The iTunes interface seems to be almost a ditto copy of their interface
Of course, that picture has been carefully rigged to look that way by resizing all the UI elements into a strange configuration to match the picture. You also have to ignore a whole section of the iTunes interface, and the fact that the music browser section in iTunes doesn't have the same three categories as the ones in the picture.
I could post that patent diagram next to my standard iTunes setup as demonstration of the fact that iTunes looks absolutely nothing like that UI, so I don't think you can fairly call it a 'ditto copy'.
In order to violate the patent, each and every element of an independent claim has to be present in what is alleged to be infringed upon.
That would make their case pretty flimsy:
3. A method of enabling a user to select a song, which is stored in a music data base, that will be played on a player piano that is controlled by a computer
The best thing about these new laws is there won't be any evidence of abuse of power
No, the best thing is that despite the usual misleading Slashdot summary the Senate Intelligence committee doesn't have the power to enact law, so there is still time to write to your senators and ask them to oppose it when it comes up for a Senate vote (you know, that thing that it takes to actually enact laws).
even then ASP.net only renders 'equivelent' HTML representations of application objects based on user-agent
That, unfortunately, is not true by default, unless things have changed in the last year. I spent quite a while trying to figure out how the pages I'd carefully crafted statically to be standards-compliant and work well cross-browser suddently went to hell in Firefox when I started serving the pieces up through ASP.NET. I thought I had screwed up while breaknig the page apart until I found that when I viewed the page in Firefox the server was liberally sprinkling my HTML with unneccessary and incorrectly placed tags that completely destroyed the ability of anything but IE to render it correctly.
Eventually I figured out how to disable all the browser capability detection, which was the only way I could keep the server from crippling my pages. That seemed awfully scummy to me.
What's truly weird is how so many of us delude ourselves into believing that we live in democracies (ie. rule of the people) simply because we hold elections. The main function of an election is not to give the people a voice, but to periodically renew the governmental entity (congress, parliament, legislature, judiciary, whatever). It's a way of cleaning out the old and bringing in the new -- but it's always the same political parties in roughly the same mixture. [...] In Canada and the US after a legislative election, generally 80% to 90% of the incumbents win.
Just because incumbents often win doesn't mean that democracy isn't working as intended. It can just as easily signify that the basic views of society as a whole haven't significantly changed since the previous election, which is to be expected in a relatively stable society.
What would a real democracy look like?
Rule of the majority, affectionately known as "tyranny of the majority" or "mob rule". That's a big part of the reason the U.S. is a democratic republic, rather than a democracy.
But those are wishy-washy measures. As long as we have any form of voting, we dilute any power vested in the people.
Um... no. The most "real" democracy, a direct democracy, is one where everyone has a vote about everything. Perhaps what you meant is that any form of representational government dilutes the power vested in the people. At some level that is true, but it's widely regarded as a good thing. See above under "tyranny of the majority"
If neither "avoirdupois" nor "troy" is specified, the international pound (avoirdupois) is meant and is by law the only proper definition in the United States
So the answer seems pretty clearly to be mass. It's even more clear if you read the actual NASA page about it, which gives it in kilograms, rather than blaming NASA for Wired's use of a marginally ambiguous unit.
If AOL is using this kind of system, it won't hurt them at all to sell the email addresses of people...because their servers will only keep one copy of the message!
Plus, think of all the storage space they would save by only keeping one copy of the:
LOL!!!! Me too!!!!! OMG ROTFL!!!!!!
email...
If the browser could do so without me knowing, yes. If the "other" site could be potentially any site with or without my knowledge, you bet.
I'm not really seeing the point... Say you go to site A, and it chooses to load site B's objectionable/dangerouse/whatever content in a subframe. How is A choosing to load B in a subframe fundamentally different than A just putting up content you don't like? Either way it comes down to whether or not you think A is trustworthy enough to visit in the first place.
Even if there is a difference to you, it's pretty easy for A to instead set up a server that transparently to you is just as bad. All A has to do is make it so that A.com/foo/ fetches the content of B.com/ (while sending B whatever info they have about you in/along with the request), does some quick url mapping from B to A in the content, then serves that.
Or, A could just do everything malicious that B does all by themselves.
The point being that if A isn't trustworthy, and you go to A's site, you are screwed.
Perhaps, but given that it only happens when you are statistically very likely to have clicked on that link anyway, I'm having a hard time imagining many problem scenarios. Anyone who's concerned about having their IP address recorded among the millions of others at the sites that are the most popupular Google results should really be browsing with an anonymizer (and maybe a tin-foil hat).
How many innocuous Google searches return illegal content as the top hit and have data suggesting to Google that enough people follow that first link that it should be prefetched?
Until I read this article I didn't even know that Firefox did this. I don't like it one bit from a security standpoint. I don't want my browser running around going to sites that I don't intened to visit. And certainly, not because Google tells my browser to do so.
How exactly is prefetching a security hole? It sounds like you are woried that you'll go to some innocuous-looking site, and it will prefetch a child porn site or something. However, the site could just as easily:
meta-redirecty you to a bad site.
have images pointing to images on a bad site.
load a bad site in a frame.
load a bad site invisibly in an iframe.
...
Unless you vet all sites with curl before you visit them, you are already wide open to loading content you didn't intend to. Heck, even then, someone could do something like have innocent looking image links that actually have.htaccess redirects to images on a completely different site.
Prefetching takes nothing away from your security.
An obvious example: innocently searching for info on the silly Vin Diesel movie "XXX" turns up a nice mix of Vin and pr0n in the top results. Presumably a mix of both are loading up in the background
That's only presumable if you don't atually read the (extremely short) description on the linked Google page. It says that it loads the top result for some queries (presumably, those where they have data that suggests that you will be clicking the first link).
Yes, there is a hidden preference that you can set to disable link prefetching. Add this line to your prefs.js file located in your Mozilla profile directory:
You should never edit prefs.js directly, actually. You should always use about:config, or change user.js.
When a grade is altered, a feedback system is automatically triggered to inform professors and the Registrar's Office of the changes.
"There's basically a feedback mechanism, and ultimately, it comes back to the feedback mechanism and the individual department trying to reconcile grades and saying 'It doesn't look like this is correct and how can this happen?'"
So while the access point security is awful, there are processes in place to flag potential problems. At least they are practicing security in depth, even if one of their layers is paper-thin.
Well, in a way I guess it's true. After all, nothing was done to actually compromise their security--the crappy, inadequete security of their system is in no way reduced as a result of what happened.
Except California law states that if you do it on your own time and on your own equipment, you own it. Its not legal to request an employee to sign that away, and is not enforcable. Burden of proof is on the employer to prove the employee did it on work time, rather than the reverse. In this state those IP agreements are a scare tactic, nothing more.
No, that's not at all true. The first exception in CA Labor Code Section 2870 says it doesn't apply to inventions which:
Relate at the time of conception or reduction to practice of the invention to the employer's business, or actual or demonstrably
anticipated research or development of the employer;
Regarding music for instance, it would be very interesting to see what would happen if copyright collapsed - my guess is we would only see a modest decline in customer satisfaction, if any.
With regards to computer games, advanced proprietary software and movies however, the effects of outright copyright collapse would most likely be disastrous.
Right, because music is so easy to make, taking only massive time and dedication to become good at, whereas programming is very hard, requiring both time and dedication to master? Or because good music only requires very expensive instruments and recording equiment, whereas programming requires an expensive computer?
It's obvious that some other people have chosen to protect their property, and some have given it away (GPL). The most important thing for you is to respect their choice, not trample all over their choice and their rights to satisfy your own view of how things should work.
Actually, some have chosen to protect their property (GPL), and some have given in away (BSD license). GPL is just another way of restricting what others can do, which makes the hypocrisy harder to defend--remembering of course that it's only hypocrisy when it has the same username attached, since Slashdot isn't (quite) a hive-mind.
Ah yes, the dreaded fork. How many IT departments running Linux haven't experienced the horror of coming in one day and discovering that all their Linux boxes have started spontaneously forking in divergent ways? Suddenly, maintenance becomes a nightmare as what were one homogeneous installs are now wild and free.
Seriously, unless people's sysadmins are too stupid to tell the difference between different flavors when it comes time to install, where exactly is the problem with the existence of forks?
Exactly. The question is not "would you pay 5 cents for a song?", but "would you shell out money even if you never buy music just so that other people can buy music cheauper?"
According to his argument that it's OK because the industry has benefited, there should also be a tax to subsidize porn site subscriptions, any other subscription-based content, the movie and tv industry, and even sites that currently run annoying ads to pay the bills.
Slashdot Mirror
The iTunes interface seems to be almost a ditto copy of their interface
Of course, that picture has been carefully rigged to look that way by resizing all the UI elements into a strange configuration to match the picture. You also have to ignore a whole section of the iTunes interface, and the fact that the music browser section in iTunes doesn't have the same three categories as the ones in the picture.
I could post that patent diagram next to my standard iTunes setup as demonstration of the fact that iTunes looks absolutely nothing like that UI, so I don't think you can fairly call it a 'ditto copy'.
In order to violate the patent, each and every element of an independent claim has to be present in what is alleged to be infringed upon.
That would make their case pretty flimsy:
The best thing about these new laws is there won't be any evidence of abuse of power
No, the best thing is that despite the usual misleading Slashdot summary the Senate Intelligence committee doesn't have the power to enact law, so there is still time to write to your senators and ask them to oppose it when it comes up for a Senate vote (you know, that thing that it takes to actually enact laws).
Wait, while this shit is voted back out of excistance.
Tricky to do, since it hasn't been voted into existence. All this did was make it out of a committee.
even then ASP.net only renders 'equivelent' HTML representations of application objects based on user-agent
That, unfortunately, is not true by default, unless things have changed in the last year. I spent quite a while trying to figure out how the pages I'd carefully crafted statically to be standards-compliant and work well cross-browser suddently went to hell in Firefox when I started serving the pieces up through ASP.NET. I thought I had screwed up while breaknig the page apart until I found that when I viewed the page in Firefox the server was liberally sprinkling my HTML with unneccessary and incorrectly placed tags that completely destroyed the ability of anything but IE to render it correctly.
Eventually I figured out how to disable all the browser capability detection, which was the only way I could keep the server from crippling my pages. That seemed awfully scummy to me.
What's truly weird is how so many of us delude ourselves into believing that we live in democracies (ie. rule of the people) simply because we hold elections. The main function of an election is not to give the people a voice, but to periodically renew the governmental entity (congress, parliament, legislature, judiciary, whatever). It's a way of cleaning out the old and bringing in the new -- but it's always the same political parties in roughly the same mixture. [...] In Canada and the US after a legislative election, generally 80% to 90% of the incumbents win.
Just because incumbents often win doesn't mean that democracy isn't working as intended. It can just as easily signify that the basic views of society as a whole haven't significantly changed since the previous election, which is to be expected in a relatively stable society.
What would a real democracy look like?
Rule of the majority, affectionately known as "tyranny of the majority" or "mob rule". That's a big part of the reason the U.S. is a democratic republic, rather than a democracy.
But those are wishy-washy measures. As long as we have any form of voting, we dilute any power vested in the people.
Um... no. The most "real" democracy, a direct democracy, is one where everyone has a vote about everything. Perhaps what you meant is that any form of representational government dilutes the power vested in the people. At some level that is true, but it's widely regarded as a good thing. See above under "tyranny of the majority"
From wikipedia:
So the answer seems pretty clearly to be mass. It's even more clear if you read the actual NASA page about it, which gives it in kilograms, rather than blaming NASA for Wired's use of a marginally ambiguous unit.
If you are reading about it from the side of the 'opressee', this is not even close to "censorship at its worst".
If AOL is using this kind of system, it won't hurt them at all to sell the email addresses of people...because their servers will only keep one copy of the message!
Plus, think of all the storage space they would save by only keeping one copy of the:
LOL!!!! Me too!!!!! OMG ROTFL!!!!!!
email...
I wanted to do the same, but I just can't find them no matter how much I search on Google.
If the browser could do so without me knowing, yes. If the "other" site could be potentially any site with or without my knowledge, you bet.
I'm not really seeing the point... Say you go to site A, and it chooses to load site B's objectionable/dangerouse/whatever content in a subframe. How is A choosing to load B in a subframe fundamentally different than A just putting up content you don't like? Either way it comes down to whether or not you think A is trustworthy enough to visit in the first place.
Even if there is a difference to you, it's pretty easy for A to instead set up a server that transparently to you is just as bad. All A has to do is make it so that A.com/foo/ fetches the content of B.com/ (while sending B whatever info they have about you in/along with the request), does some quick url mapping from B to A in the content, then serves that.
Or, A could just do everything malicious that B does all by themselves.
The point being that if A isn't trustworthy, and you go to A's site, you are screwed.
So do you expect your browser to prevent sites from loading other sites in frames, then?
Perhaps, but given that it only happens when you are statistically very likely to have clicked on that link anyway, I'm having a hard time imagining many problem scenarios. Anyone who's concerned about having their IP address recorded among the millions of others at the sites that are the most popupular Google results should really be browsing with an anonymizer (and maybe a tin-foil hat).
How many innocuous Google searches return illegal content as the top hit and have data suggesting to Google that enough people follow that first link that it should be prefetched?
Until I read this article I didn't even know that Firefox did this. I don't like it one bit from a security standpoint. I don't want my browser running around going to sites that I don't intened to visit. And certainly, not because Google tells my browser to do so.
How exactly is prefetching a security hole? It sounds like you are woried that you'll go to some innocuous-looking site, and it will prefetch a child porn site or something. However, the site could just as easily:
Unless you vet all sites with curl before you visit them, you are already wide open to loading content you didn't intend to. Heck, even then, someone could do something like have innocent looking image links that actually have .htaccess redirects to images on a completely different site.
Prefetching takes nothing away from your security.
An obvious example: innocently searching for info on the silly Vin Diesel movie "XXX" turns up a nice mix of Vin and pr0n in the top results. Presumably a mix of both are loading up in the background
That's only presumable if you don't atually read the (extremely short) description on the linked Google page. It says that it loads the top result for some queries (presumably, those where they have data that suggests that you will be clicking the first link).
Yes, there is a hidden preference that you can set to disable link prefetching. Add this line to your prefs.js file located in your Mozilla profile directory:
You should never edit prefs.js directly, actually. You should always use about:config, or change user.js.
But on the other hand:
When a grade is altered, a feedback system is automatically triggered to inform professors and the Registrar's Office of the changes.
"There's basically a feedback mechanism, and ultimately, it comes back to the feedback mechanism and the individual department trying to reconcile grades and saying 'It doesn't look like this is correct and how can this happen?'"
So while the access point security is awful, there are processes in place to flag potential problems. At least they are practicing security in depth, even if one of their layers is paper-thin.
Well, in a way I guess it's true. After all, nothing was done to actually compromise their security--the crappy, inadequete security of their system is in no way reduced as a result of what happened.
It's not even strictly true in California.
Except California law states that if you do it on your own time and on your own equipment, you own it. Its not legal to request an employee to sign that away, and is not enforcable. Burden of proof is on the employer to prove the employee did it on work time, rather than the reverse. In this state those IP agreements are a scare tactic, nothing more.
No, that's not at all true. The first exception in CA Labor Code Section 2870 says it doesn't apply to inventions which:
(Feel fre to Check it yourself.)
If you work for a large software company, that covers a *lot* of ground.
Regarding music for instance, it would be very interesting to see what would happen if copyright collapsed - my guess is we would only see a modest decline in customer satisfaction, if any.
With regards to computer games, advanced proprietary software and movies however, the effects of outright copyright collapse would most likely be disastrous.
Right, because music is so easy to make, taking only massive time and dedication to become good at, whereas programming is very hard, requiring both time and dedication to master? Or because good music only requires very expensive instruments and recording equiment, whereas programming requires an expensive computer?
It's obvious that some other people have chosen to protect their property, and some have given it away (GPL). The most important thing for you is to respect their choice, not trample all over their choice and their rights to satisfy your own view of how things should work.
Actually, some have chosen to protect their property (GPL), and some have given in away (BSD license). GPL is just another way of restricting what others can do, which makes the hypocrisy harder to defend--remembering of course that it's only hypocrisy when it has the same username attached, since Slashdot isn't (quite) a hive-mind.
Ah yes, the dreaded fork. How many IT departments running Linux haven't experienced the horror of coming in one day and discovering that all their Linux boxes have started spontaneously forking in divergent ways? Suddenly, maintenance becomes a nightmare as what were one homogeneous installs are now wild and free.
Seriously, unless people's sysadmins are too stupid to tell the difference between different flavors when it comes time to install, where exactly is the problem with the existence of forks?
Exactly. The question is not "would you pay 5 cents for a song?", but "would you shell out money even if you never buy music just so that other people can buy music cheauper?"
According to his argument that it's OK because the industry has benefited, there should also be a tax to subsidize porn site subscriptions, any other subscription-based content, the movie and tv industry, and even sites that currently run annoying ads to pay the bills.
What's so special about the music industry?