Treaties supercede state constitutions, not the federal constitution. The quoted text demonstrates this, with the "any thing in the constitution . . . of any State" bit.
Or just put one of the Linux or BSD distributions on there. They're certainly more usable and more stable than Mac OS 9 ever was.
I will not feed the troll, I will not feed the troll, I . . .
Are you out of your mind? The point other commenters are making is that a non-trivial number of folks, with an emphasis on schools and other educational institutions, have old hardware that runs Mac OS 9. It might be that, in some abstract, general sense, Linux or BSD is more usable and stable than OS 9 (although I disagree), but the question is what's more usable on the hardware available to these folks. As somebody who spent too much time in college (computer science program, university known for computer science) trying to get linux to run on apple hardware of this era, I can assure you that getting other OSes to work is nigh-impossible, and that few, if any, of the institutions that are *still* using this hardware could realistically take that option. So this is great for those users.
Seriously? A link to "http://bit.ly/4S53f"? There is no *good* reason why slashdot shouldn't use direct links, rather than this URL shortening nonsense, in story summaries. I'd like to know where I'm going in deciding whether to RTFA. Here, the link actually does go to the WSJ's "All Things Digital" site, at http://d7.allthingsd.com/20090528/d7-interview-mitchell-baker-and-john-lilly/ .
Also, as for Timothy's "not-a-transcript-but-better-than-one" heading: no. This summary in the text is not as good as a transcript, and the video is not as good as a transcript, because reading a transcript is faster, and is something I can do at work. (Yes, I know that it's Sunday).
As a bicyclist, I'd love it if google had decent maps of off-street bike paths, such that I could use google maps' normal direction-finding feature with these. I've lived in lots of cities with numerous such paths, and they're usually out of the way and hard to find if you don't already know that they're there. It would be great to have a feature that a) lets me find them, and b) tells me exactly how far out of my way I'd need to go for the added safety/pleasantness of using them.
If you own a dominant position in the market and you abuse that position to exclude competition, you open yourself up to a monopoly hearing.
with
judges . . . don't care about whether or not there CAN be competition, they only care about what there is.
I am not an antitrust lawyer, but you said it yourself. Having a dominant position in the market is not sufficient to make you a monopoly: you also have to abuse that position to exclude competition. If there can be competition, then you have not abused your position to exclude such competition.
The ancestor post (too many generations) was about whether use of open standards could, by definition, mean that you were not abusing a dominant position. Parent poster replied by saying that AT&T (presumably back in the days of Ma Bell) could have open sourced its switches, but AT&T still would have been a monopolist. That's because what AT&T was selling at the time was better understood as hardware and access to that hardware.
Another topic discussed up there somewhere was whether Apple is abusing its market dominance with the iPod. In this case, open standards, etc., might be able to themselves ensure that Apple is not excluding other music vendors from that market. These standards have less to do with whether Apple is abusing its position to exclude other hardware manufacturers from the relevant market, but that's another story (FWIW, I don't think Apple is abusing this position).
My point is that it's important to determine what the relevant market is--this thread has identified markets in software sales, hardware sales, and software support. If the market is actually selling software that works, a company that uses open standards might, by definition, be incapable of abusing their position to exclude others.
[/Rant]
Mea culpa--EFF does link to the warrant application, as Exhibit A to their motion for emergency relief, although they don't exactly highlight that fact. http://www.eff.org/files/filenode/inresearchBC/EXHIBIT-A.pdf Reading over it, the mention of the two OSes is clearly part of the "Basis of Probable Cause," and not merely meant to identify which items are covered by the warrant.
Normally, I'd say RTFA, but here, the FA goes beyond the actual excerpts of the warrant.
The excerpts EFF have posted do not say "he has two operating systems, and that's evidence that he's up to no good." Instead, the warrant says
[redacted] reported that Mr. Calixte uses two different operating systems to hide his illegal activities. One is the regular B.C. operating system and the other is a black screen with white font which he uses prompt commands on.
Paraphrased, that says that somebody directly told the police that they observed the suspect doing illegal activities, and that the dual OSes are an aspect of those activities. That's almost, although not exactly, the inverse of what the summary and most of the commenters assume. And if I was going to be up to something I shouldn't be doing on a computer, if I wasn't going to have a dedicated computer for it, then I might limit those activities to a separate OS with separate filesystems.
Finally, as another commenter noted, warrants have to state with some particularity the objects to be searched and seized. EFF isn't giving us enough context for this part of the warrant, but it could be that the warrant is talking about a computer with two OSes just so the officers know which computer to seize, the propriety of the seizure having been established elsewhere.
Not saying that this warrant was proper, that this guy did anything, etc., but I am saying that the problems most people are complaining about, and that EFF is implying, aren't necessarily there.
I was on a Southwest flight that was testing this out about a month ago, where it was free for passengers. I ran speakeasy's speed test on it, http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/ , and got about 3000 kbps down, and something like 200 kbps up. I ran the test about five minutes after they announced that we could use the service, and it seemed like more than half the people on the plane had laptops out and were playing with the service, even though none of us knew that the service would be available until we got on the plane.
To be pedantic, those rules only apply to public corporations (of which Apple is one). If you are a corporation that sells stock, then (in general) you have a legal duty to maximize return on investment for your shareholders. But if you are a private corporation (say you incorporated the family business just because you wanted a liability shield), the corporation is all yours, and you can do whatever you want with it, including being a "psychopathic money-hungry bastard" or not.
Viacom argued that Google should be forced to disclose "the computer source code which controls both the YouTube.com search function and Google's internet search tool "Google.com"." (quoting the judge, p.4 of the order) Apparently Viacom argued that Google/Yahoo had (or might have?) the capacity to determine whether material was copyrighted automatically, or that the algorithm was already making this distinction but wasn't prohibiting copyrighted material.
Lawyers advance even less plausible arguments, but it is hard to see this as anything other than an attempt to threaten google in a way money damages really can't. Luckily, the judge rejected Viacom's request.
Viacom also asked for the source to google's "Video ID" program, copies of all videos ever removed from youtube, google's "advertising and video schemas", all _private_ videos and data, and finally the individual info discussed in the summary. The judge denied Viacom's requests for advertising schemas, content of private videos, and the Video ID source. Saying no to four unreasonable requests doesn't excuse saying yes to three others, but it could have been much worse.
Doctorow is right about the principle. One nitpick: at least in medicine, most tests have different rates for false positives than they do for false negatives. Doctorow's example involves tests where these results are (coincidentally) the same: 99% accurate in identifying positives, and 99% accurate in identifying negatives. This is usually not the case: maybe a test is 99% accurate in identifying positives, but only 95% accurate in identifying negatives, or vice versa.
I don't know if one tends to be predictably higher than the other, but the false positive rate in screening for some rare diseases is definitely high enough that most of the time the test returns a positive result, it's probably the case that the test is wrong, rather than that the patient actually has the disease. But in medicine, that's OK: it is really, really important to avoid false negatives, so that's the rate you minimize. In contrast, the costs of false positive aren't so bad--they're bad, but you do more tests, take some precautionary measures just in case, etc.
In the homeland security program, false negatives are still potentially bad, but the cost of a false positive is higher (especially under current US policy).
In 2004, I gave up my right to vote in an overwhelmingly blue state in order to work on a get out the vote campaign in Ohio. The job opened up at the last minute, and I wasn't able to get my absentee voter registration in on time (I don't remember if I had actually missed the deadline, or if I just didn't have my shit together). At the time, I certainly appreciated the irony of the situation, but I never had any doubts that I was doing the right thing and participating more, rather than less, in the democratic process.
So, I'm not saying that any of the NYU kids saw things this way, but if offered the legal chance to sell my vote for $1 million (whether actually selling the vote or merely not voting), I would definitely take the offer. I'd put a large part of the money towards a campaign, and use much of the rest to support an unpaid leave from my job so I could personally do campaign work.
If an olympic athlete advertises that he can sprint 100 meters in 10 seconds, the fact that he can't run 10 kilometers in 1,000 seconds doesn't make his earlier claim false.
Moreover, in buying bandwidth, I don't care about sustained speeds, because I don't do p2p downloads, but I do want my web pages and email right away, in speedy bursts. So the claim I care about is the advertised burst speed, rather than the bandwidth cap.
No, insurance is not about socialism. I'm healthy and in my 20s. I don't pay into insurance because I good-heartedly want to subsidize the healthcare of the unhealthy. I do it because I'm not that well off, so paying $200/month with 100% certainty is actually _much_ better for me than not having insurance, but running a half a percent risk per month of getting a $20,000 bill (even though.005*20,000 is only half of $200). Insurance allows me to spread the risk among other, equally healthy people, so that I can plan my life around it rather than risking bankruptcy.
> And Dallas, especially around the downtown area, lights are designed to make you want to run them....
> a 3 mile trip shouldn't be 20-30 minutes because of 8 traffic lights(typically having to wait twice at
> two of them because of some additional not syncing up on cross streets).
I've never been to Dallas, but in other cities (I'm thinking Oakland), lights are not designed to "make you want to run them," but to make you not want to drive downtown at all. It's part of a conscious policy to to make downtown a nice place to be, by discouraging driving, encourage biking and use of public transit, or at least to encourage drivers to go around downtown (not that there are always good ways to do this.
Are you asking about the right thing?
First, you'd be surprised how much foreknowledge you probably have about driving from Sacramento to Manhattan. I've never done the drive, but I'm pretty sure if I hop onto a big, even-numbered interstate, like 80 or 90, I'll get most of the way there. And, if I find myself somewhere in the middle, I might not know the roads, but I'll have a decent sense of where each city lies. So, maybe it's "cheating" to give the robot a gps and a street map of everything, but the difference is one of degree. This background knowledge is "a pwerful [sic] set of smarts."
Second, laser-range finders and gps-based spedometers don't give the robot capabilities you don't have--they let it do what you can do. You have binocular vision, and your brain works really hard to estimate ranges from that. You probably know how fast you're going because you use your eyes to look at the spedometer. So, these tools give the robot teh equivalent of your "pair of eyes."
Not saying that a robt that can do this is the robot that will replace humanity, but I think this meets your test.
Don't get me wrong--even if their efficient centralized solar plant takes the whole four square miles, I'd prefer it to a coal fired power plant, and probably over a nuclear reactor. But, without bothering to run the numbers (this is slashdot, after all), I'd prefer something along the lines of California's "Million Solar Roofs" plan. Let's just throw solar panels on every unused vaguely flat surface we've already built.
The issue is still watts/$, but there's no reason that the $ should include paying for all that land, and the corresponding social, political and environmental costs. It doesn't matter if they the panels are so inefficient that it would take the equivalent of, say, 16 square miles to generate a kilowatt, if we can get that area for nearly free on existing structures.
This approach also brings the benefits of decentralized power generation, such as avoiding transmission losses. But I just like it because it's the zergling rush of electricity generation.
That's a great point, although I suspect the reality will be even more bleak.
Sony won't need to install a rootkit, because the Microsoft DRM will be designed specifically to help enforce things like Sony's EULA.
The worst case scenario here is not having insurmountable DRM software. It's having somebody write spyware or buggy code that introduces a vulnerability, and letting the OS shelter it from any attempts at fixing it.
In other words, having the OS shelter code and prevent others (antivirus writers or you) creates a hole if the OS makes mistakes (or judgments you disagree with) about what it shelters. DRM isn't the worst thing that can fall through that hole.
First, IANAL.
I think parent is right in that a creating audio from a MIDI score is similar to performing written sheet music. However, that doesn't put you in the clear--if I recall correctly, owning the copyright to a musical work means you can prohibit others from (publicly) performing that work. Similarly, if I own the copyright to a song, you aren't allowed to transcribe it into sheet music or MIDI and then distribute the transcription w/o my permission.
Of course, copyright does allow you to make "fair use" of other works. However, if you want to distribute your derivative, the derivative generally has to be very different than the original ("transformative").
Of course, this being slashdot, I haven't bothered to refresh my memory by looking any of this up. But I think the just of it is that you can't distribute performances of sheet music or audio generated from MIDI files w/o permission.
Slashdot Mirror
I get basically the same in Safari Version 5.0.2 (5533.18.5) on Mac OS 10.5.8. I also have a long username, so maybe parent is onto something.
Treaties supercede state constitutions, not the federal constitution. The quoted text demonstrates this, with the "any thing in the constitution . . . of any State" bit.
I will not feed the troll, I will not feed the troll, I . . .
Are you out of your mind? The point other commenters are making is that a non-trivial number of folks, with an emphasis on schools and other educational institutions, have old hardware that runs Mac OS 9. It might be that, in some abstract, general sense, Linux or BSD is more usable and stable than OS 9 (although I disagree), but the question is what's more usable on the hardware available to these folks. As somebody who spent too much time in college (computer science program, university known for computer science) trying to get linux to run on apple hardware of this era, I can assure you that getting other OSes to work is nigh-impossible, and that few, if any, of the institutions that are *still* using this hardware could realistically take that option. So this is great for those users.
Also, as for Timothy's "not-a-transcript-but-better-than-one" heading: no. This summary in the text is not as good as a transcript, and the video is not as good as a transcript, because reading a transcript is faster, and is something I can do at work. (Yes, I know that it's Sunday).
As a bicyclist, I'd love it if google had decent maps of off-street bike paths, such that I could use google maps' normal direction-finding feature with these. I've lived in lots of cities with numerous such paths, and they're usually out of the way and hard to find if you don't already know that they're there. It would be great to have a feature that a) lets me find them, and b) tells me exactly how far out of my way I'd need to go for the added safety/pleasantness of using them.
Compare
with
I am not an antitrust lawyer, but you said it yourself. Having a dominant position in the market is not sufficient to make you a monopoly: you also have to abuse that position to exclude competition. If there can be competition, then you have not abused your position to exclude such competition.
The ancestor post (too many generations) was about whether use of open standards could, by definition, mean that you were not abusing a dominant position. Parent poster replied by saying that AT&T (presumably back in the days of Ma Bell) could have open sourced its switches, but AT&T still would have been a monopolist. That's because what AT&T was selling at the time was better understood as hardware and access to that hardware.
Another topic discussed up there somewhere was whether Apple is abusing its market dominance with the iPod. In this case, open standards, etc., might be able to themselves ensure that Apple is not excluding other music vendors from that market. These standards have less to do with whether Apple is abusing its position to exclude other hardware manufacturers from the relevant market, but that's another story (FWIW, I don't think Apple is abusing this position).
My point is that it's important to determine what the relevant market is--this thread has identified markets in software sales, hardware sales, and software support. If the market is actually selling software that works, a company that uses open standards might, by definition, be incapable of abusing their position to exclude others.
[/Rant]
Mea culpa--EFF does link to the warrant application, as Exhibit A to their motion for emergency relief, although they don't exactly highlight that fact. http://www.eff.org/files/filenode/inresearchBC/EXHIBIT-A.pdf Reading over it, the mention of the two OSes is clearly part of the "Basis of Probable Cause," and not merely meant to identify which items are covered by the warrant.
The excerpts EFF have posted do not say "he has two operating systems, and that's evidence that he's up to no good." Instead, the warrant says
Paraphrased, that says that somebody directly told the police that they observed the suspect doing illegal activities, and that the dual OSes are an aspect of those activities. That's almost, although not exactly, the inverse of what the summary and most of the commenters assume. And if I was going to be up to something I shouldn't be doing on a computer, if I wasn't going to have a dedicated computer for it, then I might limit those activities to a separate OS with separate filesystems.
Finally, as another commenter noted, warrants have to state with some particularity the objects to be searched and seized. EFF isn't giving us enough context for this part of the warrant, but it could be that the warrant is talking about a computer with two OSes just so the officers know which computer to seize, the propriety of the seizure having been established elsewhere.
Not saying that this warrant was proper, that this guy did anything, etc., but I am saying that the problems most people are complaining about, and that EFF is implying, aren't necessarily there.
I was on a Southwest flight that was testing this out about a month ago, where it was free for passengers. I ran speakeasy's speed test on it, http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/ , and got about 3000 kbps down, and something like 200 kbps up. I ran the test about five minutes after they announced that we could use the service, and it seemed like more than half the people on the plane had laptops out and were playing with the service, even though none of us knew that the service would be available until we got on the plane.
To be pedantic, those rules only apply to public corporations (of which Apple is one). If you are a corporation that sells stock, then (in general) you have a legal duty to maximize return on investment for your shareholders. But if you are a private corporation (say you incorporated the family business just because you wanted a liability shield), the corporation is all yours, and you can do whatever you want with it, including being a "psychopathic money-hungry bastard" or not.
I didn't RTFA, but I read the judge's order.
Viacom argued that Google should be forced to disclose "the computer source code which controls both the YouTube.com search function and Google's internet search tool "Google.com"." (quoting the judge, p.4 of the order) Apparently Viacom argued that Google/Yahoo had (or might have?) the capacity to determine whether material was copyrighted automatically, or that the algorithm was already making this distinction but wasn't prohibiting copyrighted material.
Lawyers advance even less plausible arguments, but it is hard to see this as anything other than an attempt to threaten google in a way money damages really can't. Luckily, the judge rejected Viacom's request.
Viacom also asked for the source to google's "Video ID" program, copies of all videos ever removed from youtube, google's "advertising and video schemas", all _private_ videos and data, and finally the individual info discussed in the summary. The judge denied Viacom's requests for advertising schemas, content of private videos, and the Video ID source. Saying no to four unreasonable requests doesn't excuse saying yes to three others, but it could have been much worse.
I don't know if one tends to be predictably higher than the other, but the false positive rate in screening for some rare diseases is definitely high enough that most of the time the test returns a positive result, it's probably the case that the test is wrong, rather than that the patient actually has the disease. But in medicine, that's OK: it is really, really important to avoid false negatives, so that's the rate you minimize. In contrast, the costs of false positive aren't so bad--they're bad, but you do more tests, take some precautionary measures just in case, etc.
In the homeland security program, false negatives are still potentially bad, but the cost of a false positive is higher (especially under current US policy).
In 2004, I gave up my right to vote in an overwhelmingly blue state in order to work on a get out the vote campaign in Ohio. The job opened up at the last minute, and I wasn't able to get my absentee voter registration in on time (I don't remember if I had actually missed the deadline, or if I just didn't have my shit together). At the time, I certainly appreciated the irony of the situation, but I never had any doubts that I was doing the right thing and participating more, rather than less, in the democratic process.
So, I'm not saying that any of the NYU kids saw things this way, but if offered the legal chance to sell my vote for $1 million (whether actually selling the vote or merely not voting), I would definitely take the offer. I'd put a large part of the money towards a campaign, and use much of the rest to support an unpaid leave from my job so I could personally do campaign work.
Moreover, in buying bandwidth, I don't care about sustained speeds, because I don't do p2p downloads, but I do want my web pages and email right away, in speedy bursts. So the claim I care about is the advertised burst speed, rather than the bandwidth cap.
No, insurance is not about socialism. I'm healthy and in my 20s. I don't pay into insurance because I good-heartedly want to subsidize the healthcare of the unhealthy. I do it because I'm not that well off, so paying $200/month with 100% certainty is actually _much_ better for me than not having insurance, but running a half a percent risk per month of getting a $20,000 bill (even though .005*20,000 is only half of $200). Insurance allows me to spread the risk among other, equally healthy people, so that I can plan my life around it rather than risking bankruptcy.
> And Dallas, especially around the downtown area, lights are designed to make you want to run them. ...
> a 3 mile trip shouldn't be 20-30 minutes because of 8 traffic lights(typically having to wait twice at
> two of them because of some additional not syncing up on cross streets).
I've never been to Dallas, but in other cities (I'm thinking Oakland), lights are not designed to "make you want to run them," but to make you not want to drive downtown at all. It's part of a conscious policy to to make downtown a nice place to be, by discouraging driving, encourage biking and use of public transit, or at least to encourage drivers to go around downtown (not that there are always good ways to do this.
Are you asking about the right thing? First, you'd be surprised how much foreknowledge you probably have about driving from Sacramento to Manhattan. I've never done the drive, but I'm pretty sure if I hop onto a big, even-numbered interstate, like 80 or 90, I'll get most of the way there. And, if I find myself somewhere in the middle, I might not know the roads, but I'll have a decent sense of where each city lies. So, maybe it's "cheating" to give the robot a gps and a street map of everything, but the difference is one of degree. This background knowledge is "a pwerful [sic] set of smarts." Second, laser-range finders and gps-based spedometers don't give the robot capabilities you don't have--they let it do what you can do. You have binocular vision, and your brain works really hard to estimate ranges from that. You probably know how fast you're going because you use your eyes to look at the spedometer. So, these tools give the robot teh equivalent of your "pair of eyes." Not saying that a robt that can do this is the robot that will replace humanity, but I think this meets your test.
The issue is still watts/$, but there's no reason that the $ should include paying for all that land, and the corresponding social, political and environmental costs. It doesn't matter if they the panels are so inefficient that it would take the equivalent of, say, 16 square miles to generate a kilowatt, if we can get that area for nearly free on existing structures.
This approach also brings the benefits of decentralized power generation, such as avoiding transmission losses. But I just like it because it's the zergling rush of electricity generation.
The worst case scenario here is not having insurmountable DRM software. It's having somebody write spyware or buggy code that introduces a vulnerability, and letting the OS shelter it from any attempts at fixing it.
In other words, having the OS shelter code and prevent others (antivirus writers or you) creates a hole if the OS makes mistakes (or judgments you disagree with) about what it shelters. DRM isn't the worst thing that can fall through that hole.
First, IANAL. I think parent is right in that a creating audio from a MIDI score is similar to performing written sheet music. However, that doesn't put you in the clear--if I recall correctly, owning the copyright to a musical work means you can prohibit others from (publicly) performing that work. Similarly, if I own the copyright to a song, you aren't allowed to transcribe it into sheet music or MIDI and then distribute the transcription w/o my permission. Of course, copyright does allow you to make "fair use" of other works. However, if you want to distribute your derivative, the derivative generally has to be very different than the original ("transformative"). Of course, this being slashdot, I haven't bothered to refresh my memory by looking any of this up. But I think the just of it is that you can't distribute performances of sheet music or audio generated from MIDI files w/o permission.