It also held that the emergency search fell under the doctrine of the "special needs" exemption to the Fourth Amendment.
Speaking as one who has read the ruling, I'll simply note that it applied to whether or not the evidence was admissable (a matter of law, as this is an appeal), not whether the university was right to hack the man's computer. In fact, reading the ruling, it would appear that that might not be the case.
However, I would also imagine that the limited nature of the search and the circumstances would weigh heavily in favor of the network admin who broke into the guy's computer.
You are at the mall and some psycho starts shooting everyone in sight with an AK-47. You work in the mall as an armed guard. If the mall thinks being shot at and killed is wrong, then why do they think shooting someone else is right? Two wrongs don't make a right. The shooter is a criminal, and the mall security guard is a criminal. It's that simple.
There are specific laws involved in self defense, as well as laws that govern people who carry weapons as part of their job. The two situations simply aren't comparable. Unless, of course, you can find statutes that say the university had the power break computer crime laws and hack the man's computer?
Whether there was sufficient evidence for a warrant is irrelevant -- as you yourself noted, the University is not a law enforcement entity, nor were they working in that capacity.
Additionally, whether the University had the means to sufficiently control its network is also not relevant to whether they had the right to break the law -- unless the man in question specifically allowed hacking into his computer by agreement. Did he do so?
IANAL, but I wouldn't be terribly surprised to see a lawsuit against the university over their actions. Frankly, I'm rather surprised no one has been charged with hacking the man's computer. Perhaps it's being "overlooked" due to the obviously bad actor involved -- but IMHO it shouldn't be. OKing this sort of vigilantism is a pretty dangerous thing to do, on many levels.
You may not noticeably lose or gain much weight over the course of several weeks. Even if you've actually lost body mass, simple water gain can make up a couple of pounds difference in the short term.
Losing or gaining weight takes time. But it really does come down to calories in vs. calories burned. Not that nutrition in general doesn't matter, but the basic formula for weight gain/loss stands.
These aren't mysteries, but there's a strong social stigma that tells us that those who are obese just aren't "trying". Well, I can tell you from personal experience that, even motivated by health problems, it was a HUGE effort for me to go from morbidly obese down to merely substantially overweight, and it's even harder keeping it off in the long term.
This, I'll agree with. It's not easy to lose weight -- you need to burn an excess of 500 calories per day over what you consume just to lose a pound in a week. I view TV ads that push the idea you can lose "20 pounds in 2 weeks!" as bona-fide false advertising.
Losing weight takes time, and keeping it off takes diligence. However, becoming obese in the first place is very rarely due to genetics. Much more often, it's because the person, over a long period of time, consumes more than they think they're consuming (or just doesn't care about quantities until one day they wake up and realize they're overweight). It's still a matter of consuming more calories than you burn.
Even those mice you mentioned (hyperphagic) actually consumed far more than the others. The problem was they had lost their ability to know when to stop eating.
1000 calories per day is at least within the realm of believability. I'm not a dietitian or physician (just a diligent amateur who lost about 35 pounds in a year by counting calories), but considering the average person burns from 1000 to 1500 per day for basic organ function, I suppose it's possible you have a very, very low basal metabolism rate.
It should be noted, however, that it's very easy to mis-estimate the number of calories you eat per day.
The simple act of breathing and beating your heart (in other words, basic organ function) requires anywhere from 1000 to 1500 calories for the average adult. It is categorically impossible for an adult human to gain 35 pounds in 6 months consuming 400 calories per day, since that would actually require almost 700 excess calories per day, above and beyond what you burn.
Let me put it this way: if you're being truthful and can prove it, you'd better talk to some researchers -- you've just disproved Einstein and there's very likely a Nobel Prize in it somewhere.
Much more likely: you're consuming a lot more than you think you are.
For most people, this is true. However, there are medical conditions that are known to cause the body to store fat, no matter how little you eat. I've seen someone eat as little as 300 calories a day (over a period of several months) and gain weight, because she has one of those medical conditions.
What you say above is actually impossible for an adult human. No one burns fewer than 300 calories per day simply by breathing.
(I suppose the person in question could have consumed copius amounts of water, enough to offset the huge caloric deficit that was causing actual tissue to be consumed, but that wouldn't be fat gain.)
Yes, how quickly your body burns calories is in part genetic. And yes, if you get an overabundance of calories, genetics helps to determine where the excess goes (in other words, the percent that gets stored as fat). But genetics can't overcome the laws of physics. Mass and energy can't be created out of thin air.
I wrote a few autoloading programs myself for the C64. They'd use the ",8,1" suffix and load into the stack area, which (fortunately) was located south of location "x0101", if I recall correctly. You could just make the first few tens of bytes "x01" so that the return from the LOAD subroutine would start executing your program immediately (usually a small machine language program at x0101 that would finish the loading process). It was probably a pretty common way to do things, but certainly handy.
It may. Or this may be another in a long line of instances in which Bush political appointees have put pressure on an agency to make their publications and data fit a political agenda.
Did that happen here? It's tough to say just from one publication. But a little bit of skepticism might be in order.
This is the reasons I replied to you. I have little concern about your snide remarks on the liberal control.
I'm sorry you found them snide. For the record, one of the enduring hallmarks of modern "conservatism" (read: right-wingerism) is the belief and the attitude that liberals are everywhere, they control everything, right-wingers can't get a fair shake and are an oppressed, silent majority.
All of this is patently, demonstrably absurd, of course (last I checked, hard-line right wingers still have an overwhelming presence in both the media and the highest levels of government, and even with the recent Congressional takeover progressives are far less represented in government than right wingers). However, if it seems too nasty to note this in an offhand comment, I'll simply plead long, bitter experience as my explanation for an itchy trigger finger on the subject.
As for Hollywood and liberals, as others have noted many of the execs who control what actually gets made are GOP'ers, and when it comes to media in general, one has only to look at the likes of "24" and major network productions like the blatantly biased and fictional anti-Clinton "Path to 9/11" to prove that right-wing fantasies get turned into what we see every day. IMHO it's a pretty tough case to make, then, that real evidence human-induced global warming is wrong wouldn't make it into either Hollywood productions or TV specials.
I'll simply note that I'm not so sure the original premise (that the RIAA or it's contractors wouldn't be faking evidence) is a sound one. There are real financial reasons for them to be faking evidence, and the end result (they get to claim both that piracy is a rampant problem for them and they're doing something about it) is the same.
It's also hard to believe that an organization that has taken so much flak for its actions would care about the consequences of being accused of faking evidence, since proving that they did so would actually be rather difficult.
If they think this is a good deal, then why not make it part of a package when one buys an iPod? Spend an additional $5 for your 1GB iPod, and you get a contract that says you can download as much cartel music as you want, from any source, to that device.
For people who want to go the iTunes route, they could simply turn down the contract.
Sigh. Something tells me the fact that they're trying to legislate this means they wouldn't go for my idea. Not enough free money in it for them, I'm guessing.
...considering that you could fit maybe 250 128 bps mp3's on a 1 GB iPod (that comes to about $.02 per song), I guess we know now how much people should be penalized for illegal music sharing.
These collections are intended to compensate artists and labels for the losses they suffer when people 'illegally' copy or transfer music
No, they're not. They're intended to set up yet another cash cow for large recording companies, irrespective of whether individuals put legal or illegal copies of music on their recording devices.
And no, they're not intended to supplement the compensation of artists, regardless.
Geez, that was easy to translate. The recording companies don't even try to hide their intentions behind competent PR any more.
...I agree with you that copyright law, as it stands, prohibits copying without the author's permission (except for certain instances), regardless of whether money is involved.
However, much of recent law, designed to implement draconian criminal punishments for those who copy without making money off the action, is based not on fundamental, original notions of copyright, but new ideas about intellectual property pushed by those who stand to profit off of those changes.
First, let's be clear here: I didn't say the word "money" appears in the clause in question.
However, I think you have to be fairly daft to believe the point of such exclusive rights, geared as it is towards "the promotion of progress of science and useful arts", wasn't about making money off the deal.
In the last several years, however, the point of copyright has no longer been the promotion of public good (through ensuring the ability to earn money for one's labors); rather, it's become focused on the notion of treating ideas as "property" and copyright violation as "theft". Thus, ever more draconian copyright law has been the result.
I'm hardly an anti-copyright campaigner. However, when copyright is moved so heavily into criminal law instead of civil law; when damages completely out of line with actual harm are allowed and even mandated; when copyright duration is extended well past the death of the original creator (and thus well past reasonable expectation that the creator will continue to produce creative works); when criminal punishment for copyright violation exceeds that for certain violent crimes...I think it's fair to say that something is a little out of whack.
Which, I think, was the point of the post to which you were originally responding.
...simply don't worry about it, since the chance of a given file sharer being contacted with a demand for money, much less dragged into court, is on the order of your chances of dying from some fairly rare causes.
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It also held that the emergency search fell under the doctrine of the "special needs" exemption to the Fourth Amendment.
Speaking as one who has read the ruling, I'll simply note that it applied to whether or not the evidence was admissable (a matter of law, as this is an appeal), not whether the university was right to hack the man's computer. In fact, reading the ruling, it would appear that that might not be the case.
However, I would also imagine that the limited nature of the search and the circumstances would weigh heavily in favor of the network admin who broke into the guy's computer.
You are at the mall and some psycho starts shooting everyone in sight with an AK-47. You work in the mall as an armed guard. If the mall thinks being shot at and killed is wrong, then why do they think shooting someone else is right? Two wrongs don't make a right. The shooter is a criminal, and the mall security guard is a criminal. It's that simple.
There are specific laws involved in self defense, as well as laws that govern people who carry weapons as part of their job. The two situations simply aren't comparable. Unless, of course, you can find statutes that say the university had the power break computer crime laws and hack the man's computer?
Whether there was sufficient evidence for a warrant is irrelevant -- as you yourself noted, the University is not a law enforcement entity, nor were they working in that capacity.
Additionally, whether the University had the means to sufficiently control its network is also not relevant to whether they had the right to break the law -- unless the man in question specifically allowed hacking into his computer by agreement. Did he do so?
IANAL, but I wouldn't be terribly surprised to see a lawsuit against the university over their actions. Frankly, I'm rather surprised no one has been charged with hacking the man's computer. Perhaps it's being "overlooked" due to the obviously bad actor involved -- but IMHO it shouldn't be. OKing this sort of vigilantism is a pretty dangerous thing to do, on many levels.
You may not noticeably lose or gain much weight over the course of several weeks. Even if you've actually lost body mass, simple water gain can make up a couple of pounds difference in the short term.
Losing or gaining weight takes time. But it really does come down to calories in vs. calories burned. Not that nutrition in general doesn't matter, but the basic formula for weight gain/loss stands.
And yes, I'm speaking from experience.
These aren't mysteries, but there's a strong social stigma that tells us that those who are obese just aren't "trying". Well, I can tell you from personal experience that, even motivated by health problems, it was a HUGE effort for me to go from morbidly obese down to merely substantially overweight, and it's even harder keeping it off in the long term.
This, I'll agree with. It's not easy to lose weight -- you need to burn an excess of 500 calories per day over what you consume just to lose a pound in a week. I view TV ads that push the idea you can lose "20 pounds in 2 weeks!" as bona-fide false advertising.
Losing weight takes time, and keeping it off takes diligence. However, becoming obese in the first place is very rarely due to genetics. Much more often, it's because the person, over a long period of time, consumes more than they think they're consuming (or just doesn't care about quantities until one day they wake up and realize they're overweight). It's still a matter of consuming more calories than you burn.
Even those mice you mentioned (hyperphagic) actually consumed far more than the others. The problem was they had lost their ability to know when to stop eating.
1000 calories per day is at least within the realm of believability. I'm not a dietitian or physician (just a diligent amateur who lost about 35 pounds in a year by counting calories), but considering the average person burns from 1000 to 1500 per day for basic organ function, I suppose it's possible you have a very, very low basal metabolism rate.
It should be noted, however, that it's very easy to mis-estimate the number of calories you eat per day.
The simple act of breathing and beating your heart (in other words, basic organ function) requires anywhere from 1000 to 1500 calories for the average adult. It is categorically impossible for an adult human to gain 35 pounds in 6 months consuming 400 calories per day, since that would actually require almost 700 excess calories per day, above and beyond what you burn.
Let me put it this way: if you're being truthful and can prove it, you'd better talk to some researchers -- you've just disproved Einstein and there's very likely a Nobel Prize in it somewhere.
Much more likely: you're consuming a lot more than you think you are.
For most people, this is true. However, there are medical conditions that are known to cause the body to store fat, no matter how little you eat. I've seen someone eat as little as 300 calories a day (over a period of several months) and gain weight, because she has one of those medical conditions.
What you say above is actually impossible for an adult human. No one burns fewer than 300 calories per day simply by breathing.
(I suppose the person in question could have consumed copius amounts of water, enough to offset the huge caloric deficit that was causing actual tissue to be consumed, but that wouldn't be fat gain.)
Yes, how quickly your body burns calories is in part genetic. And yes, if you get an overabundance of calories, genetics helps to determine where the excess goes (in other words, the percent that gets stored as fat). But genetics can't overcome the laws of physics. Mass and energy can't be created out of thin air.
Exactly. Now you know :)
Or am I overanalyzing the joke and being pedantic
:)
Not at all
I wrote a few autoloading programs myself for the C64. They'd use the ",8,1" suffix and load into the stack area, which (fortunately) was located south of location "x0101", if I recall correctly. You could just make the first few tens of bytes "x01" so that the return from the LOAD subroutine would start executing your program immediately (usually a small machine language program at x0101 that would finish the loading process). It was probably a pretty common way to do things, but certainly handy.
Damn, brings back memories.
Does NASA count as a good source?
It may. Or this may be another in a long line of instances in which Bush political appointees have put pressure on an agency to make their publications and data fit a political agenda.
Did that happen here? It's tough to say just from one publication. But a little bit of skepticism might be in order.
This is the reasons I replied to you. I have little concern about your snide remarks on the liberal control.
I'm sorry you found them snide. For the record, one of the enduring hallmarks of modern "conservatism" (read: right-wingerism) is the belief and the attitude that liberals are everywhere, they control everything, right-wingers can't get a fair shake and are an oppressed, silent majority.
All of this is patently, demonstrably absurd, of course (last I checked, hard-line right wingers still have an overwhelming presence in both the media and the highest levels of government, and even with the recent Congressional takeover progressives are far less represented in government than right wingers). However, if it seems too nasty to note this in an offhand comment, I'll simply plead long, bitter experience as my explanation for an itchy trigger finger on the subject.
As for Hollywood and liberals, as others have noted many of the execs who control what actually gets made are GOP'ers, and when it comes to media in general, one has only to look at the likes of "24" and major network productions like the blatantly biased and fictional anti-Clinton "Path to 9/11" to prove that right-wing fantasies get turned into what we see every day. IMHO it's a pretty tough case to make, then, that real evidence human-induced global warming is wrong wouldn't make it into either Hollywood productions or TV specials.
I'll simply note that I'm not so sure the original premise (that the RIAA or it's contractors wouldn't be faking evidence) is a sound one. There are real financial reasons for them to be faking evidence, and the end result (they get to claim both that piracy is a rampant problem for them and they're doing something about it) is the same.
It's also hard to believe that an organization that has taken so much flak for its actions would care about the consequences of being accused of faking evidence, since proving that they did so would actually be rather difficult.
Ummm...wow. So this guy doesn't even buy the idea that CO2 traps heat in the Earth's atmosphere?
That doesn't exactly inspire confidence. What's his next act? Proving the sun goes 'round the Earth?
Absolutely correct. Liberals control the world. Sucks to be a poor, oppressed, powerless right winger these days.
It's just a suggestion, but you might want to hold off on the victory dance until these results are verified and studied a little more thoroughly.
I knew Doug Jacobson when I was an engineering student at ISU. He seemed like a decent and knowledgeable guy, very interested in computer security.
I'm very sorry to see he's come to this.
Exactly. What's more, almost all the holes he found were rated as relatively minor by Secunia, and have already been fixed.
As usual, however, Microsoft's record of performance on that score hasn't been as stellar.
So while some MS fanboy types might like to claim this as a "bad month" for Firefox, I can't say I agree.
Who the heck do you think you are, ruining a perfectly good libertarian rant with your real-world considerations?
If they think this is a good deal, then why not make it part of a package when one buys an iPod? Spend an additional $5 for your 1GB iPod, and you get a contract that says you can download as much cartel music as you want, from any source, to that device.
For people who want to go the iTunes route, they could simply turn down the contract.
Sigh. Something tells me the fact that they're trying to legislate this means they wouldn't go for my idea. Not enough free money in it for them, I'm guessing.
I guess that should have been 128 kbps.
...considering that you could fit maybe 250 128 bps mp3's on a 1 GB iPod (that comes to about $.02 per song), I guess we know now how much people should be penalized for illegal music sharing.
These collections are intended to compensate artists and labels for the losses they suffer when people 'illegally' copy or transfer music
No, they're not. They're intended to set up yet another cash cow for large recording companies, irrespective of whether individuals put legal or illegal copies of music on their recording devices.
And no, they're not intended to supplement the compensation of artists, regardless.
Geez, that was easy to translate. The recording companies don't even try to hide their intentions behind competent PR any more.
...I agree with you that copyright law, as it stands, prohibits copying without the author's permission (except for certain instances), regardless of whether money is involved.
However, much of recent law, designed to implement draconian criminal punishments for those who copy without making money off the action, is based not on fundamental, original notions of copyright, but new ideas about intellectual property pushed by those who stand to profit off of those changes.
First, let's be clear here: I didn't say the word "money" appears in the clause in question.
However, I think you have to be fairly daft to believe the point of such exclusive rights, geared as it is towards "the promotion of progress of science and useful arts", wasn't about making money off the deal.
In the last several years, however, the point of copyright has no longer been the promotion of public good (through ensuring the ability to earn money for one's labors); rather, it's become focused on the notion of treating ideas as "property" and copyright violation as "theft". Thus, ever more draconian copyright law has been the result.
I'm hardly an anti-copyright campaigner. However, when copyright is moved so heavily into criminal law instead of civil law; when damages completely out of line with actual harm are allowed and even mandated; when copyright duration is extended well past the death of the original creator (and thus well past reasonable expectation that the creator will continue to produce creative works); when criminal punishment for copyright violation exceeds that for certain violent crimes...I think it's fair to say that something is a little out of whack.
Which, I think, was the point of the post to which you were originally responding.
...simply don't worry about it, since the chance of a given file sharer being contacted with a demand for money, much less dragged into court, is on the order of your chances of dying from some fairly rare causes.