> If you've ever watched a new foal learn to walk within hours of birth, then learn to run in the same morning, you will no doubt wonder what is in the horses brain that makes them capable of this? Humans and other mammals have a long learning cycle for this.
I thought it was more a matter of us lacking the muscles to do this. Newborn humans aren't exactly strong. (Though if there was evolutionary pressure for us to develop that kind of strength right off the bat, like there would seem to be for foals, I'm sure the musculature would evolve in due time.)
> Just a quibble, the elected government of Sweden has every right to "change the rules", pretty much whenever they want.
The thing about that is that most of the people in Sweden don't seem to want this. Only the politicians are in favor of it, and they're not eager to listen to the people. Even though the Pirate Party has quite a few members for a single-issue party.
While you're absolutely correct that ex post facto refers to criminalizing something after a person has committed the act, then arresting them, I would like to point out that the copyright extensions should have been unconstitutional for a very different reason.
I believe it was Eldred v. Ashcroft that pointed out that they were violating the "limited times" clause of the section of the constitution authorizing copyright laws by doing retroactive extensions. The only reason the Supreme Court didn't uphold that argument is because they thought there were enough other advantages to the law that they didn't want to upset the boat, though they indicated that they might not look so favorably upon another retroactive extension if there wasn't a compelling enough reason for it.
Of course, by the time of the next extension, who knows who the Supremes will be or whether they'll even care about those issues any more...
> Yes, and that's exactly why Bittorrent is the mechanism of choice for many. What CBS is doing is the future, and it's a pretty good future, where Bittorent isn't needed -- once they figure out that they can solve so many problems by making shows available to the entire world.
Actually, BitTorrent would make this service a lot better. If the ads are inside the video, why can't we download and share them?
Yes, someone could use their favorite video editor to strip out the commercials. Or pass around scripts that tell your computer which parts of the video to skip. But those violate copyright law (see also: Clean Flicks) and we already have copies of the source videos, anyhow. So that would be going to a lot of work for no reason.
Honestly, I can't stream much of anything. My connection is too slow and I'm not going to wait hours for a video to buffer. But I will leave a BT client on all night and watch a show in the morning.
So I really wish they'd let us download these, but whatever. I do agree that they appear to be starting to come to their senses.
> As a people, we very well may be held away from knowledge by conspiracies we can't see, but we're certainly held away from knowledge by not reading things that are perfectly available to us, published in the clear (Middle East Journal and Far Eastern Affairs are examples of good current events journals that would be great for people to read and discuss if they want to understand the world).
Do you have any links to things that are freely available that you recommend for people to read? I'd Google the journals, but I'm probably not going to pay to read some article I know nothing about sight unseen and I have to assume those are like most journals which require paid access...
> The "fire 10%" strategy has the interesting side effect of ruthlessly exposing the quality of your performance metrics. If they are quite good, it might actually work. If they are indifferent or worse, you'll cut your own throat in short order. Nothing like an office full of people gaming the metrics and covering their asses to get things done.
You deserve to have that post moderated MUCH higher than +5, Insightful.
In a related note, if you set your standards so high that only cheaters can meet them, you will have only cheaters left. And because of their obsession with performance metrics, they'll be worse than the people who honestly came close to your goals (before they got fired or became cheaters out of necessity).
Finally, merely detecting the cheating does you no good whatsoever. You have to fix the metrics and the underlying problems (this will probably cost $$$), or you'll just start a treadmill where you constantly set up new people for failure.
> It appears that it also mentions a power supply and a 41% efficiency. That makes it not a perpetual motion machine.
If you truly want to know the physics behind what's wrong with this thing, read Nature (subscription required).
Frankly, they might as well have patented a hover car powered by Mr. Fusion and a flux capacitor, but that would have been more realistic.
That said, it does explain why you can be so oblivious to the flaws in the system when you don't immediately realize that this entire "invention" is pure BS.
> If the Supreme Court does take it, and upholds it, it's a better start.
The Supreme Court doesn't grant cert for no reason. They just don't usually hear cases they don't want to modify in some way.
So if they grant certiorari, there's a better than even chance that they want to reverse it (which would be bad). I had a professor who tracked statistics of all kinds with respect to all the Supreme Court justices and I seem to recall him giving something like 2-1 odds for a reversal of some kind based on years worth of data.
In other words, I'm really hoping that it's among the many "cert denied" listings. Don't get me wrong, I'd love to have them expand upon the ruling, perhaps to clarify that a basic PC can never be a "particular machine," but if you want to read the tea leaves, granting cert is probably a bad thing.
(For those who don't know, the Supreme Court is a court of limited jurisdiction. So they only have to hear a few rare types of cases. If they grant the "petition of certiorari" [aka 'grant cert'], they hear the case. Otherwise they don't hear the case and the original ruling stands.)
Most of it is floating around without my name attached. A couple tools are in the Bugtraq archives somewhere, though not under this name. There may also be some here and somewhere in here, though I can't keep track of where everything is any more.
Open source is like that, you know. I don't even know who all is using what any more. Especially because I prefer NOT to have my work attributed to me and do most things anonymously or pseudonymously.
And what if we scare robots into killing all the humans? Doesn't anyone remember how scared Bender was when he saw a 2 amidst all those 0s and 1s in that nightmare?
> As I understand it, this add-on just alters the useragent to declare that the PC it's running on is.NET capable (i.e. you got at least one version of the.NET framework installed). This is a good thing - as it means MORE sites that have.net extensions or controls will work in FF, meaning you can finally ditch IE completely (in theory).
So we can leave IE, but we're stuck with Windows? (Given that any Linux computer able to run.NET code won't exactly be using Windows update.) Great...
> No. Quake is not a game. It is a network performance analyzer.
Do you have a business card? I'm thinking that I should recommend to the boss that we get a contract with some consultants to regularly analyze our network performance in order to find bottlenecks before they become problematic...
How much do you have to piss off a judge before they sanction you of their own volition?
Because if you don't know, I'm hoping we can find out together. They'll have to hire SCO execs if they want to make this any crazier. I have some idea about things they could do to further annoy the judge, but I don't care to give them ideas.
I have jury duty coming up (albeit in the wrong state for any of this). Too bad. I'd just love to be able to serve on an RIAA case. But I think they'd find me out if I said, "No, Your Honor, I haven't yet formed an opinion about the sleazebag Plaintiffs in this case and can be objective when seeking to become jury foreman and asking whether we have the power to put them in jail.":]
Just FYI, Groklaw is following the case now, though it remains to be seen how much time PJ has to devote to this. As NYCL says, he doesn't have a lot of time for commentary, given that he's busy fighting the RIAA in court.
> The real test of law here is whether child pornography prosecution can be used against minors who willingly took and distributed the pictures of themselves. Furthermore, can the boys be charged for receipt of something they did not have the option to reject? I don't know about you, but I don't have a choice to reject an SMS on my phone, it just accepts it no matter what.
I believe that, under Federal law (and I'm working from memory here), that if you come across child porn, you have two options:
* Show no one & delete it immediately (no, you can't keep it around for a while first).
* Report it to the cops (and NO ONE but the cops).
The law went into some detail about this, but essentially anything outside this was illegal. You can't show it to others (except the police when reporting it) and if you just delete it, you should do that right away. There are probably other fine points to it, lest someone continually download and delete CP, but that was the gist of it.
In other words, they might be able to escape prosecution if they didn't have the pictures for very long and hadn't shown them to anyone.
As for the charges themselves, they're ridiculous. The school admins should've warned the students about those pictures getting onto the web and following these kids around for life, then made them delete them or something. Charging them with CP is just absurd. I hope that jury knows what "jury nullification" is (and that they don't get in trouble for knowing). I have jury duty coming up, but I'm in the wrong state.
> The company develops an ethics plan then pays you thousands to audit and certify them.
All I can think of is the Dilbert where the PHB is getting an online MBA and having the intern Asok take all his classes for him. And he gets upset when Asok only gets a B in the online ethics course.
In other words, while I can too easily imagine that happening, I have to imagine that they'd just find unethical auditors to audit them.
And we already have the BBB, anyhow, but I don't know how many people consult them before doing business. Maybe someone needs to make a Google app or something to list the BBB's rating beside online businesses or something...
> You're modded funny, but if they were to use BitTorrent to distribute the recorded proceedings after the fact it would provide an example of an unambiguously legitimate use for such things that judges would be able to identify with.:)
You're thinking too small. For the love of all that is holy, someone just has to put a torrent of this video on The Pirate Bay.
And be sure to document all hash fails you see so we can establish whether they're trying to poison it...:]
> Some of the posts here seem to be unwittingly revealing just how religious right fundamentalist a lot of US HR practice can be.
Fundamentalists are pro-marriage last I checked. These practices, insofar as I have encountered them, are all about avoiding sexual harassment lawsuits and accusations of nepotism or favoritism.
At least blame the right people, rather than the ones you dislike the most.
Also, they're not as widespread as you appear to think. We had a husband & wife working at my workplace a while back, not to mention the couple that married while working there or another couple I don't know what became of (they both left around the same time, I never did find out if they later got married or not).
As far as I know, the only rule at my workplace would be against having your spouse as a direct report. And this is merely to avoid issues like being able to give your spouse a raise or to cause any similar conflict of interest.
Slashdot Mirror
> If you've ever watched a new foal learn to walk within hours of birth, then learn to run in the same morning, you will no doubt wonder what is in the horses brain that makes them capable of this? Humans and other mammals have a long learning cycle for this.
I thought it was more a matter of us lacking the muscles to do this. Newborn humans aren't exactly strong. (Though if there was evolutionary pressure for us to develop that kind of strength right off the bat, like there would seem to be for foals, I'm sure the musculature would evolve in due time.)
> Just a quibble, the elected government of Sweden has every right to "change the rules", pretty much whenever they want.
The thing about that is that most of the people in Sweden don't seem to want this. Only the politicians are in favor of it, and they're not eager to listen to the people. Even though the Pirate Party has quite a few members for a single-issue party.
While you're absolutely correct that ex post facto refers to criminalizing something after a person has committed the act, then arresting them, I would like to point out that the copyright extensions should have been unconstitutional for a very different reason.
I believe it was Eldred v. Ashcroft that pointed out that they were violating the "limited times" clause of the section of the constitution authorizing copyright laws by doing retroactive extensions. The only reason the Supreme Court didn't uphold that argument is because they thought there were enough other advantages to the law that they didn't want to upset the boat, though they indicated that they might not look so favorably upon another retroactive extension if there wasn't a compelling enough reason for it.
Of course, by the time of the next extension, who knows who the Supremes will be or whether they'll even care about those issues any more...
Wait, I know what to do!
We'll need Optimus Prime, Indiana Jones and a Carebare to take him out.
> Yes, and that's exactly why Bittorrent is the mechanism of choice for many. What CBS is doing is the future, and it's a pretty good future, where Bittorent isn't needed -- once they figure out that they can solve so many problems by making shows available to the entire world.
Actually, BitTorrent would make this service a lot better. If the ads are inside the video, why can't we download and share them?
Yes, someone could use their favorite video editor to strip out the commercials. Or pass around scripts that tell your computer which parts of the video to skip. But those violate copyright law (see also: Clean Flicks) and we already have copies of the source videos, anyhow. So that would be going to a lot of work for no reason.
Honestly, I can't stream much of anything. My connection is too slow and I'm not going to wait hours for a video to buffer. But I will leave a BT client on all night and watch a show in the morning.
So I really wish they'd let us download these, but whatever. I do agree that they appear to be starting to come to their senses.
> They could "hyper-evolve" into salamanders and have gross salamander sex?
That's still an improvement over the CBS execs of today... :]
> As a people, we very well may be held away from knowledge by conspiracies we can't see, but we're certainly held away from knowledge by not reading things that are perfectly available to us, published in the clear (Middle East Journal and Far Eastern Affairs are examples of good current events journals that would be great for people to read and discuss if they want to understand the world).
Do you have any links to things that are freely available that you recommend for people to read? I'd Google the journals, but I'm probably not going to pay to read some article I know nothing about sight unseen and I have to assume those are like most journals which require paid access...
> The "fire 10%" strategy has the interesting side effect of ruthlessly exposing the quality of your performance metrics. If they are quite good, it might actually work. If they are indifferent or worse, you'll cut your own throat in short order. Nothing like an office full of people gaming the metrics and covering their asses to get things done.
You deserve to have that post moderated MUCH higher than +5, Insightful.
In a related note, if you set your standards so high that only cheaters can meet them, you will have only cheaters left. And because of their obsession with performance metrics, they'll be worse than the people who honestly came close to your goals (before they got fired or became cheaters out of necessity).
Finally, merely detecting the cheating does you no good whatsoever. You have to fix the metrics and the underlying problems (this will probably cost $$$), or you'll just start a treadmill where you constantly set up new people for failure.
> It appears that it also mentions a power supply and a 41% efficiency. That makes it not a perpetual motion machine.
If you truly want to know the physics behind what's wrong with this thing, read Nature (subscription required).
Frankly, they might as well have patented a hover car powered by Mr. Fusion and a flux capacitor, but that would have been more realistic.
That said, it does explain why you can be so oblivious to the flaws in the system when you don't immediately realize that this entire "invention" is pure BS.
> If the Supreme Court does take it, and upholds it, it's a better start.
The Supreme Court doesn't grant cert for no reason. They just don't usually hear cases they don't want to modify in some way.
So if they grant certiorari, there's a better than even chance that they want to reverse it (which would be bad). I had a professor who tracked statistics of all kinds with respect to all the Supreme Court justices and I seem to recall him giving something like 2-1 odds for a reversal of some kind based on years worth of data.
In other words, I'm really hoping that it's among the many "cert denied" listings. Don't get me wrong, I'd love to have them expand upon the ruling, perhaps to clarify that a basic PC can never be a "particular machine," but if you want to read the tea leaves, granting cert is probably a bad thing.
(For those who don't know, the Supreme Court is a court of limited jurisdiction. So they only have to hear a few rare types of cases. If they grant the "petition of certiorari" [aka 'grant cert'], they hear the case. Otherwise they don't hear the case and the original ruling stands.)
> Can I have all your code for free, then?
Sure!
Most of it is floating around without my name attached. A couple tools are in the Bugtraq archives somewhere, though not under this name. There may also be some here and somewhere in here, though I can't keep track of where everything is any more.
Open source is like that, you know. I don't even know who all is using what any more. Especially because I prefer NOT to have my work attributed to me and do most things anonymously or pseudonymously.
And what if we scare robots into killing all the humans? Doesn't anyone remember how scared Bender was when he saw a 2 amidst all those 0s and 1s in that nightmare?
> As I understand it, this add-on just alters the useragent to declare that the PC it's running on is .NET capable (i.e. you got at least one version of the .NET framework installed). This is a good thing - as it means MORE sites that have .net extensions or controls will work in FF, meaning you can finally ditch IE completely (in theory).
So we can leave IE, but we're stuck with Windows? (Given that any Linux computer able to run .NET code won't exactly be using Windows update.) Great...
> While one does not guarantee the other, they are often interlinked.
Wasn't there also a corollary to that statement that said that sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice?
> No. Quake is not a game. It is a network performance analyzer.
Do you have a business card? I'm thinking that I should recommend to the boss that we get a contract with some consultants to regularly analyze our network performance in order to find bottlenecks before they become problematic...
> Oh, don't worry. We'll just upload it to various P2P networks and torrents mistitled. Disguised as porn, more likely than not.
"Hot, barely legal action! Watch RIAA lawyers get screwed!"
Hmm ...
Yeah, that could work...
> If there is no time limit to these side odds of Enrico Fermi's--then odds could very well happen if we saw a WW3.
The real problem is collecting the bet once all life on Earth has been wiped out...
How much do you have to piss off a judge before they sanction you of their own volition?
Because if you don't know, I'm hoping we can find out together. They'll have to hire SCO execs if they want to make this any crazier. I have some idea about things they could do to further annoy the judge, but I don't care to give them ideas.
I have jury duty coming up (albeit in the wrong state for any of this). Too bad. I'd just love to be able to serve on an RIAA case. But I think they'd find me out if I said, "No, Your Honor, I haven't yet formed an opinion about the sleazebag Plaintiffs in this case and can be objective when seeking to become jury foreman and asking whether we have the power to put them in jail." :]
Just FYI, Groklaw is following the case now, though it remains to be seen how much time PJ has to devote to this. As NYCL says, he doesn't have a lot of time for commentary, given that he's busy fighting the RIAA in court.
> They will have to suffer a near-death experience before they will actually pay attention to what the user wants and what the market is delivering.
Here's to hoping they never suffer a near-death experience.
> The real test of law here is whether child pornography prosecution can be used against minors who willingly took and distributed the pictures of themselves. Furthermore, can the boys be charged for receipt of something they did not have the option to reject? I don't know about you, but I don't have a choice to reject an SMS on my phone, it just accepts it no matter what.
I believe that, under Federal law (and I'm working from memory here), that if you come across child porn, you have two options:
* Show no one & delete it immediately (no, you can't keep it around for a while first).
* Report it to the cops (and NO ONE but the cops).
The law went into some detail about this, but essentially anything outside this was illegal. You can't show it to others (except the police when reporting it) and if you just delete it, you should do that right away. There are probably other fine points to it, lest someone continually download and delete CP, but that was the gist of it.
In other words, they might be able to escape prosecution if they didn't have the pictures for very long and hadn't shown them to anyone.
As for the charges themselves, they're ridiculous. The school admins should've warned the students about those pictures getting onto the web and following these kids around for life, then made them delete them or something. Charging them with CP is just absurd. I hope that jury knows what "jury nullification" is (and that they don't get in trouble for knowing). I have jury duty coming up, but I'm in the wrong state.
> The company develops an ethics plan then pays you thousands to audit and certify them.
All I can think of is the Dilbert where the PHB is getting an online MBA and having the intern Asok take all his classes for him. And he gets upset when Asok only gets a B in the online ethics course.
In other words, while I can too easily imagine that happening, I have to imagine that they'd just find unethical auditors to audit them.
And we already have the BBB, anyhow, but I don't know how many people consult them before doing business. Maybe someone needs to make a Google app or something to list the BBB's rating beside online businesses or something...
Just make sure you get an old lady to drive the bulldozer. That way, you can get away with it, too.
> You're modded funny, but if they were to use BitTorrent to distribute the recorded proceedings after the fact it would provide an example of an unambiguously legitimate use for such things that judges would be able to identify with. :)
You're thinking too small. For the love of all that is holy, someone just has to put a torrent of this video on The Pirate Bay.
And be sure to document all hash fails you see so we can establish whether they're trying to poison it... :]
> Some of the posts here seem to be unwittingly revealing just how religious right fundamentalist a lot of US HR practice can be.
Fundamentalists are pro-marriage last I checked. These practices, insofar as I have encountered them, are all about avoiding sexual harassment lawsuits and accusations of nepotism or favoritism.
At least blame the right people, rather than the ones you dislike the most.
Also, they're not as widespread as you appear to think. We had a husband & wife working at my workplace a while back, not to mention the couple that married while working there or another couple I don't know what became of (they both left around the same time, I never did find out if they later got married or not).
As far as I know, the only rule at my workplace would be against having your spouse as a direct report. And this is merely to avoid issues like being able to give your spouse a raise or to cause any similar conflict of interest.