The simple fact that the government does not have the right to unreasonable search and seizure should be more than sufficient. In fact, it is a farce that the Bill of Rights even exists; assigning short names (e.g., "unreasonable search and seizure") to a list of things the government may not do is like telling a 2-year old not to smoke a crack pipe. There was significant debate over whether the Bill of Rights should ever have existed back when the constitution was drafted and I agree more and more with Hamilton's position on this every day.
So what happens when the increasingly obese population grows to the full size of the shrinking cubicle? I predict a new cottage industry of cubicle insertion/evacuation engineers equipped with Texas-sized shoe-horn-like instruments, bungie cords, and winces to help pop people into and out of their offices each day; it would help avoid fixing the problem(s).
I can certainly think of a lot of things the government should be doing, but socializing network access isn't one of them. Why not try clamping down on fraudulent advertising that claims unlimited service for a fixed fee or abuse of monopoly power or patent reform? Government shouldn't be telling industry what to do (or trying to do it via some "public option"). Rather than telling industry what to do, it should telling them what not to do. The role of government is punishing those whose behavior encroaches on the rights of others, not trying to predict and preempt bad behavior — that's like trying to legislate utopia and it's got us to a place where the government dictates policy by throwing cash prizes out to a few huge and largely unaccountable companies implement it. Not good.
Most of the text of laws I have seen are for the state, not the federal government, but they read much more like your latter example (e.g., "the text of Article 8 shall be superseded by..."). In any event, your argument that the acts are not really increasing the size of the actual law doesn't ring true to me. For example, the federal law by which I am governed consists of 18 volumes, each 1300-1500 pages in length (as of 2006). Supplements are issued until the next release in 2012. You might be able to read 23000+ pages but could you keep it all in mind every day as you live your life? Now add in the state laws for your home state. And those you visit. And any foreign countries you might care to see. However we got here, the end result is unknowable by any single person much less every average citizen.
As for whether this particular law is needed, I would argue that the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, 18 U.S.C. 1030 (the "CFAA") which was passed in 1984 (Hello, Orwell!) covers most if not all of the acts the "Informed P2P" law covers. As others have pointed out, its true intent is most likely to criminalize all peer-to-peer communication to make some group's life simpler (e.g., the MPAA/RIAA or government intelligence services) at the expense of everyone who uses peer-to-peer software for legitimate purposes.
Why is this a law? Certainly there are other laws on the book that make fraud and misleading advertising criminal? Why not set the attorney general loose on the most egregious offenders? This is exactly what's wrong with politicians these days: they think that writing more laws is the answer. If it's not already, the saying that "Not knowing the law is no excuse for breaking it," is going to be a joke. Sure, if you are writing malware you might guess that you are breaking the law. But what about all the new corner cases and bureaucracy that this new law introduces? Is there really no burden at all on people engaging in honest activities?
I'm glad to see him prosecuted. Not only is it against the law to sell your vote but it's clearly an immoral act. To all the people writing in support of this kid, I urge you to reconsider. Citizens have a responsibility to inform themselves (this means reading the text of proposed laws and tracking votes of elected officials yourself, not letting the press feed you) and vote what they honestly believe to be the be best choice for their government. If they don't, we all get stuck with incompetent and dishonest politicians (whose example is not an excuse to sell your own vote); poorly planned and written laws that people hold in contempt; and lawyers and judges that turn blind eyes to the truth or split hairs to avoid it. I can't believe that's really what you want.
First of all, I have to apologize. I've read several stories on open standards lately and I confused this story with another where I heard "RAND" (Reasonable And Non-Discriminatory) fees which can be used to effectively shut down open source software projects. So perhaps it's not as bad as I thought.
However, Jon Leech's comments on OpenGL.org:
The OpenGL and OpenGL ES groups can communicate under the same set of intellectual property rules. IP rules are to standards like dental checkups are to you: unpleasant, but essential to avoid pain in the future.
didn't leave me with warm fuzzies. I'm not terribly familiar with Khronos and I am happy that they release specifications freely, but remain wary that perhaps they will allow submarine IP to creep into the specifications.
I think it's more likely the Khronos Group would buy OpenGL. They are already taking over management of OpenGL.org and handle lots of other "open" media libraries (OpenGL ES, Open ML, Open VG Open SL,...). It's better than Microsoft but I suspect they would start charging a fee for access to the standard specification.
I went to a local state school, and I have to say that after meeting quite a few graduates of "better" universities, I'm happy to have gone to the state school. My curriculum was solid and the faculty did a good job teaching it. The problem with the big name universities is that most of them are focused on research; they just don't give professors credit for teaching. For a graduate school, the big names are great because that's their specialty. For an undergraduate engineering degree (not necessarily a science degree), look for a university that encourages education and not research. Find a well-known teaching university. Or better yet, if you're only interested in a bachelor's degree, find a few companies you'd enjoy working for when you get out of school and ask where they recruit. Unless the companies suck (or hire engineers for non-technical work because they know we tend to have a good work ethic and focus on problem-solving -- which is I guess a particular kind of sucking) those universities will be good teaching universities. Even if only functionally (i.e., they'll help get you a job at a company you'd like to work for).
But as for the article's complaints about low test averages -- well, it's clear the poor guy didn't have the soul of an engineer. I get particularly upset when I hear people complain about low averages on tests. There's nothing necessarily wrong with a low test average! It dismays me that people are so unprepared for a test that's hard. Welcome to real life! Engineers sometimes face problems without good solutions; get used to it. Hard tests are often there to see how students respond to problems they haven't been trained to solve because that's what happens in real life. Engineers should expect to find problems they haven't seen in a textbook, and it's important for professors to know how students respond to that. Do you want someone who just incorrectly applies textbook techniques to new situations designing your car?
Trillian was schizoid... one moment she was a happy-go-lucky party-seeking particle physicist and the next moment she was about to cry.
So, pretty human then?
Ha. Er, no. There appeared to be a bit Too Much Acting from my critic's armchair. It could also have been the old Too Much Editing trick as well. Although she was definitely a pretty human.
I saw it this afternoon and was disappointed. It wasn't as bad as, say, Highlander 2, which was able to reach back in time and slap my fond memories of Highlander with a cold wet fish. The problem was that there was so much story being crammed into the movie that no time could be taken to make the details of a scene work. As a result, it felt rushed and the characters developed no real personality.
Of the characters: Zaphod Beeblebrox was played so dumb it hurt to watch. Not funny dumb. Not slapstick dumb. More like watching someone extremely dense fill out the wrong blanks on a form and then go back and erase them only to fill them in wrong again.
Trillian was schizoid... one moment she was a happy-go-lucky party-seeking particle physicist and the next moment she was about to cry. Dent and Ford were played well. Marvin just didn't look right -- no facial expressions (or appropriate robotic substitutes) and a very awkward, non-robotic gait -- and was also not given the chance to develop.
Well, if you don't mind repelling everyone instead of the ill-willed, you might try buying a computer off this guy.
I'm sure the dead pig odor would keep thieves out of you're mom's car -- it's a deterrent whose effectiveness was recently proven on Mythbusters...
I glanced through the article and they seem to say that MacOS X had 36 vulnerabilities while XP had 48 over the same period. They then claim that this is not significantly less. Even if you discard all but the "serious" of the vulnerabilities (of which they claim MacOS X had more, but I disagree, not having seen any exploits for them) the two come out even at best. Why, then, are they so happy about XP?
What a silly thing to say. Did the makers of the games feel insulted by the label?
Well, people that wouldn't be caught dead playing adventure games wouldn't buy a "text adventure", but a lot of them read fiction. So the companies making text adventures tried to expand their demographic by neutering their language. Of course I don't think it really did them much good in the end, did it?
I have a hypothesis which I have now verified scientifically: ice cream sales are the cause of global warming! Please don't buy any more ice cream as it will cause all the polar ice to melt. Instead, if you live in a desert area, I encourage to you to purchase an umbrella or rain coat, as sales of these items have been shown to cause precipitation! And please, please, please: if you are a brilliant scientist, stay away from women.
People give microsoft a hard time about delaying releases because they have purposefully made unrealistically optimistic announcements of release dates in the past to stifle competition. An example: Borland announces Turbo Basic and Microsoft quickly preannounces Quick Basic 3 to chill the market. Furthermore, there is evidence that this was the intent. A microsoft internal memorandum stated, "The best way to stick it to Philippe is preannounce... to hold off Turbo buyers." For a monopoly like microsoft, this action is illegal under antitrust laws.
See http://www.law.gwu.edu/facweb/claw/Vaporware.htm for the full story. That is where I got this example from, but there are many others.
To elaborate on pVoid's earlier reply: points in OpenGL may have a radius. For each point primitive you send, the pixels
in the framebuffer that are associated with the point are
identified and "pixel fragments" that are combined with those pixels are run through the hardware. The fragments
are combined with the colors already in the framebuffer according to blending equations you set up with OpenGL calls ahead of time...
The good: No connectivity data is required, so there's no need to worry about starting and stopping triangle strips/fans (which typically takes up CPU time and some marginal amounts of AGP bandwidth).
The bad: Video cards are fast these days because memory prefetching strategies are _really_ good when you render a significant portion of a scanline at a time. Jumping around a lot requires random memory access resulting in cache misses.
Slashdot Mirror
The simple fact that the government does not have the right to unreasonable search and seizure should be more than sufficient. In fact, it is a farce that the Bill of Rights even exists; assigning short names (e.g., "unreasonable search and seizure") to a list of things the government may not do is like telling a 2-year old not to smoke a crack pipe. There was significant debate over whether the Bill of Rights should ever have existed back when the constitution was drafted and I agree more and more with Hamilton's position on this every day.
So what happens when the increasingly obese population grows to the full size of the shrinking cubicle? I predict a new cottage industry of cubicle insertion/evacuation engineers equipped with Texas-sized shoe-horn-like instruments, bungie cords, and winces to help pop people into and out of their offices each day; it would help avoid fixing the problem(s).
Some people take the right to bear arms seriously. You need to watch it with the puns. They might clock you with a hand and then a second hand.
I can certainly think of a lot of things the government should be doing, but socializing network access isn't one of them. Why not try clamping down on fraudulent advertising that claims unlimited service for a fixed fee or abuse of monopoly power or patent reform? Government shouldn't be telling industry what to do (or trying to do it via some "public option"). Rather than telling industry what to do, it should telling them what not to do. The role of government is punishing those whose behavior encroaches on the rights of others, not trying to predict and preempt bad behavior — that's like trying to legislate utopia and it's got us to a place where the government dictates policy by throwing cash prizes out to a few huge and largely unaccountable companies implement it. Not good.
Most of the text of laws I have seen are for the state, not the federal government, but they read much more like your latter example (e.g., "the text of Article 8 shall be superseded by..."). In any event, your argument that the acts are not really increasing the size of the actual law doesn't ring true to me. For example, the federal law by which I am governed consists of 18 volumes, each 1300-1500 pages in length (as of 2006). Supplements are issued until the next release in 2012. You might be able to read 23000+ pages but could you keep it all in mind every day as you live your life? Now add in the state laws for your home state. And those you visit. And any foreign countries you might care to see. However we got here, the end result is unknowable by any single person much less every average citizen.
As for whether this particular law is needed, I would argue that the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, 18 U.S.C. 1030 (the "CFAA") which was passed in 1984 (Hello, Orwell!) covers most if not all of the acts the "Informed P2P" law covers. As others have pointed out, its true intent is most likely to criminalize all peer-to-peer communication to make some group's life simpler (e.g., the MPAA/RIAA or government intelligence services) at the expense of everyone who uses peer-to-peer software for legitimate purposes.
Why is this a law? Certainly there are other laws on the book that make fraud and misleading advertising criminal? Why not set the attorney general loose on the most egregious offenders? This is exactly what's wrong with politicians these days: they think that writing more laws is the answer. If it's not already, the saying that "Not knowing the law is no excuse for breaking it," is going to be a joke. Sure, if you are writing malware you might guess that you are breaking the law. But what about all the new corner cases and bureaucracy that this new law introduces? Is there really no burden at all on people engaging in honest activities?
... how many cores are required?
I'm glad to see him prosecuted. Not only is it against the law to sell your vote but it's clearly an immoral act. To all the people writing in support of this kid, I urge you to reconsider. Citizens have a responsibility to inform themselves (this means reading the text of proposed laws and tracking votes of elected officials yourself, not letting the press feed you) and vote what they honestly believe to be the be best choice for their government. If they don't, we all get stuck with incompetent and dishonest politicians (whose example is not an excuse to sell your own vote); poorly planned and written laws that people hold in contempt; and lawyers and judges that turn blind eyes to the truth or split hairs to avoid it. I can't believe that's really what you want.
Only if it's dark.
I feel I will be horribly wronged by your citizens. Please have each of them pay me $5. Or $10 if their name contains the letter J.
Ice Weasel
I think it's more likely the Khronos Group would buy OpenGL. They are already taking over management of OpenGL.org and handle lots of other "open" media libraries (OpenGL ES, Open ML, Open VG Open SL, ...). It's better than Microsoft but I suspect they would start charging a fee for access to the standard specification.
I went to a local state school, and I have to say that after meeting quite a few graduates of "better" universities, I'm happy to have gone to the state school. My curriculum was solid and the faculty did a good job teaching it. The problem with the big name universities is that most of them are focused on research; they just don't give professors credit for teaching. For a graduate school, the big names are great because that's their specialty. For an undergraduate engineering degree (not necessarily a science degree), look for a university that encourages education and not research. Find a well-known teaching university. Or better yet, if you're only interested in a bachelor's degree, find a few companies you'd enjoy working for when you get out of school and ask where they recruit. Unless the companies suck (or hire engineers for non-technical work because they know we tend to have a good work ethic and focus on problem-solving -- which is I guess a particular kind of sucking) those universities will be good teaching universities. Even if only functionally (i.e., they'll help get you a job at a company you'd like to work for).
But as for the article's complaints about low test averages -- well, it's clear the poor guy didn't have the soul of an engineer. I get particularly upset when I hear people complain about low averages on tests. There's nothing necessarily wrong with a low test average! It dismays me that people are so unprepared for a test that's hard. Welcome to real life! Engineers sometimes face problems without good solutions; get used to it. Hard tests are often there to see how students respond to problems they haven't been trained to solve because that's what happens in real life. Engineers should expect to find problems they haven't seen in a textbook, and it's important for professors to know how students respond to that. Do you want someone who just incorrectly applies textbook techniques to new situations designing your car?
I saw it this afternoon and was disappointed. It wasn't as bad as, say, Highlander 2, which was able to reach back in time and slap my fond memories of Highlander with a cold wet fish. The problem was that there was so much story being crammed into the movie that no time could be taken to make the details of a scene work. As a result, it felt rushed and the characters developed no real personality.
Of the characters: Zaphod Beeblebrox was played so dumb it hurt to watch. Not funny dumb. Not slapstick dumb. More like watching someone extremely dense fill out the wrong blanks on a form and then go back and erase them only to fill them in wrong again.
Trillian was schizoid... one moment she was a happy-go-lucky party-seeking particle physicist and the next moment she was about to cry. Dent and Ford were played well. Marvin just didn't look right -- no facial expressions (or appropriate robotic substitutes) and a very awkward, non-robotic gait -- and was also not given the chance to develop.
I welcome our new eight-armed overlords.
Business Animals? You mean they're going to clone Jack Valenti?
Well, if you don't mind repelling everyone instead of the ill-willed, you might try buying a computer off this guy. I'm sure the dead pig odor would keep thieves out of you're mom's car -- it's a deterrent whose effectiveness was recently proven on Mythbusters...
I glanced through the article and they seem to say that MacOS X had 36 vulnerabilities while XP had 48 over the same period. They then claim that this is not significantly less. Even if you discard all but the "serious" of the vulnerabilities (of which they claim MacOS X had more, but I disagree, not having seen any exploits for them) the two come out even at best. Why, then, are they so happy about XP?
Well, people that wouldn't be caught dead playing adventure games wouldn't buy a "text adventure", but a lot of them read fiction. So the companies making text adventures tried to expand their demographic by neutering their language. Of course I don't think it really did them much good in the end, did it?
I have a hypothesis which I have now verified scientifically: ice cream sales are the cause of global warming! Please don't buy any more ice cream as it will cause all the polar ice to melt. Instead, if you live in a desert area, I encourage to you to purchase an umbrella or rain coat, as sales of these items have been shown to cause precipitation! And please, please, please: if you are a brilliant scientist, stay away from women.
People give microsoft a hard time about delaying releases because they have purposefully made unrealistically optimistic announcements of release dates in the past to stifle competition. An example: Borland announces Turbo Basic and Microsoft quickly preannounces Quick Basic 3 to chill the market. Furthermore, there is evidence that this was the intent. A microsoft internal memorandum stated, "The best way to stick it to Philippe is preannounce ... to hold off Turbo buyers." For a monopoly like microsoft, this action is illegal under antitrust laws.
for the full story. That is where I got this example from, but there are many others.
See http://www.law.gwu.edu/facweb/claw/Vaporware.htm
The good: No connectivity data is required, so there's no need to worry about starting and stopping triangle strips/fans (which typically takes up CPU time and some marginal amounts of AGP bandwidth).
The bad: Video cards are fast these days because memory prefetching strategies are _really_ good when you render a significant portion of a scanline at a time. Jumping around a lot requires random memory access resulting in cache misses.