Prefacing a statement of fact with the words "in my opinion" is not a "get out of libel free" card.
Saying something highly illegal happens in the backroom of the Austin PD is not a statement of opinion at all (it's a statement of fact), and saying it an opinion does not make it so. If you have no reasonable basis for making the statement (and this is a pretty loose standard), and it is not true, then it is libel. If you DO have a reasonable basis, then it is "reporting", and you have 1st amendment protection.
Libelous speech is not protected speech. Never has been, never will. It matters not that the speech is online and was intended to be anonymous.
If a post consists of "Austin cops suck!", it is obviously a protected matter of opinion.
"Austin cops' mothers were hamsters and their fathers smelled of elderberries!": Obviously an exaggeration and/or satirical, and is protected via Flynt v. Falwell.
"Austin cops routinely have orgies in the backroom with arrested hookers!": Libelous (if not true) and not protected in any sense of the word. Unleash those subpeonas!
Just sayin' that this isn't necessarily bogus, and depends on the posts in question.
Just about any evidence can be fabricated. Fingerprints can be planted, "eyewitnesses" can be fooled with a disguise, DNA can be planted, etc. This is not a reason to exclude it entirely.
Are you saying we should never hear testimony from witnesses, ever, because it is so easy for them to lie? Kind of hard to have a trial without witnesses.
If the cops arrest you based on evidence obtained via a tracking device, then your attorney can counter with any of the defenses you mentioned.
I assume you are remarking about my comment that I don't think a warrant should be necessary.
The reason I think this is because your car can already be clandestinely followed and tracked with no permission needed from anybody. A cop (or private citizen, for that matter) in an unmarked car can legally follow you all over town, record your movements, heck, even publish them on the internet if he wants, all on a whim.
If doing it in an expensive, manpower-intensive, failure-prone way is perfectly legal to do for any reason whatsoever, I think probable cause should be enough to stick something to the inside of your fender.
Slashdot News Flash! If the cops obtain a warrant, they can do stuff they can't do otherwise!
Personally, I don't even think a warrant should be necessary, but MA has gone above and beyond here and required one. If your house can be searched, your phone tapped, your DNA scanned, your financial records checked, etc., with a warrant, why not a tracking device on your car?
It's not pretty. Oracle would have a hard time putting less money in, as the only products that look halfway decent are so far out they are pretty much complete vapor.
HP's Itanic... whoops!... Itanium boxes are in the same league as Sun's SPARC boxes and IBM's POWER products, so without Sun, IBM would not exactly be standing unchallenged. (That said, the PA-RISC to Itanic transition in HP admittedly did not go well...)
In addition, I would go so far as to say that Sun wasn't in the mainframe business either. They made really big UNIX boxes, but did not make mainframes. About the only other mainframe company that comes to mind is the Tandem (now HP) NonStop line of products. Unisys claims to make some, and there are a couple of other tiny players out there. But yeah, IBM pretty much had a mainframe monopoly before, and the still have one now.
Given how little money Sun had, and how many layoffs they were making and had in the works, for Oracle to invest "more" in Solaris/SPARC than Sun did alone wouldn't take much. What would be actually interesting would be information on the updated product roadmap, which is currently a bit sparse and extremely out of date.
Firstly, it should have been obvious to the courts that the allegedly defamatory speech was crossing the bounds of believability, ala Fallwel vs. Flynt, so it was a bad court decision straight off.
However, Google did exactly what I would have expected them to do; they stayed on the sidelines and then only when an actual court order was produced, gave up the requested information. Google has no business need to protect the anonymity of their users at all costs, nor should anybody expect them to. They didn't cave at the first sign of trouble like the AOL of yore did, and it is unreasonable to require them to do more than they did.
SirWired
Screw Dan Brown's facts, or lack thereof
on
Tetraktys
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· Score: 1
Even if Dan Brown were a scrupulous fact-checker, merely weaving in plot points to his collection of "facts", his books would still be complete and utter crap. I tried to get through one and couldn't make it past twenty pages. It was downright painful to read. The dialogue was horrible and the background text even worse.
For a file server, sure ZFS is a great solution, because most of the data just sits there and is never modified. NetApp has used copy-on-write for years in WAFL for this reason.
But the writers of databases are not morons and techniques such as copy-on-write are not new; the DB's already do what they can to optimize how writes are committed to the database. They don't need the help of a filesystem to optimize this process, as the possible optimizations, have already been made. If random writes were a problem before with a given database, they are still going to be a problem.
Most of the whitepapers on ZFS w/ databases show essentially no major performance difference between Direct I/O, UFS or ZFS with databases of any significant size.
The fact that SSD perf drops like a rock when you actually need to be absolutely sure the data makes it to disk is huge factor in enterprise storage. No enterprise storage customer is going to accept the possibility their data goes down the bit-bucket just because somebody tripped over the power cord. Enterprise databases are built around the idea that when the storage stack says data has been written, it has, in fact, been written. Storage vendors spend a great deal of money, effort, and complexity guaranteeing the non-volatility of write cache; for SSD to ignore that requirement when publishing performance data is fundamentally dishonest.
1) Most high-end RAID controllers aren't used for file serving. They are used to serve databases. Changes in filesystem technology don't affect them one bit, as most of the storage allocation decisions are made by the database. 2) Assuming that a SSD controller that can pump 55k IOPS w/ 512B I/O's can do the same w/ 4K I/O's is stupid and probably wrong. That is Cringely math; could this guy possibly be as lame? 3) The databases high-end RAID arrays get mostly used for do not now, and never have, used much bandwidth. They aren't going to magically do so just because the underlying disks (which the front-end server never even sees) can now handle more IOPS.
All SSD's do is flip the Capacity/IOPS equation on the back end. Before, you ran out of drive IOPS before ran out of capacity. Now, you get to run out of capacity before you run out of IOPS on the drive side.
Even if you have sufficient capacity (due to the rapid increase in SSD capacity), you are still going to run out of IOPS capacity on the RAID controller before you run out of IOPS or bandwidth on the drives. The RAID controller still has a lot of work to do with each I/O, and that isn't going to change just because the back-end drives are now more capable.
As a corporation, if you have facilities in a certain state, you are expected to abide by the laws of that state. New York gets the money because the AG filed the suit and did all the work. I suppose the FTC could join in the fun if they wanted to... but it looks like there is no need here.
You are getting a degree in Computer Science, not attending trade school. Their job is to give you the tools you need to analyze and solve computer problems. Your career is your job. If that means obtaining expertise in a particular language on your own, so be it.
Going over a lot of different languages will give you the tools you need to understand almost any computer language. In any case, CompSci curriculums don't change nearly fast enough to keep up with Language of the Week.
It's actually a good thing your school is doing what they are... too many CompSci programs dont.
The first time I obtained security clearance, we were all told that not only were we barred for life from talking about any classified data without permission, but that they would keep the physical piece of paper that we signed stating we understood all this for at least 75 years.
They want to preclude the possibility that you will EVER think about claiming you didn't know the restrictions.
Right now, you can get a cheap Blu-Ray player for not much more than what I paid for my first DVD player. However, I have not even felt a twinge in that general direction; I've been too spoiled by $4 to $6 movies, and until I can routinely get Blu-Ray discs for under $10, forget it. There are really very few movies I would re-buy in Blu-Ray, further reducing my desire to buy one of those things.
I do have a 1080p TV, and a usable 7.1 receiver waiting for the day when it does make sense though...
Let me first say that it is obvious that the request is over-broad. I can't imagine anybody turning over their complete passwords; I certainly wouldn't. However, for political appointees, a request to reveal your online "handle"(s) is both legal and common. If you are going for a political job, it makes perfect sense to make sure your appointees don't have publicly accessible views incompatible with your administration.
However, for civil servants, yeah... tell them to go jump in a lake. The request for information on your personal life is none of their business, and probably highly illegal. It is not a problem, nor is it relevant, if an assistant librarian hangs out with the local Klan after hours. It would be relevant for the mayor's chief of staff though...
The summary clearly states that the logging of IPs is to be stopped. As a server admin, no, I don't give a damn about the actual ID of a person using an IP. But how am I to "report the IP" that is causing the problem if I can't log IPs to begin with?
The least credible source about the quality of the food at a restaurant is going to be the restaurant itself. All else being equal, I'd rank it even below that of an anonymous source; wouldn't you?
In any case, if I claim that the anonymous postings come from a rival, and I'm actually right, haven't I just "outed" the rival? Me saying it is, and should be, fine to "out" a rival was the whole point of my post!
If I'm looking for a place to eat, I'm likely to avoid places with a slew of negative reviews outright. I'm not going to say to myself "Hmmm... let me go and blow my evening to find out if the food really is as horrible and the service as bad as the last twelve reviews said?" All else being equal, I'm going to go to the place with fewer negative reviews.
If I own the victimized restaurant, how am I supposed to counter the reviews without revealing I know they were written by my rival? Just post up: "No really, our food is tasty and the service great!" Who's going to take a risk and believe self-serving crap like that?
Okay, let's say I did have a reasonable expectation of privacy when posting anonymously online... I own a restaurant and start spamming nasty (but not libelous) reviews about the competition. Does that make it illegal for my competitor to point out that my reviews come from their business rival (and therefore are biased) if they figure out it's me? Should they be able to use a subpeona to find out? No. But if they figure it out without breaking any laws, or abusing the legal process, why shouldn't they be able to publish what they have figured out?
Now that would be horrible violation of free speech. As anyone with any familiarity of 1st amendment law knows (and yes, I know this case is in the UK), prior restraint is subject to strict scrutiny. This doesn't even come close to meeting that standard. I can't imagine a single lowly district judge that wouldn't slap any such law down without hesitation.
I am making a wild guess that this service is one fanned-out locally by an ISP instead of fed individually to all users from a central source. (NBC did something like that for the olympics.) ESPN is offering this as a service to ISP's who would like to provide these live feeds to their customers. I see no difference between this and an e-mail provider offering to provide e-mail services to a particular ISP. This looks no different than any other subscription service, only in this case the subscribers are ISPs instead of individual users. Given the bandwidth live content requires, this makes perfect sense.
SAP is in the business of making money, not supporting or not supporting free software. I imagine they support some efforts when it suits their interests (like Eclipse), and oppose others, when it doesn't ("all software should be free".) Of course their participation in open-source is self-interested; they are a business, not a charity. I doubt SAP gives one flying *bleep* about being a "serious, respected player in the world of open source."
I have a funny feeling Oracle, DB2, and MS SQL executives aren't exactly quivering in abject terror at the idea of a database with "a third coordinate with elements like product reviews, blog posts, Twitter messages and the like."
"Real time updates" are a new feature (and a "fourth dimension")? That's news to me... I thought batch-only updates went out with punchcards.
I'm pretty sure this Google thing has some interesting features, but I am equally sure that it has nothing to do with the buzzword-stuff from that marketing drone/"IT Consultant."
Slashdot Mirror
Prefacing a statement of fact with the words "in my opinion" is not a "get out of libel free" card.
Saying something highly illegal happens in the backroom of the Austin PD is not a statement of opinion at all (it's a statement of fact), and saying it an opinion does not make it so. If you have no reasonable basis for making the statement (and this is a pretty loose standard), and it is not true, then it is libel. If you DO have a reasonable basis, then it is "reporting", and you have 1st amendment protection.
SirWired
Libelous speech is not protected speech. Never has been, never will. It matters not that the speech is online and was intended to be anonymous.
If a post consists of "Austin cops suck!", it is obviously a protected matter of opinion.
"Austin cops' mothers were hamsters and their fathers smelled of elderberries!": Obviously an exaggeration and/or satirical, and is protected via Flynt v. Falwell.
"Austin cops routinely have orgies in the backroom with arrested hookers!": Libelous (if not true) and not protected in any sense of the word. Unleash those subpeonas!
Just sayin' that this isn't necessarily bogus, and depends on the posts in question.
SirWired
Just about any evidence can be fabricated. Fingerprints can be planted, "eyewitnesses" can be fooled with a disguise, DNA can be planted, etc. This is not a reason to exclude it entirely.
Are you saying we should never hear testimony from witnesses, ever, because it is so easy for them to lie? Kind of hard to have a trial without witnesses.
If the cops arrest you based on evidence obtained via a tracking device, then your attorney can counter with any of the defenses you mentioned.
SirWired
I assume you are remarking about my comment that I don't think a warrant should be necessary.
The reason I think this is because your car can already be clandestinely followed and tracked with no permission needed from anybody. A cop (or private citizen, for that matter) in an unmarked car can legally follow you all over town, record your movements, heck, even publish them on the internet if he wants, all on a whim.
If doing it in an expensive, manpower-intensive, failure-prone way is perfectly legal to do for any reason whatsoever, I think probable cause should be enough to stick something to the inside of your fender.
SirWired
Slashdot News Flash! If the cops obtain a warrant, they can do stuff they can't do otherwise!
Personally, I don't even think a warrant should be necessary, but MA has gone above and beyond here and required one. If your house can be searched, your phone tapped, your DNA scanned, your financial records checked, etc., with a warrant, why not a tracking device on your car?
SirWired
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/09/11/sun_sparc_roadmap_revealed/
It's not pretty. Oracle would have a hard time putting less money in, as the only products that look halfway decent are so far out they are pretty much complete vapor.
SirWired
HP's Itanic... whoops!... Itanium boxes are in the same league as Sun's SPARC boxes and IBM's POWER products, so without Sun, IBM would not exactly be standing unchallenged. (That said, the PA-RISC to Itanic transition in HP admittedly did not go well...)
In addition, I would go so far as to say that Sun wasn't in the mainframe business either. They made really big UNIX boxes, but did not make mainframes. About the only other mainframe company that comes to mind is the Tandem (now HP) NonStop line of products. Unisys claims to make some, and there are a couple of other tiny players out there. But yeah, IBM pretty much had a mainframe monopoly before, and the still have one now.
Given how little money Sun had, and how many layoffs they were making and had in the works, for Oracle to invest "more" in Solaris/SPARC than Sun did alone wouldn't take much. What would be actually interesting would be information on the updated product roadmap, which is currently a bit sparse and extremely out of date.
SirWired
Firstly, it should have been obvious to the courts that the allegedly defamatory speech was crossing the bounds of believability, ala Fallwel vs. Flynt, so it was a bad court decision straight off.
However, Google did exactly what I would have expected them to do; they stayed on the sidelines and then only when an actual court order was produced, gave up the requested information. Google has no business need to protect the anonymity of their users at all costs, nor should anybody expect them to. They didn't cave at the first sign of trouble like the AOL of yore did, and it is unreasonable to require them to do more than they did.
SirWired
Even if Dan Brown were a scrupulous fact-checker, merely weaving in plot points to his collection of "facts", his books would still be complete and utter crap. I tried to get through one and couldn't make it past twenty pages. It was downright painful to read. The dialogue was horrible and the background text even worse.
SirWired
For a file server, sure ZFS is a great solution, because most of the data just sits there and is never modified. NetApp has used copy-on-write for years in WAFL for this reason.
But the writers of databases are not morons and techniques such as copy-on-write are not new; the DB's already do what they can to optimize how writes are committed to the database. They don't need the help of a filesystem to optimize this process, as the possible optimizations, have already been made. If random writes were a problem before with a given database, they are still going to be a problem.
Most of the whitepapers on ZFS w/ databases show essentially no major performance difference between Direct I/O, UFS or ZFS with databases of any significant size.
SirWired
The fact that SSD perf drops like a rock when you actually need to be absolutely sure the data makes it to disk is huge factor in enterprise storage. No enterprise storage customer is going to accept the possibility their data goes down the bit-bucket just because somebody tripped over the power cord. Enterprise databases are built around the idea that when the storage stack says data has been written, it has, in fact, been written. Storage vendors spend a great deal of money, effort, and complexity guaranteeing the non-volatility of write cache; for SSD to ignore that requirement when publishing performance data is fundamentally dishonest.
SirWired
1) Most high-end RAID controllers aren't used for file serving. They are used to serve databases. Changes in filesystem technology don't affect them one bit, as most of the storage allocation decisions are made by the database.
2) Assuming that a SSD controller that can pump 55k IOPS w/ 512B I/O's can do the same w/ 4K I/O's is stupid and probably wrong. That is Cringely math; could this guy possibly be as lame?
3) The databases high-end RAID arrays get mostly used for do not now, and never have, used much bandwidth. They aren't going to magically do so just because the underlying disks (which the front-end server never even sees) can now handle more IOPS.
All SSD's do is flip the Capacity/IOPS equation on the back end. Before, you ran out of drive IOPS before ran out of capacity. Now, you get to run out of capacity before you run out of IOPS on the drive side.
Even if you have sufficient capacity (due to the rapid increase in SSD capacity), you are still going to run out of IOPS capacity on the RAID controller before you run out of IOPS or bandwidth on the drives. The RAID controller still has a lot of work to do with each I/O, and that isn't going to change just because the back-end drives are now more capable.
SirWired
As a corporation, if you have facilities in a certain state, you are expected to abide by the laws of that state. New York gets the money because the AG filed the suit and did all the work. I suppose the FTC could join in the fun if they wanted to... but it looks like there is no need here.
SirWired
You are getting a degree in Computer Science, not attending trade school. Their job is to give you the tools you need to analyze and solve computer problems. Your career is your job. If that means obtaining expertise in a particular language on your own, so be it.
Going over a lot of different languages will give you the tools you need to understand almost any computer language. In any case, CompSci curriculums don't change nearly fast enough to keep up with Language of the Week.
It's actually a good thing your school is doing what they are... too many CompSci programs dont.
SirWired
The first time I obtained security clearance, we were all told that not only were we barred for life from talking about any classified data without permission, but that they would keep the physical piece of paper that we signed stating we understood all this for at least 75 years.
They want to preclude the possibility that you will EVER think about claiming you didn't know the restrictions.
SirWired
Right now, you can get a cheap Blu-Ray player for not much more than what I paid for my first DVD player. However, I have not even felt a twinge in that general direction; I've been too spoiled by $4 to $6 movies, and until I can routinely get Blu-Ray discs for under $10, forget it. There are really very few movies I would re-buy in Blu-Ray, further reducing my desire to buy one of those things.
I do have a 1080p TV, and a usable 7.1 receiver waiting for the day when it does make sense though...
SirWired
Let me first say that it is obvious that the request is over-broad. I can't imagine anybody turning over their complete passwords; I certainly wouldn't. However, for political appointees, a request to reveal your online "handle"(s) is both legal and common. If you are going for a political job, it makes perfect sense to make sure your appointees don't have publicly accessible views incompatible with your administration.
However, for civil servants, yeah... tell them to go jump in a lake. The request for information on your personal life is none of their business, and probably highly illegal. It is not a problem, nor is it relevant, if an assistant librarian hangs out with the local Klan after hours. It would be relevant for the mayor's chief of staff though...
SirWired
The summary clearly states that the logging of IPs is to be stopped. As a server admin, no, I don't give a damn about the actual ID of a person using an IP. But how am I to "report the IP" that is causing the problem if I can't log IPs to begin with?
SirWired
The least credible source about the quality of the food at a restaurant is going to be the restaurant itself. All else being equal, I'd rank it even below that of an anonymous source; wouldn't you?
In any case, if I claim that the anonymous postings come from a rival, and I'm actually right, haven't I just "outed" the rival? Me saying it is, and should be, fine to "out" a rival was the whole point of my post!
SirWired
I hope you are being sarcastic...
If I'm looking for a place to eat, I'm likely to avoid places with a slew of negative reviews outright. I'm not going to say to myself "Hmmm... let me go and blow my evening to find out if the food really is as horrible and the service as bad as the last twelve reviews said?" All else being equal, I'm going to go to the place with fewer negative reviews.
If I own the victimized restaurant, how am I supposed to counter the reviews without revealing I know they were written by my rival? Just post up: "No really, our food is tasty and the service great!" Who's going to take a risk and believe self-serving crap like that?
SirWired
Okay, let's say I did have a reasonable expectation of privacy when posting anonymously online... I own a restaurant and start spamming nasty (but not libelous) reviews about the competition. Does that make it illegal for my competitor to point out that my reviews come from their business rival (and therefore are biased) if they figure out it's me? Should they be able to use a subpeona to find out? No. But if they figure it out without breaking any laws, or abusing the legal process, why shouldn't they be able to publish what they have figured out?
Now that would be horrible violation of free speech. As anyone with any familiarity of 1st amendment law knows (and yes, I know this case is in the UK), prior restraint is subject to strict scrutiny. This doesn't even come close to meeting that standard. I can't imagine a single lowly district judge that wouldn't slap any such law down without hesitation.
SirWired
I am making a wild guess that this service is one fanned-out locally by an ISP instead of fed individually to all users from a central source. (NBC did something like that for the olympics.) ESPN is offering this as a service to ISP's who would like to provide these live feeds to their customers. I see no difference between this and an e-mail provider offering to provide e-mail services to a particular ISP. This looks no different than any other subscription service, only in this case the subscribers are ISPs instead of individual users. Given the bandwidth live content requires, this makes perfect sense.
SirWired
SAP is in the business of making money, not supporting or not supporting free software. I imagine they support some efforts when it suits their interests (like Eclipse), and oppose others, when it doesn't ("all software should be free".) Of course their participation in open-source is self-interested; they are a business, not a charity. I doubt SAP gives one flying *bleep* about being a "serious, respected player in the world of open source."
SirWired
I have a funny feeling Oracle, DB2, and MS SQL executives aren't exactly quivering in abject terror at the idea of a database with "a third coordinate with elements like product reviews, blog posts, Twitter messages and the like."
"Real time updates" are a new feature (and a "fourth dimension")? That's news to me... I thought batch-only updates went out with punchcards.
I'm pretty sure this Google thing has some interesting features, but I am equally sure that it has nothing to do with the buzzword-stuff from that marketing drone/"IT Consultant."
SirWired