When is an embryo "life"?... Scientifically, it would seem clear that it's a life the second the embryo comes into being
Honestly, the only anti-stem-cell group that has shown any sort of intellegent consistancy on this point has been the catholic church, and I respect them for that (although not for other things). They believe that life begins at conception, and that intentionally ending life is morally wrong, and thus prohibited. And to be truthfull, I agree with them on the first part - conception is the only solid line you can draw between existance and non-existance. After conception there is a new set of DNA that never existed prior to conception.
All other definitions of life (existance of soul, sentiance, self-substaining, brain activity, etc) range from entirely immesurable to fuzzy, and thus lack the rigor needed for a scientific definition. The only other solid line that I know of in this discussion is that of implantation - prior to implantation there is no chance that an emrbyo will develop into a grown being, after implantation that chance exists, no matter how small. Furthermore, this gets fuzzy again when you talk about artifically means of stimulating the embryo to develop. Besides implantation doesn't really define life, it just facilitates it.
That said, I disagree with the catholic church on the second point of whether embryonic life deserves the same rights/protections as developed life. Let me reemphasize this point - I think the quesion of when life begins, and whether that life has the same rights/protections as humans are different question with different answers. This is not as radical a position as it seems. For example, in our society today, children have fewer rights and more protections than an adult. The same applies to mentally disabled adults. Criminals also have less rights, and in the extreme may even loose their right to life. And those are the relatively well accepted examples - there are many more contravercial ones such as what right vegetables have.
Personally, my moral belief is that if an embryo has been implantated, it should be afforded basic human rights and thus deliberately ending this life for any reason other than self-defense is immoral. Once an embryo is implanted, it has a non-zero and increasing chance of developing into a human life, it has a non-zero and increasing amount of self-sustainablility. It's capabilities for consiousness increase daily. The process has started, and should not be stopped. This is reinforced by the fact that by the time implantation has occured, a deliberate choice has been made by an existing life (not necissarilly the mother) with the forseable and expectable outcome of a pregnancy. No one worries about babies spontaneously forming in the test tube or uterous. It is the only point in the process where we have a choice to create life - all other choices down the path are to end it. We should be accept the responsibility for that action, and should respect the life that was created by it, regardless of if it was us that made the choice.
I should point out that I am I very divided (emotionally and intellectually) on whether this belief should be law.
1) Usefull because it gets around Bush restrictions, by not using embryonic stem cells. 2) But not a general purpose solution, since adult stem cells are partially differentiated.
He pointed out himself that this would not have been affected by the Bush policy - you didn't need to remind him. But he reitterated the fact that while there is much possible use for adult stem cells, there is much more potential for embryonic stem cells, and we are limiting ourselves to the tip of the iceberg.
but then they couldn't fund it using tax-payer dollars. That is half of the appeal of municipal internet access - it is "cheap" or "free" because it is being subsidized by people who don't use it (those without computers), or who use it and are paying a disproportionate amount of the costs (the wealthy). The local telcos and cable companies are definately not providing the best bang-per-buck possible, mostly because there is not enough competition. But a small coop has it's own inefficiencies, and I would not expect them to be able to do much better than the existing broadband services on price - without sweetheart price-setting legislation forcing the hardline owners to offer their lines to the coop at whatever the politicians think is a "fair" price.
That said, even though I would not support government broadband in my community, I do not like these laws. I am a pragmatic liberterian but I also believe in democracy formost. If these comunities want thier towns to provide broadband, that is their decision to make. The federal government has no place telling the states what services they can and can't offer, and the states have no place telling the counties/towns what services they can and can't offer. Besides, the fact that there is such demand from the comunity for these services shows that the existing monopolies are not serving the people well, and creating legisation to enshrine them further is not the answer.
Yeah, I don't get that comment at all. The F/OSS licences created by comercial entities are rarely GPL-like. Most of them are LGPL-like, with CYA patent clauses, and some special vendor privledges added. I find it very odd that LGPL is missing of that list. It's ability to allow linking to any software, while requiring modifications to itself be LGPL, makes it an excellent license for many situations where GPL and BSD would be less than ideal.
Personally, I have rarely seen a situation that one of GPL, LGPL, or BSD, would not have been the best licence. Those cases were ones where the author wanted/needed stronger CYA patent clauses that are absent in the GPL and LGPL. And hopefully those will be resolved in the next versions of those licenses. While I do respect people decision to pick their own license, I am very vocal about the fact that any license that is incompatable with the GPL, LGPL, or BSD is conterproductive, and would prefer people stick to those proven three if they at all can.
In high school there was a classmate of mine that was on probation, or parole or something and he had to wear some type of tracking device around their ankle. At the time I was absolutely appalled by it as all he was charged with was non-violent drug offenses. Why was our government tracking this kid who was not a danger to anybody?
I think that this could be a very useful and progressive technology, provided that the punishment fit the crime. I have been growing increasingly skeptical of the prison system. I really don't think that it provides much deterrence, rehabilitation or punishment that couldn't be provided in some other manner. People who are only hurting themselves should not be criminals at all. Liquidation and seizure of all assets, combined with forced labor (say weekly) would be a much more effective deterrent / punishment for white collar crimes than a prison sentence. The only thing that prison should be reserved for are violent offenders who simply must be removed from society. However, violent offenses vary in severity, and people should be given second chances. I think that this could be very useful in providing a more effective half way step between prison and complete freedom.
On the other hand, every year in this country, penalties for crimes go up. It used to be that there were laws that had been around for generations, and being tough on crime meant punishing people when they broke those laws. When done, the public agreed that justice was served, and that was that. Now every time any big crime hits the news these paranoid soccer moms pop up screaming for harsher punishment. And the politicians happily comply so they look like they are "hard on crime". You can't keep doing this forever - at some point you have to decide that the punishment is right for the crime and leave it!
So yeah, this is definitely a valid tool for law enforcement. However, like any tool it can be used or misused, and I am very reluctant to give law enforcement new tools as long as our political environment is tolerant, encouraging and even demanding of their misuse.
Yep, that's definately what he was getting at, and I am sure that is their primary motivation in the console market period. However, the particular decision to launch early may very well be motivated in part by short-term profit. The XBox is the most expensive of all the consoles to produce. As time goes by all of the consoles are able to lower their manufacturing costs as the technology matures and full efficiencies of scale come to play. But this was less true for the XBox than other consoles. From the looks of things the XBox 2 is a much more traditional console and should be less expensive to produce. It is in Microsoft's financial interest to move from the XBox to the XBox 2 as quickly as possible because they can make more money on each XBox 2.
Lastly, I think that this will sell well even if it is released early. People keep comparing this to the dreamcast, but it isn't a good comparison. Prior to the dreamcast, Sega's consoles were not doing very well in the market, while the Playstation was kicking ass. Therefore Sony had a lot of clout to say that the PS2 was also going to kick the Dreamcast's ass when it came out, which kept many people from getting a Dreamcast despite it's good games and technical ability. Now however, the XBox is doing great in the US, and Sony has lost some of thier clout after overhyping the PS2.
I fully expect Microsoft to overtake Sony in the US market, with Nintendo continuing to carve out it's own niche. However, the only way that Nintendo to grow in the US or Microsoft to grow in Japan, is for them to do a better job of luring more developers, and who knows how that is going to go.
The fact that passphrases are easier to remember is well established by many many studies. A normal length password is practically worthless if a dictionary word is used, and yet getting people to remember a randomly generated password is very difficult. In most cases it ends up written down in their wallet or desk drawer somewhere. So if you can't get people to use a suitably strong password, then they aren't very usefull are they.
However, getting them to remember a few random words is much easier than a bunch of random letters. Assuming that you are only using a dictionary of 5000 non-obscure words then a randomly generated n-word passphrase is one in 5000^n. A randomly generated m-letter password is about one in 70^m or (70^2)^(m/2) or about 5000^(m/2). Therefore, a randomly generated 4-word passphrase is at least as secure as an 8-letter randomly generated password, but the passphrase actually has a decent chance of being handled securely in a typical organization while a password that obscure has next to none.
Oh, okay I RRTFA. IBM didn't file a motion to dismiss they filed a motion for summary judgment. That is where I was confused - SCO was the one that filed a motion to dismiss the counterclaims, and I missread that. Summary judgement would require things to be sealed tight at the ends, like another poster said, while dismissal wouldn't. So the judge is probably right about allowing the discovery to wrap up before issuing a summary judgment.
That is why the case has continued to go on - because IBM never filed a motion to dismiss. I understand now.
Yes, the flaw is actually in the open source library libpng. It was discovered and fixed back in August. Any application that uses an old version of this library is affected. This included mozilla and firefox, which both released fixed versions within a day of the libpng patch. Internet Explorer is not affected by this exploit as it doesn not use libpng.
I have a question for any legal geeks out there. Why are civil suits allowed to proceed at all without any evidence from the prosecutor? This case hasn't even begun and yet the judge has cooperated with SCO in forcing IBM to spend thousands (if not millions) of dollars, requiring huge amounts of man labor which has drug on for almost two years, and at no point did SCO provide any evidence what so ever of there charges. I understand the need for all the evidence to be brought out during the fact-finding stage, before the actual trial, but why does the fact-finding stage even proceed if the prosecutor does not have any valid evidence to provide. Burden of proof is on them, so it seems to me that they should be required to have significant evidence for their accusations from day one.
Why is it that civil cases take so much longer than criminal ones? Even the OJ Simpson criminal case finished 16 months after arrest, and people were all up in arms about how long it was dragging on, and yet this case has been going on for two years and it hasn't even go to the court room yet!
<rant> This is the sort of tort reform that we need, reducing the burden of frivolous law suits. Not some bullshit capping of damages. By definition those are not frivolous lawsuits because the people were actually found guilty! That isn't even tort reform at all - it is just changing the penalty on some particular offences, and passing off as a tort reform bill rather than a limited-liability asbestos bill. </rant>
But this is a serious question. There may be consequences that I have not thought of, and I am really interested in hearing why we choose to give the prosecutor so much benefit of doubt.
Interesting, it seems to vary. The street names in the small town that I grew up in are wrong. They're not out of date - they haven't changed in forever - they are just plain wrong. Which is interesting concidering that all the other map programs have it right and use the same GIS data (NAVTEQ) as google.
Yes, clearly the world of dental hygene is not ready for such a radical license! I wonder if he means Free / Open Source Software, though what the additional "L" stands for is anyone's guess...
Libre . Although it is understandable why many people have decided to drop the L from that acronym:)
Hmm, their site does not have any images, just movies and mentions that they were already having bandwidth issues before it was posted on slashdot. So you probably want to use the coral cache links below. I managed to get the first three links primed before the story went live.
The RPL ( Reciprocal Public License) is an odd choice for this project. It is an even stronger viral copy-left than the GPL, to the point where the FSF takes issue with it. If create a derivative work you are required required to 1) Notify the original author, and 2) Publish your changes even if you only use the program in house. Furthermore, their definition of derivative work is much, much broader than the "linking" definition that the GPL uses.
The fact that it puts these additional requirements / restrictions on the user makes it incompatible with the GPL. In fact, considering the requirements placed on you by the license, I would expect that you will have difficulty incorporating this RPL library into any existing FLOSS project without running into license conflicts. The only thing I can see this being useful for is a new project that you don't mind releasing under the RPL, or with existing BSD style licensed code which you dual license as BSD/RPL (since BSD can be included in anything).
So this library does not appear to very useable for the FLOSS world, although if you want to license it for proprietary software you may.
You do realize that UUNET(/MCI/WorldCom) supports roughly one third of all the traffic on the internet, don't you. You can't simply block one third of all your legitimate incoming mail.
Furthermore, I don't want to make ISP's responsible for the content that they are hosting. I think that would set very bad precedent, and the internet as a whole will be much better off if if ISPs are legal regarded as common carriers.
Credit cards are trivial to track anyway, so no immediate extra privacy implications as long as the data isn't retained for too long.
I would add "as long as the data is private to the company". I can easily see them cooperating with law enforcement to do fingerprint searches in their database (which contains a large number of people that are not in the criminal database). That is a significant decrease in your privacy. If all the laws on our books were just, and the police never abused power, then you wouldn't worry about it. But neither of those conditions hold, and history shows that they will likely never hold in any government.
Then again I agreed to get fingerprinted for my security clearance and I'm sure that's in some database somewhere as well, so who am I to talk.
Yes this is a bad name. I tried reading their product desciptions, but my mind kept drifing away to day dreams about Amazon Prime, the leader of the female warrior tribe of Transformers. Mmmm sexy, sexy Maternatrons.
He is right, and the reason that they are such a strong lobbying group is because old people vote.
Politicians care about one thing more than any other - getting rellected. If you look at all the lobbying groups that are successfull it is for two reasons - they have a large influence on a large voting block, or they make large contributions to the politician's campain funds. One of these is mostly good, as it represents the (politically active) people through proxy (and in a populace this large, it is impossible to get attention any other way). The other is mostly bad, as it only represents the will of a few wealthy contributers. Not all lobbying is equal.
In this case it is simply democracy in action - the majority of voters think that old people should be allowed to drive, so they are.
From all that I can tell females are less interested in engineering then men. Concider the situation at the science/engineering college I went to. There were more males then females, but that could be caused by all sorts of things, and is not the point I want to make. Instead look at what majors the females who were there chose. From my observation the departments with the highest percentage of females were biology, chemistry, psycology, then physics, geology, with the fewest in CS, EE, and mechanical. Now (nearly) all of those girls were very smart, and most were capable of getting any of the majors offered at the school. But they chose the majors the did because they found them more interesting, because it fit their mindset better. So statistically speaking far more females enjoy and life sciences / pure sciences than engineering.
Now why is this the case? Maybe we are just wired differently. Concider what happens when people encounter a problem. The stereotypical guys just wants to do something to fix it and get it over with. The girl wants to talk about it, to understand it better, and to them comming to an understanding is often the solution in and of itself. Of course this is talking in generalitys. There are definately girls with engineering mindsets, as there are guys with more diplomatic mindsets, but there does seem to be a very real tendancy behind that stereotype.
Hehe. I started this post when the story was still in the mysterious future and it kept growing till, now when most everyone has already moved onto the next story. Oh well, might as well post it and this thread is as good of a spot as any.
I would actually be in favor of a Smart-card ID - especially if the citizen ID was just one uses of a generic smart card authentication system. The use of Social Security Numbers is inherently insecure. Every authentication system needs a public identifier, and at least one secret key. But as things stand right now SSN are treated as both an identifier and a key - it is impossible to be both public and secret simultaneously! It is scary how many institutions act as though anyone who can rattle off my SSN. Something like this could greatly decrease potential for identity theft and fraud, and frankly I don't think it will decrease my privacy any (more on that later).
Suppose you had a smart card which contained a readable id and public key, an non-readable private key (encrypted with a passcode), and a small amount of processing power. When you need to authenticate yourself, you would place the card in a a drive, and enter your passcode. The person requesting authentication would generate a challenge using the public key, and the drive would pass the challenge and passcode to the smart-card. The card would then use the private key to generate a response.
The nice thing about the smart-card doing the processing is that the private key would never leave the card. In fact, the user would not have to know anything about public/private keys (unlike PGP). And it follows the good policy of "something you have" (the card), "something you know" (the passcode), and could easily include the option of "something you are" (biometrics) for high security applications. But even without the biometrics, this would be infinitely more secure than SSN, more secure than a credit card or ATM, and on par with PGP signatures.
Then imagine that this is a standard authentication system - you have a card to authenticate that you are Citizen 123-45-678 for government programs, another to authenticate that you are VISA Card Holder 1111-2222-3333-4444 for purchases, another to authenticate that you are user on domain for login authentication, and yet another to authenticate that you are user@domain.com for signing and decrypting email. If there was a standard, there is no reason that the drive could not be built into all computers, greatly increasing the security of online financial transactions, and finally creating a user-friendly mechanism for encrypted communications.
In short it would solve a great deal of the security issues (or at least technical aspects thereof) that our rush into the digital world has created. Of course all the social engineering exploits are still there, and so we should never operate on the assumption that the system is infallible.
Now privacy. I don't like giving out my social security number more than anyone else. I have gone through great trouble to not give it to people that do not need it. But even so, there are a huge number of organizations that are entitled to it by law, and have a legitimate need for my personal information. Which brings up the real crux of the government privacy issue in my opinion: We asked the government to take care of our retirement, so they need some information to do that job. We asked the government to provide medical care and drug coverage for the elderly, so they need to know my medical record. We asked the government for all sorts of benefits and exceptions in the tax code, so they need to know the nitty-gritty details of my financial life. We asked the government to help pay for college, so they need to know even more information. And now people want to ask the government to provide everyone healthcare and that will erode my privacy even more. I have an idea - if we don't want the government to know everything about us how about we stop asking it to do everything for us. Until then all this cry for privacy
That link you posted did not show what you claim it does. All it showed is that if you take a bunch of rulings, laws and definitions out of context, you can use them to different conclusion than that of the Supreme Court (and it didn't even do a very good job of that). Which is a no brainer - any large body of law will inherently have inconsistancies and vagaries. Our founders recognized that.
That is the whole point of the judicial branch of the government - to interpret the law! Their interpretation is the authoritative one - not yours, and asserting and pretending that a laws should be interpreted the way you want them to be does not make it true. You can challenge the interpretation in court, you can get congress to write laws that override the current interpretation, but until then that judicial precidence is as much a part of the legal system in this country as the laws themselves, and is just as enforcable.
As for the ammendment you are again patently false , as many people have pointed out - any of the constitution can be modified by amending it, as defined in the constitution.
I doubt that this would really fall under fair use in US as, from what I've read, that applies to re-use of copyrighted works when you have some rights to them already.
It does. The precident was set in the Kelly vs Arriba case in 2002 and has not yet been overturned.
Slashdot Mirror
When is an embryo "life"? ... Scientifically, it would seem clear that it's a life the second the embryo comes into being
Honestly, the only anti-stem-cell group that has shown any sort of intellegent consistancy on this point has been the catholic church, and I respect them for that (although not for other things). They believe that life begins at conception, and that intentionally ending life is morally wrong, and thus prohibited. And to be truthfull, I agree with them on the first part - conception is the only solid line you can draw between existance and non-existance. After conception there is a new set of DNA that never existed prior to conception.
All other definitions of life (existance of soul, sentiance, self-substaining, brain activity, etc) range from entirely immesurable to fuzzy, and thus lack the rigor needed for a scientific definition. The only other solid line that I know of in this discussion is that of implantation - prior to implantation there is no chance that an emrbyo will develop into a grown being, after implantation that chance exists, no matter how small. Furthermore, this gets fuzzy again when you talk about artifically means of stimulating the embryo to develop. Besides implantation doesn't really define life, it just facilitates it.
That said, I disagree with the catholic church on the second point of whether embryonic life deserves the same rights/protections as developed life. Let me reemphasize this point - I think the quesion of when life begins, and whether that life has the same rights/protections as humans are different question with different answers. This is not as radical a position as it seems. For example, in our society today, children have fewer rights and more protections than an adult. The same applies to mentally disabled adults. Criminals also have less rights, and in the extreme may even loose their right to life. And those are the relatively well accepted examples - there are many more contravercial ones such as what right vegetables have.
Personally, my moral belief is that if an embryo has been implantated, it should be afforded basic human rights and thus deliberately ending this life for any reason other than self-defense is immoral. Once an embryo is implanted, it has a non-zero and increasing chance of developing into a human life, it has a non-zero and increasing amount of self-sustainablility. It's capabilities for consiousness increase daily. The process has started, and should not be stopped. This is reinforced by the fact that by the time implantation has occured, a deliberate choice has been made by an existing life (not necissarilly the mother) with the forseable and expectable outcome of a pregnancy. No one worries about babies spontaneously forming in the test tube or uterous. It is the only point in the process where we have a choice to create life - all other choices down the path are to end it. We should be accept the responsibility for that action, and should respect the life that was created by it, regardless of if it was us that made the choice.
I should point out that I am I very divided (emotionally and intellectually) on whether this belief should be law.
It was entirely relevent. Read his post, before coping a canned response. His main points were:
1) Usefull because it gets around Bush restrictions, by not using embryonic stem cells.
2) But not a general purpose solution, since adult stem cells are partially differentiated.
He pointed out himself that this would not have been affected by the Bush policy - you didn't need to remind him. But he reitterated the fact that while there is much possible use for adult stem cells, there is much more potential for embryonic stem cells, and we are limiting ourselves to the tip of the iceberg.
but then they couldn't fund it using tax-payer dollars. That is half of the appeal of municipal internet access - it is "cheap" or "free" because it is being subsidized by people who don't use it (those without computers), or who use it and are paying a disproportionate amount of the costs (the wealthy). The local telcos and cable companies are definately not providing the best bang-per-buck possible, mostly because there is not enough competition. But a small coop has it's own inefficiencies, and I would not expect them to be able to do much better than the existing broadband services on price - without sweetheart price-setting legislation forcing the hardline owners to offer their lines to the coop at whatever the politicians think is a "fair" price.
That said, even though I would not support government broadband in my community, I do not like these laws. I am a pragmatic liberterian but I also believe in democracy formost. If these comunities want thier towns to provide broadband, that is their decision to make. The federal government has no place telling the states what services they can and can't offer, and the states have no place telling the counties/towns what services they can and can't offer. Besides, the fact that there is such demand from the comunity for these services shows that the existing monopolies are not serving the people well, and creating legisation to enshrine them further is not the answer.
As an AC posted below here is the website that explains the process, and here is a flowchart from the site.
I don't think there is a simple explaination because the system is inherently complex. If you care to understand it, have fun reading.
Yeah, I don't get that comment at all. The F/OSS licences created by comercial entities are rarely GPL-like. Most of them are LGPL-like, with CYA patent clauses, and some special vendor privledges added. I find it very odd that LGPL is missing of that list. It's ability to allow linking to any software, while requiring modifications to itself be LGPL, makes it an excellent license for many situations where GPL and BSD would be less than ideal.
Personally, I have rarely seen a situation that one of GPL, LGPL, or BSD, would not have been the best licence. Those cases were ones where the author wanted/needed stronger CYA patent clauses that are absent in the GPL and LGPL. And hopefully those will be resolved in the next versions of those licenses. While I do respect people decision to pick their own license, I am very vocal about the fact that any license that is incompatable with the GPL, LGPL, or BSD is conterproductive, and would prefer people stick to those proven three if they at all can.
In high school there was a classmate of mine that was on probation, or parole or something and he had to wear some type of tracking device around their ankle. At the time I was absolutely appalled by it as all he was charged with was non-violent drug offenses. Why was our government tracking this kid who was not a danger to anybody?
I think that this could be a very useful and progressive technology, provided that the punishment fit the crime. I have been growing increasingly skeptical of the prison system. I really don't think that it provides much deterrence, rehabilitation or punishment that couldn't be provided in some other manner. People who are only hurting themselves should not be criminals at all. Liquidation and seizure of all assets, combined with forced labor (say weekly) would be a much more effective deterrent / punishment for white collar crimes than a prison sentence. The only thing that prison should be reserved for are violent offenders who simply must be removed from society. However, violent offenses vary in severity, and people should be given second chances. I think that this could be very useful in providing a more effective half way step between prison and complete freedom.
On the other hand, every year in this country, penalties for crimes go up. It used to be that there were laws that had been around for generations, and being tough on crime meant punishing people when they broke those laws. When done, the public agreed that justice was served, and that was that. Now every time any big crime hits the news these paranoid soccer moms pop up screaming for harsher punishment. And the politicians happily comply so they look like they are "hard on crime". You can't keep doing this forever - at some point you have to decide that the punishment is right for the crime and leave it!
So yeah, this is definitely a valid tool for law enforcement. However, like any tool it can be used or misused, and I am very reluctant to give law enforcement new tools as long as our political environment is tolerant, encouraging and even demanding of their misuse.
Yep, that's definately what he was getting at, and I am sure that is their primary motivation in the console market period. However, the particular decision to launch early may very well be motivated in part by short-term profit. The XBox is the most expensive of all the consoles to produce. As time goes by all of the consoles are able to lower their manufacturing costs as the technology matures and full efficiencies of scale come to play. But this was less true for the XBox than other consoles. From the looks of things the XBox 2 is a much more traditional console and should be less expensive to produce. It is in Microsoft's financial interest to move from the XBox to the XBox 2 as quickly as possible because they can make more money on each XBox 2.
Lastly, I think that this will sell well even if it is released early. People keep comparing this to the dreamcast, but it isn't a good comparison. Prior to the dreamcast, Sega's consoles were not doing very well in the market, while the Playstation was kicking ass. Therefore Sony had a lot of clout to say that the PS2 was also going to kick the Dreamcast's ass when it came out, which kept many people from getting a Dreamcast despite it's good games and technical ability. Now however, the XBox is doing great in the US, and Sony has lost some of thier clout after overhyping the PS2.
I fully expect Microsoft to overtake Sony in the US market, with Nintendo continuing to carve out it's own niche. However, the only way that Nintendo to grow in the US or Microsoft to grow in Japan, is for them to do a better job of luring more developers, and who knows how that is going to go.
1) Easier to remember.
2) Larger keyspace.
The fact that passphrases are easier to remember is well established by many many studies. A normal length password is practically worthless if a dictionary word is used, and yet getting people to remember a randomly generated password is very difficult. In most cases it ends up written down in their wallet or desk drawer somewhere. So if you can't get people to use a suitably strong password, then they aren't very usefull are they.
However, getting them to remember a few random words is much easier than a bunch of random letters. Assuming that you are only using a dictionary of 5000 non-obscure words then a randomly generated n-word passphrase is one in 5000^n. A randomly generated m-letter password is about one in 70^m or (70^2)^(m/2) or about 5000^(m/2). Therefore, a randomly generated 4-word passphrase is at least as secure as an 8-letter randomly generated password, but the passphrase actually has a decent chance of being handled securely in a typical organization while a password that obscure has next to none.
I believe that SCO is suing for breach of contract... which isn't covered by tort law.
Thanks. I had a faulty definition of tort in my head that I picked up from it's usage. I have now looked up what it really means.
Oh, okay I RRTFA. IBM didn't file a motion to dismiss they filed a motion for summary judgment. That is where I was confused - SCO was the one that filed a motion to dismiss the counterclaims, and I missread that. Summary judgement would require things to be sealed tight at the ends, like another poster said, while dismissal wouldn't. So the judge is probably right about allowing the discovery to wrap up before issuing a summary judgment.
That is why the case has continued to go on - because IBM never filed a motion to dismiss. I understand now.
That makes sense, but if IBM doesn't want to end the case, why did they file a motion to dismiss?
Yes, the flaw is actually in the open source library libpng. It was discovered and fixed back in August. Any application that uses an old version of this library is affected. This included mozilla and firefox, which both released fixed versions within a day of the libpng patch. Internet Explorer is not affected by this exploit as it doesn not use libpng.
I have a question for any legal geeks out there. Why are civil suits allowed to proceed at all without any evidence from the prosecutor? This case hasn't even begun and yet the judge has cooperated with SCO in forcing IBM to spend thousands (if not millions) of dollars, requiring huge amounts of man labor which has drug on for almost two years, and at no point did SCO provide any evidence what so ever of there charges. I understand the need for all the evidence to be brought out during the fact-finding stage, before the actual trial, but why does the fact-finding stage even proceed if the prosecutor does not have any valid evidence to provide. Burden of proof is on them, so it seems to me that they should be required to have significant evidence for their accusations from day one.
Why is it that civil cases take so much longer than criminal ones? Even the OJ Simpson criminal case finished 16 months after arrest, and people were all up in arms about how long it was dragging on, and yet this case has been going on for two years and it hasn't even go to the court room yet!
<rant>
This is the sort of tort reform that we need, reducing the burden of frivolous law suits. Not some bullshit capping of damages. By definition those are not frivolous lawsuits because the people were actually found guilty! That isn't even tort reform at all - it is just changing the penalty on some particular offences, and passing off as a tort reform bill rather than a limited-liability asbestos bill.
</rant>
But this is a serious question. There may be consequences that I have not thought of, and I am really interested in hearing why we choose to give the prosecutor so much benefit of doubt.
Interesting, it seems to vary. The street names in the small town that I grew up in are wrong. They're not out of date - they haven't changed in forever - they are just plain wrong. Which is interesting concidering that all the other map programs have it right and use the same GIS data (NAVTEQ) as google.
Yes, clearly the world of dental hygene is not ready for such a radical license! I wonder if he means Free / Open Source Software, though what the additional "L" stands for is anyone's guess...
:)
Libre . Although it is understandable why many people have decided to drop the L from that acronym
Hmm, their site does not have any images, just movies and mentions that they were already having bandwidth issues before it was posted on slashdot. So you probably want to use the coral cache links below. I managed to get the first three links primed before the story went live.
Article
Movie 1
Movie 2
Movie 3
Movie 4
The RPL ( Reciprocal Public License) is an odd choice for this project. It is an even stronger viral copy-left than the GPL, to the point where the FSF takes issue with it. If create a derivative work you are required required to 1) Notify the original author, and 2) Publish your changes even if you only use the program in house. Furthermore, their definition of derivative work is much, much broader than the "linking" definition that the GPL uses.
The fact that it puts these additional requirements / restrictions on the user makes it incompatible with the GPL. In fact, considering the requirements placed on you by the license, I would expect that you will have difficulty incorporating this RPL library into any existing FLOSS project without running into license conflicts. The only thing I can see this being useful for is a new project that you don't mind releasing under the RPL, or with existing BSD style licensed code which you dual license as BSD/RPL (since BSD can be included in anything).
So this library does not appear to very useable for the FLOSS world, although if you want to license it for proprietary software you may.
You do realize that UUNET(/MCI/WorldCom) supports roughly one third of all the traffic on the internet, don't you. You can't simply block one third of all your legitimate incoming mail.
Furthermore, I don't want to make ISP's responsible for the content that they are hosting. I think that would set very bad precedent, and the internet as a whole will be much better off if if ISPs are legal regarded as common carriers.
Fight the spammers not the postal service.
Credit cards are trivial to track anyway, so no immediate extra privacy implications as long as the data isn't retained for too long.
I would add "as long as the data is private to the company". I can easily see them cooperating with law enforcement to do fingerprint searches in their database (which contains a large number of people that are not in the criminal database). That is a significant decrease in your privacy. If all the laws on our books were just, and the police never abused power, then you wouldn't worry about it. But neither of those conditions hold, and history shows that they will likely never hold in any government.
Then again I agreed to get fingerprinted for my security clearance and I'm sure that's in some database somewhere as well, so who am I to talk.
Yes this is a bad name. I tried reading their product desciptions, but my mind kept drifing away to day dreams about Amazon Prime, the leader of the female warrior tribe of Transformers. Mmmm sexy, sexy Maternatrons.
He is right, and the reason that they are such a strong lobbying group is because old people vote.
Politicians care about one thing more than any other - getting rellected. If you look at all the lobbying groups that are successfull it is for two reasons - they have a large influence on a large voting block, or they make large contributions to the politician's campain funds. One of these is mostly good, as it represents the (politically active) people through proxy (and in a populace this large, it is impossible to get attention any other way). The other is mostly bad, as it only represents the will of a few wealthy contributers. Not all lobbying is equal.
In this case it is simply democracy in action - the majority of voters think that old people should be allowed to drive, so they are.
From all that I can tell females are less interested in engineering then men. Concider the situation at the science/engineering college I went to. There were more males then females, but that could be caused by all sorts of things, and is not the point I want to make. Instead look at what majors the females who were there chose. From my observation the departments with the highest percentage of females were biology, chemistry, psycology, then physics, geology, with the fewest in CS, EE, and mechanical. Now (nearly) all of those girls were very smart, and most were capable of getting any of the majors offered at the school. But they chose the majors the did because they found them more interesting, because it fit their mindset better. So statistically speaking far more females enjoy and life sciences / pure sciences than engineering.
Now why is this the case? Maybe we are just wired differently. Concider what happens when people encounter a problem. The stereotypical guys just wants to do something to fix it and get it over with. The girl wants to talk about it, to understand it better, and to them comming to an understanding is often the solution in and of itself. Of course this is talking in generalitys. There are definately girls with engineering mindsets, as there are guys with more diplomatic mindsets, but there does seem to be a very real tendancy behind that stereotype.
Hehe. I started this post when the story was still in the mysterious future and it kept growing till, now when most everyone has already moved onto the next story. Oh well, might as well post it and this thread is as good of a spot as any.
I would actually be in favor of a Smart-card ID - especially if the citizen ID was just one uses of a generic smart card authentication system. The use of Social Security Numbers is inherently insecure. Every authentication system needs a public identifier, and at least one secret key. But as things stand right now SSN are treated as both an identifier and a key - it is impossible to be both public and secret simultaneously! It is scary how many institutions act as though anyone who can rattle off my SSN. Something like this could greatly decrease potential for identity theft and fraud, and frankly I don't think it will decrease my privacy any (more on that later).
Suppose you had a smart card which contained a readable id and public key, an non-readable private key (encrypted with a passcode), and a small amount of processing power. When you need to authenticate yourself, you would place the card in a a drive, and enter your passcode. The person requesting authentication would generate a challenge using the public key, and the drive would pass the challenge and passcode to the smart-card. The card would then use the private key to generate a response.
The nice thing about the smart-card doing the processing is that the private key would never leave the card. In fact, the user would not have to know anything about public/private keys (unlike PGP). And it follows the good policy of "something you have" (the card), "something you know" (the passcode), and could easily include the option of "something you are" (biometrics) for high security applications. But even without the biometrics, this would be infinitely more secure than SSN, more secure than a credit card or ATM, and on par with PGP signatures.
Then imagine that this is a standard authentication system - you have a card to authenticate that you are Citizen 123-45-678 for government programs, another to authenticate that you are VISA Card Holder 1111-2222-3333-4444 for purchases, another to authenticate that you are user on domain for login authentication, and yet another to authenticate that you are user@domain.com for signing and decrypting email. If there was a standard, there is no reason that the drive could not be built into all computers, greatly increasing the security of online financial transactions, and finally creating a user-friendly mechanism for encrypted communications.
In short it would solve a great deal of the security issues (or at least technical aspects thereof) that our rush into the digital world has created. Of course all the social engineering exploits are still there, and so we should never operate on the assumption that the system is infallible.
Now privacy. I don't like giving out my social security number more than anyone else. I have gone through great trouble to not give it to people that do not need it. But even so, there are a huge number of organizations that are entitled to it by law, and have a legitimate need for my personal information. Which brings up the real crux of the government privacy issue in my opinion: We asked the government to take care of our retirement, so they need some information to do that job. We asked the government to provide medical care and drug coverage for the elderly, so they need to know my medical record. We asked the government for all sorts of benefits and exceptions in the tax code, so they need to know the nitty-gritty details of my financial life. We asked the government to help pay for college, so they need to know even more information. And now people want to ask the government to provide everyone healthcare and that will erode my privacy even more. I have an idea - if we don't want the government to know everything about us how about we stop asking it to do everything for us. Until then all this cry for privacy
That link you posted did not show what you claim it does. All it showed is that if you take a bunch of rulings, laws and definitions out of context, you can use them to different conclusion than that of the Supreme Court (and it didn't even do a very good job of that). Which is a no brainer - any large body of law will inherently have inconsistancies and vagaries. Our founders recognized that.
That is the whole point of the judicial branch of the government - to interpret the law! Their interpretation is the authoritative one - not yours, and asserting and pretending that a laws should be interpreted the way you want them to be does not make it true. You can challenge the interpretation in court, you can get congress to write laws that override the current interpretation, but until then that judicial precidence is as much a part of the legal system in this country as the laws themselves, and is just as enforcable.
As for the ammendment you are again patently false , as many people have pointed out - any of the constitution can be modified by amending it, as defined in the constitution.
I doubt that this would really fall under fair use in US as, from what I've read, that applies to re-use of copyrighted works when you have some rights to them already.
It does. The precident was set in the Kelly vs Arriba case in 2002 and has not yet been overturned.