1) he was accessing a public hotspot not a private one as such the rules are different in that he is a member of said library and as such has rights to use its facilities. 2) At the time that he was using it no rules were in place against the use of wireless connections outside the library. If you read his coverage, the library stated their opposition to using wireless signals outside the library only after this incident.
The voice from the television set was measured and familiar, the cadence one that has been engraved on my memory.
"I have a dream... " the voice said. I glanced up, and saw Martin Luther King Jr. delivering his most famous speech, given at the Lincoln Memorial during the March on Washington.
It was a camera angle I hadn't seen before. And, oddly, he wasn't flanked by other civil rights leaders, but was standing all by himself. As his words continued, the camera's point of view circled to look out over his head and down the Mall, which was completely empty.
CGI, I thought. Computer-generated imagery. Then the tag line came on. It was a commercial for Alcatel, a company involved in communications networks and cell phones. An Alcatel newspaper ad with the same image spells out the message: "Before you can inspire... you must first connect."
Via Alcatel, of course.
I was filled with anger and sadness.
Not this speech, I thought. Not this moment in American history.
Ads have exploited almost every image worth quoting in our society. United Airlines has made it impossible for anyone to ever again hear Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue" without thinking about airplanes. Fred Astaire, the most graceful dancer in movie history, was seen dancing with a Dust-Buster. Such ads are pathetic, yes, but I suppose the copyright owners have a legal right to license them, and if their estates have no regard for the reputation of Gershwin or Astaire, well, that's greed for you.
But surely there are a few moments too sacred, too special, to be bought and sold. I would have thought Dr. King's "I Have a Dream" speech was one of them.
It shines like a beacon in our history. It belongs to all of us. It does not belong to Alcatel, which should not have the temerity and insensitivity to use it in an ad. And in a way, it doesn't belong to the King estate, either. The estate should consider itself the protector of this speech, not its retailer.
Perhaps, I thought, the speech was somehow in the public domain, and Alcatel had ripped it off to sell its networks and cell phones. I called the Martin Luther King Center in Atlanta and spoke with Robert Vickers, its public relations spokesman.
"I am afraid you will have to fax me your questions in writing," he said.
"I have only one question," I said. "Did the King Center license the Alcatel TV commercial?"
"Yes," he said. "It was licensed by the King estate's Intellectual Properties Management."
"Have you had a lot of calls about the ad?" I asked.
"Yes," he said, "comments both ways."
I started to ask how much the speech sold for, but he told me about the fax again. I didn't much feel like sending the fax. I knew the price.
Of all the songs in the world to have a sick copyright fight of this type over "This Land is Your Land" (or indeed anything by Guthrie) should be exempt. Guthrie was a lifelong advocate for the rights of the poor, a labor agitator.
The song itself is all about the value of the country and how it should be shared by all of us.
The version that I (and most of the people that I know) learned in school goes:
This land is your land, this land is my land From the redwood forest to the New York island. From the snow-capped mountains to the Gulf Stream waters This land is made for you and me.
As I go walkin' my ribbon of highway I see all around me my blue blue skyway Everywhere around me the wind keeps a-whistlin' This land is made for you and me.
I'm a-chasin' my shadow out across this roadmap To my wheat fields waving, to my cornfield dancing As I go walkin' this wind keeps talkin' This land is made for you and me.
I can see your mailbox, I can see your doorstep I can feel my wind rock your tip-top treetop All around your house there my sunbeam whispers This land is made for you and me.
That is the version as it was first recorded at guthrie's last commercial session. Interestingly enough there is a missing verse that shows up in a few rare recordings that appear in the Library of Congress. It states:
"Was a big high wall there that tried to stop me A sign was painted, said 'Private property.' But on the other side it didn't say nothing. This land was made for you and me."
This shows up in a recording that Woodie made that is now part of the Smithsonian Folkways recordings (see here and Here).
I can't think of a more appropriate response to this than that.
Here for the Lyrics from Arlo Guthrie, Woody's Son.
IMHO whoever claims to "own" this is as sick as the people who claim to "own" the image of Martin Luther King as property. See the commentrary at the internet archive: here.
Apparently, monkeys, just like human beings, tend to slack off on tasks until the very last minute. They become quite adept at judging how long they have till they absolutely must complete these tasks.
How exactly is this a bad thing? Seriously I know some true workaholics, depressed people who never take time off to relax because they are always pushing themselves to be earlier and earlier and to get yet more things done. Typically the end being acheived is overshadowed by the need to "do" the need to push more units rather than acheive any real effect or even get a good night's sleep. Depressed dot commers, or office slaves who consume a lot of booze.
The article states that the monkeys are very good at judging just how long each task will take and then, it seems, they do it when necessary. You call it slacking, I call it a combination of good time management and gathering roses while one may. Why should it be the case that everyone be working so far in advance that they burn out like true workaholics?
IMHO you shouldn't call someone a slacker unless they do nothing, and you shouldn't conclude that not working 24/7 is a sign of poor character, poor genes, or some disease that needs to be "fixed."
I'm in agreement with the other posters who compared this to Ritalin for ADD kids. Just another non-disease that was manufactured from hysteria and stupidity not real need.
I hate to put it in these terms, but we're going to need to look to the union movement to solve this. It's the owning class, this time the owneres and managers of big companies with patent and copyright portfolios, versus the people who are actually creating the wealth they're accumulating.
Why do you hate that? IMHO Unions have been bashed too long and too illogically. The whole purpose of Unions in the 20's and 30's was o protect the rights of the workers (the people who actually made anything) from the factory managers and owners (the ones who reap the profits and don't give a damn about the serfs).
In this situation that is exactly what is necessary. Collective bargaining and effort by those of us who oppose this privatization of thought and the wholesale theft of culture and public space that goes with it. Hat the term or not a Union is it. In essence that is what membership in the ACLU and EFF are; collective bargaining, unions.
Which again goes back to the question of whether or not the deveopers of Gnutella are doing that or not, a claim which is in some dispute. One could also argue that they are merely obtaining users based upon the idea that they can be used for illegal acts much in the same way that gun manufactuers do without actually saying it outright.
At a certain point the law and these "activist judges" have gone too far. At what point did it become imperative to protect the rights of companies over the rights of individuals. In this case the judge has clearly taken a literalist line leading to a severe circumscription of the rights of employers. I think that the John Marshall Journal has the right line.
In a sense it reminds me of a study on AI and Law that found, when dealing with Appeals court cases in West Virginia that the rule "The Coal Company Always Wins" led to 100% success when employed.
A method for distributing information to a plurality of uncoordinated user stations each of which is configured for communications with a multiplicity of independently-operated servers via a non-proprietary network includes steps for providing a distribution service that distributes updates for a plurality of different products, and providing a transporter software component to each of the plurality of uncoordinated user stations, wherein the transporter software component at each user station automatically effects communication sessions with the distribution service via the non-proprietary network for the purpose of obtaining updates for each of at least a subset of the plurality of different products that are installed on that user station. Moreover, a user station, which includes a storage medium, a plurality of different products installed on the storage medium, and transporter software installed on the storage medium for automatically effectuating communication sessions with a distribution service via a non-proprietary network in order to obtain updates for each of the plurality of different products, and a distribution service that distributes updates for a plurality of different products to a plurality of uncoordinated user stations via a non-proprietary network, are also described.
107 words and two commas in the first sentence which is probably the most vague thing that has ever been written in the english language. I for one propose that this patent be thrown out on grammatical grounds alone.
Seriously though, how did Jeffrey Gaffin, and Tammara Peyton (The patent examiners) allow this to pass? Just the Abstract alone covers any method for installing software on network-connected heterogeneous machines.
What exactly do we (the U.S. taxpayers) pay the patent office for anyway? Right now it seems that we are just paying to be screwed over.
Seriously, how can anyone look at all that they have been doing and not think that this is part of a general attack on the Internet, Personal high-performance computers that the owners control, and the general power/potential for free information that they bring.
Do I think that the RIAA is hatching plots with the goal of stifling free speech? No, of course not. I think that they want money, just as John Ashcroft wants us all to be "moral" and do what he thinks is right. In either case, however their interests dovetail. A captive, easily controlled consumer base with no freedoms is also a captive easily controlled population.
IMHO this is just part of a general attack on free speech even if those leading the charge say, and think, otherwise.
Actually the sole purpose of this legislation is to functionally overturn Betamax making it effectively undone. IOf passed this legislation would effectively nullify betamax. If you read Hatch's 'arguments' (asnine rants) in favor of the legislation that is exactly what the bastard is saying.
Any comments about the need for government data to be availible to the pulbic (or vice-versa if that's your view) should be sent to the comment page listed in the article. Discussion on/. is good but, in order for it to affect change, it can't stay limited to/.
A: Yes. Information gathered by the U.S. Census bureau helped the government round up American citizens of Japanese ancestry during World War II. When the Federal government came up with the idea that these Japanese Americans were a security threat, it needed some way to hunt them down. The solution? Use the Census records. According to officials who were in charge of the internment process, Census Bureau employees opened up their files and drew up detailed maps. These maps showed where Japanese Americans were located and how many such people were living in a given area.2 In the end, nearly 112,000 people were captured and sent to internment camps, in one of the darkest episodes in United States history.3
In the years after World War II, there have been repeated attempts to expand the use of Census records beyond mere statistical analysis. Recently, there was an effort to expand the number of public entities who have ready access to these banks of data, including state and local authorities, as well as the United States Postal Service.4 These developments underline the importance of new privacy protection laws to prevent history from repeating itself.
The historical record is clear that senior Census Bureau staff proactively
cooperated with the internment, and that census tabulations were directly implicated in the denial of civil rights to citizens of the United States who happened also to be of Japanese ancestry.
The record is less clear whether the then in effect legal prohibitions against revealing individual data records were violated. On this question, the judicial principle of innocent until proven otherwise should be honored. However, even were it to be conclusively documented that no such violation did occur, this would not and could not excuse the abuse of human rights that resulted from the rapid provision of tabulations designed to identify where Japanese Americans lived and therefore to facilitate and accelerate the forced relocation and denial of civil rights.
The problem that I see with these things is that the database is maintained by cross-linking private data of likely dubious validity so we have know way of knowing if the false positives/negatives are even within reasonable bounds. Remember what heppened in florida when many african-american voters were mistakenly "scrubbed" from the rolls and denied their rights to vote? What guarantee do we have that "bad data" (as the peole in florida assert) or deliberate falsification (as others have charged) will prevent otherwise innocent people from flying.
But, more importantly, the article makes no mention of controls, not only ensuring that a connected device is not stolen but that the data will not be misused by some guards who are seeking to stop all muslims. The potential for abuse in both forming the databases and in using them is frightening. Suppose the number of african-american men, or chinese people, or muslims who are stopped at the gates goies up even a little, who will be keeping an eye on that and keeping the airport honest? The Airport itself?
Lest we forget, the reason that the FBI doesn't have a database on 98% of Americans including past locations, etc is that, up until now, being innocent of a crime meant that you were entitled to some measure of privacy, and, that the goal was to curb abuses of police power not aid and abet them.
Cubicles, no matter how they are laid out are just that, cubicles. No real walls, no real door, no privacy. They also alway, always seem uncomfortable and uninviting to me no matter how they are colored/designed.
One of the things that architectls always say makes a building great is provacy. Give each individual their space, and give them a door that way when they want to make a phone call, talk about business, or just be alone, they can and any noise that they make is not forced upon others. The idea of having my own office rather than an all-too-temporary place in a massive cube farm is that I can really feel that it's mine, that it's secure, that it's safe. That makes the whole experience of being in it that much more appealing.
In my experience even sharing an office with a cowerker is vastly superior to sharing a biw warren with a dozen random individuals.
Re:It's Gone Beyond Science Fiction into Mainstrea
on
Open Source Life?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Not exactly. The court found that some of the seeds he was saving and planting (not at all an odd or unnatural activity for the farmer) contained monsanto's genes. They also decided that he "ought to have known" that the genes were in his saved seed. They did not rule that he did know and deliberately concealed it nor did they rule that he was fraudulately using it.
So his version of events, knowing the supreme court's decision does not fall. I would argue that the points he makes about cross-pollination are entirely valid whether you like him personally or not.
Reasonable Suspicion can also come up in a political sense. Say I'm at a protest, standing around peacably but I or someone around me is wearing black, or lookingat the cops, or looking at the sky, etc. That would probably be enough to provoke "reasaonable supicion" that I am committing a crime, have just committed a crime or am about to commit a crime since I am, after all engaged in a protest.
At this point the cops would be free to demand my name and thus compile a list of "troublemakers" or arrest me for refusing to identify myself when I have done nothing wrong. This sounds like a handy tool for the suppression of dissent and the shutting down of peaceful protests.
Before anyone argues that this wouldn't happen I would point out that a) in the 1960's the FBI ran a program called COINTELPRO In which they devoted a great deal of time to spying on peaceful civil rights protestors especially Martin Luther King who they sought to "neutralize" as a civil rights leader.
More recently New York City began denying permits to protestors during the period of the Republican National Convention (aa here, Boston Announced plans to shut down roughly 40 miles of roads in and around the city for "security reasons" See also herehere also for the choice quote "What is about to happen in Boston is the continuation of the democratic process and the American way, at a time when the country is at war,"
Lastly, during the G8 summit in Georgia, the governor declared a State of Emergency before the summit even began. This executive order made it possible for U.S. Military units to operate in the city and to photograph and harass all residents. See here, here, and here to see how peaceful protestors are treated in San Francisco.
No not really. As the dissenting justices pointed out, your name is the key to all the great national databases that store information about you. Databases that can be searched from inside most modern police cars. Thus the name is all that they need.
And you can probably forget giving a false name because that would probably set you up for some kind of fraud rap or perhaps "lying to a police officer".
Well, you know what that means, that means we can't allow this so called "Mandrake" software to be used in the U.S. Nor any other Linux distro that might have "Parisian leanings". We should follow the lead of the Congressional Lunchroom and ban the use of all francophile software in the U.S. of A.
From now on all linux users will be forced to switch to Microsoft's FreedomOS! which does most, ok some of the things that other stuff does but without all the pacifism.
Microsoft's FreedomOS, yours for on $799 and up. Because the best way to guarantee freedom is to take away your choices.
"It's all part of an $8-million Department of Justice grant designed to boost community policing. Of that, it will cost $250,000 to equip the cars, plus an additional training period to teach deputies how to take good photos. At least one car outfitted with the equipment is already on the streets, and others to follow shortly."
I was under the impression that Community-based policing meant:
Getting more police out in the community on foot and on bicycles rather than behind desks or otherwise isolated from the population.
Getting police to know their communities by, among other things hiring police from the communities that they are policing, and training them to get to know the people as individuals not suspects and the neighborhoods as places people live not just "ghettos" or "slums".
Getting police to be responsive to the needs of the community through police reviews, open panels, and yes, enhanced police oversight.
How does this piece of expensive tripe do any of that?
Granted but that is a far cry from getting the word out. I'd be willing to bet that the LWV noticed the traffic but, traffic or no, that gives them no reason to care what the referring site says. Nor does it gurantee that they will even link the two together. The same goes for any company or elected rep. In some cases (e.g. slashdotting the RIAA or Orin Hatch) I'd be willing to bet the recipients will treat it negatively ("were under attack") and behave accordingly.
If/. Readers had an impact how was it done? Was there a petition link on the previous story that I missed? Was there a letter writing campaign that I missed? Or the the LWV leadership (and the hundreds of their members who oppose paperless ballots) simply derive all their impetus from the firestorm going on in the comments? Did thjey for example read them and think, "wow we have to move now or these people may moderate each other more heavily!"
I am not minimizing the role of discussion here nor am I saying that posting a comment on/. is a waste of time.
What I am saying is that comments on/. stay on/. If you want to pressure other groups don't expect that they will read your comments and change their minds. What you do is take action at the EFF, join the ACLU, get organization info from Blackboxvoting.org, or send letters to the appropriate people (Congress, Whitehouse) . You can even create your own online petition at PeitionOnline.com. The key is to branch out to others and raise their conciousness level not preach to the choir.
Considering that, in the U.S. at least, most basic medical research is carried out at taxpayer expense it is about time that the fruits of that labour be availible to all taxpayers.
The one worry that I have (and this is not necessarily an argument against open access) is archiving. A key service that academic libraries provide is archiving of old journals. The web by contrast is not as ideal for such things as websites are always changing and individual servers are always going down. Academic libraries on the other hand are experts at the cataloguing, storage and retreival of old information.
I can see how this worry is being lost especially as it is somewhat orthagonal to the issues of access, but not entirely. Archiving costs money and that money has to come from somewhere. Most academic institutions fund this work but their archival models are built around books and journals. When a new journal comes in it is archived to shelves, microfiche, cd, etc. What are they to do with preprints on a website?
Obviously of course this is something that tyhe libraries themselves would have to solve but it would be nice to hear more of it in the debate.
One of the things that I worry about as the web grows is the loss of long-term institutional archiving. Such loss can often lead to unnecessarily repeated work or worse. I remember a professor of mine once told me about a paper that is regarded as "fundamental" in the Computer vision community. This paper is fairly old (circa 20+ years) and, unlike turing's work it is not assigned in basic cs courses. Once every few years he will attend a conference where some young student is presenting his/her latest discovery, a discovery that was already made 20+ years ago.
One could argue that the student's did not make a sufficient literature search but my prof would disagree. According to him the paper is difficult to find because there is so much literature being generated in the Computer Vision community so quickly that the paper has been buried in a mass of archives.
The thing about cash is that it exists, it works, and it is cheap as infrastructure goes. Both the IRS and the FBI have regularly suggested to congres that we move Americans away from cash. What stops them is the problems such a move would entail:
How to ensure that everyone can access the system. If there is no cash then you have to ensure that everyone can get a card. Does the government start issuing these?
Security. We have all seen how easy it is to steal credit cards. Why would a national card be any different.
Cost. Just try to imagine the cost of equipping every store, every mom n' pop, every soda machine, etc with a card reader. This is not to say that the powers that be are friends of small businesses but since small businesses employ more americans than large businesses, limiting them would devastate the economy.
Grey market. Despite the fact that many people oppose it the American economy depends in part on illegal immigration, grey market exchanges and so on (if the workers are paid properly those cherries wouldn't be so cheap).
etc.
So while I would agree with you that there are many people out there who want to see cash go away we aren't there yet and, unless the economy and infrastructure canges radically, we never will be.
The group argues that the U.S. push for globalization spawned piracy. They seem to be arguing that the only inevitable result of forming trade deals with foreign countries is theft, or at least the extreme eagerness of the U.S. to form these deals let ip rights fall by the wayside.
While one could argue very reasonably that globalization has been pursued in a less than advantageous fashion I find it illogical to argue that the inevitable result of dealing with foreigners is theft and loss.
Secondly they make the (somewhat) valid point that outsourcing (especially of the Intel variety) leads to the transfer of some intellectual property abroad. While true they seem to only be using this as a stepping stone.
Oddly enough they seem to miss the irony involved in writing a report that condemns outsourcing, lobbying for foreign workers in the U.S., etc, when their own best supporter has done and continues to do all of these things.
"triple-edge sword"? Isn't it "double-edged sword"?
They provide no actual support for the argument that Open Source software is pushing the value of "U.S. intellectual property assets downward." While I do believe that the existence of Open Office reduces the value of any patents and copyrights that Microsoft has on Word I fail to see how forcing myself to purchase an overpriced piece of software just because it has no competition is in any way beneficial. Secondly I find it illogical to argue that the use of Open Source software impacts the intellectual property rights of say, Sony as their IP is not in software.
As usual they make the case (without any supporting information) that Open Source and Linux are one in the same and that the GPL applies to all "open source" software.
They also make the case (again without supporting information) that open source advocates who "want to see Linux succeed argue that eventually, they want all intellectual property protection to end, including patents and trademarks." This would seem to contradict their earlier complaints about the restrictive nature of the Linux license (apparently it's name has been changed from the GPL).
Interestingly he immediately concludes from this that: "The bottom line is this: a non-IP future means that all companies in the Baruch Lev study go to from 85% to 0% in intangible asset value." Which is a bit odd as it embraces all "intangible assets" (which he has yet to define explicitly) which from his statements above seem to include all "intellectual property." While I will grant you that the value of a Britney Spears song will not remain as it has forever I find it odd to argue that Linux will bring about her downfall (directly).
The Commission was created by the HAVA act that passed in 2002. Yet they are holding their first meeting now in 2004. Is anyone else bothered by this?
And, just to add to the other debate. I for one think that an opinion poll is only half the issue or less. It is important that the public trust the machines but only if they do so based upon truth not a well-run ad campaign. Unfortunately what this shows is that Bev Harris's Words are not reaching the public as a whole.
In part this is unuspprising. I recently chatted with my local elections official. He allowed as how the public doesn't think about elections except twice a year on voting day and on the day after voting day. While he worries about this stuff and wants funding and time to deal with it, noone else cares, they just want it to work.
This is in large part due to the fact that we have all been trained in this manner. Consider school (in the U.S.) in it we are taught all about the vot, all about the elections system and the holy vote. Little if any time is spent (in my experience) on other (continuous) forms of public participation (running for office, attending council meetings, etc.) As a result everyone is trained to think that the vote is everything and that, for the rest of the year its out of their hands.
The real issue is how can we override this perception/instinct. How can we shatter the blind faith that most people have in the parties?
Slashdot Mirror
1) he was accessing a public hotspot not a private one as such the rules are different in that he is a member of said library and as such has rights to use its facilities.
2) At the time that he was using it no rules were in place against the use of wireless connections outside the library. If you read his coverage, the library stated their opposition to using wireless signals outside the library only after this incident.
So the wayback machine won't get /dotted.
... " the voice said. I glanced up, and saw Martin Luther King Jr. delivering his most famous speech, given at the Lincoln Memorial during the March on Washington.
... you must first connect."
The promised land goes condo
March 30, 2001
BY ROGER EBERT
The voice from the television set was measured and familiar, the cadence one that has been engraved on my memory.
"I have a dream
It was a camera angle I hadn't seen before. And, oddly, he wasn't flanked by other civil rights leaders, but was standing all by himself. As his words continued, the camera's point of view circled to look out over his head and down the Mall, which was completely empty.
CGI, I thought. Computer-generated imagery. Then the tag line came on. It was a commercial for Alcatel, a company involved in communications networks and cell phones. An Alcatel newspaper ad with the same image spells out the message: "Before you can inspire
Via Alcatel, of course.
I was filled with anger and sadness.
Not this speech, I thought. Not this moment in American history.
Ads have exploited almost every image worth quoting in our society. United Airlines has made it impossible for anyone to ever again hear Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue" without thinking about airplanes. Fred Astaire, the most graceful dancer in movie history, was seen dancing with a Dust-Buster. Such ads are pathetic, yes, but I suppose the copyright owners have a legal right to license them, and if their estates have no regard for the reputation of Gershwin or Astaire, well, that's greed for you.
But surely there are a few moments too sacred, too special, to be bought and sold. I would have thought Dr. King's "I Have a Dream" speech was one of them.
It shines like a beacon in our history. It belongs to all of us. It does not belong to Alcatel, which should not have the temerity and insensitivity to use it in an ad. And in a way, it doesn't belong to the King estate, either. The estate should consider itself the protector of this speech, not its retailer.
Perhaps, I thought, the speech was somehow in the public domain, and Alcatel had ripped it off to sell its networks and cell phones. I called the Martin Luther King Center in Atlanta and spoke with Robert Vickers, its public relations spokesman.
"I am afraid you will have to fax me your questions in writing," he said.
"I have only one question," I said. "Did the King Center license the Alcatel TV commercial?"
"Yes," he said. "It was licensed by the King estate's Intellectual Properties Management."
"Have you had a lot of calls about the ad?" I asked.
"Yes," he said, "comments both ways."
I started to ask how much the speech sold for, but he told me about the fax again. I didn't much feel like sending the fax. I knew the price.
Thirty pieces of silver.
Copyright © Chicago Sun-Times Inc.
The song itself is all about the value of the country and how it should be shared by all of us.
The version that I (and most of the people that I know) learned in school goes:
That is the version as it was first recorded at guthrie's last commercial session. Interestingly enough there is a missing verse that shows up in a few rare recordings that appear in the Library of Congress. It states:
This shows up in a recording that Woodie made that is now part of the Smithsonian Folkways recordings (see here and Here).
I can't think of a more appropriate response to this than that.
You can see more info:
IMHO whoever claims to "own" this is as sick as the people who claim to "own" the image of Martin Luther King as property. See the commentrary at the internet archive: here.
How exactly is this a bad thing? Seriously I know some true workaholics, depressed people who never take time off to relax because they are always pushing themselves to be earlier and earlier and to get yet more things done. Typically the end being acheived is overshadowed by the need to "do" the need to push more units rather than acheive any real effect or even get a good night's sleep. Depressed dot commers, or office slaves who consume a lot of booze.
The article states that the monkeys are very good at judging just how long each task will take and then, it seems, they do it when necessary. You call it slacking, I call it a combination of good time management and gathering roses while one may. Why should it be the case that everyone be working so far in advance that they burn out like true workaholics?
IMHO you shouldn't call someone a slacker unless they do nothing, and you shouldn't conclude that not working 24/7 is a sign of poor character, poor genes, or some disease that needs to be "fixed."
I'm in agreement with the other posters who compared this to Ritalin for ADD kids. Just another non-disease that was manufactured from hysteria and stupidity not real need.
Why do you hate that? IMHO Unions have been bashed too long and too illogically. The whole purpose of Unions in the 20's and 30's was o protect the rights of the workers (the people who actually made anything) from the factory managers and owners (the ones who reap the profits and don't give a damn about the serfs).
In this situation that is exactly what is necessary. Collective bargaining and effort by those of us who oppose this privatization of thought and the wholesale theft of culture and public space that goes with it. Hat the term or not a Union is it. In essence that is what membership in the ACLU and EFF are; collective bargaining, unions.
Which again goes back to the question of whether or not the deveopers of Gnutella are doing that or not, a claim which is in some dispute. One could also argue that they are merely obtaining users based upon the idea that they can be used for illegal acts much in the same way that gun manufactuers do without actually saying it outright.
At a certain point the law and these "activist judges" have gone too far. At what point did it become imperative to protect the rights of companies over the rights of individuals. In this case the judge has clearly taken a literalist line leading to a severe circumscription of the rights of employers. I think that the John Marshall Journal has the right line.
In a sense it reminds me of a study on AI and Law that found, when dealing with Appeals court cases in West Virginia that the rule "The Coal Company Always Wins" led to 100% success when employed.
This is just sick.
107 words and two commas in the first sentence which is probably the most vague thing that has ever been written in the english language. I for one propose that this patent be thrown out on grammatical grounds alone.
Seriously though, how did Jeffrey Gaffin, and Tammara Peyton (The patent examiners) allow this to pass? Just the Abstract alone covers any method for installing software on network-connected heterogeneous machines.
What exactly do we (the U.S. taxpayers) pay the patent office for anyway? Right now it seems that we are just paying to be screwed over.
That's what they are trying to do!
Seriously, how can anyone look at all that they have been doing and not think that this is part of a general attack on the Internet, Personal high-performance computers that the owners control, and the general power/potential for free information that they bring.
Do I think that the RIAA is hatching plots with the goal of stifling free speech? No, of course not. I think that they want money, just as John Ashcroft wants us all to be "moral" and do what he thinks is right. In either case, however their interests dovetail. A captive, easily controlled consumer base with no freedoms is also a captive easily controlled population.
IMHO this is just part of a general attack on free speech even if those leading the charge say, and think, otherwise.
Actually the sole purpose of this legislation is to functionally overturn Betamax making it effectively undone. IOf passed this legislation would effectively nullify betamax. If you read Hatch's 'arguments' (asnine rants) in favor of the legislation that is exactly what the bastard is saying.
Any comments about the need for government data to be availible to the pulbic (or vice-versa if that's your view) should be sent to the comment page listed in the article. Discussion on /. is good but, in order for it to affect change, it can't stay limited to /.
See here.
The Census Bureu's Take on it is:
See here.
The problem that I see with these things is that the database is maintained by cross-linking private data of likely dubious validity so we have know way of knowing if the false positives/negatives are even within reasonable bounds. Remember what heppened in florida when many african-american voters were mistakenly "scrubbed" from the rolls and denied their rights to vote? What guarantee do we have that "bad data" (as the peole in florida assert) or deliberate falsification (as others have charged) will prevent otherwise innocent people from flying.
But, more importantly, the article makes no mention of controls, not only ensuring that a connected device is not stolen but that the data will not be misused by some guards who are seeking to stop all muslims. The potential for abuse in both forming the databases and in using them is frightening. Suppose the number of african-american men, or chinese people, or muslims who are stopped at the gates goies up even a little, who will be keeping an eye on that and keeping the airport honest? The Airport itself?
Lest we forget, the reason that the FBI doesn't have a database on 98% of Americans including past locations, etc is that, up until now, being innocent of a crime meant that you were entitled to some measure of privacy, and, that the goal was to curb abuses of police power not aid and abet them.
Cubicles, no matter how they are laid out are just that, cubicles. No real walls, no real door, no privacy. They also alway, always seem uncomfortable and uninviting to me no matter how they are colored/designed.
One of the things that architectls always say makes a building great is provacy. Give each individual their space, and give them a door that way when they want to make a phone call, talk about business, or just be alone, they can and any noise that they make is not forced upon others. The idea of having my own office rather than an all-too-temporary place in a massive cube farm is that I can really feel that it's mine, that it's secure, that it's safe. That makes the whole experience of being in it that much more appealing.
In my experience even sharing an office with a cowerker is vastly superior to sharing a biw warren with a dozen random individuals.
Not exactly. The court found that some of the seeds he was saving and planting (not at all an odd or unnatural activity for the farmer) contained monsanto's genes. They also decided that he "ought to have known" that the genes were in his saved seed. They did not rule that he did know and deliberately concealed it nor did they rule that he was fraudulately using it.
So his version of events, knowing the supreme court's decision does not fall. I would argue that the points he makes about cross-pollination are entirely valid whether you like him personally or not.
Reasonable Suspicion can also come up in a political sense. Say I'm at a protest, standing around peacably but I or someone around me is wearing black, or lookingat the cops, or looking at the sky, etc. That would probably be enough to provoke "reasaonable supicion" that I am committing a crime, have just committed a crime or am about to commit a crime since I am, after all engaged in a protest.
At this point the cops would be free to demand my name and thus compile a list of "troublemakers" or arrest me for refusing to identify myself when I have done nothing wrong. This sounds like a handy tool for the suppression of dissent and the shutting down of peaceful protests.
Before anyone argues that this wouldn't happen I would point out that a) in the 1960's the FBI ran a program called COINTELPRO In which they devoted a great deal of time to spying on peaceful civil rights protestors especially Martin Luther King who they sought to "neutralize" as a civil rights leader.
More recently New York City began denying permits to protestors during the period of the Republican National Convention (aa here, Boston Announced plans to shut down roughly 40 miles of roads in and around the city for "security reasons" See also here here also for the choice quote "What is about to happen in Boston is the continuation of the democratic process and the American way, at a time when the country is at war,"
Lastly, during the G8 summit in Georgia, the governor declared a State of Emergency before the summit even began. This executive order made it possible for U.S. Military units to operate in the city and to photograph and harass all residents. See here, here, and here to see how peaceful protestors are treated in San Francisco.
No not really. As the dissenting justices pointed out, your name is the key to all the great national databases that store information about you. Databases that can be searched from inside most modern police cars. Thus the name is all that they need.
And you can probably forget giving a false name because that would probably set you up for some kind of fraud rap or perhaps "lying to a police officer".
This is, really, all that the bastards needed.
Well, you know what that means, that means we can't allow this so called "Mandrake" software to be used in the U.S. Nor any other Linux distro that might have "Parisian leanings". We should follow the lead of the Congressional Lunchroom and ban the use of all francophile software in the U.S. of A.
From now on all linux users will be forced to switch to Microsoft's FreedomOS! which does most, ok some of the things that other stuff does but without all the pacifism.
Microsoft's FreedomOS, yours for on $799 and up.
Because the best way to guarantee freedom is to take away your choices.
I was under the impression that Community-based policing meant:
How does this piece of expensive tripe do any of that?
Granted but that is a far cry from getting the word out. I'd be willing to bet that the LWV noticed the traffic but, traffic or no, that gives them no reason to care what the referring site says. Nor does it gurantee that they will even link the two together. The same goes for any company or elected rep. In some cases (e.g. slashdotting the RIAA or Orin Hatch) I'd be willing to bet the recipients will treat it negatively ("were under attack") and behave accordingly.
If /. Readers had an impact how was it done? Was there a petition link on the previous story that I missed? Was there a letter writing campaign that I missed? Or the the LWV leadership (and the hundreds of their members who oppose paperless ballots) simply derive all their impetus from the firestorm going on in the comments? Did thjey for example read them and think, "wow we have to move now or these people may moderate each other more heavily!"
/. is a waste of time.
/. stay on /. If you want to pressure other groups don't expect that they will read your comments and change their minds. What you do is take action at the EFF, join the ACLU, get organization info from Blackboxvoting.org, or send letters to the appropriate people (Congress, Whitehouse) . You can even create your own online petition at PeitionOnline.com. The key is to branch out to others and raise their conciousness level not preach to the choir.
I am not minimizing the role of discussion here nor am I saying that posting a comment on
What I am saying is that comments on
Considering that, in the U.S. at least, most basic medical research is carried out at taxpayer expense it is about time that the fruits of that labour be availible to all taxpayers.
The one worry that I have (and this is not necessarily an argument against open access) is archiving. A key service that academic libraries provide is archiving of old journals. The web by contrast is not as ideal for such things as websites are always changing and individual servers are always going down. Academic libraries on the other hand are experts at the cataloguing, storage and retreival of old information.
I can see how this worry is being lost especially as it is somewhat orthagonal to the issues of access, but not entirely. Archiving costs money and that money has to come from somewhere. Most academic institutions fund this work but their archival models are built around books and journals. When a new journal comes in it is archived to shelves, microfiche, cd, etc. What are they to do with preprints on a website?
Obviously of course this is something that tyhe libraries themselves would have to solve but it would be nice to hear more of it in the debate.
One of the things that I worry about as the web grows is the loss of long-term institutional archiving. Such loss can often lead to unnecessarily repeated work or worse. I remember a professor of mine once told me about a paper that is regarded as "fundamental" in the Computer vision community. This paper is fairly old (circa 20+ years) and, unlike turing's work it is not assigned in basic cs courses. Once every few years he will attend a conference where some young student is presenting his/her latest discovery, a discovery that was already made 20+ years ago.
One could argue that the student's did not make a sufficient literature search but my prof would disagree. According to him the paper is difficult to find because there is so much literature being generated in the Computer Vision community so quickly that the paper has been buried in a mass of archives.
So while I would agree with you that there are many people out there who want to see cash go away we aren't there yet and, unless the economy and infrastructure canges radically, we never will be.
While one could argue very reasonably that globalization has been pursued in a less than advantageous fashion I find it illogical to argue that the inevitable result of dealing with foreigners is theft and loss.
Oddly enough they seem to miss the irony involved in writing a report that condemns outsourcing, lobbying for foreign workers in the U.S., etc, when their own best supporter has done and continues to do all of these things.
The Commission was created by the HAVA act that passed in 2002. Yet they are holding their first meeting now in 2004. Is anyone else bothered by this?
And, just to add to the other debate. I for one think that an opinion poll is only half the issue or less. It is important that the public trust the machines but only if they do so based upon truth not a well-run ad campaign. Unfortunately what this shows is that Bev Harris's Words are not reaching the public as a whole.
In part this is unuspprising. I recently chatted with my local elections official. He allowed as how the public doesn't think about elections except twice a year on voting day and on the day after voting day. While he worries about this stuff and wants funding and time to deal with it, noone else cares, they just want it to work.
This is in large part due to the fact that we have all been trained in this manner. Consider school (in the U.S.) in it we are taught all about the vot, all about the elections system and the holy vote. Little if any time is spent (in my experience) on other (continuous) forms of public participation (running for office, attending council meetings, etc.) As a result everyone is trained to think that the vote is everything and that, for the rest of the year its out of their hands.
The real issue is how can we override this perception/instinct. How can we shatter the blind faith that most people have in the parties?