It's the difference between murdering a single person and pinching tens of millions of people hard, repeatedly. If someone could actually do the latter, then I'd think they deserved pretty harsh punishment. What do you think our legal system as it currently exists would do to someone convicted of ten million counts of assault?
So the next time I get stuck in a traffic jam for hours with thousands of other people because some poor bastard in a beat up el Camino knocked off on the freeway, I'm free to shoot him? Huh? The "poor bastard" presumably wasn't trying to waste anyone's time, and in any case probably only wasted a few hundred or maybe a few thousand person-hours. That's orders of magnitude away from the damages deliberately inflicted on us by spammers.
why don't you go read the 8th Amendment of the US Constitution I'm well aware of the Eighth Amendment. It's not clear to me that letting the punishment fit the crime is "cruel and unusual". The case law is mixed.
quote a few words out of your own hypocritical mouth Get a grip. I suppose you thought Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal" was serious?
I was pointing out the logical conclusion arising from someone else's suggestion that the punishment should fit the crime. I'm not claiming that our current laws would actually allow such a result, nor am I inciting anyone to apply "vigilante justice" (though that's apparently already happening).
but you can't seriously argue that he ought to be tortured for it. I most certainly can. The spammer has tortured all of us a little; it is entirely fair that we impose EXACTLY the same total amount of torture on him, to the best of our ability to determine it. It's his (or her) own damn fault that he racked up an insanely huge penalty.
So wasting a bit of time deleting unwanted email is somehow equivalent to... torture? How do you figure that? Suppose the spammer made YOU PERSONALLY spend 385 person-years deleting his messages (i.e., around four times your natural lifetime, doing NOTHING ELSE). Would you still feel that the spammer didn't deserve torture?
So why do you think it is less bad for the spammer to waste 385 person-years distributed amongst many people?
The rational part of my brain says "yeah spamming is bad, but the punishment should fit the crime."
Sure! How would we do that?
Suppose a spammer sends 300 million spams in a campaign, and 10% reach people's inboxes. The average recipient takes 3 seconds to look at the subject line and delete the spam. The spammer runs 100 such campaigns a year. In total, in the course of one year that one spammer has wasted 285 person-years of other people's lives. If someone kills him, he's gotten off lucky compared to a punishment that would truly fit the crime.
A truly just punishment would be to torture him continuously, while using every known medical means to keep him alive indefinitely (as far beyond a normal human life span as possible). And even that wouldn't really do it, because it would probably just drive him (more) insane and catatonic in a few weeks or months.
Perhaps the appropriate form of torture would be the spam equivalent of the Ludovico Technique, but carried out for as long as the spammer can be kept alive.
Standards track means that there's some chance that it will be adopted as a standard someday, but there's certainly no guarantee, and it can't even be said to be likely. Exercise for the reader: count how many RFCs are on the standards track and not obsoleted, but not yet actually adopted as an IETF standard. For bonus points: construct a histogram of these by month and year published.
This would appear to be a violation of RFC 2821, which states: "Rejection of messages (for excessive recipients) with fewer than 100 RCPT commands is a violation of this specification."
RFC 2821 isn't a standard, though. It's on the standards track, but it has not yet been accepted by the IETF as a standard. The current SMTP standard is RFC 821, also known as STD 10. RFC 821 says:
recipients buffer
The maximum total number of recipients that must be buffered is 100 recipients.
TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT POSSIBLE, IMPLEMENTATION TECHNIQUES WHICH IMPOSE NO LIMITS ON THE LENGTH OF THESE OBJECTS SHOULD BE USED.
This only requires that up to 100 recipients must be buffered, but doesn't explicitly state that there is any requirement to deliver to all 100 such recipients, nor that recipients cannot be rejected for some reason other than running out of buffer space.
Re:If someone patents something stupid, do we care
on
IBM Patents Checking a Box
·
· Score: 2, Informative
While independent claims 1, 6, and 11 do cover multiple checkboxes, they not require dragging do toggle the state of multiple checkboxes. That is covered in later dependent claims. Effectively IBM has just been granted a patent on the basic GUI checkbox which was implemented by Apple in the Lisa Office System in January 1983. Xerox probably used checkboxes before that, but I'm not certain.
It seems likely that Claims 1, 6, and 11 can be invalidated by prior art, should someone be willing to invest the time and effort to do so. The dependent claims might have a better chance of being upheld.
Where in the Constitution are you granted those rights?
Before you go waving the U.S. Constitution about, maybe you should actually READ it and learn what it is about. The Constitution does not grant ANY rights to the people. The rights inherently reside in the people. The Constitution is the means whereby the people grant limited powers to the government. The Bill of Rights, a series of amendments to the Constitution, also do not grant rights to the people, but rather serve to delineate some specific rights of the people that the government is not empowered to violate. The fact that some rights of the people are not specifically listed in the Constitution or Bill of Rights does not mean that the people do not have those rights; this is made clear by the Ninth Amendment, which states "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."
Nowhere in the Constitution is there anything empowering the government to control what clothing we wear. Such limitations may be imposed by the government only to the extent to which they further a power of the government authorized by the Constitution. See Article I Section 8 ("Powers of Congress") to get an idea of what those powers actually are.
If you want to argue that the government has the power to prevent people from wearing clothing containing obvious homemade electronics, you would have to justify that under one of the powers enumerated in the Constitution. For instance, you might argue that it is part of promoting the common welfare. However, I think it would be very difficult to construct such an argument that would be strong enough to convince a court. To my knowledge, there have been no cases in which a person wearing clothing containing obvious homemade electronics have used that electronics to significantly harm anyone. This is a much different case than someone trying to conceal something under their clothing.
That said, I will agree that the woman would have been much better off had she explained the nature of her clothing/device to the TSA agents.
It was stated that the companies already had policies that were being violated. I still don't see how updating those policies is the answer.
Every election year Congress decides that they need to get tough on crime, and passes a new crime bill, which criminalizes more things. And the result: it *increases* crime. What a surprise.
But they were already admitting to violating the old policies, so "keeping the policies up to date" doesn't gain anything. They already could have been fired for violating the old policy.
"keeps corporate policymakers and HR people employed" is undoubtedly the real answer, but is irrelevant to concerns over whether there should be an IT code of ethics.
Why bother keeping corporate policies up to date?
on
When Ethics and IT Collide
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· Score: 4, Insightful
and 42% said they had knowingly violated their company's privacy, security or IT policies. But in the absence of a professional code of ethics, companies struggle to keep corporate policies up to date."
If 42% are willing to violate the existing policies and risk termination or worse, how would adding a professional code of ethics or keeping corporate policies up to date help? Those same 42% would likely ignore the code of ethics and violate newer policies as well.
If no one will admit to owning them, then they're useful for the Chinese (or anyone else) as targets in antisatellite weapons tests. Other than the resulting debris, they'd be doing everyone a favor.
Why do they feel obliged to remove the BSD license from the Linux port of the driver? If they just keep it dual-licensed, there isn't a problem.
Or did someone issue an edict that Linux kernel code can't be dual-licensed, at some point when I wasn't paying attention?
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seven times as much energy per unity volume as common capacitors
It may well be a breakthrough, but I'm not impressed with that particular claim. Aerogel capacitors (e.g., Cooper Bussman PowerStor series) and Electric Double Layered Capacitors (e.g., Panasonic SG series "gold capacitors") already have at least 2000 times higher energy storage density than common capacitors.
The point was that it is modified, compiled, and put in a box. I should have been more clear, sorry.
Suppose the vendor adds a system call and two device drivers to the BSD kernel. Perhaps they've added 1500 lines of code. Your claim is that it's no longer a BSD kernel. I think most people would disagree. It's clearly not a *stock* BSD kernel, but nothing has magically made it cease to be a BSD kernel, any more than if you hack the kernel slightly on your desktop machine at home, it ceases to be BSD.
My point is that while clearly I am still free to download the upstream BSD kernel, it doesn't help me much with respect to the vendor's product. Concrete example: suppose the upstream kernel changes to support larger hard drives (as happened at the 128GiB limit on the Tivo). If the vendor has turned their BSD kernel proprietary, the fact that the unmodified kernel source is available isn't sufficient for me to be able to use that upstream kernel change on the box. Thus I've lost the freedom to enhance/extend/modify the BSD kernel running on that box.
If you want to play semantic games and claim that by compiling BSD code and putting it into a box, it's no longer the same code, I'm sure you and any other like minded people can go amuse yourselves that way. Most reasonable people (and, for that matter, US Copyright law) see it as clearly still being Foo (albeit a modified Foo), and thus have lost the freedom to modify and enhance that Foo.
Sure, they could go get the original Foo, and start from scratch. They could also try to build a new civilization from scratch by banging rocks together. That's not the point.
Which is about 99.95% useless as there are only a relatively small number of people with the know-how to further enhance the software and only a small portion of even those who give a flip enough to actually do it.
Wrong. Even though only 0.05% are capable of modifying the software, and fewer do it, it only takes one such person to do a useful and desirable mod and distributed it, for many people to benefit.
How many times have you had some piece of consumer electronics that had a bug or misfeature that irritated you, or that you thought could have easily been more useful or convenient if only they'd made some minor change? But of course, with most consumer electronics, the software is proprietary, and you can't do it.
With GPL'd software, you can, or someone else can, and share the results with you. Except that Tivo found a loophole in GPLv2 and was able to build a system that ran GPL'd code but could not be modified. The GPLv3 closes this loophole. The only people this hurts are people trying to force DRM onto consumers that don't want it.
The GPLv3 won't change anything because they're using GPLv2 and will continue to do so.
But if they'd used a GPLv3 kernel from the outset (had there existed such a thing at the time), they wouldn't have been allowed to lock users into running only their proprietary build of the software. They used a loophole in GPLv2 to do that; they are required by GPLv2 to share their sources, but they build their system so that you can't actually run modified code on it. The GPLv3 won't allow that.
Suppose you release package Foo under the BSD license. Now a company uses a modified version of that software in their product Bar. As an end user, I buy a Bar. Now I've got a product running a non-free version of Foo. The company won't give me the sources to their version, so I can't modify or enhance it, or fix bugs. That's about as non-free as software gets, and it was clearly facilitated by the BSD license.
If the code is linked with GPLv3 code (even dynamically linked at runtime), then it will be a violation of the GPLv3 license. The copyright owner of the GPLv3 code will have grounds to sue the company that sold the product for copyright infringement, and collect either actual or statutory damages, either of which could be a *lot* of money.
VCRs are required by US law to include/support DRM (Macrovision). If you make the argument that a Tivo is a VCR, then yes, the Tivo would have to support DRM as well.
The GPLv3 doesn't grant anyone permission to break the law. Obviously it cannot.
The point of the anti-DRM provisions of GPLv3 isn't that if someone uses GPLv3 code for DRM, the users get any legal right to circumvent it. The point is to prevent GPLv3 code from being used for DRM in the first place.
In other words, if I release FooSoft 1.8 under the GPLv3, and SomeRandomCompany uses it in their product with DRM, then tries to sue people that modify SRC's version of FooSoft to circumvent the DRM, it will be a reasonable defense to point out that SomeRandomCompany knew (or should have known) before they started using FooSoft 1.8 that its license (GPLv3) precluded its use for DRM.
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It's the difference between murdering a single person and pinching tens of millions of people hard, repeatedly. If someone could actually do the latter, then I'd think they deserved pretty harsh punishment. What do you think our legal system as it currently exists would do to someone convicted of ten million counts of assault?
I was pointing out the logical conclusion arising from someone else's suggestion that the punishment should fit the crime. I'm not claiming that our current laws would actually allow such a result, nor am I inciting anyone to apply "vigilante justice" (though that's apparently already happening).
So why do you think it is less bad for the spammer to waste 385 person-years distributed amongst many people?
Suppose a spammer sends 300 million spams in a campaign, and 10% reach people's inboxes. The average recipient takes 3 seconds to look at the subject line and delete the spam. The spammer runs 100 such campaigns a year. In total, in the course of one year that one spammer has wasted 285 person-years of other people's lives. If someone kills him, he's gotten off lucky compared to a punishment that would truly fit the crime.
A truly just punishment would be to torture him continuously, while using every known medical means to keep him alive indefinitely (as far beyond a normal human life span as possible). And even that wouldn't really do it, because it would probably just drive him (more) insane and catatonic in a few weeks or months.
Perhaps the appropriate form of torture would be the spam equivalent of the Ludovico Technique, but carried out for as long as the spammer can be kept alive.
Standards track means that there's some chance that it will be adopted as a standard someday, but there's certainly no guarantee, and it can't even be said to be likely. Exercise for the reader: count how many RFCs are on the standards track and not obsoleted, but not yet actually adopted as an IETF standard. For bonus points: construct a histogram of these by month and year published.
While independent claims 1, 6, and 11 do cover multiple checkboxes, they not require dragging do toggle the state of multiple checkboxes. That is covered in later dependent claims. Effectively IBM has just been granted a patent on the basic GUI checkbox which was implemented by Apple in the Lisa Office System in January 1983. Xerox probably used checkboxes before that, but I'm not certain. It seems likely that Claims 1, 6, and 11 can be invalidated by prior art, should someone be willing to invest the time and effort to do so. The dependent claims might have a better chance of being upheld.
Nowhere in the Constitution is there anything empowering the government to control what clothing we wear. Such limitations may be imposed by the government only to the extent to which they further a power of the government authorized by the Constitution. See Article I Section 8 ("Powers of Congress") to get an idea of what those powers actually are.
If you want to argue that the government has the power to prevent people from wearing clothing containing obvious homemade electronics, you would have to justify that under one of the powers enumerated in the Constitution. For instance, you might argue that it is part of promoting the common welfare. However, I think it would be very difficult to construct such an argument that would be strong enough to convince a court. To my knowledge, there have been no cases in which a person wearing clothing containing obvious homemade electronics have used that electronics to significantly harm anyone. This is a much different case than someone trying to conceal something under their clothing.
That said, I will agree that the woman would have been much better off had she explained the nature of her clothing/device to the TSA agents.
AKA Project X, AKA Project Xylophone.
It was stated that the companies already had policies that were being violated. I still don't see how updating those policies is the answer.
Every election year Congress decides that they need to get tough on crime, and passes a new crime bill, which criminalizes more things. And the result: it *increases* crime. What a surprise.
But they were already admitting to violating the old policies, so "keeping the policies up to date" doesn't gain anything. They already could have been fired for violating the old policy. "keeps corporate policymakers and HR people employed" is undoubtedly the real answer, but is irrelevant to concerns over whether there should be an IT code of ethics.
If no one will admit to owning them, then they're useful for the Chinese (or anyone else) as targets in antisatellite weapons tests. Other than the resulting debris, they'd be doing everyone a favor.
Why do they feel obliged to remove the BSD license from the Linux port of the driver? If they just keep it dual-licensed, there isn't a problem. Or did someone issue an edict that Linux kernel code can't be dual-licensed, at some point when I wasn't paying attention?
If you order before midnight, we'll include as a free bonus a second database containing 36525 birth dates. This database has been carefully screened to ensure that every birth date is valid!
The point was that it is modified, compiled, and put in a box. I should have been more clear, sorry.
Suppose the vendor adds a system call and two device drivers to the BSD kernel. Perhaps they've added 1500 lines of code. Your claim is that it's no longer a BSD kernel. I think most people would disagree. It's clearly not a *stock* BSD kernel, but nothing has magically made it cease to be a BSD kernel, any more than if you hack the kernel slightly on your desktop machine at home, it ceases to be BSD.
My point is that while clearly I am still free to download the upstream BSD kernel, it doesn't help me much with respect to the vendor's product. Concrete example: suppose the upstream kernel changes to support larger hard drives (as happened at the 128GiB limit on the Tivo). If the vendor has turned their BSD kernel proprietary, the fact that the unmodified kernel source is available isn't sufficient for me to be able to use that upstream kernel change on the box. Thus I've lost the freedom to enhance/extend/modify the BSD kernel running on that box.
If you want to play semantic games and claim that by compiling BSD code and putting it into a box, it's no longer the same code, I'm sure you and any other like minded people can go amuse yourselves that way. Most reasonable people (and, for that matter, US Copyright law) see it as clearly still being Foo (albeit a modified Foo), and thus have lost the freedom to modify and enhance that Foo.
Sure, they could go get the original Foo, and start from scratch. They could also try to build a new civilization from scratch by banging rocks together. That's not the point.
Wrong. Even though only 0.05% are capable of modifying the software, and fewer do it, it only takes one such person to do a useful and desirable mod and distributed it, for many people to benefit.
How many times have you had some piece of consumer electronics that had a bug or misfeature that irritated you, or that you thought could have easily been more useful or convenient if only they'd made some minor change? But of course, with most consumer electronics, the software is proprietary, and you can't do it.
With GPL'd software, you can, or someone else can, and share the results with you. Except that Tivo found a loophole in GPLv2 and was able to build a system that ran GPL'd code but could not be modified. The GPLv3 closes this loophole. The only people this hurts are people trying to force DRM onto consumers that don't want it.
The GPLv3 won't change anything because they're using GPLv2 and will continue to do so. But if they'd used a GPLv3 kernel from the outset (had there existed such a thing at the time), they wouldn't have been allowed to lock users into running only their proprietary build of the software. They used a loophole in GPLv2 to do that; they are required by GPLv2 to share their sources, but they build their system so that you can't actually run modified code on it. The GPLv3 won't allow that.
Suppose you release package Foo under the BSD license. Now a company uses a modified version of that software in their product Bar. As an end user, I buy a Bar. Now I've got a product running a non-free version of Foo. The company won't give me the sources to their version, so I can't modify or enhance it, or fix bugs. That's about as non-free as software gets, and it was clearly facilitated by the BSD license.
If the code is linked with GPLv3 code (even dynamically linked at runtime), then it will be a violation of the GPLv3 license. The copyright owner of the GPLv3 code will have grounds to sue the company that sold the product for copyright infringement, and collect either actual or statutory damages, either of which could be a *lot* of money.
VCRs are required by US law to include/support DRM (Macrovision). If you make the argument that a Tivo is a VCR, then yes, the Tivo would have to support DRM as well.
The GPLv3 doesn't grant anyone permission to break the law. Obviously it cannot.
The point of the anti-DRM provisions of GPLv3 isn't that if someone uses GPLv3 code for DRM, the users get any legal right to circumvent it. The point is to prevent GPLv3 code from being used for DRM in the first place.
In other words, if I release FooSoft 1.8 under the GPLv3, and SomeRandomCompany uses it in their product with DRM, then tries to sue people that modify SRC's version of FooSoft to circumvent the DRM, it will be a reasonable defense to point out that SomeRandomCompany knew (or should have known) before they started using FooSoft 1.8 that its license (GPLv3) precluded its use for DRM.