He got away with it *both* times because the law emasculates the citizen from carrying a weapon at all times. If there were no restrictions on concealed carry, more people would carry. If V. Tech (like may schools) didn't ban firearms on its grounds, it's probable that some people in either group would have been armed and could have defended themselves.
Christ, can't you shut up with this shit for a day? If morons carried guns everywhere, we'd have many more than 31 killed in spontaneous acts of stupidity every day. There are people who I would generally trust to be around while they carry weapons, but I would not extend that trust of judgement to more than about 5% of the general population. Most of the rest are too damned stupid or impulsive.
By and large, anyone who drives a car is a much greater potential - and actual - danger to society than someone carrying a weapon.
He claims that a culture of fear is what drives Americans to arm themselves to the teeth in such big numbers, and you end up with the ludicrous situation where you can go into a shop on just about any high street and buy an automatic assault weapon, something that is not needed for self defence or hunting or any of the other uses that gun advocates frequently come up with.
We don't actually have "high streets" in the US.:-P
You can't buy an automatic weapon in the US without a considerable amount of paperwork and money. What you can buy, however, is a semiautomatic weapon. In the vast majority of jurisdictions, you can buy and possess a long gun (rifle or shotgun) with little or no restriction. It generally makes no difference what the method of operation (semiauto, lever, bolt, pump, so on) or capacity of the long gun is. Pistols are more tightly controlled and what is legal depends on state and local laws. The magazine and "assault weapons" ban has sunsetted although some states (California in particular) still have laws regulating "assault weapons" (in other words, long arms that work just like other long arms, but look sinister).
What most people do with semiautomatic long guns is target shooting, either at ranges or outdoors in an isolated area. It's a fun, safe, and relatively inexpensive hobby. The same is generally true of pistols. Just as no one "needs" a car that goes 150mph, no one needs firearms for target shooting, but both are perfectly legal here, and I'm glad for it. Relatively few people are killed and injured in the US each year as a result of firearm accidents involving law-abiding citizens.
Meanwhile, gun crime is strictly outlawed and equally strictly punished in the United States. Nowadays, most violent criminals receive long mandatory sentences, particularly upon repeat offenses.
We could airdrop tons of corn on that idiotfuck's country and it wouldn't take him 60 seconds to find a way to complain about it. Meanwhile, I don't think anyone in Cuba is feeling oppressed due to a lack of maize.
The average juror is profoundly tech-ignorant, particularly because many students and "intellectual" jurors are eliminated during voir dire. Jurors can be disqualified for cause when they are expert in an area that is relevant to the trial because they may outthink or second-guess expert witnesses, in effect testifying during deliberations.
I don't know how to get around the problem that in highly technical trials, jurors are selected so that they have no way to judge the facts of the case. Juries are supposed to decide matters of fact, which is one thing when a juror is asked to determine which of two witnesses with conflicting testimony is more believable. It's another thing entirely when listening to the testimony of experts who may or may not be fully qualified to discuss the topic at hand (and whose expertise or lack thereof the judge may not be qualified to judge). How can a juror, even though presumably well-intentioned, be expected to weigh the testimony of an expert who may or may not be speaking comprehensibly, and who may or may not be slanting his testimony to present a particular point of view. It's like asking people who took two years of high school French to review a play by Samuel Beckett.
I don't think it's that hard to find jurors who have enough familiarity with technical vocabulary and topics that they can deliberate thoughtfully. The system we have is designed to weed those people out.
If you ask me, the juror questionnaires in technologically-oriented cases should be written to determine whether jurors are conversant in the material that is presented during the trial. It is of course reasonable to eliminate a juror who has personal experience or expertise in an area too closely related to the case being tried (e.g. an employee of Skype in this case, or the holder of significant VoIP patents), or a bias (some kid who posts to Slashdot about the evils of former Baby Bells) but I think a "jury of peers" should be made up of people who are peers in the language of the case. They don't have to be pocket protector nerds, but they should be people with education (technical or not, formal or otherwise) and analytical skills that are up to the task.
Having worked with people from "statewide" (what they call statewide IT in Alaska), this is a minor screwup when compared to what is possible there. They should thank the tech for reminding them that they should back up data just like 50% of other government organizations do.
Actually there are some well-intentioned people in government IT in Alaska, but because the work is tricky (everything in Alaska is quirky), and the pay is poor, and the cost of living is relatively high, most of the good people take off for the 48 sooner or later, where their ability to do tricky work is better compensated.
"The smog laws in America are almost pointless when you consider it's GLOBAL warming and India/Mexico are basically shitting into the atmosphere."
I'm sorry, but I can't let this one fly. America is the worst polluter in the world, not just per capita, but OVER-ALL. You produce more pollution as a country than any other country in the world, and you produce (by a somewhat significant proportion) the most pollution per head. How you can be so naive as to sit there and even suggest any other country is "shitting into the atmosphere" is beyond me.
I wouldn't read a lot into that letter. Macrovision isn't basing its future on DRM. Copy protection is a revenue stream for MVSN, but so are its installer products (InstallShield, etc.) and license management products (FlexLM), and let's not forget that MVSN is the largest backend for online (downloadable) game sales in the world. Fred has to pay lip service to DRM but MVSN has backed way, way off its fairly stern position of just 18 months ago, before the Sony audio CD protection debacle. Sony's misadventures probably put an end to the possibility of any onerous new DRM for audio material in the near future. DRM for film and video has never been a big deal, really.
Some people are quite happy with the "jukebox" model for music and on-demand video. I might be at some point in the future, but of course there's the problem that much of the music I listen to is out of print, and no one seems to have a solution to that other than used CDs/LPs and piracy.
Microsoft has repeatedly offered to fully fund Wikipedia, but its board has always refused the offer.
Google has been mirroring (archiving) Wikipedia for years. The main function of the mirror is to provide data (a lot of it) as a tool for researchers working on natural language processing and semantic linking for, you guessed, improved ad placement. Google also has a specialized search engine for Wikipedia, not currently visible to the public; that is what returns the Wikipedia results in Google searches, not the normal crawler/indexer.
These statements are all specious lies designed to stir the pot.
I don't think people who haven't used 64-bit WinXP can even begin to appreciate the scope and enduring nature of the compatibility problems with Vista.
The last time I checked, the current version of iTunes wouldn't install on XP 64-bit edition. (The installer didn't allow it.) I do have iTunes installed on my 64-bit XP box, but that's because I got lucky and downloaded a version that would. The following version wouldn't install. No version of it has ever been supported on 64-bit XP as far as I know.
Maybe all is well in the 32-bit Vista world, but I kind of doubt it.
How anyone can think that another community-based encyclopedia can succeed, while Wikipedia already exists, is beyond me. The accurate, edited resource that people are looking for is called "books." Unsurprisingly, you can use Wikipedia (and Google) to find them.
Mike Jandreau just discovered that, on the Internet, everyone carries a big stick.
He doesn't really deserve to have his entire life go to Hell in a handbasket. On the other hand, he wrote a spectacularly asinine response to a situation that most people will find at least some sympathy for. If that's his normal way of interacting with customers, and his business is customer support, it was only a matter of time.
The moral is: Sometimes you really do have to treat others the same way you would like to be treated yourself.
Tags are a case where ad hoc user input simply doesn't work.
Perhaps "labels" will be a system where there is a) a better interface for creating them and b) likely some kind of "smart" help where Google (or whoever) suggests some labels for you to begin with, and automagically corrects your labels to things that already exist when appropriate.
A megajoule (MJ) is a unit of "work" - one watt for a duration of one second. 1 kWh = 3.6 MJ, which means that 16 MJ is less than $1.00 of electricity if you get it from the power grid. The engines on jet fighters and the like generate megawatts of power on takeoff - not as electricity, but as physical power to get the aircraft off the ground.
A pound of TNT releases 1.9MJ of energy when it explodes.
The main problem is - hopefully this is obvious - creating a mechanism that can create, contain, and release megajoules, and making it small and portable. (Excluding of course "mechanisms" like sticks of TNT or, more to the point, pounds of gunpowder.) The USAF Airborne Laser works in the megajoule range, but the energy is released with a megawatt-class laser over seconds, not a fraction of a second as it has to be in a railgun.
The platform for the still-experimental Airborne Laser is a 747 and it carries chemical fuel for only 2-3 dozen shots, so obviously anything resembling publicly-known existing technology for a railgun system will have to go on something the size of a ship, or if on land, several trucks. The Army has a new power system, the MEP-PU-810A/B, that can generate a little under a megawatt from a single tractor-trailer sized unit.
Lifting and rearranging (i.e. "stealing") a tune is not sampling. If the Timbaland recording is the first published use of the song, and the use is unauthorized, then it is copyright infringement plain and simple. If it is not the first published use of the song, then there are two possibilities: a) the re-recording is a "cover" of the original, essentially similar to it, in which case compulsory licensing applies (and royalties are paid to the copyright holder at a rate defined by statute), or b) the re-recording is different enough that it is a derivative work, in which case compulsory licensing does not apply and once again it is simple copyright infringement. The copyright holder can force a halt to the infringement; what damages might be obtained in court, I don't know - the law isn't simple.
This is US law - I don't know what country's laws would actually apply in this case.
Slashdot Mirror
'It really is a message from Washington state and policymakers that we won't accept chemicals that build up in our bodies and our children.'"
Like what, niacin and Vitamin E? Iron? Calcium?
Or maybe he's referring to antibodies.
Who the hell knows. But chemicals are bad. Like, for sure.
Christ, can't you shut up with this shit for a day? If morons carried guns everywhere, we'd have many more than 31 killed in spontaneous acts of stupidity every day. There are people who I would generally trust to be around while they carry weapons, but I would not extend that trust of judgement to more than about 5% of the general population. Most of the rest are too damned stupid or impulsive.
By and large, anyone who drives a car is a much greater potential - and actual - danger to society than someone carrying a weapon.
But, whatever.
He claims that a culture of fear is what drives Americans to arm themselves to the teeth in such big numbers, and you end up with the ludicrous situation where you can go into a shop on just about any high street and buy an automatic assault weapon, something that is not needed for self defence or hunting or any of the other uses that gun advocates frequently come up with.
:-P
We don't actually have "high streets" in the US.
You can't buy an automatic weapon in the US without a considerable amount of paperwork and money. What you can buy, however, is a semiautomatic weapon. In the vast majority of jurisdictions, you can buy and possess a long gun (rifle or shotgun) with little or no restriction. It generally makes no difference what the method of operation (semiauto, lever, bolt, pump, so on) or capacity of the long gun is. Pistols are more tightly controlled and what is legal depends on state and local laws. The magazine and "assault weapons" ban has sunsetted although some states (California in particular) still have laws regulating "assault weapons" (in other words, long arms that work just like other long arms, but look sinister).
What most people do with semiautomatic long guns is target shooting, either at ranges or outdoors in an isolated area. It's a fun, safe, and relatively inexpensive hobby. The same is generally true of pistols. Just as no one "needs" a car that goes 150mph, no one needs firearms for target shooting, but both are perfectly legal here, and I'm glad for it. Relatively few people are killed and injured in the US each year as a result of firearm accidents involving law-abiding citizens.
Meanwhile, gun crime is strictly outlawed and equally strictly punished in the United States. Nowadays, most violent criminals receive long mandatory sentences, particularly upon repeat offenses.
"their views jive with a lot of other commentators"
I think you mean "jibe," as in "be in accord; agree" and not "jive," as in "a form of dance or slang talk."
Give it up. There's no one who "edits" at Slashdot who is qualified to check spelling, grammar, or meaning, never mind check submissions for idiocy.
... I'd want my tickets to go away.
Of course, as a software geek, I want them to go away too. Maybe we software geeks will have to figure out how to make our tickets go away.
Do you think he is up to his old tricks? ;)
I figure that people burning enough "hemp" don't really care about where auto fuel comes from, or whether they have any fuel for that matter.
We could airdrop tons of corn on that idiotfuck's country and it wouldn't take him 60 seconds to find a way to complain about it. Meanwhile, I don't think anyone in Cuba is feeling oppressed due to a lack of maize.
The average juror is profoundly tech-ignorant, particularly because many students and "intellectual" jurors are eliminated during voir dire. Jurors can be disqualified for cause when they are expert in an area that is relevant to the trial because they may outthink or second-guess expert witnesses, in effect testifying during deliberations.
I don't know how to get around the problem that in highly technical trials, jurors are selected so that they have no way to judge the facts of the case. Juries are supposed to decide matters of fact, which is one thing when a juror is asked to determine which of two witnesses with conflicting testimony is more believable. It's another thing entirely when listening to the testimony of experts who may or may not be fully qualified to discuss the topic at hand (and whose expertise or lack thereof the judge may not be qualified to judge). How can a juror, even though presumably well-intentioned, be expected to weigh the testimony of an expert who may or may not be speaking comprehensibly, and who may or may not be slanting his testimony to present a particular point of view. It's like asking people who took two years of high school French to review a play by Samuel Beckett.
I don't think it's that hard to find jurors who have enough familiarity with technical vocabulary and topics that they can deliberate thoughtfully. The system we have is designed to weed those people out.
If you ask me, the juror questionnaires in technologically-oriented cases should be written to determine whether jurors are conversant in the material that is presented during the trial. It is of course reasonable to eliminate a juror who has personal experience or expertise in an area too closely related to the case being tried (e.g. an employee of Skype in this case, or the holder of significant VoIP patents), or a bias (some kid who posts to Slashdot about the evils of former Baby Bells) but I think a "jury of peers" should be made up of people who are peers in the language of the case. They don't have to be pocket protector nerds, but they should be people with education (technical or not, formal or otherwise) and analytical skills that are up to the task.
Just my $.02.
Having worked with people from "statewide" (what they call statewide IT in Alaska), this is a minor screwup when compared to what is possible there. They should thank the tech for reminding them that they should back up data just like 50% of other government organizations do.
Actually there are some well-intentioned people in government IT in Alaska, but because the work is tricky (everything in Alaska is quirky), and the pay is poor, and the cost of living is relatively high, most of the good people take off for the 48 sooner or later, where their ability to do tricky work is better compensated.
"The smog laws in America are almost pointless when you consider it's GLOBAL warming and India/Mexico are basically shitting into the atmosphere."
I'm sorry, but I can't let this one fly. America is the worst polluter in the world, not just per capita, but OVER-ALL. You produce more pollution as a country than any other country in the world, and you produce (by a somewhat significant proportion) the most pollution per head. How you can be so naive as to sit there and even suggest any other country is "shitting into the atmosphere" is beyond me.
You sir, are a dick.
Well, at least we treat our sewage.
Where is this car going to be produced? India? I somehow doubt the safety standards are all that high.
Any car in India is safe as far as I am concerned (as I lie on my sofa in San Francisco).
$1 billion? Who cares. Google should just give Viacom the money without admitting anything, and go on with business as usual.
FreeDB is a lesson in misspelling, inconsistency, and duplication.
Not much chance getting away with calling a Glenn Gould recording your own.
I wouldn't read a lot into that letter. Macrovision isn't basing its future on DRM. Copy protection is a revenue stream for MVSN, but so are its installer products (InstallShield, etc.) and license management products (FlexLM), and let's not forget that MVSN is the largest backend for online (downloadable) game sales in the world. Fred has to pay lip service to DRM but MVSN has backed way, way off its fairly stern position of just 18 months ago, before the Sony audio CD protection debacle. Sony's misadventures probably put an end to the possibility of any onerous new DRM for audio material in the near future. DRM for film and video has never been a big deal, really.
Some people are quite happy with the "jukebox" model for music and on-demand video. I might be at some point in the future, but of course there's the problem that much of the music I listen to is out of print, and no one seems to have a solution to that other than used CDs/LPs and piracy.
Microsoft has repeatedly offered to fully fund Wikipedia, but its board has always refused the offer.
Google has been mirroring (archiving) Wikipedia for years. The main function of the mirror is to provide data (a lot of it) as a tool for researchers working on natural language processing and semantic linking for, you guessed, improved ad placement. Google also has a specialized search engine for Wikipedia, not currently visible to the public; that is what returns the Wikipedia results in Google searches, not the normal crawler/indexer.
These statements are all specious lies designed to stir the pot.
I do have a newer one on ... it may be current. I remember being unable to upgrade for months though.
I don't think people who haven't used 64-bit WinXP can even begin to appreciate the scope and enduring nature of the compatibility problems with Vista.
The last time I checked, the current version of iTunes wouldn't install on XP 64-bit edition. (The installer didn't allow it.) I do have iTunes installed on my 64-bit XP box, but that's because I got lucky and downloaded a version that would. The following version wouldn't install. No version of it has ever been supported on 64-bit XP as far as I know.
Maybe all is well in the 32-bit Vista world, but I kind of doubt it.
How anyone can think that another community-based encyclopedia can succeed, while Wikipedia already exists, is beyond me. The accurate, edited resource that people are looking for is called "books." Unsurprisingly, you can use Wikipedia (and Google) to find them.
Mike Jandreau just discovered that, on the Internet, everyone carries a big stick.
He doesn't really deserve to have his entire life go to Hell in a handbasket. On the other hand, he wrote a spectacularly asinine response to a situation that most people will find at least some sympathy for. If that's his normal way of interacting with customers, and his business is customer support, it was only a matter of time.
The moral is: Sometimes you really do have to treat others the same way you would like to be treated yourself.
This is the first post I've seen in a week with a link I actually wanted to check out. Thanks so much for setting someone's server room on fire.
Tags are a case where ad hoc user input simply doesn't work.
Perhaps "labels" will be a system where there is a) a better interface for creating them and b) likely some kind of "smart" help where Google (or whoever) suggests some labels for you to begin with, and automagically corrects your labels to things that already exist when appropriate.
A megajoule (MJ) is a unit of "work" - one watt for a duration of one second. 1 kWh = 3.6 MJ, which means that 16 MJ is less than $1.00 of electricity if you get it from the power grid. The engines on jet fighters and the like generate megawatts of power on takeoff - not as electricity, but as physical power to get the aircraft off the ground.
A pound of TNT releases 1.9MJ of energy when it explodes.
The main problem is - hopefully this is obvious - creating a mechanism that can create, contain, and release megajoules, and making it small and portable. (Excluding of course "mechanisms" like sticks of TNT or, more to the point, pounds of gunpowder.) The USAF Airborne Laser works in the megajoule range, but the energy is released with a megawatt-class laser over seconds, not a fraction of a second as it has to be in a railgun.
The platform for the still-experimental Airborne Laser is a 747 and it carries chemical fuel for only 2-3 dozen shots, so obviously anything resembling publicly-known existing technology for a railgun system will have to go on something the size of a ship, or if on land, several trucks. The Army has a new power system, the MEP-PU-810A/B, that can generate a little under a megawatt from a single tractor-trailer sized unit.
Lifting and rearranging (i.e. "stealing") a tune is not sampling. If the Timbaland recording is the first published use of the song, and the use is unauthorized, then it is copyright infringement plain and simple. If it is not the first published use of the song, then there are two possibilities: a) the re-recording is a "cover" of the original, essentially similar to it, in which case compulsory licensing applies (and royalties are paid to the copyright holder at a rate defined by statute), or b) the re-recording is different enough that it is a derivative work, in which case compulsory licensing does not apply and once again it is simple copyright infringement. The copyright holder can force a halt to the infringement; what damages might be obtained in court, I don't know - the law isn't simple.
This is US law - I don't know what country's laws would actually apply in this case.