Another response nicely summarized the library point. I suspect the subtlty you are missing is that time/place restrictions on speech at schools are generally perfectly constitutional. What is not constitutional is to make content based restrictions on what speech is allowed at a school.
If you were discipline because of the content of your fliers you probably had a good case. There are plenty of examples of schools violating the first ammendment and getting chastised for it and probably far more where they get away with it.
Maybe you missed the point but the islamic textbook thing is a valid argument on the point.
Generally people object to the view that filtering is a bad thing by saying that parents should have the right to decide what their children are exposed to. This example demonstrates the danger of that response.
If parents have a right to decide what their children are exposed to then radical islamic parents have the right to make sure their children are only exposed to views that portray jews as decietful manipulators who faked the holocaust to steal palestinian land. The first ammendment guarantees you can't stop these parents from exposing their children to these views and the belief that parents should get to decide what views their children are exposed to gives them the power to deny their children access to competining viewpoints.
We restrict parent's rights to beat their children, make them work too much and otherwise harm their children. We should treat their attempts to brain wash their children into accepting whatever ideolgy (religion, social views whatever) by blocking their children's access to information exactly the same way.
I don't see what your issue is. The government routinely prevents parents from harming their children and the sad truth of it is that blocking software is often used by misguided parents attempting to prevent their children from seeing through their mistaken prejudices or finding out what the world out there is really like. The point about islamic textbooks is that if you really buy into the position that parents ought to be able to control what viewpoints their parents then you need to accept it even for viewpoints you find objectionable. If you get to block your kids from seeing hate speech than radical islamics get to block their kids from learning the truth about jews and the holocaust.
I see no good evidence that blocking software does any good, e.g., studies showing kids with blocking software stay in school etc.., and other things being equal it is a harm to deny someone information about the world. So yah I'm very much against letting parents block their children's internet access. Sure I don't it is possible to legally demand they not install blocking software at home but children should be given unfiltered internet access at school.
Parenting is a responsibility not a license to indoctrinate your kids or stop them from learning about things that make you uncomfortable.
Well the first problem with that definition is the 'etc..' Is a site which tells kids not to be friends with people who have shaved heads a hate site? After all it advocates prejudice based on hair style so it boils down to what you want to include in the etc.
Secondly, as this situation illustrates, many views that people regard as racist don't facially demand unequal treatment. I think we would all recognize a site that called for seperate schooling for children of different races as endorsing prejudice even though it is cast as a neutral policy. You might try to argue that any site demanding people be seperated based on race or similar categories is inherently prejudicial but this won't fly either. After all a website that advocated seperate sex schooling on the grounds that boys and girls distract each other from learning could be non-prejudiced despite calling for seperation based on sex.
Ultimately the issue is that 'prejudicial' is a subjective standard. Something is prejudicial if it call for unwarranted different treatment of one group or another. For instance most people don't think calling for adult men who have sex with 13 year olds to be sent to jail is prejudiced. However we do think that calling for adult men who have sex with other men to be sent to jail would be prejudiced. The difference being that in the first case we think having sex with a 13 year old warrants being treated differently but having sex with another man does not.
This is ultimately why I detest restrictions on hate speech. It boils down to nothing but a list of positions that the society has deemed to be sufficently distasteful. While I happen to agree that most positions now deemed hate speech are horrible I am firmly against society imposing it's judgement through censorship or legal enforcement.
Now it's clear that the rankings from this system are heavily skewed and misses a substantial portion of the user base.
This suggests it is useless as a way to estimate how much to pay for advertising on a web site (though since this is usually per click/per display I don't see why ranking matters here). However, it doesn't show that this data can't be usefull for other things. For instance it could be quite usefull to know what other sites the users (or IE users) of a site visit.
In other words the data seems useless for any statistical analysis but it could be quite helpful to know what sorts of users visit a site. Sure slashdot's traffic might be underrepresented but I bet you the data still show that slashdot users are quite likely to go browse gadget purchase sites or programming related sites. If you want to know where to advertise your new fancy gadget or a fancy new programming enviornment that would be very usefull information even if it wouldn't support a rigorous statistical analysis.
You don't get to bring a case regarding the content of an expression before it is published.
Now perhaps Thompson has some clever argument that some pre-release copies constitute release but the essence of no prior restraint is exactly that the government doesn't get to go review your work before it is published.
It sounds like what is going on is that florida published a pretty blatantly unconstitutional law (if it supports the judge's action) and the local judge is playing it safe and letting the appealete judges do any striking down of the law.
Well that does explain the judge's ruling. The non-appealeate judges (district? or is that just for federal) are often less willing to throw out laws for being unconstitutional prefering to play it safe and leave that up to the appealeate judges.
However, you are simply wrong on the ability of lower courts to rule on constitutional claims. In fact in most cases a district court must rule on the constitutionality of a law for it even to reach the supreme court. The supreme court does not just take up these issues de novo they are appealed up through all the lower courts.
The supremacy of the supreme court merely means that the lower courts must apply the supreme court's precedents when deciding whether a law is consistant with the US constitution (state supreme courts get to interpret their own constitutions and no doubt florida also has a free speech provision there).
I don't just mean it reaches a bad result. This really is just bad law as well as bad policy.
A fundamental bedrock of first ammendment jurisprudence is the principle of no prior restraint. Sure the court has unfortunatly carved some exceptions where individuals might be fined or even prosecuted for the content of their work (obscene material with no redeming literary/scientific value) but it has universally struck down anything that even smacks of prior restraint. Obviously any damages can be sought after the game is released and the only reason to submit it now is to achieve something like judicial approval for their game. Such an action flies in the face of long established first ammendment jurisprudence.
I suspect Thompson just found a sympathetic local judge who either didn't know or didn't like the clear first ammendment case law on prior restraint. Then again maybe the publishers didn't protest too loudly knowing they could have it reversed on appeal and it would get them great publicity. In either case I don't doubt that this will quickly be reversed.
It's been reported on many a story on this subject.
Both google and youtube are protected by the ISP/forum safe harbor provisions. So long as they take down clips when served with a proper notice from the copyright provider (and I think they can choose to fight it instead) then no one can win a judgement against google. At best the content providers can sue the individual uploaders and force google to take the material down.
Now if google was forced to take down all the copyrighted content on youtube this would be seriously damaging to the site's popularity, hence the deals inked with the content providers allowing them to keep the material up on the website.
Moreover, while it is obvious that full music videos, 20 minute long clips of the daily show and similar uploads violate copyright law it is far from clear that the 3 minute long clips from the news or a TV show do. It is quite plausible that such short clips will be deemed to be fair use.
Now most likely google is going to want to play it safe and ink more deals with TV studios to host these short clips and longer ones as well. In fact the real money in this buisness (in addition to ads) is probably going to be selling TV shows and similar material much like iTunes. However, the possibility that short clips would be deemed fair use makes these court casts less appealing to copyright owners unless it is really the case that the clip on gootube is stealing viewers of their show.
Finally note that youtube was valued at 1.6b by the market even knowing all of these issues. It isn't like these were extra facts that affected the price, they were already factored in.
Now reducing emissions is clearly the safest way to go about dealing with global warming but so long as humans take these threats seriously we won't all die from massive bubbles of gas erupting.
Unlike the ancient eras of life we are (hopefully) smart enough to know we need to keep the world cooler. If we end up with our backs to the wall we can always inject more sulfates into the upper atmosphere or otherwise decrease the amount of solar energy the earth absorbs. There are big drawbacks to these plans but they are a sure of a hell lot less bad than all life on earth dying from released gases.
When you get 'official support' by buying windows XP that means you can call someone up who will run through a basic checklist of steps you could have found on google. It sounds like the services you are talking about purport to be offering serious technical support, i.e., they would good in and fix the code for you if you find a bug that gives you problems.
I suspect your comparing apples to oranges. The 'get updates and a dumb tech' type of support is better comparable to the type of support one gets for free using google and OSS software.
No the point being is the race condition would be with the low level file system access and paging systems. You would profile the software and make sure this was more likely to happen when the user had moved on to the second page then when they hadn't.
More preciscely unless you plan to eliminate all errors that could affect the kernel running in the voting machine (impossible for either linux or windows kernel) the battle is between the eyeballs trying to find bugs that might affect voting and the bad guys trying to make bugs that affect voting.
In an election situation there are just TONS of correlations between voting patterns and the state of the voting machine (how quickly people select options, how busy the machine is, how warm the machine is etc.. etc..). The bad guys just need to pick one correlation to use in their attack. The eyeballs need to look for every exploitable correlation making their job very very hard.
This asymetry means that it is more efficent to raise the barrier to inserting the bug in the first place by using code that doesn't accept third party patches than to try to find the bugs once they are in there.
Of course the right kind of OSS kernel would be even better, e.g., minix (I don't think tannenbaum accepts 3rd party patches) or some other closed development community but between linux and windows here windows wins for all the reasons that make it worse other places.
Frankly I think the concern about using an MS OS rather than an open source OS is misplaced. In fact despite my general dislike for MS I have to say that in this situation MS is probably a better choice than a Linux based OS.
Sure people are going to claim the 'lots of eyeballs' effect makes linux more secure. However, there are major sections of the code that are deep vodoo and very very few people understand. An attacker would of course choose to put his code in one of these sections and if you are really running this code atop a full blown OS and you know (because the government has demanded it be published) the software that will run on top of if there are probably tons and tons of innocent looking ways to screw with the results.
I don't know if this would really work but one might imagine a situation where the ballot will be divided into two pages. Likely whether or not the vote was recorded and sent to permanent memory before the page is flipped or after will have some statistical difference in memory reservations or paging or some subsystem like this. One could code a race condition that scrambles the cast vote which while rare is slightly more statistically likely to happen in these situations than the other ones. Hell in an election often the young have different voting patterns than the old so you could just have some statistical relation to the speed at which options are picked.
The point is the bad guy is likely to have lots of resources and be able to concentrate them in one very small area of the code in a way that looks valid or if discovered innocent. The eye balls need to look over all the code. Yet we know from the number of bugs found in the linux kernel that many bugs do make it past without even being engineered to like innocous.
While the MS kernel is likely to be more buggy it is much harder to contribute a patch to the MS kernel making it more difficult for a bad guy to slip the code into the kernel in the first place. So while it would be nice if the kernel was visible to everyone I think not accepting third party patches is a more important security feature than being open source for a situation like this. Getting someone hired as part of MS's OS team or corrupting one of them is way harder than getting a patch acceted to the linux kernel that delibrately contains a very subtle area.
Of course what they really should be doing is not using anything complicated like a real OS anyway and instead an EVM.
I mean on the surface it would seem that this is a perfect opportunity for them to sell more hardware and make more money.
The only explanation I can think of is that they are afraid their buggy voting machines will give different counts than the paper ballots. Despite all the worries and fuck ups with Diebold machines people won't really believe that the machines are problematic until they can see they screwed up in a real life situation. Sure there were a couple incidents where a machine started counting backward or people fucked up but this doesn't necessarily seem any more serious than the flaws in paper voting and after all these problems were caught.
Yes if problems are caught there are probably others that aren't but it doesn't have the same PR effect.
Yes, and I presumed the issue here was that a site hosted in the US by a US resident (or really anywhere but ireland) was being subject to the very strong irish law through the legal manuever of suing the name registrar who, by virtue of it's presence in ireland, was within the jurisdiction of the court.
I presumed in these sorts of cases the most effective way to handle them is to sue the individual who made the website and get an court order to require them to take it down. Thus I took the abscence of a court order agains the ISP or page creator to indicate that they couldn't get one because the defendant was not in ireland (I assumed the states). My moral claim of censorship then rested on the premise that I feel defamation/libel law stronger than that we have in the states and arguably some of ours is censorship.
Wait I'm very confused then. I presumed the only reason to involve godaddy in the situation was because the actual defendant (guy who created the web page) was beyond the jurisdiction of the court but godaddy was not.
If the actual defendant was under irish jurisdiction they could just issue a court order for HIM to take down the page and if he doesn't throw him in jail for contempt of court. Similarly if it was an irish ISP they could order the ISP to take down the page. I don't understand why godaddy got involved at all.
What apple really cares about (and what matters for OS adoption) is how many people are making serious or primary use of OS X. What these numbers show is what portion of web browsing is done in "OS X"
Now given the recent release of boot camp, parrells and similar programs it seems likely that a significant percentage of OS X users will spend say 5% or more of their time in windows. If the growth in market share for OS X is usually less than the average percent of time OS X users have started spending in windows it would look like the usage is down even if there was an actual ncrease in the number of people buying and using OS X.
In short it seems likely this is an artifact of the recent ability of OS X users to effectiely run windows.
I don't understand why every discussion about wikipedia is so damn ideological and dogmatic. Yes, wikipedia isn't reviewed by experts and is more likely to have a prank entry or a totally unfounded claim making it unsuitable for an authoratative reference despite it's high overall level of quality. All this means is that you probably shouldn't use it as an authoratative source in your thesis. Yet for some reason lots of people out there seem to be actively offended by wikipedia's existance as if wikipedia was pretending to be reviewed by experts.
Similarly their is a need for an authoratative edited encyclopedia. Obviously authoratative content will take longer to produce and likely not be as comprehensive as wikipedia but this doesn't mean it doesn't serve a useful purpose. So why get upset if someone is trying to provide this alternative option. Unlike a software project one doesn't need to worry about incompatible protocols or splintered interfaces. It isn't like wikipedia is a small struggling project it won't fold under the competition.
Why can't we just live and let live here. Their just websites people, useful important websites, but websites all the same. If someone else wants to serve a slightly different need let them and let the consumers, i.e., the people reading the info, decide which is more useful.
If this really is censorship (and if it isn't why didn't they just go get a defamation judgement entered in the US and get the site host to take it down?) it would certainly be nice if GoDaddy stood up to it. However, standing up to legal challenges takes a lot of money and when they are only getting 8.95 for your domain they can hardly afford to defend these legal cases.
Frankly you get what you pay for. I'm a happy GoDaddy customer but I if I wanted a registrar who will stand up under legal challenges I don't think it would be unreasonable to switch to a registrar who charges more per domain.
On the one hand requiring consumers to bear the cost of any personal information loss is unworkable. It would open the door to personally targeted attacks (say for revenge). Given enough time and research it is possible to put together a nearly unavoidable attack (say using a 0-day exploit against their computer to undermine security features). It is in both the banks and customers interest to avoid setting up a situation where ex-spouses or angry lovers can screw each other over by stealing personal information. Moreover, any attempt to distingush phising losses from personal information theft just wouldn't be workable (do emails that use a clever technique to disguise the true URL count as hacking or phishing?).
On the other hand it is unfair to make contientious carefull people who follow all the anti-phising tips pay for the carelessness or ignorance of other bank customers. Moreover, it is important that people be given an incentive to avoid phising scams. At the moment that incentive is the extreme annoyance of dealing with the bank but it would be much better if this process could be made easier.
Thankfully their is a perfect solution. Banks should offer phising insurance, perhaps even require that you purchase it. In this system rather than the paperwork and annoyance of getting your money back it is your phising insurance fees that provide the incentive to be responsible. In this scheme people who choose not to use online banking at all, or who upgrade to two-factor authentication schemes can be given discounts while people whose credit card numbers are found floating around the net or who are otherwise engage in risky behavior pay more in premiums. Banks could even send out fake phising schemes to customers to check their likelihood of falling for a phishing scheme.
This seems like a win for everyone and a good way to encourage adoption of new security measures.
Hiring a lobbying company to convince people of your position is only evil if your position is evil. If you hired this lobbying company to convince americans to give more aid to the third world it most certainly would not be evil.
Hell I don't even think outright lying in a good cause would be evil. If it was just too hard to explain network neutrality to the public and you had to tell a small lie in your PR to convince them it was bad I'm totally okay with it. Since we don't even have reason to believe google is having this company lie for them I see no reason to lambast them.
Ultimately hiring this firm is only evil if you are using it's powers for evil. So unless you ahve reason to believe that google is trying to take away our freedoms or other evil aims there is no reason to critisize them.
Also it is kinda absurd to critique a lobbying/PR firm for representing tobacco or other notorious clients. It's like calling a lawyer a bad person for defending a murderer. This is their job and it is important that everyone be able to get their side of the story out. Though for a long while big tobacco horribly misled and lied to us now the opposite is happening and it is being unfairly bashed in the media (for instance claims that it costs states tons of dollars. It doesn't it, and may actually reduce medical costs to the state by killing people early). Besides if you were going to hire a PR firm wouldn't you want the one who could shape people's opinions about the most notorious companies in the nation?
Thanks for the interview but I have to admit that I'm left feeling a bit disappointed by the answer to question 7 (the buisness about CDs getting stolen or burned in a fire). I realize that the law might be unsettled in this area but I think the questioner was asking for a legal analysis. What are the relevent questions that would have to be decided to answer these questions? What statues apply?
In particular it is my understanding that fair use has long been understood to include a right to make a backup copy of your software or music. Certainly this fair use notion only makes sense if there are SOME situations in which it is legal to restore your software from a backup. Since it is a well accepted canon of legal interpratation that one shouldn't interpret laws to have absurd consequences or to render clauses meaningless when possible it seems this provides strong reason to believe that it is okay to restore your mp3s if your CD was destroyed in a fire.
The question about the insurance company should follow pretty easily from any answers to the other questions. Surely the insurance company wishes to minimize the money it pays out and if you still retain a large fraction of the value of your music collection they will pay you less money. On the other hand if you no longer have the right to legally play/burn the music on your CDs you have lost all the value contained therein and if this sort of loss is covered by your policy they have to pay up.
The question about whether you can download music you legally own is the most interesting as it goes to the heart of what it is that you purchase when you buy the CD. Is it a physical object or some limited rights to intellectual property. Either way has some serious consequences. Many of the claims by software companies that attempt to restrict your rights to do as you want with the software you purchase rest on the notion that you are just purchasing certain limited rights to make use of the IP while if what you are purchasing is more like physical possession of a CD it puts reselling that CD on firmer ground. Now if the CD had a specific EULA banning downloading the music on the CD that would be one thing but if that isn't the case things get very interesting.
It would be nice to say that one had purchased a single right to listen to the music contained therin but copyright law doesn't work like this, generally it governs the making of copies. Thus I would guess the question comes down to whether the copy made by downloading from the internet is legal. However, if it is legal for you to copy the data from your CD to your computer what makes this case different?
Anyway the point is that there are a lot of interesting questions here and I was hoping to see some quality legal analysis not my vague musings. Maybe I've just gotten spoiled by hanging out on law blogs but I'm kinda disappointed.
Slashdot Mirror
Another response nicely summarized the library point. I suspect the subtlty you are missing is that time/place restrictions on speech at schools are generally perfectly constitutional. What is not constitutional is to make content based restrictions on what speech is allowed at a school.
If you were discipline because of the content of your fliers you probably had a good case. There are plenty of examples of schools violating the first ammendment and getting chastised for it and probably far more where they get away with it.
Maybe you missed the point but the islamic textbook thing is a valid argument on the point.
Generally people object to the view that filtering is a bad thing by saying that parents should have the right to decide what their children are exposed to. This example demonstrates the danger of that response.
If parents have a right to decide what their children are exposed to then radical islamic parents have the right to make sure their children are only exposed to views that portray jews as decietful manipulators who faked the holocaust to steal palestinian land. The first ammendment guarantees you can't stop these parents from exposing their children to these views and the belief that parents should get to decide what views their children are exposed to gives them the power to deny their children access to competining viewpoints.
Should have read "controlling what viewpoints their children are exposed to"
Sounds like a great idea to me!
We restrict parent's rights to beat their children, make them work too much and otherwise harm their children. We should treat their attempts to brain wash their children into accepting whatever ideolgy (religion, social views whatever) by blocking their children's access to information exactly the same way.
I don't see what your issue is. The government routinely prevents parents from harming their children and the sad truth of it is that blocking software is often used by misguided parents attempting to prevent their children from seeing through their mistaken prejudices or finding out what the world out there is really like. The point about islamic textbooks is that if you really buy into the position that parents ought to be able to control what viewpoints their parents then you need to accept it even for viewpoints you find objectionable. If you get to block your kids from seeing hate speech than radical islamics get to block their kids from learning the truth about jews and the holocaust.
I see no good evidence that blocking software does any good, e.g., studies showing kids with blocking software stay in school etc.., and other things being equal it is a harm to deny someone information about the world. So yah I'm very much against letting parents block their children's internet access. Sure I don't it is possible to legally demand they not install blocking software at home but children should be given unfiltered internet access at school.
Parenting is a responsibility not a license to indoctrinate your kids or stop them from learning about things that make you uncomfortable.
Well the first problem with that definition is the 'etc..' Is a site which tells kids not to be friends with people who have shaved heads a hate site? After all it advocates prejudice based on hair style so it boils down to what you want to include in the etc.
Secondly, as this situation illustrates, many views that people regard as racist don't facially demand unequal treatment. I think we would all recognize a site that called for seperate schooling for children of different races as endorsing prejudice even though it is cast as a neutral policy. You might try to argue that any site demanding people be seperated based on race or similar categories is inherently prejudicial but this won't fly either. After all a website that advocated seperate sex schooling on the grounds that boys and girls distract each other from learning could be non-prejudiced despite calling for seperation based on sex.
Ultimately the issue is that 'prejudicial' is a subjective standard. Something is prejudicial if it call for unwarranted different treatment of one group or another. For instance most people don't think calling for adult men who have sex with 13 year olds to be sent to jail is prejudiced. However we do think that calling for adult men who have sex with other men to be sent to jail would be prejudiced. The difference being that in the first case we think having sex with a 13 year old warrants being treated differently but having sex with another man does not.
This is ultimately why I detest restrictions on hate speech. It boils down to nothing but a list of positions that the society has deemed to be sufficently distasteful. While I happen to agree that most positions now deemed hate speech are horrible I am firmly against society imposing it's judgement through censorship or legal enforcement.
Now it's clear that the rankings from this system are heavily skewed and misses a substantial portion of the user base.
This suggests it is useless as a way to estimate how much to pay for advertising on a web site (though since this is usually per click/per display I don't see why ranking matters here). However, it doesn't show that this data can't be usefull for other things. For instance it could be quite usefull to know what other sites the users (or IE users) of a site visit.
In other words the data seems useless for any statistical analysis but it could be quite helpful to know what sorts of users visit a site. Sure slashdot's traffic might be underrepresented but I bet you the data still show that slashdot users are quite likely to go browse gadget purchase sites or programming related sites. If you want to know where to advertise your new fancy gadget or a fancy new programming enviornment that would be very usefull information even if it wouldn't support a rigorous statistical analysis.
You don't get to bring a case regarding the content of an expression before it is published.
Now perhaps Thompson has some clever argument that some pre-release copies constitute release but the essence of no prior restraint is exactly that the government doesn't get to go review your work before it is published.
It sounds like what is going on is that florida published a pretty blatantly unconstitutional law (if it supports the judge's action) and the local judge is playing it safe and letting the appealete judges do any striking down of the law.
Well that does explain the judge's ruling. The non-appealeate judges (district? or is that just for federal) are often less willing to throw out laws for being unconstitutional prefering to play it safe and leave that up to the appealeate judges.
However, you are simply wrong on the ability of lower courts to rule on constitutional claims. In fact in most cases a district court must rule on the constitutionality of a law for it even to reach the supreme court. The supreme court does not just take up these issues de novo they are appealed up through all the lower courts.
The supremacy of the supreme court merely means that the lower courts must apply the supreme court's precedents when deciding whether a law is consistant with the US constitution (state supreme courts get to interpret their own constitutions and no doubt florida also has a free speech provision there).
I don't just mean it reaches a bad result. This really is just bad law as well as bad policy.
A fundamental bedrock of first ammendment jurisprudence is the principle of no prior restraint. Sure the court has unfortunatly carved some exceptions where individuals might be fined or even prosecuted for the content of their work (obscene material with no redeming literary/scientific value) but it has universally struck down anything that even smacks of prior restraint. Obviously any damages can be sought after the game is released and the only reason to submit it now is to achieve something like judicial approval for their game. Such an action flies in the face of long established first ammendment jurisprudence.
I suspect Thompson just found a sympathetic local judge who either didn't know or didn't like the clear first ammendment case law on prior restraint. Then again maybe the publishers didn't protest too loudly knowing they could have it reversed on appeal and it would get them great publicity. In either case I don't doubt that this will quickly be reversed.
It's been reported on many a story on this subject.
Both google and youtube are protected by the ISP/forum safe harbor provisions. So long as they take down clips when served with a proper notice from the copyright provider (and I think they can choose to fight it instead) then no one can win a judgement against google. At best the content providers can sue the individual uploaders and force google to take the material down.
Now if google was forced to take down all the copyrighted content on youtube this would be seriously damaging to the site's popularity, hence the deals inked with the content providers allowing them to keep the material up on the website.
Moreover, while it is obvious that full music videos, 20 minute long clips of the daily show and similar uploads violate copyright law it is far from clear that the 3 minute long clips from the news or a TV show do. It is quite plausible that such short clips will be deemed to be fair use.
Now most likely google is going to want to play it safe and ink more deals with TV studios to host these short clips and longer ones as well. In fact the real money in this buisness (in addition to ads) is probably going to be selling TV shows and similar material much like iTunes. However, the possibility that short clips would be deemed fair use makes these court casts less appealing to copyright owners unless it is really the case that the clip on gootube is stealing viewers of their show.
Finally note that youtube was valued at 1.6b by the market even knowing all of these issues. It isn't like these were extra facts that affected the price, they were already factored in.
Now reducing emissions is clearly the safest way to go about dealing with global warming but so long as humans take these threats seriously we won't all die from massive bubbles of gas erupting.
Unlike the ancient eras of life we are (hopefully) smart enough to know we need to keep the world cooler. If we end up with our backs to the wall we can always inject more sulfates into the upper atmosphere or otherwise decrease the amount of solar energy the earth absorbs. There are big drawbacks to these plans but they are a sure of a hell lot less bad than all life on earth dying from released gases.
When you get 'official support' by buying windows XP that means you can call someone up who will run through a basic checklist of steps you could have found on google. It sounds like the services you are talking about purport to be offering serious technical support, i.e., they would good in and fix the code for you if you find a bug that gives you problems.
I suspect your comparing apples to oranges. The 'get updates and a dumb tech' type of support is better comparable to the type of support one gets for free using google and OSS software.
No the point being is the race condition would be with the low level file system access and paging systems. You would profile the software and make sure this was more likely to happen when the user had moved on to the second page then when they hadn't.
More preciscely unless you plan to eliminate all errors that could affect the kernel running in the voting machine (impossible for either linux or windows kernel) the battle is between the eyeballs trying to find bugs that might affect voting and the bad guys trying to make bugs that affect voting.
In an election situation there are just TONS of correlations between voting patterns and the state of the voting machine (how quickly people select options, how busy the machine is, how warm the machine is etc.. etc..). The bad guys just need to pick one correlation to use in their attack. The eyeballs need to look for every exploitable correlation making their job very very hard.
This asymetry means that it is more efficent to raise the barrier to inserting the bug in the first place by using code that doesn't accept third party patches than to try to find the bugs once they are in there.
Of course the right kind of OSS kernel would be even better, e.g., minix (I don't think tannenbaum accepts 3rd party patches) or some other closed development community but between linux and windows here windows wins for all the reasons that make it worse other places.
Frankly I think the concern about using an MS OS rather than an open source OS is misplaced. In fact despite my general dislike for MS I have to say that in this situation MS is probably a better choice than a Linux based OS.
Sure people are going to claim the 'lots of eyeballs' effect makes linux more secure. However, there are major sections of the code that are deep vodoo and very very few people understand. An attacker would of course choose to put his code in one of these sections and if you are really running this code atop a full blown OS and you know (because the government has demanded it be published) the software that will run on top of if there are probably tons and tons of innocent looking ways to screw with the results.
I don't know if this would really work but one might imagine a situation where the ballot will be divided into two pages. Likely whether or not the vote was recorded and sent to permanent memory before the page is flipped or after will have some statistical difference in memory reservations or paging or some subsystem like this. One could code a race condition that scrambles the cast vote which while rare is slightly more statistically likely to happen in these situations than the other ones. Hell in an election often the young have different voting patterns than the old so you could just have some statistical relation to the speed at which options are picked.
The point is the bad guy is likely to have lots of resources and be able to concentrate them in one very small area of the code in a way that looks valid or if discovered innocent. The eye balls need to look over all the code. Yet we know from the number of bugs found in the linux kernel that many bugs do make it past without even being engineered to like innocous.
While the MS kernel is likely to be more buggy it is much harder to contribute a patch to the MS kernel making it more difficult for a bad guy to slip the code into the kernel in the first place. So while it would be nice if the kernel was visible to everyone I think not accepting third party patches is a more important security feature than being open source for a situation like this. Getting someone hired as part of MS's OS team or corrupting one of them is way harder than getting a patch acceted to the linux kernel that delibrately contains a very subtle area.
Of course what they really should be doing is not using anything complicated like a real OS anyway and instead an EVM.
I mean on the surface it would seem that this is a perfect opportunity for them to sell more hardware and make more money.
The only explanation I can think of is that they are afraid their buggy voting machines will give different counts than the paper ballots. Despite all the worries and fuck ups with Diebold machines people won't really believe that the machines are problematic until they can see they screwed up in a real life situation. Sure there were a couple incidents where a machine started counting backward or people fucked up but this doesn't necessarily seem any more serious than the flaws in paper voting and after all these problems were caught.
Yes if problems are caught there are probably others that aren't but it doesn't have the same PR effect.
Well that sure as hell isn't the attitude of academic scientists.
This tends to be the attitude of a few very outspoken people in some humanities. It is actually a very very small minority.
Yes, and I presumed the issue here was that a site hosted in the US by a US resident (or really anywhere but ireland) was being subject to the very strong irish law through the legal manuever of suing the name registrar who, by virtue of it's presence in ireland, was within the jurisdiction of the court.
I presumed in these sorts of cases the most effective way to handle them is to sue the individual who made the website and get an court order to require them to take it down. Thus I took the abscence of a court order agains the ISP or page creator to indicate that they couldn't get one because the defendant was not in ireland (I assumed the states). My moral claim of censorship then rested on the premise that I feel defamation/libel law stronger than that we have in the states and arguably some of ours is censorship.
Wait I'm very confused then. I presumed the only reason to involve godaddy in the situation was because the actual defendant (guy who created the web page) was beyond the jurisdiction of the court but godaddy was not.
If the actual defendant was under irish jurisdiction they could just issue a court order for HIM to take down the page and if he doesn't throw him in jail for contempt of court. Similarly if it was an irish ISP they could order the ISP to take down the page. I don't understand why godaddy got involved at all.
What apple really cares about (and what matters for OS adoption) is how many people are making serious or primary use of OS X. What these numbers show is what portion of web browsing is done in "OS X"
Now given the recent release of boot camp, parrells and similar programs it seems likely that a significant percentage of OS X users will spend say 5% or more of their time in windows. If the growth in market share for OS X is usually less than the average percent of time OS X users have started spending in windows it would look like the usage is down even if there was an actual ncrease in the number of people buying and using OS X.
In short it seems likely this is an artifact of the recent ability of OS X users to effectiely run windows.
I don't understand why every discussion about wikipedia is so damn ideological and dogmatic. Yes, wikipedia isn't reviewed by experts and is more likely to have a prank entry or a totally unfounded claim making it unsuitable for an authoratative reference despite it's high overall level of quality. All this means is that you probably shouldn't use it as an authoratative source in your thesis. Yet for some reason lots of people out there seem to be actively offended by wikipedia's existance as if wikipedia was pretending to be reviewed by experts.
Similarly their is a need for an authoratative edited encyclopedia. Obviously authoratative content will take longer to produce and likely not be as comprehensive as wikipedia but this doesn't mean it doesn't serve a useful purpose. So why get upset if someone is trying to provide this alternative option. Unlike a software project one doesn't need to worry about incompatible protocols or splintered interfaces. It isn't like wikipedia is a small struggling project it won't fold under the competition.
Why can't we just live and let live here. Their just websites people, useful important websites, but websites all the same. If someone else wants to serve a slightly different need let them and let the consumers, i.e., the people reading the info, decide which is more useful.
If this really is censorship (and if it isn't why didn't they just go get a defamation judgement entered in the US and get the site host to take it down?) it would certainly be nice if GoDaddy stood up to it. However, standing up to legal challenges takes a lot of money and when they are only getting 8.95 for your domain they can hardly afford to defend these legal cases.
Frankly you get what you pay for. I'm a happy GoDaddy customer but I if I wanted a registrar who will stand up under legal challenges I don't think it would be unreasonable to switch to a registrar who charges more per domain.
On the one hand requiring consumers to bear the cost of any personal information loss is unworkable. It would open the door to personally targeted attacks (say for revenge). Given enough time and research it is possible to put together a nearly unavoidable attack (say using a 0-day exploit against their computer to undermine security features). It is in both the banks and customers interest to avoid setting up a situation where ex-spouses or angry lovers can screw each other over by stealing personal information. Moreover, any attempt to distingush phising losses from personal information theft just wouldn't be workable (do emails that use a clever technique to disguise the true URL count as hacking or phishing?).
On the other hand it is unfair to make contientious carefull people who follow all the anti-phising tips pay for the carelessness or ignorance of other bank customers. Moreover, it is important that people be given an incentive to avoid phising scams. At the moment that incentive is the extreme annoyance of dealing with the bank but it would be much better if this process could be made easier.
Thankfully their is a perfect solution. Banks should offer phising insurance, perhaps even require that you purchase it. In this system rather than the paperwork and annoyance of getting your money back it is your phising insurance fees that provide the incentive to be responsible. In this scheme people who choose not to use online banking at all, or who upgrade to two-factor authentication schemes can be given discounts while people whose credit card numbers are found floating around the net or who are otherwise engage in risky behavior pay more in premiums. Banks could even send out fake phising schemes to customers to check their likelihood of falling for a phishing scheme.
This seems like a win for everyone and a good way to encourage adoption of new security measures.
Hiring a lobbying company to convince people of your position is only evil if your position is evil. If you hired this lobbying company to convince americans to give more aid to the third world it most certainly would not be evil.
Hell I don't even think outright lying in a good cause would be evil. If it was just too hard to explain network neutrality to the public and you had to tell a small lie in your PR to convince them it was bad I'm totally okay with it. Since we don't even have reason to believe google is having this company lie for them I see no reason to lambast them.
Ultimately hiring this firm is only evil if you are using it's powers for evil. So unless you ahve reason to believe that google is trying to take away our freedoms or other evil aims there is no reason to critisize them.
Also it is kinda absurd to critique a lobbying/PR firm for representing tobacco or other notorious clients. It's like calling a lawyer a bad person for defending a murderer. This is their job and it is important that everyone be able to get their side of the story out. Though for a long while big tobacco horribly misled and lied to us now the opposite is happening and it is being unfairly bashed in the media (for instance claims that it costs states tons of dollars. It doesn't it, and may actually reduce medical costs to the state by killing people early). Besides if you were going to hire a PR firm wouldn't you want the one who could shape people's opinions about the most notorious companies in the nation?
Thanks for the interview but I have to admit that I'm left feeling a bit disappointed by the answer to question 7 (the buisness about CDs getting stolen or burned in a fire). I realize that the law might be unsettled in this area but I think the questioner was asking for a legal analysis. What are the relevent questions that would have to be decided to answer these questions? What statues apply?
In particular it is my understanding that fair use has long been understood to include a right to make a backup copy of your software or music. Certainly this fair use notion only makes sense if there are SOME situations in which it is legal to restore your software from a backup. Since it is a well accepted canon of legal interpratation that one shouldn't interpret laws to have absurd consequences or to render clauses meaningless when possible it seems this provides strong reason to believe that it is okay to restore your mp3s if your CD was destroyed in a fire.
The question about the insurance company should follow pretty easily from any answers to the other questions. Surely the insurance company wishes to minimize the money it pays out and if you still retain a large fraction of the value of your music collection they will pay you less money. On the other hand if you no longer have the right to legally play/burn the music on your CDs you have lost all the value contained therein and if this sort of loss is covered by your policy they have to pay up.
The question about whether you can download music you legally own is the most interesting as it goes to the heart of what it is that you purchase when you buy the CD. Is it a physical object or some limited rights to intellectual property. Either way has some serious consequences. Many of the claims by software companies that attempt to restrict your rights to do as you want with the software you purchase rest on the notion that you are just purchasing certain limited rights to make use of the IP while if what you are purchasing is more like physical possession of a CD it puts reselling that CD on firmer ground. Now if the CD had a specific EULA banning downloading the music on the CD that would be one thing but if that isn't the case things get very interesting.
It would be nice to say that one had purchased a single right to listen to the music contained therin but copyright law doesn't work like this, generally it governs the making of copies. Thus I would guess the question comes down to whether the copy made by downloading from the internet is legal. However, if it is legal for you to copy the data from your CD to your computer what makes this case different?
Anyway the point is that there are a lot of interesting questions here and I was hoping to see some quality legal analysis not my vague musings. Maybe I've just gotten spoiled by hanging out on law blogs but I'm kinda disappointed.