As someone who has worked on archetecting this, let me clue you folks in.
Giving quality of service guarantees means you treat some packets better than others. There IS no alternaitve.
You do this because some packets are more VALUABLE than others. Voice packets, for example, are FAR more valuable the file transfer packets - but only if they receive preferential handling. Delays and drops just slightly slow down a file transfer, but play HELL with a phone call.
Voice packets are also a drop in the ocean. A two-way phone call, with no compression whatsoever, is less than a megabyte of payload per HOUR. So giving its packets preference over, say, file transfers, won't even be noticed. Even giving it priority over best-effort VOICE traffic won't be noticed - except maybe in the very narrow pipe from the edge to the customer - because it won't interfere when there are no fat transfers going on, and when there ARE fat transfers the best-effort voice connection will still be broken.
If some packets are to be treated better than others because they're more valuable, it's fair to charge more for them. (Why should people pay as much for a packet that gets second-class treatment?) This also lets them subsidize the plumbing for the second-class packets.
ISPs only get a little for supplying fat dumb connectivity. They're looking for ways to sell "value-added services" to enhance their revenue. Providing a phone-network quality connection at far less than phone-company costs and prices is a good deal both for them and their customers - they can split the savings with their customers and both come out ahead.
If they're providing an extra-cost VoIP service, they are involved, not just in the payload traffic, but in the connection signaling. This makes it easy to identify the payload flows that need special handling. To do the same for other people's traffic they'd have to spy on the traffic to identify it - and then give it preference equivalent to their own extra-cost packets, for free? Why should they do extra work for free to help their competition? (Especially when it involves spying on the traffic and its routing, which some people might not want?)
What CAN be done, at a profit all around, is one of the following:
- The VoIP providers and ISPs can engage in agreements to handle each other's voice traffic at higher quality of service, and split the extra fee.
- Protocols can be arranged for a client application - VoIP or otherwise - to negotiate higher quality of service (at a higher fee) for its flows, and the ISPs can again engage in suitable contracts to handle the traffic prefferentially and split the extra fee. (This generalizes the service, uncoupling it from strictly VoIP applications.)
You wouldn't have to have a single tier of extra-price service, either. There are different levels, at different price points, that would be useful. (Even within VoIP: POTS emulation at a level that can handle appliances like FAX machines and 56k modems {without reencoding bridges} requires very tight guarantees - essentially every packet must go through with a tight limit on delay variability. Something suitable for compressed voice can accept more drops and jitter.)
And anybody - peer-to-peer or budget service - who doesn't want to pay extra to get their packets special treatment can still take best-effort delivery, and get service about like they get now. VoIP traffic is a very small drop in a very large bucket. Except at the very edge (like a narrow-band drop from the edge router to the customer site), giving company VoIP packets preference over non-company VoIP packets won't appreciably affect the latter: They'll still get through if there's no fat application competing with them, and still get creamed when you're downloading a file or browsing the web.
Re:Drugs = Biotech? Yes they do. Also politics.
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Juiced
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· Score: 1
Nice justification for submitting a baseball story review to/.
I have zero interest in sports. Yet I find this item interesting.
For starters, it's the first indication I've seen on a public forum that _Juiced_ took a political position against drug bans. And that it had already raised some of the issues that I've been meaning to raise since the flap started - but the media ignored them.
Anti-drug laws block, not just "harmful" drugs, but beneficial ones. Drugs that treat or cure a breakdown of ordinary health are permitted - after ENORMOUSLY expensive hoops are jumped through. But drugs that enhance life are not.
Suppose drugs are developed to retard or reverse aging, enhance strength, or boost intelligence, without non-existant detrimental side-effects (or side-effects so benign that their use is a massive net gain)? Under the current regulatory regime those drugs could not be used for such a purpose, and couldn't be marketed AT ALL unless they had some OTHER use. It is "natural" to be dumber and weaker than we COULD be, to become infirm, pain-ridden, and then dead after only a few decades. So biotech need not attempt to enhance life or prolong vigor - governments won't approve it and investors won't be able to make a return.
Even with "harmful" drugs most of the harm is not from the drug, but side-effects from the bans. Availability only from ciminal sources (who sell impure product, try to move users to more lucrative - and more harmful - products, and settle disputes with violence), artificially inflated prices (leading to massive theft to support drug dosages that could be paid for by pocket change wtih legal products), etc.
Where does the constitution even authorize the government to limit what people can put in their bodies? (They had to pass a CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT to authorize this for alcohol. Why not other "substances"?) Where does it authorize the government to penalize doctors who prescribe "too many painkillers"? To ban drugs that MIGHT enhance and/or prolong life? Or to ban drugs that just make it more fun?
The courts have found an argument that blocks the government from interfering in the doctor-patient relationship when the "treatment" is an abortion. Why does the same argument not apply to prescribing painkillers? Strength-enhancers? Mood boosters?
This is NOT just a "baseball story". It is a biotech story. And a political story. It is "stuff that matters".
Others have already pointed out how to resolve the perceived inconsistency.
I'd like to add, though, that when you dig into the mechanisms you find that there is a legal inconsistency, and a moral inconsistency, at the root of the matter.
The moral inconsistency is with regard to the copyright holder's (presumed) intent:
In the case of music and other "content industry" files, the (presumed) intent of the copyright holder is to sell the material for money or other benefits.
In the case of the GPL the (presumed) intent of the copyright holder on the base material was to freely distribute the material, obtaining less direct benefits (satisfaction, reputation, improving humanity's situation, external support of the code, access to other code on the same terms, etc.)
The GPL is used, rather than public domain, to head off a scenario where someone would write a fix or upgrade, copyright THAT, and keep the original author and the rest of humanity from using it - at all, without restrictions, and/or without paying a fee.
The underlying conflict, both in law and possibly in morality, is that distributing outside the license terms violates the intent of the author. This means that arguments against the content industry's restrictions potentially could be turned against the GPL and other open-source licenses.
But one of the beauties of an open-source license is that most SUCCESSFUL attack on copyright restrictions shouldn't damage the original point of the license. If you weaken the ability of copyright owners to control copying, you also weaken the ability of the creators of derived works to block the original authors and the rest of humanity from replicating their fixes and improvements. So the original point of the GPL - not to force disclosure, but to block attempts to lock up the free software base against improvement and reverse-engineering - may still be maintained.
[] Harleys still use pushrod tech - because it [sounds and] feels cool to ride. You don't get that groin-tweaking torque out of [some lower-power alternatives]
Once you get the torque up to where the wheels start to spin there's nowhere higher to go. That depends solely on the coefficient of friction of the tire material against the road, and you'll get the same accelleration out of the bike whether it weighs a half-ton or is lighter than a pair of boots.
Of course you won't get the same vibration in your seat, and the dynamics of wheelies and other aspects of the ride will change if the dimensions, mass, and wheel weight change. And you don't get the jerk when you engage the clutch on a spinning gas engine. But for pure torque an electric motor can't be beaten.
I think that the top speed of 50 mph might not be that popular either.
That also implies that the accelleration is pretty puny, too. One of the points of motorcycles is that they can accellerate drastically to pull ahead out of trouble. (That helps to make up for not being able to brake heavily without risking going down.)
It's also one of the points of electric-motor drive: A motor can put out a LOT of torque.
Right now it's a glorified lazy-man's bicycle, suitable for in-town commuting only.
Bump up the size of the fuel cell by a factor of 4 to get crusing speed up to highway levels and enable at-speed hill climbing, bump the size of the motor and controller by a factor of 10 or so and add a supercapacitor so you can power up to speed quicly and zip out of impending accidents. Then you'll have a serious road macine.
Extremely massive? Yes. Moderately large? No. IANAAP, but there's a Niven short story book which claims that a neutron star with the density of Sol would be roughly the size of a baseball.
I'm sorry I was confusing. By "moderately large" I mean "in comparison to a subatomic particle or an atomic nucleus". That's still quite a few orders of magnitude down from a marble or basketball. (When a nuclear engineer talks about the cross-section of the broad side of a barn he's talking about a MUCH smaller barn than a farmer would be. B-) )
Even at earth-core pressures your black hole isn't going to be eating much matter - let alone enough to keep ahead of hawking radiation - unless its event horzon is getting up to a size comparable to molecules, rather than subhadronic particles. That requires a LOT more mass than the ions they're smashing together in the news item.
You will need: a microscopic black hole having enough mass not to evaporate instantly.
Actually: You need one big enough to evaporate more slowly than it absorbs matter on its trip. Given the tiny cross-section of even quite massive black holes and high radiation rates when they're small, this is a moderately large - and extremely massive - object.
The black hole will plummet through the ground, eating its way to the centre of the Earth and all the way through to the other side: then, it'll oscillate back, over and over like a might come to rest at the core due to the resistance of the matter it passes through, [...]
As it absorbs the matter it also absorbs its momentum. If it absorbs any non-trivial amount of material on its way through it doesn't get near the surface even on the high point of its first half-orbit.
[...] but it'll have riddled the planet full of holes long before then
Except very near the surface the planet will have collapsed the holes as fast as they form.
Also, it has to be moderately large by the time it gets to a near-stop at the core. While it's orbiting at about planetary diameter it's passing through lots of stuff. Once it's at the core it's depending on the pressure to push stuff to it. So it has to be big enough by then that the absorbtion from pressure beats the losses through hawking radiation.
But even if it evaporates it will have converted a significant mass to energy. Do this enough and something that wouldn't detectably affect the planetary radius could cause a LOT of volcanism - at some geologic time later when the heat makes it to the surface.
(Not strictly a joke, by the way. The literal translation of "black hole" was one of the common euphemisms for the body part in question in Russian, about the time the physics phenomenon was first being figured out. That made it difficult for the Russions to work on it. Black hole research remained out of favor in Russian physics departments until Russian physicists came up with a different term for them.)
Online tax software has proven to be very popular over the last couple years, so not everyone shares your qualms.
The tax rules change enough each year that you need a new tax package anyhow. You use it once, throw it away, and get a new copy the next time. Meanwhile the basic information about your financial state is stored primarily at home or at the company.
So using the tax software online is just a more convenient alternative to physically obtaining it and going through an install process just to use it once.
A better example for your case would be online banking. But even there the primary records are kept in the server farm of the institution that is performing the actual money manipulation and the network is simply performing communication, replacing mail and physical visits to the bank, with the server-side tools automating the repetitive functions of a human teller.
Note that I wasn't trying to support the administration's arguments with respect to the holding of prisoners - with which I disagree on several points - just to explain what I think is their reasoning, suplemented with some of my own.
I'm especially concerned about holding prisoners indefinitely, in an offshore facility, with no access to compulsory legal process to determine whether they are being held improperly or otherwise whether and under what terms they should be released.
IMHO the simplified decision-making process for the disposition of war prisoners is justified, to the extent it is at all, by the need to avoid spending resources on this process in mid-engagement. Once they're removed from the scene of battle and sitting in a long-term holding facility there's no further reason to hold off on determining, on a case-by-case process, whether holding each of them is proper.
And since one purpose having the judicial branch do the processing is as a check on misbehavior, errors, and overzealousnes by executive branch officeholders, letting the executive branch deny access to the judicial branch indefinitely is improper.
This stuff has been available for 15 YEARS
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Sunlight in a Tube
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· Score: 2, Informative
[couldn't] the prosecution of terrorism [] be left to the State Government(s) of whichever state was targeted using laws already on the books? If we captured the "20th hijacker" from 9/11 why couldn't he be indicted and prosecuted for about 2,800 counts of murder in the first degree and conspiracy under New York State law?
Yes you could prosecute them various crimes under state law. But that's not the point of the Patroit Act.
Criminal prosecutions require individualized suspicion before any evidence can be gathered. And criminal prosecutions require that a criminal act has ALREADY TAKEN PLACE. While planning to commit mass murder and taking at least one step toward implementing the plan IS a crime, the rules are such that some number of crimes actually go to completion before there's enough probable cause to even start an investigation.
Law enforcement is not so much to prevent crime as to deter it, by raising the risk to exceed the reward and removing from circulation those who repeatedly commit crimes anyhow. But the mechanisms to suppress crime can also be used for tyranny. A runaway government would do enormously more damage to the citizens than any concevable crime wave, and governments tend to run away. So strong limits were placed on what the government can do to fight crime. A significant number of robberies, rapes, murders, extortions, frauds, and other bad things result. But it's still a good tradeoff - even if you're dealing with organized crime.
But it's NOT a good tradeoff when dealing with a war. Armies marching, bombs detonating, surprise attacks, organized violence on a massive scale, repeating until it is forcibly stopped or the whole country is captured, subdued, and added to a foreign government's assets. Then you're already dealing with the downside of runaway government. So you do the best you can to fight back. That includes preemptive information collection and preemptive use of force on the basis of it, even when it's incomplete and error-prone.
War isn't the same as crime - even organized crime. The "kingpins" are governments and their high officials - who may be psychopathic. The bulk of the people you actually have to fight may be conscripts - and even volunteers may just be law-abiding citizens.
The "laws of war" are an attempt to minimize the damage to the people (and their land and resources) who were sucked into it. They work by setting up rules for "civilized" warfare - where torture, germs, poisons, and disguising soldiers as civilians are forbidden. But if one side uses these things and the other side doesn't, the side that does has an advantage. How do you convince anyone to abide by the rules in the face of this? By making it more costly to break them. So the laws of war ONLY apply to combatants who abide by them. Show insignia, use only conventional weapons (many of which - including assault rifles - are intended only to incapacatate rather than kill), don't use noncombatants as human shields, don't torture those you capture. Then your own people will likely be treated Geneva Convention style in turn. Even by non-signatories. Even if rogue personnel occasionally break the rules (but if caught are tried and punished for it).
The problem with terrorism is that it is neither crime nor war. Terrorists aren't soldiers: No direct responsibility to a government (or proto-government), no clear chain of command from an institution that can negotiate a peace, no visible insignia, hiding among civilians, kidnap and torture, attacks directed at non-combatant civilian populations, etc. It isn't ordinary crime: Blowing up skyscrapers, poisoning or nuking a city, and the like are far different from, say, arson for profit or murder for revenge.
With ideological motivations and an expectation of a heavenly reward, the combatants can't be swayed by the cost-benefit tradeoffs used in either law enforcement or "civilized war".
Terrorism is somewhere in between. And the tradeoffs in fighting it may
The oldest methods of "data storage" go back to the birth of written language. These involved either making impressions in the sand, or for more permanent storage making engravings into stone.
Although the closest analogy might be cuneform - the oldest known system of writing. It involved making indentations in clay with a wooden stick having a triangular end. You could get a triangle with or without a corner stretched out into a tail. (Looked a bit like ones and zeros. B-) )
Now if they use a medium paved with molecules that have two stable forms and use the probe to push them back and forth to store a bit, they'd have built the world's smallest abacus. B-)
Yeah, I remember my dad telling me that back in the early days of computing how computers used to be so big that they filled rooms as large as..... oh wait, Nevermind.
Gene Amdahl - IBM's archetect for much of the mainframe era - was a lower-level worker at an early company before he went to IBM. (Honeywell, I think it was, or maybe Univac.) While working there he watched in amazement as a computer was designed and delivered to a research institution and it wouldn't fit through the doors. They had to tear out the wall of the basement to get it in. (Then they had to tear it out again to get it OUT when they retired it. B-) )
One of the first things he decreed when he became IBM's archetect was the dimensions of the standard IBM "blue box" - the chassis module into which they built the pieces of all their mainframe products in decades. (Note that, unlike other vendors, it is NOT a standard multi-bay relay rack.)
It's a couple inches narrower than the standard elevator door and a couple inches shorter than the depth of a standard elevator car. B-)
It also locks you into the purchase, making it more difficult to return something that turns out to be less-than-suitable for its intended use (though not actually broken).
Another downside to this is that it will make the government bureaus leak like a sieve.
With patches for critical bugs being distributed internally, while they're unavailable for a month outside, large numbers of people througout government will be faced with temptation:
Take it home and protect your own computer. And your family members' computers. And your friends. And the neighbor who offers you a few bucks. One neighbor? Heck: Look at the SIZE of the potential black market.
But this is SUPPOSED to be kept secret until Microsoft releases it.
Oops!
One thing both interrogators and spy recruiters know: Getting that first, qualitative, break is that hard part. That first answer to a question, that first act that breaks a rule. Once you're over that hump it's all qualitative. You can ease up the slope to more important and more revealing things and there's no clear place for your victim to draw the line. (And if he somehow DOES draw the line, you can use his previous, smaler, exposures as a lever to cut him off from his suppport network and blackmail him into going ever further.)
This policy would create thousands of leakers - and thousands of people who can potentially be "turned" to espionage. It does it by devaluing the perception of responsibility for keeping information confidential, creating a financial incentive to leak, and encouraging acts that can be used as blackmail material by hostile intelligence recruiters.
Well, it sort of depends on what you mean by "primary systems". Do you mean target acquisition systems, communication systems, supply/order systems, personnel requsition systmes,etc.
In time of war those are ALL mission-critical, systems. Given the nature of the overall mission that also makes them life-critical, even if they wouldn't be in other contexts than military.
For instance: A keystroke-logger snagging an order for toilet papaer can expose troop movements and enable an enemy to prepare an ambush. This can change a successful surprise attack into a rout. Turning a battle can turn a war - and will certainly turn many family histories. If it's YOUR toilet-paper order that got intercepted, it's YOUR side that gets to order more body bags.
Ditto for office supplies (location and size of field HQ), food (location and number of military personnel), spare parts (location and size of repair depot, type of weapons to be used and amount of use - and thus wear and repair - expected), or just about anything else. Ditto for forwarding addresses. Ditto for just about anything else.
That's just interception. Think about what happens with malfunctions: Troops arrive witout their ammo, food, toilet paper, radio batteries,... Or with the WRONG ammo. Troops arrive with only summer uniforms in winter weather. I could go on all day.
This is not theoretical. It has happened repeatedly - in the paper analogy, or through decision-making foulups - for essentially all of the recorded history of war, and preparation for war. (Summer uniforms in winter happens a lot. For instance: the first winter of the Korean engagement.) Even in training. (Rumored recent examples: War games: Guy in charge of one color-army doesn't like latrines and orders a portapotty for his headquarters site from a local commercial supplier. Other side intercepts his cellphone call, learns the location of his HQ, and pounces. Pizza orders ditto.)
The military doesn't make every little bit of paperwork secret, and treat it like the survival of the country depends on its security and accuracy, just for the hell of it (or to make busywork for office clerks or hide official malfesance). It does this stuff in this way because it's necessary to save lives and win wars.
And for fuck sake can we stop building this things to predict the weather [...]
They're not building it "to predict weather". They're building it to do really large computation jobs.
Predicting weather is just one canonical example of a really hard and really useful thing to do that can be done well by throwing enough crunch at it.
Some others are fluid/aerodynamic modeling, chemical geometry modeling (especially protein folding and drug/receptor interactions), graphics rendering, mechanical structure and motion simulation, and subatomic particle interactions.
You'll notice that, in the blurb, they mentioned commercial uses of all of those except for the nuclear engineering applications.
Given that applied nuclear physics is heavily regulated worldwide, legal users are likely to be funded well enough to have their own machines, and governments get worried about such info traveling on open networks, IBM probably doesn't see much market for that service - or at least not much that they can sell into. B-)
This is the same computing model as was used in large "computing centers" - such as those in universities - back in the 1950s-1970s:
The machine you need is too expensive to buy yourself and then leave sitting around idle most of the time (like a pencil sharpener). So an institution buys and sets one up, and you rent chunks of its time. If the demand goes up the institution gets more rent and can buy upgrades.
You get a machine fast enough to do your too-big-for-humans computing task in a short time (so YOU don't spend most of your time waiting to do YOUR next piece of work, like a pencil sharpener). You only pay for the amount you use.
Billing by CPU seconds, I/O volume, memory usage (fast and files), etc.
In the '50s you took your work to the machine, by the '60s remote terminals were becoming available, by the '70s packet-switching networks were making machines available across continents.
And also by about the '70s you were starting to see both comm and crunch becomming so cheap that, for ordinary jobs, accounting by the slice no longer made economic sense. Better use of money scattering (cheap) computers around and making them wait than only having a few and making (expensive) people wait.
Paying for comm by usage metering never caught on (too bursty, wastes human attention worrying about the effect on the bill,...). Just buy the size of pipe you need to keep from being bottlenecked at peak load and leave it mostly idle. (You'd end up doing that by proxy anyhow - eliminate the middleman.) Client-server computing models moved institutions to a similar model for crunch and storage. General-user timesharing services gave way to networking services with unmetered shell accounts, which gave way to pure networking services, as the cheapening of computation evolved the personal terminal from a special purpose keyboard/display/comm box, first to terminal emulation on a dumb computer, then to one application on a progressively more powerful (though still small and cheap) computer functioning as a full-blown network node.
But there are still REALLY BIG jobs were the economics of a shared utility make perfect sense. IBM was once a primary provider of machines to such utilities within educational and business institutions. Now it's largely a business service provider. It seems approprate they should recognize the opportunity and use it as a way to make a profit by filling a gap at the high end of the computing market.
The key word here is "non-exclusive"... they're not treating it as property this time, more like the the town commons. If this works the way I think it will, there will be a low fee to cover administrative overhead, just like the Amateur Radio service.
Nobody is going to pay millions of dollars to have to cooperate and share... millions are only payed when a monopoly is guaranteed.
Unfortunately, some of the protocols (like WiMAX) assign timeslots. That means somebody arbitrates the timeslots. That somebody is the base station - or the station "performing the base station role". (When you're doing a WiMAX mesh it gets more complicated...)
Notice that the FCC is licensing the base stations...
The way I read this: WiMAX base stations need to perform local mastering functions in order to assign timeslots and subchannels in their region - while WiMAX non-base stations ("subscriber stations" in WiMAX standard-ese, but think of it as "the ordinary guys") defer administrative decisions to base stations. That means that, if you set up a contention-based protocol between base stations to divvy up bandwidth-authority in their vicinities, the base stations are in a position to cheat by asking for more than their share and the subscriber stations are not.
So the FCC is requiring base stations to obtain a license. This means they can identify them and subject them to greater scrutiny. And it means they can revoke the license if they're found to be cheating, and bring charges and levy fines against any who are violating the terms of their license, as well as anyone who operates a base station without getting a license.
This doesn't hamper people who want to set up a mesh of non-"base station" peers, provided they use a contention-based protocol that defers to any licensed base stations within range. No base stations & contention based means no license required.
Three 14-MHz (70ish Mbps to nearby sites under good conditions) and one 7-MHz (35ish Mbps ditto) WiMAX base stations - times several antenna sectors, times several base stations in an array like cellphone sites.
Or maybe split it differently (like 3 or 5 7MHz channels for cells and 2 or 1 14s for networking the cells) to allow better signal quality in the cells by preventing channel reuse for some distance behind the cell.
Or it could be that Fox is comparing centre and centre-right think tanks to right-wing think tanks, and you don't have a clue what "left-wing" is.
I was paraphrasing a section of the research report. They, not I, were the ones who came to the conclusion that Fox News was quoting left- and right- tanks about equally but using longer quotes from right- tanks.
The researchers in question, as near as I can tell, have constructed what may be the first OBJECTIVE measure of what is left-wing and what is right-wing (using the ADA ratings to define direction and the median congresscritter to define what constitutes the center - of US voter opinion). As such they seem to have more of a clue what "left-wing" is than anyone else on the planet.
Now if you want to redefine "center" to be somewhere to the right of Attilla the Hun or left of Joe Stalin you can shovel thinktanks between the left and right sides of the fence in your own analysis to your heart's content. But I don't think that such redifinitions are at all illuminating for the purposes of this discussion.
The issue at hand is whether Fox News is left, right, or center COMPARED TO THE US POPULATION, as estimated BY THOSE RESEARCHERS' METHODOLOGY - which admidts to multiple interpretations. I was pointing out how their results - and their own words - could be interpreted as a claim that Fox News was right in the middle - because the only right-bias was of a form that could be explained solely as making the quotes clear rather than giving one side more coverage.
Issue is not research. Issue is gov out of bounds
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Is Blogging Journalism?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
The preservation of freedom of the press requires a very open view of what is considered "the press". To define it too narrowly opens the door to a tremendous loss of freedoms that the constitution is designed to protect.
Exactly.
The constitutional protection of the press is to prevent suppression of viewpoints and information by the government. What the judge was ruling on is whether the state-level journalist protection law applied to this blog. Letting that government pick and chose what is press - in order to remove protections from those it declares "non-press" - is a very slippery slope.
Amount of research going into a story is immaterial. (Can you imagine this judge claiming CBS' _60 Minutes_ is not "Press" because of its inadequate research on some of their stories?) Besides: By this measure MacInTouch would qualify as Press.
The distribution medium is immaterial. (Can you imagine this judge declaring CBS News - TV, Radio, or their web site - is not "Press" because it's not printed on paper?)
Even if you use some measure of whether they're reporting news MacInTouch is pretty clearly "Press". They're publicly reporting new information of interest to a broad readership of more-or-less ordinary people, many of whom are using it to make consumer decisions about their next computer purchase. (Can you imagine this judge declaring, say, the Detroit Free Press to not be "Press" if it reports leaked information about GM's next model year cars?)
IMHO the judge erred, and I suspect (and hope) that he will be reversed on appeal - if he doesn't change his mind before that.
I can see how he might be trying to head off a situation where every cracker, corporate espionage operator, and extortionist puts up a web site in order to claim protection under the journalist shield laws. But IMHO such things should be easy to distinguish. Current shield laws don't protect the mainstream press in such a situation. So there's no need to declare a blog to be non-press to avoid the problem.
This thing should be decided solely on the same criteria that would be used if MacInTouch was a print journal.
Slashdot Mirror
As someone who has worked on archetecting this, let me clue you folks in.
Giving quality of service guarantees means you treat some packets better than others. There IS no alternaitve.
You do this because some packets are more VALUABLE than others. Voice packets, for example, are FAR more valuable the file transfer packets - but only if they receive preferential handling. Delays and drops just slightly slow down a file transfer, but play HELL with a phone call.
Voice packets are also a drop in the ocean. A two-way phone call, with no compression whatsoever, is less than a megabyte of payload per HOUR. So giving its packets preference over, say, file transfers, won't even be noticed. Even giving it priority over best-effort VOICE traffic won't be noticed - except maybe in the very narrow pipe from the edge to the customer - because it won't interfere when there are no fat transfers going on, and when there ARE fat transfers the best-effort voice connection will still be broken.
If some packets are to be treated better than others because they're more valuable, it's fair to charge more for them. (Why should people pay as much for a packet that gets second-class treatment?) This also lets them subsidize the plumbing for the second-class packets.
ISPs only get a little for supplying fat dumb connectivity. They're looking for ways to sell "value-added services" to enhance their revenue. Providing a phone-network quality connection at far less than phone-company costs and prices is a good deal both for them and their customers - they can split the savings with their customers and both come out ahead.
If they're providing an extra-cost VoIP service, they are involved, not just in the payload traffic, but in the connection signaling. This makes it easy to identify the payload flows that need special handling. To do the same for other people's traffic they'd have to spy on the traffic to identify it - and then give it preference equivalent to their own extra-cost packets, for free? Why should they do extra work for free to help their competition? (Especially when it involves spying on the traffic and its routing, which some people might not want?)
What CAN be done, at a profit all around, is one of the following:
- The VoIP providers and ISPs can engage in agreements to handle each other's voice traffic at higher quality of service, and split the extra fee.
- Protocols can be arranged for a client application - VoIP or otherwise - to negotiate higher quality of service (at a higher fee) for its flows, and the ISPs can again engage in suitable contracts to handle the traffic prefferentially and split the extra fee. (This generalizes the service, uncoupling it from strictly VoIP applications.)
You wouldn't have to have a single tier of extra-price service, either. There are different levels, at different price points, that would be useful. (Even within VoIP: POTS emulation at a level that can handle appliances like FAX machines and 56k modems {without reencoding bridges} requires very tight guarantees - essentially every packet must go through with a tight limit on delay variability. Something suitable for compressed voice can accept more drops and jitter.)
And anybody - peer-to-peer or budget service - who doesn't want to pay extra to get their packets special treatment can still take best-effort delivery, and get service about like they get now. VoIP traffic is a very small drop in a very large bucket. Except at the very edge (like a narrow-band drop from the edge router to the customer site), giving company VoIP packets preference over non-company VoIP packets won't appreciably affect the latter: They'll still get through if there's no fat application competing with them, and still get creamed when you're downloading a file or browsing the web.
Nice justification for submitting a baseball story review to /.
I have zero interest in sports. Yet I find this item interesting.
For starters, it's the first indication I've seen on a public forum that _Juiced_ took a political position against drug bans. And that it had already raised some of the issues that I've been meaning to raise since the flap started - but the media ignored them.
Anti-drug laws block, not just "harmful" drugs, but beneficial ones. Drugs that treat or cure a breakdown of ordinary health are permitted - after ENORMOUSLY expensive hoops are jumped through. But drugs that enhance life are not.
Suppose drugs are developed to retard or reverse aging, enhance strength, or boost intelligence, without non-existant detrimental side-effects (or side-effects so benign that their use is a massive net gain)? Under the current regulatory regime those drugs could not be used for such a purpose, and couldn't be marketed AT ALL unless they had some OTHER use. It is "natural" to be dumber and weaker than we COULD be, to become infirm, pain-ridden, and then dead after only a few decades. So biotech need not attempt to enhance life or prolong vigor - governments won't approve it and investors won't be able to make a return.
Even with "harmful" drugs most of the harm is not from the drug, but side-effects from the bans. Availability only from ciminal sources (who sell impure product, try to move users to more lucrative - and more harmful - products, and settle disputes with violence), artificially inflated prices (leading to massive theft to support drug dosages that could be paid for by pocket change wtih legal products), etc.
Where does the constitution even authorize the government to limit what people can put in their bodies? (They had to pass a CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT to authorize this for alcohol. Why not other "substances"?) Where does it authorize the government to penalize doctors who prescribe "too many painkillers"? To ban drugs that MIGHT enhance and/or prolong life? Or to ban drugs that just make it more fun?
The courts have found an argument that blocks the government from interfering in the doctor-patient relationship when the "treatment" is an abortion. Why does the same argument not apply to prescribing painkillers? Strength-enhancers? Mood boosters?
This is NOT just a "baseball story". It is a biotech story. And a political story. It is "stuff that matters".
Others have already pointed out how to resolve the perceived inconsistency.
I'd like to add, though, that when you dig into the mechanisms you find that there is a legal inconsistency, and a moral inconsistency, at the root of the matter.
The moral inconsistency is with regard to the copyright holder's (presumed) intent:
In the case of music and other "content industry" files, the (presumed) intent of the copyright holder is to sell the material for money or other benefits.
In the case of the GPL the (presumed) intent of the copyright holder on the base material was to freely distribute the material, obtaining less direct benefits (satisfaction, reputation, improving humanity's situation, external support of the code, access to other code on the same terms, etc.)
The GPL is used, rather than public domain, to head off a scenario where someone would write a fix or upgrade, copyright THAT, and keep the original author and the rest of humanity from using it - at all, without restrictions, and/or without paying a fee.
The underlying conflict, both in law and possibly in morality, is that distributing outside the license terms violates the intent of the author. This means that arguments against the content industry's restrictions potentially could be turned against the GPL and other open-source licenses.
But one of the beauties of an open-source license is that most SUCCESSFUL attack on copyright restrictions shouldn't damage the original point of the license. If you weaken the ability of copyright owners to control copying, you also weaken the ability of the creators of derived works to block the original authors and the rest of humanity from replicating their fixes and improvements. So the original point of the GPL - not to force disclosure, but to block attempts to lock up the free software base against improvement and reverse-engineering - may still be maintained.
It'll still be lame.
[] Harleys still use pushrod tech - because it [sounds and] feels cool to ride. You don't get that groin-tweaking torque out of [some lower-power alternatives]
Once you get the torque up to where the wheels start to spin there's nowhere higher to go. That depends solely on the coefficient of friction of the tire material against the road, and you'll get the same accelleration out of the bike whether it weighs a half-ton or is lighter than a pair of boots.
Of course you won't get the same vibration in your seat, and the dynamics of wheelies and other aspects of the ride will change if the dimensions, mass, and wheel weight change. And you don't get the jerk when you engage the clutch on a spinning gas engine. But for pure torque an electric motor can't be beaten.
I think that the top speed of 50 mph might not be that popular either.
That also implies that the accelleration is pretty puny, too. One of the points of motorcycles is that they can accellerate drastically to pull ahead out of trouble. (That helps to make up for not being able to brake heavily without risking going down.)
It's also one of the points of electric-motor drive: A motor can put out a LOT of torque.
Right now it's a glorified lazy-man's bicycle, suitable for in-town commuting only.
Bump up the size of the fuel cell by a factor of 4 to get crusing speed up to highway levels and enable at-speed hill climbing, bump the size of the motor and controller by a factor of 10 or so and add a supercapacitor so you can power up to speed quicly and zip out of impending accidents. Then you'll have a serious road macine.
Extremely massive? Yes. Moderately large? No. IANAAP, but there's a Niven short story book which claims that a neutron star with the density of Sol would be roughly the size of a baseball.
I'm sorry I was confusing. By "moderately large" I mean "in comparison to a subatomic particle or an atomic nucleus". That's still quite a few orders of magnitude down from a marble or basketball. (When a nuclear engineer talks about the cross-section of the broad side of a barn he's talking about a MUCH smaller barn than a farmer would be. B-) )
Even at earth-core pressures your black hole isn't going to be eating much matter - let alone enough to keep ahead of hawking radiation - unless its event horzon is getting up to a size comparable to molecules, rather than subhadronic particles. That requires a LOT more mass than the ions they're smashing together in the news item.
You will need: a microscopic black hole having enough mass not to evaporate instantly.
Actually: You need one big enough to evaporate more slowly than it absorbs matter on its trip. Given the tiny cross-section of even quite massive black holes and high radiation rates when they're small, this is a moderately large - and extremely massive - object.
The black hole will plummet through the ground, eating its way to the centre of the Earth and all the way through to the other side: then, it'll oscillate back, over and over like a might come to rest at the core due to the resistance of the matter it passes through, [...]
As it absorbs the matter it also absorbs its momentum. If it absorbs any non-trivial amount of material on its way through it doesn't get near the surface even on the high point of its first half-orbit.
[...] but it'll have riddled the planet full of holes long before then
Except very near the surface the planet will have collapsed the holes as fast as they form.
Also, it has to be moderately large by the time it gets to a near-stop at the core. While it's orbiting at about planetary diameter it's passing through lots of stuff. Once it's at the core it's depending on the pressure to push stuff to it. So it has to be big enough by then that the absorbtion from pressure beats the losses through hawking radiation.
But even if it evaporates it will have converted a significant mass to energy. Do this enough and something that wouldn't detectably affect the planetary radius could cause a LOT of volcanism - at some geologic time later when the heat makes it to the surface.
Your "black hole" is a little farther down. B-)
(Not strictly a joke, by the way. The literal translation of "black hole" was one of the common euphemisms for the body part in question in Russian, about the time the physics phenomenon was first being figured out. That made it difficult for the Russions to work on it. Black hole research remained out of favor in Russian physics departments until Russian physicists came up with a different term for them.)
Online tax software has proven to be very popular over the last couple years, so not everyone shares your qualms.
The tax rules change enough each year that you need a new tax package anyhow. You use it once, throw it away, and get a new copy the next time. Meanwhile the basic information about your financial state is stored primarily at home or at the company.
So using the tax software online is just a more convenient alternative to physically obtaining it and going through an install process just to use it once.
A better example for your case would be online banking. But even there the primary records are kept in the server farm of the institution that is performing the actual money manipulation and the network is simply performing communication, replacing mail and physical visits to the bank, with the server-side tools automating the repetitive functions of a human teller.
I agree with you completely.
Note that I wasn't trying to support the administration's arguments with respect to the holding of prisoners - with which I disagree on several points - just to explain what I think is their reasoning, suplemented with some of my own.
I'm especially concerned about holding prisoners indefinitely, in an offshore facility, with no access to compulsory legal process to determine whether they are being held improperly or otherwise whether and under what terms they should be released.
IMHO the simplified decision-making process for the disposition of war prisoners is justified, to the extent it is at all, by the need to avoid spending resources on this process in mid-engagement. Once they're removed from the scene of battle and sitting in a long-term holding facility there's no further reason to hold off on determining, on a case-by-case process, whether holding each of them is proper.
And since one purpose having the judicial branch do the processing is as a check on misbehavior, errors, and overzealousnes by executive branch officeholders, letting the executive branch deny access to the judicial branch indefinitely is improper.
This stuff has been available for 15 years.
Has there been a breakthrough? A cost drop? Or is it just that Oak Ridge started playing with it?
[couldn't] the prosecution of terrorism [] be left to the State Government(s) of whichever state was targeted using laws already on the books? If we captured the "20th hijacker" from 9/11 why couldn't he be indicted and prosecuted for about 2,800 counts of murder in the first degree and conspiracy under New York State law?
Yes you could prosecute them various crimes under state law. But that's not the point of the Patroit Act.
Criminal prosecutions require individualized suspicion before any evidence can be gathered. And criminal prosecutions require that a criminal act has ALREADY TAKEN PLACE. While planning to commit mass murder and taking at least one step toward implementing the plan IS a crime, the rules are such that some number of crimes actually go to completion before there's enough probable cause to even start an investigation.
Law enforcement is not so much to prevent crime as to deter it, by raising the risk to exceed the reward and removing from circulation those who repeatedly commit crimes anyhow. But the mechanisms to suppress crime can also be used for tyranny. A runaway government would do enormously more damage to the citizens than any concevable crime wave, and governments tend to run away. So strong limits were placed on what the government can do to fight crime. A significant number of robberies, rapes, murders, extortions, frauds, and other bad things result. But it's still a good tradeoff - even if you're dealing with organized crime.
But it's NOT a good tradeoff when dealing with a war. Armies marching, bombs detonating, surprise attacks, organized violence on a massive scale, repeating until it is forcibly stopped or the whole country is captured, subdued, and added to a foreign government's assets. Then you're already dealing with the downside of runaway government. So you do the best you can to fight back. That includes preemptive information collection and preemptive use of force on the basis of it, even when it's incomplete and error-prone.
War isn't the same as crime - even organized crime. The "kingpins" are governments and their high officials - who may be psychopathic. The bulk of the people you actually have to fight may be conscripts - and even volunteers may just be law-abiding citizens.
The "laws of war" are an attempt to minimize the damage to the people (and their land and resources) who were sucked into it. They work by setting up rules for "civilized" warfare - where torture, germs, poisons, and disguising soldiers as civilians are forbidden. But if one side uses these things and the other side doesn't, the side that does has an advantage. How do you convince anyone to abide by the rules in the face of this? By making it more costly to break them. So the laws of war ONLY apply to combatants who abide by them. Show insignia, use only conventional weapons (many of which - including assault rifles - are intended only to incapacatate rather than kill), don't use noncombatants as human shields, don't torture those you capture. Then your own people will likely be treated Geneva Convention style in turn. Even by non-signatories. Even if rogue personnel occasionally break the rules (but if caught are tried and punished for it).
The problem with terrorism is that it is neither crime nor war. Terrorists aren't soldiers: No direct responsibility to a government (or proto-government), no clear chain of command from an institution that can negotiate a peace, no visible insignia, hiding among civilians, kidnap and torture, attacks directed at non-combatant civilian populations, etc. It isn't ordinary crime: Blowing up skyscrapers, poisoning or nuking a city, and the like are far different from, say, arson for profit or murder for revenge.
With ideological motivations and an expectation of a heavenly reward, the combatants can't be swayed by the cost-benefit tradeoffs used in either law enforcement or "civilized war".
Terrorism is somewhere in between. And the tradeoffs in fighting it may
The oldest methods of "data storage" go back to the birth of written language. These involved either making impressions in the sand, or for more permanent storage making engravings into stone.
Although the closest analogy might be cuneform - the oldest known system of writing. It involved making indentations in clay with a wooden stick having a triangular end. You could get a triangle with or without a corner stretched out into a tail. (Looked a bit like ones and zeros. B-) )
Now if they use a medium paved with molecules that have two stable forms and use the probe to push them back and forth to store a bit, they'd have built the world's smallest abacus. B-)
Yeah, I remember my dad telling me that back in the early days of computing how computers used to be so big that they filled rooms as large as..... oh wait, Nevermind.
Gene Amdahl - IBM's archetect for much of the mainframe era - was a lower-level worker at an early company before he went to IBM. (Honeywell, I think it was, or maybe Univac.) While working there he watched in amazement as a computer was designed and delivered to a research institution and it wouldn't fit through the doors. They had to tear out the wall of the basement to get it in. (Then they had to tear it out again to get it OUT when they retired it. B-) )
One of the first things he decreed when he became IBM's archetect was the dimensions of the standard IBM "blue box" - the chassis module into which they built the pieces of all their mainframe products in decades. (Note that, unlike other vendors, it is NOT a standard multi-bay relay rack.)
It's a couple inches narrower than the standard elevator door and a couple inches shorter than the depth of a standard elevator car. B-)
It also locks you into the purchase, making it more difficult to return something that turns out to be less-than-suitable for its intended use (though not actually broken).
Another downside to this is that it will make the government bureaus leak like a sieve.
With patches for critical bugs being distributed internally, while they're unavailable for a month outside, large numbers of people througout government will be faced with temptation:
Take it home and protect your own computer. And your family members' computers. And your friends. And the neighbor who offers you a few bucks. One neighbor? Heck: Look at the SIZE of the potential black market.
But this is SUPPOSED to be kept secret until Microsoft releases it.
Oops!
One thing both interrogators and spy recruiters know: Getting that first, qualitative, break is that hard part. That first answer to a question, that first act that breaks a rule. Once you're over that hump it's all qualitative. You can ease up the slope to more important and more revealing things and there's no clear place for your victim to draw the line. (And if he somehow DOES draw the line, you can use his previous, smaler, exposures as a lever to cut him off from his suppport network and blackmail him into going ever further.)
This policy would create thousands of leakers - and thousands of people who can potentially be "turned" to espionage. It does it by devaluing the perception of responsibility for keeping information confidential, creating a financial incentive to leak, and encouraging acts that can be used as blackmail material by hostile intelligence recruiters.
Well, it sort of depends on what you mean by "primary systems". Do you mean target acquisition systems, communication systems, supply/order systems, personnel requsition systmes,etc.
... Or with the WRONG ammo. Troops arrive with only summer uniforms in winter weather. I could go on all day.
In time of war those are ALL mission-critical, systems. Given the nature of the overall mission that also makes them life-critical, even if they wouldn't be in other contexts than military.
For instance: A keystroke-logger snagging an order for toilet papaer can expose troop movements and enable an enemy to prepare an ambush. This can change a successful surprise attack into a rout. Turning a battle can turn a war - and will certainly turn many family histories. If it's YOUR toilet-paper order that got intercepted, it's YOUR side that gets to order more body bags.
Ditto for office supplies (location and size of field HQ), food (location and number of military personnel), spare parts (location and size of repair depot, type of weapons to be used and amount of use - and thus wear and repair - expected), or just about anything else. Ditto for forwarding addresses. Ditto for just about anything else.
That's just interception. Think about what happens with malfunctions: Troops arrive witout their ammo, food, toilet paper, radio batteries,
This is not theoretical. It has happened repeatedly - in the paper analogy, or through decision-making foulups - for essentially all of the recorded history of war, and preparation for war. (Summer uniforms in winter happens a lot. For instance: the first winter of the Korean engagement.) Even in training. (Rumored recent examples: War games: Guy in charge of one color-army doesn't like latrines and orders a portapotty for his headquarters site from a local commercial supplier. Other side intercepts his cellphone call, learns the location of his HQ, and pounces. Pizza orders ditto.)
The military doesn't make every little bit of paperwork secret, and treat it like the survival of the country depends on its security and accuracy, just for the hell of it (or to make busywork for office clerks or hide official malfesance). It does this stuff in this way because it's necessary to save lives and win wars.
And for fuck sake can we stop building this things to predict the weather [...]
They're not building it "to predict weather". They're building it to do really large computation jobs.
Predicting weather is just one canonical example of a really hard and really useful thing to do that can be done well by throwing enough crunch at it.
Some others are fluid/aerodynamic modeling, chemical geometry modeling (especially protein folding and drug/receptor interactions), graphics rendering, mechanical structure and motion simulation, and subatomic particle interactions.
You'll notice that, in the blurb, they mentioned commercial uses of all of those except for the nuclear engineering applications.
Given that applied nuclear physics is heavily regulated worldwide, legal users are likely to be funded well enough to have their own machines, and governments get worried about such info traveling on open networks, IBM probably doesn't see much market for that service - or at least not much that they can sell into. B-)
This is the same computing model as was used in large "computing centers" - such as those in universities - back in the 1950s-1970s:
...). Just buy the size of pipe you need to keep from being bottlenecked at peak load and leave it mostly idle. (You'd end up doing that by proxy anyhow - eliminate the middleman.) Client-server computing models moved institutions to a similar model for crunch and storage. General-user timesharing services gave way to networking services with unmetered shell accounts, which gave way to pure networking services, as the cheapening of computation evolved the personal terminal from a special purpose keyboard/display/comm box, first to terminal emulation on a dumb computer, then to one application on a progressively more powerful (though still small and cheap) computer functioning as a full-blown network node.
The machine you need is too expensive to buy yourself and then leave sitting around idle most of the time (like a pencil sharpener). So an institution buys and sets one up, and you rent chunks of its time. If the demand goes up the institution gets more rent and can buy upgrades.
You get a machine fast enough to do your too-big-for-humans computing task in a short time (so YOU don't spend most of your time waiting to do YOUR next piece of work, like a pencil sharpener). You only pay for the amount you use.
Billing by CPU seconds, I/O volume, memory usage (fast and files), etc.
In the '50s you took your work to the machine, by the '60s remote terminals were becoming available, by the '70s packet-switching networks were making machines available across continents.
And also by about the '70s you were starting to see both comm and crunch becomming so cheap that, for ordinary jobs, accounting by the slice no longer made economic sense. Better use of money scattering (cheap) computers around and making them wait than only having a few and making (expensive) people wait.
Paying for comm by usage metering never caught on (too bursty, wastes human attention worrying about the effect on the bill,
But there are still REALLY BIG jobs were the economics of a shared utility make perfect sense. IBM was once a primary provider of machines to such utilities within educational and business institutions. Now it's largely a business service provider. It seems approprate they should recognize the opportunity and use it as a way to make a profit by filling a gap at the high end of the computing market.
... a beowulf cluster of THOSE puppies?
For starters, think of the size of the network pipes you'd need between them. (Image of a bundle of optical fibers the size of a watermain.)
Awesome!
... we'd have to invent one."
But one of us already did. B-)
The key word here is "non-exclusive"... they're not treating it as property this time, more like the the town commons. If this works the way I think it will, there will be a low fee to cover administrative overhead, just like the Amateur Radio service.
Nobody is going to pay millions of dollars to have to cooperate and share... millions are only payed when a monopoly is guaranteed.
Unfortunately, some of the protocols (like WiMAX) assign timeslots. That means somebody arbitrates the timeslots. That somebody is the base station - or the station "performing the base station role". (When you're doing a WiMAX mesh it gets more complicated...)
Notice that the FCC is licensing the base stations...
The way I read this: WiMAX base stations need to perform local mastering functions in order to assign timeslots and subchannels in their region - while WiMAX non-base stations ("subscriber stations" in WiMAX standard-ese, but think of it as "the ordinary guys") defer administrative decisions to base stations. That means that, if you set up a contention-based protocol between base stations to divvy up bandwidth-authority in their vicinities, the base stations are in a position to cheat by asking for more than their share and the subscriber stations are not.
So the FCC is requiring base stations to obtain a license. This means they can identify them and subject them to greater scrutiny. And it means they can revoke the license if they're found to be cheating, and bring charges and levy fines against any who are violating the terms of their license, as well as anyone who operates a base station without getting a license.
This doesn't hamper people who want to set up a mesh of non-"base station" peers, provided they use a contention-based protocol that defers to any licensed base stations within range. No base stations & contention based means no license required.
A whole 50MHz chunk of bandwidth?
What would -you- do with all of it?
Three 14-MHz (70ish Mbps to nearby sites under good conditions) and one 7-MHz (35ish Mbps ditto) WiMAX base stations - times several antenna sectors, times several base stations in an array like cellphone sites.
Or maybe split it differently (like 3 or 5 7MHz channels for cells and 2 or 1 14s for networking the cells) to allow better signal quality in the cells by preventing channel reuse for some distance behind the cell.
You could (un)wire a whole city that way.
Or it could be that Fox is comparing centre and centre-right think tanks to right-wing think tanks, and you don't have a clue what "left-wing" is.
I was paraphrasing a section of the research report. They, not I, were the ones who came to the conclusion that Fox News was quoting left- and right- tanks about equally but using longer quotes from right- tanks.
The researchers in question, as near as I can tell, have constructed what may be the first OBJECTIVE measure of what is left-wing and what is right-wing (using the ADA ratings to define direction and the median congresscritter to define what constitutes the center - of US voter opinion). As such they seem to have more of a clue what "left-wing" is than anyone else on the planet.
Now if you want to redefine "center" to be somewhere to the right of Attilla the Hun or left of Joe Stalin you can shovel thinktanks between the left and right sides of the fence in your own analysis to your heart's content. But I don't think that such redifinitions are at all illuminating for the purposes of this discussion.
The issue at hand is whether Fox News is left, right, or center COMPARED TO THE US POPULATION, as estimated BY THOSE RESEARCHERS' METHODOLOGY - which admidts to multiple interpretations. I was pointing out how their results - and their own words - could be interpreted as a claim that Fox News was right in the middle - because the only right-bias was of a form that could be explained solely as making the quotes clear rather than giving one side more coverage.
The preservation of freedom of the press requires a very open view of what is considered "the press". To define it too narrowly opens the door to a tremendous loss of freedoms that the constitution is designed to protect.
Exactly.
The constitutional protection of the press is to prevent suppression of viewpoints and information by the government. What the judge was ruling on is whether the state-level journalist protection law applied to this blog. Letting that government pick and chose what is press - in order to remove protections from those it declares "non-press" - is a very slippery slope.
Amount of research going into a story is immaterial. (Can you imagine this judge claiming CBS' _60 Minutes_ is not "Press" because of its inadequate research on some of their stories?) Besides: By this measure MacInTouch would qualify as Press.
The distribution medium is immaterial. (Can you imagine this judge declaring CBS News - TV, Radio, or their web site - is not "Press" because it's not printed on paper?)
Even if you use some measure of whether they're reporting news MacInTouch is pretty clearly "Press". They're publicly reporting new information of interest to a broad readership of more-or-less ordinary people, many of whom are using it to make consumer decisions about their next computer purchase. (Can you imagine this judge declaring, say, the Detroit Free Press to not be "Press" if it reports leaked information about GM's next model year cars?)
IMHO the judge erred, and I suspect (and hope) that he will be reversed on appeal - if he doesn't change his mind before that.
I can see how he might be trying to head off a situation where every cracker, corporate espionage operator, and extortionist puts up a web site in order to claim protection under the journalist shield laws. But IMHO such things should be easy to distinguish. Current shield laws don't protect the mainstream press in such a situation. So there's no need to declare a blog to be non-press to avoid the problem.
This thing should be decided solely on the same criteria that would be used if MacInTouch was a print journal.