Federal law already guarantees the the right to SAMBA-style reverse engineering
Not necessarily. That just means that reverse-engineering is not a violation under 17 U.S.C. 1201 (f). If a state adopts UCITA, it would be a crime in that state.
However, unless UCITA also criminalizes the use of the product of reverse-engineering, you could use reverse-engineered code written elsewhere, or write your own code in conformance with a specification derived from RE efforts outside the reach of the offending states.
Let's hope we can kill this before we need to.
Re:There are deadbeats in every profession
on
R.I.P. Linuxbox
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· Score: 1
Now that is a great story. And I thought I was clever by writing my consulting rates with a 10% "discount" for payment before the due date, back in the dark ages when I ran my own show. I can see that I should take some cues from the likes of you if I ever get back into that biz.
Re:Hinterland moments: the humans.
on
Hellmouth Website
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· Score: 1
It figures that you'd post your sneer as an AC. Very appropos.
Sure we are intelligent enough to almost understand how evolution and genetics accomplishes this, but ultimately our behaviour and our children's "group play" is going to mimic the fight for survival that has ensued in nature since people began walking upright. This behaviour which is so tasteless to our rational minds, is fundamental for setting life guidelines and rules for reproduction.
This notion is ridiculous. The problems we are seeing are peculiar to schools, largely in the USA, and not even all of those. And your assertion is refuted by the fact that the abusive behavior lamented by the geeks and goths is in fact unlawful in the greater society. If the school administrators were instead employers, they would be liable for enormous damage awards for failing to end the problem. Assault and battery and stalking are crimes. So why are teachers and administrators ignoring crimes committed against helpless students in their classrooms and hallways? We would not tolerate this nonsense anywhere else; neither would you.
The current state of many US high schools closely resembles the pecking order in prisons. The stronger "prisoners" dominate the weaker, and this is tolerated by the "guards" so they don't have to stick their necks out to keep the bullies in line. IMNSHO, that's plain wrong. The teachers and admins can always suspend or expel the bullies. Jocks, to name one problem group, only have status because the school (through the team) grants it. If "jock culture" has centered on assault&battery as recreation or a rite of passage, it's high time to purge the adherents from the hierarchy or eliminate HS sports entirely and get rid of the sponsored "gangs".
Let the SOB's take the football money and spend it on real wages for math & science teachers, to get the classes up to college level. That's what we need.
Making excessively "cool" sites legible
on
Hellmouth Website
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I hate to make apologies for anything Microsoft (I'm forced to use it at work because the proxy server won't work with anything else), but the "accessibility options" include a box to click to ignore the color selections specified by the web page. This eliminates the text-unreadable-over-the-background problem.
The global "suppress animations" click-box is nice too; banner ads stop being a nuisance, and the entire page still loads (unlike the last version of Netscape I used, which would stop loading the page if you did alt-V A to shut them off).
Now if it would only stop leaking memory and munging all its windows after you have about 15 open... (Bugs? In M$ products? Perish the thought!;-)
Re:Was is meant to be a joke?->Canada less clueles
on
New Cyberlaws
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· Score: 1
Actually, most drugs are not terribly lethal. If they were they would be simple poison. most deaths on drugs are due to uncertain supply quality.
For some things (e.g. opiates) this is true. However, some stimulants appear to have toxic effects even when they're pure; crank seems to drive people psychotic. This may be for no other reason than that they don't get any REM sleep, but the fact remains.
I've read that long-term use of MDMA can cause neurological damage. This does make it a poison, albeit a very pleasant one. This puts me, a serious small-l libertarian, in a bind. On the one hand, I don't want the government throwing people in prison for doing things that are their own business. On the other hand, I don't want anyone peddling stuff that's inherently damaging, or is un-tested. We have enough trouble with people dying from the FDA-approved stuff, let alone the ones crippled by stuff like fen-phen.
One thing for sure, neither Feinstein nor Hatch have any business trying to revoke the First Amendment for the things they don't like. I think the next Amendment should attack the problem of knowingly pushing laws which violate the Constitutional rights of the People; the legislators should be barred from holding public office for ten years to life. That'll put the kibosh on this stupidity.
Re:Canada less clueless?
on
New Cyberlaws
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· Score: 1
Cut down most of the trees? Excuse me? The Great Plains hadn't had trees for thousands of years; between grazing buffalo and fires, woody plants couldn't survive. Besides, the shift of tornados to the east (hitting more highly-populated areas than usual) in the past few years has occurred despite a trend toward increased forestation; twisters are created high in the sky from high-intensity storms, not on the ground. The agent responsible is Mother Nature, not man.
Re:why are drugs illegal in the US anyway?
on
New Cyberlaws
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· Score: 1
I read that the whole "reefer madness" thing was sponsored by a logging company...
Haven't done the research myself, but I've read that it was W.R. Hearst's publishing empire behind it. He'd invested a lot in vertical integration (wooded land, pulp mills) and didn't want the competition from hemp-hurd paper. If you are interested in the sources, check out Hemp for Victory by Jack Herer.
If majority opinion is any guide, you may not have to worry about your dollar for too many years; last Friday's (August 6, 1999) Wall Street Journal has an opinion column (page A-11, column 1) which predicts North American monetary union: a single currency for all.
If that happened, Ottawa would get rid of the problem of the Loonie falling against the greenback. Instead, Ottawa would have the problem of people and industry fleeing Canada's punitive taxes, and not having to take an exchange-rate hit to do it. Looks like serious reform (scaling back) of Canada's nanny state is going to be essential to survival, no matter what happens.
And despite the fact that this woman un-covered a cup of scalding hot coffee she deliberately placed between her legs, you seem to sympathize with the lawyer's view, that McDonald's is responsible for her damages. (He's probably an ATLA member.)
Pardon me if I disagree. Violently.
Some people want their coffee at 190 F, so that they can add sugar and creamer and still have it be warm enough to taste good after sitting for a while. Sure, you get worse scalds from 190 degree coffee than 160 degree coffee; that's the tradeoff. If that's how McDonald's customers want their coffee, they should have no right to complain if they mis-handle it and hurt themselves. If you want cooler coffee, you can always buy it somewhere else.
Latest thing I heard is that the Mustang Ranch, which is now owned by the Feds (the owner didn't pay his taxes), is due to be shut down. I guess the bluenoses won out over the profit motive, which is easy to do when you're using the taxpayer's money and not your own. Excuse me while I puke.
At least with a Palm you can use physical security. I dunno about you, but I'd feel a lot safer cracking into a networked box somewhere than trying to take a Palm off of someone my size.;-)
I don't think that the "three-phase" model is a good model. Stop & go traffic, at least the freeway variety, appears to be more a combination of people not leaving intervals between cars, and people waiting too long to reduce speed.
There are at least three other factors at work in most urban traffic jams:
People waiting too long to move when traffic in front moves (with slow-moving trucks failing to keep right greatly exacerbating the problem);
People not merging before lanes close, forcing traffic to stop to let them in;
Opaque vehicles, such as semis, panel trucks and SUV's, not allowing any visibility past them and increasing the necessary following distance (this reduces the carrying capacity of the road). And every time one of them moves between two cars, the usable pavement decreases again.
Instead, the typical action seems to be to coast as long as possible, then brake to avoid collision.
I have never understood the people who drive that way. I watch the traffic several vehicles ahead, and I can often manage just fine by "driving" the cruise control while the driver right in front of me has to hit the brakes. It's not hard to guess how I have 82,000 miles on the original brake pads.
If a dozen or so people do this in a row, it will naturally cause the traffic to stop and go in a ripple pattern.
It only takes one. A single driver who reacts to a near-miss by stopping to recover from the scare will do it.
We could get rid of a lot of these problems by having tighter qualifications for drivers, and eliminating things like cell-phone use while in motion (vehicle-integrated cellphones could easily be made to refuse to dial or answer if the driver was alone and the car was moving). The problem is, we lack the will.
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However, unless UCITA also criminalizes the use of the product of reverse-engineering, you could use reverse-engineered code written elsewhere, or write your own code in conformance with a specification derived from RE efforts outside the reach of the offending states.
Let's hope we can kill this before we need to.
Now that is a great story. And I thought I was clever by writing my consulting rates with a 10% "discount" for payment before the due date, back in the dark ages when I ran my own show. I can see that I should take some cues from the likes of you if I ever get back into that biz.
The current state of many US high schools closely resembles the pecking order in prisons. The stronger "prisoners" dominate the weaker, and this is tolerated by the "guards" so they don't have to stick their necks out to keep the bullies in line. IMNSHO, that's plain wrong. The teachers and admins can always suspend or expel the bullies. Jocks, to name one problem group, only have status because the school (through the team) grants it. If "jock culture" has centered on assault&battery as recreation or a rite of passage, it's high time to purge the adherents from the hierarchy or eliminate HS sports entirely and get rid of the sponsored "gangs".
Let the SOB's take the football money and spend it on real wages for math & science teachers, to get the classes up to college level. That's what we need.
The global "suppress animations" click-box is nice too; banner ads stop being a nuisance, and the entire page still loads (unlike the last version of Netscape I used, which would stop loading the page if you did alt-V A to shut them off).
Now if it would only stop leaking memory and munging all its windows after you have about 15 open... (Bugs? In M$ products? Perish the thought! ;-)
Better Esther Dyson than Dorothy Denning.
I've read that long-term use of MDMA can cause neurological damage. This does make it a poison, albeit a very pleasant one. This puts me, a serious small-l libertarian, in a bind. On the one hand, I don't want the government throwing people in prison for doing things that are their own business. On the other hand, I don't want anyone peddling stuff that's inherently damaging, or is un-tested. We have enough trouble with people dying from the FDA-approved stuff, let alone the ones crippled by stuff like fen-phen.
One thing for sure, neither Feinstein nor Hatch have any business trying to revoke the First Amendment for the things they don't like. I think the next Amendment should attack the problem of knowingly pushing laws which violate the Constitutional rights of the People; the legislators should be barred from holding public office for ten years to life. That'll put the kibosh on this stupidity.
Cut down most of the trees? Excuse me? The Great Plains hadn't had trees for thousands of years; between grazing buffalo and fires, woody plants couldn't survive. Besides, the shift of tornados to the east (hitting more highly-populated areas than usual) in the past few years has occurred despite a trend toward increased forestation; twisters are created high in the sky from high-intensity storms, not on the ground. The agent responsible is Mother Nature, not man.
If that happened, Ottawa would get rid of the problem of the Loonie falling against the greenback. Instead, Ottawa would have the problem of people and industry fleeing Canada's punitive taxes, and not having to take an exchange-rate hit to do it. Looks like serious reform (scaling back) of Canada's nanny state is going to be essential to survival, no matter what happens.
Check your sarcasm detector, I think you left it off.
I don't Bolivia had the guts to post that.
Pardon me if I disagree. Violently.
Some people want their coffee at 190 F, so that they can add sugar and creamer and still have it be warm enough to taste good after sitting for a while. Sure, you get worse scalds from 190 degree coffee than 160 degree coffee; that's the tradeoff. If that's how McDonald's customers want their coffee, they should have no right to complain if they mis-handle it and hurt themselves. If you want cooler coffee, you can always buy it somewhere else.
At least with a Palm you can use physical security. I dunno about you, but I'd feel a lot safer cracking into a networked box somewhere than trying to take a Palm off of someone my size. ;-)
- People waiting too long to move when traffic in front moves (with slow-moving trucks failing to keep right greatly exacerbating the problem);
- People not merging before lanes close, forcing traffic to stop to let them in;
- Opaque vehicles, such as semis, panel trucks and SUV's, not allowing any visibility past them and increasing the necessary following distance (this reduces the carrying capacity of the road). And every time one of them moves between two cars, the usable pavement decreases again.
I have never understood the people who drive that way. I watch the traffic several vehicles ahead, and I can often manage just fine by "driving" the cruise control while the driver right in front of me has to hit the brakes. It's not hard to guess how I have 82,000 miles on the original brake pads. It only takes one. A single driver who reacts to a near-miss by stopping to recover from the scare will do it.We could get rid of a lot of these problems by having tighter qualifications for drivers, and eliminating things like cell-phone use while in motion (vehicle-integrated cellphones could easily be made to refuse to dial or answer if the driver was alone and the car was moving). The problem is, we lack the will.