No, the question is "What's wrong with getting a valid subpoena *before* asking for the logs?"
Nothing. It's just that IPs per se are no sacred data and just because you have the right to ask for a subpoena, there are a lot of people who willingly provide such data without subpoena if a request looks genuine (no paranoia or flag waving involved). And so it only sounds reasonble for the FBI to see if more paperwork can be avoided by asking first.*
And while your argument, that the FBI shouldn't be trusted if they don't have a subpoena, goes exactly against such behaviour, you cannot really blame the FBI for adjusting to what is current practice. Blame the people not holding to your standards.
*It's an entirely different thing, if they tried to gave the impression, they can force the request without subpoena, but there was no mention of that in the article.
Lacking this, the only one who should always require a subpoena is the ISP, i.e. the one who can connect the IP to a real person.
To emphasize this: The beauty of Arexx on the Amiga was not in the scripting language, but in the fact, that it was a standard on the Amiga. Any non-trivial program had an AREXX interface.
Usually they supported running all internal commands, but at least you could trigger all menu items and hotkeys.
A real life example: When "the web" (as in HTTP) first emerged, of course, no program had support for "clicking" URLs to start a web browser, because, well, web browser were unknown when those other programs were written.
To teach my mailer to start up a browser, I assigned an Arexx script to an hotkey, which would query the current mouse location in the mail text. And then try to match an URL scanning back/forward from that pos (you could ask the mail program for the text lines). If it found one, it would open a web browser window and tell it to open that URL.
This way I hadn't a clickable URL, but all I needed to do was point my mouse at the URL and press F8 and voila. I know clickable URLs are nothing special today anymore. But note, the interesting part is not that I got an URL "clickable", but that I could do that with a program that wasn't made for this.
While today's mailers have plug-in support, you'll have a hard time to query the text and do something new, unanticipated with it. And before I get replies of the kind "but with (gnus, or insert favorite mailer here), you could do this and that to archieve the same": You are missing the point. The point being that there was a standard way which was supported by the majority of programs.
Well, it sounds as if you are trolling (history vs. actual law, claims without references,...), I give you the benifit of doubt and will answer.
You missed his point. It's not a case about stealing either. It's a case about copyright infringment.
Which, if I recall the history of copyright was
I don't recall it. Have a reference? Hm. Here is (a relatively short) one. The only mention of theft is as "digital theft" in a title of a law, and you may guess once where that comes from.
Elsewhere I also found a reference to "electronic theft". Interestingly, I never saw the term "theft" alone in legal contexts. In other words, the people who put the terms there, knew exactly that it isn't about theft law and do creative naming to muddy the water.
ABOUT theft of intellectual property (although it wasn't referred to as such).
Well, when it wasn't referred as such, why do you?
You are assuming that theft occurs only with tangible assets. This is a great assumption, but I do not believe that it is backed by U.S. law.
No, I am not assuming. That's what the Supreme Court ruled. (look a bit down, there is a fitting quotation.
Aside from that, history of law is quite irrelevant, when I argue that *today* theft has a defined and well understood meaning in legal context, and it does *not* include copyright infringement.
Let me start with saying, that I don't follow your argument. First, I agree it's irritating that people nitpick about the meaning of words, and then you go on and try to show me that we have too much nitpicking. What was your point?
Mine was that there are contexts where words have *very* specific meanings, such as laws, and that while discussing within such contexts misuse of such words is even more irritating than nitpicking. If you discuss illegal copying with your friends, call it what you want. If you go on dicuss its legal background, it's silly to use unprecise words. And here we are discussing a case with regard to the SC. It doesn't get much more legal than that.
Did you choose to write "sickening" to mean an obviously exaggerated expression of annoyance?
No, I used "sickening" as in "picking up the wording the parent poster used".
Sort of like how people use "stealing" as a metaphor for "copying music without paying for it" when referring to music downloaders? Do you see where I'm going with this?
Yeah, something like this. Would you also use such metaphors while talking about your medical status? (If you do, I hope nobody mistakes it to be of psychosomatic origin.) Do you see where I'm going with this?
Lighten up, all you semantic nitpickers. We use metaphors all the time. Get over it.
Next time you should choose to reply to someone you actually disagrees with you. Makes your argument less a joke.
Who, of what? Easy... you are depriving the copyright-holder of the right to distribute the copyright-bearing work as he/she/it sees fit. Copyright grants that right exclusively to the copyright holder -- if you deprive them of that right, you are acting against the law.
Yeah. And this has a name: copyright infringment. Not stealing. (As you noticed yourself somewhere down).
While I share your sentiment that it's sickening to be corrected in everyday talk, this is about a legal case before the Supreme Court, and in this context, paying attention to that difference isn't asked too much, IMHNSO.
If you feel that copyright has no place in our society, then add your voice and pocketbook to the fight to legislate it out or reform it.
I don't remember the parent posts bringing that point up. Seems you are mixing in what other might have said.
I'm just so sick of people arguing about whether the terms "theft" or "piracy" are accurate.
As I said, I would probably agree, if this wasn't in the context of a legal case. There is a time and place for everything and IMHO *this* is the one to be accurate about "theft" (as it's a legal term) and *this* isn't one to be upset about people being careful about the difference between legal terms.
No, that is not what this sez. Not even vaguely. It is about whether you can go on a fishing expedition to find someone who MIGHT be stealing vs. KNOWING that someone is stealing. Altogether different.
You missed his point. It's not a case about stealing either. It's a case about copyright infringment.
I don't think that being free really has much to do with it, although there could perhaps be a correlation. Probably what matters is the terms of service that you agree to. Even if you pay for the service, virtually all terms of service will contain a clause that states the provider can yank your access or hosting or whatever they provide on a whim at their own discretion.
Being free has to do a lot with it. While the ToS is there to indemnify against damages in case a site is taken down, the fact whether (or how much) a customer is paying for a service influences a lot how much time is spent on a complaint.
In other words, while the ToS allow them (at least theoretically) to take down the site at will, the difference in money is what decides how lightly they make use of that possibility.
A bad driver who pays little attention to the road will be made worse because he will depend on the system instead of (gasp) looking at signs. When the system fails [...]
Good point! And before anyone thinks that's theoretical: It already happens with parking sensors (which signal the distance to obstacles; some BMW do it by beeping, the interval of which decreases with the distance to the obstacle, until it gets one long beep when one has passed the safety distance).
While serious crashes are seldom with parking, the seriousness of incidents increased, when people who got used to such a parking aid (even up to the point where they don't look back at all), drive with full motion into whatever there is, when the aid fails and simply keeps silent.
There are some interesting questions: - Does the working system really decrease accidents or is it just some kind of comfort? (For the case of parking aids: In 10 years, I never bumped another car, but I agree it makes avoiding collisions less troublesome) - If it decreases collisions, is the benefit greater than the increase of collisions with failing systems? (When such a system fails, the probability for an accident increases a lot compared to the case without such a system.) - If it still decreases collisions, what if you factor in the damage? (The accidents with failing systems are worse in average than those without such a system.)
That's not meant to speak against helping system in general. Just that the user interface should have the possibility of failure in mind. The usuability problem of both systems is that they have an unsafe default, so to speak: a failure of the system behaves like the safe case (for the parking aid: silence indicating a safe distance to any obstacle), instead of one that indicates some form of danger and therefore asks for increased attention of the user.
For example, in the case of a parking sensor, if you develop a method to signal to the user that the system is working properly while he depends on it, he will instantly notice the lack of such a signal. (Since I am not in the business of designing automotive user interfaces, I won't spoil my argument by providing a bad example/suggestion for such a method).
Yes, you refer to "blocking google". China is not going to send a special ops team to the US to arrest google executives.
True. But then Google executives should also make sure to never visit China (wouldn't be the first time for a foreigner to be arrested because he violated some Chinese policy).
There is a large political entity threatening. And just because you are currently somewhere where the threat sounds (relatively) harmless, doesn't make a threat a request.
The biggest thing that could happen to Google is them getting blocked.
Nope. The biggest thing a land like China can do to Google and their employees is a lot more. Don't forget China is kinda big player. Just as one example, they could also start to show interest for all people (in China or in reach of China) with whom anyone at Google had contact with. There surely are some dear friends to find. I bet if you piss officials off, they can get a real PITA (yes, I am aware, they would be dumb to strain the international climate over such a thing... on the other hand they already have done a lot of things I consider quite dumb).
I am not saying that their current threat implies this, but you are playing down their possibilities or ignorant.
As far as me or the Chinese gov't is concerned, that is basically a "request".
Hm. So what you are saying? Because it doesn't sound severe and/or there is a way to avoid it, a threat becomes a request? So, well, then how about you just don't enter this side of the street or, if you do, you crawl on all four. At least, if you know what's good for you. Oh, and by the way, this is only a request.
Maybe you're so worried about somebody else's money that you just can't stand the thought of Google making slightly less profit, but believe it or not, it's not a big deal.
Really, I don't have a clue where you are pulling this BS from. I didn't mention money, nor do I care if money is involved. Maybe money is your problem?
You're leaving out two key points here, in one of these cases:
* The censorship is obvious.[...]
* Not doing dirty work [...] in exchange for money. [...evil bla bla a little money...]
As I understood, the news sites are already censored... Google is only not listing the (effectively non-functional) links in their results. Do you have different information?
So:
* the censorship is already obvious for anyone who cares
* Google isn't doing any work that isn't been done without them already
Google is most definately a "willing helper" NO ONE IS FORCING THEM TO DO THIS. If they said no, the would get blocked,
Do you think they would keep up blocking news sites, if they wouldn't get blocked themselves, if they said no? If not, how can you say it's willingly. Yes, they made a choice. No, the choices were not theirs to make.
In my little example above, while others are willingly crawling on my street side to that shop, you seem to be someone who would willingly choose to not want anything that this shop has to offer. Don't you see that I have forced my will on you either way?
and they would lose a little money.
You should get over your money thing, whatever it is.
However, the decission of Google directly helps the Chinese government keep control over information.
How? As I understand it, access to the pages in question is already blocked, and Google listing them would get Google blocked (again), too (not to speak of how fast they would get blocked if they made the pages available through their Cache).
I am not arguing here, whether what Google does is bad or not. I am just curious to understand how do you think they help the censorship. It may give others the impression as if they support the Chinese gov't, yes. But that's not what I am talking about.
The difference being that this is not the thirties, and we have sufficent knowledge of what china is doing and has recently done to nullify your "but how can they know" argument.
By supporting china, and doing business in china, you support censorship and gross human rights violations.
I second your feeling about the inner state of China.
But following your reasoning the world should stop doing business with USA? Considering their last war campaign which was justified with a carpet of lies, they have had their share of gross human rights violations, IMNSHO (you don't need to follow me, ask some human rights organizations of what they think).
Come to think of it, the "freedom fries" thing becomes even more sad (boycotting France because they refused to support that and associating it with the word "freedom").
Back to the issue, I think an important point that was neglected is that all those companies being in the (real and/or public) court with regard to the nazis, are companies that gained from the cruelities.
Ask yourself what does Google gain here from China's censoring? Isn't it okay for a company to play along when it doesn't unfairly gain something, i.e. doesn't exploit the people? Or should the world stop trade with China and let the people suffer twice? Where is the threshold? I don't think this is simply black and white. Pure ideology doesn't fit well in the real world.
I do not accept the argument that the profit motive excuses all other behavior.
You overgeneralize. The profit argument wasn't made in favor of "all other behaviour". It was made with regard to one specific behaviour and you did not provide anything against that argument, except if you meant that "the profit motive isn't a justification for any behaviour at all". If you mean the latter, I think the collary is that you reject any form of capitalism.
Or more probably, you simply don't accept a profit argument with regard to the case at hand. Well, that's your right (but it's lacking anything except your opinion).
Furthermore, Google Inc. claimed to reject that argument when they claimed that they would not be evil.
I disagree. There is a difference between "don't be evil" and "do good". You might say that "don't censor" falls in the first category. I consider it to fall into the second. Maybe you see what I mean from a different viewpoint: Take Google away from the setting. What changes? Are the Chinese better off afterwards than they are with Google now? I don't see how.
So Google doing its business in China didn't make the situation worse, did it? (Among other things, they don't add new bans, they only block what already is censored by the gov't). Then, when they make nothing worse, how are they evil?
Yeah, you may argue that they should do the Right Thing. That "doing nothing" or "fitting in" often will make things worse and looking and not helping makes you guilty as well. But that's not about being evil. That's about ideology and doing good: If I don't dare help somebody trapped within a burning house, I am not evil, I am just a wimp. Yeah, I am not doing good, either, but we are talking about "don't be evil".
I hope you can see my point by now. You don't have to agree with my point of view or make it yours. It's enough if you can agree that it's a valid point of view, i.e. that "don't be evil" can reasonably be interpreted in my way.
If you do (and I hope you don't refuse only in spite) then ask yourself, what do you accuse Google of, if they made their statement with the same understanding which I have.
(And no, I didn't come up with that interpretation of mine just now... I really understood Google to mean something like that and I am actually surprised that you understood it differently... if they meant with "don't be evil" to say "be good", they could have put that as their slogan to begin with.)
In retrospect, it is obvious that the "don't be evil" line was nothing more than marketing. I had hoped otherwise, and I will admit to a definate bitterness at discovering that it was, in fact, total BS.
Actually to me that doesn't sound as if you had much hope to begin with, but simply jumped at them when the first opportunity (alleged misbehaviour) showed up.
Disclaimer: Even if I argue in favor of Google here, it's not that I don't have doubts of what they do here (regardless of their "don't be evil" core value). But I feel you judged much too fast. Even if they fucked up... this being the first time in years, shouldn't you give them some leeway?
Google is actively censoring politcal speech at the request of the Chinese gov't.
Request? REQUEST? It's a threat. A threat the Chinese gov't didn't hesitate to let become reality once already. So there is no doubt they would do it again (I refer to blocking Google).
This isn't even like Google is selling guns to the Chinese gov't, it's more like google doing the actual shooting for them.
I agree with you if you add "it's more like google doing the actual shooting with a gun pointing at their head."
It's not that they have much choice at their disposal. Either they can shoot (censor what is demanded from them) or they will be shot themselves (be censored and out of business in China).
Yes, they could refuse to censor and don't do business in China. And maybe that would be the Right Thing to do. But it's far from saying that they a willing helper, what you seem to imply.
And when I say that it's maybe the right choice, it's because nobody can tell whether Google being present in China or Google doing a public stunt by refusing to bow to China, will have more effect. Ideology is all nice and well, but sometimes you achieve more from within the system. - I don't mean to imply that's what Google is doing... I don't know and probably they are only out for some more profit... I mean to say that you cannot know.
It's a solid at those temperatures, what is it at higher temps?
AFAIU the solution is not only solid between 45C and 75C. The article explains that the temperature where the solution becomes solid depends on the mixture ratio of the two components.
So it seems that the solution is liquid below some temperature X and solid above, with X depending on the mixture ratio and being in the range of 45C to 75C.
Does it have two melting points? At what temp does it vaporize? Does it freeze at some point below the normal low-end melting point?
Unfortunately, the other info is not mentioned in the article. I agree with you, and doubt it stays a solid at *very* high temperatures, or that it stays liquid at very low ones.
Give me an example scenario that shows me just how fucked I would be with svn and how Arch would ride in on a white horse and save the day. Then give me four or five more. Write a couple of whitepapers explaining how Arch is fundamentally much better than Subversion in its theoretical design
It's funny and sad to know he (mostly) already did this. Search the subversion-devel list back to 2002.;)
Huh? Did you read the same mails as I? Back then, Tom Lord's ramblings on the svn-dev mailing list had the same problem as this interview. And also those the grandparent complained about:
What exactly is bad about Subversion? Give me an example scenario that shows me just how fucked I would be with svn and how Arch would ride in on a white horse and save the day.
TL talked big about how Subversions design was broken but when asked to give concrete examples he always kept talking about theories.
IMHO, it's not much unlike saying that Linux sucks because it isn't a micro-kernel architecture. And when being asked about details, being unable or unwilling to come up with an example how a micro-kernel design would fix an existing major flaw (without sacrificing the existing good points of the software).
For example, I like QNX's design very much. But that doesn't imply that Linux is broken or sucks. Both have their strong and their week points dependend on the task at hand. (And for my daily desktop work I would fall into a crises if I had to use QNX instead of Mandrake due to some QNX usuability issues... oh wait, that reminds me of arch!;-)
Especially considering that it manages to generate memory leaks in a garbage collected language - quite an achievement!
Not really. IMHO, it simply an effect of the fact, that a GC isn't a magic bullet. A GC is a useful thing to have, but actually one doesn't need (too) silly bugs to get dangling references to unused objects. (Okay, that also depends on the language used.)
As a program gets complex it needs to care about memory management. A GC can take only so much of that responsibility from the programmer's shoulders.
But OCamls garbage collector is proven enough (not to mention one of the fastest) that the problem is almost certainly either with non-OCaml objects (there are a few C bits used) or some really silly code bug.
I agree, that it's not probable to be a bug in the GC.
PS: My mldonkey GUI already gets unusably slow after a few hours, but less due to eating memory, but more due to leaking "sources". After some time it thinks each files has some hundred sources when they are only tens (as can be seen after a restart of the GUI). And apparently it gets slow when it tries to handle half a million sources (150 files a 400 sources or such).
They suggest the Athlon 64 3500+ over the P4 560 for "balancing price and performance".
Naturally, I didn't RTFA
I don't see anything natural about that.
Yes, I am aware that you are referring to typical behaviour of the Slashdot croud, but the natural behaviour would have been to read the article, if you wonder about that statement.
but doesn't this suggest that I, as a geek who doesn't care about the value of my money, would get better performance with the Intel?
No. Just because an Intel processor isn't the winner in the performance/price class, it doesn't mean it's the winner in the performance class. The reasonable assumption you can make from the given statement, considering a performance/price statement was made, is that it isn't the Athlon 64 3500+ who was best in performance.
And that's obviously true: Even ignoring how the Intel procs did, the other AMD Athlon's in the test, the FX-53 and the 3800+ repeatedly won against the 3500+, which is to be expected.
As for AMD vs. Intel, they both won a share of the tests (IMHO the Athlons leading a bit) and it is not easy to declare a clear winner (for the 32-bit performance).
Otherwise, they would just come right out and say that the AMD is the fastest of all processors, wouldn't they?
You realize that it was the submitter's choice to emphasize a performance/price statement, do you?
Hell, I don't know, maybe I'll go read the article, but this sounds like some of that marketing speak we were recently warned about.
I am not sure what you are referring to.
Note that despite the quotes signs, that "balancing price and performance" isn't even an actual quote (it's "balancing price with performance") and taken out of context, too: First they look at the prices and availablity and come to the conclusion:
"Realistically, the Pentium 4 560 and the Athlon 64 3500+ are the best contenders in this match up. In six months when we run this shootout again we will likely be saying the same things about the Athlon 64 3800+. For now, however, the Athlon 64 3500+ does an excellent job of balancing price with performance."
They could have chosen the Pentiums for the "in six month" example as well. In other words, it was more a statement about new, high-priced processors and current ones (and how in 6 month the sweet spot will have shifted to the next generation), than about an Intel vs. AMD preference.
They state an AMD preference afterwards, but that's for their compelling performance with binaries compiled for 64-bit.
More aggressive spam content filtering of everybody who isn't using SPF -- after all you've whitelisted a LOT of the important people already.
And the cool thing with tools like Spamassassin[1] is, that their method to generate scores (via genetic algorithm) will automatically adapt to how effective a spam indicator SPF has become. So the risk that the filtering could be too aggressive is very low, as long as one uses sound tools.
In fact, it won't be one score, but several, like: - SPF used and valid - SPF used and invalid - SPF not used - SPF check failed (i.e. DNS down or something)
The funny thing is, if SPF is adopted by spammers more rapidly than by legitimate users, it could even be that a valid SPF entry is considered a low, but significant spam indicator for a while (until adoption gets better).:-)
[1] And yes, it looks like they support SPF, they only don't support Microsoft's Sender-ID.
So they are either (a) covering something real up, or (b) covering up their mistake and thereby making themselves look worse or (c) just really badly botched the PR side of things, which doesn't bode well for anything that might happen legitimately in the future.
Am I the only one who finds it quite normal to make a official statement when a previously announced milestone[1] is reached, no matter what the result is.
Therein saying that nothing was found - only one signal was found at all, and the signal looks strange but doesn't match what one would expect from "ET" (an artificial signal).
And then, when it gets twisted and hyped up, and what else, you take a more conservative stance to avoid any repeated "misunderstanding" and say "nothing special to see here, move along"?
Really, read the original article again. They make quite clear that they didn't found what they are looking for. Just that what they found looks interesting by itself, because they don't have a ready explanation for it.
I think the signal only got mention, because it was the only location left of 200 which got still a signal and so was the only intersting part left to elaborate on. There are only so many words to say "nothing found".
Maybe I am not paranoid enough, but for me that sounds of a standard case of "oh, people misunderstood what we wanted to say, let's stop it before it gets ugly". Or maybe it's because I see such misunderstandings every day due to my job.
[1] Finish of an analysis of an revisit of 200 locations SETI separated out as interesting.
Cherry's G80 series of keyboards is considered by many (including me) to provide the best tactile expierience since the old IBM-keyboards with click, but without the weight and noise.
Amen!
About 7-8 years ago, my wrists began to build up pain after too much typing. When it started, it was only after marathon days, but after some months it got worse and already started after 2-3 hours of programming. I managed by taking regular typing breaks and doing some exercises (stretching helped a lot).
Then there was a week where I only worked from home, where I still used an Amiga 3000[1], when I noticed after 2-3 days that the pain didn't build up the same. At the end of the week I felt only mildly unconfortable after 8 hours.
That was when I realized what a big difference a decent keyboard can make, and I saw to it, that I switched keyboards at work (don't know anymore, but I think it was an to IBM one... I simply tested all that were lying around). After 2-3 month the pain was gone completely.[2]
Then, when a coworker also mentioned problems, I started to lobby for using decent keyboards overall at work. After quite some looking, the best I found was the "soft contact" variant (LQMUS for USA) of the G80-3000, which was happily accepted around here. Yes, it costs several times of what a 08-15 keyboard (or even the G81 or G83 of Cherry) costs: around EUR 60,-- here. But IMHO it's worth every cent. The only problem is that it sometimes can be a PITA to get hold of the exact model you want. I finally found a shop which orders it, specially for us, if we take a pack of 10 at once. It's easy to get the "linear action" variant, but that didn't help my hands at all.
Also, we never had one brake in those 7 years, even with all the usual stuff people tend to do to their equipment (like dropping from the desk, spilling a drinks, and so on).
Note that we have several people here who say they don't notice a difference for their hands and don't care which keyboard they use (but then, neither have they any complaint about the G80), but for the people being more sensitive to stress from typing it really makes quite a difference.
I tend to build my home PC from low priced parts, but I leared not to save on the parts I interact with all day - the monitor and keyboard.
[1] Why buy an PC when the Amiga worked for most things and for those for which I really needed a PC, I could use my computer at work. I am not sure about the later builds, but the early series had quite a decent keyboard (which works fine even today, after almost 20 years).
[2] More precisely: It didn't build up anymore. Before, the pain was also gone after the weekend, but during the week I noticed building it up again - more slowly due to the exercises - but increasing nevertheless. Funny thing is, today, I still notice my hands get stressed somewhat, because I learned to notice it at the times when the pain was real and I tried to manage somehow, but now it never goes to the stage of actually hurting anymore.
They fought back the first time, as soon as they knew what was happening.
I'm not so sure all the passengers faught back.
I think there is no conflict in the statements, just some misunderstanding. The grandparent post didn't say, that passengers from all flights fought back. Just that those did who knew what was happening.
As far as I was informed, except in flight 95, the passengers mostly remained in their seats and did not fight back because they weren't expecting to die in flight.
So with the limitation as soon as they knew what was happening the grandparent was referring to the same fact as you with [the others] weren't expecting to die. In other words: as soon as they knew what was happening (= they were expecting to die), they fought back.
I think the interesting point here is that we don't need to completely speculate about how people in such a situation will behave, but already have a lesson from the past to look at.
Slashdot Mirror
No, the question is "What's wrong with getting a valid subpoena *before* asking for the logs?"
Nothing. It's just that IPs per se are no sacred data and just because you have the right to ask for a subpoena, there are a lot of people who willingly provide such data without subpoena if a request looks genuine (no paranoia or flag waving involved). And so it only sounds reasonble for the FBI to see if more paperwork can be avoided by asking first.*
And while your argument, that the FBI shouldn't be trusted if they don't have a subpoena, goes exactly against such behaviour, you cannot really blame the FBI for adjusting to what is current practice. Blame the people not holding to your standards.
*It's an entirely different thing, if they tried to gave the impression, they can force the request without subpoena, but there was no mention of that in the article.
Lacking this, the only one who should always require a subpoena is the ISP, i.e. the one who can connect the IP to a real person.
Most of the time they run, and sometimes someone is a little too slow - they get the axe. There's nothing like that rush.
So you get the most of a rush by chasing people which have no intention to fight back to begin with? Pathetic.
To emphasize this: The beauty of Arexx on the Amiga was not in the scripting language, but in the fact, that it was a standard on the Amiga. Any non-trivial program had an AREXX interface.
Usually they supported running all internal commands, but at least you could trigger all menu items and hotkeys.
A real life example: When "the web" (as in HTTP) first emerged, of course, no program had support for "clicking" URLs to start a web browser, because, well, web browser were unknown when those other programs were written.
To teach my mailer to start up a browser, I assigned an Arexx script to an hotkey, which would query the current mouse location in the mail text. And then try to match an URL scanning back/forward from that pos (you could ask the mail program for the text lines). If it found one, it would open a web browser window and tell it to open that URL.
This way I hadn't a clickable URL, but all I needed to do was point my mouse at the URL and press F8 and voila. I know clickable URLs are nothing special today anymore. But note, the interesting part is not that I got an URL "clickable", but that I could do that with a program that wasn't made for this.
While today's mailers have plug-in support, you'll have a hard time to query the text and do something new, unanticipated with it. And before I get replies of the kind "but with (gnus, or insert favorite mailer here), you could do this and that to archieve the same": You are missing the point. The point being that there was a standard way which was supported by the majority of programs.
I don't recall it. Have a reference? Hm. Here is (a relatively short) one. The only mention of theft is as "digital theft" in a title of a law, and you may guess once where that comes from.
Elsewhere I also found a reference to "electronic theft". Interestingly, I never saw the term "theft" alone in legal contexts. In other words, the people who put the terms there, knew exactly that it isn't about theft law and do creative naming to muddy the water.
ABOUT theft of intellectual property (although it wasn't referred to as such).
Well, when it wasn't referred as such, why do you?
You are assuming that theft occurs only with tangible assets. This is a great assumption, but I do not believe that it is backed by U.S. law.
No, I am not assuming. That's what the Supreme Court ruled. (look a bit down, there is a fitting quotation.
Aside from that, history of law is quite irrelevant, when I argue that *today* theft has a defined and well understood meaning in legal context, and it does *not* include copyright infringement.
Let me start with saying, that I don't follow your argument. First, I agree it's irritating that people nitpick about the meaning of words, and then you go on and try to show me that we have too much nitpicking. What was your point?
Mine was that there are contexts where words have *very* specific meanings, such as laws, and that while discussing within such contexts misuse of such words is even more irritating than nitpicking. If you discuss illegal copying with your friends, call it what you want. If you go on dicuss its legal background, it's silly to use unprecise words. And here we are discussing a case with regard to the SC. It doesn't get much more legal than that.
Did you choose to write "sickening" to mean an obviously exaggerated expression of annoyance?
No, I used "sickening" as in "picking up the wording the parent poster used".
Sort of like how people use "stealing" as a metaphor for "copying music without paying for it" when referring to music downloaders? Do you see where I'm going with this?
Yeah, something like this. Would you also use such metaphors while talking about your medical status? (If you do, I hope nobody mistakes it to be of psychosomatic origin.) Do you see where I'm going with this?
Lighten up, all you semantic nitpickers. We use metaphors all the time. Get over it.
Next time you should choose to reply to someone you actually disagrees with you. Makes your argument less a joke.
Who, of what? Easy... you are depriving the copyright-holder of the right to distribute the copyright-bearing work as he/she/it sees fit. Copyright grants that right exclusively to the copyright holder -- if you deprive them of that right, you are acting against the law.
Yeah. And this has a name: copyright infringment. Not stealing. (As you noticed yourself somewhere down).
While I share your sentiment that it's sickening to be corrected in everyday talk, this is about a legal case before the Supreme Court, and in this context, paying attention to that difference isn't asked too much, IMHNSO.
If you feel that copyright has no place in our society, then add your voice and pocketbook to the fight to legislate it out or reform it.
I don't remember the parent posts bringing that point up. Seems you are mixing in what other might have said.
I'm just so sick of people arguing about whether the terms "theft" or "piracy" are accurate.
As I said, I would probably agree, if this wasn't in the context of a legal case. There is a time and place for everything and IMHO *this* is the one to be accurate about "theft" (as it's a legal term) and *this* isn't one to be upset about people being careful about the difference between legal terms.
No, that is not what this sez. Not even vaguely. It is about whether you can go on a fishing expedition to find someone who MIGHT be stealing vs. KNOWING that someone is stealing. Altogether different.
You missed his point. It's not a case about stealing either. It's a case about copyright infringment.
I don't think that being free really has much to do with it, although there could perhaps be a correlation. Probably what matters is the terms of service that you agree to. Even if you pay for the service, virtually all terms of service will contain a clause that states the provider can yank your access or hosting or whatever they provide on a whim at their own discretion.
Being free has to do a lot with it. While the ToS is there to indemnify against damages in case a site is taken down, the fact whether (or how much) a customer is paying for a service influences a lot how much time is spent on a complaint.
In other words, while the ToS allow them (at least theoretically) to take down the site at will, the difference in money is what decides how lightly they make use of that possibility.
A bad driver who pays little attention to the road will be made worse because he will depend on the system instead of (gasp) looking at signs. When the system fails [...]
Good point! And before anyone thinks that's theoretical: It already happens with parking sensors (which signal the distance to obstacles; some BMW do it by beeping, the interval of which decreases with the distance to the obstacle, until it gets one long beep when one has passed the safety distance).
While serious crashes are seldom with parking, the seriousness of incidents increased, when people who got used to such a parking aid (even up to the point where they don't look back at all), drive with full motion into whatever there is, when the aid fails and simply keeps silent.
There are some interesting questions:
- Does the working system really decrease accidents or is it just some kind of comfort? (For the case of parking aids: In 10 years, I never bumped another car, but I agree it makes avoiding collisions less troublesome)
- If it decreases collisions, is the benefit greater than the increase of collisions with failing systems? (When such a system fails, the probability for an accident increases a lot compared to the case without such a system.)
- If it still decreases collisions, what if you factor in the damage? (The accidents with failing systems are worse in average than those without such a system.)
That's not meant to speak against helping system in general. Just that the user interface should have the possibility of failure in mind. The usuability problem of both systems is that they have an unsafe default, so to speak: a failure of the system behaves like the safe case (for the parking aid: silence indicating a safe distance to any obstacle), instead of one that indicates some form of danger and therefore asks for increased attention of the user.
For example, in the case of a parking sensor, if you develop a method to signal to the user that the system is working properly while he depends on it, he will instantly notice the lack of such a signal. (Since I am not in the business of designing automotive user interfaces, I won't spoil my argument by providing a bad example/suggestion for such a method).
I am not quite sure how you folks consider NVRAM support as something abnormal.
I have no clue where you read that (what you imply is almost the opposite of what I said).
I was making fun of Red Hat. And, no, I am not going to explain a joke.
Yeah, as he said, properly packaged distros...
SCNR
Yes, you refer to "blocking google". China is not going to send a special ops team to the US to arrest google executives.
True. But then Google executives should also make sure to never visit China (wouldn't be the first time for a foreigner to be arrested because he violated some Chinese policy).
There is a large political entity threatening. And just because you are currently somewhere where the threat sounds (relatively) harmless, doesn't make a threat a request.
The biggest thing that could happen to Google is them getting blocked.
Nope. The biggest thing a land like China can do to Google and their employees is a lot more. Don't forget China is kinda big player. Just as one example, they could also start to show interest for all people (in China or in reach of China) with whom anyone at Google had contact with. There surely are some dear friends to find. I bet if you piss officials off, they can get a real PITA (yes, I am aware, they would be dumb to strain the international climate over such a thing... on the other hand they already have done a lot of things I consider quite dumb).
I am not saying that their current threat implies this, but you are playing down their possibilities or ignorant.
As far as me or the Chinese gov't is concerned, that is basically a "request".
Hm. So what you are saying? Because it doesn't sound severe and/or there is a way to avoid it, a threat becomes a request? So, well, then how about you just don't enter this side of the street or, if you do, you crawl on all four. At least, if you know what's good for you. Oh, and by the way, this is only a request.
Maybe you're so worried about somebody else's money that you just can't stand the thought of Google making slightly less profit, but believe it or not, it's not a big deal.
Really, I don't have a clue where you are pulling this BS from. I didn't mention money, nor do I care if money is involved. Maybe money is your problem?
You're leaving out two key points here, in one of these cases:
* The censorship is obvious.[...]
* Not doing dirty work [...] in exchange for money. [...evil bla bla a little money...]
As I understood, the news sites are already censored... Google is only not listing the (effectively non-functional) links in their results. Do you have different information?
So:
* the censorship is already obvious for anyone who cares
* Google isn't doing any work that isn't been done without them already
Google is most definately a "willing helper" NO ONE IS FORCING THEM TO DO THIS. If they said no, the would get blocked,
Do you think they would keep up blocking news sites, if they wouldn't get blocked themselves, if they said no? If not, how can you say it's willingly. Yes, they made a choice. No, the choices were not theirs to make.
In my little example above, while others are willingly crawling on my street side to that shop, you seem to be someone who would willingly choose to not want anything that this shop has to offer. Don't you see that I have forced my will on you either way?
and they would lose a little money.
You should get over your money thing, whatever it is.
However, the decission of Google directly helps the Chinese government keep control over information.
How? As I understand it, access to the pages in question is already blocked, and Google listing them would get Google blocked (again), too (not to speak of how fast they would get blocked if they made the pages available through their Cache).
I am not arguing here, whether what Google does is bad or not. I am just curious to understand how do you think they help the censorship. It may give others the impression as if they support the Chinese gov't, yes. But that's not what I am talking about.
The difference being that this is not the thirties, and we have sufficent knowledge of what china is doing and has recently done to nullify your "but how can they know" argument.
By supporting china, and doing business in china, you support censorship and gross human rights violations.
I second your feeling about the inner state of China.
But following your reasoning the world should stop doing business with USA? Considering their last war campaign which was justified with a carpet of lies, they have had their share of gross human rights violations, IMNSHO (you don't need to follow me, ask some human rights organizations of what they think).
Come to think of it, the "freedom fries" thing becomes even more sad (boycotting France because they refused to support that and associating it with the word "freedom").
Back to the issue, I think an important point that was neglected is that all those companies being in the (real and/or public) court with regard to the nazis, are companies that gained from the cruelities.
Ask yourself what does Google gain here from China's censoring? Isn't it okay for a company to play along when it doesn't unfairly gain something, i.e. doesn't exploit the people? Or should the world stop trade with China and let the people suffer twice? Where is the threshold? I don't think this is simply black and white. Pure ideology doesn't fit well in the real world.
I do not accept the argument that the profit motive excuses all other behavior.
You overgeneralize. The profit argument wasn't made in favor of "all other behaviour". It was made with regard to one specific behaviour and you did not provide anything against that argument, except if you meant that "the profit motive isn't a justification for any behaviour at all". If you mean the latter, I think the collary is that you reject any form of capitalism.
Or more probably, you simply don't accept a profit argument with regard to the case at hand. Well, that's your right (but it's lacking anything except your opinion).
Furthermore, Google Inc. claimed to reject that argument when they claimed that they would not be evil.
I disagree. There is a difference between "don't be evil" and "do good". You might say that "don't censor" falls in the first category. I consider it to fall into the second. Maybe you see what I mean from a different viewpoint: Take Google away from the setting. What changes? Are the Chinese better off afterwards than they are with Google now? I don't see how.
So Google doing its business in China didn't make the situation worse, did it? (Among other things, they don't add new bans, they only block what already is censored by the gov't). Then, when they make nothing worse, how are they evil?
Yeah, you may argue that they should do the Right Thing. That "doing nothing" or "fitting in" often will make things worse and looking and not helping makes you guilty as well. But that's not about being evil. That's about ideology and doing good: If I don't dare help somebody trapped within a burning house, I am not evil, I am just a wimp. Yeah, I am not doing good, either, but we are talking about "don't be evil".
I hope you can see my point by now. You don't have to agree with my point of view or make it yours. It's enough if you can agree that it's a valid point of view, i.e. that "don't be evil" can reasonably be interpreted in my way.
If you do (and I hope you don't refuse only in spite) then ask yourself, what do you accuse Google of, if they made their statement with the same understanding which I have.
(And no, I didn't come up with that interpretation of mine just now... I really understood Google to mean something like that and I am actually surprised that you understood it differently... if they meant with "don't be evil" to say "be good", they could have put that as their slogan to begin with.)
In retrospect, it is obvious that the "don't be evil" line was nothing more than marketing. I had hoped otherwise, and I will admit to a definate bitterness at discovering that it was, in fact, total BS.
Actually to me that doesn't sound as if you had much hope to begin with, but simply jumped at them when the first opportunity (alleged misbehaviour) showed up.
Disclaimer: Even if I argue in favor of Google here, it's not that I don't have doubts of what they do here (regardless of their "don't be evil" core value). But I feel you judged much too fast. Even if they fucked up... this being the first time in years, shouldn't you give them some leeway?
Google is actively censoring politcal speech at the request of the Chinese gov't.
Request? REQUEST? It's a threat. A threat the Chinese gov't didn't hesitate to let become reality once already. So there is no doubt they would do it again (I refer to blocking Google).
This isn't even like Google is selling guns to the Chinese gov't, it's more like google doing the actual shooting for them.
I agree with you if you add "it's more like google doing the actual shooting with a gun pointing at their head."
It's not that they have much choice at their disposal. Either they can shoot (censor what is demanded from them) or they will be shot themselves (be censored and out of business in China).
Yes, they could refuse to censor and don't do business in China. And maybe that would be the Right Thing to do. But it's far from saying that they a willing helper, what you seem to imply.
And when I say that it's maybe the right choice, it's because nobody can tell whether Google being present in China or Google doing a public stunt by refusing to bow to China, will have more effect. Ideology is all nice and well, but sometimes you achieve more from within the system. - I don't mean to imply that's what Google is doing... I don't know and probably they are only out for some more profit... I mean to say that you cannot know.
It's a solid at those temperatures, what is it at higher temps?
AFAIU the solution is not only solid between 45C and 75C. The article explains that the temperature where the solution becomes solid depends on the mixture ratio of the two components.
So it seems that the solution is liquid below some temperature X and solid above, with X depending on the mixture ratio and being in the range of 45C to 75C.
Does it have two melting points? At what temp does it vaporize? Does it freeze at some point below the normal low-end melting point?
Unfortunately, the other info is not mentioned in the article. I agree with you, and doubt it stays a solid at *very* high temperatures, or that it stays liquid at very low ones.
Huh? Did you read the same mails as I? Back then, Tom Lord's ramblings on the svn-dev mailing list had the same problem as this interview. And also those the grandparent complained about:
What exactly is bad about Subversion? Give me an example scenario that shows me just how fucked I would be with svn and how Arch would ride in on a white horse and save the day.
TL talked big about how Subversions design was broken but when asked to give concrete examples he always kept talking about theories.
IMHO, it's not much unlike saying that Linux sucks because it isn't a micro-kernel architecture. And when being asked about details, being unable or unwilling to come up with an example how a micro-kernel design would fix an existing major flaw (without sacrificing the existing good points of the software).
For example, I like QNX's design very much. But that doesn't imply that Linux is broken or sucks. Both have their strong and their week points dependend on the task at hand. (And for my daily desktop work I would fall into a crises if I had to use QNX instead of Mandrake due to some QNX usuability issues... oh wait, that reminds me of arch!
Especially considering that it manages to generate memory leaks in a garbage collected language - quite an achievement!
Not really. IMHO, it simply an effect of the fact, that a GC isn't a magic bullet. A GC is a useful thing to have, but actually one doesn't need (too) silly bugs to get dangling references to unused objects. (Okay, that also depends on the language used.)
As a program gets complex it needs to care about memory management. A GC can take only so much of that responsibility from the programmer's shoulders.
But OCamls garbage collector is proven enough (not to mention one of the fastest) that the problem is almost certainly either with non-OCaml objects (there are a few C bits used) or some really silly code bug.
I agree, that it's not probable to be a bug in the GC.
PS: My mldonkey GUI already gets unusably slow after a few hours, but less due to eating memory, but more due to leaking "sources". After some time it thinks each files has some hundred sources when they are only tens (as can be seen after a restart of the GUI). And apparently it gets slow when it tries to handle half a million sources (150 files a 400 sources or such).
I don't see anything natural about that.
Yes, I am aware that you are referring to typical behaviour of the Slashdot croud, but the natural behaviour would have been to read the article, if you wonder about that statement.
but doesn't this suggest that I, as a geek who doesn't care about the value of my money, would get better performance with the Intel?
No. Just because an Intel processor isn't the winner in the performance/price class, it doesn't mean it's the winner in the performance class. The reasonable assumption you can make from the given statement, considering a performance/price statement was made, is that it isn't the Athlon 64 3500+ who was best in performance.
And that's obviously true: Even ignoring how the Intel procs did, the other AMD Athlon's in the test, the FX-53 and the 3800+ repeatedly won against the 3500+, which is to be expected.
As for AMD vs. Intel, they both won a share of the tests (IMHO the Athlons leading a bit) and it is not easy to declare a clear winner (for the 32-bit performance).
Otherwise, they would just come right out and say that the AMD is the fastest of all processors, wouldn't they?
You realize that it was the submitter's choice to emphasize a performance/price statement, do you?
Hell, I don't know, maybe I'll go read the article, but this sounds like some of that marketing speak we were recently warned about.
I am not sure what you are referring to.
Note that despite the quotes signs, that "balancing price and performance" isn't even an actual quote (it's "balancing price with performance") and taken out of context, too: First they look at the prices and availablity and come to the conclusion:
"Realistically, the Pentium 4 560 and the Athlon 64 3500+ are the best contenders in this match up. In six months when we run this shootout again we will likely be saying the same things about the Athlon 64 3800+. For now, however, the Athlon 64 3500+ does an excellent job of balancing price with performance."
They could have chosen the Pentiums for the "in six month" example as well. In other words, it was more a statement about new, high-priced processors and current ones (and how in 6 month the sweet spot will have shifted to the next generation), than about an Intel vs. AMD preference.
They state an AMD preference afterwards, but that's for their compelling performance with binaries compiled for 64-bit.
More aggressive spam content filtering of everybody who isn't using SPF -- after all you've whitelisted a LOT of the important people already.
:-)
And the cool thing with tools like Spamassassin[1] is, that their method to generate scores (via genetic algorithm) will automatically adapt to how effective a spam indicator SPF has become. So the risk that the filtering could be too aggressive is very low, as long as one uses sound tools.
In fact, it won't be one score, but several, like:
- SPF used and valid
- SPF used and invalid
- SPF not used
- SPF check failed (i.e. DNS down or something)
The funny thing is, if SPF is adopted by spammers more rapidly than by legitimate users, it could even be that a valid SPF entry is considered a low, but significant spam indicator for a while (until adoption gets better).
[1] And yes, it looks like they support SPF, they only don't support Microsoft's Sender-ID.
So they are either (a) covering something real up, or (b) covering up their mistake and thereby making themselves look worse or (c) just really badly botched the PR side of things, which doesn't bode well for anything that might happen legitimately in the future.
Am I the only one who finds it quite normal to make a official statement when a previously announced milestone[1] is reached, no matter what the result is.
Therein saying that nothing was found - only one signal was found at all, and the signal looks strange but doesn't match what one would expect from "ET" (an artificial signal).
And then, when it gets twisted and hyped up, and what else, you take a more conservative stance to avoid any repeated "misunderstanding" and say "nothing special to see here, move along"?
Really, read the original article again. They make quite clear that they didn't found what they are looking for. Just that what they found looks interesting by itself, because they don't have a ready explanation for it.
I think the signal only got mention, because it was the only location left of 200 which got still a signal and so was the only intersting part left to elaborate on. There are only so many words to say "nothing found".
Maybe I am not paranoid enough, but for me that sounds of a standard case of "oh, people misunderstood what we wanted to say, let's stop it before it gets ugly". Or maybe it's because I see such misunderstandings every day due to my job.
[1] Finish of an analysis of an revisit of 200 locations SETI separated out as interesting.
Yes, here in Germany you basically only get into trouble with old Nazi literature ("Mein Kampf" from Hitler comes to mind)
Books such as Mein Kampf should be carefully studied so that it doesn't happen again.
Oh, don't get the wrong idea: copies of (the original) Mein Kampf are forbidden, but not appropriately annotated/commented versions of the book.
So yes, the rules indeed are intended to let careful study happen. AFAIK, every "censoring" rule in Germany has provisions for education.
Cherry's G80 series of keyboards is considered by many (including me) to provide the best tactile expierience since the old IBM-keyboards with click, but without the weight and noise.
Amen!
About 7-8 years ago, my wrists began to build up pain after too much typing. When it started, it was only after marathon days, but after some months it got worse and already started after 2-3 hours of programming. I managed by taking regular typing breaks and doing some exercises (stretching helped a lot).
Then there was a week where I only worked from home, where I still used an Amiga 3000[1], when I noticed after 2-3 days that the pain didn't build up the same. At the end of the week I felt only mildly unconfortable after 8 hours.
That was when I realized what a big difference a decent keyboard can make, and I saw to it, that I switched keyboards at work (don't know anymore, but I think it was an to IBM one... I simply tested all that were lying around). After 2-3 month the pain was gone completely.[2]
Then, when a coworker also mentioned problems, I started to lobby for using decent keyboards overall at work. After quite some looking, the best I found was the "soft contact" variant (LQMUS for USA) of the G80-3000, which was happily accepted around here. Yes, it costs several times of what a 08-15 keyboard (or even the G81 or G83 of Cherry) costs: around EUR 60,-- here. But IMHO it's worth every cent. The only problem is that it sometimes can be a PITA to get hold of the exact model you want. I finally found a shop which orders it, specially for us, if we take a pack of 10 at once. It's easy to get the "linear action" variant, but that didn't help my hands at all.
Also, we never had one brake in those 7 years, even with all the usual stuff people tend to do to their equipment (like dropping from the desk, spilling a drinks, and so on).
Note that we have several people here who say they don't notice a difference for their hands and don't care which keyboard they use (but then, neither have they any complaint about the G80), but for the people being more sensitive to stress from typing it really makes quite a difference.
I tend to build my home PC from low priced parts, but I leared not to save on the parts I interact with all day - the monitor and keyboard.
[1] Why buy an PC when the Amiga worked for most things and for those for which I really needed a PC, I could use my computer at work. I am not sure about the later builds, but the early series had quite a decent keyboard (which works fine even today, after almost 20 years).
[2] More precisely: It didn't build up anymore. Before, the pain was also gone after the weekend, but during the week I noticed building it up again - more slowly due to the exercises - but increasing nevertheless. Funny thing is, today, I still notice my hands get stressed somewhat, because I learned to notice it at the times when the pain was real and I tried to manage somehow, but now it never goes to the stage of actually hurting anymore.
They fought back the first time, as soon as they knew what was happening.
I'm not so sure all the passengers faught back.
I think there is no conflict in the statements, just some misunderstanding. The grandparent post didn't say, that passengers from all flights fought back. Just that those did who knew what was happening.
As far as I was informed, except in flight 95, the passengers mostly remained in their seats and did not fight back because they weren't expecting to die in flight.
So with the limitation as soon as they knew what was happening the grandparent was referring to the same fact as you with [the others] weren't expecting to die. In other words: as soon as they knew what was happening (= they were expecting to die), they fought back.
I think the interesting point here is that we don't need to completely speculate about how people in such a situation will behave, but already have a lesson from the past to look at.