We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice... do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
If you prefer North Korea-style society, you are welcome to move there.
If you started with nothing and had to buy all of the tooling and equipment, recruit people, etc., I could see this easily costing $1 million, but the winner is an inverter company. They already have all of the tooling, equipment, expertise, etc.
They "just" needed to optimize one of their existing designs for size. Also, they only needed a working prototype, not a full production model. How do you figure that costs a million dollars?
Ps- if there are any fighter pilots in here, or people good at fighter sim games, yes I know that I greatly oversimplified and left out 90% of the relevant factors. I did so in order to focus on one or two relevant factors without distractions.
Sort of, but not exactly. Imagine a giant sphere with the opponent in the circle . If you're anywhere in the rear half of the sphere, you have positional advantage . If you're in the front half of the sphere, the other guy does. (Ignoring gravity and energy, for sake of simplicity) . Of course it's not just one sphere 3,000 feet in diameter, but an infinite number of spheres of various sizes. So basically half the battle space is "behind" and half the battle space is "in front", not just the line DIRECTLY behind.
If you're 10 degrees left of directly behind and 20 degrees above, you can fire on him. With a front cannon, you point your aircraft in his direction and fire. With a rear-facing cannon, you'd need to point your aircraft such that the enemy is DIRECTLY behind you in order in aim the cannon at him. That's exactly where you don't want him! You'd never maneuver to try to put him directly behind you when he's firing from anywhere in the "behind" half of the air space.
One may think "a rear cannon and a front cannon both have to be aimed, so they're the same". There are two differences. An obvious difference is that maneuvering the aircraft to aim forward is easier than maneuvering to aim backward for the same reasons that driving forward is easier than driving backward.
Just as important, the pilots aren't only maneuvering for aim, changing which direction the aircraft points. The aircraft are also moving through the sky. You're trying to "lead" the opponent with your aim, aiming where he WILL be later, when the butllets get there. In other words, you're aiming in front of your opponent. With both aircraft moving in roughly the same direction, with turning with roughly the same arc, shooting in front of you will naturally tend to shoot in front of the other guy . Shooting behind you will tend to shoot behind him , where he's already been rather than where he's about to be.
Seeker missiles don't have to be aimed as precisely as cannons, but they should be shot in the right general direction , so the same ideas apply. It's just less crucial.
Today's consumer biometrics really are a lot like PIN numbers or physical keys made of brass. If a particular scanner has a one-in-million chance of a false match, that means that hundreds of people in the US will have the same type of fingerprint, within the ability of the system to classify them. That is, one scan of my finger is unlikely to "match" a scan of YOUR finger, but it's very likely to match the scan of SOMEONE'S finger. Much like some people will use the same PIN number on their debit card, but it's unlikely that you specifically use the same PIN that I use.
They therefore do NOT identify one user out of millions. Physical keys, like you use on your front door, are similar- the #1 manufacturer, Kwikset, only makes about 20,000 different keys. A locksmith can pick a lock in seconds or minutes. Yet that's good enough for the vast majority of security needs.
Like PIN numbers, current consumer biometrics are good in either of two roles: Weak authentication, like a signature or PIN, or physical key). For most things in my life, I'm not worried about the NSA. A four-digit number, Kwikset key, or cheap fingerprint scanner is sufficient to secure my kid's locker at school, or keep the kid out of the chemicals cabinet in the garage. It's fine for securing my fireworks box because someone could just BUY $500 worth of fireworks. My security just needs to encourage people to buy their own rather than taking mine.
Multi-factor authentication. If you have my key fob in your pocket, AND pass fingerprint authentication, you can take my car. You can spend money from my bank account of you know my (strong) password AND pass fingerprint auth AND don't trigger the bank's fraud detection algorithms.
I don't think I'll ever understand why some people, apparently including yourself, have some random guess about what might be, based on no evidence whatsoever, then fervently believe it and argue to defend it. If you bothered to read even the first few pages of the book, you'd have an idea of what his thesis is. Instead, for some reason I'll never understand, you've randomly come up with some guess as to what his book may be about, and you're committed to arguing that.
You asked that I state explicitly what it is you said that's misleading (or in this case utterly false). Here's one:
> You extract his position on a specific and detailed debate, and convert it to a poorly generalized argument that is easily attacked.
No, his book is NOT about the death penalty. In fact, only a few pages cover that case. It's NOT one specific debate. As the title suggests, his book is about the influence of global views on Supreme Court decisions and vice versa. As another commenter here stated, his view, his philosophy, is radically different from what the court has always done in the past.
You then (intentionally? unknowingly? ) conflate precedent (PRE-cedent, what came before) with Breyer's radical philosophy of deciding US Constitutional law based on current popular opinion in Europe and around the world. These aren't the same thing at all.
> And if the government is operating the way it *should* be, then the gathering, processing and collating of this data should all be routed through a record so that -- voila -- anytime the government, itself, needs to know what it has on hand then it knows where exactly to look and in one place.
Lol. That's quite the opposite of the US federal government.
In some ways, it's a good thing that the federal government isn't designed for efficiency, that speed and efficiency aren't anywhere on the priority list. As a most obvious example, it would be far quicker and more efficient to have Kim Jong Obama make all of the decisions unilaterally rather than have the whole country debate policy. Heck, it took more than a decade to decide to do Hilarycare, and more than 10 more years to implement it after it was passed. (Including renaming it "Obamacare" along the way.) A dictator would be more efficient, but then you end up with North Korea. So we don't really want efficient government ; we want fair government, we want transparent government, we want big policy decisions to be made carefully, thoughtfully - slowly. Efficiency isn't what we want in government.
SOME planes are rated for bird strikes at takeoff speed. You'll notice in the second video a bunch of planes with major damage from bird strikes.
This confusion led to a humorous moment on Mythbusters. They wanted to test the story about frozen chickens vs thawed, but even their thawed chickens kept going right through the aircraft. It turns out the junked aircraft they used for testing was not rated for bird strikes. Many (most?) general aviation planes aren't.
> Vice President will then take over as Acting President.
There was a big fight about that in 1841. John Tyler insisted that he was President, his political opponents insisted that he was merely Acting President. He refused to open the letters they sent him, addressed to Acting President. Tyler won the fight. He was President.
Later, the 25th Amendment removed all doubt. The 25th begins with these words: In case of the removal of the President from office or of his death or resignation, the Vice President shall become President.
Kasich obviously can't win the nomination outright via the primaries. 99.5% chance Rubio can't either. What they CAN do is stash enough delegates to deny Trump the majority he needs to become the automatic nominee. When Kasich and probably Rubio drop out after the first convention vote, their delegates become free to vote for anyone else. That'll be the agreed non-Trump nominee. That's why they are still getting big-money donations and other support - because by dividing up the delegates four ways, Trump can't get a strict majority and the convention will be free to choose someone other than Trump. That's also why Ben Carson SUSPENDED his campaign rather than ended it- suspending means he can still select a few anti-Trump delegates. Most if not all of the drop outs suspended for that reason, and also if they had campaign debt.
If they all dropped out and supported Cruz NOW, Cruz might win 48% to Trumps 52%. By offering four primary candidates, hopefully Trump will get less than 50%, then at the convention the anti-Trump delegates (the majority) will choose the nominee.
To illustrate a bit further for those who don't "get it", virtually every gun made today, from pistols to machine guns, is a John Moses Browning design. People have tweaked things here and there, adjusted the size and shape, but they mechanisms for all types of guns are John Browning's designs. Second place is Gaston Glock, for figuring out which plastic could be used to make a frame for a Browning breach-lock design.
Basically, John Browning is the one guy we trust with our lives. We trust his designs. When he designs a smart gun, I'll buy one. That really is holding "smart" guns to the same standard we hold traditional guns - we trust their design only if John Browning signs off on the design. Of course he's been dead since 1926, so that's unlikely.
Actually any "smart" gun would almost have to be the opposite of Browning's genius - he's THE gun designer because he was a master of simplicity, of having the fewest possible moving parts. Simplicity, few parts to go wrong, is what makes his designs so reliable. That's the opposite of "smart".
Your smart thermostat is so complex and therefore difficult to FULLY understand that it can't be made secure or reliable; they get hacked and crash. That may be okay for a thermostat.
> or a gun person (amazing how those seem to go hand in hand) then you have to make stupid comments about how they'll never be able to make a smart gun that works
Your ignorance of the topic is glaring. I'm making this post via my smart phone. Often, as I post on Slashdot, my smart phone suddenly hides the keyboard, so that as I begin to press the "h" or "j" keys, they vanish and the press instead goes to the Submit button which was underneath. I end up posting half a post because the smarts in my smart phone decided it was time to remove the keyboard from my screen.
Sometimes, my smart phone phone randomly locks up for a few seconds, which is no big deal because it only lasts maybe ten seconds before it starts working again. That kind of thing happens with smart devices.
In 2011, the model 1911 (introduced in the year 1911) was still the world's most popular handgun because it's been proven reliable (partially because it has only about foir moving parts that are critical). When your smart gun locks up for ten seconds, that's enough time for the bad to put ten bullets in you. In a gun fight, a snafu with your hardware means you are dead. We carry the hundred-year-old 1911 model because reliability means life. A bug, an imperfection, an "undocumented feature" with your handgun means your kids no longer have dad, so that's why we're not interested in nifty new designs with cool new features.
The upgrade cycle on handgun designs for serious users is about once every hundred years for this reason. After 30 years of torture-testing the Glock design, including testing it after burying it in sand, in swamp, etc., we've started to trust that it's reliable, and it's taking it's place as the handgun design for this century. We pay $650 for a Glock rather than $250 for a very similar Kel-Tec model because we trust the Glock's reliability just a little bit more. In defense guns, reliability is life, so we'll absolutely pay more than twice as much to get something 2% more reliable.
Go bury your smart gun in wet sand, in a swamp, drop it down the stairs, then test it. Keep doing this for 30 or 40 years and you'll meet the testing standards we've always required of any new design.
You are of course welcome to your own opinion about what SHOULD be patentable.
What IS patentable under US law is of course unaffected by your opinion. "Recognize emotions in facial photos via a new method comprising..." is in fact patentable for virtually any wording in place of the ellipses. Actual US law, which you're free to like or dislike, is that it doesn't matter whether you describe the multiplication operation as a lever, gear, pulley, using the * symbol, a left shift, or any other way. What matters is whether it's new (novel) and useful. A method of recognizing emotions in photographs is useful regardless of whether it's done with gears, bytecode, or both.
Sorry if you don't think it SHOULD be so, it is. (And anyone who knows what an ASIC is knows why it -must- be so).
> Code is instructions to a computer to do something
That's what your fourth-grade teacher told you with the sandwich- making demonstration, but that's not really true of most languages used since about 1978.
Most languages today include a lot of stuff for humans, and also tell the compiler / query optimizer / etc which RESULT the program should ACHIEVE. The process the computer uses, the steps it takes, are not in the code. This is blindingly obvious if you compare 1960s cursor-based database code (which was procedural) to modern SQL, which is declarative. The SQL code directly specifies what the result should be. What the computer does to get that result is completely unknown to the programmer, and may change completely based on external factors. It can also be seen in modern implementations of a procedural language like C. The computer may completely remove large sections of the task description (code) and turn others inside-out. It's only expected to come up with some series of actions which end up producing the same RESULT as what is described in the code.
Further, computers run executables, humans read programming languages (code).
Try reading Excel.exe. It's almost impossible because compiled executables are written for computers, not humans. Executables use math to useful things. Programming languages (code), on the other hand, is written for humans. We can read excel_main_form.c and understand it. Source code DESCRIBES, in human-readable terms, what will be done. If executable programs are like a strange form of math, source code is like a math textbook. It describes, to humans, the operations to be done. The compiler will completely delete portions of it in order to use that description to create an executable which actually does the operations.
That's an interesting thought. I know less-informed Slashdot commenters, who have never read the relevant law, make those claims. I would be surprised if an EFF lawyer made those claims about code. They might say that about one specific algorithm, which can be expressed in English, code, or hardware.
You mention two mistakes, wrong about both the law and the facts.
The statute on patentability says: The laws of nature, including the laws physics and the laws of math, aren't patentable
That makes sense given that the laws of physics and the laws math aren't inventions.
HOWEVER, there is a common misconception among laymen. The operation of an elevator is physics- gravity, magnetism, etc. Newton's laws, etc. There is, however, "Newton's 743rd law" which states "to move people to the top of a building, you must install a motor at the top and a counterweight on the side and...". The elevator was an invention, it USES the laws of physics, but an elevator is not a law of physics.
Similarly, a law of mathematics is that a+b=b+a. There is no law of mathematics that says "to recognize a face in an image, you must XOR the brightness of each vertical segment with...". A new facial recognition system is an invention. It USES the laws of math, but facial recognition is not a law of mathematics.
You can't patent gravity, you can patent an elevator. You can't patent the commutative law (a+b=b+a), you can patent a new way of doing facial recognition.
That's the mistake of law.
Factually, trying reading Excel.exe. It's almost impossible because compiled executables are written for computers, not humans. Executables use math to useful things. Source code, on the other hand, is written for humans. We can read excel_main_form.c and understand it. Source code DESCRIBES, in human-readable terms, what will be done. If executable programs are like a strange form of math, source code is like a math textbook. It describes, to humans, the operations to be done. The compiler will completely delete portions of it in order to use that description to create an executable which actually does the operations.
The reply by AthanasiusKircher does a pretty good job of explaining why your reasoning is misguided, and frankly misleading. There's no need for me to repeat the facts laid out there. As to Justice Breyer's book, which explains his philosophy at length, you might want to read it before arguing about what it says.
What happens in France matters in the rest of the world. Obviously we're seeing more and more references to "Europe" and "European law" as the continent becomes more and more like a single country. Less obvious, perhaps, is the effect on American law.
Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer's book is called The Court and the World. His central thesis is that the US Supreme Court should make decisions about the Constitutionally of US law by consulting foreign law, particularly laws of Europe. If European countries don't have capital punishment, it must be very bad and therefore unconstitutional, he wrote in one US Supreme Court opinion. If France outlaws encryption, it's okay for the US to do the same, according to Justice Breyer's philosophy. What happens in Europe matters, everywhere.
Slashdot stripped the "html" out of my post rather than that encoding it. The html tags frame, img, embed, and "a" did essentially the same "object linking and embedding " as Microsoft's complex solution did.
In the early 1990s, Microsoft spent something like a hundred million dollars developing a technology suite which was immediately eplaced by the html tags , , and .
This is one of two reasons that Microsoft absolutely freaked out when the web started becoming popular - it did the same thing as their new "killer app", in a MUCH simpler way. Their new COM technology was a newer version of something they called Object Linking and Embedding (OLE). The web had a much simpler way to link and embed documents.
For a little while, Microsoft even tried to stop the web from becoming popular. When it was obvious that wouldn't work, they tried marketing COM as a web technology, under the name ActiveX.
Anyway, they had invested very heavily in trying to solve the same problem that frames solved, but their solution was a super- complex solution that took years to develop and an 800 page book to explain. A solution so simple as wasn't obvious to Microsoft.
The Backblaze implementation of top-loading drives is one well-known example. They've 45 drives in 3U (or 4U?) for many years. https://www.backblaze.com/blog...
PS, here's why the perjury clause is limited only to agency. Suppose I say that I'm a lawyer representing LucasFilm. That's either true or false. If I say I am, but my claim is false, that can be perjury.
On the other hand, suppose I publish a song that sounds a lot like "Stairway to Heaven". Is that infringement? It depends. It depends on how close my song is to Stairway, it depends on how much of my song sounds like Stairway, it depends on if my song is a parody of Stairway. Ultimately, it's a matter of opinion (though there are guidelines). You can't commit perjury by stating that it is (or is not) infringing, because that's a matter of opinion.
It may well be negligence, which opens the door to a civil suit.
> Should open the door to perjury charges
That's a common misconception, and the reason I specifically ended the post by highlighting which clause that applies to:
> > Note that in (vi), the "under penalty of perjury" comes AFTER the word "and", not before. it applies only to the statement of agency.
The clause is:
âoeunder penalty of perjury, that the complaining party
is authorized to act on behalf of the owner" It applies only if I were to send a DMCA notice claiming that I represent LucasFilm, asking that a copy of Star Wars be taken down. I don't work for LucasFilm, so that would be a lie. It does NOT say "under penalty of perjury that everything in the notice is true and the judge and jury will agree with all of it". The perjury attestation is only regarding the identification of the person sending the notice.
Being less-than-careful about whether or not it's actually infringement would be negligence, and the person could be sued. It wouldn't be criminal perjury unless they lied about being a representative of the copyright holder. Of course it depends on what the person knows about how much the system they are using sucks.
> since there's no way "good faith" is satisfied by...
"Good faith" doesn't really add anything significant here. In US law, good faith basically goes to intent - it means they are trying to take care of infringements, rather than maliciously trying to cause improper takedowns. 'Good faith" is -almost- the same thing as "lack of malice" - the person didn't set out with the goal of causing harm, even if they weren't very careful about avoiding harm.
> I'm 99% sure that a notice generated by a bot is not a valid DMCA notice.
What do you mean by "valid"? Do you mean 1) "correctly identifies an actual infringement which is not fair use or any other defense", or do you mean 2) "is a notice, as defined by DMCA"? Or do you mean 3) "I think that somewhere in the DMCA it says that you're not allowed to use any computer programs to assist in generating notices"?
As to 3), here's the text of the law. https://www.law.cornell.edu/us... You'l notice it does not ban the use of software to create notices. In fact, it says almost nothing about -creating- notices, it's all about what a service provider must do when they -receive- a notice.
It's the second meaning that matters. The company hosting the content has to act when they receive a notice. They can't / don't have to decide whether the content actually infringes, they only have to realize that they have received a notice. A notice is defined as a communication which "substantially complies" with these requirements:
(i) A physical OR ELECTRONIC signature of a person authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.
(ii) Identification of the copyrighted work claimed to have been infringed [the name of the song/movie/etc that was copied] or, if multiple copyrighted works at a single online site are covered by a single notification, a representative list of such works at that site.
(iii) Identification of the material that is claimed to be infringing or to be the subject of infringing activity and that is to be removed or access to which is to be disabled, and information reasonably sufficient to permit the service provider to locate the material. [The URL]
(iv) Information reasonably sufficient to permit the service provider to contact the complaining party, such as an address, telephone number, and, if available, an electronic mail address at which the complaining party may be contacted.
(v) A statement that the complaining party has a good faith belief that use of the material in the manner complained of is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law.
(vi) A statement that the information in the notification is accurate, and under penalty of perjury, that the complaining party is authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.
Note that in (vi), the "under penalty of perjury" comes AFTER the word "and", not before. it applies only to the statement of agency.
Slashdot Mirror
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice ... do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
If you prefer North Korea-style society, you are welcome to move there.
If you started with nothing and had to buy all of the tooling and equipment, recruit people, etc., I could see this easily costing $1 million, but the winner is an inverter company. They already have all of the tooling, equipment, expertise, etc.
They "just" needed to optimize one of their existing designs for size. Also, they only needed a working prototype, not a full production model. How do you figure that costs a million dollars?
Ps- if there are any fighter pilots in here, or people good at fighter sim games, yes I know that I greatly oversimplified and left out 90% of the relevant factors. I did so in order to focus on one or two relevant factors without distractions.
> always trying to get behind the enemy aircraft
Sort of, but not exactly. Imagine a giant sphere with the opponent in the circle . If you're anywhere in the rear half of the sphere, you have positional advantage . If you're in the front half of the sphere, the other guy does. (Ignoring gravity and energy, for sake of simplicity) . Of course it's not just one sphere 3,000 feet in diameter, but an infinite number of spheres of various sizes. So basically half the battle space is "behind" and half the battle space is "in front", not just the line DIRECTLY behind.
If you're 10 degrees left of directly behind and 20 degrees above, you can fire on him. With a front cannon, you point your aircraft in his direction and fire. With a rear-facing cannon, you'd need to point your aircraft such that the enemy is DIRECTLY behind you in order in aim the cannon at him. That's exactly where you don't want him! You'd never maneuver to try to put him directly behind you when he's firing from anywhere in the "behind" half of the air space.
One may think "a rear cannon and a front cannon both have to be aimed, so they're the same". There are two differences. An obvious difference is that maneuvering the aircraft to aim forward is easier than maneuvering to aim backward for the same reasons that driving forward is easier than driving backward.
Just as important, the pilots aren't only maneuvering for aim, changing which direction the aircraft points. The aircraft are also moving through the sky. You're trying to "lead" the opponent with your aim, aiming where he WILL be later, when the butllets get there. In other words, you're aiming in front of your opponent. With both aircraft moving in roughly the same direction, with turning with roughly the same arc, shooting in front of you will naturally tend to shoot in front of the other guy . Shooting behind you will tend to shoot behind him , where he's already been rather than where he's about to be.
Seeker missiles don't have to be aimed as precisely as cannons, but they should be shot in the right general direction , so the same ideas apply. It's just less crucial.
Today's consumer biometrics really are a lot like PIN numbers or physical keys made of brass. If a particular scanner has a one-in-million chance of a false match, that means that hundreds of people in the US will have the same type of fingerprint, within the ability of the system to classify them. That is, one scan of my finger is unlikely to "match" a scan of YOUR finger, but it's very likely to match the scan of SOMEONE'S finger. Much like some people will use the same PIN number on their debit card, but it's unlikely that you specifically use the same PIN that I use.
They therefore do NOT identify one user out of millions. Physical keys, like you use on your front door, are similar- the #1 manufacturer, Kwikset, only makes about 20,000 different keys. A locksmith can pick a lock in seconds or minutes. Yet that's good enough for the vast majority of security needs.
Like PIN numbers, current consumer biometrics are good in either of two roles:
Weak authentication, like a signature or PIN, or physical key). For most things in my life, I'm not worried about the NSA. A four-digit number, Kwikset key, or cheap fingerprint scanner is sufficient to secure my kid's locker at school, or keep the kid out of the chemicals cabinet in the garage. It's fine for securing my fireworks box because someone could just BUY $500 worth of fireworks. My security just needs to encourage people to buy their own rather than taking mine.
Multi-factor authentication. If you have my key fob in your pocket, AND pass fingerprint authentication, you can take my car. You can spend money from my bank account of you know my (strong) password AND pass fingerprint auth AND don't trigger the bank's fraud detection algorithms.
I don't think I'll ever understand why some people, apparently including yourself, have some random guess about what might be, based on no evidence whatsoever, then fervently believe it and argue to defend it. If you bothered to read even the first few pages of the book, you'd have an idea of what his thesis is. Instead, for some reason I'll never understand, you've randomly come up with some guess as to what his book may be about, and you're committed to arguing that.
You asked that I state explicitly what it is you said that's misleading (or in this case utterly false). Here's one:
> You extract his position on a specific and detailed debate, and convert it to a poorly generalized argument that is easily attacked.
No, his book is NOT about the death penalty. In fact, only a few pages cover that case. It's NOT one specific debate. As the title suggests, his book is about the influence of global views on Supreme Court decisions and vice versa. As another commenter here stated, his view, his philosophy, is radically different from what the court has always done in the past.
You then (intentionally? unknowingly? ) conflate precedent (PRE-cedent, what came before) with Breyer's radical philosophy of deciding US Constitutional law based on current popular opinion in Europe and around the world. These aren't the same thing at all.
> And if the government is operating the way it *should* be, then the gathering, processing and collating of this data should all be routed through a record so that -- voila -- anytime the government, itself, needs to know what it has on hand then it knows where exactly to look and in one place.
Lol. That's quite the opposite of the US federal government.
In some ways, it's a good thing that the federal government isn't designed for efficiency, that speed and efficiency aren't anywhere on the priority list. As a most obvious example, it would be far quicker and more efficient to have Kim Jong Obama make all of the decisions unilaterally rather than have the whole country debate policy. Heck, it took more than a decade to decide to do Hilarycare, and more than 10 more years to implement it after it was passed. (Including renaming it "Obamacare" along the way.) A dictator would be more efficient, but then you end up with North Korea. So we don't really want efficient government ; we want fair government, we want transparent government, we want big policy decisions to be made carefully, thoughtfully - slowly. Efficiency isn't what we want in government.
SOME planes are rated for bird strikes at takeoff speed. You'll notice in the second video a bunch of planes with major damage from bird strikes.
This confusion led to a humorous moment on Mythbusters. They wanted to test the story about frozen chickens vs thawed, but even their thawed chickens kept going right through the aircraft. It turns out the junked aircraft they used for testing was not rated for bird strikes. Many (most?) general aviation planes aren't.
> Vice President will then take over as Acting President.
There was a big fight about that in 1841. John Tyler insisted that he was President, his political opponents insisted that he was merely Acting President. He refused to open the letters they sent him, addressed to Acting President. Tyler won the fight. He was President.
Later, the 25th Amendment removed all doubt. The 25th begins with these words:
In case of the removal of the President from office or of his death or resignation, the Vice President shall become President.
Kasich obviously can't win the nomination outright via the primaries. 99.5% chance Rubio can't either. What they CAN do is stash enough delegates to deny Trump the majority he needs to become the automatic nominee. When Kasich and probably Rubio drop out after the first convention vote, their delegates become free to vote for anyone else. That'll be the agreed non-Trump nominee. That's why they are still getting big-money donations and other support - because by dividing up the delegates four ways, Trump can't get a strict majority and the convention will be free to choose someone other than Trump. That's also why Ben Carson SUSPENDED his campaign rather than ended it- suspending means he can still select a few anti-Trump delegates. Most if not all of the drop outs suspended for that reason, and also if they had campaign debt.
If they all dropped out and supported Cruz NOW, Cruz might win 48% to Trumps 52%. By offering four primary candidates, hopefully Trump will get less than 50%, then at the convention the anti-Trump delegates (the majority) will choose the nominee.
To illustrate a bit further for those who don't "get it", virtually every gun made today, from pistols to machine guns, is a John Moses Browning design. People have tweaked things here and there, adjusted the size and shape, but they mechanisms for all types of guns are John Browning's designs. Second place is Gaston Glock, for figuring out which plastic could be used to make a frame for a Browning breach-lock design.
Basically, John Browning is the one guy we trust with our lives. We trust his designs. When he designs a smart gun, I'll buy one. That really is holding "smart" guns to the same standard we hold traditional guns - we trust their design only if John Browning signs off on the design. Of course he's been dead since 1926, so that's unlikely.
Actually any "smart" gun would almost have to be the opposite of Browning's genius - he's THE gun designer because he was a master of simplicity, of having the fewest possible moving parts. Simplicity, few parts to go wrong, is what makes his designs so reliable. That's the opposite of "smart".
Your smart thermostat is so complex and therefore difficult to FULLY understand that it can't be made secure or reliable; they get hacked and crash. That may be okay for a thermostat.
> or a gun person (amazing how those seem to go hand in hand) then you have to make stupid comments about how they'll never be able to make a smart gun that works
Your ignorance of the topic is glaring. I'm making this post via my smart phone. Often, as I post on Slashdot, my smart phone suddenly hides the keyboard, so that as I begin to press the "h" or "j" keys, they vanish and the press instead goes to the Submit button which was underneath. I end up posting half a post because the smarts in my smart phone decided it was time to remove the keyboard from my screen.
Sometimes, my smart phone phone randomly locks up for a few seconds, which is no big deal because it only lasts maybe ten seconds before it starts working again. That kind of thing happens with smart devices.
In 2011, the model 1911 (introduced in the year 1911) was still the world's most popular handgun because it's been proven reliable (partially because it has only about foir moving parts that are critical). When your smart gun locks up for ten seconds, that's enough time for the bad to put ten bullets in you.
In a gun fight, a snafu with your hardware means you are dead. We carry the hundred-year-old 1911 model because reliability means life. A bug, an imperfection, an "undocumented feature" with your handgun means your kids no longer have dad, so that's why we're not interested in nifty new designs with cool new features.
The upgrade cycle on handgun designs for serious users is about once every hundred years for this reason. After 30 years of torture-testing the Glock design, including testing it after burying it in sand, in swamp, etc., we've started to trust that it's reliable, and it's taking it's place as the handgun design for this century. We pay $650 for a Glock rather than $250 for a very similar Kel-Tec model because we trust the Glock's reliability just a little bit more. In defense guns, reliability is life, so we'll absolutely pay more than twice as much to get something 2% more reliable.
Go bury your smart gun in wet sand, in a swamp, drop it down the stairs, then test it. Keep doing this for 30 or 40 years and you'll meet the testing standards we've always required of any new design.
Well said. You seem to know a bit about law, yet I haven't noticed your nick in other legal threads. I shall have to start watching for your posts.
> should NOT be patentable
You are of course welcome to your own opinion about what SHOULD be patentable.
What IS patentable under US law is of course unaffected by your opinion. "Recognize emotions in facial photos via a new method comprising ..." is in fact patentable for virtually any wording in place of the ellipses. Actual US law, which you're free to like or dislike, is that it doesn't matter whether you describe the multiplication operation as a lever, gear, pulley, using the * symbol, a left shift, or any other way. What matters is whether it's new (novel) and useful. A method of recognizing emotions in photographs is useful regardless of whether it's done with gears, bytecode, or both.
Sorry if you don't think it SHOULD be so, it is. (And anyone who knows what an ASIC is knows why it -must- be so).
> Code is instructions to a computer to do something
That's what your fourth-grade teacher told you with the sandwich- making demonstration, but that's not really true of most languages used since about 1978.
Most languages today include a lot of stuff for humans, and also tell the compiler / query optimizer / etc which RESULT the program should ACHIEVE. The process the computer uses, the steps it takes, are not in the code. This is blindingly obvious if you compare 1960s cursor-based database code (which was procedural) to modern SQL, which is declarative. The SQL code directly specifies what the result should be. What the computer does to get that result is completely unknown to the programmer, and may change completely based on external factors. It can also be seen in modern implementations of a procedural language like C. The computer may completely remove large sections of the task description (code) and turn others inside-out. It's only expected to come up with some series of actions which end up producing the same RESULT as what is described in the code.
Further, computers run executables, humans read programming languages (code).
Try reading Excel.exe. It's almost impossible because compiled executables are written for computers, not humans. Executables use math to useful things. Programming languages (code), on the other hand, is written for humans. We can read excel_main_form.c and understand it. Source code DESCRIBES, in human-readable terms, what will be done. If executable programs are like a strange form of math, source code is like a math textbook. It describes, to humans, the operations to be done. The compiler will completely delete portions of it in order to use that description to create an executable which actually does the operations.
That's an interesting thought. I know less-informed Slashdot commenters, who have never read the relevant law, make those claims. I would be surprised if an EFF lawyer made those claims about code. They might say that about one specific algorithm, which can be expressed in English, code, or hardware.
You mention two mistakes, wrong about both the law and the facts.
The statute on patentability says:
The laws of nature, including the laws physics and the laws of math, aren't patentable
That makes sense given that the laws of physics and the laws math aren't inventions.
HOWEVER, there is a common misconception among laymen. The operation of an elevator is physics- gravity, magnetism, etc. Newton's laws, etc. There is, however, "Newton's 743rd law" which states "to move people to the top of a building, you must install a motor at the top and a counterweight on the side and ...". The elevator was an invention, it USES the laws of physics, but an elevator is not a law of physics.
Similarly, a law of mathematics is that a+b=b+a. There is no law of mathematics that says "to recognize a face in an image, you must XOR the brightness of each vertical segment with ...". A new facial recognition system is an invention. It USES the laws of math, but facial recognition is not a law of mathematics.
You can't patent gravity, you can patent an elevator. You can't patent the commutative law (a+b=b+a), you can patent a new way of doing facial recognition.
That's the mistake of law.
Factually, trying reading Excel.exe. It's almost impossible because compiled executables are written for computers, not humans. Executables use math to useful things. Source code, on the other hand, is written for humans. We can read excel_main_form.c and understand it. Source code DESCRIBES, in human-readable terms, what will be done. If executable programs are like a strange form of math, source code is like a math textbook. It describes, to humans, the operations to be done. The compiler will completely delete portions of it in order to use that description to create an executable which actually does the operations.
The reply by AthanasiusKircher does a pretty good job of explaining why your reasoning is misguided, and frankly misleading. There's no need for me to repeat the facts laid out there. As to Justice Breyer's book, which explains his philosophy at length, you might want to read it before arguing about what it says.
What happens in France matters in the rest of the world. Obviously we're seeing more and more references to "Europe" and "European law" as the continent becomes more and more like a single country. Less obvious, perhaps, is the effect on American law.
Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer's book is called The Court and the World. His central thesis is that the US Supreme Court should make decisions about the Constitutionally of US law by consulting foreign law, particularly laws of Europe. If European countries don't have capital punishment, it must be very bad and therefore unconstitutional, he wrote in one US Supreme Court opinion. If France outlaws encryption, it's okay for the US to do the same, according to Justice Breyer's philosophy. What happens in Europe matters, everywhere.
Slashdot stripped the "html" out of my post rather than that encoding it. The html tags frame, img, embed, and "a" did essentially the same "object linking and embedding " as Microsoft's complex solution did.
In the early 1990s, Microsoft spent something like a hundred million dollars developing a technology suite which was immediately eplaced by the html tags , , and .
This is one of two reasons that Microsoft absolutely freaked out when the web started becoming popular - it did the same thing as their new "killer app", in a MUCH simpler way. Their new COM technology was a newer version of something they called Object Linking and Embedding (OLE). The web had a much simpler way to link and embed documents.
For a little while, Microsoft even tried to stop the web from becoming popular. When it was obvious that wouldn't work, they tried marketing COM as a web technology, under the name ActiveX.
Anyway, they had invested very heavily in trying to solve the same problem that frames solved, but their solution was a super- complex solution that took years to develop and an 800 page book to explain. A solution so simple as wasn't obvious to Microsoft.
The DMCA requires that the site list the contact information for the designated agent as follows:
(A) the name, address, phone number, and electronic mail address of the agent.
That's in  512. So requiring a web form of any kind, with or without a captcha, would require a change of law.
The Backblaze implementation of top-loading drives is one well-known example. They've 45 drives in 3U (or 4U?) for many years.
https://www.backblaze.com/blog...
Nowadays you can order a 90-bay top loader off the shelf from Super Micro:
http://www.supermicro.com/prod...
PS, here's why the perjury clause is limited only to agency. Suppose I say that I'm a lawyer representing LucasFilm. That's either true or false. If I say I am, but my claim is false, that can be perjury.
On the other hand, suppose I publish a song that sounds a lot like "Stairway to Heaven". Is that infringement? It depends. It depends on how close my song is to Stairway, it depends on how much of my song sounds like Stairway, it depends on if my song is a parody of Stairway. Ultimately, it's a matter of opinion (though there are guidelines). You can't commit perjury by stating that it is (or is not) infringing, because that's a matter of opinion.
It may well be negligence, which opens the door to a civil suit.
> Should open the door to perjury charges
That's a common misconception, and the reason I specifically ended the post by highlighting which clause that applies to:
> > Note that in (vi), the "under penalty of perjury" comes AFTER the word "and", not before. it applies only to the statement of agency.
The clause is:
âoeunder penalty of perjury, that the complaining party
is authorized to act on behalf of the owner"
It applies only if I were to send a DMCA notice claiming that I represent LucasFilm, asking that a copy of Star Wars be taken down. I don't work for LucasFilm, so that would be a lie. It does NOT say "under penalty of perjury that everything in the notice is true and the judge and jury will agree with all of it". The perjury attestation is only regarding the identification of the person sending the notice.
Being less-than-careful about whether or not it's actually infringement would be negligence, and the person could be sued. It wouldn't be criminal perjury unless they lied about being a representative of the copyright holder. Of course it depends on what the person knows about how much the system they are using sucks.
> since there's no way "good faith" is satisfied by ...
"Good faith" doesn't really add anything significant here. In US law, good faith basically goes to intent - it means they are trying to take care of infringements, rather than maliciously trying to cause improper takedowns. 'Good faith" is -almost- the same thing as "lack of malice" - the person didn't set out with the goal of causing harm, even if they weren't very careful about avoiding harm.
> I'm 99% sure that a notice generated by a bot is not a valid DMCA notice.
What do you mean by "valid"? Do you mean 1) "correctly identifies an actual infringement which is not fair use or any other defense", or do you mean 2) "is a notice, as defined by DMCA"? Or do you mean 3) "I think that somewhere in the DMCA it says that you're not allowed to use any computer programs to assist in generating notices"?
As to 3), here's the text of the law.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/us...
You'l notice it does not ban the use of software to create notices. In fact, it says almost nothing about -creating- notices, it's all about what a service provider must do when they -receive- a notice.
It's the second meaning that matters. The company hosting the content has to act when they receive a notice. They can't / don't have to decide whether the content actually infringes, they only have to realize that they have received a notice. A notice is defined as a communication which "substantially complies" with these requirements:
(i) A physical OR ELECTRONIC signature of a person authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.
(ii) Identification of the copyrighted work claimed to have been infringed [the name of the song/movie/etc that was copied] or, if multiple copyrighted works at a single online site are covered by a single notification, a representative list of such works at that site.
(iii) Identification of the material that is claimed to be infringing or to be the subject of infringing activity and that is to be removed or access to which is to be disabled, and information reasonably sufficient to permit the service provider to locate the material. [The URL]
(iv) Information reasonably sufficient to permit the service provider to contact the complaining party, such as an address, telephone number, and, if available, an electronic mail address at which the complaining party may be contacted.
(v) A statement that the complaining party has a good faith belief that use of the material in the manner complained of is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law.
(vi) A statement that the information in the notification is accurate, and under penalty of perjury, that the complaining party is authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.
Note that in (vi), the "under penalty of perjury" comes AFTER the word "and", not before. it applies only to the statement of agency.