"Evolutionists" as you call them, are just scientists who are trying to make sense of the world around them, which is a perfectly laudable goal. Some creationists have made the claim that understand is not correct, so it's definitely important to understand whether that criticism has merit. It seems it does not. This is particularly important because as creationists spread pseudoscientific theories like intellegent design and sell them as science, they undermine the spread of actual scientific knowledge.
It's probably a little late now, but I found it interesting that apparently he voiced similar complaints about the media on the CNN program Reliable Sources. A transcript can be found here.
Here's an exceprt:
KURTZ: What should happen to all of these experts who came and filled the airwaves with all of these predictions that turned out to be completely and totally wrong?
STEWART: Well, it's not their fault.
KURTZ: It's not their fault?
STEWART: No.
KURTZ: Shouldn't they have to resign from the talking head society?
STEWART: Shouldn't CNN have to pay a penalty for putting them on the air? You're Paulie Walnuts. You're vouching. You brought a guy in, and you put him on the air and you vouched. You said, "No, Tony, this guy, he's good people, he's credible." So whatever they say, I mean, they're called profilers.
If you watched the coverage, you would have thought that that's what the police do, is they literally have two guys sort of almost like psychics sitting around going, "What do you think he is?" "I don't know, maybe he's white, maybe he's black. Maybe he's with al Qaeda, maybe he's Son of Sam."
They're actually following real leads. I don't understand the idea of -- you know I heard a guy talking -- actually on your show -- saying, "Well, the public really wanted information. They had a real thirst for information. So because we didn't really have that much information, we had to just speculate."
KURTZ: We made it up. STEWART: Right. Which seems insane. That's like saying, "You know, the kids were real thirsty, and we didn't have any water, so we just gave them beer, because we figured that would work."
(LAUGHTER)
KURTZ: Well, you're right. The cable folks who put these folks in front of the camera have to bear some of the responsibility.
Yeah, I considered that; however, it means that their programming doesn't get out as much or to as many as it otherwise could. Selling commercial time or having subscription only services would so get them money, but they also avoid those things for good reason. Actually, my bigger problems with it were that a) I was already a contributor and yet I'd still have to pay the same as anyone else and b) the price was a bit outrageous (not comparable to say the price of a newspaper), though it looks as though they may have dropped at bit at this point. Personally, as a contributor I would much rather have contributed more to see it put up for free for everyone.
I think there may well be truth to a lot of that cricism. I've certainly been annoyed at the fact that you can't download copies of NPR programs to listen to on an MP3 player (either for time shifting or because you can't get a good radio signal where you need to be), and instead they sell it through Audible.com. That seemed appropriate for a corporation but not for "public" radio.
NPR is definitely still contrained by the need to be popular, but corporate dollars clearly are less important for them than for the corporate media, so one would expect them to be a bit more independant. I agree, though, that one has to wonder at the effect it may have. I do think their journalism is consistently better than that of any corporate media I see regularly (with the possible except of the BBC and I don't understand how much of their financing is governmental), I guess what I'm saying is that it's not as much better as I would hope. It's also dilluted by a not of non-news stuff. That stuff is pretty good quality, but I'd like a good place to turn for pure news. As it is I use a cocktail of NPR, BBC, the Washington Post, and other things.
The media isn't conservative, and it certainly isn't liberal... it's simply profitable.
My first reaction was "Yeah, that's the truth." But then I started thinking: I am a regular listener to NPR, and though their coverage of news is better (in my opinion) it's still not all that different. It could be because they still have to get corporate contributions, or is it more than that? One could also look at network news vs. the newshour on PBS to see the difference. Does that difference account for everything that's wrong with the news? I'm not sure it does.
Personally, I have a few peeves I'm not sure that other people share. One is that the media is not factual enough. Sure they will sometimes quote a statistic out of context, but they often don't have enough in depth covereage of the hard facts to give you a real idea of what they are. It's mostly a few statistics, press releases from political parties or corporations, and pundits, none of which give you much idea of the facts alone. Another issue is that they seem to believe that being unbiased means giving equal time to each viewpoint, rather than considering it on the basis of the facts that they're supposed to be reporting. If a polititian is wrong, they should say so, even if one is wrong more often than another. Finally, they need to challenge officials more in interviews, not so much in the O'reilly style of just barking their opinion (which is useless) but by assulting them with the hard facts to make it clear to everyone when they're lying. Those are my 2 cents, anyway.
I agree that most of the posts are just speculation, and I don't necessarily buy into the idea that there are any shady dealing here. But a relatively major site (for a non-corporate media site) gets raided by the FBI that seems like news to me. Moreover, when any media outlet is silenced by the government, especially when it might be in the current administration's interest, I think it is the responsibility of all citizens to be concerned. I imagine that is why they posted it.
I won't jump to any conclusions yet. There might be a perfectly legitimate reason for this. But you had better believe that I'll be keeping my eye on the developments. After all, "The price of liberty is eternal vigilence."
Factcheck.org seems to be broken at the moment (perhaps related to the the fact they're using ASP?). The link in question appears to be dead. The front page is up, but all other links bring back files with a DOCTYPE that is not html. Firefox thought they were binary. The search also doesn't work. So the file may or may not exist on the site.
Yes, being the somewhat paranoid anti-establishment types they are, I was wondering if some or all of Indymedia's content exists on Freenet, MUTE or similar. Or for god's sake at least Gnutella. I mean, if they're willing to put it up on a server they probably don't care so much about the anonymity angle anyway, but that would make it much harder to take down or silence.
Does anyone know if some of the collectives have done, do, or plan to do this?
As for the rest of the population, most will never hear of it unless the rest of the media picks it up. Perversely, this will only happen if Indymedia is wrong and the major media give a damn about what's going on in the country. If Indymedia is right and they're all corporately controlled mouthpieces for the hegemony, then it will get no mention or only a perfunctory "The anarchist terrorist al-Jazeera subsidiary Indmedia was raided by the FBI today to seize evidence of Emmanual Goldstein's trechery..."
Personally, I think Indymedia is half right, and I think most of the major media neither know nor care about Indymedia enough to cover it, or else they don't think it will interest the public. They're too busy preparing stories about the candidates' facial expressions during the debates.
In my case, that's more than the cost of my (used) car, so a cheaper (if less environmentally friendly) solution would just be to get a new car each year. I agree that cars need regular maintanance, but if you're spending that much you might want to have a word with your mechanic.
I think perhaps time on slashdot is warping your mind. Firstly, this is pointless antagonism. You have nothing meaningful to say. Second, the original poster's use of the word is acceptable. It fits the definition given closely enough. The "sequence of events" here being the information that it is the Crawford paper. What is much more important is that this usage would be considered correct by most of the general population as well as most people with a college education, at least in my experience. Take a poll if you like. Because, of course, it is usage that defines the dictionary and not the other way around. Language is always evolving.
In summary, you're your point is weak at best and was not worth making. I can only assume it was motivated by political antipathy, in which case I suggest that arguing about the substance of politics is far more productive than quibbling about diction in order to annoy people or as some attempt at gaining a sense of superiority.
I will await the inevitable dissection of my grammar, spelling, and other minutae.
You make an understandable mistake here, I wasn't talking about what the "founding fathers" thought about the electoral college. I was siting a passage most people would agree with (which happened to be written by them) and saying that the straightforward application of that would be proportional democracy.
As so what they though, I couldn't say, as I am not a historian. I think the electoral college was a compromise without which it would not have been possible to get the fractous states to band together as one union. I also think they were men of their times, and while they had lofty ideals about rights and equallity, they also had a lot of dumb ass ideas that were signs of their times. We are, after all, talking about people who left blacks and women without votes, and counted each slave as less than a man. I would certainly not say all the ideas they had were good ones.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal...That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed..."
There you have it. If all people are equal and the government derives its authority from the consent of those people, then each person's say should count equally. If not, then some people have, in effect, unequal dominion over others. If you believe what is quoted above, then the onus is on you to argue why representation should NOT be equal.
I agree with you that the right to assembly is essential. Unfortunately, those rights have often been ignored in the past and are currently being violated with little objection from society at large.
Certainly you've seen some coverage of IMF/WTO protests in the last few years: protesters getting beaten by batons, hundreds or thousands of people getting arrested. Now, some of those people are arrested for vandalism or because they attack police officers without cause, and certainly they should be arrested. So it leads one to wonder if they're all being arrested for good cause.
Now certainly, it's reasonable to say that people can't block traffic or similar without a prior warning or a permit, but increasingly these "time, place, and manner" restrictions are used to prevent people from protesting at all, and people are arrested even when they comply with the law. Clearly, we still have a lot of free speech in this country, but these are disturbing trends. So, all I'm saying is that while certainly the right to assemble should be respected, it is already trampled on regularly.
Some purely anecdotal evidence: For me the latest SP of Win2k was less stable than the last, so I'm not sure it's always monotonically increasing in stability.
Thankfully, I stopped using Win2k and switched to Debian.:-)
Most the above about photons is essentially irrelevent. The point is that the average energy flux will go down as 1/r^2, in the classical or quantum picture (in the quantum case it's just the expectation value you're talking about). Even a laser beam must spread, because an infinitely long confined beam is not a solution to maxwell's equations (which govern E&M) in empty space.
That being said, a columnated beam certainly will go further, because it will be more intense initially (at the same total luminosity). I think the argument made by the article is that the total energy cost is lower in sending matter payloads. I don't know how this calculation was done exactly, but you can at least see the reasoning that unlike radiation, matter does not necessarily spread, so you can think of it as acting like a beam (or pulse anyway) that stays columnated. Of course, matter is slow, comparitively. I'm sure there's more to the argument than that, though.
Well, true P2P or not, it was my impression that networks that can have a few central users on very fast connections (e.g. the original Napster) can perform much better with many people using them, for one thing because each search only has to go to the servers and not through every node. Which is probably (at least one reason) why the old Napster used to work so much better than Gnutella did not long after. With the introduction of supernodes in most P2P schemes, this is probably mitigated somewhat, but that might be an advantage. Of course, after that suit against Napster, having a few fast centralized servers wasn't really practical, hence the switch to more decentralized networks. But if there are no copyright concerns, and thus no lawsuits, then you could return to the centralized server model if it works better.
The other advantage of having a few estabilished, centeralized servers could be stability and predictability. Many P2P networks are a mess of dropped connections or trying to connect to the network but only finding none of the hosts you'd been connected to are online. Clearly having some centralization solves that. As for stability...well, of course that depends on the server.
By no means am I saying that centralized networks are always better than decentralized ones. I don't know enough about network theory to say much about that, but it would seem that decentralized networks should definitely have advantages in terms of robustness. All I'm saying is that if you didn't have to worry about playing cat and mouse with the RIAA, then you could explore some of the benefits of centralized structures and there might be some advantages there.
"While it is true that an instant runoff might be legal, the traditional runoff is not. from the Constitution: Clause 4: The Congress may determine the Time of chusing the Electors, and the Day on which they shall give their Votes; which Day shall be the same throughout the United States.
Any system that allowed the possibility that one elector would be chosen at a different time than another would not fit that."
Read the above again carefully: "...the Day on which [the Electors] give their vote..." It would seem that this refers to the day on which the electors cast their votes for President not the general elections in which the residents of each state select their electors. Quoting from Wikipedia, "These electors in turn cast the official votes for President. Federal law says that each state's electors meet in their state capitals on the Monday following the second Wednesday of December. There, they cast their electoral votes for President and Vice President."
As to the question of states not holding a popular vote at all, they didn't in the beginning. Originally, electors were chosen by the state legislature, and only later did they switch to using a popular vote, so legally they could go back if the public wouldn't vote them all out of office.
My issue is that while your reading seems like one possibile characterization of one's rights under the EULA, it's not at all clear that it's the only reading. Given the somewhat hysterical measures that have been taken by content companies in the last few years, I think you can probably understand my concern. Partially, this is an issue with EULAs in general. Since I'm not a lawyer (nor an expert in software for that matter), it's hard for me to be sure exactly WHAT I'm agreeing to.
My issue is that one could give an alternate reading. "Applicable content" could be used to mean "copyrighted material, e.g. digital music", and, anyway, the next sentance "RN is not responsible for the operation of the third party DRM in any way, including revocation of your content" seems to say essentially that no matter what "applicable content is", they might do who knows what and it's ok. I understand why this is expediant, but you can see why it's unsettling.
In fact, my problems with it would be completely resolved if they simply said that DRM features would only be enabled if you specifically agree to recieve DRMed content and would only manage that content. They don't clearly say that, though, so while that might be what they mean it leaves the user in the unpleasent sitution of signing away vaguely defined rights.
To restate what I said at the end of my first post, I don't have a problem if people want to use DRM and the product enables that. I just don't want any part of it, and I want to be sure that if I choose not to participate that my rights will be preserved. I felt that Real One EULA didn't do that.
"DRMs may be able to revoke your ability to use applicable content. RN is not responsible for the operation of the third party DRM in any way, including revocation of your content. RN is not responsible for any communications to or from any third party DRM provider, or for the collection or use of information by third party DRMs. You consent to the communications enabled and/or performed by the DRM, including automatic updating of the DRM without further notice, despite the provisions of AutoUpdate defined in Section 6(c)."
Now maybe that's harmless, but it wasn't at all clear to me. Suffice it to say that I don't like software trying to invade my privacy and play policeman in my home. It also seems like such a system is an inherent security vulnerability and could cause technical problems even with legally licensed but un-DRMed content (like my emusic mp3s or rips of my own CDs). I think DRM is a dumb idea, but I don't mind if the software has such a feature, as long as it's not enabled unless I specifically enable it to be able to get DRMed content.
So how is the EULA on the new realplayer? Is it any better?
Disclaimer: I'm speaking generally about DMCA-like laws here, I can't speak about UK laws specifically.
"
But the fact is that the UK high court is not 'ruining your rights' - it's the people who copy and sell games illegally that ruin the fun for everyone."
To use an admittedly played out analogy, if cars were made illegal it would prevent many deaths from reckless driving, drunk driving, etc., but would you be saying, "It's not the government 'ruining your rights' it's the bad drivers that are ruining things for everyone." I doubt it.
The point is that most, possibly all, laws balance infringing upon the rights of the individual against the common good of society. A law against, say, citizens owning chemical weapons like sarin gas clearly balances these well, because it doesn't infinge meaningfully on how most people would like to live while preventing crimes that could kill large numbers of people. By more people's estimation, the ban on cars I suggested would not balance those interests well.
In this case, I think that I (and others on/.) feel that it has not been sufficiently demonstrated that anticircumvention statutes protect the public good enough to be worth infinging upon the rights of the many peole who use the device in a law abiding way, particularly when there are already legal remedies for things like copyright infringement. And because things like banning "circumvention devices" are so ridiculously broad, they could almost never do enough good to balance the possible harm.
Did people copying games and the like bring down the ire of the industry and make these laws get passed and enfored? Probably. But such laws are usually a bad idea regardless. It may be a solution to the problem, but it's clearly the wrong solution.
First, if it's "a trap", it's not one that is set intentionally, since the vast majority of mods have no influence whatsoever over what goes in the post for the story. Second, I don't think it's about mods wanting to be superior as much as it is that "this is dumb" (and equivalent) is not a meaningful or useful contribution. You don't have to say something nice, but you should try to say something useful.
It seems many people on here whose useless comments are modded down are convinced that mods are out to get them. Having been a sometimes mod I can say, there is no conspiracy. If you make any even semi-reasonable comment it will not be modded down on average.
On slashdot in 2005: "A new worm has emerged that exploits the URI handler vulnerability in Microsoft onboard sotware and passes instructions directly to systems controlling vital functions."
I think that the point here (at least from my perspective) is not that Odeon isn't within their legal rights, but rather that they seem to be going out of their way to be jerks. As others have pointed out, they could have either offered him a license to use their trademarks on his site, or offered to host in on their own (so it would become their site). Instead, they took the least productive form of action possible.
I don't work in software, so let me throw out this question. Don't they make you sign an NDA when you work on something like a big search company's search technology? I know they do this in some other tech businesses, making it really hard for you to work for a competitor on the same sort of product without violating your agreement. The reason I ask is that I'm curious how they could hire him for MSN search in the first place.
As far as the stolen code goes, since it happened before he was hired by MS, you can't really blame them. I was also thinking, if he worked on it himself anyway, couldn't he probably replicate most of the functionality even without the actual code in front of him? Then again, the article says, "Chavet told investigators that he worked on the AltaVista source code while at the company and logged into the AltaVista system after leaving because he 'was curious about the evolution of the source code after his departure.'" so maybe he was just trying to steal the most up to date ideas possible.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
"Evolutionists" as you call them, are just scientists who are trying to make sense of the world around them, which is a perfectly laudable goal. Some creationists have made the claim that understand is not correct, so it's definitely important to understand whether that criticism has merit. It seems it does not. This is particularly important because as creationists spread pseudoscientific theories like intellegent design and sell them as science, they undermine the spread of actual scientific knowledge.
Here's an exceprt:
Yeah, I considered that; however, it means that their programming doesn't get out as much or to as many as it otherwise could. Selling commercial time or having subscription only services would so get them money, but they also avoid those things for good reason. Actually, my bigger problems with it were that a) I was already a contributor and yet I'd still have to pay the same as anyone else and b) the price was a bit outrageous (not comparable to say the price of a newspaper), though it looks as though they may have dropped at bit at this point. Personally, as a contributor I would much rather have contributed more to see it put up for free for everyone.
I think there may well be truth to a lot of that cricism. I've certainly been annoyed at the fact that you can't download copies of NPR programs to listen to on an MP3 player (either for time shifting or because you can't get a good radio signal where you need to be), and instead they sell it through Audible.com. That seemed appropriate for a corporation but not for "public" radio.
NPR is definitely still contrained by the need to be popular, but corporate dollars clearly are less important for them than for the corporate media, so one would expect them to be a bit more independant. I agree, though, that one has to wonder at the effect it may have. I do think their journalism is consistently better than that of any corporate media I see regularly (with the possible except of the BBC and I don't understand how much of their financing is governmental), I guess what I'm saying is that it's not as much better as I would hope. It's also dilluted by a not of non-news stuff. That stuff is pretty good quality, but I'd like a good place to turn for pure news. As it is I use a cocktail of NPR, BBC, the Washington Post, and other things.
My first reaction was "Yeah, that's the truth." But then I started thinking: I am a regular listener to NPR, and though their coverage of news is better (in my opinion) it's still not all that different. It could be because they still have to get corporate contributions, or is it more than that? One could also look at network news vs. the newshour on PBS to see the difference. Does that difference account for everything that's wrong with the news? I'm not sure it does.
Personally, I have a few peeves I'm not sure that other people share. One is that the media is not factual enough. Sure they will sometimes quote a statistic out of context, but they often don't have enough in depth covereage of the hard facts to give you a real idea of what they are. It's mostly a few statistics, press releases from political parties or corporations, and pundits, none of which give you much idea of the facts alone. Another issue is that they seem to believe that being unbiased means giving equal time to each viewpoint, rather than considering it on the basis of the facts that they're supposed to be reporting. If a polititian is wrong, they should say so, even if one is wrong more often than another. Finally, they need to challenge officials more in interviews, not so much in the O'reilly style of just barking their opinion (which is useless) but by assulting them with the hard facts to make it clear to everyone when they're lying. Those are my 2 cents, anyway.
I agree that most of the posts are just speculation, and I don't necessarily buy into the idea that there are any shady dealing here. But a relatively major site (for a non-corporate media site) gets raided by the FBI that seems like news to me. Moreover, when any media outlet is silenced by the government, especially when it might be in the current administration's interest, I think it is the responsibility of all citizens to be concerned. I imagine that is why they posted it.
I won't jump to any conclusions yet. There might be a perfectly legitimate reason for this. But you had better believe that I'll be keeping my eye on the developments. After all, "The price of liberty is eternal vigilence."
Factcheck.org seems to be broken at the moment (perhaps related to the the fact they're using ASP?). The link in question appears to be dead. The front page is up, but all other links bring back files with a DOCTYPE that is not html. Firefox thought they were binary. The search also doesn't work. So the file may or may not exist on the site.
For now you could check out the google cache of the page in question.
Yes, being the somewhat paranoid anti-establishment types they are, I was wondering if some or all of Indymedia's content exists on Freenet, MUTE or similar. Or for god's sake at least Gnutella. I mean, if they're willing to put it up on a server they probably don't care so much about the anonymity angle anyway, but that would make it much harder to take down or silence.
Does anyone know if some of the collectives have done, do, or plan to do this?
It certainly will galvanize their supporters.
As for the rest of the population, most will never hear of it unless the rest of the media picks it up. Perversely, this will only happen if Indymedia is wrong and the major media give a damn about what's going on in the country. If Indymedia is right and they're all corporately controlled mouthpieces for the hegemony, then it will get no mention or only a perfunctory "The anarchist terrorist al-Jazeera subsidiary Indmedia was raided by the FBI today to seize evidence of Emmanual Goldstein's trechery..."
Personally, I think Indymedia is half right, and I think most of the major media neither know nor care about Indymedia enough to cover it, or else they don't think it will interest the public. They're too busy preparing stories about the candidates' facial expressions during the debates.
In my case, that's more than the cost of my (used) car, so a cheaper (if less environmentally friendly) solution would just be to get a new car each year. I agree that cars need regular maintanance, but if you're spending that much you might want to have a word with your mechanic.
I think perhaps time on slashdot is warping your mind. Firstly, this is pointless antagonism. You have nothing meaningful to say. Second, the original poster's use of the word is acceptable. It fits the definition given closely enough. The "sequence of events" here being the information that it is the Crawford paper. What is much more important is that this usage would be considered correct by most of the general population as well as most people with a college education, at least in my experience. Take a poll if you like. Because, of course, it is usage that defines the dictionary and not the other way around. Language is always evolving.
In summary, you're your point is weak at best and was not worth making. I can only assume it was motivated by political antipathy, in which case I suggest that arguing about the substance of politics is far more productive than quibbling about diction in order to annoy people or as some attempt at gaining a sense of superiority.
I will await the inevitable dissection of my grammar, spelling, and other minutae.
You make an understandable mistake here, I wasn't talking about what the "founding fathers" thought about the electoral college. I was siting a passage most people would agree with (which happened to be written by them) and saying that the straightforward application of that would be proportional democracy.
As so what they though, I couldn't say, as I am not a historian. I think the electoral college was a compromise without which it would not have been possible to get the fractous states to band together as one union. I also think they were men of their times, and while they had lofty ideals about rights and equallity, they also had a lot of dumb ass ideas that were signs of their times. We are, after all, talking about people who left blacks and women without votes, and counted each slave as less than a man. I would certainly not say all the ideas they had were good ones.
There you have it. If all people are equal and the government derives its authority from the consent of those people, then each person's say should count equally. If not, then some people have, in effect, unequal dominion over others. If you believe what is quoted above, then the onus is on you to argue why representation should NOT be equal.
I agree with you that the right to assembly is essential. Unfortunately, those rights have often been ignored in the past and are currently being violated with little objection from society at large.
Certainly you've seen some coverage of IMF/WTO protests in the last few years: protesters getting beaten by batons, hundreds or thousands of people getting arrested. Now, some of those people are arrested for vandalism or because they attack police officers without cause, and certainly they should be arrested. So it leads one to wonder if they're all being arrested for good cause.
If you check out, for example, the Washington Post's coverage of the tactics used against protestors at the Republican National Convention you'll see that a great many people are arrested for no reason other than exercising their first amendment rights. Then, of course, there is the issue of the "Free Speech Zones".
Now certainly, it's reasonable to say that people can't block traffic or similar without a prior warning or a permit, but increasingly these "time, place, and manner" restrictions are used to prevent people from protesting at all, and people are arrested even when they comply with the law. Clearly, we still have a lot of free speech in this country, but these are disturbing trends. So, all I'm saying is that while certainly the right to assemble should be respected, it is already trampled on regularly.
Some purely anecdotal evidence: For me the latest SP of Win2k was less stable than the last, so I'm not sure it's always monotonically increasing in stability.
Thankfully, I stopped using Win2k and switched to Debian. :-)
Most the above about photons is essentially irrelevent. The point is that the average energy flux will go down as 1/r^2, in the classical or quantum picture (in the quantum case it's just the expectation value you're talking about). Even a laser beam must spread, because an infinitely long confined beam is not a solution to maxwell's equations (which govern E&M) in empty space.
That being said, a columnated beam certainly will go further, because it will be more intense initially (at the same total luminosity). I think the argument made by the article is that the total energy cost is lower in sending matter payloads. I don't know how this calculation was done exactly, but you can at least see the reasoning that unlike radiation, matter does not necessarily spread, so you can think of it as acting like a beam (or pulse anyway) that stays columnated. Of course, matter is slow, comparitively. I'm sure there's more to the argument than that, though.
Well, true P2P or not, it was my impression that networks that can have a few central users on very fast connections (e.g. the original Napster) can perform much better with many people using them, for one thing because each search only has to go to the servers and not through every node. Which is probably (at least one reason) why the old Napster used to work so much better than Gnutella did not long after. With the introduction of supernodes in most P2P schemes, this is probably mitigated somewhat, but that might be an advantage. Of course, after that suit against Napster, having a few fast centralized servers wasn't really practical, hence the switch to more decentralized networks. But if there are no copyright concerns, and thus no lawsuits, then you could return to the centralized server model if it works better.
The other advantage of having a few estabilished, centeralized servers could be stability and predictability. Many P2P networks are a mess of dropped connections or trying to connect to the network but only finding none of the hosts you'd been connected to are online. Clearly having some centralization solves that. As for stability...well, of course that depends on the server.
By no means am I saying that centralized networks are always better than decentralized ones. I don't know enough about network theory to say much about that, but it would seem that decentralized networks should definitely have advantages in terms of robustness. All I'm saying is that if you didn't have to worry about playing cat and mouse with the RIAA, then you could explore some of the benefits of centralized structures and there might be some advantages there.
Read the above again carefully: "...the Day on which [the Electors] give their vote..." It would seem that this refers to the day on which the electors cast their votes for President not the general elections in which the residents of each state select their electors. Quoting from Wikipedia, "These electors in turn cast the official votes for President. Federal law says that each state's electors meet in their state capitals on the Monday following the second Wednesday of December. There, they cast their electoral votes for President and Vice President."
As to the question of states not holding a popular vote at all, they didn't in the beginning. Originally, electors were chosen by the state legislature, and only later did they switch to using a popular vote, so legally they could go back if the public wouldn't vote them all out of office.
My issue is that while your reading seems like one possibile characterization of one's rights under the EULA, it's not at all clear that it's the only reading. Given the somewhat hysterical measures that have been taken by content companies in the last few years, I think you can probably understand my concern. Partially, this is an issue with EULAs in general. Since I'm not a lawyer (nor an expert in software for that matter), it's hard for me to be sure exactly WHAT I'm agreeing to.
My issue is that one could give an alternate reading. "Applicable content" could be used to mean "copyrighted material, e.g. digital music", and, anyway, the next sentance "RN is not responsible for the operation of the third party DRM in any way, including revocation of your content" seems to say essentially that no matter what "applicable content is", they might do who knows what and it's ok. I understand why this is expediant, but you can see why it's unsettling.
In fact, my problems with it would be completely resolved if they simply said that DRM features would only be enabled if you specifically agree to recieve DRMed content and would only manage that content. They don't clearly say that, though, so while that might be what they mean it leaves the user in the unpleasent sitution of signing away vaguely defined rights.
To restate what I said at the end of my first post, I don't have a problem if people want to use DRM and the product enables that. I just don't want any part of it, and I want to be sure that if I choose not to participate that my rights will be preserved. I felt that Real One EULA didn't do that.
I stopped using Realplayer even under Windows a while back because the EULA for the newer ones, like Real One, had some seemingly nasty clauses with respect to third party apps and DRM. I think the one that got me was:
Now maybe that's harmless, but it wasn't at all clear to me. Suffice it to say that I don't like software trying to invade my privacy and play policeman in my home. It also seems like such a system is an inherent security vulnerability and could cause technical problems even with legally licensed but un-DRMed content (like my emusic mp3s or rips of my own CDs). I think DRM is a dumb idea, but I don't mind if the software has such a feature, as long as it's not enabled unless I specifically enable it to be able to get DRMed content.
So how is the EULA on the new realplayer? Is it any better?
Disclaimer: I'm speaking generally about DMCA-like laws here, I can't speak about UK laws specifically.
To use an admittedly played out analogy, if cars were made illegal it would prevent many deaths from reckless driving, drunk driving, etc., but would you be saying, "It's not the government 'ruining your rights' it's the bad drivers that are ruining things for everyone." I doubt it.
The point is that most, possibly all, laws balance infringing upon the rights of the individual against the common good of society. A law against, say, citizens owning chemical weapons like sarin gas clearly balances these well, because it doesn't infinge meaningfully on how most people would like to live while preventing crimes that could kill large numbers of people. By more people's estimation, the ban on cars I suggested would not balance those interests well.
In this case, I think that I (and others on /.) feel that it has not been sufficiently demonstrated that anticircumvention statutes protect the public good enough to be worth infinging upon the rights of the many peole who use the device in a law abiding way, particularly when there are already legal remedies for things like copyright infringement. And because things like banning "circumvention devices" are so ridiculously broad, they could almost never do enough good to balance the possible harm.
Did people copying games and the like bring down the ire of the industry and make these laws get passed and enfored? Probably. But such laws are usually a bad idea regardless. It may be a solution to the problem, but it's clearly the wrong solution.
First, if it's "a trap", it's not one that is set intentionally, since the vast majority of mods have no influence whatsoever over what goes in the post for the story. Second, I don't think it's about mods wanting to be superior as much as it is that "this is dumb" (and equivalent) is not a meaningful or useful contribution. You don't have to say something nice, but you should try to say something useful.
It seems many people on here whose useless comments are modded down are convinced that mods are out to get them. Having been a sometimes mod I can say, there is no conspiracy. If you make any even semi-reasonable comment it will not be modded down on average.
On slashdot in 2005: "A new worm has emerged that exploits the URI handler vulnerability in Microsoft onboard sotware and passes instructions directly to systems controlling vital functions."
;-)
I think that the point here (at least from my perspective) is not that Odeon isn't within their legal rights, but rather that they seem to be going out of their way to be jerks. As others have pointed out, they could have either offered him a license to use their trademarks on his site, or offered to host in on their own (so it would become their site). Instead, they took the least productive form of action possible.
I don't work in software, so let me throw out this question. Don't they make you sign an NDA when you work on something like a big search company's search technology? I know they do this in some other tech businesses, making it really hard for you to work for a competitor on the same sort of product without violating your agreement. The reason I ask is that I'm curious how they could hire him for MSN search in the first place.
As far as the stolen code goes, since it happened before he was hired by MS, you can't really blame them. I was also thinking, if he worked on it himself anyway, couldn't he probably replicate most of the functionality even without the actual code in front of him? Then again, the article says, "Chavet told investigators that he worked on the AltaVista source code while at the company and logged into the AltaVista system after leaving because he 'was curious about the evolution of the source code after his departure.'" so maybe he was just trying to steal the most up to date ideas possible. :-)