You have to wonder why his boss isn't sitting in jail for letting such a valuable resource (as shown by the bail figure) be endangered by the chance that said Terry Childs gets run over by a bus (or otherwise kicks the bucket).
The only reason that the password/s had value was because of someone else's incompetence.
The CPU is going to stay base2 for a long time, mostly for electrical reasons.... even going to trinary would cost more in power than you'd save in the reduction of parts....
I'm hoping for that rosy future where (fusion?) power is dirt cheap and chips are made from diamond, so heat dissipation is a far smaller issue! Or maybe these problems will be solved in other ways totally unexpected to me.
But I do agree, (practically) everything will be base-2 for a long, long time.
I had a conversation with a relative about this issue, and he claimed the following: one of the reasons for US health care being more expensive than health care in other countries is because people tend to wait until their health problems are fare for the emergency room, rather than going frequently (i.e., preemptively) to a general practitioner and following his advice (and therefore being healthier, and getting to the ER less frequently).
What I'm wondering is, what part of the 20 million people who could pay for insurance, but don't, fit this categorization? Do you put off going to doctors until the situation seems quite serious, and does your lack of coverage affect your decision when to go?
> A lot more people (about 20 million) are wealthy enough to get insurance > but don't want it (like me).
I find it hard to believe that the reason that most of them don't want it is ideological in nature.
Which means in turn that it is too expensive.
This leads me to believe that what is necessary is reform or some other way to lower the cost of health care which, unfortunately, would hit a lot of people's income (doctors, medical schools). And since those people are highly influential, it is unlikely to happen.
I'm sorry but if posting a completely fake profile on a website with the intention of harassing another individual is not considered 'unauthorized access', can someone please tell me WTF is?
Unfortunately, if posting a completely fake profile on a website with the intention of harassing another individual is considered 'unauthorized access', then so is merely posting a completely fake profile on a website.
> measures of 'bits' and 'bytes' will no longer make any sense, > when systems are not operating on base-2
The problem with that idea is that it's possible that there will be several different computing paradigms coexisting at the same time, each having their own strengths and weaknesses. So your idea of "Binary Equivalent Capacity" seems to be what will continue to be "standard".
Or maybe not. Maybe we'll all be so intellectually augmented in that future that converting between all the different units will be considered as trivial as discerning colors is for us now (for the non-color-blind).
I already stated that it "would be a pain to convert to and from base-2" but you, while seeming to agree with me, make me understand where you are perhaps overlooking some things:
> every load and store operation
PCM wouldn't be used for the level-1 or probably even for the level-2 caches, so we are actually talking about loads and stores of cache lines which are many bytes long, said loads/stores already requiring something like 100-200 clock cycles on the last system for which I did low-level optimization (but I admit, that was quite a while ago). So it's not totally clear that its impossible to build some kind of pipelined asynchronous base converter which could convert fast enough (at small enough geometries) to make it worthwhile.
> The 2^10 kilo-, 2^20- mega, 2^30 giga- is just a convenience in terminology
and I've decided, long ago, to use kibi, mebi, and gibi instead even if it means I have to explain myself more. Less convenient, more accurate.
I don't pretend to know what is best for anyone else, however. Unlike a lot of people on both sides of this flamewar. (Of course, I would prefer that more people would use the binary prefixes, as then I would eventually have less explaining to do.)
The "standard"? All of the standards associations recommend using G/M/K as prefixes with the base-10 meanings, and using the unambiguous Gi/Mi/Ki (gibi/mebi/kibi) for base-2 measurements. One standards organization was willing to allow the deprecated use of G/M/K as base-2 for measuring semiconductor memory (i.e., RAM) only.
Do you also recommend that we will suddenly measure disk drive capacity in a different unit if/when we all move to using quantum computers or computers based on some other new currently unfamiliar technology?
Oh, and BTW, at least one of the technologies which has a small chance of replacing current RAM technologies, phase-change memory, could theoretically store 3 or 5 states per unit cell instead of 2 or 4, given the right material undergoing the phase change. One of the reasons not to do it is because it would be a pain to convert to and from base-2 to interface with the computer, so in the long run it is possible (but not necessarily likely, because there is a large initial development cost) that some computing devices will be designed to work in base-3 or base-5 if only to better utilize the abilities of PCM.
I made this mistake when I was in high school, and my chemistry teacher even agreed with me (wrongly).
If you were correct, explosions couldn't occur, because the initial heat released by the initiation would shut down, rather than speed up, the reaction of the remaining mass of explosive.
The only case which I can think of where you could be correct is when there is a/are competing reaction/s which would be sped up even more by the rise in temperature (the reverse reaction in an equilibrium situation), or which remove critical ingredients of the the reaction in question (e.g., the denaturation of an enzyme vs. the reaction which it catalyzes).
> I still find it odd that they would portray it on TV.
I never found it odd, as I had always assumed that it was obvious that they were poking fun at bigotry in general by putting up Archie Bunker as a stereotypical uneducated bigot. It was also a meta-joke in a certain sense, in that it was stereotyped bigotry, so they were guilty of meta-bigotry while doing it.
Another reason these schedules are not copyrightable is because the MTA is owned by the NY government, and the NY government is owned/funded by the People, therefore the schedules belong to the citizens of New York State. They are free to copy the schedules as often as they desire, especially since they already paid for them via taxation.
As much as I agree that your reasoning should be valid, my understanding of the legal realities are that unfortunately, only direct works of the Federal government are not copyrightable. State governments have the power to decide for themselves if their direct works are under copyright, and I don't know which of the states have given up copyright for their direct works, except for Florida, and possibly California.
Both state and Federal laws, however, are in the public domain.
I thought that the folks at the University of Arizona who had announced (in 2006) a different type of adjustable glasses using an embedded liquid crystal layer and an adjustment varying the electric field applied to it had put their development into fast gear and already were shipping prototypes.
> 1KB has been 1024 bytes since at least the '60s.
Yes, and 1Kbit/s has always been 1000 bits/s. Nice, eh?
> By using power of ten units for prefixes and power of two units for bytes and nibbles, you make > things needlessly complicated
Right. How much data can a CPU running at 1 GHz receive and process in 10 seconds without buffering if it requires 1 cycle per 10 bytes to do so?
Complication is in the eye of the beholder.
To me, looking at terms like "gay", or "hacker", it seems to be less complicated to adopt a change in language rather than having to convert between bases for various calculations. Especially if, in my eyes, the change settles an inconsistency in something which deserves to be standardized.
I can tell you how to do that right now...without spending a dime. Limit population growth.
Wow, you know how to convince humans to limit their global population growth (i.e., override their natural instinct to procreate without bounds) without spending any money? Please, tell!
> What other arguments did these lawyers miss that a "good lawyer" wouldn't > have missed? None that would be outcome-determinative, as far as I can see.
I'm glad that you are such a good lawyer.
Frankly, I believe a lot of NYCL's legal points are substantive, and a lot more convincing than the far-out theories of Joel's lawyer, who wanted to rely on a fair-use defense.
On the other hand, I can't figure out how each judge seems more clueless than the previous one. They don't even seem to listen to each other's opinions. In Jammie Thomas's case, the first judge threw out the decision based on his improperly instructing the jury. But then the second trial's judge totally ignored the reasoning of the first trial judge when he instructed the jury in the second trial.
Which leads me to believe, that even if NYCL and Louis Nizer were defending you, it's largely a matter of luck what would happen. A great reflection on our legal system, eh?
Geeks are a relatively small percentage of all filesharers, so the GP is actually correct. Just for the wrong reason.
Although you have to admit that percentage-wise, there are more geeks capable of not getting caught than ordinary people. Unfortunately, this has insignificant effect compared to the reason I stated above.
I think you're talking about SoundExchange, formerly a division of the RIAA. They collect fees for public performance of sound recordings, not from buying CDs or MP3s. The money is distributed to the copyright holders owners of those recordings (usually the record companies).
If they work things at SE like at ASCAP/BMI, then the total mass of income from payments to them is simply distributed percentage-wise based on some kind of statistical sampling. In a way which is not transparent to the artists. I rather doubt that "long-tail" RIAA artists see anything even if they get played O(1) times (and obviously, indie artists couldn't possibly receive anything).
Look, commodore64_love, NYCL maintains a fairly high-profile blog which includes a lot of "practice tips" for lawyers defending cases like this. I think it's silly that you're accusing him of being "silent", just because Joel's lawyer didn't feel like using the resources that NYCL is providing.
I have noticed that NYCL isn't posting/making the front page of Slashdot as much recently, but that I believe was because of backlash complaints about the volume of articles he had previously, when he would post about various legal happenings which sprang up in the running of these trials. The last one I remember was when he informed us that RIAA's lawyers were threatened with being sanctioned, which for him, as a lawyer, is a big, big deal --- but the reaction of most of the Slashdot geeks was, "yawn --- what's so important? stop bothering us about every little thing".
OK, after we finish this thread, I'll try not to bother you again about this if my half-senile brain will remember.
There was one very peculiar inconsistency in your reply. You make the good point that the innocent need to fight or deal with having not done so. However, you rag on Tannenbaum and Thomas-Rasset because they're guilty. OK, I'm willing to assume that they're guilty for the purpose of replying. It still seems to me that you're being hypocritical to denegrate their choice to fight having to pay thousands of dollars for their choice of infringing on RIAA's copyrights. They obviously just don't believe that they deserve to pay that much, and are taking what you put out as the admirable choice, to fight. (The obstruction of justice issue, BTW, has little to do with the amount of damages Jammie deserves to pay.)
And before you reply with "it's the law", well, as another poster has already pointed out to you, it was the "law", passed by Congress, that we go to war because of the "fucking neoconservative right". And you somehow manage to be outraged about that, eh? (BTW, did you actively do anything to oppose that? Because, based on your post, if you didn't, you should classify yourself as a "thoroughly bovine slave" and stop whining about it here on Slashdot.)
> The money isn't as big a factor as Slashdot's wee little whiners would have you believe.
Attorney Jennifer Granick doesn't whine here, as far as I can tell. Somehow I trust her wisdom on this issue a bit more than yours.
I understand your current position, even if I don't agree. However, I think there is something you are overlooking, which is the collateral damage to society brought about by RIAA attempting to stop those "folks who infringe on their copyrights".
Do you actually believe that 100% of the hundreds (or perhaps thousands, there is no real way to know how many) of people who are contacted by RIAA for paying a mere few thousand dollars to settle out-of-court are all guilty?
You do realize that even for someone who is actually innocent, settling out-of-court is the financially correct decision to make in these cases? I'd like to refer you to the blog of attorney Jennifer Granick, who represented Michael Lynn in "Ciscogate":
At the point that you get sued, or even charged with a crime, it matters less what actually happened and whether you did something wrong and more what it takes to get out of the case as unscathed as possible. It's sad, but true, that our legal system can often be more strategy than justice.
Even if you are innocent, a few grand isn't going to pay for much work from a lawyer who is good enough to go up against RIAA.
There is also the matter of how distorted and dysfunctional copyright law has become because of lobbying by RIAA. Do you actually believe that it helps society (or even the record companies themselves!) that the term of copyright is so enormously long? It looks to me to be the opposite, even for them. If the term were only something like 10 years, I think that new artists recycling of works which still had some cultural significance would actually generate more music, and more interesting music, for the industry to push. And I doubt that the 10 year limit would actually change the recording industry's income by very much, the vast majority of their sales are either new acts or to people who wouldn't bother to waste time/effort looking for the free copy as opposed to just clicking in iTunes/Amazon/or similar.
You want me to let the vast majority of users, who we all are agreeing are confused about the warnings about bad certificates, rate those certificates for me?
How is your Average Joe going to do that? If he's been MITM'd, how is he going to figure it out? You're going to give him instructions to wait 6 months and see if his bank account gets drained, and if not, he should go back and rate the certificate "good"? That's going to work real well, eh?
If I didn't know that botnet masters have better things to do than propose very stupid security ideas on Slashdot, I'd suspect you to be one of them, just waiting to be able to raise any bogus cert to an excellent rating with two or three commands to their waiting minions.
The FAQ claims that the US government has a copyright on the material. This could be possible if the material was not directly generated by the NIST itself --- for example, they paid a contractor to generate it and it is considered a "work for hire".
The facts themselves probably can't be considered to be under copyright.
OTOH, I agree with a previous poster that you should consult a lawyer if you want to actually do anything which isn't sheeple-ish with the data.
Slashdot Mirror
You have to wonder why his boss isn't sitting in jail for letting such a valuable resource (as shown by the bail figure) be endangered by the chance that said Terry Childs gets run over by a bus (or otherwise kicks the bucket).
The only reason that the password/s had value was because of someone else's incompetence.
The CPU is going to stay base2 for a long time, mostly for electrical reasons. ... even going to trinary would cost more in power than you'd save in the reduction of parts. ...
I'm hoping for that rosy future where (fusion?) power is dirt cheap and chips are made from diamond, so heat dissipation is a far smaller issue! Or maybe these problems will be solved in other ways totally unexpected to me.
But I do agree, (practically) everything will be base-2 for a long, long time.
I had a conversation with a relative about this issue, and he claimed the following: one of the reasons for US health care being more expensive than health care in other countries is because people tend to wait until their health problems are fare for the emergency room, rather than going frequently (i.e., preemptively) to a general practitioner and following his advice (and therefore being healthier, and getting to the ER less frequently).
What I'm wondering is, what part of the 20 million people who could pay for insurance, but don't, fit this categorization? Do you put off going to doctors until the situation seems quite serious, and does your lack of coverage affect your decision when to go?
> If you're talking about Apache 1.x or 2.x without multithreading, or some older versions of IIS, no.
Summary:
> ... among the most popular in the virtualized server space.
So your comment ignores the fact that this CPU will probably be running 6 (or more) VMs, which could just as well run single-threaded code....
> A lot more people (about 20 million) are wealthy enough to get insurance
> but don't want it (like me).
I find it hard to believe that the reason that most of them don't want it is ideological in nature.
Which means in turn that it is too expensive.
This leads me to believe that what is necessary is reform or some other way to lower the cost of health care which, unfortunately, would hit a lot of people's income (doctors, medical schools). And since those people are highly influential, it is unlikely to happen.
I'm sorry but if posting a completely fake profile on a website with the intention of harassing another individual is not considered 'unauthorized access', can someone please tell me WTF is?
Unfortunately, if posting a completely fake profile on a website with the intention of harassing another individual is considered 'unauthorized access', then so is merely posting a completely fake profile on a website.
> measures of 'bits' and 'bytes' will no longer make any sense,
> when systems are not operating on base-2
The problem with that idea is that it's possible that there will be several different computing paradigms coexisting at the same time, each having their own strengths and weaknesses. So your idea of "Binary Equivalent Capacity" seems to be what will continue to be "standard".
Or maybe not. Maybe we'll all be so intellectually augmented in that future that converting between all the different units will be considered as trivial as discerning colors is for us now (for the non-color-blind).
I already stated that it "would be a pain to convert to and from base-2" but you, while seeming to agree with me, make me understand where you are perhaps overlooking some things:
> every load and store operation
PCM wouldn't be used for the level-1 or probably even for the level-2 caches, so we are actually talking about loads and stores of cache lines which are many bytes long, said loads/stores already requiring something like 100-200 clock cycles on the last system for which I did low-level optimization (but I admit, that was quite a while ago). So it's not totally clear that its impossible to build some kind of pipelined asynchronous base converter which could convert fast enough (at small enough geometries) to make it worthwhile.
> The 2^10 kilo-, 2^20- mega, 2^30 giga- is just a convenience in terminology
and I've decided, long ago, to use kibi, mebi, and gibi instead even if it means I have to explain myself more. Less convenient, more accurate.
I don't pretend to know what is best for anyone else, however. Unlike a lot of people on both sides of this flamewar. (Of course, I would prefer that more people would use the binary prefixes, as then I would eventually have less explaining to do.)
The "standard"? All of the standards associations recommend using G/M/K as prefixes with the base-10 meanings, and using the unambiguous Gi/Mi/Ki (gibi/mebi/kibi) for base-2 measurements. One standards organization was willing to allow the deprecated use of G/M/K as base-2 for measuring semiconductor memory (i.e., RAM) only.
Do you also recommend that we will suddenly measure disk drive capacity in a different unit if/when we all move to using quantum computers or computers based on some other new currently unfamiliar technology?
Oh, and BTW, at least one of the technologies which has a small chance of replacing current RAM technologies, phase-change memory, could theoretically store 3 or 5 states per unit cell instead of 2 or 4, given the right material undergoing the phase change. One of the reasons not to do it is because it would be a pain to convert to and from base-2 to interface with the computer, so in the long run it is possible (but not necessarily likely, because there is a large initial development cost) that some computing devices will be designed to work in base-3 or base-5 if only to better utilize the abilities of PCM.
I made this mistake when I was in high school, and my chemistry teacher even agreed with me (wrongly).
If you were correct, explosions couldn't occur, because the initial heat released by the initiation would shut down, rather than speed up, the reaction of the remaining mass of explosive.
The only case which I can think of where you could be correct is when there is a/are competing reaction/s which would be sped up even more by the rise in temperature (the reverse reaction in an equilibrium situation), or which remove critical ingredients of the the reaction in question (e.g., the denaturation of an enzyme vs. the reaction which it catalyzes).
> I still find it odd that they would portray it on TV.
I never found it odd, as I had always assumed that it was obvious that they were poking fun at bigotry in general by putting up Archie Bunker as a stereotypical uneducated bigot. It was also a meta-joke in a certain sense, in that it was stereotyped bigotry, so they were guilty of meta-bigotry while doing it.
As much as I agree that your reasoning should be valid, my understanding of the legal realities are that unfortunately, only direct works of the Federal government are not copyrightable. State governments have the power to decide for themselves if their direct works are under copyright, and I don't know which of the states have given up copyright for their direct works, except for Florida, and possibly California.
Both state and Federal laws, however, are in the public domain.
I thought that the folks at the University of Arizona who had announced (in 2006) a different type of adjustable glasses using an embedded liquid crystal layer and an adjustment varying the electric field applied to it had put their development into fast gear and already were shipping prototypes.
Darn! Past shock, again...
> 1KB has been 1024 bytes since at least the '60s.
Yes, and 1Kbit/s has always been 1000 bits/s. Nice, eh?
> By using power of ten units for prefixes and power of two units for bytes and nibbles, you make
> things needlessly complicated
Right. How much data can a CPU running at 1 GHz receive and process in 10 seconds without buffering if it requires 1 cycle per 10 bytes to do so?
Complication is in the eye of the beholder.
To me, looking at terms like "gay", or "hacker", it seems to be less complicated to adopt a change in language rather than having to convert between bases for various calculations. Especially if, in my eyes, the change settles an inconsistency in something which deserves to be standardized.
I can tell you how to do that right now...without spending a dime. Limit population growth.
Wow, you know how to convince humans to limit their global population growth (i.e., override their natural instinct to procreate without bounds) without spending any money? Please, tell!
> What other arguments did these lawyers miss that a "good lawyer" wouldn't
> have missed? None that would be outcome-determinative, as far as I can see.
I'm glad that you are such a good lawyer.
Frankly, I believe a lot of NYCL's legal points are substantive, and a lot more convincing than the far-out theories of Joel's lawyer, who wanted to rely on a fair-use defense.
On the other hand, I can't figure out how each judge seems more clueless than the previous one. They don't even seem to listen to each other's opinions. In Jammie Thomas's case, the first judge threw out the decision based on his improperly instructing the jury. But then the second trial's judge totally ignored the reasoning of the first trial judge when he instructed the jury in the second trial.
Which leads me to believe, that even if NYCL and Louis Nizer were defending you, it's largely a matter of luck what would happen. A great reflection on our legal system, eh?
Geeks are a relatively small percentage of all filesharers, so the GP is actually correct. Just for the wrong reason.
Although you have to admit that percentage-wise, there are more geeks capable of not getting caught than ordinary people. Unfortunately, this has insignificant effect compared to the reason I stated above.
I think you're talking about SoundExchange, formerly a division of the RIAA. They collect fees for public performance of sound recordings, not from buying CDs or MP3s. The money is distributed to the copyright holders owners of those recordings (usually the record companies).
If they work things at SE like at ASCAP/BMI, then the total mass of income from payments to them is simply distributed percentage-wise based on some kind of statistical sampling. In a way which is not transparent to the artists. I rather doubt that "long-tail" RIAA artists see anything even if they get played O(1) times (and obviously, indie artists couldn't possibly receive anything).
Maybe someone should ask Janis Ian about it, though. Might be interesting to get at least one real data point.
Look, commodore64_love, NYCL maintains a fairly high-profile blog which includes a lot of "practice tips" for lawyers defending cases like this. I think it's silly that you're accusing him of being "silent", just because Joel's lawyer didn't feel like using the resources that NYCL is providing.
I have noticed that NYCL isn't posting/making the front page of Slashdot as much recently, but that I believe was because of backlash complaints about the volume of articles he had previously, when he would post about various legal happenings which sprang up in the running of these trials. The last one I remember was when he informed us that RIAA's lawyers were threatened with being sanctioned, which for him, as a lawyer, is a big, big deal --- but the reaction of most of the Slashdot geeks was, "yawn --- what's so important? stop bothering us about every little thing".
OK, after we finish this thread, I'll try not to bother you again about this if my half-senile brain will remember.
There was one very peculiar inconsistency in your reply. You make the good point that the innocent need to fight or deal with having not done so. However, you rag on Tannenbaum and Thomas-Rasset because they're guilty. OK, I'm willing to assume that they're guilty for the purpose of replying. It still seems to me that you're being hypocritical to denegrate their choice to fight having to pay thousands of dollars for their choice of infringing on RIAA's copyrights. They obviously just don't believe that they deserve to pay that much, and are taking what you put out as the admirable choice, to fight. (The obstruction of justice issue, BTW, has little to do with the amount of damages Jammie deserves to pay.)
And before you reply with "it's the law", well, as another poster has already pointed out to you, it was the "law", passed by Congress, that we go to war because of the "fucking neoconservative right". And you somehow manage to be outraged about that, eh? (BTW, did you actively do anything to oppose that? Because, based on your post, if you didn't, you should classify yourself as a "thoroughly bovine slave" and stop whining about it here on Slashdot.)
> The money isn't as big a factor as Slashdot's wee little whiners would have you believe.
Attorney Jennifer Granick doesn't whine here, as far as I can tell. Somehow I trust her wisdom on this issue a bit more than yours.
I understand your current position, even if I don't agree. However, I think there is something you are overlooking, which is the collateral damage to society brought about by RIAA attempting to stop those "folks who infringe on their copyrights".
Do you actually believe that 100% of the hundreds (or perhaps thousands, there is no real way to know how many) of people who are contacted by RIAA for paying a mere few thousand dollars to settle out-of-court are all guilty?
You do realize that even for someone who is actually innocent, settling out-of-court is the financially correct decision to make in these cases? I'd like to refer you to the blog of attorney Jennifer Granick, who represented Michael Lynn in "Ciscogate":
Even if you are innocent, a few grand isn't going to pay for much work from a lawyer who is good enough to go up against RIAA.
There is also the matter of how distorted and dysfunctional copyright law has become because of lobbying by RIAA. Do you actually believe that it helps society (or even the record companies themselves!) that the term of copyright is so enormously long? It looks to me to be the opposite, even for them. If the term were only something like 10 years, I think that new artists recycling of works which still had some cultural significance would actually generate more music, and more interesting music, for the industry to push. And I doubt that the 10 year limit would actually change the recording industry's income by very much, the vast majority of their sales are either new acts or to people who wouldn't bother to waste time/effort looking for the free copy as opposed to just clicking in iTunes/Amazon/or similar.
You want me to let the vast majority of users, who we all are agreeing are confused about the warnings about bad certificates, rate those certificates for me?
How is your Average Joe going to do that? If he's been MITM'd, how is he going to figure it out? You're going to give him instructions to wait 6 months and see if his bank account gets drained, and if not, he should go back and rate the certificate "good"? That's going to work real well, eh?
If I didn't know that botnet masters have better things to do than propose very stupid security ideas on Slashdot, I'd suspect you to be one of them, just waiting to be able to raise any bogus cert to an excellent rating with two or three commands to their waiting minions.
The FAQ claims that the US government has a copyright on the material. This could be possible if the material was not directly generated by the NIST itself --- for example, they paid a contractor to generate it and it is considered a "work for hire".
The facts themselves probably can't be considered to be under copyright.
OTOH, I agree with a previous poster that you should consult a lawyer if you want to actually do anything which isn't sheeple-ish with the data.
In this day and age, I would have thought that you would have also already posted a link to their RSS feeds page:
http://www.csmonitor.com/rss