The US constitution defines a quid-pro-quo arrangement. Artists get copyrights, then the public gets the work released. With the quid extended from 14 years to 28, to 56, to life plus 20, to life plus 70, what happens to the pro quo? You personally are meeting the requirement by electing to release work freely. What about the creator who reaps all the financial benefits of the extended period, but makes no effort to make sure copies of his or her work survive until the period when they become public domain. Hasn't that creator taken the extra money that comes with extended copyright, but given negative value for that extra? Why doesn't extended copyright give the public some rights here, such as (for just one example), requiring a creator to write a codicil to his or her will, directing the heirs to either retain original masters in a safe location, or go ahead and release works? You are to be applauded for doing what is not only the right thing, but a reasonable, rational thing - but please remember, the ideal goal is to balance creator's rights with everyone else's rights. As long as many copyright holders are busy taking the quid and passing the pro-quo obligations on to someone else, any scheme to correct that will have costs. I agree with you that the proposal you're responding to is terribly flawed, but not because it has costs, rather because people like you already seem to be paying appropriate costs, and a good system would target the people who want all the benefits without any of the obligations.
The last time I worked an election, the machines were stored in a broom closet off of an elementary school gym. Pre-balloting code for the specific election was left in them for several days. I can really see armed marines guarding those doors at all times so that the women's Pilates fitness group that uses it Thursdays can't tamper. The look on their faces when they read that "If you open this door then you will die!" sign ought to be priceless. On the other hand, cartidges with post vote data were handled according to a no lone rule, as in "I carry a locked box, other Judge carries the key". Paper print outs obtained immediately after closing the polls were made available for the press and auditors sent out by the major parties.
BIOS passwords work well on MBs built after about 1996, the vast majority these days. Some people still warn against them because of flaws that were fixed 5 to 8 years ago. Some businesses admittedly are still trying to get a little more life out of PCs that can't even run Win 95, and for them, BIOS passwords won't help (but then, what would?). One great advantage of BIOS passwords is that the earlier you limit access, the better, as a general security rule.
The best thing would be a major election with a massive win for a very obvious write in candidate like Mickey, and no obvious suspects. This would be so spectacular the major news chains would get a hold of the issue and beat it to death, and the typical ignorant voter would end up a lot better informed and the mess might just get fixed. Unfortunately, it would have to be so blatent that Uganda could introduce a UN resolution to send observers to the benighted US to ensure fair elections, and get it to pass.
"Just land" is a lot to argue about. For example,the Palestinians do not have a ntional budget big enough to compensate all the israeli settelers with equal DEVELOPED acreage in what would be the remaining nation of Israel. They simply couldn't afford it, if they spent 100% for decades on nothing else. So someone else has to pay.
Then there's the typical settler. He dosn't want to move. If he is forced to move to a new place, there will be something wrong with it. If the schools are as close then it's farther to the hospital, or to visit the relatives, or the water isn't as good (and if it tests as good, it still tastes funny). So he wants to more than break even, he wants extra. Rather, what he defines as even is always a lot better than what looks even to outsiders. Now, not only the PLO can't afford to give him what he wants, it would be a strain on Israel's taxes.
The secular, democratic government is also improbable. The people on both sides who are the most commited are highly religious. They don't like their secular fellow jews or arabs, and in fact, consider a secular government to be every bit as bad as being forced into the sea by their enemies.
Yes, penguins are found in Antarctica. They're also found in Brazil. Several species are known to come swimming into the harbor at Rio De Janero and other port cities up the eastern coast of South America on regular occasions. They look very odd tanning on the beaches in 80 degree (F) weather. They often migrate up and down the coast. Interestingly, they don't seem to time migrations to a strict winter/summer cycle. Sometimes they head south as it gets colder (spring in the southern hemisphere) While we are at it, I live 500 miles from an ocean, but there are seagulls within 5 miles of me, in the wild. Birds! go figure.
The whole question of when to put pressure on a company to fix bugs and when to back off is cluttered with irrelevancies. Even MS's past behavior is not really relevant. What would be relevant is a reasonably accurate answer to one question. "In what percentage of exploits did the cracker know about the vulnerability independent of the public report?" Note that that's different from knowing before the report came out, or whether the cracker ACTED before or after. If you think you have a good idea of what the chances are your vulnerabilty report will trigger a hack instead of just pressuring the company, then report as you think appropriate, but if you're not confident in that estimate, just maybe you should err on the side of caution. There won't be a halfway good answer until enough convicted crackers are forced to eloqute on that question, and some education oriented legal types add up the information to get the kind of data the FBI uses in profileing other more established crimes. Maybe some of these sites publicising vulnerabilities are guessing right by sys-admin's intuition, but that's about the best we can hope for. Most of us techoid types seem to do better when it's a matter of logic than intuition, right? My hat's off to a site that seems to recognize this and backs off on occasion.
Exactly. People don't have to be ready to play sys-admin and install a Linux disro to move away from Microsoft. There's Netscape and Mozilla to get away from IE, X-News for usenet (although that one's not quite ready for prime time either, its pretty close), there's Open Office or Star Office for business.
Trying to get most people to shift from Windows first sort of assumes Windows is MS's worst product, doesn't it? On a 10 scale I'd still give Windows a 7, and I wouldn't have begun swtching except Outlook Express got a personal 2, and every new version of Media Player got a lower satisfaction score than the last one, and so on. It's customers that have tried several non-MS alternatives and found them better, and survived the learning curves that came with trading, that consider changing OS's a real possiblity. Show someone who's tired of paying for Office the freeware alternatives. Show someone whose home system crashes a lot how much alternatives to IE can make the whole system more stable, show the guy who doesn't want to buy a bigger HD just yet the alternatives to MS Bloatware. If the customers just become used to deciding for themselves whether a Microsoft product or an alternative does task X better, they will make their own decisions as to whether they want one running under everything else. Some of them will have good reasons to stick with MS, but they won't be sticking out of fear that its impossible to change.
There's two reasons why this doesn't seem likely.
1. A lot of Microsoft's security holes fall in certain areas, for example buffer overrun explotation. There are basic reasons why Windows is extra vulnerable to these, and Linux won't be as easy a target. One of these is how many Microsoft pograms are allowed to do things not really needed for their real jobs, that give them extra hooks into the underliing operating system.
2. Linux is still a UNIX deriviative. (I'm probably gonna get flamed for saying that, but let it stand). UNIX has been around a long time and fewer holes exist in all variations and derivatives put together than in Windows, which has been around less than half the time total. UNIX is used on some big systems that handle vital things like finance and even national security, so real pro hackers have long had big incentives to crack the systems (Pocketing a cool 20,000,000 dollars US is a lot more motivation than bragging abut writing a worm to your L33T friends), and yet they either haven't succeeded much, or where they occasionally have, the tricks been too complicated to filter down to the script kiddees, often because they're too limited to just a few configurations.
Unfortunately, the real trend always seems to be opposite this.
New channels often allow some less structured or mainstream programming, but as they get established, drop it.
Early MTV - garage bands with no special effects, skinheads and punks, 'weird' arty stuff by Lorie Anderson. Videos that are sometimes just a single camera angle on the band - one continueous shot.
Modern MTV - Madonna - Rock Star's house tours.
Early HBO or Showtime - Forign film nights - Let's do a Lina Wurtmuller retrospective - got a 12 minute gap, let's show this student film about cartoon weasels in Hell dancing to Bach.
Modern HBO or Showtime - got a 12 minute gap, let's show "The making of Movie X", which is coincidentally coming on later in the schedule.
When bandwidth expands, minority ideas (good or bad) spread rapidly. As 50 million + people crowd onto that new bandwidth, Majority taste rules more and more. To get the kalidescope effect from where we stand now, someone has to build 1500 channel sets, and someone else has to start casting (broad or narrow) to those unused channels while there are still only a few hundred thousand people willing to pay the extra costs for access. When those get crowded too, the Kalidescope effect again vanishes.
There's also other choices, like good for environment/not so good. I buy pet safe antifreeze at some extra cost, rather than Propyline Glycol, I just bought a really efficient wster heater over several cheaper models. There's 6 inches of Owens Corning pink in the attic (and this is a southern house - half its neighbors probably have two inches blown in cellulose). I haven't bought a lot of low energy or long life bulbs (and remember, a long life saves energy in the form of manufacturing costs). Why not? The pet safer stuff is clearly explained what I'm paying the extra for, and I know enough biochemestry to know what drinking spilled PG does to cats and dogs. The water heater is clearly marked with that big yellow and black paper with the bar graph, and while I know enough statistics to question what the phrase "comparable models" can be distorted to mean, the base numbers are pretty clear. The lightbulbs are a different case. First, a lot of them are made by mega-corporations, and those own some other divisions that are lieing through their teeth to consumers, so I don't trust the numbers and claims on these "15 Watts gets you the light of a 50 Watt bulb" type labels (it looks odd, just in that 50 Watts isn't a standard size (in my area at least), so why doesn't the label say 40 Watts or 60 Watts?). I trust the "lasts 10 years or your money back" claim even less, cause I'm sure that a lot of consumers would just get a new bulb if that puppy blows in 4 or 5, and forget by then that it was warrantied. More distinctive branding or packaging and the right advertizing might make me go to the extra trouble, just as it has for printers, but is there a magazine that reviews energy saving bulbs?
That's what the words _effective_ terrorist strategy mean. It's not a matter of just crashing a system or two, its a matter of taking control of a system, and making it do whatever appears likelyest to give the terrorists what they want.
I.e. if there's an active war on, and you can screw with global positioning, either at the space end or somewhere in the chain of reports, you can shut it down, and a bunch of tank commanders will still fight pretty well in manual mode. Get it to give false info instead of just no info, and those same tanks just may generate a thousand "friendly fire" or "5 year old collateral damage" deaths. If you get into air traffic control, maybe a blanket shut down causes a crash or two, but with skillful misdirection, the system may appear to be working normally, until there are so many planes in a few selected small spaces that a dozen major collisions are inevitable.
Assume that a cyber-terrorist has at least two things, a better than average exploit to get into the system, and a better than average idea of what he wants that system to do once he's there. It's just as much of a mistake to expect the terrorist to take over a system without a major goal in mind as it would be to assume he's going to successfully hijack four airliners, then aim them all at wallmarts.
Wose than the NYSE stops working, is it continues working, but some peoples records get lost, and some transactions deleted, and its hours or days before people really notice the stock values are drifting farther and farther from what people thought they did. Party A says they got notice a transaction got through, and sues Party B for losing the records. Party C sold stock to Party A, and the prices and numbers shown don't agree. There's five million cases of A-B-C, and five million more where someone didn't have a problem, but they lost money that day so they're claiming they did now. No one's sure just when the problem started, and everyone is sueing to get an official finding for that time that supports their making money, or at least not losing so much. How many businesses fold in the next six months? Does a 25% unemployment rate count as more damage than the WTC? Maybe congress is about to vote on funding the 2nd Iraq war and suddenly that 87 billion is half of next year's projected government revenues.
Fear of death tends to trigger biological reflexes, and maybe that is precisely the point. Machines say - Oh! how beastial!, and sound just like veddy proper Victorian gentle-persons, while not seeing Life fighting to expess its will to live. "oh! its all slimy!" - just like givng birth. "Yuck! it's not intellectual!" - like humanity is going to beat AI by acting more coldly unemotional than usual. The matrix is about control - and making people ashamed of their biological origins is a fundamental way to control them.
1. IF Some downloads result in some sales losses, and some don't (a reasonable assumption admittedly).
2 AND Some piracy functions as word of mouth advertising (even if that's far from its only function).
3. THEN Piracy will do more damage to the bottom line of a film if all forms of 'word of mouth' and corporate ad campaigns are seriously out of sinc, AND in particular if word of mouth is much more negative than the official ad campaign.
4. How much more depends on how big the 'somes' and"much mores" in the first 3 lines are.
5. If the above ideas are actually logical, then Ben and J-Lo's latest effort bombed, but a heck of a lot of people have pirated copies of it.
If I recall correctly, there is a Jim Gray who writes about computing, and was involved in a recent lawsuit to keep using his own name without infringing the trademark of Jim Gray - the one who writes about sports. The case got quite a bit of press, particularly here on slashdot, as an example of how IP laws were fuxored. Despite this, people still keep confusing the two. Poor guy ought to sue us all for not knowing the difference by now, including me for not remembering the details.
(IANAL) The whole "Ignorance is no Excuse" principle is moderated by other law. For example, in pornography law, there was a case back in the 1950's where a (non-adult) bookstore owner had a book already declared obsecene on his shelves, and was still found not guilty when charged with offering obscenity.
Nothing about the book's cover gave a particular indication it mght be obscene, and the ignorance is no excuse principle did not require him to take extraordinary measures, such as reading every book in a consignment, or reading therough lists of thousands of titles just to see if a book he offered was on any of them, just to avoid the risk of acidentally offering one for sale.
Since then, there have been cases where a state government sponsored board (in Texas naturally) censored textbooks for high schoolers, and took out some references to state laws. Ignorance does turn out to be something of an excuse, where the government has helped keep the accused ignorant, and Texas had scramble to correct that situation before they could no longer prosecute those laws.
Then there's ignorance of related facts - as in "Your Honor, my client is not claiming ignorance of the law about attractive nuisances, simply claiming that he was ignorant that any child would think a skull and crossbones symbol would be attractive. The law does not require my client to know that an obscure study shows some small children have been attracted to the skull and cross bones symbol because they think its about pirates, and he acted in good faith".
In real courts, people often do claim ignorance, and in some situations, it works, while in some it doesn't.
One of the major goals of this is to require the federal government to compile databases by its own rules, and not buy commercial databases that don't. For example, inside the government, census info about race isn't supposed to be available to the IRS, which presumably has no legitimate reason to need it. Currently, the law has been relaxed somewhat, to let the FBI and others get info about people that is only very tangentially related to crime prevention. Letting these agencies get even further around these limits by buying commercial databases IS a bad idea.
IMHO, tree structures work best for people who don't mind branching structures that sound illogical, just so every branch has at least a few files in the end folders. For example, if you have e-mail relating to 10 programs you use, and you are comfortable lumping 8 or so filed e-mail docs in "freeware" because that's all you have there, and then not making folders for "shareware" and "commercial software", but organizing those by company because you have an average of five files per company there, then tree view can work for you. If you 'have' to make folders by company for each company once you start with that method, and a lot of those folders end up containing only 1 or 2 documents each, you aren't really gaining productivity by being more 'logical'. It looks neat and organized, but you end up with a number of folders = or > than the files, and so it requires as much mental effort as looking at a single list of files, unsorted.
Possibly you could set a goal, like my directory structure should look only about 1/4 as complex as the raw filenames all viewed together, or each folder should have at least 3 items in it, but no more than 12.
Actually, that's nearly what happened. It's not congress that decided, but the supremes, but the court ruled in the 80's that congress had the power to write copyright law, but the constitution didn't let them deligate that power to the states.
I'm not sure if the court ever actually said this also applies to patents and trademarks, or if people just noted the parellels in the constitution and assumed that the court would rule the same way again if the congress tried to deligate patent or trademark authority.
Not to dispute a pretty good post, but increasingly, the business mentality is about getting (nearly) everybody to RENT something, and never actually own it. What roofnet will need is a business that thinks it can make money from actual equipment sales instead of renting bandwidth.
I'm not at all sure that US citizens have any special right to access here (as opposed to say the citizens of France or Afghanistan), but it's possible they do. Lendlease and other WW2 programs sank some US money into the British entertainment industry - at the very least this included recording some music and prooducing some film footage such as used for the Victory at Sea series. How much, if any, went towards TV programming, building or upgrading studios, and so on is something on which I have never seen a straight answer from either the British government or the US GAO. It looks at least possible US citizens have some special status in re access to these files, and it would be nice to get that point cleared up.
Mandrake added native support for dual monitors in their 9.0 series distro. (9.1 if memory serves). Even if you don't use Mandrake Linux, that's a selling point to encourage that 5% of MS Windows home users that have multiple monitors to try Linux. Since these are some of the most techno-literate of MS users, a higher than avarage percent will probably listen - this is a place where Linux can win market share.
Babylon 5 at least tried. Consider "A view from the Gallery", where that very same first fact explained the different colors of some explosions, i.e. "see. that's an enermy fighter going up - their breathing mix tints the explosions green." Certainly, if people were picking up radio wave broadcasts of sound from comlinks on board the enemy ships, they'd have better things to do with the technology than convert it back to sound during a battle, like analizing the enemy's battle plans or calling the enemy pilots mom nasty names, but B5 is still a case where some real science was applied, then the authors usually gave up and went with what wouldn't seem skew to a non-tech audience for the rest.
Slashdot Mirror
See if I ever unstop your plugged garbage disposal/re-roof your condo/defend you in court again.
The US constitution defines a quid-pro-quo arrangement. Artists get copyrights, then the public gets the work released. With the quid extended from 14 years to 28, to 56, to life plus 20, to life plus 70, what happens to the pro quo? You personally are meeting the requirement by electing to release work freely. What about the creator who reaps all the financial benefits of the extended period, but makes no effort to make sure copies of his or her work survive until the period when they become public domain. Hasn't that creator taken the extra money that comes with extended copyright, but given negative value for that extra? Why doesn't extended copyright give the public some rights here, such as (for just one example), requiring a creator to write a codicil to his or her will, directing the heirs to either retain original masters in a safe location, or go ahead and release works? You are to be applauded for doing what is not only the right thing, but a reasonable, rational thing - but please remember, the ideal goal is to balance creator's rights with everyone else's rights. As long as many copyright holders are busy taking the quid and passing the pro-quo obligations on to someone else, any scheme to correct that will have costs. I agree with you that the proposal you're responding to is terribly flawed, but not because it has costs, rather because people like you already seem to be paying appropriate costs, and a good system would target the people who want all the benefits without any of the obligations.
The last time I worked an election, the machines were stored in a broom closet off of an elementary school gym. Pre-balloting code for the specific election was left in them for several days. I can really see armed marines guarding those doors at all times so that the women's Pilates fitness group that uses it Thursdays can't tamper. The look on their faces when they read that "If you open this door then you will die!" sign ought to be priceless. On the other hand, cartidges with post vote data were handled according to a no lone rule, as in "I carry a locked box, other Judge carries the key". Paper print outs obtained immediately after closing the polls were made available for the press and auditors sent out by the major parties.
BIOS passwords work well on MBs built after about 1996, the vast majority these days. Some people still warn against them because of flaws that were fixed 5 to 8 years ago. Some businesses admittedly are still trying to get a little more life out of PCs that can't even run Win 95, and for them, BIOS passwords won't help (but then, what would?). One great advantage of BIOS passwords is that the earlier you limit access, the better, as a general security rule.
The best thing would be a major election with a massive win for a very obvious write in candidate like Mickey, and no obvious suspects. This would be so spectacular the major news chains would get a hold of the issue and beat it to death, and the typical ignorant voter would end up a lot better informed and the mess might just get fixed. Unfortunately, it would have to be so blatent that Uganda could introduce a UN resolution to send observers to the benighted US to ensure fair elections, and get it to pass.
"Just land" is a lot to argue about. For example ,the Palestinians do not have a ntional budget big enough to compensate all the israeli settelers with equal DEVELOPED acreage in what would be the remaining nation of Israel. They simply couldn't afford it, if they spent 100% for decades on nothing else. So someone else has to pay.
Then there's the typical settler. He dosn't want to move. If he is forced to move to a new place, there will be something wrong with it. If the schools are as close then it's farther to the hospital, or to visit the relatives, or the water isn't as good (and if it tests as good, it still tastes funny). So he wants to more than break even, he wants extra. Rather, what he defines as even is always a lot better than what looks even to outsiders. Now, not only the PLO can't afford to give him what he wants, it would be a strain on Israel's taxes.
The secular, democratic government is also improbable. The people on both sides who are the most commited are highly religious. They don't like their secular fellow jews or arabs, and in fact, consider a secular government to be every bit as bad as being forced into the sea by their enemies.
Yes, penguins are found in Antarctica. They're also found in Brazil. Several species are known to come swimming into the harbor at Rio De Janero and other port cities up the eastern coast of South America on regular occasions. They look very odd tanning on the beaches in 80 degree (F) weather. They often migrate up and down the coast. Interestingly, they don't seem to time migrations to a strict winter/summer cycle. Sometimes they head south as it gets colder (spring in the southern hemisphere) While we are at it, I live 500 miles from an ocean, but there are seagulls within 5 miles of me, in the wild. Birds! go figure.
The whole question of when to put pressure on a company to fix bugs and when to back off is cluttered with irrelevancies. Even MS's past behavior is not really relevant. What would be relevant is a reasonably accurate answer to one question. "In what percentage of exploits did the cracker know about the vulnerability independent of the public report?" Note that that's different from knowing before the report came out, or whether the cracker ACTED before or after. If you think you have a good idea of what the chances are your vulnerabilty report will trigger a hack instead of just pressuring the company, then report as you think appropriate, but if you're not confident in that estimate, just maybe you should err on the side of caution. There won't be a halfway good answer until enough convicted crackers are forced to eloqute on that question, and some education oriented legal types add up the information to get the kind of data the FBI uses in profileing other more established crimes. Maybe some of these sites publicising vulnerabilities are guessing right by sys-admin's intuition, but that's about the best we can hope for. Most of us techoid types seem to do better when it's a matter of logic than intuition, right? My hat's off to a site that seems to recognize this and backs off on occasion.
Exactly. People don't have to be ready to play sys-admin and install a Linux disro to move away from Microsoft. There's Netscape and Mozilla to get away from IE, X-News for usenet (although that one's not quite ready for prime time either, its pretty close), there's Open Office or Star Office for business. Trying to get most people to shift from Windows first sort of assumes Windows is MS's worst product, doesn't it? On a 10 scale I'd still give Windows a 7, and I wouldn't have begun swtching except Outlook Express got a personal 2, and every new version of Media Player got a lower satisfaction score than the last one, and so on. It's customers that have tried several non-MS alternatives and found them better, and survived the learning curves that came with trading, that consider changing OS's a real possiblity. Show someone who's tired of paying for Office the freeware alternatives. Show someone whose home system crashes a lot how much alternatives to IE can make the whole system more stable, show the guy who doesn't want to buy a bigger HD just yet the alternatives to MS Bloatware. If the customers just become used to deciding for themselves whether a Microsoft product or an alternative does task X better, they will make their own decisions as to whether they want one running under everything else. Some of them will have good reasons to stick with MS, but they won't be sticking out of fear that its impossible to change.
There's two reasons why this doesn't seem likely. 1. A lot of Microsoft's security holes fall in certain areas, for example buffer overrun explotation. There are basic reasons why Windows is extra vulnerable to these, and Linux won't be as easy a target. One of these is how many Microsoft pograms are allowed to do things not really needed for their real jobs, that give them extra hooks into the underliing operating system. 2. Linux is still a UNIX deriviative. (I'm probably gonna get flamed for saying that, but let it stand). UNIX has been around a long time and fewer holes exist in all variations and derivatives put together than in Windows, which has been around less than half the time total. UNIX is used on some big systems that handle vital things like finance and even national security, so real pro hackers have long had big incentives to crack the systems (Pocketing a cool 20,000,000 dollars US is a lot more motivation than bragging abut writing a worm to your L33T friends), and yet they either haven't succeeded much, or where they occasionally have, the tricks been too complicated to filter down to the script kiddees, often because they're too limited to just a few configurations.
Unfortunately, the real trend always seems to be opposite this. New channels often allow some less structured or mainstream programming, but as they get established, drop it. Early MTV - garage bands with no special effects, skinheads and punks, 'weird' arty stuff by Lorie Anderson. Videos that are sometimes just a single camera angle on the band - one continueous shot. Modern MTV - Madonna - Rock Star's house tours. Early HBO or Showtime - Forign film nights - Let's do a Lina Wurtmuller retrospective - got a 12 minute gap, let's show this student film about cartoon weasels in Hell dancing to Bach. Modern HBO or Showtime - got a 12 minute gap, let's show "The making of Movie X", which is coincidentally coming on later in the schedule. When bandwidth expands, minority ideas (good or bad) spread rapidly. As 50 million + people crowd onto that new bandwidth, Majority taste rules more and more. To get the kalidescope effect from where we stand now, someone has to build 1500 channel sets, and someone else has to start casting (broad or narrow) to those unused channels while there are still only a few hundred thousand people willing to pay the extra costs for access. When those get crowded too, the Kalidescope effect again vanishes.
There's also other choices, like good for environment/not so good. I buy pet safe antifreeze at some extra cost, rather than Propyline Glycol, I just bought a really efficient wster heater over several cheaper models. There's 6 inches of Owens Corning pink in the attic (and this is a southern house - half its neighbors probably have two inches blown in cellulose). I haven't bought a lot of low energy or long life bulbs (and remember, a long life saves energy in the form of manufacturing costs). Why not? The pet safer stuff is clearly explained what I'm paying the extra for, and I know enough biochemestry to know what drinking spilled PG does to cats and dogs. The water heater is clearly marked with that big yellow and black paper with the bar graph, and while I know enough statistics to question what the phrase "comparable models" can be distorted to mean, the base numbers are pretty clear. The lightbulbs are a different case. First, a lot of them are made by mega-corporations, and those own some other divisions that are lieing through their teeth to consumers, so I don't trust the numbers and claims on these "15 Watts gets you the light of a 50 Watt bulb" type labels (it looks odd, just in that 50 Watts isn't a standard size (in my area at least), so why doesn't the label say 40 Watts or 60 Watts?). I trust the "lasts 10 years or your money back" claim even less, cause I'm sure that a lot of consumers would just get a new bulb if that puppy blows in 4 or 5, and forget by then that it was warrantied. More distinctive branding or packaging and the right advertizing might make me go to the extra trouble, just as it has for printers, but is there a magazine that reviews energy saving bulbs?
That's what the words _effective_ terrorist strategy mean. It's not a matter of just crashing a system or two, its a matter of taking control of a system, and making it do whatever appears likelyest to give the terrorists what they want. I.e. if there's an active war on, and you can screw with global positioning, either at the space end or somewhere in the chain of reports, you can shut it down, and a bunch of tank commanders will still fight pretty well in manual mode. Get it to give false info instead of just no info, and those same tanks just may generate a thousand "friendly fire" or "5 year old collateral damage" deaths. If you get into air traffic control, maybe a blanket shut down causes a crash or two, but with skillful misdirection, the system may appear to be working normally, until there are so many planes in a few selected small spaces that a dozen major collisions are inevitable. Assume that a cyber-terrorist has at least two things, a better than average exploit to get into the system, and a better than average idea of what he wants that system to do once he's there. It's just as much of a mistake to expect the terrorist to take over a system without a major goal in mind as it would be to assume he's going to successfully hijack four airliners, then aim them all at wallmarts.
Wose than the NYSE stops working, is it continues working, but some peoples records get lost, and some transactions deleted, and its hours or days before people really notice the stock values are drifting farther and farther from what people thought they did. Party A says they got notice a transaction got through, and sues Party B for losing the records. Party C sold stock to Party A, and the prices and numbers shown don't agree. There's five million cases of A-B-C, and five million more where someone didn't have a problem, but they lost money that day so they're claiming they did now. No one's sure just when the problem started, and everyone is sueing to get an official finding for that time that supports their making money, or at least not losing so much. How many businesses fold in the next six months? Does a 25% unemployment rate count as more damage than the WTC? Maybe congress is about to vote on funding the 2nd Iraq war and suddenly that 87 billion is half of next year's projected government revenues.
Fear of death tends to trigger biological reflexes, and maybe that is precisely the point. Machines say - Oh! how beastial!, and sound just like veddy proper Victorian gentle-persons, while not seeing Life fighting to expess its will to live. "oh! its all slimy!" - just like givng birth. "Yuck! it's not intellectual!" - like humanity is going to beat AI by acting more coldly unemotional than usual. The matrix is about control - and making people ashamed of their biological origins is a fundamental way to control them.
1. IF Some downloads result in some sales losses, and some don't (a reasonable assumption admittedly). 2 AND Some piracy functions as word of mouth advertising (even if that's far from its only function). 3. THEN Piracy will do more damage to the bottom line of a film if all forms of 'word of mouth' and corporate ad campaigns are seriously out of sinc, AND in particular if word of mouth is much more negative than the official ad campaign. 4. How much more depends on how big the 'somes' and"much mores" in the first 3 lines are. 5. If the above ideas are actually logical, then Ben and J-Lo's latest effort bombed, but a heck of a lot of people have pirated copies of it.
If I recall correctly, there is a Jim Gray who writes about computing, and was involved in a recent lawsuit to keep using his own name without infringing the trademark of Jim Gray - the one who writes about sports. The case got quite a bit of press, particularly here on slashdot, as an example of how IP laws were fuxored. Despite this, people still keep confusing the two. Poor guy ought to sue us all for not knowing the difference by now, including me for not remembering the details.
(IANAL) The whole "Ignorance is no Excuse" principle is moderated by other law. For example, in pornography law, there was a case back in the 1950's where a (non-adult) bookstore owner had a book already declared obsecene on his shelves, and was still found not guilty when charged with offering obscenity. Nothing about the book's cover gave a particular indication it mght be obscene, and the ignorance is no excuse principle did not require him to take extraordinary measures, such as reading every book in a consignment, or reading therough lists of thousands of titles just to see if a book he offered was on any of them, just to avoid the risk of acidentally offering one for sale. Since then, there have been cases where a state government sponsored board (in Texas naturally) censored textbooks for high schoolers, and took out some references to state laws. Ignorance does turn out to be something of an excuse, where the government has helped keep the accused ignorant, and Texas had scramble to correct that situation before they could no longer prosecute those laws. Then there's ignorance of related facts - as in "Your Honor, my client is not claiming ignorance of the law about attractive nuisances, simply claiming that he was ignorant that any child would think a skull and crossbones symbol would be attractive. The law does not require my client to know that an obscure study shows some small children have been attracted to the skull and cross bones symbol because they think its about pirates, and he acted in good faith". In real courts, people often do claim ignorance, and in some situations, it works, while in some it doesn't.
One of the major goals of this is to require the federal government to compile databases by its own rules, and not buy commercial databases that don't. For example, inside the government, census info about race isn't supposed to be available to the IRS, which presumably has no legitimate reason to need it. Currently, the law has been relaxed somewhat, to let the FBI and others get info about people that is only very tangentially related to crime prevention. Letting these agencies get even further around these limits by buying commercial databases IS a bad idea.
IMHO, tree structures work best for people who don't mind branching structures that sound illogical, just so every branch has at least a few files in the end folders. For example, if you have e-mail relating to 10 programs you use, and you are comfortable lumping 8 or so filed e-mail docs in "freeware" because that's all you have there, and then not making folders for "shareware" and "commercial software", but organizing those by company because you have an average of five files per company there, then tree view can work for you. If you 'have' to make folders by company for each company once you start with that method, and a lot of those folders end up containing only 1 or 2 documents each, you aren't really gaining productivity by being more 'logical'. It looks neat and organized, but you end up with a number of folders = or > than the files, and so it requires as much mental effort as looking at a single list of files, unsorted. Possibly you could set a goal, like my directory structure should look only about 1/4 as complex as the raw filenames all viewed together, or each folder should have at least 3 items in it, but no more than 12.
Actually, that's nearly what happened. It's not congress that decided, but the supremes, but the court ruled in the 80's that congress had the power to write copyright law, but the constitution didn't let them deligate that power to the states. I'm not sure if the court ever actually said this also applies to patents and trademarks, or if people just noted the parellels in the constitution and assumed that the court would rule the same way again if the congress tried to deligate patent or trademark authority.
Not to dispute a pretty good post, but increasingly, the business mentality is about getting (nearly) everybody to RENT something, and never actually own it. What roofnet will need is a business that thinks it can make money from actual equipment sales instead of renting bandwidth.
I'm not at all sure that US citizens have any special right to access here (as opposed to say the citizens of France or Afghanistan), but it's possible they do. Lendlease and other WW2 programs sank some US money into the British entertainment industry - at the very least this included recording some music and prooducing some film footage such as used for the Victory at Sea series. How much, if any, went towards TV programming, building or upgrading studios, and so on is something on which I have never seen a straight answer from either the British government or the US GAO. It looks at least possible US citizens have some special status in re access to these files, and it would be nice to get that point cleared up.
Mandrake added native support for dual monitors in their 9.0 series distro. (9.1 if memory serves). Even if you don't use Mandrake Linux, that's a selling point to encourage that 5% of MS Windows home users that have multiple monitors to try Linux. Since these are some of the most techno-literate of MS users, a higher than avarage percent will probably listen - this is a place where Linux can win market share.
Babylon 5 at least tried. Consider "A view from the Gallery", where that very same first fact explained the different colors of some explosions, i.e. "see. that's an enermy fighter going up - their breathing mix tints the explosions green." Certainly, if people were picking up radio wave broadcasts of sound from comlinks on board the enemy ships, they'd have better things to do with the technology than convert it back to sound during a battle, like analizing the enemy's battle plans or calling the enemy pilots mom nasty names, but B5 is still a case where some real science was applied, then the authors usually gave up and went with what wouldn't seem skew to a non-tech audience for the rest.