She lied in court, pure and simple. Objectively speaking she perjured herself and violated her oaths as an officer of the court. Objectively speaking, she should be convicted of a felony and serve felony time. However, she is more equal than the rest of us, and can weasel-word her way out of it where you or I couldn't. Personally, I won't call her a bitch, I'll call her a corporate whore, but ultimately she's just another idiot in a position of power who is swiftly destroying the very system that enabled her.
The U. S. Congress has added an additional term of up to 5 years to the normal 20-year patent term for pharmaceutical patents. This is designed to prevent financial losses from the additional time it takes a pharmaceutical manufacturer to get a new drug approved by the Food and Drug Administration eating up a substantial portion of overall patent life.
Overall, this may be fair. Concerns include whether the variable additional term awarded is sometimes not a close match for the time actually taken in a given case, what happens if the FDA takes over 5 years, and whether there are other industries deserving similar adjustments and not getting them.
Right, and we also doubtless have an 'evolved group-survival trait of ostracism' where we force at least some people who disrupt the group to leave or face penalties, up to and including death. The scientific evidence for that trait is at least as strong as that for altruism. So if religion is bullshit and we can rely on the traits we have evolved to take care of us, lets go stone that woman taken in adultery.
Right, we'll do away with Pilot's liscences too. Oh, and Surgeons. What could possibly go wrong? I've got a few liscences. Not one of them came from cramming for a test and forgetting everything the next day. Instead they came from years of study and application. I guess the people who modded you +1 interesting feel they didn't really earn their professional credentials, but I sure as hell earned mine.
Your first paragraph is sadly, all too true. I'm sure many people have met some of these types.
Your second paragraph, however, does not follow at all. There's simply no need implied by science, to automatically ask who created God. If there was, then back when science took the Steady State theory seriously, it would have been automatically rejected as unscientific. Since there's no "before the steady state" in that model, there's no meaning in asking what that before was like. People ask what was before the universe now, because the Big Bang theory has a starting point and other finite properties, so questions about 'before' or 'outside of' at least may make sense. Modern variations on the Big Bang are treated the same way - they either drive the question "What happened before?", or like Hawking's brief history model, are specifically written to make that very question irrelevant/unmeaningful.
If only things with starting points were allowed by science, then instead of relying on evidence (Penzias and Wilson's), science would have been able to automatically dismiss the Steady State theory before any of that evidence was even gathered.
Now as for alien computers and geeks, both of those things as we usually define them are commonly assumed to have origins in time and space, so yes it makes perfectly good sense to ask where they came from (Well first, the mommy and daddy alien computer have to love each other very much, and then....). But it's just as legitimate to assume that God didn't have a starting point but was around forever, as to assume that about the Universe itself, or time, or mathematics, or many other hypothetical entities.
OK, I just got Linux running on the last box in the house, a 266 Mhz P2 with only 128 Mb of RAM. I had to dig up a copy of Stormlinux from 2000 to find something that would run on that old box, but there it is, all 7 machines are on Linux. So, 2007 is the year of Linux on the desktop and you all can stop worrying. Those of you who predicted it now have six hours (if you're in EST) to brag about getting it right (more for those on the west coast). After that, shut up, please?
What? How are they shooting themselves in the foot?
Because people want fairness more than they want the letter of the law. To most of us, it seems fair that distributing copies to people in defiance of ownership type rights is unfair. Most juries (in the U. S. at least), would award damages for a case of someone distributing something they don't own the right to distribute. Many, probably most there would approve of criminal charges.
But juries usually want to be 'fair'. 'Fair' means that it's much more serious to sell copies for substantial profit than to pass them around for 'free'. 'Fair' means that off air recording is either not wrong, or it's a pretty trivial wrong. 'Fair' means they don't want a EULA to be the equivalent of a normal signed paper contract.
So when the recording industry starts claiming that their rights are being violated by people making legitimate backups, or not buying a second copy to use in the car, or using a VCR for space or time shifting, or lots of other thing, the recording industry starts looking like Darth Vader/Simon Legree/Satan, etc. They come off as anal-compulsive jerks trying to give basically honest people a hard time, rip off little old ladies, tie Nell Fenwick to the tracks, and probably eat live kittens on their days off.
And the jury is looking for any chance to do what's 'fair' to Baelzebub/Snydley Whiplash/Hannibal Lecter. So, they don't just reject the arguement that ripping is a violation of fair use, they look for excuses to reject the rest of the RIAA's claim as well. Any excuse.
To really Godwin a thread takes an inappropriate comparison. Generally, it's hyperbole that indicates a Godwin - i.e. Jimmy pulls the wings off of flies, and somebody posts "He'll grow up just like Hitler. One day it will be six million flies!". So it's actually hard to Godwin this thread.
It's a fair comparison, not hyperbole at all, to take what some of the founding members of the neo-conservative movement have said, and the fact that some politicians have claimed to be inspired by those people, and compare that, not to Hitler in general, but to Mussolini quoting Machiavelli, or even Hitler quoting Von Clausewitz. When someone talks to a nation's leader about repeating a lie often enough that the public believes it's the Truth, there's no exaggeration at all in comparing that someone to Gobels. Whether that makes the leader more similar to Hitler or not is something for the listener to infer if he wants to, not part of what's actually being said.
In the same way, Jack Thompson isn't a U. S. senator, but he's a politically committed lobbyist, what most would call a Washington insider, so it's only a moderate stretch to compare him to McCarthy. He's tried to turn this issue into something that will give him tremendous political power, so comparing his desire for power with Hitler's desire isn't really hyperbole either. Someone would have to greatly exaggerate his chances of success or number of followers to be drawing an inappropriate parallel.
Or suppose he bought a pair of diamond cuff-links that were never worn by anyone in any movie or TV show, but they turned out to have half the karat weight described (One little each slipped into the text...)? Or they were Zircons instead? Or they were described as high clarity yellow, and were in fact dirty brown? Or they were described as cruelty free Canadian diamonds and they turned out to come from De Beers #4 Namibian mine? If frauds in general don't justify a lawsuit, then how about it Slashdotters, just which frauds would you let slide?
I'm thinking security there too - automatic backups are (usually) enough, but if you need to wait around to lock media in a safe after it's done, it still can tempt you to skip steps. (You ARE the one who mentioned tapes - tapes are never totally automatic, but HAVE to involve some manual handling). The only way to make it really fully automatic is off site backup (with unannounced inspections of the service if your mission is really that critical).
As for the once a month rule, it's a start, but one size does not fit all. How much can it cost the company to lose 29 days worth? After calculating the worst possible scenario and the average scenario, some places have decided to test as often as weekly. A more time effective solution is 2 different backup methods, one as automated as it is possible to get using say, daily tapes and overlapping weekly tapes, and the other one also mostly automated, done once a month, two weeks, or even weekly, but using different software and media.
(One method I've seen is to time the additional backup right before issuing payroll checks, and tell misc. accounts payable to clear their backlog on the same schedule where possible).
Even if it's all tapes, we're talking using two different tape backups from two separate manufacturers, with non-interchangeable media. But even that's a bit of a hassle, as by standard it involves locking up the two sets of media two widely separated places in the facility, so again there's the temptation for the human element to take shortcuts.
To clarify, Individual pricing meant the media companies looked for every opportunity to set a price even a few cents higher trying to get the absolute maximum profit on the most popular pictures. They didn't look at all the cases where setting a price a bit lower on not-mega-blockbusters would result in more overall sales of that title, because they don't regard those as an overall profit source. Instead, discounting a film is thought to just drag in bucks that the consumer would have spent anyway on a popular film if their choices were more limited.
In other words, the media conglomerates wanted the additional sales they thought would come from Walmart advertising "Over 14,000 titles", but they didn't want to actually have to deal with setting optimum price points for over 14,000 titles. They thought that the same consumers that were attracted by the "Over 14K" claim wouldn't be turned off if more than half that inventory was priced at a base with no discounts, and the other fraction (the hot titles) was just about all priced higher. It looked to the consumers like bait-and-switch, and they responded accordingly.
It depends on whether such a planet could survive the blow offs that occur as the parent star enters a white dwarf stage. Low mass helium core white dwarfs as small as 0.11 solar masses do exist, probably as the remnants of what were originally already very small stars, but there's some question how such a small star ages fast enough that any have already blown off surface layers and collapsed. For example a star of only 0.7 standard solar masses is expected to end up as a white dwarf of about 0.4 solar masses, but stars starting even that small should have a lifetime of close to 14 billion years, so white dwarfs that proportionately small or even smaller shouldn't have had time to form by conventional means yet. There is a phenominon called Roche lobe mass transfer that could give rise to very low mass dwarfs, which would now be in binary systems, chiefly with pulsars as companion stars, but the process of forming the pulsar itself would be the sort of thing that would definitely blow a lot of a gas giant's atmosphere away into interstellar space even if the conventional small sister star's collapse was energetically light enough not to.
Could some planet start as a 10 Jupiter mass close in giant, and end up with 1 or 2 Jupiter masses left after a big star just a million miles or so away went through at least one actual Nova and subsequent collapse to pulsar, and then a smaller, equally near star went through a small red giant phases and collapse to a white dwarf? It sounds a bit improbable, but what if the small mass star is exactly between the gas giant and the large mass star when the big one Novas?
Note: For anyone who knows a little astrophysics, yes a typical white dwarf star is very hot, i.e. the surface temperature may be 23,000 K as opposed to our sun's modest 5,700 K, but the actual amount of heat emitted is very much smaller due to the small surface area. It takes a high mass (0.91 solar masses plus) white dwarf to have a zone around it hot enough for a planet to have liquid water at all. (So yes, they could have very close in but still cold Jovians).
I actually agree with you somewhat, but your claim is essentially that dose is the thing that really matters most. The parent I replied to is claiming that ADHD kids brain chemistry is the biggest factor. At least one of you must clearly be wrong. It's possible, in purely logical terms, that you could both be wrong, but it's logically impossible that you could both be right. Both of you have given reasons that are used by our legislators and institutions to justify the current status quo. Ergo, at least some of the justifications being given are pseudo-logic.
1. Your desktop PC looks like a valid place for fingerprint authentication (or other high security methods). 2. You want cable locks on the desktop gear, and if you use a laptop, a way to lock it in a drawer or to a cable system. Ideally, in your position, you don't want to take a laptop with admin info back and forth ever, and certainly not every day, but if you have to do it at all, you want a way to secure it all set up in advance, locks, encryption, programs that call home if it's stolen, and so on.
I've seen pretty good security policies backfire, when the CTO decides that, since it should never be necessary to put passwords or other sensitives on a laptop and take them out of the building, the company doesn't need to plan for that contingency, so when something comes up that forces it, they have no backup security plan at all. 3. If you are remotely administering any user machines, your monitor resolution needs to be at least as good as the very biggest you administer. If the CEO has a 34" diagonal flat screen, so should you, or better! 3a. You probably need a dual monitor setup for other reasons, but don't think two 19" CRTs will substitute for whatever you need in point 3, unless everyone in the company is still on one 19" CRT or less. 4. You need to encrypt - good software for that can be free these days, but your hardware should all work with your encryption and be up to speed for it. You need to time the system encrypting a large file, and be prepared to throw more memory at it if the time looks at all like a problem. Remember what looks tolerable to do occasionally may become onerous if you have to do it every day. 5. Re-read #4, but substitute the word back-up as appropriate. You need to be able to back-up fast enough that you are not tempted to skip backing up just because you'll be the last one out of the building if you do.
That's pretty much in line with my take on the constitutional issue involved. Since without a man-made law on copyright, the original right was part of natural law, that right expired naturally the instant a person died (or became physically unable to copy). For a limited time therefore had to mean for less time than the natural law otherwise allowed, that is a natural lifetime. That's what Jefferson, Madison, and Franklin most probably meant by limited.
The U. S. Supreme Court disagrees with this theory totally, of course. One of the implications of this disagreement is that, if the government ever repeals its copyright laws, we, 'the people', still don't regain a natural right to copy but neither do the authors automatically regain a right to any other methods to control copying!. If the natural right never existed, it can't revert. If states don't get any control, it can't be accomplished by contract either. So who could control copying if the federal government decided not to manage copyrights? Prior decisions say it's not a right of the states, so if it can't revert to individuals either, no copyright control at all can exist except as the fed arbitrarily chooses.
The federal government now maintains that it created the right to copy ex nihilo (out of nothing at all), so it, not us, and not the artists, really owns all possible forms of control over that right. In other words, if the government ever repealed the existing copyright laws and then simply claimed, without even passing a new law, that all author's royalties were now property of the government, that would not be, constitutionally speaking, a taking without compensation. If SCOTUS sticks with its last few precedents, it would have to refuse to even hear a claim that the government simply taking an author's royalties was unconstitutional.
So all you authors who think the government has stood up for your rights, do you really trust them never to shorten the period again and claim the extra royalties revert to the federal coffers? Maybe shorten it again and again? They rewrote the law, so you don't have a right, you have a gift, and the law allows take-backs.
But people are being told by the media that meth users get horrible skin lesions from the drug, that it rots teeth, causes crash and burn onset anorexia, that even one exposure causes permanent brain damage, etc.
If all this is false, then our drug laws are based on terrible lies, and we are putting lots of people in prison for lengthy mandatory minimum sentences for essentially nothing.
If all this is true, then we are exposing currently upwards of 200,000 5 to 11 year olds to a drug that is incredibly risky for adults, and counting on once-a-year doctor visits to control it. The pharmaceutical industry is expecting to see the number of elementary school aged children on Adderal rise to about 1 million in the next 4 years. Somehow, the medical difference between ADHD and normal brain chemistry automagically protects the child's body from all the horrible effects we see in the rest of an adult's body.
And yes it is exactly the same drug and not just pretty much - Adderal is a mixture of Methamphetamine and Benzedrine salts, with meth amounts similar to averages for adult recreational exposure. Parts of the pharmaceutical industry have tried to get around this fact by comparing the time release average dose in a child's system at any one time to the peak dose in a meth-junkie's system immediately after injection, which ignores three things.
1. many meth users at least supposedly addict without injecting the drug.
2. many adverse health effects depend on average dosage at least as much as peak.
3. elementary school age children normally have a much lower tolerance for just about all drugs than do adults. We generally assume safe exposures are much smaller even for non-perscription drugs.
I see what you mean about their actions, but I don't see how the 'manifesto' part makes these people any less of a revolutionary movement. The people who dumped tea in Boston harbor often criticized the tea tax in just the same words. Plus, saying that an action backed by law is 'just' a money-making scheme is essentially claiming that the law's purpose isn't even secondarily justice, which is a general complaint that revolutionaries always seem to make. In this case, the argument is that these particular cameras are veiled taxation, with many of the related decisions being made by people the tax-payers can't vote out of office, or even identify. Unequally targeted taxation? Taxation without representation? These certainly have been issues for revolutions before.
I doubt the camera busters intend real revolution because they don't seem organized enough, and I have yet to see signs they are focusing on fighting the most severe problems with their government instead of relatively unimportant ones. I'd expect those manifestos to detail some 'innocent's' unfair treatment and link the speed cameras to wider issues large enough to sound like a grounds for opposing the whole government. But, I wouldn't be entirely surprised if this is building towards just such a movement. Maybe it's the early stages of something bigger.
If somebody gets confused by a blanket term, it's because they are were confused to begin with.
You mean like SCO in the IBM case? Cause it sure looks to me like they knew the difference between Patent Infringement and Copyright Violation, but tried to confuse a judge and their potential shareholders by using that blanket term in filings and press statements.
I'd say that was a case where a lot of somebodies got confused because vicious bastards lied to them in a cynical pump and dump scheme. The term, IP, is designed to facilitate that.
What a university provides to students is usually geographically restricted high speed access to the Internet. There's a heavy investment in wire and routing, but the university doesn't necessarily put a lot of file servers and storage in sync with that. Most often the university's own research computers are behind firewalls, and their administrative systems invariably are. Some mail services are frequently offered, but the storage amounts are generally much smaller than even free sources such as Google or Yahoo. So in that way, a university network is more similar to a common carrier's systems, like the phone company or snail mail, than is a commercial ISP's. It's designed to deliver information, not to be a static source.
Wouldn't it be interesting if, a few years down the road, all this gets thrashed out in the court system, and the legal decisions are essentially that the university systems don't enjoy any of the protections of common carrier status, but commercial ISPs do? All carriers are equal, but some are more equal than others.
I don't doubt that it can be needed. IRS agents have to appear in court sometimes, either tax office courts that are not in their work locations or regular courts. The also have to contact some clients in the field, i.e. going to a business to look at its records. Often, tax law actually says a business must forward certain records automatically, but must retain other records on site for inspection. Plus the IRS is responsible for checking to see if retained copies match transmitted copies if there's doubt there.
How else can the IRS deal with a fairly common scenario such as this? (They get a dozen or so cases of this each year). The IRS receives a W-2 that has a mistake in social security withholding or some similar thing. The taxpayer claims that's what the company he works for sent him, but it doesn't match the copy the company sent the IRS. Both copies in the IRS's hands are photocopies. Close examination reveals faint indications of whiteout on the originals used to prepare both copies, in different places! Now imagine this has come up with half a dozen employees of the same company.
Dragging a whole business records department down to the IRS is doable, but the owners usually complain to their congressman, and have some clout. If they are really up to something, catching them by surprise is a lot better than giving them time to further fix the records. So, the IRS investigator travels with PDF copies of the documents in a laptop. The original paper is locked up, the better to maintain evidence accountability. The alternative is the agent travels with paper copies of the original copies. There's no way to encrypt those, of course. While most of these cases involve small business with only a handful of employees, it could also get pretty bulky. Sometimes, the agent might need multiple years tax records for a whole business branch of a medium sized corporation and all its employees, plus some records for the corporation's headquarters if that's separate.
(Megacorps do a better job of covering their tracks than this scenario assumes, so an office visit to Disney or IBM or Walmart is unlikely at best, and if it ever happened, the IRS would have to split the work between dozens of agents, each presumably carrying only a small part of the records.
You're right, doing this should always involve very good encryption. It shouldn't ever involve a million+ people's records either, which is what the Social Security Administration and the Veterans Administration losses have entailed each time. It could make sense for 50 or so people's records though.
That's not only both uncalled for and personally abusive, but it misses the whole point. Minding my own business doesn't mean I have to perjure myself for a near stranger if I'm put on a witness stand. It sure as hell doesn't mean I have to train what's become an automatic subconscious ability, to run a hundred times slower so that my conscious mind has time to stop it before I happen to see something. Why don't you go teach yourself how not to ride a bicycle, and STFU until you succeed.
Slashdot Mirror
A polite euphemism for this:
http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/smart/agm-65.htm
Scroll down to see the movie.
She lied in court, pure and simple. Objectively speaking she perjured herself and violated her oaths as an officer of the court. Objectively speaking, she should be convicted of a felony and serve felony time. However, she is more equal than the rest of us, and can weasel-word her way out of it where you or I couldn't. Personally, I won't call her a bitch, I'll call her a corporate whore, but ultimately she's just another idiot in a position of power who is swiftly destroying the very system that enabled her.
The U. S. Congress has added an additional term of up to 5 years to the normal 20-year patent term for pharmaceutical patents. This is designed to prevent financial losses from the additional time it takes a pharmaceutical manufacturer to get a new drug approved by the Food and Drug Administration eating up a substantial portion of overall patent life.
Overall, this may be fair. Concerns include whether the variable additional term awarded is sometimes not a close match for the time actually taken in a given case, what happens if the FDA takes over 5 years, and whether there are other industries deserving similar adjustments and not getting them.
Right, and we also doubtless have an 'evolved group-survival trait of ostracism' where we force at least some people who disrupt the group to leave or face penalties, up to and including death. The scientific evidence for that trait is at least as strong as that for altruism. So if religion is bullshit and we can rely on the traits we have evolved to take care of us, lets go stone that woman taken in adultery.
Right, we'll do away with Pilot's liscences too. Oh, and Surgeons. What could possibly go wrong? I've got a few liscences. Not one of them came from cramming for a test and forgetting everything the next day. Instead they came from years of study and application. I guess the people who modded you +1 interesting feel they didn't really earn their professional credentials, but I sure as hell earned mine.
Your first paragraph is sadly, all too true. I'm sure many people have met some of these types.
Your second paragraph, however, does not follow at all. There's simply no need implied by science, to automatically ask who created God. If there was, then back when science took the Steady State theory seriously, it would have been automatically rejected as unscientific. Since there's no "before the steady state" in that model, there's no meaning in asking what that before was like. People ask what was before the universe now, because the Big Bang theory has a starting point and other finite properties, so questions about 'before' or 'outside of' at least may make sense. Modern variations on the Big Bang are treated the same way - they either drive the question "What happened before?", or like Hawking's brief history model, are specifically written to make that very question irrelevant/unmeaningful.
If only things with starting points were allowed by science, then instead of relying on evidence (Penzias and Wilson's), science would have been able to automatically dismiss the Steady State theory before any of that evidence was even gathered.
Now as for alien computers and geeks, both of those things as we usually define them are commonly assumed to have origins in time and space, so yes it makes perfectly good sense to ask where they came from (Well first, the mommy and daddy alien computer have to love each other very much, and then....). But it's just as legitimate to assume that God didn't have a starting point but was around forever, as to assume that about the Universe itself, or time, or mathematics, or many other hypothetical entities.
OK, I just got Linux running on the last box in the house, a 266 Mhz P2 with only 128 Mb of RAM. I had to dig up a copy of Stormlinux from 2000 to find something that would run on that old box, but there it is, all 7 machines are on Linux. So, 2007 is the year of Linux on the desktop and you all can stop worrying. Those of you who predicted it now have six hours (if you're in EST) to brag about getting it right (more for those on the west coast). After that, shut up, please?
What? How are they shooting themselves in the foot?
Because people want fairness more than they want the letter of the law. To most of us, it seems fair that distributing copies to people in defiance of ownership type rights is unfair. Most juries (in the U. S. at least), would award damages for a case of someone distributing something they don't own the right to distribute. Many, probably most there would approve of criminal charges.
But juries usually want to be 'fair'. 'Fair' means that it's much more serious to sell copies for substantial profit than to pass them around for 'free'. 'Fair' means that off air recording is either not wrong, or it's a pretty trivial wrong. 'Fair' means they don't want a EULA to be the equivalent of a normal signed paper contract.
So when the recording industry starts claiming that their rights are being violated by people making legitimate backups, or not buying a second copy to use in the car, or using a VCR for space or time shifting, or lots of other thing, the recording industry starts looking like Darth Vader/Simon Legree/Satan, etc. They come off as anal-compulsive jerks trying to give basically honest people a hard time, rip off little old ladies, tie Nell Fenwick to the tracks, and probably eat live kittens on their days off.
And the jury is looking for any chance to do what's 'fair' to Baelzebub/Snydley Whiplash/Hannibal Lecter. So, they don't just reject the arguement that ripping is a violation of fair use, they look for excuses to reject the rest of the RIAA's claim as well. Any excuse.
To really Godwin a thread takes an inappropriate comparison. Generally, it's hyperbole that indicates a Godwin - i.e. Jimmy pulls the wings off of flies, and somebody posts "He'll grow up just like Hitler. One day it will be six million flies!". So it's actually hard to Godwin this thread.
It's a fair comparison, not hyperbole at all, to take what some of the founding members of the neo-conservative movement have said, and the fact that some politicians have claimed to be inspired by those people, and compare that, not to Hitler in general, but to Mussolini quoting Machiavelli, or even Hitler quoting Von Clausewitz. When someone talks to a nation's leader about repeating a lie often enough that the public believes it's the Truth, there's no exaggeration at all in comparing that someone to Gobels. Whether that makes the leader more similar to Hitler or not is something for the listener to infer if he wants to, not part of what's actually being said.
In the same way, Jack Thompson isn't a U. S. senator, but he's a politically committed lobbyist, what most would call a Washington insider, so it's only a moderate stretch to compare him to McCarthy. He's tried to turn this issue into something that will give him tremendous political power, so comparing his desire for power with Hitler's desire isn't really hyperbole either. Someone would have to greatly exaggerate his chances of success or number of followers to be drawing an inappropriate parallel.
Or suppose he bought a pair of diamond cuff-links that were never worn by anyone in any movie or TV show, but they turned out to have half the karat weight described (One little each slipped into the text...)? Or they were Zircons instead? Or they were described as high clarity yellow, and were in fact dirty brown? Or they were described as cruelty free Canadian diamonds and they turned out to come from De Beers #4 Namibian mine? If frauds in general don't justify a lawsuit, then how about it Slashdotters, just which frauds would you let slide?
I'm thinking security there too - automatic backups are (usually) enough, but if you need to wait around to lock media in a safe after it's done, it still can tempt you to skip steps. (You ARE the one who mentioned tapes - tapes are never totally automatic, but HAVE to involve some manual handling). The only way to make it really fully automatic is off site backup (with unannounced inspections of the service if your mission is really that critical).
As for the once a month rule, it's a start, but one size does not fit all. How much can it cost the company to lose 29 days worth? After calculating the worst possible scenario and the average scenario, some places have decided to test as often as weekly. A more time effective solution is 2 different backup methods, one as automated as it is possible to get using say, daily tapes and overlapping weekly tapes, and the other one also mostly automated, done once a month, two weeks, or even weekly, but using different software and media.
(One method I've seen is to time the additional backup right before issuing payroll checks, and tell misc. accounts payable to clear their backlog on the same schedule where possible).
Even if it's all tapes, we're talking using two different tape backups from two separate manufacturers, with non-interchangeable media. But even that's a bit of a hassle, as by standard it involves locking up the two sets of media two widely separated places in the facility, so again there's the temptation for the human element to take shortcuts.
To clarify, Individual pricing meant the media companies looked for every opportunity to set a price even a few cents higher trying to get the absolute maximum profit on the most popular pictures. They didn't look at all the cases where setting a price a bit lower on not-mega-blockbusters would result in more overall sales of that title, because they don't regard those as an overall profit source. Instead, discounting a film is thought to just drag in bucks that the consumer would have spent anyway on a popular film if their choices were more limited.
In other words, the media conglomerates wanted the additional sales they thought would come from Walmart advertising "Over 14,000 titles", but they didn't want to actually have to deal with setting optimum price points for over 14,000 titles. They thought that the same consumers that were attracted by the "Over 14K" claim wouldn't be turned off if more than half that inventory was priced at a base with no discounts, and the other fraction (the hot titles) was just about all priced higher. It looked to the consumers like bait-and-switch, and they responded accordingly.
It depends on whether such a planet could survive the blow offs that occur as the parent star enters a white dwarf stage. Low mass helium core white dwarfs as small as 0.11 solar masses do exist, probably as the remnants of what were originally already very small stars, but there's some question how such a small star ages fast enough that any have already blown off surface layers and collapsed. For example a star of only 0.7 standard solar masses is expected to end up as a white dwarf of about 0.4 solar masses, but stars starting even that small should have a lifetime of close to 14 billion years, so white dwarfs that proportionately small or even smaller shouldn't have had time to form by conventional means yet. There is a phenominon called Roche lobe mass transfer that could give rise to very low mass dwarfs, which would now be in binary systems, chiefly with pulsars as companion stars, but the process of forming the pulsar itself would be the sort of thing that would definitely blow a lot of a gas giant's atmosphere away into interstellar space even if the conventional small sister star's collapse was energetically light enough not to.
Could some planet start as a 10 Jupiter mass close in giant, and end up with 1 or 2 Jupiter masses left after a big star just a million miles or so away went through at least one actual Nova and subsequent collapse to pulsar, and then a smaller, equally near star went through a small red giant phases and collapse to a white dwarf? It sounds a bit improbable, but what if the small mass star is exactly between the gas giant and the large mass star when the big one Novas?
Note: For anyone who knows a little astrophysics, yes a typical white dwarf star is very hot, i.e. the surface temperature may be 23,000 K as opposed to our sun's modest 5,700 K, but the actual amount of heat emitted is very much smaller due to the small surface area. It takes a high mass (0.91 solar masses plus) white dwarf to have a zone around it hot enough for a planet to have liquid water at all. (So yes, they could have very close in but still cold Jovians).
Yes, but most of the authors I know are lousy shots! (Excepting maybe John Ringo).
I actually agree with you somewhat, but your claim is essentially that dose is the thing that really matters most. The parent I replied to is claiming that ADHD kids brain chemistry is the biggest factor. At least one of you must clearly be wrong. It's possible, in purely logical terms, that you could both be wrong, but it's logically impossible that you could both be right. Both of you have given reasons that are used by our legislators and institutions to justify the current status quo. Ergo, at least some of the justifications being given are pseudo-logic.
1. Your desktop PC looks like a valid place for fingerprint authentication (or other high security methods).
2. You want cable locks on the desktop gear, and if you use a laptop, a way to lock it in a drawer or to a cable system. Ideally, in your position, you don't want to take a laptop with admin info back and forth ever, and certainly not every day, but if you have to do it at all, you want a way to secure it all set up in advance, locks, encryption, programs that call home if it's stolen, and so on.
I've seen pretty good security policies backfire, when the CTO decides that, since it should never be necessary to put passwords or other sensitives on a laptop and take them out of the building, the company doesn't need to plan for that contingency, so when something comes up that forces it, they have no backup security plan at all.
3. If you are remotely administering any user machines, your monitor resolution needs to be at least as good as the very biggest you administer. If the CEO has a 34" diagonal flat screen, so should you, or better!
3a. You probably need a dual monitor setup for other reasons, but don't think two 19" CRTs will substitute for whatever you need in point 3, unless everyone in the company is still on one 19" CRT or less.
4. You need to encrypt - good software for that can be free these days, but your hardware should all work with your encryption and be up to speed for it. You need to time the system encrypting a large file, and be prepared to throw more memory at it if the time looks at all like a problem. Remember what looks tolerable to do occasionally may become onerous if you have to do it every day.
5. Re-read #4, but substitute the word back-up as appropriate. You need to be able to back-up fast enough that you are not tempted to skip backing up just because you'll be the last one out of the building if you do.
That's pretty much in line with my take on the constitutional issue involved. Since without a man-made law on copyright, the original right was part of natural law, that right expired naturally the instant a person died (or became physically unable to copy). For a limited time therefore had to mean for less time than the natural law otherwise allowed, that is a natural lifetime. That's what Jefferson, Madison, and Franklin most probably meant by limited.
The U. S. Supreme Court disagrees with this theory totally, of course. One of the implications of this disagreement is that, if the government ever repeals its copyright laws, we, 'the people', still don't regain a natural right to copy but neither do the authors automatically regain a right to any other methods to control copying!. If the natural right never existed, it can't revert. If states don't get any control, it can't be accomplished by contract either. So who could control copying if the federal government decided not to manage copyrights? Prior decisions say it's not a right of the states, so if it can't revert to individuals either, no copyright control at all can exist except as the fed arbitrarily chooses.
The federal government now maintains that it created the right to copy ex nihilo (out of nothing at all), so it, not us, and not the artists, really owns all possible forms of control over that right. In other words, if the government ever repealed the existing copyright laws and then simply claimed, without even passing a new law, that all author's royalties were now property of the government, that would not be, constitutionally speaking, a taking without compensation. If SCOTUS sticks with its last few precedents, it would have to refuse to even hear a claim that the government simply taking an author's royalties was unconstitutional.
So all you authors who think the government has stood up for your rights, do you really trust them never to shorten the period again and claim the extra royalties revert to the federal coffers? Maybe shorten it again and again? They rewrote the law, so you don't have a right, you have a gift, and the law allows take-backs.
But people are being told by the media that meth users get horrible skin lesions from the drug, that it rots teeth, causes crash and burn onset anorexia, that even one exposure causes permanent brain damage, etc.
If all this is false, then our drug laws are based on terrible lies, and we are putting lots of people in prison for lengthy mandatory minimum sentences for essentially nothing.
If all this is true, then we are exposing currently upwards of 200,000 5 to 11 year olds to a drug that is incredibly risky for adults, and counting on once-a-year doctor visits to control it. The pharmaceutical industry is expecting to see the number of elementary school aged children on Adderal rise to about 1 million in the next 4 years. Somehow, the medical difference between ADHD and normal brain chemistry automagically protects the child's body from all the horrible effects we see in the rest of an adult's body.
And yes it is exactly the same drug and not just pretty much - Adderal is a mixture of Methamphetamine and Benzedrine salts, with meth amounts similar to averages for adult recreational exposure. Parts of the pharmaceutical industry have tried to get around this fact by comparing the time release average dose in a child's system at any one time to the peak dose in a meth-junkie's system immediately after injection, which ignores three things.
1. many meth users at least supposedly addict without injecting the drug.
2. many adverse health effects depend on average dosage at least as much as peak.
3. elementary school age children normally have a much lower tolerance for just about all drugs than do adults. We generally assume safe exposures are much smaller even for non-perscription drugs.
I see what you mean about their actions, but I don't see how the 'manifesto' part makes these people any less of a revolutionary movement. The people who dumped tea in Boston harbor often criticized the tea tax in just the same words. Plus, saying that an action backed by law is 'just' a money-making scheme is essentially claiming that the law's purpose isn't even secondarily justice, which is a general complaint that revolutionaries always seem to make. In this case, the argument is that these particular cameras are veiled taxation, with many of the related decisions being made by people the tax-payers can't vote out of office, or even identify. Unequally targeted taxation? Taxation without representation? These certainly have been issues for revolutions before.
I doubt the camera busters intend real revolution because they don't seem organized enough, and I have yet to see signs they are focusing on fighting the most severe problems with their government instead of relatively unimportant ones. I'd expect those manifestos to detail some 'innocent's' unfair treatment and link the speed cameras to wider issues large enough to sound like a grounds for opposing the whole government. But, I wouldn't be entirely surprised if this is building towards just such a movement. Maybe it's the early stages of something bigger.
Realistically, as Lincoln said, "The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers."
Abe shot first!
If somebody gets confused by a blanket term, it's because they are were confused to begin with.
You mean like SCO in the IBM case? Cause it sure looks to me like they knew the difference between Patent Infringement and Copyright Violation, but tried to confuse a judge and their potential shareholders by using that blanket term in filings and press statements.
I'd say that was a case where a lot of somebodies got confused because vicious bastards lied to them in a cynical pump and dump scheme. The term, IP, is designed to facilitate that.
What a university provides to students is usually geographically restricted high speed access to the Internet. There's a heavy investment in wire and routing, but the university doesn't necessarily put a lot of file servers and storage in sync with that. Most often the university's own research computers are behind firewalls, and their administrative systems invariably are. Some mail services are frequently offered, but the storage amounts are generally much smaller than even free sources such as Google or Yahoo. So in that way, a university network is more similar to a common carrier's systems, like the phone company or snail mail, than is a commercial ISP's. It's designed to deliver information, not to be a static source.
Wouldn't it be interesting if, a few years down the road, all this gets thrashed out in the court system, and the legal decisions are essentially that the university systems don't enjoy any of the protections of common carrier status, but commercial ISPs do? All carriers are equal, but some are more equal than others.
I don't doubt that it can be needed. IRS agents have to appear in court sometimes, either tax office courts that are not in their work locations or regular courts. The also have to contact some clients in the field, i.e. going to a business to look at its records. Often, tax law actually says a business must forward certain records automatically, but must retain other records on site for inspection. Plus the IRS is responsible for checking to see if retained copies match transmitted copies if there's doubt there.
How else can the IRS deal with a fairly common scenario such as this? (They get a dozen or so cases of this each year). The IRS receives a W-2 that has a mistake in social security withholding or some similar thing. The taxpayer claims that's what the company he works for sent him, but it doesn't match the copy the company sent the IRS. Both copies in the IRS's hands are photocopies. Close examination reveals faint indications of whiteout on the originals used to prepare both copies, in different places! Now imagine this has come up with half a dozen employees of the same company.
Dragging a whole business records department down to the IRS is doable, but the owners usually complain to their congressman, and have some clout. If they are really up to something, catching them by surprise is a lot better than giving them time to further fix the records. So, the IRS investigator travels with PDF copies of the documents in a laptop. The original paper is locked up, the better to maintain evidence accountability. The alternative is the agent travels with paper copies of the original copies. There's no way to encrypt those, of course. While most of these cases involve small business with only a handful of employees, it could also get pretty bulky. Sometimes, the agent might need multiple years tax records for a whole business branch of a medium sized corporation and all its employees, plus some records for the corporation's headquarters if that's separate.
(Megacorps do a better job of covering their tracks than this scenario assumes, so an office visit to Disney or IBM or Walmart is unlikely at best, and if it ever happened, the IRS would have to split the work between dozens of agents, each presumably carrying only a small part of the records.
You're right, doing this should always involve very good encryption. It shouldn't ever involve a million+ people's records either, which is what the Social Security Administration and the Veterans Administration losses have entailed each time. It could make sense for 50 or so people's records though.
At universe time scales, where the whole planet earth life existence is almost a blimp...
Professor Malaprop, is that you?
That's not only both uncalled for and personally abusive, but it misses the whole point. Minding my own business doesn't mean I have to perjure myself for a near stranger if I'm put on a witness stand. It sure as hell doesn't mean I have to train what's become an automatic subconscious ability, to run a hundred times slower so that my conscious mind has time to stop it before I happen to see something. Why don't you go teach yourself how not to ride a bicycle, and STFU until you succeed.