I didn't say that it justified stereotyping, it's about what details are relevant. Every individual on earth is different than every other individual on earth, but those differences don't always matter.
For instance if you're talking about someone's likelihood to survive with no oxygen for a prolonged period of time then their gender, ethnic or cultural background, and for that matter species don't particularly matter to the argument, because they all fall under the category "living creatures which require close to continuous oxygen to survive".
On the other hand if you're trying to work out whether someone is likely to have committed a criminal act then you have to look at a lot more details about the individual and their character.
Distinctions sometimes matter, and sometimes don't, and in different discussions certain details matter and certain details don't.
The importance is the clarification of "like", in the instance of a duck test like can be very exact or very loose.
You can for instance look at a duck, say "it looks exactly like a duck, quacks exactly like a duck and swims exactly like a duck, so I as someone knowledgeable in the area can say without a dna test that it's a duck".
One of its common uses(aside from Duck Typing in certain computer languages), and the one I was using it in, is to show that technical differences don't matter. If a policeman breaks into your home and kills your family outside the scope of the law then the fact that he's a policeman doesn't matter. He broke into your home like a murderer, and killed someone like a murderer so for the purposes of the crime he is a murderer. Despite the fact that, as he's a policeman, he's allowed to carry a gun and allowed to use it in certain circumstance, the fact that he's a policeman, even if he was in uniform at the time, doesn't matter. He meets the important criteria of being a murderer (broke into someone's house and killed them), and so he is a murderer.
For the purposes of my example, the way the RIAA treats copyright violation(even to the extent that they actually say it's a crime) meets the important criteria for the treatment of a criminal offense. They can claim that it's a civil action, and do, but in nearly every imporant respect it's not. Hence the duck argument.
You can certainly be facetious with the duck argument (something along the lines of, it's got a skeleton like a duck, so it must be a duck), but there are always certain aspects which define something, and if something has those aspects then you can say with fair probability that it is a form of that thing.
For your specific example, if I say that I saw a duck, and it's a coot, but for the purposes of my story it doesn't matter that it's a coot not a duck, then for all intents and purposes it's a duck.
only if they're more realistic about what they're trying to block.
Unless you can ensure 100% enforcement, people have to believe that what they're doing is wrong for you to have any hope of stopping it.
Blocking anything and everything that might have some potential military application just isn't going to happen, the money is too good and people won't believe they're doing something wrong. Add to that the fact that any information freely available here will fundamentally be freely available everywhere because of the internet, and you've really got to be realistic about what you want to block and why.
Pretty much no one wants to give detailed specs for military hardware/software to our enemies(whoever they may be), but selling carbon fibre to the chinese is going to be hard to stop, and largely impractical since if we don't sell it someone else will.
Trying to block the export of certain kinds of software is also pretty much pointless particularly as a large number of people not only don't believe that it's dangerous to give it to other people, but also fundamentally disagree with keeeping it to ourselves.
Like everything else, you've got to be reasonable in what you want so that you can ensure the stuff that's really important gets covered.
I'm pretty much against the idea of political donations in general, though I would allow an exception for personal contributions of some amount that even someone working at minimum wage could afford(say a few hundred dollars up to maybe a maximum of a thousand) so that people have to opportunity to financially support people they agree with if they so choose.
Of course actually accomplishing a zero(or close to) donation system would be fairly difficult, you'd have to fund political advertisements solely out of the public purse, and if you did that by limiting the amount of advertising they were capable of you'd have to deal with advertising by third parties which is in accordance with free speech, but which adds an avenue of corruption, as the exchange could be political advertising in exchange for favours instead of bribes.
Mind you, I'd argue with the idea that it wasn't always this way. True corporations didn't always run the government(there weren't any), but neither the founding fathers, nor most of the people who were originally allowed to vote would be what you'd consider poor, and they most definitely wanted to retain control of the system in the hands of people like themselves as opposed to the regular unwashed massses. There have also been times in American history when you'd have lobbyists on the floor of congress shoving stock certificates/cash directly into the pockets of congressmen while they voted. Early American society was egalitarian only to the extent that it didn't matter who your father was or where your money came from, not for the most part to the extent that it didn't matter if you had any.
They both supported the bailout because the bailout had to happen. It should have had teeth the way the UK one did(everyone at the top of every bank the UK government socialized got fired) and it probably should have had a better plan than "we'll buy lot of your stock, but we're the government so we can't own a private corporation and so we despite owning the vast majority of your company we won't have voting rights", but the banks themselves needed to be bailed out even if the individuals didn't.
They don't both support the war(at least not identically, yes both support afghanistan, but Obama wants out of Iraq).
Redistribution of wealth depends an awful lot on how they do it. McCain will continue the usual republican model where they "create wealth" so that rich people can be richer making everyone else comparatively poorer. I'm not entirely sure what Obama will do in the end, a hand out to everyone doesn't work, but providing people with health care, protections at work, free education, and general assistance to ensure that rather than working hard to make someone else rich some of their hard work is rewarded by making them a little bit wealthier is a redistribution of wealth I can get behind.
The current system of wealth distribution is flawed. The folks who do the work get barely enough to get by, the folks who run the companies(even if they didn't build them and don't contribute to them) get paid bucketloads, and the scum sucking stock trading weasels make even more playing the market game at the expense of everyone else(including the companies that the stock market is supposed to provide investment captal for).
I think it's more a case of "if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it's a duck" than actual case law.
Civil suits are based on actual damages and you must prove actual damages before you can even proceed with a civil case in most cases. There can be a punitive component, but it's used primarily for cases where the defendent was willfully negligent, and, like the actual damages, is up to the jury to decide). The plaintiff in a civil trial also does not have the same procedures available to them for the purposes of evidence gathering. Generally the FBI will not prosecute a warrant to gather evidence for a civil trial.
Criminal cases on the other hand involve the violation of law, impose government mandated fines, and often involve forced search and siezure for the purposes of evidence gathering. Actual damages are unimportant in a criminal trial and do not have to be proven.
As far as I can see the RIAA lawsuits look a heck of a lot more like the second than the first. About the only difference between an RIAA lawsuit and a real criminal trial is that the defendent in a RIAA lawsuit has fewer rights and once the jury has decided guilt they decide the punishment rather than a judge.
So from this analysis(and from TFA) it appears very much that the RIAA is criminally prosecuting people without giving them any of the rights associated with a criminal trial(proof beyond a reasonable doubt, ethical requirements for investigators, double jeopardy, and a free lawyer facing a prosecutor instead of a whole team of viscious land sharks.
If this is indeed the case, and I'm certainly beginning to believe it is, then it's not only a travesty of justice, but decidedly unconstitutional.
It doesn't. What it does is protect an individuals rights when being prosecuted for a crime.
Copyright Infringement in the United States is treated like a crime, the FBI will sieze your assets, you're faced with damages which are largely punative, and you're in violation of a criminal statute.
If you stole a CD from a store or a record executive's car you'd get a trial with a public defender(and a public prosecutor not a team of rabid dishonest RIAA lawyers), there's almost no evidenciary requirements, and the burden of proof is much lower. The kinds of proof which the RIAA currently uses to essentially convict people (yeah it doesn't go on your criminal record but 7 years of bankruptcy or a half a quarter of a million dollar fine is just as life wrecking) would barely be enough to get a warrant in a criminal case, and if a prosecutor tried the stunts they do they'd be thrown out of office.
The article of the author isn't saying that copyright infringement is legal, they're saying that prosecuting it in the manner which it is currently prosecuted is unconstitutional. Either make the fines for copyright infringement reasonable and based on damages with no minimum for fines and a requirement to separate out actual damages from punative damages so the juries know what they're doing to people the way they do in every other civil case, or allow defendents their rights as people being prosecuted under the criminal code.
The problem with separating content and presentation(and don't get me wrong I do it myself) is that presentation is part of content.
How you present information is as important as what you present, and a lot of companies don't really want people going around and overriding that presentation willy nilly. They've done what they've done for a reason, and what it to stay that way. Users being able to override style sheets is, in fact, a negative to separating style and content to most content producers, not a positive.
Both are true, but AFAIK it's mostly the protocol. ED2k and its ilk are based around queueing for downloads which causes all sorts of problems.
They're also totally decentralized, unlike bittorrent. This isn't just the decentralization of the search(as is the case with tribbler), but also of the download which means you'll never get as many sources of the file as you will with a torrent.
This new system won't protect you from the RIAA or MPAA coming after you, but what it will do is take away the need for a tracker site. Tracker sites are the low hanging fruit of the bittorrent equation, they're static, they have verifiable owners, and they're required for large scale file distribution. They're the low hanging fruit for enforcement.
Whether removing this low hanging fruit from the equation is a good or bad thing, I'm not 100% sure, it might make it that much harder for the copyright holders to go after people, but at the same time it might mean they start going after the actual people downloading the files more often even if it is more expensive and difficult.
It's definitely a plus for legal content though, as it will make finding what you're looking for a hundred times easier(finding bittorrent sources of legal content can sometimes be tricky).
He said if you want data from the internet. You can easily send data to the internet without the end knowing what your IP address is(at least for certain protocols), but from is another matter.
The fundamental problem with these cases is that they are, for all intents and purposes criminal trials in civil court.
The people being sued are being charged with a crime "copyright infringement" with a statutory penalty that has nothing whatsoever to do with damages, but is punative in nature.
This doesn't mean that all civil cases need to be treated as criminal ones, or that punative damages in and of themselves are wrong(though often times they are excessive), merely that if you're going to ruin someone's life for a minimum of 7 years(the length of time after a bankruptcy before you can get credit again), for what is essentially a criminal statute, then they ought to have the same chance at a defense that your average drug dealer gets, and the same burden of proof.
These cases aren't about breach of contract, or negligence and they're not about recovering damages. They're about punishing, and should be treated as such, meaning government funded defense, and proof beyond a reasonable doubt. It's the same treatment you'd get for theft, and that's what the record companies are always claiming that you're doing.
Bad analogy. A vending machine purchase is still a purchase and therefor it is still a sale. No the vending machine isn't the one selling it to you, but someone is still selling it to you.
The maching is selling on someone's behalf.
Putting an automated machine in the mix doesn't change the fact that you are exchanging money for goods, which is a purchase/sale depending on your perspective.
Upload and Download don't even mean what you think they mean in a client/server relationship. A download is data coming down to the computer and an upload is data going up from the computer why you're doing each thing is rather immaterial.
The distinction is originally based on the idea of what folks wore. Office workers wore white collared shirts, people working in trades(for obvious reasons mostly having to do with the environments in which they worked) didn't. It's now got an association with overall education and of course with the general disdain in modern society for actually getting your hands dirty.
I have no problem with blue collar workers, it's not my kettle of fish, but it's skilled work and work we need. I was merely commenting that, on average, blue collar workers in the United States are not the highest paid workers, and that, from what I recall about Ohio, the midwest, and most of the US in general, the only way to make 250 grand is to be so high up the management ladder that, even if you started off as a plumber, you wouldn't actually be a plumber anymore. In a lot of places 250 grand is a fairly high salary even for a doctor or a lawyer. That doesn't mean they don't make it, but they don't generally make it below partner level.
250 grand a year is a hell of a lot of money in most of the US, you could buy a house for that in most areas, even at the peak of the housing bubble. If "Joe the Plumber" was really concerned about tax hikes for people earning more than that amount a year then either he's worried for reasons other than his own taxes(maybe he works for a lot of people who would be affected), he's not really a plumber anymore(maybe he owns his own fairly successful small business, though he wouldn't have much time for plumbing in that case), he's a really exceptional plumber, he doesn't understand the tax cuts, or he or McCain is lying.
Based on this I was implying that, while there's a fairly good chance that a lot of this investigation was just idle curiosity and human weakness, that his circumstances are suspicious and that there are people whose job it is to investigate such things and that these hits may very well have been at least partially legitimate.
To reiterate, I have nothing against tradesmen, blue collar is just the way to describe such things, I merely find the idea that the "Average Joe" is earning that much money anywhere in the US for any meaningful definition of average.
There are professionals here who've done the same thing, though I don't think many of them are making a quarter of a million a year.
250k a year is fairly big money for Ohio to begin with(excluding a few folks who work for P&G), and unless things have changed a lot since I left blue collar workers weren't exactly at the top of the salary cap.
I wasn't saying this was necessarily the case, but if someone as a plumber said they were earing 60k a year or less no one at child support or the tax office would bat an eye in surprise.
That doesn't mean that a plumber can't ear that much money legitimately, or even that he actually does earn that much money and isn't just concerned about taxes, but it's unusual enough that it might justify seeing what he's actually claimed to earn and investigating any difference.
I mean, according to McCain, this bloke is a plumber in Ohio earning greater than a quarter of a million dollars a year.
I don't know about you, but that's an awful lot of money for most of Ohio, forget about what is essentially a blue collar job.
From the looks of the agencies who investigated him, it could very well be that at least some of those agencies(child support for instance) might be looking to see if he's declared all that income he's supposedly earning appropriately.
That's not to say they might not have just been sticky beaks, but I'd want to take a closer look at a plumber in Ohio earning that kind of dosh, and at least verify that he's paying the correct amount of child support if applicable.
I didn't specifically mean badger-bating, nor do I necessarily think that killing animals for entertainment is a good thing, merely saying that this logic does not imply this.
I would disagree. My understanding of the idea(though the OP had some bad phrasing if this was his intent) is this.
If god as described by modern religions and in particular ID, exists, then he went out of his way to create every single thing in the universe, including life, and therefor everything that he created has value, at least to him. Since the monotheistic god tends to be all about the eternal punishment for people who displease him, this would imply that if god exists and values what he created that we ought to value what he created or else. *Note for all the vegetarians and the like out there, the fact that god would value these things doesn't mean he values them all the same, so there's nothing contradictory about believing that god values everything he made and thinking it's ok to kill things he made for the purposes of food, clothing or entertainment.
This does not imply that without god things, and by extension life, has no value, or that god existing gives things a greater value, merely that if there is a god such as that described in most monotheistic religions then all things must have at least some value.
You can just as easily argue that life has value because it is a beatiful amazing thing, or even because living things tend to produce things which we human beings find of monetary value, regardless of the existence or non existence of god. It's merely true that if god exists on those terms, then god values life, and under the circumstances that is sufficient, but not necessary for life to have value.
I've lived in places that had it, and I now live in places that don't(though the government is trying to pass it, and we're having a trial atm).
Aside from all the dreadful inconvenience of dealing with people in areas whose clocks have changed when ours haven't(I live in Perth Australia and dealing with the east with a 3 hour time difference is a PITA, everyone over there already wants to ignore the west and three hour time differences just make it easier), it's nice to get home to some daylight.
I'm not a morning person, I've never been a morning person, and I sort of reckon that, given that dawn in summer here without DST is something like 4:30 AM, that the early risers can give up an hour of their daylight to give me an hour to something done in the evening. I quite like actually getting home before it's too dark to anything much outside, and I see an awful lot of families out during DST that you don't see without it.
The basic thing of DST is that some places need it, and if some people are going to do it, then it becomes terribly inconvenient for people who don't do it to deal with people who do. Given that remembering to change your clocks twice a year(on a sunday, with, in every place I've ever lived constant reminders in every form of media) isn't all that much work, and that unless you're trying to milk it to prove how horrible the time shift is most halfway normal people shouldn't even be noticing the time shift in their sleep patterns for more than a week at most, everyone may as well do it.
Causation implies correlation, but not necessarily the other way around, unless you have a complete(infinite) data set.
It is statistically possible to take an arbitrarily large group of people and have them flip a coint an arbitrarily large number of times and come up with a result where every man flips all heads and every woman flips all tails.
It's incredibly unlikely, but not impossible.
Assuming you don't already know that the odds of any given flip of the coin are 50/50, you could draw a correlation between gender and the result of a coin flip, however, as we know from basic probability there is absolutely no causation in this result, merely very large improbability.
So, as you can see, causation implies correlation, and for a sufficiently large data set correlation nearly always but not always implies some sort of underlying causation.
There are certainly ways to do it, but they don't necessarily constitute good design.
Webmail is essentially atomic in nature, you have a finite number of possible states, and for the most part you can enter any one of those states at any point an in any order. That is you can go straight straight from composing an e-mail to the inbox, or to viewing an individual e-mail and back again in any particular order. There are of course exceptions, clicking back after you send an e-mail won't unsend your e-mail, but in general the system is fairly stateful.
This allows google to append fairly simple query strings to the end of the URL to artificially create history entries which you can then go back to using the back button.
This isn't so much good design as a nasty kludge required due to user behaviour, and doesn't work very well at all in more complicated applications, where a given state may not be relevant after the user progressed to the next state. AJAX doesn't break the back button, the back button just doesn't do what people think it does.
It's been discussed before, but SSD's are not particularly write limited. My recollection is that writing the entire volume of the drive per day you'd still end up with a drive lasting 30 years(presuming even usage), and since realistically the components won't last that long you could get substantially higher writes with little to no problems(presuming the usually best case 5 years for consumer hard drives that's 6 times the volume of the disk every day which is a hell of a lot of data.
They also use SSD's because they aren't mechanical and can be immersed, allowing you to actually cool your hard drives, which is sort of the point.
I'm not sure whether the time is right for this technology, or even whether it's a particularly good idea, but there's a good reason for the SSD's.
They have to break the way the web worked, because the way the web worked wasn't appropriate for rich applications.
I'm not saying that every use of AJAX is appropriate anymore than every use of flash is appropriate, but there are some really nice things about having applications that respond without having to do the traditional page reload and associated hoop jumping and delays in response.
An unfortunate side effect of this change is that the back button(which is based on a history of URLs) doesn't work the way it used to. Though of course when you were dealing with complex user input, the back button didn't even always work before.
I have confidence however that some clever coder will work out a way to modify the back button so that it can return you to the previous program state where applicable instead of the previous URL and that the back button may return in future to its former utility.
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For instance if you're talking about someone's likelihood to survive with no oxygen for a prolonged period of time then their gender, ethnic or cultural background, and for that matter species don't particularly matter to the argument, because they all fall under the category "living creatures which require close to continuous oxygen to survive".
On the other hand if you're trying to work out whether someone is likely to have committed a criminal act then you have to look at a lot more details about the individual and their character.
Distinctions sometimes matter, and sometimes don't, and in different discussions certain details matter and certain details don't.
The importance is the clarification of "like", in the instance of a duck test like can be very exact or very loose.
You can for instance look at a duck, say "it looks exactly like a duck, quacks exactly like a duck and swims exactly like a duck, so I as someone knowledgeable in the area can say without a dna test that it's a duck".
One of its common uses(aside from Duck Typing in certain computer languages), and the one I was using it in, is to show that technical differences don't matter. If a policeman breaks into your home and kills your family outside the scope of the law then the fact that he's a policeman doesn't matter. He broke into your home like a murderer, and killed someone like a murderer so for the purposes of the crime he is a murderer. Despite the fact that, as he's a policeman, he's allowed to carry a gun and allowed to use it in certain circumstance, the fact that he's a policeman, even if he was in uniform at the time, doesn't matter. He meets the important criteria of being a murderer (broke into someone's house and killed them), and so he is a murderer.
For the purposes of my example, the way the RIAA treats copyright violation(even to the extent that they actually say it's a crime) meets the important criteria for the treatment of a criminal offense. They can claim that it's a civil action, and do, but in nearly every imporant respect it's not. Hence the duck argument.
You can certainly be facetious with the duck argument (something along the lines of, it's got a skeleton like a duck, so it must be a duck), but there are always certain aspects which define something, and if something has those aspects then you can say with fair probability that it is a form of that thing.
For your specific example, if I say that I saw a duck, and it's a coot, but for the purposes of my story it doesn't matter that it's a coot not a duck, then for all intents and purposes it's a duck.
Unless you can ensure 100% enforcement, people have to believe that what they're doing is wrong for you to have any hope of stopping it.
Blocking anything and everything that might have some potential military application just isn't going to happen, the money is too good and people won't believe they're doing something wrong. Add to that the fact that any information freely available here will fundamentally be freely available everywhere because of the internet, and you've really got to be realistic about what you want to block and why.
Pretty much no one wants to give detailed specs for military hardware/software to our enemies(whoever they may be), but selling carbon fibre to the chinese is going to be hard to stop, and largely impractical since if we don't sell it someone else will.
Trying to block the export of certain kinds of software is also pretty much pointless particularly as a large number of people not only don't believe that it's dangerous to give it to other people, but also fundamentally disagree with keeeping it to ourselves.
Like everything else, you've got to be reasonable in what you want so that you can ensure the stuff that's really important gets covered.
Of course actually accomplishing a zero(or close to) donation system would be fairly difficult, you'd have to fund political advertisements solely out of the public purse, and if you did that by limiting the amount of advertising they were capable of you'd have to deal with advertising by third parties which is in accordance with free speech, but which adds an avenue of corruption, as the exchange could be political advertising in exchange for favours instead of bribes.
Mind you, I'd argue with the idea that it wasn't always this way. True corporations didn't always run the government(there weren't any), but neither the founding fathers, nor most of the people who were originally allowed to vote would be what you'd consider poor, and they most definitely wanted to retain control of the system in the hands of people like themselves as opposed to the regular unwashed massses. There have also been times in American history when you'd have lobbyists on the floor of congress shoving stock certificates/cash directly into the pockets of congressmen while they voted. Early American society was egalitarian only to the extent that it didn't matter who your father was or where your money came from, not for the most part to the extent that it didn't matter if you had any.
They don't both support the war(at least not identically, yes both support afghanistan, but Obama wants out of Iraq).
Redistribution of wealth depends an awful lot on how they do it. McCain will continue the usual republican model where they "create wealth" so that rich people can be richer making everyone else comparatively poorer. I'm not entirely sure what Obama will do in the end, a hand out to everyone doesn't work, but providing people with health care, protections at work, free education, and general assistance to ensure that rather than working hard to make someone else rich some of their hard work is rewarded by making them a little bit wealthier is a redistribution of wealth I can get behind.
The current system of wealth distribution is flawed. The folks who do the work get barely enough to get by, the folks who run the companies(even if they didn't build them and don't contribute to them) get paid bucketloads, and the scum sucking stock trading weasels make even more playing the market game at the expense of everyone else(including the companies that the stock market is supposed to provide investment captal for).
Civil suits are based on actual damages and you must prove actual damages before you can even proceed with a civil case in most cases. There can be a punitive component, but it's used primarily for cases where the defendent was willfully negligent, and, like the actual damages, is up to the jury to decide). The plaintiff in a civil trial also does not have the same procedures available to them for the purposes of evidence gathering. Generally the FBI will not prosecute a warrant to gather evidence for a civil trial.
Criminal cases on the other hand involve the violation of law, impose government mandated fines, and often involve forced search and siezure for the purposes of evidence gathering. Actual damages are unimportant in a criminal trial and do not have to be proven.
As far as I can see the RIAA lawsuits look a heck of a lot more like the second than the first. About the only difference between an RIAA lawsuit and a real criminal trial is that the defendent in a RIAA lawsuit has fewer rights and once the jury has decided guilt they decide the punishment rather than a judge.
So from this analysis(and from TFA) it appears very much that the RIAA is criminally prosecuting people without giving them any of the rights associated with a criminal trial(proof beyond a reasonable doubt, ethical requirements for investigators, double jeopardy, and a free lawyer facing a prosecutor instead of a whole team of viscious land sharks.
If this is indeed the case, and I'm certainly beginning to believe it is, then it's not only a travesty of justice, but decidedly unconstitutional.
Copyright Infringement in the United States is treated like a crime, the FBI will sieze your assets, you're faced with damages which are largely punative, and you're in violation of a criminal statute.
If you stole a CD from a store or a record executive's car you'd get a trial with a public defender(and a public prosecutor not a team of rabid dishonest RIAA lawyers), there's almost no evidenciary requirements, and the burden of proof is much lower. The kinds of proof which the RIAA currently uses to essentially convict people (yeah it doesn't go on your criminal record but 7 years of bankruptcy or a half a quarter of a million dollar fine is just as life wrecking) would barely be enough to get a warrant in a criminal case, and if a prosecutor tried the stunts they do they'd be thrown out of office.
The article of the author isn't saying that copyright infringement is legal, they're saying that prosecuting it in the manner which it is currently prosecuted is unconstitutional. Either make the fines for copyright infringement reasonable and based on damages with no minimum for fines and a requirement to separate out actual damages from punative damages so the juries know what they're doing to people the way they do in every other civil case, or allow defendents their rights as people being prosecuted under the criminal code.
This is why I asked.
How you present information is as important as what you present, and a lot of companies don't really want people going around and overriding that presentation willy nilly. They've done what they've done for a reason, and what it to stay that way. Users being able to override style sheets is, in fact, a negative to separating style and content to most content producers, not a positive.
This is really the interesting thing, 2% sounds high, but what's the level of trashed votes in a paper system?
They're also totally decentralized, unlike bittorrent. This isn't just the decentralization of the search(as is the case with tribbler), but also of the download which means you'll never get as many sources of the file as you will with a torrent.
This new system won't protect you from the RIAA or MPAA coming after you, but what it will do is take away the need for a tracker site. Tracker sites are the low hanging fruit of the bittorrent equation, they're static, they have verifiable owners, and they're required for large scale file distribution. They're the low hanging fruit for enforcement.
Whether removing this low hanging fruit from the equation is a good or bad thing, I'm not 100% sure, it might make it that much harder for the copyright holders to go after people, but at the same time it might mean they start going after the actual people downloading the files more often even if it is more expensive and difficult.
It's definitely a plus for legal content though, as it will make finding what you're looking for a hundred times easier(finding bittorrent sources of legal content can sometimes be tricky).
He said if you want data from the internet. You can easily send data to the internet without the end knowing what your IP address is(at least for certain protocols), but from is another matter.
The people being sued are being charged with a crime "copyright infringement" with a statutory penalty that has nothing whatsoever to do with damages, but is punative in nature.
This doesn't mean that all civil cases need to be treated as criminal ones, or that punative damages in and of themselves are wrong(though often times they are excessive), merely that if you're going to ruin someone's life for a minimum of 7 years(the length of time after a bankruptcy before you can get credit again), for what is essentially a criminal statute, then they ought to have the same chance at a defense that your average drug dealer gets, and the same burden of proof.
These cases aren't about breach of contract, or negligence and they're not about recovering damages. They're about punishing, and should be treated as such, meaning government funded defense, and proof beyond a reasonable doubt. It's the same treatment you'd get for theft, and that's what the record companies are always claiming that you're doing.
The maching is selling on someone's behalf.
Putting an automated machine in the mix doesn't change the fact that you are exchanging money for goods, which is a purchase/sale depending on your perspective.
Upload and Download don't even mean what you think they mean in a client/server relationship. A download is data coming down to the computer and an upload is data going up from the computer why you're doing each thing is rather immaterial.
I have no problem with blue collar workers, it's not my kettle of fish, but it's skilled work and work we need. I was merely commenting that, on average, blue collar workers in the United States are not the highest paid workers, and that, from what I recall about Ohio, the midwest, and most of the US in general, the only way to make 250 grand is to be so high up the management ladder that, even if you started off as a plumber, you wouldn't actually be a plumber anymore. In a lot of places 250 grand is a fairly high salary even for a doctor or a lawyer. That doesn't mean they don't make it, but they don't generally make it below partner level.
250 grand a year is a hell of a lot of money in most of the US, you could buy a house for that in most areas, even at the peak of the housing bubble. If "Joe the Plumber" was really concerned about tax hikes for people earning more than that amount a year then either he's worried for reasons other than his own taxes(maybe he works for a lot of people who would be affected), he's not really a plumber anymore(maybe he owns his own fairly successful small business, though he wouldn't have much time for plumbing in that case), he's a really exceptional plumber, he doesn't understand the tax cuts, or he or McCain is lying.
Based on this I was implying that, while there's a fairly good chance that a lot of this investigation was just idle curiosity and human weakness, that his circumstances are suspicious and that there are people whose job it is to investigate such things and that these hits may very well have been at least partially legitimate.
To reiterate, I have nothing against tradesmen, blue collar is just the way to describe such things, I merely find the idea that the "Average Joe" is earning that much money anywhere in the US for any meaningful definition of average.
250k a year is fairly big money for Ohio to begin with(excluding a few folks who work for P&G), and unless things have changed a lot since I left blue collar workers weren't exactly at the top of the salary cap.
I wasn't saying this was necessarily the case, but if someone as a plumber said they were earing 60k a year or less no one at child support or the tax office would bat an eye in surprise.
That doesn't mean that a plumber can't ear that much money legitimately, or even that he actually does earn that much money and isn't just concerned about taxes, but it's unusual enough that it might justify seeing what he's actually claimed to earn and investigating any difference.
I don't know about you, but that's an awful lot of money for most of Ohio, forget about what is essentially a blue collar job.
From the looks of the agencies who investigated him, it could very well be that at least some of those agencies(child support for instance) might be looking to see if he's declared all that income he's supposedly earning appropriately.
That's not to say they might not have just been sticky beaks, but I'd want to take a closer look at a plumber in Ohio earning that kind of dosh, and at least verify that he's paying the correct amount of child support if applicable.
That's technically true, but the government can't do that secretly, it can't do it on a whim, it has to be passed, and that's awfully hard.
I didn't specifically mean badger-bating, nor do I necessarily think that killing animals for entertainment is a good thing, merely saying that this logic does not imply this.
If god as described by modern religions and in particular ID, exists, then he went out of his way to create every single thing in the universe, including life, and therefor everything that he created has value, at least to him. Since the monotheistic god tends to be all about the eternal punishment for people who displease him, this would imply that if god exists and values what he created that we ought to value what he created or else. *Note for all the vegetarians and the like out there, the fact that god would value these things doesn't mean he values them all the same, so there's nothing contradictory about believing that god values everything he made and thinking it's ok to kill things he made for the purposes of food, clothing or entertainment.
This does not imply that without god things, and by extension life, has no value, or that god existing gives things a greater value, merely that if there is a god such as that described in most monotheistic religions then all things must have at least some value.
You can just as easily argue that life has value because it is a beatiful amazing thing, or even because living things tend to produce things which we human beings find of monetary value, regardless of the existence or non existence of god. It's merely true that if god exists on those terms, then god values life, and under the circumstances that is sufficient, but not necessary for life to have value.
Aside from all the dreadful inconvenience of dealing with people in areas whose clocks have changed when ours haven't(I live in Perth Australia and dealing with the east with a 3 hour time difference is a PITA, everyone over there already wants to ignore the west and three hour time differences just make it easier), it's nice to get home to some daylight.
I'm not a morning person, I've never been a morning person, and I sort of reckon that, given that dawn in summer here without DST is something like 4:30 AM, that the early risers can give up an hour of their daylight to give me an hour to something done in the evening. I quite like actually getting home before it's too dark to anything much outside, and I see an awful lot of families out during DST that you don't see without it.
The basic thing of DST is that some places need it, and if some people are going to do it, then it becomes terribly inconvenient for people who don't do it to deal with people who do. Given that remembering to change your clocks twice a year(on a sunday, with, in every place I've ever lived constant reminders in every form of media) isn't all that much work, and that unless you're trying to milk it to prove how horrible the time shift is most halfway normal people shouldn't even be noticing the time shift in their sleep patterns for more than a week at most, everyone may as well do it.
It is statistically possible to take an arbitrarily large group of people and have them flip a coint an arbitrarily large number of times and come up with a result where every man flips all heads and every woman flips all tails.
It's incredibly unlikely, but not impossible.
Assuming you don't already know that the odds of any given flip of the coin are 50/50, you could draw a correlation between gender and the result of a coin flip, however, as we know from basic probability there is absolutely no causation in this result, merely very large improbability.
So, as you can see, causation implies correlation, and for a sufficiently large data set correlation nearly always but not always implies some sort of underlying causation.
Webmail is essentially atomic in nature, you have a finite number of possible states, and for the most part you can enter any one of those states at any point an in any order. That is you can go straight straight from composing an e-mail to the inbox, or to viewing an individual e-mail and back again in any particular order. There are of course exceptions, clicking back after you send an e-mail won't unsend your e-mail, but in general the system is fairly stateful.
This allows google to append fairly simple query strings to the end of the URL to artificially create history entries which you can then go back to using the back button.
This isn't so much good design as a nasty kludge required due to user behaviour, and doesn't work very well at all in more complicated applications, where a given state may not be relevant after the user progressed to the next state. AJAX doesn't break the back button, the back button just doesn't do what people think it does.
They also use SSD's because they aren't mechanical and can be immersed, allowing you to actually cool your hard drives, which is sort of the point.
I'm not sure whether the time is right for this technology, or even whether it's a particularly good idea, but there's a good reason for the SSD's.
I'm not saying that every use of AJAX is appropriate anymore than every use of flash is appropriate, but there are some really nice things about having applications that respond without having to do the traditional page reload and associated hoop jumping and delays in response.
An unfortunate side effect of this change is that the back button(which is based on a history of URLs) doesn't work the way it used to. Though of course when you were dealing with complex user input, the back button didn't even always work before.
I have confidence however that some clever coder will work out a way to modify the back button so that it can return you to the previous program state where applicable instead of the previous URL and that the back button may return in future to its former utility.