As stated by the Supreme Court in Int'l Union v. Bagwell, 512 U.S. 821 (1994), distinguishing criminal from civil contempt, a "flat, unconditional fine" totaling even as little as $50.00 announced after a finding of contempt is criminal if the contemnor has no subsequent opportunity to reduce or avoid the fine." Id., at 829.
Thats the only precedent they site in support of this part of the argument
- there's a heck of a lot more to support their argument that the RIAA are abusing the courts. But this one claim seems pretty thin.
However that case was about civil versus criminal/contempt/ fines, and pretty much all the cases citing it seem to be about contempt. IANAL, but it looks like even this precedent might be a bit of a reach. Good luck to them though:)
Hash Values are useless anyway; change 1 pixel in an image and voila, new hash.
No, you're wrong. For images, audio, and video, the hashes they use don't work that way. They use robust feature extraction. To take a very poor example: if I average out the colours in the image to one value, and clamp rgb to integers 0-255, I've got a way of comparing images which is robust to single-pixel changes like yours (as well as scaling), although its not very selective. Real robust hashes are more complex, and can deal with rotation, cropping, colour filters, etc. Google for 'robust image hash' - a lot of this stuff is at least a decade old.
What's more, they care less about false positives. If your content gets flagged, they can quarantine it and check it by hand, or just reject it (as happens all the time with spam filters). The false positive rate just has to be low enough to make this worthwhile.
One of the reasons you can even consider introducing noise like this into an image file (or video/audio) is that your senses also filter out the damage. You can't damage an executable in the same way and get away with it.
Quite a few years back New Scientist had an article where the writer speculated about why cows tend to be parallel to railway lines. His explanation went like this: - for rectangular fields beside railway lines, 2/3 of the possible gate locations would make the cow enter the field parallel to the railway lines - even if cows turn, the cow direction is reset two or more times a day, when the cow is milked. (and a 5am/4pm milking schedule, say, would reset them not long before commuter trains pass!) - cows tend to wander forwards only turning slowly, unlike (say) sheep
the last line is a bit of a stretch, but this was a bit of fun, not a peer-reviewed paper. Anyway, whatever the explanation it really does happen - if you have a countryside commute, look out the window and check out the parallel cows.
'the cloud' is old networking/telephony terminology. Describing interconnection of two sites, you'd diagram the systems at either end, and their local links, but once the links enter the network you don't know or care how the routing happens (generally). This part of the network was 'the cloud' (and was diagrammed as a cloud).
By inference, cloud computing would be where you know the computation is happening somewhere on the network, but you neither know or care exactly where.
The Internet Archive's scanning of public domain books was one of the efforts being funded by this, it got a passing mention in TFA. Both articles mention that Microsoft are removing 'contractual restrictions placed on the digitized library content'.
Those restrictions were always a bit vague: http://www.archive.org/details/msn_books... anyone know more? They had restrictions on bulk access and commercial use, but I understood that the books couldn't be indexed by search engines other than live.com.
One of the nice things from this article was actually this nice screenshot of a selection of current versions of MS software running on Vista. The thing to notice is that not a single one of those applications has a GUI the same as any of the others.
I actually thought that was a pretty weak point he was making there, since he was implying thatOS X is consistent. See eg these screenshots from the Mac (this selection is a bit dated - 2006 - but the situation isn't much different on Leopard). I'm a Mac user btw, and I don't find these differences all that offputting.
- FIFA 2003 was released at the end of October/start of November 2002. - Avril Lavigne's first single was number 1 in Spain and number 3 in the UK... in April 2002.
So, the game made people go back in time 6 months to buy records? Now, thats impressive.
I noticed because I remembered being annoyed by the music at the time; NBA/Madden games don't do much business over here so I can't comment on those.
IIRC its come up here before, in discussions of Perelman's work on the Poincaré conjecture. I think it went like this:
|Anonymous Coward: 1st post in this dimension! |GeekB01: If it wasn't for M$, it would be homeomorphic AND diffeomorphic. Tards! |-MathGrad: RTFA GeekB01 this is about the 4th dimension. |--GeekBO1: Its some Perl man? Wasn't this in lisp years ago? |---MathGrad: I give up |----Anonymous Coward: Your mama is topologically equivalent to a 3-sphere |----Anonymous Coward: Natalie Portman has an exotic smooth structure made of hot grits
And in the provided screenshots, I can already spot ways that the "native" OS X theme doesn't cut it. For example, the screenshot which proudly shows off an Aqua-style select control and button next to a search box also shows those controls using the wrong font and with the text incorrectly placed. If they can't get those details right, they might as well not try to do a "native" theme at all.
Eh? That screenshot (and I presume you mean this one http://arstechnica.com/news.media/osxnative.png ) is not of the theme its of the native controls being used in forms. They appear when you use unstyled form controls in html. They are native, not emulated in any way, shape, or form. You do get some control of the font, which may explain why you think the font is wrong - same thing on Safari, Opera.
In other words, if these look odd, its because Apple's native controls are odd.
Modelling bird swarming behaviour isn't new....getting it right is. If you rtfa, and Craig Reynolds work, you'd know that the boids simulation assumed that birds interacted with all nearest neighbours within a certain distance. The paper this article refers to proves by observing starling flocks that that isn't true - in fact the starlings interacted with the nearest 6 or 7 independent of the distance apart the birds were.
Maybe we'll get a mathematical/algorithmic description of what the swarming birds are up to once they file their final report.
See my reply to the GP for a link to their preprint. In the preprint, notes to figure 4, they describe how to set up a numerical simulation with the behaviour they observed. The model just considers headings, not velocities, and at each timestep just averages the current heading with those of n nearest neighbours, without regard to how far those n neighbours are away.
Numerical models indicate that collective animal behaviour may emerge from simple local rules of interaction among the individuals. However, very little is known about the nature of such interaction, so that models and theories mostly rely on aprioristic assumptions. By reconstructing the three-dimensional position of individual birds in airborne flocks of few thousands members, we prove that the interaction does not depend on the metric distance, as most current models and theories assume, but rather on the topological distance. In fact, we discover that each bird interacts on average with a fixed number of neighbours (six-seven), rather than with all neighbours within a fixed metric distance. We argue that a topological interaction is indispensable to maintain flock's cohesion against the large density changes caused by external perturbations, typically predation. We support this hypothesis by numerical simulations, showing that a topological interaction grants significantly higher cohesion of the aggregation compared to a standard metric one.
3) Implement some sort of standard memory/resource allocation/deallocation API for extensions so that people can bring up a standard window and see:
There is work going on on this (the standard window, about:memory). https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=392351 (links to bugzilla usually don't work from slashdot so you may have to copy & paste that, though they did move bugzilla to a cluster recently)
Memory generally isn't explicitly allocated by extensions - they're just JS - but theres also some work going on to trace allocations back to scripts.
the cold water is the city's drinking supply, taken from deep in Lake Ontario, and its used to cool a closed-loop that in turn cools some of Toronto's office buildings.
Somewhat offtopic, but often Slashdot warns if TFA is pdf or flash. In this case, the article has style="visibility: hidden;" on the text of the article, so that it only appears when you turn javascript on (or turn off CSS). You're all paid-up geeks, so you're all surfing the web with noscript whitelisting... right?
The words obnoxious, useless and stupid spring to mind.
And being a government, these files are INCREDIBLY important.
Why haven't they been converted? Really, all their DIGITAL archives should be in a single format by now.
No, they shouldn't. You usually want 3 formats: - the original format of the document. Whatever whichever idiot happened to write (or record, or video) it in, you absolutely want the original in your records. - a searchable format (eg OCR'd text from scanned image docs) - a rendered format. (eg an image or pdf, or svg - something open enough that you can continue to show how the doc would have looked). The appropriate rendered format varies. Paper is not an appropriate format for storing CCTV footage, for example;)
If you're very, very lucky the original is both searchable and viewable; like, say, HTML. It gets more complicated too, because you often want to store a redacted copy of the document (think of the Onion story 'CIA realise they've been using black highlighter pen all these years') and you want that searchable too, so you have to keep a redacted searchable format too... and of course, some of the records are on actual paper. Have you started worrying about the fading inks in the originals yet?
BTW you can't restrict the format of the original. Consider an email from a corporate bidding for a govt contract, with attachments. They need to keep those.
- Mr. E
PS, posting anon because I have dealings with the national archives, and don't want to speak for my company.
BitTorrent is nice to have, but word processing is mission critical.
Mission critical? You mean this is about using the mac in a work setting?
Its unclear who the target of the article was suppose to be. If its for office users, then customisability, and the cost of their work tools, are pretty irrelevant (the company buys, not you). If its for gamers, then sure, customisability might matter, but the mac's poor game availability will keep them away anyway. For other home users, browsing, mail, music and home finance (eg ms money, quicken) are all more important than office apps, and they just don't customize their kit - they treat them like TVs; they might get a custom controller but they won't open the thing up.
The only crashers I get: - java. some applets seem badly behaved, like the jboss web management console (theres a bug filed for this by someone else) (windows) - the divx web player. crashes on resize, sometimes on ff/rew (os x) - javascript (os x and windows)
The last one's harder to pin down, but its usually cos I had NoScript turned off at the time. With NoScript on, none of these issues get me, and the browser is rock-solid. Yes I hear you say, how can you call it rock solid if javascript can crash it...
BTW re the plugin thing, Zack Rusin has been blogging recently about how the plugin architecture could/should be changed on X to avoid badly-behaving plugins crashing the browser, with code. Interesting stuff.
Clever trick: most mail systems are configured so that USERNAME+anything will always be delivered to USERNAME (e.g., bob+ebay, bob+paypal, bob+cray-cyber, etc). This way, you don't have to deliver *@domain to your inbox nor set up forwarding aliases.
Unfortunately, most people who write webapps are total idiots (some are geniuses, to be fair). 9 times out of 10 an email address with a + in the name will be rejected as invalid when you try to sign in, because they chose an overly conservative regexp for validation.
Dunno if anyone else has pointed this out, but Amazon also mentioned a date, "November 10, 1982". This date can't refer to the page itself - since there was no html back then - or to the series Cheers, since it predates that; or to the collection of quotes, since most of them postdate that. This must then be a footnote reference to a specific Norm quote. The only possible episodes are (says IMDB):
Season 1, Episode 1: Give Me a Ring Sometime Original Air Date: 30 September 1982 Season 1, Episode 2: Sam's Women Original Air Date: 7 October 1982 Season 1, Episode 3: The Tortelli Tort Original Air Date: 14 October 1982 Season 1, Episode 4: Sam at Eleven Original Air Date: 21 October 1982 Season 1, Episode 5: The Coach's Daughter Original Air Date: 28 October 1982 Season 1, Episode 6: Any Friend of Diane's Original Air Date: 4 November 1982 Season 1, Episode 7: Friends, Romans, and Accountants Original Air Date: 11 November 1982
This limits what they're refering to to a handful of quotes - maybe this, from episode 5: Norm: Gentlemen, start your taps.
Or this one, which seems more apposite to one-click ordering: Coach: How are you doing Norm? Norm: Cut the small talk and give me a beer.
If you ever actually need a lawyer, I sincerely hope you look somewhere other than wikipedia. If not, I have a business opportunity in Nigeria you might be interested in...
Slashdot Mirror
The motion itself has this:
As stated by the Supreme Court in Int'l Union v. Bagwell, 512 U.S.
821 (1994), distinguishing criminal from civil contempt, a
"flat, unconditional fine" totaling even as little as $50.00
announced after a finding of contempt is criminal if the
contemnor has no subsequent opportunity to reduce or avoid the
fine." Id., at 829.
Thats the only precedent they site in support of this part of the argument
- there's a heck of a lot more to support their argument that the RIAA
are abusing the courts. But this one claim seems pretty thin.
However that case was about civil versus criminal /contempt/ fines, :)
and pretty much all the cases citing it seem to be about contempt.
IANAL, but it looks like even this precedent might be a bit of a reach.
Good luck to them though
Hash Values are useless anyway; change 1 pixel in an image and voila, new hash.
No, you're wrong. For images, audio, and video, the hashes they use don't work that way. They use robust feature extraction. To take a very poor example: if I average out the colours in the image to one value, and clamp rgb to integers 0-255, I've got a way of comparing images which is robust to single-pixel changes like yours (as well as scaling), although its not very selective. Real robust hashes are more complex, and can deal with rotation, cropping, colour filters, etc. Google for 'robust image hash' - a lot of this stuff is at least a decade old.
What's more, they care less about false positives. If your content gets flagged, they can quarantine it and check it by hand, or just reject it (as happens all the time with spam filters). The false positive rate just has to be low enough to make this worthwhile.
One of the reasons you can even consider introducing noise like this into an image file (or video/audio) is that your senses also filter out the damage. You can't damage an executable in the same way and get away with it.
-Baz
Quite a few years back New Scientist had an article where the writer speculated about why cows tend to be parallel to railway lines. His explanation went like this:
- for rectangular fields beside railway lines, 2/3 of the possible gate locations would make the cow enter the field parallel to the railway lines
- even if cows turn, the cow direction is reset two or more times a day, when the cow is milked. (and a 5am/4pm milking schedule, say, would reset them not long before commuter trains pass!)
- cows tend to wander forwards only turning slowly, unlike (say) sheep
the last line is a bit of a stretch, but this was a bit of fun, not a peer-reviewed paper. Anyway, whatever the explanation it really does happen - if you have a countryside commute, look out the window and check out the parallel cows.
'the cloud' is old networking/telephony terminology. Describing interconnection of two sites, you'd diagram the systems at either end, and their local links, but once the links enter the network you don't know or care how the routing happens (generally). This part of the network was 'the cloud' (and was diagrammed as a cloud).
By inference, cloud computing would be where you know the computation is happening somewhere on the network, but you neither know or care exactly where.
See this thread back in 1995 -
http://groups.google.co.uk/group/bit.listserv.techwr-l/browse_thread/thread/d6384bd640275c43/14da0963ed1c294a?hl=en%0Eda0963ed1c294a
Or the first diagram in RFC 1587 (1994):
http://rfc.dotsrc.org/rfc/rfc1587.html
I joined a telecoms company the year before that and the term was in use there, can't vouch for earlier.
Here's archive.org's statement: http://www.archive.org/iathreads/post-view.php?id=194217
... anyone know more? They had restrictions on bulk access and commercial use, but I understood that the books couldn't be indexed by search engines other than live.com.
The Internet Archive's scanning of public domain books was one of the efforts being funded by this, it got a passing mention in TFA. Both articles mention that Microsoft are removing 'contractual restrictions placed on the digitized library content'.
Those restrictions were always a bit vague: http://www.archive.org/details/msn_books
One of the nice things from this article was actually this nice screenshot of a selection of current versions of MS software running on Vista. The thing to notice is that not a single one of those applications has a GUI the same as any of the others.
I actually thought that was a pretty weak point he was making there, since he was implying thatOS X is consistent. See eg these screenshots from the Mac (this selection is a bit dated - 2006 - but the situation isn't much different on Leopard). I'm a Mac user btw, and I don't find these differences all that offputting.
- FIFA 2003 was released at the end of October/start of November 2002.
- Avril Lavigne's first single was number 1 in Spain and number 3 in the UK... in April 2002.
So, the game made people go back in time 6 months to buy records? Now, thats impressive.
I noticed because I remembered being annoyed by the music at the time; NBA/Madden games don't do much business over here so I can't comment on those.
GP possibly meant this stuff
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4-manifold#Special_phenomena_in_4-dimensions
IIRC its come up here before, in discussions of Perelman's work on the Poincaré conjecture. I think it went like this:
|Anonymous Coward: 1st post in this dimension!
|GeekB01: If it wasn't for M$, it would be homeomorphic AND diffeomorphic. Tards!
|-MathGrad: RTFA GeekB01 this is about the 4th dimension.
|--GeekBO1: Its some Perl man? Wasn't this in lisp years ago?
|---MathGrad: I give up
|----Anonymous Coward: Your mama is topologically equivalent to a 3-sphere
|----Anonymous Coward: Natalie Portman has an exotic smooth structure made of hot grits
(etc)
From TFA:
Ryerson's academic misconduct policy, which is being updated, defines it as "any deliberate activity to gain academic advantage"
Great, no more turning up for class then!
And in the provided screenshots, I can already spot ways that the "native" OS X theme doesn't cut it. For example, the screenshot which proudly shows off an Aqua-style select control and button next to a search box also shows those controls using the wrong font and with the text incorrectly placed. If they can't get those details right, they might as well not try to do a "native" theme at all.
Eh? That screenshot (and I presume you mean this one http://arstechnica.com/news.media/osxnative.png ) is not of the theme its of the native controls being used in forms. They appear when you use unstyled form controls in html. They are native, not emulated in any way, shape, or form. You do get some control of the font, which may explain why you think the font is wrong - same thing on Safari, Opera.
In other words, if these look odd, its because Apple's native controls are odd.
The links in TFA aren't very good - theres a site
here that does real time sat tracking (ooh, animated over google maps).
I looked there last week and they didn't have enough data to show the orbit but it seems they have some elements now.
Modelling bird swarming behaviour isn't new. ...getting it right is. If you rtfa, and Craig Reynolds work, you'd know that the boids simulation assumed that birds interacted with all nearest neighbours within a certain distance. The paper this article refers to proves by observing starling flocks that that isn't true - in fact the starlings interacted with the nearest 6 or 7 independent of the distance apart the birds were.
Maybe we'll get a mathematical/algorithmic description of what the swarming birds are up to once they file their final report.
See my reply to the GP for a link to their preprint. In the preprint, notes to figure 4, they describe how to set up a numerical simulation with the behaviour they observed. The model just considers headings, not velocities, and at each timestep just averages the current heading with those of n nearest neighbours, without regard to how far those n neighbours are away.
No, the actual article is here:
Interaction Ruling Animal Collective Behaviour Depends on Topological rather than Metric Distance: Evidence from a Field Study
Numerical models indicate that collective animal behaviour may emerge from simple local rules of interaction among the individuals. However, very little is known about the nature of such interaction, so that models and theories mostly rely on aprioristic assumptions. By reconstructing the three-dimensional position of individual birds in airborne flocks of few thousands members, we prove that the interaction does not depend on the metric distance, as most current models and theories assume, but rather on the topological distance. In fact, we discover that each bird interacts on average with a fixed number of neighbours (six-seven), rather than with all neighbours within a fixed metric distance. We argue that a topological interaction is indispensable to maintain flock's cohesion against the large density changes caused by external perturbations, typically predation. We support this hypothesis by numerical simulations, showing that a topological interaction grants significantly higher cohesion of the aggregation compared to a standard metric one.
3) Implement some sort of standard memory/resource allocation/deallocation API for extensions so that people can bring up a standard window and see:
There is work going on on this (the standard window, about:memory). https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=392351
(links to bugzilla usually don't work from slashdot so you may have to copy & paste that, though they did move bugzilla to a cluster recently)
Memory generally isn't explicitly allocated by extensions - they're just JS - but theres also some work going on to trace allocations back to scripts.
That's been done in Toronto
http://www.enwave.com/enwave/dlwc/
the cold water is the city's drinking supply, taken from deep in Lake Ontario, and its used to cool a closed-loop that in turn cools some of Toronto's office buildings.
Somewhat offtopic, but often Slashdot warns if TFA is pdf or flash. In this case, the article has style="visibility: hidden;" on the text of the article, so that it only appears when you turn javascript on (or turn off CSS). You're all paid-up geeks, so you're all surfing the web with noscript whitelisting... right?
The words obnoxious, useless and stupid spring to mind.
...Galactus is coming!
Hum now. completely failed to tick the posting anon box :) good job I held back from expressing opinions in there.
And being a government, these files are INCREDIBLY important.
;)
Why haven't they been converted? Really, all their DIGITAL archives should be in a single format by now.
No, they shouldn't. You usually want 3 formats:
- the original format of the document. Whatever whichever idiot happened to write (or record, or video) it in, you absolutely want the original in your records.
- a searchable format (eg OCR'd text from scanned image docs)
- a rendered format. (eg an image or pdf, or svg - something open enough that you can continue to show how the doc would have looked). The appropriate rendered format varies. Paper is not an appropriate format for storing CCTV footage, for example
If you're very, very lucky the original is both searchable and viewable; like, say, HTML. It gets more complicated too, because you often want to store a redacted copy of the document (think of the Onion story 'CIA realise they've been using black highlighter pen all these years') and you want that searchable too, so you have to keep a redacted searchable format too... and of course, some of the records are on actual paper. Have you started worrying about the fading inks in the originals yet?
BTW you can't restrict the format of the original. Consider an email from a corporate bidding for a govt contract, with attachments. They need to keep those.
- Mr. E
PS, posting anon because I have dealings with the national archives, and don't want to speak for my company.
BitTorrent is nice to have, but word processing is mission critical.
Mission critical? You mean this is about using the mac in a work setting?
Its unclear who the target of the article was suppose to be. If its for office users, then customisability, and the cost of their work tools, are pretty irrelevant (the company buys, not you). If its for gamers, then sure, customisability might matter, but the mac's poor game availability will keep them away anyway. For other home users, browsing, mail, music and home finance (eg ms money, quicken) are all more important than office apps, and they just don't customize their kit - they treat them like TVs; they might get a custom controller but they won't open the thing up.
Seriously, who fits a new video card to use Word?
The only crashers I get:
s .html
- java. some applets seem badly behaved, like the jboss web management console (theres a bug filed for this by someone else) (windows)
- the divx web player. crashes on resize, sometimes on ff/rew (os x)
- javascript (os x and windows)
The last one's harder to pin down, but its usually cos I had NoScript turned off at the time. With NoScript on, none of these issues get me, and the browser is rock-solid. Yes I hear you say, how can you call it rock solid if javascript can crash it...
BTW re the plugin thing, Zack Rusin has been blogging recently about how the plugin architecture could/should be changed on X to avoid badly-behaving plugins crashing the browser, with code. Interesting stuff.
http://zrusin.blogspot.com/2007/05/browser-plugin
Clever trick: most mail systems are configured so that USERNAME+anything will always be delivered to USERNAME (e.g., bob+ebay, bob+paypal, bob+cray-cyber, etc). This way, you don't have to deliver *@domain to your inbox nor set up forwarding aliases.
Unfortunately, most people who write webapps are total idiots (some are geniuses, to be fair). 9 times out of 10 an email address with a + in the name will be rejected as invalid when you try to sign in, because they chose an overly conservative regexp for validation.
Dunno if anyone else has pointed this out, but Amazon also mentioned a date, "November 10, 1982". This date can't refer to the page itself - since there was no html back then - or to the series Cheers, since it predates that; or to the collection of quotes, since most of them postdate that. This must then be a footnote reference to a specific Norm quote. The only possible episodes are (says IMDB):
Season 1, Episode 1: Give Me a Ring Sometime Original Air Date: 30 September 1982
Season 1, Episode 2: Sam's Women Original Air Date: 7 October 1982
Season 1, Episode 3: The Tortelli Tort Original Air Date: 14 October 1982
Season 1, Episode 4: Sam at Eleven Original Air Date: 21 October 1982
Season 1, Episode 5: The Coach's Daughter Original Air Date: 28 October 1982
Season 1, Episode 6: Any Friend of Diane's Original Air Date: 4 November 1982
Season 1, Episode 7: Friends, Romans, and Accountants Original Air Date: 11 November 1982
This limits what they're refering to to a handful of quotes - maybe this, from episode 5:
Norm: Gentlemen, start your taps.
Or this one, which seems more apposite to one-click ordering:
Coach: How are you doing Norm?
Norm: Cut the small talk and give me a beer.
If you ever actually need a lawyer, I sincerely hope you look somewhere other than wikipedia.
If not, I have a business opportunity in Nigeria you might be interested in...
Exporting surplus elephants, perchance?