Why does the swedish chef keep mispronouncing swedish words?
First, because he's not speaking Swedish, he's speaking mock-Swedish. And Second, because his native language is actually mock-Japanese, as was revealed during the Jean Stapleton episode of the Muppet Show.
Mind you, 1.0.3 has been gagging at the old version of Slashdot for some time (login hasn't worked for the last two design tweaks), and yes, there are newer versions of OS X out. Nonetheless, it's quite monstrously bad.
And I'll join in the chorus who despise sans serif article summaries.
If this is really so novel and useful, surely an analysis of it exists that is not written by the guy trying to sell it!
Wikipedia is your freind... although I think somewhat inaccurate here. I'll have to look it up in my old Nuclear Engineering textbook when I get home, but I believe the "1 ppm" value is off. My vague recollection is the absorption frequencies were something like around 1700 angstroms, with a.3 angstrom difference between them — order of 200 ppm. Still damned finicky for tuning a laser.
AVLIS (sometimes called ALVIS) has been around for a while; I dropped out of NE in the early '90s, but there were references in my textbooks. The South Africans were trying it while they had a nuclear program.
Based on what I remember from class long ago, the main potential advantage of an ALVIS enrichment system is that you potentially get a lot more enrichment per stage-- IE, single stage from natural to reactor grade, instead of tens or hundreds of stages. It also has the potential to need less power for the enrichment process... not that that isn't still a hell of a lot of power.
Or since our bodies probably don't absorb that much nitrogen, is it not a huge problem because we'd only have to ship it up once?
If you're shipping it up, argon or helium might be preferable short term; they're both lighter per mole than molecular nitrogen. Longer term, you'd want nitrogen for plants to get a working closed ecology.
If the clickers on the ads actually use their checkout service to buy then who cares if the clicker is a dog or a bot. It is a dog who has cash to spend.
If we're going to make a 40,000+ km elevator out of it, a one mile bridge better be affordable.
But a bridge has to support the weight of a number of cars to be useful, and normal toll bridges only charge a few bucks per car. A beanstalk needs to only have a few kilos of capacity to be able to start being useful for getting small payloads to orbit, and will reduce (non-capital) lift costs from ~$1000 per kilo to ~$10 per kilo. The most obvious economical use for a small "seed" beanstalk is lifting the raw materials for larger beanstalks. This means a beanstalk becomes economically useful when the cost per kilo of making one is on the order of the cost per kilo of putting it to orbit.
A beanstalk will be insanely expensive... but whoever builds the first small one one gets an overwhelming economic advantage in putting up more. There is nowhere on earth where that sort of economic advantage can be obtained by a one-mile bridge.
Every educated person should now know that black bars in PDF do not remove what is under them.
FTA:
"In an ironic twist, the NSA published a 13-page paper in January describing how redactions could be done securely."
Maybe AT&T is trying to show that they're not just a sock puppet of the NSA. Or maybe the NSA is sneaky enough to try and hide that AT&T is merely a sock puppet.
Damn, I'm snickering so hard that I can't find my tinfoil....
When you can scale that to a mile-long suspension bridge that supports two lanes of traffic in each direction, I'll be optimistic.
Of course, the only reason anyone would built such a bridge is as a prototype demonstration to scare up investors. The potential ROI for a space elevator is pretty spectacular, not so much for a bridge... and buckytube isn't cheap.
That the court ruled that Apple has to meet as high a standard to extract a source from a news-and-rumors blogger as from (for example) a LA Times reporter.
Admittedly, that's not very high, it's California, and it's not even the state's highest court... but it's enough to leave Apple sucking Lemons, sets a precedent that will be at least considered in other US courts, and gives bloggers a little more respect than they had yesterday.
But if I am told or given those documents, pictures, etc. by another person (third party) I am protected. Is this true or am I missing something????
IANAL, but... you would also have to be revealing them as part of a produced news periodical, although a news blog may qualify; and it cannot be a criminal case -- trade secret disclosures are civil cases. If you recieved a stolen Apple prototype, and took pictures of it yourself for your news publication, they would have a better chance at a subpoena for your source.
As others have noted, X10 products really aren't that bad. While I won't buy them (due to that ghastly ad campaign), I'll use them readily enough when they're given to me for free.
Most of the other stuff on the list, I wouldn't use if you paid me. For a few, I'd either open fire or call a HazMat team in.
So, if I may submit a conjecture, doesn't this mean that if you can smuggle a proprietary corporate document out the door, and somehow publish it (using any means available), you are protected under the shield law?
IANAL, but my lay guess: If you publish it as a journalist, you might be protected under the shield law from revealing that you are you are your own source... but you wouldn't be protected from having smuggled or stolen the document originally. Presumably, it wouldn't be hard to connect you as your own source. I'm also not sure, but I believe being an accessory may abrogate the privilege, and this ruling I believe is narrowly tailored with respect to civil (as opposed to criminal) cases; ask a real lawyer.
So, short answer: even if you're protected as a journalist, you can still be prosecutable as a crook.
IANAL either; I just argue with them about the law. =)
My educated lay guess: First, the ruling is based in part on the California Constitution Journalist Shield, so in CA they are protected as journalists. Other jurisdictions with shield laws/amendments would consider the ruling advisory, not binding, but would probably be influenced by its arguements. In areas without specific shield laws it would again be advisory, and with more limited use due to the more limited protection of the First Amendment alone; I suppose it might give a basis for arguing against prior restraint in publication for a blog. Of course, that would imply someone would come to try and get a court to order prior restraint on a blog, an idea which would probably make most judge judges call for the Advil.
"We decline the implicit invitation to embroil ourselves in questions of what constitutes 'legitimate journalis(m).' The shield law is intended to protect the gathering and dissemination of news, and that is what petitioners did here."
Metered bandwidth would be good for several reasons.
An obvious question is, how much would adding the capability to meter monthly throughput of end users increase costs, and how would such increased costs be passed along?
Second, it would provide a financial disincentive for people to use file sharing software for illegal reasons, thus providing the "social solution" to the "social problem" of how to handle mass copyright infringement without DRM or legislation.
MMM... no. First, that would have the side effect of also dampening legal applications of file sharing software, which does not seem desirable. Second, while it would reduce Internet and overall file sharing, old fashioned "Sneakernet" sharing would rise, so DRM and legislation would continue to be pushed by the ??AA.
I don't want to pay the same rate for my ~5GB-10GB/month of bandwidth use as someone who uses 100GB+.
True. However, compare the cell phone market; a lot of people pay for an unlimited local/in-network/whatever plan becasue it's worth avoiding the hassle. Also compare dial-up networking: Earthlink charges something like $6/month for a piddling 10 hr/month dialup (call it 250 MB/month), and ~$23 for unlimited usage. There's going to be a certain plan admistration baseline cost, just for a minimum account, and the fewer people interested, the less economic the plan administration is. I'll agree that having limited throughput plans might provide some cost saving for some people, but many of people will prefer having the premium/unlimited plans. When you consider the relatively small fraction of people who were interested in limited dialup, it doesn't sound like that great of an idea from the ISP side.
When interpreting it provably requires an algorithm with higher order polynomial of complexity, or (hypothetically) a polynomial of equivalent order but provably higher constant. Not that I'm sure if either is the case in this instance, but it seems plausible.
Still, given the fact that you can click *no* and still get the spec, well... I dunno, but it certainly indicates yet another careless coder over at Microsoft
At that point, even Microsoft would agree they had fucked up.... but that's not what we have here. If you click the provided no button, it only takes you to the marketing crud. It's only if you submit the "no" (or any) value to the "yes"-intended page that you get the technical details.
I just wanted something about Bill blowing goats to appear in their webserver logs
Yeah... I'm wondering if anyone will notice that. Probably not, given the likely size of their server logs. A pity. =)
Illinois Tool Works doesn't give us anything about inherent limitations on licenses that limit copyright, right? It looks like it's just about limitations on bundling where a party controls the market. While Microsoft surely does, there isn't any bundling going on here, is there?
While ITW is specifically about patents, patent cases are usually somewhat extensible to IP law in general. And more generally, it can be argued as saying tha you can't use a legal monopoly to leverage restrictions beyond those allowed by the law. Here, Microsoft is attempting to tie a license to make a copy of their copyrighted material (which copyright allows) to a license to use any information you may read (which copyright does NOT allow). Trade secrets law makes it a bit more ambiguous, but it's kind of hard to argue that you're trying to make it an open (or at least public) standard and set it up as a trade secret at the same time. I still think there's a brief in it.
On the other hand, as I note, I'm not even in law school; feel free to ask one of your IP Law professors what they think on the topic. If they start laughing hysterically, don't test it in court. =)
Eldred hoped that the "limited time" dodge would make the extension for existing works per se invalid, and so didn't really get into the "is it rational?" argument.
Incorrect; evidence was presented by economists that the marginal economic benefit of an increase from 70 to 100 years of copyright term would have no appreciable incentive benefit for the creation of new works, only for those already created (and benefiting society), and that it thus has no rational basis. (Of course, most non-economists don't consider time-value calculations rational either, but they also don't consider relativistic time dialation rational.) The court saw other rational benefits, in improving the (short term) availability of existing works.0
I think what Lessig was saying in that interview is not that he didn't show it was irrational, he didn't show how that irrationality directly harmed the public. The SCOTUS doesn't usually strike down laws for being dumb so much as for being for being dangerously dumb.
This is a little beyond my reach, but in general a voluntary contract between two parties is enforceable unless there's some specific reason it shouldn't be -- being more restrictive than the copyright law wouldn't be such a reason.
My memory of Illinois Tool Works v. Independent Ink suggested there might be some parallel. Looking at it closely, there's at least enough for a brief, but maybe not enough for a case. OTOH, I'm not even in law school.
(On a side note, in my opinion copyright law itself isn't constitutional right now -- Congress is granted the power to establish copyrights to promote the advancement of science and the arts, and it seems clear to me they're doing the opposite. Unfortunately no one's asking my opinion yet...)
I'd agree, but Eldred v. Ashcroft pretty much blows any hope for that legal theory out of the water.
Here's the lesson: When you think you might be in trouble, don't admit to anything. Don't confim that you were "in the media center", that fire is hot, or that you know where the power cord plugs in to the laptop.
The exception being when you are setting out to get publicly caught and prosecuted, and willing to accept the punishment that results as a form of protest against the misuse of authority. Cf Civil Disobedience, by Henry Thoreau. At that point, you want to operate in "a manner open, notorious, hostile and continuous" as much as possible.
There are usually alternative methods of protest more effective in most circumstances. Civil disobedience should not be the first resort of any thinking citizen. However, sometimes there's no other tune to call... so be willing to pay the piper.
As suggested by others, complaining about selected sites being blocked by the firewall might be more effective. If you insist on a cgi proxy server as civil disobedience, perhaps have one that only serves pages from sites you have approved of... and be willing to back those choices as essential free speech before the school board. (I wouldn't recommend Playboy.com, for starters.)
"your honor, I read the html, and found a way to respond that would trick the machine into giving me the benefit of the contract without sending back the exact text I was supposed to." Microsoft would stand up and say, "your honor, this is like figuring out a way to get a vending machine to give you candy without putting in any money. What would happen if that was legal?"
The problem is, the server easily could be programmed to return different pages, depending on whether or not the correct form value was submitted. I believe PHP does that easily, and there are doubtless other scripting methods. Instead, someone at Microsoft coded it quick-lazy-sloppy. (Why on Earth was I suprised at that?) I'd give the counter analogy that this is like a vending machine that asks you to put in money, but gives out the candy when you push the "dispense" button without checking that any money was put in.
As for equity, I'd be more interested in an opinion on the "license to read" aspect, since it effectively protection more than is constitutionally allowed under copyright law.
Slashdot Mirror
First, because he's not speaking Swedish, he's speaking mock-Swedish. And Second, because his native language is actually mock-Japanese, as was revealed during the Jean Stapleton episode of the Muppet Show.
Given that it's not one entity (Illuminati aside), "oligopoly" might be a more accurate and defensible characterization.
We now return to your regularly scheduled flamewar....
And I'll join in the chorus who despise sans serif article summaries.
External SATA enclosures can be another practical alternative, if you have a machine with external SATA connectors.
Wikipedia is your freind... although I think somewhat inaccurate here. I'll have to look it up in my old Nuclear Engineering textbook when I get home, but I believe the "1 ppm" value is off. My vague recollection is the absorption frequencies were something like around 1700 angstroms, with a .3 angstrom difference between them — order of 200 ppm. Still damned finicky for tuning a laser.
AVLIS (sometimes called ALVIS) has been around for a while; I dropped out of NE in the early '90s, but there were references in my textbooks. The South Africans were trying it while they had a nuclear program.
Based on what I remember from class long ago, the main potential advantage of an ALVIS enrichment system is that you potentially get a lot more enrichment per stage-- IE, single stage from natural to reactor grade, instead of tens or hundreds of stages. It also has the potential to need less power for the enrichment process... not that that isn't still a hell of a lot of power.
If you're shipping it up, argon or helium might be preferable short term; they're both lighter per mole than molecular nitrogen. Longer term, you'd want nitrogen for plants to get a working closed ecology.
Especially antivirus software that intercepts kernel hooks....
But a bridge has to support the weight of a number of cars to be useful, and normal toll bridges only charge a few bucks per car. A beanstalk needs to only have a few kilos of capacity to be able to start being useful for getting small payloads to orbit, and will reduce (non-capital) lift costs from ~$1000 per kilo to ~$10 per kilo. The most obvious economical use for a small "seed" beanstalk is lifting the raw materials for larger beanstalks. This means a beanstalk becomes economically useful when the cost per kilo of making one is on the order of the cost per kilo of putting it to orbit.
A beanstalk will be insanely expensive... but whoever builds the first small one one gets an overwhelming economic advantage in putting up more. There is nowhere on earth where that sort of economic advantage can be obtained by a one-mile bridge.
FTA:
Maybe AT&T is trying to show that they're not just a sock puppet of the NSA. Or maybe the NSA is sneaky enough to try and hide that AT&T is merely a sock puppet.Damn, I'm snickering so hard that I can't find my tinfoil....
Of course, the only reason anyone would built such a bridge is as a prototype demonstration to scare up investors. The potential ROI for a space elevator is pretty spectacular, not so much for a bridge... and buckytube isn't cheap.
That the court ruled that Apple has to meet as high a standard to extract a source from a news-and-rumors blogger as from (for example) a LA Times reporter.
Admittedly, that's not very high, it's California, and it's not even the state's highest court... but it's enough to leave Apple sucking Lemons, sets a precedent that will be at least considered in other US courts, and gives bloggers a little more respect than they had yesterday.
IANAL, but... you would also have to be revealing them as part of a produced news periodical, although a news blog may qualify; and it cannot be a criminal case -- trade secret disclosures are civil cases. If you recieved a stolen Apple prototype, and took pictures of it yourself for your news publication, they would have a better chance at a subpoena for your source.
As others have noted, X10 products really aren't that bad. While I won't buy them (due to that ghastly ad campaign), I'll use them readily enough when they're given to me for free.
Most of the other stuff on the list, I wouldn't use if you paid me. For a few, I'd either open fire or call a HazMat team in.
IANAL, but my lay guess: If you publish it as a journalist, you might be protected under the shield law from revealing that you are you are your own source... but you wouldn't be protected from having smuggled or stolen the document originally. Presumably, it wouldn't be hard to connect you as your own source. I'm also not sure, but I believe being an accessory may abrogate the privilege, and this ruling I believe is narrowly tailored with respect to civil (as opposed to criminal) cases; ask a real lawyer.
So, short answer: even if you're protected as a journalist, you can still be prosecutable as a crook.
My educated lay guess: First, the ruling is based in part on the California Constitution Journalist Shield, so in CA they are protected as journalists. Other jurisdictions with shield laws/amendments would consider the ruling advisory, not binding, but would probably be influenced by its arguements. In areas without specific shield laws it would again be advisory, and with more limited use due to the more limited protection of the First Amendment alone; I suppose it might give a basis for arguing against prior restraint in publication for a blog. Of course, that would imply someone would come to try and get a court to order prior restraint on a blog, an idea which would probably make most judge judges call for the Advil.
BZZZT!
Quote from the ruling, via Wired:
An obvious question is, how much would adding the capability to meter monthly throughput of end users increase costs, and how would such increased costs be passed along?
Second, it would provide a financial disincentive for people to use file sharing software for illegal reasons, thus providing the "social solution" to the "social problem" of how to handle mass copyright infringement without DRM or legislation.
MMM... no. First, that would have the side effect of also dampening legal applications of file sharing software, which does not seem desirable. Second, while it would reduce Internet and overall file sharing, old fashioned "Sneakernet" sharing would rise, so DRM and legislation would continue to be pushed by the ??AA.
I don't want to pay the same rate for my ~5GB-10GB/month of bandwidth use as someone who uses 100GB+.
True. However, compare the cell phone market; a lot of people pay for an unlimited local/in-network/whatever plan becasue it's worth avoiding the hassle. Also compare dial-up networking: Earthlink charges something like $6/month for a piddling 10 hr/month dialup (call it 250 MB/month), and ~$23 for unlimited usage. There's going to be a certain plan admistration baseline cost, just for a minimum account, and the fewer people interested, the less economic the plan administration is. I'll agree that having limited throughput plans might provide some cost saving for some people, but many of people will prefer having the premium/unlimited plans. When you consider the relatively small fraction of people who were interested in limited dialup, it doesn't sound like that great of an idea from the ISP side.
When interpreting it provably requires an algorithm with higher order polynomial of complexity, or (hypothetically) a polynomial of equivalent order but provably higher constant. Not that I'm sure if either is the case in this instance, but it seems plausible.
At that point, even Microsoft would agree they had fucked up.... but that's not what we have here. If you click the provided no button, it only takes you to the marketing crud. It's only if you submit the "no" (or any) value to the "yes"-intended page that you get the technical details.
I just wanted something about Bill blowing goats to appear in their webserver logs
Yeah... I'm wondering if anyone will notice that. Probably not, given the likely size of their server logs. A pity. =)
While ITW is specifically about patents, patent cases are usually somewhat extensible to IP law in general. And more generally, it can be argued as saying tha you can't use a legal monopoly to leverage restrictions beyond those allowed by the law. Here, Microsoft is attempting to tie a license to make a copy of their copyrighted material (which copyright allows) to a license to use any information you may read (which copyright does NOT allow). Trade secrets law makes it a bit more ambiguous, but it's kind of hard to argue that you're trying to make it an open (or at least public) standard and set it up as a trade secret at the same time. I still think there's a brief in it.
On the other hand, as I note, I'm not even in law school; feel free to ask one of your IP Law professors what they think on the topic. If they start laughing hysterically, don't test it in court. =)
Eldred hoped that the "limited time" dodge would make the extension for existing works per se invalid, and so didn't really get into the "is it rational?" argument.
Incorrect; evidence was presented by economists that the marginal economic benefit of an increase from 70 to 100 years of copyright term would have no appreciable incentive benefit for the creation of new works, only for those already created (and benefiting society), and that it thus has no rational basis. (Of course, most non-economists don't consider time-value calculations rational either, but they also don't consider relativistic time dialation rational.) The court saw other rational benefits, in improving the (short term) availability of existing works.0
I think what Lessig was saying in that interview is not that he didn't show it was irrational, he didn't show how that irrationality directly harmed the public. The SCOTUS doesn't usually strike down laws for being dumb so much as for being for being dangerously dumb.
My memory of Illinois Tool Works v. Independent Ink suggested there might be some parallel. Looking at it closely, there's at least enough for a brief, but maybe not enough for a case. OTOH, I'm not even in law school.
(On a side note, in my opinion copyright law itself isn't constitutional right now -- Congress is granted the power to establish copyrights to promote the advancement of science and the arts, and it seems clear to me they're doing the opposite. Unfortunately no one's asking my opinion yet ...)
I'd agree, but Eldred v. Ashcroft pretty much blows any hope for that legal theory out of the water.
Sounds like the students didn't pay enough attention to "Animal Farm" in English class.
The exception being when you are setting out to get publicly caught and prosecuted, and willing to accept the punishment that results as a form of protest against the misuse of authority. Cf Civil Disobedience, by Henry Thoreau. At that point, you want to operate in "a manner open, notorious, hostile and continuous" as much as possible.
There are usually alternative methods of protest more effective in most circumstances. Civil disobedience should not be the first resort of any thinking citizen. However, sometimes there's no other tune to call... so be willing to pay the piper.
As suggested by others, complaining about selected sites being blocked by the firewall might be more effective. If you insist on a cgi proxy server as civil disobedience, perhaps have one that only serves pages from sites you have approved of... and be willing to back those choices as essential free speech before the school board. (I wouldn't recommend Playboy.com, for starters.)
The problem is, the server easily could be programmed to return different pages, depending on whether or not the correct form value was submitted. I believe PHP does that easily, and there are doubtless other scripting methods. Instead, someone at Microsoft coded it quick-lazy-sloppy. (Why on Earth was I suprised at that?) I'd give the counter analogy that this is like a vending machine that asks you to put in money, but gives out the candy when you push the "dispense" button without checking that any money was put in.
As for equity, I'd be more interested in an opinion on the "license to read" aspect, since it effectively protection more than is constitutionally allowed under copyright law.