what you need to consider is that we are now in a global market competition for goods and services that will require innovation to stay on top
Well duh! That's why we need to concentrate on practical research, instead of pure academic research. The technological edge some from practical applied research. I have nothing against pure academic research, but when you can get it from someone else for free, why pay for it? Believe me, if someone in France discovers a new subatomic particle, the US will know about it. If there is technologically relevant information to be had in an Finnish research paper on the behavior of the reindeer flea, the US can alway go out and purchase that issue of the journal.
Concentrating funding on practical instead of theoretical research does not make people stupid.
Let me go off on a tiny tangent here: economics. Basic research is one of those things that once discovered, everyone gets it. (Unless it gets classified because it has military potential). So if everyone gets to benefit from it, who should actually spend the money on it? The answer is "not me!" It's more cost effective for us to subscribe to a journal than to fund the guys writing for it. I say let the nations that want to do basic research do it, and let the US fund the applied engineering that creates private sector jobs.
The imperative to learn stuff before the Soviets do is gone. We're not in a race anymore, so we should stop acting like we are.
Freedom is not about about imposing restrictions, it is about REMOVING restrictions. The more restrictions, conditions and stipulations that the GPL has, the less free it is.
The FSF deludes itself into thinking that restrictions are necessary for freedom, but that is because they do not understand what it is. They think freedom is about controlling the code they wrote even after they have given it away. They think it is about telling the user what he can or cannot do.
However, you have a number of problems with defining distribution in such a way as to include web services.
The biggest problem being that copyright law already has a definition of distribution. Running the software remotely does not count. Applets are distributed, servlets are not.
Screw fairness. Anyone who managed to graduate from kindergarten knows that life isn't fair. Mature people learn to deal with it and move on. Besides, it's called the "Free Software Foundation", not the "Fair Software Foundation."
Holy crap! What were Eben and Richard smoking when they came up with that one! Don't they realize this fails their own definition of Free Software? It's basically saying "once a DVD player, always a DVD player." A sufficiently pedantic lawyer could argue that it does not allow you to modify software beyond its specifications.
The FSF is trying to be too clever for their own good. If the FSF had written the US Bill of RIghts it would have ended up being a twenty page document. Sometimes I seriously wonder if they even know what the first word of their name even means.
Well, thank god! Phew. Dodged a bullet. But, one thing, can you tell me, please, how you know this? I know a blanket assertion without a backing citation or reference is totally awesome, but still.
How do you know that the missing eighteen minutes of the Nixon tapes aren't in there? You don't! Hell, they might even tell us what really happened to Jimmy Hoffa!
But I seriously doubt it. And because phone records don't include taped conversations, I seriously doubt they were handed over either.
Well whoopty-fucking-doo, if they are being infringed on a regular basis, I guess that makes it OK then. Wouldn't want my rights only occasionally violated, now would I?
I am a personal fan of the tenth ammendment. Unfortunately I can't remember the last time it was enforced. There are two reasons I excluded it in this case:
1) I didn't want to get into a discussion of what a "right" is. A right to a job isn't enumerated in the constitution, does that mean I have a right to compel an employer to hire me? Privacy is too vague of a concept to declare a right, in my opinion. Some elements of privacy are, however. The right to be secure in your home and property, for example. But does one have the right to forcible prevent a third party from divulging personal information about you?
The Bill of Rights is a list of things the government CANNOT do. It is a set of limitations. Some aspects of privacy fall into this category. But others would compel the government to action, and still others would compel private third parties to action.
2) The second reason is cynical. Those people quickest to point to the tenth ammendment also tend to be the most selective in pointing to it. The tenth gives them an excuse to say "rights for me but not for thee". If you think it's a right then claim the tenth, if you don't then pretend it doesn't exist. There is no consistancy, and I don't wish to get into a discussion with someone who recognizes that the tenth exists only when it is in their favor. For example, some argue that privacy rights fall under the tenth, but then ignore it if it's the privacy of a business or corporation and not an individual.
But that has nothing at all to do with the AT&T case. Yes, it covers one aspect of privacy, namely your personal property. But it doesn't have anything to do with customer billing information voluntarily handed over to the government. No one entered your apartment. No one even tapped your phone. This is about a company choosing to hand over its billing records for the purpose of data mining.
I'm not saying it is right or wrong, I'm just saying the constitution (with the possible exception of the unenforced tenth ammendment) has nothing to say on the matter. The fourth simply doesn't apply, because a search and seizure was not made.
this lawsuit is fundamentally about secret wiretapping, right?
Wrong. This is not about wiretapping. This is about data mining. The wiretapping is a separate issue. This issue is about raw aggregate data. It's essentially the data on the second page of your phone bill.
Whether or not you feel this is wrong, it is NOT wiretapping.
You're right. Bush killed off the hybrids, and now they don't exist. How could I have been so stupid. This morning I saw that most of my neighbors had hybrids, but I must have been imagining it.
and other activists who argued that their constitutional rights had been violated
Have these people read the US Constitution? There may be a right to privacy, but it is not enumerated nor implied in that document. The closest you can get is the ninth and tenth ammendments, which are the two that are NEVER honored.
The core problem is that privacy is a vague (and very modern) concept. If I give someone a phonebook with your number in it, have I violated your privacy? How much worse is it if it's an unlisted number? Or if I give it to the government instead of to my neighbor? Or if I'm a phone company instead of an individual? Because privacy is such a nebulous property, the answers to these questions are anything but clear. The closest the courts have gotten to a definition (in the absence of anything in the Constitition itself) is the not-quite-so-vague concept of "expectation of privacy". But with the every changing technological landscape, expectations get pretty hard to pin down.
Senator Barbara Boxer regularly spams my inbox with junk. How did she get my address? Why isn't the local Registrar of Voters being sued for giving her my personal information? Why isn't Yahoo being sued for selling my account information to the highest bidder? Why isn't my old landlord being sued for telling my creditors where I moved? What makes that any of that different from what AT&T did?
AT&T didn't hand over any voice tapes of your private conversations. They might have handed over the times a call was place from your number to your mother's number, in aggregate with millions of other such records. To everyone the former is a privacy violation, to to many the latter is not. Simply because the line is very fuzzy and wide.
I'm not arguing that there isn't a right to privacy. Rather I am arguing that you're on very loose ground arguing over a constitutional right to privacy. If you think the situation is going to improve, you're sadly mistaken. I strongly suspect technology will make privacy obsolete.
Got something other than your 'belief' that there's nothing to this?
Not really. But I do have forty years of experience with people telling me there's a global oil industry conspiracy to keep alternative power sources off the market. Maybe it's true and Bush/Cheney are the culmination of a half century skullduggery by Rockefeller's ghost, or maybe it's not. But the theory itself is boring and decrepit.
California (unofficially) has their housing inspectors on a quota system. You are expected to write up at least one violation per inspection. So building contractors learn to create one obvious but easy to fix code violation on every house they built. The inspector would find it, write it up, and leave.
The problem isn't contractors taking advantage of the system, but rather that it's bureaucrats running the system. You don't get paid any more for doing a good job instead of a bad job, and the bureacracy as a whole actually benefits from bad jobs because they'll get more funding to fix the problem.
But I don't see this at all - how are state divisions meant to prevent mob rule?
It decentralizes power! If you don't think that matters, you're asleep. If you're a Democrat you're worried about all that power centralized in the Bush administration. If you're a Republican, you're spent the 90s worried about all the power centralized in the Clinton administration. If you're Libertarian or Green, you're worried about all the other people busy voting for centralized power to petty tyrants.
Perfection is not an option, but the decentralized government lends itself to far fewer abuses of power than strongly centralized government.
In other words, if 51% of a state's voters choose Candidate A, but the nationwide vote is 51% for Candidate B, then the state electorates go against their voters. Geez, talk about emasculating states!
The Electoral College is there for a reason. This proposal would coerce small states into doing what the big states tell it to.
I wish people would stop treating "record breaking" temperatures and other day-to-day thermometer readings are relevent to global warming. I've been seeing "record breaking" temperatures at least every other year since I can remember. I remember as a kid decades ago hearing on the news about old ladies dying in a New York heat wave. Doesn't someone die of the heat every couple of years in New York City?
How many days are there in a year? How many years have we been tracking temperatures? How many locations track temperature? How many of those record temperatures in a year are record lows? Think about the statistics. Also consider that a "record" temperature last Saturday might have been the mean temperature on Sunday, but only Saturday's weather report induces panic. And what does it mean when a town has a record temperature, but another town twenty miles south doesn't, even though it was one degree hotter?
It may have a "record breaking" weekend where you live, but it wasn't where I live. Yes, it was a scorcher where I live, but it wasn't unusual. We neared record electricity usage from all the air conditioners running, but that's simply because there are more people here this year than last year.
Get with the program. That was last year's conspiracy theory! This year we're supposed to talk about how Lex Luthor is causing global warming because he bought beach front property in Nevada.
Slashdot Mirror
Funny, my Honda and my neighbors Toyota where both built in the US.
what you need to consider is that we are now in a global market competition for goods and services that will require innovation to stay on top
Well duh! That's why we need to concentrate on practical research, instead of pure academic research. The technological edge some from practical applied research. I have nothing against pure academic research, but when you can get it from someone else for free, why pay for it? Believe me, if someone in France discovers a new subatomic particle, the US will know about it. If there is technologically relevant information to be had in an Finnish research paper on the behavior of the reindeer flea, the US can alway go out and purchase that issue of the journal.
Concentrating funding on practical instead of theoretical research does not make people stupid.
Don't forget that we were in a race to beat the Soviets.
Let me go off on a tiny tangent here: economics. Basic research is one of those things that once discovered, everyone gets it. (Unless it gets classified because it has military potential). So if everyone gets to benefit from it, who should actually spend the money on it? The answer is "not me!" It's more cost effective for us to subscribe to a journal than to fund the guys writing for it. I say let the nations that want to do basic research do it, and let the US fund the applied engineering that creates private sector jobs.
The imperative to learn stuff before the Soviets do is gone. We're not in a race anymore, so we should stop acting like we are.
Freedom is not about about imposing restrictions, it is about REMOVING restrictions. The more restrictions, conditions and stipulations that the GPL has, the less free it is.
The FSF deludes itself into thinking that restrictions are necessary for freedom, but that is because they do not understand what it is. They think freedom is about controlling the code they wrote even after they have given it away. They think it is about telling the user what he can or cannot do.
The GPL has never, will never, and can never cover the generated output of any GPL'ed program.
Unless, of course, such output is a webservice.
However, you have a number of problems with defining distribution in such a way as to include web services.
The biggest problem being that copyright law already has a definition of distribution. Running the software remotely does not count. Applets are distributed, servlets are not.
Screw fairness. Anyone who managed to graduate from kindergarten knows that life isn't fair. Mature people learn to deal with it and move on. Besides, it's called the "Free Software Foundation", not the "Fair Software Foundation."
Holy crap! What were Eben and Richard smoking when they came up with that one! Don't they realize this fails their own definition of Free Software? It's basically saying "once a DVD player, always a DVD player." A sufficiently pedantic lawyer could argue that it does not allow you to modify software beyond its specifications.
The FSF is trying to be too clever for their own good. If the FSF had written the US Bill of RIghts it would have ended up being a twenty page document. Sometimes I seriously wonder if they even know what the first word of their name even means.
Well, thank god! Phew. Dodged a bullet. But, one thing, can you tell me, please, how you know this? I know a blanket assertion without a backing citation or reference is totally awesome, but still.
How do you know that the missing eighteen minutes of the Nixon tapes aren't in there? You don't! Hell, they might even tell us what really happened to Jimmy Hoffa!
But I seriously doubt it. And because phone records don't include taped conversations, I seriously doubt they were handed over either.
Well whoopty-fucking-doo, if they are being infringed on a regular basis, I guess that makes it OK then. Wouldn't want my rights only occasionally violated, now would I?
I am a personal fan of the tenth ammendment. Unfortunately I can't remember the last time it was enforced. There are two reasons I excluded it in this case:
1) I didn't want to get into a discussion of what a "right" is. A right to a job isn't enumerated in the constitution, does that mean I have a right to compel an employer to hire me? Privacy is too vague of a concept to declare a right, in my opinion. Some elements of privacy are, however. The right to be secure in your home and property, for example. But does one have the right to forcible prevent a third party from divulging personal information about you?
The Bill of Rights is a list of things the government CANNOT do. It is a set of limitations. Some aspects of privacy fall into this category. But others would compel the government to action, and still others would compel private third parties to action.
2) The second reason is cynical. Those people quickest to point to the tenth ammendment also tend to be the most selective in pointing to it. The tenth gives them an excuse to say "rights for me but not for thee". If you think it's a right then claim the tenth, if you don't then pretend it doesn't exist. There is no consistancy, and I don't wish to get into a discussion with someone who recognizes that the tenth exists only when it is in their favor. For example, some argue that privacy rights fall under the tenth, but then ignore it if it's the privacy of a business or corporation and not an individual.
...and the right to security from unreasonable searches and siezures. I would think that this story would fall at least under the latter.
Neither you, your home, or your possessions were searched, nor was any of your property seized.
But that has nothing at all to do with the AT&T case. Yes, it covers one aspect of privacy, namely your personal property. But it doesn't have anything to do with customer billing information voluntarily handed over to the government. No one entered your apartment. No one even tapped your phone. This is about a company choosing to hand over its billing records for the purpose of data mining.
I'm not saying it is right or wrong, I'm just saying the constitution (with the possible exception of the unenforced tenth ammendment) has nothing to say on the matter. The fourth simply doesn't apply, because a search and seizure was not made.
this lawsuit is fundamentally about secret wiretapping, right?
Wrong. This is not about wiretapping. This is about data mining. The wiretapping is a separate issue. This issue is about raw aggregate data. It's essentially the data on the second page of your phone bill.
Whether or not you feel this is wrong, it is NOT wiretapping.
You're right. Bush killed off the hybrids, and now they don't exist. How could I have been so stupid. This morning I saw that most of my neighbors had hybrids, but I must have been imagining it.
and other activists who argued that their constitutional rights had been violated
Have these people read the US Constitution? There may be a right to privacy, but it is not enumerated nor implied in that document. The closest you can get is the ninth and tenth ammendments, which are the two that are NEVER honored.
The core problem is that privacy is a vague (and very modern) concept. If I give someone a phonebook with your number in it, have I violated your privacy? How much worse is it if it's an unlisted number? Or if I give it to the government instead of to my neighbor? Or if I'm a phone company instead of an individual? Because privacy is such a nebulous property, the answers to these questions are anything but clear. The closest the courts have gotten to a definition (in the absence of anything in the Constitition itself) is the not-quite-so-vague concept of "expectation of privacy". But with the every changing technological landscape, expectations get pretty hard to pin down.
Senator Barbara Boxer regularly spams my inbox with junk. How did she get my address? Why isn't the local Registrar of Voters being sued for giving her my personal information? Why isn't Yahoo being sued for selling my account information to the highest bidder? Why isn't my old landlord being sued for telling my creditors where I moved? What makes that any of that different from what AT&T did?
AT&T didn't hand over any voice tapes of your private conversations. They might have handed over the times a call was place from your number to your mother's number, in aggregate with millions of other such records. To everyone the former is a privacy violation, to to many the latter is not. Simply because the line is very fuzzy and wide.
I'm not arguing that there isn't a right to privacy. Rather I am arguing that you're on very loose ground arguing over a constitutional right to privacy. If you think the situation is going to improve, you're sadly mistaken. I strongly suspect technology will make privacy obsolete.
Got something other than your 'belief' that there's nothing to this?
Not really. But I do have forty years of experience with people telling me there's a global oil industry conspiracy to keep alternative power sources off the market. Maybe it's true and Bush/Cheney are the culmination of a half century skullduggery by Rockefeller's ghost, or maybe it's not. But the theory itself is boring and decrepit.
California (unofficially) has their housing inspectors on a quota system. You are expected to write up at least one violation per inspection. So building contractors learn to create one obvious but easy to fix code violation on every house they built. The inspector would find it, write it up, and leave.
The problem isn't contractors taking advantage of the system, but rather that it's bureaucrats running the system. You don't get paid any more for doing a good job instead of a bad job, and the bureacracy as a whole actually benefits from bad jobs because they'll get more funding to fix the problem.
But I don't see this at all - how are state divisions meant to prevent mob rule?
It decentralizes power! If you don't think that matters, you're asleep. If you're a Democrat you're worried about all that power centralized in the Bush administration. If you're a Republican, you're spent the 90s worried about all the power centralized in the Clinton administration. If you're Libertarian or Green, you're worried about all the other people busy voting for centralized power to petty tyrants.
Perfection is not an option, but the decentralized government lends itself to far fewer abuses of power than strongly centralized government.
In other words, if 51% of a state's voters choose Candidate A, but the nationwide vote is 51% for Candidate B, then the state electorates go against their voters. Geez, talk about emasculating states!
The Electoral College is there for a reason. This proposal would coerce small states into doing what the big states tell it to.
Intel's on my list of good guys. NVidia and ATI are not. Now make a wild guess as which one makes the video hardware on my laptop?
I wish people would stop treating "record breaking" temperatures and other day-to-day thermometer readings are relevent to global warming. I've been seeing "record breaking" temperatures at least every other year since I can remember. I remember as a kid decades ago hearing on the news about old ladies dying in a New York heat wave. Doesn't someone die of the heat every couple of years in New York City?
How many days are there in a year? How many years have we been tracking temperatures? How many locations track temperature? How many of those record temperatures in a year are record lows? Think about the statistics. Also consider that a "record" temperature last Saturday might have been the mean temperature on Sunday, but only Saturday's weather report induces panic. And what does it mean when a town has a record temperature, but another town twenty miles south doesn't, even though it was one degree hotter?
It may have a "record breaking" weekend where you live, but it wasn't where I live. Yes, it was a scorcher where I live, but it wasn't unusual. We neared record electricity usage from all the air conditioners running, but that's simply because there are more people here this year than last year.
So basically you're pumping all that heat outdoors into your home.
Get with the program. That was last year's conspiracy theory! This year we're supposed to talk about how Lex Luthor is causing global warming because he bought beach front property in Nevada.
Huh? Firmware doesn't cause those problems, it makes them GO AWAY!