a Y2K issue that the customer wanted fixed, so he issued a contract to us (sole source, of course). The budget was somewhere between $500k and $750k. The timeline was about 9 months, including writing documents justifying why the fix was needed, documents about what the fix would fix, documents about how we would fix it, documents about how we would test it, some actual coding, travel expenses for several people to fly halfway across the country to where they had airplanes, several days of extensive acceptance testing, more documents about how we tested it and what the results were and so forth.
In reality, the fix consisted of tweaking maybe 20 lines of Pascal, and I had made the changes within the first few weeks of getting the contract (while we were still in the phase of justifying why we need to change it; technically, I was not supposed to so much as touch the source files yet). The hardest part of the task was rebuilding their kludged-together make environment with hard-coded DOS paths since the thing would only work with the specific Pascal compiler they had used on their old system back in the 80s.
The best part: as soon as we were finished, and we had fully tested and qualified the shiny new Y2K-compliant code, the software got preempted by a new release of a bigger Windows-based system that rolled in the same functionality (basically it was a land grab by a program office responsible for another part of the same aircraft). As far as I know, my code was never deployed on a single computer.
Those should be em-dashes instead of hyphens. And you do not set off em-dashes with spaces. For example, "or---even better---Visual Basic" (where "---" represents an em-dash).
You can bet this vote will go down party lines. I can only hope there are some forward thinking democrats who will kill this.
Sure, we'll just count on the same forward-thinking Democrats who, now that they are suddenly all-powerful, are spending money like a teenage girl set free with daddy's credit card in the largest shopping mall in the world, and who are driving us into debt so fast they make Bush look like Ebeneezer Scrooge. So yeah, we're pretty much screwed.
Fortunately, if history has taught us one thing, it's that news agencies officially sanctioned and subsidized by the state tend to be highly independent and unbiased.
By your argument, failing to report the tin-foil hat conspiracy version of stories is biased omission.
That is precisely the point. Failing to report on tin-foil hat conspiracy versions is biased against tin-foil hat conspiracies. You've just presented a case where you, and most people, tend to agree with the bias.
It's not that uncommon for lawyers to file for R. 11 sanctions against each other (but don't expect to be friendly afterward). Probably some defense attorneys have asked for R. 11 sanctions against the RIAA lawyers. What's different here is that it looked bad enough that they plaintiffs thought the judge might actually grant them. That's why they dropped this thing and ran.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh yeah, and my firm uses Hummingbird DM on our own servers.
Well, I'm one of those poor slobs working for the Man to pay off my ridiculously-large student loans, and I still have more money than time; meaning I give myself a little $30 allowance twice a month when I get paid (you'll have to ask my wife how the rest is parceled out because I have no idea). That's humongous compared to my free time (which is just enough to post a comment on /. on occasion).
As for technical expertise, once upon a time I designed a simple RISC processor for an undergrad class, but I probably couldn't set up a RAID without a manual.
Fearmongering will get us nowhere.
I don't know about that. Al Gore has made many millions of dollars off of fearmongering.
Well, I guess to the extent that murdering somebody is considered "transforming matter" under Bilski, you could patent the murder process. But I don't know that there's a good way to claim solving a crime under Bilski, unless you're claiming some specific technique like DNA analysis, which I'm sure was patented at some point.
But can you use "sovereign immunity" to override the rights guaranteed in the constitution
Absolutely not. Sovereign immunity does not mean you get to infringe your citizens' rights with impunity. In fact, violations of civil rights is one of the cases where the United States has waived sovereign immunity, so you can sue the government. See 42 U.S.C. section 1983.
I suspect the other guy was using the term "democracy" in a broad, sloppy sense to mean "a free government representative of the governed" and responded as such. We can argue political systems, but that's not really the point since, like I said, I'm not aware of any government that does not have sovereign immunity. In any case, we thought Great Britain was "democratic" (or "free" or whatever) enough that we modeled our own government heavily after it. Much of the Bill of Rights just codified British common law rights; in fact, the argument against it was that we shouldn't have to spell those rights out because we inherited them from British common law.
We don't respect our own Constitution and freely ignore it when it gets in the way of precioussss state secrets.
Or our judges' policy preferences. So if by Oligarchy, you mean judicial oligarchy, I'll stand right up with you in complaining about the 9 Little Dictators. And by the way, that still doesn't mean state secrets are anathema to whatever you want to call our government. The Constitution does not prohibit them. It's only when we violate the Constitution to protect them that it's a problem. So I'll agree with you; yeah, when we do that, it's a problem.
Ah, well that explains a lot. Those dark-skinned folks who were originally worth 3/5ths of a person would like to talk with you.
Fortunately, those brilliant Framers were humble enough to realize that, while the Constitution was truly awesome, they were not perfect, so they gave us a process for amending the thing, so that it could adapt to our evolving needs and understanding. And once we realized it was stupid to treat black people like 3/5 humans, we amended it. We also added this wicked-cool 14th Amendment that says states can't deny them, or anybody else, the protections of the Bill of Rights. Unfortunately, conservative judges do their own activist things, so the states-rights guys decided they didn't like that and substituted the "fundamental rights" doctrine instead (Scalia is one of them, and I couldn't disagree with him more). But give Scalia some credit where credit's due. Do you like your 6th Amendment right to confront your accusers? You can think Scalia for pulling that one out of the muck it was wallowing in. And in Hamdi, it was Scalia (joined by Sevens(!)) who dissented from the "moderates" and said that Hamdi absolutely must be given due process unless Congress suspends habeas corpus (which they have the constitutional right to do under certain circumstances). See, I'm all for civil liberties that are actually in the Constitution (that's why I personally sway more Hugo Black than Antonin Scalia). I'm just not down with this Right to Sue the Sovereign and Right to Post Military Operational Details on Youtube that somebody on /. made up, because they don't exist.
That's kind of a different issue though. You're talking about your ability to not agree to the contract. I absolutely agree that if you read the contract, say "Decline," and don't install, you can't be bound by it, and you should be entitled to a refund of your purchase price. Perhaps some day we'll get there. But I was talking about being held to the EULA after you click "I Agree" and install the software. In that case, most cases have held that you've agreed to whatever it says.
A "oppressive, dictatorial democracy" is not a democracy at all; it's a totalitarian state masquerading as a democracy for PR purposes.
Some people with dark skin who lived in a certain antebellum representative democracy would like to have a talk with you.
Again, no. We did not inherit from "other democracies" because democracies do not have such laws. We inherited this law from a monarchy, which itself stole the idea from the Pope. The "Sovereign" in question was the pope or king before the idea was expanded to include the whole government.
I don't think you really understand what sovereign immunity is, and judging from the comments here, many of the other posters don't either. It does not mean that the President can do anything he wants without consequences. It doesn't mean the President, or any member of the government, is "above the law." It does mean you can't sue the state for running over your cat, unless sovereign immunity has been waived. There is a whole line of Supreme Court cases that define the scope and limits of sovereign immunity. It is a very old concept, and I am not aware of any government anywhere that does not have sovereign immunity. If there is one, perhaps you could point me to it. I'd honestly be interested in knowing how it works out. In the meantime, remember that we inherited most of our law from England, which had a legislature when we broke from them. Our gripe was that we weren't represented there to our satisfaction.
I don't think we have to put our military secrets up on Facebook to be a more transparent and democratic country.
Neither do I. You're arguing for balance. I was responding to a very broad, extreme argument that sovereign immunity and state secrets are somehow anathema to democracy per se, despite the fact that they have historically been a part of pretty much every government I've ever seen or heard of. You'll notice I said both can be abused. They can.
If you have problems with the philosophy of freedom our forefather's embraced, might I suggest that you move to a different country? This country is for people who want to continue the democratic experiment. If that frightens you, why not move to the UK.... or the DPRK?
Whoa, slow down there sparky. Remember, I'm the one arguing that we should respect the government the Framers set up, since these things have always been there. For example, have you read the 11th Amendment? Do you know it's history? We ratified it pretty quickly after we formed our nation because the Supreme Court held that sovereign immunity did not apply to citizens of other sovereign states (e.g., some guy from MA could sue the state of NH, even though, duh, everybody knows a guy from NH can't sue NH). This was a loophole in sovereign immunity, and people decided that was a really bad idea, so we passed the 11th Amendment to close the loophole. As far as actually respecting the Constitution our framers gave us, you'll find me slightly to the right of Antonin Scalia.
Why not? Should we post all of our military strategies on Facebook, just to ensure transparency? That would just make us vulnerable, and vulnerable democracies get conquered. And we've always had sovereign immunity. We inherited it from other democracies. Without it, we ALL get to pay every time somebody sues the government for damages, and the government would be crippled as the Congress and Executive would have to fight a wave of preliminary injunctions every time they took an action that some minority group doesn't agree with. Yes, both can be abused, and we should hold our elected politicians to the fire when they do so. But the democracy you envision is crippled, weak, and ineffective. A crippled, weak, and ineffective democracy will fail, just as surely as an over-reaching, oppressive, dictatorial democracy.
Google ProCD from the 7th Circuit. A lot of other cases cite to it. And while copyright is federal, meaning these cases will often be in federal court, contract law is state law, meaning SCOTUS would be bound to follow the law of the state.
17 U.S.C. s.117 knows the difference too.
Show me the law that makes installing a purchased copy of Microsoft Office on more than one computer illegal.
Ummmm... How about Title 17 of the United States Code? 17 U.S.C. s.106 grants the copyright holder the exclusive right to make copies. Section 501 says violating any of the exclusive rights of a copyright holder (including section 106) is a copyright infringement. Installing a copy of Microsoft Office on your hard drive is making a copy of the program (in fact, even just loading it into RAM is making a copy), so you can only do that with a license from Microsoft. Microsoft granted you a license to install it on one computer. So installing it on more than one computer is an infringement of their copyright.
And no, section 117 won't save you here. That only permits additional copies for archival purposes, or copying into RAM as an essential step in running the program. It doesn't grant you the right to install on more than one computer.
write your state representative and senator and get them to support Representative Dawnna Duke's economic incentive bill.
Or you could just let them succeed or fail on their own merits like every other industr...
Never mind. Apparently, that's not how we do things anymore in America (or Texas). So yeah, give 'em a handout. Just make sure it's tied to some venue tax in Austin, so I don't have to pay for it.
In the end, it's been largely ignored, Heaven knows why. There are a lot of merits to a system like this
There is a fatal flaw to this idea. If people generate their own energy, then energy companies don't make money off of selling them energy.
Ninjas
But didn't you watch the excellent, well-researched, highly-factual, non-fear-mongering Jane Fonda documentary "The China Syndrome"? When Three-Mile Island blew up, the nuclear waste melted straight through the earth's core and came out in China, and there was a huge government coverup of the whole thing. Really. Jane Fonda told me so.
On the other hand, it makes for some great SciFi.
No, it's time dilation and space contraction. If you're traveling at 0.9c relative to earth, your gamma is something like .44. So if you travel one light year, an observer on earth will see you go one light year in about 1.1 years. But from your perspective, you will have traveled only about .44 light years, and it would take something like .48 years. If you travel fast enough, you can reach even distant stars in very short times from your perspective. But you won't get a nice, tidy Galactic Federation, because people on earth will be getting very old very fast. That's the real problem with relativity. It's not that you can't get somewhere fast. Tell me where you want to go and how fast you want to get there, and we can calculate how fast you need to go (relative to the earth) to make it in that time, and it will be less than c.
In other words, we could (in theory) colonize all of the habitable planets in the galaxy in a fairly short time. But the colonies would all basically be cut off from each other. Even sending a radio message to another colony would take prohibitively long. And forget about "rescue" or "supply" ships.
While lauded on Slashdot, Lessig only wants to restore copyright to the original length instead of abolishing it completely
Well now, that's just crazy talk. Restoring copyright to a reasonable term? Madness, I say. It's not far down that slippery slope before we get to the point where we give Congress the right to promote the progress of science and useful arts by granting time-limited monopolies to authors and inventors. How far we have fallen from the purity of our true common law roots! We must re-enthrone the true constitutional principle, embodied in the 32nd Amendment, that "Congress shall make no law abridging the right of the people to keep and bear w4r3z w00t!"
True story: I worked for a government contractor in 1999. Our customer maintained an old DOS program that talked to little boxes on military aircraft. The program had a Y2K issue that the customer wanted fixed, so he issued a contract to us (sole source, of course). The budget was somewhere between $500k and $750k. The timeline was about 9 months, including writing documents justifying why the fix was needed, documents about what the fix would fix, documents about how we would fix it, documents about how we would test it, some actual coding, travel expenses for several people to fly halfway across the country to where they had airplanes, several days of extensive acceptance testing, more documents about how we tested it and what the results were and so forth.
In reality, the fix consisted of tweaking maybe 20 lines of Pascal, and I had made the changes within the first few weeks of getting the contract (while we were still in the phase of justifying why we need to change it; technically, I was not supposed to so much as touch the source files yet). The hardest part of the task was rebuilding their kludged-together make environment with hard-coded DOS paths since the thing would only work with the specific Pascal compiler they had used on their old system back in the 80s.
The best part: as soon as we were finished, and we had fully tested and qualified the shiny new Y2K-compliant code, the software got preempted by a new release of a bigger Windows-based system that rolled in the same functionality (basically it was a land grab by a program office responsible for another part of the same aircraft). As far as I know, my code was never deployed on a single computer.
This is the only truly funny thing I've read on Slashdot in 48 hours (and yes, I'm including Squeez Bacon---that was just disturbing).
Java, C# or - even better - Visual Basic
Those should be em-dashes instead of hyphens. And you do not set off em-dashes with spaces. For example, "or---even better---Visual Basic" (where "---" represents an em-dash).
Is there a pedantry achievement?
You can bet this vote will go down party lines. I can only hope there are some forward thinking democrats who will kill this.
Sure, we'll just count on the same forward-thinking Democrats who, now that they are suddenly all-powerful, are spending money like a teenage girl set free with daddy's credit card in the largest shopping mall in the world, and who are driving us into debt so fast they make Bush look like Ebeneezer Scrooge. So yeah, we're pretty much screwed.
Fortunately, if history has taught us one thing, it's that news agencies officially sanctioned and subsidized by the state tend to be highly independent and unbiased.
By your argument, failing to report the tin-foil hat conspiracy version of stories is biased omission.
That is precisely the point. Failing to report on tin-foil hat conspiracy versions is biased against tin-foil hat conspiracies. You've just presented a case where you, and most people, tend to agree with the bias.
It's not that uncommon for lawyers to file for R. 11 sanctions against each other (but don't expect to be friendly afterward). Probably some defense attorneys have asked for R. 11 sanctions against the RIAA lawyers. What's different here is that it looked bad enough that they plaintiffs thought the judge might actually grant them. That's why they dropped this thing and ran.