Does participation in the cloud make me civilly or criminally liable for infringing or illegal material that is stored on my hard drive? Distributed from my hard drive?
She wrote the MySpace rant, yes, but by printing it on their letters page, the paper represented, in writing, that she submitted it to them as a letter to the editor, which is false.
And there's a case that the libel caused real damage. Some (much? all? what say you, members of the jury?) of the townspeoples' ire may stem not from the rant itself, but from seeing it published as a letter to the local paper. That's a much more in-your-face thing to do than publishing it on MySpace.
In true QWERTY fashion, it got a lock on the market by solving an immediate problem: the need to get beyond a 16-bit address space in a single-chip microprocessor. We are hamstrung by its limitations to this day.
Lots of places would like to be a high-tech hub. High tech is prestigious, brings high-paying jobs, has good health and safety and low (local) environmental impact. Lots of places build out infrastructure (roads, office parks, networks, schools, housing) hoping to become a high-tech hub.
Some of these places succeed, some fail.
It turns out (can't recall the source, sorry) that one of the best predictors of where you will actually get a high-tech hub is the size of the local homosexual community.
Why?
Geeks and gays are both seeking the same kind of social tolerance.
Lower birth rates and higher death rates reduced Russia's population at a 0.5% annual rate, or about 750,000 to 800,000 people per year during the late 1990s and most of the 2000s. The UN warned that Russia's 2005 population of about 143 million could fall by a third by 2050.
Watts thinks that the films we watch or the music we listen to is not entirely, or even mostly, about the thing being consumed. It is about the social context in which we consume it. "If you're dating a girl who likes AC/DC, you might start listening to AC/DC. With another girlfriend, you might be listening to Aerosmith," he says.
The usual formulation of the long tail thesis is that sales volume for items follows a zipf distribution. I didn't see anything in the article to contradict that.
The article holds up the continued existence of blockbusters, like Harry Potter, and evidence against the long tail. However, there must be blockbusters in a zipf distribution--otherwise it isn't zipf.
Every retailer truncates their own tail at the point where sales volume becomes too small (relative to fixed costs) to be profitable. Anderson's original observation wasn't that the internet was going to make the long tail longer or fatter (that wouldn't be zipf, either). Rather, it was that brick-and-mortar retailers and on-line retailers have different cost structures, and that as a result, the truncation point was going to be a lot further out for on-line retailers than for brick-and-mortar retailers.
I maintain a few modules on CPAN. Nothing big, I'm the sole author.
In August, I got email from someone complaining that one of these modules doesn't pass its self-tests. After some back and forth, it turns out that it passes on Linux and fails on Windows. They even submitted a patch, but I don't want to integrate it unless I can test it on Windows.
I've got some Windows machines in my house, but I'd have to put together a usable development environment, and it's a hassle, and I've got a day job, and it just hasn't happened in 4 months.
If Alias et. al. can get me access to a Windows environment, this module could get cleaned up a lot sooner.
Programming ability seems to be distributed thinly, but uniformly, throughout the population. The fact that there are fewer women than men programming suggests that there are women out there who could be writing code but aren't.
And yet IQ scores have been moving up something like 3 points/decade over the last century. The testers have to periodically rescale the raw scores to keep the mean at 100.
We went on vacation to Canada last summer. I took a laptop. When we reentered the US (by car, with the laptop), the border agent asked about things we had acquired in Canada. They didn't ask about laptops, I didn't mention it, and they admitted us. The whole thing took 30 or 60 seconds. Maybe you get different questions if you are traveling on business.
The agent kept us talking longer than strictly necessary to get the answers to his questions. I think they are doing behavioral profiling. At
Ressam was approached by U.S. customs agent Diana Dean, who asked some routine
questions and then decided that he looked suspicious. He was fidgeting,
sweaty, and jittery. He avoided eye contact. In Dean's own words, he was
acting "hinky".
There was a TV show some years back about a physicist who tried to figure out what makes violins sound good. He found a few interesting things.
High-frequency response depends on the shape of the bridge. All those curly-cues cut into it control the transfer function from the strings to the body.
Mid-range response depends on the shape of the f-holes in the body. In this range, the bridge is rigid. The strings push on the bridge, and the bridge rocks the portion of the top plate between the f-holes back and fourth so that it radiates sound.
Bass goes from the strings, through the bridge, down through the sound post to the back panel, and is radiated by the back panel. Stradivarius shaped the back panel of his violins asymmetrically, so that the center of percussion was right where the sound post pushes on the back panel. IIRC, getting the center of percussion under the sound post was a distinguishing characteristic of Stradivarius violins.
A few years ago, congress passed a law requiring companies to disclose their privacy policies to their customers. That's when we started getting those dense little privacy notices stuffed into our credit card bills and splashed onto web signup pages.
Someone went through and *read* one of those things (from a major brand, I forget who) and worked out the actual content of it. What it came down to was
"If you don't check the box [on the signup page], we will do whatever we like with your personal information.
"If you do check the box, we will do whatever we like with your personal information, but we won't break the law."
There is a mechanism for the various states to get together and amend the Constitution without the participation of the congress, but it has never been used and it is unlikely that it will ever be used.
Yes, it has been used. That is how prohibition was repealed.
The DMCA provides legal precedent for outlawing software radio. Here's the pattern:
powerful people don't like X X is inconvenient software makes X convenient government outlaws software that does X
Case 1 content producers don't want DRM to be broken breaking DRM needs specialized hardware and expertise software makes it easy for anyone to break DRM DMCA outlaws software that breaks DRM
Case 2 <interests> don't want people to have free access to the airwaves access to the airwaves needs specialized hardware software radio gives free access to the airwaves to anyone with a commodity computer The Digital Millennium BROADCAST Act outlaws software radio
Slashdot Mirror
Does participation in the cloud make me civilly or criminally liable for infringing or illegal material that is stored on my hard drive? Distributed from my hard drive?
Does participation in the cloud violate my ISP's TOS?
And if not, how long before my ISP changes their TOS so that it does?
It seems like she should have a case for libel.
She wrote the MySpace rant, yes, but by printing it on their letters page, the paper represented, in writing, that she submitted it to them as a letter to the editor, which is false.
And there's a case that the libel caused real damage. Some (much? all? what say you, members of the jury?) of the townspeoples' ire may stem not from the rant itself, but from seeing it published as a letter to the local paper. That's a much more in-your-face thing to do than publishing it on MySpace.
Bonus points if the paper added the boiler plate
Dear Sirs:
and
Sincerely, Jane Doe
tags to the rant when they printed it.
> Should... in a fantasy world where the corporations are actually serving their customers.
BZZZTTT
Corporations serve their shareholders, not their customers.
But thanks for playing.
The 8088 is a twisted, flawed architecture.
In true QWERTY fashion, it got a lock on the market by solving an immediate problem: the need to get beyond a 16-bit address space in a single-chip microprocessor. We are hamstrung by its limitations to this day.
See
Limitations of the IBM PC Architecture
or
The Curse of Segments
http://world.std.com/~swmcd/steven/rants/pc.html
Lots of places would like to be a high-tech hub.
High tech is prestigious, brings high-paying jobs, has good health and safety and low (local) environmental impact.
Lots of places build out infrastructure (roads, office parks, networks, schools, housing) hoping to become a high-tech hub.
Some of these places succeed, some fail.
It turns out (can't recall the source, sorry) that one of the best predictors of where you will actually get a high-tech hub is the size of the local homosexual community.
Why?
Geeks and gays are both seeking the same kind of social tolerance.
1. A Long Way From Euclid
Constance Reid
A survey of math from the ancient Greeks on.
Very accessible.
I spent months reading it in 6th grade.
2. Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences
John Allen Paulos
Lots of cool stuff on probability, estimation, and application of math to current events.
From
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Russia
Lower birth rates and higher death rates reduced Russia's population at a 0.5% annual rate, or about 750,000 to 800,000 people per year during the late 1990s and most of the 2000s. The UN warned that Russia's 2005 population of about 143 million could fall by a third by 2050.
From
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/state
State: 5 a: a politically organized body of people usually occupying a definite territory
If you need a body of people to be a state,
the I'd say that Russia is on its way to failure.
Russia - Where Russians go to die
-- The Onion
The usual formulation of the long tail thesis is that sales volume for items follows a zipf distribution. I didn't see anything in the article to contradict that.
The article holds up the continued existence of blockbusters, like Harry Potter, and evidence against the long tail. However, there must be blockbusters in a zipf distribution--otherwise it isn't zipf.
Every retailer truncates their own tail at the point where sales volume becomes too small (relative to fixed costs) to be profitable. Anderson's original observation wasn't that the internet was going to make the long tail longer or fatter (that wouldn't be zipf, either). Rather, it was that brick-and-mortar retailers and on-line retailers have different cost structures, and that as a result, the truncation point was going to be a lot further out for on-line retailers than for brick-and-mortar retailers.
I maintain a few modules on CPAN. Nothing big, I'm the sole author.
In August, I got email from someone complaining that one of these modules doesn't pass its self-tests. After some back and forth, it turns out that it passes on Linux and fails on Windows. They even submitted a patch, but I don't want to integrate it unless I can test it on Windows.
I've got some Windows machines in my house, but I'd have to put together a usable development environment, and it's a hassle, and I've got a day job, and it just hasn't happened in 4 months.
If Alias et. al. can get me access to a Windows environment, this module could get cleaned up a lot sooner.
Programming ability seems to be distributed thinly, but uniformly, throughout the population. The fact that there are fewer women than men programming suggests that there are women out there who could be writing code but aren't.
This is bad. We need the code.
You have reached 123-456-7890.
Be advised that the car warranty calls do not originate from this number;
your caller ID was spoofed.
If you still want to leave a message, please wait for the beep.
<BEEP>
And yet IQ scores have been moving up something like 3 points/decade over the last century. The testers have to periodically rescale the raw scores to keep the mean at 100.
We went on vacation to Canada last summer.
I took a laptop.
When we reentered the US (by car, with the laptop),
the border agent asked about things we had acquired in Canada.
They didn't ask about laptops, I didn't mention it, and they admitted us.
The whole thing took 30 or 60 seconds.
Maybe you get different questions if you are traveling on business.
The agent kept us talking longer than strictly necessary to get the answers to his questions.
I think they are doing behavioral profiling. At
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/07/profiling.html
Schneier describes behavioral profiling:
Ressam was approached by U.S. customs agent Diana Dean, who asked some routine
questions and then decided that he looked suspicious. He was fidgeting,
sweaty, and jittery. He avoided eye contact. In Dean's own words, he was
acting "hinky".
Marx had it wrong.
*TV* is the opiate of the masses.
Any my crystal ball says if they turn of the TV,
there will be riots in the streets.
I'll bet the politicians blink (Hi, Sara!) and analog stays on the air.
What is the final cost of the generated electricity?
In $/KW-Hr?
Used to be records were kept on paper,
paper was kept in boxes,
and boxes were dated MM/YY.
I came into the office one fine 1998 January 02,
and the hallway was stacked full of boxes dated 01/94,
02/94, 03/94, etc.
Company policy was discard records after three years,
so all records from 1994 were on their way to the dumpster.
There was a TV show some years back about a physicist who tried to figure out what makes violins sound good. He found a few interesting things.
High-frequency response depends on the shape of the bridge. All those curly-cues cut into it control the transfer function from the strings to the body.
Mid-range response depends on the shape of the f-holes in the body. In this range, the bridge is rigid. The strings push on the bridge, and the bridge rocks the portion of the top plate between the f-holes back and fourth so that it radiates sound.
Bass goes from the strings, through the bridge, down through the sound post to the back panel, and is radiated by the back panel. Stradivarius shaped the back panel of his violins asymmetrically, so that the center of percussion was right where the sound post pushes on the back panel. IIRC, getting the center of percussion under the sound post was a distinguishing characteristic of Stradivarius violins.
A few years ago, congress passed a law requiring companies to disclose their privacy policies to their customers. That's when we started getting those dense little privacy notices stuffed into our credit card bills and splashed onto web signup pages.
Someone went through and *read* one of those things (from a major brand, I forget who) and worked out the actual content of it. What it came down to was
"If you don't check the box [on the signup page], we will do whatever we like with your personal information.
"If you do check the box, we will do whatever we like with your personal information, but we won't break the law."
FTA:
Non-IT graduates think a job in IT would be "boring,"
despite its good career prospects.
IOW:
People don't enter fields that they aren't interested in.
Film at 11.
There is a mechanism for the various states to get together and amend the Constitution without the participation of the congress, but it has never been used and it is unlikely that it will ever be used.
Yes, it has been used.That is how prohibition was repealed.
I do.
As of 2008 Jun 15 17:55 UTC, news.verizon.net is still hosting alt.*
As soon as that vanishes, I'll be back up on GigaNews.
There is no case for impeaching Bush.
He hasn't broken United States law.
What we ought to do is turn him over to the Hague to stand trial for war crimes.
The DMCA provides legal precedent for outlawing software radio.
Here's the pattern:
powerful people don't like X
X is inconvenient
software makes X convenient
government outlaws software that does X
Case 1
content producers don't want DRM to be broken
breaking DRM needs specialized hardware and expertise
software makes it easy for anyone to break DRM
DMCA outlaws software that breaks DRM
Case 2
<interests> don't want people to have free access to the airwaves
access to the airwaves needs specialized hardware
software radio gives free access to the airwaves to anyone with a commodity computer
The Digital Millennium BROADCAST Act outlaws software radio