Note that the link given was not to the study itself, but to a newspaper report on the study. Reporters and editors might have butchered the facts. But if it was described accurately, the UK gov't just wasted a research grant.
What particularly bothered me was all the claims of better skills being "developed". You can support that claim only with a longitudinal study, where you measure the abilities of your test and control groups repeatedly over a period of years. Then, if the two groups had the same scores at the beginning and different scores at the end, you might have actually proved something. If you randomly picked who went into groups x1 (gamers) and x2 (TV-watchers), and then sent a large man out to shadow each test subject and force him to conform to your plan, it probably did. But when the groups are self-selected, it's possible that choosing x1 and developing more y are both due to z, which you don't know enough to measure. And in a cross-sectional study (that doesn't follow the subjects over time), choosing x1 was quite likely related to having more y in the first place.
For example, although it's not surprising if shooter-type video games improve eye-hand coordination, merely showing that gamers average better ehc doesn't tell you whether gamers developed that from gaming, or the uncoordinated just bombed out of the games and went back to the boob tube. To me, showing that moderate video gamers go out for sports more makes it seem likely that they were better coordinated to begin with. (E.g, terrible coordination kept me out of sports as a kid -- and if video games had been invented, I don't think I'd have been racking up the record scores. D&D, in the original text-based version, was a game I really could get into -- but I was too adult by then to have the free time.)
As for intelligence, it's obvious that smart kids select challenging entertainment, while boobs prefer to watch the boob tube. It wouldn't be suprising if it also works the other way around (games increase intelligence) but you can't prove it either way from just a correlation. Likewise, video games quite likely increase your ability to concentrate, but you'd see the same correlation if people who couldn't concentrate didn't play the games.
So this really doesn't say anything that a reasonable and unbiased person wouldn't have guessed in the first place. The only reason the authors (or perhaps just the reporter?) seem surprised is that they were biased against "geeks" going in. This report, devoid of real information as it is, might help dispell that prejudice. Bookmark it and beat the geek-haters over the head with it regularly -- they're too dumb to see the flaws, right? 8-)
Carlo Giuliani... was throwing a fire extinguisher at a heavily armored police vehicle. The police officers... were in no danger.
Depends. One man pounding on an armored car is little danger (except possibly to the re-painting budget). One hundred are a danger. I didn't get a good view of the vehicle, but police riot vehicles are generally not tanks, they are just trucks with extra heavy sheet metal and window glass. Let enough people pound the windows for long enough, and they will break. Beyond that, there are ways one man on foot can immobilize or destroy the heaviest army tank if he is allowed to get up close with a crowbar, gasoline, or many other common items.
I doubt that the Italian police mistook that fire extinguisher for a molotov cocktail, and chances are they weren't in that much danger from the whole crowd. So shooting probably was an overreaction. But even so,
1. It's an isolated incident. (At least I assume the Italian police don't gun down protestors more often than other western countries, which is to say hardly ever.)
2. They shot one man, where the Chinese police/military in similar (or probably less physically threatening) situations have used machine guns on the crowd.
3. Most of all, people are free to talk about it, post the pictures, and campaign to remove the politicians ultimately responsible for this from office. You won't see the Chinese authorities allowing anything like that sort of free and open discussion in their country -- even if they have to shut down internet cafes and censor servers.
China was never truly communist. Nor was any other nation -- "from each according to his ability, to each according to need" works within a family, and can be made to work for a while in small groups of unrelated people, but is so unstable when more than a few hundred people are involved as to mutate to something else before implementation has more than begun. China and Soviet Russia were really fascist states using Marxist ideology as a cover story.
Obviously the internet cafes MUST be controlled so people don't anonymously let out state secrets. For instance, that the elementary school kids were being put to work making fireworks before the school exploded...
Love that enthusiasm, but: what the C/S professor can publish in his paper is a description of the crack. Probably not the source code. Certainly not the binaries. It's good for those of us who know what to do with a.cpp file, and especially those who can turn a description back into source code, but unless the whole DMCA is thrown out (and not replaced by a more narrowly written law), you'll still cross the line into illegality when you install the DECSS crack on your grandma's computer so she can view foreign DVD's.
Paying your debts is morally imperative. Giving away the money that might have paid part of the nation's debts is something else...
Actually, I'm enraged by your claim to "moral" imperatives, but on practical grounds, sending out the $300 checks as an advance on a small tax cut next year is the one intelligent part of the package. We've for once in history got the luxury of a substantial surplus (projected), but if we DON'T use part of it to keep the economy going, the surplus will evaporate as incomes and tax revenues fall. According to economic theory, releasing this money _now_ should help keep the current economic blip from turning into a deep recession. (Or worse -- the stock market hasn't become so overinflated or dropped so hard since 1929... But I think federal and state gov'ts helped turn that crash into the Great Depression by initially raising taxes to cover increased welfare bills -- even FDR initially tried to keep a balanced budget in 1933. Doing the opposite as early as possible is just good sense.)
But in the long run, the surplus has got to be paid off. It's a pipeline that takes several hundred billion dollars a year in interest payments from ordinary Americans and into the pockets of some of the richest Americans. Paying it off as soon as possible is the right thing to do, and the smart thing to do. The majority of W's tax cut not only jeopardizes paying off the surplus while kicking in too slowly to help with the present economic slowdown, but it's also ridiculous on its face. Cut the estate tax for ten years, then bring it back? Make college tuition deductible for just four years?? (Does that have anything to do with the fact that W has twins in college right now???)
The one good counter-argument is that, judging by history, if the money is available, Congress will spend it. (And if the money wasn't available, they'd spend it anyhow.) With a (mostly) Republican congress and president for the first time since Eisenhower, "smaller government" now being the Republican mantra, and no Cold War to suck up the cash, things really ought to be different. But I think that history has shown that no matter how much Rep. voters want smaller gov't, the people who win office on that ticket really don't want to shrink their own roles... BUT, there was one sensible suggestion made right at the beginning of the congressional session: tie tax cuts to paying down the debt, so any vote to spend more would automatically be a vote to tax more. It wasn't the Dems that shot that down.
What I want is for them to cut spending A WHOLE LOT, kill entire gov't departments (Education, HUD, DEA, BATF, and about 3/4 of the EPA, DOE, and FBI just for starters), slash taxes an equal amount, pay off the debt, and then we can really cut taxes. But you can't always get what you want...
But the RIAA did not bring a false suit, they only threatened to bring a false suit. That isn't barratry. Sending unfounded threats of lawsuits is a kind of harassment, intended to either frighten someone out of doing something he or she is legally entitled to do, or to cause him or her to expend time and money consulting a lawyer to determine if there is any foundation to the threat. I don't know of any law specifically allowing collection of damages for this (IANAL), but there ought to be one -- I'd suggest a right of the recipient to demand a show-cause hearing, a simple fixed fee (say $5,000) if the sender defaults by not showing up in court to demonstrate that the threat is founded, while if the sender does fight in court and lose, the recipient gets all legal fees plus damages.
In this particular case, there should be another avenue for redress. The letter was clearly intended to prevent the recipient from making a speech, and it succeeded in that (I presume due to it being timed so the legal issues couldn't be worked out before the conference). That sounds to me like a civil rights violation -- which is both a tort and a crime. I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for the Bushies to prosecute a corporation, but the professor doesn't have to get permission from the (in)Justice Dept to sue.
This sounds like an attempt to automate formal verification. And formal verification can work, but at best it proves that the program meets the spec. Usually the problem is that the customer decides he wants something else when he sees the program running according to spec. So you do better by implementing part of the spec, getting the customer to play with it, then changing the spec accordingly.
On the other hand, will this detect whether or not the programmer put anything in place to catch a buffer overflow? Considering that Microsoft has issued six patches since December, each because an unchecked buffer allowed a security exploit,...
Wrong. The first analogy I could think of was "I stopped after shooting off 3 of his toes, so that's OK, right?" Or if you were selling unauthorized copies of Disney's Snow White, Disney would want you to stop doing that, destroy all unsold tapes, pay them their catalog price times the number of tapes, and after bankrupting you thus they'd probably try to have you sent to prison on criminal charges too.
Sounds a little harsh, but AFAIK the law lets them do it. (IANAL) If you want to complain about it, write your congressman. If he still reads anything that isn't accompanied by $$$$...
If they can't get the toothpaste back in the tube (i.e., if they can't recall ALL their binaries which violated the GPL), then they should have to release the offending source under the GPL. Wrong. The most a court could order them to do is to pay damages and stop infringing the copyright. (In other words, if you sold 1 million copies of a pirated Disney video, they don't make you go get those tapes back, but rather you've got to pay Disney for the sales they presumably lost -- and that's probably more than your gross revenue from the tapes.) Since you can't lose revenue on free software, in this case the cost would be the "statutory damages", which I've been told are now $100,000. I think that would pay _part_ of the cost of going to court. So once Vidoma has ceased infringing, filing suit would just enrich the lawyers.
On the other hand, if Vidoma really wants to be sure it's over, they should offer each of the authors something (say $1,000) as a settlement in full -- otherwise it would indeed be possible for one of them (if he's rich enough) to sue for those damages. The likely result of this is that each set of lawyers gets $500K, leaving the plaintiff -400K, Vidoma -600K, lawyers +1M, but there are people pigheaded enough to be happy with that!
if there is something that can only be accomplished one way, and people are likely to find the solution independently, should such a thing even be copyrightable?
In such a case, a patent would be more appropriate. In cases of independent inventions of the same thing, patent law gives full rights to the first inventer (in the US) or filer (in the rest of the world). Copyright law just assumes that no two people are ever going to independently make up the same story and tell it the same way, and doesn't define any way to resolve the issue if that's what really happened.
Someone convicted of copyright infringement can be liable for up to $100,000 of statutory damages per infringement. Thanks, phr1, I was thinking about statutory damages but couldn't remember the number. Besides paying damages (real or statutory), the offender has to STOP infringing the copyright. Vidomi did that. Since they are no longer infringing, taking them into court over past infringement would be a lose-lose proposition. Since there is no lost revenue, the best that could happen would be getting the full statutory damages, and the lawyers would take that to cover their expenses and ask for their fees besides...
However, I would have held out for a symbolic $1 damage payment also, just to establish that Vidomi recognized that they had infringed copyright. (It's not a bad deal for Vidomi either: if they settle and the copyright holders accept a nominal payment, then no one can change their mind and decide to sue later.)
The thing is, the congresscritters are already skilled at writing tax breaks so that they turn out to apply to just one corporation. So if you don't watch them really closely on something like this, they'll construct the specs so that only one company currently has a product that qualifies, and maybe they've got patents that ensure nobody else can design anything to meet those specs. Not that in this case it is hard to write performance-oriented specs that are simple, attainable, and don't favor any one company, but how does a congress-critter repay his, er, contributors that way?
The specs I'd use for the machines:
--Leaves a hard-copy trail, so it is practical to manually spot-check machine counts, and to hand-count in a disputed election.
--Proven error rate in recording votes as marked: 0.5%
--Proven error rate of a random sample of people in marking ballots as intended: 1.5%
--Secret ballot.
That's all required for the mechanics of voting, and hand-counting would qualify. I would also require some procedural safeguards:
--Minimal use of absentee ballots. You can't pre-vote everyone who asks for an absentee ballot (e.g. someone serving overseas in the military), but do pre-vote whenever possible.
--Use the best systems available to check registration lists before elections and to ID the voters on election day. Like, have a computer cross-reference the registration list to the death certificates, for crissakes.
--Provisional voting procedure in place to deal with disputed voters (missing from registration list, questions about ID, etc.): You put the ballot inside a plain envelope, put that inside another envelope with the voters alleged name, etc., and after election day you figure out which ballots are valid and count them with the absentee ballots.
--Uniform hours, long enough that everyone gets through. Never shut out people who were standing in line an hour before closing.
--Manually spot-check the machine counts
--Full hand re-count required if the election is within the error bars in recording votes as marked, or if machine problems are discovered. This is not something the candidates have to ask for. You owe it to the _voters_ to count the votes right.
Users of all operating systems behave like this. Not entirely. If MS tech support has to put up with a lot of flack, they deserve it for selling software that is barely ready for beta test... I've seen MacManiacs flying off the handle at the least hint that other systems might be OK, but rarely the foul-mouthed, illiterate, non-stop ranting that seems standard for immature Linux fans. Judging by the communications and logical thinking skills shown in their messages, these must be script-kiddies that got Linux to load once, by accident.
I've been very happy with my HP system at home -- once I cleaned out the crap software they loaded on top of Win98SE. Only trouble is getting a chance to use it between my grandkids running JumpStart and my wife cruising the web... Never even thought about upgrading the Windows on it. I still need DOS support sometimes, and Win98 is the best of the line that descended from DOS. (And I do mean descended;-)
HP printers are a little different. Almost every one I've ever dealt with came with a driver disk that shouldn't have been released quite yet. Go to their web site, download the newest drivers, and generally it's OK. But there have been glitches in the interface between CAD programs, HP printers or plotters, and Windoze that never were satisfactorily resolved. Whoever writes their printer drivers is not too good at it. They'd do better if they published the specs and let others write the drivers, because their hardware can't be beat.
1. Go into a booth with a computer, printer, and paper shredder. On the computer, you make your choices, it verifies that you didn't vote too many times for one office, then it prints out a Scantron form. Check it, fill in any write-in names, and turn it in. Scanning is over 99% accurate under these circumstances -- and if the election comes in within the error margin of the scanners, they can hand-count scanner forms as easily as other paper ballots, and much better than punch cards. The computers will have earphones for use by the blind. If it's considered desirable, they could have pictures of the candidates for the illiterate.
2. For the techno-phobic, there are fill-in-the-box scanner forms and #2 pencils. They may have more spoiled ballots due to voting for two presidents, etc., but I don't see anywhere in the Constitution that guarantees equal rights to morons who can't count to two. (Of course, I would like to see far fewer things on the ballot like "Trustees of Michigan State University. Pick 5 out of 14" Who are these people and why in heck are we voting for them anyhow?)
Let's definitely NOT have federally-specified voting systems. If we were to have a single voting system across the country, first think of the massive bribery, I mean campaign contributions, as Congress gets to pick the winner in the marketplace, and then think of the possibilities for cracking... Set some minimum standards for accuracy and security, resolving voter registration problems, getting everyone who's standing in line through before you close, and let the states and localities pick a system that meets the requirements. E.g., there's no reason to make a village with 500 people buy a fancy system designed for cities of millions, hand-counting will do quite well. I would consider federally mandated opening and closing times, the same across the nation, and a ban on news media trying to guess the winner before the polls close.
And finally, Americans should GROW UP. You don't have a right to know who the winner is before going to bed on election day. If it takes a few of weeks for a sufficiently accurate count, quit whining and be glad you don't live in 1820 when the results had to come in by horseback!
Yes, in the US we have a whole bunch of stuff on the ballot. At a minimum, there's the President, Congressman, and Senator (if it's a senatorial election year). But the states are allowed to add other things. In Michigan, we also had state senators and representatives, various state executive branch officials that ought to be appointed by the governor instead, MI supreme court judges, the boards of state-run colleges, various ballot initiatives (that's a direct vote on a proposed law), and I think there were even county officials. It was a very crowded 11x17 scanner form. About the only offices that don't go on that ballot are the township and village officers and the governor. (The governor has 4 year terms, with elections at the presidential mid-terms so presidential politics don't get mixed up with that election. That's one of the two best provisions of the 1963 MI constitution, the other one being the balanced budget requirement. It should be extended to other offices.)
IIRC they did some of the Florida recounts in secret. Not that I heard of. In one place (Miami?) they were recounting in a glass room where anyone could look in from outside, but very few were allowed inside -- until this was stopped by a near-riot by Republicans who claimed they weren't getting a good enough view... (Maybe true, but the Republicans have been too damned good at the "big lie" technique ever since George I's "read my lips...")
Actually, there is one even simpler voting system: You get several piggy-banks with good locks, and chain them down inside the voting booth. You put a picture of a candidate on each piggy-bank. You give each voter one token.
The fundamental problem with net voting is even worse than the things you brought up. It's campaign workers going out with bags of $100 bills to buy votes and watching while people vote on their home computers. Of course, absentee voting has the same problem, but in most elections there aren't enough absentee ballots to change the results, so the chance that buying votes will make a difference isn't worth the risk of getting caught.
Back in the 1800's there _was_ rampant vote buying. Prosecuting the vote buyers did not suffice to stop it. Secret ballots did. If you mistakenly approach an honest citizen to buy votes, you've lost that vote for sure -- but a less honest citizen is probably going to take your money and vote the other way too. So if you've got a better way of keeping ballots secret than to let only one person at a time into the voting booth, please let me know.
Cable is a shared medium, like ethernet. The more people on the same segment, the less bandwidth each one gets.
So how do you avoid paying for a cable modem, then 6 months later it becomes slower than 56K? Well, first, see if they put any sort of meaningful service guarantee in their contract. (If so, let us know. I want to invest in that company, if they look likely to actually meet their commitments!) Or see if you can call one of their executives and ask about segment size. Quite likely the response will be "Segments???" Avoid that company, unless you think it's going to be quite a while before they hook up too many modems.
The other thing that can go wrong, and it affects _everything_, is that the server the cable, DSL, or whatever goes through is too slow for the traffic, or the connection out from there is not wide enough. This would cause slowdowns even if you had your own direct fiber-optic cable to the server. Companies that allow bottlenecks to develop here are just plain irresponsible. What did you expect when you signed a contract that said you were responsible for paying them, and they were responsible for nothing at all?
Disputes about prior art are usually matters of fact which require a full-scale trial before a jury if the parties can't reach an agreement. The judge apparently tried to kill the case before it got to that by ruling that, as a matter of law, internet downloads weren't even infringing. The appeals court tossed it back to him. Now he might have to bring in a jury. Juries are pretty unpredictable, but I think the odds are against the patent holders -- a judge might accept that as a matter of law a patent with 40-some obviously invalid claims (to inventing modems, remote "file duplication commands", etc.) and one possibly valid claim (paid downloads) may still be valid as to that one claim. A jury is either going to assume that if it's 98% invalid it's all invalid, or are going to do a bit of jury nullification and punish the SOB's who wrote that patent for making them read it and sit through the trial. (At least, that's what I would do...)
Wouldn't the concept of FTP, being designed in an RFC from 1980 be prior art?
Certainly, as far as free downloads are concerned. The news article doesn't exactly say, but I think the case has been about paid downloads -- so to really kill this thing, you should find a paid download using encryption for security predating 1983.
For some strange psychological reason people are much more sensitive to waiting around two minutes for a bus to come than they are to, say, crawling slowly through traffic for half an hour.
I don't like driving, walk more than most Americans, and will take alternate transport when it works, but busses don't. I don't know about that "strange psychological reason", but I wouldn't be too happy about walking 6 blocks to the bus stop, then sitting in the bus with a bunch of strangers while _it_ crawls through the same traffic, then walking another six blocks to work. And I've never lived where the buses even came that close, unless they didn't run early or late enough to cover my work shifts... For two tours (about 6 years) at Cannon Air Force Base, New Mexico my primary transportation to work (about 1-1/2 miles) was bicycle. But I still had to have a car available for the few days it rained. (Around there, rain is usually mixed with golf-ball sized hail, so you take it seriously.) When it snowed, I walked -- it gives you the best chance of dodging the sliding pickup trucks. On another assignment, I mostly used a moped to cover 6 miles, but once again had to have a car for bad weather. (I'm now in Northern Michigan, where the weather is usually bad, and I'm getting too old to ride in the rain.)
Two other issues are the perception of danger, and physical condition. You probably won't get mugged at the bus stop or on the subway, but you _could_, and the evening news will tell you all about the one person who got mugged rather than the millions that didn't. (Quick--how many of you know that the chances of being murdered has been going lower for everyone except young urban black men since 1980, and even for them since 1995?) Riding a two-wheeler beside a busy road definitely feels more dangerous than riding inside a large chunk of steel going down that road, and it probably really is more dangerous. Finally, if I hadn't stayed in better condition than most Americans, I would have been tossed out for failing the Air Force's wimpy physical fitness tests.
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Note that the link given was not to the study itself, but to a newspaper report on the study. Reporters and editors might have butchered the facts. But if it was described accurately, the UK gov't just wasted a research grant.
What particularly bothered me was all the claims of better skills being "developed". You can support that claim only with a longitudinal study, where you measure the abilities of your test and control groups repeatedly over a period of years. Then, if the two groups had the same scores at the beginning and different scores at the end, you might have actually proved something. If you randomly picked who went into groups x1 (gamers) and x2 (TV-watchers), and then sent a large man out to shadow each test subject and force him to conform to your plan, it probably did. But when the groups are self-selected, it's possible that choosing x1 and developing more y are both due to z, which you don't know enough to measure. And in a cross-sectional study (that doesn't follow the subjects over time), choosing x1 was quite likely related to having more y in the first place.
For example, although it's not surprising if shooter-type video games improve eye-hand coordination, merely showing that gamers average better ehc doesn't tell you whether gamers developed that from gaming, or the uncoordinated just bombed out of the games and went back to the boob tube. To me, showing that moderate video gamers go out for sports more makes it seem likely that they were better coordinated to begin with. (E.g, terrible coordination kept me out of sports as a kid -- and if video games had been invented, I don't think I'd have been racking up the record scores. D&D, in the original text-based version, was a game I really could get into -- but I was too adult by then to have the free time.)
As for intelligence, it's obvious that smart kids select challenging entertainment, while boobs prefer to watch the boob tube. It wouldn't be suprising if it also works the other way around (games increase intelligence) but you can't prove it either way from just a correlation. Likewise, video games quite likely increase your ability to concentrate, but you'd see the same correlation if people who couldn't concentrate didn't play the games.
So this really doesn't say anything that a reasonable and unbiased person wouldn't have guessed in the first place. The only reason the authors (or perhaps just the reporter?) seem surprised is that they were biased against "geeks" going in. This report, devoid of real information as it is, might help dispell that prejudice. Bookmark it and beat the geek-haters over the head with it regularly -- they're too dumb to see the flaws, right? 8-)
Depends. One man pounding on an armored car is little danger (except possibly to the re-painting budget). One hundred are a danger. I didn't get a good view of the vehicle, but police riot vehicles are generally not tanks, they are just trucks with extra heavy sheet metal and window glass. Let enough people pound the windows for long enough, and they will break. Beyond that, there are ways one man on foot can immobilize or destroy the heaviest army tank if he is allowed to get up close with a crowbar, gasoline, or many other common items.
I doubt that the Italian police mistook that fire extinguisher for a molotov cocktail, and chances are they weren't in that much danger from the whole crowd. So shooting probably was an overreaction. But even so,
1. It's an isolated incident. (At least I assume the Italian police don't gun down protestors more often than other western countries, which is to say hardly ever.)
2. They shot one man, where the Chinese police/military in similar (or probably less physically threatening) situations have used machine guns on the crowd.
3. Most of all, people are free to talk about it, post the pictures, and campaign to remove the politicians ultimately responsible for this from office. You won't see the Chinese authorities allowing anything like that sort of free and open discussion in their country -- even if they have to shut down internet cafes and censor servers.
China was never truly communist. Nor was any other nation -- "from each according to his ability, to each according to need" works within a family, and can be made to work for a while in small groups of unrelated people, but is so unstable when more than a few hundred people are involved as to mutate to something else before implementation has more than begun. China and Soviet Russia were really fascist states using Marxist ideology as a cover story.
Obviously the internet cafes MUST be controlled so people don't anonymously let out state secrets. For instance, that the elementary school kids were being put to work making fireworks before the school exploded...
Love that enthusiasm, but: what the C/S professor can publish in his paper is a description of the crack. Probably not the source code. Certainly not the binaries. It's good for those of us who know what to do with a .cpp file, and especially those who can turn a description back into source code, but unless the whole DMCA is thrown out (and not replaced by a more narrowly written law), you'll still cross the line into illegality when you install the DECSS crack on your grandma's computer so she can view foreign DVD's.
"engaging in any other activity that will affect prejudicially an owner of copyright." Like a bad review?
Paying your debts is morally imperative. Giving away the money that might have paid part of the nation's debts is something else...
Actually, I'm enraged by your claim to "moral" imperatives, but on practical grounds, sending out the $300 checks as an advance on a small tax cut next year is the one intelligent part of the package. We've for once in history got the luxury of a substantial surplus (projected), but if we DON'T use part of it to keep the economy going, the surplus will evaporate as incomes and tax revenues fall. According to economic theory, releasing this money _now_ should help keep the current economic blip from turning into a deep recession. (Or worse -- the stock market hasn't become so overinflated or dropped so hard since 1929... But I think federal and state gov'ts helped turn that crash into the Great Depression by initially raising taxes to cover increased welfare bills -- even FDR initially tried to keep a balanced budget in 1933. Doing the opposite as early as possible is just good sense.)
But in the long run, the surplus has got to be paid off. It's a pipeline that takes several hundred billion dollars a year in interest payments from ordinary Americans and into the pockets of some of the richest Americans. Paying it off as soon as possible is the right thing to do, and the smart thing to do. The majority of W's tax cut not only jeopardizes paying off the surplus while kicking in too slowly to help with the present economic slowdown, but it's also ridiculous on its face. Cut the estate tax for ten years, then bring it back? Make college tuition deductible for just four years?? (Does that have anything to do with the fact that W has twins in college right now???)
The one good counter-argument is that, judging by history, if the money is available, Congress will spend it. (And if the money wasn't available, they'd spend it anyhow.) With a (mostly) Republican congress and president for the first time since Eisenhower, "smaller government" now being the Republican mantra, and no Cold War to suck up the cash, things really ought to be different. But I think that history has shown that no matter how much Rep. voters want smaller gov't, the people who win office on that ticket really don't want to shrink their own roles... BUT, there was one sensible suggestion made right at the beginning of the congressional session: tie tax cuts to paying down the debt, so any vote to spend more would automatically be a vote to tax more. It wasn't the Dems that shot that down.
What I want is for them to cut spending A WHOLE LOT, kill entire gov't departments (Education, HUD, DEA, BATF, and about 3/4 of the EPA, DOE, and FBI just for starters), slash taxes an equal amount, pay off the debt, and then we can really cut taxes. But you can't always get what you want...
In this particular case, there should be another avenue for redress. The letter was clearly intended to prevent the recipient from making a speech, and it succeeded in that (I presume due to it being timed so the legal issues couldn't be worked out before the conference). That sounds to me like a civil rights violation -- which is both a tort and a crime. I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for the Bushies to prosecute a corporation, but the professor doesn't have to get permission from the (in)Justice Dept to sue.
On the other hand, will this detect whether or not the programmer put anything in place to catch a buffer overflow? Considering that Microsoft has issued six patches since December, each because an unchecked buffer allowed a security exploit, ...
Sounds a little harsh, but AFAIK the law lets them do it. (IANAL) If you want to complain about it, write your congressman. If he still reads anything that isn't accompanied by $$$$...
On the other hand, if Vidoma really wants to be sure it's over, they should offer each of the authors something (say $1,000) as a settlement in full -- otherwise it would indeed be possible for one of them (if he's rich enough) to sue for those damages. The likely result of this is that each set of lawyers gets $500K, leaving the plaintiff -400K, Vidoma -600K, lawyers +1M, but there are people pigheaded enough to be happy with that!
In such a case, a patent would be more appropriate. In cases of independent inventions of the same thing, patent law gives full rights to the first inventer (in the US) or filer (in the rest of the world). Copyright law just assumes that no two people are ever going to independently make up the same story and tell it the same way, and doesn't define any way to resolve the issue if that's what really happened.
However, I would have held out for a symbolic $1 damage payment also, just to establish that Vidomi recognized that they had infringed copyright. (It's not a bad deal for Vidomi either: if they settle and the copyright holders accept a nominal payment, then no one can change their mind and decide to sue later.)
The specs I'd use for the machines:
--Leaves a hard-copy trail, so it is practical to manually spot-check machine counts, and to hand-count in a disputed election.
--Proven error rate in recording votes as marked: 0.5%
--Proven error rate of a random sample of people in marking ballots as intended: 1.5%
--Secret ballot.
That's all required for the mechanics of voting, and hand-counting would qualify. I would also require some procedural safeguards:
--Minimal use of absentee ballots. You can't pre-vote everyone who asks for an absentee ballot (e.g. someone serving overseas in the military), but do pre-vote whenever possible.
--Use the best systems available to check registration lists before elections and to ID the voters on election day. Like, have a computer cross-reference the registration list to the death certificates, for crissakes.
--Provisional voting procedure in place to deal with disputed voters (missing from registration list, questions about ID, etc.): You put the ballot inside a plain envelope, put that inside another envelope with the voters alleged name, etc., and after election day you figure out which ballots are valid and count them with the absentee ballots.
--Uniform hours, long enough that everyone gets through. Never shut out people who were standing in line an hour before closing.
--Manually spot-check the machine counts
--Full hand re-count required if the election is within the error bars in recording votes as marked, or if machine problems are discovered. This is not something the candidates have to ask for. You owe it to the _voters_ to count the votes right.
Users of all operating systems behave like this. Not entirely. If MS tech support has to put up with a lot of flack, they deserve it for selling software that is barely ready for beta test... I've seen MacManiacs flying off the handle at the least hint that other systems might be OK, but rarely the foul-mouthed, illiterate, non-stop ranting that seems standard for immature Linux fans. Judging by the communications and logical thinking skills shown in their messages, these must be script-kiddies that got Linux to load once, by accident.
HP printers are a little different. Almost every one I've ever dealt with came with a driver disk that shouldn't have been released quite yet. Go to their web site, download the newest drivers, and generally it's OK. But there have been glitches in the interface between CAD programs, HP printers or plotters, and Windoze that never were satisfactorily resolved. Whoever writes their printer drivers is not too good at it. They'd do better if they published the specs and let others write the drivers, because their hardware can't be beat.
1. Go into a booth with a computer, printer, and paper shredder. On the computer, you make your choices, it verifies that you didn't vote too many times for one office, then it prints out a Scantron form. Check it, fill in any write-in names, and turn it in. Scanning is over 99% accurate under these circumstances -- and if the election comes in within the error margin of the scanners, they can hand-count scanner forms as easily as other paper ballots, and much better than punch cards. The computers will have earphones for use by the blind. If it's considered desirable, they could have pictures of the candidates for the illiterate.
2. For the techno-phobic, there are fill-in-the-box scanner forms and #2 pencils. They may have more spoiled ballots due to voting for two presidents, etc., but I don't see anywhere in the Constitution that guarantees equal rights to morons who can't count to two. (Of course, I would like to see far fewer things on the ballot like "Trustees of Michigan State University. Pick 5 out of 14" Who are these people and why in heck are we voting for them anyhow?)
Let's definitely NOT have federally-specified voting systems. If we were to have a single voting system across the country, first think of the massive bribery, I mean campaign contributions, as Congress gets to pick the winner in the marketplace, and then think of the possibilities for cracking... Set some minimum standards for accuracy and security, resolving voter registration problems, getting everyone who's standing in line through before you close, and let the states and localities pick a system that meets the requirements. E.g., there's no reason to make a village with 500 people buy a fancy system designed for cities of millions, hand-counting will do quite well. I would consider federally mandated opening and closing times, the same across the nation, and a ban on news media trying to guess the winner before the polls close.
And finally, Americans should GROW UP. You don't have a right to know who the winner is before going to bed on election day. If it takes a few of weeks for a sufficiently accurate count, quit whining and be glad you don't live in 1820 when the results had to come in by horseback!
Yes, in the US we have a whole bunch of stuff on the ballot. At a minimum, there's the President, Congressman, and Senator (if it's a senatorial election year). But the states are allowed to add other things. In Michigan, we also had state senators and representatives, various state executive branch officials that ought to be appointed by the governor instead, MI supreme court judges, the boards of state-run colleges, various ballot initiatives (that's a direct vote on a proposed law), and I think there were even county officials. It was a very crowded 11x17 scanner form. About the only offices that don't go on that ballot are the township and village officers and the governor. (The governor has 4 year terms, with elections at the presidential mid-terms so presidential politics don't get mixed up with that election. That's one of the two best provisions of the 1963 MI constitution, the other one being the balanced budget requirement. It should be extended to other offices.)
IIRC they did some of the Florida recounts in secret. Not that I heard of. In one place (Miami?) they were recounting in a glass room where anyone could look in from outside, but very few were allowed inside -- until this was stopped by a near-riot by Republicans who claimed they weren't getting a good enough view... (Maybe true, but the Republicans have been too damned good at the "big lie" technique ever since George I's "read my lips...")
Actually, there is one even simpler voting system: You get several piggy-banks with good locks, and chain them down inside the voting booth. You put a picture of a candidate on each piggy-bank. You give each voter one token.
Back in the 1800's there _was_ rampant vote buying. Prosecuting the vote buyers did not suffice to stop it. Secret ballots did. If you mistakenly approach an honest citizen to buy votes, you've lost that vote for sure -- but a less honest citizen is probably going to take your money and vote the other way too. So if you've got a better way of keeping ballots secret than to let only one person at a time into the voting booth, please let me know.
So how do you avoid paying for a cable modem, then 6 months later it becomes slower than 56K? Well, first, see if they put any sort of meaningful service guarantee in their contract. (If so, let us know. I want to invest in that company, if they look likely to actually meet their commitments!) Or see if you can call one of their executives and ask about segment size. Quite likely the response will be "Segments???" Avoid that company, unless you think it's going to be quite a while before they hook up too many modems.
The other thing that can go wrong, and it affects _everything_, is that the server the cable, DSL, or whatever goes through is too slow for the traffic, or the connection out from there is not wide enough. This would cause slowdowns even if you had your own direct fiber-optic cable to the server. Companies that allow bottlenecks to develop here are just plain irresponsible. What did you expect when you signed a contract that said you were responsible for paying them, and they were responsible for nothing at all?
Disputes about prior art are usually matters of fact which require a full-scale trial before a jury if the parties can't reach an agreement. The judge apparently tried to kill the case before it got to that by ruling that, as a matter of law, internet downloads weren't even infringing. The appeals court tossed it back to him. Now he might have to bring in a jury. Juries are pretty unpredictable, but I think the odds are against the patent holders -- a judge might accept that as a matter of law a patent with 40-some obviously invalid claims (to inventing modems, remote "file duplication commands", etc.) and one possibly valid claim (paid downloads) may still be valid as to that one claim. A jury is either going to assume that if it's 98% invalid it's all invalid, or are going to do a bit of jury nullification and punish the SOB's who wrote that patent for making them read it and sit through the trial. (At least, that's what I would do...)
Certainly, as far as free downloads are concerned. The news article doesn't exactly say, but I think the case has been about paid downloads -- so to really kill this thing, you should find a paid download using encryption for security predating 1983.
I don't like driving, walk more than most Americans, and will take alternate transport when it works, but busses don't. I don't know about that "strange psychological reason", but I wouldn't be too happy about walking 6 blocks to the bus stop, then sitting in the bus with a bunch of strangers while _it_ crawls through the same traffic, then walking another six blocks to work. And I've never lived where the buses even came that close, unless they didn't run early or late enough to cover my work shifts... For two tours (about 6 years) at Cannon Air Force Base, New Mexico my primary transportation to work (about 1-1/2 miles) was bicycle. But I still had to have a car available for the few days it rained. (Around there, rain is usually mixed with golf-ball sized hail, so you take it seriously.) When it snowed, I walked -- it gives you the best chance of dodging the sliding pickup trucks. On another assignment, I mostly used a moped to cover 6 miles, but once again had to have a car for bad weather. (I'm now in Northern Michigan, where the weather is usually bad, and I'm getting too old to ride in the rain.)
Two other issues are the perception of danger, and physical condition. You probably won't get mugged at the bus stop or on the subway, but you _could_, and the evening news will tell you all about the one person who got mugged rather than the millions that didn't. (Quick--how many of you know that the chances of being murdered has been going lower for everyone except young urban black men since 1980, and even for them since 1995?) Riding a two-wheeler beside a busy road definitely feels more dangerous than riding inside a large chunk of steel going down that road, and it probably really is more dangerous. Finally, if I hadn't stayed in better condition than most Americans, I would have been tossed out for failing the Air Force's wimpy physical fitness tests.