Congress can pass any law it wants. The executive branch enforces the laws. When someone gets screwed over, the related court case has the potential to strike the law down, if it's deemed unconstitutional. (Which is, largely, a matter of whether the defendant has a good enough lawyer.)
At least one attempt at getting a law (the DMCA) struck down prior to a citizen being charged was dismissed because, in the judge's eyes, said citizen wasn't then under threat of being charged. As I recall, that had to do with some academic researcher whose research was made illegal, or at least part of a gray area, by the DMCA.
For once, the mouth on the Censorship icon should have the black strip removed. This law has been the dark specter over every forum I've seen for years, and many non-communication-related services, too.
The question is, is COPA finally dead, for good? No more judgements to be made on the case? Please? The article doesn't specify if it could be appealed again.
I realize they'll just pass another law with similar provisions, but at least this helps set the tone in the courts.
I managed to land a job at the computer lab. Most of my time is spent surfing Slashdot and working on Rosetta Code. Er, I mean, sitting around and waiting for students to ask me questions.
Eh? What about those of us whose extracurricularactivitiesdepend on the Internet? And those of us who colleges offer courses online? Those of us who take classes in the evening, and catch up with our social lives afterward?
BTW article is silly, the file isn't worth $38 billion $200K at best because thats the cost of rescanning everything. Would be interesting to see an accounting record of how much recreating all the documents would cost had they not had a hard copy. You're assuming the physical documents still exist. The purpose in scanning the documents may have been to cut down on physical storage requirements.
The college computer club I run has built what we call the "Video Jukebox"... It's intended to be a MythTV/gameserver/network server box that will sit in a cafe on campus and entertain the masses. (Not to mention scoring geek cred and members for the club.)
Because of the relatively complicated nature in compiling a kernel for Ubuntu, as well as the large base install size, I'm going to use Debian as the base system. The whole thing needs to fit onto a 1GB flash drive, where the system files will lie. (The internal hard drive is being reserved and tuned for MythTV use.)
The problem with ethernet connected drives is that the lag is higher than that of internal drives
Ethernet over one single hop (no switching) has a latency of under 1ms. Over two cables with a switch in the middle, and adding on the overhead of IP, I get a round trip time of 0.2-0.3ms. The average seek time for a hard drive is 4-9ms. The extra latency of using ethernet would not be significant.
A lot of latency can be added by expensive protocols like SMB or NFS, but something like iSCSI can be very fast.
Your data doesn't make sense...after adding on overhead, youre round trip time drops by 70%? If you meant 1ns, that would make more sense.
Anyway, if you'd want more error protection than ethernet provides. You only get 32 bits of of CRC error protection for an arbitrarily large amount of data. (I've heard of environments that regularly throw around 32KB packets.)
In addition, Gigabit ethernet has only been defined for a couple cable types: Single-mode fiber and Cat 6 UTP. For reasons involving EM noise, Cat 6 inside a computer case would be a lost cause. Fiber cables, on the other hand, have a much larger minimum bend radius, and are expensive to boot.
Finally, one has to consider the size of the jacks. SATA, and PATA before it, were designed to fit into narrow places. Your best bet with Ethernet would be 110-block modular plugs, but then your boardspace for four drives approaches or exceeds that of two old IDE channels. I've heard about a high-density variety of 110 blocks, but I haven't had the chance to work with them.
But Trendalyzer won't help with per-individual marketing, it's a statistical aggregation and analysis tool. When you're talking about individuals, you're talking case studies, not statistics.
I've got personal programming I've done that uses linked lists. I've got an instructor who's been teaching them in a 200-level C++ course for god knows how long. Hell, Herb Schildt's "C++: The Complete Reference" was published before this patent was filed in 2002.
That had to be fun. But POV rendering doesn't fit my idea of desktop usage. Compiling maps for FPS games, on the other hand, could conceivably be parallelized.
Ah...so you remember when the Internet was an educational and military tool, back before it took off?
Back before Google, or even Yahoo. Back when a T1 cost $1500/mo or more, making entry in to the ISP business difficult. Back before multimedia content (shareware games) pushed your average home user's bandwidth above 2400 baud.
Yeah, commercialization of the Internet really destroyed its value.
No, the benefit here seems to be less for the end-users deploying the service and more for whoever google then turns around and sells the massive amounts of correlated information to. For instance, let's see every bit of data about a specific user so we can see everything from each search he does to his entire browsing trail. Bet we could sell that for a lot of money! You've got it backwards...statistics aren't useful when you zoom in to focus on individuals, they're useful when you zoom out to focus on groups. Marketing is rarely about selling to an individual, but to selling to masses. Individuals have too many quirks and preferences to make per-individual marketing efforts worthwhile. Why spend all that effort to gaurantee a sale to one individual, when you can spend the same amount to sell to two or three persent of a group of a few thousand?
"Targeted" advertisements are still group-based efforts. Your individual browsing history is only valuable up to the point where you can be lumped into a marketing stereotype.
About ten years ago, I went online searching for prices on printer ribbons for an IBM Proprinter II. The email address I supplied one website is still receiving spam from that one encounter, not for Proprinter ribbons, not for dot matrix supplies, but for inkjets and toner cartridges. I got lumped into a "shops for printer supplies online" marketing group; nobody's ever sent me an offer for supplies for my Proprinter II. (Though, once he found out I had a use for it, a guy handed me a box of 8.5"x11" tractor feed paper yesterday.)
Slashdot Mirror
Congress can pass any law it wants. The executive branch enforces the laws. When someone gets screwed over, the related court case has the potential to strike the law down, if it's deemed unconstitutional. (Which is, largely, a matter of whether the defendant has a good enough lawyer.)
At least one attempt at getting a law (the DMCA) struck down prior to a citizen being charged was dismissed because, in the judge's eyes, said citizen wasn't then under threat of being charged. As I recall, that had to do with some academic researcher whose research was made illegal, or at least part of a gray area, by the DMCA.
Read the article. Google stood up against the DoJ on trade secret grounds, not privacy grounds.
For once, the mouth on the Censorship icon should have the black strip removed. This law has been the dark specter over every forum I've seen for years, and many non-communication-related services, too.
The question is, is COPA finally dead, for good? No more judgements to be made on the case? Please? The article doesn't specify if it could be appealed again.
I realize they'll just pass another law with similar provisions, but at least this helps set the tone in the courts.
So are you going to be handing down Justice to them, Raz?
I could swear I've heard this approach mentioned before. Is anyone else getting a sense of deja vu?
I managed to land a job at the computer lab. Most of my time is spent surfing Slashdot and working on Rosetta Code. Er, I mean, sitting around and waiting for students to ask me questions.
Eh? What about those of us whose extracurricular activities depend on the Internet? And those of us who colleges offer courses online? Those of us who take classes in the evening, and catch up with our social lives afterward?
Glad I don't live in a dorm.
Ah. I missed the "re" part of "rescanned". I thought that was the cost of the initial digitization.
Seppuku?
The college computer club I run has built what we call the "Video Jukebox" ... It's intended to be a MythTV/gameserver/network server box that will sit in a cafe on campus and entertain the masses. (Not to mention scoring geek cred and members for the club.)
Because of the relatively complicated nature in compiling a kernel for Ubuntu, as well as the large base install size, I'm going to use Debian as the base system. The whole thing needs to fit onto a 1GB flash drive, where the system files will lie. (The internal hard drive is being reserved and tuned for MythTV use.)
Ethernet over one single hop (no switching) has a latency of under 1ms. Over two cables with a switch in the middle, and adding on the overhead of IP, I get a round trip time of 0.2-0.3ms. The average seek time for a hard drive is 4-9ms. The extra latency of using ethernet would not be significant.
Your data doesn't make sense...after adding on overhead, youre round trip time drops by 70%? If you meant 1ns, that would make more sense.A lot of latency can be added by expensive protocols like SMB or NFS, but something like iSCSI can be very fast.
Anyway, if you'd want more error protection than ethernet provides. You only get 32 bits of of CRC error protection for an arbitrarily large amount of data. (I've heard of environments that regularly throw around 32KB packets.)
In addition, Gigabit ethernet has only been defined for a couple cable types: Single-mode fiber and Cat 6 UTP. For reasons involving EM noise, Cat 6 inside a computer case would be a lost cause. Fiber cables, on the other hand, have a much larger minimum bend radius, and are expensive to boot.
Finally, one has to consider the size of the jacks. SATA, and PATA before it, were designed to fit into narrow places. Your best bet with Ethernet would be 110-block modular plugs, but then your boardspace for four drives approaches or exceeds that of two old IDE channels. I've heard about a high-density variety of 110 blocks, but I haven't had the chance to work with them.
Ah. I see. Point taken. :-)
Nope. Actually, it's 129.453827 kbps. (Is there anything Google can't do?)
But Trendalyzer won't help with per-individual marketing, it's a statistical aggregation and analysis tool. When you're talking about individuals, you're talking case studies, not statistics.
I can't find any references to lunar regolith being radioactive.
It's better than LoCs and telephone books. I just wish they'd mentioned the encoding bitrate...
I bought "The Art of Programming" for my dad for his Birthday. Then read them on my own. :-)
OK, so where do I go to submit prior art?
I've got personal programming I've done that uses linked lists. I've got an instructor who's been teaching them in a 200-level C++ course for god knows how long. Hell, Herb Schildt's "C++: The Complete Reference" was published before this patent was filed in 2002.
Human civilization has finally advanced to Feudalism.
What's the next tech? Anyone have their "Sid Meyer's Andromeda" guide handy?
That had to be fun. But POV rendering doesn't fit my idea of desktop usage. Compiling maps for FPS games, on the other hand, could conceivably be parallelized.
Ah...so you remember when the Internet was an educational and military tool, back before it took off?
Back before Google, or even Yahoo. Back when a T1 cost $1500/mo or more, making entry in to the ISP business difficult. Back before multimedia content (shareware games) pushed your average home user's bandwidth above 2400 baud.
Yeah, commercialization of the Internet really destroyed its value.
"Targeted" advertisements are still group-based efforts. Your individual browsing history is only valuable up to the point where you can be lumped into a marketing stereotype.
About ten years ago, I went online searching for prices on printer ribbons for an IBM Proprinter II. The email address I supplied one website is still receiving spam from that one encounter, not for Proprinter ribbons, not for dot matrix supplies, but for inkjets and toner cartridges. I got lumped into a "shops for printer supplies online" marketing group; nobody's ever sent me an offer for supplies for my Proprinter II. (Though, once he found out I had a use for it, a guy handed me a box of 8.5"x11" tractor feed paper yesterday.)