I'm sure that's true. But just going through the motions of reading and negotiating the contract could potentially help align the expectations of both parties. In this case, it's not clear whether one party acted in extremely bad faith, or whether the two parties simply had a huge gap in their respective expectations.
Well, I think most of the charges against him will be dropped. But the fact is, it sounds as though the guy also owned the domain, and essentially held it for ransom (for example, it sounds like the deputies all had email addresses on the domain since the article mentions that they couldn't use email after the guy pulled the plug).
If that's the case, I don't believe the guy behaved professionally or intelligently. He should have just cut off the website, or replaced it with a note saying that, due to an inability to reach an agreement with the sherrif's dept., the site was removed.
Alternatively, he could have sold them the domain for some reasonable price, and they could have kept their email up and running and so on.
Anyway, the Sherrifs were stupid to arrest him. At some point, it will probably come back and bite them. This guy will sue for false arrest or something, and the county will have to spend a bunch of money defending the suit.
Heh, I laughed at that too. But later in the article, I realized that the web-designer guy actually owns the domain. So he would be in a position to totally shutdown their email.
The Bohemian Grove retreat really happens. Virtually every president since I was a child is or was a member of the Bohemian club or grove or whatever it is called. I am not sure that they all go every year, and I am pretty sure that they don't sacrifice children.;-)
For example, Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Reagan are or were all members. Clinton and both Bushes probably are members, too, but I don't know.
I don't know that it is a conspiracy, but it seems that they do talk about important stuff there, at least some of the time. And the members take a very dim view of any information about the gathering getting out to the public. It is strictly a private club.
Oh, my bad. I guess I (mis)remembered from an IDF presentation a few years ago.
What I remember is this: they were going to drop all 8086 compatibility, and totally revamp the BIOS by publishing a new standard for the pre-boot environement.
I wonder if they changed their minds, or I just got the story completely wrong? Anyway, thanks for the correction.
Also, Itanium made a clean break with all the mode switching nonsense. There was no more real-mode to protected-mode switching, and no DOS compatibility. Also, no BIOS, or at least not like the ones we have today.
I assume that x86-64 will still have a familiar BIOS, and still come up in real mode (and run DOS). Maybe you even have to switch to a special 64-bit mode to take advantage of the 64-bit registers?
Anyway, I don't know enough about the new architectures to complain about Intel's switch. So I'll just hope that everyone switching to x86-64 was really the best outcome for consumers.
There is definitely something to what you are saying. There were a lot of break-ins, so the people making the distros could really do a lot more, and the people running servers need to do more, too.
BUT, the study was seriously flawed. First of all, the article plainly states that it is not counting recent automated attacks of Windows systems. How is this justifiable?
Second, it made no effort to detect what the OS breakdown of the total server population is. For example, if linux is the most common server OS, then you would almost expect that it would have the most break-ins. And if we consider servers that are not hidden completely by a firewall, Linux may actually be the the most common server OS. Most people try to avoid putting Windows boxes right on the frontlines of the internet. To illustrate my point, consider this made-up example: More Toyota Camry's are stolen every year in America than any other car, therefore, the Camry is the most likely to be stolen car. The problem with this logic is that the Camry is the most popular car in the USA, and what we really need to know is the number stolen divided by the number registered for use on the road. If we use that metric, some other make and model would most likely take the honor of most likely to be stolen.
In principle, I agree with you. But there were some pretty famous cases in the US, prior to the civil rights movement, where white defendants who were clearly guilty of murdering black victims were acquitted of murder by all-white juries. This abuse of the right to acquit is part of what has led to an effort at cracking down on that right.
Still, it is true that a jury can always acquit, even if it believes the defendant factually guilty. There are no legaly sanctioned repercussions for the jurors.
Actually, diamonds are graded on the three "C's." Color, Clarity, and Carats.
The clarity can be bad if the diamond has a milky appearance or if it has obvious inclusions. The larger a diamond is, the more obvious any inclusions will be, and the more important it is that the diamond be clear.
Right. The article implies that they found a way to make modulators that doesn't involve any fancy process steps or exotic substrates. This could open the door to modulators built-in to processors or chipsets, instead of relying on expensive, power-hungry external modulators.
It's a bit like when they figured out how to build serializers in CMOS. Suddenly there are serializers everywhere that don't need a separate physical layer device. This is almost like the next step.
Also, this could mean that things like optical fibre-channel and possibly 10 gigabit ethernet will be cheaper. Who knows.
The other problem with the article was the complete abscence of any facts or detailed rationale to support the basic assertion that outsourcing is good for the US. I mean, I would be willing to consider a logical argument without facts, but the article was just complete fluff, and so not very convincing.
He didn't say jail. He said be taken back to the station. There is a big difference between getting hauled in to the station and being booked overnight at county.
I don't believe the t-shirts were circumvention devices, but at least they contained (or depicted) source code which could be compiled into a binary form.
The haiku is not compileable, even in an electronic form. Did you read it? I didn't read the whole thing, but it is not even remotely code-like.
There is no way they are going to go after him. He didn't violate copyright, since the poem is original. The poem isn't a circumvention device since it is not executable or compileable. And the algorithm is no longer considered a trade secret.
The haiku is not executeable, and the deCSS algorithm is no longer considered a trade secret. While Seth Jorgason may be willing to take risks for attention, there is no evidence in this act to support that supposition.
Well. If the OP meant "tanker truck," he could have said that.
But based on the geography, which I guess I didn't pay much attention to at first, I probably should have realized that we weren't talking about ships.
It's obvious that this snooping was sneaky and morally wrong, but I just want to make 2 points:
1) The law is not made up on-the-fly, it is written down ahead of time. So if statutes were violated, then by all means let there be prison sentences meted out. On the other hand, if no statutes were technically violated, then it would not be fair to put any of these sneaks in prison.
2) Copyright infringement and theft are different crimes, punishable under different statutes with different sentences. Anybody can easily see the difference between the two crimes, and anyone who pretends to not see the difference must have an agenda. If you want to assert that both crimes are equally wrong in magnitude (whatever that means), then I won't argue with you.
Yes, it might be espionage. Even if it is NOT technically espionage, it is morally equivalent. But we still need to nail-down which statutes were violated.
If I have P2P glasses on, it's only from reading slashdot. I don't do P2P.;-)
The candy bar analogy is terrible. Illegal copying is not the same as stealing. In theft, the rightful owner is relieved of possesion of the object.
In copyright infringment, an illegal copy is made, but the original is unharmed.
If this is a crime, we must figure out what type of crime it is. Is it computer intrusion? I think that is now a crime, but I'm not sure. If it is, it seems most applicable. Is it copyright violation? It could be, but this seems kind of wrong. In any event, the works in question were never published by their authors, so this would be an unusual application of copyright law, AFAIK.
It could be some kind of ethics violation, too. I don't know what kind of ethics rules Senators are supposed to uphold. (Heh.)
But whatever it is, it is NOT theft. To equate this with theft is to buy in to the RIAA mantra that copyright infringment = theft.
Copyright infringment is wrong, and illegal in many cases, but it is not the same as theft.
Hmm. I'm not sure everything you are saying is quite right. I think the principal problem is that you are ignoring the atmosphere.
If I cover the sun with some kind of shade, the sky still looks blue. That means radiation is coming from it which is not IR at all. I don't know what other wavelengths might be coming from the sky. I think the problem is that the atmosphere is not as transparent to IR as you seem to think. Obviously, if there are clouds or just lots of water vapor in the air, your 2.7 K sky temperature is out the window, even if we exclude the half degree of arc the sun represents.
Also, lets say you have a material which is transparent at deep IR, but reflective at all shorter wavelengths. It will still absorb some energy from the sun because the sun does have some emissions in the IR. I think this would swamp the night sky as a sink. And of course, terrestrial objects all around us are at more moderate temperatures. These always occupy at least 50% of our view. On a hot day, the radiation from hot asphalt and so on can be significant.
Anyway, I don't think there is any real promise in this idea of cooling a house by radiation on a hot summer day. It might work on a planet with less atmosphere.
But the sun IS a black body to deep IR. The problem is that it is a black body at a very high temperature.
In order to maintain a net loss of radiated heat from a house, there must be a black body cooler than the house to absorb the radiation. No tricks with coatings or bandpass filters will allow you to do net radiation heat transfer from a cold object to a hot one. If that were possible, we could reverse entropy. That is, we would be violating the first law of thermodynamics.
Now, on a clear, dry night, the sky and cosmos will make a nice cool black body, but on a hot day, it is pretty hard to find anything to act as a radiation heat sink. The best you can probably hope for is to have something that gives some shade but which does not itself become too hot. Trees seem to do a good job of this. And many varieties have leaves only in the spring and summer.
Anyway, even if we had such a black body, there is another problem. The coolest possible black body is 0 Kelvins (K). If the house is at, say, 300 K, this is a delta T of 300. But the black body temperature of the sun is around 6,000 K. So the delta T is 5,700.
And since net radiative heat transfer goes with delta T to the 4th power, this difference is highly significant.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sure that's true. But just going through the motions of reading and negotiating the contract could potentially help align the expectations of both parties. In this case, it's not clear whether one party acted in extremely bad faith, or whether the two parties simply had a huge gap in their respective expectations.
MM
--
Well, I think most of the charges against him will be dropped. But the fact is, it sounds as though the guy also owned the domain, and essentially held it for ransom (for example, it sounds like the deputies all had email addresses on the domain since the article mentions that they couldn't use email after the guy pulled the plug).
If that's the case, I don't believe the guy behaved professionally or intelligently. He should have just cut off the website, or replaced it with a note saying that, due to an inability to reach an agreement with the sherrif's dept., the site was removed.
Alternatively, he could have sold them the domain for some reasonable price, and they could have kept their email up and running and so on.
Anyway, the Sherrifs were stupid to arrest him. At some point, it will probably come back and bite them. This guy will sue for false arrest or something, and the county will have to spend a bunch of money defending the suit.
MM
--
Heh, I laughed at that too. But later in the article, I realized that the web-designer guy actually owns the domain. So he would be in a position to totally shutdown their email.
MM
--
The Bohemian Grove retreat really happens. Virtually every president since I was a child is or was a member of the Bohemian club or grove or whatever it is called. I am not sure that they all go every year, and I am pretty sure that they don't sacrifice children. ;-)
For example, Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Reagan are or were all members. Clinton and both Bushes probably are members, too, but I don't know.
I don't know that it is a conspiracy, but it seems that they do talk about important stuff there, at least some of the time. And the members take a very dim view of any information about the gathering getting out to the public. It is strictly a private club.
MM
--
Oh, my bad. I guess I (mis)remembered from an IDF presentation a few years ago.
What I remember is this: they were going to drop all 8086 compatibility, and totally revamp the BIOS by publishing a new standard for the pre-boot environement.
I wonder if they changed their minds, or I just got the story completely wrong? Anyway, thanks for the correction.
MM
--
Also, Itanium made a clean break with all the mode switching nonsense. There was no more real-mode to protected-mode switching, and no DOS compatibility. Also, no BIOS, or at least not like the ones we have today.
I assume that x86-64 will still have a familiar BIOS, and still come up in real mode (and run DOS). Maybe you even have to switch to a special 64-bit mode to take advantage of the 64-bit registers?
Anyway, I don't know enough about the new architectures to complain about Intel's switch. So I'll just hope that everyone switching to x86-64 was really the best outcome for consumers.
MM
--
There is definitely something to what you are saying. There were a lot of break-ins, so the people making the distros could really do a lot more, and the people running servers need to do more, too.
BUT, the study was seriously flawed. First of all, the article plainly states that it is not counting recent automated attacks of Windows systems. How is this justifiable?
Second, it made no effort to detect what the OS breakdown of the total server population is. For example, if linux is the most common server OS, then you would almost expect that it would have the most break-ins. And if we consider servers that are not hidden completely by a firewall, Linux may actually be the the most common server OS. Most people try to avoid putting Windows boxes right on the frontlines of the internet. To illustrate my point, consider this made-up example: More Toyota Camry's are stolen every year in America than any other car, therefore, the Camry is the most likely to be stolen car. The problem with this logic is that the Camry is the most popular car in the USA, and what we really need to know is the number stolen divided by the number registered for use on the road. If we use that metric, some other make and model would most likely take the honor of most likely to be stolen.
Just my $0.02
MM
-
I just read Snowcrash, too, and felt as you do.
But when I got to the end, I saw that it was originally intended as a graphic novel, so the over-the-topness is somewhat forgiveable.
MM
--
In principle, I agree with you. But there were some pretty famous cases in the US, prior to the civil rights movement, where white defendants who were clearly guilty of murdering black victims were acquitted of murder by all-white juries. This abuse of the right to acquit is part of what has led to an effort at cracking down on that right.
Still, it is true that a jury can always acquit, even if it believes the defendant factually guilty. There are no legaly sanctioned repercussions for the jurors.
MM
--
Actually, diamonds are graded on the three "C's." Color, Clarity, and Carats.
The clarity can be bad if the diamond has a milky appearance or if it has obvious inclusions. The larger a diamond is, the more obvious any inclusions will be, and the more important it is that the diamond be clear.
MM
--
Right. The article implies that they found a way to make modulators that doesn't involve any fancy process steps or exotic substrates. This could open the door to modulators built-in to processors or chipsets, instead of relying on expensive, power-hungry external modulators.
It's a bit like when they figured out how to build serializers in CMOS. Suddenly there are serializers everywhere that don't need a separate physical layer device. This is almost like the next step.
Also, this could mean that things like optical fibre-channel and possibly 10 gigabit ethernet will be cheaper. Who knows.
Interesting!
MM
--
The other problem with the article was the complete abscence of any facts or detailed rationale to support the basic assertion that outsourcing is good for the US. I mean, I would be willing to consider a logical argument without facts, but the article was just complete fluff, and so not very convincing.
MM
--
He didn't say jail. He said be taken back to the station. There is a big difference between getting hauled in to the station and being booked overnight at county.
They don't strip search you at the station.
MM
--
Of course you mean 2.4 GHz, not 2.4 MHz.
MM
I don't believe the t-shirts were circumvention devices, but at least they contained (or depicted) source code which could be compiled into a binary form.
The haiku is not compileable, even in an electronic form. Did you read it? I didn't read the whole thing, but it is not even remotely code-like.
MM
--
There is no way they are going to go after him. He didn't violate copyright, since the poem is original. The poem isn't a circumvention device since it is not executable or compileable. And the algorithm is no longer considered a trade secret.
So on what basis would they go after him?
MM
--
Oops. I meant Seth Schoen, not Seth Jorgason. Now I'll probably get flamed.
MM
--
The haiku is not executeable, and the deCSS algorithm is no longer considered a trade secret. While Seth Jorgason may be willing to take risks for attention, there is no evidence in this act to support that supposition.
;-)
There IS evidence that someone did not RTFH.
MM
--
Well. If the OP meant "tanker truck," he could have said that.
But based on the geography, which I guess I didn't pay much attention to at first, I probably should have realized that we weren't talking about ships.
Thanks for straightening me out.
MM
--
OK, I get your point about the inattentive clerk.
It's obvious that this snooping was sneaky and morally wrong, but I just want to make 2 points:
1) The law is not made up on-the-fly, it is written down ahead of time. So if statutes were violated, then by all means let there be prison sentences meted out. On the other hand, if no statutes were technically violated, then it would not be fair to put any of these sneaks in prison.
2) Copyright infringement and theft are different crimes, punishable under different statutes with different sentences. Anybody can easily see the difference between the two crimes, and anyone who pretends to not see the difference must have an agenda. If you want to assert that both crimes are equally wrong in magnitude (whatever that means), then I won't argue with you.
MM
--
Yes, it might be espionage. Even if it is NOT technically espionage, it is morally equivalent. But we still need to nail-down which statutes were violated.
;-)
If I have P2P glasses on, it's only from reading slashdot. I don't do P2P.
MM
--
20,000 gallons of oil in a tanker? That has to be one of the most outrageous under-estimates I've ever seen.
Sort of like looking up at the night sky and saying, "Look at all the stars! Why, there must be HUNDREDS of them!"
Oil tankers are very large. The largest super tankers are something like 350 meters long, and over 50 meters wide.
You could probably spill 20,000 gallons of fuel on the deck of a supertanker and not even have a deep puddle. (I'm not going to do the math.)
MM
--
The candy bar analogy is terrible. Illegal copying is not the same as stealing. In theft, the rightful owner is relieved of possesion of the object.
In copyright infringment, an illegal copy is made, but the original is unharmed.
If this is a crime, we must figure out what type of crime it is. Is it computer intrusion? I think that is now a crime, but I'm not sure. If it is, it seems most applicable. Is it copyright violation? It could be, but this seems kind of wrong. In any event, the works in question were never published by their authors, so this would be an unusual application of copyright law, AFAIK.
It could be some kind of ethics violation, too. I don't know what kind of ethics rules Senators are supposed to uphold. (Heh.)
But whatever it is, it is NOT theft. To equate this with theft is to buy in to the RIAA mantra that copyright infringment = theft.
Copyright infringment is wrong, and illegal in many cases, but it is not the same as theft.
MM
--
Hmm. I'm not sure everything you are saying is quite right. I think the principal problem is that you are ignoring the atmosphere.
If I cover the sun with some kind of shade, the sky still looks blue. That means radiation is coming from it which is not IR at all. I don't know what other wavelengths might be coming from the sky. I think the problem is that the atmosphere is not as transparent to IR as you seem to think. Obviously, if there are clouds or just lots of water vapor in the air, your 2.7 K sky temperature is out the window, even if we exclude the half degree of arc the sun represents.
Also, lets say you have a material which is transparent at deep IR, but reflective at all shorter wavelengths. It will still absorb some energy from the sun because the sun does have some emissions in the IR. I think this would swamp the night sky as a sink. And of course, terrestrial objects all around us are at more moderate temperatures. These always occupy at least 50% of our view. On a hot day, the radiation from hot asphalt and so on can be significant.
Anyway, I don't think there is any real promise in this idea of cooling a house by radiation on a hot summer day. It might work on a planet with less atmosphere.
MM
--
But the sun IS a black body to deep IR. The problem is that it is a black body at a very high temperature.
In order to maintain a net loss of radiated heat from a house, there must be a black body cooler than the house to absorb the radiation. No tricks with coatings or bandpass filters will allow you to do net radiation heat transfer from a cold object to a hot one. If that were possible, we could reverse entropy. That is, we would be violating the first law of thermodynamics.
Now, on a clear, dry night, the sky and cosmos will make a nice cool black body, but on a hot day, it is pretty hard to find anything to act as a radiation heat sink. The best you can probably hope for is to have something that gives some shade but which does not itself become too hot. Trees seem to do a good job of this. And many varieties have leaves only in the spring and summer.
Anyway, even if we had such a black body, there is another problem. The coolest possible black body is 0 Kelvins (K). If the house is at, say, 300 K, this is a delta T of 300. But the black body temperature of the sun is around 6,000 K. So the delta T is 5,700.
And since net radiative heat transfer goes with delta T to the 4th power, this difference is highly significant.
MM
--