With our crazy patent system, if you're as big as IBM is, the smart thing to do is to patent anything and everything you do. Even if you don't intend to enforce the patent, it prevents someone else from patenting the same thing and suing you. Given court costs to defend against a patent suit and the multi-million dollar awards if you lose, $1500 for a patent application seems like really cheap insurance.
There should be nothing that compels this case to be brought up under ANY modern legislation pertaining computers. Computers and social networking were the means of the harassment... this does not mean there are any new concepts here.
Harassment and emotional abuse can be performed in person or over the Internet, and I've got to imagine that charges for wanton malicious actions against a minor will have much stiffer penalties than a simple ToS violation.
I disagree. The virtual and anonymous environment created by computers and the Internet are crucial factors that uniquely affect how the victim and the perpetrator behave in these situations. It is not like face-to-face meetings in real life, it is not like a video game. It is something in between, with a disassociation between what you say or do and the consequences of those acts because you cannot see or hear the person you're interacting with in real-time. They are just faceless words (except for maybe static pictures) on the screen. It affects a host of other problem behaviors, including spam, viruses, hacking, even copyright violation.
The issue has been known about since the early '90s. This is just the first time it has reared itself with fatal consequences, earning it the attention of the national media. The subtle differences strongly suggest that we should proceed carefully, rather than just blindly apply real-world laws to these situations. As much as I feel for the dead girl, I don't want to see this handled as a straight real-life case of harassment. Otherwise anyone who blows their cool and flames someone online could find the police knocking on their door. Likewise I don't want the Internet to be a place where anyone is free to behave as the woman did without consequence. The anonymous and virtual nature of the Internet affects how people interact with each on it, and the laws should be crafted to reflect that.
True, but the implications of "The United States, as [a] sovereign, 'is immune from suit save as it consents to be sued... and the terms of its consent to be sued in any court define that court's jurisdiction to entertain the suit,'" is particularly frightening language to me.
I'm no lawyer, but I read that as, "We're the government, we can't be sued except when we want to be sued and even then we'll define the conditions of the jurisdiction in which our lawsuit will take place as it suits us," (so to speak).
Not exactly a government by the people for the people.
This isn't exactly a new development. It's been this way for hundreds of years in countries that rely on common law, including the entire history of the U.S. The court made the legally correct (though possibly morally wrong) decision.
Data is stored linearly on a CD (and DVD). So the data can survive huge scratches running from the center to edge, but is very susceptible to radial scratches rotated around the center. If you think of a CD as an old-style phonograph record, you can scratch across the grooves and the error correction will fix it; but scratching along a groove will quickly corrupt the data because the scratch will destroy sequential data (and its ECC). That's why they recommend cleaning CDs by wiping from the center out, never in a circular motion.
That's a pretty fundamental part of information theory - communication in a noisy channel. If your communications (or data storage) are digital, you can overcome any level of random noise (error) at the cost of degraded transmission rate (increased storage requirement). Before CDs, it was (and still is) most prevalent in modem protocols and hard drives. Modern hard drives would probably be impossible without it - read errors are the norm, not the exception. It's just hidden from the high-level software by multiple levels of error correction in the low-level firmware.
Tethering is not against AT&T rules in general. Tethering is supported on AT&T if you have a plan that allows it. In the past, all data plans allowed tethering, and that's the kind I have. Nowadays their data plans for PDA phones come in two levels, with and without tethering. The difference does not seem to be strictly enforced from what I have heard, but if you are caught tethering on a no-tether plan you may be subject to big extra charges.
I've always wondered why the phone companies try to make this distinction. Their network doesn't care if I'm browsing the Internet using my phone or my laptop connected via my phone. The only thing their network cares about is the amount of bandwidth I use. So just let everyone tether to their heart's content, and distinguish between the different tiers of data plans by amount of bandwidth they let you use. e.g. a 10 GB/month plan, a 50 GB/mo plan, and a 200 GB/mo plan. Then make a simple app/site which lets you see how much bandwidth you've consumed so far this month.
You gotta love the humor of conservative lobbyists. "Opportunity" to "act" to reduce the "affordability" of your "college" tuition by hiring a guy to play whack-a-mole with your P2P ports "and" write reports about it?
Umm, I suggest you look a little more deeply into the history of the bill and Hollywood in Congress.
The Hollywood music and movie industries give more money to Democrats than Republicans by a more than 2:1 margin.
The bill, with sec 494, was introduced and sponsored by by George Miller (D-CA) and 29 other Democrats.
The House version (which introduced the offensive section) passed with Democratss voting 219-0 in favor, Republicans voting 135-58 in favor.
The combined Sen/House version passed the House with Dems voting 234-0 in favor, Reps voting 146-49 in favor.
The combined Sen/House version passed the Senate with Dems voting 45-0 in favor, Reps voting 36-8 in favor.
But since it's bad, of course it must be the product of a conservative agenda. The Democrats can do no evil, right?
I have been shocked while wiring internal DSL into a hotel when someone called that number. It's definitely not pleasant, but it's pretty low current so doesn't do much damage (about 20 mA max, fatal level is 100-200 mA). It'll leave your fingers tingling and maybe numb for a minute, but that's about it. I wouldn't really call it dangerous, unless you're doing something stupid like stripping live phone wires with your teeth. That could make you bite your tongue tip off.
I think it works better with power, water, and gas because breaks in those things are actually dangerous. I've run into gas and power problems in the past on my property which should've been my responsibility to fix. But (except for one really expensive fix) the utility company fixed it on their dime anyway. I suspect they'd rather spend a couple hundred dollars repairing something than end up with the bad publicity and possible lawsuit of a house blowing up or a person being electrocuted because they refused to fix it.
The phone company OTOH just hooked up the T1 to the junction box and left. If a phone line or fiber breaks, there isn't exactly much incentive for them to come and fix it promptly. I even had intermittent problems with their lines for two years and they'd try to dodge it rather than fix it. Every time it rained for more than a couple hours, I'd get static on the phone (and the T1 would stop working). I'd call Verizon, they'd open a ticket, which they wouldn't get to for a day or two, by which time the lines were dry and there was no problem, and they'd close the ticket. I finally got lucky when it happened while I was switching T1 companies and a Verizon tech was sitting on the line working with the T1 company.
Work the phones and talk with Verizon's FIOS people. Not the customer support folks, but the technical folks who lay the cable and stuff (if you can catch one of their vans out there laying out cable, talk with the workers). They can get you in touch with managers and supervisors who make the actual go/no-go decisions on who gets FIOS.
My previous workplace was in the same situation with FIOS available literally on the other side of the street, but Verizon unwilling to bring it to their building because it was too far back from the street. After a lot of talking, they came up with an arrangement to split the cost of the fiber install to the building 50/50 (which was still way cheaper than the T1 they were using). Last I heard Verizon decided to just pay for the whole thing. So get on the phone and talk with Verizon.
No, that's the basis of market theory. That a difficult-to-measure figures like "economic value" can, on average, be estimated accurately by people's general feeling about its value. The inputs to the system are rational (e.g. oil supplies, projected demand, whether or not the U.S. decides to drill offshore, etc). But those inputs are processed in the black box of people's hearts and minds. Capitalism is simply based on the premise that having more people process those inputs yields more accurate results than having a few elite people process it. There are no guarantees about its accuracy at any moment in time, only that on average it is more accurate than other methods.
(Ignoring for the moment the environmental aspect of burning oil.)
It's only an appreciating asset up to the point where we develop alternative energy technologies that make it obsolete, as we're clamoring to do. Then it becomes as worthless as whale oil. Well, maybe not quite that worthless, since it'll still find a use in plastics manufacturing, but that only accounts for 5% of current oil consumption.
I hope that I read that wrong. You can get good deals by entering a long term agreement. I pay about $30 less per month for my collocation because I have a 2-year agreement. Are you saying that I should be able to pull out after a month and not have to pay anything? Even if my setup fee was waived because of the deal? That sounds unfair to the providers and if this continues it will result in higher prices for everyone.
You have it backwards. You aren't paying $30 less per month for being in a 2-year contract. People who aren't in a contract or who bought their own phones full price are paying $30 per month too much. The phone companies set up a pricing structure which included prorated charges and termination fees for subsidized phones, but didn't remove those charges for people whose phones weren't being subsidized. If I paid for my phone up-front or it's paid off, why should I be forced into a contract to get lower rates or be charged an early termination fee?
The way it should work is there should be a base monthly fee for phone service and only phone service. If you want the phone company to give you a phone for a no-money-down (or $50-$100 down), then it should be structured as a loan and added on to your bill. If you end your service before the loan is repaid, you're on the hook for the balance of the loan - that's your termination fee. Those of us with old or fully paid for phones shouldn't be paying extra just because the phone company's pricing structure assumes everyone's phone is subsidized.
Will chrome even work against that? It looks like a DF laser outputs light at 3.7-4.2 micrometers, which puts it in the mid-infrared. That'll go right through clouds. Is chrome reflective at that wavelength?
IMHO the lawyers who brought the lawsuit have done even a better PR job. Their version of the "facts" is the #1 hit on Google.
They conveniently omit that the coffee was stored and served at the temperature recommended by the National Coffee Association and is also the default temperature setting used by the largest manufacturer of commercial coffee making machines (scroll down to the bottom).
Their suggestion that coffee should be served at 135-140 F contradicts recommendations by coffee connoisseurs and the industry (Bunn recomments 155-175 F at serving).
Dunkin Donuts and Starbucks served coffee at the same temperature as McDonalds. The lawyers used slick wording to mislead people into thinking the lowest temperature in a survey was the standard coffee serving temperature.
Contrary to your claims, the cups were safe. There were 700 complaints about hot coffee in a decade, but that was across billions of cups served. It works out to a complaint rate of 1 in 24 million. For comparison, the rate of being hit by lighting in the U.S. is 1 in 600,000. The mortality rate in the U.S. from motor vehicles (PDF warning) was 1 in 6580 in 2002. She was 6500x more likely to die from riding in a car than being burned by the coffee. Are cars an unsafe product?
If you read the court documents, you'll see the lawyers concentrated on the severity of the woman's burns, not the circumstances that led to those burns. This was an appeal to emotion, not a dissemination of facts. Anyone who's boiled water has handled (presumably safely) a substance capable of much more severe burns.
That brings up the other problem going on here. They're using punitive fines designed to dissuade professional pirates stamping out tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands or millions of bootleg CDs, and applying them to file sharers who individually probably only account for a few dozen shared copies.
Most people don't realize, a Faraday cage doesn't need to be made of metal, it only needs to be made of a conducting material. Water (especially salt water) is a pretty good conductor. The only RF which can pass transparently through water has wavelengths thousands of km long. So instead most underwater communication is done via cables or acoustically.
Yes, but business people don't fool themselves into thinking market success == good product. No, they are quite well aware that they are often trying to achieve market success with an inferior product. They are well aware that they are essentially tricking people into buying it. If they weren't aware, they wouldn't be able to work around the product's flaws with marketing.
The point is that the business people are driven by money, and they are well aware of the obvious fact that making money doesn't necessarily mean making the best product by any metric. It means making money. That's all.
What you're missing is that in most businesses, the bulk of the money comes from repeat business. Couple that with mass production and for most businesses there's a very high correlation between high quality products and making money. That's why capitalism usually works so much better than centralized or government planning.
Where it doesn't work is when the products are each individual and unique and bought only once. Like with a movie. The fact that the studio's previous movie was great is only very loosely correlated with the quality of the newest movie. There are some minor exceptions like sequels, and using the same director / producer / actors, but those correlations are still loose relative to any other business. The problem you describe of getting people to buy a bad product crops up in these specialized situations, not business in general. (Another place where the problem shows up is when there's a monopoly. Or if a company is on shaky financial footing and has insufficient capital to make a better product, their only choice for survival may be to try to market the bad product.)
Why does it have to be an either/or choice? If we detect the asteroid early, we can push/pull it out of a collision orbit. If we detect it too late to do that, we can nuke it. On that note, I suspect the reason NASA issued a pro-nuclear statement is because realistically that's the only option we have right now. Once an organized detection plan is put into place, then push/pull becomes a viable option. But even then you want to keep nukes on the table. Even the best detection program will have a chance of missing an asteroid until the last minute (well, days).
There's more. It's the name of a native American tribe that was forcibly modernized in-situ when they refused to leave their ancestral lands. Initially they were allowed to live following their old traditions. But eventually they were indoctrinated via mandatory re-education and laws outlawing their old ways, resulting in a dwindling population. I think the naming was a deliberate choice by a Microsoft employee with a cynical sense of humor who was being somewhat honest.
If they NOAA are the good guys? Why do they not do something about it? And why do they have AA in their abbreviated name?
They can't because Congress makes the law and the Executive (basically the President) gives them guiding directives. Anyone trying to counter those will either be disciplined or fired, or brought up on charges for breaking the law.
I also ran into this about 10-15 years ago. I was looking for sea surface temperature data from NOAA satellites so I could plan fishing trips. The satellites were paid for by my taxes, so I figured the data would be available on a public NASA or NOAA ftp server. After a lot of searching I eventually pieced together that some company had managed to get a law passed making them the exclusive distributor of the data, which they'd happily sell me for $60 for one day's photos, or something like $1000/yr. Total BS.
And the other *AAs are "Association of America". The AA in NOAA is "Atmospheric Administration".
You're not giving it to them to give to a political campaign. You're giving it to them (as a pay bonus), and pleading with them to use it to donate to a political campaign. The more loyalty the employees have for the company, the more likely they are to donate. Otherwise they'll spend it on a TV, or gas money, or whatever.
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With our crazy patent system, if you're as big as IBM is, the smart thing to do is to patent anything and everything you do. Even if you don't intend to enforce the patent, it prevents someone else from patenting the same thing and suing you. Given court costs to defend against a patent suit and the multi-million dollar awards if you lose, $1500 for a patent application seems like really cheap insurance.
I disagree. The virtual and anonymous environment created by computers and the Internet are crucial factors that uniquely affect how the victim and the perpetrator behave in these situations. It is not like face-to-face meetings in real life, it is not like a video game. It is something in between, with a disassociation between what you say or do and the consequences of those acts because you cannot see or hear the person you're interacting with in real-time. They are just faceless words (except for maybe static pictures) on the screen. It affects a host of other problem behaviors, including spam, viruses, hacking, even copyright violation.
The issue has been known about since the early '90s. This is just the first time it has reared itself with fatal consequences, earning it the attention of the national media. The subtle differences strongly suggest that we should proceed carefully, rather than just blindly apply real-world laws to these situations. As much as I feel for the dead girl, I don't want to see this handled as a straight real-life case of harassment. Otherwise anyone who blows their cool and flames someone online could find the police knocking on their door. Likewise I don't want the Internet to be a place where anyone is free to behave as the woman did without consequence. The anonymous and virtual nature of the Internet affects how people interact with each on it, and the laws should be crafted to reflect that.
It was Alvin, and the concern was the windows were made of plexiglas rather than quartz. Looks like Google Books has an excerpt of the page.
This isn't exactly a new development. It's been this way for hundreds of years in countries that rely on common law, including the entire history of the U.S. The court made the legally correct (though possibly morally wrong) decision.
Data is stored linearly on a CD (and DVD). So the data can survive huge scratches running from the center to edge, but is very susceptible to radial scratches rotated around the center. If you think of a CD as an old-style phonograph record, you can scratch across the grooves and the error correction will fix it; but scratching along a groove will quickly corrupt the data because the scratch will destroy sequential data (and its ECC). That's why they recommend cleaning CDs by wiping from the center out, never in a circular motion.
That's a pretty fundamental part of information theory - communication in a noisy channel. If your communications (or data storage) are digital, you can overcome any level of random noise (error) at the cost of degraded transmission rate (increased storage requirement). Before CDs, it was (and still is) most prevalent in modem protocols and hard drives. Modern hard drives would probably be impossible without it - read errors are the norm, not the exception. It's just hidden from the high-level software by multiple levels of error correction in the low-level firmware.
They even tipped their hat to the groups who helped draft it, and made sure its name ended in *AA.
I've always wondered why the phone companies try to make this distinction. Their network doesn't care if I'm browsing the Internet using my phone or my laptop connected via my phone. The only thing their network cares about is the amount of bandwidth I use. So just let everyone tether to their heart's content, and distinguish between the different tiers of data plans by amount of bandwidth they let you use. e.g. a 10 GB/month plan, a 50 GB/mo plan, and a 200 GB/mo plan. Then make a simple app/site which lets you see how much bandwidth you've consumed so far this month.
Umm, I suggest you look a little more deeply into the history of the bill and Hollywood in Congress.
But since it's bad, of course it must be the product of a conservative agenda. The Democrats can do no evil, right?
I have been shocked while wiring internal DSL into a hotel when someone called that number. It's definitely not pleasant, but it's pretty low current so doesn't do much damage (about 20 mA max, fatal level is 100-200 mA). It'll leave your fingers tingling and maybe numb for a minute, but that's about it. I wouldn't really call it dangerous, unless you're doing something stupid like stripping live phone wires with your teeth. That could make you bite your tongue tip off.
I think it works better with power, water, and gas because breaks in those things are actually dangerous. I've run into gas and power problems in the past on my property which should've been my responsibility to fix. But (except for one really expensive fix) the utility company fixed it on their dime anyway. I suspect they'd rather spend a couple hundred dollars repairing something than end up with the bad publicity and possible lawsuit of a house blowing up or a person being electrocuted because they refused to fix it.
The phone company OTOH just hooked up the T1 to the junction box and left. If a phone line or fiber breaks, there isn't exactly much incentive for them to come and fix it promptly. I even had intermittent problems with their lines for two years and they'd try to dodge it rather than fix it. Every time it rained for more than a couple hours, I'd get static on the phone (and the T1 would stop working). I'd call Verizon, they'd open a ticket, which they wouldn't get to for a day or two, by which time the lines were dry and there was no problem, and they'd close the ticket. I finally got lucky when it happened while I was switching T1 companies and a Verizon tech was sitting on the line working with the T1 company.
Work the phones and talk with Verizon's FIOS people. Not the customer support folks, but the technical folks who lay the cable and stuff (if you can catch one of their vans out there laying out cable, talk with the workers). They can get you in touch with managers and supervisors who make the actual go/no-go decisions on who gets FIOS.
My previous workplace was in the same situation with FIOS available literally on the other side of the street, but Verizon unwilling to bring it to their building because it was too far back from the street. After a lot of talking, they came up with an arrangement to split the cost of the fiber install to the building 50/50 (which was still way cheaper than the T1 they were using). Last I heard Verizon decided to just pay for the whole thing. So get on the phone and talk with Verizon.
No, that's the basis of market theory. That a difficult-to-measure figures like "economic value" can, on average, be estimated accurately by people's general feeling about its value. The inputs to the system are rational (e.g. oil supplies, projected demand, whether or not the U.S. decides to drill offshore, etc). But those inputs are processed in the black box of people's hearts and minds. Capitalism is simply based on the premise that having more people process those inputs yields more accurate results than having a few elite people process it. There are no guarantees about its accuracy at any moment in time, only that on average it is more accurate than other methods.
(Ignoring for the moment the environmental aspect of burning oil.)
It's only an appreciating asset up to the point where we develop alternative energy technologies that make it obsolete, as we're clamoring to do. Then it becomes as worthless as whale oil. Well, maybe not quite that worthless, since it'll still find a use in plastics manufacturing, but that only accounts for 5% of current oil consumption.
You have it backwards. You aren't paying $30 less per month for being in a 2-year contract. People who aren't in a contract or who bought their own phones full price are paying $30 per month too much. The phone companies set up a pricing structure which included prorated charges and termination fees for subsidized phones, but didn't remove those charges for people whose phones weren't being subsidized. If I paid for my phone up-front or it's paid off, why should I be forced into a contract to get lower rates or be charged an early termination fee?
The way it should work is there should be a base monthly fee for phone service and only phone service. If you want the phone company to give you a phone for a no-money-down (or $50-$100 down), then it should be structured as a loan and added on to your bill. If you end your service before the loan is repaid, you're on the hook for the balance of the loan - that's your termination fee. Those of us with old or fully paid for phones shouldn't be paying extra just because the phone company's pricing structure assumes everyone's phone is subsidized.
Will chrome even work against that? It looks like a DF laser outputs light at 3.7-4.2 micrometers, which puts it in the mid-infrared. That'll go right through clouds. Is chrome reflective at that wavelength?
Read the case as told by the lawyers who brought the suit. Then read an alternate viewpoint. Then decide for yourself which side is more in line with the facts.
That brings up the other problem going on here. They're using punitive fines designed to dissuade professional pirates stamping out tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands or millions of bootleg CDs, and applying them to file sharers who individually probably only account for a few dozen shared copies.
Most people don't realize, a Faraday cage doesn't need to be made of metal, it only needs to be made of a conducting material. Water (especially salt water) is a pretty good conductor. The only RF which can pass transparently through water has wavelengths thousands of km long. So instead most underwater communication is done via cables or acoustically.
Yeah, a doesn't need to be made of metal, it only needs to be made of a conducting material. Water (especially salt water) is a pretty good conductor. The only RF which can pass transparently through water has wavelengths thousands of km long. So instead most underwater communication is done via cables or acoustically.
What you're missing is that in most businesses, the bulk of the money comes from repeat business. Couple that with mass production and for most businesses there's a very high correlation between high quality products and making money. That's why capitalism usually works so much better than centralized or government planning.
Where it doesn't work is when the products are each individual and unique and bought only once. Like with a movie. The fact that the studio's previous movie was great is only very loosely correlated with the quality of the newest movie. There are some minor exceptions like sequels, and using the same director / producer / actors, but those correlations are still loose relative to any other business. The problem you describe of getting people to buy a bad product crops up in these specialized situations, not business in general. (Another place where the problem shows up is when there's a monopoly. Or if a company is on shaky financial footing and has insufficient capital to make a better product, their only choice for survival may be to try to market the bad product.)
Why does it have to be an either/or choice? If we detect the asteroid early, we can push/pull it out of a collision orbit. If we detect it too late to do that, we can nuke it. On that note, I suspect the reason NASA issued a pro-nuclear statement is because realistically that's the only option we have right now. Once an organized detection plan is put into place, then push/pull becomes a viable option. But even then you want to keep nukes on the table. Even the best detection program will have a chance of missing an asteroid until the last minute (well, days).
There's more. It's the name of a native American tribe that was forcibly modernized in-situ when they refused to leave their ancestral lands. Initially they were allowed to live following their old traditions. But eventually they were indoctrinated via mandatory re-education and laws outlawing their old ways, resulting in a dwindling population. I think the naming was a deliberate choice by a Microsoft employee with a cynical sense of humor who was being somewhat honest.
They can't because Congress makes the law and the Executive (basically the President) gives them guiding directives. Anyone trying to counter those will either be disciplined or fired, or brought up on charges for breaking the law.
I also ran into this about 10-15 years ago. I was looking for sea surface temperature data from NOAA satellites so I could plan fishing trips. The satellites were paid for by my taxes, so I figured the data would be available on a public NASA or NOAA ftp server. After a lot of searching I eventually pieced together that some company had managed to get a law passed making them the exclusive distributor of the data, which they'd happily sell me for $60 for one day's photos, or something like $1000/yr. Total BS.
And the other *AAs are "Association of America". The AA in NOAA is "Atmospheric Administration".
You're not giving it to them to give to a political campaign. You're giving it to them (as a pay bonus), and pleading with them to use it to donate to a political campaign. The more loyalty the employees have for the company, the more likely they are to donate. Otherwise they'll spend it on a TV, or gas money, or whatever.