while beings from outside of (apart from, however you want to put it) the physical universe would be something else.
But if you can see it, feel it, touch it, smell it, it must be part of this universe. We can only detect things in the universe, so if something appears to you, how do you know if it exists outside of the universe? Basically, there is no way to distinguish a god from a sufficiently advanced alien because a god would have to manifest himself (or herself) in some physical manifestation.
I also have to believe that statistically speaking, out of all the reports and sightings, at least one of them has to be real.
The answer is clear, then. We need more MiB movies, and X-Files episodes. We need lots and lots more UFO entertainment. If we do that, we will get lots more UFO sightings. By relying on the statistics, we can see that this will mean that we will get more visits from aliens. I didn't realize that this was just a numbers game and that if we just get enough UFO reports some of them must be real.
I think it is more than just the mindset. When I have seen these claims, the people are usually saying that the UFO did some odd aerobatic maneuver that is impossible for conventional aircraft. They really seem to believe this. To them, the only explanation is that the aircraft they see must not be man made.
The true fallacy that they make is believing too much in their eyes. They are completely unqualified to determine whether the high performance, experimental aircraft(s) flying miles away is doing something impossible. Decades of research has shown that people are notoriously bad eye witnesses and that they overestimate their own accuracy. Combine that with a real desire to discover alien life and a general distrust of government (both of which are normal and prevalent in the wider society) and you can see where people can fool themselves. I can see where even highly intelligent, rational people could fool themselves in the right circumstances.
The only people that I think are delusional are the people that put all of their faith in these eyewitnesses.
Indeed. People that through that aphorism around tend to forget that the security mechanisms we commonly use are actually security through obscurity. I use a key to unlock my front door. There is nothing special about that piece of metal. Any hardware store can reproduce it for a couple of bucks. You just need to know the height of the ridges. By keeping that information obscure, I gain some security (though not very much). Passwords are security through obscurity. Encryption is security through obscurity because you keep the key secret. Anything that depends on a secret depends on obscurity.
For most common cases, this works very well in practice. Most people don't have their houses broken into or cars stolen. Most house burglaries occur with unlocked doors in outdoor sheds and garages (where high dollar tools and golf clubs are kept).
For high value targets (bank vaults, museums, military installations, etc), obscurity is not enough and you need surveillance and guys with guns. But those are relatively rare while there are many more times where we just need to raise the security bar enough to make it not worth someone's time to bother.
This won't hold up if challenged, there is plenty of prior art.
I agree that it probably won't be upheld if challenged, but I don't think prior art will be the issue. I just looked at the references of the patent and it looks like it refers to a ton of what I would consider prior art (lots of AbiWord references for example). It would appear that the patent office saw this and concluded that this was different. Convincing a judge or jury that the patent office was wrong would be difficult.
Personally, I don't think this patent would meet the requirements of the recent Bilski decision. This patent is just a way of storing data in a format that is specifically designed to store data. If that is a legit patent, then we will have an arms race where everyone tries to think of anything that could be stored in XML and try to get a patent before anyone thinks of it. (Phone books, recipes, code, test cases, GUI layouts, packet captures, code reviews, etc, etc).
For most software the disclaimers in the EULA doesn't amount to much. Just saying that you cannot be sued does not make it so. There is an implied warranty of merchantability with almost all transactions. This says that the Oracle software should be usable for the intended purpose. I.e., you should be able to run a large database on it. If it turns out that it is not possible to use it for that purpose because it loses your data, you absolutely can sue. You can sue for the purchase price of the software and have a good chance of winning. What you cannot do easily is sue for the damage done by the failure of that software (loss of customer confidence, time to repair the situation, etc). To sue and recover that kind of damage, you would have to show gross negligence by Oracle and that would be extremely difficult.
The real fallacy behind wanting someone to sue is that you cannot possibly recover enough from a lawsuit to cover the damage. Oracle bugs have the potential to create damage that far exceeds the purchase price of the software.
The whole point of space travel is to permanently get humans to other places in the Solar System, Galaxy and Universe other than Earth.
Actually this is the major question. What is the point of NASA? That is not a settled question at all. You could ask 50 different space experts this question and get 50 different answers. Remember that when NASA was first forming the point of the space program had nothing to do with science or colonization or exploring. It was purely to show that the Soviets could not do something that we couldn't do. Apollo was all about picking a task that Russia could not do to prove that our system was superior. It had more to do with foreign policy than anything else.
NASA is suffering from a lack of direction because there is no clear purpose. The lack of funding hurts too, but there really needs to be a clear mission for why NASA exists. Is it science? Is it exploration? Is it engineering advancement? Is it paving the way for commercial exploitation? The policy makers really need to provide a mandate for NASA.
If you download songs from, say, a direct link on a website, my understanding is that you are not infringing copyright at all (at least in a legally actionable way). The person sharing them is.
Well, if I see a link to a Beatle's song on a random website, it is hard to make the case that I thought that website holds a license to make copies of that song. For sure, I do not own a license to make copies. The web site would be violating copyright but so would the downloader because the downloader is contributing in making the copy (my software is saving the file onto my disk). It isn't that the downloader is less guilty. It is, however, much harder to prove the case in court. If I download a song, listen to the first 30 seconds and delete it because it sucks, a fair use claim is a very strong defence. It is also hard to claim a high level of damages from just a download. What does RIAA lose when I download a song? 99 cents. Uploading is different, though. Uploading is an unlimited distribution license and RIAA sells those for quite a lot of money so they have a strong claim for damages.
RIAA is really just looking for token, high publicity lawsuits to prove a point. Because of that, they are looking for the best possible cases which will always be the uploaders.
Oh please, this has nothing to do with lobbyists having more power that the people. The voters clearly do not care about this issue. During this last presidential election process, did anyone at any campaign event or town hall ever ask about eliminating or reducing the penalties for copyright infringement? No. People just do see this as a problem.
If you are able to wake up the voters and get them to care about this, then all the lobbying in the world won't help the RIAA. People just don't appreciate how responsive congressmen can actually be when the electorate gets stirred up about something. The voice of the people isn't being drowned out because there is not even a squeak coming out of their voice on this issue.
Yes, it tells us that copyright is taking pretty seriously by most people. It tells us that you are highly unlikely to find a jury that is sympathetic to the infringment of the rights of others. It tells us that no matter how despicable the RIAA may be, they are still legally correct. It tells us that the fantasy legal arguments often waved about on Slashdot are fantasies that hold no weight in a courtroom.
There is more to this. In earlier deposition, he had claimed that it might have been his family and friends that used his computer to do this. This was a lie, though. To prevent these people from facing trouble he needed to make sure that he took the full blame. In the news accounts I have read, part of his admission of guilt came under questioning from his own lawyers. I think they knew they would lose and that their best hope was to try to win sympathy from the jury and juries are not sympathetic to liars.
As you pointed out, there is no comparison between copyright disputes and slavery and other immoral acts (e.g. Japanese detainment camps during WWII, Alien and Sedition Act, Segregation Laws, etc.) The authors of the Declaration of Independence certainly understood the concept of a higher moral code that the law should ideally be a reflection of. They also understood that rebelling against that when the law falls short is acceptable (and even obligatory). These men also understood that there is significant risk in doing this. Willful violation of the law subjects you to those penalties.
Tenenbaum is certainly within his rights to make a heroic stand for justice in this case. If he feels this strongly that he wants to be a $675,000 martyr for this cause then goodie for him, but he gets no sympathy from me.
As to what I would do in the slavery era? Who knows because I am not in that position. Helping slaves not only puts you in jeopardy of breaking the law, but puts you in jeopardy of lynch mobs full of ignorant rednecks with either tacit or implicit approval of the local law enforcement. I.e., you could find you and your family dead without even a trial. It's one thing to say that people should violate immoral laws. It is quite another to say that people have an obligation to become martyrs. It is really hard to look back at the history of this country and come up with a scenario where the south gives up slavery without a civil war.
The rule of law is important because it helps ensure equality and fairness in our system. This is much better than the anarchy of having some laws randomly enforced or ignored for indeterminate reasons. Some people will question my use of the word fairness by pointing out that Tenenbaums punishment is hardly fair. That may be, but the law is pretty clear on what the penalty is for this behavior. If you know what the law is and the penalty and willfully break the law, it is hard to claim the law is unfair unless it violates some higher moral code.
It doesn't look rigged to me. There is a real legal meaning behind the term "fair use". There is a history of precendents covering what is and is not "fair use". The judge knows these precedents. He looked at the facts of the case and said that downloading songs and uploading them to others does not possibly count as fair use. It is really hard to argue with that logic, too. If just making and distributing a copy of something is fair use, then what is the point of copyright? The GPL becomes completely meaningless if infringers can just claim that their distribution is fair use.
Even given this, the system is still not rigged. Tenenbaum will be able to appeal this decision to not allow a fair use defence. A judge will hear this appeal and almost certainly rule against Tenembaum. Just because Tenenbaum loses to the money-grubbing RIAA, doesn't mean the system is rigged. It just means he gets busted for breaking a law that many of us don't like. He got a fair hearing, though.
I think that few people would argue that copyright law has been extended too far and that big corporations have gained too much power from it. I would happily support politicians who want to reign in that law. If I were in politics I would actively work to reduce the copyright monopoly. However, it is the law of the land. If I were on a jury to decide a case like this, I would certainly rule against Tenenbaum because there can be no disputing that he violated the law. If I were a judge, I would help enforce that law. I might have to hold my nose, but I would do it. No one is above the law. If we can pick and choose which laws to follow we open ourselves up to the Richard M. Nixons who declare that whatever they do as president must necessarily be legal or the George W. Bushs who think they can decide when to ignore the law in the name of "protecting the nation".
Normally, you would not admit your own guilt, but in this case I think he had to. In earlier deposition he said that he did not do it and "he said his two sisters, friends and others may have been responsible for downloading the songs to his computer". He was opening up others for a potential lawsuit so he and his lawyer probably wanted to make sure the buck stopped with him. The AP article says, "Under questioning from his own lawyer, Tenenbaum said he now takes responsibility for the illegal swapping." So his own lawyer made sure that it was clear that he did it. Obviously, the defence cannot object to his own questions.
It also sounded like the defence realized that they would certainly be found guilty and so they were angling for the lowest possible penalty. In that case, you are looking for some sympathy from the jury. If the RIAA case is so strong you cannot even mount a valid defence, then the jury will come down hard on you if they think you are lying to them. This is why Jammie Thomas is looking at a $1.92 million judgement for infringing 24 songs and this guy got $675,000 for 30 songs. He got a bargain.
As usual with Facebook controversies, you can very easily opt out of this and never have your photo used by an advertiser.
I'm not sure that you really can opt out. The terms of service says "subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook". Facebook makes no guarantees about what privacy and application settings will be provided so anything you put up is liable (perhaps accidentally) to end up being made available with no limitations.
The real question is do you trust Facebook (and the various Facebook application providers). If you trust them, then put your whole life on there and hope they stay trustworthy even if they go bankrupt or get bought by Microsoft. I certainly would never want to try to show in court that Facebook violated those terms of service because it seems like there is a lot of wiggle room there.
Personally, I don't really have that level of trust so I only put things on there that I don't care if they abuse. I simply assume that Facebook will be money grubbing bastards and act accordingly.
Owning Red Hat stock doesn't make linux happen. When you (or the index fund) buys RHAT stock, that money goes to the previous shareholder, NOT Red Hat.
That is true, but there are tangible benefits to RHAT. One of the ways they can raise capital is to issue additional shares. An increase in the stock price means that they can raise more money when they do this. This also makes the stock options that are offered to employees more valuable without costing the company a cent. It also protects the company from a hostile takeover since any buyout becomes more expensive.
Wouldn't it be possible to use Amazon EC2 to set up a scalable render farm?
That is certainly possible, but it depends on the job. If you need to do a rendering job over the weekend a couple of times a year, then EC2 would definitely be the cheapest option. If you frequently need a rendering farm on a regular basis, then it would likely be cheaper to build your own. There is no guarantee of that though. If EC2 gets a better price on electricity than you do and if they have better power utilization than you, they might win just by that alone. You basically have to compute the true cost of each hour of computing for you and then compare that to Amazon's price.
But, I agree that proponents of manned space flight, such as myself, need to do come up with a better story than just sending people out into space.
I'm not sure that you need a better story. Simply figuring out how to travel and survive in space is a worthy goal. We don't need practical justifications for the Hubble or interplanetary probes or atomic colliders. We have scientific questions to answer and these tools are the only way to answer them so we do them.
The problem for manned exploration is that most policy makers have trouble spending billions upon billions just for that story. The total cost of Spirit and Opportunity (for the first 90 days of operation on Mars) was $820 million. The total cost for a single shuttle launch is $1.3 billion (the cost comes down a bit each time as the initial equipment purchases get amortized over more flights). When the shuttle is retired, we will have spent $174 billion. There just hasn't been a compelling story of why we should spend that type of money instead of spending it on other research projects. I would love for NASA to have a bigger budget, but I want to see more Hubbles and Spirits and Opportunities not more Shuttle launches with experiments designed by grade schoolers carrying teachers and former politicians for PR rides.
The most compelling reason for manned space travel is to be able to colonize and ensure our survival beyond the lifespan of earth. But that really only makes sense when you have a destination to go to and we don't. The Moon and Mars are achievable, but offer poor colonization opportunities. To colonize, we really need to get to another planet and we are a long long way from that type of technology. To me, it makes sense to spend a lot on manned exploration when we have the power capabilities to get to another star and we have identified a star which has a planet that would be worth colonizing. Until then, we are just wasting resources that could be better spent on other research areas.
Everyone says NASA is expensive, but, I think the value is just tremendous.
When you look at the scientific value of the various unmanned programs, you are right. As a percentage of the nation's GDP, it is quite small and we can make tremendous discoveries.
The manned programs are a different story. They are hugely expensive, dangerous and provide little scientific value. Apollo, the Space Shuttle, ISS are not much more than engineering exercises that answer the question of "Can we build this?" Even the goal of putting a man on Mars is an engineering exercise. How many remote probes with specialized instruments can we send there for the cost of a single manned mission? There is no question that the science value is better with unmanned missions.
This is where I think NASA is fairly criticized. They want manned missions because they are cool and sexy, but they use science to justify the outrageous costs involved. Now I'm not saying the engineering problems are unworthy of being solved. But NASA needs to be honest about why things are being done. If they want to pursue engineering challenges, then they also need to pursue the relatively unsexy challenges of taking things we already know how to do and making it cheaper and more reliable. I just don't see where they have that commitment.
It's not that hard to copy text out if you have a decent PDF viewer
I have always run into problems in trying to copy and paste out of pdfs (this is with a variety of readers). For example, if the text is layed out in mutiple columns, selections cross columns instead of flowing down the column, which is not what is wanted. You also run into problems with ligatures. For example, fi can be combined into a single glyph and that is what gets copied and pasted instead of the two individual characters.
Obviously, this is a huge conspiracy. I mean, Billy May, Farrah Fawcet, and Michael Jackson? It can't possibly be a coincidence. And this comes at a time when Ron Paul is trying to get Congress to audit the Federal Reserve. Clearly, these deaths are intended to distract the media and voters before Ron Paul gets too close to the truth.
Hmmm. If someone made a movie with this plot, I'd pay to go see it. Hopefully, I don't get knocked off for discovering the conspiracy because that is usually what happens in the movies.
As much as everyone might think this is a big boo-boo by google, I say its a great job done by automated software.
It is this kind of thing that always makes me suspicious of automated defences. These things usually generate a model of what is normal and interpret things that fall outside of normal as an attack. The problem is that sometimes the abnormal pattern that is seen is actually normal. It is completely predictable that a well known, controversial pop icon would generate a huge increase in traffic when he unexpectedly dies (he was planning a comeback concert tour). I'm not sure how an automated defence can have the contextual information necessary to make this kind of distinction between attacks and "normal" burstiness like this.
I agree that Google's software did its job, but I wouldn't call it great. Great is when they can stop attacks and not get a Slashdot article about how they screwed up when a major news event happens.
So maybe instead of a bad reflection on humanity, this is just a bad reflection on the current stability of the intertubes, Google in particular.
It actually seems to be a good reflection of the current stability of the internet. After all, it worked fine for you and most other people. Sites have gotten much better at handling heavy traffic so it is harder to bring them down. In Google's case, it wasn't so much the amount of traffic as it was misinterpreting what that traffic meant. They thought it was an attack and started playing defence instead of serving it. Once they realized the problem, they could easily handle the volume.
Why do you think I live in a fantasy world? I'm just talking about the root of the problem. The root of the problem is that writing software is hard and programmers are human and make mistakes and those mistakes result in bugs. If you can reduce the rate at which bugs are introduced, you gain a huge increase in quality and a huge reduction of cost because fixing bugs after they are introduced is very expensive.
It is a fact that there are known practices that result in better code in the first place and code reviews are one of them. It is also a fact that many companies do not use these practices and hope that the testing team can pick up the slack.
So the management question is where to spend resources to improve quality and meet deadlines. Do you just add more and more testers so you can find the bugs faster and faster? Do you throw more coders at the problem so you can get the crappy code to the testers earlier? Do you adopt some of the practices that are known to work like reviewing code even though it means some of your coders will have to spend their time not actually writing code?
Since most companies continue to do stupid things that don't work, you tell me who lives in a fantasy world.
Slashdot Mirror
while beings from outside of (apart from, however you want to put it) the physical universe would be something else.
But if you can see it, feel it, touch it, smell it, it must be part of this universe. We can only detect things in the universe, so if something appears to you, how do you know if it exists outside of the universe? Basically, there is no way to distinguish a god from a sufficiently advanced alien because a god would have to manifest himself (or herself) in some physical manifestation.
I also have to believe that statistically speaking, out of all the reports and sightings, at least one of them has to be real.
The answer is clear, then. We need more MiB movies, and X-Files episodes. We need lots and lots more UFO entertainment. If we do that, we will get lots more UFO sightings. By relying on the statistics, we can see that this will mean that we will get more visits from aliens. I didn't realize that this was just a numbers game and that if we just get enough UFO reports some of them must be real.
I think it is more than just the mindset. When I have seen these claims, the people are usually saying that the UFO did some odd aerobatic maneuver that is impossible for conventional aircraft. They really seem to believe this. To them, the only explanation is that the aircraft they see must not be man made.
The true fallacy that they make is believing too much in their eyes. They are completely unqualified to determine whether the high performance, experimental aircraft(s) flying miles away is doing something impossible. Decades of research has shown that people are notoriously bad eye witnesses and that they overestimate their own accuracy. Combine that with a real desire to discover alien life and a general distrust of government (both of which are normal and prevalent in the wider society) and you can see where people can fool themselves.
I can see where even highly intelligent, rational people could fool themselves in the right circumstances.
The only people that I think are delusional are the people that put all of their faith in these eyewitnesses.
Nice aphorism. Pity its such nonsense
Indeed. People that through that aphorism around tend to forget that the security mechanisms we commonly use are actually security through obscurity. I use a key to unlock my front door. There is nothing special about that piece of metal. Any hardware store can reproduce it for a couple of bucks. You just need to know the height of the ridges. By keeping that information obscure, I gain some security (though not very much). Passwords are security through obscurity. Encryption is security through obscurity because you keep the key secret. Anything that depends on a secret depends on obscurity.
For most common cases, this works very well in practice. Most people don't have their houses broken into or cars stolen. Most house burglaries occur with unlocked doors in outdoor sheds and garages (where high dollar tools and golf clubs are kept).
For high value targets (bank vaults, museums, military installations, etc), obscurity is not enough and you need surveillance and guys with guns. But those are relatively rare while there are many more times where we just need to raise the security bar enough to make it not worth someone's time to bother.
This won't hold up if challenged, there is plenty of prior art.
I agree that it probably won't be upheld if challenged, but I don't think prior art will be the issue. I just looked at the references of the patent and it looks like it refers to a ton of what I would consider prior art (lots of AbiWord references for example). It would appear that the patent office saw this and concluded that this was different. Convincing a judge or jury that the patent office was wrong would be difficult.
Personally, I don't think this patent would meet the requirements of the recent Bilski decision. This patent is just a way of storing data in a format that is specifically designed to store data. If that is a legit patent, then we will have an arms race where everyone tries to think of anything that could be stored in XML and try to get a patent before anyone thinks of it. (Phone books, recipes, code, test cases, GUI layouts, packet captures, code reviews, etc, etc).
For most software the disclaimers in the EULA doesn't amount to much. Just saying that you cannot be sued does not make it so. There is an implied warranty of merchantability with almost all transactions. This says that the Oracle software should be usable for the intended purpose. I.e., you should be able to run a large database on it. If it turns out that it is not possible to use it for that purpose because it loses your data, you absolutely can sue. You can sue for the purchase price of the software and have a good chance of winning. What you cannot do easily is sue for the damage done by the failure of that software (loss of customer confidence, time to repair the situation, etc). To sue and recover that kind of damage, you would have to show gross negligence by Oracle and that would be extremely difficult.
The real fallacy behind wanting someone to sue is that you cannot possibly recover enough from a lawsuit to cover the damage. Oracle bugs have the potential to create damage that far exceeds the purchase price of the software.
The whole point of space travel is to permanently get humans to other places in the Solar System, Galaxy and Universe other than Earth.
Actually this is the major question. What is the point of NASA? That is not a settled question at all. You could ask 50 different space experts this question and get 50 different answers. Remember that when NASA was first forming the point of the space program had nothing to do with science or colonization or exploring. It was purely to show that the Soviets could not do something that we couldn't do. Apollo was all about picking a task that Russia could not do to prove that our system was superior. It had more to do with foreign policy than anything else.
NASA is suffering from a lack of direction because there is no clear purpose. The lack of funding hurts too, but there really needs to be a clear mission for why NASA exists. Is it science? Is it exploration? Is it engineering advancement? Is it paving the way for commercial exploitation? The policy makers really need to provide a mandate for NASA.
If you download songs from, say, a direct link on a website, my understanding is that you are not infringing copyright at all (at least in a legally actionable way). The person sharing them is.
Well, if I see a link to a Beatle's song on a random website, it is hard to make the case that I thought that website holds a license to make copies of that song. For sure, I do not own a license to make copies. The web site would be violating copyright but so would the downloader because the downloader is contributing in making the copy (my software is saving the file onto my disk). It isn't that the downloader is less guilty. It is, however, much harder to prove the case in court. If I download a song, listen to the first 30 seconds and delete it because it sucks, a fair use claim is a very strong defence. It is also hard to claim a high level of damages from just a download. What does RIAA lose when I download a song? 99 cents. Uploading is different, though. Uploading is an unlimited distribution license and RIAA sells those for quite a lot of money so they have a strong claim for damages.
RIAA is really just looking for token, high publicity lawsuits to prove a point. Because of that, they are looking for the best possible cases which will always be the uploaders.
Oh please, this has nothing to do with lobbyists having more power that the people. The voters clearly do not care about this issue. During this last presidential election process, did anyone at any campaign event or town hall ever ask about eliminating or reducing the penalties for copyright infringement? No. People just do see this as a problem.
If you are able to wake up the voters and get them to care about this, then all the lobbying in the world won't help the RIAA. People just don't appreciate how responsive congressmen can actually be when the electorate gets stirred up about something. The voice of the people isn't being drowned out because there is not even a squeak coming out of their voice on this issue.
That ought to tell you something.
Yes, it tells us that copyright is taking pretty seriously by most people. It tells us that you are highly unlikely to find a jury that is sympathetic to the infringment of the rights of others. It tells us that no matter how despicable the RIAA may be, they are still legally correct. It tells us that the fantasy legal arguments often waved about on Slashdot are fantasies that hold no weight in a courtroom.
There is more to this. In earlier deposition, he had claimed that it might have been his family and friends that used his computer to do this. This was a lie, though. To prevent these people from facing trouble he needed to make sure that he took the full blame. In the news accounts I have read, part of his admission of guilt came under questioning from his own lawyers. I think they knew they would lose and that their best hope was to try to win sympathy from the jury and juries are not sympathetic to liars.
As you pointed out, there is no comparison between copyright disputes and slavery and other immoral acts (e.g. Japanese detainment camps during WWII, Alien and Sedition Act, Segregation Laws, etc.) The authors of the Declaration of Independence certainly understood the concept of a higher moral code that the law should ideally be a reflection of. They also understood that rebelling against that when the law falls short is acceptable (and even obligatory). These men also understood that there is significant risk in doing this. Willful violation of the law subjects you to those penalties.
Tenenbaum is certainly within his rights to make a heroic stand for justice in this case. If he feels this strongly that he wants to be a $675,000 martyr for this cause then goodie for him, but he gets no sympathy from me.
As to what I would do in the slavery era? Who knows because I am not in that position. Helping slaves not only puts you in jeopardy of breaking the law, but puts you in jeopardy of lynch mobs full of ignorant rednecks with either tacit or implicit approval of the local law enforcement. I.e., you could find you and your family dead without even a trial. It's one thing to say that people should violate immoral laws. It is quite another to say that people have an obligation to become martyrs. It is really hard to look back at the history of this country and come up with a scenario where the south gives up slavery without a civil war.
The rule of law is important because it helps ensure equality and fairness in our system. This is much better than the anarchy of having some laws randomly enforced or ignored for indeterminate reasons. Some people will question my use of the word fairness by pointing out that Tenenbaums punishment is hardly fair. That may be, but the law is pretty clear on what the penalty is for this behavior. If you know what the law is and the penalty and willfully break the law, it is hard to claim the law is unfair unless it violates some higher moral code.
It doesn't look rigged to me. There is a real legal meaning behind the term "fair use". There is a history of precendents covering what is and is not "fair use". The judge knows these precedents. He looked at the facts of the case and said that downloading songs and uploading them to others does not possibly count as fair use. It is really hard to argue with that logic, too. If just making and distributing a copy of something is fair use, then what is the point of copyright? The GPL becomes completely meaningless if infringers can just claim that their distribution is fair use.
Even given this, the system is still not rigged. Tenenbaum will be able to appeal this decision to not allow a fair use defence. A judge will hear this appeal and almost certainly rule against Tenembaum. Just because Tenenbaum loses to the money-grubbing RIAA, doesn't mean the system is rigged. It just means he gets busted for breaking a law that many of us don't like. He got a fair hearing, though.
I think that few people would argue that copyright law has been extended too far and that big corporations have gained too much power from it. I would happily support politicians who want to reign in that law. If I were in politics I would actively work to reduce the copyright monopoly. However, it is the law of the land. If I were on a jury to decide a case like this, I would certainly rule against Tenenbaum because there can be no disputing that he violated the law. If I were a judge, I would help enforce that law. I might have to hold my nose, but I would do it. No one is above the law. If we can pick and choose which laws to follow we open ourselves up to the Richard M. Nixons who declare that whatever they do as president must necessarily be legal or the George W. Bushs who think they can decide when to ignore the law in the name of "protecting the nation".
Normally, you would not admit your own guilt, but in this case I think he had to. In earlier deposition he said that he did not do it and "he said his two sisters, friends and others may have been responsible for downloading the songs to his computer". He was opening up others for a potential lawsuit so he and his lawyer probably wanted to make sure the buck stopped with him. The AP article says, "Under questioning from his own lawyer, Tenenbaum said he now takes responsibility for the illegal swapping." So his own lawyer made sure that it was clear that he did it. Obviously, the defence cannot object to his own questions.
It also sounded like the defence realized that they would certainly be found guilty and so they were angling for the lowest possible penalty. In that case, you are looking for some sympathy from the jury. If the RIAA case is so strong you cannot even mount a valid defence, then the jury will come down hard on you if they think you are lying to them. This is why Jammie Thomas is looking at a $1.92 million judgement for infringing 24 songs and this guy got $675,000 for 30 songs. He got a bargain.
As usual with Facebook controversies, you can very easily opt out of this and never have your photo used by an advertiser.
I'm not sure that you really can opt out. The terms of service says "subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook". Facebook makes no guarantees about what privacy and application settings will be provided so anything you put up is liable (perhaps accidentally) to end up being made available with no limitations.
The real question is do you trust Facebook (and the various Facebook application providers). If you trust them, then put your whole life on there and hope they stay trustworthy even if they go bankrupt or get bought by Microsoft. I certainly would never want to try to show in court that Facebook violated those terms of service because it seems like there is a lot of wiggle room there.
Personally, I don't really have that level of trust so I only put things on there that I don't care if they abuse. I simply assume that Facebook will be money grubbing bastards and act accordingly.
Owning Red Hat stock doesn't make linux happen. When you (or the index fund) buys RHAT stock, that money goes to the previous shareholder, NOT Red Hat.
That is true, but there are tangible benefits to RHAT. One of the ways they can raise capital is to issue additional shares. An increase in the stock price means that they can raise more money when they do this. This also makes the stock options that are offered to employees more valuable without costing the company a cent.
It also protects the company from a hostile takeover since any buyout becomes more expensive.
Wouldn't it be possible to use Amazon EC2 to set up a scalable render farm?
That is certainly possible, but it depends on the job. If you need to do a rendering job over the weekend a couple of times a year, then EC2 would definitely be the cheapest option. If you frequently need a rendering farm on a regular basis, then it would likely be cheaper to build your own. There is no guarantee of that though. If EC2 gets a better price on electricity than you do and if they have better power utilization than you, they might win just by that alone. You basically have to compute the true cost of each hour of computing for you and then compare that to Amazon's price.
But, I agree that proponents of manned space flight, such as myself, need to do come up with a better story than just sending people out into space.
I'm not sure that you need a better story. Simply figuring out how to travel and survive in space is a worthy goal. We don't need practical justifications for the Hubble or interplanetary probes or atomic colliders. We have scientific questions to answer and these tools are the only way to answer them so we do them.
The problem for manned exploration is that most policy makers have trouble spending billions upon billions just for that story. The total cost of Spirit and Opportunity (for the first 90 days of operation on Mars) was $820 million. The total cost for a single shuttle launch is $1.3 billion (the cost comes down a bit each time as the initial equipment purchases get amortized over more flights). When the shuttle is retired, we will have spent $174 billion. There just hasn't been a compelling story of why we should spend that type of money instead of spending it on other research projects. I would love for NASA to have a bigger budget, but I want to see more Hubbles and Spirits and Opportunities not more Shuttle launches with experiments designed by grade schoolers carrying teachers and former politicians for PR rides.
The most compelling reason for manned space travel is to be able to colonize and ensure our survival beyond the lifespan of earth. But that really only makes sense when you have a destination to go to and we don't. The Moon and Mars are achievable, but offer poor colonization opportunities. To colonize, we really need to get to another planet and we are a long long way from that type of technology. To me, it makes sense to spend a lot on manned exploration when we have the power capabilities to get to another star and we have identified a star which has a planet that would be worth colonizing. Until then, we are just wasting resources that could be better spent on other research areas.
Everyone says NASA is expensive, but, I think the value is just tremendous.
When you look at the scientific value of the various unmanned programs, you are right. As a percentage of the nation's GDP, it is quite small and we can make tremendous discoveries.
The manned programs are a different story. They are hugely expensive, dangerous and provide little scientific value. Apollo, the Space Shuttle, ISS are not much more than engineering exercises that answer the question of "Can we build this?" Even the goal of putting a man on Mars is an engineering exercise. How many remote probes with specialized instruments can we send there for the cost of a single manned mission? There is no question that the science value is better with unmanned missions.
This is where I think NASA is fairly criticized. They want manned missions because they are cool and sexy, but they use science to justify the outrageous costs involved. Now I'm not saying the engineering problems are unworthy of being solved. But NASA needs to be honest about why things are being done. If they want to pursue engineering challenges, then they also need to pursue the relatively unsexy challenges of taking things we already know how to do and making it cheaper and more reliable. I just don't see where they have that commitment.
It's not that hard to copy text out if you have a decent PDF viewer
I have always run into problems in trying to copy and paste out of pdfs (this is with a variety of readers). For example, if the text is layed out in mutiple columns, selections cross columns instead of flowing down the column, which is not what is wanted. You also run into problems with ligatures. For example, fi can be combined into a single glyph and that is what gets copied and pasted instead of the two individual characters.
Obviously, this is a huge conspiracy. I mean, Billy May, Farrah Fawcet, and Michael Jackson? It can't possibly be a coincidence. And this comes at a time when Ron Paul is trying to get Congress to audit the Federal Reserve. Clearly, these deaths are intended to distract the media and voters before Ron Paul gets too close to the truth.
Hmmm. If someone made a movie with this plot, I'd pay to go see it. Hopefully, I don't get knocked off for discovering the conspiracy because that is usually what happens in the movies.
As much as everyone might think this is a big boo-boo by google, I say its a great job done by automated software.
It is this kind of thing that always makes me suspicious of automated defences. These things usually generate a model of what is normal and interpret things that fall outside of normal as an attack. The problem is that sometimes the abnormal pattern that is seen is actually normal. It is completely predictable that a well known, controversial pop icon would generate a huge increase in traffic when he unexpectedly dies (he was planning a comeback concert tour). I'm not sure how an automated defence can have the contextual information necessary to make this kind of distinction between attacks and "normal" burstiness like this.
I agree that Google's software did its job, but I wouldn't call it great. Great is when they can stop attacks and not get a Slashdot article about how they screwed up when a major news event happens.
So maybe instead of a bad reflection on humanity, this is just a bad reflection on the current stability of the intertubes, Google in particular.
It actually seems to be a good reflection of the current stability of the internet. After all, it worked fine for you and most other people. Sites have gotten much better at handling heavy traffic so it is harder to bring them down. In Google's case, it wasn't so much the amount of traffic as it was misinterpreting what that traffic meant. They thought it was an attack and started playing defence instead of serving it. Once they realized the problem, they could easily handle the volume.
Why do you think I live in a fantasy world? I'm just talking about the root of the problem. The root of the problem is that writing software is hard and programmers are human and make mistakes and those mistakes result in bugs. If you can reduce the rate at which bugs are introduced, you gain a huge increase in quality and a huge reduction of cost because fixing bugs after they are introduced is very expensive.
It is a fact that there are known practices that result in better code in the first place and code reviews are one of them. It is also a fact that many companies do not use these practices and hope that the testing team can pick up the slack.
So the management question is where to spend resources to improve quality and meet deadlines. Do you just add more and more testers so you can find the bugs faster and faster? Do you throw more coders at the problem so you can get the crappy code to the testers earlier? Do you adopt some of the practices that are known to work like reviewing code even though it means some of your coders will have to spend their time not actually writing code?
Since most companies continue to do stupid things that don't work, you tell me who lives in a fantasy world.