The DMCA only prohibits reverse engineering to circumvent "copy protection" mechanisms. It would be circular reasoning to assert that the copyrighted material being protected is the protocol itself.
However, you can definitely be charged and found guilty of conspiring, even if 'other alleged parties' to the conspiracy have not yet been charged, or are still under investigation.
So, even though the crime of conspiracy requires multiple people working together by definition, your assertion is that a single person can be convicted of conspiracy alone. The fact that others participated is just a foregone conclusion, without them having been charged and tried? Once you've convicted a single person of conspiracy, all the other alleged conspirators could just be summarily rounded up and incarcerated? Do the other alleged conspirators have the right to defend themselves against the charge of being involved, in your opinion?
Or are you under the impression that it is possible to have a conspiracy of one? You did basically say it's possible for a single person to be convicted without even so much as an allegation that anyone else is involved. Is that really what you think?
Would you like to back up this assertion? What are you basing it on? Slashdot lawyering?
(FYI I'm perfectly aware of what goes into producing an LCD screen. I'd just like to know who the other five companies are.)
unless you want "true" compact flash which faithfully implements the true IDE standard (I.E. to use them with an IDE-CF adapter, instead of in a digital camera)... those got rebadged as "Industrial CF" and cost like $200.
I use the $20 CF cards I find on e-bay with an IDE adapter. You might have to manually set the BIOS to recognize them, but other than that they seem to work fine.
Well, let's see, in the US, officially-government-sanctioned price-fixing oligopolies include oranges, almonds, cranberries, and raisins. Then of course there is anything covered by a patent. Or any resource that is mined from government leases. And then there's other industries that supply the military, such as airplanes, car companies, steel and weapons manufacturers, which are all protected and subsidized. Then you have licensed trades, electricians, plumbers, construction workers, truck-drivers and hair-stylists. And of course finally there are licensed professionals such as doctors, lawyers, nurses, and engineers. I probably missed somebody.
Summary worthless as usual. A conspiracy usually requires more than one conspirator. The company mentioned in the linked press release doesn't even seem to produce LCD screens. What are the real companies involved that I might actually care about?
In fact, that's an interesting topic of criminal law. "Conspiracy" by itself is a "group" crime (price-fixing especially). Multiple people must work together for a crime to have even occurred. One party cannot conspire by itself. We would call that "thought crime". I know the press release says otherwise, but if only one company pleads guilty to conspiracy, is it really a conspiracy? Wouldn't a judge have to reject the plea unless or until more companies were found guilty as well?
Taking carbon out of the air and cracking water into hydrogen and oxygen takes a whole lot of energy and the plants do it better than they can in the lab, when the only energy input is the sun.
Okay, that may be true, given your constraints. I think it also probably holds for carbon fixation from the atmosphere, by itself. But surely you're not claiming that a plant is more efficient at hydrogen production than a 25% efficient solar cell paired with a 50% efficient electrolysis process. So obviously we know how to do some parts of the process more efficiently already.
And atmospheric carbon fixation is something of a moot point when we have hundreds of years of reserves of carbon that we are already digging up out of the ground and expelling into the atmosphere as highly concentrated CO2. They will even pay you to take it.
I could foresee that a small medical problem involving the digestive tract could turn into a complete crisis if they cannot get the energy they need to fight an infection from their own tissues when they need it most.
This argument demonstrates how the welfare state directly encourages substance abuse. Without a guaranteed constant supply of support, individuals would not have the incentive to risk their long-term health experimenting with unproven drugs. You're just talking about food, but how will you feel about subsidizing the health care of those who choose to risk their well-being in this way?
Even if you could, why would you want to kick your cognition in the teeth like that?
First-mover advantage, reducing time-to-market, broken patent system, over-developed property laws and capitalism (labor-mixing actually) basically subsidizing those who sacrifice long-term gains for a short-term jump on the competition.
Why do you think it's the software developers pulling all-nighters so that their program can get to market a month earlier or get a patent before the next guy who complain the most about software patents?
That's true but unfortunately you would probably have to eat a lot more protein. The diet of the average American is heavily weighted towards sugars, fats and starches since that's what our overdeveloped brains tell us we need. So we have naturally used those brains to develop mechanized agriculture that can produce those foods most efficiently. This has basically turned us into highly-intelligent blobs.
I imagine that the distinction between neoconservative and libertarian is one that requires a bit more nuance than the average American is capable of. Especially given that the previous US president went around claiming to be a small-government, libertarian-leaning conservative and then instead presided over the utter destruction of the free market and tried his damndest to institute every globalist police-state wet-dream the neoconservatives ever had. I have confused the two myself.
Neoconservatives are big-government, right-wing fascists while libertarians are basically small-government, free-market, socially-liberal minarchists.
Seeing as how the available versions of Windows didn't really even support ACPI or processor power throttling ten years ago, that sounds like a bullshit claim.
Other than that, I don't see where S@H costs any more on a system than the resource hog called "Windows Vista".
Yeah, I find this entire line of reasoning to be fatuous. Well-managed public schools operating with taxpayer funds would be running Linux on donated PCs via a terminal server rather than Windows XP or Vista on thousands of brand new Pentium 4's.
I remember distinctly the billions of dollars wasted on unnecessary computer hardware and software over the past several years in my local school district alone. This is nothing compared to that. Talk about missing the forest for the trees.
It's a complex issue and there are several opinions:
1) The climate is warming and humans are responsible and the consequences are severe enough to require action. 2) The climate is warming and humans are responsible but the consequences are not severe. 3) The climate is warming and humans are not responsible. 4) The climate is not warming. 5) Whether the climate is warming or not, we should encourage a shift to more renewable energy sources.
There are likely others, but I am sure you will find adherents to all of these at least.
I agree completely that accountants have screwed up both IT and many business processes, in lots of industries. I see tiny little microcosms of the fiscal and accounting scandals everywhere I go. It's one thing to track costs and enable billing. It's quite another to design an entire company's information technology around some vendor's proprietary system that's designed only to do one thing well (financial engineering) and not to be interoperable.
I have told every one of my clients "invest in IT to improve efficiency". And what have they done? They hire an IT guy, stick him in a broom closet, hand him the latest version of Microsoft Whatever(TM) and tell him to use it. Few take it seriously.
One of the major problems is that really implementing IT to improve efficiency requires change. Having domain knowledge means that you aren't taken seriously by the IT people. Having IT knowledge means that you aren't taken seriously by those with domain knowledge. Having both means you aren't taken seriously by anyone.
Telling everyone that they need to re-think major processes from scratch gets you laughed out of the room. At this point, IT has been sold for so long as a magical cure-all that will make the world a better place that you basically have to sell IT as a magical cure-all if you want your solutions to even be considered.
Part of the problem, that this paper deftly avoids delving into, is that people constitute a part of the "accumulated economic productivity" of mankind, as "human capital". In fact I would say it is the main structural problem of the modern economy.
Energy supports people which support machines which support more people which support production which supports more people which support energy extraction. Collapse is not a function of outputs failing to scale with inputs. It's a function of the entire house of cards being so fundamentally interconnected that it's impossible to alter any major piece of it without the entire thing coming down.
We get all sorts of food from China. Lots of farmed fish and shellfish. I've been wondering for a while whether mercury levels in farmed fish could be linked to mercury emissions from coal power plants. If you consider that an easy way to grow fish food is by piping the output of a smokestack into a pond, you on second thought probably don't want to continue down that line of reasoning and join me in my own personal little theoretical hell.
That constant is 9.7 (plus or minus 0.3) milliwatts per inflation-adjusted 1990 dollar.
Even moreso than the implications for energy conservation is the actual units of his "constant". This implies that having each dollar in circulation requires a constant expenditure of energy. That is, without constant energy production and consumption, we would not even have an economy, or trade. Growth in the economy, or in trade, is directly correlated to growth in energy production. Decline in energy production would then theoretically lead to collapse of economic growth.
Unlike others, I find this unit to be surprisingly small. If you compare it to the price of renewable energy, for example, a 200 watt solar panel costs around $600, yet according to the constant supports $20,000/year of economic activity. This shows the extreme disconnect between the money economy and the physical economy.
I wonder how well this constant holds up under extreme circumstances, such as the productive capacity of a single person on a desert island or that of a single family of subsistence farmers.
Slashdot Mirror
Water molecules do not do this.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DpiUZI_3o8s
The DMCA only prohibits reverse engineering to circumvent "copy protection" mechanisms. It would be circular reasoning to assert that the copyrighted material being protected is the protocol itself.
However, you can definitely be charged and found guilty of conspiring, even if 'other alleged parties' to the conspiracy have not yet been charged, or are still under investigation.
So, even though the crime of conspiracy requires multiple people working together by definition, your assertion is that a single person can be convicted of conspiracy alone. The fact that others participated is just a foregone conclusion, without them having been charged and tried? Once you've convicted a single person of conspiracy, all the other alleged conspirators could just be summarily rounded up and incarcerated? Do the other alleged conspirators have the right to defend themselves against the charge of being involved, in your opinion?
Or are you under the impression that it is possible to have a conspiracy of one? You did basically say it's possible for a single person to be convicted without even so much as an allegation that anyone else is involved. Is that really what you think?
Would you like to back up this assertion? What are you basing it on? Slashdot lawyering?
(FYI I'm perfectly aware of what goes into producing an LCD screen. I'd just like to know who the other five companies are.)
You think a single company can fix industry prices acting by itself?
unless you want "true" compact flash which faithfully implements the true IDE standard (I.E. to use them with an IDE-CF adapter, instead of in a digital camera)... those got rebadged as "Industrial CF" and cost like $200.
I use the $20 CF cards I find on e-bay with an IDE adapter. You might have to manually set the BIOS to recognize them, but other than that they seem to work fine.
Well, let's see, in the US, officially-government-sanctioned price-fixing oligopolies include oranges, almonds, cranberries, and raisins. Then of course there is anything covered by a patent. Or any resource that is mined from government leases. And then there's other industries that supply the military, such as airplanes, car companies, steel and weapons manufacturers, which are all protected and subsidized. Then you have licensed trades, electricians, plumbers, construction workers, truck-drivers and hair-stylists. And of course finally there are licensed professionals such as doctors, lawyers, nurses, and engineers. I probably missed somebody.
Big acrylic?
Summary worthless as usual. A conspiracy usually requires more than one conspirator. The company mentioned in the linked press release doesn't even seem to produce LCD screens. What are the real companies involved that I might actually care about?
In fact, that's an interesting topic of criminal law. "Conspiracy" by itself is a "group" crime (price-fixing especially). Multiple people must work together for a crime to have even occurred. One party cannot conspire by itself. We would call that "thought crime". I know the press release says otherwise, but if only one company pleads guilty to conspiracy, is it really a conspiracy? Wouldn't a judge have to reject the plea unless or until more companies were found guilty as well?
They hate us for our big-box retailers.
You've been reading Slashdot long enough to know that biofuels are carbon-neutral.
Taking carbon out of the air and cracking water into hydrogen and oxygen takes a whole lot of energy and the plants do it better than they can in the lab, when the only energy input is the sun.
Okay, that may be true, given your constraints. I think it also probably holds for carbon fixation from the atmosphere, by itself. But surely you're not claiming that a plant is more efficient at hydrogen production than a 25% efficient solar cell paired with a 50% efficient electrolysis process. So obviously we know how to do some parts of the process more efficiently already.
And atmospheric carbon fixation is something of a moot point when we have hundreds of years of reserves of carbon that we are already digging up out of the ground and expelling into the atmosphere as highly concentrated CO2. They will even pay you to take it.
I could foresee that a small medical problem involving the digestive tract could turn into a complete crisis if they cannot get the energy they need to fight an infection from their own tissues when they need it most.
This argument demonstrates how the welfare state directly encourages substance abuse. Without a guaranteed constant supply of support, individuals would not have the incentive to risk their long-term health experimenting with unproven drugs. You're just talking about food, but how will you feel about subsidizing the health care of those who choose to risk their well-being in this way?
Even if you could, why would you want to kick your cognition in the teeth like that?
First-mover advantage, reducing time-to-market, broken patent system, over-developed property laws and capitalism (labor-mixing actually) basically subsidizing those who sacrifice long-term gains for a short-term jump on the competition.
Why do you think it's the software developers pulling all-nighters so that their program can get to market a month earlier or get a patent before the next guy who complain the most about software patents?
That's true but unfortunately you would probably have to eat a lot more protein. The diet of the average American is heavily weighted towards sugars, fats and starches since that's what our overdeveloped brains tell us we need. So we have naturally used those brains to develop mechanized agriculture that can produce those foods most efficiently. This has basically turned us into highly-intelligent blobs.
You have to hand it to them though, I think they really pulled it off!
I imagine that the distinction between neoconservative and libertarian is one that requires a bit more nuance than the average American is capable of. Especially given that the previous US president went around claiming to be a small-government, libertarian-leaning conservative and then instead presided over the utter destruction of the free market and tried his damndest to institute every globalist police-state wet-dream the neoconservatives ever had. I have confused the two myself.
Neoconservatives are big-government, right-wing fascists while libertarians are basically small-government, free-market, socially-liberal minarchists.
Seeing as how the available versions of Windows didn't really even support ACPI or processor power throttling ten years ago, that sounds like a bullshit claim.
Other than that, I don't see where S@H costs any more on a system than the resource hog called "Windows Vista".
Yeah, I find this entire line of reasoning to be fatuous. Well-managed public schools operating with taxpayer funds would be running Linux on donated PCs via a terminal server rather than Windows XP or Vista on thousands of brand new Pentium 4's.
I remember distinctly the billions of dollars wasted on unnecessary computer hardware and software over the past several years in my local school district alone. This is nothing compared to that. Talk about missing the forest for the trees.
It's a complex issue and there are several opinions:
1) The climate is warming and humans are responsible and the consequences are severe enough to require action.
2) The climate is warming and humans are responsible but the consequences are not severe.
3) The climate is warming and humans are not responsible.
4) The climate is not warming.
5) Whether the climate is warming or not, we should encourage a shift to more renewable energy sources.
There are likely others, but I am sure you will find adherents to all of these at least.
So would it be unscientific to say that where there's smoke, there's warming?
I agree completely that accountants have screwed up both IT and many business processes, in lots of industries. I see tiny little microcosms of the fiscal and accounting scandals everywhere I go. It's one thing to track costs and enable billing. It's quite another to design an entire company's information technology around some vendor's proprietary system that's designed only to do one thing well (financial engineering) and not to be interoperable.
I have told every one of my clients "invest in IT to improve efficiency". And what have they done? They hire an IT guy, stick him in a broom closet, hand him the latest version of Microsoft Whatever(TM) and tell him to use it. Few take it seriously.
One of the major problems is that really implementing IT to improve efficiency requires change. Having domain knowledge means that you aren't taken seriously by the IT people. Having IT knowledge means that you aren't taken seriously by those with domain knowledge. Having both means you aren't taken seriously by anyone.
Telling everyone that they need to re-think major processes from scratch gets you laughed out of the room. At this point, IT has been sold for so long as a magical cure-all that will make the world a better place that you basically have to sell IT as a magical cure-all if you want your solutions to even be considered.
Part of the problem, that this paper deftly avoids delving into, is that people constitute a part of the "accumulated economic productivity" of mankind, as "human capital". In fact I would say it is the main structural problem of the modern economy.
Energy supports people which support machines which support more people which support production which supports more people which support energy extraction. Collapse is not a function of outputs failing to scale with inputs. It's a function of the entire house of cards being so fundamentally interconnected that it's impossible to alter any major piece of it without the entire thing coming down.
http://www.springerlink.com/content/9476j57g1t07vhn2/fulltext.pdf
You must not have searched very hard. It's right on his website which you can find by Googling his name.
We get all sorts of food from China. Lots of farmed fish and shellfish. I've been wondering for a while whether mercury levels in farmed fish could be linked to mercury emissions from coal power plants. If you consider that an easy way to grow fish food is by piping the output of a smokestack into a pond, you on second thought probably don't want to continue down that line of reasoning and join me in my own personal little theoretical hell.
That constant is 9.7 (plus or minus 0.3) milliwatts per inflation-adjusted 1990 dollar.
Even moreso than the implications for energy conservation is the actual units of his "constant". This implies that having each dollar in circulation requires a constant expenditure of energy. That is, without constant energy production and consumption, we would not even have an economy, or trade. Growth in the economy, or in trade, is directly correlated to growth in energy production. Decline in energy production would then theoretically lead to collapse of economic growth.
Unlike others, I find this unit to be surprisingly small. If you compare it to the price of renewable energy, for example, a 200 watt solar panel costs around $600, yet according to the constant supports $20,000/year of economic activity. This shows the extreme disconnect between the money economy and the physical economy.
I wonder how well this constant holds up under extreme circumstances, such as the productive capacity of a single person on a desert island or that of a single family of subsistence farmers.