Do we really want that? We of all people should know how dangerous it is to allow the courts to place gag orders like that. I don't like what SCO has been saying and think it's pretty irresponsible and damaging, but I'm not comfortable with the idea of the government telling them they can't say it. What would be preferable would be if the courts were to make some sort of statement to the effect that SCO's claims are groundless, which would reduce the effectiveness of SCO's claims and provide fodder for libel/slander/whatever cases against SCO.
Perhaps I'm missing something here, but aren't the tags in question used for tracking inventory and such? It's not like this blocker is intended to be used against RFID tags that the makers explicitly don't want to have disabled, so why don't the RFID tags themselves have a "disable code" that turns them off?
I think what the previous poster is saying is that the effects in general were studied in depth as part of the approval process and that if there are real substantial risks then they likely would have been detected as a side effect of the research on MRIs.
Also note that there's always plenty of warnings about how X-ray machines can be dangerous. As far as I know (I could be very incorrect here, since I've never had an MRI) the same is not true of MRIs.
But the reals, let alone the integers (unless you mean Gaussian integers), are not algebraically complete. Does it not seem plausible that God must be, at the very least, complex? In fact, since God is transcendental, algebraic completeness is merely neccesary and not sufficient (which doesn't rule out the complex field, but it does rule out the Gaussian integers).
Well I wasn't around at the time, but my understanding is that Nixon's demise was more the result of the tapes that came to light in the investigation of Watergate than Watergate itself.
It seems that advertisers measure the success of an ad entirely in terms of clickthroughs. The more obtrusive ads are easier to accidentally click, and thus they are considered more successful. Our answer has always been to just block ads, but I've often heard it said that positive feedback is more effective than negative feedback, so what if we did something like write a Mozilla plugin that sends an HTTP request to make the advertisers think we're clicking on the unobtrusive ads like those little banners?
A fingerprinting scheme can provide a heuristic that can be used to narrow down the search for possibly illegal file sharing. The RIAA looks for files that this heuristic says are likely to be bootlegged and then has someone manually look to see if they are. If you show the jury two videos, from the jury's point of view they may be identical even if a few bits have been flipped in one or the other. It is not neccesary that the files be absolutely identical.
Economically, "demand" typically refers to a demand curve, which is quantity demanded as a function of price. As price goes down, the quantity demanded goes up. As price goes up, the quantity demanded goes down. The fact that the quantity demanded at a low price (i.e. from filesharing) is high does not imply that the quantity demanded at a higher price is also high. Even a very low quality product can have a high quantity demanded if it is at a low enough price.
Someone selling an overpriced good will be undercut only if there are other providers of the good. Yes, other people can make music, but they can't compete with the RIAA labels for two reasons. One is that the RIAA labels are really selling characters rather than the music itself. The value of most pop music is in who makes it, not what it is. Of course, this is an absurd situation, but since when has any of this not been absurd? Second, the RIAA seems to be quite effective at stiffling any sort of competition. Other people can make music, but can they make studio quality recordings? Can they distribute that music effectively? Can they sell it or get people to buy merchandise or go to concerts? They can sometimes do so to some extent, but not very effectively. Certainly not effectively enough to compete with the RIAA.
Let us envision an alternate history in which the ruling had turned the other way, and VCRs were outlawed. How would things have played out from there? Of course, we can't really know for sure, but I think this is a plausible scenario:
On January 17th, 1984 (funny, that), the U.S. Supreme Court decided in favor of Universal City Studios, Inc., and preserved the status quo by banning the use of devices known as "Video Cassette Recorders." Some time later, in the 90's, a new technology was developed called DVD. DVDs were shiny disks that contained entire movies or television shows and could be played on DVD players at the user's liesure. Unfortunately this technology never really took off, for without customers in the habbit of buying video content to view at home, nobody produced such content, and without such content being produced, consumers did not bother buying DVD players.
Now back to reality, why did the legalization of VCRs prevent this fate? Because it filled in a gap. With VCRs people could not only watch videos produced by others, but record their own videos. Since people were buying VCRs anyway, a market for videos developed, and by the time DVD appeared people were in the habbit of buying stored video. Sure they had to transition to a new technology and buy new players, but the prior use of VCRs probably made that easier and smoother. It solved the chicken and egg problem by selling chickens and eggs bundled together.
Of course, this is just speculation. We have no way of being certain of what would have happened, but at the very least it seems plausible that banning VCRs would have hindered the acceptance of DVDs.
I was referring there to cases other comments have mentioned in which papers have been submitted by the professor without students being informed. The situation mentioned in the article is not in fact the only case of this service being used, you know.
Ok, I'll fall for this troll just 'cause I'm bored.
Perhaps some Slashdotters argue that MP3 sharing is fine even when it violates copyright. Well, ok, not just perhaps, almost certainly:) However, I suspect such people are a minority.
Do you have a reference to some place where nuggz has expressed such a view? If not, please refrain from putting words in his/her mouth. In general, please refrain from assuming someone is a member of a set of people when you have absolutely no evidence that they are.
Also note that not all MP3 sharing violates copyright. Some musicians support the practice and don't mind people sharing their music, in which case it is not a violation of copyright. Admittedly, many many people clearly do share music in violation of the author's copyright, but that doesn't mean filesharing is itself wrong.
The difference is that when you post to Slashdot you are giving Slashdot permission to use your writing. Now, if you yourself submit a paper to TurnItIn then I suppose the same applies, although perhaps the implicit contract isn't valid in that case since it's coerced. If a professor submits the paper without at the very least informing students, then it's even farther from the situation with Slashdot.
But isn't TurnItIn making money off these papers? Thus it does have value to someone other than the writer. The damages may be very small, but someone else is making money off these students' papers without paying any sort of royalties or even getting permission in some cases.
IANAL, but my understanding is that if you fail to protect your "intellectual property" then you lose it. Of course, who knows how this interacts with the GPL legally. Also, it's quite easy to envision a situation in which some company takes GPLed code, incorporates it into their own product, and then claims that the project the code came from is infringing their IP rights.
I think the idea is that they want to catch USAF employees sending out sensitive information. I know the story implies it's scanning incoming data, but it could just as well be applied to outgoing data, which seems much more useful to the USAF.
Slashdot Mirror
Do we really want that? We of all people should know how dangerous it is to allow the courts to place gag orders like that. I don't like what SCO has been saying and think it's pretty irresponsible and damaging, but I'm not comfortable with the idea of the government telling them they can't say it. What would be preferable would be if the courts were to make some sort of statement to the effect that SCO's claims are groundless, which would reduce the effectiveness of SCO's claims and provide fodder for libel/slander/whatever cases against SCO.
I think more frequently it's just people being stupid. They're very good at that, you know.
The issue isn't requiring VoIP to let you call 911, it's requiring VoIP to provide a way to track down the physical location of the caller.
Perhaps I'm missing something here, but aren't the tags in question used for tracking inventory and such? It's not like this blocker is intended to be used against RFID tags that the makers explicitly don't want to have disabled, so why don't the RFID tags themselves have a "disable code" that turns them off?
I think what the previous poster is saying is that the effects in general were studied in depth as part of the approval process and that if there are real substantial risks then they likely would have been detected as a side effect of the research on MRIs.
Also note that there's always plenty of warnings about how X-ray machines can be dangerous. As far as I know (I could be very incorrect here, since I've never had an MRI) the same is not true of MRIs.
Hrm. That's an interesting observation. Perhaps it might be worth studying this apparent phenomenon systematically.
Oh no! I can hear the music the guy in the car next to me has cranked way up! I hope he doesn't notice and press charges!
God is REAL! Unless explicitly declared INTEGER
But the reals, let alone the integers (unless you mean Gaussian integers), are not algebraically complete. Does it not seem plausible that God must be, at the very least, complex? In fact, since God is transcendental, algebraic completeness is merely neccesary and not sufficient (which doesn't rule out the complex field, but it does rule out the Gaussian integers).
Well I wasn't around at the time, but my understanding is that Nixon's demise was more the result of the tapes that came to light in the investigation of Watergate than Watergate itself.
It seems that advertisers measure the success of an ad entirely in terms of clickthroughs. The more obtrusive ads are easier to accidentally click, and thus they are considered more successful. Our answer has always been to just block ads, but I've often heard it said that positive feedback is more effective than negative feedback, so what if we did something like write a Mozilla plugin that sends an HTTP request to make the advertisers think we're clicking on the unobtrusive ads like those little banners?
Just watch the Firefly DVDs over and over and over and over again like I, and I'm sure many other poor souls like me, do.
A fingerprinting scheme can provide a heuristic that can be used to narrow down the search for possibly illegal file sharing. The RIAA looks for files that this heuristic says are likely to be bootlegged and then has someone manually look to see if they are. If you show the jury two videos, from the jury's point of view they may be identical even if a few bits have been flipped in one or the other. It is not neccesary that the files be absolutely identical.
Economically, "demand" typically refers to a demand curve, which is quantity demanded as a function of price. As price goes down, the quantity demanded goes up. As price goes up, the quantity demanded goes down. The fact that the quantity demanded at a low price (i.e. from filesharing) is high does not imply that the quantity demanded at a higher price is also high. Even a very low quality product can have a high quantity demanded if it is at a low enough price.
Someone selling an overpriced good will be undercut only if there are other providers of the good. Yes, other people can make music, but they can't compete with the RIAA labels for two reasons. One is that the RIAA labels are really selling characters rather than the music itself. The value of most pop music is in who makes it, not what it is. Of course, this is an absurd situation, but since when has any of this not been absurd? Second, the RIAA seems to be quite effective at stiffling any sort of competition. Other people can make music, but can they make studio quality recordings? Can they distribute that music effectively? Can they sell it or get people to buy merchandise or go to concerts? They can sometimes do so to some extent, but not very effectively. Certainly not effectively enough to compete with the RIAA.
Let us envision an alternate history in which the ruling had turned the other way, and VCRs were outlawed. How would things have played out from there? Of course, we can't really know for sure, but I think this is a plausible scenario:
On January 17th, 1984 (funny, that), the U.S. Supreme Court decided in favor of Universal City Studios, Inc., and preserved the status quo by banning the use of devices known as "Video Cassette Recorders." Some time later, in the 90's, a new technology was developed called DVD. DVDs were shiny disks that contained entire movies or television shows and could be played on DVD players at the user's liesure. Unfortunately this technology never really took off, for without customers in the habbit of buying video content to view at home, nobody produced such content, and without such content being produced, consumers did not bother buying DVD players.
Now back to reality, why did the legalization of VCRs prevent this fate? Because it filled in a gap. With VCRs people could not only watch videos produced by others, but record their own videos. Since people were buying VCRs anyway, a market for videos developed, and by the time DVD appeared people were in the habbit of buying stored video. Sure they had to transition to a new technology and buy new players, but the prior use of VCRs probably made that easier and smoother. It solved the chicken and egg problem by selling chickens and eggs bundled together.
Of course, this is just speculation. We have no way of being certain of what would have happened, but at the very least it seems plausible that banning VCRs would have hindered the acceptance of DVDs.
You said,
Although I think downloading music is a bad thing...
He said the Boston Strangler, not Jack the Ripper.
RTFA.
I was referring there to cases other comments have mentioned in which papers have been submitted by the professor without students being informed. The situation mentioned in the article is not in fact the only case of this service being used, you know.
Ok, I'll fall for this troll just 'cause I'm bored.
:) However, I suspect such people are a minority.
Perhaps some Slashdotters argue that MP3 sharing is fine even when it violates copyright. Well, ok, not just perhaps, almost certainly
Do you have a reference to some place where nuggz has expressed such a view? If not, please refrain from putting words in his/her mouth. In general, please refrain from assuming someone is a member of a set of people when you have absolutely no evidence that they are.
Also note that not all MP3 sharing violates copyright. Some musicians support the practice and don't mind people sharing their music, in which case it is not a violation of copyright. Admittedly, many many people clearly do share music in violation of the author's copyright, but that doesn't mean filesharing is itself wrong.
The difference is that when you post to Slashdot you are giving Slashdot permission to use your writing. Now, if you yourself submit a paper to TurnItIn then I suppose the same applies, although perhaps the implicit contract isn't valid in that case since it's coerced. If a professor submits the paper without at the very least informing students, then it's even farther from the situation with Slashdot.
But isn't TurnItIn making money off these papers? Thus it does have value to someone other than the writer. The damages may be very small, but someone else is making money off these students' papers without paying any sort of royalties or even getting permission in some cases.
Two panes.
"...any more than your cheese with holes in it could flow down a funnel."
I bet it could flow down this funnel!
IANAL, but my understanding is that if you fail to protect your "intellectual property" then you lose it. Of course, who knows how this interacts with the GPL legally. Also, it's quite easy to envision a situation in which some company takes GPLed code, incorporates it into their own product, and then claims that the project the code came from is infringing their IP rights.
I think the idea is that they want to catch USAF employees sending out sensitive information. I know the story implies it's scanning incoming data, but it could just as well be applied to outgoing data, which seems much more useful to the USAF.