Speed limits tuned to the vehicle do make sense, but it seems to me that they really need to be context-dependent in what might be an impractical way. For example, I drive an SUV. (Before you get upset, I live in northern British Columbia and among other things drive on unpaved logging roads.) It is clear that I should not take sharp turns at the same speed as most other vehicles. On turns, the appropriate speed limit ought to be a good deal lower for my SUV. On the other hand, on I-80 in Nevada in the absence of a strong cross-wind I can probably drive safely on a straightaway at about the same speed as other vehicles. The differential in this case should be a lot less, perhaps even zero. And of course, when properly set up, with studded winter tires and enough weight over the rear axle, I can safely drive faster on ice than most other vehicles.
A partial answer to this and various other problems would be better communication among drivers. Wouldn't it be helpful if you could tell the guy behind you that he's too close and making you nervous? You might explain that you can't go any faster because the vehicles ahead of you aren't, or that you are driving slowly for a reason and will pull over to let him pass as soon as you can do so safely. Existing communication systems are very primitive and limiting: (a) I'm planning on turning left/changing lanes to the left; (b) I'm planning on turning right/changing lanes to the right; (c) I'm braking. You can't even distinguish between "I'm just keeping myself from speeding up any further on this hill" and "I'm coming to a dead stop in order to make a right-angle turn off". I'm not sure what would be a better system. Maybe a more articulated system of lights, or maybe something like CB, but set up so that you could send the message to, e.g., the person behind you.
The closest thing I've experienced to this is on logging roads in British Columbia, where everybody has a logging truck radio. On active logging roads, you are required to announce your position, but on some roads there is a lot of back and forth on the radio and it can be quite helpful.
I do this too, though sometimes there is no good place to pull over, and sometimes, in bad conditions, the very fact that someone is on your tail makes it dangerous to slow down and turn suddenly, yet, if you don't know the road well, you may not be able to see a turnout until you are too close. I've been in this very unpleasant situation a few times in very heavy rain, so heavy that visibility was minimal, on narrow rural roads with no shoulder to speak of.
Incidentally, California has a law that makes a great deal of sense (modulo the
problem in the situation I just mentioned) that if five vehicles accumulate behind you, you are required to pull over and let them pass, even if you are going the speed limit.
It is probably true that for certain classes of vehicle on certain types of road speed limits that were set twenty or thirty years ago are now lower than they need to be. What concerns me about relying on this to set the safe limit at, say, 10 mph above the posted limit is: (a) on an unfamiliar road, you don't know when the limit was set; it may be recent; (b) you often don't know the basis for the limit. That is, if the controlling factor was the physical condition and curvature of the road, it may be true that you can go faster due to the greater ability of your vehicle to hold the road etc. of your more modern vehicle, but what if the limiting factor is the driveway or school bus stop that you can't see around the curve? (c) Some people drive vehicles that don't stop as well, or don't hold the road as well, or whatever. This may be due to having an old vehicle or one that hasn't been well maintained or to the type of vehicle. Even a current SUV, for example, can't take curves at as high a speed as a compact.
Sure, there is such a thing as a speed trap, but most tickets are not issued in speed traps. Enjoying the revenue doesn't mean that that is the motivation for the laws. For example, law enforcement just loves all the assets they confiscate in drug busts, to the extent that it arguably is corrupting the system, but essentially the same drugs were illegal long before asset forfeiture started, so it is clear that the drug laws are not simply a revenue collection mechanism.
In the jurisdictions I am familiar with, you can report dangerous driving. They won't bring charges just on the basis of your testimony (I don't know why not - they don't require professional witnesses in the case of, e.g., robbery), but if it is ongoing they may well send a patrol car to check it out, and if not, they will often send a letter to the registered owner of the vehicle. In some cases you're doing the driver a favor. One night here in British Columbia I was driving on Highway 5 between Little Fort and Kamloops, which is a single-lane (each way) undivided rural road that nonetheless gets a fair amount of truck traffic. The guy ahead of me was veering back and forth in the lane, at times crossing the center line. It was pretty scary. I called in a report to the RCMP. When I got home, I found a message from the RCMP saying that they had found the guy, stopped him, determined that he was too sleepy to drive, and got him to a motel for the night.
I hate to tell you this, but 35 in a 45 zone is not impeding traffic. 45 is the absolute limit under optimal conditions. If it is dark or foggy or raining heavily or snowing or for some other reason visibility is less than perfect, driving slower than the limit may well be highly desirable. Similarly if the road is wet or icy or covered with debris. Maybe the guy ahead of you has noticed some other factor that you can't see or haven't noticed, such as kids playing close to the road who look likely to run
out into it or a vehicle broken down up ahead. Maybe the driver is not feeling well and does not feel safe at full speed. (In the long run, if this persists, yes, he should get off the road, but sometimes you suddenly feel sick, or you need to get to the doctor or a motel or find a safe place to pull over.) Maybe the driver is concerned about a problem with his vehicle. There are lots of reasons to drive less than the speed limit. People who think that the speed limit is a minimum are a problem.
I am well acquainted with the anti-dazzle feature of the rear-view mirror.
Unfortunately, the side mirrors aren't so readily adjustable, and I like
to pay attention to the road rather than fiddle with the mirrors. And when something
big comes real close with its brights on, the anti-dazzle feature isn't enough.
A completely unjustified assertion. It's funny how the offenses for which tickets are issued are for things that are dangerous, not randomly chosen things that would generate revenue. Quite a coincidence. Whenever I see this claim, I assume that the author is a poor driver in denial.
But from GP's description of the accident, the rear-ending was totally unjustified. The consequences may not have been severe this time, but the kid was indeed not paying attention. It is understandable when people skid on unexpected ice or oil or something like that, but in this case the only reason for the accident was inattention, which is a symptom of a poor driver, not bad luck.
For this to happen as described, garage door openers must be responding to the mere
presence of a signal. Are they really that simplistic? I would have thought that they would respond only to a particular pulse sequence or code of some sort. Not only would that prevent this kind of interference, but it would prevent one person's garage door opener from interfering with the neighbor's.
The worst experiences I have had are with medicine that is impossible to get at due to excessively child-proof packaging. Some of this packaging is managable if you're in good condition, but impossible when you actually need the medication. Ever try to open something difficult with a migraine headache?
The deaf guy is perfect for them. Since he can't enjoy the music, obviously he is just downloading to cheat them out of sales. He's even worse than the hearing downloaders.
Before getting too upset about this, wait and see what happens. They find someone who isn't supposed to be working exporting a large amount of money so they arrest him. That isn't surprising. Maybe they'll deport him. Maybe they'll release him. Maybe they'll make him pay income tax on it. For all we know they'll decide that although exporting all that cash looked suspicious, since he didn't actually have a job in Japan he didn't violate his student status. We haven't seen how this will turn out.
As for Japanese immigration, it is true that you don't want to play games with them. That's true in a lot of countries. However, I have to say that in my experience (and I have held research and employment visas as well as tourist visas) Japanese immigration was quite straightforward to deal with and as bureaucracies go not unpleasant. I never thought they were xenophobic or out to screw me. If you follow the rules as best you can they seem to be pretty decent. They do like it if you make it easier for them. For example, I found that they liked it when I took the trouble to fill out forms in Japanese.
The usual Unix-type file system (in the sense of the mapping between paths and inodes, not the low-level sense of, say, ext3 vs. Reiser) is another example of this type, arguably closer since no copying of objects is involved. Due to the possibility of multiple links to the same inode you have potentially many pathnames for the same inode and, by assigning names appropriately, you can store multiple orderings.
This article really only applies to large projects like Linux and Gnome. A large amount of FOSS
is written by one person. I don't know of any statistics, but take a look at Freshmeat
or at the authorship of programs that you use, and I'm pretty sure the majority will be
single-author projects, or perhaps involve two or three people. This is often true of projects
that list many authors - often only one or two people have worked on any program at any given time - there are a lot of authors because the project has run for a long time or consists of a
number of separate pieces. Such projects are intrinsically
Cathedral-style. There isn't any large group to have different visions. This isn't to say
that what the author has to say isn't relevant as some large projects are very important, but a valid perspective on FOSS development has to avoid the mythology in which every project involves large numbers of people.
I don't think that they should be forcibly shut down, nor do other posters seem to me to be taking that position. I hope that they will come to their senses, or that it will fail economically, but I wouldn't dream of censorship.
Why are we unhappy about it? Because it isn't innocuous as you suggest. Promotions like this are part of a broader effort to convert as many people as possible to fundamentalist Christianity and to get it into the schools where children can be brainwashed with it. Creationism is a bad influence in its own right since it promotes irrationality and an anti-scientific worldview. Furthermore, insofar as Creationism promotes fundamentalist Christianity, which I consider an evil and harmful doctrine, it is all the more undesirable for it to spread.
When I first saw this, I thought: "Great! Creationism is declining so rapidly that we need a museum to teach about this primitive superstition." No such luck.
If the copyright holder knows about infringement and does nothing about it, the damages he can obtain are greatly reduced since the infringer cannot mitigate during that period. Secondly, if the infringer can show that the copyright holder knew about the infringement and did nothing, the defense of laches becomes available.
People say that Microsoft doesn't innovate, but those same people complain that they are being locked out of Microsoft technology if they don't use Microsoft products. Seems a funny argument.
There's nothing funny about it - it makes perfect sense even if you believe
that Microsoft doesn't innovate. One of the reasons people say that Microsoft doesn't innovate is that MS has a history of buying or in some cases acquiring
in more underhanded ways, innovations from other companies. In such cases, there may be innovations that one would want to interoperate with, but they don't originate with MS. Secondly, the desire to interoperate with MS software has nothing to do with whether MS software is innovative. So long as significant numbers of people use MS software, other people will have an interest in interoperating. For example, I may have to deal with documents that people send me in MS Word format, but that doesn't mean that I think that there is anything innovative or otherwise attractive about that format. I'm stuck with other people's choices.
I agree that a suit for tortious interference isn't likely to make much money,
but it seems like a better legal theory than copyright. I'm not sure that the
DMCA anti-circumvention provisions are applicable here. The DMCA only forbids
circumvention of measures taken to protect copyrighted material. Even if
the bot bypasses security measures, it isn't doing so for the purpose of
violating copyright. The bot does not, for example, extract the images from
the game. Furthermore, the DMCA expressly permits reverse engineering for the
purpose of interoperability.
Selling a program that has no use other than violating the TOS may be
actionable as tortious interference with a contract or something along those
lines, but I fail to see how copyright is involved here. What copyrighted work is
copied by the bot? Similarly, I don't see how it violates the DMCA.
Presumably the best defense against claims of stolen code is to do what the Linux kernel folks are doing and require contributors to certify that they have the right to provide the code. Here are the current rules for submitting code for the kernel, and here is the Developer's Certificate of Origin. Significant contributions should also be well publicized so that anyone claiming infringment is forced to bring it up soon, before people come to rely on it. In this case, it would then be Novell's problem, not the community's, if Microsoft claims that the code is theirs.
Here, here! Mod this up! You and I seem to be about the only people who know about this. I am often disturbed at reading news accounts or US government statements about how so-and-so was "illegally leaving" such-and-such a country, as if there was such a thing. Recently, the Tibetans whose murder by Chinese troops while trying to escape to Nepal was observed by mountaineers, were described without a blink of the eye as trying to leave Tibet "illegally"!
No, it isn't just.NET. Microsoft has such restrictions in the EULAs for other products as well, such as XML and SQL Server. See this EFF piece on problems with EULAs. To be fair, this isn't new in VISTA - Microsoft has had these restrictions since at least 2003, and it
isn't just Microsoft that does this. Other companies with similar EULAs include McAfee and VMware.
Slashdot Mirror
Speed limits tuned to the vehicle do make sense, but it seems to me that they really need to be context-dependent in what might be an impractical way. For example, I drive an SUV. (Before you get upset, I live in northern British Columbia and among other things drive on unpaved logging roads.) It is clear that I should not take sharp turns at the same speed as most other vehicles. On turns, the appropriate speed limit ought to be a good deal lower for my SUV. On the other hand, on I-80 in Nevada in the absence of a strong cross-wind I can probably drive safely on a straightaway at about the same speed as other vehicles. The differential in this case should be a lot less, perhaps even zero. And of course, when properly set up, with studded winter tires and enough weight over the rear axle, I can safely drive faster on ice than most other vehicles.
A partial answer to this and various other problems would be better communication among drivers. Wouldn't it be helpful if you could tell the guy behind you that he's too close and making you nervous? You might explain that you can't go any faster because the vehicles ahead of you aren't, or that you are driving slowly for a reason and will pull over to let him pass as soon as you can do so safely. Existing communication systems are very primitive and limiting: (a) I'm planning on turning left/changing lanes to the left; (b) I'm planning on turning right/changing lanes to the right; (c) I'm braking. You can't even distinguish between "I'm just keeping myself from speeding up any further on this hill" and "I'm coming to a dead stop in order to make a right-angle turn off". I'm not sure what would be a better system. Maybe a more articulated system of lights, or maybe something like CB, but set up so that you could send the message to, e.g., the person behind you.
The closest thing I've experienced to this is on logging roads in British Columbia, where everybody has a logging truck radio. On active logging roads, you are required to announce your position, but on some roads there is a lot of back and forth on the radio and it can be quite helpful.
I do this too, though sometimes there is no good place to pull over, and sometimes, in bad conditions, the very fact that someone is on your tail makes it dangerous to slow down and turn suddenly, yet, if you don't know the road well, you may not be able to see a turnout until you are too close. I've been in this very unpleasant situation a few times in very heavy rain, so heavy that visibility was minimal, on narrow rural roads with no shoulder to speak of.
Incidentally, California has a law that makes a great deal of sense (modulo the problem in the situation I just mentioned) that if five vehicles accumulate behind you, you are required to pull over and let them pass, even if you are going the speed limit.
It is probably true that for certain classes of vehicle on certain types of road speed limits that were set twenty or thirty years ago are now lower than they need to be. What concerns me about relying on this to set the safe limit at, say, 10 mph above the posted limit is: (a) on an unfamiliar road, you don't know when the limit was set; it may be recent; (b) you often don't know the basis for the limit. That is, if the controlling factor was the physical condition and curvature of the road, it may be true that you can go faster due to the greater ability of your vehicle to hold the road etc. of your more modern vehicle, but what if the limiting factor is the driveway or school bus stop that you can't see around the curve? (c) Some people drive vehicles that don't stop as well, or don't hold the road as well, or whatever. This may be due to having an old vehicle or one that hasn't been well maintained or to the type of vehicle. Even a current SUV, for example, can't take curves at as high a speed as a compact.
Sure, there is such a thing as a speed trap, but most tickets are not issued in speed traps. Enjoying the revenue doesn't mean that that is the motivation for the laws. For example, law enforcement just loves all the assets they confiscate in drug busts, to the extent that it arguably is corrupting the system, but essentially the same drugs were illegal long before asset forfeiture started, so it is clear that the drug laws are not simply a revenue collection mechanism.
In the jurisdictions I am familiar with, you can report dangerous driving. They won't bring charges just on the basis of your testimony (I don't know why not - they don't require professional witnesses in the case of, e.g., robbery), but if it is ongoing they may well send a patrol car to check it out, and if not, they will often send a letter to the registered owner of the vehicle. In some cases you're doing the driver a favor. One night here in British Columbia I was driving on Highway 5 between Little Fort and Kamloops, which is a single-lane (each way) undivided rural road that nonetheless gets a fair amount of truck traffic. The guy ahead of me was veering back and forth in the lane, at times crossing the center line. It was pretty scary. I called in a report to the RCMP. When I got home, I found a message from the RCMP saying that they had found the guy, stopped him, determined that he was too sleepy to drive, and got him to a motel for the night.
I hate to tell you this, but 35 in a 45 zone is not impeding traffic. 45 is the absolute limit under optimal conditions. If it is dark or foggy or raining heavily or snowing or for some other reason visibility is less than perfect, driving slower than the limit may well be highly desirable. Similarly if the road is wet or icy or covered with debris. Maybe the guy ahead of you has noticed some other factor that you can't see or haven't noticed, such as kids playing close to the road who look likely to run out into it or a vehicle broken down up ahead. Maybe the driver is not feeling well and does not feel safe at full speed. (In the long run, if this persists, yes, he should get off the road, but sometimes you suddenly feel sick, or you need to get to the doctor or a motel or find a safe place to pull over.) Maybe the driver is concerned about a problem with his vehicle. There are lots of reasons to drive less than the speed limit. People who think that the speed limit is a minimum are a problem.
I am well acquainted with the anti-dazzle feature of the rear-view mirror. Unfortunately, the side mirrors aren't so readily adjustable, and I like to pay attention to the road rather than fiddle with the mirrors. And when something big comes real close with its brights on, the anti-dazzle feature isn't enough.
A completely unjustified assertion. It's funny how the offenses for which tickets are issued are for things that are dangerous, not randomly chosen things that would generate revenue. Quite a coincidence. Whenever I see this claim, I assume that the author is a poor driver in denial.
But from GP's description of the accident, the rear-ending was totally unjustified. The consequences may not have been severe this time, but the kid was indeed not paying attention. It is understandable when people skid on unexpected ice or oil or something like that, but in this case the only reason for the accident was inattention, which is a symptom of a poor driver, not bad luck.
For this to happen as described, garage door openers must be responding to the mere presence of a signal. Are they really that simplistic? I would have thought that they would respond only to a particular pulse sequence or code of some sort. Not only would that prevent this kind of interference, but it would prevent one person's garage door opener from interfering with the neighbor's.
The worst experiences I have had are with medicine that is impossible to get at due to excessively child-proof packaging. Some of this packaging is managable if you're in good condition, but impossible when you actually need the medication. Ever try to open something difficult with a migraine headache?
The deaf guy is perfect for them. Since he can't enjoy the music, obviously he is just downloading to cheat them out of sales. He's even worse than the hearing downloaders.
Before getting too upset about this, wait and see what happens. They find someone who isn't supposed to be working exporting a large amount of money so they arrest him. That isn't surprising. Maybe they'll deport him. Maybe they'll release him. Maybe they'll make him pay income tax on it. For all we know they'll decide that although exporting all that cash looked suspicious, since he didn't actually have a job in Japan he didn't violate his student status. We haven't seen how this will turn out.
As for Japanese immigration, it is true that you don't want to play games with them. That's true in a lot of countries. However, I have to say that in my experience (and I have held research and employment visas as well as tourist visas) Japanese immigration was quite straightforward to deal with and as bureaucracies go not unpleasant. I never thought they were xenophobic or out to screw me. If you follow the rules as best you can they seem to be pretty decent. They do like it if you make it easier for them. For example, I found that they liked it when I took the trouble to fill out forms in Japanese.
The usual Unix-type file system (in the sense of the mapping between paths and inodes, not the low-level sense of, say, ext3 vs. Reiser) is another example of this type, arguably closer since no copying of objects is involved. Due to the possibility of multiple links to the same inode you have potentially many pathnames for the same inode and, by assigning names appropriately, you can store multiple orderings.
This article really only applies to large projects like Linux and Gnome. A large amount of FOSS is written by one person. I don't know of any statistics, but take a look at Freshmeat or at the authorship of programs that you use, and I'm pretty sure the majority will be single-author projects, or perhaps involve two or three people. This is often true of projects that list many authors - often only one or two people have worked on any program at any given time - there are a lot of authors because the project has run for a long time or consists of a number of separate pieces. Such projects are intrinsically Cathedral-style. There isn't any large group to have different visions. This isn't to say that what the author has to say isn't relevant as some large projects are very important, but a valid perspective on FOSS development has to avoid the mythology in which every project involves large numbers of people.
I don't think that they should be forcibly shut down, nor do other posters seem to me to be taking that position. I hope that they will come to their senses, or that it will fail economically, but I wouldn't dream of censorship.
Why are we unhappy about it? Because it isn't innocuous as you suggest. Promotions like this are part of a broader effort to convert as many people as possible to fundamentalist Christianity and to get it into the schools where children can be brainwashed with it. Creationism is a bad influence in its own right since it promotes irrationality and an anti-scientific worldview. Furthermore, insofar as Creationism promotes fundamentalist Christianity, which I consider an evil and harmful doctrine, it is all the more undesirable for it to spread.
When I first saw this, I thought: "Great! Creationism is declining so rapidly that we need a museum to teach about this primitive superstition." No such luck.
If the copyright holder knows about infringement and does nothing about it, the damages he can obtain are greatly reduced since the infringer cannot mitigate during that period. Secondly, if the infringer can show that the copyright holder knew about the infringement and did nothing, the defense of laches becomes available.
There's nothing funny about it - it makes perfect sense even if you believe that Microsoft doesn't innovate. One of the reasons people say that Microsoft doesn't innovate is that MS has a history of buying or in some cases acquiring in more underhanded ways, innovations from other companies. In such cases, there may be innovations that one would want to interoperate with, but they don't originate with MS. Secondly, the desire to interoperate with MS software has nothing to do with whether MS software is innovative. So long as significant numbers of people use MS software, other people will have an interest in interoperating. For example, I may have to deal with documents that people send me in MS Word format, but that doesn't mean that I think that there is anything innovative or otherwise attractive about that format. I'm stuck with other people's choices.
I agree that a suit for tortious interference isn't likely to make much money, but it seems like a better legal theory than copyright. I'm not sure that the DMCA anti-circumvention provisions are applicable here. The DMCA only forbids circumvention of measures taken to protect copyrighted material. Even if the bot bypasses security measures, it isn't doing so for the purpose of violating copyright. The bot does not, for example, extract the images from the game. Furthermore, the DMCA expressly permits reverse engineering for the purpose of interoperability.
Selling a program that has no use other than violating the TOS may be actionable as tortious interference with a contract or something along those lines, but I fail to see how copyright is involved here. What copyrighted work is copied by the bot? Similarly, I don't see how it violates the DMCA.
Presumably the best defense against claims of stolen code is to do what the Linux kernel folks are doing and require contributors to certify that they have the right to provide the code. Here are the current rules for submitting code for the kernel, and here is the Developer's Certificate of Origin. Significant contributions should also be well publicized so that anyone claiming infringment is forced to bring it up soon, before people come to rely on it. In this case, it would then be Novell's problem, not the community's, if Microsoft claims that the code is theirs.
Here, here! Mod this up! You and I seem to be about the only people who know about this. I am often disturbed at reading news accounts or US government statements about how so-and-so was "illegally leaving" such-and-such a country, as if there was such a thing. Recently, the Tibetans whose murder by Chinese troops while trying to escape to Nepal was observed by mountaineers, were described without a blink of the eye as trying to leave Tibet "illegally"!
No, it isn't just .NET. Microsoft has such restrictions in the EULAs for other products as well, such as XML and SQL Server. See this EFF piece on problems with EULAs. To be fair, this isn't new in VISTA - Microsoft has had these restrictions since at least 2003, and it
isn't just Microsoft that does this. Other companies with similar EULAs include McAfee and VMware.