1) The Constitution states in the "Bill of Rights" set of ammendments some things the government cannot do. Creating a national ID isn't prohibited. Sure, the Constitution doesn't order the government to create a national ID either, but by default what isn't prohibited is allowed.
That's quite incorrect.
Read the 9th and 10th amendments:
AMENDMENT IX
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
AMENDMENT X
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
In other words, according to the Bill of Rights, the fact that a right is not explicitly enumerated does not mean we don't have that right.
And, from the 10th Amendment, all powers that are not given to the government by the Constition and that are not prohibited by it to the states are reserved for the people or the states.
Thus, the Federal Government has no legal powers that are not explicitly set forth in the Constitution.
At one time, I had three valid, legal driver's licenses, all issued by the State of Texas.
First was the regular driver's license.
Then, when I got a commercial license, the commercial license was issued in addition to my regular driver's license not in place of it. That is in spite of the fact that the commercial license covered everything a regular license covered.
Then when I got a chauffeur's license, instead of replacing the two cards I had, they issued an additional driver's license.
That ended when I turned 21. At that time, all three of the previous licenses expired and I was only issued a chauffeur's license from then on.
But it was kind of fun when asked for a driver's license when cashing a check to pull out three driver's licenses and ask if they had a preference which driver's license they wanted to see.
It might be more interesting if the losing side's attorneys had to hand over their fees to the winning side's attorneys and pay their legal expenses as payment in full for the winning side's attorneys.
An attorney who didn't think there was much chance of winning would be less inclined to continue the case just to get paid by their client.
I believe that the "registered agent" is a person to contact to have copywritten information removed from a computer owned or otherwise control by that person's organization.
If a customer of the ISP has the material on their own computer, not the ISP's computer, I don't understand why they would contact the registed agent. Maybe it's because that's the only name and address they can readily identify for a person at the ISP.
Once they have the order, the ISPs are legally required to tell them who owned those IPs at those specific times and amend the lawsuits with the actual names.
That is not correct.
First of all, the first step is a subpoena, not a court order. A subpoena and a court order are two entirely different things.
If the ISP does not have that information, then they can't tell them. There is, to my knowledge, no law in the U.S. requiring ISPs to collect and store that information.
Once subpoenad, most ISPs, especially small ones, will provide the information at that point, if they have it. An ISP could, if they desired, fight the subpoena in court.
Once the court orders the ISP to turn over the information, the ISP must either comply or appeal to a higher court.
At best, our current capabilities are still rather basic.
For example, "have a meeting with a bunch of folks online" is already here and widely available if what you mean is to hold some kind of common chat session. You can even see each other one-on-one with web cams if you each have them.
Imagine an on-line meeting between a sales manager and his sales people in different cities with each person having a seat at a virtual conference table from which he can see the other people at their respective places. When one person is speaking (not typing), what are the others doing? Are they paying attention? Nodding their heads in agreement? Frowning as if they don't understand the issue or disagree with it? Are they yawning? Without this kind of interplay, they will all be likely to miss important cues.
Another example, is being able to access your own desktop regardless of the computer you are using. Currently, if we make our choice of computers wisely, we may be able to use ssh -X to connect to our work machine from home and run a program on the remote computer, say OpenOffice. We could even run OpenOffice on the home computer and open an odf file on the remote computer.
It would be more useful if we could see business desktop from home, click on OpenOffice which would run it on the home computer if OpenOffice was installed on the home computer, but with the documents available being those at the office instead of on the home computer. And, if you didn't have OpenOffice on the home computer, it would run it on the office computer and forward the display to your home computer. All seamlessly.
Suppose you wanted to purchase something from an on-line retailer. Currently, you would visit their web page. Instead, you would go to their public desktop where the merchandise would appear as items on the desktop. Click on what you want to purchase and it would appear on your shopping cart which would appear on your own desktop. Suppose you didn't place the order immediately. The shopping cart would appear in your desktop. Later, you might click on it, do a quick price check, change the number of items, and place the order. Of course, we can do that now to some extent.
Furthermore, what technology is available is available in bits and pieces. Nowhere is it a seamless whole. And not that much of anything is distributed.
As for the 3d navigation features, I think that would useful in several ways. Obviously, novice users would generally feel far more at home moving about in a more familiar setting. It would also, I think, tend to push people into organizing things in a more standardized manner. While standardizing around a virtual version of a 3 dimensional world may not be ideal, it would be more intuitive to more people. Also, since it would all be virtual, the same view could be quite different between different users.
I think a navigable distributed 3d desktop would be very interesting. The desktop would be 3 dimensional, but with pieces of it distributed across numbers of computers and accessable, contingent on permissions, from any connected computer.
Think of a hallway with various doors along the way. Behind each door would be a person's desktop. Navigate down the hallways to a person's "office", enter the door, if permitted, and enter a public version of his desktop. Through an internal door would be the private version.
A company could organize the location of the halls and common areas by department and could include rooms available to the general public as well as rooms available only to authorized users. The rooms might count as virtual meeting rooms, as rooms containing links to allow you to directly jump to related locations, or something else we can't even imagine.
Of course, it wouldn't matter what computer you logged onto. You could go to your virtual desktop office to your public desktop and, from there, enter your private door to get to your own desktop.
Imagine the merging of the desktop interface, the web, and a virtual world like secondlife or something similar.
As for a national sales tax, that is the worst and most regressive form of taxation possible. It hurts the poor, those who need their money most, especially hard.
For what it's worth, many of the plans such as the "Fair Tax" include a monthly rebate of sales taxes paid based on the poverty level. Essentially, those at the poverty level would effectively pay no national sales tax.
Furthermore, under the "Fair Tax", only new merchandise would be taxed. If you buy used merchandise, such as a used car, used cloths,..., no national sales tax would be charged.
The result is that a family at the poverty level would pay no sales tax and might even get a bigger monthly sales tax rebate than what they pay in sales taxes. Contrast that with now where there are numerous hidden taxes burried in the cost of merchandise since most every company involved in the production, transportation, manufacture, and sales of the item pay income taxes which are burried in the cost of the item.
Even housing would be affected by the "Fair Tax". Buy a new home and you'll pay the national sales tax on it. Buy a used home and there would be no national sales tax.
A national sales tax such as the "Fair Tax" far more fair than the income tax.
For a fee of from $65 to $110, depending on the service requrested, they will give you the name and address of who owns a particular cell phone, the cell phone(s) owned by any particular person, or the telephone numbers called from any particular cell phone.
It would also push people to purchase the music that they think they might like faster so as to avoid the price rises later.
For example, if you like Jimmy Buffet and he comes out with a new album, "Laid Back in Slashdotland", you might hurry to purchase a copy on-line before you ever heard it in order to avoid the price increases that will occur if it turns out to be sufficiently popular.
In any event, while I think it is a looney idea, there are songs I might download at a lower price. But generally, that would be a substantially lower price, e.g. 5 cents a song. I can't imagine that the not so popular songs would be allowed to drop that far.
Plaintiffs, usually record companies, may attempt to bring claims against the parents of children who allegedly infringe copyright via either indirect copyright liability or state parental liability statutes. This memorandum is intended as background research aimed at summarizing the relevant legal principles.
A claim of indirect copyright infringement may be premised on the theory of vicarious liability, which requires the right and ability to control the infringing action and a financial interest in the infringement, or contributory infringement, which requires knowledge of and participation in the infringement; each of these elements may be challenged by a parent. Claims based on state parental liability statutes will depend on the precise statute being considered, but in many states the statute may not apply to actions based on copyright infringement or may be preempted by the Copyright Act based on either express or conflict preemption.
Are you seriously suggesting that the program should just quit whenever you wish to exit from a loop?
For what it's worth, I can work quite well without goto's. But unlike many younger developers, I'm not at all scared of using them when they are appropriate.
The worst abuse of goto's I've seen was in a numerical analysis class.
Back in the 70's, one student turned in an assignment with a goto on nearly every other line!
It looked like she dropped or shuffled her deck of cards and used goto's to put them back in order.
The resulting program didn't work correctly and it took a good half hour or more to find the actual error. If I remember right, the failure was because she used a variable starting with 'I' for what should have been a FLOAT. Normally, I could pick those errors up very quickly.
architectures that have an explicit GOTO statement in every instruction
Modern architectures?
The only one I'm familiar with was back in the early or mid 60s, I think, for using drums as memory devices.
In those cases, each instruction contained the address of the next instruction. The program could then be optimized so that when the instruction was complete, the drum would be in the appropriate position to read the next instruction.
In such a system, storing the instructions in sequential order on the drum would mean that most of the time, the CPU would have to wait for the drum to spin all the way around before the next instruction to be read.
Has this been necessary in some more recent computer?
The use of recursive functions can lead to some very cool solutions, but if you need optimization, it is often best to completely avoid recursive functions.
First of all, we are quite cognizant that the article was about a man named Goto, not about structured programming. But because of the name, it is a very short step to also discussing the use of goto's in code.
Second, the use of goto's in code is considered bad only by those people who have been indoctrinated for years with that idea and who have never learned to question such indoctrinated views.
The entire point about production code is that it will be used by some else and maintained by someone else. Maintaining code can be much more expensive than initial development. Anything that reduces maintenence costs usually takes precedence over performance, annoyance of the initial programmer(s) and cpu time.
Right.
And in some situations, the intelligent use of goto statements can result in code that is substantially cleaner and easier to maintain.
A number of years ago, I knew one very fine software developer who really needed a goto but could not bring himself to use them where everyone would see them.
So he buried the goto's in a set of #define's in an obscure header file.
I always thought he should have just used the goto in his code and thumb his nose at the goto Nazis.
Sorry but I gotta side with the professor. Don't use goto in C++.
The problem is that the goto, in the hands of an unskilled programmer, is used for many unnecessary reasons and is rarely used appropriately.
There is nothing wrong with using a goto in situations when it results in cleaner code that is, therefore, easier to read, understand, and maintain.
For example, one situation is when nested several levels deep in a loop and have reached a condition requiring an immediate exit from the loop with no additional processing.
Sure, you can set up some elaborate mechanism so it fails each loop comparison and falls out of the loop, but that needlessly complicates the code. More than once, I've seen people introduce bugs in a program by either screwing up the exit from a set of nested loops or by modifying the later without realizing the purpose of the extra complications.
Compare that to the simple use of a goto where it determined that an exit from the loop is required. The purpose for the use of the goto in this situation should be intuitively obvious to the most casual observer.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm very seriously considering buying an LTO 2 tape drive. I need to figure out if it runs under OpenBSD, first.
..., and the LTO drive.
I'm thinking of getting a rackmount server chassis, installing a RAID 5, gigabit ethernet,
That's quite incorrect.
Read the 9th and 10th amendments:
In other words, according to the Bill of Rights, the fact that a right is not explicitly enumerated does not mean we don't have that right.
And, from the 10th Amendment, all powers that are not given to the government by the Constition and that are not prohibited by it to the states are reserved for the people or the states.
Thus, the Federal Government has no legal powers that are not explicitly set forth in the Constitution.
At one time, I had three valid, legal driver's licenses, all issued by the State of Texas.
First was the regular driver's license.
Then, when I got a commercial license, the commercial license was issued in addition to my regular driver's license not in place of it. That is in spite of the fact that the commercial license covered everything a regular license covered.
Then when I got a chauffeur's license, instead of replacing the two cards I had, they issued an additional driver's license.
That ended when I turned 21. At that time, all three of the previous licenses expired and I was only issued a chauffeur's license from then on.
But it was kind of fun when asked for a driver's license when cashing a check to pull out three driver's licenses and ask if they had a preference which driver's license they wanted to see.
What section of the law requires ISP's to track IP address allocation?
As I understand it, the section this covers is Title 17, Section 512.
I've read though it without finding any such provision.
It might be more interesting if the losing side's attorneys had to hand over their fees to the winning side's attorneys and pay their legal expenses as payment in full for the winning side's attorneys.
An attorney who didn't think there was much chance of winning would be less inclined to continue the case just to get paid by their client.
I believe that the "registered agent" is a person to contact to have copywritten information removed from a computer owned or otherwise control by that person's organization.
If a customer of the ISP has the material on their own computer, not the ISP's computer, I don't understand why they would contact the registed agent. Maybe it's because that's the only name and address they can readily identify for a person at the ISP.
That is not correct.
First of all, the first step is a subpoena, not a court order. A subpoena and a court order are two entirely different things.
If the ISP does not have that information, then they can't tell them. There is, to my knowledge, no law in the U.S. requiring ISPs to collect and store that information.
Once subpoenad, most ISPs, especially small ones, will provide the information at that point, if they have it. An ISP could, if they desired, fight the subpoena in court.
Once the court orders the ISP to turn over the information, the ISP must either comply or appeal to a higher court.
Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer.
He has plenty of respect for free markets.
That's why they are up for sale to the highest bidder.
At best, our current capabilities are still rather basic.
For example, "have a meeting with a bunch of folks online" is already here and widely available if what you mean is to hold some kind of common chat session. You can even see each other one-on-one with web cams if you each have them.
Imagine an on-line meeting between a sales manager and his sales people in different cities with each person having a seat at a virtual conference table from which he can see the other people at their respective places. When one person is speaking (not typing), what are the others doing? Are they paying attention? Nodding their heads in agreement? Frowning as if they don't understand the issue or disagree with it? Are they yawning? Without this kind of interplay, they will all be likely to miss important cues.
Another example, is being able to access your own desktop regardless of the computer you are using. Currently, if we make our choice of computers wisely, we may be able to use ssh -X to connect to our work machine from home and run a program on the remote computer, say OpenOffice. We could even run OpenOffice on the home computer and open an odf file on the remote computer.
It would be more useful if we could see business desktop from home, click on OpenOffice which would run it on the home computer if OpenOffice was installed on the home computer, but with the documents available being those at the office instead of on the home computer. And, if you didn't have OpenOffice on the home computer, it would run it on the office computer and forward the display to your home computer. All seamlessly.
Suppose you wanted to purchase something from an on-line retailer. Currently, you would visit their web page. Instead, you would go to their public desktop where the merchandise would appear as items on the desktop. Click on what you want to purchase and it would appear on your shopping cart which would appear on your own desktop. Suppose you didn't place the order immediately. The shopping cart would appear in your desktop. Later, you might click on it, do a quick price check, change the number of items, and place the order. Of course, we can do that now to some extent.
Furthermore, what technology is available is available in bits and pieces. Nowhere is it a seamless whole. And not that much of anything is distributed.
As for the 3d navigation features, I think that would useful in several ways. Obviously, novice users would generally feel far more at home moving about in a more familiar setting. It would also, I think, tend to push people into organizing things in a more standardized manner. While standardizing around a virtual version of a 3 dimensional world may not be ideal, it would be more intuitive to more people. Also, since it would all be virtual, the same view could be quite different between different users.
I think a navigable distributed 3d desktop would be very interesting. The desktop would be 3 dimensional, but with pieces of it distributed across numbers of computers and accessable, contingent on permissions, from any connected computer.
Think of a hallway with various doors along the way. Behind each door would be a person's desktop. Navigate down the hallways to a person's "office", enter the door, if permitted, and enter a public version of his desktop. Through an internal door would be the private version.
A company could organize the location of the halls and common areas by department and could include rooms available to the general public as well as rooms available only to authorized users. The rooms might count as virtual meeting rooms, as rooms containing links to allow you to directly jump to related locations, or something else we can't even imagine.
Of course, it wouldn't matter what computer you logged onto. You could go to your virtual desktop office to your public desktop and, from there, enter your private door to get to your own desktop.
Imagine the merging of the desktop interface, the web, and a virtual world like secondlife or something similar.
Quite true.
If the Operating System you use doesn't report the ID from the chip, then it doesn't report it.
Or it could just report the ID of your choice. There wouldn't be any need to crack the chip itself.
One could even build a firewall device that would remove the TPM ID from the communications going out.
For what it's worth, many of the plans such as the "Fair Tax" include a monthly rebate of sales taxes paid based on the poverty level. Essentially, those at the poverty level would effectively pay no national sales tax.
Furthermore, under the "Fair Tax", only new merchandise would be taxed. If you buy used merchandise, such as a used car, used cloths, ..., no national sales tax would be charged.
The result is that a family at the poverty level would pay no sales tax and might even get a bigger monthly sales tax rebate than what they pay in sales taxes. Contrast that with now where there are numerous hidden taxes burried in the cost of merchandise since most every company involved in the production, transportation, manufacture, and sales of the item pay income taxes which are burried in the cost of the item.
Even housing would be affected by the "Fair Tax". Buy a new home and you'll pay the national sales tax on it. Buy a used home and there would be no national sales tax.
A national sales tax such as the "Fair Tax" far more fair than the income tax.
For a fee of from $65 to $110, depending on the service requrested, they will give you the name and address of who owns a particular cell phone, the cell phone(s) owned by any particular person, or the telephone numbers called from any particular cell phone.
My boss at my first job out of college gave 1 years notice.
When the year was up, they still weren't ready to replace them.
It would also push people to purchase the music that they think they might like faster so as to avoid the price rises later.
For example, if you like Jimmy Buffet and he comes out with a new album, "Laid Back in Slashdotland", you might hurry to purchase a copy on-line before you ever heard it in order to avoid the price increases that will occur if it turns out to be sufficiently popular.
In any event, while I think it is a looney idea, there are songs I might download at a lower price. But generally, that would be a substantially lower price, e.g. 5 cents a song. I can't imagine that the not so popular songs would be allowed to drop that far.
From Electronic Frontier Foundation, Memorandum, Date: November 1, 2005, To: Defense counsel in RIAA and MPAA individual file sharing suits, Chris Conley, EFF Legal Intern, Re: parental Liability for Copyright Infringement by Minor Children
For more details, read the whole thing.
Can a covenant not to sue even be considered to be some kind of license?
I think a covenant not to sue is basically a promise, nothing more.
In contrast, a license grants certain rights to the licensee.
In what way does Microsoft's covenant actually grant any kind of rights to a licensee?
Are you seriously suggesting that the program should just quit whenever you wish to exit from a loop?
For what it's worth, I can work quite well without goto's. But unlike many younger developers, I'm not at all scared of using them when they are appropriate.
The worst abuse of goto's I've seen was in a numerical analysis class.
Back in the 70's, one student turned in an assignment with a goto on nearly every other line!
It looked like she dropped or shuffled her deck of cards and used goto's to put them back in order.
The resulting program didn't work correctly and it took a good half hour or more to find the actual error. If I remember right, the failure was because she used a variable starting with 'I' for what should have been a FLOAT. Normally, I could pick those errors up very quickly.
Modern architectures?
The only one I'm familiar with was back in the early or mid 60s, I think, for using drums as memory devices.
In those cases, each instruction contained the address of the next instruction. The program could then be optimized so that when the instruction was complete, the drum would be in the appropriate position to read the next instruction.
In such a system, storing the instructions in sequential order on the drum would mean that most of the time, the CPU would have to wait for the drum to spin all the way around before the next instruction to be read.
Has this been necessary in some more recent computer?
The use of recursive functions can lead to some very cool solutions, but if you need optimization, it is often best to completely avoid recursive functions.
First of all, we are quite cognizant that the article was about a man named Goto, not about structured programming. But because of the name, it is a very short step to also discussing the use of goto's in code.
Second, the use of goto's in code is considered bad only by those people who have been indoctrinated for years with that idea and who have never learned to question such indoctrinated views.
By the way, to what pun are you referring?
Right.
And in some situations, the intelligent use of goto statements can result in code that is substantially cleaner and easier to maintain.
A number of years ago, I knew one very fine software developer who really needed a goto but could not bring himself to use them where everyone would see them.
So he buried the goto's in a set of #define's in an obscure header file.
I always thought he should have just used the goto in his code and thumb his nose at the goto Nazis.
The problem is that the goto, in the hands of an unskilled programmer, is used for many unnecessary reasons and is rarely used appropriately.
There is nothing wrong with using a goto in situations when it results in cleaner code that is, therefore, easier to read, understand, and maintain.
For example, one situation is when nested several levels deep in a loop and have reached a condition requiring an immediate exit from the loop with no additional processing.
Sure, you can set up some elaborate mechanism so it fails each loop comparison and falls out of the loop, but that needlessly complicates the code. More than once, I've seen people introduce bugs in a program by either screwing up the exit from a set of nested loops or by modifying the later without realizing the purpose of the extra complications.
Compare that to the simple use of a goto where it determined that an exit from the loop is required. The purpose for the use of the goto in this situation should be intuitively obvious to the most casual observer.