This is silly. Google's worst sin is that when the copyright holder cannot be found, it wants to be able to index the material, subject to a veto from the copyright holders, if they show up. Ridiculously long copyright terms produce their own sort of evil.
Very expensive half-assed bill
on
Health Care Reform
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
As you might expect, this bill is heavy on the benefits and light on the necessary pain. There's virtually only one effective cost-control measure, the tax on high-cost health benefits, and that has been pushed off so far in the future that it will be killed before it sees the light of day. The bill recognizes that coverage of pre-existing conditions requires an individual mandate, but then implements it in a half-assed way that won't achieve the objective of forcing healthy people to get coverage.
(It also puts a dual drag on job growth by both raising taxes on private investment and directly increasing the cost of employing people. Way to go.)
I would much prefer a bill that provided funds to the states to let them structure their own solutions to the health-care problem, as Massachusetts has done. But the top-down command-and-control midset in Washington is too strong for that.
Why wouldn't you put a one-way hash of the biometrics on the card, so that the actual data would not be vulnerable to theft of the card? Why wouldn't you digitally sign it to make forgery more difficult?
Is this a perfect solution? No, there are no perfect solutions. Privacy is the biggest problem, but it's unavoidable once you decide that some people are allowed to work and others (indistinguishable from the legal workers) are not. Take your choice: restrict both employment and privacy, or restrict neither one. The slippery-slope argument is valid too, but since the public wants to restrict employment, we must start down that slope.
The question is not whether the right of free speech is protected in theory, but rather if it is protected in practice. If I can be prosecuted for statements of opinion, or true statements of fact, I do not have true freedom of speech.
Whether a majority of Chinese accept the status quo is unknowable. The current rulers of China certainly do not believe they have such public support, since they suppress public political discourse and refuse to allow democratic elections.
If you asked that question of the political prisoners confined in horrendous conditions in Chinese prisons, I suspect you would find that they disagree with you.
"nothing at all like the situation was in the USSR". Yeah, right. There is no similarity whatsoever between the USSR and the PRC in the restrictions on freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, and freedom of association. Not the tiniest bit of similarity. As different as night and day. Chinese censorship is not at all like Soviet censorship. Brin must be certifiably insane if he perceives a parallel between the two.
Anecdotal evidence proves everything, when the anecdote is about an area that is important to you. I'm happy to hear about the Vermont coverage, but that doesn't make the NH coverage any better.
I have an iPhone and it's OK in the Boston area, but I'm fairly often in central New Hampshire, and AT&T sucks big time. A few months ago, I had to take my wife to the emergency room, and wait for several hours. Inside the Laconia hospital, my iPhone signal was zero, zippo, nada. My wife's Verizon phone had a 4-bar signal strength. While both AT&T and Verizon have dead zones, AT&T's seem to be much more prevalent.
I laugh when I see AT&T's claims of having the "fastest" network. It's not very fast when you have NO SIGNAL AT ALL!
Q: How many miles per gallon will the Chevy Volt get?
A: A bit of a trick question. For the first 40 miles it will get infinite mpg, because no gas will be burned. When the generator starts, the car will get an equivalent of up to 50 mpg thereafter. One can calculate the average mpg per for any length drive starting with a full battery: Total MPG = 50xM/(M-40).
If GM is right, then the gasoline-only energy efficiency is not bad at all.
P.S. I'm surprised at the number of articles that are so impressed that the engine isn't connected to the drive wheels. This is how locomotives have worked for decades, albeit for different reasons.
I haven't seen many locomotives on the highway, have you?
"1. Terrorists will find another way around it anyway."
This is a silly argument that one often sees nowadays. Of course no measure we take will be perfect, and the terrorists will exploit whatever gaps we leave in the protection, but the point is not to create a perfect system, but to make it more difficult for the terrorists so that there will be fewer attacks.
One might as well argue against equipping cars with door locks, since thieves can and do find ways around them. The point is to make it more difficult for them, so a large number of potential evil-doers will give up before they start.
The British usage in this case is reaching through the corporation (Apple, singular) to the ultimate meaning of the corporation (Apple's management and employees, plural). To insist on the exclusive correctness of the singular would be to insist on the exclusive validity of the legal fiction that is a corporation. That would be absurd.
It's an idiom! Idioms are, by definition, grammatical.
What the court decided was that Google's actions do not come within the scope of the exceptions to French Copyright law (Article 122-5 of the Code de la propriété intellectuelle). While France does not recognize "fair use" as do some common-law countries such as the USA, it does provide for a number of exceptions which are similar in nature. The court case hinged on whether Google's admitted actions fell within these exceptions.
Corporations should indeed not be above the law, including corporations that hold copyrights.
Yes, scientists have other, nobler motivations as well, but it's money that makes the science go round. The politics surrounding the grant-making process governs what science gets done and therefore what gets submitted to peer-reviewed journals. We therefore have the potential for a vicious cycle, with bad politics reinforcing bad science, and bad science reinforcing bad politics.
(I'm not sure to what extent this potential problem has been realized, but it's clearly a risk.)
Paper ballots, either hand- or scanner-counted, have a few management issues that are made easier and cheaper with electronic voting:
the polling places must be sure that they don't run out, so election officials must print ballots based on their guess of the maximum possible turnout. This makes for almost certain wastage of ballots.
In many places, mutliple versions of ballots must be maintained in inventory for multiple languages and/or multiple jurisdictions, each version having the same problems listed above.
These problems are, of course, completely manageable, but at a cost. Election officials would welcome a cheaper alternative balloting system, provided it worked just as well as the best ones in use now. That the the crux of the issue.
To say that corporations receive unmerited special treatment because they are punished only by fines, while people go to jail, is nonsensical. As the old saying goes:
"A corporation has no body to be kicked and no soul to be damned."
It is utterly impossible to send a corporation to jail, since it is
"an artificial being, invisible, intangible and existing only in the contemplation of the law" [John Marshall].
The only penalty available for the corporation itself is a fine or forfeiture. However, a corporation always acts through people, and these people can be jailed if they knowingly cause the corporation to commit a crime.
Actually, JWZ is willing to pay to join the developer program, but he doesn't trust PayPal with his checking account. He invited Palm to say: "screw you, we won't change anything, you are not above our rules". It that case JWZ will simply walk away.
Palm has not confirmed neither that they will change these rules, nor that they will keep them in place and JWZ should go and have a nice life.
What particular aspect of the FISA court is unconstitutional? By the FISA statute, Congress has gone over and above the requirements of the Constitution (as interpreted by the Supreme Court) for protecion of international communications. Pre-FISA, warrantless wiretapping of international communications has been ruled acceptable under the Fourth Amendment.
Let's face it, it's not obvious exactly how
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects"
maps onto electronic communications. The Supremes have mapped it into a broad protection of domestic communications, with significantly less protection of international communications. The FISA statute is a means of prescribing a regime for protecting such communications without compromising legitimate intelligence needs.
It's silly to think that a flying car like this is more of a threat than a similar, conventional light aircraft, since it requires an airport to shift between "Car" amd "Airplane" modes.
Light aircraft are now prohibited from coming anywhere near Washington DC without permission. Violating this rule will result in a friendly fighter-jet escort. Seriously violating this rule will result in a friendly barrage of surface-to-air missiles.:-)
When I went to MIT (and I presume it's the same now), you only had to give up your inventions if MIT was paying you for your development work, through an assistantship or other form of support. Most grad students fall into this category.
You did get a foil sleeve with your new RFID passport. If you are talking about the standard "book-type" passport, the RFID sleeve is integrated in the cover. However, the new passport card comes with a separate foil sleeve.
While forging the card isn't "easy" by any reasonable definition of the word, even a perfect forgery isn't enough. The picture (and in future, other biometrics) of the genuine passport holder will be stored in the government database, and called up via the index stored in the RFID chip. No matter how good the forgery, if the guards are paying attention to the computer output you stand a significant risk of being caught.
Just cloning the RFID code isn't a particularly safe way to forge a border-crossing card. With a blank RFID card carrying cloned data you are running the risk that the border agents will examine your bogus RFID card, see that it's not geniuine, and bust you for forgery.
Even if you do a convincing forgery of the card itself, you run a risk of discovery. Using the RFID data as an index into the government database, the border agent's computer system will pull up the photo (or other biometric data) of the genuine cardholder. If they are paying attention, they will see that you are not the right person, and bust you for forgery.
Also, each RFID passport card comes with a foil-lined sleeve that protects it from both physical damage and RFID skimming. I always keep mine in the sleeve when not in use. If others do the same, this vulnerability will be restricted to places where the cards are used, i.e., border crossings. Lurking around border crossings to clone RFID data seems like another risky strategy.
Here's how it works: the TSA search is reasonable because you consented to it.
You consented to it because federal law (49 USC 44902) requires the airlines to refuse to carry you otherwise.
Don't want a TSA search? Simple: don't go to the airport.
Slashdot Mirror
This is silly. Google's worst sin is that when the copyright holder cannot be found, it wants to be able to index the material, subject to a veto from the copyright holders, if they show up. Ridiculously long copyright terms produce their own sort of evil.
As you might expect, this bill is heavy on the benefits and light on the necessary pain. There's virtually only one effective cost-control measure, the tax on high-cost health benefits, and that has been pushed off so far in the future that it will be killed before it sees the light of day. The bill recognizes that coverage of pre-existing conditions requires an individual mandate, but then implements it in a half-assed way that won't achieve the objective of forcing healthy people to get coverage. (It also puts a dual drag on job growth by both raising taxes on private investment and directly increasing the cost of employing people. Way to go.)
I would much prefer a bill that provided funds to the states to let them structure their own solutions to the health-care problem, as Massachusetts has done. But the top-down command-and-control midset in Washington is too strong for that.
Why wouldn't you put a one-way hash of the biometrics on the card, so that the actual data would not be vulnerable to theft of the card? Why wouldn't you digitally sign it to make forgery more difficult?
Is this a perfect solution? No, there are no perfect solutions. Privacy is the biggest problem, but it's unavoidable once you decide that some people are allowed to work and others (indistinguishable from the legal workers) are not. Take your choice: restrict both employment and privacy, or restrict neither one. The slippery-slope argument is valid too, but since the public wants to restrict employment, we must start down that slope.
The question is not whether the right of free speech is protected in theory, but rather if it is protected in practice. If I can be prosecuted for statements of opinion, or true statements of fact, I do not have true freedom of speech.
Whether a majority of Chinese accept the status quo is unknowable. The current rulers of China certainly do not believe they have such public support, since they suppress public political discourse and refuse to allow democratic elections.
If you asked that question of the political prisoners confined in horrendous conditions in Chinese prisons, I suspect you would find that they disagree with you.
"nothing at all like the situation was in the USSR". Yeah, right. There is no similarity whatsoever between the USSR and the PRC in the restrictions on freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, and freedom of association. Not the tiniest bit of similarity. As different as night and day. Chinese censorship is not at all like Soviet censorship. Brin must be certifiably insane if he perceives a parallel between the two.
The Emergency department waiting room was not one of the areas where they asked you to turn cellphones off.
Anecdotal evidence proves everything, when the anecdote is about an area that is important to you. I'm happy to hear about the Vermont coverage, but that doesn't make the NH coverage any better.
I have an iPhone and it's OK in the Boston area, but I'm fairly often in central New Hampshire, and AT&T sucks big time. A few months ago, I had to take my wife to the emergency room, and wait for several hours. Inside the Laconia hospital, my iPhone signal was zero, zippo, nada. My wife's Verizon phone had a 4-bar signal strength. While both AT&T and Verizon have dead zones, AT&T's seem to be much more prevalent.
I laugh when I see AT&T's claims of having the "fastest" network. It's not very fast when you have NO SIGNAL AT ALL!
If it's "very inefficient", then how do they get 50 MPG out of a 3500-lb car?
Q: How many miles per gallon will the Chevy Volt get?
A: A bit of a trick question. For the first 40 miles it will get infinite mpg, because no gas will be burned. When the generator starts, the car will get an equivalent of up to 50 mpg thereafter. One can calculate the average mpg per for any length drive starting with a full battery: Total MPG = 50xM/(M-40).
If GM is right, then the gasoline-only energy efficiency is not bad at all.
P.S. I'm surprised at the number of articles that are so impressed that the engine isn't connected to the drive wheels. This is how locomotives have worked for decades, albeit for different reasons.
I haven't seen many locomotives on the highway, have you?
This is a silly argument that one often sees nowadays. Of course no measure we take will be perfect, and the terrorists will exploit whatever gaps we leave in the protection, but the point is not to create a perfect system, but to make it more difficult for the terrorists so that there will be fewer attacks.
One might as well argue against equipping cars with door locks, since thieves can and do find ways around them. The point is to make it more difficult for them, so a large number of potential evil-doers will give up before they start.
Corporations should indeed not be above the law, including corporations that hold copyrights.
Yes, scientists have other, nobler motivations as well, but it's money that makes the science go round. The politics surrounding the grant-making process governs what science gets done and therefore what gets submitted to peer-reviewed journals. We therefore have the potential for a vicious cycle, with bad politics reinforcing bad science, and bad science reinforcing bad politics. (I'm not sure to what extent this potential problem has been realized, but it's clearly a risk.)
These problems are, of course, completely manageable, but at a cost. Election officials would welcome a cheaper alternative balloting system, provided it worked just as well as the best ones in use now. That the the crux of the issue.
It is utterly impossible to send a corporation to jail, since it is
The only penalty available for the corporation itself is a fine or forfeiture. However, a corporation always acts through people, and these people can be jailed if they knowingly cause the corporation to commit a crime.
Actually, JWZ is willing to pay to join the developer program, but he doesn't trust PayPal with his checking account. He invited Palm to say: "screw you, we won't change anything, you are not above our rules". It that case JWZ will simply walk away. Palm has not confirmed neither that they will change these rules, nor that they will keep them in place and JWZ should go and have a nice life.
maps onto electronic communications. The Supremes have mapped it into a broad protection of domestic communications, with significantly less protection of international communications. The FISA statute is a means of prescribing a regime for protecting such communications without compromising legitimate intelligence needs.
Light aircraft are now prohibited from coming anywhere near Washington DC without permission. Violating this rule will result in a friendly fighter-jet escort. Seriously violating this rule will result in a friendly barrage of surface-to-air missiles. :-)
When I went to MIT (and I presume it's the same now), you only had to give up your inventions if MIT was paying you for your development work, through an assistantship or other form of support. Most grad students fall into this category.
While forging the card isn't "easy" by any reasonable definition of the word, even a perfect forgery isn't enough. The picture (and in future, other biometrics) of the genuine passport holder will be stored in the government database, and called up via the index stored in the RFID chip. No matter how good the forgery, if the guards are paying attention to the computer output you stand a significant risk of being caught.
Even if you do a convincing forgery of the card itself, you run a risk of discovery. Using the RFID data as an index into the government database, the border agent's computer system will pull up the photo (or other biometric data) of the genuine cardholder. If they are paying attention, they will see that you are not the right person, and bust you for forgery.
Also, each RFID passport card comes with a foil-lined sleeve that protects it from both physical damage and RFID skimming. I always keep mine in the sleeve when not in use. If others do the same, this vulnerability will be restricted to places where the cards are used, i.e., border crossings. Lurking around border crossings to clone RFID data seems like another risky strategy.
Here's how it works: the TSA search is reasonable because you consented to it.
You consented to it because federal law (49 USC 44902) requires the airlines to refuse to carry you otherwise.
Don't want a TSA search? Simple: don't go to the airport.