Exactly how does that make something that was done legally suddenly illegal?
In the example I gave, it doesn't make something that was legal suddenly illegal, but it drastically changes the penalty after the fact. Suppose after you were caught speeding and plead guilty, the penalty went up from a $200 fine to 5 years imprisonment. That also qualifies as an ex post facto law.
The receiver has to make a choice when to switch a 0 to a 1, with long slopes, noise and ringing this can cause problems even if its a "digital" signal.
Not just that, but for some applications, such as digital audio, it is vital to know when the 0 or 1 appears. Even small amounts of jitter can have a noticeable effect on audio quality.
... but the delays in the cable will be governed by the laws of physics, not by the price of the cable!
Actually, the speed of signal propagation is determined in part by the physical properties of the cable. And there are also issues of slewing and jitter, which might be less of a problem with higher quality designs. Not to mention that cheaply manufactured cables will probably sooner develop problems with connectors and so forth.
Actually, if you read the article, you'll see this wasn't merely an injunction, but something called a "super-injunction". This will no doubt give rise to something which will be called the Super-Streisand effect, in which every leaked name has a super-symmetric partner.
I am not one to condone copyright theft however if I leave my front door open it does not make me a criminal. The person that enters that door locked or not however is very much a criminal.
Actually, if you leave your front door open, and leave a gun on your coffee table, and someone comes into your home, takes the gun and uses it to commit a crime, you could be liable for civil damages. The doctrine is known as "attractive nuisance". I imagine similar reasoning might apply to deliberately unsecured WiFi connections.
If there exists a demand for a good, eventually someone will fill that demand. If there is a "healthy" "market" for child pornography then some people will go out and get fresh product for that market. This is how children are harmed by viewing it.
Which is why, I think, it is important to distinguish in law between purchasing child pornography and possessing child pornography. The former should be a crime, since you are providing the means and incentive for further child abuse and are in some sense an accessory to that crime, but the latter should not be, and yet people are arrested for mere possession of child pornography all the time.
It does take a different way of thinking but is nice once you have it working. I do some consulting work with it and it is one of the better platforms I've found to work on, but only after really learning the ins and outs of it.
It's not easy to learn those ins and outs, though. I went through several books before I found one I could learn out of (Pro Drupal Development, 2nd Ed. was the one I finally learned something from, but even it wasn't as complete as I really needed.)
If this does indeed turn out to be a viable Higgs candidate, is its mass sufficiently low that the result could someday be duplicated/confirmed at Fermilab? Would it require more running time than is currently planned for the Tevatron? Would it possibly lead to an extension in order to confirm the LHC result?
Aluminum takes a terrible lot of energy to refine from ore. The one good thing about that is that it's really easily recycled, so those aluminum cans sometimes get to be part of something again. But when you dissolve it in draino, and then, inevitably, dispose of the result in your landfill or sewer, you lose all of that energy and make some nasty pollution. What you get back in energy isn't a tiny fraction of what went in.
But they got a patent. Because the patent office doesn't care if your work is good, only that it's original. So, a lot of ignorant people will be impressed by their "innovation".
This would have been cool for a high-school science-fair project. Much too much bad science runs here.
But given the fact that most people don't get paid for dumping their aluminum in the recycle bin, this could be a good invention. You get to extract energy from the aluminum in your cans and use it yourself, rather than give it away to someone else for free.
Finally, a sensible approach to copyright infringement. Instead of suing everyone in sight into oblivion, they've decided to follow the model used by traffic police. Force violators to attend "school" and try to educate them about the law and the dangers of violating it, instead of the shoot first, ask questions later approach.
I'm sure this won't work for everyone, but hopefully it will save a good number of people from being bankrupted.
If "format shifting" is truly illegal in the UK, then anything you transfer from your hard drive to your iPod (which involves making a copy) should also be illegal.
No. The terms of service of the iTunes store specifically permit you to transfer music to the iPod. And presumably the copyright holders have agreed to those terms of service when they agreed to sell their music through the iTunes store. So I imagine those transfers would be authorized by the rights holders.
Nope, the April Fools joke stories were all marked with the fill-in-your-own-word combo boxes. We're now past 8pm ET which means it's past Midnight GMT and we're into April 2nd in GMT and half the world. They really should program the site for the East Coast USA audience because that's where the most Slashdotters actually live, but they're geeks in love with GMT.
If you read the actual complaint, you will see that it is indeed an April Fool's joke. Let me quote one particularly telling passage from the complaint,
As depicted in the award winning film “Social Network,” Defendant Zuckerberg in particular lacks strong ethical and moral character, having cheated his partners out of their shares and/or ownership in Facebook early on, for which he was forced to pay large settlements once sued.
No one would use a fictionalized Hollywood film to back up a claim as to the character of the defendant in a legal document submitted to the court. This is a joke folks. Let's move along.
Technically it isn't. It is a felony to gain unauthorized access to someone else's computer, but there is no law against installing this sort of software before the computer is sold.
A car analogy: I can't break into your car to install a GPS tracking device, but many new car manufacturers install devices with similar functions at the factory, eg. GM's ONSTAR system.
Or, perhaps, academics don't see any reasons to contribute to something that'll erase anything they might add because of Wikipedia's No Original Research clause?
There's a very good reason for this: Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a journal. There are other forums for publishing original research.
While power might seem like a minor concern, with nearly two billion people now using the Internet the worldwide implications of browser power consumption are significant.
I wonder when the day will come when the government starts mandating energy efficiency requirements in software, much the same way they do appliances, cars and other things. I wonder if such rules would apply to open source, or other freely exchanged software.
I would agree with you except for the part about the restaurant continuing to process and store credit card information even *after* they knew of the breach and before they fixed it.
I found one:
An employer typically may ask an applicant if he or she has ever been convicted of a crime. Asking whether an applicant has been arrested, however, may violate anti-discrimination laws, because the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has stated that minority group members tend to be disproportionately targeted for arrest, and whether someone has been arrested is not an indication that he or she has actually committed a crime. As a result, an employer who asks applicants whether they have been arrested, and then excludes those who have, may be engaged in discriminatory hiring practices against minority applicants.http://www.anticouni.com/CM/Custom/FAQ.asp?ss=faq-wrap-single-questions.xsl
This is hardly a law. It is merely an opinion of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission on a very broad interpretation of anti-discrimination statutes. And as has been pointed out by another responder, even that very liberal interpretation would not protect a non-minority from being denied employment based on that question.
Slashdot Mirror
I know that in Canada, high school football is quite rare.
I live in a Canadian city and as far as I know, every high school in town has a football team (certainly most do).
Exactly how does that make something that was done legally suddenly illegal?
In the example I gave, it doesn't make something that was legal suddenly illegal, but it drastically changes the penalty after the fact. Suppose after you were caught speeding and plead guilty, the penalty went up from a $200 fine to 5 years imprisonment. That also qualifies as an ex post facto law.
The receiver has to make a choice when to switch a 0 to a 1, with long slopes, noise and ringing this can cause problems even if its a "digital" signal.
Not just that, but for some applications, such as digital audio, it is vital to know when the 0 or 1 appears. Even small amounts of jitter can have a noticeable effect on audio quality.
... but the delays in the cable will be governed by the laws of physics, not by the price of the cable!
Actually, the speed of signal propagation is determined in part by the physical properties of the cable. And there are also issues of slewing and jitter, which might be less of a problem with higher quality designs. Not to mention that cheaply manufactured cables will probably sooner develop problems with connectors and so forth.
Actually, if you read the article, you'll see this wasn't merely an injunction, but something called a "super-injunction". This will no doubt give rise to something which will be called the Super-Streisand effect, in which every leaked name has a super-symmetric partner.
Slander is not free speech.
Neither is it disorderly conduct. It's slander. (Or, as has been correctly pointed out by a previous poster, libel.)
Ex post facto laws are generally unenforceable. Beware of the day, however, where an ex post facto law makes ex post facto laws legal.
I'm afraid it's too late. It seems ex post facto laws are legal now, if some creative redefinitions are employed.
Does this mean that Comcast isn't evil after all?
I am not one to condone copyright theft however if I leave my front door open it does not make me a criminal. The person that enters that door locked or not however is very much a criminal.
Actually, if you leave your front door open, and leave a gun on your coffee table, and someone comes into your home, takes the gun and uses it to commit a crime, you could be liable for civil damages. The doctrine is known as "attractive nuisance". I imagine similar reasoning might apply to deliberately unsecured WiFi connections.
To the people I talked to who are in the field as volunteers, even d/l child porn accidentally is highly illegal and can land you in jail.
In what field as volunteers? The rest of that sentence makes me very curious to know precisely which field you are talking about.
In a sense, they're right.
If there exists a demand for a good, eventually someone will fill that demand. If there is a "healthy" "market" for child pornography then some people will go out and get fresh product for that market. This is how children are harmed by viewing it.
Which is why, I think, it is important to distinguish in law between purchasing child pornography and possessing child pornography. The former should be a crime, since you are providing the means and incentive for further child abuse and are in some sense an accessory to that crime, but the latter should not be, and yet people are arrested for mere possession of child pornography all the time.
It does take a different way of thinking but is nice once you have it working. I do some consulting work with it and it is one of the better platforms I've found to work on, but only after really learning the ins and outs of it.
It's not easy to learn those ins and outs, though. I went through several books before I found one I could learn out of (Pro Drupal Development, 2nd Ed. was the one I finally learned something from, but even it wasn't as complete as I really needed.)
I have a question for CDF folks:
If this does indeed turn out to be a viable Higgs candidate, is its mass sufficiently low that the result could someday be duplicated/confirmed at Fermilab? Would it require more running time than is currently planned for the Tevatron? Would it possibly lead to an extension in order to confirm the LHC result?
This happens much, much too often on Slashdot.
Aluminum takes a terrible lot of energy to refine from ore. The one good thing about that is that it's really easily recycled, so those aluminum cans sometimes get to be part of something again. But when you dissolve it in draino, and then, inevitably, dispose of the result in your landfill or sewer, you lose all of that energy and make some nasty pollution. What you get back in energy isn't a tiny fraction of what went in.
But they got a patent. Because the patent office doesn't care if your work is good, only that it's original. So, a lot of ignorant people will be impressed by their "innovation".
This would have been cool for a high-school science-fair project. Much too much bad science runs here.
But given the fact that most people don't get paid for dumping their aluminum in the recycle bin, this could be a good invention. You get to extract energy from the aluminum in your cans and use it yourself, rather than give it away to someone else for free.
Finally, a sensible approach to copyright infringement. Instead of suing everyone in sight into oblivion, they've decided to follow the model used by traffic police. Force violators to attend "school" and try to educate them about the law and the dangers of violating it, instead of the shoot first, ask questions later approach.
I'm sure this won't work for everyone, but hopefully it will save a good number of people from being bankrupted.
No real harm done.
You're joking right? Cutting off an entire country's Internet service is "no real harm done"?
This sounds like a bad case of mission creep to me. INTERPOL doesn't need global ID capabilities for its job. So why should we put them in charge?
More to the point, even if Interpol does need global IDs to "do their job", that doesn't mean we should be required to have them!
It's even worse here in Canada. They don't offer Algebra II in middle school OR high school. I took it in my freshman year at university.
If "format shifting" is truly illegal in the UK, then anything you transfer from your hard drive to your iPod (which involves making a copy) should also be illegal.
No. The terms of service of the iTunes store specifically permit you to transfer music to the iPod. And presumably the copyright holders have agreed to those terms of service when they agreed to sell their music through the iTunes store. So I imagine those transfers would be authorized by the rights holders.
Nope, the April Fools joke stories were all marked with the fill-in-your-own-word combo boxes. We're now past 8pm ET which means it's past Midnight GMT and we're into April 2nd in GMT and half the world. They really should program the site for the East Coast USA audience because that's where the most Slashdotters actually live, but they're geeks in love with GMT.
If you read the actual complaint, you will see that it is indeed an April Fool's joke. Let me quote one particularly telling passage from the complaint,
As depicted in the award winning film “Social Network,” Defendant Zuckerberg in particular lacks strong ethical and moral character, having cheated his partners out of their shares and/or ownership in Facebook early on, for which he was forced to pay large settlements once sued.
No one would use a fictionalized Hollywood film to back up a claim as to the character of the defendant in a legal document submitted to the court. This is a joke folks. Let's move along.
Yes they should, it is a felony after all.
Technically it isn't. It is a felony to gain unauthorized access to someone else's computer, but there is no law against installing this sort of software before the computer is sold.
A car analogy: I can't break into your car to install a GPS tracking device, but many new car manufacturers install devices with similar functions at the factory, eg. GM's ONSTAR system.
Or, perhaps, academics don't see any reasons to contribute to something that'll erase anything they might add because of Wikipedia's No Original Research clause?
There's a very good reason for this: Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a journal. There are other forums for publishing original research.
While power might seem like a minor concern, with nearly two billion people now using the Internet the worldwide implications of browser power consumption are significant.
I wonder when the day will come when the government starts mandating energy efficiency requirements in software, much the same way they do appliances, cars and other things. I wonder if such rules would apply to open source, or other freely exchanged software.
I would agree with you except for the part about the restaurant continuing to process and store credit card information even *after* they knew of the breach and before they fixed it.
I found one: An employer typically may ask an applicant if he or she has ever been convicted of a crime. Asking whether an applicant has been arrested, however, may violate anti-discrimination laws, because the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has stated that minority group members tend to be disproportionately targeted for arrest, and whether someone has been arrested is not an indication that he or she has actually committed a crime. As a result, an employer who asks applicants whether they have been arrested, and then excludes those who have, may be engaged in discriminatory hiring practices against minority applicants. http://www.anticouni.com/CM/Custom/FAQ.asp?ss=faq-wrap-single-questions.xsl
This is hardly a law. It is merely an opinion of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission on a very broad interpretation of anti-discrimination statutes. And as has been pointed out by another responder, even that very liberal interpretation would not protect a non-minority from being denied employment based on that question.