The issue is *NOT* Patents. It's all about copyright and licensing. Unix dates back to 1969 (see http://www.levenez.com/unix ), and software patents only go back to 1981.
Actually, there are patents open on *nix: the famous example is patent no. 4,135,240, the setuid patent (this link may work), filed 1973, granted 1979.
I don't know if there were any post-assignation grants of ownership to the patent, or if Lucent (nee Bell Labs) still owns it.
A press release from SCO states that Boies, Schiller and Flexner has been retained in an advisory capacity, which isn't unusual when a company is trying to determine an IP strategy. We often forget that lawyers are often used for things other than suing people (such as, uh, determining under what statutes one may sue, who one may sue, contracts to enforce terms over which one may sue... I'm not helping my case here, am I?). The press release (and this story) indicates that the UnixWare and OpenServer libraries are affected. Unfortunately, their "Intellectual Property Pedigree Chart" is one of the least useful displays possible, since it appears simply to be the "History of UNIX" chart with some colored lines added. Hopefully, a full clarification by SCO will be forthcoming.
I'll try to scare up the cite for you; it's one of those factoids that just kicked around my head for the past few years.
The best explanations I've heard come down to: a failure to obtain and use productivity-enhancing technologies (e.g., Tivoli, BMC, or any of the open-source tools in that genre); less-experienced technical staff and managers (a gap which is decreasing thanks to decreased private-sector competition for candidates); organizational differences due to the political and bureaucratic nature of government agencies ("The mayor can't surf the Web -- go fix it now!"); and a less technologically-conversant base of end users. To follow that final point, the numbers may be skewed in that government agencies are more prone to supply systems to end users -- e.g., sanitation workers -- who don't really need them than private sector firms are, so the studies really end up comparing apples and oranges.
Sad to say, but this has nothing to do with Linux, little to do with Microsoft (except for their enterprise licensing scheme), and everything to do with getting workstations off desks.
Given the small budgets, byzantine approval processes, and both political and bureaucratic stumbling blocks that affect civic IT departments (and I sadly speak from experience), the most effective place to get cost savings is at the client side.
Only a very few people at the civic level need independent workstations, and the cost of support per user is higher than that of private-sector firms of comparable size. Ripping out the PCs and replacing them with Sun Rays or Wyse terms is a bright solution for cash-strapped cities. However, don't confuse this with a move to open source: as has been pointed out above, it's a fallacy to think that "proprietary" is synonymous with "Microsoft."
And that is a very good point, directly related to ongoing efforts to normalize the Net. I don't think you're nitpicking at all.
The easy way out, of course, would be for me to say, "Those sysstems shouldn't be red/black at all," but that's not really a sufficient answer; the question is what if a critical system were connected to an open network.
One note is that the government, not private individuals, has the primary role in responding to critical infrastructure attacks. I don't think law enforcement hackbacks are a suitable response, but certainly even the most recalcitrant sysadmin would respond to a phone call from the feds telling him to isolate a worm-infected system -- or a visit from a response team ready to do it themselves.
One issue that I didn't bring up before: if I am to be justified in hacking a system that is hacking me, what's to stop the system that I'm hacking because it's hacking me from hacking me because I'm hacking it? (And so on.) Automatic hackbacks and low thresholds of proof lead to a whole parade of horribles.
Another answer, I think, is to simply attack the legal foundation of the problem. Mullen argues from the basis that systems owners do not have the legal responsibility to police their systems; I would argue that they do, under the application of both "industry custom" and the Learned Hand formulae (e.g., that of United States v. Carroll Towing, 159 F.2d 169 (2d Cir. 1947)). AFAIK, this hasn't been tested in open court, but any organization that does not undertake sufficient measures to protect its systems is asking for trouble. (There are contributory negligence issues, too, but they probably aren't germane at this point.) After all, if the problem is so serious as to justify hacking other organizations' computers, surely it's important enough to justify a lawsuit, right?
To be honest, two Justices is more than I thought the Eldred side could get. While I sympathize with their intent, it would have been a remarkable abrogation of Congressional power for the Court to have struck down the SBCTEA. "Ill-advised and stupid" does not, unfortunately, mean "unconstitutional."
.. it always seemed so sad to me.. just look at the logo.:{
:)
There's kind of an amusing story behind that logo, and the bizarre use of colons in the Cue:Cat name. The designer was originally asked to create a logo for a product named "Concerto," which was later renamed the "Convergence Cable." The 'C' in the logo was a stylized bass clef, hence the use of ':' as a design element.
The designer had some, er, personality conflicts with Jovan, and left not long afterwards. Evidently there were trademark issues with "Concerto," and the product line had to be renamed. Jovan didn't want to discard the logo, so he created that godawful "Cue:Cat" name, and promptly earned himself a slot in the "worst dot-com names ever" list.
So, to summarize, the author thinks that we should have the right to assault others' systems on suspicion of compromise. Mullen's presentation notes describe a process in which an automated hackback system uses Nimda vulnerabilities to attack a system, "escalates [its shell] process privileges," and sets up an IPSEC filter to "[b]lock outbound-only traffic at the port level."
This is simply vigilante hacking, supported by selective quotes from Black's Dictionary (the finest source of misleading legal information anywhere). It is telling that Mullen simply discards admin notification as a step; his software doesn't do so much as fire a warning shot across the bow before mounting its own attack. Some obvious problems:
1. Mullen's thesis essentially comes down to the idea that a compromised system is like a rabid dog. But this is a misleading, and emotional, simile; a worm does not pose the health dangers described by Mullen. Its threat is one to property, not safety, and thus the threshold to action is correspondingly higher.
2. The idea that private individuals should have the right to attack and compromise the systems of others is remarkable, not least because he doesn't suggest that those individuals should be subject to tortious responsibilities for their hacks: he does not himself accept the legal responsibility he insists others take.
3. In the world of the author, all systems are evidently equal: if my home workstation is being tagged by a worm from an American Express server, I would be able to hack AmEx (or the government!) with impunity. This is obviously an insupportable doctrine; if someone is lobbing water balloons at me, I don't have the right to trespass on a government installation to stop him.
4. Finally, Mullen argues for active attacks against compromised systems because passive defenses are, well, just too much trouble. But they are certainly no less trouble to create and maintain, and much less disruptive, than a horde of automated systems hacking their way through the Internet and claiming self-defense as a justification. Where a passive defense is available, one should provide convinicing reasons why not to use them. Mullen could build a fence; instead, he prefers to use firearms.
Somewhere I have a hornbook on tort law that contains an article by Judge Posner on a similar topic: that of tripwire defenses used to secure property. He convincingly demonstrates, through case law and economic analysis, why such weapons are a Bad Idea in law and society. Perhaps Mullen should take off his smoke-colored glasses and look at the issue as something other than a technical problem.
... following the appellate reverse and remand is here.
I skipped over the concurrence in the appellate case, which turned out to be a mistake, since it specifically addresses the mysterious 'X:' "[F]or Xerox to prevail, it must prove that each unistroke symbol in the accused symbols (i.e., all symbols except for "x" which is composed with two strokes) has (a) graphic separation, (b) definitive recognition, and (c) spatial independence."
So, I was in error; it would not have been sufficient for Palm to have made the 'X' a multistroke character. Damn these patent cases!
I'm going to have to take some time tonight and read the district court's final decision to satisfy myself, but here's a relevant excerpt on this matter:
The Court noted that Graffiti contained some multi-stroke, multi-symbol characters, the presence of which did not alter the spatially independent nature of the Graffiti symbols. As the concurring opinion noted, the "x" in Graffiti is simply a multi-stroke, (and presumably multi-symbol) character. Because the recognition device recognizes each symbol of a multi-stroke, multi-symbol character without reference to what was written before it, the spatial independence limitation of the '656 Patent is met by all Graffiti Symbols.
Correction: you can write the 'X' with a unistroke.
If you look at the Palm-supplied "Graffiti alphabet," you'll see that the 'X' (officially) consists of two strokes. The status icon on the lower-right of the Palm shows that the first stroke activates the "extended shift" mode. (Perhaps this post will explain more.)
In any case, the issue isn't germane to the question of whether Jot infringes on the Xerox patent.
Assuming I understand your question, the reason is because Graffiti and Jot share many common "swooshes" when writing letters, though not symbols. But that is self-evident.
By reading the Federal Circuit opinion that reversed the district court's summary judgment, it seems that the key issue that prevents Jot from infringing is that it "does not allow for 'definitive recognition' of symbols immediately upon pen lift by the user." Certain letters and symbols in Jot -- 'T,' 'X,' the question mark, and so on -- require multiple strokes to create the character. The actual shapes of the characters are not part of the patent, so there's no problem with Jot and Xerox's Unistroke sharing swooshes.
This leads one to wonder why the Graffiti 'X' doesn't allow Graffiti to escape infringement -- the appellate court opinion quotes the district court as citing accented characters in this sense, but not Graffiti's two-stroke 'X.' If I had to make a wild guess, I'd assume this was proffered by Palm in district court and refuted by Xerox on the grounds that the first slash in the 'X' is actually the stroke to enter extended mode, and thus the 'X' is still technically a unistroke character. If Palm had simply reversed the direction of the strokes so that the first stroke wasn't extended mode, then they might have been immunized. Of such tiny errors are great patent cases decided.
You've just nailed the reason why companies have document retention policies. If the documents don't exist, or have already been destroyed, there's nothing to subpoena.
However, if documents that fall under a retention policy are subpoenaed before they're destroyed, then you have to produce them.
Re:"or more often during heavy traffic"
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Cryptome Log Subpoenaed
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· Score: 5, Informative
If you've been served with a subpoena for documents, you can't destroy them, even if your policy is to dispose of them (I have another post around here that doesn't make that clear, so there you have it). So, yes, you are legally liable for obstruction of justice if you don't stop the cronjob.
It's also worth noting that, in some cases, you are obligated to retain documents even though no subpoena has been served: if you have reason to believe that a subpoena will be served on you, destroying related documents may be grounds for an obstruction of justice charge. See, for example, U.S. v. Gravely, 840 F.2d 1156 (4th Cir., 1988).
The burden of proof would, in such a case, be satisfied by showing that the subpoena was served before the deletion took place. After that, the burden is on you and your organization to show that the deletion was impossible to stop -- and, no, a coffee break is not an affirmative defense.;)
You are not compelled by statute to maintain access logs. If your policy is to delete logs, then you're free to delete them. Only when you don't have a disposal policy and you delete the logs in response to a potential law enforcement investigation is there a problem.
However, the precision drops as the number of viewers of a given show decreases. So, small enough viewership == large variance in precision. Not to mention that the Nielsen ratings depend heavily on pollee honesty.
It's interesting to note that the writer, Peter Vogel (not, I think, the XML guru), bases his theory around a document he bought for $0.25 at a rummage sale. Personally, I distrust serendipity as the basis of a research project.
Also probative is that Vogel wrote up his initial theory in The Black Scholar, (emphasis theirs) a journal that is famous for some of its early black power works, and has in more recent times relegated itself to cheerleading for Iraq, Hamas, Cuba, and domestic criminal organizations like MOVE.
I expect that we'll see a lot more of this kind of conspiracymongering over the next few years. Secrecy breeds mistrust, and the current Administration cherishes its secrecy indeed.
If I remember correctly, the cult's primary, er, "researcher" is an inorganic chemist. If she's going to create what would be a very organic clone, why not have a physicist verify the protocols and proofs?
A few weeks ago, a bioethicist on Morning Editionpredicted that, sometime in 2003, a scientist or organization (having explicitly mentioned the Raelians) would make an unverified, unsubstantiated claim of a cloned human birth. Good call, neh?
The problem, as has been pointed out elsewhere here, is that clones are susceptible to serious health problems -- their genotype may be identical, but their phenotype is radically altered. Although some work at Hawaii and Rockefeller University in New York suggests that clones can be created without the kinds of health and aging problems that plagued Dolly, those studies are far from definitive.
There's also the question of success rates. To get a viable human clone, you will have to make perhaps hundreds of attempts, all of which will take time, and many of which will end up in miscarriages and, potentially, the deaths of donor mothers. At this point in our understanding, the ethical and technological hurdles to successful cloning are substantial.
In any case, I'll believe it when I see the independently verified protocols and proof.
The "gummy finger" paper is here. It effectively points out how easily compromised a fingerprint-only system is.
For anything involving financial transactions, I'd want a token+knowledge system (credit cards and checks technically fall into this category: card/check + signature) or at least a way to limit my exposure beforehand (toll tags: you purchase a set number of "clicks"). A fingerprint scan may be convenient, but without some sort of backup verification, it's the thin edge of the identity theft wedge.
Re: ..when a patient in pain ...
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Complications
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The problem is that, unless you specifically limit the doctor's liability in such cases, you're advocating a course that would make doctors terribly vulnerable to (quite legitimate!) malpractice suits. While I'm more than aware of the fallibility and what is often obtuseness in doctors, I am disturbed at the thought of having them act against what they believe is the best course of action.
When I go to doctors, regardless of the amount of pain I'm in, I expect them to select the course of treatment that will properly balance safety and efficacy. If the risk of side effects, addictions, negative interactions with other drugs, or any other problem outweighs the transitory benefits of pain management, I expect the doctor to place my long-term health over short-term relief.
As much as I enjoyed the article -- and it's nice to see folks like Roblimo working to expand Linux and Open Source opportunities abroad -- there's a kind of obvious irony in evangelizing Free Software in countries that are still working on FreeSpeech.
The issue isn't the existing mod chips, per se; the corporations are defending against the slippery slope that takes us from Linux XBoxen and multiregion Playstations to hardware cracks that allow for the use of pirated media and bypassing other security features.
Say, for example, that Sony doesn't have any problems with a particular mod chip, but can't let another type to so much as exist (the exact kind of each chip doesn't matter). If the company let some chippers continue business unchallenged, but files suit and/or initiates criminal investigations against others, then they'll have to defend in open a court a policy that makes (arguably invidious) distinctions between "good" and "bad" mod chips. Since distinctions of that fine and subjective a grain are exceedingly hard to defend, especially in successive trials, the companies are a whole lot safer spending the cash to go after mod chippers in general.
What this also means is that the situation really isn't as cut-and-dried as "they're taking away our consumer rights;" to protect against selective abuse of the laws, our legal system(s) require companies to defend their rights across the board, or accept a very truncated version of them. Given that choice, they'll litigate every time.
There was a fairly recent thread on this issue over at the XML-Dev list (see here). The upshot, according to W3C XMLWG member (and occasional Microsoft foe) Tim Bray, is that Word is capable of saving documents in a WordML format that is parsable even without a DTD:
I didn't see anything that I couldn't pick apart straightforwardly with Perl, and if someone asked me to write a script to pull all the paragraphs out of a Word doc that contain the word "foo" in bold, well you could do that. Which seems pretty important to me.
So, from a technical perspective, there isn't much to worry about right now. From a legal perspective, no, there's no grounds for another antitrust suit, any more than there's grounds for suing Quark for not disclosing their file format.
The bedroom coder would not be distributing binaries or publishing his changes, except that the license requires him to, which violates his privacy. Got it?
Got it -- but remember that the license's definition of "deployment" explicitly excludes "internal research and development (R&D) and/or Personal Use." So, as long as your hypothetical coder isn't "distributing binaries or publishing... changes," he isn't required to post his source modifications under the license. If your issue with the license is confined to that situation, I can't find any space between your position and Apple's.
You must make Source Code of all Your Deployed Modifications publicly available under the terms of this License * * * for as long as you Deploy the Covered Code or twelve (12) months from the date of initial Deployment, whichever is longer. You should preferably distribute the Source Code of Your Deployed Modifications electronically (e.g. download from a web site)
So, basically, their beef is that any derivative version "deployed" ("to use, sublicense or distribute Covered Code other than for Your internal research and development (R&D) and/or Personal Use") has to have its code placed back into public view for public consumption. Yet Proclus (the GNU-Darwin maintainer) also maintains that "I find... secrecy to be... distasteful and wrong" when it comes to Apple's software. So, there seems to be a fundamental disconnect: Proclus wants Apple to lift the kilt on all its software, but give other people the right to keep their modifications to Apple's work secret.
When several people pointed out this problem in his argument, Proclus defended his position by saying, "Consenting adults should be permitted to modify and copy software in privacy," which is an effective soundbite, but no more than a shibboleth; Proclus doesn't explain why this is such a critical public policy issue, and, judging from his replies, I don't think he can. We're not talking about an invasion of the bedroom -- this is a business contract for the use of specific software. If he doesn't like the license, he doesn't have to use the software, but it's tedious to have to listen to someone who insists on turning what is a contracts dispute into an ideological war.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, there are patents open on *nix: the famous example is patent no. 4,135,240, the setuid patent (this link may work), filed 1973, granted 1979.
I don't know if there were any post-assignation grants of ownership to the patent, or if Lucent (nee Bell Labs) still owns it.
A press release from SCO states that Boies, Schiller and Flexner has been retained in an advisory capacity, which isn't unusual when a company is trying to determine an IP strategy. We often forget that lawyers are often used for things other than suing people (such as, uh, determining under what statutes one may sue, who one may sue, contracts to enforce terms over which one may sue ... I'm not helping my case here, am I?). The press release (and this story) indicates that the UnixWare and OpenServer libraries are affected. Unfortunately, their "Intellectual Property Pedigree Chart" is one of the least useful displays possible, since it appears simply to be the "History of UNIX" chart with some colored lines added. Hopefully, a full clarification by SCO will be forthcoming.
The best explanations I've heard come down to: a failure to obtain and use productivity-enhancing technologies (e.g., Tivoli, BMC, or any of the open-source tools in that genre); less-experienced technical staff and managers (a gap which is decreasing thanks to decreased private-sector competition for candidates); organizational differences due to the political and bureaucratic nature of government agencies ("The mayor can't surf the Web -- go fix it now!"); and a less technologically-conversant base of end users. To follow that final point, the numbers may be skewed in that government agencies are more prone to supply systems to end users -- e.g., sanitation workers -- who don't really need them than private sector firms are, so the studies really end up comparing apples and oranges.
Given the small budgets, byzantine approval processes, and both political and bureaucratic stumbling blocks that affect civic IT departments (and I sadly speak from experience), the most effective place to get cost savings is at the client side.
Only a very few people at the civic level need independent workstations, and the cost of support per user is higher than that of private-sector firms of comparable size. Ripping out the PCs and replacing them with Sun Rays or Wyse terms is a bright solution for cash-strapped cities. However, don't confuse this with a move to open source: as has been pointed out above, it's a fallacy to think that "proprietary" is synonymous with "Microsoft."
The easy way out, of course, would be for me to say, "Those sysstems shouldn't be red/black at all," but that's not really a sufficient answer; the question is what if a critical system were connected to an open network.
One note is that the government, not private individuals, has the primary role in responding to critical infrastructure attacks. I don't think law enforcement hackbacks are a suitable response, but certainly even the most recalcitrant sysadmin would respond to a phone call from the feds telling him to isolate a worm-infected system -- or a visit from a response team ready to do it themselves.
One issue that I didn't bring up before: if I am to be justified in hacking a system that is hacking me, what's to stop the system that I'm hacking because it's hacking me from hacking me because I'm hacking it? (And so on.) Automatic hackbacks and low thresholds of proof lead to a whole parade of horribles.
Another answer, I think, is to simply attack the legal foundation of the problem. Mullen argues from the basis that systems owners do not have the legal responsibility to police their systems; I would argue that they do, under the application of both "industry custom" and the Learned Hand formulae (e.g., that of United States v. Carroll Towing, 159 F.2d 169 (2d Cir. 1947)). AFAIK, this hasn't been tested in open court, but any organization that does not undertake sufficient measures to protect its systems is asking for trouble. (There are contributory negligence issues, too, but they probably aren't germane at this point.) After all, if the problem is so serious as to justify hacking other organizations' computers, surely it's important enough to justify a lawsuit, right?
To be honest, two Justices is more than I thought the Eldred side could get. While I sympathize with their intent, it would have been a remarkable abrogation of Congressional power for the Court to have struck down the SBCTEA. "Ill-advised and stupid" does not, unfortunately, mean "unconstitutional."
There's kind of an amusing story behind that logo, and the bizarre use of colons in the Cue:Cat name. The designer was originally asked to create a logo for a product named "Concerto," which was later renamed the "Convergence Cable." The 'C' in the logo was a stylized bass clef, hence the use of ':' as a design element.
The designer had some, er, personality conflicts with Jovan, and left not long afterwards. Evidently there were trademark issues with "Concerto," and the product line had to be renamed. Jovan didn't want to discard the logo, so he created that godawful "Cue:Cat" name, and promptly earned himself a slot in the "worst dot-com names ever" list.
This is simply vigilante hacking, supported by selective quotes from Black's Dictionary (the finest source of misleading legal information anywhere). It is telling that Mullen simply discards admin notification as a step; his software doesn't do so much as fire a warning shot across the bow before mounting its own attack. Some obvious problems:
1. Mullen's thesis essentially comes down to the idea that a compromised system is like a rabid dog. But this is a misleading, and emotional, simile; a worm does not pose the health dangers described by Mullen. Its threat is one to property, not safety, and thus the threshold to action is correspondingly higher.
2. The idea that private individuals should have the right to attack and compromise the systems of others is remarkable, not least because he doesn't suggest that those individuals should be subject to tortious responsibilities for their hacks: he does not himself accept the legal responsibility he insists others take.
3. In the world of the author, all systems are evidently equal: if my home workstation is being tagged by a worm from an American Express server, I would be able to hack AmEx (or the government!) with impunity. This is obviously an insupportable doctrine; if someone is lobbing water balloons at me, I don't have the right to trespass on a government installation to stop him.
4. Finally, Mullen argues for active attacks against compromised systems because passive defenses are, well, just too much trouble. But they are certainly no less trouble to create and maintain, and much less disruptive, than a horde of automated systems hacking their way through the Internet and claiming self-defense as a justification. Where a passive defense is available, one should provide convinicing reasons why not to use them. Mullen could build a fence; instead, he prefers to use firearms.
Somewhere I have a hornbook on tort law that contains an article by Judge Posner on a similar topic: that of tripwire defenses used to secure property. He convincingly demonstrates, through case law and economic analysis, why such weapons are a Bad Idea in law and society. Perhaps Mullen should take off his smoke-colored glasses and look at the issue as something other than a technical problem.
I skipped over the concurrence in the appellate case, which turned out to be a mistake, since it specifically addresses the mysterious 'X:' "[F]or Xerox to prevail, it must prove that each unistroke symbol in the accused symbols (i.e., all symbols except for "x" which is composed with two strokes) has (a) graphic separation, (b) definitive recognition, and (c) spatial independence."
So, I was in error; it would not have been sufficient for Palm to have made the 'X' a multistroke character. Damn these patent cases!
I'm going to have to take some time tonight and read the district court's final decision to satisfy myself, but here's a relevant excerpt on this matter:
Patent law: Meh. M-E-H, "meh."If you look at the Palm-supplied "Graffiti alphabet," you'll see that the 'X' (officially) consists of two strokes. The status icon on the lower-right of the Palm shows that the first stroke activates the "extended shift" mode. (Perhaps this post will explain more.)
In any case, the issue isn't germane to the question of whether Jot infringes on the Xerox patent.
By reading the Federal Circuit opinion that reversed the district court's summary judgment, it seems that the key issue that prevents Jot from infringing is that it "does not allow for 'definitive recognition' of symbols immediately upon pen lift by the user." Certain letters and symbols in Jot -- 'T,' 'X,' the question mark, and so on -- require multiple strokes to create the character. The actual shapes of the characters are not part of the patent, so there's no problem with Jot and Xerox's Unistroke sharing swooshes.
This leads one to wonder why the Graffiti 'X' doesn't allow Graffiti to escape infringement -- the appellate court opinion quotes the district court as citing accented characters in this sense, but not Graffiti's two-stroke 'X.' If I had to make a wild guess, I'd assume this was proffered by Palm in district court and refuted by Xerox on the grounds that the first slash in the 'X' is actually the stroke to enter extended mode, and thus the 'X' is still technically a unistroke character. If Palm had simply reversed the direction of the strokes so that the first stroke wasn't extended mode, then they might have been immunized. Of such tiny errors are great patent cases decided.
However, if documents that fall under a retention policy are subpoenaed before they're destroyed, then you have to produce them.
It's also worth noting that, in some cases, you are obligated to retain documents even though no subpoena has been served: if you have reason to believe that a subpoena will be served on you, destroying related documents may be grounds for an obstruction of justice charge. See, for example, U.S. v. Gravely, 840 F.2d 1156 (4th Cir., 1988).
The burden of proof would, in such a case, be satisfied by showing that the subpoena was served before the deletion took place. After that, the burden is on you and your organization to show that the deletion was impossible to stop -- and, no, a coffee break is not an affirmative defense. ;)
You are not compelled by statute to maintain access logs. If your policy is to delete logs, then you're free to delete them. Only when you don't have a disposal policy and you delete the logs in response to a potential law enforcement investigation is there a problem.
However, the precision drops as the number of viewers of a given show decreases. So, small enough viewership == large variance in precision. Not to mention that the Nielsen ratings depend heavily on pollee honesty.
Also probative is that Vogel wrote up his initial theory in The Black Scholar, (emphasis theirs) a journal that is famous for some of its early black power works, and has in more recent times relegated itself to cheerleading for Iraq, Hamas, Cuba, and domestic criminal organizations like MOVE.
I expect that we'll see a lot more of this kind of conspiracymongering over the next few years. Secrecy breeds mistrust, and the current Administration cherishes its secrecy indeed.
If I remember correctly, the cult's primary, er, "researcher" is an inorganic chemist. If she's going to create what would be a very organic clone, why not have a physicist verify the protocols and proofs?
The problem, as has been pointed out elsewhere here, is that clones are susceptible to serious health problems -- their genotype may be identical, but their phenotype is radically altered. Although some work at Hawaii and Rockefeller University in New York suggests that clones can be created without the kinds of health and aging problems that plagued Dolly, those studies are far from definitive.
There's also the question of success rates. To get a viable human clone, you will have to make perhaps hundreds of attempts, all of which will take time, and many of which will end up in miscarriages and, potentially, the deaths of donor mothers. At this point in our understanding, the ethical and technological hurdles to successful cloning are substantial.
In any case, I'll believe it when I see the independently verified protocols and proof.
For anything involving financial transactions, I'd want a token+knowledge system (credit cards and checks technically fall into this category: card/check + signature) or at least a way to limit my exposure beforehand (toll tags: you purchase a set number of "clicks"). A fingerprint scan may be convenient, but without some sort of backup verification, it's the thin edge of the identity theft wedge.
When I go to doctors, regardless of the amount of pain I'm in, I expect them to select the course of treatment that will properly balance safety and efficacy. If the risk of side effects, addictions, negative interactions with other drugs, or any other problem outweighs the transitory benefits of pain management, I expect the doctor to place my long-term health over short-term relief.
Oh, well. Let me do it for you: "-1, Offtopic."
I got you a Slashdotting ...
Say, for example, that Sony doesn't have any problems with a particular mod chip, but can't let another type to so much as exist (the exact kind of each chip doesn't matter). If the company let some chippers continue business unchallenged, but files suit and/or initiates criminal investigations against others, then they'll have to defend in open a court a policy that makes (arguably invidious) distinctions between "good" and "bad" mod chips. Since distinctions of that fine and subjective a grain are exceedingly hard to defend, especially in successive trials, the companies are a whole lot safer spending the cash to go after mod chippers in general.
What this also means is that the situation really isn't as cut-and-dried as "they're taking away our consumer rights;" to protect against selective abuse of the laws, our legal system(s) require companies to defend their rights across the board, or accept a very truncated version of them. Given that choice, they'll litigate every time.
Got it -- but remember that the license's definition of "deployment" explicitly excludes "internal research and development (R&D) and/or Personal Use." So, as long as your hypothetical coder isn't "distributing binaries or publishing ... changes," he isn't required to post his source modifications under the license. If your issue with the license is confined to that situation, I can't find any space between your position and Apple's.
When several people pointed out this problem in his argument, Proclus defended his position by saying, "Consenting adults should be permitted to modify and copy software in privacy," which is an effective soundbite, but no more than a shibboleth; Proclus doesn't explain why this is such a critical public policy issue, and, judging from his replies, I don't think he can. We're not talking about an invasion of the bedroom -- this is a business contract for the use of specific software. If he doesn't like the license, he doesn't have to use the software, but it's tedious to have to listen to someone who insists on turning what is a contracts dispute into an ideological war.