"Given that you don't understand current designs, I'd really rather you shut the fuck up about things you have no clue about."
Wow.
You could have gotten your point across so many more tactful ways. Ways that might have shown your opponent that your ideas are reasonable. Ways that might have made him likely to accept your arguments.
But hell, this is Slashdot. Why not throw in the gratuitous "shut the fuck up?" I'll tell you why: because you say you're eager to see good information get transmitted, so that fear and misunderstanding don't scuttle the entire project.
You can argue your point forcefully, without pulling the sort of crap that insults your opponents and turns open-minded bystanders against you.
Now, apologize to the nice man. He seems bright enough, and you would probably be better served by having him as a well-informed ally than an uninformed enemy.
Actually, the elevator could be built in a "semi-incremental" fashion, if the overall cable is a ribbon of small cables laid alongside each other. After you've got the really big asteroid to hook the top to, you send up the first segment of cable. Lower that down to the bottom, and send a small climber up with the second cable. Then send another climber with two more cables, etc.
You build the thing up to the point where it's usable for what you're trying to accomplish at the moment (small satellites, for example), and build the rest out as your demand for bandwidth (groan) increases. If the thing gets big enough that you don't have a big enough mass at the top, use all those super-strong ropes to lash a second asteroid to the first.
You don't even need to wait until the nanotubes can support twice their own weight. Start by sending up four or five segments, and send subsequent segments up one at a time. Then if material science advances and they decide to swap the original cables out with stronger ones, they only need to send the stronger ones up the cable.
It can be an incremental process, once you get beyond the minimum specs.
I don't think crashing a plane into the elevator would work. Given that the cable is going to be very thin (especially towards the bottom), they'd probably have to make several passes before actually nicking it. Then, given the relative strengths of the materials involved, it's likely that the cable will neatly sever the plane in half.
Finally, severing the cable at the bottom just means that the rest of the structure floats gently away. Presumably, the thing will be built in such a way that they can keep the thing in a stable orbit if the tension is suddenly released. Failing that, they could send all the climbers up to the top and use escape pods to get most everyone down from the top.
If you want to do it right, get a saboteur to the top. Clipping the bottom is a relatively minor problem.
I was impressed with Robinson's science from start to finish. So when you claim that he just "made it up" when he nailed so much of the science, I would hope you'd at least point to a more definitive explanation of your alternative model.
I'm certainly sure that Robinson never intended the depiction to make people fearful of the idea of building a new elevator. I say this because, after the first disaster, the Martians built another one, and eventually so did Earth.
The atmosphere of Mars was thin enough in 2061 that I don't think making it more ribbon-shaped would have helped. Segmenting the cable in such a way that it could separate into chunks in an emergency would have helped. Otherwise the cable doesn't just fall; the higher bits get yanked downward by the lower bits, which are being pulled hardest by gravity.
Somebody has to have come up with a fairly definitive simulation. You haven't convinced me that Robinson's isn't it for a badly-designed cable.
That's a pat answer. I mean, in general it's excellent advice. But in this case, it just makes you sound like you didn't read the review, because the author touches on "what they did include" in excruciating detail.
You make it sound like the reviewer's only complaint is that the movie changed the plot and dialogue of the original(s). Though I haven't seen the movie, I think he makes excellent arguments, which he best summarized here:
"I feared that I might find a funny sci-fi movie which bore a passing resemblance to Hitchhiker's Guide, but what I found instead was a desperately unfunny sci-fi movie which bore a passing resemblance to Hitchhiker's Guide."
Bah, even a competent American humorist could see the humor evaporate when the change was made. We have some outstanding humorists here in the U.S. They were the ones standing outside the studio, holding the candlelight vigil. Occasional weeping would be heard.
I really don't think it's an American/British thing. It's a talented humor writer/untalented humor writer thing. It seems that there are a lot of very untalented humor writers in Hollywood. I just don't understand how it's possible to spend tens of millions of dollars on a movie and have it come out crap, but then I have a very limited imagination.
The truth is, most developers are building software that cannot be easily commoditized, packaged, and sold on the shelves of Best Buy. The more good, useful, freely available code there is, the bigger the demand for people who can customize it to do what people need.
If software can be easily commoditized, then open source has a huge advantage. But most coders make their living doing things where open source code is an enabler, not a competitor.
Does it bother anyone else that the professor took $100,000 from the NSF to write this program, and then gets to sell it back to the rest of us taxpayers at $3000 a pop?
Had he financed the software himself, by working on it in his spare time or by saving up money so he could leave school to work on it, then I'd feel he should be free to charge what the market would bear. But when the NSF funds research, we all should be beneficiaries of that research. If the results of the research are wrapped up in a proprietary product, only the seller benefits from the new knowledge generated by the grant. The buyer benefits from the existence of the technology, but can't use it to further advance the science embodied in the program.
The rest of us? We get diddly.
Anyone else care to weigh in on this? I'm especially curious to hear from those who think this is an acceptable practice.
Which is more rewarding? Spending your working days updating crufty time-related code in order to comply with some obnoxious government rule that doesn't solve any of the problems it's trying to fix? Or... well... anything else in the world?
Make-work doesn't become less wasteful simply because I'm the one who happens to be making money doing it. The economy is at its best when everyone is doing something that actually generates benefits for others. Take it from someone who spent some years in the Army: Just because you're working hard doesn't mean you're doing something productive. It's productivity that leads to higher quality of life.
Is it really better to inject products into the general public without having a good idea of whether they're actually safe or not? Once you've put the stuff out there, it's hard to get it back. If we can't do a good job recalling defective car seats, what are the odds that we can get individual molecules out of circulation?
Yes, there are risks to moving too slow. People die by the thousands when the FDA is too slow to approve a product. But when a substance gets widely adopted and then is discovered to be too dangerous (asbestos, PCBs, etc), the costs of taking them back out of the environment range from ludicrous to prohibitive.
I simply cannot fathom this neo-connish "all regulation is evil evil evil" mentality that so many people have. I think it's absurd to regulate "nanotech" in the sense that it's absurd to regulate "computers": The field is too broad for a one-size-fits-all approach. But the article seems to be suggesting a "once the horse is gone, maybe commission an underfunded and non-binding study to see if locking the barn door might have mitigated the problem" approach.
No, the grandparent is right. Buckministerfullerine is "just a special form of soot" in the same sense that cyanide "is just a special form of plant matter". Yes, there are low concentrations of the stuff in any fireplace. But if someone is suggesting wrapping drugs in buckyballs and injecting them as a delivery system, there's no way the FDA is going to accept, "Well, we don't regulate fireplaces, do we?" and give the treatment a go-ahead.
We don't have nearly enough data about most of the molecules being introduced into our lives. I don't see buckyballs as being particularly special in that regard. You seem to be saying that, because we've lived with "soot" for the last fifty thousand years, that is sufficient evidence of one of its components' harmlessness. It isn't, and it's better that we find out the facts before we base multi-billion dollar industries on it.
I'm a little confused about the distinction you're trying to make. Subcontracting or the lack thereof shouldn't matter, because at the end of the day it's still taxpayer dollars being used to fund the service, which competes with private enterprise.
There are times when I think the government has good reason to get involved in an endeavor like this. But it has nothing to do with whether the government uses its own employees or subcontractors.
"Not to mention fact that the FBI can hack a wireless net in 3 minutes, so they'd never need to get a wiretap order to watch what you do..."
That makes about as much sense as saying "Policemen can manipulate doorknobs, so if a door is unlocked there is no need for them to get a search warrant." Your phone system transmits everything unencrypted, and yet they're still required to get a wiretap before listening in on it. The barrier to wiretapping is legal, not physical.
I'm a bit skeptical of government-based WiFi, because I believe the barrier to entering the WiFi market is low (far lower than trying to provide cable or DSL Internet service). The argument in favor of such an endeavor is simple, however: government should intervene in areas where the benefits of an endeavor are large, but hard to translate into profit.
For example, if there was a benefit to giving better Internet access to homeless people, it might help them find jobs, tell them which shelters had room for them, or give them reminders to take their meds. The entire community would benefit, but no company would provide the service because the homeless are generally short on cash.
In this case, there may be a benefit that accrues to the city as a whole when anyone can hook in from anywhere, but no individual benefit is enough that a private enterprise could capitalize on it. Maybe the hope is that a more tech-savvy population will attract businesses, or that the increased communication will have public safety benefits.
Regarding San Francisco, it looks like they're attempting to close a loophole in campaign finance law. They've botched it badly, and I think the free-speech issues trump the fair election issues by a wide margin, but I can see their rationale. It's far different than, "The government is censoring weblogs to keep people from saying things it doesn't like". All in all, I don't think a government network is going to be any more likely to censor its customers than a private one would be.
I'm inclined to agree that there's little reason to leave the Post Office in the hands of government. On the other hand, I'm skeptical of the claim that privatizing would immediately lead to increased efficiency. More likely, it would simply replace a government monopoly with a private oligopoly.
Only two plans make sense to me: either the USPS is sold in its entirety to a single private organization, or it's divvied up among the current would-be competitors (FedEx and UPS). In the former case, you have three players with sufficient infrastructure to deliver the service they provide; in the latter, you have two. It's just too expensive for new competitors to enter the market.
"That's one thing you really don't ever have to worry about the private sector allowing."
You were being sarcastic there, right?
"There is nothing that pissess off government bureaucrats than the idea that the citizenry can go elsewhere and completely ignore them."
How about the ramblings of right-wingers who seem to think all public services are theft, and that "the market" can do no wrong?
True. On the other hand, the goal of spread spectrum isn't just to keep people from listening in. It's also trying to make the signal difficult to jam. If he wants to solve that problem as well, SS may be an option for him.
Basically, it's a software-controlled receiver/transmitter, which makes it easy to pull signals out of the air, store and analyze them, and generate your own signals for broadcast.
I saw a nifty demonstration of it once. So I've already told you about everything I know.
As to your actual question, I agree with the general consensus: It's a crypto problem, not a hardware problem. Best of luck with it.
"May I ask you: if a corporation felt that a law was "bad" would it acceptable for it to break the law?"
That's a toughie for me, but it shouldn't be. Somewhere deep down, I realize that the standard by which we judge an action shouldn't have anything to do with whether the action is done by an individual or a corporation. But "to the first approximation" (by Carmack, what a useful phrase), I favor the little guy.
For me, a lot has to do with the motivation behind the law, and the motivation behind disobedience. If I think a law is bad because just because it denies me a chance to enrich myself, that motivation isn't sufficient to support breaking the law. But if I think it's doing real harm to many in order to enrich a few (DMCA), or that it subverts basic human freedoms (slavery, segregation), then I'm inclined to support civil disobedience.
On one hand, mere conviction isn't enough. Yet it's all we have. It's hard to make a case for civil disobedience in pursuit of my causes, while denying it for those things where I disagree. Maybe another distinction needs to be made between passive resistance (refusing to pay taxes while the government is pursuing an unjust war) and active resistance (bombing abortion clinics, or carpet-bombing Wal-Marts).
Maybe they decided the bugs in the ears were too "Invasion of the Body Snatchers"-esque. Sometimes ideas seem like a good idea at the time, but look worse once they've settled.
Along the same theme, nothing ever came of the creatures from another dimension that were performing bizarre medical experiments on the crew. That was a pretty freaky episode, and it seemed to be crying out for follow-ups that never happened.
I'll concede part of the second point: There are cases where saying "I was doing it at my employer's request" is an insufficient defense, and I may be held culpable anyhow. But there are cases where it's a perfectly valid defense. I'm not a lawyer, and don't know which this would fall under.
There are also circumstances where an employee is considered an agent for his company. For example, it's still unclear whether it was legal for AOL to "un-open" the source code to WASTE, which Justin Frankel (an AOL employee) released. I'm not clear on the merits of that particular case, but the point stands: An employer may be upset by an agreement made by an employee on its behalf, but still have to honor the agreement.
In your hypothetical, the employer shouldn't be held liable unless it specifically instructed you to kill the client, or otherwise agreed that you could kill people on its behalf.
Summary: The whole thing is way more complicated than either of us have made it out to be thus far. I'm now officially out of my depth.
"But he came to the US and is now subject to US law."
The only reason Adobe was able to bring suit against Elcomsoft at all was because Elcomsoft made the mistake of offering their software in the United States. Elcomsoft's actions prior to that were unarguably legal. Eventually, Elcomsoft won its case, though not on jurisdiction grounds.
It's pretty easy to caricature the supposed legal principle you're pushing. Other respondents have already done so, and I won't bother.
"Lets all disregard laws that we disagree with."
I wasn't saying that everyone should ignore every law that they don't like. But I feel strongly about the DMCA and the obvious harm it does to the public in order to benefit of a few big corporations. So I'm willing to continue holding a grudge against Adobe, and any other company that uses this law for its benefit.
I think that, in a way, refusing to cooperate with bad laws is a service to the rule of law. When bad laws are on the books, people quickly lose their belief in the idea that our laws are reasonable and respectable. So bad laws should be broken, and breaking them in such a way as to draw attention to their immorality is a public service.
Point the first: Skylarov wrote the code on behalf of his employer. Any legal liabilities should have been theirs, not his.
Point the second: Skylarov lived and worked in Russia, a place where American law doesn't apply.
Point the third: Skylarov was arrested under the DMCA, which is a bad, nasty, pointless, stupid law which effectively overthrows the balance of rights that has always existed between publishers and their customers, replacing it with a simple maxim: Publishers can limit the use of their works in whatever ways technology will allow. Further, because of the anti-circumvention portions (which make basic security research illegal) they don't even have to be terribly clever about it. DMCA kills fair use, time shifting, format shifting, etc., unless the publishers deem it in their interests to allow it. Finally, the DMCA allows publishers to protect their works in such ways as will allow them to retain complete control over their works even after the work should have reached the public domain (not that anything new will ever enter the public domain in this country).
Bad laws shouldn't exist. People shouldn't be prosecuted under bad laws. Case closed.
Point the fourth: One of your assertions is flat out wrong. After a meeting with the EFF, Adobe dropped its support for the prosecution of Dmitri Skylarov [press release]. They're still pursuing the case against Elcomsoft.
Don't care about the Skylarov case? Fine. Don't care to boycott Adobe? No problem. But don't come in here and try to misrepresent the case to a group of people who were watching when it happened.
Not before we get general-purpose artificial intelligence. As it stands, just about every language in use today is context free, so a single statement can have only one meaning. English, on the other hand, can have statements whose meaning cannot be determined in isolation.
"Time flies like an arrow."
"Fruit flies like a banana."
Both sentences can be parsed in either of two ways: Time(noun) flies(verb) like an arrow, or Time(adjective) flies(noun) like an arrow. Don't ask me what a time fly is. It might be some sort of time-travelling insect that's out to destroy us all. I don't want to think about it. The point is, a computer cannot consistently eliminate such possibilities, and therefore has a difficult time figuring out what you're talking about.
Yeah, it would be nice if I could sit down at the computer, start babbling about what I wanted it to do, answer a few clarifying questions, and hit "compile". But that's not going to happen until computers are smart enough to start wondering why exactly they need us meatbots.
English is great for getting around in everyday life, but horrible when you need the sort of precision of thought required to turn your ideas into a running program. Heck, it's not even a wonderful language for describing design requirements.
Keep dreaming, though. This sort of research is going to lead a lot of nifty places.
What "thingy" on each page is leading Yahoo to index the results in this way? More to the point, if I want to license a web page under CC, how do I get the page to signal Yahoo to let it know?
Slashdot Mirror
You could have gotten your point across so many more tactful ways. Ways that might have shown your opponent that your ideas are reasonable. Ways that might have made him likely to accept your arguments.
But hell, this is Slashdot. Why not throw in the gratuitous "shut the fuck up?" I'll tell you why: because you say you're eager to see good information get transmitted, so that fear and misunderstanding don't scuttle the entire project.
You can argue your point forcefully, without pulling the sort of crap that insults your opponents and turns open-minded bystanders against you.
Now, apologize to the nice man. He seems bright enough, and you would probably be better served by having him as a well-informed ally than an uninformed enemy.
Actually, the elevator could be built in a "semi-incremental" fashion, if the overall cable is a ribbon of small cables laid alongside each other. After you've got the really big asteroid to hook the top to, you send up the first segment of cable. Lower that down to the bottom, and send a small climber up with the second cable. Then send another climber with two more cables, etc.
You build the thing up to the point where it's usable for what you're trying to accomplish at the moment (small satellites, for example), and build the rest out as your demand for bandwidth (groan) increases. If the thing gets big enough that you don't have a big enough mass at the top, use all those super-strong ropes to lash a second asteroid to the first.
You don't even need to wait until the nanotubes can support twice their own weight. Start by sending up four or five segments, and send subsequent segments up one at a time. Then if material science advances and they decide to swap the original cables out with stronger ones, they only need to send the stronger ones up the cable.
It can be an incremental process, once you get beyond the minimum specs.
I don't think crashing a plane into the elevator would work. Given that the cable is going to be very thin (especially towards the bottom), they'd probably have to make several passes before actually nicking it. Then, given the relative strengths of the materials involved, it's likely that the cable will neatly sever the plane in half.
Finally, severing the cable at the bottom just means that the rest of the structure floats gently away. Presumably, the thing will be built in such a way that they can keep the thing in a stable orbit if the tension is suddenly released. Failing that, they could send all the climbers up to the top and use escape pods to get most everyone down from the top.
If you want to do it right, get a saboteur to the top. Clipping the bottom is a relatively minor problem.
I was impressed with Robinson's science from start to finish. So when you claim that he just "made it up" when he nailed so much of the science, I would hope you'd at least point to a more definitive explanation of your alternative model.
I'm certainly sure that Robinson never intended the depiction to make people fearful of the idea of building a new elevator. I say this because, after the first disaster, the Martians built another one, and eventually so did Earth.
The atmosphere of Mars was thin enough in 2061 that I don't think making it more ribbon-shaped would have helped. Segmenting the cable in such a way that it could separate into chunks in an emergency would have helped. Otherwise the cable doesn't just fall; the higher bits get yanked downward by the lower bits, which are being pulled hardest by gravity.
Somebody has to have come up with a fairly definitive simulation. You haven't convinced me that Robinson's isn't it for a badly-designed cable.
You make it sound like the reviewer's only complaint is that the movie changed the plot and dialogue of the original(s). Though I haven't seen the movie, I think he makes excellent arguments, which he best summarized here:
Bah, even a competent American humorist could see the humor evaporate when the change was made. We have some outstanding humorists here in the U.S. They were the ones standing outside the studio, holding the candlelight vigil. Occasional weeping would be heard.
I really don't think it's an American/British thing. It's a talented humor writer/untalented humor writer thing. It seems that there are a lot of very untalented humor writers in Hollywood. I just don't understand how it's possible to spend tens of millions of dollars on a movie and have it come out crap, but then I have a very limited imagination.
Bah! And piffle!
The truth is, most developers are building software that cannot be easily commoditized, packaged, and sold on the shelves of Best Buy. The more good, useful, freely available code there is, the bigger the demand for people who can customize it to do what people need.
If software can be easily commoditized, then open source has a huge advantage. But most coders make their living doing things where open source code is an enabler, not a competitor.
Cory Doctorow:
Eastern Standard Tribe (CC)
A Place So Foreign (and eight more) (CC)
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (CC)
Lawrence Lessig:
Free Culture
Tech and science books:
Version Control with Subversion (CC)
An open source math book
Light and Matter, a series of physics texts by Ben Crowell
Lists:
The Assayer is a place to find and review open books.
I haven't seen this subject brought up.
Does it bother anyone else that the professor took $100,000 from the NSF to write this program, and then gets to sell it back to the rest of us taxpayers at $3000 a pop?
Had he financed the software himself, by working on it in his spare time or by saving up money so he could leave school to work on it, then I'd feel he should be free to charge what the market would bear. But when the NSF funds research, we all should be beneficiaries of that research. If the results of the research are wrapped up in a proprietary product, only the seller benefits from the new knowledge generated by the grant. The buyer benefits from the existence of the technology, but can't use it to further advance the science embodied in the program.
The rest of us? We get diddly.
Anyone else care to weigh in on this? I'm especially curious to hear from those who think this is an acceptable practice.
Which is more rewarding? Spending your working days updating crufty time-related code in order to comply with some obnoxious government rule that doesn't solve any of the problems it's trying to fix? Or... well... anything else in the world?
Make-work doesn't become less wasteful simply because I'm the one who happens to be making money doing it. The economy is at its best when everyone is doing something that actually generates benefits for others. Take it from someone who spent some years in the Army: Just because you're working hard doesn't mean you're doing something productive. It's productivity that leads to higher quality of life.
Is it really better to inject products into the general public without having a good idea of whether they're actually safe or not? Once you've put the stuff out there, it's hard to get it back. If we can't do a good job recalling defective car seats, what are the odds that we can get individual molecules out of circulation?
Yes, there are risks to moving too slow. People die by the thousands when the FDA is too slow to approve a product. But when a substance gets widely adopted and then is discovered to be too dangerous (asbestos, PCBs, etc), the costs of taking them back out of the environment range from ludicrous to prohibitive.
I simply cannot fathom this neo-connish "all regulation is evil evil evil" mentality that so many people have. I think it's absurd to regulate "nanotech" in the sense that it's absurd to regulate "computers": The field is too broad for a one-size-fits-all approach. But the article seems to be suggesting a "once the horse is gone, maybe commission an underfunded and non-binding study to see if locking the barn door might have mitigated the problem" approach.
No, the grandparent is right. Buckministerfullerine is "just a special form of soot" in the same sense that cyanide "is just a special form of plant matter". Yes, there are low concentrations of the stuff in any fireplace. But if someone is suggesting wrapping drugs in buckyballs and injecting them as a delivery system, there's no way the FDA is going to accept, "Well, we don't regulate fireplaces, do we?" and give the treatment a go-ahead.
We don't have nearly enough data about most of the molecules being introduced into our lives. I don't see buckyballs as being particularly special in that regard. You seem to be saying that, because we've lived with "soot" for the last fifty thousand years, that is sufficient evidence of one of its components' harmlessness. It isn't, and it's better that we find out the facts before we base multi-billion dollar industries on it.
I'm a little confused about the distinction you're trying to make. Subcontracting or the lack thereof shouldn't matter, because at the end of the day it's still taxpayer dollars being used to fund the service, which competes with private enterprise.
There are times when I think the government has good reason to get involved in an endeavor like this. But it has nothing to do with whether the government uses its own employees or subcontractors.
I'm a bit skeptical of government-based WiFi, because I believe the barrier to entering the WiFi market is low (far lower than trying to provide cable or DSL Internet service). The argument in favor of such an endeavor is simple, however: government should intervene in areas where the benefits of an endeavor are large, but hard to translate into profit.
For example, if there was a benefit to giving better Internet access to homeless people, it might help them find jobs, tell them which shelters had room for them, or give them reminders to take their meds. The entire community would benefit, but no company would provide the service because the homeless are generally short on cash.
In this case, there may be a benefit that accrues to the city as a whole when anyone can hook in from anywhere, but no individual benefit is enough that a private enterprise could capitalize on it. Maybe the hope is that a more tech-savvy population will attract businesses, or that the increased communication will have public safety benefits.
Regarding San Francisco, it looks like they're attempting to close a loophole in campaign finance law. They've botched it badly, and I think the free-speech issues trump the fair election issues by a wide margin, but I can see their rationale. It's far different than, "The government is censoring weblogs to keep people from saying things it doesn't like". All in all, I don't think a government network is going to be any more likely to censor its customers than a private one would be.
I'm inclined to agree that there's little reason to leave the Post Office in the hands of government. On the other hand, I'm skeptical of the claim that privatizing would immediately lead to increased efficiency. More likely, it would simply replace a government monopoly with a private oligopoly.
Only two plans make sense to me: either the USPS is sold in its entirety to a single private organization, or it's divvied up among the current would-be competitors (FedEx and UPS). In the former case, you have three players with sufficient infrastructure to deliver the service they provide; in the latter, you have two. It's just too expensive for new competitors to enter the market.
You were being sarcastic there, right?
How about the ramblings of right-wingers who seem to think all public services are theft, and that "the market" can do no wrong?
True. On the other hand, the goal of spread spectrum isn't just to keep people from listening in. It's also trying to make the signal difficult to jam. If he wants to solve that problem as well, SS may be an option for him.
Why not? Works on vampires.
But since you're new to the hardware side of things, maybe this will provide an easy transition: http://www.gnu.org/software/gnuradio/.
Basically, it's a software-controlled receiver/transmitter, which makes it easy to pull signals out of the air, store and analyze them, and generate your own signals for broadcast.
I saw a nifty demonstration of it once. So I've already told you about everything I know.
As to your actual question, I agree with the general consensus: It's a crypto problem, not a hardware problem. Best of luck with it.
For the n+1th time, Al Gore said no such thing!
Sorry, didn't mean to rant.
For me, a lot has to do with the motivation behind the law, and the motivation behind disobedience. If I think a law is bad because just because it denies me a chance to enrich myself, that motivation isn't sufficient to support breaking the law. But if I think it's doing real harm to many in order to enrich a few (DMCA), or that it subverts basic human freedoms (slavery, segregation), then I'm inclined to support civil disobedience.
On one hand, mere conviction isn't enough. Yet it's all we have. It's hard to make a case for civil disobedience in pursuit of my causes, while denying it for those things where I disagree. Maybe another distinction needs to be made between passive resistance (refusing to pay taxes while the government is pursuing an unjust war) and active resistance (bombing abortion clinics, or carpet-bombing Wal-Marts).
I have to sleep. Linky!
Maybe they decided the bugs in the ears were too "Invasion of the Body Snatchers"-esque. Sometimes ideas seem like a good idea at the time, but look worse once they've settled.
Along the same theme, nothing ever came of the creatures from another dimension that were performing bizarre medical experiments on the crew. That was a pretty freaky episode, and it seemed to be crying out for follow-ups that never happened.
There are also circumstances where an employee is considered an agent for his company. For example, it's still unclear whether it was legal for AOL to "un-open" the source code to WASTE, which Justin Frankel (an AOL employee) released. I'm not clear on the merits of that particular case, but the point stands: An employer may be upset by an agreement made by an employee on its behalf, but still have to honor the agreement.
In your hypothetical, the employer shouldn't be held liable unless it specifically instructed you to kill the client, or otherwise agreed that you could kill people on its behalf.
Summary: The whole thing is way more complicated than either of us have made it out to be thus far. I'm now officially out of my depth.
The only reason Adobe was able to bring suit against Elcomsoft at all was because Elcomsoft made the mistake of offering their software in the United States. Elcomsoft's actions prior to that were unarguably legal. Eventually, Elcomsoft won its case, though not on jurisdiction grounds.
It's pretty easy to caricature the supposed legal principle you're pushing. Other respondents have already done so, and I won't bother.
I wasn't saying that everyone should ignore every law that they don't like. But I feel strongly about the DMCA and the obvious harm it does to the public in order to benefit of a few big corporations. So I'm willing to continue holding a grudge against Adobe, and any other company that uses this law for its benefit.
I think that, in a way, refusing to cooperate with bad laws is a service to the rule of law. When bad laws are on the books, people quickly lose their belief in the idea that our laws are reasonable and respectable. So bad laws should be broken, and breaking them in such a way as to draw attention to their immorality is a public service.
That's an amazingly biased summary.
Point the first: Skylarov wrote the code on behalf of his employer. Any legal liabilities should have been theirs, not his.
Point the second: Skylarov lived and worked in Russia, a place where American law doesn't apply.
Point the third: Skylarov was arrested under the DMCA, which is a bad, nasty, pointless, stupid law which effectively overthrows the balance of rights that has always existed between publishers and their customers, replacing it with a simple maxim: Publishers can limit the use of their works in whatever ways technology will allow. Further, because of the anti-circumvention portions (which make basic security research illegal) they don't even have to be terribly clever about it. DMCA kills fair use, time shifting, format shifting, etc., unless the publishers deem it in their interests to allow it. Finally, the DMCA allows publishers to protect their works in such ways as will allow them to retain complete control over their works even after the work should have reached the public domain (not that anything new will ever enter the public domain in this country).
Bad laws shouldn't exist. People shouldn't be prosecuted under bad laws. Case closed.
Point the fourth: One of your assertions is flat out wrong. After a meeting with the EFF, Adobe dropped its support for the prosecution of Dmitri Skylarov [press release]. They're still pursuing the case against Elcomsoft.
Don't care about the Skylarov case? Fine. Don't care to boycott Adobe? No problem. But don't come in here and try to misrepresent the case to a group of people who were watching when it happened.
Not before we get general-purpose artificial intelligence. As it stands, just about every language in use today is context free, so a single statement can have only one meaning. English, on the other hand, can have statements whose meaning cannot be determined in isolation.
"Time flies like an arrow."
"Fruit flies like a banana."
Both sentences can be parsed in either of two ways: Time(noun) flies(verb) like an arrow, or Time(adjective) flies(noun) like an arrow. Don't ask me what a time fly is. It might be some sort of time-travelling insect that's out to destroy us all. I don't want to think about it. The point is, a computer cannot consistently eliminate such possibilities, and therefore has a difficult time figuring out what you're talking about.
Yeah, it would be nice if I could sit down at the computer, start babbling about what I wanted it to do, answer a few clarifying questions, and hit "compile". But that's not going to happen until computers are smart enough to start wondering why exactly they need us meatbots.
English is great for getting around in everyday life, but horrible when you need the sort of precision of thought required to turn your ideas into a running program. Heck, it's not even a wonderful language for describing design requirements.
Keep dreaming, though. This sort of research is going to lead a lot of nifty places.
What "thingy" on each page is leading Yahoo to index the results in this way? More to the point, if I want to license a web page under CC, how do I get the page to signal Yahoo to let it know?