In other news, the US mint was raided by the FBI today for producing materials which were often used in illegal transactions, as well as possessed by many terrorists and potential terrorists.
"We feel that by striking now, we can keep this stuff out of the hands of people who do bad things," one agent said, under condition of anonymity. While stuffing evidence into large bags, he added "This stuff is the root of all evil." The agent declined to comment on rumors that Washington DC area banks would be the next targets of anti-terrorism action, stating that he "didn't want to tip off the bad guys."
The Homeland Security department heads were unavailable to comment. When pressed, their secretaries indicated that they were currently in a meeting to determine how to confiscate all of "this air stuff" the terrorists seem to be breathing.
Simple. The government has failed to prove they are trustworthy of the responsibility.
There are hundreds of abuses of wiretap privileges by the FBI per year. Are they to catch crooks? No, FBI agents use them to spy on their spouses, or even worse, to spy on companies for insider trading purposes (just last year I recall two FBI agents getting arrested for that). It is a classic case of "who watches the watchers"... If you want more examples, take a look at the recently/. article on the FBI database, and the FBI deciding that it wasn't important if the database was actually correct or not... It could be you mislabled as a terrorist because of some agency's sloppy works. (I wonder if the dropdown box for "things this person did wrong" has "Traffic Ticket" next to "Terrorist"?)
Not only that, but amidst all the finger pointing going on after September 11, the director of the FBI announced that agents whose wiretapping requests are turned down by the justice department are no longer supposed to ignore the justice department's orders (They were before!). Now they are to tell the director, and the director will give the order to ignore the justice department (like thats better!).
Just because you have nothing to hide doesn't protect you from the government. The same powers that allow them to claim they heard you discussing plans to blow up the White House allow them to... well, claim they heard you discussing blowing up the White House. It doesn't have to be true, but that's OK, they can't be forced to produce proof in court, after all its very security-sensitive information. The jury will just have to take their word for it.
Next time, before you cut someone else off in traffic, you should think twice. Maybe the person in the other car is a federal agent. Maybe they can hold a grudge. And maybe they can make your life hell, innocent or not.
If the Java virtual machine manages to type-check code at load time, why can't the.NET virtual machine?
Because at load time the buffer overflow hasn't happened yet, and the code hasn't been overwritten. Unless your idea of type checking is "Hm, reading from a socket into a 256 char array. Better allocate it 3 zillion chars, just in case".
I use mostly black, but the problem is if the color runs out, it won't even let me print in black.
My parents' Lexmark appears to use the color cartridge to print black. At least it can't seem to tell when a cartridge has run out, so the empty color cartridge can just sit in there while it prints black using the real black ink.
The Supreme Court is NOT the only court that can declare laws unconstitutional.
I don't think the secret terrorist courts are going to declare the law unconstitutional.
If a lesser court finds a law unconstitutional and the supreme court declines to actually review it, the result isn't that the law is removed, instead, the law isn't enforable (no, thats not quite right, they can still arrest people for it, but the fact that the law was found to be unconstitutional would be good solid defense... after you've been arrested and given a Criminal History(tm)) in that district or circuit, until such a time as either the ruling is overturned or someone convinces the supreme court to strike it down.
Quite a lot of what most of the "richest" people in the world "own" is a bunch of data in a server somewhere. Namely, the computers which run the stock markets, futures, bonds, funds, etc. and tracks who owns what. And everyone here knows how tricky investment can be, through no fault of your own, your money could just vanish.
Maybe "There" should be seen as an investment, with risk. You put some value of money+time in, and hopefully somehow get more value of money+enjoyment out than you put in.
If any of it does violate the Constitution - and I haven't yet found any part which does - that part is null and void.
Our founding fathers were too short-sighted in developing the so-called "checks and balances" system used by the US government. There is no provision for declaring a law unconstitutional, until the law is applied to someone who has the funds and legal prowess to defend himself and lose all the way to the Supreme Court.
So whats the problem? The increasing number of laws that provide for loss of citizenship and rights of a citizen (for example, look at the leaked PATRIOT II act). If you're convicted under that, you're basically shipped out of the country as a terrorist. I'm quite sure you don't have the right to appeal the outcome of top-sekret anti-terrorist hearings. It may be flat out unconstitutional, but since nobody will ever make it to the Supreme Court with it, it would (if passed) remain law until congress repeals it.
I'm not entirely sure about this, but I believe there is an actual official licensed Hong Kong release, that may not have been by Buena Vista (although they probably paid Buena Vista for the HK rights to it)
I don't know where to go about importing these DVDs though.
This bootleg page lists an "IVL Hong Kong" as one the distributer of an official licensed Region 3 DVD with english subs. This may be a branch of BV with a different name though. This review confirms that the Hong Kong release also suffered from the infamous red tint.
Reviews are split on the red tint. Many people didn't find the red tint to be annoying. Others think its the end of the world (what do you expect with fans?) If you hunt for it, you can find pages with side by side comparisons of some of the scenes.
Unlike other anime nuts, I am fully capable of expressing my fandom without feeling that people have some legal requirement to like the same stuff I do.
Thats why I try to be as objective as possible when talking about anime. It lets people make their own decisions, instead of me deciding for them.
There are almost no official Japanese DVDs that play outside of region 2. Just like there are almost no official US releases that play outside of region 1.
However, ignoring the region code on the DVD is not breaking the DMCA (not by the letter of the law anyway... just remember, you can be sued for anything at all, and then guilt must be proven in court) since the region code fails to meet the standards in the definition of an access control method by the DMCA.
Many Studio Ghibli DVDs have both subs and dubs. www.amazon.co.jp or www.cdjapan.co.jp are good places to start looking.
The bad news: The Japanese release of Sen To Chihiro has a red tint to it, supposedly because Buena Vista screwed up. BV changed their mind between claims it did what it always did to releases, and that they adjusted it for proper display on plasma tv's (this one appears to be true, the red tint may be a "color temperature" adjustment), and that it looks perfectly fine on their high-end multi-tens-of-thousands test equipment (if you were such A/V freaks that you cared about a red tint, you would too, right?).
The Official Region 1 US DVD comes out april 15th, along with Kiki's delivery service and Laputa: Castle in the Sky
You know where I got to watch it? I watched it in a nearby university's 100 seat theater. This is the kind of coverage Disney gave the film: very little advertisement, very few showings. Is there even a "box office" for universities for it to fail at?
Even 800 theatres is nothing compared to what the real box office bombs open at.
Yes, but Spirited Away isn't a Disney cartoon (its not even dubbed to English by Disney... Pixar was in charge of that) Its a Studio Ghibli animation directed by Hayao Miyazaki.
If you don't mind a show that isn't crammed with nonstop action, you might just like it. The pacing can be slow at times compared to the latest hollywood Blow Em Up, but there are still a number of action and suspense sequences.
You'd have to be a pretty fucking stupid parent to assume that the shows would be appropriate for small children
You mean sort of like the parents who buy their kids grand theft auto, because they just have no fucking clue... these parents are the ones who make me wonder if parenthood training and licensing would be worth it.
you could skip the first 12 and still totally understand the whole story.
It seems that way at first, but those first episodes set up Vash's background, his character, the way he's lived his entire life. Without it, its hard to understand just how big of a deal the stuff at the end is.
My complaint was about how businesspeople hide behind the corporate veil in general. During the Enron crash, there was at least one suicide directly relating to it. But, since the "company" was "merely" abusing vague accounting regulations, thats OK, there is no blood on the hands of the cowards behind the veil pulling the strings of the "company".
So it appears that if the patent is bad, my choices are "pay for it anyway" and "pay for defending it". Why should I have to pay? If I successfully defend against the patent infringement claim, it is unlikely that I can convince the holder (or to convince the court to order the holder) to pay my legal fees, so in the end I (as a single individual who writes software in my free time and may or may not infringe on patent x which I had never heard of) become bankrupt, possibly losing everything I own (normally, there are laws protecting some possessions from bankruptcy proceedings... but as an ex-student, I owe the government student loans, and the government ALWAYS gets their money)
I flew off the handle a bit there and chose a bad analogy. How about if I take advantage of the salvage laws that allow me to take trash from the curbside? After all, those cars left at the curbside must be trash too. I *know* the cars are not trash, just like Bezos must *know* his idea is not novel.
Here you are wrong. The patent process is a back-and-forth process by which Person X says "I want to patent the world", then the USPTO examiner says "You cannot patent the world. Try again."
"I want to patent making things." "You cannot patent making things. Try again."
"I want to patent making shiny things." "You cannot patent making shiny things. Try again."
"I want to patent making shiny things that go zoom." "You cannot patent making shiny things that go zoom. Try again."
"I want to patent discombobulmentarian motion of a pharxic body in respect to the basal notion of tremwise widgetness." "Huh? Well, my kid needs a new bike, and you've managed to confuse me enough, so I'll give you the patent so I can get the commision."... If you don't believe this is whats going on, just look at the discussion so far. Half the people think this is a patent on online auctions. Plenty of people thought it covers all online ads. Some people think it covers auctioning off online ads. Clearly the patent is misleading, as most modern software patents are.
I lost my cool and used a bad analogy. Clearly murder is nothing like what businessmen do when they kill off entire companies at once. After all, nobody is dead when they're done, they just have their lives ruined. (Oh wait... there was at least one well-publicized suicide due to the Enron crash. But thats OK, the businessmen were merely taking advantage of the government, so there is no blood on their hands)
Considerable fees are involved in having a patent cancelled, and defending against a patent lawsuit is not cheap stuff, and so we sit, watching the gears of stupidity grind on.
Is there a process for arguing against a pending patent? Can we demonstrate prior art (for instance googlewords, where ad placement is based on the amount paid) to keep the patent from ever being issued? Is there anything we can do short of expensive legal action?
as a responsible businessman, he has no choice but to seize every advantage the government offers him.
I wish people would STOP SPOUTING THIS BULLSHIT. Hiding your lack of ethics and/or morals behind the corporate veil is no excuse for this behavior.
Why do corporations feel that they are above the rest of us? If its Bezos's job to take advantage of the government due to poor enforcement for as long as he can get away with it, that must make it my job to take advantage of the government due to poor enforcement by killing people for as long as I can get away with it.
It's clear that the "advertisement" is an advertisement of an item up for bids on an online auction, such as ebay
Wrong.
"selecting, based at least in part on review of bid amounts, a received bid; and adding the advertisement of the selected bid to the web page."
This is indicating that the ad is added to the webpage based on (at least partly) the amount of the bid. It covers both outright sale of a slot to the highest bidder (you paid the most, so your ad will always show up), AND sale of the same ad slot to multiple people, with timesharing based on the amount each bid (A paid $1000, A's ad shows up 90/100 pages. B paid $100, B's ad shows up 9/100 pages. C paid $10, C's ad shows up 1/10 pages.)
So negotiating the highest price possible for the ads will be a patent infringement? (how is this different from selling ads to company x who will pay more? from company x bidding more?) I wish the patent office would learn some common sense.
We must finish the collection of languages before it is too late! Once the last speakers have passed on, nobody will ever know how to say "I can eat glass, it does not hurt me", and the world will forever be a sadder place.
Perhaps not completely new *classes* of drivers, but there are a dozen or so closed source kernel modules out there for various bits of hardware, for instance nvidia's graphics card driver.
Thats it then. Lets all admit defeat. Universities in the US will no longer offer computer science and computer engineering classes since the demand has dropped to zero (the jobs will be worth far less than the cost of the degree). Everyone who is a programmer either goes back to school (if they saved enough money) or goes to McDonalds. Technological development in the US grinds to a halt.
But thats OK because the companies got to save a buck for their shareholders this year.
So if 99% of the population of Texas decided to, could they get together and form a club and call it THE Texas? Sure they could, but that wouldn't make them be Texas since documents issued by an existing authority (the government) exist outlining what exactly Texas is.
So IE with its huge marketshare can call itself a standard, but that doesn't make them the real standard, since documents issued by an existing authority (the w3c) exist outlining what exactly the standard is.
Slashdot Mirror
They are profiting on illegal activities.
In other news, the US mint was raided by the FBI today for producing materials which were often used in illegal transactions, as well as possessed by many terrorists and potential terrorists.
"We feel that by striking now, we can keep this stuff out of the hands of people who do bad things," one agent said, under condition of anonymity. While stuffing evidence into large bags, he added "This stuff is the root of all evil." The agent declined to comment on rumors that Washington DC area banks would be the next targets of anti-terrorism action, stating that he "didn't want to tip off the bad guys."
The Homeland Security department heads were unavailable to comment. When pressed, their secretaries indicated that they were currently in a meeting to determine how to confiscate all of "this air stuff" the terrorists seem to be breathing.
Simple. The government has failed to prove they are trustworthy of the responsibility.
/. article on the FBI database, and the FBI deciding that it wasn't important if the database was actually correct or not... It could be you mislabled as a terrorist because of some agency's sloppy works. (I wonder if the dropdown box for "things this person did wrong" has "Traffic Ticket" next to "Terrorist"?)
... well, claim they heard you discussing blowing up the White House. It doesn't have to be true, but that's OK, they can't be forced to produce proof in court, after all its very security-sensitive information. The jury will just have to take their word for it.
There are hundreds of abuses of wiretap privileges by the FBI per year. Are they to catch crooks? No, FBI agents use them to spy on their spouses, or even worse, to spy on companies for insider trading purposes (just last year I recall two FBI agents getting arrested for that). It is a classic case of "who watches the watchers"... If you want more examples, take a look at the recently
Not only that, but amidst all the finger pointing going on after September 11, the director of the FBI announced that agents whose wiretapping requests are turned down by the justice department are no longer supposed to ignore the justice department's orders (They were before!). Now they are to tell the director, and the director will give the order to ignore the justice department (like thats better!).
Just because you have nothing to hide doesn't protect you from the government. The same powers that allow them to claim they heard you discussing plans to blow up the White House allow them to
Next time, before you cut someone else off in traffic, you should think twice. Maybe the person in the other car is a federal agent. Maybe they can hold a grudge. And maybe they can make your life hell, innocent or not.
If the Java virtual machine manages to type-check code at load time, why can't the .NET virtual machine?
Because at load time the buffer overflow hasn't happened yet, and the code hasn't been overwritten. Unless your idea of type checking is "Hm, reading from a socket into a 256 char array. Better allocate it 3 zillion chars, just in case".
I use mostly black, but the problem is if the color runs out, it won't even let me print in black.
My parents' Lexmark appears to use the color cartridge to print black. At least it can't seem to tell when a cartridge has run out, so the empty color cartridge can just sit in there while it prints black using the real black ink.
Repeat after me: Security is a process, not a product. HLL's can be misused just as effectively as LLL's.
Bingo! Here's an excellent example: word macros
The Supreme Court is NOT the only court that can declare laws unconstitutional.
I don't think the secret terrorist courts are going to declare the law unconstitutional.
If a lesser court finds a law unconstitutional and the supreme court declines to actually review it, the result isn't that the law is removed, instead, the law isn't enforable (no, thats not quite right, they can still arrest people for it, but the fact that the law was found to be unconstitutional would be good solid defense... after you've been arrested and given a Criminal History(tm)) in that district or circuit, until such a time as either the ruling is overturned or someone convinces the supreme court to strike it down.
Quite a lot of what most of the "richest" people in the world "own" is a bunch of data in a server somewhere. Namely, the computers which run the stock markets, futures, bonds, funds, etc. and tracks who owns what. And everyone here knows how tricky investment can be, through no fault of your own, your money could just vanish.
Maybe "There" should be seen as an investment, with risk. You put some value of money+time in, and hopefully somehow get more value of money+enjoyment out than you put in.
If any of it does violate the Constitution - and I haven't yet found any part which does - that part is null and void.
Our founding fathers were too short-sighted in developing the so-called "checks and balances" system used by the US government. There is no provision for declaring a law unconstitutional, until the law is applied to someone who has the funds and legal prowess to defend himself and lose all the way to the Supreme Court.
So whats the problem? The increasing number of laws that provide for loss of citizenship and rights of a citizen (for example, look at the leaked PATRIOT II act). If you're convicted under that, you're basically shipped out of the country as a terrorist. I'm quite sure you don't have the right to appeal the outcome of top-sekret anti-terrorist hearings. It may be flat out unconstitutional, but since nobody will ever make it to the Supreme Court with it, it would (if passed) remain law until congress repeals it.
I'm not entirely sure about this, but I believe there is an actual official licensed Hong Kong release, that may not have been by Buena Vista (although they probably paid Buena Vista for the HK rights to it)
I don't know where to go about importing these DVDs though.
This bootleg page lists an "IVL Hong Kong" as one the distributer of an official licensed Region 3 DVD with english subs. This may be a branch of BV with a different name though. This review confirms that the Hong Kong release also suffered from the infamous red tint.
Reviews are split on the red tint. Many people didn't find the red tint to be annoying. Others think its the end of the world (what do you expect with fans?) If you hunt for it, you can find pages with side by side comparisons of some of the scenes.
Unlike other anime nuts, I am fully capable of expressing my fandom without feeling that people have some legal requirement to like the same stuff I do.
Thats why I try to be as objective as possible when talking about anime. It lets people make their own decisions, instead of me deciding for them.
There are almost no official Japanese DVDs that play outside of region 2. Just like there are almost no official US releases that play outside of region 1.
However, ignoring the region code on the DVD is not breaking the DMCA (not by the letter of the law anyway... just remember, you can be sued for anything at all, and then guilt must be proven in court) since the region code fails to meet the standards in the definition of an access control method by the DMCA.
Many Studio Ghibli DVDs have both subs and dubs. www.amazon.co.jp or www.cdjapan.co.jp are good places to start looking.
The bad news: The Japanese release of Sen To Chihiro has a red tint to it, supposedly because Buena Vista screwed up. BV changed their mind between claims it did what it always did to releases, and that they adjusted it for proper display on plasma tv's (this one appears to be true, the red tint may be a "color temperature" adjustment), and that it looks perfectly fine on their high-end multi-tens-of-thousands test equipment (if you were such A/V freaks that you cared about a red tint, you would too, right?).
The Official Region 1 US DVD comes out april 15th, along with Kiki's delivery service and Laputa: Castle in the Sky
Failed at the box office? What box office?
You know where I got to watch it? I watched it in a nearby university's 100 seat theater. This is the kind of coverage Disney gave the film: very little advertisement, very few showings. Is there even a "box office" for universities for it to fail at?
Even 800 theatres is nothing compared to what the real box office bombs open at.
Yes, but Spirited Away isn't a Disney cartoon (its not even dubbed to English by Disney... Pixar was in charge of that) Its a Studio Ghibli animation directed by Hayao Miyazaki.
If you don't mind a show that isn't crammed with nonstop action, you might just like it. The pacing can be slow at times compared to the latest hollywood Blow Em Up, but there are still a number of action and suspense sequences.
You'd have to be a pretty fucking stupid parent to assume that the shows would be appropriate for small children
You mean sort of like the parents who buy their kids grand theft auto, because they just have no fucking clue... these parents are the ones who make me wonder if parenthood training and licensing would be worth it.
you could skip the first 12 and still totally understand the whole story.
It seems that way at first, but those first episodes set up Vash's background, his character, the way he's lived his entire life. Without it, its hard to understand just how big of a deal the stuff at the end is.
My complaint was about how businesspeople hide behind the corporate veil in general. During the Enron crash, there was at least one suicide directly relating to it. But, since the "company" was "merely" abusing vague accounting regulations, thats OK, there is no blood on the hands of the cowards behind the veil pulling the strings of the "company".
So it appears that if the patent is bad, my choices are "pay for it anyway" and "pay for defending it". Why should I have to pay? If I successfully defend against the patent infringement claim, it is unlikely that I can convince the holder (or to convince the court to order the holder) to pay my legal fees, so in the end I (as a single individual who writes software in my free time and may or may not infringe on patent x which I had never heard of) become bankrupt, possibly losing everything I own (normally, there are laws protecting some possessions from bankruptcy proceedings... but as an ex-student, I owe the government student loans, and the government ALWAYS gets their money)
I flew off the handle a bit there and chose a bad analogy. How about if I take advantage of the salvage laws that allow me to take trash from the curbside? After all, those cars left at the curbside must be trash too. I *know* the cars are not trash, just like Bezos must *know* his idea is not novel.
He's not being sneaky or hiding anything
... If you don't believe this is whats going on, just look at the discussion so far. Half the people think this is a patent on online auctions. Plenty of people thought it covers all online ads. Some people think it covers auctioning off online ads. Clearly the patent is misleading, as most modern software patents are.
Here you are wrong. The patent process is a back-and-forth process by which Person X says "I want to patent the world", then the USPTO examiner says "You cannot patent the world. Try again."
"I want to patent making things." "You cannot patent making things. Try again."
"I want to patent making shiny things." "You cannot patent making shiny things. Try again."
"I want to patent making shiny things that go zoom." "You cannot patent making shiny things that go zoom. Try again."
"I want to patent discombobulmentarian motion of a pharxic body in respect to the basal notion of tremwise widgetness." "Huh? Well, my kid needs a new bike, and you've managed to confuse me enough, so I'll give you the patent so I can get the commision."
I lost my cool and used a bad analogy. Clearly murder is nothing like what businessmen do when they kill off entire companies at once. After all, nobody is dead when they're done, they just have their lives ruined. (Oh wait... there was at least one well-publicized suicide due to the Enron crash. But thats OK, the businessmen were merely taking advantage of the government, so there is no blood on their hands)
Considerable fees are involved in having a patent cancelled, and defending against a patent lawsuit is not cheap stuff, and so we sit, watching the gears of stupidity grind on.
Is there a process for arguing against a pending patent? Can we demonstrate prior art (for instance googlewords, where ad placement is based on the amount paid) to keep the patent from ever being issued? Is there anything we can do short of expensive legal action?
as a responsible businessman, he has no choice but to seize every advantage the government offers him.
I wish people would STOP SPOUTING THIS BULLSHIT. Hiding your lack of ethics and/or morals behind the corporate veil is no excuse for this behavior.
Why do corporations feel that they are above the rest of us? If its Bezos's job to take advantage of the government due to poor enforcement for as long as he can get away with it, that must make it my job to take advantage of the government due to poor enforcement by killing people for as long as I can get away with it.
It's clear that the "advertisement" is an advertisement of an item up for bids on an online auction, such as ebay
Wrong.
"selecting, based at least in part on review of bid amounts, a received bid;
and adding the advertisement of the selected bid to the web page."
This is indicating that the ad is added to the webpage based on (at least partly) the amount of the bid. It covers both outright sale of a slot to the highest bidder (you paid the most, so your ad will always show up), AND sale of the same ad slot to multiple people, with timesharing based on the amount each bid (A paid $1000, A's ad shows up 90/100 pages. B paid $100, B's ad shows up 9/100 pages. C paid $10, C's ad shows up 1/10 pages.)
So negotiating the highest price possible for the ads will be a patent infringement? (how is this different from selling ads to company x who will pay more? from company x bidding more?) I wish the patent office would learn some common sense.
http://hcs.harvard.edu/~igp/glass.html
We must finish the collection of languages before it is too late! Once the last speakers have passed on, nobody will ever know how to say "I can eat glass, it does not hurt me", and the world will forever be a sadder place.
Perhaps not completely new *classes* of drivers, but there are a dozen or so closed source kernel modules out there for various bits of hardware, for instance nvidia's graphics card driver.
Thats it then. Lets all admit defeat. Universities in the US will no longer offer computer science and computer engineering classes since the demand has dropped to zero (the jobs will be worth far less than the cost of the degree). Everyone who is a programmer either goes back to school (if they saved enough money) or goes to McDonalds. Technological development in the US grinds to a halt.
But thats OK because the companies got to save a buck for their shareholders this year.
So if 99% of the population of Texas decided to, could they get together and form a club and call it THE Texas? Sure they could, but that wouldn't make them be Texas since documents issued by an existing authority (the government) exist outlining what exactly Texas is.
So IE with its huge marketshare can call itself a standard, but that doesn't make them the real standard, since documents issued by an existing authority (the w3c) exist outlining what exactly the standard is.