You're just being silly. There's no way that a tightly-provisioned radio packet service could ever be made to service both latency-sensitive and bulk traffic at the same time. Ignore the fact that this is essentially what's done (albeit in larger increments) with current voice vs. data cellular connections, and that GSM supports provisioning of (essentially) arbitrarily sized channels, and that EGPRS/3G support dynamic binding to several channels at once to form a single connection, thereby allowing you to have access both to low-latency dedicated bandwidth and non-dedicated, as-available, high-throughput channels at the same time without any fundamental changes to the cellular network.
What's really important here is that they're making good money selling it the way it is, and therefore what you suggest is "not possible" until that changes.
Then there would be no DVDs, no microwaves, and no cordless phones -- generally there's no technical reason your new cordless POTS handset couldn't work with your existing base station, other than vendor lock-in. And sometimes it might be convenient to run the microwave with the door open, but it's locked down to prevent such use.
But most people don't want to spend 20 minutes setting up the comm protocol and tuning the radio on their new handset, and don't want to risk running the microwave with the door open. To those people the "lock-down" is actually a feature, not a hinderance.
Certainly there are some people who could make use of additional functions that are technically supported by the hardware, and there are cases where "lock-down" goes too far and is a hinderance for most users, but it's disingenuous to pretend that no end users benefit for "lock-down" under any circumstance, or that people are too dumb/sheep-like/etc. to do anything about this terrible injustice.
You actually can film a movie in the park without any permits. It's just that in a typical movie you'd like to do things like block off part of the park, or leave equipment there overnight, or put up tents/etc. -- permits from the city allow you to do those things, which are not generally permissible.
I know we're supposed to hate the evil corporations and pretend that anything that makes money is somehow harmful to society, but honestly it's ridiculous differentiation to make in most cases -- if you can do it by yourself, or could do it with a group of friends, why should there be different rules for people who are organized for an economic purpose rather than a social one, so long as their actions are the same? What if you invited only your friends from work -- should we make rules against "social" gatherings when all the participants work for the same company?
But if you and one other username on the Internet get together we'll be certain to have a good representation of "socially acceptable"; two generally-aligned singular opinions are absolute proof that a third, non-aligned opinion is not representative of society at large.
At the very least it is more common in males, which suggests that there is some genetic component; generally speaking "male" is determined genetically rather than by environment.
The standard the court was enforcing is a "reasonable expectation of privacy". It seems likely that a reasonable person would expect the non-windowed parts of the walls of their home to provide privacy from people on the street.
It's not any different than requiring a warrant to use a laser microphone from across the street -- even though the police aren't actually entering your property they are violating your reasonable expectation of privacy, and therefore need a warrant.
It would not be a good time if we told the police "anything you can do from the street, using any technology you want, is a valid method for collecting evidence without a warrant" -- I for one cannot afford to wrap my entire house in material that blocks all EM radiation across the entire spectrum, or to provide 100% isolation from all vibrations.
In the general sense, the ability to determine that A > B requires arithmetic. Without arithmetic you could only look at two piles and say "they both contain many items"; the ability to say "pile A contains more items than pile B" requires some form of arithmetic, even if it is very simply.
And I'm not sure where you got this idea that arithmetic is purely discrete. For the purposes of calculation we often treat our observations that way, but in reality most arithmetic involves quantities that were not determined exactly. It's only our abstractions that allow counting in the first place -- "car" is not a measurable unit, it's an abstraction that we use to categories and describe our environment, and it's only such abstractions that can be discretely counted in the first place.
That's not to say that the birds were counting discrete plastic containers, as opposed to identifying the set of containers with the most visible surface, but in either case if the birds can determine that one set has "more" of something than the other set, it's still basic arithmetic. (And as always it's certainly possible that "more" had nothing to do with their behavior, and that the birds were motivated by something that the experiment did not control against, but that's beyond the scope of this comment)
Or maybe someone will point out that throwing things onto the rink is not a gag that Colbert invented? Or that, so long as it's done respectfully -- say during existing stoppages in play -- the crowd and participants might not mind, and may even find it fun?
But probably not, because it's too much fun to rip on popular people with cultural influence.
You got something experimentally, but with Mythbusters you're rarely sure exactly what it is you got. The problem with most of their experiments is not that their results are unreliable, or that the test can't be reproduced with similar results, it's that they results don't answer the question they claim to be asking.
See cold fusion for an example -- 1. Claim you can produce cold fusion by putting zinc in acid 2. Collect the resulting gas in a balloon 3. Float the balloon 4. Remind people that helium makes balloons float, and can only be produced by nuclear reactions
That's a 100% reproducible experiment that uses the right buzzwords and enough real science to convince people that it's true. And the experimentation is true -- it's just that the experimentation doesn't have anything to do with cold fusion.
I've actually had no trouble spending my US dollars in Canada or Mexico. Seriously -- people take greenback almost anywhere.
It can be a little complicated depending on where you are in Canada and how smart the clerk is, but I've honestly never had it be a big problem, even when I was 200+ miles north of the border. Mexico was even less of a problem, and no one even blinked if you paid in US dollars, though you did sometimes need to negotiate the exchange rate to avoid getting screwed.
How many of your products do anything at all with the IP address? Seriously, TCP works the same way over IPv4 as IPv6, so unless you're writing 40 versions of a network stack or something that reads IP address for something more complicated than checking that old.address == new.address, I don't see how much testing you'd need outside of the network itself.
There ARE good reasons for regional pricing, at least from the perspective of the producer -- segmenting the market means you can maximize profits with differing strategies.
But there are also very good reasons for not allowing enforcement of pricing policies with technology that prohibits legitimate use and further trade. Let's say I own 400 DVD (which I do) and then I move to Australia (which I might) -- none of my DVDs will play on the devices available there. Even if I take a player with me I'll never be able to replace it without having one shipped in from the US (which I'm sure the MPAA would also like to outlaw). The content producer doesn't even have a legitimate interest in a pricing differential at this point, because I've already bought their content at the prices they set in the segmented market; at this point it's either a scam to make me re-buy the same content or an insidious infringement on my legitimate use of content I have license to view.
And that's not even to point out the limitation of secondary-market sales and other legitimate uses that, if executed, may not reduce the primary-market sales one iota but which are prevented by region-locking. Or the fact that as a primary-market customer I should be free to make my own choice as to whether I want to preserve the regional pricing differential or mitigate it through my secondary-market sales -- that isn't a decision we should allow content producers to make for us.
Is there some way to program for Windows Mobile without buying a license for MS Windows AND a license for MS Visual Studio? Because I've got a WM device that I'd really like to program for -- it's a fairly reasonable device as smartphones go, other than insisting that I use ActiveSync instead of standard BlueTooth sync profiles -- but I don't own either Windows or Visual Studio, and I can't figure out any way to compile for it without those two very expensive programs.
Android, on the other hand, only seems to require an i386 machine and Java, which makes entry a lot cheaper and less vendor dependent. Not that I wouldn't like root access there, but pretending that you don't have to play MS's game to program for Windows Mobile is a bit disingenuous.
Couldn't they have just called the parents, informed them of the potential threat, and allow her actual parents to make whatever decision seemed reasonable to them?
And that's assuming you evaluated potential abuse of some amount of ibuprofen small enough to be hidden in your clothing to be a credible threat in the first place.
It doesn't apply if you're student -- courts have ruled that schools are acting as guardian ad litem for all students under its care and therefore have most of the rights generally reserved for parents, allowing them to take actions generally prohibited by agents of the state.
I'm not saying that's the way things should be, but it's most certainly the way they are.
Then all you have to do is make sure that all your duplicated data is exactly 1 disk block in length. That's got to be easier than just not storing it twice in the first place, or adding more disks.
I realize that's true from a pure copyright standpoint, but in the real world it's sometimes useful to say, install a copy of a tool for evaluation in your workflow before deciding to spend $600 on a license for that tool.
Or do you know of a merchant that will accept opened software package for return, should I decide that $600 isn't worth the cost for deployment, or doesn't do what I need? Because I'd be happy buy a license if I had the right to terminate the license and return the product for refund, and even to pay some reasonable fee for my trial usage -- I'm just not willing to pay full price with no opportunity for refund for a product that I've never had the opportunity to test. I wouldn't do it for a car or a DVD player and I won't do it for software either.
They get a numeric, widely-used evaluation tool, which they see as providing three main benefits: 1. It's a non-actionable reason to prefer person A over person B -- because it's widely used it's difficult for B to sue you for preferring A if A had scores more closely aligned with your goals. 2. Hiring managers absolutely love numeric scores as a way to cover themselves if things don't work out later -- I hired A because he had better scores, so how could I know that B would have been better? 3. Hiring more people with similar scores to those people you're already hired is seen as a risk-reducing behavior -- since you know someone with score X can do this job, maybe other people with score X can do it too.
Now, I'm not saying any of those reasons are particularly useful in terms of actually finding the right people to work for you -- such reasoning may actually be detrimental to that end -- but hiring the "right" person isn't the only goal that either the company or the hiring manager have, and given their other goals tests like these are at least somewhat rational.
You've setup your system backwards. If you start with the right single law -- the state has no powers except those explicitly granted to it -- then removing laws would necessarily do things like restricting police power and granting access to information because the police would only have been granted powers through laws, and the state would only have been granted the right to keep secrets through laws.
I'm sure the state would love this idea of a system where they implicitly have power and we must explicitly take it away with new laws, but it doesn't sound much like civil libertarianism or Libertarianism to me.
I wouldn't go around lambasting the US for their small units just because the British Empire went about making up new measures decades after the formation of the US.
England didn't start using the 20 floz pint until 1824. The previous 16 floz unit was defined as 1/8 of the British wine gallon -- about 231 cubic inches -- and had been since 1707. I'm not positive about the force/mass bit, but I'm pretty sure the same 1824 change made a hundredweight 8 stones, making it 112 lbs instead of 100 lbs used in the US or the previous 108 lbs.
What exactly makes forking so expensive with shared libraries? The code segment shouldn't be duplicated for shared or static libraries, and shared libraries have the benefit of only be loaded once per system, rather than once per program. Is there some important step I'm missing?
Cashless society doesn't have to give control to anyone -- you don't have to link the card back to an account or have any central repository. Putting value into the card, rather than into a DB, exposes the system to possible counterfeiting, but it's not any different than the same risks today, and you get the benefits of electronic data transfers. You only carry only one bit of "cash", you can transfer funds to or from it via anything with an appropriate port (i.e. your cell phone), you could have it store a record of your transactions, always having exact change -- all sorts of things that are convenient, with no requirement for central reporting.
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You're just being silly. There's no way that a tightly-provisioned radio packet service could ever be made to service both latency-sensitive and bulk traffic at the same time. Ignore the fact that this is essentially what's done (albeit in larger increments) with current voice vs. data cellular connections, and that GSM supports provisioning of (essentially) arbitrarily sized channels, and that EGPRS/3G support dynamic binding to several channels at once to form a single connection, thereby allowing you to have access both to low-latency dedicated bandwidth and non-dedicated, as-available, high-throughput channels at the same time without any fundamental changes to the cellular network.
What's really important here is that they're making good money selling it the way it is, and therefore what you suggest is "not possible" until that changes.
If nobody bought things that were locked down
Then there would be no DVDs, no microwaves, and no cordless phones -- generally there's no technical reason your new cordless POTS handset couldn't work with your existing base station, other than vendor lock-in. And sometimes it might be convenient to run the microwave with the door open, but it's locked down to prevent such use.
But most people don't want to spend 20 minutes setting up the comm protocol and tuning the radio on their new handset, and don't want to risk running the microwave with the door open. To those people the "lock-down" is actually a feature, not a hinderance.
Certainly there are some people who could make use of additional functions that are technically supported by the hardware, and there are cases where "lock-down" goes too far and is a hinderance for most users, but it's disingenuous to pretend that no end users benefit for "lock-down" under any circumstance, or that people are too dumb/sheep-like/etc. to do anything about this terrible injustice.
You actually can film a movie in the park without any permits. It's just that in a typical movie you'd like to do things like block off part of the park, or leave equipment there overnight, or put up tents/etc. -- permits from the city allow you to do those things, which are not generally permissible.
I know we're supposed to hate the evil corporations and pretend that anything that makes money is somehow harmful to society, but honestly it's ridiculous differentiation to make in most cases -- if you can do it by yourself, or could do it with a group of friends, why should there be different rules for people who are organized for an economic purpose rather than a social one, so long as their actions are the same? What if you invited only your friends from work -- should we make rules against "social" gatherings when all the participants work for the same company?
But if you and one other username on the Internet get together we'll be certain to have a good representation of "socially acceptable"; two generally-aligned singular opinions are absolute proof that a third, non-aligned opinion is not representative of society at large.
LOL -- You have evidence that it's not?
At the very least it is more common in males, which suggests that there is some genetic component; generally speaking "male" is determined genetically rather than by environment.
The standard the court was enforcing is a "reasonable expectation of privacy". It seems likely that a reasonable person would expect the non-windowed parts of the walls of their home to provide privacy from people on the street.
It's not any different than requiring a warrant to use a laser microphone from across the street -- even though the police aren't actually entering your property they are violating your reasonable expectation of privacy, and therefore need a warrant.
It would not be a good time if we told the police "anything you can do from the street, using any technology you want, is a valid method for collecting evidence without a warrant" -- I for one cannot afford to wrap my entire house in material that blocks all EM radiation across the entire spectrum, or to provide 100% isolation from all vibrations.
In the general sense, the ability to determine that A > B requires arithmetic. Without arithmetic you could only look at two piles and say "they both contain many items"; the ability to say "pile A contains more items than pile B" requires some form of arithmetic, even if it is very simply.
And I'm not sure where you got this idea that arithmetic is purely discrete. For the purposes of calculation we often treat our observations that way, but in reality most arithmetic involves quantities that were not determined exactly. It's only our abstractions that allow counting in the first place -- "car" is not a measurable unit, it's an abstraction that we use to categories and describe our environment, and it's only such abstractions that can be discretely counted in the first place.
That's not to say that the birds were counting discrete plastic containers, as opposed to identifying the set of containers with the most visible surface, but in either case if the birds can determine that one set has "more" of something than the other set, it's still basic arithmetic. (And as always it's certainly possible that "more" had nothing to do with their behavior, and that the birds were motivated by something that the experiment did not control against, but that's beyond the scope of this comment)
You have a microwave that easily creates temperatures over 100C? When you have food in it?
Or maybe someone will point out that throwing things onto the rink is not a gag that Colbert invented? Or that, so long as it's done respectfully -- say during existing stoppages in play -- the crowd and participants might not mind, and may even find it fun?
But probably not, because it's too much fun to rip on popular people with cultural influence.
You got something experimentally, but with Mythbusters you're rarely sure exactly what it is you got. The problem with most of their experiments is not that their results are unreliable, or that the test can't be reproduced with similar results, it's that they results don't answer the question they claim to be asking.
See cold fusion for an example --
1. Claim you can produce cold fusion by putting zinc in acid
2. Collect the resulting gas in a balloon
3. Float the balloon
4. Remind people that helium makes balloons float, and can only be produced by nuclear reactions
That's a 100% reproducible experiment that uses the right buzzwords and enough real science to convince people that it's true. And the experimentation is true -- it's just that the experimentation doesn't have anything to do with cold fusion.
I've actually had no trouble spending my US dollars in Canada or Mexico. Seriously -- people take greenback almost anywhere.
It can be a little complicated depending on where you are in Canada and how smart the clerk is, but I've honestly never had it be a big problem, even when I was 200+ miles north of the border. Mexico was even less of a problem, and no one even blinked if you paid in US dollars, though you did sometimes need to negotiate the exchange rate to avoid getting screwed.
How many of your products do anything at all with the IP address? Seriously, TCP works the same way over IPv4 as IPv6, so unless you're writing 40 versions of a network stack or something that reads IP address for something more complicated than checking that old.address == new.address, I don't see how much testing you'd need outside of the network itself.
There ARE good reasons for regional pricing, at least from the perspective of the producer -- segmenting the market means you can maximize profits with differing strategies.
But there are also very good reasons for not allowing enforcement of pricing policies with technology that prohibits legitimate use and further trade. Let's say I own 400 DVD (which I do) and then I move to Australia (which I might) -- none of my DVDs will play on the devices available there. Even if I take a player with me I'll never be able to replace it without having one shipped in from the US (which I'm sure the MPAA would also like to outlaw). The content producer doesn't even have a legitimate interest in a pricing differential at this point, because I've already bought their content at the prices they set in the segmented market; at this point it's either a scam to make me re-buy the same content or an insidious infringement on my legitimate use of content I have license to view.
And that's not even to point out the limitation of secondary-market sales and other legitimate uses that, if executed, may not reduce the primary-market sales one iota but which are prevented by region-locking. Or the fact that as a primary-market customer I should be free to make my own choice as to whether I want to preserve the regional pricing differential or mitigate it through my secondary-market sales -- that isn't a decision we should allow content producers to make for us.
Is there some way to program for Windows Mobile without buying a license for MS Windows AND a license for MS Visual Studio? Because I've got a WM device that I'd really like to program for -- it's a fairly reasonable device as smartphones go, other than insisting that I use ActiveSync instead of standard BlueTooth sync profiles -- but I don't own either Windows or Visual Studio, and I can't figure out any way to compile for it without those two very expensive programs.
Android, on the other hand, only seems to require an i386 machine and Java, which makes entry a lot cheaper and less vendor dependent. Not that I wouldn't like root access there, but pretending that you don't have to play MS's game to program for Windows Mobile is a bit disingenuous.
Couldn't they have just called the parents, informed them of the potential threat, and allow her actual parents to make whatever decision seemed reasonable to them?
And that's assuming you evaluated potential abuse of some amount of ibuprofen small enough to be hidden in your clothing to be a credible threat in the first place.
Legitimate use is not a defense against zero-tolerance policies.
It doesn't apply if you're student -- courts have ruled that schools are acting as guardian ad litem for all students under its care and therefore have most of the rights generally reserved for parents, allowing them to take actions generally prohibited by agents of the state.
I'm not saying that's the way things should be, but it's most certainly the way they are.
Then all you have to do is make sure that all your duplicated data is exactly 1 disk block in length. That's got to be easier than just not storing it twice in the first place, or adding more disks.
I realize that's true from a pure copyright standpoint, but in the real world it's sometimes useful to say, install a copy of a tool for evaluation in your workflow before deciding to spend $600 on a license for that tool.
Or do you know of a merchant that will accept opened software package for return, should I decide that $600 isn't worth the cost for deployment, or doesn't do what I need? Because I'd be happy buy a license if I had the right to terminate the license and return the product for refund, and even to pay some reasonable fee for my trial usage -- I'm just not willing to pay full price with no opportunity for refund for a product that I've never had the opportunity to test. I wouldn't do it for a car or a DVD player and I won't do it for software either.
They get a numeric, widely-used evaluation tool, which they see as providing three main benefits:
1. It's a non-actionable reason to prefer person A over person B -- because it's widely used it's difficult for B to sue you for preferring A if A had scores more closely aligned with your goals.
2. Hiring managers absolutely love numeric scores as a way to cover themselves if things don't work out later -- I hired A because he had better scores, so how could I know that B would have been better?
3. Hiring more people with similar scores to those people you're already hired is seen as a risk-reducing behavior -- since you know someone with score X can do this job, maybe other people with score X can do it too.
Now, I'm not saying any of those reasons are particularly useful in terms of actually finding the right people to work for you -- such reasoning may actually be detrimental to that end -- but hiring the "right" person isn't the only goal that either the company or the hiring manager have, and given their other goals tests like these are at least somewhat rational.
You've setup your system backwards. If you start with the right single law -- the state has no powers except those explicitly granted to it -- then removing laws would necessarily do things like restricting police power and granting access to information because the police would only have been granted powers through laws, and the state would only have been granted the right to keep secrets through laws.
I'm sure the state would love this idea of a system where they implicitly have power and we must explicitly take it away with new laws, but it doesn't sound much like civil libertarianism or Libertarianism to me.
I wouldn't go around lambasting the US for their small units just because the British Empire went about making up new measures decades after the formation of the US.
England didn't start using the 20 floz pint until 1824. The previous 16 floz unit was defined as 1/8 of the British wine gallon -- about 231 cubic inches -- and had been since 1707. I'm not positive about the force/mass bit, but I'm pretty sure the same 1824 change made a hundredweight 8 stones, making it 112 lbs instead of 100 lbs used in the US or the previous 108 lbs.
What exactly makes forking so expensive with shared libraries? The code segment shouldn't be duplicated for shared or static libraries, and shared libraries have the benefit of only be loaded once per system, rather than once per program. Is there some important step I'm missing?
My computer knows when it's on, when it's sleeping, and when it's about to turn off. Does it have free will too?
Cashless society doesn't have to give control to anyone -- you don't have to link the card back to an account or have any central repository. Putting value into the card, rather than into a DB, exposes the system to possible counterfeiting, but it's not any different than the same risks today, and you get the benefits of electronic data transfers. You only carry only one bit of "cash", you can transfer funds to or from it via anything with an appropriate port (i.e. your cell phone), you could have it store a record of your transactions, always having exact change -- all sorts of things that are convenient, with no requirement for central reporting.