This is definitely one that the lawyers will have to address....
A license is just a bunch of words and, strictly speaking, it could assert that a ham sandwich is your backup copy for the purposes of the law that mandates you have the right to make a backup copy of all media.
That doesn't mean that a court wouldn't throw out that claim immediately - a ham sandwich won't protect you when, not if, you need that backup copy so it implicitly forces you to give up a right without compensation. The problem is that you have to get this license before a judge.
This claim isn't as silly... at least, not at first sight. However, the sole reason that people make backup copies of these discs is to ensure that there's no single point of failure. If the hard disk is corrupted, you have your original media. If your original media is unusable (e.g., because you have to constantly reinstall the OS for some odd reason and the media has become scratched), you have the backup media. If you don't have usable backup media, you *can't* just hop down to the store to buy a new copy - systems evolve so quickly that your only remaining choice is to buy a new computer! (It will probably be cheaper than trying to install a full copy of Windows, once you include staff costs.)
Therefore, I would argue that this clause is one of two things:
1) it says that the backups permitted under the law must be images of that disc, not of the installed system (which is rather silly since that's what you would duplicate anyway), or
2) it's null and void on its face because the purchase included both hardware and software, but that hardware has no value if that lone disc fails when you need it.
You're lucky - you can probably use each OEM disc to "back up" the others. If you only had one disc I would document the various interpretations... and conclude that the only interpretation which made sense was that your archival copy is of the OEM disc, not the installed system. The alternative asks you to expose yourself to a significant amount of risk with no consideration.
On a somewhat related topic, why did the school buy a bunch of computers but fail to get a site license? That way all systems are loaded from a single disc and use a single key -- keeping track of dozens (or hundreds) of separate discs and keys is not a realistic possibility.
We can laugh, but there are a lot of people who ask this question seriously every time physicists push the envelope a bit further. (Last time I checked we didn't collapse into a Bose-Einstein Condensate or become a strange(r) planet.)
For people who are worried about micro black holes, remember two compensating factors:
<ul> <li>Hawking radiation should quickly evaporate it <li>Even if it doesn't, this black hole would be so small that the earth would look as empty as interstellar space to it. It would quietly orbit within the earth and very, very, very, very rarely hit a proton (or quark?!) head-on. </ul>
David Brin (astrophysicist by training) discussed this in _Earth_. I don't recall the mass of a black hole which could ultimately consume the earth, but it's a lot heavier than you would expect - equivalent to small mountains (or larger!)
The mere appearance of a (credible) conflict of interest is usually enough for a judge to recluse himself. The real issue isn't that the judge can't put the conflict behind him - it's the fear that the public will lose confidence in the impartiality of the courts.
That's why the fact that the judge's firm once worked on a DVD case doesn't bother me too much, but the personal animosity displayed towards the defendant's lawyers *does*. It won't take many arbitrary decisions that harm the defendants (e.g., regarding scheduling, admissibility of evidence, etc.) for a reasonable member of the community to decide that the most important thing to bring to this judge's court is not the facts, nor is it the law. Bring his golfing buddies - the ones who let him win - if you want to win.
*That* perception will kill the public's faith in the courts, and the extreme violence in drug trafficking shows what happens when people are denied access to fair courts. (To revisit an earlier discussion, it's one of the reasons I support decriminalization of the low-level trafficking to adults. I would rather see small drug deals gone bad end up in small claims court than gun battles with collateral injuries and deaths!)
I know nothing about the particulars of this case, but maybe the real target is his ISPs. I've known a few people who redefined what it meant to be an "asshole," but their ISPs made a deliberate decision to not get involved. (The fact that "taking no action" is still taking an action never occured to them.) Note well that quick research showed that this was something like their 23rd ISP in two years, so it's not a case where this ISP was just trying to avoid a knee-jerk reaction.
We all agree that the better ISPs will always ask to see a court order before yanking someone's access. Perhaps this is what it requires - a federal court saying that eBay has the right to evict people for life, and any ISP that offers him sanctuary *will* answer to that court.
January 31, 1945 - Pvt. Eddie D. Slovik is executed by a firing squad of military police, after his conviction by a court martial of desertion in December 1944. He is the first soldier executed since the Civil War, for desertion. Slovik was only one of approximately 21,000 soldiers who deserted up until this time. Of those convicted of desertion, 49 were sentenced to death, six were considered for the death penalty, but Slovik is the only one in which the sentence is actually carried out. He is buried in France with 94 other soldiers hanged for murder and rape. His body is returned to the United States in 1987.
There is also a movie about the case starting Martin Sheen. It shows that *everyone* in the firing squad missed his heart in the first round of shots, which left Slovik alive (briefly) and in incredible pain. The men were chewed out, issued another round, but IIRC Slovik was declared dead before another volley was fired.
(Sorry about the hyperlink - Slashcode decided to nuke the closing tag for reasons known only to itself).
This is *not* an either-or question. Many of the critics (including myself) agree that drug abuse is a major problem that needs to be fought with the full strength of our society -- but we feel that the current approach is the most fucked-up way to do it and that the person who thought it up must be... stoned!
Some quick examples:
1) Why on earth are we willing to spend *billions* of dollars incarcerating something like half of our prison population on minor drug charges - to say nothing of the immense social disruption in "supplier" countries - while treatment centers are so cash starved that an addict who really wants to stop must be put on a months-long waiting list?
2) Speaking of prison populations, why do we have an inverted policy that guarantees users and low-level dealers will serve 20-years-without-parole (to the point of giving violent criminals early paroles in order to free space for the smuck caught with an ounce of pot at the airport), while mid-level dealers with information to trade can negotiate lighter sentences?
3) Why do we have an official policy of convincing our children that they can never, ever trust someone in authority to tell them the truth? As one local critic (and county commissioner) observes, kids are *not* going to believe the horror stories about how bad horse is if they were told that one toke on a joint will make them insane, yet they took a toke and the hit was lighter than their first cigarette. That's why E is a problem today - many researchers thought it might have a valid medical use but the Feds knee-jerked yet again and declared it without any legitimate use. (The same thing can be said about LSD, btw). There's now some evidence that E *might* cause long-term problems, and definite evidence that street users need to be careful about heat exhaustion, but the authorities have lost all credibility so the message isn't getting out. Not only that, they are actively hostile to DanceSafe telling ravers what's really in their pills and what the consequences of them taking it will be.
There is no cold calculus that tells us you should see three friends die of overdoses to equate two units of civil authority, but that doesn't mean that there isn't a very real tradeoff here. I don't know where the line is, but I get *very* worried when the government tells me that I can't get the information necessary to make an informed decision in the voting booth.
But then again, I am a hard-ass on this. Were I President, I would have immediately called a press conference to announce that I had relunctantly accepted Barry McCaffrey's(sp?) resignation after he made some comment about the stupid, ignorant voters in California and Arizona passing state referendums contrary to the national drug policy. (The fact that he offered no resignation wouldn't stop me from accepting it:-) I often think election results are crazy, but I would rather have a hundred stupid referendums than a government that considers itself above the voters who elected it.
This bill/amendment sounds like it is another case of Congressional Chicken. Remember to bake lots of chicken pot pies in November!
Congressional Chicken, if you haven't heard of it before, goes like this:
Each Congressman: This bill is flat-out unconstitutional. (It clearly violates *at least* the First and Fourth Amendments, with prior restraint of speech, restraint of peaceful assembly, seizure without court authority and searches without timely notification.) But the voters in my district are SO DUMB (how dumb are they?!) that they'll applaud me taking a Tough Stand Against Drugs, Rapists and Godless Communists. Besides, the Senate would never allow this piece of crap to pass!
Now you jump to the Senate. Historically, they've had enough respect for "the system" that they would not play along. But Senators aren't cut from the same cloth any more, so they're also letting obviously unconstitutional stuff get through. After all, the President will surely veto this piece of crap!
Now you jump to the President. Sometimes he'll veto the bills, but it often seems to be a function of party politics. If the president can veto the opposing party's puff piece and come across like a "Statesman," it's history. If it's Dubya and a Republican controlled Congress dropping trousers and pulling out micrometers expect to see legislation that allows school crossing guards to summarily execute jaywalkers.
Ultimately it comes down to everyone's favorite bogeyman, the Supreme Court. They are the ones who throw water on the bonfires by saying that "speech" doesn't require words (e.g., daring to breast-feed an infant on a city bus to protest the laws that declare *all* naked breasts in public obscene), that we are *not* a Christian nation which can force people to swear oaths to Jesus before you can drive/vote/take office, etc. For the most part, they do a pretty good job. But nominees must be ratified by an increasingly politicized President and Senate that seem far too focused on litmus tests. (Disregard their protests of innocence.)
The bottom line in this game of chicken is contempt for the voter. They believe - and act on that belief - that the voters are too dumb to recognize clearly unconstitutional bills, and too apathetic to do anything about it anyway.
Unfortunately, history suggests that things will get worse before they get better. E.g., there are a lot of similarities between Congressional Chicken and the chicken-shit Court Martial that sentenced Pvt. Slovak to death for dissertion during WW-II. All of those officers believed that a higher court would commute the sentence, and meanwhile they could avoid appearing "weak." It took his death (his particularly gruesome death) for everyone to accept that they had to take responsibility for their own actions.
Copies for the wife (but not your friend, unless he's a "special" one) falls under the umbrella of community property law.
You might have purchased the CD, but you both own it. You both have equal rights to it. Nobody can come in and force you to buy a second copy of the disk. Do I really have to point out the utter silliness of claiming that houses are community property, cars are community property, but a $20 CD isn't?!
Obviously, this argument doesn't extend to friends. And I don't burn and share tapes or discs with friends, with the sole exception of _Daria_ tapes I pass to a friend without cable TV. But I make him watch the commercials.:-)
However, I'm getting *very* tired of people claiming that if I like an album I need to buy three copies of it - one for enjoyment at home, one for enjoyment at work, and a third copy to enjoy in the car while commuting between home and work. And if the wife also likes the album we need *five* copies. Yeah, right.
If the economy is humming, most people are happy most of the time and there's not much real difference between the candidates (or one of them doesn't scare the shit out of them due to negative ads), 50% turnout is actually pretty good. And despite your claim, the Presidential general election generally has the highest turnout.
Many other democracies have 90+% turnout, but what people forget is that these countries have stiff fines if people fail to vote. Try passing a law mandating a $100-250 fine for failure to vote here! (Besides, it would almost certainly be unconstitutional.)
Ironically, the highest turnout is in communist countries where every registered voter (who is also a member of the party) turns out to vote for the parties candidate. That, by itself, should tell you to take *any* number citing turnout percentages with a grain of salt.
I am getting damn tired of this strawman argument.
Few people are concerned about the possibility more LIVE people will vote. To be sure, we often question the wisdom of pushing apathetic and ignorant citizens into the voting booth, but nobody disputes the right of the LIVING to vote.
What terrifies us is the ease with which DEAD people vote when you eliminate all human contact from the process. Ditto our pets, fictional characters, resident and illegal aliens, citizens living (and voting) in other jurisdictions, etc. Some of us are also concerned that, to keep the total ballots cast reasonable, that the votes from the DEAD will actually replace the votes from the living.
This problem *must* be honestly addressed - and solved - or we'll see a massive civil unrest when "hot button" issues are decided by narrow margins. It will only take a few cases of election fraud to undermine confidence in all elections, and where are you when people refuse to obey controversial laws because they believe - with reason - that these laws were passed via fraud?
The other thing to remember is that sometimes employers have no choice. They're in an industry which requires supervision of employee statements (e.g., a stock broker can't promise that a stock price will rise), or they're subject to some specific enforcement action or settlement (e.g., they have a history of allowing a racially or sexually hostile "work environment" and must ensure email is free of offensive terms).
*That* doesn't bother me because it's clear that there was two sides to the story and it was a conscious attempt to balance interests. On the other hand, the monitoring used to micromanage "productivity," or to intimidate employees from briefly using the 'net for legitimate personal business, etc., is worrisome.
Finally, the article totally missed the point that leaves HR employees running screaming in horror at this technology. What happens if this software picks up the fact that an employee has been visiting Alcoholic Anonymous websites and may be thinking of joining? What if it picks up the fact that the employee has an undisclosed, but ADA-protected, illness?
I don't think that technology - or more precisely the way businesses expect us to work because of technology - has eliminated leisure. What it has done is profoundly changed the nature of it.
My parents had holiday and two-week vacations every year. I don't, and am amazed that they avoided going crazy under those conditions.
When I'm "on contract" I don't have holidays, evenings, or even many weekends. Even if I'm only working 40 hours "on the clock," I average at least 60 when you include everything I need to do to keep current in this field. But my vacations (every 2-3 years) generally last 2-3 months, with the time evenly split between travel and career "skills sharpening" activities.
My parents think I'm crazy, but a two-week break just isn't long enough for me to recover. At the same time it is so long that it causes major disruptions in the office. (Not because I don't know how to minimize these problems, but businesses have deemphasized these practices.)
The downsides to this approach? It requires much more financial planning to prepare for a three-month period of unemployment than a two-week vacation. Many people can't pull it off, often for reasons beyond their control. Also, if you don't take a long break and hit "burnout" it can take a *long* time to recover - 6-12 months "off contract." That's long enough that it can be harder to reenter the job market.
But the upside is that you can do things that our parents could only dream of. Want to hike the length of the Appl. Trail? No problem. Want to live in Paris all spring, practicing your French? Pack your bags!
The only problem with this analysis is that (IIRC) it's already been dismissed. Unfortunately I can't recall where I read the discussion, but someone has presented this exact question to several hardware manufacturers.
The unanimous agreement of everyone in a position to complain is that there is no meaningful difference between opening a file to load it into the device and copying an embedded image into the same device. If anything, they prefer the latter since it eliminates a possible source of data corruption (and hence reduces their support costs).
What did worry them was the possibility that *their* firmware would also suddenly be covered by the GPL if it is loaded by the kernel. This is the logical conclusion to your reasoning -- and why some major corporations had refused to permit employees to use "emacs" in the past. (If someone uses emacs to edit a file, isn't the results a "derived" work?)
That argument falls on its face because it's too extreme. Once you accept that the exact mechanism for loading the firmware image is not significant, you find that the "data is GPL'd" argument would also apply to the contents of a file server, mail server, print server, etc.
It's hard to take a moral stand when your snout is deep in the slop.
I told *two* grocery stores that I would change my shopping habits and never darken their door again rather than provide personally identifiable marketing information. Fortunately the third chain (Albertsons) has repeatedly stated that they will not introduce them. When I really wanted something that only a carded store carried, I shopped at the local grocery store and paid full price. (It subsequently went bankrupt and was purchased by Albertsons.)
This was a pain, but nobody can accuse me of sitting on the fence. I was also always very clear that I would accept their cards if they were truly anonymous - put a bowl of them out on the customer service desk and donate any bonus points to charity. I'll grab a new card every few months - long enough for you to collect real marketing information, but not long enough that I would worry about my privacy. I have been told by all stores that that is "impossible."
In contrast, you're already in bed with the marketers. You lie, other people swap cards at parties, but you all buy into the Big Lie that it's legitimate for a grocery store to demand personal information in exchange for token discounts on merchandise they artificially marked up in the first place. (E.g., I noticed that 2-liter bottles of soda shot up from $0.99/2L to $3.99/2L, with a "sale" price of $1.99/2L, after the introduction of these cards.) When they decide to crack down on identity fraud and demand that you provide real information to get your discounts you're not in a strong moral position to protest.
This seems like a minor point, but if you look at the civil disobediences that worked (including the experiences of POW camp survivors) you'll see that one of the common threads is that the leaders and members always made an explicit effort to avoid any benefits which weren't available to all. I'll take advantange of a sales price which is available to everyone, card or not, but I won't accept a sales price that in any way - no matter how small - reflects special treatment in return for cooperation.
If you read a file, it will probably be through the VFS layer with the file read into disk buffer blocks. I've played around with this just enough to be dangerous....
In the meanwhile, provided the firmware doesn't change frequently you can always include a copy of it in your module! Basically, write a small program that reads the file and converts it into C code, e.g.
You can then compile this into your module. If you want to be fancy, you can wrap the whole mess in the __init tag (IIRC) and it will only be in core long enough to initialize the system.
Even if the module changes regularly, you can create one module which contains nothing but this firmware image, and a second that will read the first (if present) and initialize the controller. You may be able to play games that allow you to subsequently remove the firmware image module.
It's worse than that. An employer has a legal *obligation* to provide a workplace free of sexual and racial harassment, etc. These cases aren't always widely known, and it's certainly possible that the "snooping" employer is actually desperately trying to comply with the terms of a settlement that most employees are unaware exists.
Part of that settlement could be scanning office e-mail for offensive language or content, e.g., nude pictures of Natalie Portman rolling around in grits. Encrypted mail might be construed - as part of the settlement - as a deliberate and conscious attempt to circumvent monitoring and thus trigger immediate punitive measures. YOU DON'T KNOW, AND NOBODY IS OBLIGATED TO TELL YOU.
If you really want privacy, use SSH to connect to your personal account from work. Bring in your own laptop if you have to... at most, they'll tell you that it's not permitted.
But blindly installing and using PGP or GPG might cause problems far, far beyond anything you would expect. If you're lucky, you'll be fired "for cause." If you're unlucky, you'll be named as codefendant in some criminal or multi-billion dollar lawsuit, have your face plastered across the cover of magazines as the Geek Who Cost TLA $5 Million,....
The funniest thing is that I interviewed with them prior to posting to that site (in fact, I suggested that site!) and warned them that what they were proposing could be misinterpreted as an attack. I pointed them to the then-recently completed Internet Security Scan.
I don't think they believed me.
I passed on the job for other reasons, and unless they've gone off into a wildly different direction in the past 6 months or so they really do need a lot of data and they really are attempting to extract innoculuous information. But I can't talk about it, sorry!
*augh* That's a joke based on the fact that "sex" can be a verb or an adjective.
As other people have pointed out, words change their meaning over time as social needs change. We are a *long* way from the time when "sex-as-a-verb" meant a man porking his wife (always man-on-top, vaginal only, etc.) For several generations the most pressing social question involving "sex" wasn't "are you an innie or an outie", it was "do you sleep with your girlfriend?" (premarital sex, cohabitation), "do you sleep with your buddies?" (homosexuality), and the like.
If you're in a grammar class and really, really need to follow the archaic rules people have sex. If you're in a psychology (or sociology?) class people have sex and act out their gender. Anywhere else "sex" is what people do with the parts of their anatomy that give them "gender."
Compiler output is not a derivative work of the compiler....
Then why do many embedded system compilers charge per-customer royalties? Why did (does?) Microsoft include restrictions on the use of its compiler, e.g., you couldn't use MS C to develop a competing operating system or compiler?
This is one of those questions that can only be definitively answered by case law, but as I understand copyright law there is absolutely no doubt that the output of a <b>compiler</b> (but not assembler) is copyrighted. That's because compilers involve a significant amount of creative expression - do you unroll or optimize code, color registers, eliminate dead code, perform keyhole optimization, etc.?
A standard analogy is that assemblers are akin to transliteration of text, while compilers are akin to translation of text. Unless your lawyers are incompetent, they'll assure you that translators *always* have a copyright on the translated text.
(Historical sidenote: sometimes the translator's rights can exceed the original authors! In the 30's someone published an honest translation of _Mein Kampf_ and Hitler sued to cease publication. For some odd reason he wanted English speakers to see only a gutted version of his ravings.:-) The unofficial translator won. It's been a while since I read about this case so I can't recall the details, but the translator was someone easily recognized today. Perhaps William F. Buckeley...)
Even if we posit that all of this work is unworthy of protection, there's the pesky fact that compilers rarely stand alone. Even if *your* code is unencumbered, you're gonna link it to startup code, standard libraries, etc.
Finally, your argument seems to come down to the compiler company's lawyers writing licenses that benefit the consumer. This is an... interesting idea. In the real world I doubt any of these lawyers would lose sleep over the fact that, *oops*, they forgot to include that clause and the customer needs to send in a check to get a license to distribute their own product. The major customers will always negotiate their own license terms (instead of being forced to accept the offered one or get lost) and I'm sure *those* licenses included the right to redistributed derived work.
(P.S., any usable text editor or word processor should give you back exactly what you put into it, so copyright law is not an issue. However, if you print to a file look at it carefully - you'll probably find a copyright notice in generated PS, PDF, or any other format that allows comments.)
In honor of the Fourth of July (even though I would probably have still posted this response on any other day of the year!)...
(rant on)
I am not a doctor, but I don't run to the doctor because I am totally incompetent in deciding my own care.
I am not a CPA, but I don't run to the accountant every month so he can pay my bills, deposit my paycheck, etc.
I am not a lawyer, only someone with a graduate-level technical education which included some (not much) coverage of legal issue and a strong layman's interest in Civil Liberties law. But I guess you're right - in this field, alone, I am a drolling idiot who has absolutely no opinions of value to any other person.
Tell you what... why don't you take my voter card and cast my vote for me as well. I'm obviously incompetent to use my franchise.
I'm not picking on you, really, but this post demonstrates the type of arrogance that makes lawyers one of the most despised professions around. The mere fact that you feel the need to tell intelligent, educated people that they must remain silent unless they are practicing lawyers (or why else would you feel the need to mention your insurance?) says volumes about just how screwed up this country is.
If someone was asking -- or offering -- specific advice about a specific problem I would back you 100% in any statement that the person needs to see a practicing lawyer. Likewise, if someone has a sucking chest wound I'll tell them that they need to see a doctor, not someone who knows just enough first aid to get by while hiking.
But the vast majority of the "IANAL" posts I have seen refer to general questions that should be comprehensible to the average citizen... or we do not have a democracy. What is felony murder? Are slashdot comments copyrighted? Usenet comments? Small source files without any copyright notice? Can I be fired from my job (or suspended from my public high school) for possessing a magazine I bought at Barnes & Nobel during lunch? Can a cop demand to see what files are on my laptop? Even in an airport? (Read the letters in the summer issue of 2600 if you think the last few questions seem silly.)
The alternative which you suggest, whether you realize it or not, is to formally give up the American Experiment and recognize a two-class society. The upper class is practicing lawyers, and everyone else is banned from filing any grievance with the government or seeking redress (you know, those forgotten bits from the First Amendment), from <i>pro se</i> representation before either court or government agency, etc.
(Hmm, another poster's comments about his right to use an archaic title of nobility, "esquire," suddenly take on a whole new meaning. Last time I checked *any* American could add Esq. to their name if they desired. Of course I know that some lawyers were starting to use it, but I thought it was considered a bit of silliness by the mainstream of the bar. But it now sounds like at least one state has changed that....)
Do I think <i>pro se</i> representation is smart? For any serious problem, no. In fact, the only thing dumber than <i>pro se</i> is getting legal advice from slashdot.:-)
But for *routine* issues, I get *very* alarmed when a practicing lawyer tells me that the law has gotten so complex that only a lawyer can say anything about it. When I hear that, I don't want to shut up, I want to kick out every member of Congress and elect a bunch who will pass laws that can be understood by the people who are expected to live by them. You cannot have a meaningful democracy if the law is "too complex" for any but a handful of voters to understand.
(rant off)
An aside, since the last paragraph is often followed by a statement supporting direct democracy or citizen referendums - the initiative process terrifies me because it tends to *write* extremely bad laws. (With a few notable exceptions, the electorate generally doesn't *pass* those laws, which is more than I can say about our legislature.:-)
However, I find myself constantly defending actions that expand the power of citizen initiatives because the alternative is worse - I would rather have the people propose, and pass, bad law than Our Benevolent Lords and Masters of the Legislature have sole say in what laws are even discussed.
Jurisdiction is actually pretty straightforward - it is an American flagged aircraft in international airspace, with domestic departure and arrival points. It is no more exotic than a murder on a United Airlines 747 flying between LA and Hawaii.
(This, incidently, is a fscking big question with "Sea Haven." If it's truly sovereign, I can grab a helicopter, land there, shot everyone up, and get away clean because no civil authority exists to prosecute me.)
On an unrelated note, Federal land has historically either been a military base (and everyone was subject to military jurisdiction) or public lands where felonies were handled by the state. You couldn't get away with murder, but you could get away with most misdemeanors if you were off in a remote forest or beach. The car changed all of that, since you can now import blue-noses to be offended at the behavior of people who are deliberately trying to get away from the cookie-cutter norm.
In retrospect that phrasing was poor. She was charged with felony murder, but the DA was pushing for the death penalty. The reasoning was that the gunman would have faced the death penalty, and since felony murder means all actors are equally guilty it follows that *she* should face the death penalty as well. So it was a capital "felony murder" case.
I find that reasoning dangerous... but I grew up in Florida (and had a HS classmate shot in the chest) during an era when the laws actually encouraged convenience store robbers to herd everyone into the freezer and execute them. Extending felony murder to include capital offenses for all is exceedingly dangerous - it means that instead of one person with nothing to lose you now have a carload of armed, desperate people with nothing to lose.
(My point stands, BTW. If the underlying felony was the burglary then the DA should have either charged all or charged none. To charge Lisl alone means that she and Mattheaus committed a felony that the others did not.)
Regarding "intent" - I don't disagree that intent is, and should be, irrelevant. My concern is the other half of the equation - casuality.
Nobody can dispute the causality of a death due to a stray bullet or fleeing (or pursuing) vehicle. I'm even willing to concede a causal connection between a bomb in a public space and a subsequent heart attack.
But I *don't* see a legally significant causal connection between someone helping to subdue a thief and a subsequent heart attack. I can't ignore the possibility that he was going to die that day regardless of what he did that morning, and that's enough to form reasonable doubt about the causal connection between the thief's acts and the subsequent death.
I might be willing to let this slide if the dead man was the victim -- but he wasn't. As I understand the situation he was a bystander who *choose* to get involved. He could have let the thief escape, or other men subdue the thief. What if he suffered a heart attack after chasing the thief (e.g., to get a description of his car?) What if he hopped into a car, pursued him, and died in an accident after blowing through a stop light or stop sign? At some point the victim *has* to bring on his own death by misadventure, instead of felony murder.
Finally, I know that suicide is *normally* an independent, intervening act that breaks liability... but that's not always the case. E.g., a recent case out of Orlando involved a woman who wanted to stop her daughter (IIRC) from refusing medical treatment (= a form of suicide) since the woman would then be charged with murder. (That also follows the ancient tradition that it's murder even if the victim survives, but dies from injuries within a given period - traditionally a year and a day.) My example was a bit more extreme, but that's the nature of slippery-slope arguments;-)
Thank the failed "Equal Rights Amendment." It proposed to prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex, and some bright bulb opposed to it realized that "sex" can refer to either a noun (the plumbing) or a verb (what you do with that plumbing). Gender isn't a verb - you'll never here someone singing about how they want to "gender you up."
Toss in a non-unreasonable legal interpretation (if a broader word is used instead of a more precise word, the author must have chosen it deliberately) and a bit of fear-mongering about the Law of Unintentional Consequences, and you get the charming theory that the real effect of the ERA will be to prohibit laws banning sex with members of the same sex (remember, the ERA was debated in the 1970s when gays didn't dare show themselves outside of a few major cities), interracial couples (ditto), to say nothing of pedophilia, necrophilia, etc.
Look at the current debate over "gay rights" and multiply it 100-fold. Most of the opponents of the ERA were misogynists of the type that you only find in the Southern Baptist Convention today (or am I the intolerant one for mocking their stated belief that wives must be subservient to husbands, women must stay out of the pulpit, etc.?), but a significant number of liberals were also concerned with the ERA because of the very real possibility that it could be viewed as covering more than intended.
Unfortunately, as another poster observed other people are defining "gender" in psychological terms. It's not <i>that</i> far from "homosexual female trapped in male body" to "13-year-old horndog trapped in 25-year-old body." The latter may even be a valid description of someone with arrested sexual development, but that doesn't mean that we as a society must condone pedophilia.
Bottom line: you may have had a point a generation ago, but this is one area where the language is rapidly evolving.
1) Group burglarizes an apartment (supposedly one member recently moved out and was "retrieving" personal possessions - I don't recall details). Couple in one car is seen by police, pursued. Woman refuses to pull over when cop flashes his lights; male passenger fires gun at pursuing officer. Later, the woman is in custody when male fatally shoots a cop, then takes his own life.
I'm not sure what the underlying felony was (I though refusal to pull over was a misdemeanor), but she was charged with CAPITAL felony murder. She was ultimately sentenced to life-in-prison, no parole.
2) A man attempts to rob a grocery store. A group of patrons subdue him and hold him for police. A few hours later one of those men suffers a fatal heart attack.
The DA makes noises about charging the would-be thief with felony murder since the man suffered a fatal heart attack as a direct consequence of the excitement and exertion he experienced that day. (I don't recall if the DA actually filed the charges.)
These cases have opened up a local debate on the felony murder statutes. IANAL, but the second case seems excessive - people die from heart attacks every day, and this sets a dangerous precedence. Could someone be charged with felony murder if a TV viewer suffers a heart attack after watching live TV coverage? What if a distraught victim subsequently commits suicide?
The first case is more consistent with the intent of felony murder statutes... but was strangely incomplete. The woman claimed that she was unable to pull over because the gunman threatened to shoot her if she did - and she had no way of knowing he would ultimately kill a cop. All she was trying to do was get some distance between them and the cops so he would stop shooting.
On the other hand, she did willingly participate in the burglary. On the gripping hand, none of the other people involved in the burglary (who were in a separate car) were charged with felony murder.
I didn't follow the case closely, so there may have been a legitimate underlying felony that applied to her alone. I, and many other people, are disturbed by the prospect she might have faced a possible death sentence because she offered a ride to the wrong person.
As for the scenario in question, the biggest issue seems to be jurisdiction. If one astronaut flips out and murders another, where is the trial held?
(Hint: the same problem occurs with aircraft and ships in international waters... and this "hacker" would be no different than someone on shore interfering with navigational gear that affects a vessel in international waters.)
Standard telnet, FTP, and POP are insecure because they require the user to pass their password in plaintext. Because man-in-the-middle-attacks are trivial and indetectable. Because playback attacks are trivial and indetectable. Because...
I emphasize *standard* because I'm a "security moron" who uses telnet and FTP. Of course, both of these programs use Kerberos authentication so the password is not sent in plaintext. Man-in-the-middle attacks are believed to be impossible, due to the mutual authentication. Playback attacks are impossible outside of the narrow window defined by the clock skew parameter - less than a minute.
Slashdot Mirror
This is definitely one that the lawyers will have to address....
A license is just a bunch of words and, strictly speaking, it could assert that a ham sandwich is your backup copy for the purposes of the law that mandates you have the right to make a backup copy of all media.
That doesn't mean that a court wouldn't throw out that claim immediately - a ham sandwich won't protect you when, not if, you need that backup copy so it implicitly forces you to give up a right without compensation. The problem is that you have to get this license before a judge.
This claim isn't as silly... at least, not at first sight. However, the sole reason that people make backup copies of these discs is to ensure that there's no single point of failure. If the hard disk is corrupted, you have your original media. If your original media is unusable (e.g., because you have to constantly reinstall the OS for some odd reason and the media has become scratched), you have the backup media. If you don't have usable backup media, you *can't* just hop down to the store to buy a new copy - systems evolve so quickly that your only remaining choice is to buy a new computer! (It will probably be cheaper than trying to install a full copy of Windows, once you include staff costs.)
Therefore, I would argue that this clause is one of two things:
1) it says that the backups permitted under the law must be images of that disc, not of the installed system (which is rather silly since that's what you would duplicate anyway), or
2) it's null and void on its face because the purchase included both hardware and software, but that hardware has no value if that lone disc fails when you need it.
You're lucky - you can probably use each OEM disc to "back up" the others. If you only had one disc
I would document the various interpretations... and conclude that the only interpretation which made sense was that your archival copy is of the OEM disc, not the installed system. The alternative asks you to expose yourself to a significant amount of risk with no consideration.
On a somewhat related topic, why did the school buy a bunch of computers but fail to get a site license? That way all systems are loaded from a single disc and use a single key -- keeping track of dozens (or hundreds) of separate discs and keys is not a realistic possibility.
We can laugh, but there are a lot of people who ask this question seriously every time physicists push the envelope a bit further. (Last time I checked we didn't collapse into a Bose-Einstein Condensate or become a strange(r) planet.)
For people who are worried about micro black holes, remember two compensating factors:
<ul>
<li>Hawking radiation should quickly evaporate it
<li>Even if it doesn't, this black hole would be so small that the earth would look as empty as interstellar space to it. It would quietly orbit within the earth and very, very, very, very rarely hit a proton (or quark?!) head-on.
</ul>
David Brin (astrophysicist by training) discussed this in _Earth_. I don't recall the mass of a black hole which could ultimately consume the earth, but it's a lot heavier than you would expect - equivalent to small mountains (or larger!)
The mere appearance of a (credible) conflict of interest is usually enough for a judge to recluse himself. The real issue isn't that the judge can't put the conflict behind him - it's the fear that the public will lose confidence in the impartiality of the courts.
That's why the fact that the judge's firm once worked on a DVD case doesn't bother me too much, but the personal animosity displayed towards the defendant's lawyers *does*. It won't take many arbitrary decisions that harm the defendants (e.g., regarding scheduling, admissibility of evidence, etc.) for a reasonable member of the community to decide that the most important thing to bring to this judge's court is not the facts, nor is it the law. Bring his golfing buddies - the ones who let him win - if you want to win.
*That* perception will kill the public's faith in the courts, and the extreme violence in drug trafficking shows what happens when people are denied access to fair courts. (To revisit an earlier discussion, it's one of the reasons I support decriminalization of the low-level trafficking to adults. I would rather see small drug deals gone bad end up in small claims court than gun battles with collateral injuries and deaths!)
I know nothing about the particulars of this case, but maybe the real target is his ISPs. I've known a few people who redefined what it meant to be an "asshole," but their ISPs made a deliberate decision to not get involved. (The fact that "taking no action" is still taking an action never occured to them.) Note well that quick research showed that this was something like their 23rd ISP in two years, so it's not a case where this ISP was just trying to avoid a knee-jerk reaction.
We all agree that the better ISPs will always ask to see a court order before yanking someone's access. Perhaps this is what it requires - a federal court saying that eBay has the right to evict people for life, and any ISP that offers him sanctuary *will* answer to that court.
www.azstartnet.com/~rovedo/mph2c.html - military police history - has this entry:
There is also a movie about the case starting Martin Sheen. It shows that *everyone* in the firing squad missed his heart in the first round of shots, which left Slovik alive (briefly) and in incredible pain. The men were chewed out, issued another round, but IIRC Slovik was declared dead before another volley was fired.
(Sorry about the hyperlink - Slashcode decided to nuke the closing tag for reasons known only to itself).
This is *not* an either-or question. Many of the critics (including myself) agree that drug abuse is a major problem that needs to be fought with the full strength of our society -- but we feel that the current approach is the most fucked-up way to do it and that the person who thought it up must be... stoned!
:-) I often think election results are crazy, but I would rather have a hundred stupid referendums than a government that considers itself above the voters who elected it.
Some quick examples:
1) Why on earth are we willing to spend *billions* of dollars incarcerating something like half of our prison population on minor drug charges - to say nothing of the immense social disruption in "supplier" countries - while treatment centers are so cash starved that an addict who really wants to stop must be put on a months-long waiting list?
2) Speaking of prison populations, why do we have an inverted policy that guarantees users and low-level dealers will serve 20-years-without-parole (to the point of giving violent criminals early paroles in order to free space for the smuck caught with an ounce of pot at the airport), while mid-level dealers with information to trade can negotiate lighter sentences?
3) Why do we have an official policy of convincing our children that they can never, ever trust someone in authority to tell them the truth? As one local critic (and county commissioner) observes, kids are *not* going to believe the horror stories about how bad horse is if they were told that one toke on a joint will make them insane, yet they took a toke and the hit was lighter than their first cigarette. That's why E is a problem today - many researchers thought it might have a valid medical use but the Feds knee-jerked yet again and declared it without any legitimate use. (The same thing can be said about LSD, btw). There's now some evidence that E *might* cause long-term problems, and definite evidence that street users need to be careful about heat exhaustion, but the authorities have lost all credibility so the message isn't getting out. Not only that, they are actively hostile to DanceSafe telling ravers what's really in their pills and what the consequences of them taking it will be.
There is no cold calculus that tells us you should see three friends die of overdoses to equate two units of civil authority, but that doesn't mean that there isn't a very real tradeoff here. I don't know where the line is, but I get *very* worried when the government tells me that I can't get the information necessary to make an informed decision in the voting booth.
But then again, I am a hard-ass on this. Were I President, I would have immediately called a press conference to announce that I had relunctantly accepted Barry McCaffrey's(sp?) resignation after he made some comment about the stupid, ignorant voters in California and Arizona passing state referendums contrary to the national drug policy. (The fact that he offered no resignation wouldn't stop me from accepting it
This bill/amendment sounds like it is another case of Congressional Chicken. Remember to bake lots of chicken pot pies in November!
Congressional Chicken, if you haven't heard of it before, goes like this:
Each Congressman: This bill is flat-out unconstitutional. (It clearly violates *at least* the First and Fourth Amendments, with prior restraint of speech, restraint of peaceful assembly, seizure without court authority and searches without timely notification.) But the voters in my district are SO DUMB (how dumb are they?!) that they'll applaud me taking a Tough Stand Against Drugs, Rapists and Godless Communists. Besides, the Senate would never allow this piece of crap to pass!
Now you jump to the Senate. Historically, they've had enough respect for "the system" that they would not play along. But Senators aren't cut from the same cloth any more, so they're also letting obviously unconstitutional stuff get through. After all, the President will surely veto this piece of crap!
Now you jump to the President. Sometimes he'll veto the bills, but it often seems to be a function of party politics. If the president can veto the opposing party's puff piece and come across like a "Statesman," it's history. If it's Dubya and a Republican controlled Congress dropping trousers and pulling out micrometers expect to see legislation that allows school crossing guards to summarily execute jaywalkers.
Ultimately it comes down to everyone's favorite bogeyman, the Supreme Court. They are the ones who throw water on the bonfires by saying that "speech" doesn't require words (e.g., daring to breast-feed an infant on a city bus to protest the laws that declare *all* naked breasts in public obscene), that we are *not* a Christian nation which can force people to swear oaths to Jesus before you can drive/vote/take office, etc. For the most part, they do a pretty good job. But nominees must be ratified by an increasingly politicized President and Senate that seem far too focused on litmus tests. (Disregard their protests of innocence.)
The bottom line in this game of chicken is contempt for the voter. They believe - and act on that belief - that the voters are too dumb to recognize clearly unconstitutional bills, and too apathetic to do anything about it anyway.
Unfortunately, history suggests that things will get worse before they get better. E.g., there are a lot of similarities between Congressional Chicken and the chicken-shit Court Martial that sentenced Pvt. Slovak to death for dissertion during WW-II. All of those officers believed that a higher court would commute the sentence, and meanwhile they could avoid appearing "weak." It took his death (his particularly gruesome death) for everyone to accept that they had to take responsibility for their own actions.
Copies for the wife (but not your friend, unless he's a "special" one) falls under the umbrella of community property law.
:-)
You might have purchased the CD, but you both own it. You both have equal rights to it. Nobody can come in and force you to buy a second copy of the disk. Do I really have to point out the utter silliness of claiming that houses are community property, cars are community property, but a $20 CD isn't?!
Obviously, this argument doesn't extend to friends. And I don't burn and share tapes or discs with friends, with the sole exception of _Daria_ tapes I pass to a friend without cable TV. But I make him watch the commercials.
However, I'm getting *very* tired of people claiming that if I like an album I need to buy three copies of it - one for enjoyment at home, one for enjoyment at work, and a third copy to enjoy in the car while commuting between home and work. And if the wife also likes the album we need *five* copies. Yeah, right.
If the economy is humming, most people are happy most of the time and there's not much real difference between the candidates (or one of them doesn't scare the shit out of them due to negative ads), 50% turnout is actually pretty good. And despite your claim, the Presidential general election generally has the highest turnout.
Many other democracies have 90+% turnout, but what people forget is that these countries have stiff fines if people fail to vote. Try passing a law mandating a $100-250 fine for failure to vote here! (Besides, it would almost certainly be unconstitutional.)
Ironically, the highest turnout is in communist countries where every registered voter (who is also a member of the party) turns out to vote for the parties candidate. That, by itself, should tell you to take *any* number citing turnout percentages with a grain of salt.
I am getting damn tired of this strawman argument.
Few people are concerned about the possibility more LIVE people will vote. To be sure, we often question the wisdom of pushing apathetic and ignorant citizens into the voting booth, but nobody disputes the right of the LIVING to vote.
What terrifies us is the ease with which DEAD people vote when you eliminate all human contact from the process. Ditto our pets, fictional characters, resident and illegal aliens, citizens living (and voting) in other jurisdictions, etc. Some of us are also concerned that, to keep the total ballots cast reasonable, that the votes from the DEAD will actually replace the votes from the living.
This problem *must* be honestly addressed - and solved - or we'll see a massive civil unrest when "hot button" issues are decided by narrow margins. It will only take a few cases of election fraud to undermine confidence in all elections, and where are you when people refuse to obey controversial laws because they believe - with reason - that these laws were passed via fraud?
The other thing to remember is that sometimes employers have no choice. They're in an industry which requires supervision of employee statements (e.g., a stock broker can't promise that a stock price will rise), or they're subject to some specific enforcement action or settlement (e.g., they have a history of allowing a racially or sexually hostile "work environment" and must ensure email is free of offensive terms).
*That* doesn't bother me because it's clear that there was two sides to the story and it was a conscious attempt to balance interests. On the other hand, the monitoring used to micromanage "productivity," or to intimidate employees from briefly using the 'net for legitimate personal business, etc., is worrisome.
Finally, the article totally missed the point that leaves HR employees running screaming in horror at this technology. What happens if this software picks up the fact that an employee has been visiting Alcoholic Anonymous websites and may be thinking of joining? What if it picks up the fact that the employee has an undisclosed, but ADA-protected, illness?
I don't think that technology - or more precisely the way businesses expect us to work because of technology - has eliminated leisure. What it has done is profoundly changed the nature of it.
My parents had holiday and two-week vacations every year. I don't, and am amazed that they avoided going crazy under those conditions.
When I'm "on contract" I don't have holidays, evenings, or even many weekends. Even if I'm only working 40 hours "on the clock," I average at least 60 when you include everything I need to do to keep current in this field. But my vacations (every 2-3 years) generally last 2-3 months, with the time evenly split between travel and career "skills sharpening" activities.
My parents think I'm crazy, but a two-week break just isn't long enough for me to recover. At the same time it is so long that it causes major disruptions in the office. (Not because I don't know how to minimize these problems, but businesses have deemphasized these practices.)
The downsides to this approach? It requires much more financial planning to prepare for a three-month period of unemployment than a two-week vacation. Many people can't pull it off, often for reasons beyond their control. Also, if you don't take a long break and hit "burnout" it can take a *long* time to recover - 6-12 months "off contract." That's long enough that it can be harder to reenter the job market.
But the upside is that you can do things that our parents could only dream of. Want to hike the length of the Appl. Trail? No problem. Want to live in Paris all spring, practicing your French? Pack your bags!
The only problem with this analysis is that (IIRC) it's already been dismissed. Unfortunately I can't recall where I read the discussion, but someone has presented this exact question to several hardware manufacturers.
The unanimous agreement of everyone in a position to complain is that there is no meaningful difference between opening a file to load it into the device and copying an embedded image into the same device. If anything, they prefer the latter since it eliminates a possible source of data corruption (and hence reduces their support costs).
What did worry them was the possibility that *their* firmware would also suddenly be covered by the GPL if it is loaded by the kernel. This is the logical conclusion to your reasoning -- and why some major corporations had refused to permit employees to use "emacs" in the past. (If someone uses emacs to edit a file, isn't the results a "derived" work?)
That argument falls on its face because it's too extreme. Once you accept that the exact mechanism for loading the firmware image is not significant, you find that the "data is GPL'd" argument would also apply to the contents of a file server, mail server, print server, etc.
It's hard to take a moral stand when your snout is deep in the slop.
I told *two* grocery stores that I would change my shopping habits and never darken their door again rather than provide personally identifiable marketing information. Fortunately the third chain (Albertsons) has repeatedly stated that they will not introduce them. When I really wanted something that only a carded store carried, I shopped at the local grocery store and paid full price. (It subsequently went bankrupt and was purchased by Albertsons.)
This was a pain, but nobody can accuse me of sitting on the fence. I was also always very clear that I would accept their cards if they were truly anonymous - put a bowl of them out on the customer service desk and donate any bonus points to charity. I'll grab a new card every few months - long enough for you to collect real marketing information, but not long enough that I would worry about my privacy. I have been told by all stores that that is "impossible."
In contrast, you're already in bed with the marketers. You lie, other people swap cards at parties, but you all buy into the Big Lie that it's legitimate for a grocery store to demand personal information in exchange for token discounts on merchandise they artificially marked up in the first place. (E.g., I noticed that 2-liter bottles of soda shot up from $0.99/2L to $3.99/2L, with a "sale" price of $1.99/2L, after the introduction of these cards.) When they decide to crack down on identity fraud and demand that you provide real information to get your discounts you're not in a strong moral position to protest.
This seems like a minor point, but if you look at the civil disobediences that worked (including the experiences of POW camp survivors) you'll see that one of the common threads is that the leaders and members always made an explicit effort to avoid any benefits which weren't available to all. I'll take advantange of a sales price which is available to everyone, card or not, but I won't accept a sales price that in any way - no matter how small - reflects special treatment in return for cooperation.
If you read a file, it will probably be through the VFS layer with the file read into disk buffer blocks. I've played around with this just enough to be dangerous....
In the meanwhile, provided the firmware doesn't change frequently you can always include a copy of it in your module! Basically, write a small program that reads the file and converts it into C code, e.g.
static const char firmware[] = { 0x23, 0x11, 0x85,... }
You can then compile this into your module. If you want to be fancy, you can wrap the whole mess in the __init tag (IIRC) and it will only be in core long enough to initialize the system.
Even if the module changes regularly, you can create one module which contains nothing but this firmware image, and a second that will read the first (if present) and initialize the controller. You may be able to play games that allow you to subsequently remove the firmware image module.
It's worse than that. An employer has a legal *obligation* to provide a workplace free of sexual and racial harassment, etc. These cases aren't always widely known, and it's certainly possible that the "snooping" employer is actually desperately trying to comply with the terms of a settlement that most employees are unaware exists.
Part of that settlement could be scanning office e-mail for offensive language or content, e.g., nude pictures of Natalie Portman rolling around in grits. Encrypted mail might be construed - as part of the settlement - as a deliberate and conscious attempt to circumvent monitoring and thus trigger immediate punitive measures. YOU DON'T KNOW, AND NOBODY IS OBLIGATED TO TELL YOU.
If you really want privacy, use SSH to connect to your personal account from work. Bring in your own laptop if you have to... at most, they'll tell you that it's not permitted.
But blindly installing and using PGP or GPG might cause problems far, far beyond anything you would expect. If you're lucky, you'll be fired "for cause." If you're unlucky, you'll be named as codefendant in some criminal or multi-billion dollar lawsuit, have your face plastered across the cover of magazines as the Geek Who Cost TLA $5 Million,....
The funniest thing is that I interviewed with them prior to posting to that site (in fact, I suggested that site!) and warned them that what they were proposing could be misinterpreted as an attack. I pointed them to the then-recently completed Internet Security Scan.
I don't think they believed me.
I passed on the job for other reasons, and unless they've gone off into a wildly different direction in the past 6 months or so they really do need a lot of data and they really are attempting to extract innoculuous information. But I can't talk about it, sorry!
*augh* That's a joke based on the fact that "sex" can be a verb or an adjective.
As other people have pointed out, words change their meaning over time as social needs change. We are a *long* way from the time when "sex-as-a-verb" meant a man porking his wife (always man-on-top, vaginal only, etc.) For several generations the most pressing social question involving "sex" wasn't "are you an innie or an outie", it was "do you sleep with your girlfriend?" (premarital sex, cohabitation), "do you sleep with your buddies?" (homosexuality), and the like.
If you're in a grammar class and really, really need to follow the archaic rules people have sex. If you're in a psychology (or sociology?) class people have sex and act out their gender. Anywhere else "sex" is what people do with the parts of their anatomy that give them "gender."
Compiler output is not a derivative work of the compiler....
:-) The unofficial translator won. It's been a while since I read about this case so I can't recall the details, but the translator was someone easily recognized today. Perhaps William F. Buckeley...)
Then why do many embedded system compilers charge per-customer royalties? Why did (does?) Microsoft include restrictions on the use of its compiler, e.g., you couldn't use MS C to develop a competing operating system or compiler?
This is one of those questions that can only be definitively answered by case law, but as I understand copyright law there is absolutely no doubt that the output of a <b>compiler</b> (but not assembler) is copyrighted. That's because compilers involve a significant amount of creative expression - do you unroll or optimize code, color registers, eliminate dead code, perform keyhole optimization, etc.?
A standard analogy is that assemblers are akin to transliteration of text, while compilers are akin to translation of text. Unless your lawyers are incompetent, they'll assure you that translators *always* have a copyright on the translated text.
(Historical sidenote: sometimes the translator's rights can exceed the original authors! In the 30's someone published an honest translation of _Mein Kampf_ and Hitler sued to cease publication. For some odd reason he wanted English speakers to see only a gutted version of his ravings.
Even if we posit that all of this work is unworthy of protection, there's the pesky fact that compilers rarely stand alone. Even if *your* code is unencumbered, you're gonna link it to startup code, standard libraries, etc.
Finally, your argument seems to come down to the compiler company's lawyers writing licenses that benefit the consumer. This is an... interesting idea. In the real world I doubt any of these lawyers would lose sleep over the fact that, *oops*, they forgot to include that clause and the customer needs to send in a check to get a license to distribute their own product. The major customers will always negotiate their own license terms (instead of being forced to accept the offered one or get lost) and I'm sure *those* licenses included the right to redistributed derived work.
(P.S., any usable text editor or word processor should give you back exactly what you put into it, so copyright law is not an issue. However, if you print to a file look at it carefully - you'll probably find a copyright notice in generated PS, PDF, or any other format that allows comments.)
In honor of the Fourth of July (even though I would probably have still posted this response on any other day of the year!)...
:-)
:-)
(rant on)
I am not a doctor, but I don't run to the doctor because I am totally incompetent in deciding my own care.
I am not a CPA, but I don't run to the accountant every month so he can pay my bills, deposit my paycheck, etc.
I am not a lawyer, only someone with a graduate-level technical education which included some (not much) coverage of legal issue and a strong layman's interest in Civil Liberties law. But I guess you're right - in this field, alone, I am a drolling idiot who has absolutely no opinions of value to any other person.
Tell you what... why don't you take my voter card and cast my vote for me as well. I'm obviously incompetent to use my franchise.
I'm not picking on you, really, but this post demonstrates the type of arrogance that makes lawyers one of the most despised professions around. The mere fact that you feel the need to tell intelligent, educated people that they must remain silent unless they are practicing lawyers (or why else would you feel the need to mention your insurance?) says volumes about just how screwed up this country is.
If someone was asking -- or offering -- specific advice about a specific problem I would back you 100% in any statement that the person needs to see a practicing lawyer. Likewise, if someone has a sucking chest wound I'll tell them that they need to see a doctor, not someone who knows just enough first aid to get by while hiking.
But the vast majority of the "IANAL" posts I have seen refer to general questions that should be comprehensible to the average citizen... or we do not have a democracy. What is felony murder? Are slashdot comments copyrighted? Usenet comments? Small source files without any copyright notice? Can I be fired from my job (or suspended from my public high school) for possessing a magazine I bought at Barnes & Nobel during lunch? Can a cop demand to see what files are on my laptop? Even in an airport? (Read the letters in the summer issue of 2600 if you think the last few questions seem silly.)
The alternative which you suggest, whether you realize it or not, is to formally give up the American Experiment and recognize a two-class society. The upper class is practicing lawyers, and everyone else is banned from filing any grievance with the government or seeking redress (you know, those forgotten bits from the First Amendment), from <i>pro se</i> representation before either court or government agency, etc.
(Hmm, another poster's comments about his right to use an archaic title of nobility, "esquire," suddenly take on a whole new meaning. Last time I checked *any* American could add Esq. to their name if they desired. Of course I know that some lawyers were starting to use it, but I thought it was considered a bit of silliness by the mainstream of the bar. But it now sounds like at least one state has changed that....)
Do I think <i>pro se</i> representation is smart? For any serious problem, no. In fact, the only thing dumber than <i>pro se</i> is getting legal advice from slashdot.
But for *routine* issues, I get *very* alarmed when a practicing lawyer tells me that the law has gotten so complex that only a lawyer can say anything about it. When I hear that, I don't want to shut up, I want to kick out every member of Congress and elect a bunch who will pass laws that can be understood by the people who are expected to live by them. You cannot have a meaningful democracy if the law is "too complex" for any but a handful of voters to understand.
(rant off)
An aside, since the last paragraph is often followed by a statement supporting direct democracy or citizen referendums - the initiative process terrifies me because it tends to *write* extremely bad laws. (With a few notable exceptions, the electorate generally doesn't *pass* those laws, which is more than I can say about our legislature.
However, I find myself constantly defending actions that expand the power of citizen initiatives because the alternative is worse - I would rather have the people propose, and pass, bad law than Our Benevolent Lords and Masters of the Legislature have sole say in what laws are even discussed.
Jurisdiction is actually pretty straightforward - it is an American flagged aircraft in international airspace, with domestic departure and arrival points. It is no more exotic than a murder on a United Airlines 747 flying between LA and Hawaii.
(This, incidently, is a fscking big question with "Sea Haven." If it's truly sovereign, I can grab a helicopter, land there, shot everyone up, and get away clean because no civil authority exists to prosecute me.)
On an unrelated note, Federal land has historically either been a military base (and everyone was subject to military jurisdiction) or public lands where felonies were handled by the state. You couldn't get away with murder, but you could get away with most misdemeanors if you were off in a remote forest or beach. The car changed all of that, since you can now import blue-noses to be offended at the behavior of people who are deliberately trying to get away from the cookie-cutter norm.
In retrospect that phrasing was poor. She was charged with felony murder, but the DA was pushing for the death penalty. The reasoning was that the gunman would have faced the death penalty, and since felony murder means all actors are equally guilty it follows that *she* should face the death penalty as well. So it was a capital "felony murder" case.
;-)
I find that reasoning dangerous... but I grew up in Florida (and had a HS classmate shot in the chest) during an era when the laws actually encouraged convenience store robbers to herd everyone into the freezer and execute them. Extending felony murder to include capital offenses for all is exceedingly dangerous - it means that instead of one person with nothing to lose you now have a carload of armed, desperate people with nothing to lose.
(My point stands, BTW. If the underlying felony was the burglary then the DA should have either charged all or charged none. To charge Lisl alone means that she and Mattheaus committed a felony that the others did not.)
Regarding "intent" - I don't disagree that intent is, and should be, irrelevant. My concern is the other half of the equation - casuality.
Nobody can dispute the causality of a death due to a stray bullet or fleeing (or pursuing) vehicle. I'm even willing to concede a causal connection between a bomb in a public space and a subsequent heart attack.
But I *don't* see a legally significant causal connection between someone helping to subdue a thief and a subsequent heart attack. I can't ignore the possibility that he was going to die that day regardless of what he did that morning, and that's enough to form reasonable doubt about the causal connection between the thief's acts and the subsequent death.
I might be willing to let this slide if the dead man was the victim -- but he wasn't. As I understand the situation he was a bystander who *choose* to get involved. He could have let the thief escape, or other men subdue the thief. What if he suffered a heart attack after chasing the thief (e.g., to get a description of his car?) What if he hopped into a car, pursued him, and died in an accident after blowing through a stop light or stop sign? At some point the victim *has* to bring on his own death by misadventure, instead of felony murder.
Finally, I know that suicide is *normally* an independent, intervening act that breaks liability... but that's not always the case. E.g., a recent case out of Orlando involved a woman who wanted to stop her daughter (IIRC) from refusing medical treatment (= a form of suicide) since the woman would then be charged with murder. (That also follows the ancient tradition that it's murder even if the victim survives, but dies from injuries within a given period - traditionally a year and a day.) My example was a bit more extreme, but that's the nature of slippery-slope arguments
Thank the failed "Equal Rights Amendment." It proposed to prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex, and some bright bulb opposed to it realized that "sex" can refer to either a noun (the plumbing) or a verb (what you do with that plumbing). Gender isn't a verb - you'll never here someone singing about how they want to "gender you up."
Toss in a non-unreasonable legal interpretation (if a broader word is used instead of a more precise word, the author must have chosen it deliberately) and a bit of fear-mongering about the Law of Unintentional Consequences, and you get the charming theory that the real effect of the ERA will be to prohibit laws banning sex with members of the same sex (remember, the ERA was debated in the 1970s when gays didn't dare show themselves outside of a few major cities), interracial couples (ditto), to say nothing of pedophilia, necrophilia, etc.
Look at the current debate over "gay rights" and multiply it 100-fold. Most of the opponents of the ERA were misogynists of the type that you only find in the Southern Baptist Convention today (or am I the intolerant one for mocking their stated belief that wives must be subservient to husbands, women must stay out of the pulpit, etc.?), but a significant number of liberals were also concerned with the ERA because of the very real possibility that it could be viewed as covering more than intended.
Unfortunately, as another poster observed other people are defining "gender" in psychological terms. It's not <i>that</i> far from "homosexual female trapped in male body" to "13-year-old horndog trapped in 25-year-old body." The latter may even be a valid description of someone with arrested sexual development, but that doesn't mean that we as a society must condone pedophilia.
Bottom line: you may have had a point a generation ago, but this is one area where the language is rapidly evolving.
Two recent examples from Colorado:
1) Group burglarizes an apartment (supposedly one member recently moved out and was "retrieving" personal possessions - I don't recall details). Couple in one car is seen by police, pursued. Woman refuses to pull over when cop flashes his lights; male passenger fires gun at pursuing officer. Later, the woman is in custody when male fatally shoots a cop, then takes his own life.
I'm not sure what the underlying felony was (I though refusal to pull over was a misdemeanor),
but she was charged with CAPITAL felony murder. She was ultimately sentenced to life-in-prison, no parole.
2) A man attempts to rob a grocery store. A group of patrons subdue him and hold him for police. A few hours later one of those men suffers a fatal heart attack.
The DA makes noises about charging the would-be thief with felony murder since the man suffered a fatal heart attack as a direct consequence of the excitement and exertion he experienced that day. (I don't recall if the DA actually filed the charges.)
These cases have opened up a local debate on the felony murder statutes. IANAL, but the second case seems excessive - people die from heart attacks every day, and this sets a dangerous precedence. Could someone be charged with felony murder if a TV viewer suffers a heart attack after watching live TV coverage? What if a distraught victim subsequently commits suicide?
The first case is more consistent with the intent of felony murder statutes... but was strangely incomplete. The woman claimed that she was unable to pull over because the gunman threatened to shoot her if she did - and she had no way of knowing he would ultimately kill a cop. All she was trying to do was get some distance between them and the cops so he would stop shooting.
On the other hand, she did willingly participate in the burglary. On the gripping hand, none of the other people involved in the burglary (who were in a separate car) were charged with felony murder.
I didn't follow the case closely, so there may have been a legitimate underlying felony that applied to her alone. I, and many other people, are disturbed by the prospect she might have faced a possible death sentence because she offered a ride to the wrong person.
As for the scenario in question, the biggest issue seems to be jurisdiction. If one astronaut flips out and murders another, where is the trial held?
(Hint: the same problem occurs with aircraft and ships in international waters... and this "hacker" would be no different than someone on shore interfering with navigational gear that affects a vessel in international waters.)
Standard telnet, FTP, and POP are insecure because they require the user to pass their password in plaintext. Because man-in-the-middle-attacks are trivial and indetectable. Because playback attacks are trivial and indetectable. Because...
I emphasize *standard* because I'm a "security moron" who uses telnet and FTP. Of course, both of these programs use Kerberos authentication so the password is not sent in plaintext. Man-in-the-middle attacks are believed to be impossible, due to the mutual authentication. Playback attacks are impossible outside of the narrow window defined by the clock skew parameter - less than a minute.