The US has a lot more social stigmas regarding toilets and bathrooms than Japan.
Uh, I remember reading somewhere (I think on Wikipedia) that in Japanese women's rooms everybody was flushing the toilets continuously because they didn't want to be heard while they were doing the plop-plop, drip-drip.
As a result, many women's rooms in Japan have a little box you can wave your hand in front of which generates the sound of a flushing toilet - that way you can have all the flushing you want without actually wasting 100 gallons of water while you go.
I hope you're joking. The AG's office would be overloaded with a backlog of contracts to "be reviewed" because company XYZ just modified the terms of Widget X. I take offense to the fact that you don't believe people aren't able to determine what is or is not "fair". Wouldn't you agree that a more pragmatic approach is to say a the parties involved decide what or is not fair? You don't like the terms, don't buy it.
The fact of the matter is that most people don't like those one-sided agreements. However, they have become standard practice because of the various economies of limited-supply industries. If you want to go skiing there are probably at most ten places to do so in most normal areas. You won't find any variety in the disclaimers they make you sign (probably because they're all insured by the same company).
Car manufacturers would do the same thing if it weren't for lemon laws. Every industry would like to get rid of liability for the products they sell. Consumers generally don't have much power here, and laws have generally given them the leverage they've needed in the past.
As far as the AG's office being backlogged - I doubt this would happen:
First, the fees would be designed to cover most of the costs of the review, so they could hire more attourneys for this purpose. (It doesn't have to cover all of it, the state is already saving tons of money by heading up litigation in advance - murcky contracts would never get signed in the first place.)
Second, the fees would eliminate most of the contracts you sign these days. Where right now you waive 1400 separate rights every time you get a grocery discount store, in the future they might just hand you their privacy policy, and that's it. If they don't write a contract, then there is no fee to pay. Standard law and the precedence set in the courts would become the equitable standard for how business is conducted. Once upon a time that is probably how it all worked - I doubt that George Washington had to sign an agreement to get fair prices at the local butcher's shop. He probably didn't even sign an agreement when he bought a horse. Maybe when he bought a house, but probably not when he had somebody fix the roof on it.
My feeling is that the average person should be able to recall every binding document they've ever signed if they think hard enough. I couldn't remember all the trivial ones I've signed in the last six months. And I certainly didn't read them all completely first before signing them!
By getting rid of the garbage, the few real contracts that remain will be seriously negotiated and well-considered. That should reduce litigation overall. And it gives power to the average consumer over the company that forces you give up your right to sue to do business with them.
I think the reason that EULAs get away with that nonsense is that people are used to just clicking on them and the general impression is that they aren't terribly legally binding.
Imagine that whenever you went to the grocery store you were handed a 12 page contract at the checkouts - every time. Imagine that you had to sign a 27 page document every time you bought gas. Imagine having your babysitter and yourself exchange 107 page contracts every time you went out to dinner.
Contracts are great for their intended purpose - outlining rights and responsiblities in major transactions (your house, your car). They work best when you're talking about tangible things, or clearly defined services. Things are already getting murky when you start talking employment contracts and non-disclosure agreements. The standard we-can-kill-your-entire-family-and-you-can't-sue-u s things you get at the ski slopes are highly questionable.
What is the point in having all these one-sided contracts for every possible action under the sun?
Perhaps there should be a law that all contracts are reviewed for fairness by a state attourney. There would be a fee of about $100 for every contract that is executed - this can be split by the parties however they feel is fair. Something like this wouldn't be a big deal for a house sale (gosh, most areas charge 1% plus a bundle of other fees). On the other hand, if MS had to send the state $100 for every windows installation, they'd think twice about those contracts. Ditto for the million other documents that serve no purpose.
Standard forms of business that have standard disclaimers should be covered by state law - such as a law stating what ski-lift operators are and are not responsible for. If they want to use a non-standard set of disclaimers, fine, but fork over $100 per customer. The state bears all the litigation costs when the contract is disputed - this lets them approve the contract before there is anything to argue over.
I wonder if a concept like this could actually work?
I would imagine that in most shops, the clients are running some flavor of windows.
The issue with CALs isn't that the clients aren't free. It is that you have to pay for not only the OS on the client but also for their right to connect to a server.
I don't know all the details, but if you have a server and 100 workstations you pay for:
1. Server license 2. 100 workstation licenses 3. 100 CALs to enable server to talk to 100 workstations at once.
If you had 10 servers my guess is that you'd pay:
1. 10 Server licenses 2. 100 workstation licenses 3. 1000 CALs to enable each server to talk to 100 workstations at once.
You see that the CALs are more of a server-related expense than a client-related, since they go up as you add servers as well as clients.
The other problem with all of this is license managment. If you don't have CALs all you need is to tape a copy of the OS license to the top of each computer and you know that you are fully legit. With CALs thrown in you also need to analyze who is connecting to what server at what time to figure out how you're doing.
With Samba there are no CALs, so you can pick the server and clients on their own merits, and mix and match them however you want...
The thing I don't understand is why the US caves in with these cases, or why they are so outraged.
The US should just refuse to drop the death penalty and put the suspect on the arrest-on-sight list at the border.
Think about it - the US saves all the costs of a trial, and yet there is no threat of a US citizen ever being hurt by the suspect again. If the Canadians are smart they'll file charges against the guy to get him off the streets (would you want him walking around loose?). Thus the US has neatly transferred the cost of imprisonment to the foreign country.
Same goes for all those terrorists that the EU was threatening not to extradite to the US out of fear that they will be executed. The US should just let them stay there - it isn't like they're going to be allowed to walk around on the streets or anything. If they were just going to get jailed either way let the Europeans pick up the tab. I'm sure the US would be willing to take them back once the EU gets tired of being the new Autstralia of the world - but only with no strings attached...
I think the principle is that unless there is a good reason not to allow it, everybody should be able to petition their courts when they are treated unjustly. After all, their local courts are the ones which they would tend to trust to judge their case fairly (since they comply with local views of right and wrong and civil rights).
When a sensitive issue of diplomacy is involved, the local state department or equivalent may file briefs with the court to address these issues as well. Once a judgement is made, the foreign government can choose whether or not to obey it, and the local executive branch can decide whether or not to seek to force the foreign goverment to obey it.
For countries with similar principles of justice and civil rights this probably works out fine most of the time. It tends to work out less well when one country is a democracy and the other is a dictatorship, or something like that. Unless the democracy wants to go to war or impose heavy sanctions (which only work so well, and may lead to war), things are pretty much in the hands of the dictator.
Note that one of the big areas of controversy surounding the International Criminal Court is the concept that individual countries would give up their power to veto a judgement of this court. In the USA, for instance, supreme court justices are appointed by a US-elected president and confirmed by a US-elected senate. An ICC justice would have a much more murky selection process, and the US would certainly have fairly little influence over their selection. To a US sentator asked to ratify the necessary treaties, the question is "why appoint somebody we have no control over to have power over US citizens, when the international court gives us no benefit we don't already have?" (The ICC doesn't benefit the US much, since if Osama Bin Laden were found the US wouldn't be calling for a warrant by the ICC, they would simply transport him to America to stand justice there. It isn't like anybody is going to refuse to extradite him.)
Suppose somebody from Sealand travels to Canada and kills somebody. Then they fly back to Sealand before the crime is discovered.
Clearly the broke Canadian law. However, the fact is that the Canadians can't do anything about it except invade Sealand, impose sanctions of some sort on the entire country, or hope the guy flys back to Canada so that they can arrest him at Immigration.
The company in question gets lots of money from Canadians, but probably never steps foot in Canada, or has assets of any kind there. If they aren't violating Indian laws then the Indian govermnent will probably not extradite them. That is, unless the rest of the civilized world imposes sanctions until they adopt privacy laws. Probably won't happen - too much money to be made there...
Many people break foreign laws all the time - perhaps by not praying daily to the local dictator, or whatever. As long as you never set foot in those countries, there isn't much they can do about it. This is usually a good thing, but sometimes a bad thing. Then again, the average Indian probably could care less about Canadian privacy laws - they're just happy for the extra jobs...
As he indicated it wouldn't be a true ICMP ping, but an application that uses a challenge-response system of some sort. Send random bytes, laptop encrypts with private RSA key, sends back, security server decrypts with public RSA key - no way to impersonate the laptop without hacking into it, which means that you can't take it home to crack it.
A few problems with your points above (taken in order):
1. It also allows industry to DRM-away fair use. If I miss an episode of name-your-favorite-brainless-reality-show-here, it is almost certainly legal within the confines of fair use to download a single copy of it with ads to watch the next day (assuming you normally watch it on TV). The TV industry would almost certainly sue anybody who hosts such a file, however.
3. Why would I want to donate my home computer bandwidth so that some RIAA label can save their bandwidth when distributing songs online? If somebody is making money off the network, then they're going to pay me if I run a server.
If we're just talking about mirror download sites, the existing bittorrent system works just fine. The only time you need something robust is when somebody else doesn't want you distributing something. Note that I didn't say that you need something else only when your activity is illegal - only when somebody is willing to sue you to stop it. You can be sued for doing something completely legal, and in theory you might be found innocent after spending a few thousand dollars on your defence and losing your job due to court appearances.
Freenet would probably work better if there were more permenant nodes. It has been steadily improving.
However, I'll be the first to admit that it isn't there already.
The problem is that Freenet is inherently less efficient than bittorrent/kazza/whatever. The reason is that you can't just go over to google to get a direct link to a tracker, and you can't just have a supernode indexing what is over the entire network. The reason for this, of course, is those are the exact same tools somebody choosing to suppress a publisher would use.
Freenet works really well with regard to its primary goal - protecting privacy. No other network really comes close. Honestly, I can't think of a single other network I'd trust if I wanted to download something that a powerful entity (such as an oppressive government, or trigger-happy industry organization) disagreed with. GNUnet comes close and is a little more practical in design. However, GNUnet, by allowing hosting, is succeptible to a number of attacks that can be used to trace who is hosting a file.
Here's the problem. If you can differentiate content, then you can censor it.
RIAA connects their Freenet node to yours, and asks for copyrighted song.
Your node relays the request, and sends it back to them.
RIAA sues you for not blocking the transit of the song through your computer.
And how exactly would you tell Freenet to block certain content? You can't even tell what you're realying since it is encrypted and not even nodes in transit can figure out what it is. If traffic weren't encrypted enroute then that is a potential privacy problem for people in China. And even if it weren't encrypted, how would you filter it? Sure, you could probably block by file type (no jpgs, mp3s, etc.). In fact, the ??AA would sue you to block mp3s, avis, etc of any kind since they could be copyrighted.
The inefficiency of Freenet is largely due to its design, which make anonymity the primary goal, not a secondary one. No other P2P network offers the same kind of protection from lawsuits...
I think he was indicating that he was erring on the side of giving a liberal estimate.
If not all hterosexual contact is "responsible" (which is obviously true), then even a smaller number of cases were obtained by "responsible" people.
His point is that the vast majority of HIV cases were preventable purely by actions that could have been taken by the person who got infected.
He also conceded that there is a significant minority who got HIV despite doing nothing to put them at risk.
His valid point is that our first focus should be on encouraging responsible behavior until such time as a cure is available. If more people were responsible, HIV would be much less common, and even those who got it without being at risk would be less likely to get it (since their irresponsible spouses/doctors/whatevers would be less likely to have caught it).
Re:Welcome to capitalism
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HIV Vaccine
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Face it - there is quite a bit of competition already in the pharma industry.
You have tons of biotechs competing at the basic research level. Some have grown into full-fledged pharma companies.
You have tons of manufacturing-oriented outsourcers. Anybody who comes up with an idea for a pill can get some Indian company to mass-produce it for a song. Granted, most of those companies will also steal the formula from you and sell it under their own label. But hey, it seems like half the posters here advocate that anyway, so they shouldn't complain about that part.
About the only thing that the small pharmas dependon the big pharmas for is advertising. No problem there - the claim that is being debated is that advertising is optional anyway.
If the proposal that the big companies add no value were true, then the small companies would be dominating the market. They wouldn't waste their money and profits on co-promotion agreements - they'd just discover some molecule, outsource production and testing, and then publish a paper in The Lancet and let physicians do the prescribing. No need for expensive TV ads. Of course, in five years when nobody is taking the drug since many doctors don't bother prescribing anything unless they get a nice kickback.
Doctors are half the problem. I had a friend who was a sales rep for a big company, and a doctor actually told her that he wouldn't prescribe her company's drug unless she came up with a better giveaway than the sales rep from the current favored company. Clinical trials cost a fortune since doctors claim a hefty finder's fee for brining in patients to participate in them. And so on...
Trust me, the situation isn't nearly as clear-cut as the AARP would have you believe...
Re:Welcome to capitalism
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HIV Vaccine
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· Score: 1
The government already gives money to universities. Why not just say that drugs discovered by government-funded investigators are ineligible for patent protection? You don't need to regulate pharma companies - if all the drugs on the market are the result of government spending then all drugs will end up being generic.
If the NIH discovers a cure for cancer they can simply pay some clinical research labs to do safety and efficacy testing on it, and then release the molecule into the public domain.
Of course, my feeling is that you'll spend 5 times as much money on R&D this way than you'd spend on drug company profits if you had just maintained the status quo, but you don't have to take my word for it.
Just all the two processes to operate in parallel, then add up tax dollars spent on NIH R&D versus tax dollars spent on drug advertising, and see which is cheaper for society.
Of course, if the drug ends up killing people you had better factor in the costs the US public isn't allowed to recover if they aren't allowed to sue the federal government. If somebody suggested giving drug companies that kind of treatment the activists would be screaming. Often when government turns out to be more efficient it is simply because of the craziness of the rest of our legal system which makes private industry fair game for all kinds of silly lawsuits (and many legitimate ones as well - which the government often evades just as easily).
The government is going to make decisions of fact and law with regards to interpretation of copyright law that impact open source software. The decisions that are made establish precedent which can allow people to sue or prosecute you.
So, I'd say this has a big impact on everyone, and the government is very much involved.
So, why don't they get to say when you can watch it, or more plainly, what gives you the right to download it via BitTorrent?
What gives them the right to say when you can watch it? In general in the USA you can do anything you want to do unless it is explictly prohibited.
In this case, the relevant law is copyright, which includes exceptions for fair use. So, now the question is whether he was exercising fair use. The studio doesn't get to define fair use, by the way, it is a legal concept defined by Cogress and the courts.
There really is no concrete definition of fair use - it tends to be "if it looks like a duck, and sounds like a duck..." kind of argument.
If you copied two episodes that you missed so that you can keep up with the advertising-supported TV series, that would probably fall under fair use. If you downloaded every episode as a substitute for watching the ad-supported TV series, then that would probably not fall under fair use. The uploader did not bother to find out which you're doing, so they can potentially be found liable. If, on the other hand, the uploader just sent files directly to email contacts that he first checked were just trying to obtain a show or two, they probably would not be able to be held liable in practice. Of course, this is why MPAA is going after large-scale sharers - not people sending lone files by email. P2P is littered with gray areas, and of course the ??AA are going to fight their battles against defendants who are more likely to lose. If they went after somebody who downloaded a single MP3 file from an out-of-print record to complete their full collection of Beetles songs, then they'd probably lose. Instead, they go after somebody hosting 500 Brittany Spears recordings for anyone to download...
Copyright isn't just about what you copy - it is also about why you are copying it. In some cases, copying is perfectly legal.
Because the way I understood it, it's about using embryos already aborted (intentionally or not), which kinda reduces the problem to the embryos not having a donor card. Am I out of the loop here?
The concern is that by creating financial incentives for delivering aborted embryos, there will be incentive for creating those embryos in the first place. Those who oppose the creation of aborted embryos in the first place find it rather revolting that people are trying to balance out the issue by obtaining utility from the aborted tissue.
As far as donor cards go - if a person dies without a voluntarily signed donor card, their organs are off-limits - period. Somebody else in this thread mentioned the problems with Chinese prisoners having their organs extracted against their will (usually after execution). I'd hate to be a political prisoner with the right blood type if the party chairman gets shot by a protestor...
The issue of harvesting stem cells from aborted embryos is very similar to the issue of harvesting organs from an executed prisoner who did not sign a donor card. Neither is considered acceptable by a significant portion of the population.
That's like preventing inmates on death row from donating their kidneys.
No, it is like preventing the governemnt from removing kidneys from executed prisoners who didn't agree to donate them.
I know people who avoid carrying donor cards out of the fear that they'll be close to death in a hospital, and somebody more important than them will be needing one of their organs. If their organs had no utility after they were dead, then the doctors would have no choice but to try heroic measures. If they sign the donor card, then the doctors instead have an ethical dilema in which they're supposed to prioritize their life over the rich person's, but where they are allowed to make a judgement call and say that they're beyond saving.
Once the most valuable contribution that a criminal can make is to be executed and have their organs removed, the more likely it will be that the standard for execution gets lowered.
If you are absolutely against considering a human embryo with a two-digit number of cells as somewhat lesser than a human being, your minority vote is hereby duly noted.
You do realize that if you took a poll and asked that question, probably 40% of the US population would be in that minority. We're not talking about the two crackpots in town who opposed upgrading the sewage system that was leaking into people's lawns. We're talking about a group of people more populous than New York City.
You're assuming that life is defined by sentience. Many people do not agree with that definition. Many retarded people would fail that test.
The fact is that there is a huge disparity of opinion on this topic, and the debate really isn't furthered by everybody just refusing to associate with those they disagree with...
A full-size computer takes 300 watts. Well, let's just pretend it does. There's plenty of other numbers to pick from, but from the blown up "300 watts" chinese power supplies I see day in and day out, it's a good number to assume.
You don't need the whole computer to work.
Put a chip on the motherboard to manage the whole thing. The OS gets an alert from the power supply that everything is about to die. It immediately dumps whatever it was doing to RAM, and gets the CPU to flush the write cache. Now, everything we need to save is in RAM (And that took probably a microsecond - the power would probably last this long without any backup.) The OS sends a message to the hibernation chip on the motherboard. This chip immediately cuts all power to the CPU and all peripherals except a single hard drive, and the RAM refresh (no fans, PCI bus, etc). It then does a DMA transfer of RAM to the hard drive, and sets a flag in CMOS for the next power-on to indicate that it needs to restore.
So, you need full power for about 1ms or so, and then power for one hard drive and RAM (no CPU) for about 30-60 seconds. That can't be more than a watt or two. If you were really slick you'd design any extra hard drives to put power back into the system as they spin down (regenerative braking - but we don't really need it). The power could probably be generated by standard-sized (AA/9V/C/D/etc) batteries - which are a trivial expense compared to UPS batteries.
Even a desktop running full-speed doesn't pull 300W - that is a peak capacity which is probably only seen when drives are spinning up initially.
1. Big OS maker with clout defines standard for how this can be implemented in a power supply and motherboard that supports a DC voltage for x seconds after loss of AC. The OS will sense the warning from the power supply and do a fast hibernate.
2. Allow users to buy the supply/board for $20 extra at their option.
Without OS support no vendor would add such a feature to their hardware. The OS support is fairly trivial to add, however, and doesn't raise cost for people who don't use the feature.
The cost of doing this has to be a LOT lower than an external UPS. You can supply the power as DC (far more efficient), and only need about 30 seconds worth.
Model 1 - Somebody wants to do mass identity theft and steal names and social security numbers. An individual name and number is only worth maybe $50 to him.
Model 2 - Somebody is collecting info on their ex-wife in order to bolster a $500,000 divorce-related lawsuit. The info on the disk could make or break the case.
Model 3 - Private company wants to be a potential employee screener for big corporations. They promise to have good insights on potential applicants without saying how they get their info.
In model 1 sending the disks via mail is probably fine. There is no easy way to harvest a significant number of the disks without getting caught. If all the disks disappear it probably causes an investigation, and for $50 each the chances of success are too low.
In model 2 the unencrypted disks are a good target. If only one disk disappears then chances are that nobody will even notice the theft, and if there is no investigation it is likely that the theif will get away with it. The high stakes are also going to lead to desperate measures.
In model 3, email communications would be a nice target, but not disks. They need to make a huge database to be worth anything, and they can't bribe every post office in the nation. On the other hand, evesdropping on network data is a much lower hurdle to leap.
In general, once you enter the physical (vs online) world, you create huge costs for attackers, who now have to travel to a real place, case a place out, avoid getting seen, etc. Online you can commit a crime while you are at a party and have an alibai. You can't do that in the real world...
haven't we sort of sidestepped the issue of whether ethical objections to destroying small clumps of human cells (which could potentially, but will not, produce babies) trump the research benefits of embryonic stem cell research.
Well, the problem isn't whether those clumps of cells can potentially produce babies, but whether those clumps of cells are in fact already babies. This is a very heated area of dispute.
If embryos are human beings, then it is immoral to manipulate or destroy them for personal benefit. It would clearly be wrong to kill a one-month old (that is, one month after birth) even if the tissue you harvested from them could save 100 people. Now we're debating over where the line gets drawn. Is it OK to kill a fetus just before it is born in order to harvest tissue to benefit those same 100 people? Is it OK to do it one month after conception? A week?
It really isn't as simple an issue as the rhetoric would have you believe...
But, I don't believe one or more cells of a fertilized egg in a lab is a living, breathing, cognizant human being....nor would it ever become one in said lab setting without implantation into a female host.
Ah, so now we just need to agree on a definition for "human life". If you ask the Nazis it is anybody who isn't Jewish. If you ask an American from the 1700's, it is anybody who isn't black.
Keep in mind that many retarded people are going to fail to meet some criteria that you'd tend to propose for human life (ability to reason, etc.). Young children (up to a year or two in age) would fail to meet many criteria related to ability to survive on their own, etc.
Right now the legal definition is that a human life is effectively a fully developed infant which is no longer in its mother's body. This leads to strage practices like partial birth abortion where as long as at least a few hairs are still inside the birth canal the newborn has no legal rights.
If it were easy to define human life, there wouldn't be any debate at all. The problem is that it isn't easy. Does it start at birth (thus leading to partial birth abortion, and how anybody can differentiate between a child ten seconds before and after birth escapes me)? Does it start at conception (in which case do we probably have an ethical obligation to try to rescue children who fail to implant properly)? You can probably come up with a rediculous scenario for any definition that you come up with.
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The US has a lot more social stigmas regarding toilets and bathrooms than Japan.
Uh, I remember reading somewhere (I think on Wikipedia) that in Japanese women's rooms everybody was flushing the toilets continuously because they didn't want to be heard while they were doing the plop-plop, drip-drip.
As a result, many women's rooms in Japan have a little box you can wave your hand in front of which generates the sound of a flushing toilet - that way you can have all the flushing you want without actually wasting 100 gallons of water while you go.
And they say the US has stigmas?
I hope you're joking. The AG's office would be overloaded with a backlog of contracts to "be reviewed" because company XYZ just modified the terms of Widget X. I take offense to the fact that you don't believe people aren't able to determine what is or is not "fair". Wouldn't you agree that a more pragmatic approach is to say a the parties involved decide what or is not fair? You don't like the terms, don't buy it.
The fact of the matter is that most people don't like those one-sided agreements. However, they have become standard practice because of the various economies of limited-supply industries. If you want to go skiing there are probably at most ten places to do so in most normal areas. You won't find any variety in the disclaimers they make you sign (probably because they're all insured by the same company).
Car manufacturers would do the same thing if it weren't for lemon laws. Every industry would like to get rid of liability for the products they sell. Consumers generally don't have much power here, and laws have generally given them the leverage they've needed in the past.
As far as the AG's office being backlogged - I doubt this would happen:
First, the fees would be designed to cover most of the costs of the review, so they could hire more attourneys for this purpose. (It doesn't have to cover all of it, the state is already saving tons of money by heading up litigation in advance - murcky contracts would never get signed in the first place.)
Second, the fees would eliminate most of the contracts you sign these days. Where right now you waive 1400 separate rights every time you get a grocery discount store, in the future they might just hand you their privacy policy, and that's it. If they don't write a contract, then there is no fee to pay. Standard law and the precedence set in the courts would become the equitable standard for how business is conducted. Once upon a time that is probably how it all worked - I doubt that George Washington had to sign an agreement to get fair prices at the local butcher's shop. He probably didn't even sign an agreement when he bought a horse. Maybe when he bought a house, but probably not when he had somebody fix the roof on it.
My feeling is that the average person should be able to recall every binding document they've ever signed if they think hard enough. I couldn't remember all the trivial ones I've signed in the last six months. And I certainly didn't read them all completely first before signing them!
By getting rid of the garbage, the few real contracts that remain will be seriously negotiated and well-considered. That should reduce litigation overall. And it gives power to the average consumer over the company that forces you give up your right to sue to do business with them.
I think the reason that EULAs get away with that nonsense is that people are used to just clicking on them and the general impression is that they aren't terribly legally binding.
u s things you get at the ski slopes are highly questionable.
Imagine that whenever you went to the grocery store you were handed a 12 page contract at the checkouts - every time. Imagine that you had to sign a 27 page document every time you bought gas. Imagine having your babysitter and yourself exchange 107 page contracts every time you went out to dinner.
Contracts are great for their intended purpose - outlining rights and responsiblities in major transactions (your house, your car). They work best when you're talking about tangible things, or clearly defined services. Things are already getting murky when you start talking employment contracts and non-disclosure agreements. The standard we-can-kill-your-entire-family-and-you-can't-sue-
What is the point in having all these one-sided contracts for every possible action under the sun?
Perhaps there should be a law that all contracts are reviewed for fairness by a state attourney. There would be a fee of about $100 for every contract that is executed - this can be split by the parties however they feel is fair. Something like this wouldn't be a big deal for a house sale (gosh, most areas charge 1% plus a bundle of other fees). On the other hand, if MS had to send the state $100 for every windows installation, they'd think twice about those contracts. Ditto for the million other documents that serve no purpose.
Standard forms of business that have standard disclaimers should be covered by state law - such as a law stating what ski-lift operators are and are not responsible for. If they want to use a non-standard set of disclaimers, fine, but fork over $100 per customer. The state bears all the litigation costs when the contract is disputed - this lets them approve the contract before there is anything to argue over.
I wonder if a concept like this could actually work?
I would imagine that in most shops, the clients are running some flavor of windows.
The issue with CALs isn't that the clients aren't free. It is that you have to pay for not only the OS on the client but also for their right to connect to a server.
I don't know all the details, but if you have a server and 100 workstations you pay for:
1. Server license
2. 100 workstation licenses
3. 100 CALs to enable server to talk to 100 workstations at once.
If you had 10 servers my guess is that you'd pay:
1. 10 Server licenses
2. 100 workstation licenses
3. 1000 CALs to enable each server to talk to 100 workstations at once.
You see that the CALs are more of a server-related expense than a client-related, since they go up as you add servers as well as clients.
The other problem with all of this is license managment. If you don't have CALs all you need is to tape a copy of the OS license to the top of each computer and you know that you are fully legit. With CALs thrown in you also need to analyze who is connecting to what server at what time to figure out how you're doing.
With Samba there are no CALs, so you can pick the server and clients on their own merits, and mix and match them however you want...
The thing I don't understand is why the US caves in with these cases, or why they are so outraged.
The US should just refuse to drop the death penalty and put the suspect on the arrest-on-sight list at the border.
Think about it - the US saves all the costs of a trial, and yet there is no threat of a US citizen ever being hurt by the suspect again. If the Canadians are smart they'll file charges against the guy to get him off the streets (would you want him walking around loose?). Thus the US has neatly transferred the cost of imprisonment to the foreign country.
Same goes for all those terrorists that the EU was threatening not to extradite to the US out of fear that they will be executed. The US should just let them stay there - it isn't like they're going to be allowed to walk around on the streets or anything. If they were just going to get jailed either way let the Europeans pick up the tab. I'm sure the US would be willing to take them back once the EU gets tired of being the new Autstralia of the world - but only with no strings attached...
I think the principle is that unless there is a good reason not to allow it, everybody should be able to petition their courts when they are treated unjustly. After all, their local courts are the ones which they would tend to trust to judge their case fairly (since they comply with local views of right and wrong and civil rights).
When a sensitive issue of diplomacy is involved, the local state department or equivalent may file briefs with the court to address these issues as well. Once a judgement is made, the foreign government can choose whether or not to obey it, and the local executive branch can decide whether or not to seek to force the foreign goverment to obey it.
For countries with similar principles of justice and civil rights this probably works out fine most of the time. It tends to work out less well when one country is a democracy and the other is a dictatorship, or something like that. Unless the democracy wants to go to war or impose heavy sanctions (which only work so well, and may lead to war), things are pretty much in the hands of the dictator.
Note that one of the big areas of controversy surounding the International Criminal Court is the concept that individual countries would give up their power to veto a judgement of this court. In the USA, for instance, supreme court justices are appointed by a US-elected president and confirmed by a US-elected senate. An ICC justice would have a much more murky selection process, and the US would certainly have fairly little influence over their selection. To a US sentator asked to ratify the necessary treaties, the question is "why appoint somebody we have no control over to have power over US citizens, when the international court gives us no benefit we don't already have?" (The ICC doesn't benefit the US much, since if Osama Bin Laden were found the US wouldn't be calling for a warrant by the ICC, they would simply transport him to America to stand justice there. It isn't like anybody is going to refuse to extradite him.)
The issue isn't principle - it is practicality.
Suppose somebody from Sealand travels to Canada and kills somebody. Then they fly back to Sealand before the crime is discovered.
Clearly the broke Canadian law. However, the fact is that the Canadians can't do anything about it except invade Sealand, impose sanctions of some sort on the entire country, or hope the guy flys back to Canada so that they can arrest him at Immigration.
The company in question gets lots of money from Canadians, but probably never steps foot in Canada, or has assets of any kind there. If they aren't violating Indian laws then the Indian govermnent will probably not extradite them. That is, unless the rest of the civilized world imposes sanctions until they adopt privacy laws. Probably won't happen - too much money to be made there...
Many people break foreign laws all the time - perhaps by not praying daily to the local dictator, or whatever. As long as you never set foot in those countries, there isn't much they can do about it. This is usually a good thing, but sometimes a bad thing. Then again, the average Indian probably could care less about Canadian privacy laws - they're just happy for the extra jobs...
As he indicated it wouldn't be a true ICMP ping, but an application that uses a challenge-response system of some sort. Send random bytes, laptop encrypts with private RSA key, sends back, security server decrypts with public RSA key - no way to impersonate the laptop without hacking into it, which means that you can't take it home to crack it.
A few problems with your points above (taken in order):
1. It also allows industry to DRM-away fair use. If I miss an episode of name-your-favorite-brainless-reality-show-here, it is almost certainly legal within the confines of fair use to download a single copy of it with ads to watch the next day (assuming you normally watch it on TV). The TV industry would almost certainly sue anybody who hosts such a file, however.
3. Why would I want to donate my home computer bandwidth so that some RIAA label can save their bandwidth when distributing songs online? If somebody is making money off the network, then they're going to pay me if I run a server.
If we're just talking about mirror download sites, the existing bittorrent system works just fine. The only time you need something robust is when somebody else doesn't want you distributing something. Note that I didn't say that you need something else only when your activity is illegal - only when somebody is willing to sue you to stop it. You can be sued for doing something completely legal, and in theory you might be found innocent after spending a few thousand dollars on your defence and losing your job due to court appearances.
Freenet would probably work better if there were more permenant nodes. It has been steadily improving.
However, I'll be the first to admit that it isn't there already.
The problem is that Freenet is inherently less efficient than bittorrent/kazza/whatever. The reason is that you can't just go over to google to get a direct link to a tracker, and you can't just have a supernode indexing what is over the entire network. The reason for this, of course, is those are the exact same tools somebody choosing to suppress a publisher would use.
Freenet works really well with regard to its primary goal - protecting privacy. No other network really comes close. Honestly, I can't think of a single other network I'd trust if I wanted to download something that a powerful entity (such as an oppressive government, or trigger-happy industry organization) disagreed with. GNUnet comes close and is a little more practical in design. However, GNUnet, by allowing hosting, is succeptible to a number of attacks that can be used to trace who is hosting a file.
Here's the problem. If you can differentiate content, then you can censor it.
RIAA connects their Freenet node to yours, and asks for copyrighted song.
Your node relays the request, and sends it back to them.
RIAA sues you for not blocking the transit of the song through your computer.
And how exactly would you tell Freenet to block certain content? You can't even tell what you're realying since it is encrypted and not even nodes in transit can figure out what it is. If traffic weren't encrypted enroute then that is a potential privacy problem for people in China. And even if it weren't encrypted, how would you filter it? Sure, you could probably block by file type (no jpgs, mp3s, etc.). In fact, the ??AA would sue you to block mp3s, avis, etc of any kind since they could be copyrighted.
The inefficiency of Freenet is largely due to its design, which make anonymity the primary goal, not a secondary one. No other P2P network offers the same kind of protection from lawsuits...
I think he was indicating that he was erring on the side of giving a liberal estimate.
If not all hterosexual contact is "responsible" (which is obviously true), then even a smaller number of cases were obtained by "responsible" people.
His point is that the vast majority of HIV cases were preventable purely by actions that could have been taken by the person who got infected.
He also conceded that there is a significant minority who got HIV despite doing nothing to put them at risk.
His valid point is that our first focus should be on encouraging responsible behavior until such time as a cure is available. If more people were responsible, HIV would be much less common, and even those who got it without being at risk would be less likely to get it (since their irresponsible spouses/doctors/whatevers would be less likely to have caught it).
Face it - there is quite a bit of competition already in the pharma industry.
You have tons of biotechs competing at the basic research level. Some have grown into full-fledged pharma companies.
You have tons of manufacturing-oriented outsourcers. Anybody who comes up with an idea for a pill can get some Indian company to mass-produce it for a song. Granted, most of those companies will also steal the formula from you and sell it under their own label. But hey, it seems like half the posters here advocate that anyway, so they shouldn't complain about that part.
About the only thing that the small pharmas dependon the big pharmas for is advertising. No problem there - the claim that is being debated is that advertising is optional anyway.
If the proposal that the big companies add no value were true, then the small companies would be dominating the market. They wouldn't waste their money and profits on co-promotion agreements - they'd just discover some molecule, outsource production and testing, and then publish a paper in The Lancet and let physicians do the prescribing. No need for expensive TV ads. Of course, in five years when nobody is taking the drug since many doctors don't bother prescribing anything unless they get a nice kickback.
Doctors are half the problem. I had a friend who was a sales rep for a big company, and a doctor actually told her that he wouldn't prescribe her company's drug unless she came up with a better giveaway than the sales rep from the current favored company. Clinical trials cost a fortune since doctors claim a hefty finder's fee for brining in patients to participate in them. And so on...
Trust me, the situation isn't nearly as clear-cut as the AARP would have you believe...
The government already gives money to universities. Why not just say that drugs discovered by government-funded investigators are ineligible for patent protection? You don't need to regulate pharma companies - if all the drugs on the market are the result of government spending then all drugs will end up being generic.
If the NIH discovers a cure for cancer they can simply pay some clinical research labs to do safety and efficacy testing on it, and then release the molecule into the public domain.
Of course, my feeling is that you'll spend 5 times as much money on R&D this way than you'd spend on drug company profits if you had just maintained the status quo, but you don't have to take my word for it.
Just all the two processes to operate in parallel, then add up tax dollars spent on NIH R&D versus tax dollars spent on drug advertising, and see which is cheaper for society.
Of course, if the drug ends up killing people you had better factor in the costs the US public isn't allowed to recover if they aren't allowed to sue the federal government. If somebody suggested giving drug companies that kind of treatment the activists would be screaming. Often when government turns out to be more efficient it is simply because of the craziness of the rest of our legal system which makes private industry fair game for all kinds of silly lawsuits (and many legitimate ones as well - which the government often evades just as easily).
The government is going to make decisions of fact and law with regards to interpretation of copyright law that impact open source software. The decisions that are made establish precedent which can allow people to sue or prosecute you.
So, I'd say this has a big impact on everyone, and the government is very much involved.
So, why don't they get to say when you can watch it, or more plainly, what gives you the right to download it via BitTorrent?
What gives them the right to say when you can watch it? In general in the USA you can do anything you want to do unless it is explictly prohibited.
In this case, the relevant law is copyright, which includes exceptions for fair use. So, now the question is whether he was exercising fair use. The studio doesn't get to define fair use, by the way, it is a legal concept defined by Cogress and the courts.
There really is no concrete definition of fair use - it tends to be "if it looks like a duck, and sounds like a duck..." kind of argument.
If you copied two episodes that you missed so that you can keep up with the advertising-supported TV series, that would probably fall under fair use. If you downloaded every episode as a substitute for watching the ad-supported TV series, then that would probably not fall under fair use. The uploader did not bother to find out which you're doing, so they can potentially be found liable. If, on the other hand, the uploader just sent files directly to email contacts that he first checked were just trying to obtain a show or two, they probably would not be able to be held liable in practice. Of course, this is why MPAA is going after large-scale sharers - not people sending lone files by email. P2P is littered with gray areas, and of course the ??AA are going to fight their battles against defendants who are more likely to lose. If they went after somebody who downloaded a single MP3 file from an out-of-print record to complete their full collection of Beetles songs, then they'd probably lose. Instead, they go after somebody hosting 500 Brittany Spears recordings for anyone to download...
Copyright isn't just about what you copy - it is also about why you are copying it. In some cases, copying is perfectly legal.
Because the way I understood it, it's about using embryos already aborted (intentionally or not), which kinda reduces the problem to the embryos not having a donor card. Am I out of the loop here?
The concern is that by creating financial incentives for delivering aborted embryos, there will be incentive for creating those embryos in the first place. Those who oppose the creation of aborted embryos in the first place find it rather revolting that people are trying to balance out the issue by obtaining utility from the aborted tissue.
As far as donor cards go - if a person dies without a voluntarily signed donor card, their organs are off-limits - period. Somebody else in this thread mentioned the problems with Chinese prisoners having their organs extracted against their will (usually after execution). I'd hate to be a political prisoner with the right blood type if the party chairman gets shot by a protestor...
The issue of harvesting stem cells from aborted embryos is very similar to the issue of harvesting organs from an executed prisoner who did not sign a donor card. Neither is considered acceptable by a significant portion of the population.
That's like preventing inmates on death row from donating their kidneys.
No, it is like preventing the governemnt from removing kidneys from executed prisoners who didn't agree to donate them.
I know people who avoid carrying donor cards out of the fear that they'll be close to death in a hospital, and somebody more important than them will be needing one of their organs. If their organs had no utility after they were dead, then the doctors would have no choice but to try heroic measures. If they sign the donor card, then the doctors instead have an ethical dilema in which they're supposed to prioritize their life over the rich person's, but where they are allowed to make a judgement call and say that they're beyond saving.
Once the most valuable contribution that a criminal can make is to be executed and have their organs removed, the more likely it will be that the standard for execution gets lowered.
If you are absolutely against considering a human embryo with a two-digit number of cells as somewhat lesser than a human being, your minority vote is hereby duly noted.
You do realize that if you took a poll and asked that question, probably 40% of the US population would be in that minority. We're not talking about the two crackpots in town who opposed upgrading the sewage system that was leaking into people's lawns. We're talking about a group of people more populous than New York City.
You're assuming that life is defined by sentience. Many people do not agree with that definition. Many retarded people would fail that test.
The fact is that there is a huge disparity of opinion on this topic, and the debate really isn't furthered by everybody just refusing to associate with those they disagree with...
A full-size computer takes 300 watts. Well, let's just pretend it does. There's plenty of other numbers to pick from, but from the blown up "300 watts" chinese power supplies I see day in and day out, it's a good number to assume.
You don't need the whole computer to work.
Put a chip on the motherboard to manage the whole thing. The OS gets an alert from the power supply that everything is about to die. It immediately dumps whatever it was doing to RAM, and gets the CPU to flush the write cache. Now, everything we need to save is in RAM (And that took probably a microsecond - the power would probably last this long without any backup.) The OS sends a message to the hibernation chip on the motherboard. This chip immediately cuts all power to the CPU and all peripherals except a single hard drive, and the RAM refresh (no fans, PCI bus, etc). It then does a DMA transfer of RAM to the hard drive, and sets a flag in CMOS for the next power-on to indicate that it needs to restore.
So, you need full power for about 1ms or so, and then power for one hard drive and RAM (no CPU) for about 30-60 seconds. That can't be more than a watt or two. If you were really slick you'd design any extra hard drives to put power back into the system as they spin down (regenerative braking - but we don't really need it). The power could probably be generated by standard-sized (AA/9V/C/D/etc) batteries - which are a trivial expense compared to UPS batteries.
Even a desktop running full-speed doesn't pull 300W - that is a peak capacity which is probably only seen when drives are spinning up initially.
Simple solution to the cost issue:
1. Big OS maker with clout defines standard for how this can be implemented in a power supply and motherboard that supports a DC voltage for x seconds after loss of AC. The OS will sense the warning from the power supply and do a fast hibernate.
2. Allow users to buy the supply/board for $20 extra at their option.
Without OS support no vendor would add such a feature to their hardware. The OS support is fairly trivial to add, however, and doesn't raise cost for people who don't use the feature.
The cost of doing this has to be a LOT lower than an external UPS. You can supply the power as DC (far more efficient), and only need about 30 seconds worth.
I guess it depends on your threat model.
Model 1 - Somebody wants to do mass identity theft and steal names and social security numbers. An individual name and number is only worth maybe $50 to him.
Model 2 - Somebody is collecting info on their ex-wife in order to bolster a $500,000 divorce-related lawsuit. The info on the disk could make or break the case.
Model 3 - Private company wants to be a potential employee screener for big corporations. They promise to have good insights on potential applicants without saying how they get their info.
In model 1 sending the disks via mail is probably fine. There is no easy way to harvest a significant number of the disks without getting caught. If all the disks disappear it probably causes an investigation, and for $50 each the chances of success are too low.
In model 2 the unencrypted disks are a good target. If only one disk disappears then chances are that nobody will even notice the theft, and if there is no investigation it is likely that the theif will get away with it. The high stakes are also going to lead to desperate measures.
In model 3, email communications would be a nice target, but not disks. They need to make a huge database to be worth anything, and they can't bribe every post office in the nation. On the other hand, evesdropping on network data is a much lower hurdle to leap.
In general, once you enter the physical (vs online) world, you create huge costs for attackers, who now have to travel to a real place, case a place out, avoid getting seen, etc. Online you can commit a crime while you are at a party and have an alibai. You can't do that in the real world...
haven't we sort of sidestepped the issue of whether ethical objections to destroying small clumps of human cells (which could potentially, but will not, produce babies) trump the research benefits of embryonic stem cell research.
Well, the problem isn't whether those clumps of cells can potentially produce babies, but whether those clumps of cells are in fact already babies. This is a very heated area of dispute.
If embryos are human beings, then it is immoral to manipulate or destroy them for personal benefit. It would clearly be wrong to kill a one-month old (that is, one month after birth) even if the tissue you harvested from them could save 100 people. Now we're debating over where the line gets drawn. Is it OK to kill a fetus just before it is born in order to harvest tissue to benefit those same 100 people? Is it OK to do it one month after conception? A week?
It really isn't as simple an issue as the rhetoric would have you believe...
But, I don't believe one or more cells of a fertilized egg in a lab is a living, breathing, cognizant human being....nor would it ever become one in said lab setting without implantation into a female host.
Ah, so now we just need to agree on a definition for "human life". If you ask the Nazis it is anybody who isn't Jewish. If you ask an American from the 1700's, it is anybody who isn't black.
Keep in mind that many retarded people are going to fail to meet some criteria that you'd tend to propose for human life (ability to reason, etc.). Young children (up to a year or two in age) would fail to meet many criteria related to ability to survive on their own, etc.
Right now the legal definition is that a human life is effectively a fully developed infant which is no longer in its mother's body. This leads to strage practices like partial birth abortion where as long as at least a few hairs are still inside the birth canal the newborn has no legal rights.
If it were easy to define human life, there wouldn't be any debate at all. The problem is that it isn't easy. Does it start at birth (thus leading to partial birth abortion, and how anybody can differentiate between a child ten seconds before and after birth escapes me)? Does it start at conception (in which case do we probably have an ethical obligation to try to rescue children who fail to implant properly)? You can probably come up with a rediculous scenario for any definition that you come up with.
Let's hope that we don't see that one on Mythbusters...