This is conceptually identical to the Army/Navy ROTC program, replacing military discipline/law with serious non-disclosure "official secrets" obligations.
Only people have a right to life. Dogs, cats, dolphins, chimpanzees, pigs, cows and computer programs do not. The question then becomes: When does an egg/embryo/fetus/baby become a person?
Although science might be able to shed some light with neonatal EEG, this is a deeply religious question. Since the USSC seemed inclined to create a Constitutional Right to abortion, I'm a bit suprised they didn't base it on The Third Ammendment "prohibit estabilishment of religion".
Look, if the USSC can find a Right to Abortion hidden in the Ninth Amendment " other rights not denied", then they can surely find "Fair Use" there too. But I don't think any lower Court would dare.
One important test for this Right: The People consider that they have it. Criticism, parody and other fair uses has been viewed as a right of those derivitive creators.
If DNS when down, the great washed masses would think the Internet is down.
But I don't have DNS half the time [corp FW] and the other half it's slow, so I put important sites in a big @$$/etc/hosts [doubleclick.net 127.0.0.1].
I don't think I'd notice DNS out except for an inexplicable speedup:)
A little stronger than copyright, because you'd have to also prove that you weren't influenced by seeing or hearing of the patentholder's implementation. It's not easy to prove a negative, but fortunately, this is a civil case, so it's "preponderence of evidence" and not "beyond reasonable doubt".
There is a solution to this morass. Simply allow the fact that an inventor discovered/invented a thing independantly of the patent as a defense against patent violation. Of course, there are evidentiary problems. But there always are.
The issue is that if something was independantly discovered, the patent should hardly be granted since it doesn't induce anything that wouldn't otherwise happen.
The patent problem, as well as many other issues are an example of how political and business systems fall victim to few concentrated interests and underweight more widespread "common" interests.
If you're in the patenting biz, or have some patents (copyrights, environmental problem, any sort of valuable asset/liability), it's worth alot to you. You will spend alot of energy [money,time,...] defending your interests and trying to make things go your way before the Courts, Legislatures, Regulators, media, markets, public opinion.
Your very-numerous prey/antagonists do many things. You little asset/liab is a small part of their lives. It's hardly life-or-death for most of them to put up with you. [Parasitic!] If they ever found out, they might not like what you're doing, but it's not worth enough to them to be worth fighting. A whole reservoir of opposition gets trapped below the inaction thresholdaa.
Now some people will always complain, and more do if the inaction threshold can be lowered [email & Internet]. But how do you _prevent_ the squeeky wheel from getting the grease?
Well, doh! Those astronauts are all-American boys who know how to play ball in gravity. Probably made some sort of ball sports team.
Of course they're going to have trouble in zero-gee. They'll have to unlearn all the trajectory compensations they learned in practice. I'd expect someone who who didn't make the team and doesn't know throwing/catching to do alot better.
Habits are harder to unlearn than to learn.
File/block slack is hardly news. Nor is it even moderately secure.
One of the first things a forensic analyst will do, mostly in search of deleted blocks is `strings/dev/hda1`. More likely off a ro image, but out everything ASCII will pop.
I thought about this before posting. The problem is not with what was said, but how it's interpreted.
Of course some people will read it in their favor. That's called bias, and they're excluded from Juries.
In your example, this smoking gun doesn't prove a thing _unless_ there was some anti-competitive activity that resulted. If FavCo had a corporate values statement saything they would obey all laws and act ethically [any company large enough to sue would], then that would be a strong defense. But it would ultimately boil down to what people say that the alleged smoking gun meant to them.
If you don't presuppose some level of reasonableness in juries, then you're living under an oppression much more serious than the government can even impose. The prior-restraint and self-censorship is intolerable. Don't live in fear. Sometimes not even if the fears are real!
IANAL, but isn't there a Common law principle that if a party fundamentally breaks a contract that they cannot later sue the other party for any breach? I'm not sure if this is in US law.
So how about if a publisher impedes Fair Use in any way, they are prevented (estopped) from enforcing copyright against those that circumvent these measures?
Why are people worried about email retention? Do they say things that aren't true at the time? Why should people be allowed/encouraged to distroy evidence?
"Things will be misconstrued" is a cop-out. How do you misconstrue a direct warning that the recipient is too pre-occupied to do anything about? If there is an explanation, give it. I don't think juries are that stupid. If they are, then we're in alot more trouble and need to work more at educating them, or at least not putting them to sleep in court.
Sure, anything can be taken the wrong way. But the solution isn't to give nothing, but rather to assist people in seeing the right way. Unless there isn't one! In which case, you're guilty, and I don't see why anyone should help you hide your guilt.
One of the things that has annoyed me the most about this case has been MSFT's continued insistance that they couldn't have broken any laws. Not merely the customary statements of innocence, or the hedged "we believe we broke no laws", but an out-and-out genuine incredulity that they would even be accused. The reaction of a sociopath.
The fact that Micosoft won't even admit they were getting close to the line when everyone else was screaming they were far across it greatly disturbs me. Such an inability to distinguish right-from-wrong justifies unusually strong protective [harsh] measures.
Allchin most certainly did not say this without approval. I think this is a trail-balloon being floated. How could MSFT be expected to abid by any conduct remedy when they don't recognize offending conduct?
Nope. Technology simply makes a bigger cake. It is still finite size, and you cannot both have it and consume it.
If you eat all the growth, then you will will have nothing to take home.
Moore's law has done a fine job of keeping up with software bloat. More mature battery technology has not.
Personally, I don't use GUIs. They're graphical menuing menuing systems: the limited choice of all menu systems which abandon the clarity of the alphabet. I'm very happy running VTs at 160x60 with SVGATextMode. Only when absolutely necessary (every few days) do I `startx`.
Moore's law, especially the process shrink should _help batteries, not put higher demands on them.
It is the users/marketers insistance on cramming more "functionality" [aka bloatware] in that gobbles battery life. Quit whining -- we do this to ourselves. The technology is an innocent bystander.
Granted if the dest buffer is on the heap, EBP-*ptr is a very big number. But I don't see trashing the heap nearly as bad as trashing the stack. Unless someone has put a jump table there.
After all, in order to get control of the return address, you'll have to fill up ~1 GB, and almost certainly run over sbrk() which will segfault. The linked-list memory you mention was used on MS-DOS/Win16, but obviously cannot be used on any decent pmode OS.
Yes, the blinking 12 problem is still with us. But allow me to defend those sufferers!
I think people suffer with such problems simply because the perceived benefits
of solving it is not worth the cost involved. That is a perfectly rational
decision, especially in light of the documentation usually sent with VCRs. So
they just go back to being mesmerized by the phosphor tube.
The MPAA doesn't get any such easy-out. This organization exists to promote
the general interests of the movie industry. As such, it has to figure out
what those best interests are. Instead, they seem to be opposing any and all
change: TV broadcast of movies, VCRs and now PVRs, etc. This seems more
motivated by fear than any rational analysis.
Granted good programming practice [fixed length buffers] is the best
solution. But while waiting for code clean-up, wouldn't it be a fairly
simple fix to wrapper the offending variable-length libc calls with fixed length calls?
The problem is how long a length.
For x86 with standard stackframe setup, there is an answer: length _MUST_
be less than (EBP - *ptr) if the stack isn't to be trashed. Note that other
local data may well get trashed. But at least the pgm doesn't lose control.
The wrapper could drop early chars or trailing chars, but should signal
an error in the unlikely event the code has been made with error trapping.
Of course, this wouldn't work if the code was compiled with -fomit-frame-pointer
[or equivalent], but there is a price for security.
May I suggest a better target for...complaints would be the FCC & the US Congress? They're the ones supposed to be watching out for our interest. AFAIK, the FCC has always vigorously resisted any encryption of broadcast frequencies.
The MPAA is not supposed to be watching out for the public, they're supposed to be watching out for their shareholders. Of course, they're rather thickheaded to think they can scr3w their customers and not suffer. But stupidity is not usually a crime.
A good point. I think TV & software also fit into the "high cost" mold.
But for the others, say books, the publishing houses pay quite a bit for the rights to publish. The cost for these rights should also be written off over the copyright period. The publisher would "persuade" the author that they don't want to see a long copyright.
Copyright owners are seeming to insist that copyrights are long term assets. 95 vs 75 years matters. Fine -- let's take them at their word!
Under the US Income Tax Code, expenses to make/buy long-term assets are treated very differently from other running expenses. If you buy a 2k$ computer, a 20 k$ business car, a 10 M$ building or a 1 G$ chemical plant, you _don't_ get to deduct against income the whole cost of these things in the year spent. You are forced to spread the cost out [amortize] over an estimate of the useful life of the asset. This principle should hold true for all long-term assets, most particularly copyrights.
Now I have no idea how long the economically useful life of a copyright is. It probably varies from weeks for a newspaper story to decades for a novel. Our beloved IRS probably has even less of a clue. But I bet the copyright owner has a pretty good idea. So I'd let the copyright owner set the term of his copyright (subject to maximum), but force him to write-off all production costs over that term!
If an owner was willing to keep the term less than a year, then they could write-off all expenses as they do now. But if they wanted a 75 year copyright term, they could only write off 1.33% of total expenses per year over 75 years. That's a long time to wait for the tax back, and I very seriously doubt any businessman would go that long. Most likely 5 or 10 years would be the economic optimum.
I like this concept because it is voluntary and making these sorts of trade-off are very normal in business. The owner has income and cost projections, and can chose a term to match. I also see no problem in allowing a copyright holder to accelerate deductions by shortening the term. Lengthening the term is obviously out of the question.
One thing surprises me: Bjorn Lomborg seems to accept that Carbon dioxide emissions cause 2-3C warming. I'm not there yet.
The uncontrolled, ex-post atmospheric models hardly convince me, but the correlation of temperature with CO2 over millenia is intriguing. But have you ever opened a warm soda can?
The 8C air temperature swing would affect rain and the oceans about the same amount. Atmospheric Carbon dioxide swings from 200 to 300 ppm which is coincidentally just about the decreased solubility at increasing temperature.
So which is the chicken, and which the egg? If the Earth heated up from some exogenous cause (solar, geothermal, geomagnetic), then CO2 would rise as an effect not a cause.
A statistics professor would say "Correlation does not prove causality". Why doesn't Bjorn?
Well, it seems like at least four Supremes want to rule on the Sonny Bono Copyright Extention Act of 1996. Great. A more egregious example of influence peddling would be hard to find.
My argument is that the CREA96 is that the term granted was not shown "to Promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" are required by the US Constitution. In fact, it can be fairly shown it hampers said progress since no incentives it gave could possibly have influenced past creativity yet the extention reduces creativity of those who would use the materials once they enter the public domain. Somebody might want to make a competing "Mickey Mouse" comic strip!
IMHO, copyright term should reflect the use of the work, and the likely motive behind creating it. For projects made for commercial exploitation (most mass media), this period should match that used by the company's financial analysts or stockholders. They seldom look beyond 20 years simply because the power of compound interest reduces the value of any future revenues to insignificance. So I would make the copyright period 20 years after first sale. This is generous, because most investors demand 2-5 year pay-back! For unsold works, some of which are potentially private papers, I would make the period longer, say life of the author plus 20-50 years.
Unfortunately, the "takings clause" doesn't apply since that only forbits the uncompensated taking of private property for public use, while CREA96 takes public property for private use:(
I think I see your point. So journalling gets around corruption of metadata by double-writing?
That's fairly high overhead, and I would want to know how often corrupt sectors get written to disk. Nothing is safe against software faults, not even journalling. My working hypothesis is that most crashes are actually hangs or deadlocks. Accidental powerfail/reset also happens, but is also the deliberately caused to recover.
In this case, I would think that modern disks have a fairly sophisticated power-down routine, probably involving completing a certain amount of write-out (at least the sector) before parking the heads. Power comes from platter spin-down.
Slashdot Mirror
Although science might be able to shed some light with neonatal EEG, this is a deeply religious question. Since the USSC seemed inclined to create a Constitutional Right to abortion, I'm a bit suprised they didn't base it on The Third Ammendment "prohibit estabilishment of religion".
One important test for this Right: The People consider that they have it. Criticism, parody and other fair uses has been viewed as a right of those derivitive creators.
But I don't have DNS half the time [corp FW] and the other half it's slow, so I put important sites in a big @$$ /etc/hosts [doubleclick.net 127.0.0.1] .
I don't think I'd notice DNS out except for an inexplicable speedup :)
The issue is that if something was independantly discovered, the patent should hardly be granted since it doesn't induce anything that wouldn't otherwise happen.
If you're in the patenting biz, or have some patents (copyrights, environmental problem, any sort of valuable asset/liability), it's worth alot to you. You will spend alot of energy [money,time,...] defending your interests and trying to make things go your way before the Courts, Legislatures, Regulators, media, markets, public opinion.
Your very-numerous prey/antagonists do many things. You little asset/liab is a small part of their lives. It's hardly life-or-death for most of them to put up with you. [Parasitic!] If they ever found out, they might not like what you're doing, but it's not worth enough to them to be worth fighting. A whole reservoir of opposition gets trapped below the inaction thresholdaa.
Now some people will always complain, and more do if the inaction threshold can be lowered [email & Internet]. But how do you _prevent_ the squeeky wheel from getting the grease?
*BSD has the -P flag for `rm`, but I don't know if it wipes full blocks, or just the listed filelength.
One of the first things a forensic analyst will do, mostly in search of deleted blocks is `strings /dev/hda1`. More likely off a ro image, but out everything ASCII will pop.
Have a look at The Coroner's Toolkit
In your example, this smoking gun doesn't prove a thing _unless_ there was some anti-competitive activity that resulted. If FavCo had a corporate values statement saything they would obey all laws and act ethically [any company large enough to sue would], then that would be a strong defense. But it would ultimately boil down to what people say that the alleged smoking gun meant to them.
If you don't presuppose some level of reasonableness in juries, then you're living under an oppression much more serious than the government can even impose. The prior-restraint and self-censorship is intolerable. Don't live in fear. Sometimes not even if the fears are real!
So how about if a publisher impedes Fair Use in any way, they are prevented (estopped) from enforcing copyright against those that circumvent these measures?
"Things will be misconstrued" is a cop-out. How do you misconstrue a direct warning that the recipient is too pre-occupied to do anything about? If there is an explanation, give it. I don't think juries are that stupid. If they are, then we're in alot more trouble and need to work more at educating them, or at least not putting them to sleep in court.
Sure, anything can be taken the wrong way. But the solution isn't to give nothing, but rather to assist people in seeing the right way. Unless there isn't one! In which case, you're guilty, and I don't see why anyone should help you hide your guilt.
The fact that Micosoft won't even admit they were getting close to the line when everyone else was screaming they were far across it greatly disturbs me. Such an inability to distinguish right-from-wrong justifies unusually strong protective [harsh] measures.
Allchin most certainly did not say this without approval. I think this is a trail-balloon being floated. How could MSFT be expected to abid by any conduct remedy when they don't recognize offending conduct?
Moore's law has done a fine job of keeping up with software bloat. More mature battery technology has not.
Personally, I don't use GUIs. They're graphical menuing menuing systems: the limited choice of all menu systems which abandon the clarity of the alphabet. I'm very happy running VTs at 160x60 with SVGATextMode. Only when absolutely necessary (every few days) do I `startx`.
It is the users/marketers insistance on cramming more "functionality" [aka bloatware] in that gobbles battery life. Quit whining -- we do this to ourselves. The technology is an innocent bystander.
After all, in order to get control of the return address, you'll have to fill up ~1 GB, and almost certainly run over sbrk() which will segfault. The linked-list memory you mention was used on MS-DOS/Win16, but obviously cannot be used on any decent pmode OS.
I think people suffer with such problems simply because the perceived benefits of solving it is not worth the cost involved. That is a perfectly rational decision, especially in light of the documentation usually sent with VCRs. So they just go back to being mesmerized by the phosphor tube.
The MPAA doesn't get any such easy-out. This organization exists to promote the general interests of the movie industry. As such, it has to figure out what those best interests are. Instead, they seem to be opposing any and all change: TV broadcast of movies, VCRs and now PVRs, etc. This seems more motivated by fear than any rational analysis.
For x86 with standard stackframe setup, there is an answer: length _MUST_ be less than (EBP - *ptr) if the stack isn't to be trashed. Note that other local data may well get trashed. But at least the pgm doesn't lose control.
The wrapper could drop early chars or trailing chars, but should signal an error in the unlikely event the code has been made with error trapping. Of course, this wouldn't work if the code was compiled with -fomit-frame-pointer [or equivalent], but there is a price for security.
The MPAA is not supposed to be watching out for the public, they're supposed to be watching out for their shareholders. Of course, they're rather thickheaded to think they can scr3w their customers and not suffer. But stupidity is not usually a crime.
But for the others, say books, the publishing houses pay quite a bit for the rights to publish. The cost for these rights should also be written off over the copyright period. The publisher would "persuade" the author that they don't want to see a long copyright.
95 vs 75 years matters. Fine -- let's take them at their word!
Under the US Income Tax Code, expenses to make/buy long-term assets are
treated very differently from other running expenses. If you buy a 2k$
computer, a 20 k$ business car, a 10 M$ building or a 1 G$ chemical plant,
you _don't_ get to deduct against income the whole cost of these things
in the year spent. You are forced to spread the cost out [amortize] over
an estimate of the useful life of the asset. This principle should hold
true for all long-term assets, most particularly copyrights.
Now I have no idea how long the economically useful life of a copyright
is. It probably varies from weeks for a newspaper story to decades for
a novel. Our beloved IRS probably has even less of a clue. But I bet
the copyright owner has a pretty good idea. So I'd let the copyright
owner set the term of his copyright (subject to maximum), but force him
to write-off all production costs over that term!
If an owner was willing to keep the term less than a year, then they
could write-off all expenses as they do now. But if they wanted a
75 year copyright term, they could only write off 1.33% of total expenses
per year over 75 years. That's a long time to wait for the tax back,
and I very seriously doubt any businessman would go that long. Most
likely 5 or 10 years would be the economic optimum.
I like this concept because it is voluntary and making these sorts
of trade-off are very normal in business. The owner has income and
cost projections, and can chose a term to match. I also see no problem
in allowing a copyright holder to accelerate deductions by shortening
the term. Lengthening the term is obviously out of the question.
One thing surprises me: Bjorn Lomborg seems to accept that Carbon
dioxide emissions cause 2-3C warming. I'm not there yet.
The uncontrolled, ex-post atmospheric models hardly convince me, but
the correlation of temperature with CO2 over millenia is intriguing.
But have you ever opened a warm soda can?
The 8C air temperature swing would affect rain and the oceans about
the same amount. Atmospheric Carbon dioxide swings from 200 to 300 ppm
which is coincidentally just about the decreased solubility at
increasing temperature.
So which is the chicken, and which the egg? If the Earth heated up
from some exogenous cause (solar, geothermal, geomagnetic), then CO2
would rise as an effect not a cause.
A statistics professor would say "Correlation does not prove
causality". Why doesn't Bjorn?
My argument is that the CREA96 is that the term granted was not shown "to Promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" are required by the US Constitution. In fact, it can be fairly shown it hampers said progress since no incentives it gave could possibly have influenced past creativity yet the extention reduces creativity of those who would use the materials once they enter the public domain. Somebody might want to make a competing "Mickey Mouse" comic strip!
IMHO, copyright term should reflect the use of the work, and the likely motive behind creating it. For projects made for commercial exploitation (most mass media), this period should match that used by the company's financial analysts or stockholders. They seldom look beyond 20 years simply because the power of compound interest reduces the value of any future revenues to insignificance. So I would make the copyright period 20 years after first sale. This is generous, because most investors demand 2-5 year pay-back! For unsold works, some of which are potentially private papers, I would make the period longer, say life of the author plus 20-50 years.
Unfortunately, the "takings clause" doesn't apply since that only forbits the uncompensated taking of private property for public use, while CREA96 takes public property for private use
That's fairly high overhead, and I would want to know how often corrupt sectors get written to disk. Nothing is safe against software faults, not even journalling. My working hypothesis is that most crashes are actually hangs or deadlocks. Accidental powerfail/reset also happens, but is also the deliberately caused to recover.
In this case, I would think that modern disks have a fairly sophisticated power-down routine, probably involving completing a certain amount of write-out (at least the sector) before parking the heads. Power comes from platter spin-down.