When the inside temperature is too cold, my typing productivity does not go down because my arms get cold. It goes down because my fingers get cold, and wearing long sleeves does not change this. I could wear gloves, but that would be outside social norms and more error-prone.
yes. its indymedias property. what a silly assertion to make.
On what basis do you make that (in my view frivolous) assertion? Unless you know something that Indymedia has not made clear in a public forum -- specifically, that they actually owned the servers rather than leasing their use from Rackspace -- you are just demonstrating typical Slashdot cretinism and mindless following of leftist-anarchist mob. I already explained why I do not think that Indymedia had any property rights that would be infringed by the seizure, but you clearly didn't bother to read the comment I linked to in my post, since you didn't address any of the points in it.
And I bet you wonder why nobody takes the Angry Left seriously.
You need to understand that when it comes to individual rights governments must not be allowed to make exceptions. Not one, even in the investigation of a crime or terrorist activities.
Every
potential for abuse by a government will be realized eventually. So the potential must not be allowed to exist.
Usually people with such a deluded black-and-white view of the world are on the other side of the fence, but no matter.
Law is all about how to balance potentials for abuse and how to make sure that wrongs can be redressed. The only way to prevent every potential for abuse by a government is to totally abolish government, which I doubt you really want. In the case of Indymedia, eight days is too short a time to come to any specific conclusions.
Its the authorities who have the burden to bring actual facts to the table, because it is them who infringed on other peoples freedom and property.
See my other post on this topic. For all their whining, Indymedia has not even shown that they owned the property that was seized (and, incidentally, returned in what must be nearly record time; it can take years before someone recovers property seized in a US criminal investigation -- see Steve Jackson Games, among others).
You assume a hell of a lot of facts not in evidence, primarily that Indymedia had ownership rights to the servers that were infringed without notification. This assumes three things:
(1) You assume Indymedia owned the servers. More often than not, the hosting service owns the machine and only leases their use to the customer. If Rackspace owned the machines, then Indymedia's only complaint can be with Rackspace.
(2) That Rackspace let the feds carry off a customer's property without just cause. This would be a huge legal and PR risk for Rackspace, no matter what their contracts might say about such things.
(3) The warrant or seizure order served on Rackspace did not detail cause, or prohibited Rackspace from telling Indymedia what the cause was. This would be a significant departure from normal investigations; the few comments from Rackspace do not suggest that kind of breach.
But Ben Franklin forbid that we wait more than 8 days for any public explanation of what happened or get actual facts about the court orders. We can't have that when we instead have the opportunity to cry censorship and oppression!
The very fact that they still haven't told us the reason behind the raid
is censorship.
One might equally well claim that the reason you posted as Anonymous Coward is because you are criminal scum who supports Intarweb terrrists.
Put another way: There exist valid reasons to not immediately publicize why law enforcement does what they do. It may turn out that none of them apply in this case, and the raids and seizures were an oppressive abuse of the process, but crying censorship in the absense of evidence really is no better than crying wolf.
But whiny liberal kiddies seldom want to work to substantiate their prejudices, so I expect you to dismiss me as a mindless sycophant to The Man. Unless you have actual facts to bring to the table, don't bother.
No. Some groups require that (most notably the Free Software Foundation), but many do not. Linus and the other kernel folks are part of the latter group.
While there are some benefits to having a single copyright holder, you need a lot of bookkeeping to track everyone's copyright assignments and a lot of work to make sure they are proper. US copyright law requires that any copyright assignment be in writing and identify (in writing) exactly for what works copyrights are being assigned. Many European countries recognize "natural rights" or "droits d'auteur" that cannot be assigned to a third party. Some programmers have employment contracts that stipulate all software copyrights for things they write while employed belong to their employer, even if the software was written on the programmer's own time. Et cetera.
Linus decided either the effort was not worth it or that there were other benefits to not requiring copyright assignments. The Free Software Foundation does go to the effort to work all the details out. If you (or anyone else) wants to have a single copyright holder for a GPLed program, I encourage you to assign that copyright to the FSF. It saves a lot of effort on your part and ensures that the copyright holder has both the resources and resources to protect the software.
Help, I'm locked in a vital interaction with the atmosphere -- if I stop breathing, I die!
You speak of "Greenhouse deniers" without defining them or explaining why they are relevant. This kind of map shows only one kind of pollutant, and does not purport to show a causal relationship between human-generated pollution and temperature. Ranting about them with such a flimsy basis is only reducing yourself to the level of "Greenhouse deniers."
Decades ago, people were worried about nuclear winter. It never happened, largely because nuclear bombs have not been used in war since WW2. Pollution is similar: Global warming can be caused by excess pollution, but there are many other -- including more local -- reasons to reduce pollution. There are links to elevated cancer rates, birth defects, and a host of other health-related problems, for both humans and other animals, when pollution goes up; none of these rely on the much more tenuous (and less well-understood) link between global temperatures and air pollution.
If we are fortunate, we will never find out how much air pollution is too much for our planet to handle. We can improve our chances by arguing clearly and coherently to reduce pollution, rather than resorting to hyperbole or patronizing.
9 terabits in 20 hours is slightly over 131 Mb/sec. Most of the telescopes were in Europe, but even assuming the Arecibo telescope generated three quarters of the traffic, 100 Mbit should be a drop in the bucket going across the Atlantic.
The point isn't that they can get by with a smaller budget -- they might need a bigger budget down the road, and there are no incentives to cut the budget. That is true for any level of the management structure. It's a hard problem: You want to encourage frugality, but not being a cheapskate, yet there is no benefit for people who deliver cost savings. The only noticable benefit is when your group gets a bigger budget because it spent all the money it got before.
Perhaps Sony realized that users are probably better served by having a "commodity" hard drive connected over USB or IEEE 1394; this makes using a hard drive cheaper and more upgradable -- and requires less design work on Sony's part. I am interested to see how they work that out, since I doubt Sony would do something to seriously offend Square Enix (like breaking their flagship product).
Your claim of "144x as much traffic" exhibits an ignorance of how DNS caching works -- not that I should be surprised by the ignorance of anything I read on Slashdot. Specifically, caching is controllable independently of zone revision. It is easy to instruct clients to cache negative replies for a longer time than that revision of the zone is current. The only way to increase the frequency of lame requests is to reduce the TTL or SOA MINIMUM values.
On top of that, maximum-frequency error responses are only a problem when you have enough headstrong or automated users to see requests for the SAME misspelled domain name just past the SOA MINIMUM (or TTL, if appropriate) time. It is not a problem for valid name requests, since they have separate TTLs. While that frequency of lame requests is indeed a valid assumption with infinite load, in practice, only the largest ISPs will see anything that approximates that traffic.
Your comment that domains are not supposed to change every minute is correct for some domains; but the particular domains in question (TLDs) do change every minute as new domains are registered or expire. (Other things, like DHCP-driven dynamic DNS, can also legitimately cause frequent zone updates.)
The Register already dug into the details. The premium-rate calls were not added by a virus or by warez monkeys, but were in the original game as a way to monitor who copied it.
You missed John Kerry's latest "nuance" on this issue -- Benedict Arnold companies are now limited to those who move their nominal headquarters overseas to avoid paying US income tax on most of their revenue. Apparently an overzealous speechwriter was responsible for having offshoring qualify CEOs as Benedict Arnolds.
I suppose you didn't see the advertising system shown in the movie Minority Report (if not, don't bother wasting your time watching it). Surveillance systems there captured your eye motion, identified you, and made an aggressive personal pitch for you to buy their product.
The harm of this omnipresent surveillance is not to those who could be surveilled in person (most of those are fairly well-to-do, and could avoid the manual surveillance if they wish). It is to Average Joe, who only knows that billboards are yelling at him to BUY BUY BUY, or that he gets mobile phone spam about the latest movie tie-ins just for walking by Bigchain Hamburgers. It is also to Janet Whistleblower, who could be fired because in-building video cameras see her linger over an incriminating document left out by a manager.
The details of the Minority Report ads are a far-fetched, especially in details I glossed over, but between RFID, mobile E911, and pattern (face, gait, speech, etc) recognition techniques already being used, something like it is closer than you might think.
The dictionary can explain perfectly well. Doing it professionally means it is your profession, your bread and butter. Burt Rutan's crew seems to qualify as professionals, although their investors expect to lose money on the X-Prize pursuit. An amateur is someone who does it for fun or as a hobby. Armadillo Aerospace may (or may not) be as expert as the professionals, but they are an amateur operation because they pay the bills with other pursuits.
But I remember reading that statements published in court documents aren't subject to libel/slander.
Right. Statements before a court (including filings) are privileged with respect to libel and slander. The court can impose sanctions for contempt or frivolous claims, if there is no reasonable basis for making the claims.
However, these statements were made to the press, which means they are not protected. I rather hope that IBM goes after a gag order to prevent SCO from further maligning IBM's AIX business. It should be pretty easy to do. Even if IBM doesn't seek a gag order, I am sure both sides will have plenty to say about this when they go before the judge later this month.
That makes it look like the ever-popular "My book got published and I can afford a lawyer, give me the domain name I want" approach. I hope Katie Jones finds good counsel to put Ms. Tarbox in her place.
You have a rather broad definition of "random, uninteresting American." If you had bothered to do even a modicum of research, you would find that Katie Jones (owner of katie.com) lives in London, and Pearson Group (which seems to own the Penguin Putnam group) is based in London.
You clearly dislike it when Americans assume everything is about them, but is it fair to complain when you also assume everything is about Americans?
I really don't think that ANY biometric system will be foolproof until the old basic of security is implemented. The scheme is called "Something you have and Something you know" (someone out there does know the right name even if I can't remember it at the moment).
You're probably thinking of "three-factor security." The most secure identification is based on three different kinds of factors: something you have, something you know, and something you are. Frequently you can get away with just one or two factors because you do not need the confidence from checking all three.
Naive security -- no matter which factor it involves -- is easy to undermine, so you want a real person watching to make sure nobody is trading access cards, whispering passwords, or carrying around gelatin fingertips.
Could you please make sense? Lobbying for a change in laws is different than lobbying for people to break laws.
Your example can be refined and clarified. Copyright law: Copyright law is broken and needs to be fixed (DMCA, copyright duration are two examples). Copyright itself: Good idea, so don't violate others' copyrights, even if "other" is slime like Microsoft, RIAA or MPAA. Similar logic applies to patents. We don't like details of the laws, so they should be changed, but we like the concept behind the laws, so the laws should be obeyed.
You're only likely to install Linux once on your machine, so why do you want a friendly installer for it? (Translation: Your argument overlooks important considerations. If they want a good configuration interface, they can do like others and have an "Expert" mode or separate dialog.)
If GNOME were designed for usability, why does its file manager want to open up so many windows when I'll end up closing most of them? At least Microsoft has realized that users don't treat local file systems that differently from web pages, and so many interface modalities should be shared.
I have seen FAR too many hideous bits of code that no one who understood the underpinnings of assembly would never dream of.
I have seen FAR too many hideous bits of code due to people not knowing appropriate data structures. I have seen FAR too many hideous bits of code just because people didn't know what clean code looks like (or didn't know why it helps maintenance).
Sure, you can save some time by passing fewer arguments on the stack. You generally will not save much time that way; if somebody passes 15 arguments to a function, it is usually because they do something with most of them, and that bounds the potential speedup. But you can often save mountains of execution time by using a better algorithm. You can also save mountains of developer time by trying to write clear, concise code in the first place.
Knowing how the CPU works is just one facet of competent programming, and is important to remember; but too many people focus on just one facet and ignore the others.
Indeed: The key point the US ISP insisted on was the assertion under penalty of perjury. That is the essential accountability measure under the US DMCA; it seems that the EU directive and UK law do not have that kind of provision, so the only possible countering torts would be commercial in nature.
Slashdot Mirror
When the inside temperature is too cold, my typing productivity does not go down because my arms get cold. It goes down because my fingers get cold, and wearing long sleeves does not change this. I could wear gloves, but that would be outside social norms and more error-prone.
On what basis do you make that (in my view frivolous) assertion? Unless you know something that Indymedia has not made clear in a public forum -- specifically, that they actually owned the servers rather than leasing their use from Rackspace -- you are just demonstrating typical Slashdot cretinism and mindless following of leftist-anarchist mob. I already explained why I do not think that Indymedia had any property rights that would be infringed by the seizure, but you clearly didn't bother to read the comment I linked to in my post, since you didn't address any of the points in it.
And I bet you wonder why nobody takes the Angry Left seriously.
Law is all about how to balance potentials for abuse and how to make sure that wrongs can be redressed. The only way to prevent every potential for abuse by a government is to totally abolish government, which I doubt you really want. In the case of Indymedia, eight days is too short a time to come to any specific conclusions.
You assume a hell of a lot of facts not in evidence, primarily that Indymedia had ownership rights to the servers that were infringed without notification. This assumes three things:
(1) You assume Indymedia owned the servers. More often than not, the hosting service owns the machine and only leases their use to the customer. If Rackspace owned the machines, then Indymedia's only complaint can be with Rackspace.
(2) That Rackspace let the feds carry off a customer's property without just cause. This would be a huge legal and PR risk for Rackspace, no matter what their contracts might say about such things.
(3) The warrant or seizure order served on Rackspace did not detail cause, or prohibited Rackspace from telling Indymedia what the cause was. This would be a significant departure from normal investigations; the few comments from Rackspace do not suggest that kind of breach.
But Ben Franklin forbid that we wait more than 8 days for any public explanation of what happened or get actual facts about the court orders. We can't have that when we instead have the opportunity to cry censorship and oppression!
Put another way: There exist valid reasons to not immediately publicize why law enforcement does what they do. It may turn out that none of them apply in this case, and the raids and seizures were an oppressive abuse of the process, but crying censorship in the absense of evidence really is no better than crying wolf.
But whiny liberal kiddies seldom want to work to substantiate their prejudices, so I expect you to dismiss me as a mindless sycophant to The Man. Unless you have actual facts to bring to the table, don't bother.
Impressive trick, isn't it? I meant "both the resources and experience" -- thanks for the catch.
No. Some groups require that (most notably the Free Software Foundation), but many do not. Linus and the other kernel folks are part of the latter group.
While there are some benefits to having a single copyright holder, you need a lot of bookkeeping to track everyone's copyright assignments and a lot of work to make sure they are proper. US copyright law requires that any copyright assignment be in writing and identify (in writing) exactly for what works copyrights are being assigned. Many European countries recognize "natural rights" or "droits d'auteur" that cannot be assigned to a third party. Some programmers have employment contracts that stipulate all software copyrights for things they write while employed belong to their employer, even if the software was written on the programmer's own time. Et cetera.
Linus decided either the effort was not worth it or that there were other benefits to not requiring copyright assignments. The Free Software Foundation does go to the effort to work all the details out. If you (or anyone else) wants to have a single copyright holder for a GPLed program, I encourage you to assign that copyright to the FSF. It saves a lot of effort on your part and ensures that the copyright holder has both the resources and resources to protect the software.
Help, I'm locked in a vital interaction with the atmosphere -- if I stop breathing, I die!
You speak of "Greenhouse deniers" without defining them or explaining why they are relevant. This kind of map shows only one kind of pollutant, and does not purport to show a causal relationship between human-generated pollution and temperature. Ranting about them with such a flimsy basis is only reducing yourself to the level of "Greenhouse deniers."
Decades ago, people were worried about nuclear winter. It never happened, largely because nuclear bombs have not been used in war since WW2. Pollution is similar: Global warming can be caused by excess pollution, but there are many other -- including more local -- reasons to reduce pollution. There are links to elevated cancer rates, birth defects, and a host of other health-related problems, for both humans and other animals, when pollution goes up; none of these rely on the much more tenuous (and less well-understood) link between global temperatures and air pollution.
If we are fortunate, we will never find out how much air pollution is too much for our planet to handle. We can improve our chances by arguing clearly and coherently to reduce pollution, rather than resorting to hyperbole or patronizing.
9 terabits in 20 hours is slightly over 131 Mb/sec. Most of the telescopes were in Europe, but even assuming the Arecibo telescope generated three quarters of the traffic, 100 Mbit should be a drop in the bucket going across the Atlantic.
The point isn't that they can get by with a smaller budget -- they might need a bigger budget down the road, and there are no incentives to cut the budget. That is true for any level of the management structure. It's a hard problem: You want to encourage frugality, but not being a cheapskate, yet there is no benefit for people who deliver cost savings. The only noticable benefit is when your group gets a bigger budget because it spent all the money it got before.
Perhaps Sony realized that users are probably better served by having a "commodity" hard drive connected over USB or IEEE 1394; this makes using a hard drive cheaper and more upgradable -- and requires less design work on Sony's part. I am interested to see how they work that out, since I doubt Sony would do something to seriously offend Square Enix (like breaking their flagship product).
Your claim of "144x as much traffic" exhibits an ignorance of how DNS caching works -- not that I should be surprised by the ignorance of anything I read on Slashdot. Specifically, caching is controllable independently of zone revision. It is easy to instruct clients to cache negative replies for a longer time than that revision of the zone is current. The only way to increase the frequency of lame requests is to reduce the TTL or SOA MINIMUM values.
On top of that, maximum-frequency error responses are only a problem when you have enough headstrong or automated users to see requests for the SAME misspelled domain name just past the SOA MINIMUM (or TTL, if appropriate) time. It is not a problem for valid name requests, since they have separate TTLs. While that frequency of lame requests is indeed a valid assumption with infinite load, in practice, only the largest ISPs will see anything that approximates that traffic.
Your comment that domains are not supposed to change every minute is correct for some domains; but the particular domains in question (TLDs) do change every minute as new domains are registered or expire. (Other things, like DHCP-driven dynamic DNS, can also legitimately cause frequent zone updates.)
The Register already dug into the details. The premium-rate calls were not added by a virus or by warez monkeys, but were in the original game as a way to monitor who copied it.
You missed John Kerry's latest "nuance" on this issue -- Benedict Arnold companies are now limited to those who move their nominal headquarters overseas to avoid paying US income tax on most of their revenue. Apparently an overzealous speechwriter was responsible for having offshoring qualify CEOs as Benedict Arnolds.
I suppose you didn't see the advertising system shown in the movie Minority Report (if not, don't bother wasting your time watching it). Surveillance systems there captured your eye motion, identified you, and made an aggressive personal pitch for you to buy their product.
The harm of this omnipresent surveillance is not to those who could be surveilled in person (most of those are fairly well-to-do, and could avoid the manual surveillance if they wish). It is to Average Joe, who only knows that billboards are yelling at him to BUY BUY BUY, or that he gets mobile phone spam about the latest movie tie-ins just for walking by Bigchain Hamburgers. It is also to Janet Whistleblower, who could be fired because in-building video cameras see her linger over an incriminating document left out by a manager.
The details of the Minority Report ads are a far-fetched, especially in details I glossed over, but between RFID, mobile E911, and pattern (face, gait, speech, etc) recognition techniques already being used, something like it is closer than you might think.
The dictionary can explain perfectly well. Doing it professionally means it is your profession, your bread and butter. Burt Rutan's crew seems to qualify as professionals, although their investors expect to lose money on the X-Prize pursuit. An amateur is someone who does it for fun or as a hobby. Armadillo Aerospace may (or may not) be as expert as the professionals, but they are an amateur operation because they pay the bills with other pursuits.
Right. Statements before a court (including filings) are privileged with respect to libel and slander. The court can impose sanctions for contempt or frivolous claims, if there is no reasonable basis for making the claims.
However, these statements were made to the press, which means they are not protected. I rather hope that IBM goes after a gag order to prevent SCO from further maligning IBM's AIX business. It should be pretty easy to do. Even if IBM doesn't seek a gag order, I am sure both sides will have plenty to say about this when they go before the judge later this month.
That makes it look like the ever-popular "My book got published and I can afford a lawyer, give me the domain name I want" approach. I hope Katie Jones finds good counsel to put Ms. Tarbox in her place.
You have a rather broad definition of "random, uninteresting American." If you had bothered to do even a modicum of research, you would find that Katie Jones (owner of katie.com) lives in London, and Pearson Group (which seems to own the Penguin Putnam group) is based in London.
You clearly dislike it when Americans assume everything is about them, but is it fair to complain when you also assume everything is about Americans?
You're probably thinking of "three-factor security." The most secure identification is based on three different kinds of factors: something you have, something you know, and something you are. Frequently you can get away with just one or two factors because you do not need the confidence from checking all three.
Naive security -- no matter which factor it involves -- is easy to undermine, so you want a real person watching to make sure nobody is trading access cards, whispering passwords, or carrying around gelatin fingertips.
Could you please make sense? Lobbying for a change in laws is different than lobbying for people to break laws.
Your example can be refined and clarified. Copyright law: Copyright law is broken and needs to be fixed (DMCA, copyright duration are two examples). Copyright itself: Good idea, so don't violate others' copyrights, even if "other" is slime like Microsoft, RIAA or MPAA. Similar logic applies to patents. We don't like details of the laws, so they should be changed, but we like the concept behind the laws, so the laws should be obeyed.
You're only likely to install Linux once on your machine, so why do you want a friendly installer for it? (Translation: Your argument overlooks important considerations. If they want a good configuration interface, they can do like others and have an "Expert" mode or separate dialog.)
If GNOME were designed for usability, why does its file manager want to open up so many windows when I'll end up closing most of them? At least Microsoft has realized that users don't treat local file systems that differently from web pages, and so many interface modalities should be shared.
I have seen FAR too many hideous bits of code due to people not knowing appropriate data structures. I have seen FAR too many hideous bits of code just because people didn't know what clean code looks like (or didn't know why it helps maintenance).
Sure, you can save some time by passing fewer arguments on the stack. You generally will not save much time that way; if somebody passes 15 arguments to a function, it is usually because they do something with most of them, and that bounds the potential speedup. But you can often save mountains of execution time by using a better algorithm. You can also save mountains of developer time by trying to write clear, concise code in the first place.
Knowing how the CPU works is just one facet of competent programming, and is important to remember; but too many people focus on just one facet and ignore the others.
Indeed: The key point the US ISP insisted on was the assertion under penalty of perjury. That is the essential accountability measure under the US DMCA; it seems that the EU directive and UK law do not have that kind of provision, so the only possible countering torts would be commercial in nature.