The bug tracking system is almost never the problem with an organization's quality improvement effort. Never-the-less time spent entering and retrieving information into the bug tracking system is 100% non-value added waste. It should be minimized by using good technology if it can be done cheaply. However, in no case does the software solve problems for you or prevent you from having to get your hands dirty. If your organization isn't eyeballing each and every problem, assigning ownership, prioritizing, and tracking improvements to closure, you are just going to fail more with a better system.
Bugzilla is cheap (free) and good, but even more importantly, you can see how other groups build a cradle to grave corrective action process around it. My advice to you is to give your boss a tour of the Mozilla bug tracking **process** with their copy of bugzilla as your window. Set up bugzilla on your own machine and play-test it by re-entering a few of your own bugs into it and mock-working them.
I would hope that would be Unconstitutional, since mandatory speech is a violation of the first amendment. I also think a 10th amendment argument would be a good one -- there is no enumerated power in the US Constitution that authorizes Congress to impose record keeping requirements on publishers.
But as always, the US Court system is not reliable for getting the right result when it comes to individual liberty, so we would have to see.
You only need to do 2^64 calculations if you share the results among the participating computers, including storing the original files. I did not posit any such abiilty.
Since there are ~2^80 atoms in the known universe, I think it unlikely that any such storage mechanism will ever be built.
So your assertion is incorrect with respect to MD5.
I disagree.
Part of the MD5 algorithm is analytically weak, but that falls far short of an actual working attack for the whole thing. Researchers suspect that this weakness MIGHT eventually lead to an analytic attack against the whole of MD5, but as yet, no such attack exists. As Robshaw said: "While the existence of pseudo-collisions is significant on an analytical level, it is of less practical importance."
Moreover...
"Note that existing signatures that were generated using MD5 are likely to remain safe from compromise since it seems that current techniques used to cryptanalyze MD5 do not offer any advantage in finding a second preimage. Existing signatures should not be considered as being at risk of compromise at this point."
This appeal has not been granted certiori yet, so no question is yet before the high court. All that happened is that O'Connor paused the final resolution while the High Court decides if it wants to hear the case.
Moreover, this case is NOT ABOUT THE DMCA in any way, it is about JURISDICTION in a state law trade secret case. The Pavlovich appeal does not consider the merits of the trade secret dispute. That is still waiting to go up to the CA Supreme Court after the good guys won below. This one is solely about whether you can be sued in California for posting it to the web outside of California.
I'm actually surprised by O'Connor's action -- it seems very unlikely that the Supreme Court would have the audacity to tell a state court that it must exercise jurisdiction under that state's law. As the justices are fond of saying: "What is the Federal issue?".
If I understand you correctly, you are saying that both NVidia and ATI are stiff arming the open source community in terms of how their cards work, but that NVidia is at least offering less buggy proprietary drivers.
Another poster commented that the same guy working on the nvidia driver for the 2.5 kernel is an intern at nvidia, so perhaps nvidia is coming around.
But it also raises the question: until open source drivers can run the full feature set of these cards why is this news? More interesting would be the best performing card using open source drivers only. Anybody know?
Last time I checked, NVidia had an obnoxious policy of not releasing technical info for all the functionality of their cards. Is that still the case?
How is ATI regarding open source support? Can I run a fully powered video card from ATI without having to download special drivers directly from ATI, like I used to have to do with NVidia?
Are they saying that two different files can't have the same hash value? That's a load of crap! It's not hard at all to modify data to create any hash value that you want, especially when you're including "deleted space" in the CRC calculations... It's good at telling you if there were any random modifications caused by errors during copying, but not that the files are identical.
There are no known examples of two files that have the same MD5 (or SHA-1) hash values, so I think you should reevaluate your statement. While it certainly is true that such files do exist (2^128 MD5 values, > 2^128 possible files, pigeon-hole principle, etc...), that does not mean that finding them is computationally easy or even possible.
A brute force search of files would require ~2^128 files to be search to find a match. If 2^32 computers each processed 2^16 files a second on average per year (60*60*24*365 20^30 seconds), then it would take greater than 2^50 years to find a match. Equivalently, the odds that any of the files that have ever been produced by humans have the same MD5 are pretty bad.
It might be possbile that a cryptographic flaw in MD5 exists that could be exploited to reduce the number of files that needed to be searched. I believe no such flaw is known. If one does exist, I'm quite sure it doesn't provide dramatic benefits.
Ummmm, excuse me, but if you're a contractor, and I hire you to write something, that's a work for hire.
No, that is 100% wrong. Copyright in a work done by an independent contractor is by default owned by the contractor. The contract may assign copyright ownership if the agreement is explicit, but even then it is not usually a "work for hire", but rather a transfer of copyright ownership. A contractor's work can only be a work for hire by agreement in 9 specifically enumerated cases that do not include software.
There was a Supreme Court case in the 1980's on the copyright differentiation between the independent contractor vs. work for hire.
I'm always skeptical about 2nd hand interpretations of judicial decisions. At face value, this sounds bad, because it appears to find you are bound by the terms of a Clickwrap contract even if you don't explicitly agree to it.
On the other hand, if this case basically held that abiding by robots.txt is mandatory for spiders, I think I would support that. If the judge held that the terms of use applies even if this site's robots.txt did not forbid crawling, then that is horrendous.
The Court's silence in Miller informed the body of appellate decisions that followed.
The doctrine of judicial restraint tells us that Courts should decide cases based on the narrowest grounds possible. Silence never constitutes support. But Miller was not silent, it adopted a test for determining which weapons Miller did have a right to keep. Lower courts should simply apply that test.
Oh, and I'll be happy to see the Ninth's decision challenged (which, of course, it will be); I'm just not optimistic that the Supreme Court, Thomas notwithstanding, will give gun-rights advocates anything to celebrate.
Actually, I think it is much more likely they will get it right. The DOJ will advocate the individual rights viewpoint. The conservative 5 on the Supreme Court are especially critical of the 9th Circuit.
If you confine your self to Supreme Court precedent, there is plenty of stuff to support the individual rights view. The strongest arguement is based on the extended analysis of the usage of the term of art "the people" in UNITED STATES v. VERDUGO-URQUIDEZ, 494 U.S. 259 (1990).
The Preamble declares that the Constitution is ordained and established by "the People of the United States." The Second Amendment protects "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms," and the Ninth and Tenth Amendments provide that certain rights and powers are retained by and reserved to "the people." See also U.S. Const., Amdt. 1 ("Congress shall make no law... abridging... the right of the people peaceably to assemble") (emphasis added); Art. I, 2, cl. 1 ("The House of Representatives shall be composed of Members chosen every second Year by the People of the several States").
While this textual exegesis is by no means conclusive, it suggests that "the people" protected by the Fourth Amendment, and by the First and Second Amendments, and to whom rights and powers are reserved in the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, refers to a class of persons who are part of a national community or who have otherwise developed sufficient connection with this country to be considered part of that community.
This opinion was joined by Rehnquist, Scalia, O'Connor, and Kennedy. Add Thomas, and you've got your five votes.
If you admit Miller is "silent" on the question, you'll find these cases are not:
U.S. v. CRUIKSHANK, 92 U.S. 542 (1875) [Analyzes RTKBA by comparing it to other rights in Bill or Rights as belonging to individual citizens]
Logan v. United States, 144 U.S. 263, 276 (1892) [Refered to RTKBA among rights discussed in Cruikshank as "rights and privileges of the citizen" and as a "birthright"]
Robertson v Baldwin, 165 U.S. 275, 281-82 (1897) [commonality of meaning of individual rights in Bill or Rights, including RTKBA, arises from English commonlaw tradition.]
Maxwell v. Dow, 176 U.S. 581, 597 (1900) [first ten amendments adopted as restraints to Federal powers to limit "certain privileges or immunities possessed by a citizen of the United States"]
In Miller, the Supreme Court examined the Second Amendment at length, considered its application to the case at hand, and concluded that the National Firearms Act did not violate the Constitution - and that Miller did not have any individual right to bear sawed-off shotguns.
That is inaccurate. In Miller, the Court ruled concerning a particular type of weapon's coverage by the 2nd Amendment. The question was "which weapons" not "who" or "if/when". For support I turn to Justice Thomas, who discussed this in his concurring opinion in Concurrence in Printz v. United States, 521 U.S. 898, 938-939 (1997):
In Miller, we determined that the Second Amendment did not guarantee a citizen's right to possess a sawed-off shotgun because that weapon had not been shown to be "ordinary military equipment" that could "contribute to the common defense." The Court did not, however, attempt to define, or otherwise construe, the substantive right protected by the Second Amendment.
How could a court possibly find that the United States, acting as public prosecutor, did not have standing?
They would have reversed the lower court's finding that Miller did have standing. Since their review was "de novo" a finding of standing to a Consitutional challenge to the NFA is within the scope of their review. Since they implicitly accepted the argument of standing, the only possible conclusion is that they accepted his right to argue for the position that his shotgun was among the arms he had a personal right to have. That question would have been moot had this latter class of arms been non-empty.
In 2001's Emerson, the Fifth Circuit examined the Second Amendment at length, considered its application to the case at hand, and concluded that the law in question (a temporary restraining order) still did not violate the Constitution - even if Emerson did have an individual right to bear arms.
I agree with the Emerson Court that a court order is necessary and sufficient to prevent an individual from carrying a gun. I do not advocate an unlimited individual right. Just yesterday, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in the Bean case that a felon may not seek judicial review when their request for reinstatement of firearms rights is not ruled on by the agency in question. I agree with that too.
The Fifth Circuit explicitly did not find in Miller a precedent that all other federal appellate courts have found to date; in order to reach its ruling, it had to avoid in Miller what all other courts have found there, which was that Miller explicitly denies an individual right.
And it did so for the right reason... Miller does not support, but in fact contradicts the position adopted by the 9th Circuit. As Thomas indicated in the quote above, Miller simply didn't explicitly consider the issue. Emerson did, however, consider directly the original understanding of the clause and the historical sources that probe its meaning. For example, great weight is often given to the early Congressional enactments. For example, the Militia Act of 1792 provides that able-bodied citizens of appropriate age "provide himself with a good musket or firelock".
Moreover, I challenge you to find a single reference supporting the 9th Circuit's position from caselaw before 1930. The "State's Rights" view is the product of an explict attempt in the last 70 years to enact the functional equivalent of a Constitutional Amendment. It is a movement that obeys no law. To use Judicial infiltration to acheive what the democratic process cannot provide is dangerous and contemptible.
But I also recognize that reasonable people, acting in good faith, can honestly disagree over the scope of rights guaranteed by the Second Amendment. I think judges who disagree with me (and with each other, for that matter) are a sign that our democracy is healthy and strong, and not a sign that some judges are evil and should be replaced by people who parrot my views.
I agree with this, but I stop short of adopting the outright moral relativism required to find no judicial decision to be evil. Your position seems to be that if several courts adopt an egregious viewpoint, that it should not be challenged or corrected.
You'd impeach a lot of judges, then: Historically the courts all agree with the Ninth Circuit, including the Supreme Court (United States v. Miller [findlaw.com], 1939); the odd man out is the 2001 Fifth Circuit case [findlaw.com].
The Supreme Court adopted no such view in Miller. You are engaging in naked historical revisionism, just like the judges in the 9th Circuit. You should really think about what it means for a judge to impose his personal politics above what the black letter law says. That is not a democratic republic, it is rule by judge, which is an evil form of government.
The "state's rights" view of the 2nd Amendment got started in the 1960's. Anti gun control people like to assert that it is much more widely adopted than it really is. For example, in Miller had the US supreme court not believed that he had an individual right to bear arms, they would have ruled based on lack of standing (as the 9th Circuit here did). They didn't. Instead they adopted a criteria for testing which weapons Miller had a right to have.
The assertion that Miller adopts the view that the 2nd Amendment provides only a State power to arm the National Guard flies directly in the face of its text:
These show plainly enough that the Militia comprised all males physically capable of acting in concert for the common defense. 'A body of citizens enrolled for military discipline.' And further, that ordinarily when called for service these men were expected to appear bearing arms
supplied by themselves and of the kind in common use at the time.
Also, your dissection of key Second Amendment words and phrases omits any discussion of what "well regulated" means, unless you meant that John Ashcroft (and, before him, Janet Reno) gets to decide. Care to elaborate?
The words are a reference to the Art 1, Sec 8, Clause 16: Congress shall have the power "To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia, and for governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States, reserving to the States respectively, the Appointment of the Officers, and the Authority of training the Militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress; "
This is really very simple. Active duty in the Militia, of which the National Guard is an example, is highly regulated by both state and federal laws, while militia non-active duty membership and the right to own firearms belong to all ordinary citizens. Thus Miller describes the militia as "civilians primarily, soldiers on occasion".
The 2nd Amendment would be superfluous, given the above power, if it only meant the government could provide guns to active duty members. The government already has that power. The 2nd Amendment establishes a right that assures that individuals can also provide for their own firearms.
As a historical note, during the civil war the union Army was trounced at the first Battle of Bull Run. In the ensuing disarray, ordinary citizens were hastily assembled to protect the white house. There is a nice photo of this in Ken Burn's book on the Civil War (which accompanied the PBS series). The 2nd Amendment is about establishing an armed populace so that during the hopefully infrequent periods of political instability, the People can act directly to preserve their right to maintain freedom.
The Ninth's recent decision (online here [uscourts.gov]) concludes that the Second Amendment preserves the citizen's right to serve in a well-regulated militia - that is, it grants the state government the right to have National Guard units, and grants you the right to serve in them. If the framers had meant to guarantee an individual right to gun ownership, the Ninth asserts, they would have done so in the plain language of the other nine amendments enacted at the same time (e.g., "Congress shall make no law infringing upon the people's right to possess arms" or similar language).
You have correcly stated the 9th Circuit's position. The position is complete crap, however. I would impeach a judge for adopting such a position, because I believe it violates the oath of office to uphold the Constitution.
The 2nd Amendment's statement of the right is "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed". When the Constitution refers to "the people" does not mean the "States". The people are the individual citizens who delegate "power" not "rights" to the government.
Indeed, if "the people" means the "States", then the 10th Amendment's differentiation between the two is inexplicable. It provides "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." The People are the People. The people are not the States. The People grant power to the States. The People have rights, which are limitations against State powers. The States do not have rights, they have powers.
The movivating clause of the 2nd Amendment "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State" does not refer to "States" but rather to "a free State". Here the word state is used as in "Department of State". This does not suggest that the organization of the Militia is a power granted to the "States" plural. That would be completely inconsistent with Federal statutes that define who is a member of the Militia (all males 18 to 45), and it would certainly be inconsistent with the Constitution's granting the President the power "To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions;". The States are not the State. The "United States" is the State.
Indeed, when Alabama refused to obey federal laws on public school desegregation, it was the President who ordered the National Guard to enforce the law. It is hard to view the 2nd Amendment as establishing a "States Rights" power to form the National Guard, when that very National Guard obeys the President to enforce the laws upon objecting States.
And in fact, the president, through his exectutive agency, the Department of Justice, has "provided" that the individuals who are potential members have the right to own firearms. So it is in fact a breach of the separation of powers for the Judicial branch to attempt to interfere with this.
There's also the 9th Circuit's intellecutal dishonesty with regard to the Founders. For example, Stuart Buck exposes how the opinion doctors a quote to remove the words "except in private self-defense" from John Adams.
As an aside, Howard Bashman's How Appealing [blogspot.com] is a surprisingly entertaining source of information on the federal courts of appeals, and a goldmine of information about this particular ruling. If you're interested at all in the activities of the judicial branch, check it out.
On this, I will agree with you. He's very balanced and tracks the happenings in near real time. Great Blog.
Where do you get the idea that a licence can be revoked at any time? They can stop granting the licence freely to anyone, but for those who have relied on having it already will have a very strong "explicit permission" defense.
As for "your word against theirs", that is true and courts are very good at looking at the available evidence to figure out who to believe. In this case they published on the internet which means that 1) neutral 3rd parties witnessed it and 2) it's probably in an archive and/or cache somewhere and 3) the person taking advantage of the grant may have a verifiable record
Under these circumstances, during discovery, no corporation (except maybe Arther Anderson:-] ) is going to fail to produce the exact page they displayed when asked for it. The words "obstruction of justice" do have an impact on corporations.
* A bunch of web pages do not constitute a legally binding contract.
That is certainly true. A contract is a quid-pro-quot between two parties where each side assents to give up some form of consideration to the other.
On the other hand, patents and copyrights do not require a contract to use -- they only require a licence. A licence is a unilateral grant of permission. Any unambiguous statement granting permission suffices, so while you are correct that their grant is not a contract, it is a licence and your point is offbase.
Here is the EFF's blurb about the background of the case.
Here is the full document archive. In particular the counterclaims document there is very interesting (skip over all the item-by-item responses -- the juicy stuff is at the end).
Folks this is a very important lawsuit. Bnetd is challenging BOTH the enforcability of "no reverse engineering" clauses AND the constitutionality of the DMCA on First Amendment grounds. Moreover, this lawsuit is happening in Missouri District Court, which is in the 8th Circuit, rather than the 2nd, which is known for its pro-copyright holder judicial activism (as we saw).
I hope that this case will get the attention it deserves here on slashdot.
"two dot.com millionaires" Are there that many left?
Ah, so you admit they are more successful than "Treasure Planet". Disney wants to protect its copyrights with a police state, but it sure will take a great book for free and turn it into crap, won't it. I think Disney's doing a fine job becoming artists/waiters all by themselves. Actually, I'm not sure I'd go to a restaurant where Phil Lelyveld was the waiter. He'd probably charge for water, restrooms, and using the napkins by the wipe. But the moral of this story is that, at long last, Disney has found the one working strategy to prevent copying: making movies like Treasure Planet that nobody WANTS to copy.
You've got it backwards -- initial build times are going to be faster using Struts with JSP (say) than they will be using PHP or Perl. If you were talking about coding servlets directly in java you might have a point, but that isn't how Struts works.
Struts is written in java, but writing a web app with it will find you producing a lot of XML action bindings and JSP (most commonly) for the view layer. JSP is used in the view layer and JSP is easier to write web pages in than either PHP or Perl, no contest. The navigation actions are coded up in XML, which struts taking care of for you.
The action implementation classes that affect state in the model have to be written up in Java, but they'd have to be written up in something no matter what you use, and you don't have to code up the glue code that figures out what triggers what. Java is faster than both PHP and Perl, but the real advantage is in maintainability -- I pity the sorry sap that has to refactor somebody else's Perl or PHP. Most of an app's total lifecycle cost is in exactly this kind of expense as requirements change and integration happens with other systems.
First of all, you deserve a lot of credit for standing up to the allegations that were sent your way. Bravo.
On the other hand, you prove my point. You are still distributing your program. Their attempts to shut you down failed. They probably did "annoy" you, but it is very clear from reading your letters that they did not "intimidate" you. Since they have not brought litigation against you, it appears instead that you have intimidated them.
The ambiguities in the DMCA cut both ways, and the 2600 case illustrates that you may have to litigate for years and in the end all you will get is an injunction that applies to one of the 30,000 kayakers coming down the Hudson, to paraphrase the judge.
I agree that the DMCA has not had the effect it was intended to have. It is very similar to the Napster decision in this regard. Sklyarov's company IS the first criminal prosecution. 2600 lost, but DeCSS is still available. They didn't have to pay any real damages either. Felten published his paper. Any dolt can watch DVD's under linux with a variety of players that get better every few months. The bottom line is that the general public is quietly ignoring this law.
The only real effect of the DMCA is that companies can't openly distribute stuff that violates the DMCA. Good. It makes people who want that stuff anyway look to alternative channels of software distribution to get it.
Unions are for people who want to increase their individual interest. The big trends in unions in the 21st century are white collar unions. You might be interested to know there are a few doctors unions around.
But if you want to not join a union, that is your right. Just don't complain if one forms at your company or in your area and the employer agrees with them to only allow union workers and lays you off ithe next time business drops off because non-union workers have lower priority. The bottom line is that you are competing in the job market against other employees, and you are decreasing your competitiveness by not using every means of enhancing your negotiating position.
Oh, and a modern factory has a lot of high tech systems that need IT support. I suppose you think its just an accident that every part on a bill-of-materials happens to be showing up in the right place in the factory? Your ideas about "cleaner air" and "hearing loss" indicate you don't know what OSHA is. The idea that collective bargaining is for solving those kinds of safety problems is about 50-100 years out of date.
Slashdot Mirror
The bug tracking system is almost never the problem with an organization's quality improvement effort. Never-the-less time spent entering and retrieving information into the bug tracking system is 100% non-value added waste. It should be minimized by using good technology if it can be done cheaply. However, in no case does the software solve problems for you or prevent you from having to get your hands dirty. If your organization isn't eyeballing each and every problem, assigning ownership, prioritizing, and tracking improvements to closure, you are just going to fail more with a better system.
Bugzilla is cheap (free) and good, but even more importantly, you can see how other groups build a cradle to grave corrective action process around it. My advice to you is to give your boss a tour of the Mozilla bug tracking **process** with their copy of bugzilla as your window. Set up bugzilla on your own machine and play-test it by re-entering a few of your own bugs into it and mock-working them.
I would hope that would be Unconstitutional, since mandatory speech is a violation of the first amendment. I also think a 10th amendment argument would be a good one -- there is no enumerated power in the US Constitution that authorizes Congress to impose record keeping requirements on publishers.
But as always, the US Court system is not reliable for getting the right result when it comes to individual liberty, so we would have to see.
You only need to do 2^64 calculations if you share the results among the participating computers, including storing the original files. I did not posit any such abiilty.
Since there are ~2^80 atoms in the known universe, I think it unlikely that any such storage mechanism will ever be built.
So your assertion is incorrect with respect to MD5.
I disagree.
Part of the MD5 algorithm is analytically weak, but that falls far short of an actual working attack for the whole thing. Researchers suspect that this weakness MIGHT eventually lead to an analytic attack against the whole of MD5, but as yet, no such attack exists. As Robshaw said: "While the existence of pseudo-collisions is significant on an analytical level, it is of less practical importance."
Moreover...
"Note that existing signatures that were generated using MD5 are likely to remain safe from compromise since it seems that current techniques used to cryptanalyze MD5 do not offer any advantage in finding a second preimage. Existing signatures should not be considered as being at risk of compromise at this point."
This appeal has not been granted certiori yet, so no question is yet before the high court. All that happened is that O'Connor paused the final resolution while the High Court decides if it wants to hear the case.
Moreover, this case is NOT ABOUT THE DMCA in any way, it is about JURISDICTION in a state law trade secret case. The Pavlovich appeal does not consider the merits of the trade secret dispute. That is still waiting to go up to the CA Supreme Court after the good guys won below. This one is solely about whether you can be sued in California for posting it to the web outside of California.
I'm actually surprised by O'Connor's action -- it seems very unlikely that the Supreme Court would have the audacity to tell a state court that it must exercise jurisdiction under that state's law. As the justices are fond of saying: "What is the Federal issue?".
If I understand you correctly, you are saying that both NVidia and ATI are stiff arming the open source community in terms of how their cards work, but that NVidia is at least offering less buggy proprietary drivers.
Another poster commented that the same guy working on the nvidia driver for the 2.5 kernel is an intern at nvidia, so perhaps nvidia is coming around.
But it also raises the question: until open source drivers can run the full feature set of these cards why is this news? More interesting would be the best performing card using open source drivers only. Anybody know?
Last time I checked, NVidia had an obnoxious policy of not releasing technical info for all the functionality of their cards. Is that still the case?
How is ATI regarding open source support? Can I run a fully powered video card from ATI without having to download special drivers directly from ATI, like I used to have to do with NVidia?
Are they saying that two different files can't have the same hash value? That's a load of crap! It's not hard at all to modify data to create any hash value that you want, especially when you're including "deleted space" in the CRC calculations... It's good at telling you if there were any random modifications caused by errors during copying, but not that the files are identical.
There are no known examples of two files that have the same MD5 (or SHA-1) hash values, so I think you should reevaluate your statement. While it certainly is true that such files do exist (2^128 MD5 values, > 2^128 possible files, pigeon-hole principle, etc...), that does not mean that finding them is computationally easy or even possible.
A brute force search of files would require ~2^128 files to be search to find a match. If 2^32 computers each processed 2^16 files a second on average per year (60*60*24*365 20^30 seconds), then it would take greater than 2^50 years to find a match. Equivalently, the odds that any of the files that have ever been produced by humans have the same MD5 are pretty bad.
It might be possbile that a cryptographic flaw in MD5 exists that could be exploited to reduce the number of files that needed to be searched. I believe no such flaw is known. If one does exist, I'm quite sure it doesn't provide dramatic benefits.
Ummmm, excuse me, but if you're a contractor, and I hire you to write something, that's a work for hire.
No, that is 100% wrong. Copyright in a work done by an independent contractor is by default owned by the contractor. The contract may assign copyright ownership if the agreement is explicit, but even then it is not usually a "work for hire", but rather a transfer of copyright ownership. A contractor's work can only be a work for hire by agreement in 9 specifically enumerated cases that do not include software.
There was a Supreme Court case in the 1980's on the copyright differentiation between the independent contractor vs. work for hire.
I'm always skeptical about 2nd hand interpretations of judicial decisions. At face value, this sounds bad, because it appears to find you are bound by the terms of a Clickwrap contract even if you don't explicitly agree to it.
On the other hand, if this case basically held that abiding by robots.txt is mandatory for spiders, I think I would support that. If the judge held that the terms of use applies even if this site's robots.txt did not forbid crawling, then that is horrendous.
The doctrine of judicial restraint tells us that Courts should decide cases based on the narrowest grounds possible. Silence never constitutes support. But Miller was not silent, it adopted a test for determining which weapons Miller did have a right to keep. Lower courts should simply apply that test.
Oh, and I'll be happy to see the Ninth's decision challenged (which, of course, it will be); I'm just not optimistic that the Supreme Court, Thomas notwithstanding, will give gun-rights advocates anything to celebrate.
Actually, I think it is much more likely they will get it right. The DOJ will advocate the individual rights viewpoint. The conservative 5 on the Supreme Court are especially critical of the 9th Circuit.
If you confine your self to Supreme Court precedent, there is plenty of stuff to support the individual rights view. The strongest arguement is based on the extended analysis of the usage of the term of art "the people" in UNITED STATES v. VERDUGO-URQUIDEZ, 494 U.S. 259 (1990)
This opinion was joined by Rehnquist, Scalia, O'Connor, and Kennedy. Add Thomas, and you've got your five votes.
If you admit Miller is "silent" on the question, you'll find these cases are not:
U.S. v. CRUIKSHANK, 92 U.S. 542 (1875) [Analyzes RTKBA by comparing it to other rights in Bill or Rights as belonging to individual citizens]
Logan v. United States, 144 U.S. 263, 276 (1892) [Refered to RTKBA among rights discussed in Cruikshank as "rights and privileges of the citizen" and as a "birthright"]
Robertson v Baldwin, 165 U.S. 275, 281-82 (1897) [commonality of meaning of individual rights in Bill or Rights, including RTKBA, arises from English commonlaw tradition.]
Maxwell v. Dow, 176 U.S. 581, 597 (1900) [first ten amendments adopted as restraints to Federal powers to limit "certain privileges or immunities possessed by a citizen of the United States"]
That is inaccurate. In Miller, the Court ruled concerning a particular type of weapon's coverage by the 2nd Amendment. The question was "which weapons" not "who" or "if/when". For support I turn to Justice Thomas, who discussed this in his concurring opinion in Concurrence in Printz v. United States, 521 U.S. 898, 938-939 (1997):
How could a court possibly find that the United States, acting as public prosecutor, did not have standing?
They would have reversed the lower court's finding that Miller did have standing. Since their review was "de novo" a finding of standing to a Consitutional challenge to the NFA is within the scope of their review. Since they implicitly accepted the argument of standing, the only possible conclusion is that they accepted his right to argue for the position that his shotgun was among the arms he had a personal right to have. That question would have been moot had this latter class of arms been non-empty.
In 2001's Emerson, the Fifth Circuit examined the Second Amendment at length, considered its application to the case at hand, and concluded that the law in question (a temporary restraining order) still did not violate the Constitution - even if Emerson did have an individual right to bear arms.
I agree with the Emerson Court that a court order is necessary and sufficient to prevent an individual from carrying a gun. I do not advocate an unlimited individual right. Just yesterday, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in the Bean case that a felon may not seek judicial review when their request for reinstatement of firearms rights is not ruled on by the agency in question. I agree with that too.
The Fifth Circuit explicitly did not find in Miller a precedent that all other federal appellate courts have found to date; in order to reach its ruling, it had to avoid in Miller what all other courts have found there, which was that Miller explicitly denies an individual right.
And it did so for the right reason
Moreover, I challenge you to find a single reference supporting the 9th Circuit's position from caselaw before 1930. The "State's Rights" view is the product of an explict attempt in the last 70 years to enact the functional equivalent of a Constitutional Amendment. It is a movement that obeys no law. To use Judicial infiltration to acheive what the democratic process cannot provide is dangerous and contemptible.
But I also recognize that reasonable people, acting in good faith, can honestly disagree over the scope of rights guaranteed by the Second Amendment. I think judges who disagree with me (and with each other, for that matter) are a sign that our democracy is healthy and strong, and not a sign that some judges are evil and should be replaced by people who parrot my views.
I agree with this, but I stop short of adopting the outright moral relativism required to find no judicial decision to be evil. Your position seems to be that if several courts adopt an egregious viewpoint, that it should not be challenged or corrected.
The Supreme Court adopted no such view in Miller. You are engaging in naked historical revisionism, just like the judges in the 9th Circuit. You should really think about what it means for a judge to impose his personal politics above what the black letter law says. That is not a democratic republic, it is rule by judge, which is an evil form of government.
The "state's rights" view of the 2nd Amendment got started in the 1960's. Anti gun control people like to assert that it is much more widely adopted than it really is. For example, in Miller had the US supreme court not believed that he had an individual right to bear arms, they would have ruled based on lack of standing (as the 9th Circuit here did). They didn't. Instead they adopted a criteria for testing which weapons Miller had a right to have.
The assertion that Miller adopts the view that the 2nd Amendment provides only a State power to arm the National Guard flies directly in the face of its text:
Also, your dissection of key Second Amendment words and phrases omits any discussion of what "well regulated" means, unless you meant that John Ashcroft (and, before him, Janet Reno) gets to decide. Care to elaborate?
The words are a reference to the Art 1, Sec 8, Clause 16: Congress shall have the power "To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia, and for governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States, reserving to the States respectively, the Appointment of the Officers, and the Authority of training the Militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress; "
This is really very simple. Active duty in the Militia, of which the National Guard is an example, is highly regulated by both state and federal laws, while militia non-active duty membership and the right to own firearms belong to all ordinary citizens. Thus Miller describes the militia as "civilians primarily, soldiers on occasion".
The 2nd Amendment would be superfluous, given the above power, if it only meant the government could provide guns to active duty members. The government already has that power. The 2nd Amendment establishes a right that assures that individuals can also provide for their own firearms.
As a historical note, during the civil war the union Army was trounced at the first Battle of Bull Run. In the ensuing disarray, ordinary citizens were hastily assembled to protect the white house. There is a nice photo of this in Ken Burn's book on the Civil War (which accompanied the PBS series). The 2nd Amendment is about establishing an armed populace so that during the hopefully infrequent periods of political instability, the People can act directly to preserve their right to maintain freedom.
The Ninth's recent decision (online here [uscourts.gov]) concludes that the Second Amendment preserves the citizen's right to serve in a well-regulated militia - that is, it grants the state government the right to have National Guard units, and grants you the right to serve in them. If the framers had meant to guarantee an individual right to gun ownership, the Ninth asserts, they would have done so in the plain language of the other nine amendments enacted at the same time (e.g., "Congress shall make no law infringing upon the people's right to possess arms" or similar language).
You have correcly stated the 9th Circuit's position. The position is complete crap, however. I would impeach a judge for adopting such a position, because I believe it violates the oath of office to uphold the Constitution.
The 2nd Amendment's statement of the right is "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed". When the Constitution refers to "the people" does not mean the "States". The people are the individual citizens who delegate "power" not "rights" to the government.
Indeed, if "the people" means the "States", then the 10th Amendment's differentiation between the two is inexplicable. It provides "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." The People are the People. The people are not the States. The People grant power to the States. The People have rights, which are limitations against State powers. The States do not have rights, they have powers.
The movivating clause of the 2nd Amendment "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State" does not refer to "States" but rather to "a free State". Here the word state is used as in "Department of State". This does not suggest that the organization of the Militia is a power granted to the "States" plural. That would be completely inconsistent with Federal statutes that define who is a member of the Militia (all males 18 to 45), and it would certainly be inconsistent with the Constitution's granting the President the power "To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions;". The States are not the State. The "United States" is the State.
Indeed, when Alabama refused to obey federal laws on public school desegregation, it was the President who ordered the National Guard to enforce the law. It is hard to view the 2nd Amendment as establishing a "States Rights" power to form the National Guard, when that very National Guard obeys the President to enforce the laws upon objecting States.
And in fact, the president, through his exectutive agency, the Department of Justice, has "provided" that the individuals who are potential members have the right to own firearms. So it is in fact a breach of the separation of powers for the Judicial branch to attempt to interfere with this.
There's also the 9th Circuit's intellecutal dishonesty with regard to the Founders. For example, Stuart Buck exposes how the opinion doctors a quote to remove the words "except in private self-defense" from John Adams.
As an aside, Howard Bashman's How Appealing [blogspot.com] is a surprisingly entertaining source of information on the federal courts of appeals, and a goldmine of information about this particular ruling. If you're interested at all in the activities of the judicial branch, check it out.
On this, I will agree with you. He's very balanced and tracks the happenings in near real time. Great Blog.
Where do you get the idea that a licence can be revoked at any time? They can stop granting the licence freely to anyone, but for those who have relied on having it already will have a very strong "explicit permission" defense.
:-] ) is going to fail to produce the exact page they displayed when asked for it. The words "obstruction of justice" do have an impact on corporations.
As for "your word against theirs", that is true and courts are very good at looking at the available evidence to figure out who to believe. In this case they published on the internet which means that 1) neutral 3rd parties witnessed it and 2) it's probably in an archive and/or cache somewhere and 3) the person taking advantage of the grant may have a verifiable record
Under these circumstances, during discovery, no corporation (except maybe Arther Anderson
* A bunch of web pages do not constitute a legally binding contract.
That is certainly true. A contract is a quid-pro-quot between two parties where each side assents to give up some form of consideration to the other.
On the other hand, patents and copyrights do not require a contract to use -- they only require a licence. A licence is a unilateral grant of permission. Any unambiguous statement granting permission suffices, so while you are correct that their grant is not a contract, it is a licence and your point is offbase.
Here is the EFF's blurb about the background of the case.
Here is the full document archive. In particular the counterclaims document there is very interesting (skip over all the item-by-item responses -- the juicy stuff is at the end).
Folks this is a very important lawsuit. Bnetd is challenging BOTH the enforcability of "no reverse engineering" clauses AND the constitutionality of the DMCA on First Amendment grounds. Moreover, this lawsuit is happening in Missouri District Court, which is in the 8th Circuit, rather than the 2nd, which is known for its pro-copyright holder judicial activism (as we saw).
I hope that this case will get the attention it deserves here on slashdot.
"two dot.com millionaires" Are there that many left?
Ah, so you admit they are more successful than "Treasure Planet". Disney wants to protect its copyrights with a police state, but it sure will take a great book for free and turn it into crap, won't it. I think Disney's doing a fine job becoming artists/waiters all by themselves. Actually, I'm not sure I'd go to a restaurant where Phil Lelyveld was the waiter. He'd probably charge for water, restrooms, and using the napkins by the wipe. But the moral of this story is that, at long last, Disney has found the one working strategy to prevent copying: making movies like Treasure Planet that nobody WANTS to copy.
Yes, MVC is the best way to build a web app.
You've got it backwards -- initial build times are going to be faster using Struts with JSP (say) than they will be using PHP or Perl. If you were talking about coding servlets directly in java you might have a point, but that isn't how Struts works.
Struts is written in java, but writing a web app with it will find you producing a lot of XML action bindings and JSP (most commonly) for the view layer. JSP is used in the view layer and JSP is easier to write web pages in than either PHP or Perl, no contest. The navigation actions are coded up in XML, which struts taking care of for you.
The action implementation classes that affect state in the model have to be written up in Java, but they'd have to be written up in something no matter what you use, and you don't have to code up the glue code that figures out what triggers what. Java is faster than both PHP and Perl, but the real advantage is in maintainability -- I pity the sorry sap that has to refactor somebody else's Perl or PHP. Most of an app's total lifecycle cost is in exactly this kind of expense as requirements change and integration happens with other systems.
More importantly, if I have highlighted a plain text URL, then place it in the text box for me, so all I have to do is hit enter.
VCR's are obsolete. Blockbuster is going all DVD and nobody is going to keep them around.
First of all, you deserve a lot of credit for standing up to the allegations that were sent your way. Bravo.
On the other hand, you prove my point. You are still distributing your program. Their attempts to shut you down failed. They probably did "annoy" you, but it is very clear from reading your letters that they did not "intimidate" you. Since they have not brought litigation against you, it appears instead that you have intimidated them.
The ambiguities in the DMCA cut both ways, and the 2600 case illustrates that you may have to litigate for years and in the end all you will get is an injunction that applies to one of the 30,000 kayakers coming down the Hudson, to paraphrase the judge.
I agree that the DMCA has not had the effect it was intended to have. It is very similar to the Napster decision in this regard. Sklyarov's company IS the first criminal prosecution. 2600 lost, but DeCSS is still available. They didn't have to pay any real damages either. Felten published his paper. Any dolt can watch DVD's under linux with a variety of players that get better every few months. The bottom line is that the general public is quietly ignoring this law.
The only real effect of the DMCA is that companies can't openly distribute stuff that violates the DMCA. Good. It makes people who want that stuff anyway look to alternative channels of software distribution to get it.
Unions are for people who want to increase their individual interest. The big trends in unions in the 21st century are white collar unions. You might be interested to know there are a few doctors unions around.
But if you want to not join a union, that is your right. Just don't complain if one forms at your company or in your area and the employer agrees with them to only allow union workers and lays you off ithe next time business drops off because non-union workers have lower priority. The bottom line is that you are competing in the job market against other employees, and you are decreasing your competitiveness by not using every means of enhancing your negotiating position.
Oh, and a modern factory has a lot of high tech systems that need IT support. I suppose you think its just an accident that every part on a bill-of-materials happens to be showing up in the right place in the factory? Your ideas about "cleaner air" and "hearing loss" indicate you don't know what OSHA is. The idea that collective bargaining is for solving those kinds of safety problems is about 50-100 years out of date.