Yeah, but who exactly have we declared war on? Terrorism? We've declared war on a tactic? How the hell will such a war ever have an end? Seems pretty much like the War on Drugs to me. It will go on forever. If there is no declaration of war and no specific enemy, then how can these people be POWs? How can the administration be justified in holding them until the end of the war when no war has been defined?
Heh. Don't ask me, man. I think it's all a load crap myself. I'm just pointing out that approaching it from a constitutional angle is a complete waste of time, as they've expended a great deal of effort to ensure that it's not a matter of "criminal prosecution", but rather one of "rules of war".
So, it's not that it's "crappy but technically", it's crappy and in contravention of the Geneva conventions
I don't dispute that they are ignoring the Geneva Convention. All I said was that, as prisoners of war, they are not covered by the US Constitution and therefore arguments citing denial of constitutional rights will be of no avail. I'm totally with you on the bullshit "illegal combatants" thing-- I'm just saying that they've taken considerable pains to make this a "rules of war" issue rather than one of criminal prosecution and, subsequently, arguments about constitutionality are almost entirely moot.
The ACLU maintains that individual gun rights are a matter for congress to decide since the Constitution is clear that only states have a constitutional right to bare arms.
I think the primary argument against interpretation of the 2ndAmd as a protected state right is the fact that, in every other amendment, the term the people applies to the individual, and when they talk about states, they say the states. An examination of the actual debate that led to the wording of the 2nd Amd. shows two philosophical camps slightly at odds. One wanted to emphasize the right of the states to have militias, and the other wanted to emphasize the right of the individual to bear arms. What you see in the compromise wording is a statement to the effect of: "because the states have their own militias, individuals have the right to keep and bear arms". Really, the "states right" argument has been debunked six ways from sunday. Original intent can even be found with a quick reading of The Federalist Papers.
Amendment V
No person shall be held to answer...
Funny how it doesn't say "No citizen"
Amendment VI
In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right...
Again, it's odd how it says "all criminal prosecutions" and not "criminal prosecutions of citizens"
The reasoning they're employing is that those folks are POW's rather than criminals. One could argue all day about fair trials, and they'd only say "we have no intention of even charging them with a crime; we're holding them as POWs till the war is over". Crappy, but technically valid.
You might have a point about amendment 4, depending on how you define "the people" The point is, rights are universal. They are NOT granted by the constitution. And so they apply to everyone, just for being human.
Yeah, this is the REAL travesty of the situation. While they play semantic games with the letter of the law, they conveniently ignore the entire basis of it: that all persons have certain inalienable rights. But we have to save the children, right?
Didn't your interpreter have a renum command? Mine did. If the program got too long, I'd just type "renum" and watch it all magically fix itself.
Hah! I wish. It was a Commodore 64. By the time I found an after-market assembly patch to add a renumbering command, I had already discovered "planning" and (even better) 6502 assembly.
When I encountered this problem for the first time, I decided to use a GOSUB instead. My first thought was "this is going to turn out badly". It turned out that I was wrong; I had just discovered structured programming.
Heh. GOSUB is an even worse choice for "stretching" when you've run out of line numbers. A pair of out-and-back GOTOs is better because instead of an inscrutable RETURN at the end, you have a GOTO pointing back to where this little code segment really belongs. GOSUB is only structured if you're actually breaking things into discrete elements. Spaghetti is spaghetti, no matter how you make it.
Hah! GOSUB is for wieners! Also, it's really the same thing as a spaghetti GOTO call, only you have an inscrutable RETURN at the end instead of a GOTO telling you where it came from originally.
You were never much a fan of Avalon Hill board games, were you?
Heh. It used to take us two hours just to get all the chits straight for Third Reich. I tried to get my "nintendo generation" brother to play Squad Leader with me and he was horrified by the very idea of chits. Kids nowadays!
I can remember hours of frustration on my Apple IIc when I'd space lines too closely and run out of room to insert the one line I needed to make my program work as I wanted.
That's easy to fix. Replace one of those lines with GOTO 12000, then put all that stuff at 12000, ending with a GOTO pointed at the line after GOTO 12000. The first time I had to do that, my first thought was "this is going to turn out badly". It turned out I was right.
Thus its completely justified to assert that copying an encoded DVDs is not fair use. . The courts can deicie if this interpretationis correct but the law DEFINTLEY allows for such dicrimination in allowed uses of a work.
Nobody said anything about copying DVDs. We're talking about whether the "no circumvention" rule of the DMCA effectively blocks fair use by forcing the end user to view the work on certain equipment. As it stands, copyright law does not specifically prohibit playing DVDs under Linux, but the effect of the DMCA is such that no one can legally create a player unless they pay tribute to the holder of the CSS keys. This being the case, they can, through restrictive licensing, prohibit certain modes of usage which would clearly be considered "fair use" otherwise. A US copyright doesn't give the holder the right to forbid me to watch a US-bought VHS videotape of their movie in South America, but via the compulsory licensing of access devices under the DMCA, they can do exactly that with DVDs. What if they came out with an updated version of CSS that did region coding by time zone? Would it not be an obvious infringement of fair use for them to prevent me from taking a DVD I bought in Arizona and watching it in Florida? The courts may be allowed to decide on a case-by-case basis whether a certain usage constitutes fair use, but the basis for such decisions is whether or not the use is reasonable. Are you saying wanting watch a DVD on a laptop running linux isn't a reasonable position?
I think you would lose the anti-trust argument in court. The MPAA doesn't tell you which device you must use, only that you must use a licensed device. Any licensed device. And, they argue, the necessary licenses are available on "reasonable and non-discriminatory terms" to all parties. I don't know what the charges are for a CSS license these days, but say it's $1.00 per device. I seriously doubt that any court would find that to be an unreasonable charge
The cost of the license isn't the only issue. The terms of the license are restrictive beyond what is the normal scope of copyright. If I buy a paperback, I can read it in any country I want, and I can skip the first two pages where they have ads for other books if I want. Even if you pay the nominal $1.00 fee, you have to watch the ads and be in the correct country to watch the DVD. The issue is that the DMCA has essentially built a fence around copyright law. Your fair use rights are all there, perfectly intact, but they're inside the fence. There are ways through the fence, but they're either a) limited, or b) illegal.
The Ninth Amendment: "Even if we didn't mention them here, all your rights are belong to you!"
The Tenth Amendment: "If we didn't say here that they can, then the Feds can't do it."
Heh. Those are my favorites as well, and boy have they been ignored! I used to say that what we (the people) ought to do is walk through Washington DC with a molotov in one hand, and a copy of the constitution in the other; then, when we come across a federal gov't building, we check the constitution to see if the duties of the agency therein are enumerated and, if not, in goes the molotov.
I always wonder why interviewers don't respond sometimes by saying "You aren't ansering the question I asked." and if the interviewed person continues to avoid the question, cut them off and repeat "You aren't answering the question" until you get an answer to the question and not some prewritten canned response.
Because they will keep repeating the same canned answer, and when you say "you aren't answering the question", they shout back "I am trying to answer thequestion, but you keep interrupting me!" They will never admit that their "answer" is just gas. When interviewing a clown like that, your best bet is not to try to ram through the canned answer, but to try and get to the answer in a roundabout way by asking more indirectly.
Am I being denied fair use becaue I cant run windows 98 on my iMac. After all I bought and paid for that copy, I should be able to use it how I like.
If there were a simple 6-line perl script that would allow Win98 to run on your iMac, but that script was considered an illegal decryption device, then yes, your fair use rights are being denied. COme back when you understand fair use.
Even though the end result of the research is unknown, i see no reason to believe that more funds would not get us there faster.
I don't dispute that more money will get results faster. I simply disagree with the original poster's unfounded assertion that $39.61 billion (10% of the FY2003 US Defense Budget) is all that's needed to quickly find an adequate non-dilute alternative energy source. We have no clue how close we are to the goal or even if we're barking up the right tree yet. If you went back to 1804, there's no amount of money you could spend that would result in the discovery of the transistor. For all we know, we could be 30 years from discovering even the theoretical basis upon which an viable alternative energy source ban be constructed.
Dead ends gain you alot. First, you know it's a waste of time, and can concentrate on one of the other areas I outlined. Personally, I suspect one of them is indeed worthwhile, but I will concede that the odds are all will be dead ends. So we dump this shitload of cash on them, and if they all turn out to be dead ends, well, then you're right, at that point it is purely a research problem again. But with my monthly electric bill what it is, I certainly hope that wouldn't be the case.
As do I. I live in California (argh)
And with the federal government spending my tax dollars are angora sheep subsidies, you'd think they'd wake up and spend it on something important like this.
You just don't understand the importance of WOOL to all our contingency plans. I won't even TRY to explain how important the Strategic Helium Reserve is.:)
Are you sure all these are dead ends, and that if we dumped a shitload of cash on them, that we couldn't accelerate a timetable?
No, but my point is that nobody knows for sure that they're not dead ends, which is what makes them research rather than development. You can accelerate research along one particular line, but if it turns out to be a dead end, you haven't gained much.
I'd sure agree that its not linear, but more money does mean faster research, particularly during experimentation.
This is true, but I think it applies to a different type of goal. More money will surely produce results faster if the goal is to "get to the bottom of this cold-fusion stuff", but when the goal is an unknown (e.g. "find an alternative energy source"), one can't even rightly say what the bottlenecks are.
You think the reason alternative energy projects are moving slowly is lack of money? Please.
Please what?
"Please" as in "please don't confuse research with development". The pace of development scales almost directly with money spent. Research is, by its very nature, unknown. Saying that research will magically produce results if only we put 10% of the defense budget into it completely fails to understand the nature of research.
You think the reason alternative energy projects are moving slowly is lack of money? Please.
Well, when JFK said he would put a man on the moon by the end of the decade, he did it.
"go to the moon" was a problem with a clear path to the desired result. In the R&D department it required a whole lot more D than R. We already knew we were going to stick those guys on a rocket full of life support and guidance equipment-- it was just a matter of designing and testing the rockets and equipment.
The problem of "find an alternative energy source" is mostly a question of research, and research is usually pretty open-ended. Once they find a usable non-dilute source of energy, then it will be comparable to the JFK/moon thing. At present, we have no idea what the suitable alternative will be, much less how we'll deploy it.
Perhaps it's not just lack of money but lack of the vision and determination to try hard enough.
Determination isn't the issue. We have to discover the path to the goal first. Until that's done, no amount of urging people to run faster will get us closer to the goal. True, no progress can be made with no funding, but beyond a very basic minimum level of necessary manpower and equipment, the timetable of discovery can't be halved by doubling the funding.
As for "vision", yeah, I suppose you could say there's a lack of vision, but that assumes there's something to "see" that nobody's looking at, and all we're lacking is enough people with this "vision" skill to see it. Even if you try to brute-force the problem by hiring every scientist in the world to think about it all day, there's no guarantee of success because the goal is too dependent on advances in secondary technology to even be within reach. You could hire every scientist in the 18th century to work on it, but none of them would have the "vision" to see the technological path to a fission reactor.
Basically, elapsed time till results doesn't scale to money spent when it comes to research.
Slashdot Mirror
Heh. Don't ask me, man. I think it's all a load crap myself. I'm just pointing out that approaching it from a constitutional angle is a complete waste of time, as they've expended a great deal of effort to ensure that it's not a matter of "criminal prosecution", but rather one of "rules of war".
I don't dispute that they are ignoring the Geneva Convention. All I said was that, as prisoners of war, they are not covered by the US Constitution and therefore arguments citing denial of constitutional rights will be of no avail. I'm totally with you on the bullshit "illegal combatants" thing-- I'm just saying that they've taken considerable pains to make this a "rules of war" issue rather than one of criminal prosecution and, subsequently, arguments about constitutionality are almost entirely moot.
I think the primary argument against interpretation of the 2ndAmd as a protected state right is the fact that, in every other amendment, the term the people applies to the individual, and when they talk about states, they say the states. An examination of the actual debate that led to the wording of the 2nd Amd. shows two philosophical camps slightly at odds. One wanted to emphasize the right of the states to have militias, and the other wanted to emphasize the right of the individual to bear arms. What you see in the compromise wording is a statement to the effect of: "because the states have their own militias, individuals have the right to keep and bear arms". Really, the "states right" argument has been debunked six ways from sunday. Original intent can even be found with a quick reading of The Federalist Papers.
The reasoning they're employing is that those folks are POW's rather than criminals. One could argue all day about fair trials, and they'd only say "we have no intention of even charging them with a crime; we're holding them as POWs till the war is over". Crappy, but technically valid.
You might have a point about amendment 4, depending on how you define "the people" The point is, rights are universal. They are NOT granted by the constitution. And so they apply to everyone, just for being human.
Yeah, this is the REAL travesty of the situation. While they play semantic games with the letter of the law, they conveniently ignore the entire basis of it: that all persons have certain inalienable rights. But we have to save the children, right?
Hah! I wish. It was a Commodore 64. By the time I found an after-market assembly patch to add a renumbering command, I had already discovered "planning" and (even better) 6502 assembly.
Heh. GOSUB is an even worse choice for "stretching" when you've run out of line numbers. A pair of out-and-back GOTOs is better because instead of an inscrutable RETURN at the end, you have a GOTO pointing back to where this little code segment really belongs. GOSUB is only structured if you're actually breaking things into discrete elements. Spaghetti is spaghetti, no matter how you make it.
Hah! GOSUB is for wieners! Also, it's really the same thing as a spaghetti GOTO call, only you have an inscrutable RETURN at the end instead of a GOTO telling you where it came from originally.
Heh. It used to take us two hours just to get all the chits straight for Third Reich. I tried to get my "nintendo generation" brother to play Squad Leader with me and he was horrified by the very idea of chits. Kids nowadays!
That's easy to fix. Replace one of those lines with GOTO 12000, then put all that stuff at 12000, ending with a GOTO pointed at the line after GOTO 12000. The first time I had to do that, my first thought was "this is going to turn out badly". It turned out I was right.
Nobody said anything about copying DVDs. We're talking about whether the "no circumvention" rule of the DMCA effectively blocks fair use by forcing the end user to view the work on certain equipment. As it stands, copyright law does not specifically prohibit playing DVDs under Linux, but the effect of the DMCA is such that no one can legally create a player unless they pay tribute to the holder of the CSS keys. This being the case, they can, through restrictive licensing, prohibit certain modes of usage which would clearly be considered "fair use" otherwise. A US copyright doesn't give the holder the right to forbid me to watch a US-bought VHS videotape of their movie in South America, but via the compulsory licensing of access devices under the DMCA, they can do exactly that with DVDs. What if they came out with an updated version of CSS that did region coding by time zone? Would it not be an obvious infringement of fair use for them to prevent me from taking a DVD I bought in Arizona and watching it in Florida? The courts may be allowed to decide on a case-by-case basis whether a certain usage constitutes fair use, but the basis for such decisions is whether or not the use is reasonable. Are you saying wanting watch a DVD on a laptop running linux isn't a reasonable position?
The cost of the license isn't the only issue. The terms of the license are restrictive beyond what is the normal scope of copyright. If I buy a paperback, I can read it in any country I want, and I can skip the first two pages where they have ads for other books if I want. Even if you pay the nominal $1.00 fee, you have to watch the ads and be in the correct country to watch the DVD. The issue is that the DMCA has essentially built a fence around copyright law. Your fair use rights are all there, perfectly intact, but they're inside the fence. There are ways through the fence, but they're either a) limited, or b) illegal.
The Ninth Amendment: "Even if we didn't mention them here, all your rights are belong to you!"
The Tenth Amendment: "If we didn't say here that they can, then the Feds can't do it."
Heh. Those are my favorites as well, and boy have they been ignored! I used to say that what we (the people) ought to do is walk through Washington DC with a molotov in one hand, and a copy of the constitution in the other; then, when we come across a federal gov't building, we check the constitution to see if the duties of the agency therein are enumerated and, if not, in goes the molotov.
Just an amusing fantasy, I suppose.
Because they will keep repeating the same canned answer, and when you say "you aren't answering the question", they shout back "I am trying to answer thequestion, but you keep interrupting me!" They will never admit that their "answer" is just gas. When interviewing a clown like that, your best bet is not to try to ram through the canned answer, but to try and get to the answer in a roundabout way by asking more indirectly.
Am I being denied fair use becaue I cant run windows 98 on my iMac. After all I bought and paid for that copy, I should be able to use it how I like.
If there were a simple 6-line perl script that would allow Win98 to run on your iMac, but that script was considered an illegal decryption device, then yes, your fair use rights are being denied. COme back when you understand fair use.
Actually, the article is about copyright. I'm not sure what "copywritten" means, but it doesn't mean the same as "copyrighted".
Traces? Who cares about traces? Being that they're "enemies", they're going to blame it on the the US anyway. Might as well make a good show of it.
My install is fairly dull. Must be my low threshold for entertainment. 1 - winrar
2 - Borland C++ Builder 6
3 - winhex
4 - numega driver studio
5 - photoshop
6 - eudora
7 - cygwin
8 - emacs
9 - Civilization III
10- trillian
I don't dispute that more money will get results faster. I simply disagree with the original poster's unfounded assertion that $39.61 billion (10% of the FY2003 US Defense Budget) is all that's needed to quickly find an adequate non-dilute alternative energy source. We have no clue how close we are to the goal or even if we're barking up the right tree yet. If you went back to 1804, there's no amount of money you could spend that would result in the discovery of the transistor. For all we know, we could be 30 years from discovering even the theoretical basis upon which an viable alternative energy source ban be constructed.
As do I. I live in California (argh)
And with the federal government spending my tax dollars are angora sheep subsidies, you'd think they'd wake up and spend it on something important like this.
You just don't understand the importance of WOOL to all our contingency plans. I won't even TRY to explain how important the Strategic Helium Reserve is. :)
No, but my point is that nobody knows for sure that they're not dead ends, which is what makes them research rather than development. You can accelerate research along one particular line, but if it turns out to be a dead end, you haven't gained much.
This is true, but I think it applies to a different type of goal. More money will surely produce results faster if the goal is to "get to the bottom of this cold-fusion stuff", but when the goal is an unknown (e.g. "find an alternative energy source"), one can't even rightly say what the bottlenecks are.
Please what?
"Please" as in "please don't confuse research with development". The pace of development scales almost directly with money spent. Research is, by its very nature, unknown. Saying that research will magically produce results if only we put 10% of the defense budget into it completely fails to understand the nature of research.
Well, when JFK said he would put a man on the moon by the end of the decade, he did it.
"go to the moon" was a problem with a clear path to the desired result. In the R&D department it required a whole lot more D than R. We already knew we were going to stick those guys on a rocket full of life support and guidance equipment-- it was just a matter of designing and testing the rockets and equipment.
The problem of "find an alternative energy source" is mostly a question of research, and research is usually pretty open-ended. Once they find a usable non-dilute source of energy, then it will be comparable to the JFK/moon thing. At present, we have no idea what the suitable alternative will be, much less how we'll deploy it.
Perhaps it's not just lack of money but lack of the vision and determination to try hard enough.
Determination isn't the issue. We have to discover the path to the goal first. Until that's done, no amount of urging people to run faster will get us closer to the goal. True, no progress can be made with no funding, but beyond a very basic minimum level of necessary manpower and equipment, the timetable of discovery can't be halved by doubling the funding.
As for "vision", yeah, I suppose you could say there's a lack of vision, but that assumes there's something to "see" that nobody's looking at, and all we're lacking is enough people with this "vision" skill to see it. Even if you try to brute-force the problem by hiring every scientist in the world to think about it all day, there's no guarantee of success because the goal is too dependent on advances in secondary technology to even be within reach. You could hire every scientist in the 18th century to work on it, but none of them would have the "vision" to see the technological path to a fission reactor.
Basically, elapsed time till results doesn't scale to money spent when it comes to research.
You think the reason alternative energy projects are moving slowly is lack of money? Please.
You really ought to have that looked at. Could be TB.