If you're in favor of network neutrality, you probably want to leave the toll road analogies alone.
The telcos are going to be the ones dragging out the concept of toll roads and "high speed lanes" as analogies to tiered service, and when you frame the debate that way, many people are not as opposed to tiered service as they might be otherwise.
There are quite a few people -- myself included -- who feel that the main reason why toll lanes on highways aren't a good idea is because we've already been charged for the construction of the road (via tax dollars); if a company built its own road and wanted to create a tiered service model, where you could pay $10 and go 75MPH or $5 and go 45MPH, more power to them, as long as I'm not being double-charged (paying for the road with my taxes and then being charged to use it).
Since the telcos aren't directly supported by tax revenues, it's not difficult for them to compare themselves to a "private road." That puts you, the pro-neutrality person, in the position of having to debate whether they're a public utility or a private throughfare operator, and you get into the messy issue of monopoly rights and right-of-way use, etc. (Basically, you have to say, although they're private, they've been granted the use -- sometimes the exclusive use -- of public land in order to run their cables, and thus lose some of their freedom to do whatever the hell they want with their 'property.')
So basically, if you're looking for a compelling analogy, comparing highways to the telcos is not a particularly good choice. Inherent in the highway analogy is a choice: you can decide whether to use the private road or not; this choice does not exist when we're talking about the internet, in many cases. By making the telcos out to be equivalent to the operator of a private toll road, you play right into their hands.
The real question is, do you want to have only one person / entity deciding how to "improve" society? I find that concept pretty scary, honestly. There are lots of things that I can think of that would be 'improvements' that I'm pretty sure other people might not like, and vice versa. A whole lot of harm has been done, historically, by people whose intentions were good.
Regardless of the stated motives of the B&M Gates Foundation, you can't escape the reality that it's a lot of power concentrated in the hands of a few people, and perhaps that's not always a good thing. That's why I wish this donation had gone to a separate institution: at least then it would have doubled the number of people in control of the resources.
In other words, Digg fuels and exacerbates your ADHD...
Pretty much.
I've gone over to Digg from time to time, but I've never stayed there because I just don't enjoy it as much. Slashdot, to me, is a discussion site. The articles are really just prompts that get people talking; the real "content" isn't in the links / TFAs -- which are mostly just stuff you can find on Google News most of the time anyway -- but in the discussion itself.
Digg is the other way around. It seems like it's basically a news aggregator, and the discussion is mostly mindless drivel (even compared to Slashdot) and people voting. Maybe I just picked the wrong threads to read, but the S/N ratio was even lower there than it is in your average Slashdot thread, and that's really saying something. Yeah, Slashdot has bizarre trolling phenomena (FPs, the whole GNAA business, etc.) but there's almost always good posts as well; on Digg, quality posts seemed more the exception than the rule.
I can get my news anywhere -- there are tons of aggregators and newsfeeds and bloggers who sift endlessly through basically everything the internet has to offer, pulling out things to read. That, to me, isn't particularly interesting. The discussion (which comes from the userbase) is: that's something that has value to me, and why I think Slashdot still comes out on top of Digg.
If Digg draws the ADD-types away who are just looking for an endless stream of new links, all the better.
(Because CNN's site sucks worse than anything else I've seen lately; if you want to read the little blurbs on each, you'll have to suffer through their shit, because I can't be bothered to copy/paste it all...)
Allegedly in "no particular order:"
1. Steve Ballmer, CEO, Microsoft 2. Jeffrey Citron, Chairman and chief strategist, Vonage 3. Reed Hastings, CEO, Netflix 4. Ken Kutaragi, President, Sony Computer Entertainment 5. Warren Lieberfarb, Senior Consultant, HD-DVD Promotion Group 6. Rob Malda, Slashdot.org 7. Arun Sarin, CEO, Vodafone 8. Jonathan Schwartz, CEO, Sun Microsystems 9. Linus Torvalds, Creator, Linux 10. Mark Zuckerberg, Founder, Facebook
Here's the blurb about Malda:
Remember the days when "getting Slashdotted" was every sysadmin's worst nightmare? Referrals from the "News for Nerds" website would send so much traffic to websites that many crashed. But for those that survived the flood, it was the online equivalent of a papal benediction. Today, the buzz has moved elsewhere. Slashdot's editor-driven story selection model is being supplanted by user-generated systems such as Digg. According to recent Alexa data, Digg already has more daily reach and generates more page views than Slashdot. Malda knows his subject, and he's a good editor, but in the end, he's just no match for the power of the multitudes.
And just because I thought it was interesting, here's the blurb about Linus Torvalds:
It's a testament to the success of Torvalds's open-source ideas that he's on this list at all. His Linux operating system is fast, cheap, and out of control - and that's entirely by design. While Torvalds still oversees any changes made to the innermost core of Linux, most of the innovation is now done by others, and commercial businesses like Red Hat and Novell increasingly steer its future. Although he can claim credit for popularizing one of the most powerful ideas ever to sweep through the software industry, Torvalds's project has matured to such an extent that it's largely outgrown its illustrious creator.
I think we're disagreeing on the difference between "being secure" and "feeling secure." I would agree that the government is given some responsibility (in a democracy) for attempting to ensure the former. But you said originally that people have a right to "feel safe," and it is with this that I take issue.
Just because you don't feel secure, doesn't mean that the government (or anybody else) is necessarily doing anything wrong. It might just be you being oversensitive. Thus, the goal of making everyone feel secure is impossible -- it's like saying that everyone has a right to 'be happy.' You don't. You have a right to pursue happiness, and the duty of government is to create an environment where this is possible, but the end result (whether you are actually happy or not) is not the responsibility of government. Likewise, the government has the responsibility of attempting to protect you from physical harm, but whether you feel secure as a result of the actions taken or not, is up to you.
In the case of both happiness and security, there is a feedback mechanism: if people are unhappy or feel insecure, they will vote for a government that they think will improve the situation. However, this is a far cry from saying that people have an inherent 'right' to feel a particular way.
To make it the business of government that everyone 'feels' secure is dangerous, because it allows someone to claim that their rights are being violated -- that someone else is harming them and should be sanctioned -- because of a way they feel, in the absence of physical reality. For example, let's say that I was just a particularly well-muscled black man, and I took a stroll down the street in a White neighborhood that happened to be populated with people who have a socially-instilled fear of black people: if your statement was true, I would be violating one of their rights (the right to feel secure) simply by my very presence: because just having me around would make them feel insecure.
If we change the situation so that I (the black guy) am wearing an explosive vest, than you would be correct in saying that I'm violating their right to physical security by essentially threatening them implicitly with physical harm -- since the reality of the threat is there (and is evident to everyone), the government would be correct to make this behavior illegal. But the crime/violation-of-rights occurs not in making them feel insecure, but in creating the actual possibility of physical harm. (Or in creating a situation where the people realistically believe themselves to be in danger of actual physical harm: e.g., pointing an unloaded gun at someone if they don't know it's unloaded.)
It is one thing to say that a government should protect its citizens well-being, but quite another to say that a person has an inviolate right to be able to think a certain way, especially since by creating a 'right,' there is the immediate implication that anyone violating it in another is doing something wrong. In short, while you have a right (perhaps) to 'be' secure, you don't have a right to 'feel' secure.
I've seen that done as an experiment, and it's always intrigued me, but I've wondered if anyone has actually used such a system in anything approaching production. Even if "production" was 'average everyday home use.'
I'm curious as well whether the heat transfer from a chip submerged in fluid like that is better or worse than one that has a cooling block with some sort of coolant forced through it. The dissipation of heat throughout a static volume of fluid might end up being worse than you can achieve by forcing coolant through pipes, because of the hot spots that would develop in a tank. (You could prevent this by circulating the fluid in the tank.)
Submerged-liquid cooling is one of those ideas that keeps coming up, and it's obviously possible to do, but it's never really taken off as more than an experimental thing, even though it would seem on the surface to be much easier to do than running pipes and cooling blocks and radiators and the rest of the stuff that's involved in a "conventional" setup. Given that it ought to be that much easier, and nobody seems to use it, I'm suspicious.
Yeah, I wondered the same thing. Although we don't often think of charities as something that "compete" with each other, in reality they do; only instead of competing for business, they compete for places to spend money -- that is, projects to work on. They basically compete to out-good each other.
It seems like giving more money to one massive charity, although it might allow them to take on projects that are even larger in scale than before, is not as good for everyone as starting a second charity would have been.
Just think that you're some organization who would like to get some funding for something. Wouldn't it be better if there were two multi-billion-dollar charities you could apply to, instead of just one? That way, if Bill and Melinda had their fill of feeding starving [Asian/African/Mideastern] people this year, there would be another place to apply to. But by giving the money to one giant charity, in effect we create a monoculture: if you don't get any money from the One Giant Charity, or heaven forbid you're doing something that the One Giant Charity doesn't like or doesn't choose to support (cough*OLPC*cough), then you're shit outta luck. Or what if the leadership of the One Giant Charity goes downhill in time? Having two charities might serve as counterpoises to each other, keeping themselves honest. There are lots of reasons why a duopoly is better than a single overwhelming entity, even in the field of charities.
There's room in the world for more than just Bill and Melinda's pet charity...I would have liked to see something set up that could have given funding to the things that they choose not to support.
Some people want to water-cool in order to cut down on fan noise.
Rather than overclocking, they want to take a regular desktop processor running at its normal speed and move the heat out of the case and into a large radiator, where it can cool just into the ambient room air, without fans.
I don't know how well this works, or how much noise the pumps make, but I've definitely heard people talking about using liquid systems as an alternative to forced air on basically typical (non-hotrodded) desktop systems.
Just as an aside, this is kind of a neat example of the resistors-in-parallel theorem; if you equate pressure to voltage and electrical resistance to flow resistance, and current to flow rate in volume/time, I'd be very surprised if you didn't get a result where the flow through each cooling block was close to what you'd calculate by dividing the pressure drop across the block by the flow resistance through the same block.
The reason I bring this up is that it gives you a nice way to easily calculate the flow resistance if you only have one flowmeter (if the manufacturer doesn't state it): you can connect up each of the blocks separately and figure out their "resistance" by measuring the flow (for safety I'd want to check it at various pressures / flow rates to see if it's linear) and then use that value when figuring out the flow with both blocks in the system in parallel.
If you also knew what the flow resistance was of the tubing (this can also be obtained from a lot of engineering manuals), it might be possible to equalize the flow through both blocks by adding extra tubing to one or the other, twisting it in a spiral, etc.
There are obviously going to be some problems when doing it this way -- it's a big approximation to just assume that a liquid is going to flow like electricity (as you change the pressure and flow dramatically you might enter different flow behavior regions, i.e. non-laminar, and it might change unpredictably), but it would be easy enough to try if you had one flowmeter and pressure gauge.
Well it's self-evident to most governments that aren't receiving a substantial amount of tax revenue from a particular company marketing the software, or where the individuals in that government haven't been given large campaign contributions by said company.
It's sort of a litmus test, in fact. It's like sending out a survey ("Question: Do you think that forcing all of your citizens to send between $80-300 USD each to Redmond, Washington, USA is a good idea?") but without having to do all the paperwork. You just watch the results roll in.
There's no "right to not be offended", but everyone has a right to feel safe.
Actually, no, you don't. This idea, that people have some "right" to feel secure, or good about themselves, or where they live, or anything else, is an incredibly dangerous thing, and it's sort of crept into the public's mind lately. It needs to go away.
You have certain rights spelled out in the Constitution, as well as in many other documents; among them is the Fourth Amendment. ("The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.")
If that makes you feel secure, great! If it doesn't, too bad. There's no protection for feeling secure, any more than there's a protection for 'having a great life.' If you feel secure within the realm of protections afforded to you by law, or don't feel secure, that's your own business. The job of the police, and of government in general, are not to make you feel a certain way, and just because you feel insecure, it doesn't mean that they're not doing their jobs.
I called my Senator yesterday, and I can confirm that the interaction with his staffers was exactly like the script above.
I called, some kid answered, I said I was a constituent looking to express my feelings about a bill to the Senator, he asked me what about, I gave my little spiel, he said 'Thanks for your opinion,' we hung up.
Whether it'll have any effect, I have no idea... but short of sending a lot of money in a paper bag, it's the best thing I can think of at the moment.
Anyone know when we'll know the results from the committee?
This is true. I didn't go into this more in my original post because I felt that the thing was just getting too long, but part of the blame for technological gaffes like this lies on the vendors and designers of the technology. More the vendors than the desigers.
Too often we see technology -- of whatever sort -- marketed to the public as either literal or figurative 'sealed boxes.' The public is told "you don't really need to know what goes on inside of this! Trust us!" and they basically say OK and use it. When something that's been sold as a black box doesn't function as promised, then you really can't blame the users, since they're going along with how the stuff was represented to them.
PDF is a little like this: Adobe sells it as a virtual version of paper documents, that you can sign, rubberstamp, mark-up, etc. So when a user goes 'hey, I can draw a black line over text I don't want people to see, just like I can on paper,' they're working within the metaphor that's been sold to them by Adobe (if in fact that's how Adobe represented the product, which I doubt -- I'm sure they're a little more careful). When the e-document doesn't function like paper at all, the user ought to get the benefit of the doubt. At least the first time -- when it keeps happening over and over, then you really can't blame the vendor anymore, since the users aren't learning even after the mistake should be obvious.
The user still has some blame for swallowing wholesale a new piece of tech without understanding it, and incorporating it into their life -- that's the risk I was talking about earlier -- but you're correct in that this shouldn't absolve the people who market and sold the technology to them in the first place, by telling them it was something that could be used without understanding the internals. (Although on the other hand, it's ultimately very naive to just believe the words that somebody who is trying to sell you something says, without question -- I'd hope we've all learned that by the time we graduate highschool, although I suppose I shouldn't hope for such things.)
The whole terminal server aspect is something I'd not thought of before.
I wonder what it would take to build something that wasn't a desktop OS, but was just capable of serving up applications remotely, over Citrix, or something Citrix-like?
There could be a big market for something that let you serve up Windows applications (even older Win98 ones), without paying the really steep Windows Terminal Server per-seat licensing fees. I've worked on some Citrix stuff and the amount they pay in licensing is just outrageous. There are per-client fees for the application that you're delivering remotely (if it's not your own application), per-client fees for Citrix, and then per-client fees for the Windows-based server. Talk about getting screwed more than once.
Just replacing one of those components (the Windows-based server) would be huge, and I think you'd find a lot of companies interested in it because of the way Microsoft does it's licensing.
I don't know whether making something to act as an application server is any easier or harder than making a regular desktop OS, but if somebody were looking for a way to productize ReactOS into something they could sell to corporations (sell the support on, naturally), something involving remote delivery of Windows applications would be killer. The money that I've seen poured into Citrix farms is just mind-boggling on the corporate side, and people don't spend money because they like it, they do it because they think there's no other way.
As for desktop computers, being addressable doesn't help for anything except profitless peer-to-peer applications.
I agree with your first point (about cable boxes) -- the boxes are as addressable right now as the cable companies want or need them to be. But this latter thing I disagree with. VoIP is notoriously difficult to pass through NAT (I'd bet that if you go onto some Vonage user forums, questions about NAT are all over the place), and represents a "killer app" for IPv6 as much as anything. UPnP has made this easier, but it's still problematic if you want to have two VoIP ATAs on one home network or small business network, for which right now you're only issued one IP.
Streaming video and Video-over-IP is going to make this even a bigger challenge: suppose you want to do IP video, and watch a different channel on one TV than you do on another? With only one externally-facing IP address, this could be quite a challenge; all the kludges that you'd need to make something like this function through NAT go away when you have IPv6 and every device in the house can be globally addressable (if you want it to be--people are still going to want firewalls, obviously). Same with multiple SIP streams. Even if you can get a SIP phone working through NAT, it becomes almost exponentially more complex to add another SIP ATA (say you wanted to have more than one "line"). Unless you can tell the headend to route the second line to a different port on your one externally-facing IP address, and then tell the NAT box to route that to a different internal IP, you're out of luck. People are going to want to do stuff like that as the technology becomes more mature.
The cable TV companies aren't going to be very interested from the video perspective, but they might be interested because of the voice possibilities, and the telephone companies who want to deliver video over IP might see easier implementations with IPv6 as well.
More than all this though are the "killer apps" that we don't even know about right now, and that we'll never know about without IPv6 and heavily wired, addressable homes. There are all sorts of neat things that we can't do now, or are hard to do (which is bascially the same thing if you're Joe User) that become a lot easier when everything has a unique address. To say that there aren't any benefits from switching to IPv6 is to say that we can imagine all the possibilities that might arise when the capabilities exist, and that to me is a bit of an arrogant statement. (Note I'm not saying you said that, but I see it as an implicit assumption in a lot of other anti-IPv6 blanket statements.)
Disability guidelines prohibit rasterized docs.
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More PDF Blackout Follies
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I am pretty sure that rasterized PDF documents violate government disability-access guidelines, since they can't be read with screenreaders, braille terminals, or basically anything other than a set of human eyes (or a good OCR program).
They would be a lot better off going through the document in Word (or Notepad/Textedit/vi/EMACS/whatever) and just selecting the regions of text that they want to remove, and replacing it with [-- TEXT REMOVED --] or even [REDACTED]. If they were really slick, I'm sure somebody could write a little macro to replace the text with an equivalent number of characters of whitespace or random text or dashes, to preserve formatting. (Okay, so to really preserve the formatting it would have to be replaced with characters that have the same amount width as the deleted characters; maybe there's a font-set containing various widths of whitespace characters that they could use? In TeX it would be trivial.)
The results would be ugly (but really, were black bars ever very beautiful?) but at least it would actually remove the information, and wouldn't result in an inaccessible, rasterized document.
While you make a good point, the people who have to use computers to accomplish their jobs, but do not make an attempt to understand how they work (and just treat them like "black boxes") are taking an enormous risk. They are hitching the metaphorical wagon of their livelihood to a team of horses that they don't know shit about.
If you were somebody who made your living in television, but didn't understand anything about it, you would likewise be taking a great risk. You might, for instance, look like a big idiot when you show up to work at your anchor desk wearing a horizontally pinstriped shirt (which looks like ass on TV because of the Moire effect between the lines on the shirt and the TV scanlines). If you had understood the technology a little better, you might not have done that. That's a trivial example -- undoubtedly if you were a TV anchor, you'd learn or be told at some point not to wear a shirt like that without having to learn about scanlines -- but I hope you see my point.
Whenever you use a technology without learning about it, you accept a certain amount of risk. Sometimes, you gamble and win: you just use the technology, get your job done, and nobody's the wiser. You're faster, more efficient, more competitive, you look like a hero to your boss, whatever. But if the technology doesn't work, then you're SOL -- but that's the price you pay for not understanding it. That's the risk you accepted when you said to yourself "eh, I don't really care what goes on inside there."
In the case of PDF, we have a lot of people using a certain technology without knowing anything about how it works, and thus -- like the TV anchor in his pinstriped shirt (or a weatherman wearing chroma-key blue or green) -- you get these gaffes.
I'm not saying that everybody needs to learn about how everything they use all day works, down to the bare metal. Virtually nobody needs to know that, except perhaps people who are doing things that are so dangerous that they can't afford to fuck up. However, people should be aware of the tradeoff they're making and the risk they're accepting when they forgo figuring out the internal details of a system and simply accept it as a whole, on faith that it will always work a certain way. As long as people are aware of that decision, and make it consiously, and accept the results, you can't ask for more.
Generally speaking: faith is a fine thing, as long as you know when you're relying on it. It's when you thought you were relying on something else, and find out that you had nothing but faith, that a problem has occured.
If I am releasing a document for publication and decide to remove information from it, this is redaction. It's editing for publication, which can include the removal of information. It could also include the addition of new information, but that's not what typically happens. Redaction can be a form of self-censorship, but it's not always the same.
Censorship is when a third party, generally a person in authority, suppresses information which is considered objectionable. The 'authority' can be the same as the author (e.g. 'self-censorship'), or the suppression can be indirect -- it need not be editing per se.
It's my understanding that "redact" is used only in reference to written documents that are being edited, while 'censor' is more general and can refer to anything. The terms are closely related, especially in their typical use, but they're not exactly the same. "Redact" is actually a more specific and precise word for what's going on in this instance. We can argue about whether censorship is also going on, but redaction definitely is.
Anyway, arguing about definitions by citing dictionaries is always a bit pedantic, since dictionaries are not authoritative except as a historical reference: they can tell you what a word meant at the time the dictionary was written, but not what it means right now, since a word's definition is determined by its usage. All language is inherently arbitrary: they're just sounds we make or things we write down in order to convey ideas, and the relationship between the sounds/characters and ideas is not fixed, but infinitely variable. If everyone were to decide tomorrow that 'redaction' meant the same thing as 'censorship,' that's what it would mean, and next year's dictionaries would have to be updated to reflect that.
It sounds like (my reading of TFA anyway) that they only found out he was a sex offender after he was arrested. So that could not have been the reason used to arrest him in the first place. People keep bringing it up as a kind of ex post facto justification of what happened, which isn't really relevant to the whole internet/AP argument or to his actual arrest, although it'll obviously be a key factor in what happens to him.
So I suspect that the police probably found some other grounds to arrest him on originally, and then once they made the ID and found out he was a sex offender (jackpot!), they can now charge him with all sorts of other good stuff -- violation of the terms of his parole or of a court order, probably.
From an internet-law perspective, it's too bad the guy turned out to be a sex offender because the interesting legal point of whether he was actually committing a crime by using the AP while sitting on the street and not going into the business will never be addressed; it'll almost certainly be overshadowed by more serious infractions this guy has committed. I'd wager that they never bother to charge him with theft of services or anything, if they can get him on more substantial parole violations. (Because theft of services wouldn't carry much of a penalty and would be a weak case to begin with, while the parole violation can probably land him back in prison without trial, just a hearing before the sentencing judge or parole board. From the police's perspective -- "how do we put the creepy guy away with the least amount of effort/expense" -- that's a better outcome.)
Even if you run Linux, ReactOS is a project worth paying attention to.
Right now we have Wine (or Cedega, if you prefer) if you want to run Windows applications on Linux. However, what's always intrigued me about ReactOS is the possibility of using it as the client OS on a virtual machine. I think this has certain advantages over Wine (sandboxing, greater application compatibility), and removes the biggest disincentive to Windows virtualization -- the requirement of purchasing a Windows license.
Also, because it's open source, it seems like it would be easier to get ReactOS working as a client OS on a paravirtualized system like Xen without having to use things like Vanderpool/Pacifica or accept the performance penalties of VMware. That, to me seems very cool: I could be running a Linux system as the server/Domain-zero OS, and then have multiple paravirtualized, Windows-compatible clients running on it, at full speed, without having to purchase any licenses or being dependent on any specialized virtualization hardware.
Your front door isn't floating out into public space, If you play your music really loud and the sound waves travel out to my ears, am I stealing your music?
Actually, in that situation, if you turn your music up really loud and I can hear it, you're conducting an unauthorized public performance of the music, and probably violating somebody's copyright. According to the RIAA, copyright violations are stealing, and stealing is a crime, so therefore, you are a thief.
Well, the police are intended to have the power to arrest you without a warrant on the suspicion or reasonable belief that you've broken a law; exactly the standards are for that varies from one jurisdiction to the next, but they can usually hold you (at least where I live) for a certain period of time (24 or 48 hours usually) while they gather evidence, after which they have to begin charging you or release you. Generally the statues require that the officer have "reasonable cause to belive" that you committed a felony, or are driving drunk or a variety of other things. They are supposed to have a particular crime in mind, but there's a little room there (intentionally, IMO) for vagueness.
It's not clear from what I've read exactly what they suspected of this guy when they arrested him; there are a variety of things they could probably put down that would fly on paper though, at least enough to haul him in for 24 hours. Suspicion of theft of services, fraud, maybe stalking if one of the people in the restaurant filed a private complaint ahead of time. The police and district attorneys do this for a living -- they're pretty good at finding ways to hold on to people if they think they've done something.
Just from reading the article, it sounds a lot like the people from the restaurant complained to the police about this guy, so they went out there and arrested him, and now they're going to try and figure out whether he broke any laws. It's not really the way that the system is intended to work, but it's how it often does.
The Constitution itself (nor amendments to it) wouldn't have to abide by either of those two rules; else the effect would be to create a rule that could never be changed, which IMO is anathema to our system of government -- part of the idea behind our Consitution is that it can be changed (with intentionally great difficulty) over time.
The form this rule I'm proposing would take would be a Constitutional amendment, which regulated how regular Congressional bills and legislation had to be handled. It would not affect future Constitutional amendments, or revise the interpretation of the Constitution, or have a retroactive effect on laws already passed (as much as it would be nice to go through and strike down everything that's ever been pushed through as a rider on another bill, I think that would upset too much settled law). So "vague" Constitutional amendments could still be passed in the future, unaffected by this rule: I don't think this is a big problem, because so few Amendments get passed anyway, and there's already an established framework for working out vagueries in its intent. Plus, sometimes a certain amount of vagueness is desirable, since it allows the Supreme Court a little interpretive leeway in response to prevailing public opinion and keeps the legislature from 'thrashing' the Constitution with contradictory amendments every few years/decades (which is I think what would happen if the USSC didn't have the interpretive power that it does as a result of Constitutional vagueness; of course we could debate this all day, and I'm open to the possibility that maybe this isn't a good thing).
But you are correct, there is a certain amount of hypocrisy inherent in such a rule, however that doesn't necessarily mean that it wouldn't work. I don't think it would ever get passed for other reasons, but the lack of internal consistency isn't what would kill it.
Actually your point #2 could probably be rectified by coming up with a better definition of what "vague" means and spelling out exactly how 'overly vague' a law could or couldn't be. And I'd argue that the rule would itself contribute to a single core purpose: the purpose being to eliminate bad laws tacked on as riders to hard-to-kill bills. That's a pretty singular purpose, and passes the rule's own test.
I still think the security research exemption is pretty narrow. Note the use of the word "solely" before the phrase "promote the security of the owner or operator of such computer...". It would seem to me that if you disclosed the exploit at a 'Black Hat' conference, you would pretty much blow the 'solely promoting security' exemption out of the water.
My reading of the exemption -- and which I believe is the safest reading, in the absence of good guidance by the courts on this matter (that I am aware of) -- is that you're allowed to conduct security testing, and then use the results of such testing to harden your own systems, or communicate with the developer to fix the hole, but that if you were to publicly disclose it, then you might lose your defense that the testing was for the 'sole purpose' of hardening your system or fixing the software, and was instead being done for personal gain via publicity, etc.
Basically, the DMCA was not written with the idea of OSS in mind; most of the exemptions including the security/research ones are designed to cope with software written by commercial develeopers that is closed source, with a clear reporting chain that bugs can be submitted to in order for the software to be fixed, without full public disclosure being necessary or desirable.
That doesn't mean that a court might not find that full public disclosure was permitted under the security exemption, but there's also the possibility, if you got a judge who insisted on an absolutely strict interpretation and was totally ignorant of OSS issues, that they might not, and depending on how the disclosure was handled, the researcher/s could find themselves in hot water.
I don't think the issue is quite as clear cut as you're making it out to be.
Well what would be better was if the Constitution just specified that all legislation on a bill had to contribute to a single core purpose, and that the purpose couldn't be overly vague (to keep the purpose of every bill from being "Making the United States a Better Place"). That way the Supreme Court would have the ability to just delete anything that got attached to a bill that it wasn't supposed to have been attached to. It wouldn't solve the problem altogether (and might make it worse -- politicians would just take lots of crap on and let the courts figure it out), but it wouldn't hand that much extra power to the Executive.
I guess at the end of the day it just depends: would you rather give more power to the President or to the Justices? Historically, the latter seems to have made a lot less total boners, but that doesn't mean they will continue to do so.
I also think that the USSC should have automatic review of all new laws passed, without having to wait for a challenge case, but that's a separate issue.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're in favor of network neutrality, you probably want to leave the toll road analogies alone.
The telcos are going to be the ones dragging out the concept of toll roads and "high speed lanes" as analogies to tiered service, and when you frame the debate that way, many people are not as opposed to tiered service as they might be otherwise.
There are quite a few people -- myself included -- who feel that the main reason why toll lanes on highways aren't a good idea is because we've already been charged for the construction of the road (via tax dollars); if a company built its own road and wanted to create a tiered service model, where you could pay $10 and go 75MPH or $5 and go 45MPH, more power to them, as long as I'm not being double-charged (paying for the road with my taxes and then being charged to use it).
Since the telcos aren't directly supported by tax revenues, it's not difficult for them to compare themselves to a "private road." That puts you, the pro-neutrality person, in the position of having to debate whether they're a public utility or a private throughfare operator, and you get into the messy issue of monopoly rights and right-of-way use, etc. (Basically, you have to say, although they're private, they've been granted the use -- sometimes the exclusive use -- of public land in order to run their cables, and thus lose some of their freedom to do whatever the hell they want with their 'property.')
So basically, if you're looking for a compelling analogy, comparing highways to the telcos is not a particularly good choice. Inherent in the highway analogy is a choice: you can decide whether to use the private road or not; this choice does not exist when we're talking about the internet, in many cases. By making the telcos out to be equivalent to the operator of a private toll road, you play right into their hands.
The real question is, do you want to have only one person / entity deciding how to "improve" society? I find that concept pretty scary, honestly. There are lots of things that I can think of that would be 'improvements' that I'm pretty sure other people might not like, and vice versa. A whole lot of harm has been done, historically, by people whose intentions were good.
Regardless of the stated motives of the B&M Gates Foundation, you can't escape the reality that it's a lot of power concentrated in the hands of a few people, and perhaps that's not always a good thing. That's why I wish this donation had gone to a separate institution: at least then it would have doubled the number of people in control of the resources.
In other words, Digg fuels and exacerbates your ADHD...
Pretty much.
I've gone over to Digg from time to time, but I've never stayed there because I just don't enjoy it as much. Slashdot, to me, is a discussion site. The articles are really just prompts that get people talking; the real "content" isn't in the links / TFAs -- which are mostly just stuff you can find on Google News most of the time anyway -- but in the discussion itself.
Digg is the other way around. It seems like it's basically a news aggregator, and the discussion is mostly mindless drivel (even compared to Slashdot) and people voting. Maybe I just picked the wrong threads to read, but the S/N ratio was even lower there than it is in your average Slashdot thread, and that's really saying something. Yeah, Slashdot has bizarre trolling phenomena (FPs, the whole GNAA business, etc.) but there's almost always good posts as well; on Digg, quality posts seemed more the exception than the rule.
I can get my news anywhere -- there are tons of aggregators and newsfeeds and bloggers who sift endlessly through basically everything the internet has to offer, pulling out things to read. That, to me, isn't particularly interesting. The discussion (which comes from the userbase) is: that's something that has value to me, and why I think Slashdot still comes out on top of Digg.
If Digg draws the ADD-types away who are just looking for an endless stream of new links, all the better.
(Because CNN's site sucks worse than anything else I've seen lately; if you want to read the little blurbs on each, you'll have to suffer through their shit, because I can't be bothered to copy/paste it all...)
Allegedly in "no particular order:"
1. Steve Ballmer, CEO, Microsoft
2. Jeffrey Citron, Chairman and chief strategist, Vonage
3. Reed Hastings, CEO, Netflix
4. Ken Kutaragi, President, Sony Computer Entertainment
5. Warren Lieberfarb, Senior Consultant, HD-DVD Promotion Group
6. Rob Malda, Slashdot.org
7. Arun Sarin, CEO, Vodafone
8. Jonathan Schwartz, CEO, Sun Microsystems
9. Linus Torvalds, Creator, Linux
10. Mark Zuckerberg, Founder, Facebook
Here's the blurb about Malda:And just because I thought it was interesting, here's the blurb about Linus Torvalds:
I think we're disagreeing on the difference between "being secure" and "feeling secure." I would agree that the government is given some responsibility (in a democracy) for attempting to ensure the former. But you said originally that people have a right to "feel safe," and it is with this that I take issue.
Just because you don't feel secure, doesn't mean that the government (or anybody else) is necessarily doing anything wrong. It might just be you being oversensitive. Thus, the goal of making everyone feel secure is impossible -- it's like saying that everyone has a right to 'be happy.' You don't. You have a right to pursue happiness, and the duty of government is to create an environment where this is possible, but the end result (whether you are actually happy or not) is not the responsibility of government. Likewise, the government has the responsibility of attempting to protect you from physical harm, but whether you feel secure as a result of the actions taken or not, is up to you.
In the case of both happiness and security, there is a feedback mechanism: if people are unhappy or feel insecure, they will vote for a government that they think will improve the situation. However, this is a far cry from saying that people have an inherent 'right' to feel a particular way.
To make it the business of government that everyone 'feels' secure is dangerous, because it allows someone to claim that their rights are being violated -- that someone else is harming them and should be sanctioned -- because of a way they feel, in the absence of physical reality. For example, let's say that I was just a particularly well-muscled black man, and I took a stroll down the street in a White neighborhood that happened to be populated with people who have a socially-instilled fear of black people: if your statement was true, I would be violating one of their rights (the right to feel secure) simply by my very presence: because just having me around would make them feel insecure.
If we change the situation so that I (the black guy) am wearing an explosive vest, than you would be correct in saying that I'm violating their right to physical security by essentially threatening them implicitly with physical harm -- since the reality of the threat is there (and is evident to everyone), the government would be correct to make this behavior illegal. But the crime/violation-of-rights occurs not in making them feel insecure, but in creating the actual possibility of physical harm. (Or in creating a situation where the people realistically believe themselves to be in danger of actual physical harm: e.g., pointing an unloaded gun at someone if they don't know it's unloaded.)
It is one thing to say that a government should protect its citizens well-being, but quite another to say that a person has an inviolate right to be able to think a certain way, especially since by creating a 'right,' there is the immediate implication that anyone violating it in another is doing something wrong. In short, while you have a right (perhaps) to 'be' secure, you don't have a right to 'feel' secure.
I've seen that done as an experiment, and it's always intrigued me, but I've wondered if anyone has actually used such a system in anything approaching production. Even if "production" was 'average everyday home use.'
I'm curious as well whether the heat transfer from a chip submerged in fluid like that is better or worse than one that has a cooling block with some sort of coolant forced through it. The dissipation of heat throughout a static volume of fluid might end up being worse than you can achieve by forcing coolant through pipes, because of the hot spots that would develop in a tank. (You could prevent this by circulating the fluid in the tank.)
Submerged-liquid cooling is one of those ideas that keeps coming up, and it's obviously possible to do, but it's never really taken off as more than an experimental thing, even though it would seem on the surface to be much easier to do than running pipes and cooling blocks and radiators and the rest of the stuff that's involved in a "conventional" setup. Given that it ought to be that much easier, and nobody seems to use it, I'm suspicious.
Yeah, I wondered the same thing. Although we don't often think of charities as something that "compete" with each other, in reality they do; only instead of competing for business, they compete for places to spend money -- that is, projects to work on. They basically compete to out-good each other.
It seems like giving more money to one massive charity, although it might allow them to take on projects that are even larger in scale than before, is not as good for everyone as starting a second charity would have been.
Just think that you're some organization who would like to get some funding for something. Wouldn't it be better if there were two multi-billion-dollar charities you could apply to, instead of just one? That way, if Bill and Melinda had their fill of feeding starving [Asian/African/Mideastern] people this year, there would be another place to apply to. But by giving the money to one giant charity, in effect we create a monoculture: if you don't get any money from the One Giant Charity, or heaven forbid you're doing something that the One Giant Charity doesn't like or doesn't choose to support (cough*OLPC*cough), then you're shit outta luck. Or what if the leadership of the One Giant Charity goes downhill in time? Having two charities might serve as counterpoises to each other, keeping themselves honest. There are lots of reasons why a duopoly is better than a single overwhelming entity, even in the field of charities.
There's room in the world for more than just Bill and Melinda's pet charity...I would have liked to see something set up that could have given funding to the things that they choose not to support.
Some people want to water-cool in order to cut down on fan noise.
Rather than overclocking, they want to take a regular desktop processor running at its normal speed and move the heat out of the case and into a large radiator, where it can cool just into the ambient room air, without fans.
I don't know how well this works, or how much noise the pumps make, but I've definitely heard people talking about using liquid systems as an alternative to forced air on basically typical (non-hotrodded) desktop systems.
Just as an aside, this is kind of a neat example of the resistors-in-parallel theorem; if you equate pressure to voltage and electrical resistance to flow resistance, and current to flow rate in volume/time, I'd be very surprised if you didn't get a result where the flow through each cooling block was close to what you'd calculate by dividing the pressure drop across the block by the flow resistance through the same block.
The reason I bring this up is that it gives you a nice way to easily calculate the flow resistance if you only have one flowmeter (if the manufacturer doesn't state it): you can connect up each of the blocks separately and figure out their "resistance" by measuring the flow (for safety I'd want to check it at various pressures / flow rates to see if it's linear) and then use that value when figuring out the flow with both blocks in the system in parallel.
If you also knew what the flow resistance was of the tubing (this can also be obtained from a lot of engineering manuals), it might be possible to equalize the flow through both blocks by adding extra tubing to one or the other, twisting it in a spiral, etc.
There are obviously going to be some problems when doing it this way -- it's a big approximation to just assume that a liquid is going to flow like electricity (as you change the pressure and flow dramatically you might enter different flow behavior regions, i.e. non-laminar, and it might change unpredictably), but it would be easy enough to try if you had one flowmeter and pressure gauge.
Well it's self-evident to most governments that aren't receiving a substantial amount of tax revenue from a particular company marketing the software, or where the individuals in that government haven't been given large campaign contributions by said company.
It's sort of a litmus test, in fact. It's like sending out a survey ("Question: Do you think that forcing all of your citizens to send between $80-300 USD each to Redmond, Washington, USA is a good idea?") but without having to do all the paperwork. You just watch the results roll in.
You have certain rights spelled out in the Constitution, as well as in many other documents; among them is the Fourth Amendment. ("The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.")
If that makes you feel secure, great! If it doesn't, too bad. There's no protection for feeling secure, any more than there's a protection for 'having a great life.' If you feel secure within the realm of protections afforded to you by law, or don't feel secure, that's your own business. The job of the police, and of government in general, are not to make you feel a certain way, and just because you feel insecure, it doesn't mean that they're not doing their jobs.
I called my Senator yesterday, and I can confirm that the interaction with his staffers was exactly like the script above.
... but short of sending a lot of money in a paper bag, it's the best thing I can think of at the moment.
I called, some kid answered, I said I was a constituent looking to express my feelings about a bill to the Senator, he asked me what about, I gave my little spiel, he said 'Thanks for your opinion,' we hung up.
Whether it'll have any effect, I have no idea
Anyone know when we'll know the results from the committee?
This is true. I didn't go into this more in my original post because I felt that the thing was just getting too long, but part of the blame for technological gaffes like this lies on the vendors and designers of the technology. More the vendors than the desigers.
Too often we see technology -- of whatever sort -- marketed to the public as either literal or figurative 'sealed boxes.' The public is told "you don't really need to know what goes on inside of this! Trust us!" and they basically say OK and use it. When something that's been sold as a black box doesn't function as promised, then you really can't blame the users, since they're going along with how the stuff was represented to them.
PDF is a little like this: Adobe sells it as a virtual version of paper documents, that you can sign, rubberstamp, mark-up, etc. So when a user goes 'hey, I can draw a black line over text I don't want people to see, just like I can on paper,' they're working within the metaphor that's been sold to them by Adobe (if in fact that's how Adobe represented the product, which I doubt -- I'm sure they're a little more careful). When the e-document doesn't function like paper at all, the user ought to get the benefit of the doubt. At least the first time -- when it keeps happening over and over, then you really can't blame the vendor anymore, since the users aren't learning even after the mistake should be obvious.
The user still has some blame for swallowing wholesale a new piece of tech without understanding it, and incorporating it into their life -- that's the risk I was talking about earlier -- but you're correct in that this shouldn't absolve the people who market and sold the technology to them in the first place, by telling them it was something that could be used without understanding the internals. (Although on the other hand, it's ultimately very naive to just believe the words that somebody who is trying to sell you something says, without question -- I'd hope we've all learned that by the time we graduate highschool, although I suppose I shouldn't hope for such things.)
The whole terminal server aspect is something I'd not thought of before.
I wonder what it would take to build something that wasn't a desktop OS, but was just capable of serving up applications remotely, over Citrix, or something Citrix-like?
There could be a big market for something that let you serve up Windows applications (even older Win98 ones), without paying the really steep Windows Terminal Server per-seat licensing fees. I've worked on some Citrix stuff and the amount they pay in licensing is just outrageous. There are per-client fees for the application that you're delivering remotely (if it's not your own application), per-client fees for Citrix, and then per-client fees for the Windows-based server. Talk about getting screwed more than once.
Just replacing one of those components (the Windows-based server) would be huge, and I think you'd find a lot of companies interested in it because of the way Microsoft does it's licensing.
I don't know whether making something to act as an application server is any easier or harder than making a regular desktop OS, but if somebody were looking for a way to productize ReactOS into something they could sell to corporations (sell the support on, naturally), something involving remote delivery of Windows applications would be killer. The money that I've seen poured into Citrix farms is just mind-boggling on the corporate side, and people don't spend money because they like it, they do it because they think there's no other way.
Streaming video and Video-over-IP is going to make this even a bigger challenge: suppose you want to do IP video, and watch a different channel on one TV than you do on another? With only one externally-facing IP address, this could be quite a challenge; all the kludges that you'd need to make something like this function through NAT go away when you have IPv6 and every device in the house can be globally addressable (if you want it to be--people are still going to want firewalls, obviously). Same with multiple SIP streams. Even if you can get a SIP phone working through NAT, it becomes almost exponentially more complex to add another SIP ATA (say you wanted to have more than one "line"). Unless you can tell the headend to route the second line to a different port on your one externally-facing IP address, and then tell the NAT box to route that to a different internal IP, you're out of luck. People are going to want to do stuff like that as the technology becomes more mature.
The cable TV companies aren't going to be very interested from the video perspective, but they might be interested because of the voice possibilities, and the telephone companies who want to deliver video over IP might see easier implementations with IPv6 as well.
More than all this though are the "killer apps" that we don't even know about right now, and that we'll never know about without IPv6 and heavily wired, addressable homes. There are all sorts of neat things that we can't do now, or are hard to do (which is bascially the same thing if you're Joe User) that become a lot easier when everything has a unique address. To say that there aren't any benefits from switching to IPv6 is to say that we can imagine all the possibilities that might arise when the capabilities exist, and that to me is a bit of an arrogant statement. (Note I'm not saying you said that, but I see it as an implicit assumption in a lot of other anti-IPv6 blanket statements.)
I am pretty sure that rasterized PDF documents violate government disability-access guidelines, since they can't be read with screenreaders, braille terminals, or basically anything other than a set of human eyes (or a good OCR program).
They would be a lot better off going through the document in Word (or Notepad/Textedit/vi/EMACS/whatever) and just selecting the regions of text that they want to remove, and replacing it with [-- TEXT REMOVED --] or even [REDACTED]. If they were really slick, I'm sure somebody could write a little macro to replace the text with an equivalent number of characters of whitespace or random text or dashes, to preserve formatting. (Okay, so to really preserve the formatting it would have to be replaced with characters that have the same amount width as the deleted characters; maybe there's a font-set containing various widths of whitespace characters that they could use? In TeX it would be trivial.)
The results would be ugly (but really, were black bars ever very beautiful?) but at least it would actually remove the information, and wouldn't result in an inaccessible, rasterized document.
While you make a good point, the people who have to use computers to accomplish their jobs, but do not make an attempt to understand how they work (and just treat them like "black boxes") are taking an enormous risk. They are hitching the metaphorical wagon of their livelihood to a team of horses that they don't know shit about.
If you were somebody who made your living in television, but didn't understand anything about it, you would likewise be taking a great risk. You might, for instance, look like a big idiot when you show up to work at your anchor desk wearing a horizontally pinstriped shirt (which looks like ass on TV because of the Moire effect between the lines on the shirt and the TV scanlines). If you had understood the technology a little better, you might not have done that. That's a trivial example -- undoubtedly if you were a TV anchor, you'd learn or be told at some point not to wear a shirt like that without having to learn about scanlines -- but I hope you see my point.
Whenever you use a technology without learning about it, you accept a certain amount of risk. Sometimes, you gamble and win: you just use the technology, get your job done, and nobody's the wiser. You're faster, more efficient, more competitive, you look like a hero to your boss, whatever. But if the technology doesn't work, then you're SOL -- but that's the price you pay for not understanding it. That's the risk you accepted when you said to yourself "eh, I don't really care what goes on inside there."
In the case of PDF, we have a lot of people using a certain technology without knowing anything about how it works, and thus -- like the TV anchor in his pinstriped shirt (or a weatherman wearing chroma-key blue or green) -- you get these gaffes.
I'm not saying that everybody needs to learn about how everything they use all day works, down to the bare metal. Virtually nobody needs to know that, except perhaps people who are doing things that are so dangerous that they can't afford to fuck up. However, people should be aware of the tradeoff they're making and the risk they're accepting when they forgo figuring out the internal details of a system and simply accept it as a whole, on faith that it will always work a certain way. As long as people are aware of that decision, and make it consiously, and accept the results, you can't ask for more.
Generally speaking: faith is a fine thing, as long as you know when you're relying on it. It's when you thought you were relying on something else, and find out that you had nothing but faith, that a problem has occured.
Their use of redact is completely correct.
If I am releasing a document for publication and decide to remove information from it, this is redaction. It's editing for publication, which can include the removal of information. It could also include the addition of new information, but that's not what typically happens. Redaction can be a form of self-censorship, but it's not always the same.
Censorship is when a third party, generally a person in authority, suppresses information which is considered objectionable. The 'authority' can be the same as the author (e.g. 'self-censorship'), or the suppression can be indirect -- it need not be editing per se.
It's my understanding that "redact" is used only in reference to written documents that are being edited, while 'censor' is more general and can refer to anything. The terms are closely related, especially in their typical use, but they're not exactly the same. "Redact" is actually a more specific and precise word for what's going on in this instance. We can argue about whether censorship is also going on, but redaction definitely is.
Anyway, arguing about definitions by citing dictionaries is always a bit pedantic, since dictionaries are not authoritative except as a historical reference: they can tell you what a word meant at the time the dictionary was written, but not what it means right now, since a word's definition is determined by its usage. All language is inherently arbitrary: they're just sounds we make or things we write down in order to convey ideas, and the relationship between the sounds/characters and ideas is not fixed, but infinitely variable. If everyone were to decide tomorrow that 'redaction' meant the same thing as 'censorship,' that's what it would mean, and next year's dictionaries would have to be updated to reflect that.
It sounds like (my reading of TFA anyway) that they only found out he was a sex offender after he was arrested. So that could not have been the reason used to arrest him in the first place. People keep bringing it up as a kind of ex post facto justification of what happened, which isn't really relevant to the whole internet/AP argument or to his actual arrest, although it'll obviously be a key factor in what happens to him.
So I suspect that the police probably found some other grounds to arrest him on originally, and then once they made the ID and found out he was a sex offender (jackpot!), they can now charge him with all sorts of other good stuff -- violation of the terms of his parole or of a court order, probably.
From an internet-law perspective, it's too bad the guy turned out to be a sex offender because the interesting legal point of whether he was actually committing a crime by using the AP while sitting on the street and not going into the business will never be addressed; it'll almost certainly be overshadowed by more serious infractions this guy has committed. I'd wager that they never bother to charge him with theft of services or anything, if they can get him on more substantial parole violations. (Because theft of services wouldn't carry much of a penalty and would be a weak case to begin with, while the parole violation can probably land him back in prison without trial, just a hearing before the sentencing judge or parole board. From the police's perspective -- "how do we put the creepy guy away with the least amount of effort/expense" -- that's a better outcome.)
Even if you run Linux, ReactOS is a project worth paying attention to.
Right now we have Wine (or Cedega, if you prefer) if you want to run Windows applications on Linux. However, what's always intrigued me about ReactOS is the possibility of using it as the client OS on a virtual machine. I think this has certain advantages over Wine (sandboxing, greater application compatibility), and removes the biggest disincentive to Windows virtualization -- the requirement of purchasing a Windows license.
Also, because it's open source, it seems like it would be easier to get ReactOS working as a client OS on a paravirtualized system like Xen without having to use things like Vanderpool/Pacifica or accept the performance penalties of VMware. That, to me seems very cool: I could be running a Linux system as the server/Domain-zero OS, and then have multiple paravirtualized, Windows-compatible clients running on it, at full speed, without having to purchase any licenses or being dependent on any specialized virtualization hardware.
Well, the police are intended to have the power to arrest you without a warrant on the suspicion or reasonable belief that you've broken a law; exactly the standards are for that varies from one jurisdiction to the next, but they can usually hold you (at least where I live) for a certain period of time (24 or 48 hours usually) while they gather evidence, after which they have to begin charging you or release you. Generally the statues require that the officer have "reasonable cause to belive" that you committed a felony, or are driving drunk or a variety of other things. They are supposed to have a particular crime in mind, but there's a little room there (intentionally, IMO) for vagueness.
It's not clear from what I've read exactly what they suspected of this guy when they arrested him; there are a variety of things they could probably put down that would fly on paper though, at least enough to haul him in for 24 hours. Suspicion of theft of services, fraud, maybe stalking if one of the people in the restaurant filed a private complaint ahead of time. The police and district attorneys do this for a living -- they're pretty good at finding ways to hold on to people if they think they've done something.
Just from reading the article, it sounds a lot like the people from the restaurant complained to the police about this guy, so they went out there and arrested him, and now they're going to try and figure out whether he broke any laws. It's not really the way that the system is intended to work, but it's how it often does.
Example rules of criminal procedure (These are for AR, but just as an example.)
The Constitution itself (nor amendments to it) wouldn't have to abide by either of those two rules; else the effect would be to create a rule that could never be changed, which IMO is anathema to our system of government -- part of the idea behind our Consitution is that it can be changed (with intentionally great difficulty) over time.
The form this rule I'm proposing would take would be a Constitutional amendment, which regulated how regular Congressional bills and legislation had to be handled. It would not affect future Constitutional amendments, or revise the interpretation of the Constitution, or have a retroactive effect on laws already passed (as much as it would be nice to go through and strike down everything that's ever been pushed through as a rider on another bill, I think that would upset too much settled law). So "vague" Constitutional amendments could still be passed in the future, unaffected by this rule: I don't think this is a big problem, because so few Amendments get passed anyway, and there's already an established framework for working out vagueries in its intent. Plus, sometimes a certain amount of vagueness is desirable, since it allows the Supreme Court a little interpretive leeway in response to prevailing public opinion and keeps the legislature from 'thrashing' the Constitution with contradictory amendments every few years/decades (which is I think what would happen if the USSC didn't have the interpretive power that it does as a result of Constitutional vagueness; of course we could debate this all day, and I'm open to the possibility that maybe this isn't a good thing).
But you are correct, there is a certain amount of hypocrisy inherent in such a rule, however that doesn't necessarily mean that it wouldn't work. I don't think it would ever get passed for other reasons, but the lack of internal consistency isn't what would kill it.
Actually your point #2 could probably be rectified by coming up with a better definition of what "vague" means and spelling out exactly how 'overly vague' a law could or couldn't be. And I'd argue that the rule would itself contribute to a single core purpose: the purpose being to eliminate bad laws tacked on as riders to hard-to-kill bills. That's a pretty singular purpose, and passes the rule's own test.
I still think the security research exemption is pretty narrow. Note the use of the word "solely" before the phrase "promote the security of the owner or operator of such computer...". It would seem to me that if you disclosed the exploit at a 'Black Hat' conference, you would pretty much blow the 'solely promoting security' exemption out of the water.
My reading of the exemption -- and which I believe is the safest reading, in the absence of good guidance by the courts on this matter (that I am aware of) -- is that you're allowed to conduct security testing, and then use the results of such testing to harden your own systems, or communicate with the developer to fix the hole, but that if you were to publicly disclose it, then you might lose your defense that the testing was for the 'sole purpose' of hardening your system or fixing the software, and was instead being done for personal gain via publicity, etc.
Basically, the DMCA was not written with the idea of OSS in mind; most of the exemptions including the security/research ones are designed to cope with software written by commercial develeopers that is closed source, with a clear reporting chain that bugs can be submitted to in order for the software to be fixed, without full public disclosure being necessary or desirable.
That doesn't mean that a court might not find that full public disclosure was permitted under the security exemption, but there's also the possibility, if you got a judge who insisted on an absolutely strict interpretation and was totally ignorant of OSS issues, that they might not, and depending on how the disclosure was handled, the researcher/s could find themselves in hot water.
I don't think the issue is quite as clear cut as you're making it out to be.
Well what would be better was if the Constitution just specified that all legislation on a bill had to contribute to a single core purpose, and that the purpose couldn't be overly vague (to keep the purpose of every bill from being "Making the United States a Better Place"). That way the Supreme Court would have the ability to just delete anything that got attached to a bill that it wasn't supposed to have been attached to. It wouldn't solve the problem altogether (and might make it worse -- politicians would just take lots of crap on and let the courts figure it out), but it wouldn't hand that much extra power to the Executive.
I guess at the end of the day it just depends: would you rather give more power to the President or to the Justices? Historically, the latter seems to have made a lot less total boners, but that doesn't mean they will continue to do so.
I also think that the USSC should have automatic review of all new laws passed, without having to wait for a challenge case, but that's a separate issue.