You've gone off on a tangent. The point is that even assuming that laws against speeding are basically good, if not carefully formulated they can have negative consequences. The fact that you don't like laws against speeding isn't really relevant.
In any case, your distaste for laws against speeding is unsupported by fact or argument. That driving too quickly (and that includes faster than other drivers, even if your reflexes are better than average) is well established as a safety problem. People also tend to overestimate their driving ability, including their ability to handle high speeds, and they tend to make decisions about appropriate speed based only on their (mis-)estimation of their ability, and their vehicle's, to handle the physical road conditions. They tend to ignore considerations such as the presence of children, nearby entrances and exits that they cannot see, firestations, and other factors that affect safe speed.
Speeding is a good example of the tragedy of the commons. It isn't that I, or legislators, am smarter than other people. Rather, it is that research into driving behavior provides better information than people's own subjective, egocentric estimates.
That might be in part because good laws are written so as not to have
negative unintended consequences. Good laws sometimes do have negative unintended consequences, but they are quickly revised to deal with them.
For example, most people agree that laws against speeding are desirable. If such a law is formulated too broadly, it will make it illegal to speed even in emergencies where the risk from speeding is overshadowed by the emergency. The speeding law can be formulated carefully so as to except emergencies, and if it is written too broadly can be revised. The problem with bad laws like the DMCA is that their proponents either haven't formulated them carefully or do not see the negative consequences as negative and so are happy with the overbroad formulation.
Why should developers have to license Nikon's proprietary code in order to process images from Nikon cameras? The images don't belong to Nikon - they belong to the person who took the picture. It shouldn't be necessary to have Nikon's permission to do this nor should it be necessary to pay Nikon for it. This is exactly the kind of situation in which people should be free to reverse engineer.
The total cost of maintaining a sailor includes not only pay and benefits but a proportionate share of living space and services such as health care. What do you think one person/year's worth of bunk space, bathroom space, etc. costs?
The $100K figure becomes quite plausible, I tink.
It's true that patents are supposed to apply only to useful things or methods of doing something, but those are still ideas rather than details of expression. You can see this distinction with software. If I wrote a program implementing a certain algorithm, my code is protected by copyright but not the algorithm. You can't copy my code without permission but you are free to study it to figure out the algorithm and rewrite it differently. Furthermore, if you implement the same algorithm without seeing my code, I have no claim on you,
even if your code, by accident, or because the algorithm cannot be implemented
very differently, ends up being virtually identical to mine.
On the other hand, if I obtain a patent on the algorithm, you can't use
it without a license from me even if your code is quite different from mine.
Indeed, even if you independently rediscover the algorithm my patent would prevent you from using it. In this sense, patents cover ideas rather than their expression.
A further point is that, although patents are supposed to be for ideas reduced to practice, what that means has become increasingly unclear. It is, for example, no longer necessary to present a working model, and in the case of software patents it isn't obviouos even in principle what the distinction would be.
With luck nobody will realize that because you're wrong.
copyright protects the expression of an idea not the idea itself. However, copyright is not the only form of intellectual property. Another important form is the patent. Patents protect the idea, not merely its expression.
Re:Nothing to do with systems administration
on
Sysadmin Toolbox Top Ten
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
This is one of an ongoing series of such articles, not the only one.
So, yes, it is desirable for a certain class of reader to hear from someone who administers a large network, but since many people who ar enot professional sysadmins do in fact administer a machine or two (their own and sometimes others), it is quite reasonable to hear from people in other situations as well.
In the romanization of Hindi and other languages of India, bh, dh, and gh are used for so-called "voiced aspirates". The difference between these and their unaspirated counterparts b, d, and g has nothing to do with tongue position. Rather, it is a matter of what phoneticians call phonation type. The ordinary b, d and g have modal voicing, in which the vocal folds vibrate in the usual way. The "voiced aspirates" have what is called breathy or murmured voicing, which results from the vocal folds being held together rather loosely. The glottal source spectrum of murmured sounds is much noisier than that of sounds with modal voicing. You can listen to a contrasting set of examples here.
Whether Google has a duty to the sites ranked to get it right and explain itself depends on what page rank is. If it is merely opinion, basically subjective, then they have no such duty. If, on the other hand, page rank is an objective measure of visibility on the web or some such thing, then giving a site a lower rank than it deserves is effectively making a false and pejorative claim about the site and the site should be entitled to relief. The applicable law here is the law of commercial libel.
If Sergei Brin posts on his web site that he thinks McDonalds food is awful, McDonalds has no claim against him because he has merely expressed an opinion. If, on the other hand, he posts that he doesn't go to McDonalds because their food is contaminated with E. coli, he has made a factual claim and McDonalds is entitled to go after him if he has it wrong. The question is, is page rank a subjective matter of opinion or an objective claim of fact? It seems to me that it is intended to be the latter, in which case Google has a duty to stand up for it.
Senior curators at the Smithsonian are in the upper GS grades and the ones I know about are outstanding. Of course they're probably not typical of government bureaucrats.
It's not like the US is the only country in which one observes incompetance and inefficiency. I think the point is that there is good reason to think that the US government is a lot more incompetant and inefficient than it was say ten years ago.
The secondary point is that this fits the Bush agenda in several ways. One is that, if you're a hard-core advocate of privatization and corporate welfare, it makes sense to run down government services so as to load the dice in favor of the view that private enterprise will do better. Another is that there is a bias to towards throwing a lot of money at the big corporations. A third is that incompetance and inefficiency are expected results when cronyism and ideological ties override merit. A fourth is that when decisions are made the grounds of ideology, whether religious or political, programs are likely to be ineffective (examples being the administration's insistence that teen sex education focus on abstinence rather than contraception and safe sex and the ridiculous assumptions it made about how Iraqis would greet the US with open arms and readily establish a liberal democracy).
Re:DRM to be used in GNOME's multimedia backend
on
Gnome 2.14 Released
·
· Score: 1
Since there are infinitely man "next library"s and finitely many libraries already in existence, the Lebesgue measure of the set of libraries for which the FSF indicates approval of using the LGPL is 0. In this technical sense one may therefore legitimately say that the FSF opposes the use of the LGPL in all cases.
So long as the Damocles Amendment makes it clear that it overrides the First Amendment, the First Amendment is no barrier. Existing parts of the Constitution don't constrain amendments (except, of course, the parts that specify the
amendment process).
the vast majority of all historical accomplishments were achieved by straight, white, Christian males.
Its hard to evaluate this without knowing what you consider an accomplishment, but it seems dubious however you cut it. Western philosophy and mathematics originated with the Greeks, who were generally bisexual and were certainly not Christian. The next important phase in mathematics and science is dominated by Muslims. Inventors of writing? The Sumerians were not Christian, nor were the Egyptians, the Chinese, or the Olmecs. The latter two were not white, either. Codification of laws? Hammurabi was no Christian, nor was Moses. Indeed, many of the American Founding Fathers were deists, not Christians. Empire-builders? Alexander the Great was bisexual and not a Christian. The creators of the Roman Empire were not Christian. Genghis Khan was non-white and non-Christian. Domesticators of important animals and crops? ALL of the important domestications are due to non-Christians, many of them not white. Inventors of important technology? Numerous inventions are Chinese (non-white, non-Christian), including gunpowder and paper. Literature? The novel was created by Japanese women, not white, not Christian, not male. In modern science, yes, a lot was done by white males, many of them Christian, but a vastly disproportionate percentage were Jews. In the past few decades, Chinese have taken on a disproportionate role.
Do you think that SourceForge is better than Freshmeat? I search Freshmeat when I'm looking for something, and read the front page regularly. I go to SourceForge when referred to a specific project or to file a bug report. The standard Freshmeat format provides more information than the default SourceForge home page, though some projects have elaborate and informative home pages on SourceForge.
This also makes me think of a recommendation for the poster. If your software does something new or unusual, announce it on Freshmeat and make sure to announce new releases so that people will notice it. If your software does something ordinary, people will find it when they search for it, but if it does something unusual, they very likely won't have thought to search for it.
I think you're missing the legal point. Sure, if the laptop contained data that he should have handed over to his employer and he deleted it, he may be in breach of contract. However, the legal issue at hand is not whether he is in breach of contract but whether he illegally accessed the computer.
That's in addition to any contractual dispute, and it is important because, unlike the contract dispute, it involves federal law and creates federal jurisdiction.
How do they know at what point he erased the disk? If he erased it before he resigned, he was an authorized user when he did it. It seems to me that all he has to say is that he decided to clear the disk and reinstall shortly before he resigned.
Just make the building circular. Then everyone can have a corner office with a window. Put the bathrooms, storerooms, coffee machines and so forth in the center, with a circular corridor that opens on the outside to the offices and on the inside to the bathrooms etc.
What do you think this is? This is the market speaking. Notice that most of the consortium members are NOT vendors of office software. Libraries, archives, researchers and others who need to use documents produced by others want them to be in an open format. Nobody is trying to force anybody to use any particular format for their own use - the point here is that consumers of documents want to get them in a format that makes the documents useful to them. What we have here is simply advertising for the purpose of affecting the market, just like Microsoft does for its own purposes.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's the Virginia exemption.
Check out the California motor vehicle code exemption of emergency vehicles.
The claim that speed enforcement is just a money-maker is silly. Speeding kills, and it does it on the highway as well as in residential areas.
You've gone off on a tangent. The point is that even assuming that laws against speeding are basically good, if not carefully formulated they can have negative consequences. The fact that you don't like laws against speeding isn't really relevant.
In any case, your distaste for laws against speeding is unsupported by fact or argument. That driving too quickly (and that includes faster than other drivers, even if your reflexes are better than average) is well established as a safety problem. People also tend to overestimate their driving ability, including their ability to handle high speeds, and they tend to make decisions about appropriate speed based only on their (mis-)estimation of their ability, and their vehicle's, to handle the physical road conditions. They tend to ignore considerations such as the presence of children, nearby entrances and exits that they cannot see, firestations, and other factors that affect safe speed. Speeding is a good example of the tragedy of the commons. It isn't that I, or legislators, am smarter than other people. Rather, it is that research into driving behavior provides better information than people's own subjective, egocentric estimates.
That might be in part because good laws are written so as not to have negative unintended consequences. Good laws sometimes do have negative unintended consequences, but they are quickly revised to deal with them. For example, most people agree that laws against speeding are desirable. If such a law is formulated too broadly, it will make it illegal to speed even in emergencies where the risk from speeding is overshadowed by the emergency. The speeding law can be formulated carefully so as to except emergencies, and if it is written too broadly can be revised. The problem with bad laws like the DMCA is that their proponents either haven't formulated them carefully or do not see the negative consequences as negative and so are happy with the overbroad formulation.
Why should developers have to license Nikon's proprietary code in order to process images from Nikon cameras? The images don't belong to Nikon - they belong to the person who took the picture. It shouldn't be necessary to have Nikon's permission to do this nor should it be necessary to pay Nikon for it. This is exactly the kind of situation in which people should be free to reverse engineer.
The total cost of maintaining a sailor includes not only pay and benefits but a proportionate share of living space and services such as health care. What do you think one person/year's worth of bunk space, bathroom space, etc. costs? The $100K figure becomes quite plausible, I tink.
It's true that patents are supposed to apply only to useful things or methods of doing something, but those are still ideas rather than details of expression. You can see this distinction with software. If I wrote a program implementing a certain algorithm, my code is protected by copyright but not the algorithm. You can't copy my code without permission but you are free to study it to figure out the algorithm and rewrite it differently. Furthermore, if you implement the same algorithm without seeing my code, I have no claim on you, even if your code, by accident, or because the algorithm cannot be implemented very differently, ends up being virtually identical to mine.
On the other hand, if I obtain a patent on the algorithm, you can't use it without a license from me even if your code is quite different from mine. Indeed, even if you independently rediscover the algorithm my patent would prevent you from using it. In this sense, patents cover ideas rather than their expression.
A further point is that, although patents are supposed to be for ideas reduced to practice, what that means has become increasingly unclear. It is, for example, no longer necessary to present a working model, and in the case of software patents it isn't obviouos even in principle what the distinction would be.
With luck nobody will realize that because you're wrong. copyright protects the expression of an idea not the idea itself. However, copyright is not the only form of intellectual property. Another important form is the patent. Patents protect the idea, not merely its expression.
This is one of an ongoing series of such articles, not the only one. So, yes, it is desirable for a certain class of reader to hear from someone who administers a large network, but since many people who ar enot professional sysadmins do in fact administer a machine or two (their own and sometimes others), it is quite reasonable to hear from people in other situations as well.
In the romanization of Hindi and other languages of India, bh, dh, and gh are used for so-called "voiced aspirates". The difference between these and their unaspirated counterparts b, d, and g has nothing to do with tongue position. Rather, it is a matter of what phoneticians call phonation type. The ordinary b, d and g have modal voicing, in which the vocal folds vibrate in the usual way. The "voiced aspirates" have what is called breathy or murmured voicing, which results from the vocal folds being held together rather loosely. The glottal source spectrum of murmured sounds is much noisier than that of sounds with modal voicing. You can listen to a contrasting set of examples here.
There's always the Harvard system, about which the best guess is that it is based on height of author.
I can't wait to see the lawsuits against the US government for copyright infringement.
Whether Google has a duty to the sites ranked to get it right and explain itself depends on what page rank is. If it is merely opinion, basically subjective, then they have no such duty. If, on the other hand, page rank is an objective measure of visibility on the web or some such thing, then giving a site a lower rank than it deserves is effectively making a false and pejorative claim about the site and the site should be entitled to relief. The applicable law here is the law of commercial libel.
If Sergei Brin posts on his web site that he thinks McDonalds food is awful, McDonalds has no claim against him because he has merely expressed an opinion. If, on the other hand, he posts that he doesn't go to McDonalds because their food is contaminated with E. coli, he has made a factual claim and McDonalds is entitled to go after him if he has it wrong. The question is, is page rank a subjective matter of opinion or an objective claim of fact? It seems to me that it is intended to be the latter, in which case Google has a duty to stand up for it.
Senior curators at the Smithsonian are in the upper GS grades and the ones I know about are outstanding. Of course they're probably not typical of government bureaucrats.
Are you guys in the Coast Guard by any chance? They have a repuation for actually knowing what they're doing.
It's not like the US is the only country in which one observes incompetance and inefficiency. I think the point is that there is good reason to think that the US government is a lot more incompetant and inefficient than it was say ten years ago. The secondary point is that this fits the Bush agenda in several ways. One is that, if you're a hard-core advocate of privatization and corporate welfare, it makes sense to run down government services so as to load the dice in favor of the view that private enterprise will do better. Another is that there is a bias to towards throwing a lot of money at the big corporations. A third is that incompetance and inefficiency are expected results when cronyism and ideological ties override merit. A fourth is that when decisions are made the grounds of ideology, whether religious or political, programs are likely to be ineffective (examples being the administration's insistence that teen sex education focus on abstinence rather than contraception and safe sex and the ridiculous assumptions it made about how Iraqis would greet the US with open arms and readily establish a liberal democracy).
Since there are infinitely man "next library"s and finitely many libraries already in existence, the Lebesgue measure of the set of libraries for which the FSF indicates approval of using the LGPL is 0. In this technical sense one may therefore legitimately say that the FSF opposes the use of the LGPL in all cases.
So long as the Damocles Amendment makes it clear that it overrides the First Amendment, the First Amendment is no barrier. Existing parts of the Constitution don't constrain amendments (except, of course, the parts that specify the amendment process).
You've misread the article. Kirchner is not a reporter; he's the coroner who may have given the reporters his password.
Its hard to evaluate this without knowing what you consider an accomplishment, but it seems dubious however you cut it. Western philosophy and mathematics originated with the Greeks, who were generally bisexual and were certainly not Christian. The next important phase in mathematics and science is dominated by Muslims. Inventors of writing? The Sumerians were not Christian, nor were the Egyptians, the Chinese, or the Olmecs. The latter two were not white, either. Codification of laws? Hammurabi was no Christian, nor was Moses. Indeed, many of the American Founding Fathers were deists, not Christians. Empire-builders? Alexander the Great was bisexual and not a Christian. The creators of the Roman Empire were not Christian. Genghis Khan was non-white and non-Christian. Domesticators of important animals and crops? ALL of the important domestications are due to non-Christians, many of them not white. Inventors of important technology? Numerous inventions are Chinese (non-white, non-Christian), including gunpowder and paper. Literature? The novel was created by Japanese women, not white, not Christian, not male. In modern science, yes, a lot was done by white males, many of them Christian, but a vastly disproportionate percentage were Jews. In the past few decades, Chinese have taken on a disproportionate role.
Do you think that SourceForge is better than Freshmeat? I search Freshmeat when I'm looking for something, and read the front page regularly. I go to SourceForge when referred to a specific project or to file a bug report. The standard Freshmeat format provides more information than the default SourceForge home page, though some projects have elaborate and informative home pages on SourceForge.
This also makes me think of a recommendation for the poster. If your software does something new or unusual, announce it on Freshmeat and make sure to announce new releases so that people will notice it. If your software does something ordinary, people will find it when they search for it, but if it does something unusual, they very likely won't have thought to search for it.
I think you're missing the legal point. Sure, if the laptop contained data that he should have handed over to his employer and he deleted it, he may be in breach of contract. However, the legal issue at hand is not whether he is in breach of contract but whether he illegally accessed the computer. That's in addition to any contractual dispute, and it is important because, unlike the contract dispute, it involves federal law and creates federal jurisdiction.
How do they know at what point he erased the disk? If he erased it before he resigned, he was an authorized user when he did it. It seems to me that all he has to say is that he decided to clear the disk and reinstall shortly before he resigned.
Just make the building circular. Then everyone can have a corner office with a window. Put the bathrooms, storerooms, coffee machines and so forth in the center, with a circular corridor that opens on the outside to the offices and on the inside to the bathrooms etc.
What do you think this is? This is the market speaking. Notice that most of the consortium members are NOT vendors of office software. Libraries, archives, researchers and others who need to use documents produced by others want them to be in an open format. Nobody is trying to force anybody to use any particular format for their own use - the point here is that consumers of documents want to get them in a format that makes the documents useful to them. What we have here is simply advertising for the purpose of affecting the market, just like Microsoft does for its own purposes.