As a blogger I am horrified when I see someone post the full text of an AP story on their site.
As a computer engineer, I am horrified whenever I see someone mindlessly cling to outdated and unrealistic ideas about information. The internet makes copying information effectively a zero cost operation, it is what the internet was designed to do. So stop fighting it, accept and embrace it and the new business models it makes possible.
Quoteing is one thing, but putting the entire article in a blog post is blatent plagirism.
No, unless the article is unattributed, it is not plagarism.
In Europe, where the taxes on oil account for a full ¾ of the costs, people use significantly more fuel efficient cars and in general burn much less oil.
Taxes on petrol in Europe aren't the only factor. Taxes on the vehicles themselves play a part, I don't remember the exact details but larger engines tend to be taxed more - I think it is calculated by displacement, but the number of cylinders may also be part of the calculation too. Thus the popularity of tiny little turbo-charged engines in european cars.
Y'all are missing the point. These guys are not about taking out P2P. They are part of a denial of service attack against the RIAA and MPAA, and we need more companies like them in order to make it effective.
You see, it works like this:
1) Make up a really snazzing sound anti-piracy product, 2) Back it with lots of sexy buzzwords and hand-waving 3) Sell, sorry LICENSE, it for lots of money to the (RI|MP)AA. 4) When it fails to perform, let in the next guy ready to do the same.
Repeat until (RI|MP)AA bank accounts have been depleted.
Maybe you are referring to their filing of bankruptcy in order to avoid paying ~$4M in punitive damages to the "owner" of the pop-up/down/over/under ad patent(?) Boohoo...
Referencing the Declaration of Independence to prove that Scalia's viewpoint on religion is in line with his claims of being a "strict constructionist" is not particularly valid.
Scalia likes to say, like you do, that since the founding fathers were mostly religious (which is such a broad term that it does disservice to such "religions" as deisim which was one of the more common "sects" you refer to) that their religious beliefs were embedded in the Constitution.
If that argument were of any real validity, then why is there no mention of God, or any god, in the text of the constitution or the bill of rights itself? In fact, the only reference to the word religion at all is to make sure that it is a non-issue:
Article IV, Clause 3: no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States
1st Amendment: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof
If the framers' intent was really that religious beliefs, christian or otherwise, were to be a foundation for this country's government, they would have at least referenced religion in a supporting fashion. They did not, and thus all of Scalia's self-indulgent arguments about "originalism" and "strict constructionism" with respect to religion in the US government are just his own personal method of self justification, or self-delusion if you prefer.
Just as skyrocketing oil costs have now made alternative energy sources like solar and wind price competitive, thus spurning much needed R&D investment, so should the increases in lumber pricing (it has about doubled over the last year alone) made alternatives like light-weight composite concrete more attractive (it was already a better deal over the long-run in terms of energy savings, but most builders only think about the up-front costs).
Increases in steel pricing should help too with R&D in light-weight composites like carbon-fiber (which is still way too expensive).
We run a few sites on IIS and use Exchange for all our corporate email, and haven't had a single incident. Similarly, we've not had a single incident on any of our Linux or Solaris servers, either.
That you know of.
So, no script kiddies have compromised your system, its not them you have to worry about. It's the guys who are in and out with the goods and don't leave trails like defaced web pages or crashed systems with everything under / deleted that you need to worry about.
Don't forget the impact of insurance. Insurance companies maximize profit by minimizing risk. This approach is not necessarily in the best interests of their customers or the public in general because it brings down the other half the equation, reward which is what the insured need to maximize profit. For example, every harmless freaky looking guy that the GAP has hauled off by the cops is one less freaky looking guy who will never spend money there again.
This is not completely fair. Most hardware companies depend on code in their drivers that their staff did not write. As contracts generally go, the outside developer usually imposes limits on use and distribution of their work. It's invariably more expensive to purchase outsourced code without restrictions.
That does not excuse manufacturers from releasing the programming specifications for their cards. The mantra from the Free software people has always been - give us the specs, we'll give you the drivers.
In this case, Via and Volari have gone a step further, but in the long run, good specs are actually more useful than just driver sources because you still have to reverse engineer the specs from the driver source if you want to do anything substantially new or different.
Note, I don't know if they released formal documentation too, I'm just making a general point.
even if they pull out the platter and put it under an atomic force microscopy with a magnetic sensing tip, and really can identify a bit with 90% probability even after overwriting... if you need a byte, you are down to 50%, if you need a word, 18%. And 90% may be doable if its overwriten once, but if its overwritten 5 times, it isnt.
Except that the more bits you know, the easier it is to figure out the other bits. The raw data on the platters contain tons of ECC, and if you have an idea of what you are looking for, you may be able to "help out" with smarter than normal, domain-spcific ECC algorithms.
It may not be easy, but if it is simply possible, then its just a matter of money and how much.
Do I not have the right to order those atoms however I want, including the reproduction of a Lamborghini, down to the brand badge?
Ignoring patent issues, which are distinct from copyright issues, yes you do.
Just don't try to sell it by misrepresenting it as the real thing. Ebay is full of "kit-cars" that look a heck of a lot like lambos, but none of the sellers misrepresent them as being the real thing.
Chuck, why do you post the same thing in every article?
Most of us are lucky to have even one good idea. He probably thinks this idea is his one good one and wants to make sure it gets heard. With almost a million registered users, he can probably post it 100 times and each time 99% of the readers will read it for the first time.
According to federal laws, it does not matter if you are a journalist or not. According to most state's laws revealing what you know, or can reasonably be expected to know is a trade secret is illegal (again it does not matter if you are a journalist.)
However, the Uniform Trade Secrets Act is primarily concerned with economic harm done to the company's who has had its secrets revealed. The recoverable damages are limited to a maximum of three times the actual damages and any unjust enrichment.
This particular case, it is highly doubtful that Apple lost any money at all. If there was any unjust enrichment, it was the ad revenue generated by the site and it is not clear, to me at least, if that even counts as unjust enrichment since it was not a use of the trade secrets in the regular way of using them to gain a competitive advantage over Apple by either the website owner or anyone who read about them.
Now, don't get me wrong...I'm all about the free speech...but pornography simply doesn't deserve the same sort of protection that journalists receive. If it is granted that protection, then all legitimate speech is weakened as a result, and we may ultimately see a decline in our right to free speech, rather than an increase.
My point is that "legitimate" journalism is not weakened by protections of borderline journalism, if anything it is strengthened by having had the boundries moved that much further out. For example, nobody in the West complains when the news reports on developments with mammograms and breast cancer drugs, but you are quite unlikely to hear anything about them on the news in a place like Saudia Arabia. "Porn" (as a very general term) has pushed the boundaries of legitimate speech in the West to society's benefit.
The reason this kind of reporting needs to be protected is that while this case may appear clean cut, the next one may not be so obvious where to draw the lines. As a society we need to err on the side of openness and disclosure, not on the side of corporate secretism.
Otherwise, a case like this can easily create a chilling effect where a person with a legitimate issue to disclose decides that it is just not worth the personal risk and so decides to keep his mouth shut instead of informing society at large. One thing to keep in mind is that it is not always so easy for the "whistleblower" in the middle of things to objectively evaluate the importance of the information he posseses. Better that a few "unimportant" secrets be revealed so that the the important ones can be reported on too than no secrets, relevant or not, are ever revealed.
In this particular case, while little societal benefit was accrued, little actual harm was done to Apple. If Apple had not made a legal issue of it, 99.999% of the people who knew about it would have forgotten about it by now. Jobs may feel like some of his thunder was stolen, but in the big picture it didn't really matter. Just another product announcement out of thousands.
So far the two ACs who responded have actually made cases supporting your point, they just don't understand things well enough to do any better.
I will attempt to actually disprove your point, understanding it full well.
My argument is that you do benefit from his (or more generally, "some" of the public's) use of that trail. You benefit indirectly in that society benefits as a whole when there are enough public resources for entertainment and recreation such that as much of society that is able can make use of them, regardless of their economic means.
Consider the case of public recreation facilities in neighborhoods of low economic class. Kids who are unable to pay for private recreation are much more tempted to take their entertainment via theft - stolen DVDs, stolen basketballs, or other stolen stuff which can be converted to cash to pay for that private recreation. You may argue that theft is immoral, but that doesn't matter one bit, practicality is what counts in the real world. And then there is the less tangible benefit of having as much of society as possible be engaged, healthy and expressive which results in a net gain in creativity and productivity.
So, public property used as a way to maintain a baseline of opportunity and wealth for all members of society can well be in your best interest.
Furthermore, the idea that private ownership of property is the best way to manage property rests on the idea of the "tragedy of the commons." But in these cases, as long as there is a sufficient quantity of public property, society will never reach the point of exhaustion, thus that whole argument for privatization is moot in this case.
That's bogus, the EULA is not for the whole thinkpad, it is just for windows. I'm sure that if you were to take the rest of the terms in the EULA and apply them equally thinkpad itself, they would be ridiculous.
two cpus are two cpus.. the OS sees them and uses them as it does other resources. dual core the OS does not see, the cpu employs the two cores to execute more pipelines in parallel.
Then why is it that I am posting from a dual core workstation and top shows two distinct CPUs?
The stupidest one I've seen is that kid's show on saturday morning where a giant arena of people gathered to watch kids fight with spinning tops! It was like ten-thousand people all looking down at a little 2 sq-ft board with little spinning tops smacking into each other
Well, "Robot Wars" did so well, they figured "Dreidle Wars" was worth a shot!
Macromedia should be on my side with this, unless they are somehow benefitting everytime a flash app is loaded (which isn't impossible, but creates a serious conflict of interest).
They do benefit, indirectly but not very circuitously.
If flash-designers can count on their flashlets always loading in the browser, it makes flash a more marketable medium which means more sales for flash development tools which is where macromedia makes their money.
> I think this shows the tidings of the new application: built entirely > using the browser as a client interface, and the server as the > app-logic/storage.
A major problem with this model is that it is inherently not-Free. Sure, you may get Free access to the client-side source, but the server side is where the real work probably gets done and getting access to that source in any meaningful way is not going to be possible.
Remember the point of Free software is so that the user, or his agent, can modify and improve it to better fit their needs. But, even if you were able to get the source for the server-side code, you still could not implement any improvements or bug fixes that you made to it, unless you were to go and get your own server to run it on too which isn't likely.
> Plus, the software "seller" doesn't need to bother with tech support > nearly as much - only need to answer the occasional "my JavaScript > is turned off/I use Lynx" call.
I don't think that would be true. Yes, the more of the logic that runs on the server, the less outside influences like broken drivers and such on the client end will cause failures. But, that does not reduce the potential for bugs in the implementation itself and, refering to my previous paragraph, since it is infeasible even for expert users to fix bugs themselves, things may be harder for the user in the long run.
They are also, supposedly "designed only to be readable from 8 centimeters (about 3 inches) away when the passport is open."
My question at that point is: why not use another technology?
Because they want to be able to read them from more then 8cm. They know perfectly well that, with the right equipment, these 8cm devices can be read up to 10m away and they intend to use that feature themselves - they even talk about the ease of tracking people in airports and such as part of the justification for this implementation.
So, you have what basically amounts to spin control. Enough of the general public has latched onto the meme that RFID is a danger to their privacy. So instead of working to eliminate the entirely valid risks that RFID brings to this particular application, they are just trying to cover them up - literally and figuratively.
Slashdot Mirror
As a blogger I am horrified when I see someone post the full text of an AP story on their site.
As a computer engineer, I am horrified whenever I see someone mindlessly cling to outdated and unrealistic ideas about information. The internet makes copying information effectively a zero cost operation, it is what the internet was designed to do. So stop fighting it, accept and embrace it and the new business models it makes possible.
Quoteing is one thing, but putting the entire article in a blog post is blatent plagirism.
No, unless the article is unattributed, it is not plagarism.
In Europe, where the taxes on oil account for a full ¾ of the costs, people use significantly more fuel efficient cars and in general burn much less oil.
Taxes on petrol in Europe aren't the only factor. Taxes on the vehicles themselves play a part, I don't remember the exact details but larger engines tend to be taxed more - I think it is calculated by displacement, but the number of cylinders may also be part of the calculation too. Thus the popularity of tiny little turbo-charged engines in european cars.
Y'all are missing the point.
These guys are not about taking out P2P.
They are part of a denial of service attack against the RIAA and MPAA, and we need more companies like them in order to make it effective.
You see, it works like this:
1) Make up a really snazzing sound anti-piracy product,
2) Back it with lots of sexy buzzwords and hand-waving
3) Sell, sorry LICENSE, it for lots of money to the (RI|MP)AA.
4) When it fails to perform, let in the next guy ready to do the same.
Repeat until (RI|MP)AA bank accounts have been depleted.
Iraqi Printer Virus
Hoax Alert.
It was an April Fool's Day joke in InfoWorld that some clueless reporters were suckered into believing.
http://www.soci.niu.edu/~crypt/other/adams.htm
It's sort of like how the definition of sci-fi has been twisted to exclude Star Wars.
Star Wars defines sci-fi which is the sub-genre of science fiction that contains all the cheeze.
X10 is still in business.
Maybe you are referring to their filing of bankruptcy in order to avoid paying ~$4M in punitive damages to the "owner" of the pop-up/down/over/under ad patent(?) Boohoo...
Referencing the Declaration of Independence to prove that Scalia's viewpoint on religion is in line with his claims of being a "strict constructionist" is not particularly valid.
Scalia likes to say, like you do, that since the founding fathers were mostly religious (which is such a broad term that it does disservice to such "religions" as deisim which was one of the more common "sects" you refer to) that their religious beliefs were embedded in the Constitution.
If that argument were of any real validity, then why is there no mention of God, or any god, in the text of the constitution or the bill of rights itself? In fact, the only reference to the word religion at all is to make sure that it is a non-issue:
Article IV, Clause 3: no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States
1st Amendment: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof
If the framers' intent was really that religious beliefs, christian or otherwise, were to be a foundation for this country's government, they would have at least referenced religion in a supporting fashion. They did not, and thus all of Scalia's self-indulgent arguments about "originalism" and "strict constructionism" with respect to religion in the US government are just his own personal method of self justification, or self-delusion if you prefer.
All the better for alternative home construction.
Just as skyrocketing oil costs have now made alternative energy sources like solar and wind price competitive, thus spurning much needed R&D investment, so should the increases in lumber pricing (it has about doubled over the last year alone) made alternatives like light-weight composite concrete more attractive (it was already a better deal over the long-run in terms of energy savings, but most builders only think about the up-front costs).
Increases in steel pricing should help too with R&D in light-weight composites like carbon-fiber (which is still way too expensive).
We run a few sites on IIS and use Exchange for all our corporate email, and haven't had a single incident. Similarly, we've not had a single incident on any of our Linux or Solaris servers, either.
That you know of.
So, no script kiddies have compromised your system, its not them you have to worry about. It's the guys who are in and out with the goods and don't leave trails like defaced web pages or crashed systems with everything under / deleted that you need to worry about.
Don't forget the impact of insurance. Insurance companies maximize profit by minimizing risk. This approach is not necessarily in the best interests of their customers or the public in general because it brings down the other half the equation, reward which is what the insured need to maximize profit. For example, every harmless freaky looking guy that the GAP has hauled off by the cops is one less freaky looking guy who will never spend money there again.
Anyway, where do you think that these laws COME from in the first place? God?
Apparently Chief Justice Antonin Scalia thinks so.
When I heard that on the news a month ago I literally felt a chill go down my spine.
This is not completely fair. Most hardware companies depend on code in their drivers that their staff did not write. As contracts generally go, the outside developer usually imposes limits on use and distribution of their work. It's invariably more expensive to purchase outsourced code without restrictions.
That does not excuse manufacturers from releasing the programming specifications for their cards. The mantra from the Free software people has always been - give us the specs, we'll give you the drivers.
In this case, Via and Volari have gone a step further, but in the long run, good specs are actually more useful than just driver sources because you still have to reverse engineer the specs from the driver source if you want to do anything substantially new or different.
Note, I don't know if they released formal documentation too, I'm just making a general point.
even if they pull out the platter and put it under an atomic force microscopy with a magnetic sensing tip, and really can identify a bit with 90% probability even after overwriting... if you need a byte, you are down to 50%, if you need a word, 18%.
And 90% may be doable if its overwriten once, but if its overwritten 5 times, it isnt.
Except that the more bits you know, the easier it is to figure out the other bits. The raw data on the platters contain tons of ECC, and if you have an idea of what you are looking for, you may be able to "help out" with smarter than normal, domain-spcific ECC algorithms.
It may not be easy, but if it is simply possible, then its just a matter of money and how much.
Do I not have the right to order those atoms however I want, including the reproduction of a Lamborghini, down to the brand badge? Ignoring patent issues, which are distinct from copyright issues, yes you do. Just don't try to sell it by misrepresenting it as the real thing. Ebay is full of "kit-cars" that look a heck of a lot like lambos, but none of the sellers misrepresent them as being the real thing.
Chuck, why do you post the same thing in every article?
Most of us are lucky to have even one good idea. He probably thinks this idea is his one good one and wants to make sure it gets heard. With almost a million registered users, he can probably post it 100 times and each time 99% of the readers will read it for the first time.
It really ain't that bad of a point.
According to federal laws, it does not matter if you are a journalist or not. According to most state's laws revealing what you know, or can reasonably be expected to know is a trade secret is illegal (again it does not matter if you are a journalist.)
However, the Uniform Trade Secrets Act is primarily concerned with economic harm done to the company's who has had its secrets revealed. The recoverable damages are limited to a maximum of three times the actual damages and any unjust enrichment.
This particular case, it is highly doubtful that Apple lost any money at all. If there was any unjust enrichment, it was the ad revenue generated by the site and it is not clear, to me at least, if that even counts as unjust enrichment since it was not a use of the trade secrets in the regular way of using them to gain a competitive advantage over Apple by either the website owner or anyone who read about them.
Now, don't get me wrong...I'm all about the free speech...but pornography simply doesn't deserve the same sort of protection that journalists receive. If it is granted that protection, then all legitimate speech is weakened as a result, and we may ultimately see a decline in our right to free speech, rather than an increase.
My point is that "legitimate" journalism is not weakened by protections of borderline journalism, if anything it is strengthened by having had the boundries moved that much further out. For example, nobody in the West complains when the news reports on developments with mammograms and breast cancer drugs, but you are quite unlikely to hear anything about them on the news in a place like Saudia Arabia. "Porn" (as a very general term) has pushed the boundaries of legitimate speech in the West to society's benefit.
The reason this kind of reporting needs to be protected is that while this case may appear clean cut, the next one may not be so obvious where to draw the lines. As a society we need to err on the side of openness and disclosure, not on the side of corporate secretism.
Otherwise, a case like this can easily create a chilling effect where a person with a legitimate issue to disclose decides that it is just not worth the personal risk and so decides to keep his mouth shut instead of informing society at large. One thing to keep in mind is that it is not always so easy for the "whistleblower" in the middle of things to objectively evaluate the importance of the information he posseses. Better that a few "unimportant" secrets be revealed so that the the important ones can be reported on too than no secrets, relevant or not, are ever revealed.
In this particular case, while little societal benefit was accrued, little actual harm was done to Apple. If Apple had not made a legal issue of it, 99.999% of the people who knew about it would have forgotten about it by now. Jobs may feel like some of his thunder was stolen, but in the big picture it didn't really matter. Just another product announcement out of thousands.
So far the two ACs who responded have actually made cases supporting your point, they just don't understand things well enough to do any better.
I will attempt to actually disprove your point, understanding it full well.
My argument is that you do benefit from his (or more generally, "some" of the public's) use of that trail. You benefit indirectly in that society benefits as a whole when there are enough public resources for entertainment and recreation such that as much of society that is able can make use of them, regardless of their economic means.
Consider the case of public recreation facilities in neighborhoods of low economic class. Kids who are unable to pay for private recreation are much more tempted to take their entertainment via theft - stolen DVDs, stolen basketballs, or other stolen stuff which can be converted to cash to pay for that private recreation. You may argue that theft is immoral, but that doesn't matter one bit, practicality is what counts in the real world. And then there is the less tangible benefit of having as much of society as possible be engaged, healthy and expressive which results in a net gain in creativity and productivity.
So, public property used as a way to maintain a baseline of opportunity and wealth for all members of society can well be in your best interest.
Furthermore, the idea that private ownership of property is the best way to manage property rests on the idea of the "tragedy of the commons." But in these cases, as long as there is a sufficient quantity of public property, society will never reach the point of exhaustion, thus that whole argument for privatization is moot in this case.
That's bogus, the EULA is not for the whole thinkpad, it is just for windows. I'm sure that if you were to take the rest of the terms in the EULA and apply them equally thinkpad itself, they would be ridiculous.
If you want a better system, do something for your local elementary school, shake, stir, then wait twenty years and hope things turn out better.
Or, just spray the local elementary school with brain-enhancer nanobots and let them do what they're good at!
dual core and smp are like apples and oranges.
No, they are like winesap and mcintosh apples.
two cpus are two cpus.. the OS sees them and uses them as it does other resources. dual core the OS does not see, the cpu employs the two cores to execute more pipelines in parallel.
Then why is it that I am posting from a dual core workstation and top shows two distinct CPUs?
The stupidest one I've seen is that kid's show on saturday morning where a giant arena of people gathered to watch kids fight with spinning tops! It was like ten-thousand people all looking down at a little 2 sq-ft board with little spinning tops smacking into each other
Well, "Robot Wars" did so well, they figured "Dreidle Wars" was worth a shot!
Macromedia should be on my side with this, unless they are somehow benefitting everytime a flash app is loaded (which isn't impossible, but creates a serious conflict of interest).
They do benefit, indirectly but not very circuitously.
If flash-designers can count on their flashlets always loading in the browser, it makes flash a more marketable medium which means more sales for flash development tools which is where macromedia makes their money.
> I think this shows the tidings of the new application: built entirely
> using the browser as a client interface, and the server as the
> app-logic/storage.
A major problem with this model is that it is inherently not-Free. Sure, you may get Free access to the client-side source, but the server side is where the real work probably gets done and getting access to that source in any meaningful way is not going to be possible.
Remember the point of Free software is so that the user, or his agent, can modify and improve it to better fit their needs. But, even if you were able to get the source for the server-side code, you still could not implement any improvements or bug fixes that you made to it, unless you were to go and get your own server to run it on too which isn't likely.
> Plus, the software "seller" doesn't need to bother with tech support
> nearly as much - only need to answer the occasional "my JavaScript
> is turned off/I use Lynx" call.
I don't think that would be true. Yes, the more of the logic that runs on the server, the less outside influences like broken drivers and such on the client end will cause failures. But, that does not reduce the potential for bugs in the implementation itself and, refering to my previous paragraph, since it is infeasible even for expert users to fix bugs themselves, things may be harder for the user in the long run.
They are also, supposedly "designed only to be readable from 8 centimeters (about 3 inches) away when the passport is open."
My question at that point is: why not use another technology?
Because they want to be able to read them from more then 8cm. They know perfectly well that, with the right equipment, these 8cm devices can be read up to 10m away and they intend to use that feature themselves - they even talk about the ease of tracking people in airports and such as part of the justification for this implementation.
So, you have what basically amounts to spin control. Enough of the general public has latched onto the meme that RFID is a danger to their privacy. So instead of working to eliminate the entirely valid risks that RFID brings to this particular application, they are just trying to cover them up - literally and figuratively.
Your tax dollar at work...