Let's just consider the source, i.e. the LA times which has a 10/1 ratio of liberal versus conservative responses in the letter's to the editors section.
The LA times hasn't been worth reading for 15plus years...this from a native Angelino that grew up on the times!
Flamebait? Why is this modded flamebait? It's true. The LA Times is worst kind of trite hollywood "left-wing lite" tripe. It's smug, vapid hand-wringing liberal style has disgusted serious political progressives and conservatives alike for over thirty years.
The idea is to make the expected value of the crime negative. As any good mathematician could tell you expected value is the sum of the (product of the probability of an outcome by the value of an outcome), summed over all outcomes.
In your example, let's imagine that $100 is stolen by 50,000 shoplifters, yielding that $5M figure. The probability of getting caught is therefore quite low, specifically, 0.0001. So, if every shoplifter were fined $1M, then the expected value of shoplifting would be (0.9999) * 100 + (0.0001) * (-1,000,000) = $99.99 - $100 = -$0.01. So $1M is probably not enough of a fine.
The major flaw in your "negative expected value" theory is that it depends upon the entire affected population being, essentially, fully informed mathematicians. Since this presumption is ludicrous, you cannot use it as a basis to calculate an "adequate deterrence value threshold". There is no magic formula that's going to tell you how big an fine needs to be so long as there are people out there who spend $50 a week on the lottery but put $0 a week away for retirement.
"If you download a song illegaly, all you have done is possibly eliminate a potential sale.?"
But isn't that a real cost as well? It may be less that, say, a retail cost, but it does have a cost -- it's not zero. So when you have illegally downloaded a song, you have stolen something -- the value of not only a potential sale to you, but to everyone who then shares from you. You have stolen something of economic value, and that's theft, period.
Actually, that's not "theft, period". Theft is depriving someone of real property without compensation*. Copyright infringement is not theft, period. *(certain non-property crimes, e.g. "theft of services", have "theft" in their name, but "theft" alone can only be a property crime.
It may be complicated to determine just how much that economic loss is, but it sure isn't zero.
"Future sales", or "sales that might have been" are worth exactly squat. I can stand in a public place and exhort people to not shop at WalMart all I want and they can't sue me for "lost sales". It is not merely "complicated" to determine what economic loss might result from said copyright infringement, it's impossible. This is why it's sheer folly to attempt to frame the copyright debate in the same terms as property rights. They are unrelated.
(emphasis mine) why is it unfair? if you break the law despite its punishment, then shouldn't you accept the punishment?
He means "unfairly" in reference to the degree of punishment, not the fact of punishment at all. In other words, it is unfair that they are punished so harshly.
This might seem a little harsh, but why was a wind measuring experiment sent with the probe if we could gather the same data remotely via doppler shift measurements?
They didn't gather all the data solely by measuring the doppler shift on a constant signal, if that's what you're thinking. The bulk of the data was collected wind measuring equipment and transmitted. The doppler shift of this data signal provided additional information. What they're saying is that they not only managed to recover the data signal, but also were able to measure the doppler shift to some degree as well.
I dunno what the time scale was like but many of the later laser printers are also fantastic. I just bought a Laserjet 2100 because they are the low-end professional printer, supposed to be good for 10,000 pages a month and I believe it because I've used them in office environments more than once. Its big brother, the 4050, is an absolutely fantastic printer.
2100's are great. I have one as well. Notice how they don't make them anymore...
January 1st,2005...that's pretty late to claim that excuse.
If you take "torture" out of the search, you get 5700 hits. It's not a trick. I'm not sure you can rationally claim censorship. Their image indexing just plain sucks.
A googol is ten to the one hundredth power, written as a one followed by one hundred zeros.
Ninety nine zeros, the name of the blog, is a googol minus one.
And now we have Google, minus one. One named "Mark".
Maybe it's just because I'm a former math geek, but I just love the way this worked out...
Actually it's googol divided by ten. Rmember, you divide to subtract those superscripty to-the-power-of numbery things.
One of the inconveniences......of the professional world (damn these short comment titles!)
Perhaps you shouldn't be trying to cram your first sentence into the title space. Titles should stand alone and, preferrably, not be necessary to understand the rest of the post.
My guess is that the reason for having SPS unencrypted is that it makes it not worthwhile to do the work of decrypting PPS. If PPS were the only available service, decoding it woulda been a/. article long long time ago.
From what I remember of the few PLGR units I used in the gulf, military GPS units use what is basically a one-time pad type system. The crypto key is good for 6 weeks. When that key expires, you load the next from a secure data transfer device. The military has a serious belt-and-suspenders approach to key management. The keys are large enough to realistically take decades to brute-force, and they change them very frequently.
The only reason why Europe has GPS service is that the US military wants the ability to accuratly blow up any location on the planet.
That's not a 'free' service in my book.
GPS consists of two separate signals: PPS and SPS. PPS is encrypted and is what the military uses to blow stuff up. SPS is unencrypted and can be turned off or "degraded" at will either globally or over certain geographic areas. SPS is what all commercial GPS is based on. If all they were concerned with was blowing shit up, they wouldn't have SPS.
Many of the classics, among them Lisp, Algol, APL, Simula, and Smalltalk. Modula-3 even had C#-like safe/unsafe sublanguages (as did a few other languages). And while they didn't have GC, languages like Pascal and Modula were safe languages in most other respects.
OK, now I get where you're coming from. I didn't catch the whole safe/unsafe subdivision. Indeed, [C|C++] has no "safe" aspect.
The world did not begin with 16k Apple II's or the teenage dabblings of some industry luminaries in software. People had large computers running multiuser operating systems and safe, high-level languages in the 1960's.
Well yeah, I was thinking of those same large machines, like the initial base release of the PDP-11 with its max usable RAM of 28Kwords. Admittedly, I was exaggerating a bit to make the point.
"and did they really bother to weed out all possible "exploits" when weren't 10,000 russian teenagers writing viruses to "zombie box" that machine?"
We are talking about runtime safety here. You are confusing runtime safety and security; runtime safety helps with security, but it is neither necessary nor sufficient to guarantee it.
Understood, but my point remains. The scouring of every nook and cranny of the software is always less critical when you don't have hordes of cretinous jerks looking to "pwnz0r!" the machine. Were they really safer at runtime, or were they just not pushed to the extremity many current systems are? Admittedly, [C|C++] is Not The Ideal Choice in a world where everything is getting bigger and more complex.
Re:since it was down the first 2 times i tried
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Atari 2600 Mac Mod
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I once had a guy assure me he was read-on for "Hampster-Cornhole" when he wanted access to our SCIF.
Heh. I think I was read on to that SAP. Reminds me of the smoking area "inside the fence" where our multi-building SCIF was. Smoking had been banned inside the fence by the weirdo installation commander, but those of us who were serious chain smokers never had time to go the half mile to get outside the fence while on duty. We had a corner behind one building with sand filled coffee cans where we'd hide while smoking. Initially one of the cans had a sign on it that said:
RESTRICTED AREA
Access Limited to Personnel
with SAP read-on SECRET SMOKE.
Eventually its removal was requested by an NCO who was uncomfortable with its thinly veiled reference to the classification-caveat combo "SECRET - SPOKE" (as it was, of course, classified CONFIDENTIAL - HVCCO...)
...half a century of computing history: safe, managed code used to be common in high-level language.... The real question to ask is how in the world unsafe languages like C and C++ ever managed to succeed
Just curious...which high level languages were these, and is the greater safety not in large part due to the relative simplicity of older systems? I mean, how hard is it to wring all the bugs out of an application or OS written for a machine with 16K of RAM, and did they really bother to weed out all possible "exploits" when weren't 10,000 russian teenagers writing viruses to "zombie box" that machine?
Re:since it was down the first 2 times i tried
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Atari 2600 Mac Mod
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· Score: 1
This project should have been online a year ago, but it was not meant to be. We ran into many more problems after filming wrapped than we want to go into here. Suffice it to say, we did finish the project, but not alone. Special thanks go to Jim Allard, who was present every day during filming. While you the viewer never see or hear Jim, he was the invisible third man of the show. This would not have happened without him. Tad Scheeler was the talent behind our animated opening, as well as helping film during day two. MacMod would not look the same, or have whatever polish is present, without Tad. Adam Karneboge lent his help in technical matters, as well as providing a part we sorely needed. And Chris Seibold stepped in at the last minute to provide the over-the-top narration the show needed. Without these people, MacMod would never have happened.
You know, I'm not sure why they felt the need to turn this into a fully-produced TV mini-series. Come on, it's just Yet Another Case Mod. Does it really warrant more than than the usual series of mediocre digital camera stills with badly worded captions? Even if they decided they wanted to show it "film style", did they really need more than a guy to hold a camera and point it at stuff? It almost seems like the real project was the film, rather than the case mod.
And if you are selling something, and you want people to look at you stuff, you must add LOOK to the subject line. And if you really want people to look at your wares, you write LQQK or L@@K. LOOK, LQQK and L@@K are a guarentee of a quality product.
Another important phrase for the description is "RARE!" or "VERY RARE!". Doesn't matter that it's only a valve cover retaining clip for an aircooled VW Bug or a used distributor cap for an early 70's GM V8, it still counts as "RARE!"
'scuse me for asking the obvious question, but how come the staff at safeway/etc didn't notice that this guy was using his mother's card?...if credit cards had a photo of the owner upon them, then (in some cases) this kinda stuff could be prevented (because--correct me if i'm wrong, i live in the uk and ccards may work differently in the usa--this kid should not have been able/allowed to use his mother's credit card in the first place)
Supermarkets in the US have credit/debit terminals where the customer swipes the card themselves and often even signs electronically. The card holder's name might appear on the register where the cashier could see it, but they seldom bother to read it, and they prectically never check the card for small purchases.
The thing about Microsoft and patents is that they file them defensively, not offensively.
Heh. Funny thing about that is that even if you take their assertion of such at face value, all it takes is to characterize any infringement as an "attack" to maintain their "defensive" attitude.
The Department of Homeland Security is a combination of what used to be several departments in the federal government. If you get all your information from TV news, you might believe that all they do is counter terrorism, but they actually do much more. A quick perusal of their web site lists some of their various parts:
Border and Transportation Security (BTS) - this is the TSA and Border Patrol, mostly.
Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) - www.fema.gov
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS)
U.S. Coast Guard
U.S. Secret Service (USSS) - formerly part of the Treasury Dept.
What they did was take all those gov't agencies with overlapping responsibilities vis-a-vis "homeland security", but no communication because they were in separate departments, and combine them under one department. Really, this should have been done a long time ago.
In this case, it's the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arm that's investigating because it appears to involve a child from Canada being brought to the US. If this were a purely domestic investigation, the FBI would take care of it.
Because Google is diluting the trademark, by directly associating it with other competing entities. Trademark protection is an unusual form of IP protection, in that it is organized around protecting the consumer, who uses the mark as a tool to identify an entity. The primary test for trademark infringement is whether the act causes confusion among consumers as to what is represented by the mark.
The competitors weren't representing themselves as Louis Vitton. These ads are the equivalent of someone standing in the street shouting "anyone have any Louis Vuitton bags?" and having a couple guys come out of their shops and say "No, but we got bags you might like anyway". How does this in any way dilute the trademark?
The issue is whether someone else can use your own name for advertising against you.
But how is this different than, say, a used car lot where the salesmen are told "if a potential customer calls and asks if we have any Mazdas, tell them what they really want is a Ford"? Where in trademark law does it say that you must give somebody the answer they're looking for in a search engine?
Slashdot Mirror
Flamebait? Why is this modded flamebait? It's true. The LA Times is worst kind of trite hollywood "left-wing lite" tripe. It's smug, vapid hand-wringing liberal style has disgusted serious political progressives and conservatives alike for over thirty years.
In your example, let's imagine that $100 is stolen by 50,000 shoplifters, yielding that $5M figure. The probability of getting caught is therefore quite low, specifically, 0.0001. So, if every shoplifter were fined $1M, then the expected value of shoplifting would be (0.9999) * 100 + (0.0001) * (-1,000,000) = $99.99 - $100 = -$0.01. So $1M is probably not enough of a fine.
The major flaw in your "negative expected value" theory is that it depends upon the entire affected population being, essentially, fully informed mathematicians. Since this presumption is ludicrous, you cannot use it as a basis to calculate an "adequate deterrence value threshold". There is no magic formula that's going to tell you how big an fine needs to be so long as there are people out there who spend $50 a week on the lottery but put $0 a week away for retirement.
But isn't that a real cost as well? It may be less that, say, a retail cost, but it does have a cost -- it's not zero. So when you have illegally downloaded a song, you have stolen something -- the value of not only a potential sale to you, but to everyone who then shares from you. You have stolen something of economic value, and that's theft, period.
Actually, that's not "theft, period". Theft is depriving someone of real property without compensation*. Copyright infringement is not theft, period. *(certain non-property crimes, e.g. "theft of services", have "theft" in their name, but "theft" alone can only be a property crime.
It may be complicated to determine just how much that economic loss is, but it sure isn't zero.
"Future sales", or "sales that might have been" are worth exactly squat. I can stand in a public place and exhort people to not shop at WalMart all I want and they can't sue me for "lost sales". It is not merely "complicated" to determine what economic loss might result from said copyright infringement, it's impossible. This is why it's sheer folly to attempt to frame the copyright debate in the same terms as property rights. They are unrelated.
He means "unfairly" in reference to the degree of punishment, not the fact of punishment at all. In other words, it is unfair that they are punished so harshly.
They didn't gather all the data solely by measuring the doppler shift on a constant signal, if that's what you're thinking. The bulk of the data was collected wind measuring equipment and transmitted. The doppler shift of this data signal provided additional information. What they're saying is that they not only managed to recover the data signal, but also were able to measure the doppler shift to some degree as well.
"Italian" isn't a race, it's (at best) an ethnicity. His comments show ethnic prejudice, not racism.
2100's are great. I have one as well. Notice how they don't make them anymore...
If you take "torture" out of the search, you get 5700 hits. It's not a trick. I'm not sure you can rationally claim censorship. Their image indexing just plain sucks.
Actually it's googol divided by ten. Rmember, you divide to subtract those superscripty to-the-power-of numbery things.
Perhaps you shouldn't be trying to cram your first sentence into the title space. Titles should stand alone and, preferrably, not be necessary to understand the rest of the post.
Correction: they were SLGR units. PLGR's are the nice hand-held ones we WISHED we had.
From what I remember of the few PLGR units I used in the gulf, military GPS units use what is basically a one-time pad type system. The crypto key is good for 6 weeks. When that key expires, you load the next from a secure data transfer device. The military has a serious belt-and-suspenders approach to key management. The keys are large enough to realistically take decades to brute-force, and they change them very frequently.
Wouldn't that be a sextant?
Obligatory funny astrolabe tech support link.
GPS consists of two separate signals: PPS and SPS. PPS is encrypted and is what the military uses to blow stuff up. SPS is unencrypted and can be turned off or "degraded" at will either globally or over certain geographic areas. SPS is what all commercial GPS is based on. If all they were concerned with was blowing shit up, they wouldn't have SPS.
OK, now I get where you're coming from. I didn't catch the whole safe/unsafe subdivision. Indeed, [C|C++] has no "safe" aspect.
The world did not begin with 16k Apple II's or the teenage dabblings of some industry luminaries in software. People had large computers running multiuser operating systems and safe, high-level languages in the 1960's.
Well yeah, I was thinking of those same large machines, like the initial base release of the PDP-11 with its max usable RAM of 28Kwords. Admittedly, I was exaggerating a bit to make the point.
"and did they really bother to weed out all possible "exploits" when weren't 10,000 russian teenagers writing viruses to "zombie box" that machine?"
We are talking about runtime safety here. You are confusing runtime safety and security; runtime safety helps with security, but it is neither necessary nor sufficient to guarantee it.
Understood, but my point remains. The scouring of every nook and cranny of the software is always less critical when you don't have hordes of cretinous jerks looking to "pwnz0r!" the machine. Were they really safer at runtime, or were they just not pushed to the extremity many current systems are? Admittedly, [C|C++] is Not The Ideal Choice in a world where everything is getting bigger and more complex.
Heh. I think I was read on to that SAP. Reminds me of the smoking area "inside the fence" where our multi-building SCIF was. Smoking had been banned inside the fence by the weirdo installation commander, but those of us who were serious chain smokers never had time to go the half mile to get outside the fence while on duty. We had a corner behind one building with sand filled coffee cans where we'd hide while smoking. Initially one of the cans had a sign on it that said:
Eventually its removal was requested by an NCO who was uncomfortable with its thinly veiled reference to the classification-caveat combo "SECRET - SPOKE" (as it was, of course, classified CONFIDENTIAL - HVCCO...)
Just curious...which high level languages were these, and is the greater safety not in large part due to the relative simplicity of older systems? I mean, how hard is it to wring all the bugs out of an application or OS written for a machine with 16K of RAM, and did they really bother to weed out all possible "exploits" when weren't 10,000 russian teenagers writing viruses to "zombie box" that machine?
You know, I'm not sure why they felt the need to turn this into a fully-produced TV mini-series. Come on, it's just Yet Another Case Mod. Does it really warrant more than than the usual series of mediocre digital camera stills with badly worded captions? Even if they decided they wanted to show it "film style", did they really need more than a guy to hold a camera and point it at stuff? It almost seems like the real project was the film, rather than the case mod.
Another important phrase for the description is "RARE!" or "VERY RARE!". Doesn't matter that it's only a valve cover retaining clip for an aircooled VW Bug or a used distributor cap for an early 70's GM V8, it still counts as "RARE!"
Supermarkets in the US have credit/debit terminals where the customer swipes the card themselves and often even signs electronically. The card holder's name might appear on the register where the cashier could see it, but they seldom bother to read it, and they prectically never check the card for small purchases.
Heh. Funny thing about that is that even if you take their assertion of such at face value, all it takes is to characterize any infringement as an "attack" to maintain their "defensive" attitude.
Border and Transportation Security (BTS) - this is the TSA and Border Patrol, mostly.
Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) - www.fema.gov
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS)
U.S. Coast Guard
U.S. Secret Service (USSS) - formerly part of the Treasury Dept.
What they did was take all those gov't agencies with overlapping responsibilities vis-a-vis "homeland security", but no communication because they were in separate departments, and combine them under one department. Really, this should have been done a long time ago.
In this case, it's the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arm that's investigating because it appears to involve a child from Canada being brought to the US. If this were a purely domestic investigation, the FBI would take care of it.
The competitors weren't representing themselves as Louis Vitton. These ads are the equivalent of someone standing in the street shouting "anyone have any Louis Vuitton bags?" and having a couple guys come out of their shops and say "No, but we got bags you might like anyway". How does this in any way dilute the trademark?
But how is this different than, say, a used car lot where the salesmen are told "if a potential customer calls and asks if we have any Mazdas, tell them what they really want is a Ford"? Where in trademark law does it say that you must give somebody the answer they're looking for in a search engine?
Hey, if you don't trust the Linux Time Machine project, why don't you download the source and fix it rather than complaining about it! :)