Another swipe at the ex-post-facto provision that the Supreme Court has foolishly vitiated over the past few years, and one at freedom of speech as well.
While MySpace as a private company certainly has the right to use these registries that way, for the government to set up a list of "people not to listen to" or worse "people who private entities should block the speech of or risk lawsuits" is a blow to free speech. Whether it's _for the children_ or not.
Next story on Slashdot: Users blocked from slashdot for a "public lewdity" offense committed in college.
No, the C '/' operator does NOT take floats as operands. If you give it integers, it executes an integer divide, not a floating point divide. The POWER architecture does not generate a hardware exception on integer divide by zero; explicit code must be generated to catch the error. The AIX XLC compiler has long had an option to generate that code, but of course it does slow things down.
Their sense of self is now defined by factors largely beyond their control - i.e. their appeal to the opposite sex.
This is NEW? No, this is old, older than the caveman.
100 years ago, heck, even 50 years ago, teenage girls prided themselves on their ability to do domestic duties - cooking, cleaning, social graces, etc.
And just what do you think all that cooking, cleaning, and social graces were in service of? That's right, landing a man.
Porn only reinforces the notion that a person's self worth is a matter not of their personality and intelligence, but of their sexual appeal to others
Even granting that for the sake of argument, it's insufficient reason to restrict it. Unless you also think it should be the government's job to restrict the bald statement "Your worth depends on how attractive you are to the opposite sex".
A 2000 Economic Policy Institute study showed that almost 60 percent of Americans in the lowest income quintile in 1969 were in a higher quintile in 1996, and over 61 percent in the highest income quintile had moved down into a lower income quintile during the same period.
Sure, but the reason for those effects is obvious. Most of the people who fell from the highest income quintile retired. Most of the people who moved up from the bottom were making little income because they were young and inexperienced.
'Software developers have become adept at the difficult art of building reasonably reliable systems out of unreliable parts. The snag is that often we do not know exactly how we did it.'
No, alas, what we generally do is build unreliable systems out of reliable parts.
The RIAA and MPAA got the DMCA 512 provisions passed so they could stomp on alleged copyright violations without bothering with going to court. In return, they threw the bone of safe harbor to ISPs, a bone which the ISPs actually already had thanks to the Netcom and some other decisions. Now alleged copyright violations happen fast and furious and the copyright owners find their own law means they _can't_ sue the ISPs provided that the ISPs respect takedown notices and have a policy against violations. Why should the ISPs go through any further effort to prevent violations?
The copyright owners made their bed, now they can damn well lie in it.
I'm running the Ubuntu edgy kernel, patched with the ck patchset (for user-level pseudo-real-time stuff), and the July v4l-dvb snapshot with modifications to make audio more reliable (check out the pchdtv forum for them). I don't know about combining with the PVR150/250; making multiple cards work together reliably gets to be a pain because v4l-dvb is not good at keeping the indexes consistent across boots, particularly not when hybrid (analog + digital) tuner cards are involved.
I have the box you desire, built off the HD-5500 (I also have a KWORLD ATSC-110 but it seems less reliable on QAM... too bad, it's cheaper and comes with a remote). MythTV 0.20, clear-QAM, ATSC, NTSC. 64-bit Ubuntu with some custom stuff. And probably 100% legal, at least as far as criminal law goes (because I didn't include the dvdCss library). I've considered trying to sell them but I haven't found a good forum. Not cheap -- about $700 or so in parts bought at retail.
The dictionary definition (according to m-w.com) of "innovate" is "to introduce as or as if new". Microsoft has certainly introduced a lot of things _as if_ they were new (even though they weren't, since Unix, Linux, and/or Apple had them years before). Therefore Microsoft is innovative.
Exactly. By bringing a civil suit for EU2000, MS can essentially act as accusor and judge. There's no way the teenager (guilty or otherwise) can afford to fight it, and even if they can, it'll cost them more than EU2000 for a defense. So they're punished just because Microsoft makes them a target, and no objective examination of the evidence is ever made.
It's also hard to see how one could be a phisher _without_ criminal intent, so I question what Microsoft is really up to here.
But with these explicit exceptions in place, the tools needed to achieve the allowed circumvention become legal. It's possible, for example, that allowing DVDs to be ripped for educational purposes makes libdvdcss legal, because it now has a legal use. And if you can legally acquire a copy of the tool needed to break DVD encryption, you can then legally exercise your full Fair Use rights.
This is not the case. The Library of Congress does not have the authority to issue exemptions to the device provisions of the DMCA. So even though they are making it legal to rip a DVD for educational purposes, manufacturing, marketing or trafficking in any tool which can actually rip said DVD is still grounds for $100,000 fines and/or 5+ years in Federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison.
You missed the point. If this were a free market, copyrights would never expire.
If this were a free market, there wouldn't be any copyrights. And certainly no DMCA, so if companies insisted on putting out crappy DRM-ed software and hardware, all they'd succeed in doing is creating a secondary market in tools to remove the DRM. That situation in fact existed prior to the DMCA.
Copyright holder's life plus 70 years is NOT a limited time. Not given the language of the clause: "for limited Times to Authors and Inventors". If the copyright lasts for the life of the author or longer, then from the perspective of the author, it is secured for an unlimited time; as long as the author is alive, he has the rights. Once he no longer is, he no longer does, regardless of the number of years the right exists after his life ends.
Further, when the copyrights are continually extended shortly before or even _after_ they've expired, that's not a limited time either, from anyone's perspective. That's an unlimited time on the installment plan.
Here in the US, patents are also (apparently) given without any checks on the claims. Unfortunately, these patents are then given a strong presumption of validity in court. There's a strong burden of proof required to invalidate the patent, and only a weak one required to show infringement. So, simple method to control the use of something already in use:
1) Patent something just slightly different from the prior art. This particular implementation should not be one in wide use, but it can (and usually will be) some fairly trivial variant of it, or some obvious combination with another technique.
2) Find a company practicing the prior art and sue them
3) When they try to invalidate the patent, use your strong presumption of validity to show that your patent is, in fact, different from the prior art because you did at least one thing differently.
4) When they try to claim they aren't infringing, use other court precedents to claim their implementation is close enough to yours to be infringing.
5) Profit (no "????")
This is how the CSIRO WiFi OFDM case went down recently, for instance. Though they added the twist of applying with a restriction (to frequencies above 10Ghz) then getting it removed at the last minute; the court was fine with that.
A substantive due process claim in a conservative court system, when the defendant isn't sympathetic and the plaintiff is viewed (by the legal system if no one else) as good guys who support the American economy? Forget about it.
I thought journalists thought the US was the root of all evil and Cuba was a paradise with wonderful medical care whose only problems were caused by US oppression? Something's wrong here.
around my source code and now it's not an implementation, just a description.
Of course, that's a false distinction; the source code itself is a description of an algorithm, one detailed enough that a computer can use it to implement the algorithm (or convert it into a form in which it can be so used). That's a basic problem with software patents; a good enough description IS an implementation, so it's impossible to protect a monopoly on implementations without also protecting a monopoly on descriptions (which patents are emphatically not supposed to do).
You're right, and I should have remembered that, as I work for a company which just had some products tested (not in that band). We call it 'FCC testing' so often that I tend to forget it's actually not the FCC doing the testing.
Design changes are an ugly possibility, though a design change which would both reduce cost and cause a 43dB increase in power is something I'd really like to hear about. Though I'd guess it increases distortion and out of band radiation as well.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been to Denmark. Your food is nothing to write home about.
Another swipe at the ex-post-facto provision that the Supreme Court has foolishly vitiated over the past few years, and one at freedom of speech as well.
While MySpace as a private company certainly has the right to use these registries that way, for the government to set up a list of "people not to listen to" or worse "people who private entities should block the speech of or risk lawsuits" is a blow to free speech. Whether it's _for the children_ or not.
Next story on Slashdot: Users blocked from slashdot for a "public lewdity" offense committed in college.
The computers are just doing 0^0 = exp(0 log(0)) = exp (0) = 1. The problem is that log(0) isn't really defined, so this is nonsense.
Engineers approximate "i" as "j".
No, the C '/' operator does NOT take floats as operands. If you give it integers, it executes an integer divide, not a floating point divide. The POWER architecture does not generate a hardware exception on integer divide by zero; explicit code must be generated to catch the error. The AIX XLC compiler has long had an option to generate that code, but of course it does slow things down.
The RIAA and MPAA got the DMCA 512 provisions passed so they could stomp on alleged copyright violations without bothering with going to court. In return, they threw the bone of safe harbor to ISPs, a bone which the ISPs actually already had thanks to the Netcom and some other decisions. Now alleged copyright violations happen fast and furious and the copyright owners find their own law means they _can't_ sue the ISPs provided that the ISPs respect takedown notices and have a policy against violations. Why should the ISPs go through any further effort to prevent violations?
The copyright owners made their bed, now they can damn well lie in it.
I'm running the Ubuntu edgy kernel, patched with the ck patchset (for user-level pseudo-real-time stuff), and the July v4l-dvb snapshot with modifications to make audio more reliable (check out the pchdtv forum for them). I don't know about combining with the PVR150/250; making multiple cards work together reliably gets to be a pain because v4l-dvb is not good at keeping the indexes consistent across boots, particularly not when hybrid (analog + digital) tuner cards are involved.
I have the box you desire, built off the HD-5500 (I also have a KWORLD ATSC-110 but it seems less reliable on QAM... too bad, it's cheaper and comes with a remote). MythTV 0.20, clear-QAM, ATSC, NTSC. 64-bit Ubuntu with some custom stuff. And probably 100% legal, at least as far as criminal law goes (because I didn't include the dvdCss library). I've considered trying to sell them but I haven't found a good forum. Not cheap -- about $700 or so in parts bought at retail.
The dictionary definition (according to m-w.com) of "innovate" is "to introduce as or as if new". Microsoft has certainly introduced a lot of things _as if_ they were new (even though they weren't, since Unix, Linux, and/or Apple had them years before). Therefore Microsoft is innovative.
The levy for mp3 players was overturned, so if you've been charged it recently, you've been ripped off.
A copyright is a government-granted monopoly; in a free market it wouldn't exist. I don't know what a non-government copyright would be.
Exactly. By bringing a civil suit for EU2000, MS can essentially act as accusor and judge. There's no way the teenager (guilty or otherwise) can afford to fight it, and even if they can, it'll cost them more than EU2000 for a defense. So they're punished just because Microsoft makes them a target, and no objective examination of the evidence is ever made.
It's also hard to see how one could be a phisher _without_ criminal intent, so I question what Microsoft is really up to here.
Copyright holder's life plus 70 years is NOT a limited time. Not given the language of the clause: "for limited Times to Authors and Inventors". If the copyright lasts for the life of the author or longer, then from the perspective of the author, it is secured for an unlimited time; as long as the author is alive, he has the rights. Once he no longer is, he no longer does, regardless of the number of years the right exists after his life ends. Further, when the copyrights are continually extended shortly before or even _after_ they've expired, that's not a limited time either, from anyone's perspective. That's an unlimited time on the installment plan.
Here in the US, patents are also (apparently) given without any checks on the claims. Unfortunately, these patents are then given a strong presumption of validity in court. There's a strong burden of proof required to invalidate the patent, and only a weak one required to show infringement. So, simple method to control the use of something already in use:
1) Patent something just slightly different from the prior art. This particular implementation should not be one in wide use, but it can (and usually will be) some fairly trivial variant of it, or some obvious combination with another technique.
2) Find a company practicing the prior art and sue them
3) When they try to invalidate the patent, use your strong presumption of validity to show that your patent is, in fact, different from the prior art because you did at least one thing differently.
4) When they try to claim they aren't infringing, use other court precedents to claim their implementation is close enough to yours to be infringing.
5) Profit (no "????")
This is how the CSIRO WiFi OFDM case went down recently, for instance. Though they added the twist of applying with a restriction (to frequencies above 10Ghz) then getting it removed at the last minute; the court was fine with that.
A substantive due process claim in a conservative court system, when the defendant isn't sympathetic and the plaintiff is viewed (by the legal system if no one else) as good guys who support the American economy? Forget about it.
He's using an open wireless node in Miami. Hey, he runs his own country, he can use amps and antennas as big as he wants.
I thought journalists thought the US was the root of all evil and Cuba was a paradise with wonderful medical care whose only problems were caused by US oppression? Something's wrong here.
JPEG compression is nontrivial. Forgent's patent on a particular twist of run-length-encoding is not.
I just put ...
#if 0
#endif
around my source code and now it's not an implementation, just a description.
Of course, that's a false distinction; the source code itself is a description of an algorithm, one detailed enough that a computer can use it to implement the algorithm (or convert it into a form in which it can be so used). That's a basic problem with software patents; a good enough description IS an implementation, so it's impossible to protect a monopoly on implementations without also protecting a monopoly on descriptions (which patents are emphatically not supposed to do).
You're right, and I should have remembered that, as I work for a company which just had some products tested (not in that band). We call it 'FCC testing' so often that I tend to forget it's actually not the FCC doing the testing.
Design changes are an ugly possibility, though a design change which would both reduce cost and cause a 43dB increase in power is something I'd really like to hear about. Though I'd guess it increases distortion and out of band radiation as well.