"get you disappeared" sounds like kidnapping. A serious felony. If government agents (or anyone else) are prepared to do this, they certainly will not hesitate to tap phones. Legal or otherwise. However, I suspect not many are. Most are bureaucrats worried about their pensions and rather afraid of incarceration. Some might even be interested in enforcing laws.
While certainly gray areas have been pushed by many Presidents and federal officers, none so far has really wanted to break law flagrantly. That we know of. Habeas corpus is grinding slowly stronger.
So the snatch comes to trial and the evidence gets thrown out so there's no conviction. Then the snatchee sues. The evidence _is_ admissible in civil court, so no damages. Just like OJ.
Not how it works -- you have to show losses. The celb has no problem because the adverse publicity costs them roles/gigs that have defined profitability. There are probably precedents. Celebs major asset is their reputation and public image. Impairment costs them $.
These private individuals would have a far tougher time showing actual losses. According to TFA, their lawyer is claiming $100/day for 202 days. And punatives are up to the court. What can they claim, presuming investigators have kept data confidential? What actual losses?
They didn't know they were being monitored, so it didn't affect their behaviours. Zero losses. Now, they could very reasonably claim "psychological trauma" because they now have excellent reason to be afraid of police wrongdoing. But how can you quantify that? How much is it worth?
I'm not sure exactly what damages they can claim. Perhaps lawyers fees. More important is the actual finding -- if the surveillance was illegal, it falls under the "Fruit of the Poisoned Vine" doctrine, and and evidence gathered as a consequence becomes inadmissible in any criminal action.
This the a mjaor finding, and I expect the Feds to appeal. They have lots of lawyers and do not worry about the cost.
While the question of ownership / work-for-hire might exist for proprietary software (MS-Windows, SAP, etc), it most emphatically _does_not_ for software developed for a GPL base.
As derivative works, the software creator is required to accept the GPL to distribute her software. The GPL clearly states that anyone who receives binaries is entitled to source _and_ rights of further modification and distribution. Stallman wrote it this way after frustration with a Xerox printer driver.
Now, the question might arise "What is a derivative work?" "Pure" C code without any OS-specific references obviously is not. IANAL, but I would also suggest that any code that is trivially portable between OSes (simple recompilation with OS flag set) is also not derivative.
But if it runs on Linux/GNU and won't run on *BSD without porting, then it sure looks derivative.
Fully agreed many copyright holders are unlikely to benefit. I hold copyright in this post and sure won't". And even major holders will suffer if the "appetite whetting" argument (which they reject) is actually true.
However, the copyright combines _will_ benefit. Why such association of monopolists is tolerated is beyond me. While not operative in the UK, the US Sherman and Clayton Acts do not ban monopolies. They ban the _extention_ and expansion of monopolies. Copyright is a govt granted monopoly, it should not get special exemption.
Certainly many US Sens & Reps "are there". But it takes buying or otherwise having delivered 51 of the former and 220 of the latter. Much harder work than buying ONE party (a few key brokers). Small wonder there are many more lobbyists and pols spend all their time "fundraising". These negotiations are delicate and time-consuming.
... even here at SlashDot, society is infested with the innumerates! Arrrrh!
A DISCOUNT cannot be applied to a purchase price until/unless it is clear of other conditions. In this case, a 24 month service "contract".
The $20/mo can only be considered if the contract price is fully competitive with the offer you would otherwise take. Personally, I consider $60-75/mo utterly outrageous. The $20/mo makes them slightly less outrageous, but still usurous. I have a nice grandfathered sweet deal at $2-4/mo, but more than $40 is just plain extortion.
Qui buono? Who benefits? The people? Or copyright holders? This one is obviously the latter. How do they get such favors? Through some obscure mechanism to earn support. Most likely
party funding.
Many people complain about the US system (&Japan) where individual candidates raise their own campaign funds. And would like to limit them. But at least these systems produce independant legislators.
It was a spectacle when Tony Blair thrice put down backbencher revolts over UK involvement in Iraq (quite reasonably, labor platforms & supporters have always been dovish and somewhat antiUS). This convinced me that the UK (&other parlementary systems) are really elected dictatorships. Diktat is to be expected.
Gee... you don't think that a puritain morality has anything to do with it? Whoever draws first is the aggressor and is justified in being shot by someone who was just defending themselves?
Not to say there might not be other explanations, but I think the storyline is primary. People will only pay for a story they "like". Movies are commercial enterprises, expensive to make and requiring financial justification. Art is secondary but the most talented producers, directors and others know how to bring art in effectively.
Yes, I have SSDs spec'd read 200+ . Who knows, they might even do that for 128kB bursts. But when I test them with `hdparm tT` they typically turn _alot_ less, consistently ~50% nominal. 110 is common. Sometimes they run considerably faster on `time md5sum/dev/sda` (140), but never full nominal. YMMV.
There are alignment tricks with SSD around their large erase blocks, so you have to be careful partitioning.
Also, consumer-grade MHC SSDs are _not_ tremendously faster than spinning disks in transfer speed. Maybe 20%. Access time is where SSDs shine, 0.2 ms vs 8-10ms.
A simple scheme I use is to put the OS & small, frequent datafiles on SSD, and large [image] files on platter.
This might not help large databases with sparse access, but lots of RAM disk cache should be better. IIRC Seagate had a disk with flash boost, but had trouble with it.
As for the cost calculus, consider it prophylactic. If the defense costs 100 k$, the plaintiff will cost at least some [large] fraction of this. You need to scare them off. Delousing as a cost of business.
Humans are the the top of the food chain, so we prey upon ourselves. Do not imagine you can live as a sheep, without horns. The legal system is not intended to stop all predatation, but rather to optimize it. Any purely defensive war is guaranteed to lose.
Patent trolls are in a very tenuous position -- in the absence of a lawsuit/settlement, they would not make _ANYTHING_ from their patents (even if valid). So their damages are _ZERO_. Not some hypothetical value had they chosen to manufacture or licence.
Time to look at the concept of damages more closely, not just make them broad. There is a serious question whether juries should set damages, or perhaps as fact-finders be forced to break them down for appeals to review at-law.
A strong passwd is only a small part of the entire security system. It is important to address _all_ parts. One of the most important is to make the cost of guessing passwords high.
A non-shadow/etc/passwd has extremely low guessing costs, just a few CPU cycles. An ATM that eats cards after 3 wrong guesses has an extremely high guessing cost. Account lockouts, timed or manual are somewhere in-between.
The important point is these guessing costs are largely under the control of the admins and not subject to variable user compliance or resentful coersion.
It really bothers me when service people try to blame me for some inefficiency when they are not doing all they can. I'm not supposed to do their job, or even make it easy. They're there to make mine easy.
Most people want fast & free and are less concerned about privacy. This is observable behaviour, and it would be idiotic to expect online corps to hobble their advertising revenue by foregoing user customization. Or courts to ignore admissible evidence.
Some people also seem to positively eschew privacy and want to publicise themselves. Their choice is valid too, but they must accept the consequences as well as the benefits. The interesting thing is that the consequences severity*probability has not scared people yet. This is evidence of a "not-too-horrible" society. Some societies [DDR] have been otherwise.
A bigger question will be to preserve privacy for the minority who opt to keep it. Fortunately, silence cannot be used against you in a [anglo] court-of-law. Unfortunately, nothing can protect you against the expectations of others.
Do not underestimate the French! The right ("Le Figaro") most certainly will complain at the illogic. It is also a more than customarily stupid tax on business which the french right support. A proper object of ridicule. They might not complain of a raw bandwidth tax.
Everyone knows advertisers pay for ads, and have to pass those costs onto their customers. When the ad is in french, just who can anyone thinks is paying?
... wasen't it a frenchman [Flaubert?] who said "The art of taxation is plucking the goose with the least amount of squawking?" So taxes should make sense if they are to be effective.
Taxing on-line ads would do nothing to impede piracy. Less than a bandwidth tax. It would be ultimately paid for by the customers of online advertisers, most a tax on online products and services. I have no doubt the French govt would like to tax these to save their bricks-and-mortar over whom they have more control. Onlines mostly won't care, raise prices or go elsewhere and it is just the French people who will pay for the [desired?] ossification.
Oh... never mind. Another frenchman said "Never interrupt your enemy while he is making a mistake" [Napoleon 1er].
Just what is so tough? Scan autoreplies for the spam sig and delete (leave ar set to blank). Spam affected [l]users with a msg.
Or just turn off AR altogether. It's an optional feature, and people that rely excessively on the internet or optional features get what they pay for. There will be whiners! Which would they rather: buggy code or nothing? Bugfree code is _not_ an option. No service at all is. [intern BoFH]
Sure, HotMail has egg all over its' face for allowing an exploitable hole (most likely). But better to 'fess & fix than duck & cover (up).
... left unstated (perhaps to save embarrassement) is what others are giving up to get the INTERPOL immunity. Perhaps US SecSvc or FBI dipl.immunity in the EU / G-8 ?
Diplomatic negotiations like these are always on a like-for-like reciprocal exchange, so I'd bet it is for US services to operate abroad as they do inside the US. There have been quite some incidents with the US SecSvc running afoul of national police during POTUS and other protectee visits.
You bring up some good points, especially about what happens when people's expectations are not fulfilled. And politicians always oversell. Asymmetric payoff.
However, revenge is a dead-end. It always escalates because you perceive your pain greater than that which you cause.
India today reminds me of post-Civil-War US. Nominal equality for all, deep social barriers supported occasionaly by legal tricks. The same sort of solution (1960s Civil Rights Acts) might apply. At least break the self-propagating back of prejudice and allow it to decay (half-live ~20 y).
What? Do you think censorship and other oppressions steal theatrically onto the scene in the guise of an Snidely Whiplash or some other obvious villain?
No, no, a thousand times no. Very earnest and well intentioned men promulgate evil most often in the guise of preventing greater evil. Harm to children, innocents or other spectres are proffered. These spectacular horrors are given to distract you and "justify" far more pervasive oppressions. Searching your underwear so an airplane does not crash. Using the spectacular size difference to hide an even more enormous frequency difference.
Even if the "riots" are not exaggerated hyperbole (which would not surprise me), then the serious question is why such people have been so stressed they have only rioting as an outlet. Because if it is not one trigger, it will be some other. Simple disagreeing, disagreeable or even insulting information does not drive normal people to violence. That is way up the ladder of provocation.
The stated purpose of these government-granted IP monopolies is "to advance the progress of science and the useful arts". Fine. Patents run 19 years, why does copyright run 95? Are Thomas Alva Edison's daughters less deserving of a legacy than Samuel Clements [Mark Twain]?
The overlong copyright is beyond irrelevant to the act of creation -- in prospect, something is worth the creative effort based on the chances of near-term success, not long term. The power of compound interest, unless the US Constitution is meant to support irrationality.
In 1995 of course with expiry looming, mediacorps wish to extend their monopolies. Long past influing creation. Perhaps media ought to be allowed in a more limited way through trademark. There can be no question Disney has maintained the Mouse as a TM, and this would give them defenses against [sexual] parodies.
Of course, this applies only for works created expressly for profitable publication. Private papers remain secret, just like trade secrets. If subsequently published, that would start the clock.
Slashdot Mirror
While certainly gray areas have been pushed by many Presidents and federal officers, none so far has really wanted to break law flagrantly. That we know of. Habeas corpus is grinding slowly stronger.
So the snatch comes to trial and the evidence gets thrown out so there's no conviction. Then the snatchee sues. The evidence _is_ admissible in civil court, so no damages. Just like OJ.
These private individuals would have a far tougher time showing actual losses. According to TFA, their lawyer is claiming $100/day for 202 days. And punatives are up to the court. What can they claim, presuming investigators have kept data confidential? What actual losses?
They didn't know they were being monitored, so it didn't affect their behaviours. Zero losses. Now, they could very reasonably claim "psychological trauma" because they now have excellent reason to be afraid of police wrongdoing. But how can you quantify that? How much is it worth?
I'm not sure exactly what damages they can claim. Perhaps lawyers fees. More important is the actual finding -- if the surveillance was illegal, it falls under the "Fruit of the Poisoned Vine" doctrine, and and evidence gathered as a consequence becomes inadmissible in any criminal action.
This the a mjaor finding, and I expect the Feds to appeal. They have lots of lawyers and do not worry about the cost.
While the question of ownership / work-for-hire might exist for proprietary software (MS-Windows, SAP, etc), it most emphatically _does_not_ for software developed for a GPL base.
As derivative works, the software creator is required to accept the GPL to distribute her software. The GPL clearly states that anyone who receives binaries is entitled to source _and_ rights of further modification and distribution. Stallman wrote it this way after frustration with a Xerox printer driver.
Now, the question might arise "What is a derivative work?" "Pure" C code without any OS-specific references obviously is not. IANAL, but I would also suggest that any code that is trivially portable between OSes (simple recompilation with OS flag set) is also not derivative.
But if it runs on Linux/GNU and won't run on *BSD without porting, then it sure looks derivative.
However, the copyright combines _will_ benefit. Why such association of monopolists is tolerated is beyond me. While not operative in the UK, the US Sherman and Clayton Acts do not ban monopolies. They ban the _extention_ and expansion of monopolies. Copyright is a govt granted monopoly, it should not get special exemption.
Certainly many US Sens & Reps "are there". But it takes buying or otherwise having delivered 51 of the former and 220 of the latter. Much harder work than buying ONE party (a few key brokers). Small wonder there are many more lobbyists and pols spend all their time "fundraising". These negotiations are delicate and time-consuming.
I have a 10+ year old plan, airtime only, $0.08/min. I don't think you can get them fresh.
... even here at SlashDot, society is infested with the innumerates! Arrrrh!
A DISCOUNT cannot be applied to a purchase price until/unless it is clear of other conditions. In this case, a 24 month service "contract".
The $20/mo can only be considered if the contract price is fully competitive with the offer you would otherwise take. Personally, I consider $60-75/mo utterly outrageous. The $20/mo makes them slightly less outrageous, but still usurous. I have a nice grandfathered sweet deal at $2-4/mo, but more than $40 is just plain extortion.
Many people complain about the US system (&Japan) where individual candidates raise their own campaign funds. And would like to limit them. But at least these systems produce independant legislators.
It was a spectacle when Tony Blair thrice put down backbencher revolts over UK involvement in Iraq (quite reasonably, labor platforms & supporters have always been dovish and somewhat antiUS). This convinced me that the UK (&other parlementary systems) are really elected dictatorships. Diktat is to be expected.
Not to say there might not be other explanations, but I think the storyline is primary. People will only pay for a story they "like". Movies are commercial enterprises, expensive to make and requiring financial justification. Art is secondary but the most talented producers, directors and others know how to bring art in effectively.
Yes, I have SSDs spec'd read 200+ . Who knows, they might even do that for 128kB bursts. But when I test them with `hdparm tT` they typically turn _alot_ less, consistently ~50% nominal. 110 is common. Sometimes they run considerably faster on `time md5sum /dev/sda` (140), but never full nominal. YMMV.
There are alignment tricks with SSD around their large erase blocks, so you have to be careful partitioning.
Also, consumer-grade MHC SSDs are _not_ tremendously faster than spinning disks in transfer speed. Maybe 20%. Access time is where SSDs shine, 0.2 ms vs 8-10ms .
A simple scheme I use is to put the OS & small, frequent datafiles on SSD, and large [image] files on platter.
This might not help large databases with sparse access, but lots of RAM disk cache should be better. IIRC Seagate had a disk with flash boost, but had trouble with it.
As for the cost calculus, consider it prophylactic. If the defense costs 100 k$, the plaintiff will cost at least some [large] fraction of this. You need to scare them off. Delousing as a cost of business.
Humans are the the top of the food chain, so we prey upon ourselves. Do not imagine you can live as a sheep, without horns. The legal system is not intended to stop all predatation, but rather to optimize it. Any purely defensive war is guaranteed to lose.
If there is a first-filer advantage, grab it! You know there's a suit coming, why duck?
Get the patent purchase price as part of discovery!
Time to look at the concept of damages more closely, not just make them broad. There is a serious question whether juries should set damages, or perhaps as fact-finders be forced to break them down for appeals to review at-law.
A strong passwd is only a small part of the entire security system. It is important to address _all_ parts. One of the most important is to make the cost of guessing passwords high.
A non-shadow /etc/passwd has extremely low guessing costs, just a few CPU cycles. An ATM that eats cards after 3 wrong guesses has an extremely high guessing cost. Account lockouts, timed or manual are somewhere in-between.
The important point is these guessing costs are largely under the control of the admins and not subject to variable user compliance or resentful coersion.
It really bothers me when service people try to blame me for some inefficiency when they are not doing all they can. I'm not supposed to do their job, or even make it easy. They're there to make mine easy.
Most people want fast & free and are less concerned about privacy. This is observable behaviour, and it would be idiotic to expect online corps to hobble their advertising revenue by foregoing user customization. Or courts to ignore admissible evidence.
Some people also seem to positively eschew privacy and want to publicise themselves. Their choice is valid too, but they must accept the consequences as well as the benefits. The interesting thing is that the consequences severity*probability has not scared people yet. This is evidence of a "not-too-horrible" society. Some societies [DDR] have been otherwise.
A bigger question will be to preserve privacy for the minority who opt to keep it. Fortunately, silence cannot be used against you in a [anglo] court-of-law. Unfortunately, nothing can protect you against the expectations of others.
Everyone knows advertisers pay for ads, and have to pass those costs onto their customers. When the ad is in french, just who can anyone thinks is paying?
... wasen't it a frenchman [Flaubert?] who said "The art of taxation is plucking the goose with the least amount of squawking?" So taxes should make sense if they are to be effective.
Taxing on-line ads would do nothing to impede piracy. Less than a bandwidth tax. It would be ultimately paid for by the customers of online advertisers, most a tax on online products and services. I have no doubt the French govt would like to tax these to save their bricks-and-mortar over whom they have more control. Onlines mostly won't care, raise prices or go elsewhere and it is just the French people who will pay for the [desired?] ossification.
Oh ... never mind. Another frenchman said "Never interrupt your enemy while he is making a mistake" [Napoleon 1er].
Just what is so tough? Scan autoreplies for the spam sig and delete (leave ar set to blank). Spam affected [l]users with a msg.
Or just turn off AR altogether. It's an optional feature, and people that rely excessively on the internet or optional features get what they pay for. There will be whiners! Which would they rather: buggy code or nothing? Bugfree code is _not_ an option. No service at all is. [intern BoFH]
Sure, HotMail has egg all over its' face for allowing an exploitable hole (most likely). But better to 'fess & fix than duck & cover (up).
... left unstated (perhaps to save embarrassement) is what others are giving up to get the INTERPOL immunity. Perhaps US SecSvc or FBI dipl.immunity in the EU / G-8 ?
Diplomatic negotiations like these are always on a like-for-like reciprocal exchange, so I'd bet it is for US services to operate abroad as they do inside the US. There have been quite some incidents with the US SecSvc running afoul of national police during POTUS and other protectee visits.
However, revenge is a dead-end. It always escalates because you perceive your pain greater than that which you cause.
India today reminds me of post-Civil-War US. Nominal equality for all, deep social barriers supported occasionaly by legal tricks. The same sort of solution (1960s Civil Rights Acts) might apply. At least break the self-propagating back of prejudice and allow it to decay (half-live ~20 y).
What? Do you think censorship and other oppressions steal theatrically onto the scene in the guise of an Snidely Whiplash or some other obvious villain?
No, no, a thousand times no. Very earnest and well intentioned men promulgate evil most often in the guise of preventing greater evil. Harm to children, innocents or other spectres are proffered. These spectacular horrors are given to distract you and "justify" far more pervasive oppressions. Searching your underwear so an airplane does not crash. Using the spectacular size difference to hide an even more enormous frequency difference.
Even if the "riots" are not exaggerated hyperbole (which would not surprise me), then the serious question is why such people have been so stressed they have only rioting as an outlet. Because if it is not one trigger, it will be some other. Simple disagreeing, disagreeable or even insulting information does not drive normal people to violence. That is way up the ladder of provocation.
The stated purpose of these government-granted IP monopolies is "to advance the progress of science and the useful arts". Fine. Patents run 19 years, why does copyright run 95? Are Thomas Alva Edison's daughters less deserving of a legacy than Samuel Clements [Mark Twain]?
The overlong copyright is beyond irrelevant to the act of creation -- in prospect, something is worth the creative effort based on the chances of near-term success, not long term. The power of compound interest, unless the US Constitution is meant to support irrationality.
In 1995 of course with expiry looming, mediacorps wish to extend their monopolies. Long past influing creation. Perhaps media ought to be allowed in a more limited way through trademark. There can be no question Disney has maintained the Mouse as a TM, and this would give them defenses against [sexual] parodies.
Of course, this applies only for works created expressly for profitable publication. Private papers remain secret, just like trade secrets. If subsequently published, that would start the clock.
... with so many slashtards, /. will not qualify for the normal "news" exemption on images and stories.