This is probably very difficult to do. It's not a technical challenge, but rather a source data challenge. Parcel data is usually handled by local municipalities - cities, counties, whatever, and there aren't any nation-wide standards for that kind of data. So you'd have to integrate a lot of data in different formats from a lot of individual government entities, all of which have their own unique procedures for obtaining the data. If you want to do it for a specific area, like Santa Clara County, it's probably not tough. For something larger, like all of California, well, have fun...
You specifically mentioned DNR. My understanding is that DNR shows state-owned property only, so that wouldn't help you with privately-owned stuff (and someone correct me if I'm wrong).
Whoops, I misstated something here. I meant to say that if you claim to be a common carrier, I agree that you should not be allowed to *selectively* block some services. Common carriers blocking *all* such services are OK, my monopoly comment notwithstanding.
Blocking traffic based on a competing company should be illegal, plain and simple.
Eh, I agree and I don't. If you claim to be a common carrier, I agree. And if you operate a monopoly (actual or even just effective), I agree. Otherwise, I don't - in other cases, competitors should have no right to dictate your behavior.
The arguments that people have made about the fact that the ISP marketplace truly isn't free are good ones. I'm reluctant to say that a company offering the only DSL traffic to a region can blithely block traffic, because as has been pointed out, they're just as likely to make those decisions from an anti-competitive point of view as they are from a business model point of view. But to blindly mandate that such services must be supported is anti-competitive too - smaller ISPs can't necessarily handle the bandwidth requirements of unfettered VoIP support, and they should be required to do so in order to conduct their business
Yes, but the ISP that you're paying doesn't have any relationship or obligation to the VoIP service that you're paying for separately. That's like saying that the phone company somehow has some obligation to support the ISP that you connect to via modem.
If I understand the issue, certain ISPs are blocking the ports used by VOIP apps for whatever reason (bandwidth, probably). Assume for the moment that the VOIP complaint is valid. The logical next step would be for trojan writers to say that blocking ports that their trojans use is *also* censorship.
ISPs shouldn't be required to support VOIP, any more than they're required to support email, FTP, or any other service. An ISP should be free to choose the services that it wishes to support, and a customer can then choose an ISP that offers the services that he desires. If VOIP is a good thing, then customers will punish ISPs that don't support it. If it's bad, then VOIP will die (as is natural in a competitive marketplace). The VOIP cry of censorship is just an attempt to get legislative backing for a business model.
I frequently game with a bunch of friends, who are all pretty much power gamers (GenCon, that kind of thing). My list of favorites, based on my experiences with them, is
Outpost - pure strategy, with little "hose your enemy" to it
Puerto Rico
Junta - great for people who like to bring personalities into games
Any of the Catan versions
And, of course, I'd always recommend the classic, Cosmic Encounter (sans lucre).
These are mostly "play for a few hours" games.
Finally, according to the U.S. News & World Report 1997 Career Guide, the bet job in the United States, for the second year in a row, is Interactive Business System Analyst. However, last year's worst job, Assistant Crack Whore, has been replaced by a new worst job: Crack Whore Trainee.
It depends on how it's derived. If they took a playlist, or even all playlists from one station and used it or them to create their own playlist, then yes, you're probably right. If, on the other hand, they said "stations A and B and C are the same type of station", and if they then took the playlists from A and B and C and used them to create a generic playlist to represent those three stations, then probably not. On the other hand, the very fact that the stations are somehow publishing their playlists may imply that the stations are conveying some sort of permission for reuse. I don't know for sure.
I used to work for a digital mapping company (think Yahoo! Maps, Rand McNally Streetfinder, that kind of thing), and they built their map database from many sources, some public domain, some copyrighted. The general rule was that if they were able to find three or more independent copyrighted maps which confirmed the existence of a street detail (any "fact"), then they could include that detail in their product without violating any copyrights. I'm not sure if that's a standard legal principle, but the company took copyrights seriously, so I'm sure it was approved by lawyers before they adopted the rule. Anyways, the fact that three independent radio stations group songs A and B together may convey that there's some relationship between A and B beyond a copyrightable presentation. Again, IANAL.
Say for the sake of argument that you talked them into it. And say that a week later, you decided to quit. How screwed would your company be, in terms of maintaining the solution you implemented? If the answer is "not at all", then your proposal is a fine thing. If your answer is anything else, then it's a bad idea.
Doing something like this is just like trying to use Perl or Python (or Java or whatever) in an all-C/C++ shop for the first time. It may be the best solution for the problem you happen to be solving. But if the company doesn't consciously maintain a knowledge base in the "new" technology, any of the new work is essentially dead once the author leaves. Same thing applies to a new OS, a new third-party app, or whatever.
The best technology solutions are maintainable, extendable, and reusable. And the most common error is to overlook maintainability.
[ob. IANAL, and I've only read about the service] There are copyright concerns, but it sounds like MS is avoiding them. You can take a list of uncopyrightable things and have a copyright on that list. For instance, a map is nothing more than a list of streets, and while the streets are just uncopyrightable facts, your presentation of those facts is copyrightable. Likewise, I would think that while the individual songs are copyrighted by others, you can create a playlist which is then copyrightable.
If MS took a station's playlist and played it, exactly as the radio station did, then the radio station could probably sue MS for violating its "compilation copyright" - the general look and feel by which the radio station presented the music.
But MS apparently isn't doing that. They're apparently aggregating playlists in order to get a sense of a station's music genre, then using it to select from the songs it has the right to broadcast. The aggregation and selection process probably gets MS around the compilation copyright problem, especially if MS presents at least one song that is *not* on a station's playlist. So I'd guess that if they do what the article claims they do, then they're fine.
Sure, no question about it. There is a trade-off here. I agree that fewer laws is good, from an elegance of design point of view. But you can also have too few laws. If a law isn't explicit enough, you get potentially bad court rulings, aggressive prosecutors who unfairly target defendants, lenient prosecutors who refuse to prosecute scumbags, and activist judges making new law by way of precedence. If you get too explicit, you get too many laws, as well as loopholes. *Someone* has to decide these things, and there are a *lot* more cops, prosecutors, and judges than there are legislators, so I have a little more faith in any group of legislators than in any generic cop, prosecutor, or judge.
I dunno, but I think that expressly saying "having a DVD display in plain view of a driver is bad" as a matter of law is a fine thing.
As has been pointed out by three or four people already, the term "malice" as applied to murder legally includes "reckless disregard". Malice need not be explicit - it can be implicit in the nature of the act. If you're a surgeon who kills a patient because you operated drunk, you have no explicit malice, but you can still be prosecuted for second-degree murder because you acted with reckless disregard for human life. Whether or not the DVD case counts as reckless disregard remains to be seen, but other states (such as California) already consider such action reckless.
The purpose of the legislature is to create laws. The purpose of the court is to interpret laws. If you want something to be expressly illegal, which one should be responsible? Hint: the answer isn't "one court".
Precedence is a great thing. But there are three problems with legal precedence. First, you're depending on some jury being smart, which they're often not. Second, you're depending on some future judge not choosing to create an entirely different precedence. Third, it can take ten years for precedence to be upheld. If you want something to be illegal in your lifetime, you pass a law. You don't hold your breath and hope that the courts eventually do the right thing.
Actually, you're wrong. It doesn't complicate things - it simplifies them. In order to prove second-degree murder (as the article mentioned), the prosecutors have to prove that his actions were reckless, and that he knew they were reckless at the time. An explicit law prohibiting viewing of DVDs by drivers encodes into law that behavior as reckless by definition. That way, every prosecutor doesn't have to prove for every future defendant that such actions are reckless - a separate law already says they are. The law serves two purposes - it hopefully lessens the number of instances where this occurs, and it makes it easier to prosecute stupid people who violate the law and kill someone. Sounds like a good idea to me.
"It's not a notebook" doesn't matter, nor does "it can be used in the backseat". The California law prohibits any display screen forward of the driver (even if only visible to the passenger-side) capable of showing a television signal, a video signal, or another signal for entertainment purposes (including DVD players). His system would only be legal in California if it automatically turned off whenever the ignition was started.
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Why? It's not like she's a flight risk...
You specifically mentioned DNR. My understanding is that DNR shows state-owned property only, so that wouldn't help you with privately-owned stuff (and someone correct me if I'm wrong).
Probably the most idiomatic translation would be "spotty".
Whoops, I misstated something here. I meant to say that if you claim to be a common carrier, I agree that you should not be allowed to *selectively* block some services. Common carriers blocking *all* such services are OK, my monopoly comment notwithstanding.
Eh, I agree and I don't. If you claim to be a common carrier, I agree. And if you operate a monopoly (actual or even just effective), I agree. Otherwise, I don't - in other cases, competitors should have no right to dictate your behavior.
The arguments that people have made about the fact that the ISP marketplace truly isn't free are good ones. I'm reluctant to say that a company offering the only DSL traffic to a region can blithely block traffic, because as has been pointed out, they're just as likely to make those decisions from an anti-competitive point of view as they are from a business model point of view. But to blindly mandate that such services must be supported is anti-competitive too - smaller ISPs can't necessarily handle the bandwidth requirements of unfettered VoIP support, and they should be required to do so in order to conduct their business
Yes, but the ISP that you're paying doesn't have any relationship or obligation to the VoIP service that you're paying for separately. That's like saying that the phone company somehow has some obligation to support the ISP that you connect to via modem.
ISPs shouldn't be required to support VOIP, any more than they're required to support email, FTP, or any other service. An ISP should be free to choose the services that it wishes to support, and a customer can then choose an ISP that offers the services that he desires. If VOIP is a good thing, then customers will punish ISPs that don't support it. If it's bad, then VOIP will die (as is natural in a competitive marketplace). The VOIP cry of censorship is just an attempt to get legislative backing for a business model.
- Outpost - pure strategy, with little "hose your enemy" to it
- Puerto Rico
- Junta - great for people who like to bring personalities into games
- Any of the Catan versions
And, of course, I'd always recommend the classic, Cosmic Encounter (sans lucre). These are mostly "play for a few hours" games.I used to work for a digital mapping company (think Yahoo! Maps, Rand McNally Streetfinder, that kind of thing), and they built their map database from many sources, some public domain, some copyrighted. The general rule was that if they were able to find three or more independent copyrighted maps which confirmed the existence of a street detail (any "fact"), then they could include that detail in their product without violating any copyrights. I'm not sure if that's a standard legal principle, but the company took copyrights seriously, so I'm sure it was approved by lawyers before they adopted the rule. Anyways, the fact that three independent radio stations group songs A and B together may convey that there's some relationship between A and B beyond a copyrightable presentation. Again, IANAL.
Doing something like this is just like trying to use Perl or Python (or Java or whatever) in an all-C/C++ shop for the first time. It may be the best solution for the problem you happen to be solving. But if the company doesn't consciously maintain a knowledge base in the "new" technology, any of the new work is essentially dead once the author leaves. Same thing applies to a new OS, a new third-party app, or whatever.
The best technology solutions are maintainable, extendable, and reusable. And the most common error is to overlook maintainability.
If MS took a station's playlist and played it, exactly as the radio station did, then the radio station could probably sue MS for violating its "compilation copyright" - the general look and feel by which the radio station presented the music.
But MS apparently isn't doing that. They're apparently aggregating playlists in order to get a sense of a station's music genre, then using it to select from the songs it has the right to broadcast. The aggregation and selection process probably gets MS around the compilation copyright problem, especially if MS presents at least one song that is *not* on a station's playlist. So I'd guess that if they do what the article claims they do, then they're fine.
I dunno, but I think that expressly saying "having a DVD display in plain view of a driver is bad" as a matter of law is a fine thing.
As has been pointed out by three or four people already, the term "malice" as applied to murder legally includes "reckless disregard". Malice need not be explicit - it can be implicit in the nature of the act. If you're a surgeon who kills a patient because you operated drunk, you have no explicit malice, but you can still be prosecuted for second-degree murder because you acted with reckless disregard for human life. Whether or not the DVD case counts as reckless disregard remains to be seen, but other states (such as California) already consider such action reckless.
I submitted it as "Index: The Courts". I don't know what happens to it after that point. Do you have a better suggestion? (sincerely asked)
No, he's right - I said "DVD-watching" instead of "alleged DVD-watching". My bad.
Precedence is a great thing. But there are three problems with legal precedence. First, you're depending on some jury being smart, which they're often not. Second, you're depending on some future judge not choosing to create an entirely different precedence. Third, it can take ten years for precedence to be upheld. If you want something to be illegal in your lifetime, you pass a law. You don't hold your breath and hope that the courts eventually do the right thing.
Actually, you're wrong. It doesn't complicate things - it simplifies them. In order to prove second-degree murder (as the article mentioned), the prosecutors have to prove that his actions were reckless, and that he knew they were reckless at the time. An explicit law prohibiting viewing of DVDs by drivers encodes into law that behavior as reckless by definition. That way, every prosecutor doesn't have to prove for every future defendant that such actions are reckless - a separate law already says they are. The law serves two purposes - it hopefully lessens the number of instances where this occurs, and it makes it easier to prosecute stupid people who violate the law and kill someone. Sounds like a good idea to me.
But points 2 and 4 are still valid...