The OP is misleading. Neither the FBI nor any other part of government has these powers. Yet. This is a committee proposal; it's not been voted on in either house of congress and it certainly hasn't been signed into law yet.
Certainly this is something to fear, but it's not here yet.
Just a couple of initial thoughts... I personally don't have any real problems with Apple going x86. Here's why:
1) higher performance per watt 2) more likely-interchangeable PCI / AGP cards 3) Full-speed Windows / Linux / BSD emulation (think VMWare as opposed to Virtual PC) 4) Better Linux / BSD support 5) Less effort in porting (Windows API issues aside, which will possibly be solved by #3) 6) finally, we'll see the NeXTSTEP fat binaries in action
and the bad:
7) no more AltiVec 8) no more elegance in instruction set 9) fewer GP registers to play with 10) the death of the FreeBSD-ppc effort (not that NetBSD/ppc won't live on and flourish)
There are a lot of people bemoaning the court's decision, saying that it's criminalizing encryption, etc.. More over, the OP makes reference to sentencing hearings. Fortunately (except for the egos of the uninformed people posting here), legal relevance has little, if anything, to do with criminalization of a given act.
Relevance can be defined as the quality of a piece of evidence (including testimony) that makes a contested issue in the case either more or less likely to have occurred (is it "probative" of a contested issue?). In other words, to be relevant, evidence need only pass a very minimal standard: does it make any element of the plaintiff's / prosecution's care more or less likely to be fulfilled.
The most common incorrect assumption about relevance is that for a piece of evidence to be relevant, it must make an element more likely to be true than false. That is where, I think, the OP got it all wrong. It only has to make an element more or less likely than it would be without the offered evidence.
My evidence teacher put it in terms of the betting-man test: If you were about to wager on whether something had already happened, but you had no idea and were going to flip a coin to decide, then a fact would be relevant if it would sway you, no matter how little, such that you, as a true statistical-believer of a gambling man, would rather wager based on that fact and not by means of flipping a coin.
Now, there are statutory and evolved exceptions to this; there's a lot of relevant evidence out there that's been, either by legislation or by tradition, called irrelevant, e.g. evidence that's relevant but not rationally so (it plays pretty much only to emotions), evidence of prior convictions, or character evidence to prove conduct.
So that's why the court got it right. The fact that this guy had PGP on his computer and that there were certain directories of encrypted files makes it more likely, in connection with other relevant facts already in evidence, that he was dealing with child pornography (note, once again, that this is not saying that the fact of PGP makes it more likely that he committed the crime, only that the fact makes you lean more towards "guilty" than you would lean without the fact).
Although the presence of PGP, in the absence of other evidence of crime, would not be relevant evidence of crime (at least to me as a juror), once there's something about a crime, I'd be willing to say that encryption makes it more likely (perhaps not by much), that the crime has been committed.
Yeah, I suppose there's a first for everything, even karma whoring. Either way, here's the decision, in PDF format.
Additionally, the post is misleading; the dissent only says that the majority does not support its interpretation of the Commerce clause with authority, not that the Commissioner's word is law.
Until recently (the last 3 or so years), the legal profession had widely used only WordPerfect, making it a standard within the community. Even now, there's a significantly larger percentage of legal professionals who use WordPerfect than there is in other professions / industries.
If one department of the federal government were to drop Word for WordPerfect, it would be the Justice Department.
But OS X, wonderfulness thereof aside, isn't FreeBSD!
Really, it's the XNU microkernel with a userland that's an amalgamation of Free-, Net-, and OpenBSD. The majority of Darwin (the underlying "UNIX" of OS X) isn't FreeBSD and when you add in the other parts that make up OS X, you're left with something that only vaguely resembles FreeBSD.
For me, the biggest point is that the kernel is not FreeBSD-based (although, admittedly, the UNIX parts bolted onto XNU are pretty reminiscent of FreeBSD).
Don't even get me started on the large amount of GNU utilities included.
I don't know if I'd say that belief in the Trinity is "christian." It's certainly Catholic, but the belief in the Trinity is the reason that most Protestant religions exist. They didn't like it and they split, like the Lutherans did over the question of whether the eucharist is really the body of Christ or if it's just a symbol thereof.
You said business desktop, right? Really, Linux on the desktop is fine and dandy for us nerds, but it's not OK for business-at-large. Your average office worker knows Word, Excel, etc., not OOo or gnumeric.
In other words there is a *huge* advantage to the Mac in your example, even in terms of IT management: namely, you won't be getting helpdesk calls all the time about how to use a word-processor.
It's what you want if you're into accurate reproduction of sound. If the response (to input) curve is flat, it means that the output of the system is an accurate reproduction of the input. The curve is along a graph with decibels on the y-axis and frequency along the x-axis.
Here (the U.S.A.) we have a similar law. The Social Security Administration is the only agency / organization which is unconditionally allowed to use the SSN for identification purposes. Even other parts of the government can't if the citizen doesn't let them. That's why the IRS (Internal Revenue Service) allows you to fill out a form and get a Taxpayer Identification number (which you'd then use for financial aid).
Private parties and organizations don't have the right to demand your SSN. Nonetheless, without at least a Taxpayer Identification Number to reference, you're never going to get credit anywhere.
Essentially, a U.S. citizen can refuse to give the SSN to anyone but the SSI; everyone else has to assign you a number.
Schools phase out SSN usage to prevent identity theft due to losing your wallet with your student ID therein. They still have the SSN on file for financial aid use and it's still part of your student record. It just isn't usually printed.
You may be on to something here, but if they have a good enough case against you, there's no reason they wouldn't sue. Section 505 of the Copyright act allows a successful plaintiff to recover attorney costs and fees from the defendant if the copyright violation was "willful". Since attorney costs are the big balancing factor in the equation, if they can be taken care of, there's no reason not to sue.
Oh. And the seeder can leave the sharing. The leechers will share among themselves until they can do so no more. If another person becomes a seeder, then the original can leave forever. This shows a practical separation between the.torrent file and the seeder (as well as one between the seeder and the tracker)
Um, no. The torrent doesn't point to anyone other than a tracker. The tracker is the one who "keeps track" of who're seeders and who are leechers. Once there's another seeder (when someone else completes), the tracker will point to them as a seeder too.
The real crux of it all is that the judge said that the Federal government can't wiretap things that don't touch interstate issues. That's the beauty of federalism. The states themselves can outlaw such activity, but unless the keys signals from pressed are somehow going outside the state, it's really just not the federal government's business.
This is a good thing.
No one here wants a pervasive, all-seeing, Big Brother of a government. The states are both less dangerous (due to their size) and more responsive to the voters (because voters are more likely to see things they don't like when they stem from a state law). It's the federal government we need to worry about when it comes to erosion of our rights.
Thus, although no one wants private individuals snooping our keyboards, this decision is a good step in keeping the larger federal government at bay in terms of possible overreaching into what should rightfully be the purview of the states.
Remember, although "states rights" have been used for such evil purposes as slavery and banning gay marriage (you can dispute that all you want, but you can't legitimately say that there's any secular reason not to allow it, if we allow octogenarians to marry), there are some states which have set the pace for the others in terms of protection of civil rights.
I gotta get to class, otherwise, I'd write quite a bit more...
BU may have a lot of computers, but its IT department is not so hot. I was at University of Oregon for undergrad (an Internet2 school) and it blows the pants off of BU in terms of user-friendliness, security, and variety of available systems. For cryin' out loud, they don't even support POP3S when they only give you 20M of storage and encourage the use of webmail.
I'm really bitter about the downgrade in my computing experience since moving here. It's a fine school, but for what we're paying, I think we deserve better IT service.
IAALS (law student), and in the interests of precise and accurate language (as nerds and lawyers can both appreciate), it's not illegal; it's unlawful. Illegality comes from breaking a statute, regulation or ordinance. Unlawfulness comes from the same thing as does illegality, but also includes the breaking of legal principles.
Here, as there seems to be what amounts to breach of contract, we're only in the area of non-conformance with legal principles (i.e. honoring the GPL), and thus we're talking about unlawfulness.
Again, I don't want to be pedantic, I just want to get the words right.
But that's a good thing. When states start "wasting" their votes, it means that the system is working and we're moving away from the two-party system that first-past-the-post encourages.
Slashdot Mirror
The OP is misleading. Neither the FBI nor any other part of government has these powers. Yet. This is a committee proposal; it's not been voted on in either house of congress and it certainly hasn't been signed into law yet.
Certainly this is something to fear, but it's not here yet.
Just a couple of initial thoughts... I personally don't have any real problems with Apple going x86. Here's why:
1) higher performance per watt
2) more likely-interchangeable PCI / AGP cards
3) Full-speed Windows / Linux / BSD emulation (think VMWare as opposed to Virtual PC)
4) Better Linux / BSD support
5) Less effort in porting (Windows API issues aside, which will possibly be solved by #3)
6) finally, we'll see the NeXTSTEP fat binaries in action
and the bad:
7) no more AltiVec
8) no more elegance in instruction set
9) fewer GP registers to play with
10) the death of the FreeBSD-ppc effort (not that NetBSD/ppc won't live on and flourish)
There are a lot of people bemoaning the court's decision, saying that it's criminalizing encryption, etc.. More over, the OP makes reference to sentencing hearings. Fortunately (except for the egos of the uninformed people posting here), legal relevance has little, if anything, to do with criminalization of a given act.
Relevance can be defined as the quality of a piece of evidence (including testimony) that makes a contested issue in the case either more or less likely to have occurred (is it "probative" of a contested issue?). In other words, to be relevant, evidence need only pass a very minimal standard: does it make any element of the plaintiff's / prosecution's care more or less likely to be fulfilled.
The most common incorrect assumption about relevance is that for a piece of evidence to be relevant, it must make an element more likely to be true than false. That is where, I think, the OP got it all wrong. It only has to make an element more or less likely than it would be without the offered evidence.
My evidence teacher put it in terms of the betting-man test: If you were about to wager on whether something had already happened, but you had no idea and were going to flip a coin to decide, then a fact would be relevant if it would sway you, no matter how little, such that you, as a true statistical-believer of a gambling man, would rather wager based on that fact and not by means of flipping a coin.
Now, there are statutory and evolved exceptions to this; there's a lot of relevant evidence out there that's been, either by legislation or by tradition, called irrelevant, e.g. evidence that's relevant but not rationally so (it plays pretty much only to emotions), evidence of prior convictions, or character evidence to prove conduct.
So that's why the court got it right. The fact that this guy had PGP on his computer and that there were certain directories of encrypted files makes it more likely, in connection with other relevant facts already in evidence, that he was dealing with child pornography (note, once again, that this is not saying that the fact of PGP makes it more likely that he committed the crime, only that the fact makes you lean more towards "guilty" than you would lean without the fact).
Although the presence of PGP, in the absence of other evidence of crime, would not be relevant evidence of crime (at least to me as a juror), once there's something about a crime, I'd be willing to say that encryption makes it more likely (perhaps not by much), that the crime has been committed.
You probably actually want 'sudo find / -perm +6000 -ls'. That'll find all the files with not just both, but either SUID or SGID.
Yeah, I suppose there's a first for everything, even karma whoring. Either way, here's the decision, in PDF format.
Additionally, the post is misleading; the dissent only says that the majority does not support its interpretation of the Commerce clause with authority, not that the Commissioner's word is law.
Until recently (the last 3 or so years), the legal profession had widely used only WordPerfect, making it a standard within the community. Even now, there's a significantly larger percentage of legal professionals who use WordPerfect than there is in other professions / industries.
If one department of the federal government were to drop Word for WordPerfect, it would be the Justice Department.
Why not use bochs? It's open, free, and if you're using assembly, you won't need to worry about speed issues.
But OS X, wonderfulness thereof aside, isn't FreeBSD!
Really, it's the XNU microkernel with a userland that's an amalgamation of Free-, Net-, and OpenBSD. The majority of
Darwin (the underlying "UNIX" of OS X) isn't FreeBSD and when you add in the other parts that make up OS X, you're left with something that only vaguely resembles FreeBSD.
For me, the biggest point is that the kernel is not FreeBSD-based (although, admittedly, the UNIX parts bolted onto XNU are pretty reminiscent of FreeBSD).
Don't even get me started on the large amount of GNU utilities included.
I don't know if I'd say that belief in the Trinity is "christian." It's certainly Catholic, but the belief in the Trinity is the reason that most Protestant religions exist. They didn't like it and they split, like the Lutherans did over the question of whether the eucharist is really the body of Christ or if it's just a symbol thereof.
You said business desktop, right? Really, Linux on the desktop is fine and dandy for us nerds, but it's not OK for business-at-large. Your average office worker knows Word, Excel, etc., not OOo or gnumeric.
In other words there is a *huge* advantage to the Mac in your example, even in terms of IT management: namely, you won't be getting helpdesk calls all the time about how to use a word-processor.
It's what you want if you're into accurate reproduction of sound. If the response (to input) curve is flat, it means that the output of the system is an accurate reproduction of the input. The curve is along a graph with decibels on the y-axis and frequency along the x-axis.
Here (the U.S.A.) we have a similar law. The Social Security Administration is the only agency / organization which is unconditionally allowed to use the SSN for identification purposes. Even other parts of the government can't if the citizen doesn't let them. That's why the IRS (Internal Revenue Service) allows you to fill out a form and get a Taxpayer Identification number (which you'd then use for financial aid).
Private parties and organizations don't have the right to demand your SSN. Nonetheless, without at least a Taxpayer Identification Number to reference, you're never going to get credit anywhere.
Essentially, a U.S. citizen can refuse to give the SSN to anyone but the SSI; everyone else has to assign you a number.
Schools phase out SSN usage to prevent identity theft due to losing your wallet with your student ID therein. They still have the SSN on file for financial aid use and it's still part of your student record. It just isn't usually printed.
You may be on to something here, but if they have a good enough case against you, there's no reason they wouldn't sue. Section 505 of the Copyright act allows a successful plaintiff to recover attorney costs and fees from the defendant if the copyright violation was "willful". Since attorney costs are the big balancing factor in the equation, if they can be taken care of, there's no reason not to sue.
Oh. And the seeder can leave the sharing. The leechers will share among themselves until they can do so no more. If another person becomes a seeder, then the original can leave forever. This shows a practical separation between the .torrent file and the seeder (as well as one between the seeder and the tracker)
Um, no. The torrent doesn't point to anyone other than a tracker. The tracker is the one who "keeps track" of who're seeders and who are leechers. Once there's another seeder (when someone else completes), the tracker will point to them as a seeder too.
Nein und neinzug to be precise (pardon the spelling, I haven't taken German in a while)
Nope, it looks like it uses something like polarized glass. The site says that it uses two "masks," so that'd be my guess.
That came out munged. It should be in ISO 8859-5. Anyone know what would be the proper encoding for /. posts?
½ã Úâ ØáßëâÐÛ ÛÐ×Õà? Ï ØÜÕÕî Ò ÒØÔã, çâ Üë ×ÝÐÕÜ, çâ Òë àÐááàØÛØáì Ø×-×Ð ×ÐßÐÔÝÓ ßãâç ÝÐ ÃÚàÐØÝÕ, Ý Òë ÔÛÖÝë, ßÒâàïî, ÔÛÖÝë ÝÕ ØáßëâØÒÐâì ÛÐ×Õà.
The real crux of it all is that the judge said that the Federal government can't wiretap things that don't touch interstate issues. That's the beauty of federalism. The states themselves can outlaw such activity, but unless the keys signals from pressed are somehow going outside the state, it's really just not the federal government's business.
This is a good thing.
No one here wants a pervasive, all-seeing, Big Brother of a government. The states are both less dangerous (due to their size) and more responsive to the voters (because voters are more likely to see things they don't like when they stem from a state law). It's the federal government we need to worry about when it comes to erosion of our rights.
Thus, although no one wants private individuals snooping our keyboards, this decision is a good step in keeping the larger federal government at bay in terms of possible overreaching into what should rightfully be the purview of the states.
Remember, although "states rights" have been used for such evil purposes as slavery and banning gay marriage (you can dispute that all you want, but you can't legitimately say that there's any secular reason not to allow it, if we allow octogenarians to marry), there are some states which have set the pace for the others in terms of protection of civil rights.
I gotta get to class, otherwise, I'd write quite a bit more...
BU may have a lot of computers, but its IT department is not so hot. I was at University of Oregon for undergrad (an Internet2 school) and it blows the pants off of BU in terms of user-friendliness, security, and variety of available systems. For cryin' out loud, they don't even support POP3S when they only give you 20M of storage and encourage the use of webmail.
I'm really bitter about the downgrade in my computing experience since moving here. It's a fine school, but for what we're paying, I think we deserve better IT service.
IAALS (law student), and in the interests of precise and accurate language (as nerds and lawyers can both appreciate), it's not illegal; it's unlawful. Illegality comes from breaking a statute, regulation or ordinance. Unlawfulness comes from the same thing as does illegality, but also includes the breaking of legal principles.
Here, as there seems to be what amounts to breach of contract, we're only in the area of non-conformance with legal principles (i.e. honoring the GPL), and thus we're talking about unlawfulness.
Again, I don't want to be pedantic, I just want to get the words right.
And just for further reference, a Finn is a person from Finland.
My head is swimming too.
But that's a good thing. When states start "wasting" their votes, it means that the system is working and we're moving away from the two-party system that first-past-the-post encourages.