Now there's a whatcouldpossiblygowrong article if I ever saw one...
Well, yes, the people who use that tag are all reactionary luddites, and this story will appeal to them.
Please, what could go wrong with this? The virus escapes and... err... behaves almost exactly like the virus it was engineered from? Except, you know, in presence of iron phosphate (a rather rare substance) it grows in a different shape. Clearly a danger to the survival of our species, there.
1. Everyone shall have the right to hold opinions without interference. 2. Everyone shall have the right to freedom of expression;[...] 3. The exercise of the rights provided for in paragraph 2 of this article carries with it
special duties and responsibilities. It may therefore be subject to certain
restrictions, but these shall only be such as are provided by law and are
necessary:
(a) For respect of the rights or reputations of others;
(b) For the protection of national security or of public order (order public), or of
public health or morals.
I am reminded of DeValera's 1937 Constitution of Ireland [...] In my opinion, ICANN's ultimate aim to transform the internet into a place akin to 1950's Ireland
I'm not sure why the text you quote suggests this to you, as it should remind you of something else somewhat more strongly (scroll down to article 10). I don't think we can ascribe the motives you describe to the Council of Europe, so something else is at play here.
In fact, the text you quote is not that far away from the US constitution, or at least the modern interpretation of it, which has exceptions (for example) for protecting the young and impressionable from certain types of speech (e.g. it is not legal to show sexually explicit material to children, the purpose of this is to protect their morals) or encouraging people to violent action (which is for the purpose of protecting public health, by preventing injury). Yes, these exceptions were not codified in the first amendment, but they have been treated as existing by the courts.
The point is that this is a reasonable description of the most universal understanding of the idea of freedom of expression. What ICANN are proposing is in line with the human rights legislation of ECHR signatories (i.e., almost all of Europe, along with most of northern Asia and Iceland). It is similar to language in the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which held that the rights it described may be subject to restrictions "meeting the just requirements of morality, public order and the general welfare in a democratic society." It isn't far removed from the human rights legislation of the USA. It is also very similar to similar rights in the laws of other countries, including India.
So, really, I don't think you're on the right track here at all. By almost everyone's standards, the description given is a reasonable description of the right to freedom of expression.
Director of IT (former sysadmin): This should only take four weeks.
Want to guess who got blamed when the project took four months?
I find myself in this situation all the time. The annoying thing is, whenever I call my boss on his underestimates, he does the project himself and gets it done in the time he said it would take.
Of course, I'm then left to maintain his umaintainable, obnoxious code.:(
Even if the salesdroid lies through their teeth you have no recourse because what the salesdroid said doesn't matter, it's what is written on the piece of paper you signed that matters in a court of law.
This is not true. In common law countries, of which the US is one, statements made during the sales process can override contract terms in some circumstances, and can render the contract voidable in others (i.e., you're no longer tied to that 24-month agreement you signed if it turned out the sales droid was wrong).
Out of curiosity, is that actually true? Last time I checked, the only way to compile applications for the Windows Mobile platform required that you have at least the "Standard" edition of Visual Studio, which will set you back $250.
There's an important difference in that music is not a primarily verbal activity, while programming is. To understand what an average musician needs, they need to be able to read and understand a vocabulary of maybe 20 or so Italian words. A programmer needs to understand the following classes of words:
* The words that the keywords of their programming language are based on. This is a small class, so unless we're talking PL/I it's probably fewer words than the Italian in music (although not by far). * The names of the basic classes and the parts of the APIs that they will use commonly in their programs. I'd guess an average programmer probably holds information on maybe 100 different API classes with an average of 5-10 methods each, so guess at about 700 names, although some of those will overlap. 100 words ought to cover it, though.
Also, the kind of recall required is different: it is effectively a requirement to be able to write in the language, rather than read it. As any language student will tell you, that is a much tougher requirement.
The analogy's interesting, but it doesn't really illuminate the problem because the two fields are not equal.
Literary Agent Janet Reid has a rather scathing rebuttal to Chu's article which Reid (who has actually read the settlement, something Chu did not do) feels is spectacularly uninformed and incorrect. I tend to agree with Reid. (FYI, I am an author whose in copyright books were scanned by Google. I am a member of the class.)
I tend to side with Charlie Petit on this one. Petit's a copyright lawyer with years and years of experience representing writers. He knows his shit. And he's right about this one: the class in this supposed class action is *way* too broad, and is being represented by *way* too narrow a subset of the appropriate plaintiffs. The class action should never have been certified.
>Should publishers get a cut of the money, at least as long as their book is being scanned?
Definitely. Especially if the book has been out of print for decades and the publisher has no plans, and no interest, in every publishing fresh copies. We need to keep the revenue going to the people it's always gone to!
Actually, most publishers have a term in their contracts with their authors that allows the rights to revert to the author if the book is out of print for some period of time, usually about 5 years, so the original author can republish with a different publisher who is interested.
Of course, the availability of cheap-to-distribute ebooks and print-on-demand systems is starting to screw this system up, but traditionally this hasn't been a problem.
Don't forget that they will very likely be tried as adults because they were fully capable of understanding the nature and consequences of their actions for something that is only illegal because they are NOT capable of doing exactly that.
Ouch.
You win the thread. Hell, I think you win the entire f'ckin site.
no-win-no-fee is contributing to an horrific rise in the potential costs of losing a case when you're sued - where you end up paying for cases in which you weren't involved. The obvious reform is that the fees claimed should not be allowed to be inflated for the costs of lost cases - if solicitors had to absorb the cost from what would otherwise be their profit margin they'd have to take on almost entirely winning cases, or go out of business.
This is only partially true. The solicitors are required to disclose how much they have increased their fees by, and the courts will limit it if they think they're charging too much extra, which usually comes down to about a third more than their normal fees.
But the 'no-win-no-fee' will make it a no-cost low-effort to suppress unwanted speech. There is a big difference between libel and things you do not want to hear.
No, it doesn't. You see, all "no-win-no-fee" (technically known as a conditional fee arrangement) means is that you don't have to pay your own lawyer if you don't win. On the other hand, if the judge thinks you're being an arsehole (e.g., by using them to try to suppress somebody else's right to freedom of expression), they'll order you to pay the defendant's legal costs.
Besides, a lawyer isn't going to take on a case on such a basis if he doesn't think he will win; there'd be no profit for him in taking losing cases.
So if I download the freely available online version(s) I'm potentially committing an offence by "re-publishing" "The Hacker's Handbook"
No, the owner of the site is, not you.
but if I borrow the (real, physical) book(s) from my local library (which actually does have some copies of it), then that's fine?
If the library were aware of the content then there may be a potential issue, particularly if it seemed they had endorsed it in any way.
Of course, that "would likely" is a matter of opinion, and I would suggest that in light of the 1998 Human Rights Act it is now a lot less likely that a court would decide that way than it was previously; incitement to commit an offence must be weighed against the right to disseminate knowledge about how the offence is committed, particularly if (as in this case) there is a legitimate interest in having that knowledge (i.e., ability to defend yourself against potential crime).
The problem occurs because [...] it can be excessively expensive to defend against charges brought with minimal expense and without significant danger of retribution in an form.
Please, this is far less true of English law than it is of US law. British court and solicitor costs are generally lower than those in the US, and we operate a system where the loser pays the winners in most cases. It may cost you a little up front to defend against an allegation, but as long as you are clearly in the right you should be able to claim all of your costs back from the claimant, which means that the idea that this operation can be conducted with virtually no risk to the claimant is well and truly wrong; the claimant in a baseless claim may well not have his own fees to pay, but he is quite likely to end up with the defendents.
Also, conditional fee arrangements (aka "no win no fee") are at the discretion of the solicitor making the arrangement. They don't want to take cases they can't win, because they know they won't get a fee. The system is reasonably well self-governing.
But a drawing still allows people living out their sexual fantasies regarding children - and even though you may scream "thoughtcrime!!11" now, who guarantees that a person who looks at drawn image of underage girls today won't look for photos tomorrow?
You're right! And who's to say that looking at photos of 19-year olds won't have the same effect, also? We should ban all porn, because one thing leads to another and the next thing you know we'll all be rapists.
I wonder if anyone would be so bold as to do the right thing, and suggest a law protecting artistic expression in the UK, equivalent in scope to American Freedom of Speech?
The UK already has the Human Rights Act, which guarantees a right to free expression, with such limits only as are necessary in a democratic society for the protection of the rights of others and to prevent crime (if I recall the exclusions correctly, which I might not). This is very similar in scope to the US right.
This particular restriction may be arguable on the prevention of crime grounds.
Odd, then, that LLVM's very own documentation refers to LLVM's instruction as "an abstract RISC-like instruction set".
I suspect whoever wrote that documentation isn't familiar enough with processor architecture theory to know what RISC actually means.
Remember, RISC-like only describes the nature of the actual instructions (basic arithmetic, flow control, etc), not the style of the register set.
Actually, RISC is very much tied to the register set: it requires that all instructions access data from and store results in registers except for a small minority that are specifically designed for memory access. LLVM's instruction set is agnostic about whether the values it works with are in memory or a register, so is quite clearly not RISC. You can get much closer to reproducing the same sequence of instructions that LLVM uses to represent an operation on a CISC machine than you can on RISC because on a CISC architecture you won't need as many additional memory access instructions.
It's a problem anyway. If you have structures that are being accessed by two threads at once, you need a lock (or your head examining; your choice) to stop demons from flying out of your nose.
Not necessarily; there are plenty of application areas where you can easily design your data structures and access rules so that multiple threads accessing them are not a problem. Consider the application I'm currently working on, a parallel artificial neural network trainer. I have one copy of the weights, and 4 threads with a different training set each. Each runs through its training set, totalling changes to make to the weights, then passes [a pointer to] those changes off to a coordinator thread which waits until all 4 have finished before adjusting the weights and then telling them to resume with the next epoch. The weight matrix is in the range of 50-100MB, so we really don't want to have to copy it each time around. This is a much more efficient way of achieving this result than anything I can think of without shared data, and I'd love to know if anyone else can see a better solution.
I'd like to see virtual machines like Java and CLR shifting more work to compile-time and link-time. I'm pretty sure they could get decent performance with static compilation + link-time escape analysis for eliminating heap allocations.
Both Java and CLR do run-time linking. This is essential for many of their features, and supporting it makes ahead-of-time escape analysis impossible; as soon as a class is loaded that wasn't considered at compile time the results become invalidated.
The overengineering of Java frameworks is equally a contributing factor.
Agreed with this one, and.NET isn't much better. Try looking at a dependency graph of basic Java classes some time, it's horrible. You can't write a small-footprint Java application because as soon as you refer to certain classes (System, for example), you're pulling in half the framework. AWT is horrible and a total resource pig. SWING is worse. And that's not even touching EJB.
Slashdot Mirror
Now there's a whatcouldpossiblygowrong article if I ever saw one...
Well, yes, the people who use that tag are all reactionary luddites, and this story will appeal to them.
Please, what could go wrong with this? The virus escapes and... err... behaves almost exactly like the virus it was engineered from? Except, you know, in presence of iron phosphate (a rather rare substance) it grows in a different shape. Clearly a danger to the survival of our species, there.
1. Everyone shall have the right to hold opinions without interference.
2. Everyone shall have the right to freedom of expression;[...]
3. The exercise of the rights provided for in paragraph 2 of this article carries with it
special duties and responsibilities. It may therefore be subject to certain
restrictions, but these shall only be such as are provided by law and are
necessary:
(a) For respect of the rights or reputations of others;
(b) For the protection of national security or of public order (order public), or of
public health or morals.
I am reminded of DeValera's 1937 Constitution of Ireland [...] In my opinion, ICANN's ultimate aim to transform the internet into a place akin to 1950's Ireland
I'm not sure why the text you quote suggests this to you, as it should remind you of something else somewhat more strongly (scroll down to article 10). I don't think we can ascribe the motives you describe to the Council of Europe, so something else is at play here.
In fact, the text you quote is not that far away from the US constitution, or at least the modern interpretation of it, which has exceptions (for example) for protecting the young and impressionable from certain types of speech (e.g. it is not legal to show sexually explicit material to children, the purpose of this is to protect their morals) or encouraging people to violent action (which is for the purpose of protecting public health, by preventing injury). Yes, these exceptions were not codified in the first amendment, but they have been treated as existing by the courts.
The point is that this is a reasonable description of the most universal understanding of the idea of freedom of expression. What ICANN are proposing is in line with the human rights legislation of ECHR signatories (i.e., almost all of Europe, along with most of northern Asia and Iceland). It is similar to language in the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which held that the rights it described may be subject to restrictions "meeting the just requirements of morality, public order and the general welfare in a democratic society." It isn't far removed from the human rights legislation of the USA. It is also very similar to similar rights in the laws of other countries, including India.
So, really, I don't think you're on the right track here at all. By almost everyone's standards, the description given is a reasonable description of the right to freedom of expression.
Anyone see this film? Fast Flux Hosting sounds a lot like the technique the bad guy was using in that...
(BTW: for anyone who hasn't seen it, it isn't as bad as the premise makes it sound.)
I find myself in this situation all the time. The annoying thing is, whenever I call my boss on his underestimates, he does the project himself and gets it done in the time he said it would take.
Of course, I'm then left to maintain his umaintainable, obnoxious code. :(
Even if the salesdroid lies through their teeth you have no recourse because what the salesdroid said doesn't matter, it's what is written on the piece of paper you signed that matters in a court of law.
This is not true. In common law countries, of which the US is one, statements made during the sales process can override contract terms in some circumstances, and can render the contract voidable in others (i.e., you're no longer tied to that 24-month agreement you signed if it turned out the sales droid was wrong).
IANAL, but I do play one on Slashdot.
Out of curiosity, is that actually true? Last time I checked, the only way to compile applications for the Windows Mobile platform required that you have at least the "Standard" edition of Visual Studio, which will set you back $250.
http://cegcc.sourceforge.net/
http://classic.pocketgear.com/software_detail.asp?id=11502&associateid=1224
I'm sure at least one of these WinCE ports of GCC works.
[...] a French programming language [...]
A Pascal variant?
There's an important difference in that music is not a primarily verbal activity, while programming is. To understand what an average musician needs, they need to be able to read and understand a vocabulary of maybe 20 or so Italian words. A programmer needs to understand the following classes of words:
* The words that the keywords of their programming language are based on. This is a small class, so unless we're talking PL/I it's probably fewer words than the Italian in music (although not by far).
* The names of the basic classes and the parts of the APIs that they will use commonly in their programs. I'd guess an average programmer probably holds information on maybe 100 different API classes with an average of 5-10 methods each, so guess at about 700 names, although some of those will overlap. 100 words ought to cover it, though.
Also, the kind of recall required is different: it is effectively a requirement to be able to write in the language, rather than read it. As any language student will tell you, that is a much tougher requirement.
The analogy's interesting, but it doesn't really illuminate the problem because the two fields are not equal.
An unfounded, unbased assertion is not an argument
Yes, it is!
Now I have to learn to think in Japanese as well as Russian.
Only +1 for that? Mods these days have no culture.
Literary Agent Janet Reid has a rather scathing rebuttal to Chu's article which Reid (who has actually read the settlement, something Chu did not do) feels is spectacularly uninformed and incorrect. I tend to agree with Reid. (FYI, I am an author whose in copyright books were scanned by Google. I am a member of the class.)
I tend to side with Charlie Petit on this one. Petit's a copyright lawyer with years and years of experience representing writers. He knows his shit. And he's right about this one: the class in this supposed class action is *way* too broad, and is being represented by *way* too narrow a subset of the appropriate plaintiffs. The class action should never have been certified.
>Should publishers get a cut of the money, at least as long as their book is being scanned?
Definitely. Especially if the book has been out of print for decades and the publisher has no plans, and no interest, in every publishing fresh copies. We need to keep the revenue going to the people it's always gone to!
Actually, most publishers have a term in their contracts with their authors that allows the rights to revert to the author if the book is out of print for some period of time, usually about 5 years, so the original author can republish with a different publisher who is interested.
Of course, the availability of cheap-to-distribute ebooks and print-on-demand systems is starting to screw this system up, but traditionally this hasn't been a problem.
Ouch.
You win the thread. Hell, I think you win the entire f'ckin site.
no-win-no-fee is contributing to an horrific rise in the potential costs of losing a case when you're sued - where you end up paying for cases in which you weren't involved. The obvious reform is that the fees claimed should not be allowed to be inflated for the costs of lost cases - if solicitors had to absorb the cost from what would otherwise be their profit margin they'd have to take on almost entirely winning cases, or go out of business.
This is only partially true. The solicitors are required to disclose how much they have increased their fees by, and the courts will limit it if they think they're charging too much extra, which usually comes down to about a third more than their normal fees.
But the 'no-win-no-fee' will make it a no-cost low-effort to suppress unwanted speech. There is a big difference between libel and things you do not want to hear.
No, it doesn't. You see, all "no-win-no-fee" (technically known as a conditional fee arrangement) means is that you don't have to pay your own lawyer if you don't win. On the other hand, if the judge thinks you're being an arsehole (e.g., by using them to try to suppress somebody else's right to freedom of expression), they'll order you to pay the defendant's legal costs.
Besides, a lawyer isn't going to take on a case on such a basis if he doesn't think he will win; there'd be no profit for him in taking losing cases.
So if I download the freely available online version(s) I'm potentially committing an offence by "re-publishing" "The Hacker's Handbook"
No, the owner of the site is, not you.
but if I borrow the (real, physical) book(s) from my local library (which actually does have some copies of it), then that's fine?
If the library were aware of the content then there may be a potential issue, particularly if it seemed they had endorsed it in any way.
Of course, that "would likely" is a matter of opinion, and I would suggest that in light of the 1998 Human Rights Act it is now a lot less likely that a court would decide that way than it was previously; incitement to commit an offence must be weighed against the right to disseminate knowledge about how the offence is committed, particularly if (as in this case) there is a legitimate interest in having that knowledge (i.e., ability to defend yourself against potential crime).
given the rush to deprecate privacy, to criminalise the abuse of imaginary children, and so forth, I wouldn't classify the UK as "highly free"
Because of course, this would never happen in the US.
The problem occurs because [...] it can be excessively expensive to defend against charges brought with minimal expense and without significant danger of retribution in an form.
Please, this is far less true of English law than it is of US law. British court and solicitor costs are generally lower than those in the US, and we operate a system where the loser pays the winners in most cases. It may cost you a little up front to defend against an allegation, but as long as you are clearly in the right you should be able to claim all of your costs back from the claimant, which means that the idea that this operation can be conducted with virtually no risk to the claimant is well and truly wrong; the claimant in a baseless claim may well not have his own fees to pay, but he is quite likely to end up with the defendents.
Also, conditional fee arrangements (aka "no win no fee") are at the discretion of the solicitor making the arrangement. They don't want to take cases they can't win, because they know they won't get a fee. The system is reasonably well self-governing.
But a drawing still allows people living out their sexual fantasies regarding children - and even though you may scream "thoughtcrime!!11" now, who guarantees that a person who looks at drawn image of underage girls today won't look for photos tomorrow?
You're right! And who's to say that looking at photos of 19-year olds won't have the same effect, also? We should ban all porn, because one thing leads to another and the next thing you know we'll all be rapists.
I wonder if anyone would be so bold as to do the right thing, and suggest a law protecting artistic expression in the UK, equivalent in scope to American Freedom of Speech?
The UK already has the Human Rights Act, which guarantees a right to free expression, with such limits only as are necessary in a democratic society for the protection of the rights of others and to prevent crime (if I recall the exclusions correctly, which I might not). This is very similar in scope to the US right.
This particular restriction may be arguable on the prevention of crime grounds.
Odd, then, that LLVM's very own documentation refers to LLVM's instruction as "an abstract RISC-like instruction set".
I suspect whoever wrote that documentation isn't familiar enough with processor architecture theory to know what RISC actually means.
Remember, RISC-like only describes the nature of the actual instructions (basic arithmetic, flow control, etc), not the style of the register set.
Actually, RISC is very much tied to the register set: it requires that all instructions access data from and store results in registers except for a small minority that are specifically designed for memory access. LLVM's instruction set is agnostic about whether the values it works with are in memory or a register, so is quite clearly not RISC. You can get much closer to reproducing the same sequence of instructions that LLVM uses to represent an operation on a CISC machine than you can on RISC because on a CISC architecture you won't need as many additional memory access instructions.
It's a problem anyway. If you have structures that are being accessed by two threads at once, you need a lock (or your head examining; your choice) to stop demons from flying out of your nose.
Not necessarily; there are plenty of application areas where you can easily design your data structures and access rules so that multiple threads accessing them are not a problem. Consider the application I'm currently working on, a parallel artificial neural network trainer. I have one copy of the weights, and 4 threads with a different training set each. Each runs through its training set, totalling changes to make to the weights, then passes [a pointer to] those changes off to a coordinator thread which waits until all 4 have finished before adjusting the weights and then telling them to resume with the next epoch. The weight matrix is in the range of 50-100MB, so we really don't want to have to copy it each time around. This is a much more efficient way of achieving this result than anything I can think of without shared data, and I'd love to know if anyone else can see a better solution.
Sure. Just open a socket on my desktop and I'll stream it over.
Doesn't work with my OS.
But not, it would appear, iPods. So it doesn't work with my portable media player.
No movies. No software. No audio books. No ebooks. No porn.
TPB just works, and has a much wider collection of stuff. Now, once more, why would I want to pay for this service?
I'd like to see virtual machines like Java and CLR shifting more work to compile-time and link-time. I'm pretty sure they could get decent performance with static compilation + link-time escape analysis for eliminating heap allocations.
Both Java and CLR do run-time linking. This is essential for many of their features, and supporting it makes ahead-of-time escape analysis impossible; as soon as a class is loaded that wasn't considered at compile time the results become invalidated.
The overengineering of Java frameworks is equally a contributing factor.
Agreed with this one, and .NET isn't much better. Try looking at a dependency graph of basic Java classes some time, it's horrible. You can't write a small-footprint Java application because as soon as you refer to certain classes (System, for example), you're pulling in half the framework. AWT is horrible and a total resource pig. SWING is worse. And that's not even touching EJB.