The lockers in a public school are public property
I think its a little more technical than that. Public schools dont have the authority to search a teachers desk or office without a warrant due to 4th amendment rights. They do have the right to search a students locker because theyre acting loco parentis(sp?) or in place of the parent. Just as a parent has the right to search their kids property regardless of location, the school has the right to search the students belongings when they are on school grounds for just about any reason.
Parents and the courts are continually refining what is allowable (ie random drug tests are constantly being banned by courts, corporal punishment has been banned, etc.), but in light of recent shootings, it is more likely that the power of the schools is going to be expanded.
Why didn't these parents argue for their children's freedom of speech?
Because they wanted their kids to be able to continue attending this school. The school has no authority to force the kids to take down the web sites, but they do have the authority to tell the kids they can no longer attend the school. The only way the school is able to punish these students is because the students have to accept the punishment if they want to continue to be students at the school. A private school can regulate the speech of its members in the same way that the Boy Scouts can regulate the speech of its members. You cant force the school to keep your kid as a student. With that in mind, you have to then weigh the consequences of the situation. What is more important, speaking your mind about the school or being able to go to that school. I think its pretty clear that the students and their parents feel that the education at that school is more important than being able to speak their mind about the school.
I am not trying to say that the crimes are the same, just that our basis for defining the crimes is the same. The reason that we can call someone a pirate for the illegal transmission of radio signals even though they are out of the jurisdiction of the US is the same reason that we can call someone a murderer even though they are out of the jurisdiction of the US. The claim (as I interpreted it) of the original poster was that there was no crime(or at least they shouldnt be called criminals) because the person was not physically within the jurisdiction of the FCC. However, the radio transmission did go into the jurisdiction of the FCC. A crime was committed (violation of the FCC rules on radio transmissions) even though the person comitting the crime was not within the jurisdiction of the FCC. That crime was determined to be piracy. The person who facilitated the crime is then referred to as a pirate by people who recognize the authority of the FCC. If I am in international waters and shoot someone in the US with my handy-dandy-long-range-rifle, the US defines the crime as murder and calls me a murderer. Anyone who recognizes the authority of the US to define this crime will also call me a murderer. I am not saying that the US has any authority to punish me for the crime while I am still in international waters, but if I go back into the jurisdiction of the US they will punish me because, by their definition, I comitted a crime.
My question is why in this Patent-or-Copyright-anything-We-can era is there no monopoly yet? Why didnt someone patent the basic concepts and keep everyone else out? Were the patent applications rejected? Were they too specific to limit the competition? Are they still being reviewed? Is someone making all their money off of licenses? Why dont we hear about patents on cell phones and pagers and PDAs and such? Not just the internal algorithms and such, but the entire device. Did some company actually have a conscious when they decided not to patent their new electronics device or did they just forget to patent it?
Why were the broadcasters pirates? They were in international waters, beyond the jurisdiction of the FCC.
They were pirates for the same reason that killing someone in international waters is still murder. The definition of the crime has to do with the location of the crime, not the location of the criminal. Location of the criminal is only taken into account when trying to punish the criminal.
First, I'd write down _explicitly_ what you have been working on for the last few months, both on and off the job. Clearly state how there is no overlap, and how you took initiative to explore strange new worlds. Send this to your boss so that it is "on the record". If it goes to court, this will look good.
After you write this stuff down, you should also get it notarized. For only a couple dollars, this will stand up better in court and provides a specific date that cant be argued. This is especially important if your company is heading in the direction of your work. If you get your docs notarized before the company mirrors your hobbies, you have the leverage.
Don't working quantum computers, (in addition to easy factoring of large composites,) imply easy solution of all NP Complete problems?
No, IIRC, you only get exponential speedup if you can use a fourier transform to solve the problem. Search and factorization have been solved in this manner, but neither are NP-complete.
One flaw in the idea that the mind uses quantum effects as a quantum computer would, is that we don't have any special skill at solving the sorts of problems that quantum computers could.
Agreed. People like to come up with lots of examples to show how humans can use our mind to do things that a computer could never do, like look at code and find the infinite loop, etc. Unfortunately, when humans do these tricks, we dont use formal logic or exhaustive search to solve them (like most computers do), we use heuristics to guess as to what a good answer will look like and proceed from there. We form these heuristics from years or even decades of experience. To put it in laymans terms, we just make educated guesses. When we build a computer that can form its own heuristics, then give it decades of experience, I think we will see some amazing results.
Quantum computers are not non-deterministic computers regardless of how much we want them to be. IIRC, to get exponential speed up you need to use a fourier transform. This has been applied to things like factorization and search, and such, but not to NP-complete problems. Last I heard, it was still an open question as to whether or not P=NP on quantum computers. Much of the confusion comes from people assuming that factorization is an NP-complete problem. It is really hard and time consuming, but it is not NP-complete. It just happens to be hard enough and time consuming enough to be practical for encryption assuming you have a big enough number.
Until the theoreticians tell us whether or not P=NP on quantum computers, a good NP-complete encrytption algorithm will work just fine.
I'd like to know more about how accurate it is before I get all upset about it. Yes people have been doing stuff like this for years, but it hasnt been all that robust so far. If the CIA got it to work like the article makes it sounds and with good accuracy then they have some pretty nice software. Otherwise, its just more PR to make the president and congress give them a pat on the back and more money to play with.
I wouldnt be too suprised if it is really accurate though. The government, at least the part that likes to keep a low profile (CIA, NSA, etc.), always seems to be about 10 years ahead of the public on the technology curve
I really doubt rebuilding computers would be a priority in that situation.
I disagree. One of the highest priorities would be to quickly restore infrastructure(electricity, water, etc). The fastest way to do that would be to replace the dead computers with working ones. Even if it takes a year to build another computer, that is much faster than trying to rebuild a power plant so that it does not use computers. Granted, it all depends on how long it would take to build a new computer, but I wouldnt just give up on all the existing infrastructure so quickly.
You are trying to look only at the immediate state of the world without thinking about the future. Yes, food, water and heat will be the top priority and we would be unable to satisfy these needs using the dead equipment, but the only way to support a nation that was so reliant on computers is to find a way to build them again and quickly. Any plan you come up with to satisfy the immediate need for food and water and heat that does not use computers will not sustain a population of hundreds of millions of people. You can support a large population without massive infrastructure for a couple months or even a year, but pretty soon, people will start dropping like flies of malnutrition and exposure. The only way to prevent that is to have some sort of infrastructure that can handle the entire population and that will require computers.
...there would be no infrastructure for government to 'sieze control' in a situation like that.
I dont see how you can make that assumption. The government doesnt need infrastructure to sieze control. There are military bases just about everywhere (at least in the US) and local police forces literally everywhere. Within a day or two, the military would have control of practically every major metropolitan area. They dont need massive transports, just their feet. I wouldnt imagine that it would take more than a month for them to establish some kind of rudimentary local communication system (ie Pony Express in the worst case scenario). This would easily be enough for government to sieze control.
Yes, there would be massive unemployment, probably lots of suffering. But, this would not be some huge holocaust that would wipe out enough people to clean up the gene pool in any significant way. That said, I agree with the rest of your post. Personally, I would be more worried about surviving the disaster that causes this to happen than trying to survive after it did happened.
Ok, im not too familiar with the details of DMCA, but why do ISPs have to listen to a letter from RIAA? No judge has decided whether or not the servers in question did actually have copyrighted material on them. They are just assuming that RIAA is right. Are these letters just a threat of possible legal action because no one has verified their clames. Has anyone challenged RIAAs authority to demand ISPs to shut servers down? It seems to me that the orders to shut down servers should come from the courts, not the corporations.
You are right in that it has been shown that with todays health standards in industrialized nations, circumcision is no longer beneficial to your health. The point is that people living thousands of years ago did not have soap. And that it is pretty amazing for them to come up with a method, brutal as it may be, that makes a person more healthy without the use of soap.
How in the world did these people with their lack of scientific knowledge (we're talking a few 1000 years B.C. here when it first started) decide they should circumcize a child at all?
This is where Darwin would pop in and mention that due to a random fluke of nature, someone was probably just born with the inclination to cut their child as such. Their children prospered more than the children of others due to being slightly healthier than the other children. Over time, the offspring of the healthier children became the dominant social group. This is not the result of scientific experimentation, but a random fluke of nature and survival of the fittest. Over time, the practice became imbedded in the local dogma. And here we are today still circumcising.
If you are constantly thinking about God, you are bound to look at things with the perspective that He created everything.
Likewise, if you think religion is junk, you're going to take more notice of scientific studyies that support your opinion.
As the saying goes: "To a hammer, the world is a nail." This is not just about religion, but about everything in a persons life. A programmer will view the world as an algorithm, an artist will view the world as a painting, etc. Look at the nail someone is pounding on and you will get a pretty good idea as to what kind of hammer they are.
What would be nice is if they would do this for the USPTO. Maybe if the patent reviewers had some sound advice from someone in the field as to what is actually a new idea, they wouldnt be granting so many stupid patents.
Its more like $6-$10 per month for unlimited access according to the article. As for me, Ill just get my mp3s at one of the free sites till they shut the rest of them down, if they can.
What I am saying is that different brains generalize differently. Even two different honest judges can come to two different interpretations/generalizations of the same law depending on their ideologies. Our judges are already (usually) given specific examples (precedent cases) when they are asked to rule over a case, but we still have different judges coming to different conclusions over the same case with the same specific examples. If this werent the case, there would be no need for the appeals court system. Im not saying that asking law makers to add specific examples to the laws they write would be worse, i'm just saying that it would not be an improvement over our current situation because any time that a person, honest or not, is given a chance to generalize meaning of an event, they will do everything in their power to ensure that it agrees with their personal ideology. If a generalized answer to a specific case would go against a judges ideology, they will try to say that the generalization is not aplicable, that it is too general. If there are multiple generalizations of the same specific example, only one of which the judge agrees with, the judge will naturally pick the one they agree with. Even honest judges work this way because that is what they are asked to do, interpret the law. Giving them more examples to generalize wont make the situation any better.
What they do, is, instead of trying to give a precise description, is they give several for-instances, and let the human mind do what it does best - generalize.
Ok, but who's generalization of the law do you pick? How general can you be when interpreting a law? What do you do when a law has been generalized in a manner in which it was not intended? For example, Congress has managed to generalize its constitutional power to regulate interstate commerce to do just about anything it wants.
At some point you need to have specifics to limit the context of the law. Otherwise it gets applied to things it never was intended to be applied to.
I wonder how much it will cost Disney to buy off enough legislators every twenty or so years to protect Mickey indefinately. Or for that matter, how much it cost them to protect Mickey for the next twenty years.
...some government scheme to slow down the evil computer industry. How can we stop this crazy technology? Tax it till people stop buying it of course. We'll say its to stop piracy, give some of the proceeds to the copyright holders, skim off enough to get me another house and the public will think its for a good cause. Theres no down side!
Slashdot Mirror
I think its a little more technical than that. Public schools dont have the authority to search a teachers desk or office without a warrant due to 4th amendment rights. They do have the right to search a students locker because theyre acting loco parentis(sp?) or in place of the parent. Just as a parent has the right to search their kids property regardless of location, the school has the right to search the students belongings when they are on school grounds for just about any reason.
Parents and the courts are continually refining what is allowable (ie random drug tests are constantly being banned by courts, corporal punishment has been banned, etc.), but in light of recent shootings, it is more likely that the power of the schools is going to be expanded.
Because they wanted their kids to be able to continue attending this school. The school has no authority to force the kids to take down the web sites, but they do have the authority to tell the kids they can no longer attend the school. The only way the school is able to punish these students is because the students have to accept the punishment if they want to continue to be students at the school. A private school can regulate the speech of its members in the same way that the Boy Scouts can regulate the speech of its members. You cant force the school to keep your kid as a student. With that in mind, you have to then weigh the consequences of the situation. What is more important, speaking your mind about the school or being able to go to that school. I think its pretty clear that the students and their parents feel that the education at that school is more important than being able to speak their mind about the school.
I am not trying to say that the crimes are the same, just that our basis for defining the crimes is the same. The reason that we can call someone a pirate for the illegal transmission of radio signals even though they are out of the jurisdiction of the US is the same reason that we can call someone a murderer even though they are out of the jurisdiction of the US. The claim (as I interpreted it) of the original poster was that there was no crime(or at least they shouldnt be called criminals) because the person was not physically within the jurisdiction of the FCC. However, the radio transmission did go into the jurisdiction of the FCC. A crime was committed (violation of the FCC rules on radio transmissions) even though the person comitting the crime was not within the jurisdiction of the FCC. That crime was determined to be piracy. The person who facilitated the crime is then referred to as a pirate by people who recognize the authority of the FCC. If I am in international waters and shoot someone in the US with my handy-dandy-long-range-rifle, the US defines the crime as murder and calls me a murderer. Anyone who recognizes the authority of the US to define this crime will also call me a murderer. I am not saying that the US has any authority to punish me for the crime while I am still in international waters, but if I go back into the jurisdiction of the US they will punish me because, by their definition, I comitted a crime.
My question is why in this Patent-or-Copyright-anything-We-can era is there no monopoly yet? Why didnt someone patent the basic concepts and keep everyone else out? Were the patent applications rejected? Were they too specific to limit the competition? Are they still being reviewed? Is someone making all their money off of licenses? Why dont we hear about patents on cell phones and pagers and PDAs and such? Not just the internal algorithms and such, but the entire device. Did some company actually have a conscious when they decided not to patent their new electronics device or did they just forget to patent it?
They were pirates for the same reason that killing someone in international waters is still murder. The definition of the crime has to do with the location of the crime, not the location of the criminal. Location of the criminal is only taken into account when trying to punish the criminal.
They can when it envolves interstate commerce according to Article 1 section 8.
After you write this stuff down, you should also get it notarized. For only a couple dollars, this will stand up better in court and provides a specific date that cant be argued. This is especially important if your company is heading in the direction of your work. If you get your docs notarized before the company mirrors your hobbies, you have the leverage.
No, IIRC, you only get exponential speedup if you can use a fourier transform to solve the problem. Search and factorization have been solved in this manner, but neither are NP-complete.
Agreed. People like to come up with lots of examples to show how humans can use our mind to do things that a computer could never do, like look at code and find the infinite loop, etc. Unfortunately, when humans do these tricks, we dont use formal logic or exhaustive search to solve them (like most computers do), we use heuristics to guess as to what a good answer will look like and proceed from there. We form these heuristics from years or even decades of experience. To put it in laymans terms, we just make educated guesses. When we build a computer that can form its own heuristics, then give it decades of experience, I think we will see some amazing results.
Until the theoreticians tell us whether or not P=NP on quantum computers, a good NP-complete encrytption algorithm will work just fine.
I'd like to know more about how accurate it is before I get all upset about it. Yes people have been doing stuff like this for years, but it hasnt been all that robust so far. If the CIA got it to work like the article makes it sounds and with good accuracy then they have some pretty nice software. Otherwise, its just more PR to make the president and congress give them a pat on the back and more money to play with.
I wouldnt be too suprised if it is really accurate though. The government, at least the part that likes to keep a low profile (CIA, NSA, etc.), always seems to be about 10 years ahead of the public on the technology curve
I disagree. One of the highest priorities would be to quickly restore infrastructure(electricity, water, etc). The fastest way to do that would be to replace the dead computers with working ones. Even if it takes a year to build another computer, that is much faster than trying to rebuild a power plant so that it does not use computers. Granted, it all depends on how long it would take to build a new computer, but I wouldnt just give up on all the existing infrastructure so quickly.
You are trying to look only at the immediate state of the world without thinking about the future. Yes, food, water and heat will be the top priority and we would be unable to satisfy these needs using the dead equipment, but the only way to support a nation that was so reliant on computers is to find a way to build them again and quickly. Any plan you come up with to satisfy the immediate need for food and water and heat that does not use computers will not sustain a population of hundreds of millions of people. You can support a large population without massive infrastructure for a couple months or even a year, but pretty soon, people will start dropping like flies of malnutrition and exposure. The only way to prevent that is to have some sort of infrastructure that can handle the entire population and that will require computers.
I dont see how you can make that assumption. The government doesnt need infrastructure to sieze control. There are military bases just about everywhere (at least in the US) and local police forces literally everywhere. Within a day or two, the military would have control of practically every major metropolitan area. They dont need massive transports, just their feet. I wouldnt imagine that it would take more than a month for them to establish some kind of rudimentary local communication system (ie Pony Express in the worst case scenario). This would easily be enough for government to sieze control.
Yes, there would be massive unemployment, probably lots of suffering. But, this would not be some huge holocaust that would wipe out enough people to clean up the gene pool in any significant way. That said, I agree with the rest of your post. Personally, I would be more worried about surviving the disaster that causes this to happen than trying to survive after it did happened.
Ok, im not too familiar with the details of DMCA, but why do ISPs have to listen to a letter from RIAA? No judge has decided whether or not the servers in question did actually have copyrighted material on them. They are just assuming that RIAA is right. Are these letters just a threat of possible legal action because no one has verified their clames. Has anyone challenged RIAAs authority to demand ISPs to shut servers down? It seems to me that the orders to shut down servers should come from the courts, not the corporations.
You are right in that it has been shown that with todays health standards in industrialized nations, circumcision is no longer beneficial to your health. The point is that people living thousands of years ago did not have soap. And that it is pretty amazing for them to come up with a method, brutal as it may be, that makes a person more healthy without the use of soap.
This is where Darwin would pop in and mention that due to a random fluke of nature, someone was probably just born with the inclination to cut their child as such. Their children prospered more than the children of others due to being slightly healthier than the other children. Over time, the offspring of the healthier children became the dominant social group. This is not the result of scientific experimentation, but a random fluke of nature and survival of the fittest. Over time, the practice became imbedded in the local dogma. And here we are today still circumcising.
Likewise, if you think religion is junk, you're going to take more notice of scientific studyies that support your opinion.
As the saying goes: "To a hammer, the world is a nail." This is not just about religion, but about everything in a persons life. A programmer will view the world as an algorithm, an artist will view the world as a painting, etc. Look at the nail someone is pounding on and you will get a pretty good idea as to what kind of hammer they are.
What would be nice is if they would do this for the USPTO. Maybe if the patent reviewers had some sound advice from someone in the field as to what is actually a new idea, they wouldnt be granting so many stupid patents.
Its more like $6-$10 per month for unlimited access according to the article. As for me, Ill just get my mp3s at one of the free sites till they shut the rest of them down, if they can.
What I am saying is that different brains generalize differently. Even two different honest judges can come to two different interpretations/generalizations of the same law depending on their ideologies. Our judges are already (usually) given specific examples (precedent cases) when they are asked to rule over a case, but we still have different judges coming to different conclusions over the same case with the same specific examples. If this werent the case, there would be no need for the appeals court system. Im not saying that asking law makers to add specific examples to the laws they write would be worse, i'm just saying that it would not be an improvement over our current situation because any time that a person, honest or not, is given a chance to generalize meaning of an event, they will do everything in their power to ensure that it agrees with their personal ideology. If a generalized answer to a specific case would go against a judges ideology, they will try to say that the generalization is not aplicable, that it is too general. If there are multiple generalizations of the same specific example, only one of which the judge agrees with, the judge will naturally pick the one they agree with. Even honest judges work this way because that is what they are asked to do, interpret the law. Giving them more examples to generalize wont make the situation any better.
Its the expensive initial investments that stop all too many good ideas from getting past bugeteers in congress.
Ok, but who's generalization of the law do you pick? How general can you be when interpreting a law? What do you do when a law has been generalized in a manner in which it was not intended? For example, Congress has managed to generalize its constitutional power to regulate interstate commerce to do just about anything it wants.
At some point you need to have specifics to limit the context of the law. Otherwise it gets applied to things it never was intended to be applied to.
I wonder how much it will cost Disney to buy off enough legislators every twenty or so years to protect Mickey indefinately. Or for that matter, how much it cost them to protect Mickey for the next twenty years.
With the financial resources of MS and the ignorant/decietful nature of Bill, yes.
...some government scheme to slow down the evil computer industry. How can we stop this crazy technology? Tax it till people stop buying it of course. We'll say its to stop piracy, give some of the proceeds to the copyright holders, skim off enough to get me another house and the public will think its for a good cause. Theres no down side!