It's possible this could be very important. NOTE: What I'm suggesting here is a long odds sort of thing, not the likelyest scenario, but it's also not impossible, maybe not even all that low probability. Science in general is frequently about a new hypothesis having low probability in the initial stages, and someone still researching it because if that hypothesis works out, it will have major implications. Many of those gambles never pay off, but Nobels get awarded to ones that do.
There were some odd position and velocity data coming back from the Pioneer spacecraft when they reached the same distance from our sun. It's a known anomaly, and some unusual hypothesi exist.
The likelyest scenarios probably involve instrumentation flaws, methods of calculating, and such, basically anything which would affect the data from both craft in the same way. Those scenarios are testable, i.e. by finding bugs in the code. Looking for similar effects with the Voyagers at the least will rule some of these scenarios out, as they are built with very different components from the Pioneer design. If corresponding data anomalies occur here, it will be fair to assume a common cause. The unlikely but very, very interesting alternatives include some basic 'Laws of Physics' working a bit differently once you get far enough from a star. That's a spectacular claim, and needs a lot of proving, but I'd argue that even if the odds are, say, 100,000 to 1 against, it's worth throwing a few grad students and a cheap Beowulf cluster at the Voyager data for a summer project, to see if it links up with the Pioneer anomalies. If the odds are as good as 1,000 to 1 against, someone with their piled higher and deeper needs to really look at it.
the only reason to mention it specifically would be as bait for pro/anti-israeli flames.
Because people never mention something that actually happened and give a few details about who and where just to make it easier for other people to verify it. Honest people never say "it happened in Detroit, at the Hilton", to make it easier to check their story. Only people with ulterior motives do that, right?
You are demonizing your debate opponent.
Several people have mentioned "Quarentine" in this thread*. How about another work - Greg Bear's "Blood Music" (The full novel version). Part way through the novel, his supra-intelligent nano scale organisms have to stop half-way with assimilating the Earth, because as their total population reaches some enormous number of skilled observers, they start increasingly forcing the universe to adjust to keep their observations consistent. Will they figure out a way to keep expanding and eat the rest of the humans? And what does this have to do with glowing snow? Read the book to find out.
*I'm not keeping track of who posted this point first, and this is NOT about modding anyone redundant. I just want to plug a good book.
They are all rich, so they are clearly not stupid.
So when the French aristocracy provoked the terror, they were clearly not stupid, as they had lots of money right up until the mob dragged them off to meet a short sharp shock? Rich people as a whole probably aren't any stupider than the rest of us, but why believe they are smarter? Did average or poor people drag the U.S. into the great depression?
Using spyware to search a computer is a separate method. Police already have the option to get a warrant and physically seize and then search the computer with some very good forensic tools if they have probable cause. In principle, to justify the police keeping spyware tools around, with the additional risk they may be misused, is similar to justifying the police needing new anti-riot weapons, more powerful firearms, or any other special equipment that could entail a risk to innocent bystanders.
One justification might be that the police have enough evidence to get a conventional warrant, but don't know where the computer physically is - rather all they know is a network location. But is this likely to be true? Rather, if the police don't know where the machine is in the real world, aren't they also less likely to know where the machine's owner resides, or other facts they would normally present to get a warrant? Aren't they going to have trouble proving they are targeting a machine that is owned by the suspect, and not one hacked remotely, belonging to someone else? And if they don't know where the machine is, how can they even be sure it's not outside their jurisdiction?
This looks like a way around having to first conduct enough of an investigation to get a conventional warrant, or else for the police to get around respecting the law themselves. If they remotely access a rooted box, and that box's actual owner keeps legal or medical records for hundreds of people on it, then the police wouldn't have to exercise the care they would with a physical warrant. There would be no office manager informing them that the box contained sensitive records or observing the search. The innocent third party would have no knowledge of the search, and no chance to appeal the warrant.
If you answer yes to "Join the Space Marines, fight things that take 40 bullets to put down, and die in a hole on some damned place called Klendathu" then we know you can't be trusted not to have a Trojan, worm, or virus.
Only one example in 100,000 or so gets fossilized. If that 1 in 100,000 is also the Andre the Giant of its species, the odds multiply, so it's extremely less likely (1 in 10^10).
(Yes, I'm simplifying a lot. Different types of beings have greatly different chances of leaving fossils, depending on things such as how bony they were, what environment they frequented and probably fifty other factors).
Science assumes things are typical unless proved otherwise. Astronomy, for example, frequently involves assuming Earth is not in a special position, and anyone else would see the sorts of things we see, on a sufficiently large scale. Xenobiology assumes we are unlikely to be the first species to evolve to intelligence, and are more probably somewhere in the middle range of a vast number of species.
Of course, something, somewhere is bound to be exceptional. Somewhere, there may be a species that is unusually close to a number of black holes, and thinks they are much more common than they actually are. One, out of all those dinosaur fossils we've found, may be the smallest of its kind ever to reach adulthood, etc. But in any given case, that's not the way to bet.
While we're at it, why do pen and paper RPGs still have dungeons and similar structures? Why does any game ever put someone in a position where there are only a few directions to go, instead of constantly giving them 32,364+ choices of direction? Why does chess start off with only the pawns and knights capable of moving? Why can't my checkers move backwards until they are kinged?
The summary repeatedly begs the question - "Levels are bad, M'kay? Only a terrorist pedophile would like levels. Your mommy will cry if you see any value at all in levels. Now, why do we still have levels?". It's behavior on the level of a political candidate, and I felt deeply ashamed for the writer who was trying to manipulate me like that.
Yes, the base topic makes some sense if considered abstractly, less and less in the particular examples given. (To be fair, the actual article isn't as bad as the Slashdot summary, which focuses on a specific implementation that I, like you, don't see as at all workable.). In a really abstract sense, it's the old phrase "Trust but Verify". Provide opportunities for a site's visitors to make decisions that could normally be smart or dumb, then adjust how you treat them accordingly.
"IP" really is "imaginary." Legally speaking, there is no such thing. There are copyrights and patents and trademarks, but they are not similar enough to be spoken about under one umbrella term with any semblance of accuracy!
It's never been a legal term, but more a category or a concept. The main members of the category are all legally sanctioned. Just because it's not legally defined, doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
I'll make an assertion here, the ridiculousness of which is up to you to judge. IP, as some prominent advocates are using the term, really doesn't exist, because all those main members you mention have different conditions, limitations and requirements for use, and the way many an IP lawyer typically uses the blanket term, those conditions, etc. are being ignored. Look at SCO's flip-flopping over whether the real issues in their suits were based on copyrights or patents. Look at Microsoft claiming failure to disclose on a patent didn't invalidate it, it just made it another form of IP (a trade secret). Look at the firm which recently claimed quoting their cease and desist letter violated their IP.
IP all to often seems to mean a 'Special-Top-secret EULAcopypatmark'. The owner doesn't really have to defend it like a trademark, but can claim he has no choice but to enforce it when he prefers without the claim tainting his case. It never expires, it costs the minimum of all types to register (usually Zero), the owner can get damages at which ever rate is highest, and it doesn't have any separate standing in the EU unless that's somehow to the owner's advantage. There's no requirement to disclose, the GPL doesn't apply if the company simply forgets about it, and violations can be prosecuted as though they were criminal acts, at the tax-payer's expense, while still resulting in money going to the IP owner as penalties instead of the state as fines. Doctrines such as Laches and laws against Submarine Patents don't apply. It will increase the stock value of your corporation over a shorter term than any real property acquisition, but is non-volatile and neigh-invulnerable to downward market trends.
And yes, I find the idea that something with those properties exists to be both ridiculous and reprehensible.
I don't particularly see worrying about it, but the point is that a particular type of hardware based flaw, which we have seen at least a couple of times, could make it easy for people who aren't nearly math geniuses to do something that normally takes a grande el-supremo lot of computer science skills.
I'm not sure if a WAP is analogous to a webserver, but I don't see how either can be considered private by default. There are certainly public web pages, and there are certainly public wireless access points (i.e. the ones offered at Starbucks, Krystal, various hotels and others are intended to be publicly accessed, at least by their customers. Sometimes whole communities have set up public WAPs). Then there's WAPs that a completely innocently minded person might well assume are public, (i.e. the cases where a person parked outside the local library has accessed its wireless net, and knows that the library provides public terminals, so assumes this is part of the same service). The ratio of public to private WAPs favors private, but the law isn't based on some "is the majority private or public" test in most other cases.
(For example there are lots of charter only buses, and some private buses with fixed stops and routes on the roads near my location, and there are lots of School buses, and a public transport community bus system that paints its vehicles with many different designs and colors. There's no law that says people should not hail a bus until they are absolutely certain it's not a private chartered vehicle, or anything remotely like that, and no one is looking at how many buses of what kinds are public or private, and what subtypes there are, when it comes to passing new laws. If the ratio of chartered lines to school buses changed, I don't think anyone would say we needed to change the existing laws vis-a-vis buses.).
Most laws are built on reasonableness tests and the like, not some percentage test. Telling people they should assume any WAP not explicitly marked public is private is no different from telling them they should assume anything not explicitly marked public domain is still copyrighted, or should assume any road without a clear sign is a private drive. That pesky "Innocent unless proven guilty" principle includes not shortcutting the law by claiming that someone had criminal intent just because they didn't assume automatically that something was private unless clearly marked otherwise. Instead the law should have to prove the person didn't have a reasonable expectation that something was being made public. That's mostly well established law - hanging your wash out on a clothesline isn't making the wash legally takeable by the public, putting in a sidewalk that better supports access to an adjacent location is explicitly giving someone permission to walk that way (unless it's marked otherwise). Instead of whole new laws, WAP issues are best resolved by a body of precedents that follow existing examples. The courts can decide just how much or little the WAP owner has to do to have it considered private.
We frequently tell private owners they should put up the signs or shut up (i.e. If you want parking in front of your business to be used for your business only, post it or don't complain, if you don't want your buried cable dug up, then mark it, etc.). We used to make copyright holders put explicit notices on works rather than make everyone else assume they existed unless proved to have expired. Let a person cross your land enough times without complaint, and you don't have to give them explicit permission to have established an easement. The law has many cases where not doing something to stop access counts as granting access. A legal decision that not changing the WAP defaults is in line with giving permission is justifiable on similar grounds. It's not necessarily the right call, but people who are arguing that the courts can't, or should never do that don't know common law very well (Or they know it very well indeed, but hope the general public never learns).
Excellent assessment! I don't know what prompts some people to assume that one of the world's most renowned philosophers doubtless missed any of a number of 'simple', 'obvious' points any 'normal person' would spot in an instant. It seems to happen a lot to Plato, Kant, and Bishop Berkeley.
While we're at it, Plato, of all philosophers, would have held just going as the wind blows as a distinctly bad thing and not neutral.
It was Socrates that first said "The unexamined life is not worth living", but Plato that quoted it with great approval in his Dialogues and developed it into a whole argument for moral behavior only being truly moral if it was rationally chosen rather than by rote.
There wouldn't be a need to conceal growing, but legal growers wouldn't necessarily fall back on natural light, and you'd still get idiots overloading wiring and burning down the location, wherever it was. Grow your own would still be indoors in urban neighborhoods, where people simply don't have land for a greenhouse, etc. Sure, with full legality, including legal sales, there's little need for growing your own at all, but that's a different level of legality from just legalizing simple possession of personal amounts. Things such as wiring fires are not directly a consequence of the legality or illegality of the plants, and are far more directly a consequence of not knowing how to handle electricity.
To put it another way, the law is not the only reason why people sometimes choose to grow large amounts of plants indoors and do their own wiring.
How many people think they are 'safe' because they bought their guns with cash, but at least one of the following is true:
1. The dealer has been selling to some serious bad guys, and when caught, will roll over and give all sorts of descriptions, names and other information on customers like you before he risks informing on the 'really dangerous' sorts.
2. How did you stay in practice with that gun? How many bought the gun itself with cash, but bought ammunition, or rented a range at least once, with a card, check, or other traceable?
3. Did your face get recorded on camera when you bought or trained with anything? That's the essence of data mining - putting faces, names, SSNs and such together with the other data. No one wants any info what-so-ever on a person unless they can link it to a name, a face, a bank balance or an ID number, but a photo is almost as good as a name for most law enforcement purposes.
4. Do you have a military record? Every weapon you have so much as familiarization fired, let alone qualified with, is there, as are range scores. Law enforcement personnel will assume you might still have just about anything you ever had, and judges have issued warrants based solely on an exotic weapon being used in a crime and some person having that weapon on their military record before.
This is also one of the most risky points for a non-gun owner - If you currently have absolutely nothing, but are on record as having ever fired a machine gun or grenade launcher, guess how much force looks reasonable to those cops serving you for something as non-violent as failure to pay child support, let alone a violent felony?
I'd qualify my earlier opinion: The RIAA is fundamentally irrational in the sense that they overrate how much controlling a system is worth. They think more control will automagically equal more money, just like a company owner who only hires stupid people and thinks that will keep anyone from demanding more competitive pay, but doesn't realize that sort of control gives an opening to other companies to out-compete his.
All this is very different from the RIAA being fundamentally irrational because, say, they want to dress up like Napoleon and make burble noises with their invisible dog. Thinking you can impose (over)simplification on naturally complex systems, and uniformity on diversity, is something every human is tempted to try now and then.
If today's musicians aren't just propaganda idols, where's the anti-war songs? I see 18 and 20 year olds, at marches and rallies, and overwhelmingly, they are marching and rallying to my generation's war protest songs - Jackson Browne, Jefferson Airplane, etc. I talk to people in their twenties, and they use the songs, (and the films, TV shows, and books) of 30 and 40 years ago whenever they reach for a metaphor about the war, or the war on drugs, or the increasing prison population, or just about anything else political (And that's not just when they are talking to an old fart like me, but each other). There's a few exceptions, mostly in Hip-Hop, but then minorities joining up for the education benefits and then dieing disproportionately in a shooting war is a pretty good explanation why it's there more than in the predominant culture.
You mean the Shipstones from Heinlein's novel "Friday" and other books? (Or maybe the ultracapacitor part of John W Campbell Jr's Luxmetal technologies predates any Heinlein mentions - that's the 1950s) (How about the gadjets in Doc Smith's "Subspace Explorers" - I never can remember if it's the Chaytors or the Wesleys that hold all that capacitance, but it's one of those two. The Grahams, of course are the big wire wrapped widjets that go between the other two. And how much capacitance does one of Clarke's monoliths hold? (As much as it wants). The non-moving, eternal machines that project the city of Diaspar? (that would be the version in "Against the Fall of Night", completed in 1946, not "The City and the Stars" in 53. Clarke could have written the necessary part as early as 1937, when he started - that book was on publication hold for the entirety of WW2).
And it's proof that the RIAA is fundamentally irrational. They've spoken out against used CD stores, tried to get laws passed limiting or eliminating the normal 'right of first sale', even lobbied against libraries carrying recorded music. They've lobbied congress in the wake of 9-11 to get copyright infringement added to the list of terrorist activities under the USAPATRIOT act. This is not just something superficially plausible as a business model but unworkable in the details, it's genuinely crazy behavior.
To take your car analogy farther, if some guy, just because he had an MBA, told Toyota they could eliminate the used car market by act of congress, and their sales of new cars would go up, prices would remain as high as they are, and the extra money required would be produced by the customers with no losses to the industry, they wouldn't work for Toyota anymore. When do the stockholders of the RIAA members get the same clue?
Since recorded music is very far from a necessity, at least compared to cars or housing, how did this industry ever entertain the nut-bar idea they could eliminate used sales and not hurt themselves in the process? Used sales help prop up their price structure, yet the RIAA is treating them as another problem instead of an ally, just like they did radio, the cassette deck and DAT.
Japan was actually getting serious about the possibility of a fission bomb, Germany wasn't. Some historians think it was because Germany's racial doctrine was so aggressively disparaging of 'Jewish' physics, and so their research and funding ended up being steered in other directions. Japan had physicists who weren't afraid to use Einstein's or other Jewish physicists work in their own papers.
In September 1940, the Japanese Army controlled Institute of Physical and Chemical Research, or Rikken, was assigned a preliminary project. In 1942, the Japanese Navy began also (somewhat independently of the Army) working on a Uranium based fission device. The project was called F-Go {or sometimes just No. F, for fission]. This was located at Kyoto, and was actually the chief reason why Kyoto was added to the list of potential military targets for the U.S. bombs, although in the end the city was still taken off the list by Truman due to its historic and social value. Despite a certain military commitment these programs weren't backed with adequate resources, and the Japanese were probably still four or more years from having a bomb by the end of the war.
A Japanese plant, concealed in Hungnam, now part of North Korea, may have been the source of heavy water subsequently used by the USSR for its own bomb research. There are reports the Soviet Union continued to run that plant and collected the output every other month by submarine, and it alone may have shaved a year or more off the USSR's development time.
In May 1945, a German submarine which surrendered to US forces , was found to be carrying over 500 kg. of Uranium oxide destined for Japan. The oxide contained about 3.5 kilograms of isotope U-235. While not enough to make a bomb, that was a sizable fraction of one. After the Japanese surrender, the occupying US Army found five cyclotrons which were capable of separating fissionable material from ordinary uranium. The US bomb program was accomplished by using gaseous diffusion based separation, but cyclotronic separation was rejected not because it wouldn't work, but because it seemed likely to take longer. Some historians see the willingness of the Germans to supply Uranium to their ally as proof they didn't fully appreciate the potential, while Japan did.
Slashdot Mirror
It's possible this could be very important. NOTE: What I'm suggesting here is a long odds sort of thing, not the likelyest scenario, but it's also not impossible, maybe not even all that low probability. Science in general is frequently about a new hypothesis having low probability in the initial stages, and someone still researching it because if that hypothesis works out, it will have major implications. Many of those gambles never pay off, but Nobels get awarded to ones that do.
There were some odd position and velocity data coming back from the Pioneer spacecraft when they reached the same distance from our sun. It's a known anomaly, and some unusual hypothesi exist.
http://www.sixside.com/13_things_that_do_not_make_sense.htm
(about halfway down)
The likelyest scenarios probably involve instrumentation flaws, methods of calculating, and such, basically anything which would affect the data from both craft in the same way. Those scenarios are testable, i.e. by finding bugs in the code. Looking for similar effects with the Voyagers at the least will rule some of these scenarios out, as they are built with very different components from the Pioneer design. If corresponding data anomalies occur here, it will be fair to assume a common cause.
The unlikely but very, very interesting alternatives include some basic 'Laws of Physics' working a bit differently once you get far enough from a star. That's a spectacular claim, and needs a lot of proving, but I'd argue that even if the odds are, say, 100,000 to 1 against, it's worth throwing a few grad students and a cheap Beowulf cluster at the Voyager data for a summer project, to see if it links up with the Pioneer anomalies. If the odds are as good as 1,000 to 1 against, someone with their piled higher and deeper needs to really look at it.
the only reason to mention it specifically would be as bait for pro/anti-israeli flames.
Because people never mention something that actually happened and give a few details about who and where just to make it easier for other people to verify it. Honest people never say "it happened in Detroit, at the Hilton", to make it easier to check their story. Only people with ulterior motives do that, right?
You are demonizing your debate opponent.
Several people have mentioned "Quarentine" in this thread*. How about another work - Greg Bear's "Blood Music" (The full novel version). Part way through the novel, his supra-intelligent nano scale organisms have to stop half-way with assimilating the Earth, because as their total population reaches some enormous number of skilled observers, they start increasingly forcing the universe to adjust to keep their observations consistent. Will they figure out a way to keep expanding and eat the rest of the humans? And what does this have to do with glowing snow? Read the book to find out.
*I'm not keeping track of who posted this point first, and this is NOT about modding anyone redundant. I just want to plug a good book.
They are all rich, so they are clearly not stupid.
So when the French aristocracy provoked the terror, they were clearly not stupid, as they had lots of money right up until the mob dragged them off to meet a short sharp shock? Rich people as a whole probably aren't any stupider than the rest of us, but why believe they are smarter? Did average or poor people drag the U.S. into the great depression?
Using spyware to search a computer is a separate method. Police already have the option to get a warrant and physically seize and then search the computer with some very good forensic tools if they have probable cause. In principle, to justify the police keeping spyware tools around, with the additional risk they may be misused, is similar to justifying the police needing new anti-riot weapons, more powerful firearms, or any other special equipment that could entail a risk to innocent bystanders.
One justification might be that the police have enough evidence to get a conventional warrant, but don't know where the computer physically is - rather all they know is a network location. But is this likely to be true? Rather, if the police don't know where the machine is in the real world, aren't they also less likely to know where the machine's owner resides, or other facts they would normally present to get a warrant? Aren't they going to have trouble proving they are targeting a machine that is owned by the suspect, and not one hacked remotely, belonging to someone else? And if they don't know where the machine is, how can they even be sure it's not outside their jurisdiction?
This looks like a way around having to first conduct enough of an investigation to get a conventional warrant, or else for the police to get around respecting the law themselves. If they remotely access a rooted box, and that box's actual owner keeps legal or medical records for hundreds of people on it, then the police wouldn't have to exercise the care they would with a physical warrant. There would be no office manager informing them that the box contained sensitive records or observing the search. The innocent third party would have no knowledge of the search, and no chance to appeal the warrant.
Archimedes invented/discovered the Calculus, and did plenty of work in harmonics (the original 'string' theory) too.
I don't know if you're aware of it under it's right name or not, but to make his sentence make sense, try:
Gresham's law: "Bad money drives out good" (colloquial version)
(And the "Given enough time, someone inappropriately shouts Nazi" rule is Godwin's, not Goodwin's.)
If you answer yes to "Join the Space Marines, fight things that take 40 bullets to put down, and die in a hole on some damned place called Klendathu" then we know you can't be trusted not to have a Trojan, worm, or virus.
Only one example in 100,000 or so gets fossilized. If that 1 in 100,000 is also the Andre the Giant of its species, the odds multiply, so it's extremely less likely (1 in 10^10).
(Yes, I'm simplifying a lot. Different types of beings have greatly different chances of leaving fossils, depending on things such as how bony they were, what environment they frequented and probably fifty other factors).
Science assumes things are typical unless proved otherwise. Astronomy, for example, frequently involves assuming Earth is not in a special position, and anyone else would see the sorts of things we see, on a sufficiently large scale. Xenobiology assumes we are unlikely to be the first species to evolve to intelligence, and are more probably somewhere in the middle range of a vast number of species.
Of course, something, somewhere is bound to be exceptional. Somewhere, there may be a species that is unusually close to a number of black holes, and thinks they are much more common than they actually are. One, out of all those dinosaur fossils we've found, may be the smallest of its kind ever to reach adulthood, etc. But in any given case, that's not the way to bet.
While we're at it, why do pen and paper RPGs still have dungeons and similar structures? Why does any game ever put someone in a position where there are only a few directions to go, instead of constantly giving them 32,364+ choices of direction? Why does chess start off with only the pawns and knights capable of moving? Why can't my checkers move backwards until they are kinged?
The summary repeatedly begs the question - "Levels are bad, M'kay? Only a terrorist pedophile would like levels. Your mommy will cry if you see any value at all in levels. Now, why do we still have levels?". It's behavior on the level of a political candidate, and I felt deeply ashamed for the writer who was trying to manipulate me like that.
Yes, the base topic makes some sense if considered abstractly, less and less in the particular examples given. (To be fair, the actual article isn't as bad as the Slashdot summary, which focuses on a specific implementation that I, like you, don't see as at all workable.). In a really abstract sense, it's the old phrase "Trust but Verify". Provide opportunities for a site's visitors to make decisions that could normally be smart or dumb, then adjust how you treat them accordingly.
Change the variable itself to include a third, "Would you like to know more?" option, and adjust the delay to a full second plus double latency.
"IP" really is "imaginary." Legally speaking, there is no such thing. There are copyrights and patents and trademarks, but they are not similar enough to be spoken about under one umbrella term with any semblance of accuracy!
It's never been a legal term, but more a category or a concept. The main members of the category are all legally sanctioned. Just because it's not legally defined, doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
I'll make an assertion here, the ridiculousness of which is up to you to judge. IP, as some prominent advocates are using the term, really doesn't exist, because all those main members you mention have different conditions, limitations and requirements for use, and the way many an IP lawyer typically uses the blanket term, those conditions, etc. are being ignored. Look at SCO's flip-flopping over whether the real issues in their suits were based on copyrights or patents. Look at Microsoft claiming failure to disclose on a patent didn't invalidate it, it just made it another form of IP (a trade secret). Look at the firm which recently claimed quoting their cease and desist letter violated their IP.
IP all to often seems to mean a 'Special-Top-secret EULAcopypatmark'. The owner doesn't really have to defend it like a trademark, but can claim he has no choice but to enforce it when he prefers without the claim tainting his case. It never expires, it costs the minimum of all types to register (usually Zero), the owner can get damages at which ever rate is highest, and it doesn't have any separate standing in the EU unless that's somehow to the owner's advantage. There's no requirement to disclose, the GPL doesn't apply if the company simply forgets about it, and violations can be prosecuted as though they were criminal acts, at the tax-payer's expense, while still resulting in money going to the IP owner as penalties instead of the state as fines. Doctrines such as Laches and laws against Submarine Patents don't apply. It will increase the stock value of your corporation over a shorter term than any real property acquisition, but is non-volatile and neigh-invulnerable to downward market trends.
And yes, I find the idea that something with those properties exists to be both ridiculous and reprehensible.
But have you ever heard of overloaded home wiring catching fire?
I don't particularly see worrying about it, but the point is that a particular type of hardware based flaw, which we have seen at least a couple of times, could make it easy for people who aren't nearly math geniuses to do something that normally takes a grande el-supremo lot of computer science skills.
I'm not sure if a WAP is analogous to a webserver, but I don't see how either can be considered private by default. There are certainly public web pages, and there are certainly public wireless access points (i.e. the ones offered at Starbucks, Krystal, various hotels and others are intended to be publicly accessed, at least by their customers. Sometimes whole communities have set up public WAPs). Then there's WAPs that a completely innocently minded person might well assume are public, (i.e. the cases where a person parked outside the local library has accessed its wireless net, and knows that the library provides public terminals, so assumes this is part of the same service). The ratio of public to private WAPs favors private, but the law isn't based on some "is the majority private or public" test in most other cases.
(For example there are lots of charter only buses, and some private buses with fixed stops and routes on the roads near my location, and there are lots of School buses, and a public transport community bus system that paints its vehicles with many different designs and colors. There's no law that says people should not hail a bus until they are absolutely certain it's not a private chartered vehicle, or anything remotely like that, and no one is looking at how many buses of what kinds are public or private, and what subtypes there are, when it comes to passing new laws. If the ratio of chartered lines to school buses changed, I don't think anyone would say we needed to change the existing laws vis-a-vis buses.).
Most laws are built on reasonableness tests and the like, not some percentage test. Telling people they should assume any WAP not explicitly marked public is private is no different from telling them they should assume anything not explicitly marked public domain is still copyrighted, or should assume any road without a clear sign is a private drive. That pesky "Innocent unless proven guilty" principle includes not shortcutting the law by claiming that someone had criminal intent just because they didn't assume automatically that something was private unless clearly marked otherwise. Instead the law should have to prove the person didn't have a reasonable expectation that something was being made public. That's mostly well established law - hanging your wash out on a clothesline isn't making the wash legally takeable by the public, putting in a sidewalk that better supports access to an adjacent location is explicitly giving someone permission to walk that way (unless it's marked otherwise). Instead of whole new laws, WAP issues are best resolved by a body of precedents that follow existing examples. The courts can decide just how much or little the WAP owner has to do to have it considered private.
We frequently tell private owners they should put up the signs or shut up (i.e. If you want parking in front of your business to be used for your business only, post it or don't complain, if you don't want your buried cable dug up, then mark it, etc.). We used to make copyright holders put explicit notices on works rather than make everyone else assume they existed unless proved to have expired. Let a person cross your land enough times without complaint, and you don't have to give them explicit permission to have established an easement. The law has many cases where not doing something to stop access counts as granting access. A legal decision that not changing the WAP defaults is in line with giving permission is justifiable on similar grounds. It's not necessarily the right call, but people who are arguing that the courts can't, or should never do that don't know common law very well (Or they know it very well indeed, but hope the general public never learns).
Excellent assessment! I don't know what prompts some people to assume that one of the world's most renowned philosophers doubtless missed any of a number of 'simple', 'obvious' points any 'normal person' would spot in an instant. It seems to happen a lot to Plato, Kant, and Bishop Berkeley.
While we're at it, Plato, of all philosophers, would have held just going as the wind blows as a distinctly bad thing and not neutral.
It was Socrates that first said "The unexamined life is not worth living", but Plato that quoted it with great approval in his Dialogues and developed it into a whole argument for moral behavior only being truly moral if it was rationally chosen rather than by rote.
There wouldn't be a need to conceal growing, but legal growers wouldn't necessarily fall back on natural light, and you'd still get idiots overloading wiring and burning down the location, wherever it was. Grow your own would still be indoors in urban neighborhoods, where people simply don't have land for a greenhouse, etc. Sure, with full legality, including legal sales, there's little need for growing your own at all, but that's a different level of legality from just legalizing simple possession of personal amounts. Things such as wiring fires are not directly a consequence of the legality or illegality of the plants, and are far more directly a consequence of not knowing how to handle electricity.
To put it another way, the law is not the only reason why people sometimes choose to grow large amounts of plants indoors and do their own wiring.
How many people think they are 'safe' because they bought their guns with cash, but at least one of the following is true:
1. The dealer has been selling to some serious bad guys, and when caught, will roll over and give all sorts of descriptions, names and other information on customers like you before he risks informing on the 'really dangerous' sorts.
2. How did you stay in practice with that gun? How many bought the gun itself with cash, but bought ammunition, or rented a range at least once, with a card, check, or other traceable?
3. Did your face get recorded on camera when you bought or trained with anything? That's the essence of data mining - putting faces, names, SSNs and such together with the other data. No one wants any info what-so-ever on a person unless they can link it to a name, a face, a bank balance or an ID number, but a photo is almost as good as a name for most law enforcement purposes.
4. Do you have a military record? Every weapon you have so much as familiarization fired, let alone qualified with, is there, as are range scores. Law enforcement personnel will assume you might still have just about anything you ever had, and judges have issued warrants based solely on an exotic weapon being used in a crime and some person having that weapon on their military record before.
This is also one of the most risky points for a non-gun owner - If you currently have absolutely nothing, but are on record as having ever fired a machine gun or grenade launcher, guess how much force looks reasonable to those cops serving you for something as non-violent as failure to pay child support, let alone a violent felony?
I'd qualify my earlier opinion: The RIAA is fundamentally irrational in the sense that they overrate how much controlling a system is worth. They think more control will automagically equal more money, just like a company owner who only hires stupid people and thinks that will keep anyone from demanding more competitive pay, but doesn't realize that sort of control gives an opening to other companies to out-compete his.
All this is very different from the RIAA being fundamentally irrational because, say, they want to dress up like Napoleon and make burble noises with their invisible dog. Thinking you can impose (over)simplification on naturally complex systems, and uniformity on diversity, is something every human is tempted to try now and then.
If today's musicians aren't just propaganda idols, where's the anti-war songs? I see 18 and 20 year olds, at marches and rallies, and overwhelmingly, they are marching and rallying to my generation's war protest songs - Jackson Browne, Jefferson Airplane, etc. I talk to people in their twenties, and they use the songs, (and the films, TV shows, and books) of 30 and 40 years ago whenever they reach for a metaphor about the war, or the war on drugs, or the increasing prison population, or just about anything else political (And that's not just when they are talking to an old fart like me, but each other). There's a few exceptions, mostly in Hip-Hop, but then minorities joining up for the education benefits and then dieing disproportionately in a shooting war is a pretty good explanation why it's there more than in the predominant culture.
I learn something new every time I browse Slashdot. I honestly did not know British penis size is measured diagonally.
And it's absolutely true the US doesn't ever use Celcius for temperature (although we occasionally do use Celsius).
Those are mostly North Americans, just not starting as far north as they end up.
You mean the Shipstones from Heinlein's novel "Friday" and other books?
(Or maybe the ultracapacitor part of John W Campbell Jr's Luxmetal technologies predates any Heinlein mentions - that's the 1950s)
(How about the gadjets in Doc Smith's "Subspace Explorers" - I never can remember if it's the Chaytors or the Wesleys that hold all that capacitance, but it's one of those two. The Grahams, of course are the big wire wrapped widjets that go between the other two.
And how much capacitance does one of Clarke's monoliths hold? (As much as it wants). The non-moving, eternal machines that project the city of Diaspar? (that would be the version in "Against the Fall of Night", completed in 1946, not "The City and the Stars" in 53. Clarke could have written the necessary part as early as 1937, when he started - that book was on publication hold for the entirety of WW2).
And it's proof that the RIAA is fundamentally irrational. They've spoken out against used CD stores, tried to get laws passed limiting or eliminating the normal 'right of first sale', even lobbied against libraries carrying recorded music. They've lobbied congress in the wake of 9-11 to get copyright infringement added to the list of terrorist activities under the USAPATRIOT act. This is not just something superficially plausible as a business model but unworkable in the details, it's genuinely crazy behavior.
To take your car analogy farther, if some guy, just because he had an MBA, told Toyota they could eliminate the used car market by act of congress, and their sales of new cars would go up, prices would remain as high as they are, and the extra money required would be produced by the customers with no losses to the industry, they wouldn't work for Toyota anymore. When do the stockholders of the RIAA members get the same clue?
Since recorded music is very far from a necessity, at least compared to cars or housing, how did this industry ever entertain the nut-bar idea they could eliminate used sales and not hurt themselves in the process? Used sales help prop up their price structure, yet the RIAA is treating them as another problem instead of an ally, just like they did radio, the cassette deck and DAT.
Japan was actually getting serious about the possibility of a fission bomb, Germany wasn't. Some historians think it was because Germany's racial doctrine was so aggressively disparaging of 'Jewish' physics, and so their research and funding ended up being steered in other directions. Japan had physicists who weren't afraid to use Einstein's or other Jewish physicists work in their own papers.
In September 1940, the Japanese Army controlled Institute of Physical and Chemical Research, or Rikken, was assigned a preliminary project. In 1942, the Japanese Navy began also (somewhat independently of the Army) working on a Uranium based fission device. The project was called F-Go {or sometimes just No. F, for fission]. This was located at Kyoto, and was actually the chief reason why Kyoto was added to the list of potential military targets for the U.S. bombs, although in the end the city was still taken off the list by Truman due to its historic and social value. Despite a certain military commitment these programs weren't backed with adequate resources, and the Japanese were probably still four or more years from having a bomb by the end of the war.
A Japanese plant, concealed in Hungnam, now part of North Korea, may have been the source of heavy water subsequently used by the USSR for its own bomb research. There are reports the Soviet Union continued to run that plant and collected the output every other month by submarine, and it alone may have shaved a year or more off the USSR's development time.
In May 1945, a German submarine which surrendered to US forces , was found to be carrying over 500 kg. of Uranium oxide destined for Japan. The oxide contained about 3.5 kilograms of isotope U-235. While not enough to make a bomb, that was a sizable fraction of one. After the Japanese surrender, the occupying US Army found five cyclotrons which were capable of separating fissionable material from ordinary uranium. The US bomb program was accomplished by using gaseous diffusion based separation, but cyclotronic separation was rejected not because it wouldn't work, but because it seemed likely to take longer. Some historians see the willingness of the Germans to supply Uranium to their ally as proof they didn't fully appreciate the potential, while Japan did.