US law is hardly a cohesive system -- it's all over the map. And some states do have draconian provisions that are motivated primarily by puritanical religious convictions. Extra-marital sex a felony? That's a stretch.
And if you think these laws don't count because they aren't enforced, I encourage you to google the name of "Lloyd Waltonen".
That's a pretty good idea. The source code it self is ludicrously short (about 9 printed pages), so it would amount to something more like a pamphlet than a book -- but it proves the point nicely.
I wonder whether it could be reduced even further in size through a concerted effort like the Export-a-crypto perl script that ended up printed on t-shirts. It would be sweet if we could get Cafe Press a DMCA takedown notice on crypto grounds...
Yes! Then, we can have a separate TLD for violent content (.vio), too -- remove that from the debate. And a new one for political speech (.pol). Ond, of course, there's no telling what the teeming masses might publish, so we need to move blogs and other discussion forums into their own domain (.blog). I mean, yeah, it makes it far easier to shut down dissent, but at least we've shunted the problem off to a ghetto corner of the web so that the argument doesn't interfere with your ability to browse santized, Clear-Channel operated, government-approved web sites. Yaay! Nirvana!
than'[th]&n, '[th]an (conjunction) 1 a -- used as a function word to indicate the second member or the member taken as the point of departure in a comparison expressive of inequality; used with comparative adjectives and comparative adverbs
then'[th]en (adverb) 2 a : soon after that : next in order of time b : following next after in order of position, narration, or enumeration : being next in a series c : in addition : BESIDES
Anyone who thinks that eating meat from a restaurant or store is more human than eating meat you took yourself... either doesn't know what they are talking about or has a twisted sense of morality.
I couldn't agree more. I suspect most people have absolutely no clue about the horrific conditions that factory-farmed food animals are forced to live and die in.
At least when you hunt, you understand what's at stake, and you can't ignore that something has just died for you to be able to eat -- going to the store and paying $2 a pound for a chunk of beef is so far removed from the animal's the miserable life and cruel, horror-house-style death that we inflicted upon it that it's easy to ignore the inhumanity of it all.
Your position is a bit hard to support unless you also oppose eating meat in general.
As long as the animal being shot (even recreationally) is eaten, then it represnts one less animal that lives its life in an unnatural and often vigorously inhumane environment, only to meet a very, very stressful and quite occasionally painful end.
On the balance, the deer that lived free and was shot had a *far* better quality of life -- and, yes, quality of death -- than 99% of the animals that you find laid out nice and neat in your grocery store. Eating a hunted wild deer is going to reduce demand for the drugged-up, tortured cattle you can buy at the store, which is a clear net win for animal suffering overall.
Now, killing a healthy non-nuisance creature and failing to eat it is, yes, morally repugnant -- and illegal in many parts of the US. But your comments elsewhere made it clear that you were referring to all sport hunting, even when the game is eaten.
Not really. The patent examiners have the solution in front of them. It's easy to solve a puzzle when the answer is written down in front of you, so they're not really in a good position to judge "obviousness." What I'm proposing is based roughly on a "dirty room/clean room" approach where the examiner reduces the patent to its requirements, and the engineers propose a solution to meet those requirements.
That's why I proposed a short period of time: if even 0.1% of the engineers out there can immediately think of the same solution, then it's obvious for the purposes of the patent system.
Patents theoretically promote innovation by encouraging people and companies to invest significant resources into solving problems. At 0.1% of the engineering population, you're pretty much guaranteed that, once the problem comes to light, the fact that tens of thousands of people would be able to solve the problem means that patenting the idea doesn't serve the common good: because, statistically speaking, several companies will have employees all equally capable of solving the problem, several companies will. Allowing patents to be issued for those kind of "inventions" doesn't promote anything useful at all.
I'm way too familiar with patents, and my experience is that the vast, vast majority -- I'm talking two to three sigmas here -- are issued not because someone thought up a novel solution to a problem, but because someone thought up a stunningly obvious solution to a newly emerging problem.
It's too late for those patents that have made it out of the gate already, but I have long held that there should be a small pool of engineers -- you could probably even find people do do it on a non-paid volunteer basis -- who were involved in the patent process in a very specific, blinded fashion. The way it would work is: as part of the review process, the patent reviewer would state the problem the patent was trying to solve as an unsolved problem. This problem would then be sent to one or more of these engineers. The engineers would consider the problem, and have a short period of time to submit one or more potential solutions that solve the problem. If any of the potential solutions substantially replicates the claims of the patent under review, it would be rejected as obvious.
Sadly, this makes *way* too much sense, so I doubt it would ever be seriously considered by the USPTO.
...it's easier to hate wealthy nations than it is to reform a poor government run by corrupt theologues
You misplaced a clause there. I think you meant to say: "it's easier to hate wealthy nations run by corrupt theologues than it is to reform a poor government."
I'm sure speed limits are an inconvenience to people who can safely and skilfully drive at 100mph
You, sir, misunderstand the purpose of speed limits. You may recall (or, depending on your age, may have heard about the fact) that the U.S. federal government imposed a national limit of 55 mph to speed limits in 1974. (Technically, they threatened to cut off federal funding for highways if states failed to lower their maximum speed limits, but this would have been the kiss of death to any U.S. state). At the time, many states had maximum speed limits in the 60 to 80 mph range, and some (Nevada, Montana) had some roads with no speed limits at all.
There wasn't some sudden national safety push that prompted the federal government to take this action; the feds dropped speed limits in response to an oil embargo imposed by several countries in the middle east. Supplies plummeted, and oil prices rocketed out of control. The National Maximum Speed Limit (NMSL) was an attempt to limit fuel consumption by making Americans use gasoline more efficiently. Gas mileage plummets at speeds in excess of 55 mph, which is where the national limit of 55 came from. After gas prices were normalized for quite a time, the national limits were relaxed; unless you're really quite young (or not American), you probably recall the repeal of the 55 mph NMSL in 1987.
Of course, this is all irrelvant now, what with oil being so plentiful and inexpensive -- and without any negative geopolitical consequences, either! (I'm not going to claim that speeding is buying supplies for Iranian-supplied IEDs that are killing U.S. Marines in Iraq, but I know a number of people who do).
Re:AC because of slashdot anti-disabled policy
on
DirecTV's New HD-DVR
·
· Score: 3, Funny
How did you get ahold of the Vista speech recognition technology? I thought that was still in internal trials at Microsoft...
Ok, fess up, how many of you have downloaded gigs of MP3s before with no intention of going out to see the band live or buy the merchandise?
I've done far, far worse than that. I've spent decades listening to music on the radio, habitually changing the station when commercials come on.
A lot of the hysteria around music "piracy" has to do with fairly recent brainwashing campaigns by those who stand to gain the most (the RIAA and record labels) from twisting copyright into a farsical parody of what it was intended to be. It largely ignores the IPR landscape of 20 or even 10 years ago. It's an increasingly effective propaganda campaign that has managed to convince people that these middlemen, who have long outlived their usefulness, are somehow owed a huge, privately-funded welfare income -- at the expense of not just artists and consumers, but the commons as a whole. The ultimate goal is a full dismantling of "fair-use."
You're a bit confused, I think. If something is patented, then (in theory, at least), there is a publicly available patent disclosure that describes the technique in sufficient detail that anyone "skilled in the art" of its field should be able to read and implement it. Patents and trade secrets are mutually exclusive.
Why isn't encryption being built into the protocol when it's designed?
For any IETF protocol developed in the past 10 years or so, it is. For example, RFC 3261 (which defines SIP) makes TLS encryption *mandatory* to implement. It does allow the users/administrators/whatever to turn it on and off, but you can't say your implementation is RFC 3261 compliant unless it contains TLS encryption.
For most other important protocols defined before the IESG required strong security in all protocols, there have been significant efforts to revise them as necessary to provide encryption. For example, RFC 3711 defines a mechanism for encrypting RTP (the voice packets in a VoIP call).
Anyone who bothers to actually implement to spec already has released products that do encryption, many by default. For example if I use the Snom 360 SIP phone on my desk to call anyone else using a client that has actually implemented all of RFC 3261 (instead of whatever small portion of it amused them) and implemented RFC 3711, both the signaling and the media will be strongly encrypted BY DEFAULT. And that's the way it was configured when I took it out of the box.
The fact that some current implementations don't bother following spec impugns their designers and implementors, not the protocols they're using. Using the standardized VoIP protocols available today, everyone *should* be able to make encrypted calls.
...albeit grammatically incorrect. (Prepositional phrases start with a preposition. They don't end with one -- although simply ending one with a preposition is far less jarring than bookending the phrase with prepositions. The former sounds lazy or colloquial; the latter, uneducated and pretentious.)
If it's a Toyota nav system (and the five "quick stop" things sounds like it is) -- at least, from 2004 on -- your passenger can override the lock-out by doing the following:
- Go to the map menu screen - Select "volume" - Tap the upper-left corner then the lower-left corner; repeat three times. - On the screen that pops up, press and hold "override" until it beeps - Tap "back"
Now, until you turn the car off, your passenger should be able to use the nav system just fine. You will need to select "guide" after selecting your route, since it will no longer automatically start guiding you when the car starts rolling.
Yeah, this would be tragic if the whole system buckled under to this kind of pressure. In practice, what you had were a few cops who flunked 8th-grade civics giving someone a hard time. The court took care of it. The Progressive added a couple of addenda to its article on this incident; in particular:
The case against Frank Van Den Bosch was dismissed on May 27.
On June 8, Van Den Bosch's attorney, Andrea Baker, filed a civil complaint against Platteville Police Chief Earl Hernandez, five other police officers, and one fire fighter.
Don't get me wrong: there's plenty to worry about with the current state of civil liberties in the U.S. The assault on privacy, assumption of innocence, and right to counsel is truly terrifying. The first amendment is holding up about as well as it has in the past several decades. It's the other ones that need some help.
Here I sit without mod points as something genuinely amusing floats by. Oh, well.
ObNit: There's no way "who'se" can stand in for the completely-devoid-of-the-letter-E phrase "who has." Spelling observations should be more carefully crafted.;-)
Actually, Texas has probably the most ambitious plans for rail anywhere in the U.S. at the moment -- so much so that the plan has been ridiculed from many quarters. Google "Texas Superhighways." A major component of that plan is high-speed passenger rail links between major Texas cities (giving the ability to go from, e.g., Dallas to Houston [240 miles] nonstop).
And although things are slow getting off the ground, Dallas (and to a lesser degree Houston) is finally getting usable (electric) light rail systems in place. We'll all probably be dead before Texas has a system that can be compared to those in Europe (or even Massachusetts), but at least we're working on it now.
So, yes, some of the Texas transportation budget is going to rails, and it's not trivial.
Slashdot Mirror
So you're familiar with sex laws in all 50 states?
a n-adultery-law.php
http://www.sherlockpi.com/infidelity-cases/michig
US law is hardly a cohesive system -- it's all over the map. And some states do have draconian provisions that are motivated primarily by puritanical religious convictions. Extra-marital sex a felony? That's a stretch.
And if you think these laws don't count because they aren't enforced, I encourage you to google the name of "Lloyd Waltonen".
Yes -- and it would stop 98% of the creative output in the world. Rare is the artist who will dance for your amusement while starving to death.
That's a pretty good idea. The source code it self is ludicrously short (about 9 printed pages), so it would amount to something more like a pamphlet than a book -- but it proves the point nicely.
I wonder whether it could be reduced even further in size through a concerted effort like the Export-a-crypto perl script that ended up printed on t-shirts. It would be sweet if we could get Cafe Press a DMCA takedown notice on crypto grounds...
Yes! Then, we can have a separate TLD for violent content (.vio), too -- remove that from the debate. And a new one for political speech (.pol). Ond, of course, there's no telling what the teeming masses might publish, so we need to move blogs and other discussion forums into their own domain (.blog). I mean, yeah, it makes it far easier to shut down dissent, but at least we've shunted the problem off to a ghetto corner of the web so that the argument doesn't interfere with your ability to browse santized, Clear-Channel operated, government-approved web sites. Yaay! Nirvana!
Oh, heck. I have karma to burn.
than '[th]&n, '[th]an (conjunction) 1 a -- used as a function word to indicate the second member or the member taken as the point of departure in a comparison expressive of inequality; used with comparative adjectives and comparative adverbs
then '[th]en (adverb) 2 a : soon after that : next in order of time b : following next after in order of position, narration, or enumeration : being next in a series c : in addition : BESIDES
You're new around here, aren't you?
(Your comment is spot on, but I can't resist a perfect setup like that)
I couldn't agree more. I suspect most people have absolutely no clue about the horrific conditions that factory-farmed food animals are forced to live and die in.
At least when you hunt, you understand what's at stake, and you can't ignore that something has just died for you to be able to eat -- going to the store and paying $2 a pound for a chunk of beef is so far removed from the animal's the miserable life and cruel, horror-house-style death that we inflicted upon it that it's easy to ignore the inhumanity of it all.
Your position is a bit hard to support unless you also oppose eating meat in general.
As long as the animal being shot (even recreationally) is eaten, then it represnts one less animal that lives its life in an unnatural and often vigorously inhumane environment, only to meet a very, very stressful and quite occasionally painful end.
On the balance, the deer that lived free and was shot had a *far* better quality of life -- and, yes, quality of death -- than 99% of the animals that you find laid out nice and neat in your grocery store. Eating a hunted wild deer is going to reduce demand for the drugged-up, tortured cattle you can buy at the store, which is a clear net win for animal suffering overall.
Now, killing a healthy non-nuisance creature and failing to eat it is, yes, morally repugnant -- and illegal in many parts of the US. But your comments elsewhere made it clear that you were referring to all sport hunting, even when the game is eaten.
I think what it says is: no one wants to steal a Zune.
Not really. The patent examiners have the solution in front of them. It's easy to solve a puzzle when the answer is written down in front of you, so they're not really in a good position to judge "obviousness." What I'm proposing is based roughly on a "dirty room/clean room" approach where the examiner reduces the patent to its requirements, and the engineers propose a solution to meet those requirements.
That's why I proposed a short period of time: if even 0.1% of the engineers out there can immediately think of the same solution, then it's obvious for the purposes of the patent system.
Patents theoretically promote innovation by encouraging people and companies to invest significant resources into solving problems. At 0.1% of the engineering population, you're pretty much guaranteed that, once the problem comes to light, the fact that tens of thousands of people would be able to solve the problem means that patenting the idea doesn't serve the common good: because, statistically speaking, several companies will have employees all equally capable of solving the problem, several companies will. Allowing patents to be issued for those kind of "inventions" doesn't promote anything useful at all.
I'm way too familiar with patents, and my experience is that the vast, vast majority -- I'm talking two to three sigmas here -- are issued not because someone thought up a novel solution to a problem, but because someone thought up a stunningly obvious solution to a newly emerging problem.
It's too late for those patents that have made it out of the gate already, but I have long held that there should be a small pool of engineers -- you could probably even find people do do it on a non-paid volunteer basis -- who were involved in the patent process in a very specific, blinded fashion. The way it would work is: as part of the review process, the patent reviewer would state the problem the patent was trying to solve as an unsolved problem. This problem would then be sent to one or more of these engineers. The engineers would consider the problem, and have a short period of time to submit one or more potential solutions that solve the problem. If any of the potential solutions substantially replicates the claims of the patent under review, it would be rejected as obvious.
Sadly, this makes *way* too much sense, so I doubt it would ever be seriously considered by the USPTO.
You misplaced a clause there. I think you meant to say: "it's easier to hate wealthy nations run by corrupt theologues than it is to reform a poor government."
You, sir, misunderstand the purpose of speed limits. You may recall (or, depending on your age, may have heard about the fact) that the U.S. federal government imposed a national limit of 55 mph to speed limits in 1974. (Technically, they threatened to cut off federal funding for highways if states failed to lower their maximum speed limits, but this would have been the kiss of death to any U.S. state). At the time, many states had maximum speed limits in the 60 to 80 mph range, and some (Nevada, Montana) had some roads with no speed limits at all.
There wasn't some sudden national safety push that prompted the federal government to take this action; the feds dropped speed limits in response to an oil embargo imposed by several countries in the middle east. Supplies plummeted, and oil prices rocketed out of control. The National Maximum Speed Limit (NMSL) was an attempt to limit fuel consumption by making Americans use gasoline more efficiently. Gas mileage plummets at speeds in excess of 55 mph, which is where the national limit of 55 came from. After gas prices were normalized for quite a time, the national limits were relaxed; unless you're really quite young (or not American), you probably recall the repeal of the 55 mph NMSL in 1987.
Of course, this is all irrelvant now, what with oil being so plentiful and inexpensive -- and without any negative geopolitical consequences, either! (I'm not going to claim that speeding is buying supplies for Iranian-supplied IEDs that are killing U.S. Marines in Iraq, but I know a number of people who do).
How did you get ahold of the Vista speech recognition technology? I thought that was still in internal trials at Microsoft...
I've done far, far worse than that. I've spent decades listening to music on the radio, habitually changing the station when commercials come on.
A lot of the hysteria around music "piracy" has to do with fairly recent brainwashing campaigns by those who stand to gain the most (the RIAA and record labels) from twisting copyright into a farsical parody of what it was intended to be. It largely ignores the IPR landscape of 20 or even 10 years ago. It's an increasingly effective propaganda campaign that has managed to convince people that these middlemen, who have long outlived their usefulness, are somehow owed a huge, privately-funded welfare income -- at the expense of not just artists and consumers, but the commons as a whole. The ultimate goal is a full dismantling of "fair-use."
You're a bit confused, I think. If something is patented, then (in theory, at least), there is a publicly available patent disclosure that describes the technique in sufficient detail that anyone "skilled in the art" of its field should be able to read and implement it. Patents and trade secrets are mutually exclusive.
Jose Padilla?
For any IETF protocol developed in the past 10 years or so, it is. For example, RFC 3261 (which defines SIP) makes TLS encryption *mandatory* to implement. It does allow the users/administrators/whatever to turn it on and off, but you can't say your implementation is RFC 3261 compliant unless it contains TLS encryption.
For most other important protocols defined before the IESG required strong security in all protocols, there have been significant efforts to revise them as necessary to provide encryption. For example, RFC 3711 defines a mechanism for encrypting RTP (the voice packets in a VoIP call).
Anyone who bothers to actually implement to spec already has released products that do encryption, many by default. For example if I use the Snom 360 SIP phone on my desk to call anyone else using a client that has actually implemented all of RFC 3261 (instead of whatever small portion of it amused them) and implemented RFC 3711, both the signaling and the media will be strongly encrypted BY DEFAULT. And that's the way it was configured when I took it out of the box.
The fact that some current implementations don't bother following spec impugns their designers and implementors, not the protocols they're using. Using the standardized VoIP protocols available today, everyone *should* be able to make encrypted calls.
...albeit grammatically incorrect. (Prepositional phrases start with a preposition. They don't end with one -- although simply ending one with a preposition is far less jarring than bookending the phrase with prepositions. The former sounds lazy or colloquial; the latter, uneducated and pretentious.)
If it's a Toyota nav system (and the five "quick stop" things sounds like it is) -- at least, from 2004 on -- your passenger can override the lock-out by doing the following:
- Go to the map menu screen
- Select "volume"
- Tap the upper-left corner then the lower-left corner; repeat three times.
- On the screen that pops up, press and hold "override" until it beeps
- Tap "back"
Now, until you turn the car off, your passenger should be able to use the nav system just fine. You will need to select "guide" after selecting your route, since it will no longer automatically start guiding you when the car starts rolling.
Yeah, this would be tragic if the whole system buckled under to this kind of pressure. In practice, what you had were a few cops who flunked 8th-grade civics giving someone a hard time. The court took care of it. The Progressive added a couple of addenda to its article on this incident; in particular:
Don't get me wrong: there's plenty to worry about with the current state of civil liberties in the U.S. The assault on privacy, assumption of innocence, and right to counsel is truly terrifying. The first amendment is holding up about as well as it has in the past several decades. It's the other ones that need some help.
Here I sit without mod points as something genuinely amusing floats by. Oh, well.
;-)
ObNit: There's no way "who'se" can stand in for the completely-devoid-of-the-letter-E phrase "who has." Spelling observations should be more carefully crafted.
I'm deeply suspicious of a so-called "educational" distribution put together by people who can't seem to spell "calendar" correctly.
Actually, Texas has probably the most ambitious plans for rail anywhere in the U.S. at the moment -- so much so that the plan has been ridiculed from many quarters. Google "Texas Superhighways." A major component of that plan is high-speed passenger rail links between major Texas cities (giving the ability to go from, e.g., Dallas to Houston [240 miles] nonstop).
And although things are slow getting off the ground, Dallas (and to a lesser degree Houston) is finally getting usable (electric) light rail systems in place. We'll all probably be dead before Texas has a system that can be compared to those in Europe (or even Massachusetts), but at least we're working on it now.
So, yes, some of the Texas transportation budget is going to rails, and it's not trivial.