If the only way of discovering something which we do not need to know is to torture an animal, then I think we're better off not knowing. And yes, I do consider medical science to be something we need to advance.
Okay, I don't really want to start anything gnarly here, but... could I please enquire as to why? After all, in a very literal sense, individual human deaths are not the end of the world.
The GMICS technology is offered as shippable components or as licensed intellectual property. Companies wishing to create their own custom silicon may obtain an inexpensive license to the technology. Other developers may wish to simply incorporate the GMICS chip set that is offered.
Bear in mind that Oracle will pursue patents for their expressed purpose; namely to build up a portfolio.
It's the same principle as the nuclear deterrent. Such a portfolio is usually used as a defence, rather than to generate revenue. If one large company tried to attack another for a specific infringement, the ensuing war would cost both a fortune!
If opening up the source code to a search engine enabled people to abuse it, it would highlight which parts of the site-ranking formula were artificial and enable the community to remove these flaws.
The differentiator would then become who could get the most of the web mapped most recently, which would be much more worthwhile.
Believe me, there are quite a few of us here in Europe who aren't pleased about large US (or other) corporations such as Monsanto dictating the New Food Chain of Command.
And action is exactly how we made it a political issue. Supermarkets here in the UK are queuing up to certify their food as organic (highlighting a whole new myriad of labelling loopholes, but...) Why? Because non-violent direct action brought it into the news.
Hamish
p.s. Fingers crossed for the Fife six, who are soon to answer charges in the UK's GM test case.
Surely the first language paradigms in their fields: assembler, smalltalk, lisp, prolog, haskell and any others I've forgotten (apologies if these were not the first in their fields) deserve a little credit for being original.
It's not just the rest of the world who think that the US government is behind the times - discussions like these on slashdot are visible proof that its own citizens are disgruntled.
Business can force the government's hand for exactly those reasons you mentioned, because the actual location of a business is becoming less and less important in today's global markets.
Likewise, if citizens are unwilling to relocate, ways will be found of working on crypto projects stored outside the US from within it. If even this proves impossible (which I doubt), they'll still be able to download GPG from Europe. If the legislation on import of strong crypto changes, we'll make weak crypto code with strong crypto hooks available. Et cetera.
Not that I trust any government's third parties, but... if I did, I'd only trust them if they could be trusted only to send my key to a law enforcement agency with a large enough key.
I heard somewhere that Palm were going to replace their wireless protocol with WAP for the next release of a wireless Palm. Can anyone confirm or deny this?
...if the US government doesn't move quickly, it will seriously lose market- and mind-share in encryption products, without gaining any advantage in doing so (GPG and PGPi being freely importable).
To paraphrase a well-known comment:
"You have no access to our private communications anyway... get over it"
This analogy is not drawn to try to make the role of Windows in your PC any clear - rather the opposite. MassacrE parodied it perfectly with his appendix quip:
"When you have a baby, you do not ask the doctor to give the baby your own Appendix."
If Microsoft had wanted to make the situation clearer, they would have stated:
"When you buy a new house, you do not ask the removal company to take your old furniture there."
It's not up to the patent office to pass moral judgement in this issue. Their place is to provide the means by which certain disputes over intellectual property can be resolved.
However, granting this one is absurd because of the existence of large amounts of prior art.
"We do not mislead anybody, moderates it. When you buy a new car, you do not ask your manufacturer to install the engine of your old there. Windows 98, it is similar, it is the engine of each computer."
I can't remember Micros~1 ever having sunk this low before.
I don't think the AC was suggesting that the NSA wanted to check for backdoors - I think s/he meant that the NSA wanted to ensure that they themselves had backdoors in the product.
Let me begin by stating my position on the incident in question: I completely agree with you that the act of prosecution was unjust. I was simply trying to present a standpoint from which two different types of 'linking' could be differentiated.
I don't think there's any difference between the first and third alternatives you presented:
- he was providing information either to a known cop as part of a set-up - he was providing information on the basis that it would be used to/spot/ a crime and bring those involved to justice.
In the second case (he was only saying that person/might/ have something, and the "cop" needn't have got any), if the teenager thought that the cop intended to commit a crime, and furnished him with the means to do so, this is a crime in most parts of the world. Again, I'm not saying that I agree with this, just that it is so.
Personally, I think the real injustice lies in the mandatory life sentence - otherwise common sense could have been applied by the judge or jury.
Hamish
Re:To tap, or not to tap
on
CALEA update
·
· Score: 1
I think not. What if someone was convinced (incorrectly) that you had done something illegal, and was determined to nail you for it, but (for obvious reasons) couldn't find any evidence that you had done it. However, when listening to your phone calls, he hears you offer a joint to your friend. Bingo! Nailing you for that might be the closest thing to 'real' justice, in his mind...
Hamish
Re:About "tapping" the Internet...
on
CALEA update
·
· Score: 1
You hardly need me to tell you this, but... many of the social problems with black market trading of alcohol went away when prohibition ceased.
The judge also implied that the teenager would have been found guilty of being an accessory to infringement of copyright, had the relevant charges been drawn. So it's not much comfort that linking is not a direct violation of copyright, because the intent is in many cases more seriously viewed than the crime (for example in our country, I think it is true to say that talking about causing grevious bodily harm with another person (i.e., conspiring) carries a greater penalty than causing actual bodily harm itself.
I think it could be argued that the difference lies in whether or not the information has the potential to be used innocuously.
For instance, if you walk into a 'head shop', you'll find a vast array of bongs, pipes, rolling papers, hydroponic systems etc. Ninety-five percent of them are surely taken home and loaded up with pot, but the fact that they can be used to smoke tobacco and other legal substances gives the storeholder the right to sell them.
In the case of the teenager, he might have a defence if he argued that he was somehow aware of the identity of the undercover cop, and was passing on the information to assist in bringing the dealer to justice. Otherwise he was certainly providing that information on the basis that it would be used to commit a crime.
With this approach, it would be straightforward to argue that linking directly to an mp3 file consituted an offence; less obvious that linking to the http://mp3.warez.com homepage was illegal; and very hard to argue that linking to a site which provided links to mp3 files was illegal (unless that site provided no other information).
Slashdot Mirror
If the only way of discovering something which we do not need to know is to torture an animal, then I think we're better off not knowing. And yes, I do consider medical science to be something we need to advance.
Okay, I don't really want to start anything gnarly here, but... could I please enquire as to why? After all, in a very literal sense, individual human deaths are not the end of the world.
Hamish
Here's a simple overview of the licensing policy as laid out on http://www.gmics.org/chip.html#tag:
The GMICS technology is offered as shippable components or as licensed intellectual property. Companies wishing to create their own custom silicon may obtain an inexpensive license to the technology. Other developers may wish to simply incorporate the GMICS chip set that is offered.
Hamish
You may find that drivers for high-end soundcards appear sooner for BeOS than for linux. Worth keeping an eye on, anyway.
http://www.lebuzz.com
Hamish
Bear in mind that Oracle will pursue patents for their expressed purpose; namely to build up a portfolio.
It's the same principle as the nuclear deterrent. Such a portfolio is usually used as a defence, rather than to generate revenue. If one large company tried to attack another for a specific infringement, the ensuing war would cost both a fortune!
Hamish
In the same directory:
Adobe
Autodesk
Borland
IBM
Intel
Microsoft
SGI
Sun
Synopsis
Taligent
Time Warner
Windriver
Some pro, some anti, as you might expect.
I fail to see how anyone can accuse a company of being anticompetitive in an industty where there's a concept like Open Source.
Hmmm... I fail to see how anyone can get wet in a rainstorm when there's so much space between the raindrops.
Security through obscurity?
If opening up the source code to a search engine enabled people to abuse it, it would highlight which parts of the site-ranking formula were artificial and enable the community to remove these flaws.
The differentiator would then become who could get the most of the web mapped most recently, which would be much more worthwhile.
Hamish
Believe me, there are quite a few of us here in Europe who aren't pleased about large US (or other) corporations such as Monsanto dictating the New Food Chain of Command.
And action is exactly how we made it a political issue. Supermarkets here in the UK are queuing up to certify their food as organic (highlighting a whole new myriad of labelling loopholes, but...) Why? Because non-violent direct action brought it into the news.
Hamish
p.s. Fingers crossed for the Fife six, who are soon to answer charges in the UK's GM test case.
Surely the first language paradigms in their fields: assembler, smalltalk, lisp, prolog, haskell and any others I've forgotten (apologies if these were not the first in their fields) deserve a little credit for being original.
Hamish
It's not just the rest of the world who think that the US government is behind the times - discussions like these on slashdot are visible proof that its own citizens are disgruntled.
Business can force the government's hand for exactly those reasons you mentioned, because the actual location of a business is becoming less and less important in today's global markets.
Likewise, if citizens are unwilling to relocate, ways will be found of working on crypto projects stored outside the US from within it. If even this proves impossible (which I doubt), they'll still be able to download GPG from Europe. If the legislation on import of strong crypto changes, we'll make weak crypto code with strong crypto hooks available. Et cetera.
Hamish
You can have 'em, but you can't take 'em somewhere else. A bit like a license to sell alcohol to be consumed ON the premises.
Hamish
Not that I trust any government's third parties, but... if I did, I'd only trust them if they could be trusted only to send my key to a law enforcement agency with a large enough key.
Hamish
I heard somewhere that Palm were going to replace their wireless protocol with WAP for the next release of a wireless Palm. Can anyone confirm or deny this?
Hamish
errr... what's the word again? Parody.
...if the US government doesn't move quickly, it will seriously lose market- and mind-share in encryption products, without gaining any advantage in doing so (GPG and PGPi being freely importable).
To paraphrase a well-known comment:
"You have no access to our private communications anyway... get over it"
Hamish
Not the perfect comparison?!?
This analogy is not drawn to try to make the role of Windows in your PC any clear - rather the opposite. MassacrE parodied it perfectly with his appendix quip:
"When you have a baby, you do not ask the doctor to give the baby your own Appendix."
If Microsoft had wanted to make the situation clearer, they would have stated:
"When you buy a new house, you do not ask the removal company to take your old furniture there."
Hamish
It's not up to the patent office to pass moral judgement in this issue. Their place is to provide the means by which certain disputes over intellectual property can be resolved.
However, granting this one is absurd because of the existence of large amounts of prior art.
Hamish
"We do not mislead anybody, moderates it. When you buy a new car, you do not ask your manufacturer to install the engine of your old there. Windows 98, it is similar, it is the engine of each computer."
I can't remember Micros~1 ever having sunk this low before.
A one-time pad is only completely secure if it is used one time.
So you might as well put your plaintext in your RSA or Diffie-Helmann envelope and send that, because it's the same length as your pad.
Encryption is only as strong as its weakest point.
Hamish
I don't think the AC was suggesting that the NSA wanted to check for backdoors - I think s/he meant that the NSA wanted to ensure that they themselves had backdoors in the product.
Hamish
Let me begin by stating my position on the incident in question: I completely agree with you that the act of prosecution was unjust. I was simply trying to present a standpoint from which two different types of 'linking' could be differentiated.
/spot/ a crime and bring those involved to justice.
/might/ have something, and the "cop" needn't have got any), if the teenager thought that the cop intended to commit a crime, and furnished him with the means to do so, this is a crime in most parts of the world. Again, I'm not saying that I agree with this, just that it is so.
I don't think there's any difference between the first and third alternatives you presented:
- he was providing information either to a known cop as part of a set-up
- he was providing information on the basis that it would be used to
In the second case (he was only saying that person
Personally, I think the real injustice lies in the mandatory life sentence - otherwise common sense could have been applied by the judge or jury.
Hamish
I think not. What if someone was convinced (incorrectly) that you had done something illegal, and was determined to nail you for it, but (for obvious reasons) couldn't find any evidence that you had done it. However, when listening to your phone calls, he hears you offer a joint to your friend. Bingo! Nailing you for that might be the closest thing to 'real' justice, in his mind...
Hamish
You hardly need me to tell you this, but... many of the social problems with black market trading of alcohol went away when prohibition ceased.
Hamish
The judge also implied that the teenager would have been found guilty of being an accessory to infringement of copyright, had the relevant charges been drawn. So it's not much comfort that linking is not a direct violation of copyright, because the intent is in many cases more seriously viewed than the crime (for example in our country, I think it is true to say that talking about causing grevious bodily harm with another person (i.e., conspiring) carries a greater penalty than causing actual bodily harm itself.
Hamish
I think it could be argued that the difference lies in whether or not the information has the potential to be used innocuously.
For instance, if you walk into a 'head shop', you'll find a vast array of bongs, pipes, rolling papers, hydroponic systems etc. Ninety-five percent of them are surely taken home and loaded up with pot, but the fact that they can be used to smoke tobacco and other legal substances gives the storeholder the right to sell them.
In the case of the teenager, he might have a defence if he argued that he was somehow aware of the identity of the undercover cop, and was passing on the information to assist in bringing the dealer to justice. Otherwise he was certainly providing that information on the basis that it would be used to commit a crime.
With this approach, it would be straightforward to argue that linking directly to an mp3 file consituted an offence; less obvious that linking to the http://mp3.warez.com homepage was illegal; and very hard to argue that linking to a site which provided links to mp3 files was illegal (unless that site provided no other information).
Hamish