I disagree. By backing off, they're letting the cartels know that their methods of intimidation work. It will only encourage similar acts in the future. The only way to stand up to bullies like the drug cartels is to defy them, not to cave in to their threats.
Suppose a driverless car is caught speeding or running a red light? Who gets the ticket? The owner? The person who programmed the route? The manufacturer who programmed the car itself? Or do the standard laws of the road not apply to these vehicles at all? If I'm hit by one of these cars, do I get to sue somebody or am I responsible for all the medical bills myself?
It's strange that so many people that use this site can understand the intricacies of a programming language but can't sound-out a misspelled word. I appreciate proper spelling and grammar, but is it really worth derailing a thread just to mock someone's mistake?
You fail to take into account the fact that it was the original poster himself who pointed out his own mistake, and the subsequent discussion of that grammatical error were in response to that particular self-response. So nothing was derailed really. There is a lively discussion in direct response to the original post.
No, it is often intended to cover cases where any of the parties are non-consenting.
Not the federal wire-tapping laws. Some states require two party consent for recording conversations (and then the law generally only covers audio recording, which is not the case here), but I think Facebook is being sued under a federal wiretap law.
With the consent of certain websites, the cookie mechanism is used to inform Facebook when users visit these sites.
Is that true? Did the website operators displaying a Facebook "like" button actually know that it allowed their site users to be tracked by Facebook even if the button was not clicked?
Well, in that situation, the person clicking the Like button is communicating with Facebook, not the hosting website, so wiretapping laws are even less applicable. How can Facebook be wiretapping a communication between a user and Facebook?
As much as I dislike Facebook's rampant disregard for users' privacy, this is simply not what the wiretapping law is about. The wiretapping law is meant to cover interception by a third party of communications between two other non-consenting parties. What Facebook did is entirely different. With the consent of certain websites, the cookie mechanism is used to inform Facebook when users visit these sites. Facebook is not intercepting and recording any communications.
Many of us might not like Facebook, and may see this lawsuit as a victory, but misapplication of federal computer and communication laws sets a dangerous precedent for anyone who uses the Internet. Do something that pisses someone off? The Feds will find a law and twist it to make it fit your actions. If new laws are needed to cover emerging technologies, they should be considered by appropriate legislative and regulatory bodies. Then people can comply with the law or face the consequences. But if laws can be twisted to cover any behavior we don't like, it makes it difficult for anyone to be sure they are in compliance with the law.
I was a graduate student at Princeton, and our group submitted several papers to various journals. At no time did we need nor did we seek permission from the University to submit these papers. Once all the authors agreed, someone in the group e-mailed the article to the editor for the journal in question, and all further correspondence was between the journal and the authors; the University was not involved at all, and pretty much all correspondence was done by e-mail. So how, exactly, does enforcement work? Does the administration read through all journals and look for professors with a Princeton address and then check to see if they signed the copyright over to the journal, and fire them if they broke the rules? Seriously, I don't know how this would be workable.
i feel like i am a room full of 45 year old pedophiles
the tenor of concerns here skews far away from actual parental concerns
Really? You think parents want police searching through their kids' phones looking at naked pictures? You think parents want their kids to face a very public trial over simple youthful indiscretions? You think parents want their kids fined and given a record simply because they didn't report to police that someone forwarded them some dirty pictures? If that's what you think parents want, then I thank God I'm not one of your children!
Did you miss the part where the penalties if you don't report it are very very minor?
Does it matter that the penalties are minor? If someone sends you an unsolicited pic, and you delete it right away, why should there be any penalties at all?
This week is banned books week. Celebrate (?) by reading a banned book - say no to censorship:)
The only books that are truly banned in the United States are child pornography (with actual photographs.) Yes, there are many books that libraries choose not to buy with their limited funds, and many books that schools choose not to have on their library bookshelves, but that's not the same thing as being banned. So if you really want to stick up for your right to read banned books, you'll need to look at some kiddie porn.
As much as I hate the idea of children being abused, we can't truly claim, as a country, to have full freedom to read as long a people can be jailed for merely possessing or reading the wrong books or magazines, no matter how disgusting they might be.
The problem is that B is not a person, but rather a device that is the legal property of C. It makes no sense to grant rights to an inanimate object that are not also granted to the legal owner of that inanimate object. B and C should be, legally speaking, one and the same.
But that is simply not true. Just because you buy and own an gun doesn't mean you have the right to use it to kill somebody. Owning a piece of equipment doesn't grant you the legal right to do whatever you want with it.
Real name or not, it only takes a minimal amount of effort for data gatherers to work together or pool data together and derive an identity from you. That's one of the benefits (for the data miners) of having, say, the Facebook connect/like/whatever stuff on EVERY WEB PAGE IN EXISTENCE. Know a couple or so pieces of information about a person (doesn't have to include their name) and you can be pretty certain about who you are zero-ing in on.
Absolutely. The GP is kidding himself if he thinks that by simply using a fake name the data mining companies, whose job it is to mine data from social networks, can't find you.
And even if you are successful in hiding behind a fake name, it will be harder and harder to find work if you don't have a Facebook page. As the Facebook generation enters the workforce, it will be increasingly rare for a job candidate to not have a Facebook page. Why would an employer choose the one person in the pile who they can't find anything about to interview? This is why people need to build a strong online identity in high school and college when they have lots of friends. Otherwise, you might look a bit strange down the road when you're looking for a job.
So if private feeds are coming in, what's to prevent a malicious private party from staging anything from a robbery to a murder and editing the footage to implicate their choice of targets and splicing said footage into the feed?
Other than tampering with evidence (and the actual crime), I doubt it would even be illegal since they own the feed.
Why don't I just kill the person I don't like. Other than the murder, it wouldn't even be a crime!
constitutional guidance as far as monetary fines go
See 8th Amendment, specifically nor excessive fines imposed.
Any reasonable person, which was and should be the test for the above, should consider $675,000 to be an excessive fine for the alleged crime.
This isn't a fine, though. It's an award in a civil suit. A fine would be payable to the government and you could face jail time if you are unable to pay.
New York's court of appeals has already determined that GPS tracking by law enforcement is illegal without a warrant. Since the powers of cops are a superset of the powers of an individual, this case should be a slam dunk for the plaintiff.
Unfortunately, federal courts have disagreed. In particular, the 7th Circuit Court of appeals ruled in United States vs. Garcia (Case no. 06-2741), that police don't need a warrant to attach a GPS device to a suspects car.
While I like this idea, doesn't it cause problems with first to file?
I just imagine a scenario where a university discovers something, doesn't file a patent, and megacorp comes along and patents it. With first to file, Megacorp gets the patent.
Maybe there's something I'm missing, but to me it would seem better that the university file the patent, but not be able to enforce it.
As long as the university publishes their discoveries, there would be demonstrable prior art.
. Follow them or I will call 911 and have you sent to federal prison.
FTFY
Firstly, 911 is for emergencies. Although I don't share the liberal views on copyright that many Slashdotters hold, I do not consider copyright violation to be an emergency.
Secondly, although you could technically spend time in federal prison for copyright violation, I don't think that would be a likely outcome for non-commercial infringement. A lawsuit by a copyright holder is much more probable.
My roommate insists on doing things that might create expensive legal nightmares for me. I've asked him to stop, but he won't. What should I do?
The answer is, "Get a new roommate. Your current one is not respecting you, as evidenced by his disregard for your wishes and the way he's exposing you to potentially massive legal fees. You need to be able to trust your roommate, and you apparently can't trust your current one. Finding a new roommate might be hard, but it's necessary. Good luck!"
With respect to the legal question you've raised, the only answer here is "talk to a real lawyer." Trusting Slashdot to give you legal counsel is, TBH, just flat-out crazy.
Exactly. What if your roommate were running a meth lab or had a child pornography studio set up in his room? Yes, these are more serious crimes, but the principle is the same. If you are aware that your roommate is engaging in illegal activity that could get you into trouble, it would be prudent to either stop the activity or get a new roommate. You wouldn't give it a second thought if it were one of the more serious crimes listed above.
I was going to mention Design Patterns too, but you beat me to it. I second the vote. Along with The C Programming Language and Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment one of the best programming books I've ever read.
The copyright owners must contact the ISP with proof of an offence (an IP address from a torrent would be enough), then the ISP passes on the warning.
If you get three notices, then you have to go to court and defend yourself by proving that you didn't download the material.
Do the three notices have to come from independent sources? If not, this shift of burden from the accuser to the accused could be greatly abused. You're a copyright holder and don't like someone? Just claim their IP address showed up on a torrent list. Then do it two more times and unless he can prove he didn't copy the material (and proving a negative is just about impossible) then he loses his Internet and has to pay a fine.
Can I ask the same question for particle physics -- specifically non-abelian gauge theories. I'd like to be able to under stand the Higgs mechanism and supersymmetry properly and how the particles emerge from the symmetries of the fields.
My pure maths background is quite strong, but I stopped doing applied somewhere in my second undergraduate year and have forgotten most of the more advanced bits of it. So I have a hazy memory of curvilinear coordinates, and an even hazier one of Hamiltonians and Lagrangians. I can still more or less remember my SR course. On the positive side, I understand Lie groups and Lie algebras and their representation theory pretty well.
The problem with particle physics is that the math background required is often not taught in math departments. The fact that you have studied Lie groups, Lie algebras, and their representations is very good. You are luckier than most. Keep in mind, though, that in particle physics you often need to deal with infinite dimensional representations, whereas many math courses I've seen are limited to finite dimensional (matrix) representations of groups. Also keep in mind that one of the most basic symmetry groups in physics, namely the Poincaré group, is neither semi-simple nor compact, and many math courses limit their study to compact or semi-simple Lie groups. In short, real physics is hard. Your background sounds very strong though, and you should be able to tackle a book like Weinberg's series The Quantum Theory of Fields, which is probably the best set of books on the subject that I know of.
Incidentally, another good sign is the fact that recent LHC experiments seem to be ruling out supersymmetry. I say that's a good thing, as SUSY makes all the math (literally!) twice as hard.
Many introductory general relativity books give you some of the math background you need. A very good one in that regard is Bernard Schutz: A First Course in General Relativity, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-521-27703-5. It begins with a very good introduction to special relativity, and then develops the math needed for basic GR. I would avoid Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler. The 2 track approach is confusing, and the math is thrown at you in bits and pieces as you need it, making it hard to see the big picture.
If you are interested in math courses to take, multi-variable calculus, then differential geometry are good choices. If there are separate courses on tensor calculus or tensor analysis, they are good, but that material is often just taught as part of differential geometry. For really advanced stuff, like cosmology, you might need some topology as well.
The problem with the unification of time systems is that 4am may be 4am everywhere, but now you'd need to know if that was the middle of the day in New York or the middle of the night. You still need to know all the time differences to have any meaningful interaction with other people, so the problem is no simpler. If you go on holiday you still need to learn to get up at 4pm instead of 6am, and it won't be as simple as just changing your watch and trying to adjust to the normal localised times you'd do those things.
So it's a whole load of pain changing the system for no gain, or even a step backwards. Woo.
Exactly right! Time zones give us clues as to when to do things such as eat dinner or go to sleep when we travel. Also, it makes it easier to know when it's okay to phone someone. If you know it's 3AM where Grandma lives, you know it's probably not a good time to call her. If all you know is that it's 14:00 UTC where she lives, and where you live, you need to calculate how many hours it is between sunset and sunrise where she is living and is she therefore likely to be in bed. Time zones make that much, much easier. All you need to know is she's 5 hours ahead of you (which time zones tell you) and you can figure out if it's okay to call!
Slashdot Mirror
I disagree. By backing off, they're letting the cartels know that their methods of intimidation work. It will only encourage similar acts in the future. The only way to stand up to bullies like the drug cartels is to defy them, not to cave in to their threats.
Suppose a driverless car is caught speeding or running a red light? Who gets the ticket? The owner? The person who programmed the route? The manufacturer who programmed the car itself? Or do the standard laws of the road not apply to these vehicles at all? If I'm hit by one of these cars, do I get to sue somebody or am I responsible for all the medical bills myself?
It's strange that so many people that use this site can understand the intricacies of a programming language but can't sound-out a misspelled word. I appreciate proper spelling and grammar, but is it really worth derailing a thread just to mock someone's mistake?
You fail to take into account the fact that it was the original poster himself who pointed out his own mistake, and the subsequent discussion of that grammatical error were in response to that particular self-response. So nothing was derailed really. There is a lively discussion in direct response to the original post.
No, it is often intended to cover cases where any of the parties are non-consenting.
Not the federal wire-tapping laws. Some states require two party consent for recording conversations (and then the law generally only covers audio recording, which is not the case here), but I think Facebook is being sued under a federal wiretap law.
With the consent of certain websites, the cookie mechanism is used to inform Facebook when users visit these sites.
Is that true? Did the website operators displaying a Facebook "like" button actually know that it allowed their site users to be tracked by Facebook even if the button was not clicked?
Well, in that situation, the person clicking the Like button is communicating with Facebook, not the hosting website, so wiretapping laws are even less applicable. How can Facebook be wiretapping a communication between a user and Facebook?
As much as I dislike Facebook's rampant disregard for users' privacy, this is simply not what the wiretapping law is about. The wiretapping law is meant to cover interception by a third party of communications between two other non-consenting parties. What Facebook did is entirely different. With the consent of certain websites, the cookie mechanism is used to inform Facebook when users visit these sites. Facebook is not intercepting and recording any communications.
Many of us might not like Facebook, and may see this lawsuit as a victory, but misapplication of federal computer and communication laws sets a dangerous precedent for anyone who uses the Internet. Do something that pisses someone off? The Feds will find a law and twist it to make it fit your actions. If new laws are needed to cover emerging technologies, they should be considered by appropriate legislative and regulatory bodies. Then people can comply with the law or face the consequences. But if laws can be twisted to cover any behavior we don't like, it makes it difficult for anyone to be sure they are in compliance with the law.
Funny. Here in Finland the back of the bus is traditionally reserved for the troublemakers.
You have troublemakers in Finland????
I was a graduate student at Princeton, and our group submitted several papers to various journals. At no time did we need nor did we seek permission from the University to submit these papers. Once all the authors agreed, someone in the group e-mailed the article to the editor for the journal in question, and all further correspondence was between the journal and the authors; the University was not involved at all, and pretty much all correspondence was done by e-mail. So how, exactly, does enforcement work? Does the administration read through all journals and look for professors with a Princeton address and then check to see if they signed the copyright over to the journal, and fire them if they broke the rules? Seriously, I don't know how this would be workable.
i feel like i am a room full of 45 year old pedophiles
the tenor of concerns here skews far away from actual parental concerns
Really? You think parents want police searching through their kids' phones looking at naked pictures? You think parents want their kids to face a very public trial over simple youthful indiscretions? You think parents want their kids fined and given a record simply because they didn't report to police that someone forwarded them some dirty pictures? If that's what you think parents want, then I thank God I'm not one of your children!
Did you miss the part where the penalties if you don't report it are very very minor?
Does it matter that the penalties are minor? If someone sends you an unsolicited pic, and you delete it right away, why should there be any penalties at all?
This week is banned books week. Celebrate (?) by reading a banned book - say no to censorship :)
The only books that are truly banned in the United States are child pornography (with actual photographs.) Yes, there are many books that libraries choose not to buy with their limited funds, and many books that schools choose not to have on their library bookshelves, but that's not the same thing as being banned. So if you really want to stick up for your right to read banned books, you'll need to look at some kiddie porn.
As much as I hate the idea of children being abused, we can't truly claim, as a country, to have full freedom to read as long a people can be jailed for merely possessing or reading the wrong books or magazines, no matter how disgusting they might be.
The problem is that B is not a person, but rather a device that is the legal property of C. It makes no sense to grant rights to an inanimate object that are not also granted to the legal owner of that inanimate object. B and C should be, legally speaking, one and the same.
But that is simply not true. Just because you buy and own an gun doesn't mean you have the right to use it to kill somebody. Owning a piece of equipment doesn't grant you the legal right to do whatever you want with it.
Real name or not, it only takes a minimal amount of effort for data gatherers to work together or pool data together and derive an identity from you. That's one of the benefits (for the data miners) of having, say, the Facebook connect/like/whatever stuff on EVERY WEB PAGE IN EXISTENCE. Know a couple or so pieces of information about a person (doesn't have to include their name) and you can be pretty certain about who you are zero-ing in on.
Absolutely. The GP is kidding himself if he thinks that by simply using a fake name the data mining companies, whose job it is to mine data from social networks, can't find you.
And even if you are successful in hiding behind a fake name, it will be harder and harder to find work if you don't have a Facebook page. As the Facebook generation enters the workforce, it will be increasingly rare for a job candidate to not have a Facebook page. Why would an employer choose the one person in the pile who they can't find anything about to interview? This is why people need to build a strong online identity in high school and college when they have lots of friends. Otherwise, you might look a bit strange down the road when you're looking for a job.
So if private feeds are coming in, what's to prevent a malicious private party from staging anything from a robbery to a murder and editing the footage to implicate their choice of targets and splicing said footage into the feed? Other than tampering with evidence (and the actual crime), I doubt it would even be illegal since they own the feed.
Why don't I just kill the person I don't like. Other than the murder, it wouldn't even be a crime!
constitutional guidance as far as monetary fines go
See 8th Amendment, specifically nor excessive fines imposed.
Any reasonable person, which was and should be the test for the above, should consider $675,000 to be an excessive fine for the alleged crime.
This isn't a fine, though. It's an award in a civil suit. A fine would be payable to the government and you could face jail time if you are unable to pay.
New York's court of appeals has already determined that GPS tracking by law enforcement is illegal without a warrant. Since the powers of cops are a superset of the powers of an individual, this case should be a slam dunk for the plaintiff.
Unfortunately, federal courts have disagreed. In particular, the 7th Circuit Court of appeals ruled in United States vs. Garcia (Case no. 06-2741), that police don't need a warrant to attach a GPS device to a suspects car.
While I like this idea, doesn't it cause problems with first to file?
I just imagine a scenario where a university discovers something, doesn't file a patent, and megacorp comes along and patents it. With first to file, Megacorp gets the patent.
Maybe there's something I'm missing, but to me it would seem better that the university file the patent, but not be able to enforce it.
As long as the university publishes their discoveries, there would be demonstrable prior art.
FTA: "The ISPs were given two weeks to respond and are entitled to be reimbursed for their expenses."
Once ISP expenses cost more than the expected settlement amount, this nonsense will stop in Canada.
I disagree. I don't think these lawsuits are about making money for the studios as much as they are about deterrence.
. Follow them or I will call 911 and have you sent to federal prison.
FTFY
Firstly, 911 is for emergencies. Although I don't share the liberal views on copyright that many Slashdotters hold, I do not consider copyright violation to be an emergency.
Secondly, although you could technically spend time in federal prison for copyright violation, I don't think that would be a likely outcome for non-commercial infringement. A lawsuit by a copyright holder is much more probable.
Let's rephrase the question.
The answer is, "Get a new roommate. Your current one is not respecting you, as evidenced by his disregard for your wishes and the way he's exposing you to potentially massive legal fees. You need to be able to trust your roommate, and you apparently can't trust your current one. Finding a new roommate might be hard, but it's necessary. Good luck!"
With respect to the legal question you've raised, the only answer here is "talk to a real lawyer." Trusting Slashdot to give you legal counsel is, TBH, just flat-out crazy.
Exactly. What if your roommate were running a meth lab or had a child pornography studio set up in his room? Yes, these are more serious crimes, but the principle is the same. If you are aware that your roommate is engaging in illegal activity that could get you into trouble, it would be prudent to either stop the activity or get a new roommate. You wouldn't give it a second thought if it were one of the more serious crimes listed above.
Great book on design patterns, Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software.
I was going to mention Design Patterns too, but you beat me to it. I second the vote. Along with The C Programming Language and Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment one of the best programming books I've ever read.
It doesn't work like that at all.
The copyright owners must contact the ISP with proof of an offence (an IP address from a torrent would be enough), then the ISP passes on the warning. If you get three notices, then you have to go to court and defend yourself by proving that you didn't download the material.
Do the three notices have to come from independent sources? If not, this shift of burden from the accuser to the accused could be greatly abused. You're a copyright holder and don't like someone? Just claim their IP address showed up on a torrent list. Then do it two more times and unless he can prove he didn't copy the material (and proving a negative is just about impossible) then he loses his Internet and has to pay a fine.
Can I ask the same question for particle physics -- specifically non-abelian gauge theories. I'd like to be able to under stand the Higgs mechanism and supersymmetry properly and how the particles emerge from the symmetries of the fields.
My pure maths background is quite strong, but I stopped doing applied somewhere in my second undergraduate year and have forgotten most of the more advanced bits of it. So I have a hazy memory of curvilinear coordinates, and an even hazier one of Hamiltonians and Lagrangians. I can still more or less remember my SR course. On the positive side, I understand Lie groups and Lie algebras and their representation theory pretty well.
The problem with particle physics is that the math background required is often not taught in math departments. The fact that you have studied Lie groups, Lie algebras, and their representations is very good. You are luckier than most. Keep in mind, though, that in particle physics you often need to deal with infinite dimensional representations, whereas many math courses I've seen are limited to finite dimensional (matrix) representations of groups. Also keep in mind that one of the most basic symmetry groups in physics, namely the Poincaré group, is neither semi-simple nor compact, and many math courses limit their study to compact or semi-simple Lie groups. In short, real physics is hard. Your background sounds very strong though, and you should be able to tackle a book like Weinberg's series The Quantum Theory of Fields, which is probably the best set of books on the subject that I know of.
Incidentally, another good sign is the fact that recent LHC experiments seem to be ruling out supersymmetry. I say that's a good thing, as SUSY makes all the math (literally!) twice as hard.
Many introductory general relativity books give you some of the math background you need. A very good one in that regard is Bernard Schutz: A First Course in General Relativity, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-521-27703-5. It begins with a very good introduction to special relativity, and then develops the math needed for basic GR. I would avoid Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler. The 2 track approach is confusing, and the math is thrown at you in bits and pieces as you need it, making it hard to see the big picture.
If you are interested in math courses to take, multi-variable calculus, then differential geometry are good choices. If there are separate courses on tensor calculus or tensor analysis, they are good, but that material is often just taught as part of differential geometry. For really advanced stuff, like cosmology, you might need some topology as well.
The problem with the unification of time systems is that 4am may be 4am everywhere, but now you'd need to know if that was the middle of the day in New York or the middle of the night. You still need to know all the time differences to have any meaningful interaction with other people, so the problem is no simpler. If you go on holiday you still need to learn to get up at 4pm instead of 6am, and it won't be as simple as just changing your watch and trying to adjust to the normal localised times you'd do those things.
So it's a whole load of pain changing the system for no gain, or even a step backwards. Woo.
Exactly right! Time zones give us clues as to when to do things such as eat dinner or go to sleep when we travel. Also, it makes it easier to know when it's okay to phone someone. If you know it's 3AM where Grandma lives, you know it's probably not a good time to call her. If all you know is that it's 14:00 UTC where she lives, and where you live, you need to calculate how many hours it is between sunset and sunrise where she is living and is she therefore likely to be in bed. Time zones make that much, much easier. All you need to know is she's 5 hours ahead of you (which time zones tell you) and you can figure out if it's okay to call!