In my country, when somebody is wronged by a law he deems to be unconstitutional, he can try to overthrow the law in the Constitutional Tribunal. Is there such possibility in the USA?
In theory, yes -- the Supreme Court is the judge of constitutionality. For instance, see the various EFF and Gilmore lawsuits. The problem now sems to be that there's so much unconstitutional shit going on, things that actually result in people being thrown in jail with no lawyers or any of the other constitutional guarantees, that the DMCA's constitutionality test may have to wait. The good guys have a limited amount of money, as opposed to the forces of evil.
People buy Windows for one reason- it's the far-and-away market leader.
People don't buy operating systems, they buy PCs. Until Linux is a prominent option (i.e. not hidden away on some obscure page) for consumer PCs from places like Gateway and Dell, Windows wins. If MS Office were available on Linux, people with geek friends will run Linux or BSD but I don't think Joe Q. Public will pick Linux. Joe has seen those glossy ads for MS in magazines and TV.
I really don't want the SS breaking down my door and seizing all the computers (and then I have to sue the state and wait a few years to get my stuff back maybe) because some clerk at HQ typed in the wrong address.
if you were sending viagra spams, nigerian investment emails, or phishing scams, then you certainly deserve the SS breaking down your door and seizing your computers. and don't expect them back, ever.
Perhaps your reading comprehension is not up to par. If "some clerk at HQ typed in the wrong address" so the SS bust down my door, why does that mean that I was "sending viagra spams, nigerian investment emails, or phishing scams"? cf. Tuttle vs. Buttle.
Co-counsel Shawn Newman explained, "We have a Kafkaesque situation in which the government can take your property without a conviction. The government and their paid informants are like bounty hunters who share a percentage of the proceeds." In this case after three years of enormous effort and expense McGavick and Newman were able to win back her property and a $100,000 judgment for damages. Her loss of business, damage to her reputation and emotional distress were not recovered with that award, but it was better than her client received. He was offered a choice: plead guilty to drug sales and receive a 9 month sentence and you may keep half of the value of your $800,000 property when the county sells it, or, you can fight the drug charge in criminal court and you may win, but in that case all of your property will be forfeited.
Ah, to think that a just a couple of decades ago, it was the Soviets we accused of suppressing dissent, requiring papers for domestic travel, guilty until proven innocent, and the state seizing private property "just because".
Let's not lose perspective. Draconian measures like forfeiture (or public flogging, which is what I'd choose) are a bit much for spamming. It's not right for the War On Some Drugs (no charges or trial, but they take your house -- where the hell is the protection against unreasonable search and seizure, and speedy trial by a jury of peers?) and it's not right for spammers.
I really don't want the SS breaking down my door and seizing all the computers (and then I have to sue the state and wait a few years to get my stuff back maybe) because some clerk at HQ typed in the wrong address.
"When I pay my water bill, I expect my water to be drinkable out of the tap. Today, when you pay your Internet bill, the data you get is not consumable."
A flawed analogy, of course, but one that points out a fundamental way that this guy doesn't get it: internet access is not a one-way service like TV, but two way like the phone -- the consumer has the ability to affect the infrastructure.
A better analogy: a new super-duper answering machine. Your Answer-Matic 2000 not only answers your phone (and shows you caller ID, the news, makes dinner, makes you irresistible to members of the appropriate sex etc. etc.) -- it has this cool feature. Say your Mom calls to tell you that Uncle Joe is marrying someone young enough to be his grand-daughter. Then she thinks -- she needs to tell Aunt Millie too. No problemo! She hits the * button twice, then enters Aunt Millie's phone number. The machine will call Aunt Millie and send her the message too! Uncle Fred also? You can enter multiple numbers!
Oops! Your next phone bill is $4000000 because telemarketers called your Answer-Matic 2000 and left a message advertising cheap generic viagra with guaranteed breast and penis enlargement, and 200,000 phone numbers to call and deliver the message to. Hey, at least it placed all the calls from 10 pm to 2 am when you wouldn't notice.
Should we insist that the phone company "filter the water", or that consumers should buy Norton EZ-IcePhoneFilterGuard and put it between the Answer-Matic 2000 and the jack on the wall? Or should we take the Answer-Matic people out back and have them shot?
I would have assumed that whereever they find you using a Ruritanian passport here for serious ID checking...
The point is not where you can use a Ruritanian passport for immigration purposes, but that ID checking by the airlines in the US is ineffectual and unnecessary.
(Well, unnecessary for regular people; the airlines love it because it means you can't give away or sell your air ticket if your plans change.)
They check you on the way in but not on the way out, so they don't know who is in the country.
(This may vary by visa type -- on leaving, F-1 students have to surrender the entry record they got when they first arrived, so the government can figure out which F-1 students are in the country.) Why should they know who's where? In the US, rights (except for voting, running for office, and serving on juries) are for all people, not just citizens. If a person is not known to be evil, she should be allowed to travel freely.
We're talking about domestic travel, so why is a visa going to be required? (I have a foreign passport; when I use it for ID, they just compare the name to the ticket and see if the photo looks something like me.)
In fact, a visa is not obligatory for foreign nationals. I'm a foreign national living in the US, and I do not have a US visa (or any other INS stuff) in my passport. A visa is required to enter the country; it has nothing to do with whether or not you can stay in the country. (Most people don't know much about US immigration, so your error is excusable.) For example, an unexpired F-1 visa is not required for foreign students; they just need to stay enrolled full-time at the school that issued the I-20 (the school is named in the visa, besides a few other places). An H-1B visa may be single entry and valid for six months but the holder can stay in the US for upto 3 years as long as she continues to work in the same job. Permanent residents also don't need a visa: my immigration document is the green card, my passport does not have a US visa.
Sure, we can talk about rectal scans and everything else Ashcroft wants, but in today's world, that Ruritanian passport (possibly issued to Mickey Mouse) will get me on domestic US flights.
... it reminded me of the "structured language" = conscienceness thought debate.
What do you mean by "conscienceness"? I couldn't figure out if you meant "conscience" or "conciseness" -- reading the rest of your message I'd guess "conciseness" but I'm not completely sure. What would "conciseness thought debate" mean? Which are the devices you say are necessary but over-emphasized -- "structured language" and "conciseness"? Conciseness of "thought debate", or conciseness through debate? Or a debate on structured language and conciseness of thought?
People often say "Oh, who cares about grammar and spelling, the point is to communicate." They don't seem to appreciate that with poor spelling and grammar the meaning is diluted or lost. I'm sure I'm not alone in being quicker to abandon a hard to understand message than one that's easy to read.
IX. The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
You do not have a right to drive on the public highways, but you certainly have the right to travel freely within the country. Without this right, freedom is meaningless, and we call it incarceration or house arrest.
An aircraft owned by an airline is not the same as a private vehicle. An airline is a common carrier and is different from me taking people up for joyrides in my airplane. If a passenger is caught transporting drugs on an airline, the airline is not liable; but if one of my passengers is transporting drugs the DEA can throw us all in jail and impound my airplane. On the other hand, I can say that I will not allow any Republicans on my airplane, and that is my right. An airline cannot refuse to carry you because of your political views, or national origin, or sex, or race, or...
So why does an airline need to know my identity? Why can I not pay with cash and board anonymously? (Assuming I'm willing to submit to a reasonable search for security -- say metal detectors and/or X-ray.) I don't need to carry papers on other modes of transportation like buses, ferries, trains etc. or while walking. I bet a terrorist could kill more people by putting a bomb on a ferry in cold waters, like the Seattle-Victoria ferry. Why then do we have this hysterical attitude towards aviation?
the cheap arline [that doesn't screen] would be a threat to national security because a terrorist could slip on and bomb/fly it into a building.
Point: A fake drivers' license may be obtained in reasonably large cities for around $50. A fake passport for some minor tiny country can't be more than a couple of hundred dollars. The gate agent that checks the "government issued ID" is just a regular person with no access to any special secret ID checking machinery. (I could just as well use a passport from the Kingdom of Ruritania as long as it looked impressive and had seals and stamps.)
So how does requiring this easily faked document prevent terrorism?
You don't even need a fake ID. If I were a terrorist legally in the country and without prior arrests etc., I could just use my regular ID -- just as the 9/11 hijackers did.
Explain to me again why "Your papers, please" prevents terrorism?
I feel the companies will be hampered with the "but if we release the specs then company XYZ will start producing amazing graphics cards!" line on things.
Yeah, right. Any unscrupulous company can just take the binary driver, disassemble it and convert it to C. Not a trivial undertaking, but not anything a reasonably good hacker can't do in a few months of full-time work. And if ATI can't design hardware that can't be used without revealing all their K00L "Interlecshul Property" they're idiots. Besides, it's not like Joe Schmoe in a garage will be able to design and fabricate today's graphics cards.
No, it's the same old story: pinheaded management who sing the mantra of this mysterious "intellectual property" (ignorance+greed -> paranoia). I have to deal with them often, trying to convince them that there's absolutely no reason to not release our source code, because our product is service and infrastructure. There's nothing any competitor could do with our code that wouldn't also require spending mucho bucks on hardware and colo space.
the problem is for somebody who uses an authed SMTP connection normally.
Eh? On my home server (static IP, say 10.1.2.3) I have SMTP+TLS, and POP3 over SSL. When I want to send mail (from anywhere) I connect to my server, authenticate, and send it any outgoing email I need to send. My friend's mailserver sees a connection from 10.1.2.3 for a message claiming to be from me@my-domain.org. Look up SPF for my-domain.org and check to see if 10.1.2.3 is allowed to send email from my-domain.org -- yes it is, so the message is accepted and all's well.
I looked into setting up SPF on the domains our company hosts, but then I hit upon a problem - some ISPs (for example my home ISP) limit outgoing SMTP to just their server, so in my SPF records, I need to specify every other restricted SMTP server my clients may send mail through.
This is the part that doesn't make sense. Ok, so your home ISP limits outgoing SMTP so you have to connect to their server to send email; that is, mail from your-domain.org is sent from mail1.big-isp.com. Create an SPF record for your-domain.org [which I assume you control] that says mail1.big-isp.com is allowed to send email from you@your-domain.org. Viola! A musical instrument.
Here's the executive summary: if your MTA knows SPF, for every domain that publishes SPF you know that that domain cannot be spoofed. If you publish SPF, no one can spoof your address. The only problem SPF has is when mail is forwarded -- e.g. by a mailing list, or with ~/.forward.
... but I have so much control over the placement of constructs especially tables, text, pictures, page breaks, etc.
Why?
When writing a document you should be concerned about the content, not exactly how high this table column should be.
For automatic document generation, LaTeX is so much easier to generate than any binary proprietary format -- shell script, awk, perl, C code, take your pick. And typesetting details like column width belong in a style file, not in the document.
However, TeX to DVI was never 100% guaranteed either, and when I tried DVI generation in Linux I found some strangenesses.
What does this mean, exactly? Do you know of Knuth's bounty for bugs in TeX? This "no 100% guarantee" and "some strangeness" sounds awfully close to FUD.
Since the laws of math are going to be the same (except maybe at the very highest levels of math where things are still being discovered)...
Not just in math, but in any area that features ongoing research. However research topics don't get to textbooks for quite a while, so it's safe to say that for an average high-school or lower-level undergraduate textbook, you won't lose anything by getting an older edition. Even with upper-level undergraduate material you'll be pretty safe.
Not all professors... when I was one, I: (a) told publishers' reps I'd be happy to review any books they had, and they were welcome to pick them up when I was done (they never did); and (b) told students that it was stupid to buy books just to find homework problems and then sell them back after the semester, so not only would textbooks be optional, they'd be books that I felt would be good references for their future (computer science). I could handle the teaching and homework problem setting myself.
The reason is simple. I can use my BSD code at any company I work for or contract with with no restrictions. I can't use any GPLed code because the company I was working for would have to decide of they want the rest of their project to also be GPLed.
You don't get it. If you are the owner of the copyright, you can release your code under any number of licenses. You could chose to release your code under the GPL, and also use it at work by licensing the code under a different license to your company. (This is what I do.) In fact there are free projects that release code under GPL that, if you want to use their code in a proprietary project, you can buy a different license that lets you do so.
But hey, it's your code; use the license you want.
I have been working with software companies or writing software directly for over 20 years. I cannot tell you the number of great software products that have been lost because somebody thought they were "protecting" it by putting non-freedom licensing on it.
Amen. We're still using free software that was written over two decades ago on machines that no longer exist. (One example: I still use xeyes on my desktop. I first started using it on 68000-based Sun-3 workstations in the 80s.) We often hear of attempts to revive old abandoned games for long-dead machines.
Or consider the case of Lighthouse Design. A quality design suite for NeXTSTEP that was axed when Sun bought Lighthouse. It is now completely lost: Sun has no interest in releasing it. In fact, inside Sun (I work there) no one even knows where the source might be. Just before going under they (Lighthouse) released free binary licenses so if you have a NeXTSTEP machine you can run it; but it's the end of the line.
During normal typing, your hands -- hell, your entire body -- are nowhere near as tense as during marathon or any other gaming. When I bother firing up a game on my peecee, I'm leaning forward, I'm tense, I'm on edge waiting for the next baddy; I have to get him before he gets me, after all.
You need to learn to relax; you'll get much better. Talk to flight instructors or music teachers (probably others, those are just areas I know) -- getting students to relax is one of the biggest obstacles. For myself, both when learning to fly and learning to play trumpet, once I learned to relax it was like suddenly I wasn't in mud anymore. When you're tense, your muscles are working against each other. This may be good for those isometric body-building exercises, but not for anything else. Learn to relax and the body disappears, freeing up your brain to think and anticipate while simultaneously increasing your endurance.
I have a Thinkpad 600e (2645-CP2) running RedHat 9 with kernel 2.4.26. PCMCIA -- Linksys wireless and wired ethernet -- sound, USB, hibernate (suspend to disk) -- everything works. I had to install tpctl and the thinkpad modules for hibernate; everything else was auto-detected on install.
The 2.6 kernel (and Fedora Core 2) is a different matter, though -- I couldn't get ALSA working in spite of a lot of updating kernels, modules, BIOS settings etc. The newer hardware (like Centrino) is even worse where free software is concerned. It really sucks when an upgrade is a step back.
Try doing a similar test with commercial airplanes.
Ok, compare the DH Comet (or B-707) to the current 777. Gas turbine engines (the "jet") have been absolutely revolutionized from the 60s. Compare thrust and fuel consumption -- "orders of magnitude" would not be an exaggeration. Look at airfoil deisgn and cruising speeds -- going from Mach 0.68 or so to today's Mach 0.8. Consider design and construction techniques. No, airliners are a bad example of static technology.
I'm hoping... sub-orbital...
Unlikely. Consider this: if air travel were instantaneous -- runway to runway -- your travel time will still be many hours. Ground transport to/from airport, check-in, baggage handling, security, aircraft taxi -- a significant proportion of travel time. Travelling faster than Mach 0.8 in the atmosphere takes a huge amount of energy (civilian supersonic travel is unlikely to come back). Escaping the atmosphere will require hugely more. Add to that the cost of life support -- passengers do not want to don space suits to visit grandma, and decompression would be rather more serious than at 35,000 feet. More likely: turbine manufacturing advances? Modern gas turbine engines are ridiculously expensive. Different source of energy? It would be nice to not have to carry large quantities of explosives (chemical fuel) on passenger-carrying craft.
but what about the ability to forge email from user@localhost, undisclosed.recipients@yourdomain.com, etc
Please read about SPF. This is what your MTA does: incoming SMTP connection from 1.2.3.4, sending a message claiming to be from foo.com. Wait a minute, foo.com's SPF record says only 7.8.9.10 is allowed to send email from foo.com -- send back an error and drop the connection. The forged message isn't even accepted by your system.
SPF isn't a panacea; it simply forbids email forgery. If I can reject all forged email I have already taken care of most spam; for the rest I know exactly which domain is sending it to me. It reduces false positives: if the major ISP's and corporations use SPF, then my friends (and others) at those ISPs and corps can always send me email without running afoul of my spam filters. If I get spam from an ISP or corp, I know exactly where my complaint to abuse@ should be sent.
Have you even read about SPF? I do run a small vanity domain on my DSL line at home. My domain has SPF records.
All SPF is: you add a line in your DNS zone file saying which machines are allowed to send email from your domain. That's it. My SPF record
v=spf1 a -all
says that only my IP number is allowed to send email from my domain -- that will probably be the most common SPF setting for personal "vanity" domains. It doesn't even have to be a static IP address. If you have a domain, you have a DNS record; ergo you can use SPF. (If your DNS provider doesn't allow you TXT records, time to switch.)
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I hope you've heard of the grandmother who had her property seized even though all charges were dismissed.
Ah, to think that a just a couple of decades ago, it was the Soviets we accused of suppressing dissent, requiring papers for domestic travel, guilty until proven innocent, and the state seizing private property "just because".I really don't want the SS breaking down my door and seizing all the computers (and then I have to sue the state and wait a few years to get my stuff back maybe) because some clerk at HQ typed in the wrong address.
A better analogy: a new super-duper answering machine. Your Answer-Matic 2000 not only answers your phone (and shows you caller ID, the news, makes dinner, makes you irresistible to members of the appropriate sex etc. etc.) -- it has this cool feature. Say your Mom calls to tell you that Uncle Joe is marrying someone young enough to be his grand-daughter. Then she thinks -- she needs to tell Aunt Millie too. No problemo! She hits the * button twice, then enters Aunt Millie's phone number. The machine will call Aunt Millie and send her the message too! Uncle Fred also? You can enter multiple numbers!
Oops! Your next phone bill is $4000000 because telemarketers called your Answer-Matic 2000 and left a message advertising cheap generic viagra with guaranteed breast and penis enlargement, and 200,000 phone numbers to call and deliver the message to. Hey, at least it placed all the calls from 10 pm to 2 am when you wouldn't notice.
Should we insist that the phone company "filter the water", or that consumers should buy Norton EZ-IcePhoneFilterGuard and put it between the Answer-Matic 2000 and the jack on the wall? Or should we take the Answer-Matic people out back and have them shot?
(Well, unnecessary for regular people; the airlines love it because it means you can't give away or sell your air ticket if your plans change.)
(This may vary by visa type -- on leaving, F-1 students have to surrender the entry record they got when they first arrived, so the government can figure out which F-1 students are in the country.) Why should they know who's where? In the US, rights (except for voting, running for office, and serving on juries) are for all people, not just citizens. If a person is not known to be evil, she should be allowed to travel freely.In fact, a visa is not obligatory for foreign nationals. I'm a foreign national living in the US, and I do not have a US visa (or any other INS stuff) in my passport. A visa is required to enter the country; it has nothing to do with whether or not you can stay in the country. (Most people don't know much about US immigration, so your error is excusable.) For example, an unexpired F-1 visa is not required for foreign students; they just need to stay enrolled full-time at the school that issued the I-20 (the school is named in the visa, besides a few other places). An H-1B visa may be single entry and valid for six months but the holder can stay in the US for upto 3 years as long as she continues to work in the same job. Permanent residents also don't need a visa: my immigration document is the green card, my passport does not have a US visa.
Sure, we can talk about rectal scans and everything else Ashcroft wants, but in today's world, that Ruritanian passport (possibly issued to Mickey Mouse) will get me on domestic US flights.
People often say "Oh, who cares about grammar and spelling, the point is to communicate." They don't seem to appreciate that with poor spelling and grammar the meaning is diluted or lost. I'm sure I'm not alone in being quicker to abandon a hard to understand message than one that's easy to read.
So why does an airline need to know my identity? Why can I not pay with cash and board anonymously? (Assuming I'm willing to submit to a reasonable search for security -- say metal detectors and/or X-ray.) I don't need to carry papers on other modes of transportation like buses, ferries, trains etc. or while walking. I bet a terrorist could kill more people by putting a bomb on a ferry in cold waters, like the Seattle-Victoria ferry. Why then do we have this hysterical attitude towards aviation?
So how does requiring this easily faked document prevent terrorism?
You don't even need a fake ID. If I were a terrorist legally in the country and without prior arrests etc., I could just use my regular ID -- just as the 9/11 hijackers did.
Explain to me again why "Your papers, please" prevents terrorism?
No, it's the same old story: pinheaded management who sing the mantra of this mysterious "intellectual property" (ignorance+greed -> paranoia). I have to deal with them often, trying to convince them that there's absolutely no reason to not release our source code, because our product is service and infrastructure. There's nothing any competitor could do with our code that wouldn't also require spending mucho bucks on hardware and colo space.
Here's the executive summary: if your MTA knows SPF, for every domain that publishes SPF you know that that domain cannot be spoofed. If you publish SPF, no one can spoof your address. The only problem SPF has is when mail is forwarded -- e.g. by a mailing list, or with ~/.forward.
When writing a document you should be concerned about the content, not exactly how high this table column should be.
For automatic document generation, LaTeX is so much easier to generate than any binary proprietary format -- shell script, awk, perl, C code, take your pick. And typesetting details like column width belong in a style file, not in the document.
What does this mean, exactly? Do you know of Knuth's bounty for bugs in TeX? This "no 100% guarantee" and "some strangeness" sounds awfully close to FUD.I have two -- for work and for home. Expensive? Cheaper than a pair of sneakers.
Not all professors... when I was one, I: (a) told publishers' reps I'd be happy to review any books they had, and they were welcome to pick them up when I was done (they never did); and (b) told students that it was stupid to buy books just to find homework problems and then sell them back after the semester, so not only would textbooks be optional, they'd be books that I felt would be good references for their future (computer science). I could handle the teaching and homework problem setting myself.
But hey, it's your code; use the license you want.
Or consider the case of Lighthouse Design. A quality design suite for NeXTSTEP that was axed when Sun bought Lighthouse. It is now completely lost: Sun has no interest in releasing it. In fact, inside Sun (I work there) no one even knows where the source might be. Just before going under they (Lighthouse) released free binary licenses so if you have a NeXTSTEP machine you can run it; but it's the end of the line.
Harmonics are at integer multiples of frequencies. If you can't perceive UV, you can't see any harmonics, even or odd.
The 2.6 kernel (and Fedora Core 2) is a different matter, though -- I couldn't get ALSA working in spite of a lot of updating kernels, modules, BIOS settings etc. The newer hardware (like Centrino) is even worse where free software is concerned. It really sucks when an upgrade is a step back.
SPF isn't a panacea; it simply forbids email forgery. If I can reject all forged email I have already taken care of most spam; for the rest I know exactly which domain is sending it to me. It reduces false positives: if the major ISP's and corporations use SPF, then my friends (and others) at those ISPs and corps can always send me email without running afoul of my spam filters. If I get spam from an ISP or corp, I know exactly where my complaint to abuse@ should be sent.
All SPF is: you add a line in your DNS zone file saying which machines are allowed to send email from your domain. That's it. My SPF record
says that only my IP number is allowed to send email from my domain -- that will probably be the most common SPF setting for personal "vanity" domains. It doesn't even have to be a static IP address. If you have a domain, you have a DNS record; ergo you can use SPF. (If your DNS provider doesn't allow you TXT records, time to switch.)