Remember to use the soap in the soap box first...:) It's amazing how much easier it is to convince people if you don't come across as an unwashed druggie.
No one sees the COPS footage were the innocent person was abused, found to be innocent, and then let go -- that would not make good TV.
Actually, it'd make excellent TV, but not for COPS, which depends on keeping good relations with law enforcement agencies to be able to keep making shows.
Once this happens, your drivers licence can be your passport AND your drivers licence at the same time. This means that your fingerprints, taken by the governemt so that you can travel, will be available to the police when they ask you for your drivers licence.
There isn't anything especially wrong with that. There are circumstances where police are allowed to identify you (for example, when you are arrested for other reasons). There are also reasons why you may wish to identify yourself (for example, to avoid arrest because you happen to resemble a suspect). Having an efficent way of doing that isn't bad, per se.
The issue of compulsory identification is very different to the means by which said identification is actually done.
Also, such a digital system could be devised so that only relevant information was returned. For example, if you're required to "show your license" to a cop, the system could return information such as "Yes, he's licensed", or "Yes, he's licensed, but BTW, he's wanted for armed robbery"; if you hadn't committed any crime, the extra details wouldn't need to be disclosed to the officer in question. As such, a (voluntary) smart ID system could actually enhance privacy, rather than decrease it.
Lots of ways. For example, he could have asked the woman.
Failing that, given a reasonable suspicion that the person was the suspect (and that a crime had been committed), the cop could have arrested the guy on those grounds. Should the cop have ended up arresting the wrong person, there wouldn't be any grounds for false arrest because the victim could have identified himself and voided the reasonable suspicion that way.
*sigh* It's not "theft". Theft involves someone taking something from you.
Consider these two scenarios: 1) Person A hears music produces by Person B, decides they don't want to buy it because they have a copy downloaded from the 'Net. 2) Person A never hears the music, and thus doesn't buy the song.
In both cases, the outcome is the same for Person B; they don't get paid by Person A for the music. But scenario 2 is definitely not theft.
The first scenario is a violation of the Person's B rights, and they are not getting due compensation, but nothing has been stolen because Person B is no worse off than if nothing had happened at all.
Just because it's a crime doesn't make it theft; different crimes have different names. For example, maintaining an monopoly and engaging in fixing of prices massively above production costs for popular albums in order to subsidise unpopular ones (and the lifestyles of the record company executives) is price gouging, not theft.
The Sun Community License makes it clear that research is explicitly permitted. Research includes, for example, reading their implementations in order to come up with your own spec-compliant implementation.
Now, you can't just "cut-and-paste" sections. But you certainly can take suitable ideas and reimplement. So it's not a problem for the clean-room implementations.
The only exception would be patents; Sun almost certainly holds patents over some of the concepts implemented in the Java SDKs. But then, seeing (or not seeing) the source won't help or hinder avoid patent problems. Indeed, it's perhaps even easier to violate a patent if you don't know the details of the implementation.
Mind you, I would love to be able to see Sun's sources as much as the next guy, but I really fail to see how their choice to keep their code proprietary in any way lessens the value of the language itself.
You do know that Sun makes available, for free download, specific versions of their SDK?
Now what Sun did was hire the project lead from Jakarta's Structs to write the spec and an implementation of JSF.
JSF is a direct competitor to Structs! If a Jakarta was a company this would be an incredible agressive tactic. Hire the project lead and get him/her to develop a new more featureful version of his old product.
Let's revisit that again: they approached the lead developer of the dominant MVC web framework for Java. They said "there's this JSR to standardise MVC web frameworks, at an integration API level, so that components written for one can work with the others. Want to head it up?"
Let's think. Benefits of helping:
Get to define an industry spec, and be personally identified with it.
Get a heads up in modifying Struts to comply
whereas the benefits of not helping include seeing someone else getting that chance (with their own framework).
In any case, Sun nearly always approach the market leader in this case. Look at who writes the EJB specs, for example: there's representatives from every major EJB vendor ('cept JBoss). That is, after all, the point: the Sun specs mandate how compliant software interacts with other compliant software. It kind of helps to get agreement.
you CAN'T deflect a beam of light with just "Mind Power!"
But (assuming you buy into her power of telekinesis in the first place) you could cause the air to act as a natural lens or mirror, causing the beam to be distorted and deflected...
It is a great deal. The reason coal and oil is so cheap to produce now is because of all the previously built infrastructure around it.
This is the economy of scale effect; throw money into it, and you'll see a huge reduction in cost.
Consider this: how much would it cost to produce a barrel of oil, IF you had to start from scratch? No oil wells, no experience drilling for oil, no refineries or experience in refining oil, etc...
What bloody energy? Give it a good solid toss and watch it land on Earth a few days later.
The "solid toss" can be supplied via a magnetic induction launcher powered by solar power; the solar power panels, in turn, can be made from silica present in Moon dust.
Don't like this approach? Use the fuel right there on the Moon. Convert it to microwaves and beam it to an array of receiving satellites for transferal to receiving stations on the ground. Easy.
If you don't want to be tracked on the net while visiting the New York Times web site, then here's a novel suggestion for you:
Buy a bloody newspaper. It's what, a couple of dollars? Complete privacy. You can even keep it for later reading (as opposed to the free NYT website articles, which aren't accessible when they're archived)
The NYT web site is free in money terms, non-free in other ways. Deal with it.
What about if they start bundling their own PDF writer... Adobe has no recourse?
Adobe has a perfect recourse: Microsoft would need to license the rights to PDF from Adobe first, the same way they have to license the right to Postscript for the printer drivers they develop.
Besides, the market in Acrobat is about a lot more than just Distiller.
That is the case for more recent versions of Windows.
However, Microsoft gave IE away for early versions of Win95, and went to the trouble of making a version that worked under Win 3.1, and gave that away too. And then proceeded to claim it was an indespensible part of the operating system.
There was a film with Robin Williams in it wherein a robot in fact reached sentience and it wasn't until after the robot's death that it was granted personhood and all the rights and privileges thereby.
You're talking about Bicentennial Man, which was a novella by Isaac Asimov long before it got Hollywooded.
And the robot got granted personhood just before he died. It's also worth noting that the key condition of becoming a legal person was that he would die; personhood, apparently, can not be granted indefinitely.
That's a fallacious argument. You're assuming that the presence of gun laws prevents gun ownership.
If you want to argue on those grounds, you really need to look at number of guns (and probably not just on a per-capita basis, either), combined with availability. I don't believe you're saying that New York has less guns than Vermont.
(Not that I have an opinion one way or another; I just wanted to nitpick your argument)
More likely then not, this was the brainchild of some idiot in marketing
Needs to be a bit more than that. Some idiot in marketing is highly unlikely to be able to modify the firmware of a product in the way described.
Nope, this was a deliberate feature, that would have been signed off by the product manager, and assigned to an engineer to implement. Odds are it had testers verifying that it worked, as well.
There is no way that "some idiot in marketing" is solely responsible for this; this is a deliberate ploy by a company with no consideration for its customers.
In Australia, the Australian Electoral Commission oversees all voting, at all levels, not just federal. As part of the Separation of Powers, the AEC is funded by the federal government, but isn't responsible to it (similar to the judical branch).
I don't know how Australia handles the issue of "check off any random candidate because I have to vote";
Australian law doesn't require you to vote. It requires you to turn up at a voting centre, have your name sign off, collect a piece of paper, and drop it into an appropriate box.
What you do with that piece of paper is your choice. Most people take it into a curtained enclave and write down some numbers in the boxes. If you want, however, you can drop it straight into the box blank.
Slashdot Mirror
Remember to use the soap in the soap box first... :) It's amazing how much easier it is to convince people if you don't come across as an unwashed druggie.
Actually, it'd make excellent TV, but not for COPS, which depends on keeping good relations with law enforcement agencies to be able to keep making shows.
There isn't anything especially wrong with that. There are circumstances where police are allowed to identify you (for example, when you are arrested for other reasons). There are also reasons why you may wish to identify yourself (for example, to avoid arrest because you happen to resemble a suspect). Having an efficent way of doing that isn't bad, per se.
The issue of compulsory identification is very different to the means by which said identification is actually done.
Also, such a digital system could be devised so that only relevant information was returned. For example, if you're required to "show your license" to a cop, the system could return information such as "Yes, he's licensed", or "Yes, he's licensed, but BTW, he's wanted for armed robbery"; if you hadn't committed any crime, the extra details wouldn't need to be disclosed to the officer in question. As such, a (voluntary) smart ID system could actually enhance privacy, rather than decrease it.
Lots of ways. For example, he could have asked the woman.
Failing that, given a reasonable suspicion that the person was the suspect (and that a crime had been committed), the cop could have arrested the guy on those grounds. Should the cop have ended up arresting the wrong person, there wouldn't be any grounds for false arrest because the victim could have identified himself and voided the reasonable suspicion that way.
*sigh* It's not "theft". Theft involves someone taking something from you.
Consider these two scenarios:
1) Person A hears music produces by Person B, decides they don't want to buy it because they have a copy downloaded from the 'Net.
2) Person A never hears the music, and thus doesn't buy the song.
In both cases, the outcome is the same for Person B; they don't get paid by Person A for the music. But scenario 2 is definitely not theft.
The first scenario is a violation of the Person's B rights, and they are not getting due compensation, but nothing has been stolen because Person B is no worse off than if nothing had happened at all.
Just because it's a crime doesn't make it theft; different crimes have different names. For example, maintaining an monopoly and engaging in fixing of prices massively above production costs for popular albums in order to subsidise unpopular ones (and the lifestyles of the record company executives) is price gouging, not theft.
This turns out not to be the case.
The Sun Community License makes it clear that research is explicitly permitted. Research includes, for example, reading their implementations in order to come up with your own spec-compliant implementation.
Now, you can't just "cut-and-paste" sections. But you certainly can take suitable ideas and reimplement. So it's not a problem for the clean-room implementations.
The only exception would be patents; Sun almost certainly holds patents over some of the concepts implemented in the Java SDKs. But then, seeing (or not seeing) the source won't help or hinder avoid patent problems. Indeed, it's perhaps even easier to violate a patent if you don't know the details of the implementation.
You do know that Sun makes available, for free download, specific versions of their SDK?
Let's revisit that again: they approached the lead developer of the dominant MVC web framework for Java. They said "there's this JSR to standardise MVC web frameworks, at an integration API level, so that components written for one can work with the others. Want to head it up?"
Let's think. Benefits of helping:
whereas the benefits of not helping include seeing someone else getting that chance (with their own framework).
In any case, Sun nearly always approach the market leader in this case. Look at who writes the EJB specs, for example: there's representatives from every major EJB vendor ('cept JBoss). That is, after all, the point: the Sun specs mandate how compliant software interacts with other compliant software. It kind of helps to get agreement.
But (assuming you buy into her power of telekinesis in the first place) you could cause the air to act as a natural lens or mirror, causing the beam to be distorted and deflected...
You do realise that they develop a lot of plastics out of vegetable oils, now? Particularly biodegradable ones?
It is a great deal. The reason coal and oil is so cheap to produce now is because of all the previously built infrastructure around it.
This is the economy of scale effect; throw money into it, and you'll see a huge reduction in cost.
Consider this: how much would it cost to produce a barrel of oil, IF you had to start from scratch? No oil wells, no experience drilling for oil, no refineries or experience in refining oil, etc...
What bloody energy? Give it a good solid toss and watch it land on Earth a few days later.
The "solid toss" can be supplied via a magnetic induction launcher powered by solar power; the solar power panels, in turn, can be made from silica present in Moon dust.
Don't like this approach? Use the fuel right there on the Moon. Convert it to microwaves and beam it to an array of receiving satellites for transferal to receiving stations on the ground. Easy.
Having read that one, it struck me as being more bashing XP whilst draping the banner of "skeptical inquiry" around the author's shoulders.
A true skeptic acknowledges that they don't have all the answers; the author didn't.
If you don't want to be tracked on the net while visiting the New York Times web site, then here's a novel suggestion for you:
Buy a bloody newspaper. It's what, a couple of dollars? Complete privacy. You can even keep it for later reading (as opposed to the free NYT website articles, which aren't accessible when they're archived)
The NYT web site is free in money terms, non-free in other ways. Deal with it.
I'm not so sure; there's a lot of other tools out there to produce PDFs; some free, some commercial, all a lot cheaper than Acrobat.
MS going into this space would be seen as competing with those other products a lot more than it would be seen as competing with Adobe.
Adobe has a perfect recourse: Microsoft would need to license the rights to PDF from Adobe first, the same way they have to license the right to Postscript for the printer drivers they develop.
Besides, the market in Acrobat is about a lot more than just Distiller.
That is the case for more recent versions of Windows.
However, Microsoft gave IE away for early versions of Win95, and went to the trouble of making a version that worked under Win 3.1, and gave that away too. And then proceeded to claim it was an indespensible part of the operating system.
Robert.
You're talking about Bicentennial Man, which was a novella by Isaac Asimov long before it got Hollywooded.
And the robot got granted personhood just before he died. It's also worth noting that the key condition of becoming a legal person was that he would die; personhood, apparently, can not be granted indefinitely.
That's a fallacious argument. You're assuming that the presence of gun laws prevents gun ownership.
If you want to argue on those grounds, you really need to look at number of guns (and probably not just on a per-capita basis, either), combined with availability. I don't believe you're saying that New York has less guns than Vermont.
(Not that I have an opinion one way or another; I just wanted to nitpick your argument)
You should drop the 'y' too... A county is the region controlled by a count or earl.
And the RIAA... you're lucky they didn't come after you for copyright violation. :)
Nearly right. You need to add the word "more" at the end of that sentence though. People using Windows are already suffering...
Needs to be a bit more than that. Some idiot in marketing is highly unlikely to be able to modify the firmware of a product in the way described.
Nope, this was a deliberate feature, that would have been signed off by the product manager, and assigned to an engineer to implement. Odds are it had testers verifying that it worked, as well.
There is no way that "some idiot in marketing" is solely responsible for this; this is a deliberate ploy by a company with no consideration for its customers.
In Australia, the Australian Electoral Commission oversees all voting, at all levels, not just federal. As part of the Separation of Powers, the AEC is funded by the federal government, but isn't responsible to it (similar to the judical branch).
Australian law doesn't require you to vote. It requires you to turn up at a voting centre, have your name sign off, collect a piece of paper, and drop it into an appropriate box.
What you do with that piece of paper is your choice. Most people take it into a curtained enclave and write down some numbers in the boxes. If you want, however, you can drop it straight into the box blank.