You missed the part about fair use. See Lewis Galoob Toys, Inc. v. Nintendo of America, Inc. -- "Having paid Nintendo a fair return, the consumer may experiment with the product and create new variations of play, for personal enjoyment, without creating a derivative work."
Now, that's just one circuit court case, and it's possible it wouldn't stand up in the supreme court, or that it isn't generally applicable to all software, but in general fair use *does* grant exemptions to title 17, and the right to modify a program which you have license to use may well be such an exemption.
You're assuming the only sensors are mounted on you; that is not necessarily true. If you're traveling in a team you could easy have 6+ sensors, all but one of which would not be directly in the line of fire.
How exactly do you get the kidnapping/crash victim to put this stuff on in the first place? Are you thinking people will wear bullet-dodging armor in their day-to-day lives?
You're not purchasing the story in the book either, just the right to use a single copy of it. Just like the phone, you own the physical implementation of the copyrighted material, but only hold a license to use that copyrighted material, and do not own the copyrighted material itself.
It's also my understanding that the DMCA specifically allows circumvention of the purposes of interoperation, and "lets me software run on my hardware" is clearly interoperation.
There's not even approximately a one-to-one mapping of phone numbers or physical addresses to individuals either. For one thing, many people have more than one phone number. Alternatively, anyone without a cell phone likely doesn't have a number to themselves. And it's pretty common for more than one person to live at a physical address.
The whole idea is ridiculous. Addresses, IP or otherwise, are necessarily public information; every packet you send out has your source IP address on it, and as a matter of long-standing policy the owner of that IP address is available to the public, including the government. Individuals have been somewhat insulated from that process because they typically aren't the real owners of the IP addresses they use, but that's only a matter of economics, not an intentional policy choice.
It will only break incoming mail that uses TNEF attachments. It's perfectly possible to send rich-text mail without TNEF.
And since we don't use Outlook as a mail client, I actually filter all incoming messages to extract the actual attachments from those stinking winmail.dat file before the mail is delivered. You could do the same thing at the postfix server so that Exchange never sees TNEF files.
First, you're assuming that the QA department of a comparable closed-source product has any purpose other than checking for obvious bugs. Stand-alone QA is a great idea, but in most places there's not nearly enough QA to even begin testing for things like architecture or specification flaws, let alone rare-case implementation errors -- they're lucky to get good coverage on implementation of expected use cases.
Second, I audit some of the code I build. I do not do comprehensive audits, nor do I audit every bit of software I build. But I've audited the pre-auth bits of my IMAP server and I've been through the pre-auth and GSSAPI code in my SSH server, not to mention all the lesser reviews I've done of other software just for the purposes of adding features or checking expected behavior. Even if only 1 in 1,000 users looks at the code, and those reviewers are only qualified to catch 10% of the errors in the code they read, it's still likely to be better quality and quantity code-level review than happens in most commercial QA environments.
If the power is down for weeks you're still counting on a generator to run your phone, you're just paying the phone company to run it for you. It's not like they've got a 600-hour battery backup.
Second, if you're really worried about availability, you could keep a spare battery pack around to plug into your router/ATA when you needed to make an emergency call -- most of them run at 5V or 12V DC, so it's trivial to make a backup that would last long enough for several emergency phone calls, would have weeks of standby time, and could left out-of-the-loop to avoid premature draining but still be easily switched on in an emergency, all for under $50. Not to mention the 12V power source and fuel-powered recharging system available in your car.
Or you could get a radio -- CBs don't require any license. And in an emergency would probably be willing to face the FCC in order to use restricted comm channels. Or get a satellite phone, which has its own battery, a car charger, and doesn't require any local ground infrastructure of any kind.
Heck, you could even light the signal fire at Amon Din to call for aid from Rohan.
I'm not saying it's unreasonably to have a land line, but it's far from the only choice for emergency communication.
If you want to provide service in unprofitable areas you could provide incentives to make those areas profitable without forcing any particular company to run service there, and without granting a perpetual monopoly on service.
Let's say a phone company would lose $X/customer-month given expected customer revenues on an amortized basis over the life of the installation by running service to customers in town Y.
So if the government offered a tax credit of $X + $0.01/customer-month to anyone willing to run service in town Y, wouldn't the area become profitable to service? And since no particular company would be required to run the service there would be no need to grant a monopoly, and therefore the market would remain open to competitors.
Now you can argue about whether or not the government should be involved in phone service in the first place, but even if you maintain that we should have universal service, it hardly follows that we must have monopoly service providers.
The author may not get more than $2 when you buy a book, but the whole chain between author and retailer certainly does. By re-selling the book after you've read it you're effectively sharing the cost with other readers; that sharing has no impact on the profit from the original sale, and therefore paying the difference between the original sale and resale price should not absolve your conscience.
That's pretty different from what you're talking about where you actually "make" the music.
I agree, it's different. But it's not inauthentic merely because it's different. That's like saying that using an electric piano makes music inauthentic, because it's different from an acoustic piano -- both tools allow artists to express themselves; the fact that one artist chooses a different method of expression does not make their expression any less valuable. That's not to say you can't make crap using auto-tune, but the fact that you used auto-tune doesn't make it crap, even if it does make it different.
If marketing were the answer, there would be no need for a contest of any form, they'd simply pick a random idiot and market them into radio plays.
Maybe you haven't seen American Idol. They are simply picking a random idiot and marketing them into radio plays. Part of that marketing is a "contest" -- "contests" that are decided by consumer spending are knowing in the marketing world as "test marketing", and that's exactly what American Idol is from the perspective of record companies.
Now the show also makes money in it's own right, before album sales ever come in to play. And therefore the show has some interest in picking moderately talented people to perform, though like most TV the determination of "talent" is largely based on physical appearance and other characteristics consumers expect in commercial television, and not particularly musical ability.
It's apples and oranges. Certainly it's always safer to run with less privileges -- administrator accounts on OS X have some extra file system permissions, and the ability to become root. But the accounts are not root and can't become root without a password. All the vital bits of the file system require root access, which simply isn't the case with Windows administrator accounts.
So for free services like this, exactly what consideration am I putting up? They're giving me software/media/etc., but I'm not giving them anything. I'm pretty sure mutual consideration is one of the required elements of a contract -- am I missing something here?
Once you pull your passport out and open it, anyone in line-of-sight can read it with or without RFID. As it turns out, light transmits your password information over the air well.
If you want to bash RFID feel free, but please pick a threat that's actually related to its use.
Couldn't you just wrap your passport in tinfoil, so that the RFID chip only worked when it was open? Then it would still work for valid uses and would be undetectable the rest of the time.
Seesh. I think governmental monitoring is a terrible idea, but people like you make it hard to take the real threat seriously.
But an 8-year-old doesn't care. They'd be happy with a very superficial explanation -- because they have no interest in sex, explaining it to them is just boring for them. They're only asking questions because they don't understand at all; a little bit of context is plenty to make them stop caring.
2% doesn't mean anything unless you know the spoilage rate for non-electronic voting. In the US 2000 elections, 1.94% of the ballots cast were spoiled, and most of those were not electronic. I don't know if Finland usually has similar spoilage rates, but if they do I don't see why this is any more or less a problem than the old method.
Really? Because AFAIK most of my buses are binary. Heck, most of my busses are differential pairs -- SATA, PCIe, DisplayPort, RS-432, DDR, 10 GbE, Infiniband, Hypertransport
Am I missing something? What busses are you using that aren't binary?
The "small performance penalty" is potentially tripling the amount of time it takes to write a block -- you have to read the old block, re-write the old block someplace else, and then write the new block. It doesn't happen every time, but it's quite a penalty when it does, and there's no parameter you can tune to make that penalty smaller. If you're rating drives in IOPS/$ there's no "idle" time to do housekeeping like this, and it results in a direct performance loss.
You're assuming the system file is re-written at some point, so that it's previous position becomes available. What happens if I have 50% of my disk full of data that won't ever be re-written over the life of the drive? Does the drive interrupt my writes, do some internally copying, and then let me access it again? It does, is there any way I can make it stop, so I don't have unpredictable delays related to garbage collection?
What you describe here doesn't necessarily do what the parent describes. It might exist, but I have yet to see an implementation of either that takes in-use sectors and moves them to not-in-use sectors.
Re-mapping not-in-use blocks and selecting the least-used blocks for writing is pretty easy, and can be 0-overhead in terms of main storage bandwidth. But remapping in-use blocks requires stealing at least one read and one write cycle for every block you move. Those extra cycles detract directly from the available disk bandwidth, and would drive impede performance; it hardly seems like the sort of thing a company touting the speed of the disks would do.
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You missed the part about fair use. See Lewis Galoob Toys, Inc. v. Nintendo of America, Inc. -- "Having paid Nintendo a fair return, the consumer may experiment with the product and create new variations of play, for personal enjoyment, without creating a derivative work."
Now, that's just one circuit court case, and it's possible it wouldn't stand up in the supreme court, or that it isn't generally applicable to all software, but in general fair use *does* grant exemptions to title 17, and the right to modify a program which you have license to use may well be such an exemption.
You're assuming the only sensors are mounted on you; that is not necessarily true. If you're traveling in a team you could easy have 6+ sensors, all but one of which would not be directly in the line of fire.
How exactly do you get the kidnapping/crash victim to put this stuff on in the first place? Are you thinking people will wear bullet-dodging armor in their day-to-day lives?
You're not purchasing the story in the book either, just the right to use a single copy of it. Just like the phone, you own the physical implementation of the copyrighted material, but only hold a license to use that copyrighted material, and do not own the copyrighted material itself.
It's also my understanding that the DMCA specifically allows circumvention of the purposes of interoperation, and "lets me software run on my hardware" is clearly interoperation.
There's not even approximately a one-to-one mapping of phone numbers or physical addresses to individuals either. For one thing, many people have more than one phone number. Alternatively, anyone without a cell phone likely doesn't have a number to themselves. And it's pretty common for more than one person to live at a physical address.
The whole idea is ridiculous. Addresses, IP or otherwise, are necessarily public information; every packet you send out has your source IP address on it, and as a matter of long-standing policy the owner of that IP address is available to the public, including the government. Individuals have been somewhat insulated from that process because they typically aren't the real owners of the IP addresses they use, but that's only a matter of economics, not an intentional policy choice.
It will only break incoming mail that uses TNEF attachments. It's perfectly possible to send rich-text mail without TNEF.
And since we don't use Outlook as a mail client, I actually filter all incoming messages to extract the actual attachments from those stinking winmail.dat file before the mail is delivered. You could do the same thing at the postfix server so that Exchange never sees TNEF files.
First, you're assuming that the QA department of a comparable closed-source product has any purpose other than checking for obvious bugs. Stand-alone QA is a great idea, but in most places there's not nearly enough QA to even begin testing for things like architecture or specification flaws, let alone rare-case implementation errors -- they're lucky to get good coverage on implementation of expected use cases.
Second, I audit some of the code I build. I do not do comprehensive audits, nor do I audit every bit of software I build. But I've audited the pre-auth bits of my IMAP server and I've been through the pre-auth and GSSAPI code in my SSH server, not to mention all the lesser reviews I've done of other software just for the purposes of adding features or checking expected behavior. Even if only 1 in 1,000 users looks at the code, and those reviewers are only qualified to catch 10% of the errors in the code they read, it's still likely to be better quality and quantity code-level review than happens in most commercial QA environments.
If the power is down for weeks you're still counting on a generator to run your phone, you're just paying the phone company to run it for you. It's not like they've got a 600-hour battery backup.
Second, if you're really worried about availability, you could keep a spare battery pack around to plug into your router/ATA when you needed to make an emergency call -- most of them run at 5V or 12V DC, so it's trivial to make a backup that would last long enough for several emergency phone calls, would have weeks of standby time, and could left out-of-the-loop to avoid premature draining but still be easily switched on in an emergency, all for under $50. Not to mention the 12V power source and fuel-powered recharging system available in your car.
Or you could get a radio -- CBs don't require any license. And in an emergency would probably be willing to face the FCC in order to use restricted comm channels. Or get a satellite phone, which has its own battery, a car charger, and doesn't require any local ground infrastructure of any kind.
Heck, you could even light the signal fire at Amon Din to call for aid from Rohan.
I'm not saying it's unreasonably to have a land line, but it's far from the only choice for emergency communication.
If you want to provide service in unprofitable areas you could provide incentives to make those areas profitable without forcing any particular company to run service there, and without granting a perpetual monopoly on service.
Let's say a phone company would lose $X/customer-month given expected customer revenues on an amortized basis over the life of the installation by running service to customers in town Y.
So if the government offered a tax credit of $X + $0.01/customer-month to anyone willing to run service in town Y, wouldn't the area become profitable to service? And since no particular company would be required to run the service there would be no need to grant a monopoly, and therefore the market would remain open to competitors.
Now you can argue about whether or not the government should be involved in phone service in the first place, but even if you maintain that we should have universal service, it hardly follows that we must have monopoly service providers.
The author may not get more than $2 when you buy a book, but the whole chain between author and retailer certainly does. By re-selling the book after you've read it you're effectively sharing the cost with other readers; that sharing has no impact on the profit from the original sale, and therefore paying the difference between the original sale and resale price should not absolve your conscience.
At least it buys us some time.
That's pretty different from what you're talking about where you actually "make" the music.
I agree, it's different. But it's not inauthentic merely because it's different. That's like saying that using an electric piano makes music inauthentic, because it's different from an acoustic piano -- both tools allow artists to express themselves; the fact that one artist chooses a different method of expression does not make their expression any less valuable. That's not to say you can't make crap using auto-tune, but the fact that you used auto-tune doesn't make it crap, even if it does make it different.
If marketing were the answer, there would be no need for a contest of any form, they'd simply pick a random idiot and market them into radio plays.
Maybe you haven't seen American Idol. They are simply picking a random idiot and marketing them into radio plays. Part of that marketing is a "contest" -- "contests" that are decided by consumer spending are knowing in the marketing world as "test marketing", and that's exactly what American Idol is from the perspective of record companies.
Now the show also makes money in it's own right, before album sales ever come in to play. And therefore the show has some interest in picking moderately talented people to perform, though like most TV the determination of "talent" is largely based on physical appearance and other characteristics consumers expect in commercial television, and not particularly musical ability.
And somehow delaying the switchover a few months will fix your reception problems?
It's apples and oranges. Certainly it's always safer to run with less privileges -- administrator accounts on OS X have some extra file system permissions, and the ability to become root. But the accounts are not root and can't become root without a password. All the vital bits of the file system require root access, which simply isn't the case with Windows administrator accounts.
So for free services like this, exactly what consideration am I putting up? They're giving me software/media/etc., but I'm not giving them anything. I'm pretty sure mutual consideration is one of the required elements of a contract -- am I missing something here?
Once you pull your passport out and open it, anyone in line-of-sight can read it with or without RFID. As it turns out, light transmits your password information over the air well.
If you want to bash RFID feel free, but please pick a threat that's actually related to its use.
Couldn't you just wrap your passport in tinfoil, so that the RFID chip only worked when it was open? Then it would still work for valid uses and would be undetectable the rest of the time.
Seesh. I think governmental monitoring is a terrible idea, but people like you make it hard to take the real threat seriously.
But an 8-year-old doesn't care. They'd be happy with a very superficial explanation -- because they have no interest in sex, explaining it to them is just boring for them. They're only asking questions because they don't understand at all; a little bit of context is plenty to make them stop caring.
2% doesn't mean anything unless you know the spoilage rate for non-electronic voting. In the US 2000 elections, 1.94% of the ballots cast were spoiled, and most of those were not electronic. I don't know if Finland usually has similar spoilage rates, but if they do I don't see why this is any more or less a problem than the old method.
Really? Because AFAIK most of my buses are binary. Heck, most of my busses are differential pairs -- SATA, PCIe, DisplayPort, RS-432, DDR, 10 GbE, Infiniband, Hypertransport
Am I missing something? What busses are you using that aren't binary?
I don't understand what part of owning shares of a company is "dangerous territory" with regard to taxes. Care to elaborate?
The "small performance penalty" is potentially tripling the amount of time it takes to write a block -- you have to read the old block, re-write the old block someplace else, and then write the new block. It doesn't happen every time, but it's quite a penalty when it does, and there's no parameter you can tune to make that penalty smaller. If you're rating drives in IOPS/$ there's no "idle" time to do housekeeping like this, and it results in a direct performance loss.
You're assuming the system file is re-written at some point, so that it's previous position becomes available. What happens if I have 50% of my disk full of data that won't ever be re-written over the life of the drive? Does the drive interrupt my writes, do some internally copying, and then let me access it again? It does, is there any way I can make it stop, so I don't have unpredictable delays related to garbage collection?
What you describe here doesn't necessarily do what the parent describes. It might exist, but I have yet to see an implementation of either that takes in-use sectors and moves them to not-in-use sectors.
Re-mapping not-in-use blocks and selecting the least-used blocks for writing is pretty easy, and can be 0-overhead in terms of main storage bandwidth. But remapping in-use blocks requires stealing at least one read and one write cycle for every block you move. Those extra cycles detract directly from the available disk bandwidth, and would drive impede performance; it hardly seems like the sort of thing a company touting the speed of the disks would do.