1) Robots.txt being a mandatory instruction to not spider a site bearing the instruction. Fine, I can go along with that.
2) Robots.txt being a mandatory instruction to retroactively get rid of any archives collected before the robots.txt directive went up. That is much harder to justify.
It's more like: bum asks you for a dollar. You give him one. Two weeks later you decide you don't want to give handouts any more, so you write on your forehead "no soliciting". Next you go to court and claim that writing "no soliciting" on your forehead means you not only won't give more handouts, but the bum who you PREVIOUSLY gave a dollar to, now has to return it.
See: that company DID NOT HAVE a robots.txt directive active when the Wayback machine archived it. They put the robots directive up two weeks later, once they realized that the archived file showed they were doing bad stuff that would embarass them.
This stuff about taking out airplanes with them is clearly nonsense. They have some other problem with lasers, e.g. that lasers can be used for medium distance high speed data communication without wires and without FCC-controlled radio broadcasting.
Are they trying to make sure we can't communicate with each other without government approval?
and no act of Congress turning corporations into persons. There was not even a supreme court decision.
Rather, the notion of corporate personhood got written into some other supreme court decision in the 1870's, by a former railroad executive who was working as a clerk at the Supreme Court. It wasn't part of the actual Court opinion but rather was part of the introduction or something like that, but regardless, later court decisions quoted it and it became binding law.
The Supreme Court in that era was very corrupt, even worse than now. The 14th amendment (resulting from the Civil War) spelled out a bunch of rights guaranteed to all "persons", i.e. all people (previously, only white people had rights). Corporations realized that they wanted to get in on the action and have those rights themselves, so after sufficient palm greasing, the decisions came down.
For more info, see the movie "The Corporation", which is really excellent.
and do the apps like openoffice and firefox work in xfce?
I just started running fc3 and it's much more up-to-date than my old system, but launches gnome immediately on bootup. I haven't yet figured out how to turn that off, and it's a big pain.
Gnome itself also sometimes gets wedged in a way that trashes my desktop beyond recovery. I have to delete ALL the gnome configuration files in my home dir (and also the ones in/tmp, which took me a while to figure out) and start over from scratch. Sort of like Windows when the registry gets corrupted. Gnome is just way too much like windows.
The cellular modem looks like a regular modem to the laptop. It uses traditional AT commands and there's some special phone numbers you're supposed to send it. The O'Reilly book "Linux Unwired" has a good section about this. T-Mobile seems to have the best deal going, if you're in their coverage area.
Yeah, I get tons of mail to my catchall, but it's mostly Rumpelstiltskin attacks to a few hundred distinct names. 90% of it is to 150 or so names. 97% of it is to 320 names. I just blacklist the top couple hundred names and that gets rid of almost all of the spam.
Here are my top 100 in order of decreasing frequency, for what it's worth (these are all generic, I've removed a few specific to my domain). Together these account for about 75% of all my spam:
hanson greene gregory dean vargas hawkins graham elliott hardy graves ferguson hart harper guzman fletcher hale dunn haynes hammond day howell hamilton gordon douglas dixon vaughn garrett flowers duncan
gilbert barnett walters fleming warren wade horton adkins watts sutton
knight austin wallace barker banks armstrong andrews carroll watkins
pearson johnston jennings cobb carpenter terry jensen peters palmer
kelley stone silva santiago rhodes morales jimenez craig bradley soto
malone hunt chambers burns sullivan kennedy hudson black sims pena
olson may bush shaw ramos mills castro burke bishop snyder shelton
powers reyes ray perkins schultz moody meyer page lucas miles mcdaniel
they do something like that, but I'm not aware of any other state that prints sequence numbers on its ballots. What state are you in? Ballots shouldn't have any distinguishing numbers.
It's very easy to use the touchscreen machines, which is why the election officials are so resistant to taking them out of service until their problems are fixed.
One thing absolutely amazed me. With very few exceptions, the voters really LOVED the machines. They raved about them to us judges. The most common comment was "That was so easy." I can see why people take so much offense at the notion that the machines are completely insecure. Given my role today, I just smiled and nodded. I was not about to tell voters that the machines they had just voted on were so insecure. I was curious that voters did not seem to question how their votes were recorded. The voter verifiability that I find so precious did not seem to be on the minds of these voters. One woman did come up to Joy and complain that she wanted a paper ballot to verify. But, Joy managed to convince her that these machines were state of the art and that there was nothing to worry about, which was followed by a smile and a wink in my direction. I just kept quiet, given the circumstances. As an election judge, my job is to make the election work as well as possible, and creating doubts in the voters' minds at the polls does not figure into my idea of responsible behavior. Perhaps the lightest moment in the day came when one voter standing at his machine asked in the most deadpan voice, "What do I do if it says it is rebooting?" Head judge Marie turned white, and Joy's mouth dropped. My heart started to beat quickly, when he laughed and said "just kidding." There was about a two second pause of silence followed by roaring laughter from everyone.
each ballot is a piece of paper that you can look at with your eyeball before dropping it in the ballot box. So you can make sure that the ballot is marked the way you wanted. When the votes are counted, if there's a dispute, they're recounted by hand with representatives of both candidates inspecting each ballot.
I don't see how that CD-ROM system leaves the secret ballot intact. If you watch the polls and see that Fred is the 37th voter that day, then examining the 37th vote on the CD-ROM tells you how Fred voted, right? With paper ballots, the ballots all get shuffled before being counted.
More to the point, how does the voter know that the data written to the CD-ROM is the same as how he actually voted? I can show you a computer and a printout of a GPL program, and claim that the GPL program is what's actually running on the computer, but how do you verify that?
it came at the end of a long legal process, and an extra day or so won't make any real difference.
I'm more concerned about a situation where your site gets shut down by surprise. You might have it hosted in some a country where ISP's aren't so quick to censor as they are in the US (you might even be a citizen of that country publishing stuff that's legal there), but the DNS system creates another point of attack.
The good part: when you register a new domain, you can publish it immediately and people can start using it right away.
The bad part: if someone gets Verisign to shut off your DNS, your site goes dark before anyone knows what happened. It's a lot harder for anyone to mirror it when the news starts breaking.
I hit "submit" rather than "preview" before I finished writing the above comment. So to continue...
...The Supreme Court in Eldred stupidly didn't strike down the Mickey Mouse Protection Act (that extended copyright retroactively), but it did admit that new copyright legislation was subject to first amendment scrutiny if it changed the "traditional contours of copyright". Well, patenting software certainly changes the traditional contours! You can infringe without copying, you can infringe by publishing something even before patent is issued (and the application is still secret), etc. Clearly, if you're a programmer, software patents do your free speech rights a world of harm.
Now where does this go about what businesses think of patents? The point is that there's more fundamental viewpoints to consider. Businesses for the most part don't give a rip about free speech; if anything, they want to suppress it. And so if they're allowed to decide software patent policy, programmers' civil liberties aren't going to matter at all to them.
Good policy has to be made in the interests of the public, not just for special interest groups such as software vendors. So the notion that "well, industry is upset about the patent system now, so our belief that the system is bogus must be legitimate" is dangerous. The system is bogus no matter what industry thinks. We need to reform it for the good of the public, not just for the good of industry.
It's not a good sign if corporations are the only ones whose opinions matter in this area. What's good for any particular industry may not be good for the general public. This is especially bad with software patents. They're either good for business or they're not; the corporate view seems to be that they're bad now, but could be made good if changed in certain ways.
Copyright law has the notion of "fair use", which comes from the tension between copyright (a set of laws that let you get sued or prosecuted for printing the wrong stuff on your printing press) and the First Amendment (which says you can print anything you want). Copyright guru Melville Nimmer explains (quote taken from FSF brief in Eldred vs Ashcroft):
If I may own Blackacre in perpetuity, why not also Black Beauty? The answer lies in the first amendment. There is no countervailing speech interest which must be balanced against perpetual ownership of tangible real and personal property. There is such a speech interest, with respect to literary property, or copyright.
The courts resolve the tension by saying some limited ("fair") usage of copyrighted material is permissible whether Congress likes it or not. Also, in order to infringe copyright, you have to actually copy stuff, not just write something similar independently. The same Constitution both authorizes copyright and promises freedom of the press and so the courts have to find the correct balance. Neither of the two can shut out the other.
Patent law doesn't have a comparable notion of fair use. There's no first amendment right to manufacture a particular configuration of mousetrap, so Congress can go further in assigning rights to patent holders than it can to copyright holders. You can infringe a patent even by developing the same invention independently, etc.
This is problematic for software, which is published rather than manufactured, and in the case of source code, is protected by the First Amendment (vide Bernstein vs. US, not a copyright case but rather a case about whether the government was allowed to stop Bernstein from publishing cryptography code). The Supreme Court in Eldred stupidly didn't strike down the Mickey Mouse Protection Act (that extended copyright retroactively), but it did admit that new copyright legislation
See, it says "no fact tried by a jury". Juries only decide factual questions:
Prosecutor: 3 witnesses saw Fred shoot the victim.
Defendant Fred: I didn't do it, and 3 other witnesses say I was in another town at the time of the shooting.
So what really happened? There's a dispute over the facts of that evening. Somebody has to decide out what set of facts the law should treat as true. That somebody is a jury; the defendant has the right to not leave questions of fact up to a judge. (That particular example is a criminal case but obviously factual disputes arise in civil suits as well).
Sometimes there's no dispute over the facts:
Prosecutor: Fred was carrying this switchblade knife when the cops arrested him. Carrying a switchblade is a felony; lock him up.
Fred's lawyer: Yes, Fred was carrying that knife, but it's not a switchblade, it's called an "assisted opener"; the legal definition of a switchblade is blah blah, and this knife has the spring a different place and doesn't fit that definition.
Prosecutor: it's still a switchblade because of subparagraph d(3), which says, blah blah...
See, there's no disagreement about facts that actually happened in the world (where Fred was, whether he was carrying a certain knife). There's a dispute over how the court should interpret the law. Juries only decide questions of fact, not questions of law. Judges decide questions of law. The judge above now has to pore over the statute and prior appellate decisions about switchblades, and decide if Fred's knife is a switchblade or not. Typically there's mixed questions: "My client Fred (a) was only holding that knife because he'd just found it on the floor the moment that the cops burst in, and (b) anyway it's not a switchblade [insert legal argument similar to above]". (a) has to be tried by the jury but (b) is decided by the judge.
Now is patent infringement (Fred is manufacturing knives exactly like this one, and they infringe my client's patent) a question of fact, or a question of law? The central question is whether the claims in the patent cover Fred's knives, which is a matter of legal interpretation. As such, it should be decided by a judge and not a jury. There's usually related factual questions like whether Fred is infringing on purpose; how much damages the patent holder really suffered; etc., and those may have to be decided by jury. Juries aren't supposed to decide questions that are entirely legal rather than factual.
If the kid has been blind since birth, has his visual cortex developed properly? I seem to remember hearing about horrible experiments involving sewing shut the eyes of newborn kittens. When the kitten is a month or two old, the eyelids get unsewn and the eyes work completely normally, but the kitten never really learns to see.
I feel feel squicked just thinking about this, but I wonder if that kid will ever have really useable vision.
The article is not clear whether Apple released these modified programs as free source code, or just as proprietary products in binary form only.
If Apple took free source code (say BSD-licensed) written by other people and turned it into proprietary products, well, that's legal (assuming the licenses permitted it) and it's acceptable to the authors (or else they wouldn't have used those licenses). But what's remarkable or praiseworthy about it? It just means Apple figured out that it's cheaper to get something for nothing, than to pay for it. If they're taking stuff from the FOSS community but not releasing back the patches, they're just parasites.
When Apple releases some good FOSS code (either new stuff, or improvements to existing stuff), then some complimentary Slashdot articles will be appropriate. Otherwise it's no different than when someone ships yet another embedded-Linux hardware product. Yawn. There's nothing interesting about that kind of one-way transaction. Wake us up when they're ready to give something back.
Even if both Moore and the Weinsteins officially permit downloading, there's still a lot of songs in the soundtrack that are copyrighted by various artists. For example they play the theme from "Greatest American Hero" almost all the way through, while GWBush is flying around over the "Mission Accomplished" aircraft carrier. I wonder what the business arrangements are between Miramax and those bands. I'm guessing that the bands are supposed to get a royalty from DVD and theater ticket sales. So while Moore (and even the Weinsteins) might be able to say that they don't personally object to downloads, there's still a whole slew of other people who can go after downloaders.
What would REALLY be awesome is if the Weinsteins, when they get the inevitable phone calls from the musicians' lawyers complaining about lost revenues to downloaders, simply ask "well, how much revenue do you think you're losing from it? How about if we just write you a check for that amount, and you grant permission?". The total amount involved may actually be fairly small, compared with the movie's revenues. And since 60% of the profits are going to charities specified by Disney (part of the deal Disney insisted on to let the Weinsteins get the film back), the effect on the bottom line would be even smaller.
I'd expect the chance of that happening is pretty close to nil, though.
Using binoculars to look into the windows of someone else's residence (say from across the street) is indeed an invasion of privacy and can get you busted in my state, even though looking with the naked eye is permissible.
The night vision thing creeps me out. I imagine theater security goons walking around with those goggles on like Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs. And if the film is political, for example Fahrenheit 911, the idea that they are watching your every move even in the dark is scary. At some F911 showings in rightwing areas, they have cops in the theater, supposedly to quell possible disturbances but in reality apparently just to intimidate people. The night vision stuff really adds to the creep factor.
I'm glad that I almost never go to the movies any more.
The situation with +R/-R is that both have compatibility problems with set-top players but +R's problems are a bit worse. So the salesman wasn't completely FOS but overstated +R's problems and understated -R's.
The problems are mostly with older players. Newer ones tend to be more thoroughly tested with recordable media of all types.
VOIP packets are temporarily stored in ram at the different routers they visit as they travel the network. Does that mean that VOIP providers can listen in on phone conversations?
And what about the ECPA provision on unauthorized access to stored communications (Steve Jackson case)? Don't they apply here?
Slashdot Mirror
that got there aboard Viking, Mariner, etc. The terraforming has already begun.
2) Robots.txt being a mandatory instruction to retroactively get rid of any archives collected before the robots.txt directive went up. That is much harder to justify.
Do you understand the difference?
It's more like: bum asks you for a dollar. You give him one. Two weeks later you decide you don't want to give handouts any more, so you write on your forehead "no soliciting". Next you go to court and claim that writing "no soliciting" on your forehead means you not only won't give more handouts, but the bum who you PREVIOUSLY gave a dollar to, now has to return it.
See: that company DID NOT HAVE a robots.txt directive active when the Wayback machine archived it. They put the robots directive up two weeks later, once they realized that the archived file showed they were doing bad stuff that would embarass them.
Are they trying to make sure we can't communicate with each other without government approval?
Rather, the notion of corporate personhood got written into some other supreme court decision in the 1870's, by a former railroad executive who was working as a clerk at the Supreme Court. It wasn't part of the actual Court opinion but rather was part of the introduction or something like that, but regardless, later court decisions quoted it and it became binding law.
The Supreme Court in that era was very corrupt, even worse than now. The 14th amendment (resulting from the Civil War) spelled out a bunch of rights guaranteed to all "persons", i.e. all people (previously, only white people had rights). Corporations realized that they wanted to get in on the action and have those rights themselves, so after sufficient palm greasing, the decisions came down.
For more info, see the movie "The Corporation", which is really excellent.
See also: wikipedia on corporate personhood.
and do the apps like openoffice and firefox work in xfce? I just started running fc3 and it's much more up-to-date than my old system, but launches gnome immediately on bootup. I haven't yet figured out how to turn that off, and it's a big pain. Gnome itself also sometimes gets wedged in a way that trashes my desktop beyond recovery. I have to delete ALL the gnome configuration files in my home dir (and also the ones in /tmp, which took me a while to figure out) and start over from scratch. Sort of like Windows when the registry gets corrupted. Gnome is just way too much like windows.
The cellular modem looks like a regular modem to the laptop. It uses traditional AT commands and there's some special phone numbers you're supposed to send it. The O'Reilly book "Linux Unwired" has a good section about this. T-Mobile seems to have the best deal going, if you're in their coverage area.
Here are my top 100 in order of decreasing frequency, for what it's worth (these are all generic, I've removed a few specific to my domain). Together these account for about 75% of all my spam:
hanson greene gregory dean vargas hawkins graham elliott hardy graves ferguson hart harper guzman fletcher hale dunn haynes hammond day howell hamilton gordon douglas dixon vaughn garrett flowers duncan gilbert barnett walters fleming warren wade horton adkins watts sutton knight austin wallace barker banks armstrong andrews carroll watkins pearson johnston jennings cobb carpenter terry jensen peters palmer kelley stone silva santiago rhodes morales jimenez craig bradley soto malone hunt chambers burns sullivan kennedy hudson black sims pena olson may bush shaw ramos mills castro burke bishop snyder shelton powers reyes ray perkins schultz moody meyer page lucas miles mcdaniel
they do something like that, but I'm not aware of any other state that prints sequence numbers on its ballots. What state are you in? Ballots shouldn't have any distinguishing numbers.
See http://avirubin.com/judge.html:
each ballot is a piece of paper that you can look at with your eyeball before dropping it in the ballot box. So you can make sure that the ballot is marked the way you wanted. When the votes are counted, if there's a dispute, they're recounted by hand with representatives of both candidates inspecting each ballot.
More to the point, how does the voter know that the data written to the CD-ROM is the same as how he actually voted? I can show you a computer and a printout of a GPL program, and claim that the GPL program is what's actually running on the computer, but how do you verify that?
I'm more concerned about a situation where your site gets shut down by surprise. You might have it hosted in some a country where ISP's aren't so quick to censor as they are in the US (you might even be a citizen of that country publishing stuff that's legal there), but the DNS system creates another point of attack.
The bad part: if someone gets Verisign to shut off your DNS, your site goes dark before anyone knows what happened. It's a lot harder for anyone to mirror it when the news starts breaking.
Now where does this go about what businesses think of patents? The point is that there's more fundamental viewpoints to consider. Businesses for the most part don't give a rip about free speech; if anything, they want to suppress it. And so if they're allowed to decide software patent policy, programmers' civil liberties aren't going to matter at all to them.
Good policy has to be made in the interests of the public, not just for special interest groups such as software vendors. So the notion that "well, industry is upset about the patent system now, so our belief that the system is bogus must be legitimate" is dangerous. The system is bogus no matter what industry thinks. We need to reform it for the good of the public, not just for the good of industry.
Copyright law has the notion of "fair use", which comes from the tension between copyright (a set of laws that let you get sued or prosecuted for printing the wrong stuff on your printing press) and the First Amendment (which says you can print anything you want). Copyright guru Melville Nimmer explains (quote taken from FSF brief in Eldred vs Ashcroft):
The courts resolve the tension by saying some limited ("fair") usage of copyrighted material is permissible whether Congress likes it or not. Also, in order to infringe copyright, you have to actually copy stuff, not just write something similar independently. The same Constitution both authorizes copyright and promises freedom of the press and so the courts have to find the correct balance. Neither of the two can shut out the other.Patent law doesn't have a comparable notion of fair use. There's no first amendment right to manufacture a particular configuration of mousetrap, so Congress can go further in assigning rights to patent holders than it can to copyright holders. You can infringe a patent even by developing the same invention independently, etc.
This is problematic for software, which is published rather than manufactured, and in the case of source code, is protected by the First Amendment (vide Bernstein vs. US, not a copyright case but rather a case about whether the government was allowed to stop Bernstein from publishing cryptography code). The Supreme Court in Eldred stupidly didn't strike down the Mickey Mouse Protection Act (that extended copyright retroactively), but it did admit that new copyright legislation
Sometimes there's no dispute over the facts:
See, there's no disagreement about facts that actually happened in the world (where Fred was, whether he was carrying a certain knife). There's a dispute over how the court should interpret the law. Juries only decide questions of fact, not questions of law. Judges decide questions of law. The judge above now has to pore over the statute and prior appellate decisions about switchblades, and decide if Fred's knife is a switchblade or not. Typically there's mixed questions: "My client Fred (a) was only holding that knife because he'd just found it on the floor the moment that the cops burst in, and (b) anyway it's not a switchblade [insert legal argument similar to above]". (a) has to be tried by the jury but (b) is decided by the judge.Now is patent infringement (Fred is manufacturing knives exactly like this one, and they infringe my client's patent) a question of fact, or a question of law? The central question is whether the claims in the patent cover Fred's knives, which is a matter of legal interpretation. As such, it should be decided by a judge and not a jury. There's usually related factual questions like whether Fred is infringing on purpose; how much damages the patent holder really suffered; etc., and those may have to be decided by jury. Juries aren't supposed to decide questions that are entirely legal rather than factual.
See the links in some of the other followups.
In 2000, I remember noticing that GWB's site used Apache and Gore's used IIS.
I feel feel squicked just thinking about this, but I wonder if that kid will ever have really useable vision.
If Apple took free source code (say BSD-licensed) written by other people and turned it into proprietary products, well, that's legal (assuming the licenses permitted it) and it's acceptable to the authors (or else they wouldn't have used those licenses). But what's remarkable or praiseworthy about it? It just means Apple figured out that it's cheaper to get something for nothing, than to pay for it. If they're taking stuff from the FOSS community but not releasing back the patches, they're just parasites.
When Apple releases some good FOSS code (either new stuff, or improvements to existing stuff), then some complimentary Slashdot articles will be appropriate. Otherwise it's no different than when someone ships yet another embedded-Linux hardware product. Yawn. There's nothing interesting about that kind of one-way transaction. Wake us up when they're ready to give something back.
What would REALLY be awesome is if the Weinsteins, when they get the inevitable phone calls from the musicians' lawyers complaining about lost revenues to downloaders, simply ask "well, how much revenue do you think you're losing from it? How about if we just write you a check for that amount, and you grant permission?". The total amount involved may actually be fairly small, compared with the movie's revenues. And since 60% of the profits are going to charities specified by Disney (part of the deal Disney insisted on to let the Weinsteins get the film back), the effect on the bottom line would be even smaller.
I'd expect the chance of that happening is pretty close to nil, though.
The night vision thing creeps me out. I imagine theater security goons walking around with those goggles on like Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs. And if the film is political, for example Fahrenheit 911, the idea that they are watching your every move even in the dark is scary. At some F911 showings in rightwing areas, they have cops in the theater, supposedly to quell possible disturbances but in reality apparently just to intimidate people. The night vision stuff really adds to the creep factor.
I'm glad that I almost never go to the movies any more.
The problems are mostly with older players. Newer ones tend to be more thoroughly tested with recordable media of all types.
And what about the ECPA provision on unauthorized access to stored communications (Steve Jackson case)? Don't they apply here?