If you book online with American Airlines, make sure to add $50 per checked bag. I bought an AA flight because it was cheaper, only to find out it was actually $100 more expensive ($50 checked bag, both ways). It would be nice if it asked you this when comparing tickets.
While you are correct about the religious-like fanaticism, the problem is that some people cite one of these facts and act as though it debunks every bit of science out there. There are occassions here on Slashdot where someone cites a 100-page page-reviewed scientific article on the effect of CO2, and someone else counters with "but the model could be wrong!" and acts like the combined work of 5000 scientists was suddenly silenced by their off-hand remark.
I want to start a site that rates end user license agreements. The site would archive agreements, sent in by volunteers so that people could look-up the agreements before purchasing the software, or see what they are supposedly bound by after the fact. It would provide an English summary of each license, and rate them on several key criterial. Ex: Ability to reverse engineer, etc. I think it could also feature a jerky license-of-the-week section that would highlight egregious, unenforceable, or unconscionable agreements and explain why. The site would be a combination of a database and a blog.
I've wanted to do this for years, but lawyers always want to say "this is not legal advice, etc. etc." so none of them are interested in helping. The few I know who would are not IP lawyers or aren't interested in contract law, etc.
You have no clue what you are talking about. Start with the Wikipedia article on Mugabe and work from there. Your post makes no sense at all.
I don't see how they've managed to call this undemocratic - nothing undemocratic has been done yet.
It's undemocratic because Mugabe isn't the elected leader of the country. He is a dictator who seized power violently when he lost the election. So any "investigations" against his opponent are propaganda, not campaigning. I think arresting and physically beating your opponent is kinda undemocratic.
What happened was Anti-American.
How does this have anything to do with America? Various sanctions have been imposed on the nation by the EU, the US, Australia, and the Catholic church. Almost no one recognizes him as the leader of Zimbabwe. America is taking the same stance as most of the rest of the world.
Mugabe would be a fool to scrap the democratic process if he had popular support of the people
ummm... what? He is not the democratically elected leader of the nation. He already scrapped the democratic process.
any under-handed rigging for the next elections he might set up could be just as possible in the States as anywhere else. However, worse crimes are done by US Officials and the judicial system does nearly nothing about it. I wonder which state is actually more democratic right now.
In the US, I have not heard of any presidential candidates hiring thugs to beat people for voting against them. Or holding a military inauguration before the official results were declared.
Fair use explicitly allows use of copyrighted materials for educational purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Rather than listing exact limits of fair use, copyright law provides four standards for determination of the fair use exemption:
I think you're stretching "easily computable" - when I want to log into a website I don't want to spend 10 minutes with a calculator and an ascii table, or require access to the md5sum application.
Then do whatever you are comfortable with in your head. I just gave an example.
Once they figure out your algorithm through brute-force then it can be trivially applied to any other sites you have accounts on.
Yes, that is a valid limitation. But it is not a reason to avoid using the algorithm. Most hackers aren't interested in determining your personal password trick, that takes too much time. They want to grab that Bugzilla password and try it on your bank accounts. When it doesn't work, they will move on to the next person.
The point is, this trick is not perfect security. But it is an enormous improvement over using the same password over and over.
I can't create and remember 100 distinct strong username/password combinations on all of those websites
You don't have to if you use a hash. Ex: My slashdot password = my base password + an easily computable hash of the word "slashdot." You know ASCII? Take the ASCII values for the first and last vowels of the site and sum them together. Something like that. Do the same for every site, then write down the user name + the word you used to hash it. (It is usually easy to guess, but with some sites you have to make rules like remove the spaces and punctuation or ignore the numbers)
How about we just stick a GIANT MAGNET right smack on the real North Pole? That way, we don't need to worry about the "natural" pole shifting. Set this artificial magnet to have a different frequency than the earth's natural magnetism, so we can set our compass magnets to that same frequency and not worry about interference. (This will also keep this valuable asset from wandering into Russian territory.)
The Joel Test does not need updating
on
Joel Test Updated
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
as many companies are moving to web technologies, and new development tools exist.
Web technologies change nothing in his test. And his test does not mention any specific tools, just general classes of tools. "Do you use source control?" and the catch-all "Do you use the best tools money can buy?" are asking if you use the general types of tools that distinguishes good shops from bad shops. You could add "Do you use a mock-objects framework?" but now it isn't universal, because that doesn't always apply and could be subject to debate.. Then it just becomes someone's checklist of "Have you used every tool that I use and endorse?" The Joel Test is universally applicable, covering the kinds of things all shops should do.
Most of the updates in his blog are a pedantic rewording of the existing ones.
Even taking into account all your points, assuming they are all perfectly accurate: it still doesn't support the insane hatred of HFCS that has been in the popular media recently. Replacing HFCS with some other sugar won't significantly alter US health.
1) The Copyright infringement thing made no sense. Loading software into memory is not a copy. Especially if you are the person who owns/licenses the software. If it was, every person on earth would be liable for 5 trillion counts of copyright infringement. 2) This is *exactly* what the DMCA was made to stop. So if we are to debate the merits or downsides of the DMCA, this is perfect case to make an example of it.
P.S. IF you don't like this ruling, don't blame the judge. He ruled according to the law. If you don't like it, write your congressperson explaining that this is why this is a bad law.
Although frankly, I don't see why this isn't a simple contract dispute. The contract for WoW says "no bots" and this guy made a bot. I'm unclear why this is even a big legal issue. It should be a simple civil matter.
The entire article just talks about what leftist-liberal-marxist-socialist groups are supporting network neutrality. There is no evidence that this guy even knows what the issue is. You could replace "Network Neutrality" with "Lowering Taxes" or "Abortion" and not even notice. There's only one single attempt to even talk about the legislation:
There's little evidence the public is demanding these rules, which purport to stop the non-problem of phone and cable companies blocking access to websites and interfering with Internet traffic.
That's the only "fact" he stated, and it is completely wrong.
If you are making a point, I recommend defining CRTC and UBB. Or better yet, just explain your point instead of making a vague reference to some event that most Americans won't recognize.
Nobody is saying all regulation is good. But network neutrality regulation is good. Lets not compare it to other dissimilar regulation. Lets look at this regulation, which boils down to "do what you've been doing for the past decade and don't try to defraud people in subtle, complicated ways."
...build your own ISP. It's actually somewhat trivial to do.If your local municipality has locked out competition...
This isn't just a few municipalities: this is everywhere. And it actually makes some sense because wiring is a natural monopoly - you can't physically have 100 companies running 100 sets of lines to your house. What you want is 1 or 2 companies running lines to your house, and 100 ISPs providing service over those lines. That is how it was a decade ago. Network neutrality is the first step toward getting back to that. (Or really, it is more like a wall to stop us from going in the wrong direction.)
Also: When they built those networks, we had common carrier laws that demanded network neutrality. The only reason we are in this mess at all is because a few judges and congressman didn't understand that voice data should not be legally different from digital data.
I'm sorry this is long. I tried to narrow it down to 2 sentences that would get noticed by mods, but I can't do it...
It would be illegal under your scheme to give real time or streaming applications priority.
No, it means it would be illegal for *the ISP* to determine the priority. That's probably a good thing. To understand why, one must determine two things: 1) Who determines priority, and 2) What does priority actually do?
1) The ISP and cannot determine the priority, and they should not try. In theory, an ISP could use deep packet inspection to guess a priority. Packet A looks like email, packet B looks like a youtube video stream, packet C seems encrypted on an odd port: so it doesn't know. But in reality Packet A is an email with a Powerpoint presentation that someone needs in 2 minutes for a video conference. Packet B is streaming porn. Packet C is a video game where latency is vital. So which of these packets gets priority? There's simply no fair answer, and even if we could agree to one there's no way for the ISP's routers to determine this.
The TCP/IP protocol is designed to allow the *sender and receiver* to determine the priority. The problem is this relies on the honor system. If someone turns on BitTorrent and sets it to send packets as high QOS, then they are a jerk and they might slow things down for everyone (including themselves - they likely will have trouble browsing the web on their own network.)
2) What to do with the priority? Priority mostly matters when you are saturating your bandwidth. If I am sending an email and it means your streaming video slows down, it doesn't mean you need priority. It means the ISP is out of bandwidth and needs to upgrade their pipes. Priority doesn't speed up packets, it merely slows down other packets. This is why giving ISPs the ability to determine priority is bad. It means they don't have to upgrade their networks to handle the traffic, it just means they can take "undesirables" who use lots of bandwidth and make them pay extra, without having to invest in their networks.
I think your entire response boils down to one thing:
So you're basically saying here that we should never prosecute police for crimes of any sort because the system is stacked in their favor anyway.
I never said anything of the sort! I said that it rarely works - which is part of why we need to deny them the evidence as well. (That is only part of the reason - the other part is because illegally obtained evidence is too likely to be fabricated.)
If you don't do an illegal search you have no evidence. If you do the illegal search, there's a chance that it will get admitted. So you're better off doing the illegal search than not. Without real negative consequences to the person breaking the law, there is no deterrent at all.
That's exactly what I said! Now, on to the relevany points.
Failure to prosecute the police for their crimes creates a police state.
Then we have a police state, because such prosecutions are rare. When they happen, they almost never win. (Which, is part of why it rarely happens... repeat)
Obviously we need special prosecutors to avoid this obvious conflict of interest.
touché.
The evidence in question is already held by the court.
It doesn't work that way. Evidence against police has a habit of vanishing. Example: In Baltimore, there was a rape case in recent years where the officer's condom vanished from police lock-up after being admitted as evidence. The case was dropped due to lack of evidence.) Those darned condom thieves! Are they the same gnomes that steal my socks?
Prosecute the cops who broke the law to obtain evidence and you no longer need the exclusionary rule,
That can't work. It creates a police state. Here is why:
1) Manipulating evidence is a criminal act. So guess who decides whether or not to prosecute? The police. Specifically, the federal/state/local prosecutor. So they would basically have to prosecute themselves. 2) Assume they do prosecute the police. What evidence will be used against them? The evidence held by... the police. Doh! So that evidence will also be manipulated. The cycle continues. 3) Assume they do succeed anyway. Who enforces the sentence? The police. Doh! They will get off for good behavior very easily. 4) But! Let's say this does all work out - it will still happen, because it is worth it. What officer/prosecutor wouldn't be willing to do that if it was the right cause? It is all about the convictions for them.
Ultimately, denying the evidence in court is the only real penalty that works to deter the police and prosecutors from abusing their power. Yes, it sucks because it means an alleged criminal goes free. Sorry.
are more likely to be watchers of fox news, not the other way around?
That was my first thought too, but they actually address this in the first survey, and it turns out that it really is the news:
Variations in misperceptions according to news source cannot simply be explained as a result of differences in the demographics of each audience, because these variations can also be found when comparing the rate of misperceptions within demographic subgroups of each audience.
Slashdot Mirror
Well said.
If you book online with American Airlines, make sure to add $50 per checked bag. I bought an AA flight because it was cheaper, only to find out it was actually $100 more expensive ($50 checked bag, both ways). It would be nice if it asked you this when comparing tickets.
You can't get the mac address of the phone over an HTTP request.
While you are correct about the religious-like fanaticism, the problem is that some people cite one of these facts and act as though it debunks every bit of science out there. There are occassions here on Slashdot where someone cites a 100-page page-reviewed scientific article on the effect of CO2, and someone else counters with "but the model could be wrong!" and acts like the combined work of 5000 scientists was suddenly silenced by their off-hand remark.
1) Volunteer for the EFF
2) Volunteer to help me
I want to start a site that rates end user license agreements. The site would archive agreements, sent in by volunteers so that people could look-up the agreements before purchasing the software, or see what they are supposedly bound by after the fact. It would provide an English summary of each license, and rate them on several key criterial. Ex: Ability to reverse engineer, etc. I think it could also feature a jerky license-of-the-week section that would highlight egregious, unenforceable, or unconscionable agreements and explain why. The site would be a combination of a database and a blog.
I've wanted to do this for years, but lawyers always want to say "this is not legal advice, etc. etc." so none of them are interested in helping. The few I know who would are not IP lawyers or aren't interested in contract law, etc.
You have no clue what you are talking about. Start with the Wikipedia article on Mugabe and work from there. Your post makes no sense at all.
I don't see how they've managed to call this undemocratic - nothing undemocratic has been done yet.
It's undemocratic because Mugabe isn't the elected leader of the country. He is a dictator who seized power violently when he lost the election. So any "investigations" against his opponent are propaganda, not campaigning. I think arresting and physically beating your opponent is kinda undemocratic.
What happened was Anti-American.
How does this have anything to do with America? Various sanctions have been imposed on the nation by the EU, the US, Australia, and the Catholic church. Almost no one recognizes him as the leader of Zimbabwe. America is taking the same stance as most of the rest of the world.
Mugabe would be a fool to scrap the democratic process if he had popular support of the people
ummm... what? He is not the democratically elected leader of the nation. He already scrapped the democratic process.
any under-handed rigging for the next elections he might set up could be just as possible in the States as anywhere else. However, worse crimes are done by US Officials and the judicial system does nearly nothing about it. I wonder which state is actually more democratic right now.
In the US, I have not heard of any presidential candidates hiring thugs to beat people for voting against them. Or holding a military inauguration before the official results were declared.
Sounds like the German's don't have fair-use exceptions for schools.
From Fair Use and Copyright for Teachers:
Fair use explicitly allows use of copyrighted materials for educational purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Rather than listing exact limits of fair use, copyright law provides four standards for determination of the fair use exemption:
I think you're stretching "easily computable" - when I want to log into a website I don't want to spend 10 minutes with a calculator and an ascii table, or require access to the md5sum application.
Then do whatever you are comfortable with in your head. I just gave an example.
Once they figure out your algorithm through brute-force then it can be trivially applied to any other sites you have accounts on.
Yes, that is a valid limitation. But it is not a reason to avoid using the algorithm. Most hackers aren't interested in determining your personal password trick, that takes too much time. They want to grab that Bugzilla password and try it on your bank accounts. When it doesn't work, they will move on to the next person.
The point is, this trick is not perfect security. But it is an enormous improvement over using the same password over and over.
Mod the parent up - I still haven't seen the rules either. Thanks for the new open government, where we can't even read the regulations!
I can't create and remember 100 distinct strong username/password combinations on all of those websites
You don't have to if you use a hash. Ex: My slashdot password = my base password + an easily computable hash of the word "slashdot." You know ASCII? Take the ASCII values for the first and last vowels of the site and sum them together. Something like that. Do the same for every site, then write down the user name + the word you used to hash it. (It is usually easy to guess, but with some sites you have to make rules like remove the spaces and punctuation or ignore the numbers)
roflmao!
How bad would it be if you installed them backwards?
Don't do that. Never cross the streams.
How about we just stick a GIANT MAGNET right smack on the real North Pole? That way, we don't need to worry about the "natural" pole shifting. Set this artificial magnet to have a different frequency than the earth's natural magnetism, so we can set our compass magnets to that same frequency and not worry about interference. (This will also keep this valuable asset from wandering into Russian territory.)
as many companies are moving to web technologies, and new development tools exist.
Web technologies change nothing in his test. And his test does not mention any specific tools, just general classes of tools. "Do you use source control?" and the catch-all "Do you use the best tools money can buy?" are asking if you use the general types of tools that distinguishes good shops from bad shops. You could add "Do you use a mock-objects framework?" but now it isn't universal, because that doesn't always apply and could be subject to debate.. Then it just becomes someone's checklist of "Have you used every tool that I use and endorse?" The Joel Test is universally applicable, covering the kinds of things all shops should do.
Most of the updates in his blog are a pedantic rewording of the existing ones.
You are just jealous that the shentino action figure didn't sell so well. :-p
Even taking into account all your points, assuming they are all perfectly accurate: it still doesn't support the insane hatred of HFCS that has been in the popular media recently. Replacing HFCS with some other sugar won't significantly alter US health.
This is great news.
1) The Copyright infringement thing made no sense. Loading software into memory is not a copy. Especially if you are the person who owns/licenses the software. If it was, every person on earth would be liable for 5 trillion counts of copyright infringement.
2) This is *exactly* what the DMCA was made to stop. So if we are to debate the merits or downsides of the DMCA, this is perfect case to make an example of it.
P.S. IF you don't like this ruling, don't blame the judge. He ruled according to the law. If you don't like it, write your congressperson explaining that this is why this is a bad law.
Although frankly, I don't see why this isn't a simple contract dispute. The contract for WoW says "no bots" and this guy made a bot. I'm unclear why this is even a big legal issue. It should be a simple civil matter.
The entire article just talks about what leftist-liberal-marxist-socialist groups are supporting network neutrality. There is no evidence that this guy even knows what the issue is. You could replace "Network Neutrality" with "Lowering Taxes" or "Abortion" and not even notice. There's only one single attempt to even talk about the legislation:
There's little evidence the public is demanding these rules, which purport to stop the non-problem of phone and cable companies blocking access to websites and interfering with Internet traffic.
That's the only "fact" he stated, and it is completely wrong.
If you are making a point, I recommend defining CRTC and UBB. Or better yet, just explain your point instead of making a vague reference to some event that most Americans won't recognize.
Nobody is saying all regulation is good. But network neutrality regulation is good. Lets not compare it to other dissimilar regulation. Lets look at this regulation, which boils down to "do what you've been doing for the past decade and don't try to defraud people in subtle, complicated ways."
...build your own ISP. It's actually somewhat trivial to do.If your local municipality has locked out competition...
This isn't just a few municipalities: this is everywhere. And it actually makes some sense because wiring is a natural monopoly - you can't physically have 100 companies running 100 sets of lines to your house. What you want is 1 or 2 companies running lines to your house, and 100 ISPs providing service over those lines. That is how it was a decade ago. Network neutrality is the first step toward getting back to that. (Or really, it is more like a wall to stop us from going in the wrong direction.)
Also: When they built those networks, we had common carrier laws that demanded network neutrality. The only reason we are in this mess at all is because a few judges and congressman didn't understand that voice data should not be legally different from digital data.
I'm sorry this is long. I tried to narrow it down to 2 sentences that would get noticed by mods, but I can't do it...
It would be illegal under your scheme to give real time or streaming applications priority.
No, it means it would be illegal for *the ISP* to determine the priority. That's probably a good thing. To understand why, one must determine two things: 1) Who determines priority, and 2) What does priority actually do?
1) The ISP and cannot determine the priority, and they should not try.
In theory, an ISP could use deep packet inspection to guess a priority. Packet A looks like email, packet B looks like a youtube video stream, packet C seems encrypted on an odd port: so it doesn't know. But in reality Packet A is an email with a Powerpoint presentation that someone needs in 2 minutes for a video conference. Packet B is streaming porn. Packet C is a video game where latency is vital. So which of these packets gets priority? There's simply no fair answer, and even if we could agree to one there's no way for the ISP's routers to determine this.
The TCP/IP protocol is designed to allow the *sender and receiver* to determine the priority. The problem is this relies on the honor system. If someone turns on BitTorrent and sets it to send packets as high QOS, then they are a jerk and they might slow things down for everyone (including themselves - they likely will have trouble browsing the web on their own network.)
2) What to do with the priority?
Priority mostly matters when you are saturating your bandwidth. If I am sending an email and it means your streaming video slows down, it doesn't mean you need priority. It means the ISP is out of bandwidth and needs to upgrade their pipes. Priority doesn't speed up packets, it merely slows down other packets. This is why giving ISPs the ability to determine priority is bad. It means they don't have to upgrade their networks to handle the traffic, it just means they can take "undesirables" who use lots of bandwidth and make them pay extra, without having to invest in their networks.
I think your entire response boils down to one thing:
So you're basically saying here that we should never prosecute police for crimes of any sort because the system is stacked in their favor anyway.
I never said anything of the sort! I said that it rarely works - which is part of why we need to deny them the evidence as well. (That is only part of the reason - the other part is because illegally obtained evidence is too likely to be fabricated.)
If you don't do an illegal search you have no evidence. If you do the illegal search, there's a chance that it will get admitted. So you're better off doing the illegal search than not. Without real negative consequences to the person breaking the law, there is no deterrent at all.
That's exactly what I said! Now, on to the relevany points.
Failure to prosecute the police for their crimes creates a police state.
Then we have a police state, because such prosecutions are rare. When they happen, they almost never win. (Which, is part of why it rarely happens... repeat)
Obviously we need special prosecutors to avoid this obvious conflict of interest.
touché.
The evidence in question is already held by the court.
It doesn't work that way. Evidence against police has a habit of vanishing. Example: In Baltimore, there was a rape case in recent years where the officer's condom vanished from police lock-up after being admitted as evidence. The case was dropped due to lack of evidence.) Those darned condom thieves! Are they the same gnomes that steal my socks?
Prosecute the cops who broke the law to obtain evidence and you no longer need the exclusionary rule,
That can't work. It creates a police state. Here is why:
1) Manipulating evidence is a criminal act. So guess who decides whether or not to prosecute? The police. Specifically, the federal/state/local prosecutor. So they would basically have to prosecute themselves.
2) Assume they do prosecute the police. What evidence will be used against them? The evidence held by... the police. Doh! So that evidence will also be manipulated. The cycle continues.
3) Assume they do succeed anyway. Who enforces the sentence? The police. Doh! They will get off for good behavior very easily.
4) But! Let's say this does all work out - it will still happen, because it is worth it. What officer/prosecutor wouldn't be willing to do that if it was the right cause? It is all about the convictions for them.
Ultimately, denying the evidence in court is the only real penalty that works to deter the police and prosecutors from abusing their power. Yes, it sucks because it means an alleged criminal goes free. Sorry.
Try this: Charity Navigator's page on The Wikimedia Foundation.
are more likely to be watchers of fox news, not the other way around?
That was my first thought too, but they actually address this in the first survey, and it turns out that it really is the news:
Variations in misperceptions according to news source cannot simply be explained as a result of differences in the demographics of each audience, because these variations can also be found when comparing the rate of misperceptions within demographic subgroups of each audience.