Judges tend to be better than police offices, purly because of the nature of the job.
If I'm not mistaken, cops have been used to enforce the DMCA precisely once. To arrest and detain Sklyarov. And even that was at the behest of Adobe. Every other case has been lawyers sending nastygrams threatening to obliterate your corporeal existence if you should fail to obey.
The big payoff for solar cells will come when you can produce them for almost nothing and plaster them over everything
Solar chimneys are sorta like that. They're only 1% efficient, but the area you can cover with the greenhouse is measured in square miles. And they work at night.
But that would be like pinning an obstruction charge on a janitor for sweeping the hallways like she does every night because this timesome evidence was swept up
You say that as if you thought a bored AG would actually be above such behavior. Such naivete.
As I recall, tidal drag slows the planet's rotation down by something like 1/100th of a second every century. We'll have 25-hour days by the 50 megayear mark.
And yes, the moon is receding, but on time scales way beyond 60k years. It gets around 5 cm further away every year. This in turn affects the tidal drag effect.... basically requires degrees in astrophysics I don't have. Suffice it to say, it'll be _very_ long time (well over a billion years) before the Earth's pull is weak enough that some random perturbation can snatch Luna away.
Well, we think tides are less important today, now that life is well established, than it was In The Beginning. Also, solar tides are still there, if less powerful. On the one hand, we really can't say for certain. On the other, life on this planet has put up with some very apocalyptic events in the past. I don't see the loss of most tidal effects to cause mass extinctions worse than anything the ecology hasn't already seen.
I dug up a copy of it at the library ages ago. It started off very interesting and believable. The predator rats, for instance. But towards the end it got very wierd. The whole Batavia part seemed to be stretching it.
Or maybe I'm just pissed at the fact that he only included one feline descendant and it ended up in the 'sloth' niche. Which I suppose is kinda appropriate...
I think certainly distribution of the actual private key would violate the DMCA. But does distribution of keys which are not the private key qualify? I doubt it.
Lol. So the effort to crack the key would be legal right up to the moment it succeeds.
No matter what the DMCA says, MS is likely to try and squelch this anyway.
Please, please tell me you're joking. I can't bring myself to believe that anyone, not even the most socially inept physics/CS/math student of all time, would think to use that as a line.
Metropolis and a number of other old movies are out on DVD, no? Which means that when (if?) its copyright expires, we will have an extremely legal (not just 'fair use') usage for DeCSS. If, by the MPAA's logic, all I own is the disc, then when the stuff on it ceases to belong to anyone else, I can do whatever the heck I feel like with it.
Of course, this train of thought is logical and reasonable, so I expect it will have no effect on lawyers, judges, and politicians.
An artist is 20-40 years old when he makes his music and the copyright expires after 50 years. So when the last copyright expires he's 90 years old
The clock on today's copyright doesn't even start ticking until he's bucked the kicket. Life of the author plus 70 years, no?
Which means that if Mozart were born today and was destined to be particularly long-lived, the stuff he composes at age 5 wouldn't fall into the public domain until the last years of the 22nd century. I cannot in my wild hallucinations comprehend how anyone can consider this state of affairs to be necessary and, against all logic, insufficient.
Basically you are never sure if whatever you do is not going to be affected by some law in the future and you may even be sued in the future for something that was legal when you did it in the past, but now (in the future) is illegal.
That's the whole Ex Post Facto ("after the fact") bit, and it is very well established. You can't be tried for doing something at a time when it wasn't illegal. However, you can be made to stop doing it when it becomes illegal, like printing copyrighted works that fall 'out' of the public domain.
Of course, the FBI and the DMCA tell us that doing something at a place where it isn't illegal is definitely punishable...
If the state of Oregon really wanted to impose a tax based on miles driven, they can simply use the odometer, checking this reading at the same time they do emissions testing every year or two.
But what if you live right on the border and do 99% of your driving in another state? Contrived example, I know, but any kind of extended road trip could tack on a few thousand miles worth of taxes that State A would get but that States B, C, and D should. This might not be such a big deal for Oregon, but here in Florida, where every other car has an out-of-state license, it'd add up pretty quick into lost revenues for Uncle Sam.
I suppose technically a similar problem exists right now with gasoline taxes. But it's self-limiting; i.e., the average car will only get 2 or 3 hundred miles on a single tank, so if you spend too long driving in any state you'll end up paying them some taxes.
Re:But if the grown meat ...
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Lab-Grown Steak
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But if it hasn't been slaughtered, and slaughtered properly, then it isn't kosher. Catch-22.
This is why I can't figure out why anyone bothers with religious nonsense like this. What, exactly, is the benefit derived from having to go through a monumental debate over some totally arbitrary rules every time you want to add anything to your diet?
Ahh, but you have no way of proving that the damage wasn't done by the few inhabitants that stayed and went wild looting the place.
Re:No reason to celebrate...
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I think the analogy is an extremely good one. Assume that the car is legal to drive on both sides of the pond. This is not unreasonable, since the manufacturer would probably not close out his ability to sell in these other markets unless it really wasn't worth the cost. So what we have here is the exact same car being driven on both continents, and yet it is not immediately possible (and therefore, under the DMCA, illegal) to take a vehicle from one to the other and drive it around.
Remember also that 'road-driving license agreements' only apply when you are driving on a public road. The DMV can't do squat if all you do is tool around on your own property. But the inability to fill the tank from the local gas station negates even that.
Do you have any idea how grateful some of are that MS is actually going to give up on embracing and extending something? More often than not they screw it up, much to the detriment of people who have to actually use it. Java, SMB, and Kerberos come readily to mind. They were certainly willing to try with TCP/IP/
If then Microsoft makes their.NET clr run rings around Sun's JVM then it will be a matter of the products winning on their own merits, not a matter of MS putting more resources to one than the other
Perfectly fine. That's all we really want, anyway. It's the constant dirty and underhanded business tactics that fuck up what shreds of compatability exist whilst bitching and moaning about protecting their own IP that really pisses everyone off.
Dislike their business practices all you want but the programmers there are a fairly sharp bunch.
Very likely. But remember that actual coders are usually pretty far down on the totem pole. If management says "make a broken version of this protocol which is already in use everywhere" or "put in annoying features that do nothing but irritate users", then it gets done regardless of what mere programmers want.
This would be funny except that it is exactly what the DMCA is about. You may not have designed the lock, but you do own it, and you can get in trouble for picking it. Excuse me, for telling other people how to pick it.
Jurors: Can we read the law that the defendant is accused of breaking?
Judge: No.
Jurors: Can we read the transcript of the trial?
Judge: No.
Jurors: Can we read about some relevant piece of evidence?
Judge: No.
Jurors: Can we deliver a non-guilty verdict?
Judge: No.
Yeah, works real well. So long as one is never on trial under the DMCA with this judge, that is. I see no reason why a judge saying no to the first would not also say no to the others as well.
Fantasy is pretty much the same, only instead of phasers, gravitic generators, and self-aware machines you have wizard's staffs, magical incantations, and elven swords. The use of those items has to be believable (via the initial suspension of disbelief, of course) and self-consistent lest it totally ruin the effect.
Oddly enough though, Douglas Adam's Hitchikers Guide books (I happen to have been reperusing them) violate these principles every other page and yet are still excellent reads. Shrug.
Look, the whole point of scence fiction is to create some semi-believable technology and use it as a plot device. If it, or indeed any other plot device, is unbelievable, it ruins the effect. Neither of us would enjoy an action movie in which the Supreme Ultimate Head Honcho Bad Guy Bent on World Domination has a change of heart, surrenders to the hero, and retires to a peaceful cabin in the woods. It's blatantly unreal. It simply would not happen. Similarly, the widgets in a sci-fi simply have to not be stupid. How many times do you see a perfectly usable gadget being ignored in favor of more aesthetic (sp?) plot? I for one find it extremely irritating.
And anyway, the uber-high tensile strength is needed in _The_ RingWorld since it's 600 million miles around. _A_ Ringworld could easily be made much smaller and built around a smaller, dimmer, longer-lived star. Heck, given the amount of effort needed to build one, it probably would be. One can also build free-floating rings with dimensions in the mere thousands of miles. We could probably build something like that with current tech.
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If I'm not mistaken, cops have been used to enforce the DMCA precisely once. To arrest and detain Sklyarov. And even that was at the behest of Adobe. Every other case has been lawyers sending nastygrams threatening to obliterate your corporeal existence if you should fail to obey.
Solar chimneys are sorta like that. They're only 1% efficient, but the area you can cover with the greenhouse is measured in square miles. And they work at night.
You say that as if you thought a bored AG would actually be above such behavior. Such naivete.
Well, our dear legislators have such a hard-on for 'harmonizing copyright law', they might as well harmonize the courts too.
One towel to rule them all...
Right. Keep Alive is a standard aspect of HTTP. This nonsense is being done on the TCP/IP level.
And yes, the moon is receding, but on time scales way beyond 60k years. It gets around 5 cm further away every year. This in turn affects the tidal drag effect.... basically requires degrees in astrophysics I don't have. Suffice it to say, it'll be _very_ long time (well over a billion years) before the Earth's pull is weak enough that some random perturbation can snatch Luna away.
Well, we think tides are less important today, now that life is well established, than it was In The Beginning. Also, solar tides are still there, if less powerful. On the one hand, we really can't say for certain. On the other, life on this planet has put up with some very apocalyptic events in the past. I don't see the loss of most tidal effects to cause mass extinctions worse than anything the ecology hasn't already seen.
I dug up a copy of it at the library ages ago. It started off very interesting and believable. The predator rats, for instance. But towards the end it got very wierd. The whole Batavia part seemed to be stretching it.
Or maybe I'm just pissed at the fact that he only included one feline descendant and it ended up in the 'sloth' niche. Which I suppose is kinda appropriate...
Lol. So the effort to crack the key would be legal right up to the moment it succeeds.
No matter what the DMCA says, MS is likely to try and squelch this anyway.
Please, please tell me you're joking. I can't bring myself to believe that anyone, not even the most socially inept physics/CS/math student of all time, would think to use that as a line.
No, no, no, he's spent the last few decades chilling out with Walt Disney.
Of course, this train of thought is logical and reasonable, so I expect it will have no effect on lawyers, judges, and politicians.
The clock on today's copyright doesn't even start ticking until he's bucked the kicket. Life of the author plus 70 years, no?
Which means that if Mozart were born today and was destined to be particularly long-lived, the stuff he composes at age 5 wouldn't fall into the public domain until the last years of the 22nd century. I cannot in my wild hallucinations comprehend how anyone can consider this state of affairs to be necessary and, against all logic, insufficient.
That's the whole Ex Post Facto ("after the fact") bit, and it is very well established. You can't be tried for doing something at a time when it wasn't illegal. However, you can be made to stop doing it when it becomes illegal, like printing copyrighted works that fall 'out' of the public domain.
Of course, the FBI and the DMCA tell us that doing something at a place where it isn't illegal is definitely punishable...
But what if you live right on the border and do 99% of your driving in another state? Contrived example, I know, but any kind of extended road trip could tack on a few thousand miles worth of taxes that State A would get but that States B, C, and D should. This might not be such a big deal for Oregon, but here in Florida, where every other car has an out-of-state license, it'd add up pretty quick into lost revenues for Uncle Sam.
I suppose technically a similar problem exists right now with gasoline taxes. But it's self-limiting; i.e., the average car will only get 2 or 3 hundred miles on a single tank, so if you spend too long driving in any state you'll end up paying them some taxes.
This is why I can't figure out why anyone bothers with religious nonsense like this. What, exactly, is the benefit derived from having to go through a monumental debate over some totally arbitrary rules every time you want to add anything to your diet?
Ahh, but you have no way of proving that the damage wasn't done by the few inhabitants that stayed and went wild looting the place.
Remember also that 'road-driving license agreements' only apply when you are driving on a public road. The DMV can't do squat if all you do is tool around on your own property. But the inability to fill the tank from the local gas station negates even that.
If then Microsoft makes their .NET clr run rings around Sun's JVM then it will be a matter of the products winning on their own merits, not a matter of MS putting more resources to one than the other
Perfectly fine. That's all we really want, anyway. It's the constant dirty and underhanded business tactics that fuck up what shreds of compatability exist whilst bitching and moaning about protecting their own IP that really pisses everyone off.
Dislike their business practices all you want but the programmers there are a fairly sharp bunch.
Very likely. But remember that actual coders are usually pretty far down on the totem pole. If management says "make a broken version of this protocol which is already in use everywhere" or "put in annoying features that do nothing but irritate users", then it gets done regardless of what mere programmers want.
This would be funny except that it is exactly what the DMCA is about. You may not have designed the lock, but you do own it, and you can get in trouble for picking it. Excuse me, for telling other people how to pick it.
Judge: No.
Jurors: Can we read the transcript of the trial?
Judge: No.
Jurors: Can we read about some relevant piece of evidence?
Judge: No.
Jurors: Can we deliver a non-guilty verdict?
Judge: No.
Yeah, works real well. So long as one is never on trial under the DMCA with this judge, that is. I see no reason why a judge saying no to the first would not also say no to the others as well.
Oddly enough though, Douglas Adam's Hitchikers Guide books (I happen to have been reperusing them) violate these principles every other page and yet are still excellent reads. Shrug.
Exactly. In fact, the Ringworld in the X-Box game Halo is just such a construct.
And anyway, the uber-high tensile strength is needed in _The_ RingWorld since it's 600 million miles around. _A_ Ringworld could easily be made much smaller and built around a smaller, dimmer, longer-lived star. Heck, given the amount of effort needed to build one, it probably would be. One can also build free-floating rings with dimensions in the mere thousands of miles. We could probably build something like that with current tech.
I give them 6 hours before the source is leaked and we can peruse (and be horrified) at our leisure.