In a country where video rental stores routinely demand your social security number before they allow you to rent tapes (and it takes a minimum 30-minute argument with 3 managers to convince them that's an illegal requirement), most or all of the harms of universal ID number are already here. Let's get some of the benefits. With a national ID number and national ID card,
1. Voter registration can be eliminated: Along with all the civil rights battles that entails. Anyone old enough can simply show up at a polling place on election day and vote. This eliminates a whole level of exclusionism.
2. Driver's Licenses can be just for drivers: So, so many Americans who can't drive (for reasons including age, disability, etc.) fight to maintain their driver's licenses because it's HARD to participate in society and commerce without one. A national ID card would provide all persons with an ID that merchants wouldn't question -- and no need for a driving test. Furthermore, people who know that they're unsafe, incapable drivers would have an alternative to keeping their licenses. This would allow them to avoid the temptation to drive.
"A. My interest in the law, I suppose, stems in part from a family tradition, to be honest. Grandfather was a lawyer, parents, uncle is a law professor.... But it also stems, of course, in large part from interesting experiences in and around the law, especially these past few years, absolutely."
Could be a regional issue. I can say that a stilted "Grandfather was a lawyer" would sound pretentious around these here parts. But as I read the paragraph for the way-too-many-eth time, I now "hear" it as an abbreviated bullet point list. Imagine him ticking each one off on his fingers. In that context, I'd have dropped the "my"s, too. Oh well, we've now devoted way more attention to this than it deserved.
I was sold on the guy from the point where he gently corrected the interviewer to point out that the ideas he was advocating had been articulated by his professor.
Also, your personal connections don't have a whole hell of a lot of weight at HLS, the screening process is such that if you don't have at least exceptional qualifications you won't make it to a point where anyone important even sees your application.
On that, I have to disagree. Haa-vaad, like a lot of top programs in law and other subjects turns down more exceptionally qualified candidates than it accepts. I would suggest that that personal connections can and often are _the deciding factor_ between one candidate and another.
But, I agree with your point that everyone who gets into such programs was at least exceptional to begin with.
I believe that these days it takes some kind of crazy, crazy connections to get into such a program if you aren't well qualified. For instance, consider people who want to fly jet fighter aircraft for a living. Not only do they have to be smart and lucky enough to have a physically perfect body (including eyesight), but it takes a recommendation from some one in government (often a senator) as well. A buddy of mine, who knew no one, but was otherwise well-qualified, spent years butting his head into this wall.
I think this kid sounds like an overpriviledged clown who got into HLS partly on scholarship but mostly on the heritage of grandaddy et alia. He even calls his granfather "Grandfather . .."
And here I just thought he sounded like someone who knew what the hell he was talking about with this topic. He credits his sources. He is humble about his own contributions. What more do you want?
I say, judge Ben on his work, not on his family. Isn't that the standard we've all been pushing for for years? Where do we get off discounting Ben's thoughts or his work because of something that has nothing to do with Ben's merits? How would I like it if everything I said was discounted because of my West Virginian heritage? Or my German heritage, or my English, or my Irish, or my Hungarian, or my Native American? Or that my family includes farmers, or school teachers, or chemists, or doctors, or lawyers, or accountants? WTF?
Oh, and about the grandfather thing. I call my grandpa "Grandpa" when I'm talking to him, but I describe him as "my grandfather" when I'm talking about him. It just doesn't mean anything.
"He's no lawyer yet, but he responds quite well to several objections to the case." This implies that one must be a lawyer to understand legality, and to be able to convincingly argue one's position. Sorry, I don't buy it.
Oh, calm down. Of course we don't need to be lawyers to understand the law or to be able to present a coherent, convincing argument.
But, we expect those who are lawyers to be able to do both. I thought the above statement was a simple compliment and a suggestion that Edelman's comments were well said. And, having read the interview, I'd say the submitter was right.
IMHO, it's the rare non-lawyer who really understands how a law works. And, it's the rare lawyer who really pays attention to what a law means. As with anything, there are plenty of exceptions.
Sec. 514(a): "Notwithstanding any State or Federal statute or other law, . . . a copyright owner shall not be liable in any criminal or civil action for disabling, interfering with, blocking, diverting, or otherwise impairing the unauthorized distribution, display, performance, or reproduction of his or her copyrighted work on a publicly accessible peer-to-peer file trading network, if such impairment does not, without authorization, alter, delete, or otherwise impair the integrity of any computer file or data residing on the computer of a file trader."
But there are other gems as well. Such as the part that says no matter how much of your legitimate traffic they screw up, it's OK if they're going after a work they have copyright to.
Sec. 514(b)(1)(A): The copyright holder is still liable if he "impairs the availability within a publicly accessible peer-to-peer file trading network of a computer file or data that does not contain a work, or portion thereof, in which the copyright owner has an exclusive right granted under section 106, except as may be reasonably necessary to impair the distribution, display, performance, or reproduction of such a work, or portion thereof, in violation of any of the exclusive rights of the copyright owner under section 106"
Finally, there's the notice provision. This is truly comical -- they're required to notify you of your rights after they DoS you and only if you ask them. How you're supposed to know who it is who did this to you is a good question. Heck, how are you even supposed to diagnose the problem when your entire internet service suddenly goes out, much less figure out which rights-holder did it?
Sec. 514(c)(2): "At the request of an affected file trader or the assignee of an Internet Protocol address used by an affected file trader, a copyright owner shall provide notice to the affected file trader or assignee (as the case may be)..."
The OS's one foundation
is Linus Torvald's code; She is his new creation
by semaphores bestrode. In Finland Linus wrote her,
his macro-kernel core; With GPL he gave her,
that we might pay no more.
Input from every nation,
yet one o'er all the earth; Her message: revolution,
open source proves its worth! No profit-mad excesses,
she charges us no fee, And to this hope she presses,
that software will be free.
#3 - What's in a name anyway? It's just an identifier. We could all just as well be numbered for all the real value that a name contains. What are you without your name? Still you, right?
While I value the Google cache, this philosophically true rant is naive from a privacy perspective. Our names are the first of several username/password combinations that allow us to control our interaction with the world. Couple a name with a few more facts, and identity theft becomes possible.
So, while we may still be us without our names, some one else with our names (and some additional info) can become us, too, to a certain extent. This is a practical problem, not a philosophical one.
Patience. Patience. First, try to break the patent, then withdraw the standard if necessary. If it's invalidated, you won't have to mess with the standard. Haste makes waste.
Of course, the time necessary to bring a patent case through trial is almost as long as the remaining life of the Compression Labs / Forgent patent (October 6, 2004--17 years after issue).
Further, even if you changed the standard last week, you couldn't get all devices and software that use JPEG out of circulation before the patent expired. Even assuming anyone, consumer or corporations, would cooperate, which they wouldn't.
Yes, revoking standards that can't be practiced royalty free is a good stance to take, but it won't have time to accomplish much here.
Why does patent law allow this? JPEG has been around for YEARS! This is not something that somebody started using yesterday.
First of all, don't assume that Patent Law allows what Forgent is apparently asking for. As several people have pointed out, there are any number of legal reasons why a court might very well laugh in Forgent's face. It's jumping the gun to blame "the law" every time some company starts making unreasonable demands that it may not be able to back up.
The odd thing about this patent (U.S. Pat. 4,698,672) is how old it is. Wen-hsiung Chen and Daniel Klenke applied for this patent on October 27, 1986 (App. No. ) and it was issued on October 6, 1987 to a company named Compression Labs, Inc. (San Jose, CA). It should expire 17 years after issue on October 6, 2004.
I guess we can't blame this one on the dot-bubble and the Patent Office being overloaded in the late 1990s. Still, Forgent is going to have serious problems enforcing this thing after a 15 year delay.
While it's true that Orwell's predictions (if that's what they were) didn't come true by the year 1984, it is perfectly reasonable, and probably a good excercise, to always consider the possibility of the devolopment of a repressive government.
True, true. We cannot say (and I didn't) that the Orwellian world has been avoided forever. We can only say that it is being avoided.
No doubt, technology increases the means for oppression. For instance, without cheap networks, storage space, and processing, building a profile of a consumer's purchases (e.g. supermarket shopper card) is prohibitively expensive for the value that profile has to merchants. Similarly, Echelon is far cheaper than the same system implemented for snail mail. Still, it's concentration of power, not technology that's the primary danger. Oppressive, totalitarian states are quite possible with low tech.
I agree that constant vigilence is called for to avoid such a future. OTOH constant doomsaying / crying-of-wolf is boring.
Your reading of the parent post may be right; I can't say. What I don't quite understand is a "flamebait" mod, but what the 7734.:-)
Actually, for dystopian novels, I recommend Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. Makes some interesting points, and Huxley is somewhat less convinced of the inherent unworthiness of people.
So far, the only thing we know for certain that Orwell was wrong about was the year.
I. Such an argument proves nothing because it is incapable of refutation. One can always say, "Just wait a little longer, it'll all come true." How many decades must we go until we admit that this dystopia is being avoided? One? Two?
II. If Orwell had been making predictions (instead of critiquing society by metaphor), then it makes as much sense to say that "the only thing we know for certain is that Orwell was right about the year."
And wrong about everything else. That is, a year called 1984 did come to pass, but all (or most of) the rest did not happen.
III. What basis is there begin from the presumption that a prophet is right? None. Instead, we disbelieve prophets until their predictions begin to prove out. Any tendancy to believe prognosticators are usually right time comes from the fact that most prophets who are wrong are quickly forgotten while the right ones are lauded and remembered.
Several directors have recently released "special editions" of their classic movies . . . these "special editions" seem to be the ones that show up on TV and on video rental shelves, so that they and not the original become the pervasive copy.
Don't forget that the new editions get brand spanking new copyright dates. This is incentive #1 for the studio to push this sort of work. Also, the so-called extra material drives DVD sales. This is incentive #2.
Allowing the director to take a second whack at "getting it right" is most likely a distant third. Still and all, a good enough question for Thad.
Shouldn't we be disappointed that "the most powerful processing site in the Southern Hemisphere" is doing nothing more important than entertainment? Surely there is some real problem we could be solving with our collective resources!
Oh well, see you at the theatre on opening night -- I'll be at the 12:05 a.m. show.
Physics is nice, but life at the surface of this planet involves one heck of a lot of practical problems involving water.
Furthermore, a measurement system based on fundamental constants is not all that helpful for solving problems at the human scale. As a portion of all math problems solved by all humans everywhere, those involving c, G, etc. are a pretty small subset. Viva Newtonian mechanics!
Now, a system that reconciled pi and e with integer values would be helpful. Unfortunately, no such system can exist. "I have discovered a truly remarkable proof but this margin is too small to contain it".
So basically what we're saying is that the computer industry has now caught up to where McDonalds was about 20 years ago.
Re:Publishing source != making OpenSource
on
Analyzing Palladium
·
· Score: 1
WarpedMind the AC are very very right. "Open" was too strong a word. "Reveal" would have been better.
Still, it's a tacit admission by M$ that no one will trust them if they don't reveal their source. (Heck, no one with sense will trust them anyway, but that's a whole other problem.) And this is also only a thin shade from saying that revealing the source makes things more secure, not less as they and their patsies have spent countless $$ trying to convince everyone in recent weeks. (Not to mention what actually opening the source could do to improve security.)
It's just fun to see some one admitting that they don't believe their own propeganda.
It goes without saying, of course, that the whole Palladium bit is yet another in a long series of Really Bad Ideas.
Call me crazy, but I think M$ just said that opening (some of) its source was the way to achieve trust.
Juarez:... As a side note, we will publish the source code on that Trusted Operating Root. We will make sure that people have the opportunity to really go deep on that and kick the tires and know that what we're doing in there is what we say we are doing.
Quite right. That's sovereign immunity--complete immunity from suit.
Unless, as you say, the government consents to allow itself to be sued. In the case of law enforcement within the U.S., to the best of my knowledge, the Federal and every state government have consented to allow some suits against law enforcement personnel who exceed their authority. (Though it may be against the individuals, not the sovereign.) For example,
42 U.S. Code Sec. 1983. - Civil action for deprivation of rights
Every person who, under color of any statute, ordinance, regulation, custom, or usage, of any State or Territory or the District of Columbia, subjects, or causes to be subjected, any citizen of the United States or other person within the jurisdiction thereof to the deprivation of any rights, privileges, or immunities secured by the Constitution and laws, shall be liable to the party injured in an action at law, suit in equity, or other proper proceeding for redress . ..
I don't see any mention of any special recourse unfairly targeted parties may have, . . . Without disincentives, why shouldn't companies spam & otherwise disrupt the P2P for any perceived or concocted reason?
Thus the system could be ripe for abuse, but without the opportunity for that inconvenient oversight afforded the wronged under our official legal system. But then again, that's why modern society doesn't tolerate vigalantes...
Actually, the government is generally entitled to some latitude when it acts to enforce laws. That is, if law enforcement has a reasonable basis for investigating, seizing, or arresting, they generally don't get in trouble for being wrong. This idea is related to the notion of probable cause for a search. It is also related to the notion that only really excessive force constitutes police brutality. This is also part of what it means to be "deputized" in the old sense. It's a balance with the concept of sovereign immunity.
Citizens can't sue real law enforcement for an honest mistake. And this state of affairs isn't such a bad thing. It's only law enforcement goes really overboard that they are liable to the citizens they abuse.
Now, lets look at this propsed bill. If there is no provision in it for protecting the vigilante purported copyright holder from liability for mistakes, then they have no shield against liability for attacks they make. But that's not enough.
Two things we need: (2) A provision stating that asserting copyright when you don't actually have it is punishable by a fine. And that any whistleblower can be paid that fine as a bounty if he takes the time to bring a suit in the courts.
(1) A provision stating that enforcers under this law may not act by stealth. They may not sneak around under aliases, but must disclose who they are. Nowhere, nowhere, nowhere do we give law enforcement the option to enforce the law without ever standing up at the end and saying "I am the police." Undercover officers do NOT get to drag off alleged criminals (e.g. shop lifters) in secret. We certainly cannot let citizen vigilantes operate in secret.
(0) Not to have this law.
--- "Do you like apples?" 'Huh?' "Do you like apples?" 'Yes.' "Well I got her number. How do you like them apples?"
Slashdot Mirror
In a country where video rental stores routinely demand your social security number before they allow you to rent tapes (and it takes a minimum 30-minute argument with 3 managers to convince them that's an illegal requirement), most or all of the harms of universal ID number are already here. Let's get some of the benefits. With a national ID number and national ID card,
1. Voter registration can be eliminated: Along with all the civil rights battles that entails. Anyone old enough can simply show up at a polling place on election day and vote. This eliminates a whole level of exclusionism.
2. Driver's Licenses can be just for drivers: So, so many Americans who can't drive (for reasons including age, disability, etc.) fight to maintain their driver's licenses because it's HARD to participate in society and commerce without one. A national ID card would provide all persons with an ID that merchants wouldn't question -- and no need for a driving test. Furthermore, people who know that they're unsafe, incapable drivers would have an alternative to keeping their licenses. This would allow them to avoid the temptation to drive.
"A. My interest in the law, I suppose, stems in part from a family tradition, to be honest. Grandfather was a lawyer, parents, uncle is a law professor. ... But it also stems, of course, in large part from interesting experiences in and around the law, especially these past few years, absolutely."
Could be a regional issue. I can say that a stilted "Grandfather was a lawyer" would sound pretentious around these here parts. But as I read the paragraph for the way-too-many-eth time, I now "hear" it as an abbreviated bullet point list. Imagine him ticking each one off on his fingers. In that context, I'd have dropped the "my"s, too. Oh well, we've now devoted way more attention to this than it deserved.
I was sold on the guy from the point where he gently corrected the interviewer to point out that the ideas he was advocating had been articulated by his professor.
Also, your personal connections don't have a whole hell of a lot of weight at HLS, the screening process is such that if you don't have at least exceptional qualifications you won't make it to a point where anyone important even sees your application.
On that, I have to disagree. Haa-vaad, like a lot of top programs in law and other subjects turns down more exceptionally qualified candidates than it accepts. I would suggest that that personal connections can and often are _the deciding factor_ between one candidate and another.
But, I agree with your point that everyone who gets into such programs was at least exceptional to begin with.
I believe that these days it takes some kind of crazy, crazy connections to get into such a program if you aren't well qualified. For instance, consider people who want to fly jet fighter aircraft for a living. Not only do they have to be smart and lucky enough to have a physically perfect body (including eyesight), but it takes a recommendation from some one in government (often a senator) as well. A buddy of mine, who knew no one, but was otherwise well-qualified, spent years butting his head into this wall.
Hrrmph. Good points.
I think this kid sounds like an overpriviledged clown who got into HLS partly on scholarship but mostly on the heritage of grandaddy et alia. He even calls his granfather "Grandfather . . ."
And here I just thought he sounded like someone who knew what the hell he was talking about with this topic. He credits his sources. He is humble about his own contributions. What more do you want?
I say, judge Ben on his work, not on his family. Isn't that the standard we've all been pushing for for years? Where do we get off discounting Ben's thoughts or his work because of something that has nothing to do with Ben's merits? How would I like it if everything I said was discounted because of my West Virginian heritage? Or my German heritage, or my English, or my Irish, or my Hungarian, or my Native American? Or that my family includes farmers, or school teachers, or chemists, or doctors, or lawyers, or accountants? WTF?
Oh, and about the grandfather thing. I call my grandpa "Grandpa" when I'm talking to him, but I describe him as "my grandfather" when I'm talking about him. It just doesn't mean anything.
Yeeeesh.
"He's no lawyer yet, but he responds quite well to several objections to the case."
This implies that one must be a lawyer to understand legality, and to be able to convincingly argue one's position. Sorry, I don't buy it.
Oh, calm down. Of course we don't need to be lawyers to understand the law or to be able to present a coherent, convincing argument.
But, we expect those who are lawyers to be able to do both. I thought the above statement was a simple compliment and a suggestion that Edelman's comments were well said. And, having read the interview, I'd say the submitter was right.
IMHO, it's the rare non-lawyer who really understands how a law works. And, it's the rare lawyer who really pays attention to what a law means. As with anything, there are plenty of exceptions.
The meat is in
Sec. 514(a): "Notwithstanding any State or Federal statute or other law, . . . a copyright owner shall not be liable in any criminal or civil action for disabling, interfering with, blocking, diverting, or otherwise impairing the unauthorized distribution, display, performance, or reproduction of his or her copyrighted work on a publicly accessible peer-to-peer file trading network, if such impairment does not, without authorization, alter, delete, or otherwise impair the integrity of any computer file or data residing on the computer of a file trader."
But there are other gems as well. Such as the part that says no matter how much of your legitimate traffic they screw up, it's OK if they're going after a work they have copyright to.
Sec. 514(b)(1)(A): The copyright holder is still liable if he "impairs the availability within a publicly accessible peer-to-peer file trading network of a computer file or data that does not contain a work, or portion thereof, in which the copyright owner has an exclusive right granted under section 106, except as may be reasonably necessary to impair the distribution, display, performance, or reproduction of such a work, or portion thereof, in violation of any of the exclusive rights of the copyright owner under section 106"
Finally, there's the notice provision. This is truly comical -- they're required to notify you of your rights after they DoS you and only if you ask them. How you're supposed to know who it is who did this to you is a good question. Heck, how are you even supposed to diagnose the problem when your entire internet service suddenly goes out, much less figure out which rights-holder did it?
Sec. 514(c)(2): "At the request of an affected file trader or the assignee of an Internet Protocol address used by an affected file trader, a copyright owner shall provide notice to the affected file trader or assignee (as the case may be)..."
The OS's one foundation
is Linus Torvald's code;
She is his new creation
by semaphores bestrode.
In Finland Linus wrote her,
his macro-kernel core;
With GPL he gave her,
that we might pay no more.
Input from every nation,
yet one o'er all the earth;
Her message: revolution,
open source proves its worth!
No profit-mad excesses,
she charges us no fee,
And to this hope she presses,
that software will be free.
--to the tune of The Church's One Foundation
also here
#3 - What's in a name anyway? It's just an identifier. We could all just as well be numbered for all the real value that a name contains. What are you without your name? Still you, right?
While I value the Google cache, this philosophically true rant is naive from a privacy perspective. Our names are the first of several username/password combinations that allow us to control our interaction with the world. Couple a name with a few more facts, and identity theft becomes possible.
So, while we may still be us without our names, some one else with our names (and some additional info) can become us, too, to a certain extent. This is a practical problem, not a philosophical one.
You know :-), to quite literally millions of people, the LBW is the Lutheran Book of Worship.
I guess that means the Linux Beer Hikers should drink boldly!
Patience. Patience. First, try to break the patent, then withdraw the standard if necessary. If it's invalidated, you won't have to mess with the standard. Haste makes waste.
Of course, the time necessary to bring a patent case through trial is almost as long as the remaining life of the Compression Labs / Forgent patent (October 6, 2004--17 years after issue).
Further, even if you changed the standard last week, you couldn't get all devices and software that use JPEG out of circulation before the patent expired. Even assuming anyone, consumer or corporations, would cooperate, which they wouldn't.
Yes, revoking standards that can't be practiced royalty free is a good stance to take, but it won't have time to accomplish much here.
Why does patent law allow this? JPEG has been around for YEARS! This is not something that somebody started using yesterday.
First of all, don't assume that Patent Law allows what Forgent is apparently asking for. As several people have pointed out, there are any number of legal reasons why a court might very well laugh in Forgent's face. It's jumping the gun to blame "the law" every time some company starts making unreasonable demands that it may not be able to back up.
The odd thing about this patent (U.S. Pat. 4,698,672) is how old it is. Wen-hsiung Chen and Daniel Klenke applied for this patent on October 27, 1986 (App. No. ) and it was issued on October 6, 1987 to a company named Compression Labs, Inc. (San Jose, CA). It should expire 17 years after issue on October 6, 2004.
I guess we can't blame this one on the dot-bubble and the Patent Office being overloaded in the late 1990s. Still, Forgent is going to have serious problems enforcing this thing after a 15 year delay.
Oh, there's a misquote above. Purely unintentional. Misplaced the emphasis.
While it's true that Orwell's predictions (if that's what they were) didn't come true by the year 1984, it is perfectly reasonable, and probably a good excercise, to always consider the possibility of the devolopment of a repressive government.
:-)
True, true. We cannot say (and I didn't) that the Orwellian world has been avoided forever. We can only say that it is being avoided.
No doubt, technology increases the means for oppression. For instance, without cheap networks, storage space, and processing, building a profile of a consumer's purchases (e.g. supermarket shopper card) is prohibitively expensive for the value that profile has to merchants. Similarly, Echelon is far cheaper than the same system implemented for snail mail. Still, it's concentration of power, not technology that's the primary danger. Oppressive, totalitarian states are quite possible with low tech.
I agree that constant vigilence is called for to avoid such a future. OTOH constant doomsaying / crying-of-wolf is boring.
Your reading of the parent post may be right; I can't say. What I don't quite understand is a "flamebait" mod, but what the 7734.
Actually, for dystopian novels, I recommend Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. Makes some interesting points, and Huxley is somewhat less convinced of the inherent unworthiness of people.
So far, the only thing we know for certain that Orwell was wrong about was the year.
I. Such an argument proves nothing because it is incapable of refutation. One can always say, "Just wait a little longer, it'll all come true." How many decades must we go until we admit that this dystopia is being avoided? One? Two?
II. If Orwell had been making predictions (instead of critiquing society by metaphor), then it makes as much sense to say that "the only thing we know for certain is that Orwell was right about the year."
And wrong about everything else. That is, a year called 1984 did come to pass, but all (or most of) the rest did not happen.
III. What basis is there begin from the presumption that a prophet is right? None. Instead, we disbelieve prophets until their predictions begin to prove out. Any tendancy to believe prognosticators are usually right time comes from the fact that most prophets who are wrong are quickly forgotten while the right ones are lauded and remembered.
Several directors have recently released "special editions" of their classic movies . . . these "special editions" seem to be the ones that show up on TV and on video rental shelves, so that they and not the original become the pervasive copy.
Don't forget that the new editions get brand spanking new copyright dates. This is incentive #1 for the studio to push this sort of work. Also, the so-called extra material drives DVD sales. This is incentive #2.
Allowing the director to take a second whack at "getting it right" is most likely a distant third. Still and all, a good enough question for Thad.
Shouldn't we be disappointed that "the most powerful processing site in the Southern Hemisphere" is doing nothing more important than entertainment? Surely there is some real problem we could be solving with our collective resources!
Oh well, see you at the theatre on opening night -- I'll be at the 12:05 a.m. show.
With reference to water at Earth surface conditions,
,tamreF ed erreiP)
1 centimeter^3 = 1 milliliter = 1 gram = 1 degree celsius = 1 calorie
Physics is nice, but life at the surface of this planet involves one heck of a lot of practical problems involving water.
Furthermore, a measurement system based on fundamental constants is not all that helpful for solving problems at the human scale. As a portion of all math problems solved by all humans everywhere, those involving c, G, etc. are a pretty small subset. Viva Newtonian mechanics!
Now, a system that reconciled pi and e with integer values would be helpful. Unfortunately, no such system can exist. "I have discovered a truly remarkable proof but this margin is too small to contain it".
(7361
So basically what we're saying is that the computer industry has now caught up to where McDonalds was about 20 years ago.
WarpedMind the AC are very very right. "Open" was too strong a word. "Reveal" would have been better.
Still, it's a tacit admission by M$ that no one will trust them if they don't reveal their source. (Heck, no one with sense will trust them anyway, but that's a whole other problem.) And this is also only a thin shade from saying that revealing the source makes things more secure, not less as they and their patsies have spent countless $$ trying to convince everyone in recent weeks. (Not to mention what actually opening the source could do to improve security.)
It's just fun to see some one admitting that they don't believe their own propeganda.
It goes without saying, of course, that the whole Palladium bit is yet another in a long series of Really Bad Ideas.
Call me crazy, but I think M$ just said that opening (some of) its source was the way to achieve trust.
... As a side note, we will publish the source code on that Trusted Operating Root. We will make sure that people have the opportunity to really go deep on that and kick the tires and know that what we're doing in there is what we say we are doing.
Juarez:
Unless, as you say, the government consents to allow itself to be sued. In the case of law enforcement within the U.S., to the best of my knowledge, the Federal and every state government have consented to allow some suits against law enforcement personnel who exceed their authority. (Though it may be against the individuals, not the sovereign.) For example,
This new technique could produce 150 gigabits per square centimeter-- that's ~57,000 songs on an iPod or a terabyte on a laptop size hard drive!
Um, no. Measurements are given for different machines based on size of the drives.
57,000 songs * 3 minutes / song * 1 hour / 60 minutes * 1 day / 24 hours = 118+ days of continuous 24-hour music
(a) When, exactly, are you going to listen to all this? Not to mention collect it?
(b) Don't you think the critical part of the system might be something other than storage space? Like, say, the battery?
I don't see any mention of any special recourse unfairly targeted parties may have, . . . Without disincentives, why shouldn't companies spam & otherwise disrupt the P2P for any perceived or concocted reason?
Thus the system could be ripe for abuse, but without the opportunity for that inconvenient oversight afforded the wronged under our official legal system. But then again, that's why modern society doesn't tolerate vigalantes...
Actually, the government is generally entitled to some latitude when it acts to enforce laws. That is, if law enforcement has a reasonable basis for investigating, seizing, or arresting, they generally don't get in trouble for being wrong. This idea is related to the notion of probable cause for a search. It is also related to the notion that only really excessive force constitutes police brutality. This is also part of what it means to be "deputized" in the old sense. It's a balance with the concept of sovereign immunity.
Citizens can't sue real law enforcement for an honest mistake. And this state of affairs isn't such a bad thing. It's only law enforcement goes really overboard that they are liable to the citizens they abuse.
Now, lets look at this propsed bill. If there is no provision in it for protecting the vigilante purported copyright holder from liability for mistakes, then they have no shield against liability for attacks they make. But that's not enough.
Two things we need:
(2) A provision stating that asserting copyright when you don't actually have it is punishable by a fine. And that any whistleblower can be paid that fine as a bounty if he takes the time to bring a suit in the courts.
(1) A provision stating that enforcers under this law may not act by stealth. They may not sneak around under aliases, but must disclose who they are. Nowhere, nowhere, nowhere do we give law enforcement the option to enforce the law without ever standing up at the end and saying "I am the police." Undercover officers do NOT get to drag off alleged criminals (e.g. shop lifters) in secret. We certainly cannot let citizen vigilantes operate in secret.
(0) Not to have this law.
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"Do you like apples?"
'Huh?'
"Do you like apples?"
'Yes.'
"Well I got her number. How do you like them apples?"
Size of Lake >Texas and New Mexico
So, using Standard Texas Units (STU), we have:
Location; Square Miles; STU
Texas; 261,914; 1.000
New Mexico; 121,365; 0.463
Colorado; 104,247; 0.398
Arizona; 114,006; 0.435
France; 211,209; 0.806
Spain; 194,898; 0.744
Belgium; 11,755; 0.045
Germany; 137,838; 0.526
Texas and New Mexico; 383,279; 1.463
France and Spain; 406,107; 1.551
France and Spain less Belgium; 394,352; 1.506