Meta-moders,
There are posts on here that are from the NASA story. The reason is that/. is currently broke (as in a bug, not as in USA debt). Some came here automatically. Mine was posted because I was following the other posters. Please nuke the modders that hit these as off-topic. It should be obvious that they KNEW that/. had issues and some of the posts came here (a post from in front of here told them so). For these modders to be nuking ppl for posting in this area is ridiculous considering the situation.
I disagree. If a posting ends up linked to the wrong story it is off-topic. It doesn't matter whether it is the fault of the poster or a bug in the Slashdot code, off-topic is off-topic, and should be modded as such. The purpose of modding is for the benefit of the readers, not the posters!
Instead of battling online anonymity, maybe the police chief should be out searching vehicles for child whores being carried to points east and points north.
Yes, because when I'm driving through Austin with my family, I want the police to pull me over and question my kids about whether or not they've been forced to have sex. Nothing remotely like a police state about that.
This looks like an interesting service. At $1170 per month, it seems to be aimed at companies providing security services such as anti-virus providers. That price should also keep it out of reach of casual hackers (or crackers!)
Most universities/polytechs/etc. are quite Linux-friendly here. They generally have a mix of machines, and avoid doing anything particularly hostile to any one platform.
That's great, but keep in mind Finland might have a very slight bias when it comes to Linux for obvious reasons.
"Jail" for a corporation should mean that all assets are frozen and all business activities are forced to halt for the same number of days that a real person would have been incarcerated.
The problem is that you'd be punishing a lot more people than those at Microsoft. Microsoft doesn't just sell operating systems for home computers; they sell and support a large number of business applications to a HUGE number of businesses. If Microsoft "went offline" for even just a few months, there'd be huge ripples throughout all sectors of the economy. Imagine if a critical security flaw were found in Windows, or IIS, or SQL Server and Microsoft couldn't patch it because they were "in jail". Just because you might not use MS products doesn't mean you don't do business with someone who does. It would be a disaster.
Actually, that's very close to the special "safe harbor" rule with regard to copyright infringement that was part of the DMCA. No such "safe harbor" rule exists with regard to trademark infringement.
That's because at the time the DMCA was passed, there was no such thing as contributory trademark infringement. This is a new doctrine created by this court. Having a safe harbor for some types of infringement but not others completely nullifies the effect of the safe harbor provision to begin with. People now have a mechanism to silence other people's speech: complain they are contributing to violation of their trademark. With no safe harbor, no sane ISP will ignore their request. Especially considering the size of a judgement like the one in the present case.
Technically, the BBC is neither government owned nor taxpayer funded. Of course, by law if you operate any equipment capable of receiving broadcast material you have to pay the license fee, but the government doesn't handle or distribute the funding.
So if you want to compete with the BBC in the television broadcast business, your customers still have to pay the BBC in order to watch your broacasts. Yeah, that's great for competition. And it is a tax if the government is doing the enforcing. Just because they don't call it a tax doesn't mean it isn't.
If you don't think a 16-year-old driver who causes a non-lethal accident deserves to rot away in jail for almost the same number of years he's been alive, then it doesn't make sense to punish another 16-year-old driver who made the exact same mistake, but was simply not as lucky.
If two people choose to walk out in a golf course during a lightning storm it is quite possible that one will be fatally struck by lightning while the other will merely get wet. Should we kill the lucky person to even things out? After all, it is just a matter of luck that one was struck and one wasn't.
I've never been in favor of punishing people because of what they might have done rather than what they did do. When you exercise bad judgment, you are putting yourself in a position where you might get very unlucky and have disastrous consequences. That isn't a reason to punish those who don't have similar bad luck. Personally, I like the Japanese system. There's no penalty for driving drunk, but if you drive drunk and kill someone, you get the same penalty as willful murder. It's about taking responsibility for your own actions.
Hmmm. This requirement that you need a license/ID to "travel the net" is roughly equivalent to saying I need a license to walk down the sidewalk.
Actually, in many countries you do need to carry a national ID card with you even just to walk down the sidewalk. I'm not just talking about Communist and third world dictatorships either. Many EU countries have this requirement.
Don't assume that American rights and values are universal. They guy who proposed this license system is Australian.
How does letting THEM, know who I am, make ME safer?
Read the article. It is talking primarily about identity theft and fraud. Better identification policies help to reduce these crimes. After all, typically when someone commits fraud with your credit card, they are pretending to be you. If people are required to identify themselves in the first place, that kind of fraud would be rather difficult. (Unless they get hold of your Internet license as well. But if you store it separately from your credit card you can reduce that risk as well.)
To travel from one point to another, an object must pass through all the points in between. There are an infinite number of points "in between," thus to move at all, an object must travel through an infinite number of points in a finite time. Clearly this definition of reality is flawed: stop using it.
Actually, I don't think the GP mentioned travelling at all!
Here's the thing: stateless works everywhere there is any internet connectivity. Imagine having to define a long-lasting stateful protocol around slow and unreliable internet connections.
That's exactly what TCP was designed for: persistent 2-way connections over possibly unreliable networks. But I agree with your basic point, given that firewalls may be configured to only allow HTTP and other basic protocols through.
Does that mean cell phone transmission is 4D? How do we visualize that?
Nope. It's 3D as well. Unlike the other examples provided, the vibrations here are in the same 3D space in which the wave propagates. The electric and magnetic field vectors are in 3D space, transverse to the direction of propagation.
This is exactly why I purchased my own copy of AnyDVD HD with a lifetime license (does not expire). Slysoft update's the ripping program at least once every two weeks, so you know many bugs are being worked out with ripping DVDs and BD disks.
I would highly suggest purchasing this program before it becomes illegal to do so. If not by Slysoft, by some other company.
You also got to consider the likelihood that as full or majority electric power cars start to become popular, you're going to see governments at the state, local and federal level attempting to make up for lost tax revenues. I'm not sure how they'll manage to differentiate between power for transport and power for home/business use, but if there's one thing that the government is good at it's figuring out new and inventive ways to tax people.
You make an interesting point. I suspect what will happen long term is that indeed, electricity for your car will be quite a bit more expensive than electricity for your home as a result of taxation. What will probably end up happening is, in the future, electric cars will have special plugs, that fit only in special outlets which are metered separately. There may be some sort of electronic connection between the car and the outlet as well, with secure/encrypted communication to prevent tampering or plug converters. Of course the Volt doesn't have this yet, but it wouldn't surprise me if this sort of technology were mandated soon.
The other option, considerably less palatable due to privacy implications is to charge at license plate renewal time a tax based on miles driven in the state by using a state mandated GPS unit installed in the car. I think some states (Oregon perhaps?) are already talking about doing this.
Of course, what will probably end up happening is BOTH.
That's the beauty of the GPL, in that if the opposition (defendant, perhaps plaintiff in a declaratory judgment) doesn't accept the license, everything defaults back to standard copyright protections, which don't allow use/copying/distribution in the first place,
Where do you get this definition of "standard copyright protections"? I agree that they cover copying and distribution, which is exactly what is being argued about, but use? Doesn't software need an explicit EULA (such as a click-through agreement) to limit use? I don't think most commonly used GPL libraries include EULAs.
FWIW, the IP attorneys I've discussed this with don't agree with you. They take the GPL at the FSF's word with regard to the meaning of "derivative work". I asked a couple about this and the response was that because the clearly-stated intent of the license was to preclude linking except to code distributed under compatible terms, that a court would most likely agree with the copyright holder. Basically, the "linking implies derivation" notion is reasonable and well-understood by all parties, so the court would accept it.
How many IP attorneys have you discussed this with? I am rather surprised to hear lawyers, who among other things generally receive training in logic, apply such a clearly circular argument. The GPL is a distribution license, not a usage license, so one must be distributing GPL or GPL-derived code for the license to even apply. How can you then go on to argue that the novel definition of "derived work" appearing in the GPL is relevant to whether or not the distributing party is bound by the GPL in the first place? If established case law (and I'm not up to date on this) says that linking to libraries (without distributing those libraries) doesn't constitute a derived work, how can a copyright license (which then wouldn't apply) change that definition? And isn't writing code that links to a library essentially just writing to an API? And haven't courts ruled that writing to an API does not constitute a derived work?
I read the entire Smoking Gun article linked, and found a disturbing lack of evidence presented as to the identity of Dex, the leader of Pranknet.
According to this Windsor Star article, Smoking Gun sent Dex an e-mail with some custom crafted URLs claiming they were public articles on the Smoking Gun website. When he allegedly clicked on the link, they supposedly had his IP address.
Never mind the fact that that is one of the oldest tricks in the book, and the real Dex would almost surely have been wise to it, but the article leaves out a critical detail. According to the Star article, after obtaining Dex's supposed IP address, Smoking Gun investigators then went to his home address, and looked through server logs, etc. What they fail to mention is how they obtained his name and home address from the IP address. I don't know too many ISPs who hand over such information to private investigative firms. Some are even reluctant to hand over this information to law enforcement without a warrant. So how did Smoking Gun get this information? Which server logs did they subsequently investigate and how did they get access to them? And most importantly, according to Smoking Gun's own article, Dex apparently never paid for his Internet access, but rather found open Wi-Fi access points to obtain Internet access. If that is the case, how did Smoking Gun map his IP address to to name and address? This all sounds very suspicious. The Windsor Star even refused to print his name and address, because they were unable to independently verify any of this.
Yet, reading the above posts, it appears that many Slashdotters take it is a given that the identity of Dex revealed in the Smoking Gun article is correct. Aren't such people exhibiting the same kind of mentality of many of Pranknet's victims?
Your post is modded funny, but it is absolutely correct.
The key point, however, is that when you flick your finger, and end up hitting a huge number of protons, the energy is therefore distributed among all these protons, neutrons, electrons, etc., and so nothing very interesting happens. When all the energy is is concentrated in one collision between two subatomic particles, then very interesting things happen, the most important of which is the creation of a shower of short-lived particles which we don't see in ordinary matter. The most interesting of these particles don't live long enough to even propagate into the detectors, but their decay products do give clues to their existence. It is hoped that the current holy grail of particle physics, the Higgs boson, will be found this way.
This car's range and charging time are suitable for 90% of commuters. You may think it's not, but your baseless opinions have nothing to do with reality.
If you'd bothered to read what I'd said, you'd have seen that I don't claim the car would be insufficient for a commute. Instead what I said is that most people can't afford to have two cars: one for commuting and one for the highway. Maintenance, insurance, and garage/parking space make it impractical for most people. Or are you assuming that people want to give up the ability to leave the city on occasion?
I'm sorry but the range and charging time aren't even close to being acceptable to the vast majority of users. How many people can afford two cars: one for the city and one for the highway? Yes, some families have two or more cars, but usually there are as many cars as commuters, so you'd still need an extra car for the highway. I think this car would have a very limited market. They wouldn't even be useful as pizza delivery cars for heaven's sake with that kind of charging time!
Wasn't there a story on Slashdot recently about a car that had a range over 200 miles with a ten minute charge time? That would be useful. But stats like the one on this car will simply turn people off electric cars for good.
Slashdot Mirror
Meta-moders, There are posts on here that are from the NASA story. The reason is that /. is currently broke (as in a bug, not as in USA debt). Some came here automatically. Mine was posted because I was following the other posters. Please nuke the modders that hit these as off-topic. It should be obvious that they KNEW that /. had issues and some of the posts came here (a post from in front of here told them so). For these modders to be nuking ppl for posting in this area is ridiculous considering the situation.
I disagree. If a posting ends up linked to the wrong story it is off-topic. It doesn't matter whether it is the fault of the poster or a bug in the Slashdot code, off-topic is off-topic, and should be modded as such. The purpose of modding is for the benefit of the readers, not the posters!
Sleeping is basically a good chance to get eaten.
Wow. And I thought I lived in a bad neighborhood.
So twenty-five of your thirty Facebook friends are gay and of the same gender as you. And they conclude you're probably gay! Wow!
Instead of battling online anonymity, maybe the police chief should be out searching vehicles for child whores being carried to points east and points north.
Yes, because when I'm driving through Austin with my family, I want the police to pull me over and question my kids about whether or not they've been forced to have sex. Nothing remotely like a police state about that.
I can certainly understand why the GP was modded Troll, but why was the parent modded Troll as well?
This looks like an interesting service. At $1170 per month, it seems to be aimed at companies providing security services such as anti-virus providers. That price should also keep it out of reach of casual hackers (or crackers!)
Most universities/polytechs/etc. are quite Linux-friendly here. They generally have a mix of machines, and avoid doing anything particularly hostile to any one platform.
That's great, but keep in mind Finland might have a very slight bias when it comes to Linux for obvious reasons.
"Jail" for a corporation should mean that all assets are frozen and all business activities are forced to halt for the same number of days that a real person would have been incarcerated.
The problem is that you'd be punishing a lot more people than those at Microsoft. Microsoft doesn't just sell operating systems for home computers; they sell and support a large number of business applications to a HUGE number of businesses. If Microsoft "went offline" for even just a few months, there'd be huge ripples throughout all sectors of the economy. Imagine if a critical security flaw were found in Windows, or IIS, or SQL Server and Microsoft couldn't patch it because they were "in jail". Just because you might not use MS products doesn't mean you don't do business with someone who does. It would be a disaster.
Actually, that's very close to the special "safe harbor" rule with regard to copyright infringement that was part of the DMCA. No such "safe harbor" rule exists with regard to trademark infringement.
That's because at the time the DMCA was passed, there was no such thing as contributory trademark infringement. This is a new doctrine created by this court. Having a safe harbor for some types of infringement but not others completely nullifies the effect of the safe harbor provision to begin with. People now have a mechanism to silence other people's speech: complain they are contributing to violation of their trademark. With no safe harbor, no sane ISP will ignore their request. Especially considering the size of a judgement like the one in the present case.
This isn't free software. There is no source available anywhere.
There's a difference between free software and open source software.
Technically, the BBC is neither government owned nor taxpayer funded. Of course, by law if you operate any equipment capable of receiving broadcast material you have to pay the license fee, but the government doesn't handle or distribute the funding.
So if you want to compete with the BBC in the television broadcast business, your customers still have to pay the BBC in order to watch your broacasts. Yeah, that's great for competition. And it is a tax if the government is doing the enforcing. Just because they don't call it a tax doesn't mean it isn't.
If you don't think a 16-year-old driver who causes a non-lethal accident deserves to rot away in jail for almost the same number of years he's been alive, then it doesn't make sense to punish another 16-year-old driver who made the exact same mistake, but was simply not as lucky.
If two people choose to walk out in a golf course during a lightning storm it is quite possible that one will be fatally struck by lightning while the other will merely get wet. Should we kill the lucky person to even things out? After all, it is just a matter of luck that one was struck and one wasn't.
I've never been in favor of punishing people because of what they might have done rather than what they did do. When you exercise bad judgment, you are putting yourself in a position where you might get very unlucky and have disastrous consequences. That isn't a reason to punish those who don't have similar bad luck. Personally, I like the Japanese system. There's no penalty for driving drunk, but if you drive drunk and kill someone, you get the same penalty as willful murder. It's about taking responsibility for your own actions.
Hmmm. This requirement that you need a license/ID to "travel the net" is roughly equivalent to saying I need a license to walk down the sidewalk.
Actually, in many countries you do need to carry a national ID card with you even just to walk down the sidewalk. I'm not just talking about Communist and third world dictatorships either. Many EU countries have this requirement.
Don't assume that American rights and values are universal. They guy who proposed this license system is Australian.
How does letting THEM, know who I am, make ME safer?
Read the article. It is talking primarily about identity theft and fraud. Better identification policies help to reduce these crimes. After all, typically when someone commits fraud with your credit card, they are pretending to be you. If people are required to identify themselves in the first place, that kind of fraud would be rather difficult. (Unless they get hold of your Internet license as well. But if you store it separately from your credit card you can reduce that risk as well.)
To travel from one point to another, an object must pass through all the points in between. There are an infinite number of points "in between," thus to move at all, an object must travel through an infinite number of points in a finite time. Clearly this definition of reality is flawed: stop using it.
Actually, I don't think the GP mentioned travelling at all!
Here's the thing: stateless works everywhere there is any internet connectivity. Imagine having to define a long-lasting stateful protocol around slow and unreliable internet connections.
That's exactly what TCP was designed for: persistent 2-way connections over possibly unreliable networks. But I agree with your basic point, given that firewalls may be configured to only allow HTTP and other basic protocols through.
Does that mean cell phone transmission is 4D? How do we visualize that?
Nope. It's 3D as well. Unlike the other examples provided, the vibrations here are in the same 3D space in which the wave propagates. The electric and magnetic field vectors are in 3D space, transverse to the direction of propagation.
This is exactly why I purchased my own copy of AnyDVD HD with a lifetime license (does not expire). Slysoft update's the ripping program at least once every two weeks, so you know many bugs are being worked out with ripping DVDs and BD disks.
I would highly suggest purchasing this program before it becomes illegal to do so. If not by Slysoft, by some other company.
http://www.slysoft.com/en/anydvdhd.html
So how is AnyDVD legal, while this RealDVD thing isn't?
You also got to consider the likelihood that as full or majority electric power cars start to become popular, you're going to see governments at the state, local and federal level attempting to make up for lost tax revenues. I'm not sure how they'll manage to differentiate between power for transport and power for home/business use, but if there's one thing that the government is good at it's figuring out new and inventive ways to tax people.
You make an interesting point. I suspect what will happen long term is that indeed, electricity for your car will be quite a bit more expensive than electricity for your home as a result of taxation. What will probably end up happening is, in the future, electric cars will have special plugs, that fit only in special outlets which are metered separately. There may be some sort of electronic connection between the car and the outlet as well, with secure/encrypted communication to prevent tampering or plug converters. Of course the Volt doesn't have this yet, but it wouldn't surprise me if this sort of technology were mandated soon.
The other option, considerably less palatable due to privacy implications is to charge at license plate renewal time a tax based on miles driven in the state by using a state mandated GPS unit installed in the car. I think some states (Oregon perhaps?) are already talking about doing this.
Of course, what will probably end up happening is BOTH.
That's the beauty of the GPL, in that if the opposition (defendant, perhaps plaintiff in a declaratory judgment) doesn't accept the license, everything defaults back to standard copyright protections, which don't allow use/copying/distribution in the first place,
Where do you get this definition of "standard copyright protections"? I agree that they cover copying and distribution, which is exactly what is being argued about, but use? Doesn't software need an explicit EULA (such as a click-through agreement) to limit use? I don't think most commonly used GPL libraries include EULAs.
FWIW, the IP attorneys I've discussed this with don't agree with you. They take the GPL at the FSF's word with regard to the meaning of "derivative work". I asked a couple about this and the response was that because the clearly-stated intent of the license was to preclude linking except to code distributed under compatible terms, that a court would most likely agree with the copyright holder. Basically, the "linking implies derivation" notion is reasonable and well-understood by all parties, so the court would accept it.
How many IP attorneys have you discussed this with? I am rather surprised to hear lawyers, who among other things generally receive training in logic, apply such a clearly circular argument. The GPL is a distribution license, not a usage license, so one must be distributing GPL or GPL-derived code for the license to even apply. How can you then go on to argue that the novel definition of "derived work" appearing in the GPL is relevant to whether or not the distributing party is bound by the GPL in the first place? If established case law (and I'm not up to date on this) says that linking to libraries (without distributing those libraries) doesn't constitute a derived work, how can a copyright license (which then wouldn't apply) change that definition? And isn't writing code that links to a library essentially just writing to an API? And haven't courts ruled that writing to an API does not constitute a derived work?
I read the entire Smoking Gun article linked, and found a disturbing lack of evidence presented as to the identity of Dex, the leader of Pranknet.
According to this Windsor Star article, Smoking Gun sent Dex an e-mail with some custom crafted URLs claiming they were public articles on the Smoking Gun website. When he allegedly clicked on the link, they supposedly had his IP address.
Never mind the fact that that is one of the oldest tricks in the book, and the real Dex would almost surely have been wise to it, but the article leaves out a critical detail. According to the Star article, after obtaining Dex's supposed IP address, Smoking Gun investigators then went to his home address, and looked through server logs, etc. What they fail to mention is how they obtained his name and home address from the IP address. I don't know too many ISPs who hand over such information to private investigative firms. Some are even reluctant to hand over this information to law enforcement without a warrant. So how did Smoking Gun get this information? Which server logs did they subsequently investigate and how did they get access to them? And most importantly, according to Smoking Gun's own article, Dex apparently never paid for his Internet access, but rather found open Wi-Fi access points to obtain Internet access. If that is the case, how did Smoking Gun map his IP address to to name and address? This all sounds very suspicious. The Windsor Star even refused to print his name and address, because they were unable to independently verify any of this.
Yet, reading the above posts, it appears that many Slashdotters take it is a given that the identity of Dex revealed in the Smoking Gun article is correct. Aren't such people exhibiting the same kind of mentality of many of Pranknet's victims?
Your post is modded funny, but it is absolutely correct.
The key point, however, is that when you flick your finger, and end up hitting a huge number of protons, the energy is therefore distributed among all these protons, neutrons, electrons, etc., and so nothing very interesting happens. When all the energy is is concentrated in one collision between two subatomic particles, then very interesting things happen, the most important of which is the creation of a shower of short-lived particles which we don't see in ordinary matter. The most interesting of these particles don't live long enough to even propagate into the detectors, but their decay products do give clues to their existence. It is hoped that the current holy grail of particle physics, the Higgs boson, will be found this way.
This car's range and charging time are suitable for 90% of commuters. You may think it's not, but your baseless opinions have nothing to do with reality.
If you'd bothered to read what I'd said, you'd have seen that I don't claim the car would be insufficient for a commute. Instead what I said is that most people can't afford to have two cars: one for commuting and one for the highway. Maintenance, insurance, and garage/parking space make it impractical for most people. Or are you assuming that people want to give up the ability to leave the city on occasion?
I'm sorry but the range and charging time aren't even close to being acceptable to the vast majority of users. How many people can afford two cars: one for the city and one for the highway? Yes, some families have two or more cars, but usually there are as many cars as commuters, so you'd still need an extra car for the highway. I think this car would have a very limited market. They wouldn't even be useful as pizza delivery cars for heaven's sake with that kind of charging time!
Wasn't there a story on Slashdot recently about a car that had a range over 200 miles with a ten minute charge time? That would be useful. But stats like the one on this car will simply turn people off electric cars for good.