"Lets see, WWI, its illegal to hinder the war effort. One man was arrested for distrubiting flyers to draftees. Freedom of speech, apparently not. And now you say but that was then."
Out of curiousity, was he convicted? And if so, of what exactly?
He was convicted, the case is an amazingly famous one, Schenck vs. the United States , 1919. This is the case where the Supreme Court first came up with the term "clear and present danger" and first used the example of "shouting fire in a crowded theatre" to describe examples of speech which could indeed be suppressed.
My opinion is that the precedent that they created was reasonable, but that they misapplied it in this very first case! There is no way that distributing flyers advocating dodging the draft is at all comparable to shouting fire in a crowded theatre, nor does it constitute any sort of "clear and present danger." But they didn't ask me, did they...
Actually some constitutional experts are urging the Supreme Court to move away from the "clear and present danger" test because it is too vague and broad and subject to interpretation, and move to a test that more clearly delineates temporal proximity and causality of the speech to the action. Under these new tests only direct causal speech, such as intentionally inciting a crowd to lynch some tall person, would be illegal, while simply stating that tall people are inferior and should be euthanized would be legal.
Just wanted to say it's a very impressive library, we liked the C++ class hierarchy and the "pull on the end of the chain and only recompute what you need" architecture. We started using it back in 1996 because its architecture was orders of magnitude better than anything else we could find, and we were sure SGI would try to make it into a cross-platform standard (this was before "Open Source" was popular, at least as far as we knew) like they had done with OpenGL. We still haven't found anything nearly as good, we needed support for multi-band images and 16-bit and floating point pixel types.
I guess their marketing people must have told them there just wasn't any money in this one. SGI stock is at 3 25/32 and falling. Oh well, we're just having to do more with less on our other platforms.
My company uses ImageVision in a software product that we developed initially on SGI and later needed to port to Sun and Windows. We contacted SGI repeatedly and most people responded "Image what?" but when we finally reached the people who worked on ImageVision, they said that they had no interest in open-sourcing the library. We even asked about licensing the source code so we could port it ourselves. They said the licensing fee would be "6 figures." We ended up creating our own mini-image processing library.
Still, the lawyers may just be keeping their options open.
Slashdot Mirror
"Lets see, WWI, its illegal to hinder the war effort. One man was arrested for distrubiting flyers to draftees. Freedom of speech, apparently not. And now you say but that was then."
Out of curiousity, was he convicted? And if so, of what exactly?
He was convicted, the case is an amazingly famous one, Schenck vs. the United States , 1919. This is the case where the Supreme Court first came up with the term "clear and present danger" and first used the example of "shouting fire in a crowded theatre" to describe examples of speech which could indeed be suppressed.
My opinion is that the precedent that they created was reasonable, but that they misapplied it in this very first case! There is no way that distributing flyers advocating dodging the draft is at all comparable to shouting fire in a crowded theatre, nor does it constitute any sort of "clear and present danger." But they didn't ask me, did they...
Actually some constitutional experts are urging the Supreme Court to move away from the "clear and present danger" test because it is too vague and broad and subject to interpretation, and move to a test that more clearly delineates temporal proximity and causality of the speech to the action. Under these new tests only direct causal speech, such as intentionally inciting a crowd to lynch some tall person, would be illegal, while simply stating that tall people are inferior and should be euthanized would be legal.
I gotta go watch some fireworks...
Just wanted to say it's a very impressive library, we liked the C++ class hierarchy and the "pull on the end of the chain and only recompute what you need" architecture. We started using it back in 1996 because its architecture was orders of magnitude better than anything else we could find, and we were sure SGI would try to make it into a cross-platform standard (this was before "Open Source" was popular, at least as far as we knew) like they had done with OpenGL. We still haven't found anything nearly as good, we needed support for multi-band images and 16-bit and floating point pixel types.
I guess their marketing people must have told them there just wasn't any money in this one. SGI stock is at 3 25/32 and falling. Oh well, we're just having to do more with less on our other platforms.
Still, the lawyers may just be keeping their options open.