When was the last time you read a patent for a chemical or biological agent? The substance itself is just a valid a claim under the patent as the process that created it. US Classification 200/157.68 (definition) is one of the classes the resulting patent could land in if the process involves microwave energy.
If the person(s) who solved this challenge realize this, a landmark legal battle over crowd-sourcing for patent-eligible materials could be on the verge of happening.
Conventional wisdom is also called into question here, when the University system is trumped as the best way to continue research in an age when we could see the most significant advances in bio science come from people who are dynamos for complex rules. i.e. Gamers. Will it change? Likely not, the University system does have many advantages. But a decades-old problem solved in 3 weeks, by a single-generation crowd compared to how many layers of research papers on the topic? That's beyond embarrassing.
So you'd favor shutting down one of the greatest advances in technology purely on the grounds that the auxilliary effects would be expensive? Buy a bio-scanning lock and move on. They will become cheaper and cheaper as time goes on. Expense is no excuse to hold a technology this important back. Imagine what would have happened if your logic was considered when decisions about information technology in the early 90s were present? Not building the internet because of the distributed adjustment that needed to happen would have meant immeasurable losses in advancement on many fronts.
Years from now historians will lament over the fall of a nation. The Americas have finally reached a manufacturing technology zenith, and instead of realizing the potential for all if us, "vested" interests will hold all of us back for the sake of "we've always done it this way".
Does anyone here honestly think that China will not use this technology to empower citizens who are more nationally unified than Americans to outright cut imports from the US?
think about the potential plummet in the national debt alone if cheap plastic parts and products were domestic again.
Technical solution? Smalll merge documents, small table of possible storage locations, small table of important keyword combinations, table-valued function that returns a huge list of alpha-numeric "document number, one cartesian product, three million dollars in postage. The department handling these documents would be in quite some trouble if they try to implement a spam filter.
Atheist, as the word would imply, is one without theism. I don't think it's been used in selective context as you have done here. (Zeus, Thor)
At any rate, yes your second statement is always unreasonable to these people. You can't seem to reach their logic centers on this topic, even given the massive contradictions they've read, let alone dichotomy between the book they hold sacred and their beliefs. Womens' Rights were not part of the old or new testament, but you'll find just as fierce opposition when pointing that out - usually in a dismissive wave such as "times change."
I find it sad that these people feel the need to sequester themselves away from the rest of the information on the web. It's doesn't take much to be just-critical enough to get by in a browser, yet their answer is a new service that blacklists most of the net with horrible ranks (or no result at all)
For all those people wanting their kids to excel and succeed beyond their parents, IT (real IT, not simply tech support) is a great avenue, and introduction early will foster aptitude in their adult life. The lowest rungs will be apt enough for stable tech support and the upper rungs will be developing FAT table hacks in grade 9.
For the nationalists out there, this is how to cultivate technical prowess in a country without costing the school system in overly-burdensome licensing fees, and not insult the intelligence of our children by calling classes on MS Word an "IT" class.
Hmm...This could be just the (mis)opportunity they were looking for. Wasn't there an article sometime back about what the guys who came up with TCP/IP wanted to really do with the net and new protocols, but couldn't because of entrenched culture? Maybe now is the time...and to really look at employing that quantum entanglement effect as a communication medium. Let's see them tap that.
There are ups and downs to many solutions out there. One of my current projects involves XML files and migration into databases (Oracle or MS SQL - both commercial) larger than the application memory limit on 32 bit windows machines let alone the (practical) limit on any editor. Since I'm stuck having to use windows, I needed a solution to split them up, so I had a perl script (free) written that does the job beautifully. The files would be hard to manage if there were too many of them, so the sizes are still large. (70-100M) TextPad (commercial) or saxon-b's XQuery engine (FOSS) to run searches and analysis, but if I am doing anything simple with XML app configuration files, transforming table name lists into SQL create scripts, or non-XML text processing, I use Notepad++ because it's simply better than TextPad AND free, but doesn't handle larger files easily. While our main product is MS SQL-based, our internal project tracking system is MySQL/PHP/Apache with a dash of MS SQL (we have bulk licenses anyways) for convenience.
Anyone who's worked IT (not just tech support) knows that FOSS practically is your trade, or you'd go broke in license fees. Sure, where I work we have some commercial products we work with, but much of the bulk of the business core is custom-built and on platforms we didn't have to pay for. Using the equivalent reasoning of smart business decisions only becomes a problem to the MAFIAA companies when the decisions are in the public eye. (government) Heavy users of IT (including those who work IT) should be using the least costly, most agile solution. Sorry, but that means that a lot of commercial firms will lose out. That's market forces for you. People who whine about that aren't so much capitalists as casting themselves as an obsolete feudal lord in the 21st century. If you're main trade is moved in on, you either adapt and become better, or become obsolete. This is what software is all about.
The only problem I see with mandating (as opposed to recommending) FOSS everywhere might be slow development in the long run but could make software writers more free agents who get contracted at the drop of a hat to interpret and expand a dead project that they built infrastructure on. Much like civil engineers obtain contracts.
On Privacy and Human rights: You don't see that stopping the advocates of the full body scanners, or the people at airport gates who can't fly without exposing themselves, yet did nothing to stop the move in the first place. Web cams in laptops used to play Nanny State on unsuspecting kids, all your packets are belong to the NSA, smile for the nudist-cam, and soon to be laws to randomly pull people over for (effectively) no reason - oh yeah, the US is a MODEL for Human Rights adherence these days.
That list would be the most-sought-after batch of info to the tech community at large if it existed outside the circle of attendants and guards. I tried poking around for officials who were out of country over the last meeting's weekend, but didn't get a peep back. Find that list, and the community will have struck gold.
Perfect example of DRM gone wrong and hurting consumers: A guy I know actually bought the media center edition of WinXP, (yes, I know) and recorded some video on an older-model hand held and then tried to play the resulting AVI file. I was called on to help them debug why it wasn't playing. I don't recall the exact error message now, but it was something related to an unknown author (Media Player was default). So on a wild hunch I downloaded and installed vlc real quick to test my theory and it played perfectly. Way to go Micro$oft, yet another normal user who will never buy your products again.
The problem is if ACTA goes through, there will be no choice. Something must be done to take these players drafting this piece of crap down or out before governments have a chance to sign away our rights to choose.
Yes. I totally agree. I hope there's a massive storming of political email accounts (particularly the two picked up by Obama's cherished Blackberries) to highlight the largest threat to democracy since the cold war.
I'd dub it the Corp War, WE are the resistance - the people. The masters of this 'agreement' dream us their slaves rather than remain relevant by competition.
We must pull together and storm the political strongholds of those who conspire against us lest we grow complacent to wake in a survailence society from hell. Do ANYTHING you can to sway those in your country of Citizenship (and elsewhere if able). We must organize.
Wow...ok, let's take this how legalese might interpret it if you were being prosecuted (or contesting your account being shut off), and make a simple Cartesian Product explanation of things that would cause contracted consumers to breach this.
Unsolicited: The receiver didn't as for it.
Defamatory: Defamatory material, even if it's about you.
Offensive: Good luck not finding a transmitted opinion that is not offensive to someone in the world, unless the scope is merely limited to the ruling body - stuff that pisses us off.
Abusive: This covers a wide variety of things, but is basically a step up from offensive, possibly expands scope.
Obscene: Despite the fact that there are generations alive today who grew up thinking anything Brittany Spears did in front of a camera was obscene, I imagine this scope is once again limited to the firm. They don't express their views on obscenity.
Pornographic: Don't keep porn here. For several reason, probably mostly image, but also for technical reasons like potential hot-linking to a stored file.
Menacing: Your kink, plans for world domination, or the informative chemistry video about the reactive applications of alkali metals
Breach of Copyright: No one on/. should need this explained.
Breach of Confidence: Ok, really? How can they enforce this? Only if your spurned friend, who knew you were on the mailing list for their leaked AND knew about this application of your contract would this be usable.
Breach of Privacy: PIs need not apply.
Breach of Any Other Rights: Conflicting breaches to be resolved in court, either way your service is toast.
--Times--
Store: Don't keep any material dealing with any of the above on our servers. (with no time limit, the first time something hits your inbox could trigger here on any of the above conditions)
Send: Don't forward, compose or otherwise cause any any material dealing with any of the above to be sent from your account.
Knowingly Receive: Getting into intent contracting here, but basically if they find that you've arranged for something that trips the material provisions above to your account, it's toast.
Upload: We don't care if something off the list above did come from your virus-infected computer, don't send it to our servers.
Download: This is the kicker here, and I'll expand after this table.
Distribute: Doesn't send already cover this definition because of its more restricted scope?
Download is the one that will fry everyone who's ever been the recipient of one of those bad forwards, like a goatse attachment. So let's say you get an email one day that is simply titled 'Check this out' with some explanation from a friend that this is funny and you have to see these pics. It's a horrible joke and it is a goatse-type attachment - offensive, obscene, possibly pornographic, and unsolicited - that you just: downloaded (you can't display it without receiving the information), and stored on your email account while you reeled. because each of those lists in the legal statement is effectively concatenated with 'or', you now have a breach of contract sitting in your inbox because you downloaded the horrible joke from their machines to yours.
It will also threaten anyone who's researching any controversy - You're supposed to see and consider points that may be very offensive to some. What trips the offensive clause, what doesn't, and will this be used as a new corporate censorship to the masses to cancel accounts on discovery of researching that corp's old skeletons in the closet? Deals like these are no deals at all, we need fresh blood in the provider industry.
So in addition to the fact that your ISP is handing over private details to non-law-enforcement, private companies to go trolling for copyright violations, they've also put your agreement (and patronage, I might add!) at risk by their own miopic contract design.
Yeah, that's a real good way to keep advertisers interested in you: "Pay me to promote me." Moron.
If the scenario ended up playing out like that, Google should just decline the offer to pay Murdock to promote his ventures by leading users to his sites. Will this hurt Google? Likely. Will it hurt Google more than Murdock's ventures? Most likely not. Both have considerable weight, but Google connects a lot more than news and news readers - they're diversified enough to survive a fight like that. It may not come down to that after discussions we'll never see/hear, but my bet is if Murdock keeps pushing and Google pushes back, News Corp's not going to like the result.
Social interest isn't a result of religion, it's a sentient response to family group and/or swarm behavior. While we have no way of proving motive in animals, other species exhibit self-sacrificing and/or self-risking behavior.
Many breeds of dogs will defend another from threat, even animals not of their own species, though such episodes are usually the result of (social) bonding. Bees have continued to survive by many individuals sacrificing themselves for the good of the queen. Dolphins engage in swarm fighting against foes that would overpower any given one.
While self-interest is a large factor in surviving, the ability to recognize another, that other's interests, and act in those interests instead of ones' own is the hallmark of any species that could be considered social.
I'm not a religious scholar, but it seems that it was a convenient way to align populaces for peace, war, or nearly anything in between. Look at the might of Sharia law in Islam as an example. Handed down by men - yes, religious experts, but still men - on situations not directly covered by existing religous text. Can you argue this concept hasn't been used for conflicting purposes across the geoscape? Indicating what? Decentralized alignment.
As such, I don't belive religion to be a direct evolutionary trait, but rather an exploitation of an evolutionary trait - our social and cognitive abilities.
Ok, let's put this in context, I've seen car registrations pointed to here, so I'll start there.
An automated radar gun catches your car speeding at 70 mph in a 45 zone, and the camera only gets the license plate for whatever reason - does that give the state the right to issue a warrant in a similarly automated manner for the owner's arrest? No. Because the car, the license plate, and the VIN might be registered to one person, but the infraction may have been executed by a car theif, a run-away teen, or a spiteful soon-to-be-ex-spouse. This is why a pair of cameras are part of speed cameras, because a face is personally identifiable (putting the questions about adopted procedures aside).
The same thing could be applied to IPs or hell even if each machine had its own ID, only on a larger scale. The time to download some movie is not insignificant, but could be hidden out of sight of roomates, siblings, what have you if need be. Shared machines using the same IP might have seperate logon info to subpeona, but what if the final steps of a damaging hack job were executed from a library public machine? It becomes more complex than the IP alone, and the same mentality should be the default approach when dealing with private IPs. IPs are not personally identifiable, because no one beside those physically present can identify who was operating the device at the time. Even logon information may have been compromised (surely/.'ers know many people who don't use secure passwords at home), leading to a potentially stream of framing/fraud crimes when the system is exploited for its naïve scope.
In short, the operator is at fault, not the machine being commanded. If we want to move to biometric logons as the norm, that will be quite expensive for such a small issue.
You are right about the use adding value. It occurs to me that licensing to internet radio stations is an alternative for RIAA execs, but in reality something like that isn't nearly as complicated as what goes into fine-tuning a final recording these days, and could be handled by indie music makers with some minor counsel. Let's not get into the pay-per-use argument for media though, if the public let that model succeed, we'd all be daily criminals. No, the way forward is for the market to adjust to the conditions it now faces, but I'll not be redundant about digital media from above.
As to Shakespeares' value, you're right about the works inspired by him, and you are right about the current scene being poorer if his material was managed with modern mindsets about media, but no matter how much the media companies would love to push it, having multi-century monopolies on anything not only cripples innovation, such as adaptions of Shakespeares' work, but would also create a slow pressure of discontent from customers and artists alike, much like the public backlash to DRM or tongue-in-cheek slang like the Copyright Term Extension Act being synonymous to "The Mickey Mouse Protection Act", only worse.
I agree. Put up a reasonable sized-monument for the sentimental types and call it good. If we start worrying about a historical landmark that's literally made of silicon dust, where does it stop? development regulations that limit seismic activity through machine use for fear of 'shaking' the footprint out of existence over the course of 500 years? What about a random meteor hit just the right spot? Oops, there goes the history argument. Seriously, geo-map the moon like we did Earth and our GPS system, plot the points of landing and point to that record as the history of the moon.
That's the pie-in-the-sky version of corporations. The way you've described communism is exactly the way corpoartism works - which is to say neither of them is consensus-based. Who decides what gets said? Management and the PR team. Who decides what gets made? Management and marketability teams. Who decides what processes to use to achieve goals? Management, safety, and financial controllers. Who decides customer protcol, dress code, internal procedures? Management. The workers are your citizens, the deciders are your government.
Almost all social organizations, no matter which side of the fence you are on, will trend toward this pyramidic form of power structure. Yeah, there's exceptions, but to date, they remain just that, exceptions.
To believe that a corporation is somehow the sum of wills of its employees is naïve, realizing that individual skills come together to benefit the pyramid structure is closer to the truth, but realizing that making decisions that influence the lives of many 'under' someone describes both communism and corporations is even closer. Yes, there are vast other differences, they simply don't include the set you attempted to put forth.
Very true. We had a hard enough time with rights for a people of color, and then women after that, neither gap has really gone away even today. Can you imagine the problems with a created sentience and many who would cry rights of ownership over sentience?
Modern society wants to categorize everything, even the various minutia of a given category have names for everything. As such, even if we take a single point (murder) and decide that some cases warrant different punishment (sentence scaling) then we've turned a simple thing like m^0 into m^1, and even if society can avoid breaking m^1 down into a calculus problem to assign punishments, there will inevitably be someone who looks at direction of intent to harm and the interplay between it. Even if we can accept that this turns m^1 into m^2 by virtue of this still-analogous system, people will want to break analog into digital, as a 'fuzzy' line can get people into more (or less!) trouble than should be if there is bias in the judge(s).
That's how a 'simple' act such as murder can be analyzed and go from a single point (biblical thou shalt not kill) to a graphical plane that's still imprecise to measure. Not so simple, even if many of these dimensions were interchangeable to other crimes, do we argue for hard-line sentence modification on the intent scale, or should the scale be relative to the perceived 'severity' of the crime? (there's m^3 - emotional responses to 'gruesome' murders) People, in general, think better with explicit rules than with multiple dimensions in their heads, so the current system of writing laws explicitly is the best they can come up with.
Also, it should be noted that overcoming individual bias is easy, overcoming social bias within a social system is nearly impossible in the context of a society. If the society has access to affect change in laws, laws will reflect the bias of the people making those changes. (but not everyone - abstinence-only-education anyone?) Overcoming social bias in a jury might happen if you can somehow systematically get 12 people to discuss and agree on verdict without facilitating groupthink. Something this current system is terrible at doing.
Exactly. Unfortunately, standards have not been adopted for laptop structure or parts that would allow this guy to jump to a competitor. That leaves him trying to buy an obscure part 2nd hand because the company in control of the only source of first-hand equipment seems to think that denying sale to someone who claims to have a laptop of theirs is a brilliant idea.
Personally, Dell has been on my blacklist for a long time, no one I know ever gets that brand as a positive recommend from me, and now Alienware will get the same treatment.
Harsh? Not in the least. When I had trouble with my ASUS motherboard, sure they wanted an SN, but I never had to go through the hassle of telling them ahead of time that I bought that serial numbered product before I called up tech support. The fact that there was a serial number and (perhaps) it didn't kick back an error in their system was enough for them to just help me solve my problem, AND I never have to deal with them AT ALL if I decide to drop it into a new case, I DON'T need their say-so.
Develop standards for laptop hardware and enforce them, and then you'll see the provider market change. It worked for desktops.
Mod parent up! I can't wait till someone gets wise and publishes a story similar to this.
On the other hand, I wonder if there's anything to gaming decentralized records, such as attracting attention in the northeast states, slipping off through the border, circumvent the globe, and arrive in LA to do the same shit all over again with reduced risk.
Of course, I've probably landed on at least one of their watch-lists for simply mentioning it, but hey, what does that say about their organization if some lay-person can see vulnerabilities in their practices?
Slashdot Mirror
When was the last time you read a patent for a chemical or biological agent? The substance itself is just a valid a claim under the patent as the process that created it. US Classification 200/157.68 (definition) is one of the classes the resulting patent could land in if the process involves microwave energy.
If the person(s) who solved this challenge realize this, a landmark legal battle over crowd-sourcing for patent-eligible materials could be on the verge of happening.
Conventional wisdom is also called into question here, when the University system is trumped as the best way to continue research in an age when we could see the most significant advances in bio science come from people who are dynamos for complex rules. i.e. Gamers. Will it change? Likely not, the University system does have many advantages. But a decades-old problem solved in 3 weeks, by a single-generation crowd compared to how many layers of research papers on the topic? That's beyond embarrassing.
So you'd favor shutting down one of the greatest advances in technology purely on the grounds that the auxilliary effects would be expensive? Buy a bio-scanning lock and move on. They will become cheaper and cheaper as time goes on. Expense is no excuse to hold a technology this important back. Imagine what would have happened if your logic was considered when decisions about information technology in the early 90s were present? Not building the internet because of the distributed adjustment that needed to happen would have meant immeasurable losses in advancement on many fronts.
Years from now historians will lament over the fall of a nation. The Americas have finally reached a manufacturing technology zenith, and instead of realizing the potential for all if us, "vested" interests will hold all of us back for the sake of "we've always done it this way".
Does anyone here honestly think that China will not use this technology to empower citizens who are more nationally unified than Americans to outright cut imports from the US?
think about the potential plummet in the national debt alone if cheap plastic parts and products were domestic again.
Technical solution? Smalll merge documents, small table of possible storage locations, small table of important keyword combinations, table-valued function that returns a huge list of alpha-numeric "document number, one cartesian product, three million dollars in postage. The department handling these documents would be in quite some trouble if they try to implement a spam filter.
Atheist, as the word would imply, is one without theism. I don't think it's been used in selective context as you have done here. (Zeus, Thor)
At any rate, yes your second statement is always unreasonable to these people. You can't seem to reach their logic centers on this topic, even given the massive contradictions they've read, let alone dichotomy between the book they hold sacred and their beliefs. Womens' Rights were not part of the old or new testament, but you'll find just as fierce opposition when pointing that out - usually in a dismissive wave such as "times change."
I find it sad that these people feel the need to sequester themselves away from the rest of the information on the web. It's doesn't take much to be just-critical enough to get by in a browser, yet their answer is a new service that blacklists most of the net with horrible ranks (or no result at all)
Mod parent up!
For all those people wanting their kids to excel and succeed beyond their parents, IT (real IT, not simply tech support) is a great avenue, and introduction early will foster aptitude in their adult life. The lowest rungs will be apt enough for stable tech support and the upper rungs will be developing FAT table hacks in grade 9.
For the nationalists out there, this is how to cultivate technical prowess in a country without costing the school system in overly-burdensome licensing fees, and not insult the intelligence of our children by calling classes on MS Word an "IT" class.
Hmm...This could be just the (mis)opportunity they were looking for. Wasn't there an article sometime back about what the guys who came up with TCP/IP wanted to really do with the net and new protocols, but couldn't because of entrenched culture? Maybe now is the time...and to really look at employing that quantum entanglement effect as a communication medium. Let's see them tap that.
Now THAT would shut them up!
There are ups and downs to many solutions out there. One of my current projects involves XML files and migration into databases (Oracle or MS SQL - both commercial) larger than the application memory limit on 32 bit windows machines let alone the (practical) limit on any editor. Since I'm stuck having to use windows, I needed a solution to split them up, so I had a perl script (free) written that does the job beautifully. The files would be hard to manage if there were too many of them, so the sizes are still large. (70-100M) TextPad (commercial) or saxon-b's XQuery engine (FOSS) to run searches and analysis, but if I am doing anything simple with XML app configuration files, transforming table name lists into SQL create scripts, or non-XML text processing, I use Notepad++ because it's simply better than TextPad AND free, but doesn't handle larger files easily. While our main product is MS SQL-based, our internal project tracking system is MySQL/PHP/Apache with a dash of MS SQL (we have bulk licenses anyways) for convenience.
Anyone who's worked IT (not just tech support) knows that FOSS practically is your trade, or you'd go broke in license fees. Sure, where I work we have some commercial products we work with, but much of the bulk of the business core is custom-built and on platforms we didn't have to pay for. Using the equivalent reasoning of smart business decisions only becomes a problem to the MAFIAA companies when the decisions are in the public eye. (government) Heavy users of IT (including those who work IT) should be using the least costly, most agile solution. Sorry, but that means that a lot of commercial firms will lose out. That's market forces for you. People who whine about that aren't so much capitalists as casting themselves as an obsolete feudal lord in the 21st century. If you're main trade is moved in on, you either adapt and become better, or become obsolete. This is what software is all about.
The only problem I see with mandating (as opposed to recommending) FOSS everywhere might be slow development in the long run but could make software writers more free agents who get contracted at the drop of a hat to interpret and expand a dead project that they built infrastructure on. Much like civil engineers obtain contracts.
On Privacy and Human rights: You don't see that stopping the advocates of the full body scanners, or the people at airport gates who can't fly without exposing themselves, yet did nothing to stop the move in the first place. Web cams in laptops used to play Nanny State on unsuspecting kids, all your packets are belong to the NSA, smile for the nudist-cam, and soon to be laws to randomly pull people over for (effectively) no reason - oh yeah, the US is a MODEL for Human Rights adherence these days.
That list would be the most-sought-after batch of info to the tech community at large if it existed outside the circle of attendants and guards. I tried poking around for officials who were out of country over the last meeting's weekend, but didn't get a peep back. Find that list, and the community will have struck gold.
Perfect example of DRM gone wrong and hurting consumers: A guy I know actually bought the media center edition of WinXP, (yes, I know) and recorded some video on an older-model hand held and then tried to play the resulting AVI file. I was called on to help them debug why it wasn't playing. I don't recall the exact error message now, but it was something related to an unknown author (Media Player was default). So on a wild hunch I downloaded and installed vlc real quick to test my theory and it played perfectly. Way to go Micro$oft, yet another normal user who will never buy your products again.
The problem is if ACTA goes through, there will be no choice. Something must be done to take these players drafting this piece of crap down or out before governments have a chance to sign away our rights to choose.
Yes. I totally agree. I hope there's a massive storming of political email accounts (particularly the two picked up by Obama's cherished Blackberries) to highlight the largest threat to democracy since the cold war.
I'd dub it the Corp War, WE are the resistance - the people. The masters of this 'agreement' dream us their slaves rather than remain relevant by competition.
We must pull together and storm the political strongholds of those who conspire against us lest we grow complacent to wake in a survailence society from hell. Do ANYTHING you can to sway those in your country of Citizenship (and elsewhere if able). We must organize.
Wow...ok, let's take this how legalese might interpret it if you were being prosecuted (or contesting your account being shut off), and make a simple Cartesian Product explanation of things that would cause contracted consumers to breach this.
/. should need this explained.
Unsolicited: The receiver didn't as for it.
Defamatory: Defamatory material, even if it's about you.
Offensive: Good luck not finding a transmitted opinion that is not offensive to someone in the world, unless the scope is merely limited to the ruling body - stuff that pisses us off.
Abusive: This covers a wide variety of things, but is basically a step up from offensive, possibly expands scope.
Obscene: Despite the fact that there are generations alive today who grew up thinking anything Brittany Spears did in front of a camera was obscene, I imagine this scope is once again limited to the firm. They don't express their views on obscenity.
Pornographic: Don't keep porn here. For several reason, probably mostly image, but also for technical reasons like potential hot-linking to a stored file.
Menacing: Your kink, plans for world domination, or the informative chemistry video about the reactive applications of alkali metals
Breach of Copyright: No one on
Breach of Confidence: Ok, really? How can they enforce this? Only if your spurned friend, who knew you were on the mailing list for their leaked AND knew about this application of your contract would this be usable.
Breach of Privacy: PIs need not apply.
Breach of Any Other Rights: Conflicting breaches to be resolved in court, either way your service is toast.
--Times--
Store: Don't keep any material dealing with any of the above on our servers. (with no time limit, the first time something hits your inbox could trigger here on any of the above conditions)
Send: Don't forward, compose or otherwise cause any any material dealing with any of the above to be sent from your account.
Knowingly Receive: Getting into intent contracting here, but basically if they find that you've arranged for something that trips the material provisions above to your account, it's toast.
Upload: We don't care if something off the list above did come from your virus-infected computer, don't send it to our servers.
Download: This is the kicker here, and I'll expand after this table.
Distribute: Doesn't send already cover this definition because of its more restricted scope?
Download is the one that will fry everyone who's ever been the recipient of one of those bad forwards, like a goatse attachment. So let's say you get an email one day that is simply titled 'Check this out' with some explanation from a friend that this is funny and you have to see these pics. It's a horrible joke and it is a goatse-type attachment - offensive, obscene, possibly pornographic, and unsolicited - that you just: downloaded (you can't display it without receiving the information), and stored on your email account while you reeled. because each of those lists in the legal statement is effectively concatenated with 'or', you now have a breach of contract sitting in your inbox because you downloaded the horrible joke from their machines to yours.
It will also threaten anyone who's researching any controversy - You're supposed to see and consider points that may be very offensive to some. What trips the offensive clause, what doesn't, and will this be used as a new corporate censorship to the masses to cancel accounts on discovery of researching that corp's old skeletons in the closet? Deals like these are no deals at all, we need fresh blood in the provider industry.
So in addition to the fact that your ISP is handing over private details to non-law-enforcement, private companies to go trolling for copyright violations, they've also put your agreement (and patronage, I might add!) at risk by their own miopic contract design.
Yeah, that's a real good way to keep advertisers interested in you: "Pay me to promote me." Moron.
If the scenario ended up playing out like that, Google should just decline the offer to pay Murdock to promote his ventures by leading users to his sites. Will this hurt Google? Likely. Will it hurt Google more than Murdock's ventures? Most likely not. Both have considerable weight, but Google connects a lot more than news and news readers - they're diversified enough to survive a fight like that. It may not come down to that after discussions we'll never see/hear, but my bet is if Murdock keeps pushing and Google pushes back, News Corp's not going to like the result.
Social interest isn't a result of religion, it's a sentient response to family group and/or swarm behavior. While we have no way of proving motive in animals, other species exhibit self-sacrificing and/or self-risking behavior.
Many breeds of dogs will defend another from threat, even animals not of their own species, though such episodes are usually the result of (social) bonding. Bees have continued to survive by many individuals sacrificing themselves for the good of the queen. Dolphins engage in swarm fighting against foes that would overpower any given one.
While self-interest is a large factor in surviving, the ability to recognize another, that other's interests, and act in those interests instead of ones' own is the hallmark of any species that could be considered social.
I'm not a religious scholar, but it seems that it was a convenient way to align populaces for peace, war, or nearly anything in between. Look at the might of Sharia law in Islam as an example. Handed down by men - yes, religious experts, but still men - on situations not directly covered by existing religous text. Can you argue this concept hasn't been used for conflicting purposes across the geoscape? Indicating what? Decentralized alignment.
As such, I don't belive religion to be a direct evolutionary trait, but rather an exploitation of an evolutionary trait - our social and cognitive abilities.
Ok, let's put this in context, I've seen car registrations pointed to here, so I'll start there.
An automated radar gun catches your car speeding at 70 mph in a 45 zone, and the camera only gets the license plate for whatever reason - does that give the state the right to issue a warrant in a similarly automated manner for the owner's arrest? No. Because the car, the license plate, and the VIN might be registered to one person, but the infraction may have been executed by a car theif, a run-away teen, or a spiteful soon-to-be-ex-spouse. This is why a pair of cameras are part of speed cameras, because a face is personally identifiable (putting the questions about adopted procedures aside).
The same thing could be applied to IPs or hell even if each machine had its own ID, only on a larger scale. The time to download some movie is not insignificant, but could be hidden out of sight of roomates, siblings, what have you if need be. Shared machines using the same IP might have seperate logon info to subpeona, but what if the final steps of a damaging hack job were executed from a library public machine? It becomes more complex than the IP alone, and the same mentality should be the default approach when dealing with private IPs. IPs are not personally identifiable, because no one beside those physically present can identify who was operating the device at the time. Even logon information may have been compromised (surely /.'ers know many people who don't use secure passwords at home), leading to a potentially stream of framing/fraud crimes when the system is exploited for its naïve scope.
In short, the operator is at fault, not the machine being commanded. If we want to move to biometric logons as the norm, that will be quite expensive for such a small issue.
Scientology anyone?
Most eloquently put. I second this statement.
You are right about the use adding value. It occurs to me that licensing to internet radio stations is an alternative for RIAA execs, but in reality something like that isn't nearly as complicated as what goes into fine-tuning a final recording these days, and could be handled by indie music makers with some minor counsel. Let's not get into the pay-per-use argument for media though, if the public let that model succeed, we'd all be daily criminals. No, the way forward is for the market to adjust to the conditions it now faces, but I'll not be redundant about digital media from above.
As to Shakespeares' value, you're right about the works inspired by him, and you are right about the current scene being poorer if his material was managed with modern mindsets about media, but no matter how much the media companies would love to push it, having multi-century monopolies on anything not only cripples innovation, such as adaptions of Shakespeares' work, but would also create a slow pressure of discontent from customers and artists alike, much like the public backlash to DRM or tongue-in-cheek slang like the Copyright Term Extension Act being synonymous to "The Mickey Mouse Protection Act", only worse.
I agree. Put up a reasonable sized-monument for the sentimental types and call it good. If we start worrying about a historical landmark that's literally made of silicon dust, where does it stop? development regulations that limit seismic activity through machine use for fear of 'shaking' the footprint out of existence over the course of 500 years? What about a random meteor hit just the right spot? Oops, there goes the history argument. Seriously, geo-map the moon like we did Earth and our GPS system, plot the points of landing and point to that record as the history of the moon.
It's made of dust, people!
That's the pie-in-the-sky version of corporations. The way you've described communism is exactly the way corpoartism works - which is to say neither of them is consensus-based. Who decides what gets said? Management and the PR team. Who decides what gets made? Management and marketability teams. Who decides what processes to use to achieve goals? Management, safety, and financial controllers. Who decides customer protcol, dress code, internal procedures? Management. The workers are your citizens, the deciders are your government.
Almost all social organizations, no matter which side of the fence you are on, will trend toward this pyramidic form of power structure. Yeah, there's exceptions, but to date, they remain just that, exceptions.
To believe that a corporation is somehow the sum of wills of its employees is naïve, realizing that individual skills come together to benefit the pyramid structure is closer to the truth, but realizing that making decisions that influence the lives of many 'under' someone describes both communism and corporations is even closer. Yes, there are vast other differences, they simply don't include the set you attempted to put forth.
Very true. We had a hard enough time with rights for a people of color, and then women after that, neither gap has really gone away even today. Can you imagine the problems with a created sentience and many who would cry rights of ownership over sentience?
Modern society wants to categorize everything, even the various minutia of a given category have names for everything. As such, even if we take a single point (murder) and decide that some cases warrant different punishment (sentence scaling) then we've turned a simple thing like m^0 into m^1, and even if society can avoid breaking m^1 down into a calculus problem to assign punishments, there will inevitably be someone who looks at direction of intent to harm and the interplay between it. Even if we can accept that this turns m^1 into m^2 by virtue of this still-analogous system, people will want to break analog into digital, as a 'fuzzy' line can get people into more (or less!) trouble than should be if there is bias in the judge(s).
That's how a 'simple' act such as murder can be analyzed and go from a single point (biblical thou shalt not kill) to a graphical plane that's still imprecise to measure. Not so simple, even if many of these dimensions were interchangeable to other crimes, do we argue for hard-line sentence modification on the intent scale, or should the scale be relative to the perceived 'severity' of the crime? (there's m^3 - emotional responses to 'gruesome' murders) People, in general, think better with explicit rules than with multiple dimensions in their heads, so the current system of writing laws explicitly is the best they can come up with.
Also, it should be noted that overcoming individual bias is easy, overcoming social bias within a social system is nearly impossible in the context of a society. If the society has access to affect change in laws, laws will reflect the bias of the people making those changes. (but not everyone - abstinence-only-education anyone?) Overcoming social bias in a jury might happen if you can somehow systematically get 12 people to discuss and agree on verdict without facilitating groupthink. Something this current system is terrible at doing.
Exactly. Unfortunately, standards have not been adopted for laptop structure or parts that would allow this guy to jump to a competitor. That leaves him trying to buy an obscure part 2nd hand because the company in control of the only source of first-hand equipment seems to think that denying sale to someone who claims to have a laptop of theirs is a brilliant idea.
Personally, Dell has been on my blacklist for a long time, no one I know ever gets that brand as a positive recommend from me, and now Alienware will get the same treatment.
Harsh? Not in the least. When I had trouble with my ASUS motherboard, sure they wanted an SN, but I never had to go through the hassle of telling them ahead of time that I bought that serial numbered product before I called up tech support. The fact that there was a serial number and (perhaps) it didn't kick back an error in their system was enough for them to just help me solve my problem, AND I never have to deal with them AT ALL if I decide to drop it into a new case, I DON'T need their say-so.
Develop standards for laptop hardware and enforce them, and then you'll see the provider market change. It worked for desktops.
Mod parent up! I can't wait till someone gets wise and publishes a story similar to this.
On the other hand, I wonder if there's anything to gaming decentralized records, such as attracting attention in the northeast states, slipping off through the border, circumvent the globe, and arrive in LA to do the same shit all over again with reduced risk.
Of course, I've probably landed on at least one of their watch-lists for simply mentioning it, but hey, what does that say about their organization if some lay-person can see vulnerabilities in their practices?