How do we deal with people who break the rules? Everybody tell your broker! Tell them exactly what is wrong with LinuxOne, and point them to documents.
Many, if not most, of the reasons behind the troubles we see at LinuxOne make sense to financial types; you don't have to explain technical concepts to them. If enough brokers and financial types get enough LinuxOne anti-buzz about this, they will send in researchers, and show them exactly what to look for. The results of that research can get the financial community to avoid LinuxOne in droves, taking their investors with them. Remember, these people don't like being wrong.
For the search engines, the MPAA is not the problem. If the MPAA gets the courts to set a precedent that linking to illegal data is illegal itself, then the doors are blown wide open on search engines, which are nothing but links.
Note that the MPAA never has to even threaten a search engine for this to happen. They just have to sue a site that doesn't have questionable information on it, but links to a site that does (like, say, Slashdot?). If they do that successfully, the precedent can then be used by anybody to beat search engines senseless.
At any time, any computerized search engine can link you to hundreds, if not thousands, of sites with illegal content. The content is out there, and the sites link to everything.
Interestingly, there is already precedent the other way to protect search engines. It's the phone book. Any major metropolitan phone book consists of hundreds of links (phone numbers) to known felons. Imagine a parent suing the local Bell for posting the phone number of a local pedophile? I think not (egad, I hope not).
Re:Corporations are *people* under the law
on
Hole in GNU GPL?
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· Score: 2
There's a second amendment?!? I thought that they removed that from the Constitution with an Xact-O knife.
Some character comes up behind a dragon hatchling with a baseball bat and plants one on his skull. Said hatchling reaches up, grabs the weapon, turns around, bites and chews the aluminum baseball bat, and blows fine aluminum shavings at a tree next to his attacker. Said tree falls over, victim of the Death of a Thousand Razors.
Attacker goes from Conan to Shaggy in about a second flat...
1) You end up shifting the pollution to the power generation stations. Recent generations of autos have much better pollution controls than ten years ago.
Shifting the pollution from millions of automobiles to hundreds (or thousands) of power plants sounds like a big win in my book. It's a lot easier to regulate stationary power plants than roving ones, and economies of scale tell us that you can do pollution controlling cheaper at large plants.
Help increase the number of domains available to small organizations that just don't care that much (yet) about protecting a name (e.g. scat.arts, and scat.com could be, respectively some jazz singers and a porn site without causing too much confusion).
Depending on the social and political climate (especially near ICANN et al), scat.com and scat.arts could be reversed from the order you suggest. After all, what is art?
It is absolutely in a country's best interest to deny strong crypto to everybody else. The problem is that crypto export regulations produce the opposite effect.
Per current law, most "strong" (not easily crackable) crypto cannot be exported from the US. It can be imported from anywhere. Other countries don't particularly have this policy. As a result, people who really want to write crypto software have reason to move overseas. Moreover, remember that most of the mathematical types who do crypto don't live in this country.
Where a piece of software needs to have crypto built in, foriegn developers have a natural advantage because they can ship a secure product anywhere.
What it comes down to is that crypto export regulations insure that the best crypto, and the best crypto-enabled software, come from places other than the US. And this is exactly how you fail to deny strong crypto to your enemies.
Techniques such as wavelet compression are far more useful if they are not patented, because the requirement to negotiate use rights is a barrier to their use, and their value is increased by ubiquity; the promise of "progress in the useful arts" is taken back by the barriers to entry.
The problem with this argument is that it assumes the creation of the technology in question. Once a technique such as wavelet compression (or RSA public-key encryption, something I am more familiar with) is created, it is most beneficial to the world as a whole that it be promulgated without restrictions. That is, without a patent.
The question is: which of these technologies would have been created without the promise of a patent, and which would not? Would the team of R, S, and A (I don't remember the names offhand) have bothered to make their public-key algorithm, and then to publish it so that the rest of us could check for weaknesses, if they didn't have the promise of profit by license royalties?
That I don't know the answer to. But I know that there are a lot of technologies that exist solely due to patent protection, and I also know that there are a lot of technologies that would exist with or without patent protection. The trick is categorizing technologies to these two types, and making the second type unpatentable.
Never trust that a large organization, especially a government, will act in its best interests. If that were the case, we would have no crypto export regulations.
By the ideal of communism, China should keep their Linux open sourced. By the ideal of central governmental control, China should keep their Linux closed source. Which ideal do you expect China to hold more closely?
Wit isn't detrimental to coding. But the hours you spend learning karate will put the other guy way ahead of you if he's doing what doctors and researchers do in their fields: namely spending that same time mastering their trade.
Allow me to paraphrase (and thoroughly mangle) a Zen koan. A student asks his master how long it will take him to achieve enlightenment if he spends an hour a day. The master says "A year".
"And if I spend four hours a day?"
"Ten years."
"And if I spend all my waking hours?"
"Then you will never achieve enlightenment."
To a certain extent, persuits outside of one's major field helps one inside that major field. While this is counterintuitive, it is true. Who can find a true expert in any field who is totally dedicated to that field?
One possible solution is to have the entire story framed as a flashback in the head of an older Ender, and having that older Ender provide some narration for the flashbacks.
Blade Runner.
Dune. Narration almost always gets in the way. If you need narration in turning a book to a movie, either you're doing it wrong, or the movie should not be made.
You point out the flaws of an adversarial legal system: your points are well taken. But I cannot see a viable alternative.
I certainly don't believe that such a system is perfect, but I personally believe that the basic trial by judge/trial by jury system is the best we know how to do today. Obviously there are some flaws in how certain countries (like my own USA) implement the process, and there are cases where the whole idea is spectacularly bad, but what is better?
Consider the closing scene of the first act of Earth 2, the scene where the Earth colony ship tumbles into the atmosphere with its outer surface boiling away and pieces breaking off -- in all, a scene of great visual violence -- took place in *complete silence.*
Amusingly, such complete silence is technically inaccurate. A large object entering an atmosphere, especially as you described it, is going to make a lot of noise. You probably won't be able to hear it from high orbit, but if you are close enough that the ship is well visible (rather than a flaming dot), you are going to hear a lot of noise.
I'm actually rather surprised that I haven't seen much really good zero-G on either the big or little screen. Still, one of the better attempts was Kubrik's 2001.
2001 did quite well for its time with rotating sets and all. Note the flight attendents in this movie. They either were directed well in doing "velcro-walking" (pretending that velcro, not gravity, held their feet to the floor), or they were actually wearing velcro.
Even more interesting: those ugly hats they were wearing. As near as I can tell, this got around the issue of long hair, which doesn't fall nicely to the shoulders in zero-G. Today, the real way to handle this might be to "scrub" and computer-animate all long hair in post-production. Since this is expensive, one may cheat by making short hair the fashion for all characters in zero-G. This may not be too unrealistic--do you want long, flowing hair where it can float into your face? Kubrick couldn't do this because women just didn't have short hair in those days--it would freak people out. But now we have Ripley and Sinead!
Swap partition? Hell, I've installed it on a RAM disk! Amusingly, I had to do this to fdisk away an HPFS partition when redoing an OS/2 install. Ah, back when I was young and stupid...
Did they exclude error factors like their own LAN?
They did have some broad criteria for failure. I wonder what a similar study in brick-and-mortar would turn up. How many such transactions fail because you get there after closing time, they don't have the particular Furby you want, or the shopper gets a flat tire on the way to the mall?
RMS has a sense of humor, at least at times. I've met him face-to-face exactly once, at a science fiction con. Karma works; several hours ago, I had purchased a button reading "Does Emacs have the buddha nature? Why not, it has bloody well everything else!"
It turned out he was wearing a button stating "I won't * ane", with the * being replaced with a red playing-card diamond. As I was on sleep deprevation at the time (hey, it's a con), he had to explain the translation ("I won't die mundane") to me.
If he had no sense of humor, I can't imagine him going to an SF con.
The commercial stations are in a difficult position: they aren't making any more money from the re-broadcast, and iCrave is making money from selling banner ads to other companies.
Actually, the commercial stations either are or will make more money because of iCrave. Advertisers pay per slot, not per "hit", and they do so based on expected hits per slot. This is why Neilson ratings are so important, and why Superbowl slots are so expensive.
Advertisers who know iCrave exists will realize that a particular broadcaster is covering more area, and this increases the demand (thus the price) per slot on that broadcaster.
I doubt that Gates is in it for the money. I mean, after the first $50 Billion, who keeps count? IMHO, he's in it for the control, for the power. I think that, if MS was broken up and prevented from remonopolizing (remonopolizing is a very real possibility), Bill will be twice as rich and half as happy.
I'm not looking to make Bill less rich or less happy. To me, vengence is petty and irrelevant. I am interested in a remedy that allows competition to flourish in the software arena. I don't mind Bill making gobs of money, but I mind him making one penny of it selling crap.
One of the interesting implications of this trial is that the witnesses are contradicting the marketroids. Either Linux is viable competition for Windows, or it isn't. If it is, then Microsoft is guilty of slander and/or false advertisement, both civil charges that can open them up to class-action lawsuits. If it isn't, then certain witnesses are guilty of perjury, and could be put away for at least a token amount of time--and the BMW crowd hates slumming in the Big House.
Slashdot Mirror
Many, if not most, of the reasons behind the troubles we see at LinuxOne make sense to financial types; you don't have to explain technical concepts to them. If enough brokers and financial types get enough LinuxOne anti-buzz about this, they will send in researchers, and show them exactly what to look for. The results of that research can get the financial community to avoid LinuxOne in droves, taking their investors with them. Remember, these people don't like being wrong.
"LinuxOne, the Linux distribution for the dumber than average user. It's not any easier to learn than other distros, but more likely to fleece you".
Note that the MPAA never has to even threaten a search engine for this to happen. They just have to sue a site that doesn't have questionable information on it, but links to a site that does (like, say, Slashdot?). If they do that successfully, the precedent can then be used by anybody to beat search engines senseless.
At any time, any computerized search engine can link you to hundreds, if not thousands, of sites with illegal content. The content is out there, and the sites link to everything.
Interestingly, there is already precedent the other way to protect search engines. It's the phone book. Any major metropolitan phone book consists of hundreds of links (phone numbers) to known felons. Imagine a parent suing the local Bell for posting the phone number of a local pedophile? I think not (egad, I hope not).
For the sake of the children, of course...
Some character comes up behind a dragon hatchling with a baseball bat and plants one on his skull. Said hatchling reaches up, grabs the weapon, turns around, bites and chews the aluminum baseball bat, and blows fine aluminum shavings at a tree next to his attacker. Said tree falls over, victim of the Death of a Thousand Razors.
Attacker goes from Conan to Shaggy in about a second flat...
I'd be impressed by a geek under the age of 3. I was going onto five when I found my inner geek ;^>
Shifting the pollution from millions of automobiles to hundreds (or thousands) of power plants sounds like a big win in my book. It's a lot easier to regulate stationary power plants than roving ones, and economies of scale tell us that you can do pollution controlling cheaper at large plants.
Depending on the social and political climate (especially near ICANN et al), scat.com and scat.arts could be reversed from the order you suggest. After all, what is art?
Yes, this scares me. But only a little.
Per current law, most "strong" (not easily crackable) crypto cannot be exported from the US. It can be imported from anywhere. Other countries don't particularly have this policy. As a result, people who really want to write crypto software have reason to move overseas. Moreover, remember that most of the mathematical types who do crypto don't live in this country.
Where a piece of software needs to have crypto built in, foriegn developers have a natural advantage because they can ship a secure product anywhere.
What it comes down to is that crypto export regulations insure that the best crypto, and the best crypto-enabled software, come from places other than the US. And this is exactly how you fail to deny strong crypto to your enemies.
The problem with this argument is that it assumes the creation of the technology in question. Once a technique such as wavelet compression (or RSA public-key encryption, something I am more familiar with) is created, it is most beneficial to the world as a whole that it be promulgated without restrictions. That is, without a patent.
The question is: which of these technologies would have been created without the promise of a patent, and which would not? Would the team of R, S, and A (I don't remember the names offhand) have bothered to make their public-key algorithm, and then to publish it so that the rest of us could check for weaknesses, if they didn't have the promise of profit by license royalties?
That I don't know the answer to. But I know that there are a lot of technologies that exist solely due to patent protection, and I also know that there are a lot of technologies that would exist with or without patent protection. The trick is categorizing technologies to these two types, and making the second type unpatentable.
By the ideal of communism, China should keep their Linux open sourced. By the ideal of central governmental control, China should keep their Linux closed source. Which ideal do you expect China to hold more closely?
My Windows 95 is much more secure now, but it took several months of intense psychotherapy...
Allow me to paraphrase (and thoroughly mangle) a Zen koan. A student asks his master how long it will take him to achieve enlightenment if he spends an hour a day. The master says "A year".
"And if I spend four hours a day?"
"Ten years."
"And if I spend all my waking hours?"
"Then you will never achieve enlightenment."
To a certain extent, persuits outside of one's major field helps one inside that major field. While this is counterintuitive, it is true. Who can find a true expert in any field who is totally dedicated to that field?
Blade Runner.
Dune. Narration almost always gets in the way. If you need narration in turning a book to a movie, either you're doing it wrong, or the movie should not be made.
I certainly don't believe that such a system is perfect, but I personally believe that the basic trial by judge/trial by jury system is the best we know how to do today. Obviously there are some flaws in how certain countries (like my own USA) implement the process, and there are cases where the whole idea is spectacularly bad, but what is better?
Amusingly, such complete silence is technically inaccurate. A large object entering an atmosphere, especially as you described it, is going to make a lot of noise. You probably won't be able to hear it from high orbit, but if you are close enough that the ship is well visible (rather than a flaming dot), you are going to hear a lot of noise.
2001 did quite well for its time with rotating sets and all. Note the flight attendents in this movie. They either were directed well in doing "velcro-walking" (pretending that velcro, not gravity, held their feet to the floor), or they were actually wearing velcro.
Even more interesting: those ugly hats they were wearing. As near as I can tell, this got around the issue of long hair, which doesn't fall nicely to the shoulders in zero-G. Today, the real way to handle this might be to "scrub" and computer-animate all long hair in post-production. Since this is expensive, one may cheat by making short hair the fashion for all characters in zero-G. This may not be too unrealistic--do you want long, flowing hair where it can float into your face? Kubrick couldn't do this because women just didn't have short hair in those days--it would freak people out. But now we have Ripley and Sinead!
If you can imagine a Beanie Baby like a Victoria's secret bra, yup, you're weird.
Swap partition? Hell, I've installed it on a RAM disk! Amusingly, I had to do this to fdisk away an HPFS partition when redoing an OS/2 install. Ah, back when I was young and stupid...
They did have some broad criteria for failure. I wonder what a similar study in brick-and-mortar would turn up. How many such transactions fail because you get there after closing time, they don't have the particular Furby you want, or the shopper gets a flat tire on the way to the mall?
RMS was the one who explained it!
It turned out he was wearing a button stating "I won't * ane", with the * being replaced with a red playing-card diamond. As I was on sleep deprevation at the time (hey, it's a con), he had to explain the translation ("I won't die mundane") to me.
If he had no sense of humor, I can't imagine him going to an SF con.
Actually, the commercial stations either are or will make more money because of iCrave. Advertisers pay per slot, not per "hit", and they do so based on expected hits per slot. This is why Neilson ratings are so important, and why Superbowl slots are so expensive.
Advertisers who know iCrave exists will realize that a particular broadcaster is covering more area, and this increases the demand (thus the price) per slot on that broadcaster.
I doubt that Gates is in it for the money. I mean, after the first $50 Billion, who keeps count? IMHO, he's in it for the control, for the power. I think that, if MS was broken up and prevented from remonopolizing (remonopolizing is a very real possibility), Bill will be twice as rich and half as happy.
I'm not looking to make Bill less rich or less happy. To me, vengence is petty and irrelevant. I am interested in a remedy that allows competition to flourish in the software arena. I don't mind Bill making gobs of money, but I mind him making one penny of it selling crap.
One of the interesting implications of this trial is that the witnesses are contradicting the marketroids. Either Linux is viable competition for Windows, or it isn't. If it is, then Microsoft is guilty of slander and/or false advertisement, both civil charges that can open them up to class-action lawsuits. If it isn't, then certain witnesses are guilty of perjury, and could be put away for at least a token amount of time--and the BMW crowd hates slumming in the Big House.