That doesn't really prove your point, since the Google creeps can change the privacy policy at any time
No, they can't. That's exactly the point. If they changed it in a way that violated their previous privacy policy commitments, Google would be in breach of contract. It would generate a huge class action suit, and probably significant punitive action from the DoJ. That's why it's really rare to find statements in policies about what the future policy may or may not be, because it limits freedom to change it. Even if someone bought Google, the new owner would inherit all of Google's legal commitments, including the commitment to the statement I quoted.
What I really don't know at all is whether or not passing the assets through a bankruptcy court changes any of it. It seems like legal obligations related to assets should go along with the assets, but I do know that bankruptcy judges can do all sorts of things that seem really wrong.
In the good ol' US of A, a company can bend over backwards to in fact do no evil with the personal data they collect. But, if they go Chapter 7 bankruptcy (the full monty), the court is under no obligation to care.
Are you sure? It seems like whoever ends up with the data would still be bound by the agreements under which it was obtained, in this case the relevant privacy policy. I suppose if the privacy policy allows changing the terms, the new owner could just publish a new "I will be evil with your data" policy. Google's policy, at least, explicitly does not allow the terms to be changed in that way:
From http://www.google.com/policies/privacy/: "Our Privacy Policy may change from time to time. We will not reduce your rights under this Privacy Policy without your explicit consent."
But maybe none of that matters when the assets get allocated by the bankruptcy court. IANAL and don't really know.
Putting latex files under revision control just works. Doesn't work so well with word/openoffice.
LaTeX files under revision control works okay, but it's a far cry from the sort of collaboration enabled by Word, which is itself a pale, pale shadow of the sort of collaboration enabled by Google Docs.
I made a big mistake when I bought MS Office. I spent ~$150 and used it to update my resume. Have done very little else with it.
For casual uses like that, I think Google Docs is an even better choice. Not only is it free, you don't have to download or install it, and you don't have to worry about keeping track of where you left that resume file two years ago last time you needed to update it. It's right there in your docs list. It may have gotten buried under a lot of other stuff if you use Docs a lot, but there's a search bar. You also don't have to worry about backing it up, and sharing it with someone is trivial, and you know they'll be able to read it (not that it's that hard to generated and mail a PDF).
The downsides are, obviously, that it lacks some features (but not stuff a casual user would care about), and that it doesn't work well off-line. On the other hand, how often are we off-line these days?
(Disclaimer: I'm a Google engineer, but I don't work on Docs and my comments aren't an attempt to pump the product for financial gain. I've just become a big fan since I started using it heavily for work and then home, and now find LibreOffice annoyingly limited. I used to be a big fan of OOo/LO, back from when it was StarOffice.)
I agree Linus does deserve it the guy gave away an idea that was worth billions.
What idea was that? I respect Linus and Linux, but there really aren't many novel ideas in the kernel, and what novel ideas are there didn't come from Linus. Linus' achievement was primarily figuring out how to get first tens, then hundreds, then thousands of other developers to pitch in and help him out -- and for creating a process that allows him to manage such an enormous flow of contributions without sacrificing code quality, losing control of the project, or pissing people off so much they stopped helping him.
His achievement is about hard work, good coding chops and superb cat-herding, not any "idea that was worth billions". Perspiration, not inspiration.
Stallman deserves credit too, for the creation of the GPL and the GNU tools Linus used
I don't think so.
I'm not knocking Stallman, but this is a prize for contributions to technology, not for contributions to the philosophy of technology. Stallman's contributions to technology are not insignificant, but he would have to get the prize for his work on EMACS, gcc, etc. And while those aren't trivial, his technical contributions to them is, at this point, far less significant than Linus Torvalds' technical contributions to Linux. They also suffer from a lack of visibility, which admittedly isn't relevant to a true evaluation of technical merit, but definitely influences selection for big prizes. Linux, as the kernel that powers most of the Internet, half of the world's smartphones, and a huge majority of modern embedded systems has a visible effect on the world that GCC does not.
Stallman definitely deserves credit for what he has done, but I don't think this prize is the right place to give it to him. That said, it would be entirely appropriate for Torvalds to give Stallman a nod in the acceptance speech, though I also wouldn't fault Torvalds for focusing his thanks on all of the people who worked on Linux with him.
I guess my other question is, how can the most utilized utility on a system still have unchecked overflows?
Have you ever looked at the OpenSSL code? It could have the Ark of the Covenant hidden in all that mess somewhere for all we know and we'd never find it.
No kidding. I've seen a lot of horrible messes in my career, but OpenSSL tops them all. There have to be hundreds of serious security bugs lurking in there... the only thing saving us is that it's so nasty not even the black hats want to dig in there to find them. Good security code should be as simple and straightforward as possible, to make it easy to verify. The authors of OpenSSL took a... different approach.
But 99% of the POS customers out there aren't mega-corps. You've got all the corner bars and hair salons and independent car repair garages where the only person who cares about the POS system is the owner, and he/she is typically not a "computer person".
Of course, that was never IBM's market. IBM couldn't figure out how to sell to Mom & Pops if they wanted to. IBM's definition of a "small business" is one with annual revenues of less than $4 billion.
I think there's been exactly one improvement to airline security since 9/11: Reinforced cockpit doors that lock from the inside. If you can't replace the pilots you can't use the plane as a missile.
Yes, that was a huge improvement. And it also addresses the sort of hijackings for transportation that were common a few decades back... although everyone's realization that planes make good missiles pretty much killed that possibility anyway. If the passengers don't take you out, *and* you can convince the pilots (who you can't get to) to listen to you, you'd still better make sure you keep your hijacked plane well away from any possible terror targets or you're going to have an AMRAAM up your tail.
Obviously, not including the change in passenger attitude toward hijackings, even though that does make the plane more secure.
I think that's an even bigger deterrent. A couple of years after 9/11 there was an Air France flight out of Malaysia (IIRC) that was hijacked. The captain told the passengers over the PA what was going on (in French, which the hijackers didn't speak) and the passengers dogpiled the hijackers and beat them to a pulp. IIRC, one of the hijackers nearly died he was beaten so badly.
You have an interesting idea, but it has a jaw-dropping problem. The terrorists who hijacked the 9/11 planes probably would have signed up for this program.
And would have utterly failed the background check.
Today is the 7th GMail outage. Who in his right mind would trust those morons who cannot run a simple E-mail service?
Umm, what does the volunteer Tahoe LAFS grid have to do with GMail?
And, according to the dashboard (how many companies publish their service problems, with history, to the whole world?), GMail didn't have an outage, just a disruption. A fairly large one, as GMail disruptions go since it affected almost 10% of GMail users and lasted over an hour, but still hardly an "outage".
And I can't but a terabyte and a half of cloud storage from a reputable place at a reasonable price... yet
I know where you can get about 500 GB for no monthly fee. You just need an always-on server (preferably running *nix) and network connection, and be willing to "trade" storage, storing about 1 TB of other peoples' files (all data is automatically encrypted before upload), using the Tahoe LAFS distributed storage grid. Actually, if you get your own group together you can get as much space as you want, but the grid I'm a member (currently) has a 1 TB maximum. The storage nodes are scattered across several continents and Tahoe applies Reed-Solomon coding to your data so even if many of the servers holding your data were to disappear, you could stil recover all of it.
Are you sure you work for Google? With all those disclaimers and shit I'd have had you down for a Wikipedant.
[post needs [citation needed] rewriting, may break WP:abuse, WP:NPOV and WP:SIUYA,BEF]
Hehe. I'll admit I was a little nervous about posting at all on an active legal case involving Google, so I wanted to be really careful to separate my opinions from Google's official positions -- even though they seem to me to be in perfect agreement.
I suppose lawyers have an ethical duty to argue every point that reasonably could help their client, but this is silly. I really like the comments in a couple of the footnotes in Google's response:
Similarly, fictional languages such as Na’vi and Dothraki cannot be copyrighted. While the
film Avatar and the television series Game of Thrones are copyrightable (including the portions in
the fictional Na’vi and Dothraki languages), and while, for example, a dictionary or grammar
textbook for either language would be copyrightable, the languages themselves are not. Oracle
asks why copyright should not protect such languages, see Oracle 4/5/12 Br. [Dkt. 859] at 9; the
answer is that Section 102(b) says that they are not protected. Moreover, there is no reason to
believe that allowing copyright owners to control who can express themselves in these languages
would further the aims of copyright law.
Umm, duh. Do they really want to argue that, say, stating "Your mother is ugly" or some other random sentence in, say, Dothraki is a public performance of a copyrighted work? That's what it would have to be if the language itself were copyrightable.
Even clearer, though:
Oracle also argues that a computer language can be “original, text-based, and capable of
fixation,” and thus that it must be copyrightable. See Oracle 4/5/12 Br. [Dkt. 859] at 9. First,
Section 102(b) bars copyright protection for “original works of authorship” that fall within its
enumerated classes of exclusion. See 17 U.S.C. 102(b). Thus, the fact that a system is original,
text-based and fixed does not mean that Section 102(b) does not apply.
Second, a language cannot be fixed. Certainly, a description of a language (e.g., a specification)
can be fixed. A computer program written using the language (e.g., the Gmail application on
Android phones) or an implementation of a language (e.g., a compiler or interpreter) can be fixed.
But none of those things is “the language,” any more than a dictionary “is” English, Das Boot “is”
German, or a C compiler “is” the C programming language. See Baker, 101 U.S. at 102 (“But'
there is a clear distinction between the book, as such, and the art which it is intended to illustrate.
The mere statement of the proposition is so evident, that it requires hardly any argument to
support it.”); cf. René Magritte, La trahison des images.
Exactly. How can you write down a "language"? You can describe it. You can list the allowable words and explain how they can and cannot be put together, but such a description isn't a language. You can use it. You can create prose, poetry, or, computer programs with it, expressing and fixing your own ideas in the constructs provided by the language, but an expression in a language isn't the language.
A language is about as pure an abstract idea as I can imagine, and ideas are not copyrightable, only expressions.
(Disclaimer: I work for Google, but have nothing to do with any of this Java folderol, other than using the language occasionally. I'm a programmer but not a language expert and would not be qualified to offer expert testimony on this topic, even if I were asked to, which I haven't been. Other than the quotes, the above is my own opinions, nothing more. In this case it appears that they align closely with Google's officially-stated opinions, however!)
When will America finally have enough guns that she and all her citizens are safe? What a happy day that shall be.
There is no such thing as safety until there are no people with evil intent, which means there is no such thing as safety.
Any perception of safety, anywhere, is an illusion caused mostly by not paying attention. That doesn't mean danger is omnipresent, either, nor that the vast majority of people can't live out their whole lives without being threatened by death or maiming, but there's basically nowhere that it's impossible.
Guns are a great equalizer, which give a 90 year-old woman some hope of fending off violence from a 20 year-old martial artist, and allow a person to defend themselves at a distance, but they're only tools, they don't address the fundamental problem. However, neither are the tools the fundamental problem... if criminals cannot obtain firearms they will use knives, bats, fists, etc. See the example of Great Britain, which has had some success at making handguns hard to obtain, only to witness a wave of knife violence that causes people to talk semi-seriously about banning knives with points.
Violence is caused by people, not by the tools they use. In the presence of aggressive, unlawful violence, the only effective response is defensive, lawful violence and a handgun is the most effective defensive tool we've yet invented -- though a good pepper spray or taser is a close second in effectiveness. Perhaps someday we'll invent the Star Trek phaser with its stun setting. Of course, even with that Captain Kirk occasionally felt the need to set his to kill.
But there isn't any falsity about the sense of increased security you have when you're armed. The gun does give you significantly greater ability to protect yourself or others.
That's only in a very narrow sense of "protect". As the Zimmerman case shows, if you carry a gun, you are at risk of someone trying to grab it from you. Furthermore, the cost of using it may be higher than the cost of the injuries you might have sustained without a gun.
Your points are correct, but I disagree that they make the sense of "protection" unusefully narrow.
On the first point, yes, if you bring a gun into a situation, you are at risk of having it taken from you and used against you. In practice, this really doesn't happen very often, but it's something you have to consider. There are multiple implications of this fact. Some of the implications I cover in my class are: First, if you're carrying a gun you should not get into a fist fight, because your gun may become exposed (it shouldn't fall -- if there's any danger of that you need a better holster). If that happens, your opponent may take it and use it on you -- even worse, he may do so because he suddenly realizes you have a gun and fears you're going to use it on him. Second, you should not expose or draw your gun until you've determined that you have to shoot. Third, you should learn and practice handgun retention techniques, and how to shoot from retention. It's not hard to defeat a gun grab if you know how.
On the second, you're absolutely right that the cost of using your gun may be very high. That's why I teach that you should always assume that if you draw your gun and shoot someone you will be financially ruined and will spend years in prison. If what will happen if you don't shoot is worse than that, then shoot.
The purpose of carrying a gun is to be able to defend yourself or others against deadly threats. For anything else... just talk your way out of it or run away. But for those deadly dangerous situations, having a gun does make you much more likely to survive.
I'm not actually arguing that Martin was justified in taking a swing if, indeed, he did. It just seems that the application of this kind of situation seems to benefit the survivor of an altercation.
Without witnesses, the survivor always has an upper hand, because his is the only version of the story. As long as he can come up with something plausible that fits the physical evidence and casts his actions within the law (whatever it may be), he's in good shape. The nature of the law doesn't change that much. On the other hand, states that require you to attempt to retreat often convict people who were faced with the option of either killing unlawfully or being killed as they tried to run away.
No matter how you structure the law, there will be cases in which its application could be unjust, especially if one party or the other is twisting the facts. That being the case, I favor laws like Florida's which build in the assumption of innocence unless guilt can be proven.
US CDC website tells me that there were over 500 accidental deaths in 2009 caused by firearms.
Out of more than 300 million people, and 220 million guns... that's really not very many at all. Good luck finding any significant sporting OR industrial piece of equipment that doesn't at least rival, if not significantly exceed, those numbers. The average swimming pool, for example, kills ~100 times as many people as the average gun. And those 554 accidental firearms deaths were overwhelmingly by guns in the hands of people with no formal training whatsoever.
That's a lot of dead people, even without flying at 40,000 feet.
Being at 40,000 feet doesn't change anything (note that bullet holes do not cause explosive decompression except in movies. In fact, it would take a lot of bullet holes to cause the cabin pressure to drop at all, even slowly).
It's not that I don't trust intelligent, trained, mentally stable, informed and responsible adults with firearms, it's just that I don't trust the general public, police officers or Americans with them.
And yet, over seven million American citizens regularly legally carry a gun on their person, and each year less than five of those people shoot someone unlawfully or accidentally, even though in many states the training required is minimal. Air marshals carry on hundreds of thousands of flights annually, without shooting anyone at all.
Oh, and I forgot to mention (because I don't use it): ChromeOS has a guest account. So users could always just log in with the guest account and then use the browser. They won't have all their Google account-related stuff, obviously -- won't have all their bookmarks synced, etc.
Certain aggravating factors can escalate a crime to first-degree. They vary by jurisdiction, but often include murder during rape, killing a member of law enforcement, or being party to a crime such as burglary or robbery where one of the accomplices is killed.
Also, the pre-meditation doesn't have to be lengthy or well in advance, and it doesn't have to be centered around a particular person. All that's required is a split-second decision, not in the heat of the moment, to kill. And, of course, the prosecutor has to be able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the killer made a cold-blooded decision to kill.
Based on what little we know of the evidence, it seems pretty clear to me that even if Zimmerman did pre-meditate the act, there's no proof that he did so. Unless there's a significant piece of evidence we're not aware of, the prosecutor would be foolish to make that charge, especially if Florida law doesn't allow the jury to choose to convict on a lesser charge (I don't know if it does). That might force them to acquit even if they find that Zimmerman did commit murder.
Swinging at someone just because they are following you is not justified, and is rightfully illegal.
So now there's video? I thought there was only audio.
Cruciform tried to argue that Martin was justified in assaulting Zimmerman, based on the "Stand Your Ground" law and the fact that Zimmerman was "stalking" him. phantomfive pointed out that if Martin did attack Zimmerman in response to being stalked, that would not be justified by the Stand Your Ground law and would be a crime.
Try to keep up. Nowhere was there a claim of video, or of any knowledge of whether or not Martin swung at Zimmerman.
And doubtlessly, carrying a weapon gave Zimmerman a false sense of security.
I don't think his sense of security was false. Of course -- and this is a point I make strongly and repeatedly to my concealed carry students -- if you're carrying a gun you really should try even harder than when you're not to avoid situations where you might feel you have to use it, because by being armed you've raised the stakes, and may have to deal with the legal, financial, emotional and social effects of shooting someone.
But there isn't any falsity about the sense of increased security you have when you're armed. The gun does give you significantly greater ability to protect yourself or others.
Slashdot Mirror
That doesn't really prove your point, since the Google creeps can change the privacy policy at any time
No, they can't. That's exactly the point. If they changed it in a way that violated their previous privacy policy commitments, Google would be in breach of contract. It would generate a huge class action suit, and probably significant punitive action from the DoJ. That's why it's really rare to find statements in policies about what the future policy may or may not be, because it limits freedom to change it. Even if someone bought Google, the new owner would inherit all of Google's legal commitments, including the commitment to the statement I quoted.
What I really don't know at all is whether or not passing the assets through a bankruptcy court changes any of it. It seems like legal obligations related to assets should go along with the assets, but I do know that bankruptcy judges can do all sorts of things that seem really wrong.
In the good ol' US of A, a company can bend over backwards to in fact do no evil with the personal data they collect. But, if they go Chapter 7 bankruptcy (the full monty), the court is under no obligation to care.
Are you sure? It seems like whoever ends up with the data would still be bound by the agreements under which it was obtained, in this case the relevant privacy policy. I suppose if the privacy policy allows changing the terms, the new owner could just publish a new "I will be evil with your data" policy. Google's policy, at least, explicitly does not allow the terms to be changed in that way:
From http://www.google.com/policies/privacy/: "Our Privacy Policy may change from time to time. We will not reduce your rights under this Privacy Policy without your explicit consent."
But maybe none of that matters when the assets get allocated by the bankruptcy court. IANAL and don't really know.
Putting latex files under revision control just works. Doesn't work so well with word/openoffice.
LaTeX files under revision control works okay, but it's a far cry from the sort of collaboration enabled by Word, which is itself a pale, pale shadow of the sort of collaboration enabled by Google Docs.
I made a big mistake when I bought MS Office. I spent ~$150 and used it to update my resume. Have done very little else with it.
For casual uses like that, I think Google Docs is an even better choice. Not only is it free, you don't have to download or install it, and you don't have to worry about keeping track of where you left that resume file two years ago last time you needed to update it. It's right there in your docs list. It may have gotten buried under a lot of other stuff if you use Docs a lot, but there's a search bar. You also don't have to worry about backing it up, and sharing it with someone is trivial, and you know they'll be able to read it (not that it's that hard to generated and mail a PDF).
The downsides are, obviously, that it lacks some features (but not stuff a casual user would care about), and that it doesn't work well off-line. On the other hand, how often are we off-line these days?
(Disclaimer: I'm a Google engineer, but I don't work on Docs and my comments aren't an attempt to pump the product for financial gain. I've just become a big fan since I started using it heavily for work and then home, and now find LibreOffice annoyingly limited. I used to be a big fan of OOo/LO, back from when it was StarOffice.)
I agree Linus does deserve it the guy gave away an idea that was worth billions.
What idea was that? I respect Linus and Linux, but there really aren't many novel ideas in the kernel, and what novel ideas are there didn't come from Linus. Linus' achievement was primarily figuring out how to get first tens, then hundreds, then thousands of other developers to pitch in and help him out -- and for creating a process that allows him to manage such an enormous flow of contributions without sacrificing code quality, losing control of the project, or pissing people off so much they stopped helping him.
His achievement is about hard work, good coding chops and superb cat-herding, not any "idea that was worth billions". Perspiration, not inspiration.
Stallman deserves credit too, for the creation of the GPL and the GNU tools Linus used
I don't think so.
I'm not knocking Stallman, but this is a prize for contributions to technology, not for contributions to the philosophy of technology. Stallman's contributions to technology are not insignificant, but he would have to get the prize for his work on EMACS, gcc, etc. And while those aren't trivial, his technical contributions to them is, at this point, far less significant than Linus Torvalds' technical contributions to Linux. They also suffer from a lack of visibility, which admittedly isn't relevant to a true evaluation of technical merit, but definitely influences selection for big prizes. Linux, as the kernel that powers most of the Internet, half of the world's smartphones, and a huge majority of modern embedded systems has a visible effect on the world that GCC does not.
Stallman definitely deserves credit for what he has done, but I don't think this prize is the right place to give it to him. That said, it would be entirely appropriate for Torvalds to give Stallman a nod in the acceptance speech, though I also wouldn't fault Torvalds for focusing his thanks on all of the people who worked on Linux with him.
I guess my other question is, how can the most utilized utility on a system still have unchecked overflows?
Have you ever looked at the OpenSSL code? It could have the Ark of the Covenant hidden in all that mess somewhere for all we know and we'd never find it.
No kidding. I've seen a lot of horrible messes in my career, but OpenSSL tops them all. There have to be hundreds of serious security bugs lurking in there... the only thing saving us is that it's so nasty not even the black hats want to dig in there to find them. Good security code should be as simple and straightforward as possible, to make it easy to verify. The authors of OpenSSL took a... different approach.
But 99% of the POS customers out there aren't mega-corps. You've got all the corner bars and hair salons and independent car repair garages where the only person who cares about the POS system is the owner, and he/she is typically not a "computer person".
Of course, that was never IBM's market. IBM couldn't figure out how to sell to Mom & Pops if they wanted to. IBM's definition of a "small business" is one with annual revenues of less than $4 billion.
Oops, hit "submit" too fast.
I think there's been exactly one improvement to airline security since 9/11: Reinforced cockpit doors that lock from the inside. If you can't replace the pilots you can't use the plane as a missile.
Yes, that was a huge improvement. And it also addresses the sort of hijackings for transportation that were common a few decades back... although everyone's realization that planes make good missiles pretty much killed that possibility anyway. If the passengers don't take you out, *and* you can convince the pilots (who you can't get to) to listen to you, you'd still better make sure you keep your hijacked plane well away from any possible terror targets or you're going to have an AMRAAM up your tail.
Obviously, not including the change in passenger attitude toward hijackings, even though that does make the plane more secure.
I think that's an even bigger deterrent. A couple of years after 9/11 there was an Air France flight out of Malaysia (IIRC) that was hijacked. The captain told the passengers over the PA what was going on (in French, which the hijackers didn't speak) and the passengers dogpiled the hijackers and beat them to a pulp. IIRC, one of the hijackers nearly died he was beaten so badly.
You have an interesting idea, but it has a jaw-dropping problem. The terrorists who hijacked the 9/11 planes probably would have signed up for this program.
And would have utterly failed the background check.
Today is the 7th GMail outage. Who in his right mind would trust those morons who cannot run a simple E-mail service?
Umm, what does the volunteer Tahoe LAFS grid have to do with GMail?
And, according to the dashboard (how many companies publish their service problems, with history, to the whole world?), GMail didn't have an outage, just a disruption. A fairly large one, as GMail disruptions go since it affected almost 10% of GMail users and lasted over an hour, but still hardly an "outage".
Sorry, but we really don't know if it was a flaw in tor or bitcoin or something similar that led to the arrests.
It's much, much more likely that they compromised it through the physical distribution channels.
no monthly fee... always-on server... network connection
Now one of those items doesn't fit well with the other two.
Well, assuming you're going to have the network connection and server anyway, there's no contradiction.
And I can't but a terabyte and a half of cloud storage from a reputable place at a reasonable price... yet
I know where you can get about 500 GB for no monthly fee. You just need an always-on server (preferably running *nix) and network connection, and be willing to "trade" storage, storing about 1 TB of other peoples' files (all data is automatically encrypted before upload), using the Tahoe LAFS distributed storage grid. Actually, if you get your own group together you can get as much space as you want, but the grid I'm a member (currently) has a 1 TB maximum. The storage nodes are scattered across several continents and Tahoe applies Reed-Solomon coding to your data so even if many of the servers holding your data were to disappear, you could stil recover all of it.
If this is interesting, check out our wiki at: http://bigpig.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/WebHome
No. I don't believe any state in the US requires the driver to remain stationary for any interval. They just require coming to a complete stop.
Are you sure you work for Google? With all those disclaimers and shit I'd have had you down for a Wikipedant.
[post needs [citation needed] rewriting, may break WP:abuse, WP:NPOV and WP:SIUYA,BEF]
Hehe. I'll admit I was a little nervous about posting at all on an active legal case involving Google, so I wanted to be really careful to separate my opinions from Google's official positions -- even though they seem to me to be in perfect agreement.
I suppose lawyers have an ethical duty to argue every point that reasonably could help their client, but this is silly. I really like the comments in a couple of the footnotes in Google's response:
Similarly, fictional languages such as Na’vi and Dothraki cannot be copyrighted. While the film Avatar and the television series Game of Thrones are copyrightable (including the portions in the fictional Na’vi and Dothraki languages), and while, for example, a dictionary or grammar textbook for either language would be copyrightable, the languages themselves are not. Oracle asks why copyright should not protect such languages, see Oracle 4/5/12 Br. [Dkt. 859] at 9; the answer is that Section 102(b) says that they are not protected. Moreover, there is no reason to believe that allowing copyright owners to control who can express themselves in these languages would further the aims of copyright law.
Umm, duh. Do they really want to argue that, say, stating "Your mother is ugly" or some other random sentence in, say, Dothraki is a public performance of a copyrighted work? That's what it would have to be if the language itself were copyrightable.
Even clearer, though:
Oracle also argues that a computer language can be “original, text-based, and capable of fixation,” and thus that it must be copyrightable. See Oracle 4/5/12 Br. [Dkt. 859] at 9. First, Section 102(b) bars copyright protection for “original works of authorship” that fall within its enumerated classes of exclusion. See 17 U.S.C. 102(b). Thus, the fact that a system is original, text-based and fixed does not mean that Section 102(b) does not apply. Second, a language cannot be fixed. Certainly, a description of a language (e.g., a specification) can be fixed. A computer program written using the language (e.g., the Gmail application on Android phones) or an implementation of a language (e.g., a compiler or interpreter) can be fixed. But none of those things is “the language,” any more than a dictionary “is” English, Das Boot “is” German, or a C compiler “is” the C programming language. See Baker, 101 U.S. at 102 (“But' there is a clear distinction between the book, as such, and the art which it is intended to illustrate. The mere statement of the proposition is so evident, that it requires hardly any argument to support it.”); cf. René Magritte, La trahison des images.
Exactly. How can you write down a "language"? You can describe it. You can list the allowable words and explain how they can and cannot be put together, but such a description isn't a language. You can use it. You can create prose, poetry, or, computer programs with it, expressing and fixing your own ideas in the constructs provided by the language, but an expression in a language isn't the language.
A language is about as pure an abstract idea as I can imagine, and ideas are not copyrightable, only expressions.
(Disclaimer: I work for Google, but have nothing to do with any of this Java folderol, other than using the language occasionally. I'm a programmer but not a language expert and would not be qualified to offer expert testimony on this topic, even if I were asked to, which I haven't been. Other than the quotes, the above is my own opinions, nothing more. In this case it appears that they align closely with Google's officially-stated opinions, however!)
When will America finally have enough guns that she and all her citizens are safe? What a happy day that shall be.
There is no such thing as safety until there are no people with evil intent, which means there is no such thing as safety.
Any perception of safety, anywhere, is an illusion caused mostly by not paying attention. That doesn't mean danger is omnipresent, either, nor that the vast majority of people can't live out their whole lives without being threatened by death or maiming, but there's basically nowhere that it's impossible.
Guns are a great equalizer, which give a 90 year-old woman some hope of fending off violence from a 20 year-old martial artist, and allow a person to defend themselves at a distance, but they're only tools, they don't address the fundamental problem. However, neither are the tools the fundamental problem... if criminals cannot obtain firearms they will use knives, bats, fists, etc. See the example of Great Britain, which has had some success at making handguns hard to obtain, only to witness a wave of knife violence that causes people to talk semi-seriously about banning knives with points.
Violence is caused by people, not by the tools they use. In the presence of aggressive, unlawful violence, the only effective response is defensive, lawful violence and a handgun is the most effective defensive tool we've yet invented -- though a good pepper spray or taser is a close second in effectiveness. Perhaps someday we'll invent the Star Trek phaser with its stun setting. Of course, even with that Captain Kirk occasionally felt the need to set his to kill.
That's only in a very narrow sense of "protect". As the Zimmerman case shows, if you carry a gun, you are at risk of someone trying to grab it from you. Furthermore, the cost of using it may be higher than the cost of the injuries you might have sustained without a gun.
Your points are correct, but I disagree that they make the sense of "protection" unusefully narrow.
On the first point, yes, if you bring a gun into a situation, you are at risk of having it taken from you and used against you. In practice, this really doesn't happen very often, but it's something you have to consider. There are multiple implications of this fact. Some of the implications I cover in my class are: First, if you're carrying a gun you should not get into a fist fight, because your gun may become exposed (it shouldn't fall -- if there's any danger of that you need a better holster). If that happens, your opponent may take it and use it on you -- even worse, he may do so because he suddenly realizes you have a gun and fears you're going to use it on him. Second, you should not expose or draw your gun until you've determined that you have to shoot. Third, you should learn and practice handgun retention techniques, and how to shoot from retention. It's not hard to defeat a gun grab if you know how.
On the second, you're absolutely right that the cost of using your gun may be very high. That's why I teach that you should always assume that if you draw your gun and shoot someone you will be financially ruined and will spend years in prison. If what will happen if you don't shoot is worse than that, then shoot.
The purpose of carrying a gun is to be able to defend yourself or others against deadly threats. For anything else... just talk your way out of it or run away. But for those deadly dangerous situations, having a gun does make you much more likely to survive.
I'm not actually arguing that Martin was justified in taking a swing if, indeed, he did. It just seems that the application of this kind of situation seems to benefit the survivor of an altercation.
Without witnesses, the survivor always has an upper hand, because his is the only version of the story. As long as he can come up with something plausible that fits the physical evidence and casts his actions within the law (whatever it may be), he's in good shape. The nature of the law doesn't change that much. On the other hand, states that require you to attempt to retreat often convict people who were faced with the option of either killing unlawfully or being killed as they tried to run away.
No matter how you structure the law, there will be cases in which its application could be unjust, especially if one party or the other is twisting the facts. That being the case, I favor laws like Florida's which build in the assumption of innocence unless guilt can be proven.
US CDC website tells me that there were over 500 accidental deaths in 2009 caused by firearms.
Out of more than 300 million people, and 220 million guns... that's really not very many at all. Good luck finding any significant sporting OR industrial piece of equipment that doesn't at least rival, if not significantly exceed, those numbers. The average swimming pool, for example, kills ~100 times as many people as the average gun. And those 554 accidental firearms deaths were overwhelmingly by guns in the hands of people with no formal training whatsoever.
That's a lot of dead people, even without flying at 40,000 feet.
Being at 40,000 feet doesn't change anything (note that bullet holes do not cause explosive decompression except in movies. In fact, it would take a lot of bullet holes to cause the cabin pressure to drop at all, even slowly).
It's not that I don't trust intelligent, trained, mentally stable, informed and responsible adults with firearms, it's just that I don't trust the general public, police officers or Americans with them.
And yet, over seven million American citizens regularly legally carry a gun on their person, and each year less than five of those people shoot someone unlawfully or accidentally, even though in many states the training required is minimal. Air marshals carry on hundreds of thousands of flights annually, without shooting anyone at all.
Oh, and I forgot to mention (because I don't use it): ChromeOS has a guest account. So users could always just log in with the guest account and then use the browser. They won't have all their Google account-related stuff, obviously -- won't have all their bookmarks synced, etc.
Certain aggravating factors can escalate a crime to first-degree. They vary by jurisdiction, but often include murder during rape, killing a member of law enforcement, or being party to a crime such as burglary or robbery where one of the accomplices is killed.
Also, the pre-meditation doesn't have to be lengthy or well in advance, and it doesn't have to be centered around a particular person. All that's required is a split-second decision, not in the heat of the moment, to kill. And, of course, the prosecutor has to be able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the killer made a cold-blooded decision to kill.
Based on what little we know of the evidence, it seems pretty clear to me that even if Zimmerman did pre-meditate the act, there's no proof that he did so. Unless there's a significant piece of evidence we're not aware of, the prosecutor would be foolish to make that charge, especially if Florida law doesn't allow the jury to choose to convict on a lesser charge (I don't know if it does). That might force them to acquit even if they find that Zimmerman did commit murder.
Swinging at someone just because they are following you is not justified, and is rightfully illegal.
So now there's video? I thought there was only audio.
Cruciform tried to argue that Martin was justified in assaulting Zimmerman, based on the "Stand Your Ground" law and the fact that Zimmerman was "stalking" him. phantomfive pointed out that if Martin did attack Zimmerman in response to being stalked, that would not be justified by the Stand Your Ground law and would be a crime.
Try to keep up. Nowhere was there a claim of video, or of any knowledge of whether or not Martin swung at Zimmerman.
And doubtlessly, carrying a weapon gave Zimmerman a false sense of security.
I don't think his sense of security was false. Of course -- and this is a point I make strongly and repeatedly to my concealed carry students -- if you're carrying a gun you really should try even harder than when you're not to avoid situations where you might feel you have to use it, because by being armed you've raised the stakes, and may have to deal with the legal, financial, emotional and social effects of shooting someone.
But there isn't any falsity about the sense of increased security you have when you're armed. The gun does give you significantly greater ability to protect yourself or others.