So your ISP says you're responsible. Can that document land you in Jail? Not in this country (USA). They can hold you responsible for monitary damages to their equipment or service caused by your negligence, but they can't, by that document, make you liable for criminal acts carried over your wire.
Put another way, if some guy shoots some other guy in your house, you won't go to jail. It doesn't matter what your homeowner association rules say about gun possesion on your premises and you being responsible.
Nope, this is the genuine artical. This guy is so dead on it's not even funny. How do you think Comcast avoides being put out of business if someone should use their connection to download illegal materials? Answer: "your honor, we're just the pipe. We let others actualy use it. We have no idea what goes on in that pipe that we rent out."
This guy is behaving just like Comcast. He's the pipe and he doesn't know what goes on in that pipe. Unless the Judge were to determine that the pipe owner is responsible (and Comcast will certainly help him fight _that_ kind of fight) then he's ok.
BTW, he also said he turned off logging. In many, many cases, there is no law that says you have to log, but there is a law that says you can't destroy evidence you alread poses. If you don't have a log in the first place, you have nothing to turn over to the feds and you have no evidence to destroy. I think that's a big step closer to true freedom.
They problem is written right in the article. They call this stuff "content". I cringe whenever I read that word. The term is hopelessly entangled with people trying to sell you stuff you weren't looking to buy instead of you seeking out something because you want to buy it.
Writers write, directors direct and game designers design games. If they look interesting to you, you buy them. Only assholes "generate content." and then try to convince you to buy it whether it's interesting or not.
TW
BTW, speaking of content, remember when internet people were busy trying to generate it? You don't hear about that much anymore do you? AOL was the biggest culprit and, not surprisingly, the biggest loser as a result.
Yeah, we need some more boring, crappy games based on movies and boring, crappy movies based on games so people will get jaded about the games and the industry will go into recession like it did post-Atari. Then maybe the people that are in it for the glitz instead of the games will go find something else to do.
What would we have gotten if Atari had continued to dominate back-in-the-day? More Atari 2600 Pac-Man probably. That brief recession allowed us to get the NES. Cool upgrade, eh? But,now we're getting yet another stupid James Bond game on PS-2. It needs to die so people will at least try to reinvent gaming into something better instead of continuing to push hollywoodfied, star-studded crap.
TW
Re:Start by banning plastics for useless crap
on
Out of Gas
·
· Score: 1
Why is everyone so keen to ban stuff? If gas prices skyrocket, so will the price of Billy Bass. So will the price of your plastic soda bottle. So will the price of your sneakers. We then determine that sneakers are a necessity and that Billy Bass is not. So we don't buy him. And the company goes out of business or starts making something else.
The effect: Billy Bass goes away and there is no need to ban.
Same thing with recycling. People tend to recycle aluminum cans because they bring a decent return on the effort required. If the cost of plastic were to skyrocket, it would be recycled at a much higer rate than it is now. Bingo, Billy Bass gets recycled instead of thrown in the trash.
Supply and demand are not always right, but they do tend to sove problems like Billy Bass in the long run. Sigh... it makes me wish gas were 10 bucks a gallon right now:-)
Apple is not what it once was marketshare wise, but it's still a cool company. Why does everyone want to kill these shrinking companies instead of letting them carve their own niche?
Frankly, if the U.S. Congress says it's illegal, doesn't that end the discussion? I mean, that's the point of the legislative branch, isn't it?
Not really. We have the judicial branch to keep those guys in check. When congress makes bullshit law (Jim Crowe anyone?) it's their job to make sure I don't go to jail for something that should have never been written into law in the first place.
The constitution may not mention fair use, but it does specifically mention copyright and the highest court in the land has ruled on copyright on many occasions. If they say something is fair, like taping movies off the airwaves with my VCR, then it's fair.
Unless those congress guys want to make a constitutional ammendment to cover the subject (shudder) then you need to be listening to a different branch of government.
Agreed. Many people say MS is all bad but they tend to forget the MS has a reputation for eventually making things better. Win2K was a solid OS for business. Win XP is a solid OS for the home(and business).
The Open Source community would be better served by not spewing this FUD, and it _is_ FUD, and instead concentrating on the real problems with MS such as the monolithic nature of their development and important security problems caused by the monoculture of their monopoly (enough monos for you?).
Open Source and Free software are very important, but they'll get the attention they deserve faster if they concentrate on their positives and not on the made-up negatives of Microsoft.
It does not protect you......taping entire concerts without the permission of the artist.
Really? The supreme court said "fair use" protects me while taping live concerts on TV, along with any other TV signal. It also protects me taping anything I want off the radio, including entire live concerts.
Why on earth do you think it only protects me if I copy a portion? There are many court cases that define fair use as covering the copying of entire works if the intended purpose is "fair".
Matallica, ironically enough, encourages fans to do this today. They're effectively "licensing" their patrons to make a recording from their seats. They also sell an official version, in FLAC no less, from their web site for about the cost of a CD.
Why are concert recordings illegal? Is it like taping a movie at the theater?
Yes.
But it wasn't always illegal if it was for private use. An ancient concept called "fair use" would allow many people in the past to record things for their personal enjoyment. Allas, such a thing no longer exists according to official sources such as the RIAA, the MPAA and the US Congress.
I think this is why I've had a problem with most religions. Religions tend to take hyperbola and categorize it as fact. An "all-powerful god" gets made into a god that literally has omnipotence rather than being just a really, really powerful force. In the end, hype like "all-seeing and all-knowing" becomes very difficult to sustain unless you practice willful ignorance.
I can't help but think that religion would be much more popular among scientists and geeks if it just stuck to the basics. If we thought that god just created us and has a whole hell of a lot of power then we might give it more serious attention as an explanation of where we came from. The addition of, " you have to believe that he exists outside of known physics" seems to be a deal breaker.
If there's a limit to consiousness on the high end of an expanding universe then we should also be able to make educated guesses at the low end and then put a front time on the resulting "wave" of intelligence.
If we have a beggining of the "wave" then we should be able to make better educated guesses about the distribution of intelligence in the universe and possible level of advancement of any intelligent life we might find. We might discover, for example, that we're reletively advanced (came early in the wave) and that we're less likely to find more advanced life. On the other hand, we may find that we're late in the wave and thus likely surrounded by life much more advanced than us.
This could be a much better way of looking at extraterrestrial life than just guessing based on the number of stars.
More interestingly, the story mentions that despite increases in funding for libraries, spending on books has sharply declined! Presumably, at least some of that money went on Internet provision instead - that's great as a means of broadening access, but not if it diverts money from a core function.
What is the core function of your library? Books? I doubt librarians would agree. The core function of a library is to catalog and give access to information. Buying books at the expense of internet-connected computers would definately be "diverting money from a core function" if you consider the internet to be a major source of information. Thus the balancing act.
I think the government, both UK and US, needs to realize that more money needs to be spent on the libraries so nothing needs to be diverted from anything else. Libraries are much more of a salvation than welfare to the bright, motivated poor.
Outlook 2003 is a nice improvement over Outlook 2002 and I would definately recommend it for Exchange users. But, If I'm not mistaken, you basically get that anyway with an Exchange CAL. Why not use OOo to replace the rest of your Office suite?
Rashes on food handlers, pollen escaping the bounds of test crops and some bad tasting produce are all attributed to GM foods. No, nobody's head exploded from eating a GM rutabega. But if you think these guys have been as really, really careful as they've been promising then I've got a bridge to sell you.
When we start looking at biology as if it's software then we need to start thinking of all the possible exploits. The current crop of scientists say they're doing this, but they're not checking the proverbial buffers for proverbial overflows. They're just throwing the "new" food out there and looking to see if a goat dies before sending it to market.
This is exactly like MS saying their browser is "safe" time and time and time again. I'll throw in some swamp land with that bridge if you believe the fact that the latest revision hasn't been hacked yet is the same thing as saying the latest revision is "safe."
I couldn't help notice the situation you describe with biological systems work sounds awfully similar to computing 50 years ago.
I'm not saying that in 50 years everyone is going to have to have a bio-laptop, but you will see the cost come way down and the ability and insentive to do something clever go way up.
Look at the current situation with cosmetic surgery. What is the insentive to develop an instant face-lift in a pill? The customer wont understand the complex biological "program" involved any more than they understand the underpinnings of MS Word. Nor will they understand the risk of some accidentally or purposefully created "macro virus" that will only affect those people that got instant face-lifts... or the people who touch mucus membranes of instant face-lift customers... or breath their air.
This technology is very difficult now, but imagine a future in which it is as easy as creating a web brower. If your web browser crashes you can live with the consequences.
TW
Re:Saviour for people in need in of transplants?
on
Synthetic Life In The Lab
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I'm not worried about replicants. I'm worried accidentally creating critters that interact with humans like viruses or bacteria but we don't have a very good idea of how to deal with them.
I'm also worried about the same thing, but made on purpose.
Once life becomes as easy to engineer as a computer program then you have to deal with the same thing as computer systems have to deal with now that any nutjob can use the tools. I don't really think we're ready for the consequences of not having McCaffee AV installed in our bone marrow.
Should it be stopped. Nah. But these folks better be pretty damn careful with what they're doing. As with GM foods though, I doubt they will.
Dude, I ordered one for my GFs birthday and three weeks afterwards she still doesn't have it. I'm getting KIND OF PISSED OFF with/. printing all this good press and making it EVEN HARDER to get! WHEN WILL THEY GET IT THROUGH THEIR THICK HEADS THAT I WANT TO SEE BAD PRESS so my GF will get her mini and start letting me have som lovin'. I WILL KEEP using random CAPITALIZATION until you listen to me damnit! Stop printing good stuff NOW!
BTW, she wanted pink. If that's the most popular color I'm gonna jump off a bridge.
Compared to those lossy processes, the difference between a PNG master and high quality JPEG master is negligible.
Great comparison. For one generation. But when you're editing pics you don't want to keep saving to a lossy format because each save will increase the noise. How would that pic look after 10 - 20 generations of saves as a JPEG?
You can compare single generations all you want and you'll get the same results (the JPEG looks great!) but that absolutely does not indicate thats how you should save your masters.
Companies are required to have no more than 50% staff on Exempt status (ratio may change from state to state)
Can someone confirm this? I'm in Virginia and I'm pretty sure my company (total company, not just IT) is >90% 'exempt'. I've never heard of this rule before.
As a matter of fairness (it's obviously not a matter of law) I think only management should be able to be classified as 'exempt'. Even though we work in an office, many(most?) IT jobs more closely resemble factory jobs than most people think. Isn't what many of us do basically like assembly line work or construction? It's highly skilled labor to be sure, but it's still basically labor.
As far as #1 and #2 are concerned, you're right. As I mentioned in my previous post, we should be concerned about the purpose for the commissioning of our inventions. for example, I personally wouldn't take a job in the defense industry.
But on #3 I draw the line. I think anything and everything can be used for non-peaceful purposes. Arguably the most peaceful pursuits of all, love and religion, have been used against us to devastating effect.
At the very least we should look at our inventions as a whole. If there is some evil use, but it is not the dominant one, then we should just accept it. Kitchen knives fall in this category. So does Linux. But if there is substantial evil being done with an invention, even then I think we should exercise great care in turning against an object or a concept. The gun that kills one robbery victim could save another. The atom bomb that could destroy a planet could also stop a deadly war. More importantly, when you cant carry a knife then you won't be able to trim rope for your job and when your "evil" religion is banned, you won't be able to worship your creator.
There can be danger in our inventions, but there can be even greater danger turning against them because of perceived evil. Cliché warning: We need to keep a damn good eye on those babies because those drains are much larger than most of us think.
Slashdot Mirror
So your ISP says you're responsible. Can that document land you in Jail? Not in this country (USA). They can hold you responsible for monitary damages to their equipment or service caused by your negligence, but they can't, by that document, make you liable for criminal acts carried over your wire.
Put another way, if some guy shoots some other guy in your house, you won't go to jail. It doesn't matter what your homeowner association rules say about gun possesion on your premises and you being responsible.
TW
Nope, this is the genuine artical. This guy is so dead on it's not even funny. How do you think Comcast avoides being put out of business if someone should use their connection to download illegal materials? Answer: "your honor, we're just the pipe. We let others actualy use it. We have no idea what goes on in that pipe that we rent out."
This guy is behaving just like Comcast. He's the pipe and he doesn't know what goes on in that pipe. Unless the Judge were to determine that the pipe owner is responsible (and Comcast will certainly help him fight _that_ kind of fight) then he's ok.
BTW, he also said he turned off logging. In many, many cases, there is no law that says you have to log, but there is a law that says you can't destroy evidence you alread poses. If you don't have a log in the first place, you have nothing to turn over to the feds and you have no evidence to destroy. I think that's a big step closer to true freedom.
TW
They problem is written right in the article. They call this stuff "content". I cringe whenever I read that word. The term is hopelessly entangled with people trying to sell you stuff you weren't looking to buy instead of you seeking out something because you want to buy it.
Writers write, directors direct and game designers design games. If they look interesting to you, you buy them. Only assholes "generate content." and then try to convince you to buy it whether it's interesting or not.
TW
BTW, speaking of content, remember when internet people were busy trying to generate it? You don't hear about that much anymore do you? AOL was the biggest culprit and, not surprisingly, the biggest loser as a result.
Yeah, we need some more boring, crappy games based on movies and boring, crappy movies based on games so people will get jaded about the games and the industry will go into recession like it did post-Atari. Then maybe the people that are in it for the glitz instead of the games will go find something else to do.
What would we have gotten if Atari had continued to dominate back-in-the-day? More Atari 2600 Pac-Man probably. That brief recession allowed us to get the NES. Cool upgrade, eh? But,now we're getting yet another stupid James Bond game on PS-2. It needs to die so people will at least try to reinvent gaming into something better instead of continuing to push hollywoodfied, star-studded crap.
TW
Why is everyone so keen to ban stuff? If gas prices skyrocket, so will the price of Billy Bass. So will the price of your plastic soda bottle. So will the price of your sneakers. We then determine that sneakers are a necessity and that Billy Bass is not. So we don't buy him. And the company goes out of business or starts making something else.
:-)
The effect: Billy Bass goes away and there is no need to ban.
Same thing with recycling. People tend to recycle aluminum cans because they bring a decent return on the effort required. If the cost of plastic were to skyrocket, it would be recycled at a much higer rate than it is now. Bingo, Billy Bass gets recycled instead of thrown in the trash.
Supply and demand are not always right, but they do tend to sove problems like Billy Bass in the long run. Sigh... it makes me wish gas were 10 bucks a gallon right now
TW
Apple is not what it once was marketshare wise, but it's still a cool company. Why does everyone want to kill these shrinking companies instead of letting them carve their own niche?
TW
Frankly, if the U.S. Congress says it's illegal, doesn't that end the discussion? I mean, that's the point of the legislative branch, isn't it?
Not really. We have the judicial branch to keep those guys in check. When congress makes bullshit law (Jim Crowe anyone?) it's their job to make sure I don't go to jail for something that should have never been written into law in the first place.
The constitution may not mention fair use, but it does specifically mention copyright and the highest court in the land has ruled on copyright on many occasions. If they say something is fair, like taping movies off the airwaves with my VCR, then it's fair.
Unless those congress guys want to make a constitutional ammendment to cover the subject (shudder) then you need to be listening to a different branch of government.
TW
Agreed. Many people say MS is all bad but they tend to forget the MS has a reputation for eventually making things better. Win2K was a solid OS for business. Win XP is a solid OS for the home(and business).
The Open Source community would be better served by not spewing this FUD, and it _is_ FUD, and instead concentrating on the real problems with MS such as the monolithic nature of their development and important security problems caused by the monoculture of their monopoly (enough monos for you?).
Open Source and Free software are very important, but they'll get the attention they deserve faster if they concentrate on their positives and not on the made-up negatives of Microsoft.
TW
It does not protect you... ...taping entire concerts without the permission of the artist.
Really? The supreme court said "fair use" protects me while taping live concerts on TV, along with any other TV signal. It also protects me taping anything I want off the radio, including entire live concerts.
Why on earth do you think it only protects me if I copy a portion? There are many court cases that define fair use as covering the copying of entire works if the intended purpose is "fair".
TW
Matallica, ironically enough, encourages fans to do this today. They're effectively "licensing" their patrons to make a recording from their seats. They also sell an official version, in FLAC no less, from their web site for about the cost of a CD.
TW
Why are concert recordings illegal? Is it like taping a movie at the theater?
Yes.
But it wasn't always illegal if it was for private use. An ancient concept called "fair use" would allow many people in the past to record things for their personal enjoyment. Allas, such a thing no longer exists according to official sources such as the RIAA, the MPAA and the US Congress.
TW
since in my definition, God is a perfect being.
I think this is why I've had a problem with most religions. Religions tend to take hyperbola and categorize it as fact. An "all-powerful god" gets made into a god that literally has omnipotence rather than being just a really, really powerful force. In the end, hype like "all-seeing and all-knowing" becomes very difficult to sustain unless you practice willful ignorance.
I can't help but think that religion would be much more popular among scientists and geeks if it just stuck to the basics. If we thought that god just created us and has a whole hell of a lot of power then we might give it more serious attention as an explanation of where we came from. The addition of, " you have to believe that he exists outside of known physics" seems to be a deal breaker.
TW
This is great work.
If there's a limit to consiousness on the high end of an expanding universe then we should also be able to make educated guesses at the low end and then put a front time on the resulting "wave" of intelligence.
If we have a beggining of the "wave" then we should be able to make better educated guesses about the distribution of intelligence in the universe and possible level of advancement of any intelligent life we might find. We might discover, for example, that we're reletively advanced (came early in the wave) and that we're less likely to find more advanced life. On the other hand, we may find that we're late in the wave and thus likely surrounded by life much more advanced than us.
This could be a much better way of looking at extraterrestrial life than just guessing based on the number of stars.
TW
Does this mean we have to give Ponz and Fleishman their dignity back?
More interestingly, the story mentions that despite increases in funding for libraries, spending on books has sharply declined! Presumably, at least some of that money went on Internet provision instead - that's great as a means of broadening access, but not if it diverts money from a core function.
What is the core function of your library? Books? I doubt librarians would agree. The core function of a library is to catalog and give access to information. Buying books at the expense of internet-connected computers would definately be "diverting money from a core function" if you consider the internet to be a major source of information. Thus the balancing act.
I think the government, both UK and US, needs to realize that more money needs to be spent on the libraries so nothing needs to be diverted from anything else. Libraries are much more of a salvation than welfare to the bright, motivated poor.
TW
Recommend an MS product? Pretty gutsy here on /.
Outlook 2003 is a nice improvement over Outlook 2002 and I would definately recommend it for Exchange users. But, If I'm not mistaken, you basically get that anyway with an Exchange CAL. Why not use OOo to replace the rest of your Office suite?
TW
Rashes on food handlers, pollen escaping the bounds of test crops and some bad tasting produce are all attributed to GM foods. No, nobody's head exploded from eating a GM rutabega. But if you think these guys have been as really, really careful as they've been promising then I've got a bridge to sell you.
When we start looking at biology as if it's software then we need to start thinking of all the possible exploits. The current crop of scientists say they're doing this, but they're not checking the proverbial buffers for proverbial overflows. They're just throwing the "new" food out there and looking to see if a goat dies before sending it to market.
This is exactly like MS saying their browser is "safe" time and time and time again. I'll throw in some swamp land with that bridge if you believe the fact that the latest revision hasn't been hacked yet is the same thing as saying the latest revision is "safe."
TW
I couldn't help notice the situation you describe with biological systems work sounds awfully similar to computing 50 years ago.
I'm not saying that in 50 years everyone is going to have to have a bio-laptop, but you will see the cost come way down and the ability and insentive to do something clever go way up.
Look at the current situation with cosmetic surgery. What is the insentive to develop an instant face-lift in a pill? The customer wont understand the complex biological "program" involved any more than they understand the underpinnings of MS Word. Nor will they understand the risk of some accidentally or purposefully created "macro virus" that will only affect those people that got instant face-lifts... or the people who touch mucus membranes of instant face-lift customers... or breath their air.
This technology is very difficult now, but imagine a future in which it is as easy as creating a web brower. If your web browser crashes you can live with the consequences.
TW
I'm not worried about replicants. I'm worried accidentally creating critters that interact with humans like viruses or bacteria but we don't have a very good idea of how to deal with them.
I'm also worried about the same thing, but made on purpose.
Once life becomes as easy to engineer as a computer program then you have to deal with the same thing as computer systems have to deal with now that any nutjob can use the tools. I don't really think we're ready for the consequences of not having McCaffee AV installed in our bone marrow.
Should it be stopped. Nah. But these folks better be pretty damn careful with what they're doing. As with GM foods though, I doubt they will.
TW
Dude, I ordered one for my GFs birthday and three weeks afterwards she still doesn't have it. I'm getting KIND OF PISSED OFF with /. printing all this good press and making it EVEN HARDER to get! WHEN WILL THEY GET IT THROUGH THEIR THICK HEADS THAT I WANT TO SEE BAD PRESS so my GF will get her mini and start letting me have som lovin'. I WILL KEEP using random CAPITALIZATION until you listen to me damnit! Stop printing good stuff NOW!
BTW, she wanted pink. If that's the most popular color I'm gonna jump off a bridge.
Compared to those lossy processes, the difference between a PNG master and high quality JPEG master is negligible.
Great comparison. For one generation. But when you're editing pics you don't want to keep saving to a lossy format because each save will increase the noise. How would that pic look after 10 - 20 generations of saves as a JPEG?
You can compare single generations all you want and you'll get the same results (the JPEG looks great!) but that absolutely does not indicate thats how you should save your masters.
TW
Your handle very well fits you today. These are indeed wise statements.
TW
Thanks very much for the good info and correction.
TW
Companies are required to have no more than 50% staff on Exempt status (ratio may change from state to state)
Can someone confirm this? I'm in Virginia and I'm pretty sure my company (total company, not just IT) is >90% 'exempt'. I've never heard of this rule before.
As a matter of fairness (it's obviously not a matter of law) I think only management should be able to be classified as 'exempt'. Even though we work in an office, many(most?) IT jobs more closely resemble factory jobs than most people think. Isn't what many of us do basically like assembly line work or construction? It's highly skilled labor to be sure, but it's still basically labor.
TW
As far as #1 and #2 are concerned, you're right. As I mentioned in my previous post, we should be concerned about the purpose for the commissioning of our inventions. for example, I personally wouldn't take a job in the defense industry.
But on #3 I draw the line. I think anything and everything can be used for non-peaceful purposes. Arguably the most peaceful pursuits of all, love and religion, have been used against us to devastating effect.
At the very least we should look at our inventions as a whole. If there is some evil use, but it is not the dominant one, then we should just accept it. Kitchen knives fall in this category. So does Linux. But if there is substantial evil being done with an invention, even then I think we should exercise great care in turning against an object or a concept. The gun that kills one robbery victim could save another. The atom bomb that could destroy a planet could also stop a deadly war. More importantly, when you cant carry a knife then you won't be able to trim rope for your job and when your "evil" religion is banned, you won't be able to worship your creator.
There can be danger in our inventions, but there can be even greater danger turning against them because of perceived evil. Cliché warning: We need to keep a damn good eye on those babies because those drains are much larger than most of us think.
TW