Sklyarov is clearly guilty of violating the DMCA. The not guilty plea is stupid nonsense
You're confusing the casual usage of the word "guilty" with the legal use of the word.
Yes, he violated the DMCA in a literal sense, but that doesn't make him "guilty" in any way (at least until he is convicted by the proper legal process).
You can kill someone and not be "guilty" of it because it was self-defense. You can kill someone and not be "guilty" of it because you were mentally incapable of understanding the difference between right and wrong.
The issue here very much is one of guilt -- that's the only reason we take people to criminal court in this country.
Dmitri is presumably going to claim that he is not guilty of anything because by the Constitution the DMCA itself is not an enforceable law -- thus there is nothing to be guilty of.
If the DMCA is unconstitutional, legally it is as if it had never existed in the first place (except of course as a legal precedent)-- there will be no such thing as being guilty of violating it.
they state their viewpoint and philosophical justification for that viewpoint
As a longstanding member of the ACLU, I am well aware of their stated opinion.
I simply find it HIGHLY bizarre that there is only one amendment to the entire constitution where the ACLU's official stance is "well, the Supreme Court has said in the past that the right only goes so far, so who are we to argue?"
I questioned early on whether the ACLU would risk their hollywood gravy train by coming out in support of Sklyarov
That's okay, they ignore the whole second amendment, too. They're slowly paring down the amount of the bill of rights to expend energy defending, apparently...
the battery power required to transmit to a LEO satellite is a bit much to ask for in a portable phone that any joe can use
The newest Iridium phones (from Motorola) last for a few hours transmitting on a battery (and the batteries are SMALL). I honestly don't know how they got such efficiency out of it but they do.
The Globalstar phones are a little less efficient (of course our phone is also a year older) and the Inmarsat M4 unit (64k) only runs for about 20 minutes on battery power, but its not a LEO system so it'll fry your testacles if you stand in front of the antennae. Try explaining that in Swahili...
We do a lot of extremely remote data projects (Mt Everest, North pole, Amazon river, etc) and I can definitely say that the satellite data market is getting pretty useful for general business use in remote locations. But i don't think a consumer will ever buy one, which means it'll always be more expensive than cellular.
We have used Iridium, Globalstar, and InMarSat all in the field, and currently the Iridium is tough to beat for a truly mobile solution. The fact that the company gets to make a profit without having to pay for the satellites makes a big difference, of course -- they can afford to sell airtime at less than a dollar in the US (if you buy time in bulk -- it's $1.50 for a non-bulk rate). Globalstar is having a tough time matching that considering they don't have the convenience of going through bankruptcy to write off their infrastructure costs.
Globalstar does have a better data rate, though -- 9.6k vs Iridium's 2.4k (they do compression "up to" 10k). InMarSat has the great 64k/128k bandwidth but its hardly a handheld unit.
The biggest disadvantage of course is the line-of-sight requirement. So using a sat phone in a city can be next to impossible (unless you have a dual-mode with cellular, which require tariff agreements overseas and aren't always available), and bringing an external antenna with a long cable is necessary if you're doing data work indoors in a rural area. And of course plenty of power no matter where you are.
But if you're in the middle of nowhere, it beats the heck out of smoke signals...
Well, if you want to be anal, its a Constitutional Democratic Republic.
And FWIW, other state had equally bad voting problems -- its just that they didnt affect the outcome, as they did in Florida, so no one paid much attention to them...
Knowing we may have the technology to provide a worthwhile alternative to M.A.D.,
there is no such thing. MAD is based on the reality that we cannot be 100% certain of the reaction and outcome from a given set of provocations.
We cannot know with certainty the counter and counter-counter measures of the opposing sides.
We can build missile defense systems for the next thousand years, but we cannot be confident enough that they will provide sufficient protection to eliminate the real threat of mutual destruction.
I must say that any person who exclusively supports M.A.D., whether military or political, is betraying the safety of American lives. Thus, they are un-American.
Or, they recognixe that with limited resources the research and construction dollars would be better placed elsewhere.
If we were talking about billions for theater-defense systems (which are very likley to be used in most every non-trivial conflict) I'd be fully in support. Building a boondoggle defense system from an attack that will never come seems a foolish waste of resources that could be going to genuine protection of American (and allied) lives.
Putting more Aegis cruisers in the South China Sea will do far more to protect american interests than SDI (and at a far lower cost)...
WE do the sat connection magic for work all the time -- thats why I chimed in on the Iridium. We just got our first Iridium system last week and its pretty neat except for the low transmission speed.
Its much better than Globalstar has been for us.
And making calls from random places is very cool!..
Everybody could bring Iridium phones and plug their laptops into them and dial AOL or whatever from china. THAT would be cool. I mean, if Iridium was still around.
Iridium is very much alive and kicking.
Unfortunately they only offer data services at 2400 bps, so you're not going to be doing a lot of web surfing on that connection.
Besides which, satellite communications equipment is just as likely to get you into trouble as looking at verboten sites...
Top Gun and NRA Life Member John Ashcroft called today for the virtually immediate destruction of all records of approved purchasers retained for the audit log of the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) -- a death certificate for the Brady law. 6/28/2001
FWIW, he was just doing the job -- the instant background checks were a comprimise reached by the stipulation that all the records at the federal level would be destroyed. The FBI never destroyed ANY of them, claiming it was simply keeping an "audit" trail. Whether you agree with the law or not, the FBI was clearly keeping an extensive list of legal handgun purchasers, in direct contradiction to the very federal law that implemented the background checks.
Nothing would kill the Brady bill and similar measures faster than things like this, where the FBI and fed proves it is unwilling to live up to their own comprimises with gun rights advocates. Now it will be MUCH harder to convince the NRA the fed is working in good faith.
So NRA aside, Ashcroft was just enforcing the federal law (and his FBI oversight responsibilities)...
but it seems that manual counting is far worse than even the primitive machines that the US uses
The paper clearly says that human tabulation is among the most accurate methods of counting.
Its not like one person counts the ballots and then burns them all -- usually several people count them, and any discrepancies can be resolved by even more people.
For all the hyperbole in Florida, people are very responsible about this sort of thing. Especially when cheating will be noticed quickly and the penalties are high (VERY high).
That's okay, we're a non-capitalist country (and definitely a non-laissez-faire country).
We're also not a democracy.
We have found that setting up any system at the extreme end of a scale tends to be counter-productive.
Have an economy with some regulations, minimal requirements for disclosure, and significant financial oversight, and the rest of it can be pretty free-going.
besides the fact that there is not necessarily lying taking place here
Of course. That's what "investigation" means. They want to find out if there is or isn't.
And you go out of business because the customers choose not to come to your crooked horrible store
Um, no, its much worse than that.
If you are allergic to walnuts and buy a food because it says "no walnuts", but it does, and you die, you have a bigger problem than simply "oops, just don't shop there again".
When a hospital buys supplies, it expects that syringes and gauze labelled "sterile" are, in fact sterile according to the legal requirements of that word. If we can label anything "sterile" we like, a lot of folks are going to die of infections before we "punish" the vendor by taking our business elsewhere.
That "punishment" doesn't seem very useful, seeing as how they just killed a lot of people by lying and now they get to sell their same product for the same purpose to other hospitals (probably under a different company name).
Last time I checked we lived in a free market economy
One of the fundamental tenets of capitalism is that the free market only works efficiently with accurate information.
Misrepresenting (also called "lying" by normal people) your product or business in order to decieve the public is not a right of a company (at least in our country).
Whether the search engines are misrepresenting themselves and services is what Nader is asking to investigate.
"We can say what we want to sell our stuff, and by the way did I mention this cures cancer?" is not a particularly compelling argument.
The whole issue of what? the total economic and healthcare ramifications of what we do? Is there a bigger "whole issue" I'm missing?
When we die and the 2001 GNP has been spent, but we're still cleaning up the mess (at a measurable economic cost) what then? We've seen with medicare how easily a deferred economic cost can snowball. Later generations will have to make even greater profit just to tread water (forgive the pun) while paying to treat the problems we create today.
Even a dog knows not to shit where it eats.
I have yet to see a single long-term economic justification for contaminating limited (but vital) resources. You can claim all sorts of economic justifications for it in the short-term, but where is the idiocy in asking "what do we do then?"
I supose if long-term planning makes one an idiot, then I wouldn't mind being part of that club. I have yet to hear you offer one actual justification or economic explanation other than "take eco 101".
Maybe you didn't understand -- you can eat organic food every day of your life and you'll still be poisoned by soil and water.
Will the company have to chip in to help pay for the chemotherapy for all the people who get cancer from them? Do they get to take that as a tax deduction? Or will you and I just have to eat the whole healthcare cost through paying taxes to medicaid?
In the absence of the subsidies, organic farming would be even less viable.
Organic farming is the single most profitable agricultural field today. It does not rely at all on subsidies (most subsidies are given to the argicultural megacorps -- independent farmers can't keep up with the govt hoops to jump through and paperwork). Of course, its so profitable because it is the "alternative", so they charge a premium -- if everyone used normal methods it would likely be no more or less profitable than modern/chemical farming.
but modern methods are cleaner, more efficient, and safer.
No, modern methods are the exact opposite of those things (they may or may not be more efficient depending how you define the term, from an economic standpoint they are more efficient in the short-term by boosting production, but in the long term we're seeing relatively disastrous effects equivelent to the dust-bowls of the midwest in the early part of the 20th century, when over-farming reduced huge swaths of land to desert -- but as long as the topsoil doesn't blow away in the next financial quarter I guess it's considered "better".)
They are certainly not cleaner or safer by even the most abysmally permissive definitions -- unless you consider pouring Agent Orange into crops to be a safe and nutritious way to combat pests. Luckily, most places ran out of agent orange a decade or so after it was banned so you probably arent' getting much anymore (of course it's still in the ground water). Now they have much more powerful chemicals, and have to use more, because the only pests now are immune due to the liberal use of toxins. Rinse, later, repeat -- evolution in action.
Unfortunately we don't reproduce as quickly as the insects, so I'm not sure how long it will take US to become immune to the stuff...
I suggest you look into taking an economics class at your local community college.
And there they will teach me that extinction IS an economically viable outcome?
Or will they tell me that we have boosted the economy somehow by increasing agricultural output by poisoning the ground, then having tax subsidies go to those same companies that have eliminated normal farming (for increased production!) for them to not sell the output because they produce too much?
You're right, it's just too brilliant for me to comprehend.
The notion that the risk of us slowly choking ourselves to death is simply an opportunity cost eludes me...
It is absurd that people take so lightly the idea of shaving off a couple of percent of GDP;
Compared to extinction? Yeah, I'd say the choice between extinction and a slightly higher GDP is pretty easy.
are so quick to sacrifice the livlihood of their fellow man.
When did using ecologically friendly equipment reduce the workforce? If we stopped dumping chemicals into our farmland and went back to organic farming (which requires more manual labor ) there would be a lot more low-wage jobs available (hint: those are the jobs that are disappearing in the search for a higher GDP)...
Following this logic, everybody should convert to my religion
Then you didn't follow his logic.
Given two choices, if one has disastrous effects and the other has negligible effects, and either one is equally likely, choose to avoid the disastrous effects.
Choosing the wrong religion (at least western ones) would have disastrous effects regardless, because it measn an etenity of suffering. Therefore all choices are equally defensible and logical.
Slashdot Mirror
All you've shown is which form is more popular, not more correct
In the english lanuage, popularity does equal corectness (sonner or later)...
Sklyarov is clearly guilty of violating the DMCA. The not guilty plea is stupid nonsense
You're confusing the casual usage of the word "guilty" with the legal use of the word.
Yes, he violated the DMCA in a literal sense, but that doesn't make him "guilty" in any way (at least until he is convicted by the proper legal process).
You can kill someone and not be "guilty" of it because it was self-defense. You can kill someone and not be "guilty" of it because you were mentally incapable of understanding the difference between right and wrong.
The issue here very much is one of guilt -- that's the only reason we take people to criminal court in this country.
Dmitri is presumably going to claim that he is not guilty of anything because by the Constitution the DMCA itself is not an enforceable law -- thus there is nothing to be guilty of.
If the DMCA is unconstitutional, legally it is as if it had never existed in the first place (except of course as a legal precedent)-- there will be no such thing as being guilty of violating it.
they state their viewpoint and philosophical justification for that viewpoint
As a longstanding member of the ACLU, I am well aware of their stated opinion.
I simply find it HIGHLY bizarre that there is only one amendment to the entire constitution where the ACLU's official stance is "well, the Supreme Court has said in the past that the right only goes so far, so who are we to argue?"
I questioned early on whether the ACLU would risk their hollywood gravy train by coming out in support of Sklyarov
That's okay, they ignore the whole second amendment, too. They're slowly paring down the amount of the bill of rights to expend energy defending, apparently...
What does privacy have to do with government? Is it not possible to have privacy from a corporation?
the battery power required to transmit to a LEO satellite is a bit much to ask for in a portable phone that any joe can use
The newest Iridium phones (from Motorola) last for a few hours transmitting on a battery (and the batteries are SMALL). I honestly don't know how they got such efficiency out of it but they do.
The Globalstar phones are a little less efficient (of course our phone is also a year older) and the Inmarsat M4 unit (64k) only runs for about 20 minutes on battery power, but its not a LEO system so it'll fry your testacles if you stand in front of the antennae. Try explaining that in Swahili...
We do a lot of extremely remote data projects (Mt Everest, North pole, Amazon river, etc) and I can definitely say that the satellite data market is getting pretty useful for general business use in remote locations. But i don't think a consumer will ever buy one, which means it'll always be more expensive than cellular.
We have used Iridium, Globalstar, and InMarSat all in the field, and currently the Iridium is tough to beat for a truly mobile solution. The fact that the company gets to make a profit without having to pay for the satellites makes a big difference, of course -- they can afford to sell airtime at less than a dollar in the US (if you buy time in bulk -- it's $1.50 for a non-bulk rate). Globalstar is having a tough time matching that considering they don't have the convenience of going through bankruptcy to write off their infrastructure costs.
Globalstar does have a better data rate, though -- 9.6k vs Iridium's 2.4k (they do compression "up to" 10k). InMarSat has the great 64k/128k bandwidth but its hardly a handheld unit.
The biggest disadvantage of course is the line-of-sight requirement. So using a sat phone in a city can be next to impossible (unless you have a dual-mode with cellular, which require tariff agreements overseas and aren't always available), and bringing an external antenna with a long cable is necessary if you're doing data work indoors in a rural area. And of course plenty of power no matter where you are.
But if you're in the middle of nowhere, it beats the heck out of smoke signals...
America isn't a democracy, it's a republic
Well, if you want to be anal, its a Constitutional Democratic Republic.
And FWIW, other state had equally bad voting problems -- its just that they didnt affect the outcome, as they did in Florida, so no one paid much attention to them...
Knowing we may have the technology to provide a worthwhile alternative to M.A.D.,
there is no such thing. MAD is based on the reality that we cannot be 100% certain of the reaction and outcome from a given set of provocations.
We cannot know with certainty the counter and counter-counter measures of the opposing sides.
We can build missile defense systems for the next thousand years, but we cannot be confident enough that they will provide sufficient protection to eliminate the real threat of mutual destruction.
I must say that any person who exclusively supports M.A.D., whether military or political, is betraying the safety of American lives. Thus, they are un-American.
Or, they recognixe that with limited resources the research and construction dollars would be better placed elsewhere.
If we were talking about billions for theater-defense systems (which are very likley to be used in most every non-trivial conflict) I'd be fully in support. Building a boondoggle defense system from an attack that will never come seems a foolish waste of resources that could be going to genuine protection of American (and allied) lives.
Putting more Aegis cruisers in the South China Sea will do far more to protect american interests than SDI (and at a far lower cost)...
WE do the sat connection magic for work all the time -- thats why I chimed in on the Iridium. We just got our first Iridium system last week and its pretty neat except for the low transmission speed.
Its much better than Globalstar has been for us.
And making calls from random places is very cool!..
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Everybody could bring Iridium phones and plug their laptops into them and dial AOL or whatever from china. THAT would be cool. I mean, if Iridium was still around.
Iridium is very much alive and kicking.
Unfortunately they only offer data services at 2400 bps, so you're not going to be doing a lot of web surfing on that connection.
Besides which, satellite communications equipment is just as likely to get you into trouble as looking at verboten sites...
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Top Gun and NRA Life Member John Ashcroft called today for the virtually immediate destruction of all records of approved purchasers retained for the audit log of the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) -- a death certificate for the Brady law. 6/28/2001
FWIW, he was just doing the job -- the instant background checks were a comprimise reached by the stipulation that all the records at the federal level would be destroyed. The FBI never destroyed ANY of them, claiming it was simply keeping an "audit" trail. Whether you agree with the law or not, the FBI was clearly keeping an extensive list of legal handgun purchasers, in direct contradiction to the very federal law that implemented the background checks.
Nothing would kill the Brady bill and similar measures faster than things like this, where the FBI and fed proves it is unwilling to live up to their own comprimises with gun rights advocates. Now it will be MUCH harder to convince the NRA the fed is working in good faith.
So NRA aside, Ashcroft was just enforcing the federal law (and his FBI oversight responsibilities)...
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Vidomi has splited their program into two programs
I assume they splited off the part that included the spell and grammar checker.
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but it seems that manual counting is far worse than even the primitive machines that the US uses
The paper clearly says that human tabulation is among the most accurate methods of counting.
Its not like one person counts the ballots and then burns them all -- usually several people count them, and any discrepancies can be resolved by even more people.
For all the hyperbole in Florida, people are very responsible about this sort of thing. Especially when cheating will be noticed quickly and the penalties are high (VERY high).
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you can now get arrested for what would otherwise be a civil action
Copyright violations can also be a criminal violation.
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is a non-capitalistic action
That's okay, we're a non-capitalist country (and definitely a non-laissez-faire country).
We're also not a democracy.
We have found that setting up any system at the extreme end of a scale tends to be counter-productive.
Have an economy with some regulations, minimal requirements for disclosure, and significant financial oversight, and the rest of it can be pretty free-going.
besides the fact that there is not necessarily lying taking place here
Of course. That's what "investigation" means. They want to find out if there is or isn't.
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And you go out of business because the customers choose not to come to your crooked horrible store
Um, no, its much worse than that.
If you are allergic to walnuts and buy a food because it says "no walnuts", but it does, and you die, you have a bigger problem than simply "oops, just don't shop there again".
When a hospital buys supplies, it expects that syringes and gauze labelled "sterile" are, in fact sterile according to the legal requirements of that word. If we can label anything "sterile" we like, a lot of folks are going to die of infections before we "punish" the vendor by taking our business elsewhere.
That "punishment" doesn't seem very useful, seeing as how they just killed a lot of people by lying and now they get to sell their same product for the same purpose to other hospitals (probably under a different company name).
---------------------------------------------
Last time I checked we lived in a free market economy
One of the fundamental tenets of capitalism is that the free market only works efficiently with accurate information.
Misrepresenting (also called "lying" by normal people) your product or business in order to decieve the public is not a right of a company (at least in our country).
Whether the search engines are misrepresenting themselves and services is what Nader is asking to investigate.
"We can say what we want to sell our stuff, and by the way did I mention this cures cancer?" is not a particularly compelling argument.
---------------------------------------------
The whole issue of what? the total economic and healthcare ramifications of what we do? Is there a bigger "whole issue" I'm missing?
When we die and the 2001 GNP has been spent, but we're still cleaning up the mess (at a measurable economic cost) what then? We've seen with medicare how easily a deferred economic cost can snowball. Later generations will have to make even greater profit just to tread water (forgive the pun) while paying to treat the problems we create today.
Even a dog knows not to shit where it eats.
I have yet to see a single long-term economic justification for contaminating limited (but vital) resources. You can claim all sorts of economic justifications for it in the short-term, but where is the idiocy in asking "what do we do then?"
I supose if long-term planning makes one an idiot, then I wouldn't mind being part of that club. I have yet to hear you offer one actual justification or economic explanation other than "take eco 101".
---------------------------------------------
Buy all the organic food you want
Maybe you didn't understand -- you can eat organic food every day of your life and you'll still be poisoned by soil and water.
Will the company have to chip in to help pay for the chemotherapy for all the people who get cancer from them? Do they get to take that as a tax deduction? Or will you and I just have to eat the whole healthcare cost through paying taxes to medicaid?
Or does that not get covered in economics 101?...
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In the absence of the subsidies, organic farming would be even less viable.
Organic farming is the single most profitable agricultural field today. It does not rely at all on subsidies (most subsidies are given to the argicultural megacorps -- independent farmers can't keep up with the govt hoops to jump through and paperwork). Of course, its so profitable because it is the "alternative", so they charge a premium -- if everyone used normal methods it would likely be no more or less profitable than modern/chemical farming.
but modern methods are cleaner, more efficient, and safer.
No, modern methods are the exact opposite of those things (they may or may not be more efficient depending how you define the term, from an economic standpoint they are more efficient in the short-term by boosting production, but in the long term we're seeing relatively disastrous effects equivelent to the dust-bowls of the midwest in the early part of the 20th century, when over-farming reduced huge swaths of land to desert -- but as long as the topsoil doesn't blow away in the next financial quarter I guess it's considered "better".)
They are certainly not cleaner or safer by even the most abysmally permissive definitions -- unless you consider pouring Agent Orange into crops to be a safe and nutritious way to combat pests. Luckily, most places ran out of agent orange a decade or so after it was banned so you probably arent' getting much anymore (of course it's still in the ground water). Now they have much more powerful chemicals, and have to use more, because the only pests now are immune due to the liberal use of toxins. Rinse, later, repeat -- evolution in action.
Unfortunately we don't reproduce as quickly as the insects, so I'm not sure how long it will take US to become immune to the stuff...
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I suggest you look into taking an economics class at your local community college.
And there they will teach me that extinction IS an economically viable outcome?
Or will they tell me that we have boosted the economy somehow by increasing agricultural output by poisoning the ground, then having tax subsidies go to those same companies that have eliminated normal farming (for increased production!) for them to not sell the output because they produce too much?
You're right, it's just too brilliant for me to comprehend.
The notion that the risk of us slowly choking ourselves to death is simply an opportunity cost eludes me...
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I can tell you haven't worked with surgeons.
That IS pretty much how they can be in the OR.
Some are nice, but all will give you crap about the quality of your stitches until you turn 50.
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It is absurd that people take so lightly the idea of shaving off a couple of percent of GDP;
Compared to extinction? Yeah, I'd say the choice between extinction and a slightly higher GDP is pretty easy.
are so quick to sacrifice the livlihood of their fellow man.
When did using ecologically friendly equipment reduce the workforce? If we stopped dumping chemicals into our farmland and went back to organic farming (which requires more manual labor ) there would be a lot more low-wage jobs available (hint: those are the jobs that are disappearing in the search for a higher GDP)...
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Following this logic, everybody should convert to my religion
Then you didn't follow his logic.
Given two choices, if one has disastrous effects and the other has negligible effects, and either one is equally likely, choose to avoid the disastrous effects.
Choosing the wrong religion (at least western ones) would have disastrous effects regardless, because it measn an etenity of suffering. Therefore all choices are equally defensible and logical.
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