This, actually, is just as bad. Although one requirement of an acceptable voting system is that the voter be able to verify that their vote is correctly counted, another requirement, less obvious, is this: It must be impossible for an individual voter to prove how they voted to others. Without this requirement, a political party could truck 5,000 people who just didn't give a damn to a polling place, have them vote, and then give $50 to each person who could prove they voted for candidate Z.
CHAPTER 670
FILED WITH SECRETARY OF STATE OCTOBER 3, 2003
APPROVED BY GOVERNOR OCTOBER 2, 2003
PASSED THE SENATE SEPTEMBER 2, 2003
PASSED THE ASSEMBLY AUGUST 28, 2003
AMENDED IN ASSEMBLY AUGUST 18, 2003
AMENDED IN SENATE APRIL 30, 2003
AMENDED IN SENATE APRIL 21, 2003
INTRODUCED BY Senator Murray
(Coauthors: Assembly Members Goldberg, Koretz, and Leno)
FEBRUARY 21, 2003
An act to add Section 653z to the Penal Code, relating to crime.
LEGISLATIVE COUNSEL'S DIGEST
SB 1032, Murray. Motion picture theaters: unauthorized recordings.
(1) Existing law provides that a person admitted to a theater in which a motion picture is to be or is being exhibited who refuses to cease the operation of a video recording device upon the request of the theater owner is guilty of intentionally interfering with and obstructing the operation of a lawful business, a misdemeanor.
This bill would provide, in addition, that every person who operates a recording device in a motion picture theater while a motion picture is being exhibited, for the purpose of recording a theatrical motion picture and without the express written authority of the owner of the motion picture theater, is guilty of a public offense and shall be punished by imprisonment in a county jail not exceeding one year, by a fine not exceeding $2,500, or by both that fine and imprisonment. By creating a new crime, this bill would impose a state-mandated local program.
(2) The California Constitution requires the state to reimburse local agencies and school districts for certain costs mandated by the state. Statutory provisions establish procedures for making that reimbursement.
This bill would provide that no reimbursement is required by this act for a specified reason.
THE PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA DO ENACT AS FOLLOWS:
SECTION 1. Section 653z is added to the Penal Code, to read:
653z. (a) Every person who operates a recording device in a motion picture theater while a motion picture is being exhibited, for the purpose of recording a theatrical motion picture and without the express written authority of the owner of the motion picture theater, is guilty of a public offense and shall be punished by imprisonment in a county jail not exceeding one year, by a fine not exceeding two thousand five hundred dollars ($2,500), or by both that fine and imprisonment.
(b) For the purposes of this section, the following terms have the following meanings:
(1) "Recording device" means a photographic, digital or video camera, or other audio or video recording device capable of recording the sounds and images of a motion picture or any portion of a motion picture.
(2) "Motion picture theater" means a theater or other premises in which a motion picture is exhibited.
(c) Nothing in this section shall preclude prosecution under any other provision of law.
SEC. 2. No reimbursement is required by this act pursuant to Section 6 of Article XIII B of the California Constitution because the only costs that may be incurred by a local agency or school district will be incurred because this act creates a new crime or infraction, eliminates a crime or infraction, or changes the penalty for a crime or infraction, within the meaning of Section 17556 of the Government Code, or changes the definition of a crime within the meaning of Section 6 of Article XIII B of the California Constitution.
Re:That's how discovery works in litigation
on
SCOrched Earth
·
· Score: 0, Redundant
Gosh, such masterful handwaving. And yet you're still an idiot.
Here's the law of conservation of energy: you get out as much energy, in one way or another, as you put in.
Let's suppose that a conventional gas-guzzling SUV puts in G units of energy, in the form of combusting 1/30 of a gallon of gas (it's going one mile). Since it starts and ends its trip at rest (we're assuming it travels on a flat plane), ALL energy is technically "lost" to friction.
Now let's suppose we have a theoretical 100MPG car. Obviously, it only burns 1/100 of a gallon of gasoline to go the same mile. All of its energy is also "lost" to friction, but that's less energy. At the end of the day, the more efficient car has burned LESS gas.
Considerations of "translating energy" can come into play when you start thinking about battery-powered cars, and other types of cars not directly powered by gasoline. But that's not what we're talking about. So go away.
You're still not getting it. Those advances would all have been possible, even WITHOUT going to space. All we had to do was spend money on technological advances. And if we'd set terrestrial goals instead, we would have accomplished more of use.
To sum up: Advancements in technology: GOOOD. Advancements in technology targeted to help society: BETTER.
I'm still trying to figure out what your point is. Who are you to decide what "enough" is?
It's great that we got all these side benefits from the space program. But those were SIDE EFFECTS. And for every dollar that went towards a wide-ranging, general-technology-improving innovation, we spent a thousand bucks on deciding how to make a moon rover rove. So perhaps the "other stuff" would be a little more efficient at helping society?
Have you heard of the "broken window fallacy"? The basic idea is that employing thousands of people to accomplish very little of use isn't a good idea, that it's not necessarily productive to society.
We could spend a billion bucks and send a guy to the moon. Or we could spend a billion bucks and find a cure for some fatal disease, or provide food and shelter to a large number of third-world citizens, or overhaul the nation's educational system, or... etc., etc., etc. I dunno about you, but it seems to me that "the people" might need, or at least want, any one of those a bit more.
Uh huh. I didn't hear any refutation of my last point.
Let's try this one more time. Operating system services, such as file access and networking, are offered by UNIX, under which WINE runs. WINE allows programs Win32 programs--which are not built to make direct use of those UNIX facilities--to use them anyway, by taking the Win32 calls they make, and translating them into appropriate UNIX calls, which it then passes to the operating system. What's not an emulator about that?
Right. It's a translation. It takes the GDI calls, for instance, and TRANSLATES them into XLib calls, which it then sends to the X-server. Really, what's so hard about this?
Of course it's an issue, because it removes the legitimacy of the RPMs, which is a major issue. when Microsoft Instant Unintentional Update #8793873 just happens to overwrite ntfs.sys, BAM--people using the automagic installer (which copies ntfs.sys from the NTFS partition) will run into big problems. Instead of getting that benefit, they'll have to extract ntfs.sys from a CAB on their windows CD which they hopefully still have lying around somewhere, or explicitly go out and find an illegal copy of ntfs.sys.
They don't have to change the filesystem, just the driver. Have it do the same stuff, but differently... make use of API calls that are known to be missing from Wine...have it make other calls with improper semantics, and depend on the undefined (but known) results...Or just have it crash Wine, which doesn't exactly require a computing genius.
Wine does not consist of an emulation layer, a necessary feature of what most people would consider an emulator.
Of course Wine has an emulation layer. What do you think it does when an application calls a win32api function... calls up Redmond and asks what to do?
...and yet these things obviously have not yet been done. So since the "able program for Gnome for free" people haven't stepped up to the plate yet, why don't they try it this way?
....So, at the end of the day, Autodesk may not be required for the creating of an excellent open source AutoCAD.
Not required. But very, very helpful. The assertion that a million OSS programmers would be able to make an AutoCAD-quality CAD program in a matter of years is a classic fallacy with respect to software project efficiency. (See: The Mythical Man Month by Frederick Brooks.)
We are still dealing with hundreds of millions of dollars... enough to spur plenty of innovation and development, even if it is a mere pittance to the revinues of monopolists like Microsoft
Are we? Let's say ten thousand dollars for a copy of AutoCAD, under the government contract. Is the Brazilian government really going to need 10,000 copies of this niche software? This is why OS software (wide usefulness) and teeny niche utilities (easy to develop) are the meat and potatoes of Open Source: they either have a clear utility model, or they're so cheap to make they don't need one. AutoCAD fits into neither of these categories. It's a huge, full-featured, well-weathered application with decades of UI engineering under its belt. Not simple to compete with, and not even particularly easy to steal the look-n-feel from....when one considers the broader picture...
Which is great for OSS, but sucks for Brazil, or whatever other countries said "no more commercial software" first. Brazil can't afford to be a trendsetter, to be the first wave of infantry that gets mowed down by the commercial software archers. No country which is small and flexible enough to switch over Just Like That (TM) can afford it. Yes, it's a classic Catch-22. But it's a reality.
The problem with your argument is that the Brazilian government does not have the capability to represent much of a demand. Try telling Autodesk that they should open-source AutoCAD so that they can sell to the Brazilian government, and prepare to get laughed out of their office. Influencing supply by influencing demand only works if you have the ability to significantly influence demand.
You're missing the point of the parent post. If ISP X allows people to post copyrighted material through lax enforcement of its EULA, it will get a reputation as an infringement-friendly ISP, and thus will profit from other potential customers who don't want their warez sites shut down by the ISP.
The note about iPod's market share is a good one, and I think the most interesting part of all this. Microsoft might try their own foray into the embedded music device market, but I doubt it; the iPod has huge amounts of name recognition already. Also, if they did try to move in that direction, Microsoft politics would dictate that the CE people be given charge of the firmware (a task that CE is a bit heavy for), leading to the need for an expensive and energy-hungry processor, leading to low battery life, and a heavy battery to compensate. By no means definitive, but I'm guessing that would be the result of Microsoft making a Pod.NET.
This gives Microsoft an interesting, and (to it) unfamiliar alternative: To reverse-engineer or license the iPod interface, and write apps to talk to it in DRM-speak. Apple, of course, wouldn't dare give MS access under any but the most restrictive terms possible, and MS would have to be careful about skirting the DMCA when reverse-engineering. An interesting role reversal.
Slashdot Mirror
Am I missing something here? Why is this in the "news" section of the site, rather than in a banner ad up top?
This, actually, is just as bad. Although one requirement of an acceptable voting system is that the voter be able to verify that their vote is correctly counted, another requirement, less obvious, is this: It must be impossible for an individual voter to prove how they voted to others. Without this requirement, a political party could truck 5,000 people who just didn't give a damn to a polling place, have them vote, and then give $50 to each person who could prove they voted for candidate Z.
Uh huh. Read the legislative roll lately? Not too many Bushies.
Damn, I wish I had modpoints.
Gosh, such masterful handwaving. And yet you're still an idiot.
Here's the law of conservation of energy: you get out as much energy, in one way or another, as you put in.
Let's suppose that a conventional gas-guzzling SUV puts in G units of energy, in the form of combusting 1/30 of a gallon of gas (it's going one mile). Since it starts and ends its trip at rest (we're assuming it travels on a flat plane), ALL energy is technically "lost" to friction.
Now let's suppose we have a theoretical 100MPG car. Obviously, it only burns 1/100 of a gallon of gasoline to go the same mile. All of its energy is also "lost" to friction, but that's less energy. At the end of the day, the more efficient car has burned LESS gas.
Considerations of "translating energy" can come into play when you start thinking about battery-powered cars, and other types of cars not directly powered by gasoline. But that's not what we're talking about. So go away.
You actually believe scientists are just "out of ideas"? That they need a moon-landing to brainstorm new stuff?
Innovation, by definition, is throwing money at the impossible. How about an impossible goal like 100 MPG cars?
Indeed. It'd be eerie, if the same damn thing hadn't been happening to countries with large standing armies since the dawn of civilization.
You're still not getting it. Those advances would all have been possible, even WITHOUT going to space. All we had to do was spend money on technological advances. And if we'd set terrestrial goals instead, we would have accomplished more of use.
To sum up: Advancements in technology: GOOOD. Advancements in technology targeted to help society: BETTER.
I'm still trying to figure out what your point is. Who are you to decide what "enough" is?
It's great that we got all these side benefits from the space program. But those were SIDE EFFECTS. And for every dollar that went towards a wide-ranging, general-technology-improving innovation, we spent a thousand bucks on deciding how to make a moon rover rove. So perhaps the "other stuff" would be a little more efficient at helping society?
Have you heard of the "broken window fallacy"? The basic idea is that employing thousands of people to accomplish very little of use isn't a good idea, that it's not necessarily productive to society.
We could spend a billion bucks and send a guy to the moon. Or we could spend a billion bucks and find a cure for some fatal disease, or provide food and shelter to a large number of third-world citizens, or overhaul the nation's educational system, or... etc., etc., etc. I dunno about you, but it seems to me that "the people" might need, or at least want, any one of those a bit more.
Oh jesus. And how about some bread and circuses?
Uh huh. I didn't hear any refutation of my last point.
Let's try this one more time. Operating system services, such as file access and networking, are offered by UNIX, under which WINE runs. WINE allows programs Win32 programs--which are not built to make direct use of those UNIX facilities--to use them anyway, by taking the Win32 calls they make, and translating them into appropriate UNIX calls, which it then passes to the operating system. What's not an emulator about that?
Right. It's a translation. It takes the GDI calls, for instance, and TRANSLATES them into XLib calls, which it then sends to the X-server. Really, what's so hard about this?
Of course it's an issue, because it removes the legitimacy of the RPMs, which is a major issue. when Microsoft Instant Unintentional Update #8793873 just happens to overwrite ntfs.sys, BAM--people using the automagic installer (which copies ntfs.sys from the NTFS partition) will run into big problems. Instead of getting that benefit, they'll have to extract ntfs.sys from a CAB on their windows CD which they hopefully still have lying around somewhere, or explicitly go out and find an illegal copy of ntfs.sys.
They don't have to change the filesystem, just the driver. Have it do the same stuff, but differently... make use of API calls that are known to be missing from Wine...have it make other calls with improper semantics, and depend on the undefined (but known) results...Or just have it crash Wine, which doesn't exactly require a computing genius.
Wine does not consist of an emulation layer, a necessary feature of what most people would consider an emulator.
Of course Wine has an emulation layer. What do you think it does when an application calls a win32api function... calls up Redmond and asks what to do?
...and yet these things obviously have not yet been done. So since the "able program for Gnome for free" people haven't stepped up to the plate yet, why don't they try it this way?
....So, at the end of the day, Autodesk may not be required for the creating of an excellent open source AutoCAD.
... enough to spur plenty of innovation and development, even if it is a mere pittance to the revinues of monopolists like Microsoft
...when one considers the broader picture...
Not required. But very, very helpful. The assertion that a million OSS programmers would be able to make an AutoCAD-quality CAD program in a matter of years is a classic fallacy with respect to software project efficiency. (See: The Mythical Man Month by Frederick Brooks.)
We are still dealing with hundreds of millions of dollars
Are we? Let's say ten thousand dollars for a copy of AutoCAD, under the government contract. Is the Brazilian government really going to need 10,000 copies of this niche software? This is why OS software (wide usefulness) and teeny niche utilities (easy to develop) are the meat and potatoes of Open Source: they either have a clear utility model, or they're so cheap to make they don't need one. AutoCAD fits into neither of these categories. It's a huge, full-featured, well-weathered application with decades of UI engineering under its belt. Not simple to compete with, and not even particularly easy to steal the look-n-feel from.
Which is great for OSS, but sucks for Brazil, or whatever other countries said "no more commercial software" first. Brazil can't afford to be a trendsetter, to be the first wave of infantry that gets mowed down by the commercial software archers. No country which is small and flexible enough to switch over Just Like That (TM) can afford it. Yes, it's a classic Catch-22. But it's a reality.
The problem with your argument is that the Brazilian government does not have the capability to represent much of a demand. Try telling Autodesk that they should open-source AutoCAD so that they can sell to the Brazilian government, and prepare to get laughed out of their office. Influencing supply by influencing demand only works if you have the ability to significantly influence demand.
What is the sound of a synthesizer getting slashdotted?
Uh huh. Did you actually RTFA? you can turn this off in the options. Tell me, how is a product defective because you haven't configured it?
Read up on the "Slippery Slope Fallacy". Then come back here and apologize.
You're missing the point of the parent post. If ISP X allows people to post copyrighted material through lax enforcement of its EULA, it will get a reputation as an infringement-friendly ISP, and thus will profit from other potential customers who don't want their warez sites shut down by the ISP.
The note about iPod's market share is a good one, and I think the most interesting part of all this. Microsoft might try their own foray into the embedded music device market, but I doubt it; the iPod has huge amounts of name recognition already. Also, if they did try to move in that direction, Microsoft politics would dictate that the CE people be given charge of the firmware (a task that CE is a bit heavy for), leading to the need for an expensive and energy-hungry processor, leading to low battery life, and a heavy battery to compensate. By no means definitive, but I'm guessing that would be the result of Microsoft making a Pod.NET.
This gives Microsoft an interesting, and (to it) unfamiliar alternative: To reverse-engineer or license the iPod interface, and write apps to talk to it in DRM-speak. Apple, of course, wouldn't dare give MS access under any but the most restrictive terms possible, and MS would have to be careful about skirting the DMCA when reverse-engineering. An interesting role reversal.