Just because the code CAN be fixed by someone else, doesn't mean it WOULD be.
To summarize that blast of anti-logic: "CAN" != "WOULD", therefore "CAN" = "CAN'T"
Alrighty then!
Relying on ANY software is stupid, by that logic, since if the author decides to screw me around, not fix a bug, or just generally bugger off and move on to a new project, I'm JUST as screwed as if it were MS who did it.
No. If MS discontinues the software, you can never get upgrades again. It would be slow and expensive to reverse-engineer the binary code, and illegal to distribute those fixes.
If Linux is discontinued, new changes can legally happen, and they WILL happen so long as there is a marginal economic incentive to doing so.
If you desire a change in a program, and that change needs $500 worth of programmer-effort, and it's a Free Software program, then you will recieve your new upgrade in 2-3 weeks. But if it's a traditional proprietary program, you must find the copyright holder and ask him to make the change.
If he demands $50,000 to do that work, you have no way to go to the free market and shop around for a better deal. It's a monopoly, and the typical bad effects of a monopolist begin to appear.
I can name four games with heavy gunplay with realistic weapons that are all rated Teen by the ESRB: Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, Call of Duty, Battlefield 1942, Battlefield Vietnam. All of these games get a Teen rating because they lack blood.
Um, all of those are about real wars where real TEENS were drafted and sent to fight to the death on the frontlines.
Something is wrong if you think a person shouldn't SEE graphic violence, but then you think 2-3 years later its fine for him to go and DO IT.
The reason for the forehead transformation on Buffy was to make vampires more rodent-like.
If you say so, although rodents don't actually have lumpy foreheads. I can think of many simpler features to suggest rat similarity, such as, a pointy nose, enlarged incisors, or just GIANT WHISKERS.
(Vampires are usually depicted with enlarged canines like a wolf, instead of big incisors like a rodent)
The mythology of the Buffy series includes a Lovecraftian concept of demons pre-dating humans on Earth,
That's not Lovecraftian. That's a Christan concept- check Isaiah, or Genesis- noticing that the Serpent was already there before Adam & Eve. Also, Lovecraft never wrote a story involving a demon on Earth.
Other vampires on the show were younger and tended to look more human, as they are "less pure" than The Master was.
I didn't pay much attention, but in the episode where she tried (and failed) to destroy Dracula it was implied he was unusually old, but he didn't look any more deformed than the new vampires she demolishes at the rate of 3-5 per episode.
On the other hand, shows like "buffy the vampire slayer" and "dark angel" had remarkably consistent, convincing and affordable special effects from start to finish.
Actually, Buffy gave vampires forehead wrinkles remarkably similar to those on a Klingon, which had no relationship to pre-existing vampire mythology. So I didn't find them convincing at all- give me the pale, haughty beauties of Bram Stoker and Anne Rice any day.
(Additionally, that program also made vampires distintegrate when stabbed through the chest, a plot and prop convenience that also is different from vampire legends, but similar to what happened to Klingons when Kirk zapped his phaser at them)
I'm sure that at some point, people would have started bringing things through that the machines wouldn't have caught, such as plastic explosives, but from what I've heard, the hijackers had guns/knives/etc, all metallic ojbects, and very detectable even by an 85 year old machine.
In 1998, some people repeatedly travelled on USA domestic flights carrying folding knives with 8.5 cm blades. The inspectors were aware, they just didn't care, because the rules didn't say they should.
Considering the American defense system isn't allowed to shoot down planes unless they're headed for the White House or what have you, that would have made little difference.
False. For an example, look at the Payne Stewart incident from 1999. When that plane went out of control, multiple Air National Guard fighters followed alongside, ready to shoot it if it started to threaten Pierre, SD.
Back in 1987, the world laughed at the pathetic Russian military when an unauthorized Cessna flew into the heart of their capital. The USA felt it was quite superior to that interception showing, but it turned out to be little better.
If F-15 interceptors had been launched within 5 minutes of the airliner's dropping communication and going off course, they could easily have blocked all attacks.
That kind of vigilance should've been standard procedure.
What should have the government done?
On a more general note, Bush should have continued or strengthened Clinton's harsh policies towards Afganistan, instead of giving them tens of millions of dollars as free gifts.
No, that wouldn't have stopped the specific attacks, but it would've shown his brain was in the right place.
The reason it worked is because no one imagined it could or would be done.
That's a horrible lie. Multiple people have imagined 5+ years ago: not merely authors like Tom Clancy and Chris Carter, but security professionals as well.
Likewise, now that we have a practical example of an airplane as a instrument of death, it is not going to be so easy to subdue passengers who know death is imminent in either case.
That is, prehaps, a comforting illusion. True, passengers will now be more physically aggressive in resisting that particular attack. But it isn't difficult to devise concealable weapons that will let one man defeat 80 (so long as they attack in a line). Far more important is that pilots now have a better physical barrier between themselves and the passengers.
However, none of that really matters. It's not even necessary to capture a plane in-flight. A terrorist with billionare-level resources can charter, rent, or buy his own plane. Or a few men with guns can steal it off a small airstrip. Loading it with TNT can compensate some for the reduced size... plus, large targets that get the full effect of a big plane are rarer and harder to find.
A 20-seat business jet flying through the stands of a baseball game is plenty of dead victims for a terrorist's needs.
ab means left shift a by b bits. Overriding it to now mean write to a stream is a horrible and confusing idea.
Yeah, because when I saw cout << "hello" I naturally assumed it was trying to shift the standard input file handle left by hello bits.
Give it up, C++ is 15 years old, and << has meant "write to a stream" for that entire time.
Saying that operator overloading shouldn't be used because the function's behavior might not be like the symbol's traditional meaning is the same as saying I shouldn't be allowed to name my own functions, because I might call something a fake description.
And because C++ supports several programming paradigms, you can do object-oriented programming, functional programming and/or generic programming - often all at the same time.
No, C++ does not support functional programming. Functions are not first-class concepts of C or C++. If they were, it would be possible for you to pass functions as arguments and return functions as output. That works with function constants (as pointers to a function written by the programmer), but not with functions defined at runtime.
Just try to make a straightforward translation of a functional program from Scheme to C++. It can't be done. Function pointers as objects which imitate functions give you some of the benefits of functional programming for a reduced problem domain, but aren't enough to deserve the "FP" name.
PS. If you try hard, you can make a "function object" with enough power to represent almost-arbitrarily functions defined at runtime. But that would be an example of "All programs of sufficient complexity eventually grow to include a LISP interpreter"
AC: Anyone can use a number of the general purpose AOP languages like AspectJ (theres even AspectScheme).
It is true that the patent owner provided a license to use it in AspectJ.
AC Moreover, you can program in aspect style without any special language mechanisms.
Yes, anyone can go do that. You'll just be breaking the law, which many people find not much of an obstacle. The license Xerox gave to AspectJ only applies to the implementation they provided. Re-implementing those kinds of features yourself is worthy of a lawsuit.
AC: The patents are no problem at all
Do your own research, then. Type "aspectj" "patent" into google.com and see what comes up. (You'll get articles like this, which straightforwardly explains that AspectJ is an implementation of someone's patent)
Everyone has known the BMI was simply *incorrect* since it came out, now the governement is just figuring it out?
Well no. The bad part is, they're not noticing that BMI is an incorrect way to measure obesity. They're instead deciding that since higher BMI doesn't kill people, obesity must not really be dangerous. The Republicans controlling the federal government may use this opportunity to score libertarian-points by knocking off some anti-obesity "nanny state" policies of the FDA and CDC.
This is about as sensible as the time the pilot of a propeller airplane reported he had broken the sound barrier- instead of complaining that his airspeed gauge was broken.
Although it's true that BMI is proportional to obesity for people of the same organic density, for general use you can come closer simply by measuring the circumference of a subject's waist.
in 20 years time when they are long obsolete and the software that converts them won't run on any modern hardware?
The passage of time makes software run on MORE hardware platforms, not less. 20 years ago I could run Super Mario Bros on exactly one model of hardware. Today, it can be precisely emulated on any PC, PDA, and even some phones.
I call BS on this "proven" fact that you so claim. In fact, I challange you to site factual and multi references.
Sorry, but it's the kind of thing that if you can't observe for yourself is true, you are hopeless.
Here's a hint though: EVERYTHING costs money. Lying is part of everything...
As for republicans having more money. Perhaps maybe thier supportes do, but I really doubt republicans in office have more wealth then a democrat in office
Yes, of course, that's the point. Politicians very rarely use their personal wealth to fund advertising. It all comes from supporter donations, and the Republican supporters have more money to donate.
Two words: political leverage. "See how outraged our citizens are? You must be more conciliatory towards us!"
That's part of it. But the PROC isn't only trying to influence Japan and the "international community", but also their own citizens. By encouraging some pseudo-grassroots anti-Japan protests, they get more of their citizens angry at 70-year-old Japanese warcrimes.
That keeps them distracted from remembering the 40-year-old PROC peacecrimes, which coincidentally had 10,000 times as many victims as anything the Japanese did.
Quite funny to watch China accuse Japan of whitewashing history, when China has whitewashed its more recent, more local history to a much greater extent.
Here's hoping that most Congresspeople see this bill for what it is - lunacy.
Almost as lunatic as giving away a ton of public-owned TV spectrum rights, instead of auctioning them for the estimated $40,000,000,000 they might have gone for. Oh, and two senators decided to vote against that one.
The net result would be a focus on profitable ventures, an attentiveness to urban and densely populated areas (i.e., those who will pay), and complete ignorance of rural areas and major swaths of the country (except where profitable for, e.g., commercial food growers).
Weather forecasting doesn't work that way. It's not like the Rural Electrification Program.
Residents of dense cities want to know if will be raining next Saturday or not. To predict that, meteorologists don't want sensors aimed just at the city- they need to know conditions all around the continent (and beyond), to model large-scale weather patterns.
Consider the relative population density of Manhattan Island and the rest of New York state (called "upstate"). Then ask yourself if the city dwellers pay any attention to radar images of precipitation clouds over the less populated regions, especially if the wind is aiming it towards them.
Your half blind yourself in that you think Democrats make a more "honest" politition then a Republican.
Although Democrats are often liars, it can be mathmatically proven that Republicans are more dishonest. It's short inference from known facts: 1) spreading a lie requires advertising 2) advertising costs money 3) Republicans have more money
(Fact 3 can be taken as a given, although construction of a proof is a simple exercise for the reader)
In short, Democrats are more honest because they are poorer, which gives them less ability to lie convincingly.
Communication protocols are methods, not works of authorship.
Communication protocols can require exchange of standardized data strings as part of handshaking. That data may be copyrighted. In fact, this has already been done by some software corporations (Raven Games is one example, but there may be others)
I could write a protocol that requires the client to upload a bitmap of Mickey Mouse to connect. Even if you have the method, it would be an infringement of Disney's copyright for you to use it.
This is similar to how the DMCA can be stretched to cover printer cartridges- glue on an electronic chip, load on some copyrighted data, and now physical property can be subject to the same regulations as Intellectual Property!
In effect, by operating the program under these conditions, he is attempting to reverse-engineer the program, with the understanding that you are his accomplice.
"In effect" != "in legal terms". That's called a "legal loophole", and loopholes do actually work.
But even you were right (or if the BK license had an expanded clause "shall not reverse engineer nor provide to any other party data for the purpose of"), tne so what? It means your friend has violated the BK license, and can't use BK anymore. The single individual friend you had. Just one person- not hundreds of uninvolved Linux developers who had been obeying their licenses.
It was not that a pre-declared license condition triggered which removed the ability to use BitKeeper for free; it's that Larry saw that people were going to reverse-engineer BK, so he got mad and took away the free versions. Doesn't make much of a difference, because now nobody important will use BK anymore, if they can't get it free.
Now what if you try to monitor his traffic without his knowledge? Those pesky federal wiretap laws cover the other half.
That's rather unlikely, since the USA's federal wiretap laws only apply outside of the 50 states. They'd only be relevant in Washington DC, Puerto Rico, or certain "Indian" Reservations.
Inside a state, there is a seperate per-state law, and the differences between them are often substantial. Wiretaping is not illegal everywhere, or sometimes it's only a violation to monitor audio content, or other interesting variations.
Slashdot Mirror
Just because the code CAN be fixed by someone else, doesn't mean it WOULD be.
To summarize that blast of anti-logic:
"CAN" != "WOULD", therefore "CAN" = "CAN'T"
Alrighty then!
Relying on ANY software is stupid, by that logic, since if the author decides to screw me around, not fix a bug, or just generally bugger off and move on to a new project, I'm JUST as screwed as if it were MS who did it.
No. If MS discontinues the software, you can never get upgrades again. It would be slow and expensive to reverse-engineer the binary code, and illegal to distribute those fixes.
If Linux is discontinued, new changes can legally happen, and they WILL happen so long as there is a marginal economic incentive to doing so.
If you desire a change in a program, and that change needs $500 worth of programmer-effort, and it's a Free Software program, then you will recieve your new upgrade in 2-3 weeks. But if it's a traditional proprietary program, you must find the copyright holder and ask him to make the change.
If he demands $50,000 to do that work, you have no way to go to the free market and shop around for a better deal. It's a monopoly, and the typical bad effects of a monopolist begin to appear.
I can name four games with heavy gunplay with realistic weapons that are all rated Teen by the ESRB: Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, Call of Duty, Battlefield 1942, Battlefield Vietnam. All of these games get a Teen rating because they lack blood.
Um, all of those are about real wars where real TEENS were drafted and sent to fight to the death on the frontlines.
Something is wrong if you think a person shouldn't SEE graphic violence, but then you think 2-3 years later its fine for him to go and DO IT.
The reason for the forehead transformation on Buffy was to make vampires more rodent-like.
If you say so, although rodents don't actually have lumpy foreheads. I can think of many simpler features to suggest rat similarity, such as, a pointy nose, enlarged incisors, or just GIANT WHISKERS.
(Vampires are usually depicted with enlarged canines like a wolf, instead of big incisors like a rodent)
The mythology of the Buffy series includes a Lovecraftian concept of demons pre-dating humans on Earth,
That's not Lovecraftian. That's a Christan concept- check Isaiah, or Genesis- noticing that the Serpent was already there before Adam & Eve. Also, Lovecraft never wrote a story involving a demon on Earth.
Other vampires on the show were younger and tended to look more human, as they are "less pure" than The Master was.
I didn't pay much attention, but in the episode where she tried (and failed) to destroy Dracula it was implied he was unusually old, but he didn't look any more deformed than the new vampires she demolishes at the rate of 3-5 per episode.
On the other hand, shows like "buffy the vampire slayer" and "dark angel" had remarkably consistent, convincing and affordable special effects from start to finish.
Actually, Buffy gave vampires forehead wrinkles remarkably similar to those on a Klingon, which had no relationship to pre-existing vampire mythology. So I didn't find them convincing at all- give me the pale, haughty beauties of Bram Stoker and Anne Rice any day.
(Additionally, that program also made vampires distintegrate when stabbed through the chest, a plot and prop convenience that also is different from vampire legends, but similar to what happened to Klingons when Kirk zapped his phaser at them)
I'm sure that at some point, people would have started bringing things through that the machines wouldn't have caught, such as plastic explosives, but from what I've heard, the hijackers had guns/knives/etc, all metallic ojbects, and very detectable even by an 85 year old machine.
In 1998, some people repeatedly travelled on USA domestic flights carrying folding knives with 8.5 cm blades. The inspectors were aware, they just didn't care, because the rules didn't say they should.
Considering the American defense system isn't allowed to shoot down planes unless they're headed for the White House or what have you, that would have made little difference.
False. For an example, look at the Payne Stewart incident from 1999. When that plane went out of control, multiple Air National Guard fighters followed alongside, ready to shoot it if it started to threaten Pierre, SD.
What should have the government done?
Had a decent domestic air-defense system.
Back in 1987, the world laughed at the pathetic Russian military when an unauthorized Cessna flew into the heart of their capital. The USA felt it was quite superior to that interception showing, but it turned out to be little better.
If F-15 interceptors had been launched within 5 minutes of the airliner's dropping communication and going off course, they could easily have blocked all attacks.
That kind of vigilance should've been standard procedure.
What should have the government done?
On a more general note, Bush should have continued or strengthened Clinton's harsh policies towards Afganistan, instead of giving them tens of millions of dollars as free gifts.
No, that wouldn't have stopped the specific attacks, but it would've shown his brain was in the right place.
The reason it worked is because no one imagined it could or would be done.
That's a horrible lie. Multiple people have imagined 5+ years ago: not merely authors like Tom Clancy and Chris Carter, but security professionals as well.
Likewise, now that we have a practical example of an airplane as a instrument of death, it is not going to be so easy to subdue passengers who know death is imminent in either case.
That is, prehaps, a comforting illusion. True, passengers will now be more physically aggressive in resisting that particular attack. But it isn't difficult to devise concealable weapons that will let one man defeat 80 (so long as they attack in a line). Far more important is that pilots now have a better physical barrier between themselves and the passengers.
However, none of that really matters. It's not even necessary to capture a plane in-flight. A terrorist with billionare-level resources can charter, rent, or buy his own plane. Or a few men with guns can steal it off a small airstrip. Loading it with TNT can compensate some for the reduced size... plus, large targets that get the full effect of a big plane are rarer and harder to find.
A 20-seat business jet flying through the stands of a baseball game is plenty of dead victims for a terrorist's needs.
Star Trek, in particular, is lengendary in it's effeciency with money.
I can build you SIX full Dalek props for the less than the cost of applying Michael Dorn's forhead ONCE.
ab means left shift a by b bits. Overriding it to now mean write to a stream is a horrible and confusing idea.
Yeah, because when I saw cout << "hello" I naturally assumed it was trying to shift the standard input file handle left by hello bits.
Give it up, C++ is 15 years old, and << has meant "write to a stream" for that entire time.
Saying that operator overloading shouldn't be used because the function's behavior might not be like the symbol's traditional meaning is the same as saying I shouldn't be allowed to name my own functions, because I might call something a fake description.
And because C++ supports several programming paradigms, you can do object-oriented programming, functional programming and/or generic programming - often all at the same time.
No, C++ does not support functional programming. Functions are not first-class concepts of C or C++. If they were, it would be possible for you to pass functions as arguments and return functions as output. That works with function constants (as pointers to a function written by the programmer), but not with functions defined at runtime.
Just try to make a straightforward translation of a functional program from Scheme to C++. It can't be done. Function pointers as objects which imitate functions give you some of the benefits of functional programming for a reduced problem domain, but aren't enough to deserve the "FP" name.
PS. If you try hard, you can make a "function object" with enough power to represent almost-arbitrarily functions defined at runtime. But that would be an example of "All programs of sufficient complexity eventually grow to include a LISP interpreter"
AC: Anyone can use a number of the general purpose AOP languages like AspectJ (theres even AspectScheme).
It is true that the patent owner provided a license to use it in AspectJ.
AC Moreover, you can program in aspect style without any special language mechanisms.
Yes, anyone can go do that. You'll just be breaking the law, which many people find not much of an obstacle. The license Xerox gave to AspectJ only applies to the implementation they provided. Re-implementing those kinds of features yourself is worthy of a lawsuit.
AC: The patents are no problem at all
Do your own research, then. Type "aspectj" "patent" into google.com and see what comes up. (You'll get articles like this, which straightforwardly explains that AspectJ is an implementation of someone's patent)
Everyone has known the BMI was simply *incorrect* since it came out, now the governement is just figuring it out?
Well no. The bad part is, they're not noticing that BMI is an incorrect way to measure obesity. They're instead deciding that since higher BMI doesn't kill people, obesity must not really be dangerous. The Republicans controlling the federal government may use this opportunity to score libertarian-points by knocking off some anti-obesity "nanny state" policies of the FDA and CDC.
This is about as sensible as the time the pilot of a propeller airplane reported he had broken the sound barrier- instead of complaining that his airspeed gauge was broken.
Although it's true that BMI is proportional to obesity for people of the same organic density, for general use you can come closer simply by measuring the circumference of a subject's waist.
And since Aspect-Oriented programming is a patented technique, basically nobody can legally use it unless you're a personal friend of the inventor.
So, who really cares if its theoretically any good, when legally it is worthless?
in 20 years time when they are long obsolete and the software that converts them won't run on any modern hardware?
The passage of time makes software run on MORE hardware platforms, not less. 20 years ago I could run Super Mario Bros on exactly one model of hardware. Today, it can be precisely emulated on any PC, PDA, and even some phones.
But that doesn't mean that the rest of the program can't be open source.
Yes, it does mean that, per the definition of "open source".
money from Big Business, but the Demos counter that with money from Trial Lawyers and Union Bosses.
BB obviously has a lot more money than TL and UB. A lot, lot more.
To a first order, this fight is a wash.
To a first order, the 2004 Presidential election was a tie.
I call BS on this "proven" fact that you so claim. In fact, I challange you to site factual and multi references.
Sorry, but it's the kind of thing that if you can't observe for yourself is true, you are hopeless.
Here's a hint though: EVERYTHING costs money. Lying is part of everything...
As for republicans having more money. Perhaps maybe thier supportes do, but I really doubt republicans in office have more wealth then a democrat in office
Yes, of course, that's the point. Politicians very rarely use their personal wealth to fund advertising. It all comes from supporter donations, and the Republican supporters have more money to donate.
Two words: political leverage. "See how outraged our citizens are? You must be more conciliatory towards us!"
That's part of it. But the PROC isn't only trying to influence Japan and the "international community", but also their own citizens. By encouraging some pseudo-grassroots anti-Japan protests, they get more of their citizens angry at 70-year-old Japanese warcrimes.
That keeps them distracted from remembering the 40-year-old PROC peacecrimes, which coincidentally had 10,000 times as many victims as anything the Japanese did.
Quite funny to watch China accuse Japan of whitewashing history, when China has whitewashed its more recent, more local history to a much greater extent.
We don't want the least significant digit first.
Do you think $90,000.75 dollars is basically the same as $9.75, because the 9 that comes first isn't really significant?
Here's hoping that most Congresspeople see this bill for what it is - lunacy.
Almost as lunatic as giving away a ton of public-owned TV spectrum rights, instead of auctioning them for the estimated $40,000,000,000 they might have gone for. Oh, and two senators decided to vote against that one.
The net result would be a focus on profitable ventures, an attentiveness to urban and densely populated areas (i.e., those who will pay), and complete ignorance of rural areas and major swaths of the country (except where profitable for, e.g., commercial food growers).
Weather forecasting doesn't work that way. It's not like the Rural Electrification Program.
Residents of dense cities want to know if will be raining next Saturday or not. To predict that, meteorologists don't want sensors aimed just at the city- they need to know conditions all around the continent (and beyond), to model large-scale weather patterns.
Consider the relative population density of Manhattan Island and the rest of New York state (called "upstate"). Then ask yourself if the city dwellers pay any attention to radar images of precipitation clouds over the less populated regions, especially if the wind is aiming it towards them.
Your half blind yourself in that you think Democrats make a more "honest" politition then a Republican.
Although Democrats are often liars, it can be mathmatically proven that Republicans are more dishonest. It's short inference from known facts:
1) spreading a lie requires advertising
2) advertising costs money
3) Republicans have more money
(Fact 3 can be taken as a given, although construction of a proof is a simple exercise for the reader)
In short, Democrats are more honest because they are poorer, which gives them less ability to lie convincingly.
Communication protocols are methods, not works of authorship.
Communication protocols can require exchange of standardized data strings as part of handshaking. That data may be copyrighted. In fact, this has already been done by some software corporations (Raven Games is one example, but there may be others)
I could write a protocol that requires the client to upload a bitmap of Mickey Mouse to connect. Even if you have the method, it would be an infringement of Disney's copyright for you to use it.
This is similar to how the DMCA can be stretched to cover printer cartridges- glue on an electronic chip, load on some copyrighted data, and now physical property can be subject to the same regulations as Intellectual Property!
In effect, by operating the program under these conditions, he is attempting to reverse-engineer the program, with the understanding that you are his accomplice.
"In effect" != "in legal terms". That's called a "legal loophole", and loopholes do actually work.
But even you were right (or if the BK license had an expanded clause "shall not reverse engineer nor provide to any other party data for the purpose of"), tne so what? It means your friend has violated the BK license, and can't use BK anymore. The single individual friend you had. Just one person- not hundreds of uninvolved Linux developers who had been obeying their licenses.
It was not that a pre-declared license condition triggered which removed the ability to use BitKeeper for free; it's that Larry saw that people were going to reverse-engineer BK, so he got mad and took away the free versions. Doesn't make much of a difference, because now nobody important will use BK anymore, if they can't get it free.
Now what if you try to monitor his traffic without his knowledge? Those pesky federal wiretap laws cover the other half.
That's rather unlikely, since the USA's federal wiretap laws only apply outside of the 50 states. They'd only be relevant in Washington DC, Puerto Rico, or certain "Indian" Reservations.
Inside a state, there is a seperate per-state law, and the differences between them are often substantial. Wiretaping is not illegal everywhere, or sometimes it's only a violation to monitor audio content, or other interesting variations.