I suspect that the answer to #1 is that it was intended as a response to Napster's filtering that would not have existed if it weren't for that... If that's true, then that's very strong circumstantial evidence that they fully intended to abet infringement.
Go ahead and make a similar case that cars are intended primarily as infringement tools. Hell, these two questions are asked by the DMCA, IIRC -- which, for all the whining about it that people do on this site, you'd expect that people actually would bother to read.
Many people, including, a few years ago, the Federal Government (specifically HUD, under Clinton / Cuomo, which threatened to sue financially-strapped S&W into oblivion unless it made a deal).
Two critical concepts that Timothy is, almost certainly, willfully ignoring in order to stimulate a flame-fest --
* Primary purpose. What was Aimster designed to do? Given their name, clearly they're trying to resemble Napster, which doesn't exactly imply clean hands.
* Substantial non-infringing use. What is it used for? If the usage patterns are anything like Napster's, where usage dropped dramatically once they started filtering, then they're quite possibly guilty as hell.
Timothy's comment is merely a pathetically transparent strawman -- nothing more.
That may be more of a function of your school not asking for much more than quickly-answered questions. A profound synthesis/analysis question that actually requires a significant amount of thought requires comprehension and logic regardless of the storage medium -- and in that case, search efficiency is a good thing.
I find that the mundane details are in the resources I'm hunting for -- whether they be research papers and books that may be related to my work, or for unrelated queries such as analyses of Constitutional law. The actual process of searching a card catalog and hunting down physical volumes isn't terribly informative by itself.
It's interesting that the parent post got marked as a troll. Perhaps a moderator's uncomfortable with the concept that not all kids are, in terms of aptitudes and mental capabilities, identical. One would think that statement is, in fact, self-evident given the existence of extreme outliers -- would one argue that with effort, anybody could be a proficient golfer as Mr. Woods? Or that aptitude in physics and mathematics meant that Einstein could have instead applied his talents to become a star choreographer of modern dance?
Instead, it seems clear that different skills tax different traits, and these can even be linked to different physical areas of the brain. Human brains are not identical even at birth. Should we expect perfectly identical behavior from such complex organisms when even more basic functions such vary to the point where most of us do not have *precisely* a "normal body temperature" of exactly 98.6F?
And your statistics and research to back them up are... ?
Can you cite NEAP estimates? Refute the Flynn effect? Refute the trends in Iowan test scores -- Iowa has a long history of state exams, including methods for determining relative difficulty from year to year -- which have actually been positive, IIRC?
Can you claim that educational standards have been _dropping_? Or contradict the studies that show that, contrary to popular misconception, teens DO read and aren't just TV drones?
Kids generally aren't bureaucrats. Employees in a large hierarchy have an incentive to place greater trust in machines -- namely, to justify the costs of their machines, and to safeguard their jobs from higher-ups who also feel the need to justify the costs of their machines (and thus, given the choice between human and computer judgement, might be somewhat biased towards the computer).
Kids, OTOH, aren't generally subject to being, say, disowned, and they're usually hired by people who spent millions of dollars on mainframes and software that's been trusted for so many years that it must be right -- or somebody will look like a fool.
Whether or not they have employ critical thought may be a more general problem; for instance, whether or not they believe gossip, or sensationalist "news", or so forth.
SCOTUS would probably suggest that there is no reasonable right to privacy for students in a school. ISTR that they've (well, maybe not the current members, but not THAT long ago) upheld locker searches on a similar basis. And as long as the school makes sufficient effort to restrict access to the monitoring data to parents and school administrators, that argument might still stick.
One might also need the data -- their collection of previous raw test scores and so forth, which the system used to determine relative difficulty of exams from year to year. Just the source code might not be as useful if the bugs were subtle and unusual.
Heh. That's just ASKING for mean-spirited jokes about protecting kids from heavily armed soldiers breaking into kids' homes and forcing them out of the country...
With companies, you can avoid doing business with them. And they're accountable to the judicial system...
...whereas a corrupt government can *control* the judicial system, and even results in such absurdities as "investigating" Congressmen coaching witnesses about taking the fifth, and a DOJ that cheerfully looks the other way as relevant persons flee the country.
And try defying either. A business is likely to merely be annoyed if you ignore its ads and don't buy its products. A government is likely to eventually send heavily armed people after you if you ignore ITS dictats.
You do realize, of course, that at one point the Soviets were *really* freaked because they had mistaken a satellite launch by a Norwegian vessel as a possible surprise solo nuclear missile strike on them. The world came fairly close to being obliterated -- which would have been avoided if the superpowers knew that they could down singleton birds.
No. Of course you didn't know that. You probably never research this sort of thing.
For that matter, you're probably not aware that a PRC military official pointedly made the statement that the US cared more about Los Angeles than Taiwan. It doesn't take a DIA analyst to know what THAT means. And why the PRC opposes NMD more vehemently than the Russians -- because the Russians *know* that they could overwhelm it, while the PRC isn't sure -- and it's important to their foreign policy that they *are* able to destroy large cities in the United States.
And I don't think you're going to be able to push "microwaves from space" on a population that's so scientifically illiterate that large segments are frightened by NMR (because of the word 'nuclear'), by irradiated food (it'll make you radioactive! Right.), and genetics (there are non-trivial numbers of people so un-clued that they believe that food doesn't even HAVE genes unless they're engineered to do so). It'll fry us, right?
a) implement air units in a _reasonable_ way -- find a way to let them fly OVER other units, for cryin' out loud. In SMAC you could block planet-busting missiles with a line of Chiron locusts...
b) less blatant AI cheating; even if they know exactly how much tech and money you have, and whether you have nukes, AI's really shouldn't *flaunt* it.
c) tech costs that are based on specific areas, and not just how many (of any kind) techs you already have
d) differentiate between "hard to kill" versus "likely to kill you if you try". Not all battles should end in a unit death.
e) a GOTO algorithm that actually handles a *round world* and doesn't try to go the long way around if you cross 0 longitude.
f) quality control. Please, fewer blatant bugs like infinite-range AI missiles, et al.
g) auto-engineers/formers that AREN'T so irritating, riding around rails in infinite loops, that I vaporize them out of contempt.
h) Interface improvements. e.g. ability to drag a line indicating multiple squares where I want a railroad to be built. CivII/SMAC both degenerate into massive amounts of inane micro in large worlds.
i) if they go with SMAC-style social engineering... make them fit. Morgan had the LEAST incentive to go Free Markets, for instance, because a mere +1 economy would suffice for the big boost rather than +2.
Re:Good point. Outlaw pay phone use by children.
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"For the children" is a slogan that's well-tested for luring women voters. ISTR that surveys and focus groups have shown that they respond to it positively, regardless of context.
Re:web filtering is good for children and america
on
Congress@Work
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· Score: 1
I'm pretty sure that it's a _Dr. Strangelove_ reference. Gen. Jack Ripper's letter refers to protecting the US from godless Commies using fluoridation to contaminate our "precious, bodily fluids".
When he's talking about radical environmentalists, I suspect that he's referring to ELF (moreso than Earth First!, even). "ELF" arson has been linked to teenagers.
It depends on the market. In the wargaming and hardcore TBS sectors, for instance, there are many gamers NOT addicted to glitz. Both _Space Empires 4_ and _Combat Mission_ were done by small developers, and both are highly-praised products that have far more gameplay than, oh, full-motion video. Both succeeded. _TOAW_, while not by a 'small' house, is another example of a game for which flashiness is irrelevant, because the focus is on the system and scenarios.
Now, it may be easier to ignore FMV and so forth in the strategy market than in other sectors -- but it should still be possible. That's especially true for a small house where you don't have the overhead of much larger HR, marketing and so forth.
I'm reminded of Netrek, where only the trusted compilers have RSA keys used when compiling the official versions of blessed (legitimate) clients, which are then used to answer verification challenges from the servers.
Hence, if you want to use an augmented Borg client, you need to use a server configured not to use the crypto. One could probably edit the Quake client to use the same system to verify the server type and warn the user if it came from an untrusted source.
This Constitution, and the laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof; and all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every state shall be bound thereby, anything in the Constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding.
Federal law trumps state law. Since the Feds claim that drug enforcement is a federal power, the 10th shouldn't apply -- unless CA argued that the Feds had *no right* at all to legislate with regards to drugs in CA.
Remember the Jon Katz book brouhaha? ISTR that/.'s editorial staff was of the opinion that they *could* in fact republish en masse without bothering to ask for consent.
Slashdot Mirror
Have you looked at Sony v. Betamax yet?
The fundamental questions are:
1. What is the intended purpose of Aimster?
2. Does it have significant, non-infringing use?
I suspect that the answer to #1 is that it was intended as a response to Napster's filtering that would not have existed if it weren't for that... If that's true, then that's very strong circumstantial evidence that they fully intended to abet infringement.
Go ahead and make a similar case that cars are intended primarily as infringement tools. Hell, these two questions are asked by the DMCA, IIRC -- which, for all the whining about it that people do on this site, you'd expect that people actually would bother to read.
Many people, including, a few years ago, the Federal Government (specifically HUD, under Clinton / Cuomo, which threatened to sue financially-strapped S&W into oblivion unless it made a deal).
Two critical concepts that Timothy is, almost certainly, willfully ignoring in order to stimulate a flame-fest --
* Primary purpose. What was Aimster designed to do? Given their name, clearly they're trying to resemble Napster, which doesn't exactly imply clean hands.
* Substantial non-infringing use. What is it used for? If the usage patterns are anything like Napster's, where usage dropped dramatically once they started filtering, then they're quite possibly guilty as hell.
Timothy's comment is merely a pathetically transparent strawman -- nothing more.
That may be more of a function of your school not asking for much more than quickly-answered questions. A profound synthesis/analysis question that actually requires a significant amount of thought requires comprehension and logic regardless of the storage medium -- and in that case, search efficiency is a good thing.
I find that the mundane details are in the resources I'm hunting for -- whether they be research papers and books that may be related to my work, or for unrelated queries such as analyses of Constitutional law. The actual process of searching a card catalog and hunting down physical volumes isn't terribly informative by itself.
It's interesting that the parent post got marked as a troll. Perhaps a moderator's uncomfortable with the concept that not all kids are, in terms of aptitudes and mental capabilities, identical. One would think that statement is, in fact, self-evident given the existence of extreme outliers -- would one argue that with effort, anybody could be a proficient golfer as Mr. Woods? Or that aptitude in physics and mathematics meant that Einstein could have instead applied his talents to become a star choreographer of modern dance?
Instead, it seems clear that different skills tax different traits, and these can even be linked to different physical areas of the brain. Human brains are not identical even at birth. Should we expect perfectly identical behavior from such complex organisms when even more basic functions such vary to the point where most of us do not have *precisely* a "normal body temperature" of exactly 98.6F?
And your statistics and research to back them up are... ?
Can you cite NEAP estimates? Refute the Flynn effect? Refute the trends in Iowan test scores -- Iowa has a long history of state exams, including methods for determining relative difficulty from year to year -- which have actually been positive, IIRC?
Can you claim that educational standards have been _dropping_? Or contradict the studies that show that, contrary to popular misconception, teens DO read and aren't just TV drones?
Or make any factual points at all?
Kids generally aren't bureaucrats. Employees in a large hierarchy have an incentive to place greater trust in machines -- namely, to justify the costs of their machines, and to safeguard their jobs from higher-ups who also feel the need to justify the costs of their machines (and thus, given the choice between human and computer judgement, might be somewhat biased towards the computer).
Kids, OTOH, aren't generally subject to being, say, disowned, and they're usually hired by people who spent millions of dollars on mainframes and software that's been trusted for so many years that it must be right -- or somebody will look like a fool.
Whether or not they have employ critical thought may be a more general problem; for instance, whether or not they believe gossip, or sensationalist "news", or so forth.
SCOTUS would probably suggest that there is no reasonable right to privacy for students in a school. ISTR that they've (well, maybe not the current members, but not THAT long ago) upheld locker searches on a similar basis. And as long as the school makes sufficient effort to restrict access to the monitoring data to parents and school administrators, that argument might still stick.
One might also need the data -- their collection of previous raw test scores and so forth, which the system used to determine relative difficulty of exams from year to year. Just the source code might not be as useful if the bugs were subtle and unusual.
Heh. That's just ASKING for mean-spirited jokes about protecting kids from heavily armed soldiers breaking into kids' homes and forcing them out of the country...
With companies, you can avoid doing business with them. And they're accountable to the judicial system...
...whereas a corrupt government can *control* the judicial system, and even results in such absurdities as "investigating" Congressmen coaching witnesses about taking the fifth, and a DOJ that cheerfully looks the other way as relevant persons flee the country.
And try defying either. A business is likely to merely be annoyed if you ignore its ads and don't buy its products. A government is likely to eventually send heavily armed people after you if you ignore ITS dictats.
Never to trust that a teacher knows how to spell basic words?
u nd/onbackground990927.html).
(See http://abcnews.go.com/sections/politics/OnBackgro
You do realize, of course, that at one point the Soviets were *really* freaked because they had mistaken a satellite launch by a Norwegian vessel as a possible surprise solo nuclear missile strike on them. The world came fairly close to being obliterated -- which would have been avoided if the superpowers knew that they could down singleton birds.
No. Of course you didn't know that. You probably never research this sort of thing.
For that matter, you're probably not aware that a PRC military official pointedly made the statement that the US cared more about Los Angeles than Taiwan. It doesn't take a DIA analyst to know what THAT means. And why the PRC opposes NMD more vehemently than the Russians -- because the Russians *know* that they could overwhelm it, while the PRC isn't sure -- and it's important to their foreign policy that they *are* able to destroy large cities in the United States.
And I don't think you're going to be able to push "microwaves from space" on a population that's so scientifically illiterate that large segments are frightened by NMR (because of the word 'nuclear'), by irradiated food (it'll make you radioactive! Right.), and genetics (there are non-trivial numbers of people so un-clued that they believe that food doesn't even HAVE genes unless they're engineered to do so). It'll fry us, right?
*chortle*
Well, for starters...
a) implement air units in a _reasonable_ way -- find a way to let them fly OVER other units, for cryin' out loud. In SMAC you could block planet-busting missiles with a line of Chiron locusts...
b) less blatant AI cheating; even if they know exactly how much tech and money you have, and whether you have nukes, AI's really shouldn't *flaunt* it.
c) tech costs that are based on specific areas, and not just how many (of any kind) techs you already have
d) differentiate between "hard to kill" versus "likely to kill you if you try". Not all battles should end in a unit death.
e) a GOTO algorithm that actually handles a *round world* and doesn't try to go the long way around if you cross 0 longitude.
f) quality control. Please, fewer blatant bugs like infinite-range AI missiles, et al.
g) auto-engineers/formers that AREN'T so irritating, riding around rails in infinite loops, that I vaporize them out of contempt.
h) Interface improvements. e.g. ability to drag a line indicating multiple squares where I want a railroad to be built. CivII/SMAC both degenerate into massive amounts of inane micro in large worlds.
i) if they go with SMAC-style social engineering... make them fit. Morgan had the LEAST incentive to go Free Markets, for instance, because a mere +1 economy would suffice for the big boost rather than +2.
"For the children" is a slogan that's well-tested for luring women voters. ISTR that surveys and focus groups have shown that they respond to it positively, regardless of context.
I'm pretty sure that it's a _Dr. Strangelove_ reference. Gen. Jack Ripper's letter refers to protecting the US from godless Commies using fluoridation to contaminate our "precious, bodily fluids".
When he's talking about radical environmentalists, I suspect that he's referring to ELF (moreso than Earth First!, even). "ELF" arson has been linked to teenagers.
"HOOK - Hands Off Our Kids"?
Sounds like a horrible, horrible choice of words.
"Why yes, let's chop the Hands Off Our Kids, and replace them with HOOKs!"
It depends on the market. In the wargaming and hardcore TBS sectors, for instance, there are many gamers NOT addicted to glitz. Both _Space Empires 4_ and _Combat Mission_ were done by small developers, and both are highly-praised products that have far more gameplay than, oh, full-motion video. Both succeeded. _TOAW_, while not by a 'small' house, is another example of a game for which flashiness is irrelevant, because the focus is on the system and scenarios.
Now, it may be easier to ignore FMV and so forth in the strategy market than in other sectors -- but it should still be possible. That's especially true for a small house where you don't have the overhead of much larger HR, marketing and so forth.
I'm reminded of Netrek, where only the trusted compilers have RSA keys used when compiling the official versions of blessed (legitimate) clients, which are then used to answer verification challenges from the servers.
Hence, if you want to use an augmented Borg client, you need to use a server configured not to use the crypto. One could probably edit the Quake client to use the same system to verify the server type and warn the user if it came from an untrusted source.
The original versions often really, really stink. With luck, the worst of those die off before they can cross the Atlantic to you.
I'm not sure you're missing much, except perhaps PBS programs; I don't know whether you can get _Frontline_ and so forth.
Look at Article VI, Paragraph II.
This Constitution, and the laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof; and all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every state shall be bound thereby, anything in the Constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding.
Federal law trumps state law. Since the Feds claim that drug enforcement is a federal power, the 10th shouldn't apply -- unless CA argued that the Feds had *no right* at all to legislate with regards to drugs in CA.
Remember the Jon Katz book brouhaha? ISTR that /.'s editorial staff was of the opinion that they *could* in fact republish en masse without bothering to ask for consent.
No law abridging the freedom of speech. Period.