Too dedicated to replacing earlier tools like ink and paper?
Like having a "desktop" with "manila folders" where home users typically store "documents", even though these days half those 'documents' are music or video?
Like showing a piece of paper being moved frrom manila folder to manila folder for file transfer dialogs?
Like having a "recycle bin" that looks like a trash can and presumably catches those itty bitty pieces of paper that lurk inside the machine?
Loop 1 1. Microsoft selected which OEM makers would be allowed steep discounts on its bundled software for about the last decade. 2. This pruned the small, Mom & Pop OEMs, speeding up the process of a few bigger industry members becoming dominant. 3. Even though Microsoft generally did business with all the remaining larger OEMs, raising the threshold startup costs for new competitors entering the market made the competition one limited to the existing ones, which helped trigger and speed up the OEM shakedown that has left Dell in a dominant position. 4. Dell, being number 1, becomes powerful enough to push back at Microsoft, at least a little. 5. Micosoft profits fall as they have to cut a better deal with Dell.
Loop 2 1. Microsoft delays production of Longhorn and other software repeatedly. 2. Newer, faster computers not needed to run newer, bigger programs. 3. Industy wide OEM sales become sluggish, Dell doesn't have the profit margin to push very hard at Microsoft, but Microsoft can't afford to gouge Dell with the whole industry tepid. 4. If Microsoft succeeds in selling bigger, shinyier software that raises OEM sales numbers, Dell gains more power to break away. If Microsoft fails, Dell sales become flat, with no margin to be shaved off to increase MS profits.
If I'm not reading too much into your post, you're basically saying more than that Microsoft products have become an alibi with many stockholders, board members, and customers. Your use of the phrase "fiscally responsible" seems to suggest it's a legal strategy.
I can see how CIO's and such could pick Microsoft so that they could say:
1. Don't fire me, Oh boardmembers, I went with the industry leader. 2. Don't blame us, Oh customers, blame Microsoft.
But "someone else is fiscally responsible" sounds like more, as in: 3. Don't sue us, sue Microsoft.
(or is it: 3a. Don't sue us until we work out a friendly deal where your choice of claims and testimony helps us to countersue Microsoft for the damages we will have to pay out.)
I don't recall a lot of actual actions along these lines, but if some CEOs, CIOs and such are thinking like that, it's pretty obvious they are not going to want to switch away from Microsoft under any circumstances that don't give them another big target to sue.
The exploitation issue is the tougher one to fix, and in fact it tends to drive the other one (knowing how to live sustainably). People are more exploitable if they are kept ignorant.
The US and other rich countries tend to lack of sustainability because of "planned obsolescence" and other wasteful practices such as transmitting power over very long distances. The poorest countries tend to lack sustainability because of internal warfare and low tech bad practices - i.e. goat ranching is not stable, long term, because goats tend to spread desertification where they go.
Usually, the higher court's decisions cite what precidents or constitutional principles are in conflict, which is obviously needed to make a nyea or nay meaningful. After all, what could congress do if the passed a law, it was shot down, and the court would only tell them "you lost by 5 to 4, and we can't say why".
Some decisions have sketched out ways to rewrite the law that would pass whatever test it failed. That doesn't make such a method the law, and legislators are free to try to rewrite a law in other ways instead if they still want a law to do X, unless doing X is itself the part that is unconstiutional. If it is, they will see the new law shot down on the same grounds as the old version.
For example, the US Congress has passed several obscenity on the internet bills in a row that have the exact same constitutional problems. Court decisions have become more and more detailed at spelling out just what the problem is. The congressmen who wanted the law point to this as proof the court is an activist body, exceeding its mandate. Then they pass another law that still ignores the problems pointed out to them 20 years ago in the exact same way. Another recent example of this is the California court's actions re. abuse of imminent domain by municipalities. They tell county A "you can't do that without paying the property owner". Six months later, they tell county B "you can't do that without paying the property owner". Four months later, they tell city C "you can't do that without paying the property owner". Then City C complains that they thought the law only applied to county governments. Six months later, the court tells city C "you still can't do that without paying the property owner, whether you're a county or not". City C's attourneys promptly give a press statement condemning the District court's "Exceeding its authority by pontificating on the relative roles of the city and county governments inastead of just sticking to the issue at hand".
1/10th's actually a fair number. Ranching Beef, for example is about 10% efficient. Every 1 lb steak you skip represents 10 lbs. of grain that could be available to feed people instead of cattle, IF we can work out ways to distribute it.
"1. Keep track of how users enlarge/reduce the font size: if sites that use a 10 point font are repeatedly enlarged to 14 or 16 point then it is fairly safe to assume that the user has poor eyesight and all sites with tiny text should automatically be sized up."
This is a good concept in several ways. First, what most people with eyesight limitations do is adjust the really severe problem text and put up with the less severe sorts, so if they enlarge 10 point to 16 consistently, they enlarge 12 to 16 only late in a browsing session, and just put up with 14 point type even though it's a bit smaller than optimum for them. People will go to an effort only when the threshold of discomfort is crossed and the problem gets their consious attention, and many people will put up with a problem beyond that. Second, it's a clearly quantifiable area, making it the sort of thing machines can excel at. If it turns out to have unexpected complexities, we will get a warning about how much worse other tasks, such as adjusting web sites based on the user's color preference or aestetic criteria, will be (no plaid backgrounds)
If Microsoft can quickly determine if there is stolen code in their property, it actually makes sense not to drag things out. If it's there, they will get a very light slap on the wrist at worst, by making sure all the blame falls on the employee, going back to actions before he became an employee. If it's not there, Alta Vista just got a look at a bunch of MS code. If AV develops anything that resembles any part of that code, or is in the process of doing so right now, they become very open to a lawsuit that would be both much larger and much easier to prove than any claim they could make right now against MS. Just asking for that code means AV risks having to drop or rework any projects that might look like they are based on that knowledge.
Keep a developer's custom toolkit, consisting only of things you wrote. Put in it only things you did completely on your own time, or better yet, only things you did in school or between jobs. ABOVE ALL, DON"T WORK ON THEM ON COMPANY TIME OR COMPANY MACHINES. You might keep code you wrote outside of employment hours, that is not closely related to any project the company does, but I'd be careful even there. For the things you should keep, don't dispose of working copies but hold onto them to show your development process. Accurate timestamps there may help show that you worked on a project nights and weekends and that it took the time you would expect under those circumstances. Also document when you did your work in a log and don't just rely on timestamps.
Don't copy from the kit to work projects. If there is something in the kit that would be useful on a work project, tell your boss "I've got something that could be useful on project X, but I did it before I started here. Can we get legal to liscence it from me real cheap so I don't give up my rights?"
Be prepared to cut your current employer a really sweet deal, much cheaper than paying you to rework the idea from scratch, so you can keep your work to use elsewhere later. Be prepared to give your employer a pretty good deal, even if they want all rights. Remember, they know what they expected to pay you to develop it from scratch, (if the project comes in on time and budget) - That's the position they expect to start bargaining from. If you're not already on a firm footing of honesty with your employer, just don't do it at all.
If you don't want to share your code with your employer, this still works somewhat to protect you in a lawsuit, but some companies are just plain paranoid, and sue ex-employees at the drop of a hat.
Being a Monopoly is just a precondition that has to be proved in Antitrust cases.
In an average criminal case, the DA has to prove that the accused had an opportunity to commit the crime (if the accused claims he didn't, at least). That doesn't mean that every person who had an opportunity to commit the crime did it, but that none of the persons who didn't have any opportunity did. There are probably 100,000 people who can't account for where they were at the time in the OJ Simpson case, and lived close enough to the crime scene that they could theoretically have had an opportunity, but that doesn't mean we should put them all on trial.
A company that isn't a monopoly has no way to commit certain antitrust violations, but a company that is a monopoly can. That's all it means, can and not did.
One philosophical reason to read enough fiction to understand the concept of fiction itself is that Truth has many antonyms. Fiction, Legend, Myth and Poetry are all in some sense opposites of the Truth, yet none of them are Lies, and in some other sense each of the words I've capitalized in this sentence is just as much an opposite of the others. Eliminating them all means accessing perhaps 5% of the universe of discourse, and worse, thinking that that 5% is at least half and likely by far the better half.
"just like I thought the midichlorian was a hideously stupid plot trick in Star Wars Ep1."
I had high hopes for that. If manipulating the force was based on a genetic advantage and had little or no connection to philosophical training, then the black and white ethos of the Star Wars Ep. 4 through 6 was all a Jedi con game. The whole star wars series would have been resolved in a Dune like struggle by various factions to out devious each other and the winner would rewrite history as needed. Star Wars would have become a powerful and mature commentary on our willinglness to follow charismatic but irrational and uncareing leaders like sheep and joined 1984 and Blade Runner as cautionary tales.
Of course, episode 3 would have a box office gross of $ 27.00, but Roger Ebert would have given it a thumb's up.
I'll grant you, we should assume many techs know more about the machines than is strictly necessary for their jobs, and that this is particularly likely for a tech that is up to something. And yes, seals can be counterfitted, if the tech can get a look at the numbers sheets and some other information. However, the tech may encounter a seal placed during a spot audit or by another tech, and if his procedure isn't supposed to involve cutting that particular seal, he has to get his counterfit made to match it. He has to be there twice, once to get the number and once to install the counterfit (or he has help, or he's carrying hundreds of thousands of counterfits in various colors and six digit numbers to cover all possibilities, or he takes a set of blanks and a number stamper with him). For this reason alone, I'd argue that it takes a larger number of people or more time than I gather you think.
Most voting machines are in places such as schools, National Guard armories, and public safety buildings, and most of these keep their own records of when a tech arrives and leaves (I can't say all schools do, but I will guarentee an armory, which usually locks up the machines in its weapons vault, keeps detailed logs AND follows an ALL visitors must be accompanied rule. For most armament vaults, there are only a very limited number of persons who can enter that vault alone even among the troops, and it requires a DoD secret clearance to get on that list. Public safety buildings these days have similar policies and often a cop assigned to follow any visitor everywhere including restroom breaks. Since most of these people don't know the technical details, they won't know what to look for in many cases, but some are generally suspicious types, and will catch some of it (like a tech hand stamping a numbered seal), plus they usually log accurately, so that's another set of logs that can be checked against anything the tech stands even a remote chance of getting access to. It surprised me the first time a Federal Election Commission Judge was granted access to our armament vault log with less resistance than I would have expected for anybody outside of the chain of command, but yes, I can verify such spot checks happen, at least in states still supervised by the federal system over old problems such as the 1964 voting rights act violations.
The tech doesn't have to just tamper with a machine, he has to tamper with enough machines to affect an election. This with other people running diagnostic software the week before the election in most cases, so his actual window of opportunity is narrow, exceptionally narrow if he doesn't know which machines will be checked first this time. Keep him from accessing the list of which machines get spot checked, or which ones will be tested a week before the election and which the very last day, and he's got a lot of obstacles to overcome.
Now if other people in the election office pass on information they shouldn't, if our tech has a photographic memory or is allowed time to not just glance at some papers he shouldn't even see but photocopy them, and if multiple people don't bother to spot check just about everything every time, he can do it. I'd worry a lot more about some other things. Corporate organized, rather than local tampering with the software, machines that include LAN ports, like some of the Dibold ones do, officials changing the reported results after they have them all in in one place, or for federal elections, a largish conspiracy that concentrates on states where the race is close and there is no federal law enforcement routinely supervising the process. Any of these looks like a bigger risk.
Dangnabbit! That's the second time I've seen all the HTML get totally trashed posting to Slashdot. Where did my
's, 's, and such go? Please let me appologise for how hard the above is to read. I'm going back to plain text posting until I either figure out what's wrong on my end or die of shame. Again, sorry.
The problem is, there is no way to prove ANYTHING about ANY social issue using the methodology you would limit us to. No one can show that any tax system is better or worse than any other, no one can prove that the death penalty does or doesn't deter, or that the three strikes rules do or don't work, or whatever.
Why? because there are supposed to be different burdens of proof for differing hypothesi. If I propose in a physics experiment that there is an unknown fith fundamental force, any responsible physicist will, and should, say "Produce some real proof of that remarkable claim or shut up". Now in the social sciences, all to often there is no corresponding mechanism. If one theory is based on broad models of brain development, has a basis in physical as well as mental sciences, and makes predictions matching the predictions the model makes for those other areas, anyone is free to say, "but sexual development is an exception to that rule, and we shouldn't count that other evidence as relevant to the sexual development case", and the sociological community as a whole is reluctant to say "Ah, the burden of proof shifts to the person claiming the exceptions".
There are about a hundred thousand variables proposed in this matter. You can't apply multivariant analysis to them because they don't have a common scale of measurement. If they did, you would need the entire world's projected computing power for the next 100 years to crunch the data. (And I'm at least a half-believer in the Vingian singularity).
You "don't think anyone has the data to make that claim". There's lots of data, and I can even post some links. But how can that data be analyzed by an industry that too often gives equal weight to all competing claims, from the reasonable to the totally far fetched? While a consensus is developing in this area, and there are plenty of major institutes and organizations that will take a solid stand about the negative effects of various media on kids, there are still, for example, psychiatric industry people who have proposed that all rapists had fundamentalist Christian parents, without exception. Instead of being laughed out of their jobs, their theories are often still competing for funding, analysis, and public attention with ones like the ones I mentioned. Will your multivariant analysis really include as many variables as we can think of? I welcome more analysis of the existing data to further clarify what we know, and don't yet know, but if we can't call obvious junk science junk science, and keep having to go back to square one, we will never get it.
Links:
http://www.data-archive.ac.uk/findingData/snDescri ption.asp?sn=3535
This is the British cohort study. It was begun in 1970, continued for 16 years and used as its sample all the children born in Britain in the initial year that were born where hospital records were kept (so it excluded only a small fraction of children born at home via midwives). As studies go, it's a whopper, but it did end in 86 for what that's worth.
http://www.fradical.com/research_links_updated2.ht m
This will go to a number of links the American Academy of Paediatrics and the American Psychiatric Association sites, and some Canadian and overseas sites of note as well. Links cover childhood exposure to a broad range of various forms of sex, violence, racism, and other stimuli, and are generally current, i.e. 2000-2004.
http://www.cps.ca/english/statements/PP/pp03-01.ht m
Here's a Canadian Association link that's fairly general, about overall media effects rather than just Porn. Of the 50 footnoted documents, only about 10 are multivariate studies.
The broadcaster wants broadcast flagging and other DRM that will keep viewers from being able to do just that. Even if you can make one, you can't submit an illegal copy as legal evidence. The burden the companies don't want simply goes with the perks they do want.
First, I agree with you, both about the importance of liberty, and the way you applied the metaphor about boiling frogs.
With that said, I'd like to point out that frog boiling works for describing what can happen to social mores as well. Imagine the people who thought the Ed Sullivan show was being stuffy for not showing Elvis from the waist down. (This was actually mostly the majority even in that age we sometimes think of as Uber-smarmy). 10 years later it was Ziggy Stardust, then Alice Cooper. Now we're the post Marylin Manson generation. What would have happend if you invented a time machine, and showed video of those later acts to those people in the late 50's - early 60's, and told them just those facts about the future? Of course I can't really say what they would think, but I suspect Elvis would have been lucky to keep his career and Ed Sullivan could have run for president on it.
The thing is, there IS data. Scientists have put together a pretty good model of juvenal brain development. For example, it is now known that the adolescent brain at about the age of 12 to 14 goes through what is called a second pruning, where many nerve connections die back just as they do in the first yerar after birth. This second pruning appears to involve more environmental selection, and even consious choice on the part of the individual, in the sense that if a child were to say, practice the violin or a sport at this time, rapid progress more usually results than at other times. There are known limitations on this too, for example people don't see such development in the language centers, in fact this period is when the ability to learn a new language from scratch takes its last sharp downturn into the state it continues to occupy therough the rest of our lives.
How does this relate to Janet's (i.m.h.o. rather cute) breast? During this period, sexual cues seem to imprint deeply, resulting in a lot of very sharp, profound behavioral changes. Since humans also synthesize bits and pieces in the process, and some people imprint very deeply. I'd argue that a lot of porn, and on rare occasions even a relatively inocuous thing like the wardrobe malfunction can damage a young person, and here's why.
We all know some people who are sexually very tightly focused. It seems quite normal, especially in males, for a man to have a thing for breasts or legs, to always date blondes or redheads, or other such self selected rules. These people run to about 15% of the hetero male population. Note that we now think homosexual behavior is something that happens prenatally or in the very early stages of childhood, and I am specifically NOT saying that it is selected in this same way. I've brought up this arguement before and someone always jumps me for gay bashing even if I don't say anything one way or the other.
What I am saying is that an incident like the wardrobe malfunction will work on young hetero males as follows. Roughly 85% don't fixate much on just one feature, and so aren't particularly vulnerable to a negative effect here. They will incorporate JJ's nipple with other memories and later, for example, they will still develop interpersonal relationships with women who have smaller or larger breasts without feeling dissatisfied. They won't judge a woman largely or solely by breast size or shape.
Of the males who fixate more heavily, some will get a thing for black women, which is not a negative in general, and may promote a positive sense of racial diversity if the young viewer doesn't totally obsess, but I suppose it could be counted as a negative if the focus goes to an inability to be sexually interested in any woman who doesn't have that exact skin color. Then there's the boys who focus on the fact that that nipple guard she is wearing is attached through the nipple. That's more problematic. A strong fixator may gain a focus on women with body piercings, which can be difficult on a relationship and so counts as moderately negative, but a few will focus on it as the start of an S&M development, and this can become seriously negative indeed. With the number of viewers for the incident, a small percentage, just amonng 12-14 year old heterosexual strong fixators, may equal 1,000 viewers.
Is this a big deal? Probably not for a nipple, but remember, most states prohibit a child from getting anything except ears pierced until age 18, so I'd argue that parents have a concern over the piercing part and not just the flesh part. Is it a bigger deal for commercial porn, where any lessons learned are usually reinforced by immmediate masturbation (an ultra strong positive reinforcement with little or no time delay)? Undoubtedly.
What does this say for TV violence? Well, we know that some of the brain centers that are developing are related to our neolithic hunter gatherer mode. A male at this time is acquiring some nearly instinctual ways of thinking about protecting the tribe, hunti
"Because it's in a "vault" it will still exist when it becomes public property..."
I was thinking more of some of the MPAA members IP, where the orignal filmstock is in a literal vault, not a figurative one. Recent efforts to restore films such as My Fair Lady and Seven Samurai have revealed that there are lots of very old film originals growing mold and such, and at this rate, they WON'T still exist when the time comes for them to become public property. We've already lost some, films from the 20's, 30's and 40's that are irrepairable, and as the uncorrectable flaws in the restored copy of 7 Samurai show, there are a lot more whose quality is already compromised to a lesser degree.
"Without any way of knowing when the 70 years will start or even if it will stay at 70 years..."
Life is already a very variable term, and a life plus system favors the young over the old. Under it, authors get more benefits for their first works rather than what are more usually their best ones. As long as life expectancy's increase, the current law also has built in "inflation". As you point out, the law also has a history of being readjusted in favor of one side and never the other, and we have no reason to expect it to stay at life+70.
If the copyright laws were a contract you could sign voluntarily or renegotiate, would you sign it? Would you even negotiate? Or would you decide to take your business elsewhere because anyone who would propose such terms obviously has something crooked in mind.
Cosmic rays do have a probablility of about 1 a month or so, if you mean for one passing through a chip. However, the term 'cosmic rays' is often used to refer both to actual energetic gamma rays and to some particles, sometimes even including exotic, short lived ones like muons, so it helps to be specific.
Heavy, really energetic gamma may penetrate meters of rock, but any random gamma has a somewhat better chance of being absorbed if it's passing through someting dense, i.e. metal. To show how counter intuitive this is, a really high energy gamma ray from space, that actually hits an alumuinum nucleus in that foil, will kick off a cascade of energetic electrons and other particles, in a roughly fan shaped spray inside the case. This will be more likely to affect a data bearing structure than if that same gamma passes directly through the CPU, hits a tiny wire there, and kicks off a shower there that sprays into the plastic holder underneath instead of across the other wires inside the chip.
So, any effects from tinfoil are not particularly prone to be good, are generally unpredictable, and are outweighed by other effects, such as how your computer is oriented towards the sun and known cosmic ray sources like the crab nebula, how your location is oriented re. the van Allen belts, whether your building is steel frame construction or not, and probably a thousand other factors.
Actually, one of the big gaming businesses claimed to have registered Nazi as a trademark in their Raiders of the Lost Ark board game. So Hitler lost the trademark for not defending it sufficiently in a joint action suit (3rd armor, Big red 1 and a whole bunch of soviet tank divisions v. Hitler), but it's currently owned by Hasbro.
And this got modded insightful? 30, 50, 70 years ago, you could still own a house or a car, and there weren't nearly as many records on you. I don't use credit cards anymore, but have debit cards instead, yet the fact that I'm the one with the money, and I'm loaning it to them instead of vice-versa doesn't stop "them" from keeping records on me.
Calling people cowards is easy. Realizing that the current system can no more last than an America half slave and half free could have lasted 150 years ago is much harder, but you need to do it. If we don't make some changes soon, such as really cracking down on identity and medical records theft, protecting privacy in general, and standing up for that right you dismiss in quotations, we will see damage to the US economy that will destroy that upward mobility those people you call cowards are mostly seeking, and leave us with a government that is out of carrots and so has to resort increasingly to sticks.
The counter-reaction is already building, and will continue to build the longer we resist making those changes. It may be relatively benign, an expression of voters deciding privacy and control over their own lives are important and they want them badly enough to vote that way. The more it is delayed, the better the chances are it won't result at all, at least until after we deal with a government that issues universal id cards and worse, but the pressure is not going to simply go away. You are living in interesting times. What are you going to do if not dealing with that presure positively leads all the way to a government that panics at the next crisis, and issues shoot on sight orders against those good people who don't have universal id's? Brag about how you had the balls to position yourself in front of the cross hairs, but not the common sense to fight the trend before it went that far? Boast about how you helped inactivate the positive movements within the system by calling them all cowards? And even if it never goes that far, there are possibilities such as internment camps for "illegals", forced mass deportation, and losing all those other rights along with the right to privacy.
Here's a tip for you, for all your talk about courage, if you don't look like the cop's idea of a typical Mexican, you will still be effectively invisible to most of these risks. Yep, if you are a white guy, we can't know if you really have those balls you are bragging about unless you stand up in the middle of a sweep for illegals and announce you too don't have proof of citizenship. talk is cheap. Let's hope you never see a USA where you are called on to prove it.
(IANAL) In a normal civil suit, a plaintif can get triple damages and a possible criminal charge against the other party by showing criminal negligence.
In a civil suit over copy right, the platif can get 5 times damages and a possible criminal charge aganst the other party by merely showing willfullness. Willfullness, as defined by law, is a lot easier to show than Negligence at a criminal level, and in fact is about like showing simple neglegence.
It's an Animal Farm Law: All parties in a civil suit are equal, but some are more equal than others.
Offtopic but, love your sig. While we're at it, good workmen still blame their tools, even if they make them work anyway.
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Too dedicated to replacing earlier tools like ink and paper?
Like having a "desktop" with "manila folders" where home users typically store "documents", even though these days half those 'documents' are music or video?
Like showing a piece of paper being moved frrom manila folder to manila folder for file transfer dialogs?
Like having a "recycle bin" that looks like a trash can and presumably catches those itty bitty pieces of paper that lurk inside the machine?
Loop 1
1. Microsoft selected which OEM makers would be allowed steep discounts on its bundled software for about the last decade.
2. This pruned the small, Mom & Pop OEMs, speeding up the process of a few bigger industry members becoming dominant.
3. Even though Microsoft generally did business with all the remaining larger OEMs, raising the threshold startup costs for new competitors entering the market made the competition one limited to the existing ones, which helped trigger and speed up the OEM shakedown that has left Dell in a dominant position.
4. Dell, being number 1, becomes powerful enough to push back at Microsoft, at least a little.
5. Micosoft profits fall as they have to cut a better deal with Dell.
Loop 2
1. Microsoft delays production of Longhorn and other software repeatedly.
2. Newer, faster computers not needed to run newer, bigger programs.
3. Industy wide OEM sales become sluggish, Dell doesn't have the profit margin to push very hard at Microsoft, but Microsoft can't afford to gouge Dell with the whole industry tepid.
4. If Microsoft succeeds in selling bigger, shinyier software that raises OEM sales numbers, Dell gains more power to break away. If Microsoft fails, Dell sales become flat, with no margin to be shaved off to increase MS profits.
If I'm not reading too much into your post, you're basically saying more than that Microsoft products have become an alibi with many stockholders, board members, and customers. Your use of the phrase "fiscally responsible" seems to suggest it's a legal strategy.
I can see how CIO's and such could pick Microsoft so that they could say:
1. Don't fire me, Oh boardmembers, I went with the industry leader.
2. Don't blame us, Oh customers, blame Microsoft.
But "someone else is fiscally responsible" sounds like more, as in:
3. Don't sue us, sue Microsoft.
(or is it:
3a. Don't sue us until we work out a friendly deal where your choice of claims and testimony helps us to countersue Microsoft for the damages we will have to pay out.)
I don't recall a lot of actual actions along these lines, but if some CEOs, CIOs and such are thinking like that, it's pretty obvious they are not going to want to switch away from Microsoft under any circumstances that don't give them another big target to sue.
The exploitation issue is the tougher one to fix, and in fact it tends to drive the other one (knowing how to live sustainably). People are more exploitable if they are kept ignorant.
The US and other rich countries tend to lack of sustainability because of "planned obsolescence" and other wasteful practices such as transmitting power over very long distances. The poorest countries tend to lack sustainability because of internal warfare and low tech bad practices - i.e. goat ranching is not stable, long term, because goats tend to spread desertification where they go.
Usually, the higher court's decisions cite what precidents or constitutional principles are in conflict, which is obviously needed to make a nyea or nay meaningful. After all, what could congress do if the passed a law, it was shot down, and the court would only tell them "you lost by 5 to 4, and we can't say why".
Some decisions have sketched out ways to rewrite the law that would pass whatever test it failed. That doesn't make such a method the law, and legislators are free to try to rewrite a law in other ways instead if they still want a law to do X, unless doing X is itself the part that is unconstiutional. If it is, they will see the new law shot down on the same grounds as the old version.
For example, the US Congress has passed several obscenity on the internet bills in a row that have the exact same constitutional problems. Court decisions have become more and more detailed at spelling out just what the problem is. The congressmen who wanted the law point to this as proof the court is an activist body, exceeding its mandate. Then they pass another law that still ignores the problems pointed out to them 20 years ago in the exact same way. Another recent example of this is the California court's actions re. abuse of imminent domain by municipalities. They tell county A "you can't do that without paying the property owner". Six months later, they tell county B "you can't do that without paying the property owner". Four months later, they tell city C "you can't do that without paying the property owner". Then City C complains that they thought the law only applied to county governments. Six months later, the court tells city C "you still can't do that without paying the property owner, whether you're a county or not". City C's attourneys promptly give a press statement condemning the District court's "Exceeding its authority by pontificating on the relative roles of the city and county governments inastead of just sticking to the issue at hand".
1/10th's actually a fair number. Ranching Beef, for example is about 10% efficient. Every 1 lb steak you skip represents 10 lbs. of grain that could be available to feed people instead of cattle, IF we can work out ways to distribute it.
"1. Keep track of how users enlarge/reduce the font size: if sites that use a 10 point font are repeatedly enlarged to 14 or 16 point then it is fairly safe to assume that the user has poor eyesight and all sites with tiny text should automatically be sized up."
This is a good concept in several ways.
First, what most people with eyesight limitations do is adjust the really severe problem text and put up with the less severe sorts, so if they enlarge 10 point to 16 consistently, they enlarge 12 to 16 only late in a browsing session, and just put up with 14 point type even though it's a bit smaller than optimum for them. People will go to an effort only when the threshold of discomfort is crossed and the problem gets their consious attention, and many people will put up with a problem beyond that.
Second, it's a clearly quantifiable area, making it the sort of thing machines can excel at. If it turns out to have unexpected complexities, we will get a warning about how much worse other tasks, such as adjusting web sites based on the user's color preference or aestetic criteria, will be (no plaid backgrounds)
If Microsoft can quickly determine if there is stolen code in their property, it actually makes sense not to drag things out. If it's there, they will get a very light slap on the wrist at worst, by making sure all the blame falls on the employee, going back to actions before he became an employee. If it's not there, Alta Vista just got a look at a bunch of MS code. If AV develops anything that resembles any part of that code, or is in the process of doing so right now, they become very open to a lawsuit that would be both much larger and much easier to prove than any claim they could make right now against MS. Just asking for that code means AV risks having to drop or rework any projects that might look like they are based on that knowledge.
Ways around this?
Keep a developer's custom toolkit, consisting only of things you wrote. Put in it only things you did completely on your own time, or better yet, only things you did in school or between jobs. ABOVE ALL, DON"T WORK ON THEM ON COMPANY TIME OR COMPANY MACHINES. You might keep code you wrote outside of employment hours, that is not closely related to any project the company does, but I'd be careful even there. For the things you should keep, don't dispose of working copies but hold onto them to show your development process. Accurate timestamps there may help show that you worked on a project nights and weekends and that it took the time you would expect under those circumstances. Also document when you did your work in a log and don't just rely on timestamps.
Don't copy from the kit to work projects. If there is something in the kit that would be useful on a work project, tell your boss "I've got something that could be useful on project X, but I did it before I started here. Can we get legal to liscence it from me real cheap so I don't give up my rights?"
Be prepared to cut your current employer a really sweet deal, much cheaper than paying you to rework the idea from scratch, so you can keep your work to use elsewhere later. Be prepared to give your employer a pretty good deal, even if they want all rights. Remember, they know what they expected to pay you to develop it from scratch, (if the project comes in on time and budget) - That's the position they expect to start bargaining from. If you're not already on a firm footing of honesty with your employer, just don't do it at all.
If you don't want to share your code with your employer, this still works somewhat to protect you in a lawsuit, but some companies are just plain paranoid, and sue ex-employees at the drop of a hat.
Being a Monopoly is just a precondition that has to be proved in Antitrust cases.
In an average criminal case, the DA has to prove that the accused had an opportunity to commit the crime (if the accused claims he didn't, at least). That doesn't mean that every person who had an opportunity to commit the crime did it, but that none of the persons who didn't have any opportunity did. There are probably 100,000 people who can't account for where they were at the time in the OJ Simpson case, and lived close enough to the crime scene that they could theoretically have had an opportunity, but that doesn't mean we should put them all on trial.
A company that isn't a monopoly has no way to commit certain antitrust violations, but a company that is a monopoly can. That's all it means, can and not did.
One philosophical reason to read enough fiction to understand the concept of fiction itself is that Truth has many antonyms. Fiction, Legend, Myth and Poetry are all in some sense opposites of the Truth, yet none of them are Lies, and in some other sense each of the words I've capitalized in this sentence is just as much an opposite of the others. Eliminating them all means accessing perhaps 5% of the universe of discourse, and worse, thinking that that 5% is at least half and likely by far the better half.
"just like I thought the midichlorian was a hideously stupid plot trick in Star Wars Ep1."
I had high hopes for that. If manipulating the force was based on a genetic advantage and had little or no connection to philosophical training, then the black and white ethos of the Star Wars Ep. 4 through 6 was all a Jedi con game. The whole star wars series would have been resolved in a Dune like struggle by various factions to out devious each other and the winner would rewrite history as needed. Star Wars would have become a powerful and mature commentary on our willinglness to follow charismatic but irrational and uncareing leaders like sheep and joined 1984 and Blade Runner as cautionary tales.
Of course, episode 3 would have a box office gross of $ 27.00, but Roger Ebert would have given it a thumb's up.
I'm going to spill the big secret we've been keeping from the BSD is dead gang:
Beastie's horns double as neck bolts! It's alive! Alive!
I'll grant you, we should assume many techs know more about the machines than is strictly necessary for their jobs, and that this is particularly likely for a tech that is up to something. And yes, seals can be counterfitted, if the tech can get a look at the numbers sheets and some other information. However, the tech may encounter a seal placed during a spot audit or by another tech, and if his procedure isn't supposed to involve cutting that particular seal, he has to get his counterfit made to match it. He has to be there twice, once to get the number and once to install the counterfit (or he has help, or he's carrying hundreds of thousands of counterfits in various colors and six digit numbers to cover all possibilities, or he takes a set of blanks and a number stamper with him). For this reason alone, I'd argue that it takes a larger number of people or more time than I gather you think.
Most voting machines are in places such as schools, National Guard armories, and public safety buildings, and most of these keep their own records of when a tech arrives and leaves (I can't say all schools do, but I will guarentee an armory, which usually locks up the machines in its weapons vault, keeps detailed logs AND follows an ALL visitors must be accompanied rule. For most armament vaults, there are only a very limited number of persons who can enter that vault alone even among the troops, and it requires a DoD secret clearance to get on that list. Public safety buildings these days have similar policies and often a cop assigned to follow any visitor everywhere including restroom breaks. Since most of these people don't know the technical details, they won't know what to look for in many cases, but some are generally suspicious types, and will catch some of it (like a tech hand stamping a numbered seal), plus they usually log accurately, so that's another set of logs that can be checked against anything the tech stands even a remote chance of getting access to. It surprised me the first time a Federal Election Commission Judge was granted access to our armament vault log with less resistance than I would have expected for anybody outside of the chain of command, but yes, I can verify such spot checks happen, at least in states still supervised by the federal system over old problems such as the 1964 voting rights act violations.
The tech doesn't have to just tamper with a machine, he has to tamper with enough machines to affect an election. This with other people running diagnostic software the week before the election in most cases, so his actual window of opportunity is narrow, exceptionally narrow if he doesn't know which machines will be checked first this time. Keep him from accessing the list of which machines get spot checked, or which ones will be tested a week before the election and which the very last day, and he's got a lot of obstacles to overcome.
Now if other people in the election office pass on information they shouldn't, if our tech has a photographic memory or is allowed time to not just glance at some papers he shouldn't even see but photocopy them, and if multiple people don't bother to spot check just about everything every time, he can do it. I'd worry a lot more about some other things. Corporate organized, rather than local tampering with the software, machines that include LAN ports, like some of the Dibold ones do, officials changing the reported results after they have them all in in one place, or for federal elections, a largish conspiracy that concentrates on states where the race is close and there is no federal law enforcement routinely supervising the process. Any of these looks like a bigger risk.
Oh great, now I post in plain text and yet see the HTML parsed instead of displayed as text. That's just plain wrong.
's, 's, and such go? Please let me appologise for how hard the above is to read.
I'm going back to plain text posting until I either figure out what's wrong on my end or die of shame. Again, sorry.
The problem is, there is no way to prove ANYTHING about ANY social issue using the methodology you would limit us to. No one can show that any tax system is better or worse than any other, no one can prove that the death penalty does or doesn't deter, or that the three strikes rules do or don't work, or whatever. Why? because there are supposed to be different burdens of proof for differing hypothesi. If I propose in a physics experiment that there is an unknown fith fundamental force, any responsible physicist will, and should, say "Produce some real proof of that remarkable claim or shut up". Now in the social sciences, all to often there is no corresponding mechanism. If one theory is based on broad models of brain development, has a basis in physical as well as mental sciences, and makes predictions matching the predictions the model makes for those other areas, anyone is free to say, "but sexual development is an exception to that rule, and we shouldn't count that other evidence as relevant to the sexual development case", and the sociological community as a whole is reluctant to say "Ah, the burden of proof shifts to the person claiming the exceptions". There are about a hundred thousand variables proposed in this matter. You can't apply multivariant analysis to them because they don't have a common scale of measurement. If they did, you would need the entire world's projected computing power for the next 100 years to crunch the data. (And I'm at least a half-believer in the Vingian singularity). You "don't think anyone has the data to make that claim". There's lots of data, and I can even post some links. But how can that data be analyzed by an industry that too often gives equal weight to all competing claims, from the reasonable to the totally far fetched? While a consensus is developing in this area, and there are plenty of major institutes and organizations that will take a solid stand about the negative effects of various media on kids, there are still, for example, psychiatric industry people who have proposed that all rapists had fundamentalist Christian parents, without exception. Instead of being laughed out of their jobs, their theories are often still competing for funding, analysis, and public attention with ones like the ones I mentioned. Will your multivariant analysis really include as many variables as we can think of? I welcome more analysis of the existing data to further clarify what we know, and don't yet know, but if we can't call obvious junk science junk science, and keep having to go back to square one, we will never get it. Links: http://www.data-archive.ac.uk/findingData/snDescri ption.asp?sn=3535
This is the British cohort study. It was begun in 1970, continued for 16 years and used as its sample all the children born in Britain in the initial year that were born where hospital records were kept (so it excluded only a small fraction of children born at home via midwives). As studies go, it's a whopper, but it did end in 86 for what that's worth.
http://www.fradical.com/research_links_updated2.ht m
This will go to a number of links the American Academy of Paediatrics and the American Psychiatric Association sites, and some Canadian and overseas sites of note as well. Links cover childhood exposure to a broad range of various forms of sex, violence, racism, and other stimuli, and are generally current, i.e. 2000-2004.
http://www.cps.ca/english/statements/PP/pp03-01.ht m
Here's a Canadian Association link that's fairly general, about overall media effects rather than just Porn. Of the 50 footnoted documents, only about 10 are multivariate studies.
The broadcaster wants broadcast flagging and other DRM that will keep viewers from being able to do just that. Even if you can make one, you can't submit an illegal copy as legal evidence. The burden the companies don't want simply goes with the perks they do want.
First, I agree with you, both about the importance of liberty, and the way you applied the metaphor about boiling frogs.
With that said, I'd like to point out that frog boiling works for describing what can happen to social mores as well.
Imagine the people who thought the Ed Sullivan show was being stuffy for not showing Elvis from the waist down. (This was actually mostly the majority even in that age we sometimes think of as Uber-smarmy). 10 years later it was Ziggy Stardust, then Alice Cooper. Now we're the post Marylin Manson generation. What would have happend if you invented a time machine, and showed video of those later acts to those people in the late 50's - early 60's, and told them just those facts about the future? Of course I can't really say what they would think, but I suspect Elvis would have been lucky to keep his career and Ed Sullivan could have run for president on it.
The thing is, there IS data. Scientists have put together a pretty good model of juvenal brain development. For example, it is now known that the adolescent brain at about the age of 12 to 14 goes through what is called a second pruning, where many nerve connections die back just as they do in the first yerar after birth. This second pruning appears to involve more environmental selection, and even consious choice on the part of the individual, in the sense that if a child were to say, practice the violin or a sport at this time, rapid progress more usually results than at other times. There are known limitations on this too, for example people don't see such development in the language centers, in fact this period is when the ability to learn a new language from scratch takes its last sharp downturn into the state it continues to occupy therough the rest of our lives.
How does this relate to Janet's (i.m.h.o. rather cute) breast? During this period, sexual cues seem to imprint deeply, resulting in a lot of very sharp, profound behavioral changes. Since humans also synthesize bits and pieces in the process, and some people imprint very deeply. I'd argue that a lot of porn, and on rare occasions even a relatively inocuous thing like the wardrobe malfunction can damage a young person, and here's why.
We all know some people who are sexually very tightly focused. It seems quite normal, especially in males, for a man to have a thing for breasts or legs, to always date blondes or redheads, or other such self selected rules. These people run to about 15% of the hetero male population. Note that we now think homosexual behavior is something that happens prenatally or in the very early stages of childhood, and I am specifically NOT saying that it is selected in this same way. I've brought up this arguement before and someone always jumps me for gay bashing even if I don't say anything one way or the other.
What I am saying is that an incident like the wardrobe malfunction will work on young hetero males as follows. Roughly 85% don't fixate much on just one feature, and so aren't particularly vulnerable to a negative effect here. They will incorporate JJ's nipple with other memories and later, for example, they will still develop interpersonal relationships with women who have smaller or larger breasts without feeling dissatisfied. They won't judge a woman largely or solely by breast size or shape.
Of the males who fixate more heavily, some will get a thing for black women, which is not a negative in general, and may promote a positive sense of racial diversity if the young viewer doesn't totally obsess, but I suppose it could be counted as a negative if the focus goes to an inability to be sexually interested in any woman who doesn't have that exact skin color. Then there's the boys who focus on the fact that that nipple guard she is wearing is attached through the nipple. That's more problematic. A strong fixator may gain a focus on women with body piercings, which can be difficult on a relationship and so counts as moderately negative, but a few will focus on it as the start of an S&M development, and this can become seriously negative indeed. With the number of viewers for the incident, a small percentage, just amonng 12-14 year old heterosexual strong fixators, may equal 1,000 viewers.
Is this a big deal? Probably not for a nipple, but remember, most states prohibit a child from getting anything except ears pierced until age 18, so I'd argue that parents have a concern over the piercing part and not just the flesh part. Is it a bigger deal for commercial porn, where any lessons learned are usually reinforced by immmediate masturbation (an ultra strong positive reinforcement with little or no time delay)? Undoubtedly.
What does this say for TV violence? Well, we know that some of the brain centers that are developing are related to our neolithic hunter gatherer mode. A male at this time is acquiring some nearly instinctual ways of thinking about protecting the tribe, hunti
"Because it's in a "vault" it will still exist when it becomes public property..."
I was thinking more of some of the MPAA members IP, where the orignal filmstock is in a literal vault, not a figurative one. Recent efforts to restore films such as My Fair Lady and Seven Samurai have revealed that there are lots of very old film originals growing mold and such, and at this rate, they WON'T still exist when the time comes for them to become public property. We've already lost some, films from the 20's, 30's and 40's that are irrepairable, and as the uncorrectable flaws in the restored copy of 7 Samurai show, there are a lot more whose quality is already compromised to a lesser degree.
"Without any way of knowing when the 70 years will start or even if it will stay at 70 years..."
Life is already a very variable term, and a life plus system favors the young over the old. Under it, authors get more benefits for their first works rather than what are more usually their best ones. As long as life expectancy's increase, the current law also has built in "inflation". As you point out, the law also has a history of being readjusted in favor of one side and never the other, and we have no reason to expect it to stay at life+70.
If the copyright laws were a contract you could sign voluntarily or renegotiate, would you sign it? Would you even negotiate? Or would you decide to take your business elsewhere because anyone who would propose such terms obviously has something crooked in mind.
Cosmic rays do have a probablility of about 1 a month or so, if you mean for one passing through a chip. However, the term 'cosmic rays' is often used to refer both to actual energetic gamma rays and to some particles, sometimes even including exotic, short lived ones like muons, so it helps to be specific.
Heavy, really energetic gamma may penetrate meters of rock, but any random gamma has a somewhat better chance of being absorbed if it's passing through someting dense, i.e. metal. To show how counter intuitive this is, a really high energy gamma ray from space, that actually hits an alumuinum nucleus in that foil, will kick off a cascade of energetic electrons and other particles, in a roughly fan shaped spray inside the case. This will be more likely to affect a data bearing structure than if that same gamma passes directly through the CPU, hits a tiny wire there, and kicks off a shower there that sprays into the plastic holder underneath instead of across the other wires inside the chip.
So, any effects from tinfoil are not particularly prone to be good, are generally unpredictable, and are outweighed by other effects, such as how your computer is oriented towards the sun and known cosmic ray sources like the crab nebula, how your location is oriented re. the van Allen belts, whether your building is steel frame construction or not, and probably a thousand other factors.
Actually, one of the big gaming businesses claimed to have registered Nazi as a trademark in their Raiders of the Lost Ark board game. So Hitler lost the trademark for not defending it sufficiently in a joint action suit (3rd armor, Big red 1 and a whole bunch of soviet tank divisions v. Hitler), but it's currently owned by Hasbro.
And this got modded insightful? 30, 50, 70 years ago, you could still own a house or a car, and there weren't nearly as many records on you. I don't use credit cards anymore, but have debit cards instead, yet the fact that I'm the one with the money, and I'm loaning it to them instead of vice-versa doesn't stop "them" from keeping records on me.
Calling people cowards is easy. Realizing that the current system can no more last than an America half slave and half free could have lasted 150 years ago is much harder, but you need to do it. If we don't make some changes soon, such as really cracking down on identity and medical records theft, protecting privacy in general, and standing up for that right you dismiss in quotations, we will see damage to the US economy that will destroy that upward mobility those people you call cowards are mostly seeking, and leave us with a government that is out of carrots and so has to resort increasingly to sticks.
The counter-reaction is already building, and will continue to build the longer we resist making those changes. It may be relatively benign, an expression of voters deciding privacy and control over their own lives are important and they want them badly enough to vote that way. The more it is delayed, the better the chances are it won't result at all, at least until after we deal with a government that issues universal id cards and worse, but the pressure is not going to simply go away. You are living in interesting times. What are you going to do if not dealing with that presure positively leads all the way to a government that panics at the next crisis, and issues shoot on sight orders against those good people who don't have universal id's? Brag about how you had the balls to position yourself in front of the cross hairs, but not the common sense to fight the trend before it went that far? Boast about how you helped inactivate the positive movements within the system by calling them all cowards? And even if it never goes that far, there are possibilities such as internment camps for "illegals", forced mass deportation, and losing all those other rights along with the right to privacy.
Here's a tip for you, for all your talk about courage, if you don't look like the cop's idea of a typical Mexican, you will still be effectively invisible to most of these risks. Yep, if you are a white guy, we can't know if you really have those balls you are bragging about unless you stand up in the middle of a sweep for illegals and announce you too don't have proof of citizenship. talk is cheap. Let's hope you never see a USA where you are called on to prove it.
(IANAL)
In a normal civil suit, a plaintif can get triple damages and a possible criminal charge against the other party by showing criminal negligence.
In a civil suit over copy right, the platif can get 5 times damages and a possible criminal charge aganst the other party by merely showing willfullness. Willfullness, as defined by law, is a lot easier to show than Negligence at a criminal level, and in fact is about like showing simple neglegence.
It's an Animal Farm Law: All parties in a civil suit are equal, but some are more equal than others.
Offtopic but, love your sig. While we're at it, good workmen still blame their tools, even if they make them work anyway.