a student downloading legal music, such as concerts from bands that allow taping/trading, is not using the network for academic purposes
It's not? Were my credits in music appreciation not academic? If I downloaded a couple of ditties by Beethoven, was I cutting into the bandwidth of students browsing the Web, no doubt purely for academic purposes?
Making sweeping statements like this without thought leads to poor policies. Mind you, I agree with the rest of your post.
D&D, and most other role-playing games are exactly the embodiment of this. They are about teams achieving things, and it is not uncommon for one member to make a personal (or ultimate) sacrifice so that the team can achieve their goal.
Er, I think this is sort of what they're talking about when they say "detached from reality". The loss of a D&D character is neither a personal nor ultimate sacrifice. It's just part of the game, y'know?
I play D&D, and have had a (U.S.) clearance. I'm inclined to disagree with the premise they're working from, but I can see the other side of it.
See, employers have the right -- absolute, but limited by some very specific and narrow laws meant to keep the balance -- to hire and fire whomever they want for whatever reason they want. If you're my employee and I decide I don't like your socks, I can fire you on the spot if I want.
Mind you, there's a disincentive. It's a minor point, but worth mentioning: an employee who's been fired without cause ("cause" being determined by the Department of Labor) can collect unemployment insurance, assuming that person is otherwise eligible (usually this requires a certain amount of time worked within some period of time). This especially can hurt small businesses, since it raises their unemployment insurance rates.
Unfortunately, this quite often leads to employers "finding a reason" in order to keep their rates down, even if they really just want to cut payroll a bit. This leads to various off-topic ramifications to the hapless, disenfranchised employee.
Ultimately, what the article doesn't say is that the reason companies want more clear-cut policies is so that firings for blogging are "for cause" (because they violated company policies). It's not because they don't think they can fire 'em.
Claria and other similar companies have a legal business
I disagree. They just haven't been shut down yet.
To wit: Let's say I call up a particularly dim secretary at IBM. I claim to be with a consulting firm, and need access to certain files. This person gives me the password to his or her boss' account. I log in and copy everything I can get my hands on.
When tried, I explain that I had permission from a company representative to take those files. This would probably not go over well.
Claria uses similar tactics, taking advantage of stupid people by making vague statements, in order to gain access to private information. In my mind, there's little difference. EULAs require a greater level of literacy than many computer users possess; taking advantage of this fact is, in my opinion, not a legal method of doing business.
I'll agree with JGski pretty much entirely. Of course, we're talking about -most- corporations here, not, say, Ben & Jerry's, or MERIT.
Corporations -do- have certain duties, sometimes, though. First and foremost, paying taxes. Unca Sam'll get -down- on a delinquent corporation. A lot of industries are, or have been, pretty directly regulated through public regulatory agencies, and others indirectly through agencies such as OSHA and the FDA.
Effectiveness of these agencies, as we all know, has been mixed. Mostly I think they're a Good Thing, if a bit subject to the whims of the usual political shenannigans.
Occasionally, a corporation gets hit with a consent decree from a judge. I dunno exactly how these get passed out, but they're pretty binding and corporations take 'em Very Seriously. I guess there's the occasional antitrust action against the largest corporations, too.
Corporations always seem to find ways to play silly buggers with anything not regulated, or not regulated -closely-, often even if it's otherwise illegal. And they have to be dragged to court an awful lot over things that seem pretty straightforward. For example, a given corporation will probably file a perfect work accident report, cover immediate hospital costs without an eyeblink, and fight tooth and nail over any long-term treatment, even if it's physical therapy for that arm they sewed back on after the CEO's drunk sixteen-year-old nephew pushed the switch on the arm lopper while you were repairing it.
Assigning criminal penalties is a tricky matter, mainly because it's really hard to assign blame and you can't punish innocent workers. Dissolving the corporation involves putting innocent folk out of work - sometimes lots of 'em. So that's a poor idea.
Unfortunately, current civil -and- criminal penalties are pretty much just fines, which often ends up punishing the innocent -anyway-. The executive-types rarely take the brunt of financial losses - fines get made up in unpaid overtime, raised quotas, and increased demands, all on the front lines. (Okay, this only applies to large-ish corporations, but most of my complaints do. Smaller corporations tend to be benevolent, barring the occasional one that's so insanely illegal that it's not really what we're talking about.) In publicly traded corporations, legal action usually is unfavorable to their stock value.
I agree that the correct answer is to strip corporations of human rights, although certain (non-Constitutional) rights should be instituted in their place. For example, I think corporations should be represented appropriately in (and have access to) court, but I don't think corporations should have the right to free expression -at all-.
As far as criminal liability, I've no answer at all. Okay, one - but that would involve dissolving the legal concept of a for-profit corporation, which is pretty radical and would no doubt have Repurcussions.
-More- important? So, like, if all humans died, you'd be cool with it as long as our civilization didn't collapse first? Personally, I'd weigh our survival as a species as a greater priority than maintaining our culture, if I had to choose between 'em.;)
Others have mentioned the great Infocom and Lucasarts games, and all like that. I'm just surprised nobody's mentioned Nethack and its derivatives (and predecessors). For long-time players, one of the major goals in Nethack is to dredge up amusing messages.
Some of these are deliberate ("you hear a faint typing noise"), others a matter of circumstance ("The lawyer hits! It sucks your brains out!"), and still others an artifact of the interface ("What do you want to eat? BLT* or ?"). In any case, while the game itself is reasonably serious, its odd sense of humor is almost a bottomless well: "You die. Do not pass Go. Do not collect 200 Zorkmids." "The microscopic space fleet swallows the little dog!" "The pit fiend falls into a pit! How pitiful. Isn't that the pits?"... and so on.
The link provided in the parent has no citations to anything aside from one repetition of the Ft. Lee experiment
No, the link provided in the parent has numerous cites, under the heading "Sources". Just because they require a trip to the library or bookstore doesn't mean they aren't valid.
...the RIAA is indiscriminately cutting people down for a crime most sane people would put on par with jay walking.
I s'pose that makes me slightly insane, since I'd put it about on par with shoplifting. Extrapolating from a lot of vague data from the Web, I'd say about a third of us have snagged something off a shelf at some point, and it's when we were a teen or young adult.
One estimate has about 30 million active shoplifters at a time in the U.S.. Since half of 'lifters are between 18 and 30, and a third are from 13-18, I'll pretend that 24 million shoplifters are between these ages, which according to U.S. Census is around a third of folks in this age group.
So, we can unsafely assume about a third of us have shoplifted. Market researchers say about a fourth of us have participated in music filesharing. We'll pretend for a moment that all of these files were copyrighted. So, assuming (yes, another assumption - I like making assumptions, because it saves research) that the financial loss of a CD is about equal to 12 downloaded songs, we're looking at an equivalent of shoplifting a dollar or so worth of merchandise per song.
We'll ignore the fact that shoplifting has greater physical costs, such as the overhead for the merchandise space, shipping, and manufacturing, while copyright-infringing-filesharing only has production costs. We'll also ignore the fact that the author of this post has had a few beers.
For shoplifting a buck's worth of product, I'd expect to see restitution in the form of cost plus a fine, maybe a couple hundred bucks, and a criminal sentence appropriate to the offender's record. For most folks, that'd be a first offense, and prolly a lil' community service. Maybe unsupervised probation. For repeats, probably longer, supervised probation. Time served, if any, either way.
Since the demographics are not highly dissimilar (compared to violent crime, grand theft, and the like), the penalty ought'a be similar. Cost (about a buck per song), a couple-few hundred dollars on top as a slap on the wrist, and some community service or probation. Repeaters (I emphasize that "repeat" means "doing it after being convicted", not "doing it more than once before getting caught".) should probably be hit about as hard as repeat shoplifters, with, like, actual jail time.
It should be clear at this point that I support U.S. copyright law more-or-less in its current form. The musicians had rights, they signed a contract giving them away, they didn't get lobotomized first, so the RIAA owns those rights. I don't much like the RIAA, but I didn't like Sam Walton, either - and I don't think that gives me the right to take his stuff. I disagree with copyright torts of this nature, though - I think it ought'a be criminal, not civil. For one thing, criminal law gives protections to alleged offenders that civil law doesn't, thanks to that Constitution thingee.
I suggest that civil law shouldn't (in a perfect world) apply to corporate actions against private citizens acting privately. They should, in my mind, have to convince law enforcement-types that said citizens did something bad.
This is prolly obvious at this point, but I'm not, like, a lawyer or anything.
It's not exactly relevant, but here's a guy who's written a lot about shoplifting, but doesn't appear to have gotten laid since Jimmy Carter was in office.
People can always write to the Attorney General and appeal that they are not a child porn site. I would say even if 10% of the sites which are blokced are not child porn, then that is acceptable. What is not acceptable is doing nothing.
This is, in formal logic, what's known as a false dichotomy. You can do _something_ without blocking legitimate sites. For example, you can attempt to identify and prosecute the creators and distributors of child pornography. "Deputizing" ISPs without their consent is just silly. If they're aware of any kiddie porn, they should act, but forcing them to monitor everything that passes through their network is just silly. Anybody seriously suggest that telecomm companies be liable for stopping drug deals that occur over the phone?
I also think states must work together to track down the providers of child porn and arrest and jail these scumbags. They should be forced to go to jail.
I agree. But we, as a society, pay people to round up these scumbags (the kiddie pornographers, not the ISPs). Foisting off the responsibility onto someone who isn't employed to do so is just passing the buck.
Yes, there's shades of grey here. Hotel proprietors are often required to run off any known prostitutes, but you don't see laws requiring them to monitor all rooms at all times to prevent it, nor would such laws be feasable.
Similarly, requiring that ISPs report known child pornographers is reasonable (and is currently the law, AFAIK). Requiring ISPs to monitor and make a judgement on everything that passes through their servier is not reasonable.
...respect for intellectual property is not optional - it is mandatory.
SCO is your friend. Trust SCO. Open source programmers must show respect. SCO says so, and SCO is your friend.
Open source programmers get lied about to the media, strangled in red tape, cheated, and occasionally accidentally sued. Being an open source programmer is fun and rewarding if they negotiate with SCO. SCO says so. Of course SCO is right!
SCO owns UNIX. Which parts? What's your security clearance, citizen? I'm sorry, but that information is not available at your clearance level. Serve SCO and perhaps you will one day be rewarded.
Remember - Stay Alert! Trust No One! Keep Your Licence Handy!
Funny Spider Robinson should complain about this though. The Callahan's stories fall under Clarke's Law; the Future Beings who drop into the Cross-Time Saloon might as well be magicians from Myth Adventures.
Robinson's written somewhat harder sci-fi, most notably (in my mind) Mindkiller and Telempath. The various Callahan's stories are fun, though.
Why, nobody ever sniped before violent video games were around or popular. And nobody in other countries would ever do such a thing. Especially Canada.
People seem to think that sniper attacks are a new and American phenomenon. That just ain't so. It's just another kind of murder, and murder's been around for a while, now.
Creativity comes naturally, it doesn't have to be learned.
I couldn't agree more. However, meaningful expression must be learned, and without it, creativity is less useful. Technical ability in language improves one's ability to express oneself verbally. Similarly, technical prowess in sculpting, painting, and performance aids expression in these (or any) media.
Er, I'll save you moderators the trouble. -1, Flamebait. And a grammar flame to boot. With grammatical errors in it. I deserve modding down. I probably deserve worse. But I must speak.
If you do know English te word grammar checker should be used to write perfect technical papers. Its possible to write perfect technical papers, I do it all the time in college, its like standard here if you want an A.
This makes me want to weep. Did you intend it ironically?
"Its"? Twice?(!) A run-on sentence bragging about your prowess at grammar? Redundancy, incorrect capitalization, a typographical error, punctuation errors, and errors I don't know the name of?
Mind you, my grammar ain't perfect, even in this post. That last paragraph was nothing but sentence framents. I'm just saying I really, really hope you did that on purpose.
If not, shut the hell up about your perfect technical papers, 'kay?
It seems pretty obvious to me that hackers doing this sort of thing are simply trying to draw as much attention to themselves as possible, in order to boost their ego and enhance their career options.
Not at all like, say, teen athletes, who play sports for the sheer fun of it.
Besides, if he was so confident his activities were legal and ok, why is he running around from state to state, in hiding?
Well, according to the article, he's in California working on a documentary. Not exactly the kind of thing you'd do if you were "in hiding".
If he felt he had a strong case in his favor, you'd think he'd just turn himself in to the FBI right away, so he could show their folly in court and walk away righteous.
This just tells me he's not an idiot. Talking to a lawyer before the cops is good sense, and perfectly legal. Nothing in the law requires him to turn himself in, so he can take his own sweet time and make sure his rights are protected.
You got some kinda grudge against this guy, or did you just not read the article?
WTF? And computers are less buggy than paper?!?! Help me.
Generally, I agree with you. But this statement... well, yeah, computers are less buggy than paper.
You might be thinking of the thing on top of your desk as a computer. It is, but there are a lotta types of computers in this world. Dedicated machines do pretty well. When's the last time your digital watch crashed? Ever have to re-boot your microwave in mid-cooking? You think currency counters make many mistakes?
Sure, if you want a flexible user interface, Plug n' Pray, Quake III, and a set of interoperable office applications, you're gonna get problems. But if you want something that just counts stuff, you can't beat silicon.
How about the State of Iowa voting that the value of pi is 3? At least I think it was Iowa...
Er, Stranger in a Strange Land is fictional, you understand. Despite what happened in the novel, Tennessee did not actually pass such a law. Here's a good debunking of this legend, with citations and everything.
If Didio did not sign the NDA, and they showed her the code, can they still claim the code as a trade secret????
Well, an oral contract is just as valid as a written one. A contract's a contract. Oral contracts are generally discouraged 'cause they're tough to prove in court, but they're perfectly legal and totally binding.
After all, bamboo produces more oxygen than it's pulp counterparts, making it far more valuble, etc etc etc...
I saw this statement in the article, too, and frankly it sounds fishy. I'm no biologist, but it seems to me that wood pulp usually comes from trees, which also have leaves, which produce quite a bit of oxygen.
I'm given to understand that algae is our big concern in terms of oxygen production, though. I've been told that the oceans produce most of the oxygen floating around. Trees are more important in preventing erosion, building topsoil through defoliation, and providing habitats for critters. Israel has shown that desert can be reclaimed through forestation. Bamboo does some of this, but it shouldn't be thought of as a "tree alternative" in terms of the ecosphere. It doesn't work like that, folks.
It might have merits as a material in its own right. I like the idea of using bamboo for making stuff. It sounds like it's cheap and easy to produce, is pretty strong, and very lightweight. I think it's cool that someone's taking a shot at it. Although the arguments here have convinced me that bicycles probably aren't the killer bamboo app, it's heartening to see someone trying, and I hope I see more of this kind of thing in the future.
Getting spam faxed to me always pushes my buttons the best.
If you're in the United States, and recieving unsolicited FAXes, you can sue the hell out of them. Usual damages, as I understand it, are five hundred bucks per violation, although I think it can be higher in some cases. I am not a lawyer.
Yeah, I'm going to go with a no on this one. Everyone said the same thing when ATMs came around, "Oh no, they're going to replace actual tellers!" But it didn't, banks still hire quite frequently for bank tellers.
I agree with you (and others) on this point, but I'm going to pick an example from the same industry: remember in the seventies when diners had little microphones at the tables to place orders? Those were designed to cut down labor costs, too. While kiosks of the sort described might catch on, there's no guarantee that a given technology will be popular, even if it works.
On another note, the philosopher Robert Wilson speculated on a roboticized economy in Schrodinger's Cat (assume there's an umlaut in there), the sort-of-sequel trilogy to his and Robert Shea's popular Illuminatus! trilogy. Some interesting ideas in there.
You might also want to see NRAO's Very Large Array between Datil and Socorro New Mexico. It is also out in the middle of nowhere, great for hiking.
Well... great for driving, maybe. From Socorro, you've got 30 miles of serious desert before the Village of Magdalena, then close to thirty more before you hit the VLA.
People do die out here, folks, from walking in the desert without enough water.
Remember, Trinity Site and the VLA are only open to the public during certain times of the year, mostly pretty hot ones, so if you come out here check the durned schedules online first. And on your way through Socorro, stop off at Martha's Black Dog (a coffeeshop) and say hello.
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a student downloading legal music, such as concerts from bands that allow taping/trading, is not using the network for academic purposes
It's not? Were my credits in music appreciation not academic? If I downloaded a couple of ditties by Beethoven, was I cutting into the bandwidth of students browsing the Web, no doubt purely for academic purposes?
Making sweeping statements like this without thought leads to poor policies. Mind you, I agree with the rest of your post.
D&D, and most other role-playing games are exactly the embodiment of this. They are about teams achieving things, and it is not uncommon for one member to make a personal (or ultimate) sacrifice so that the team can achieve their goal. Er, I think this is sort of what they're talking about when they say "detached from reality". The loss of a D&D character is neither a personal nor ultimate sacrifice. It's just part of the game, y'know? I play D&D, and have had a (U.S.) clearance. I'm inclined to disagree with the premise they're working from, but I can see the other side of it.
Don't Americans use the word touque? Yes. Yes, we do, but in the U.S., "toque" generaly refers to a touque blanche (chef's hat).
See, employers have the right -- absolute, but limited by some very specific and narrow laws meant to keep the balance -- to hire and fire whomever they want for whatever reason they want. If you're my employee and I decide I don't like your socks, I can fire you on the spot if I want.
Mind you, there's a disincentive. It's a minor point, but worth mentioning: an employee who's been fired without cause ("cause" being determined by the Department of Labor) can collect unemployment insurance, assuming that person is otherwise eligible (usually this requires a certain amount of time worked within some period of time). This especially can hurt small businesses, since it raises their unemployment insurance rates.
Unfortunately, this quite often leads to employers "finding a reason" in order to keep their rates down, even if they really just want to cut payroll a bit. This leads to various off-topic ramifications to the hapless, disenfranchised employee.
Ultimately, what the article doesn't say is that the reason companies want more clear-cut policies is so that firings for blogging are "for cause" (because they violated company policies). It's not because they don't think they can fire 'em.
Claria and other similar companies have a legal business
I disagree. They just haven't been shut down yet.
To wit: Let's say I call up a particularly dim secretary at IBM. I claim to be with a consulting firm, and need access to certain files. This person gives me the password to his or her boss' account. I log in and copy everything I can get my hands on.
When tried, I explain that I had permission from a company representative to take those files. This would probably not go over well.
Claria uses similar tactics, taking advantage of stupid people by making vague statements, in order to gain access to private information. In my mind, there's little difference. EULAs require a greater level of literacy than many computer users possess; taking advantage of this fact is, in my opinion, not a legal method of doing business.
I'll agree with JGski pretty much entirely. Of course, we're talking about -most- corporations here, not, say, Ben & Jerry's, or MERIT.
Corporations -do- have certain duties, sometimes, though. First and foremost, paying taxes. Unca Sam'll get -down- on a delinquent corporation. A lot of industries are, or have been, pretty directly regulated through public regulatory agencies, and others indirectly through agencies such as OSHA and the FDA.
Effectiveness of these agencies, as we all know, has been mixed. Mostly I think they're a Good Thing, if a bit subject to the whims of the usual political shenannigans.
Occasionally, a corporation gets hit with a consent decree from a judge. I dunno exactly how these get passed out, but they're pretty binding and corporations take 'em Very Seriously. I guess there's the occasional antitrust action against the largest corporations, too.
Corporations always seem to find ways to play silly buggers with anything not regulated, or not regulated -closely-, often even if it's otherwise illegal. And they have to be dragged to court an awful lot over things that seem pretty straightforward. For example, a given corporation will probably file a perfect work accident report, cover immediate hospital costs without an eyeblink, and fight tooth and nail over any long-term treatment, even if it's physical therapy for that arm they sewed back on after the CEO's drunk sixteen-year-old nephew pushed the switch on the arm lopper while you were repairing it.
Assigning criminal penalties is a tricky matter, mainly because it's really hard to assign blame and you can't punish innocent workers. Dissolving the corporation involves putting innocent folk out of work - sometimes lots of 'em. So that's a poor idea.
Unfortunately, current civil -and- criminal penalties are pretty much just fines, which often ends up punishing the innocent -anyway-. The executive-types rarely take the brunt of financial losses - fines get made up in unpaid overtime, raised quotas, and increased demands, all on the front lines. (Okay, this only applies to large-ish corporations, but most of my complaints do. Smaller corporations tend to be benevolent, barring the occasional one that's so insanely illegal that it's not really what we're talking about.) In publicly traded corporations, legal action usually is unfavorable to their stock value.
I agree that the correct answer is to strip corporations of human rights, although certain (non-Constitutional) rights should be instituted in their place. For example, I think corporations should be represented appropriately in (and have access to) court, but I don't think corporations should have the right to free expression -at all-.
As far as criminal liability, I've no answer at all. Okay, one - but that would involve dissolving the legal concept of a for-profit corporation, which is pretty radical and would no doubt have Repurcussions.
-More- important? So, like, if all humans died, you'd be cool with it as long as our civilization didn't collapse first? Personally, I'd weigh our survival as a species as a greater priority than maintaining our culture, if I had to choose between 'em. ;)
Others have mentioned the great Infocom and Lucasarts games, and all like that. I'm just surprised nobody's mentioned Nethack and its derivatives (and predecessors). For long-time players, one of the major goals in Nethack is to dredge up amusing messages.
... and so on.
Some of these are deliberate ("you hear a faint typing noise"), others a matter of circumstance ("The lawyer hits! It sucks your brains out!"), and still others an artifact of the interface ("What do you want to eat? BLT* or ?"). In any case, while the game itself is reasonably serious, its odd sense of humor is almost a bottomless well:
"You die. Do not pass Go. Do not collect 200 Zorkmids."
"The microscopic space fleet swallows the little dog!"
"The pit fiend falls into a pit! How pitiful. Isn't that the pits?"
The link provided in the parent has no citations to anything aside from one repetition of the Ft. Lee experiment No, the link provided in the parent has numerous cites, under the heading "Sources". Just because they require a trip to the library or bookstore doesn't mean they aren't valid.
I s'pose that makes me slightly insane, since I'd put it about on par with shoplifting. Extrapolating from a lot of vague data from the Web, I'd say about a third of us have snagged something off a shelf at some point, and it's when we were a teen or young adult.
One estimate has about 30 million active shoplifters at a time in the U.S.. Since half of 'lifters are between 18 and 30, and a third are from 13-18, I'll pretend that 24 million shoplifters are between these ages, which according to U.S. Census is around a third of folks in this age group.
So, we can unsafely assume about a third of us have shoplifted. Market researchers say about a fourth of us have participated in music filesharing. We'll pretend for a moment that all of these files were copyrighted. So, assuming (yes, another assumption - I like making assumptions, because it saves research) that the financial loss of a CD is about equal to 12 downloaded songs, we're looking at an equivalent of shoplifting a dollar or so worth of merchandise per song.
We'll ignore the fact that shoplifting has greater physical costs, such as the overhead for the merchandise space, shipping, and manufacturing, while copyright-infringing-filesharing only has production costs. We'll also ignore the fact that the author of this post has had a few beers.
For shoplifting a buck's worth of product, I'd expect to see restitution in the form of cost plus a fine, maybe a couple hundred bucks, and a criminal sentence appropriate to the offender's record. For most folks, that'd be a first offense, and prolly a lil' community service. Maybe unsupervised probation. For repeats, probably longer, supervised probation. Time served, if any, either way.
Since the demographics are not highly dissimilar (compared to violent crime, grand theft, and the like), the penalty ought'a be similar. Cost (about a buck per song), a couple-few hundred dollars on top as a slap on the wrist, and some community service or probation. Repeaters (I emphasize that "repeat" means "doing it after being convicted", not "doing it more than once before getting caught".) should probably be hit about as hard as repeat shoplifters, with, like, actual jail time.
It should be clear at this point that I support U.S. copyright law more-or-less in its current form. The musicians had rights, they signed a contract giving them away, they didn't get lobotomized first, so the RIAA owns those rights. I don't much like the RIAA, but I didn't like Sam Walton, either - and I don't think that gives me the right to take his stuff. I disagree with copyright torts of this nature, though - I think it ought'a be criminal, not civil. For one thing, criminal law gives protections to alleged offenders that civil law doesn't, thanks to that Constitution thingee.
I suggest that civil law shouldn't (in a perfect world) apply to corporate actions against private citizens acting privately. They should, in my mind, have to convince law enforcement-types that said citizens did something bad.
This is prolly obvious at this point, but I'm not, like, a lawyer or anything.
It's not exactly relevant, but here's a guy who's written a lot about shoplifting, but doesn't appear to have gotten laid since Jimmy Carter was in office.
People can always write to the Attorney General and appeal that they are not a child porn site. I would say even if 10% of the sites which are blokced are not child porn, then that is acceptable. What is not acceptable is doing nothing.
This is, in formal logic, what's known as a false dichotomy. You can do _something_ without blocking legitimate sites. For example, you can attempt to identify and prosecute the creators and distributors of child pornography. "Deputizing" ISPs without their consent is just silly. If they're aware of any kiddie porn, they should act, but forcing them to monitor everything that passes through their network is just silly. Anybody seriously suggest that telecomm companies be liable for stopping drug deals that occur over the phone?I also think states must work together to track down the providers of child porn and arrest and jail these scumbags. They should be forced to go to jail.
I agree. But we, as a society, pay people to round up these scumbags (the kiddie pornographers, not the ISPs). Foisting off the responsibility onto someone who isn't employed to do so is just passing the buck.
Yes, there's shades of grey here. Hotel proprietors are often required to run off any known prostitutes, but you don't see laws requiring them to monitor all rooms at all times to prevent it, nor would such laws be feasable.
Similarly, requiring that ISPs report known child pornographers is reasonable (and is currently the law, AFAIK). Requiring ISPs to monitor and make a judgement on everything that passes through their servier is not reasonable.
SCO is your friend. Trust SCO. Open source programmers must show respect. SCO says so, and SCO is your friend.
Open source programmers get lied about to the media, strangled in red tape, cheated, and occasionally accidentally sued. Being an open source programmer is fun and rewarding if they negotiate with SCO. SCO says so. Of course SCO is right!
SCO owns UNIX. Which parts? What's your security clearance, citizen? I'm sorry, but that information is not available at your clearance level. Serve SCO and perhaps you will one day be rewarded.
Remember - Stay Alert! Trust No One! Keep Your Licence Handy!
Funny Spider Robinson should complain about this though. The Callahan's stories fall under Clarke's Law; the Future Beings who drop into the Cross-Time Saloon might as well be magicians from Myth Adventures.
Robinson's written somewhat harder sci-fi, most notably (in my mind) Mindkiller and Telempath. The various Callahan's stories are fun, though.
People seem to think that sniper attacks are a new and American phenomenon. That just ain't so. It's just another kind of murder, and murder's been around for a while, now.
Creativity comes naturally, it doesn't have to be learned.
I couldn't agree more. However, meaningful expression must be learned, and without it, creativity is less useful. Technical ability in language improves one's ability to express oneself verbally. Similarly, technical prowess in sculpting, painting, and performance aids expression in these (or any) media.
Er, I'll save you moderators the trouble. -1, Flamebait. And a grammar flame to boot. With grammatical errors in it. I deserve modding down. I probably deserve worse. But I must speak.
If you do know English te word grammar checker should be used to write perfect technical papers. Its possible to write perfect technical papers, I do it all the time in college, its like standard here if you want an A.
This makes me want to weep. Did you intend it ironically?
"Its"? Twice?(!) A run-on sentence bragging about your prowess at grammar? Redundancy, incorrect capitalization, a typographical error, punctuation errors, and errors I don't know the name of?
Mind you, my grammar ain't perfect, even in this post. That last paragraph was nothing but sentence framents. I'm just saying I really, really hope you did that on purpose.
If not, shut the hell up about your perfect technical papers, 'kay?
It seems pretty obvious to me that hackers doing this sort of thing are simply trying to draw as much attention to themselves as possible, in order to boost their ego and enhance their career options.
Not at all like, say, teen athletes, who play sports for the sheer fun of it.
Besides, if he was so confident his activities were legal and ok, why is he running around from state to state, in hiding?
Well, according to the article, he's in California working on a documentary. Not exactly the kind of thing you'd do if you were "in hiding".
If he felt he had a strong case in his favor, you'd think he'd just turn himself in to the FBI right away, so he could show their folly in court and walk away righteous.
This just tells me he's not an idiot. Talking to a lawyer before the cops is good sense, and perfectly legal. Nothing in the law requires him to turn himself in, so he can take his own sweet time and make sure his rights are protected.
You got some kinda grudge against this guy, or did you just not read the article?
WTF? And computers are less buggy than paper?!?! Help me.
Generally, I agree with you. But this statement... well, yeah, computers are less buggy than paper.
You might be thinking of the thing on top of your desk as a computer. It is, but there are a lotta types of computers in this world. Dedicated machines do pretty well. When's the last time your digital watch crashed? Ever have to re-boot your microwave in mid-cooking? You think currency counters make many mistakes?
Sure, if you want a flexible user interface, Plug n' Pray, Quake III, and a set of interoperable office applications, you're gonna get problems. But if you want something that just counts stuff, you can't beat silicon.
How about the State of Iowa voting that the value of pi is 3? At least I think it was Iowa...
Er, Stranger in a Strange Land is fictional, you understand. Despite what happened in the novel, Tennessee did not actually pass such a law. Here's a good debunking of this legend, with citations and everything.
If Didio did not sign the NDA, and they showed her the code, can they still claim the code as a trade secret????
Well, an oral contract is just as valid as a written one. A contract's a contract. Oral contracts are generally discouraged 'cause they're tough to prove in court, but they're perfectly legal and totally binding.
And when did I say it was a tree?
Did you have some other "pulp counterpart" in mind? I assumed you were referring to this statement in the article:
When you said:
I was merely pointing out that bamboo is _not_ more valuable than trees, but may be valuable as a material in its own right.
After all, bamboo produces more oxygen than it's pulp counterparts, making it far more valuble, etc etc etc...
I saw this statement in the article, too, and frankly it sounds fishy. I'm no biologist, but it seems to me that wood pulp usually comes from trees, which also have leaves, which produce quite a bit of oxygen.
I'm given to understand that algae is our big concern in terms of oxygen production, though. I've been told that the oceans produce most of the oxygen floating around. Trees are more important in preventing erosion, building topsoil through defoliation, and providing habitats for critters. Israel has shown that desert can be reclaimed through forestation. Bamboo does some of this, but it shouldn't be thought of as a "tree alternative" in terms of the ecosphere. It doesn't work like that, folks.
It might have merits as a material in its own right. I like the idea of using bamboo for making stuff. It sounds like it's cheap and easy to produce, is pretty strong, and very lightweight. I think it's cool that someone's taking a shot at it. Although the arguments here have convinced me that bicycles probably aren't the killer bamboo app, it's heartening to see someone trying, and I hope I see more of this kind of thing in the future.
Getting spam faxed to me always pushes my buttons the best.
If you're in the United States, and recieving unsolicited FAXes, you can sue the hell out of them. Usual damages, as I understand it, are five hundred bucks per violation, although I think it can be higher in some cases. I am not a lawyer.
Yeah, I'm going to go with a no on this one. Everyone said the same thing when ATMs came around, "Oh no, they're going to replace actual tellers!" But it didn't, banks still hire quite frequently for bank tellers.
I agree with you (and others) on this point, but I'm going to pick an example from the same industry: remember in the seventies when diners had little microphones at the tables to place orders? Those were designed to cut down labor costs, too. While kiosks of the sort described might catch on, there's no guarantee that a given technology will be popular, even if it works.
On another note, the philosopher Robert Wilson speculated on a roboticized economy in Schrodinger's Cat (assume there's an umlaut in there), the sort-of-sequel trilogy to his and Robert Shea's popular Illuminatus! trilogy. Some interesting ideas in there.
You might also want to see NRAO's Very Large Array between Datil and Socorro New Mexico. It is also out in the middle of nowhere, great for hiking.
Well... great for driving, maybe. From Socorro, you've got 30 miles of serious desert before the Village of Magdalena, then close to thirty more before you hit the VLA.
People do die out here, folks, from walking in the desert without enough water.
Remember, Trinity Site and the VLA are only open to the public during certain times of the year, mostly pretty hot ones, so if you come out here check the durned schedules online first. And on your way through Socorro, stop off at Martha's Black Dog (a coffeeshop) and say hello.