First, an affirmative defense is not a negative defense; that is, an affirmative defense does not mean "I didn't break the law". A negative defense is "you're missing something to prove the violation of law". An affirmative defense is "yes, I broke the law, but punish me less because...". It is a justification on why one should not be punished even though they broke the law, or should be minimally punished, because of some extenuating circumstance. In other words, a factor considered in sentencing, as I said in the first place.
Second, necessity is a criminal defense, not a defense to the tort of trespass. Trespass on a private citizen's property is almost never criminal absent some other aggravation, such as trespass for the purpose of committing crime. That goes far beyond the example given.
Third, while criminal trespass may indeed be met with a necessity argument, but "I was hurt and it was faster for me to get to the doctor by trespassing" is not necessity. Necessity at law generally requires an actual, immediate, and life-threateningly serious harm that can only be avoided by the unlawful conduct in question. That, again, greatly overstates the simple example I gave of an injury that left the trespasser sufficiently mobile to trespass in the first place.
IANAL
Clearly. Before jumping to declare someone incorrect, perhaps you should consider your certainty of basic facts.
Still waiting for copyright enforcement advocates to realize that copyright infringement isn't always a bad thing.
Nothing that is against the law or otherwise a violation of a property right is always a "bad thing".
No form of stealing is always bad. Trespassing isn't always bad. Neither is copyright infringement. Neither is outright theft. But in each instance, you impinge on someone's inherent and exclusive rights (otherwise known at law as "property"), and the adult thing to do is to face the consequences of that action and pay the price.
Take trespassing, for example. Unless you're stomping on some prized and rare flowers, it causes no harm to anyone and permanently deprives the owner of the land of nothing. And yet, it remains unlawful because the owner of the land has the sole right to authorize admission onto it, whether it would be reasonable to deny entry or not, or whether he charges for admission at a reasonable rate or not. If you trespass, you are liable for damages should the owner wish to pursue them.
Now maybe you were injured and had a reasonable justification to trespass in order to get timely medical assistance. That's something that can be considered in the weighing of damages, but it doesn't change the fact that what you did was unlawful. It doesn't have to be reasonable, and the trespass might have been economically efficient or otherwise better than the alternative.
Taking food without paying when you're about to starve isn't a bad thing. But then turning and claiming you did nothing wrong is. You did what you had to do, and that will be considered in sentencing. You'll pay for the food that you took (restoring the tangible), and you will pay for the injury you caused to the food's owner by taking it without permission.
With copyright infringement, you pay for the injury, your depriving the owner of his exclusive property rights. That can range anywhere from a few hundred dollars (less than damages for trespassing) to many thousands, depending on the seriousness of your violation and the value of the work. Yes, there should be a cap on damages for private citizens infringing without commercial gain, but no, there should be no exception for arguing that your breach of law was a net positive. It often is with property crimes and impingement.
The law protects the rights of owners to maintain the freedom to make determinations on the use of their property. When an owner decides to sell some of those property rights, he has the right to determine at what price and under what conditions to do so, constrained only by other laws limiting his choice.
People are never required to do what's best with what they own. They're free to be as stupid, generous, savvy, greedy, or unreasonable as they wish, within the confines of the law.
Steal (v): to appropriate without authority or right; to take or acquire surreptitiously; to pass off dishonestly as one's own; to deprive the property of another.
Only one of many applicable definitions refers to deprivation or tangibility. So yes, you can steal a number.
You can't then be charged with theft, though, because theft is a crime of personalty. But while theft is always stealing, stealing is not always theft. This is not a terribly complicated point, though it sadly seems so lost amidst the demagoguery.
There are dozens of forms of stealing at law, both criminal and civil, and few of them are confined to personal property. Those are theft, trespass to chattels, larceny, and some types of conversion. Even theft does not necessarily require deprivation of use by the true owner (for that you need larceny).
There are many additional forms of stealing, including burglary, robbery, misappropriation, trespass, infringement, theft of service, identity theft (statutorily independent from fraud in many jurisdictions), fraud, unjust enrichment, adverse possession, the remaining types of conversion, and so on that do not require removal of anything tangible.
The difference really shouldn't be that hard to understand...
It really shouldn't, but the meme will never die here.
It is a pointless and circular argument that only comes up when it's a copyright story involving media consumption. It never comes up in discussions about GPL violations, where the comments are brimming with "stolen code" references that go untouched.
The basic reality is that "stealing" is a term of no legal significance carrying a broad colloquial meaning far beyond what you attempt to winnow it down to: a 1:1 equivalence with the crime of theft of personalty. It hasn't meant solely that for five centuries, and it never will.
Every device which [sic] I purchase needs to give me the option to stop the manufacturer from interfering with the device at some point after the sale.
Meaning?
How does any device not provide such an option? Don't install the updates or don't connect it to someone else's network. Absent that, there's never a guarantee.
That's all setting aside the point still unaddressed: why does every device need to be sold in a way that supports tinkering?
The author is not complaining that the iPad is not geek friendly, but overtly anti geek.
That's orthogonal to the parent's point. Why does every device need to be geek friendly?
Whether the degree of non-friendliness is mild, moderate, or downright anti-geek, why does that constitute a problem? There are many alternatives on the market. There are many devices that would easily fit the bill that don't carry the name iPad.
But every story contains angry tales of woe. I think the iPad is pretty dumb, myself--I expected an iPhone-based OS, but not just the iPhone OS, and I'm bothered by the lack of a desktop and the difficulty of external storage. It's not the product I hoped it would be. But that doesn't mean it's not the product someone else has been dreaming of for years.
There's a big difference between voicing a wish for a different product more suited to one's individual interests, and the rabid outrage and condemnation over a product feature (in this case, "geek friendliness") that they decided was outside of the target market.
There is room for all development options, and there is room for an array of products to choose. Not all of them will have the same priorities and selling points.
but that some random person decided that their way is not authorized or worthy anymore and they can't walk it.
They're free to walk it. Right down to Best Buy or Newegg to buy the MSI tablet. You paint a picture of some company taking a product right out of your hands and smashing your hopes and dreams. The reality is this: life is a series of imperfect choices. Nothing can be everything to anyone; people have different ideas about how to make things their "best".
It isn't that "some random person" decided you don't get to make choices anymore. It's that the creator of a device decided not to cater to your market, either for personal or economic reasons. It wasn't taken away from you after the fact as you describe.
If you make a choice to walk down a path for an electronic device, then the consequence of that is only choosing from products that line the sides of that path. The very metaphor you've introduced is emblematic of this issue: take the left fork and it might be shorter and get you home faster, but then you miss the apple orchard and scenic lake on the right fork. The choice is yours, but it is a choice. Option A to the exclusion of Option B.
If I sent a netbook back in time 20 years and you got yourself a hold of it, what would you have to say back then?
If I sent an electric juicer back in time 20 years, it would equally shame the general purpose hardware of the time. The point is irrelevant. A low-end router has more computing power than a 386. Doesn't make it a general purpose computer, because it wasn't built to be.
I think that you have confused yourself into thinking that if its not comparable to a modern desktop, then its not a general purpose computer.
No, I think you have confused yourself with raw hardware specs somehow magically dictating what a device "should" be.
Is an XBox a general purpose computer? No. Is that because of an arbitrary decision to cripple it? No. It's an intentional design decision to use available hardware to build a specific product.
A literal supercomputer on your lap with more memory than was imaginable back then, and a storage device many thousands of times bigger than the RLL/MFM drives of the time.
And 20 years from now, when Core 2 Duo-based systems are used in embedded applications simply because it's cheaper than some purpose-built system, they won't be general purpose computers, either. They also won't be "arbitrarily prevented" from that task because they would not be useful in that role, just as your example is almost totally useless as a general purpose machine today.
Also, 20 years ago was 1990. RLL-based drives haven't been used widely in over 25 years.
As you see, General Purpose is not some moving metric that follows whatever the current desktop standard is. General Purpose means unrestricted.
No, "general purpose" is (a) not a proper noun phrase, (b) a function of design, and (c) very much based on whatever the current standard of functionality is. It's asinine to claim, particularly in the realm of electronics, that some piece of equipment that was fully capable as a general purpose platform in 1979 remains so in 2027, when it is no longer capable of being used as a non-tasked system.
"General purpose" involves simultaneously capacity, design, and contemporary use cases. It connotes the functionality of a computer system to handle any specialized task in software. Netbooks don't fit that bill, because their hardware is anything but unrestricted.
Again, I'll repeat: your cable box, AV receiver, cellular phone, electric juicer, wireless router, and quite possibly your alarm clock all beat the pants off a 386 DOS box in terms of hardware performance and capabilities. That does not make them general purpose computers. They are purpose-built systems not designed or meant for general purpose use, even if, like the XBox, it contains a fully working set of hardware that could theoretically be tasked for other uses.
A C2D-based embedded system configured and installed in an industrial application is not a general purpose computer either, even if the mainboard retains logic for video and audio output and expansion buses. It is undeniably powerful enough to be, but it is not suited for that role.
Only because its locked down. Remember that. Only because its locked down.
So is your cable box and your Blu-ray player. What's your point?
Just because it has hardware that could (roughly and poorly) approximate a full-blown computer does not make it so.
Personally, I don't consider netbooks to be true "general purpose" computers, and they have hardware that's even closer to approximating one. I don't know anyone who would want to run a modern, full-blown desktop OS on a 1GHz ARM-based CPU, which, for "general purpose" computing, would perform worse than one core of a 700MHz C2D-equivalent.
While I agree that the iPad should have more capabilities out of the box and an OS that is closer to OS X than iPhone, I do not agree that it was ever in the cards for this to be a fully capable general purpose computer.
1) Getting a Patent: There's evidence that the USPTO isn't doing its job at examining patent applications. There are a slew of Federal regulatory services that have been suffering for years from inadequate staffing, the USPTO being one.
It's no secret that the Patent Office is badly understaffed. That's not a systemic flaw (at least in the patent system), it's a flaw in public priorities and government spending.
This seems to be manifesting itself in the examiners not having time to spot a lot of obvious or non-original work.
While it's true that a lower workload would result in more time per application, there are two major problems with the presentation of this point on Slashdot:
1. "Novel" and "Non-obvious" are grossly mischaracterized and misunderstood by the overwhelming majority of posters, with the particular point being what portions of the application must demonstrate these two elements and what the requirements for each are. The abstract, summary, or title will often state the invention in fairly "obvious" terms--by design. The actual invention is disclosed in the claims and the specification, and most of the patent stories around here gloss past that part for ad revenue and cheap laughs. Many patents presented here actually deal with the existing art in the specification.
2. It is not the function of a patent examiner to conclude that the patent works. There is no way to have a fully versed office, conversant in all applicable technologies and methods, nor is there any conclusive way to search and fulfill a negative proposition (that there is no disqualifying art in existence). It is the job of competitors and interested parties to pursue litigation, and more importantly, it is the job of the applicant to conduct an exhaustive search and certify that the patent application contains patentable material.
By design, it is litigation that primarily handles this problem.
IANAL, but baring someone pointing out long established case law to the contrary, I'd bet money that the framers didn't foresee and would have legislated against "patent trolls".
Doubtful. The entire legal system of the United States is predicated on extremely low bars to entry--a measured and intentional response to the court practices of England.
This as a matter of course includes having only minimal checks against frivolous lawsuits and it includes a full awareness of potential for abuse. It was decided, as part of the Framers' systemic design, that putting up with abuse was the cost for freedom. After all, part of freedom is living with people who make choices you don't like.
Finally, given that the very early development of the patent system involved (and to this day involves) a high priority placed on free assignment, that is, the ability to sell wholesale patented inventions, assign royalties to any party, and generally deal freely with the invention, patent trolls existed from day one. Anyone can buy a patent outright and then milk the competition.
Patent trolls have become more sophisticated and more prevalent, and their job is much easier with the Internet exposing targets for them that in, say, 1813, they'd never have heard of, but the patent system grants exclusive rights to patent holders on, among others, the manufacturing and use of the patented device or process.
The holder of that exclusive right is free to exercise it. Once again, we come full circle to "freedom means dealing with the disagreeable choices of others."
None of that is to say that there aren't reforms that can alleviate some of the burdens of today's troll industries, but the patent troll will never be eradicated without interfering significantly with legitimate patent applicants and holders. (Then of course, there's also the argument that patent trolls actually perform a useful service and respond to market forces--but that's a topic for another time.)
Not fewer trade secrets, but a strong economic incentive to elect full disclosure, without the competitive disadvantage that comes with it. Trade secrets actually have become more pervasive as the patent system progressed, because companies have specifically elected against public disclosure.
Patents help inventors who do not want to jump through the hoops of trade secret protection but also do not want to give away their hard (and often expensive) work. The statutory schemes primarily help smaller players, since the large corporations can afford the contractual and transactional licensing work to ensure that their products remain their products, even in the absence of statutory patent and copyright law. On the other hand, smaller inventors can rely on the basics of that work being put forth by the government--lowering costs significantly.
Same deal, roughly, with copyrights. It facilitated broad access to creative works without giving away the store, as it were.
Both systems have problems, but both also work remarkably well and with a great deal of flexibility. Patent and copyright holders have a great deal of choice in how to weigh the balances, exactly as it should be. Some patents are licensed royalty-free; some copyrights are voluntarily abandoned or licensed in a permissive style (e.g. BSD, GPL). Other choose to exercise more control because they can afford to.
The problem isn't the system; the problem is that like so many other things, market forces don't really interact well with certain social values. Microsoft would go open source in a heartbeat if it meant greater profitability; it's just that there's no economic incentive for voluntarily lowering the bar.
Now you could say that patent or copyright protection could be extended for those who choose to license in a royalty-free manner. That would provide some downward pressure on prices and proscriptive licensing. You could offer other perks, such as a damage multiplier in infringement cases, such that EFF lawyers and open source projects would earn greater protection.
But there is no way you can say with a straight face that on balance, these systems have not been wildly successful at encouraging investment in R&D, proliferation of art, and consumer access. At no other time in human history has so much been available to so many. Whining about the tiny fraction of extremely popular works that can afford to be highly selective about transactional terms is no way to suggest such an argument.
No, you've missed the point: You keep talking about how "invasive" the searches are as being a determining factor, but how "invasive" a search is has nothing to do with whether it's thorough or effective.
Whether it's thorough or effective has nothing to do with whether it is constitutionally defensible.
The NSA monitoring all communications and wiretapping all phones would be very effective at stopping crimes, from pot sales to terrorist plots. That doesn't justify the government doing it.
There's this concept that seems to escape you of "innocent until proven guilty". Perhaps you should consider the implications of that.
If someone is already being permitted to pat you down, then no one has a problem with that person also using a metal detector.
Because a pat down is already a more invasive procedure than a metal detector. You're going the opposite way.
As far as I know, there's also no legal way in which metal detectors are considered more invasive than a pat down.
Because they're not. Metal detectors are less invasive, and that is why.
metal detectors even use signals that penetrate your clothes, and no one complains about metal detectors being "strip searches"
Metal detectors aren't strip searches. They're passive devices calibrated to respond to certain materials only.
No, what makes people view these body scanners as "more invasive" is specifically the fact that it allows others to *see* under
NO. NO. NO. It is not the body revealed that is the invasion, it is the compulsion of being subjected to the highest standards of evidence gathering for less than the minimum standard to be stopped as a citizen on the street.
It truly is not this complicated, so I must assume at this point that you are just trolling.
Invasion and compulsion are concepts of impingement into constitutional liberty. You cannot be compelled to produce proof absent suspicion of a wrongful act. Just as a police officer can't arrest you without probable cause, they cannot without justification demand a cavity search of a person. It is the demand for evidence that is an invasion, not the fact that a naked person is involved.
You may think it a minor distinction, but it is the foundation of the criminal justice and evidentiary systems of American jurisprudence.
There is nothing about airports or air travel that justifies this complete elimination of suspicion and of less invasive methods of detection. If you are making the vacuous argument that airports are dangerous and therefore it's okay not to have rights, are you also saying you consent to strip searches at ball parks and sports stadiums if a terrorist decides one day to blow one of those up? Are you comfortable being forced to present conclusive evidence of your innocence for wanting to step into a bank, because those are sensitive places? Maybe we should install giant car-sized scanners at gas stations, because that would be pretty effective at finding criminals? Is it acceptable for the government to search your hard drives and monitor your Internet activity as long as they don't change any data? No harm, no foul?
I have nothing to hide, therefore I am willing to subject all of my fellow citizens to a world of supervision and surveillance of all actions and communications when none of them is even suspected of wrongdoing?
It certainly is. A pat down is a search, and requiring you to empty your pockets is a search.
No, those are not full searches, just as a temporary detention is not a full arrest. There is a significant constitutional and legal difference between a pat-down for weapons and a full search.
Also, I don't think the question of embarrassment and humiliation is irrelevant.
Clearly you do, since your whole argument to this point has been "the only difference between now and these machines is embarrassment"--an argument that ignores the entirety of the problem.
Now if you want to argue that people should not be subjected to a search at the airport, then you should have a problem with the searches that already take place.
No. What part of "levels of suspicion" and "levels of invasion and compulsion" is not registering here?
There is a massive difference between a metal detector and a strip search. Because one is justified does not mean the other is.
The schema that is in place is the most invasive protocol that can be constitutionally and rationally defended. Jumping a minimum of four levels of compulsion and personal invasion with absolutely no suspicion whatsoever is the entire issue.
This is the most invasive search possible, conducted for absolutely no cause. It is a complete and total abrogation of rights.
If the objection to these body scans is not that they're humiliating and degrading, then I don't know what the objection is. That they're too effective?
Is your objection to being stopped on the street and asked to step into a strip search booth based on the fact that it would be humiliating?
It's specifically that the process is degrading, traumatic, and invasive, and that we don't want to subject people to it without good reason.
No, it isn't. Degradation is a factor in how the searches are conducted, not whether they are tolerated at all. You've missed the whole point in case law regarding when it's permissible to be subjected to compulsory search beyond reason.
Your argument smacks of "once you've been pulled over for a minor traffic violation, you're now subject to a complete search of your person and vehicle"--a conclusion not supported by US jurisprudence. "Search" is not a binary state as you so ineffectively argue. If the police are investigating a crime, they can ask you questions and you have every right to decline to answer. If you've been stopped for a traffic violation, the only permissible search is what's in plain sight, unless the officer has a reasonable suspicion (a legal term of art) that you have a weapon, in which case he can search your person and, per Gant, any area under your immmediate physical control. He doesn't have a right to search your passengers, or your trunk, or your engine compartment.
Mandatory use of these machines renders an innocent citizen completely without rights--even more so than inmates in prison, who can be searched without cause, but not subjected to a cavity search without suspicion. That is the problem in a nutshell. It is not justifiable that a person in prison enjoys greater personal protection than an innocent citizen suspected of no impropriety.
Then why is it ok for them to search my luggage, ask me to empty my pockets, and pat me down?
As already explained, because special exceptions have already been created to lower the standards at airports. There is no need and no justification to lower them further.
They're already conducting a search, and even conducting a searching me.
No, they aren't. A pat down isn't a search.
The only difference I see between a pat down and a body scan is that a body scan is potentially more embarrassing.
Let vanity go. It's an irrelevant straw man. Embarrassment has nothing to do with anything.
Then you've missed the concept of levels of suspicion and constitutional limits on evidence gathering entirely.
A pat down is currently an extra level of invasion (+1) over the current standard procedure. It is two levels beneath a strip search (+3) and three beneath a cavity search (+4) on the scales for legal standards. These machines launch all passengers to a digital cavity search. It's hard to make the problem any more clear.
Just getting to the metal detectors and X-ray machines at all required relaxing legal standards and invading on the personal rights of passengers. What justifies them skipping past go all the way to the top?
So given this issue of context, I would say that airports are already situations where we endure a lower expectation of privacy than elsewhere.
Lower doesn't mean nonexistent.
I don't know if that's a legally appropriate way of saying it, but what I mean is, we already essentially allow our bags to be searched at airports.
That's fine, but I'm not a bag, nor is my laptop's hard drive.
There's nothing wrong with some basic preventative scanning, but you don't get to order a strip search with absolutely zero suspicion. If there is something irregular about the purchase, some red flag in the computer, or some anomaly with a passenger's bag, by all means, it may be appropriate to pull them aside and pat them down or ask them if they'd consent to a body scan.
No suspicion means no search. This is a principle that has stood for two centuries, first whittled away by the extremely lax standards at border crossings (but again, originally those had limits and required some irregularity to justify the extra processes). In the past twenty years, airport security has washed that away, now to the point of having no rights when traveling by air.
I've also emptied my pockets, walked through a metal detector, and allowed myself to be pat down at an airport. I wouldn't approve of police doing that randomly on the streets.
So in essence you're saying that they can do whatever they want in an airport, but not on the street? I wholeheartedly disagree.
We are already subject to less privacy and more invasion at an airport. They haven't the right to demand more invasion with less suspicion. It will yield no better results.
I suppose if the consensus is that you feel like you've been stripped of your dignity
It's not about dignity, as clearly illustrated above. It's about liberty and the right to be treated as innocent until presented with the appropriate level of suspicion for the alleged crime or offense.
Law enforcement must have grounds to conduct a search. They already get to do a more thorough search without any suspicion than would ever be tolerated on the street. People should not have to submit to even more for no reason at all.
There's no exigency, no probable cause, no reasonable suspicion. Enough is enough. We draw lines around these requirements and the various levels of search and seizure because each one is a greater and greater harm to privacy and liberty. A digital strip search revealing more than a cavity search could ever hope to is a whole new level, justified by nothing at all.
It's not about dignity. Dignity is why these searches are currently conducted in small rooms near the security lines instead of at the metal detector. Yes, strip searches happen in airports right now. But you have to trigger special screening, and then do something to trigger a third level of suspicion, where they bring in real cops and conduct a strip search.
These machines do away with those three levels and subject everyone to the same degree of search--something previously justified essentially only by observed criminal behavior. That with the arbitrary power to seize your computer, again with no suspicion whatsoever, even when those machines contain confidential and/or privileged information protected by law, including attorney/client communications and records, medical records, financial records and the like is something that cannot be justified and should not be tolerated.
This is the single biggest affront to personal liberty of this generation, and it's going over with barely a hiccup because it's abstract and because people like you assume it's about dignity or vanity. Not consenting to strip searches on the street isn't about dignity or vanity. It's no different at an airport. They have strip search policies and laws already. They can use them. They don't need to extend that highest level of invasion to all travelers of all flights simply because they can do it digitally.
1) The energy required to transport "packets" of hot water is many, many times greater than the losses through the hot water pipes.
2) The cost of building such a system would exceed any logical benefit; adding a large-diameter pipe system would occupy considerable space and would require some (presumably mechanized) system for sorting, draining, and filling the containers (as well as isolating waste water containers from the others) in a space-consuming "sorting room".
3) Each shower, sink, and drain in the building would require a large accumulation tank, since it would take multiple "packets" to flush a toilet, and storing enough hot water for even a brief shower would require many, many trips through the system. Any drain reservoir that filled faster than the system could empty it would back up into the sink/toilet/bathtub. The largest conceivable container to fit into a typical building could hold about a gallon of water and would be twice the size of the system used at banks--it certainly wouldn't fit inside a standard wall and would require a special breakout conduit.
4) For home use, building a sufficiently complex system would simply be impossible--all water flow would stop while your "packets" were en route to other destinations. There is no conceivable way to build bypass structures and waiting areas sufficient to allow multiple taps to work simultaneously at an acceptable refill rate.
5) Given the necessary locations for most of the accumulation tanks, you would need active pumps to run most faucets--the system would not function on water pressure alone as it does now. This adds cost, complexity, and new failure modes. Power outage? There goes the toilets.
The whole idea is a Rube. If the relatively small losses in the hot water pipes concern you, build a home with insulated hot water pipes. Add a central vac if you like. The end result will be cheaper, more efficient, and 99% less insane.
The shock waves do indeed travel slower than light, but messages would take at least several seconds to be relayed, transmitted, received, and read by a human. An email in my office takes about six seconds to be routed within the building, let alone over a variety of wireless networks. A realtime message might make it out in under a second, but we're talking about shock waves that travel at 15,000-30,000mph and faster, with an damage radius on big quakes of 40 to 60 miles.
A middle case, say, 50 miles at 25k mph is about 7 seconds until the last person at risk feels it. If the message sent out is any longer than the word "earthquake!", the message generation, transmission, receipt, and processing by that guy's brain will end right at the same time the ground starts moving. And everybody closer than him will know before they get the message.
That's even assuming instant identification of an earthquake. In reality, it takes a few seconds to confirm the readings. So even that guy on the outer edge of the damage radius won't realistically get the message in time to do anything before the shaking begins.
People further out, who will feel the quake but aren't at any substantial risk of significant damage might get a few seconds' notice, but they don't really benefit from a warning in the first place, given their relatively minor inconvenience. It's like telling people on the extreme periphery as a hurricane makes landfall that it's going to start raining in a few seconds because a hurricane is making landfall somewhere else. They're not the ones who need the warning.
Sure it does, so long as you didn't lock up your own files with Microsoft's rights management services.
Considering that this is used mostly, if not entirely, by corporate clients implementing access control, the idea that it's Microsoft doing evil in the background is foolhardy. Locking documents out because of the failure of a security certificate would hardly convince a corporate client to upgrade to a newer version of Office.
Re:Meaning is not a key component of syntax.
on
Monkeys With Syntax
·
· Score: 1
Gobble-dee gobble-dee gobble-dee dock. Happy?
QED. The grammar there being what, exactly?
Re:Meaning is not a key component of syntax.
on
Monkeys With Syntax
·
· Score: 1
and you can also have syntax without meaning.
No, you can't. If there is no meaning attached to the structure itself, there is no syntax.
Just any regular expression defines a grammar or syntax.
No, it most certainly doesn't.
That doesn't mean that any string matching that regular expression has a meaning.
This is true of all languages, but not a conclusion supported by your claims.
Re:It depends what one means by syntax...
on
Monkeys With Syntax
·
· Score: 1
Again, there's a reason for the subject line. You're using "syntax" in a very loose sense, where it seems to mean nothing more than "rule-governed combination an expression drawn from set A with one of set B to form an expression from set C."
No, syntax means a great deal more than simple combination. The overriding issue with your very lengthy comment is that you on one hand go to great pains to delineate fields of study based on human languages and then come to present the following:
More importantly, I worry that you're taking the analogies between animal calls and human language expressions too closely.
This is in fact the nature of the issue with your comments. You suggest that the evidence is of morphology at best, but not syntax. But the issue is that you are foreclosing the issue by making sweeping conclusions based on a process that is not fully understood.
I would dispute that morphology is more "basic" than syntax, actually. There are good reasons to think that syntax is more basic than morphology--though again, just like there's the problem of what one means by "syntax," there's the problem of what one means by "basic." One of the leading theories about morphology is grammaticalization,
This just chases your point in circles: you set forth an opinion stating that these sounds are at best morphological processes that fall short of syntax, and yet now you argue that syntax is the undergirding element of morphology.
You are considering delineations in a sophisticated and infinitely expressive language with one that is far more basic. Grammaticalization is necessarily a consequence of a sophisticated language--as you summarize, the process is one of simplifying complex preexisting syntactic structures for more streamlined morphological ones. Such a phenomenon requires a fairly complex syntax--a complete grammar, in other words--to exist before grammaticalization. This is a development of a much more sophisticated morphology.
And again, this is one picture of how language emerges, but not the only possible one. The story can be told backwards, so that some phrases grow more and more habitual and disproportionately frequent, until they get squashed together and become single words.
The reverse process is a simplification of prior existing structures. You must concede the prior existing structures before arguing for this kind of language development.
What seems clear to me is that (a) compositionality is key [...]
Indeed, which is why it is the question of this research. Once again, you are answering the hypothesis in the negative as a condition precedent of your argument. You're supplying the answer and thus faulting the research.
It's like saying, "There's no water on the moon, so this research looking for water on the moon is unlikely to be successful."
Frankly, what you're describing here is more closely analogous to phonology than to syntax or morphology.
Sorry, but that is flatly untrue
The simpler thesis would be that calls have some sort of quasi-phonological complexity, but that the meaning of "krak-oo" is no more the combination of the meanings of "krak" and "oo" than the meaning of wafer is a combination of the meanings of way and fur.
You seem to be, again, arguing against yourself here, and are certainly begging the question again.
You start from the premise that "krak-oo" is a word in isolation rather than two words (or even a single word) in a syntactic structure. Once again, that may be the case, but is the topic of the research, not a premise.
The problem is that once you start going down that path you weaken your case dramatically, because it degenerates into a game similar to how fanciful of a story
Re:It depends what one means by syntax...
on
Monkeys With Syntax
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
my first reaction to it is that the example cited by TFA is not clearly syntactic, in the strictest linguistic sense.
And in no small part, that's because you're analyzing it as a human language. You go on to suggest that the examples cited tend to indicate morphology. And if this were an elementary study of a phenomenon in a more sophisticated language, I would agree. However, two points:
1. Morphology is fundamentally syntax (underlying mathematics of structure), it's just the syntax with the word, rather than the assembly of words. 2. While morphology is unquestionably more basic than syntax, as a lexicon of words is (we assume) a precursor to the emergence of a language, and though morphology eventually becomes a distinct field in highly developed languages, the initial emergence of syntax (and accordingly, sentences) from morphology is not a black and white line.
Words grow longer and more complicated, and thus carry more and more meaning, until eventually a different structure, a grammar, has to replace a word-based method of communication. The question that this research seeks to answer is whether there is, in fact, a grammar within this language.
The second paragraph makes an even more problematic claim: "boom" and "krak-oo," combined together, means something completely different than the parts.
What's the problem with this? That one of the paradigmatic properties of syntactic constructions in human language is compositionality, the principle that the meaning of an expression made of parts A and B is a function of the meanings of A and B themselves, and of the manner in which they are combined in the expression.
The claim is not problematic and does not necessarily indicate non-compositionality. Again, I believe your perspective is influenced by a study of highly evolved human languages. Consider it more like a machine language and you begin to see things slightly differently.
If you only have a limited range of sounds (as monkeys do, compared to humans) and if you only have a limited storage capacity (again, as monkeys do, compared to humans), then basic syntax enables a great deal of added complexity for relatively no cost. You can recycle the sounds without creating untenably long morphemes.
It is not necessarily that "boom" and "krak-oo" when combined mean something different than the parts, but rather that these primates have multiple working definitions for each of their words, and rather than a contextual association, which is rather advanced cognition and language, the different definition is triggered by the syntactical position of the word.
There's in fact tons of noncompositionality in human language, but it's hard to argue that monkeys have a semblance of human language unless you can clearly argue that the meanings of the subparts of the complex calls combine compositionally
Agreed, but the issue here is a question of whether we fully understand the meanings attached to their sounds. If you assume that one of their morphemes has exactly one fixed definition regardless of combination, your point is valid.
But if the meaning shifts based on sequence, allowing each morpheme to be associated with multiple lexical entries depending on its grammatical position within a basic "sentence", then that is indeed evidence of a much more sophisticated language than is commonly assumed.
Because we have no experience with the development of any human languages at this level, it's hard to say which comes first. I'm of the belief that phonology blurs into morphology, which then blurs into syntax. Is a diphthong a phoneme trying to be a morpheme? Is "boom boom krak-oo [...]" an overextended morpheme, or has it spilled over into a proto-sentence? What is the line between word and sentence, morphology and syntax?
You're assuming the answer to the question they're asking, and thus begging the question. If the "words" always have one meaning, then it's not much of a syntax--but the research aims to show whether those sounds always have the same meaning or if it does vary with composition.
Re:Meaning is not a key component of syntax.
on
Monkeys With Syntax
·
· Score: 1
No, because you can have meaning without syntax. You just have a limited set of combinations and thus a limited field of expression.
If you can make 40 unique sounds, you can express at least 40 unique concepts.
Then you can throw morphology into the mix, which is really just intraword syntax, and string those 40 sounds together in combinations to express many more concepts. Without syntax, though, you're limited to single-word expression (which is basically how most people view animal languages--they can communicate, but only from a basic set of pre-written expressions).
Re:Meaning is not a key component of syntax.
on
Monkeys With Syntax
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Actually, "meaning" isn't just limited to sense and reference (semantics).
Meaning, that is, syntactic meaning, is a key component of syntax. Without meaning, syntax can't exist.
Knowing that a repeating pattern has a logical definitional rule behind it is a key element of meaning. If I say the word "mine" to you, without syntax, you have no idea of the semantic meaning. Is it a verb? An object? A noun? If it is a noun, does it refer to the kind for digging or the kind for exploding? Syntax plays a huge role in meaning.
Consider that the monkeys have a semantic inventory of distinct sounds A , B, and C. Semantically, they have three concepts and no more--because they lack syntax. With a simple syntactic structure, the sounds get new meanings because sequence suddenly informs meaning.
Without syntax, words can only have one meaning. As the article argues and as the sentence describes, the fact that position changes the meaning of sounds is key evidence of the use of syntax in the language. If semantic meaning were unaffected by sequence, that would be evidence of the absence of syntax.
Semantics cannot be divorced from phonology and syntax in oral language. Phonological meaning plus syntactic meaning is fundamentally semantic meaning. More advanced languages have more complicated systems of context and idiom that add layers onto this. But the basic point remains that meaning is certainly an element of syntax.
so what your telling me is that the data only tells us how much net traffic windows generates
No. You're misusing the numbers. It shows what proportion of the traffic they monitor, from the sites they monitor, weighted the way they weight it, comes from machines reporting themselves as Windows (or Linux, or BSD, or OS X) computers.
are we to conclude that this is because of market share, or that linux and mac users are actually doing some work
Neither.
it is of course the correlation of the two.
Nope. The data collected is for relative trends, not for overall "net traffic" or for install base market share or for active users or any other actual market.
By using the same methodology consistently, the relative reporting in your sample size can show clues about projections of adoptions of new versions, shifts to other platforms, and other generalized trends. It may indicate relative changes in market share by showing consistent gains or losses over time, and it is weighted in such a way as to approximate market share estimates from other sources, but it is not a projection of any actual market, whether that market is units sold, units in active use, "net traffic", or anything else.
also does this take into account any of the traffic from compromised windows machines?
No effect, unless those "little M$ bonnets" (botnets?) are being directed to open a browser and load one or more of the tracked websites.
The weighting isn't based on projections to an actual market share, though. That's the missing step.
Error bars and statistical confidence are applicable only when stating that a sample is reflective of a population. This data is not reflective of a population. It's just a calculation of raw data passed through a systemic algorithm.
For a simplistic example, if I have a data collection method that tracks occurrences through two populations, A and B, and I discard 50% of population B because that's the sample weight I've adopted, I don't need error bars when listing my results:
A: 1374/9978 or 13.77% B: 3430/10035 or 34.18% [weighted at 50%] = 17.09%
There's no need for error bars or a discussion of confidence. It's only when I take the next step and make a projection concluding that "13.77% of Americans have X" that I need to go further. If I'm only talking about the results of my sample set itself, it's just straight math: 13.77% of group A. No plus or minus.
The weighting by country changes the reported numbers in a way that the surveyors obviously hope is more reflective of reality, but until they make a projection to reality, it's still just in the end a multiplier on the raw calculation.
There are no error bars. This is a straight dump from their collected information on web traffic.
Anyone who mistakes this information for a statistical evaluation of actual market share by physical units or even actual market share by "web presence" is misusing the data.
They may well try to make a fairly representative sampling based on diversifying websites they collect data from, but day-to-day, let alone month-to-month, variation makes this data at best a rough approximation of the actual market. But they're not claiming that this data is a reflective snapshot of any actual market--they leave that to lazy journalists. Instead, what their statistics track are trends over time using a consistent methodology. It's a clue about the state of the actual market, but nothing more. Only lazy journalists would take a single month's reported numbers and make a claim about actual market share.
Their numbers are accurate to several decimal places--they have an exact count of the "survey respondents"--the over 100 million reporting machines each month. Where there is insufficient data is making a projection from that sample to the actual market (but again, the data can't realistically be used for that). Linux's NetApp share has bounced up and down a distance of 0.1% since the middle of the year. This probably has nothing to do with Linux's actual market share changing and more to do with variations in browsing habits and which sites are recorded.
Slashdot Mirror
It is not incorrect.
First, an affirmative defense is not a negative defense; that is, an affirmative defense does not mean "I didn't break the law". A negative defense is "you're missing something to prove the violation of law". An affirmative defense is "yes, I broke the law, but punish me less because...". It is a justification on why one should not be punished even though they broke the law, or should be minimally punished, because of some extenuating circumstance. In other words, a factor considered in sentencing, as I said in the first place.
Second, necessity is a criminal defense, not a defense to the tort of trespass. Trespass on a private citizen's property is almost never criminal absent some other aggravation, such as trespass for the purpose of committing crime. That goes far beyond the example given.
Third, while criminal trespass may indeed be met with a necessity argument, but "I was hurt and it was faster for me to get to the doctor by trespassing" is not necessity. Necessity at law generally requires an actual, immediate, and life-threateningly serious harm that can only be avoided by the unlawful conduct in question. That, again, greatly overstates the simple example I gave of an injury that left the trespasser sufficiently mobile to trespass in the first place.
IANAL
Clearly. Before jumping to declare someone incorrect, perhaps you should consider your certainty of basic facts.
Still waiting for copyright enforcement advocates to realize that copyright infringement isn't always a bad thing.
Nothing that is against the law or otherwise a violation of a property right is always a "bad thing".
No form of stealing is always bad. Trespassing isn't always bad. Neither is copyright infringement. Neither is outright theft. But in each instance, you impinge on someone's inherent and exclusive rights (otherwise known at law as "property"), and the adult thing to do is to face the consequences of that action and pay the price.
Take trespassing, for example. Unless you're stomping on some prized and rare flowers, it causes no harm to anyone and permanently deprives the owner of the land of nothing. And yet, it remains unlawful because the owner of the land has the sole right to authorize admission onto it, whether it would be reasonable to deny entry or not, or whether he charges for admission at a reasonable rate or not. If you trespass, you are liable for damages should the owner wish to pursue them.
Now maybe you were injured and had a reasonable justification to trespass in order to get timely medical assistance. That's something that can be considered in the weighing of damages, but it doesn't change the fact that what you did was unlawful. It doesn't have to be reasonable, and the trespass might have been economically efficient or otherwise better than the alternative.
Taking food without paying when you're about to starve isn't a bad thing. But then turning and claiming you did nothing wrong is. You did what you had to do, and that will be considered in sentencing. You'll pay for the food that you took (restoring the tangible), and you will pay for the injury you caused to the food's owner by taking it without permission.
With copyright infringement, you pay for the injury, your depriving the owner of his exclusive property rights. That can range anywhere from a few hundred dollars (less than damages for trespassing) to many thousands, depending on the seriousness of your violation and the value of the work. Yes, there should be a cap on damages for private citizens infringing without commercial gain, but no, there should be no exception for arguing that your breach of law was a net positive. It often is with property crimes and impingement.
The law protects the rights of owners to maintain the freedom to make determinations on the use of their property. When an owner decides to sell some of those property rights, he has the right to determine at what price and under what conditions to do so, constrained only by other laws limiting his choice.
People are never required to do what's best with what they own. They're free to be as stupid, generous, savvy, greedy, or unreasonable as they wish, within the confines of the law.
Steal (v): to appropriate without authority or right; to take or acquire surreptitiously; to pass off dishonestly as one's own; to deprive the property of another.
Only one of many applicable definitions refers to deprivation or tangibility. So yes, you can steal a number.
You can't then be charged with theft, though, because theft is a crime of personalty. But while theft is always stealing, stealing is not always theft. This is not a terribly complicated point, though it sadly seems so lost amidst the demagoguery.
There are dozens of forms of stealing at law, both criminal and civil, and few of them are confined to personal property. Those are theft, trespass to chattels, larceny, and some types of conversion. Even theft does not necessarily require deprivation of use by the true owner (for that you need larceny).
There are many additional forms of stealing, including burglary, robbery, misappropriation, trespass, infringement, theft of service, identity theft (statutorily independent from fraud in many jurisdictions), fraud, unjust enrichment, adverse possession, the remaining types of conversion, and so on that do not require removal of anything tangible.
The difference really shouldn't be that hard to understand...
It really shouldn't, but the meme will never die here.
It is a pointless and circular argument that only comes up when it's a copyright story involving media consumption. It never comes up in discussions about GPL violations, where the comments are brimming with "stolen code" references that go untouched.
The basic reality is that "stealing" is a term of no legal significance carrying a broad colloquial meaning far beyond what you attempt to winnow it down to: a 1:1 equivalence with the crime of theft of personalty. It hasn't meant solely that for five centuries, and it never will.
Every device which [sic] I purchase needs to give me the option to stop the manufacturer from interfering with the device at some point after the sale.
Meaning?
How does any device not provide such an option? Don't install the updates or don't connect it to someone else's network. Absent that, there's never a guarantee.
That's all setting aside the point still unaddressed: why does every device need to be sold in a way that supports tinkering?
The author is not complaining that the iPad is not geek friendly, but overtly anti geek.
That's orthogonal to the parent's point. Why does every device need to be geek friendly?
Whether the degree of non-friendliness is mild, moderate, or downright anti-geek, why does that constitute a problem? There are many alternatives on the market. There are many devices that would easily fit the bill that don't carry the name iPad.
But every story contains angry tales of woe. I think the iPad is pretty dumb, myself--I expected an iPhone-based OS, but not just the iPhone OS, and I'm bothered by the lack of a desktop and the difficulty of external storage. It's not the product I hoped it would be. But that doesn't mean it's not the product someone else has been dreaming of for years.
There's a big difference between voicing a wish for a different product more suited to one's individual interests, and the rabid outrage and condemnation over a product feature (in this case, "geek friendliness") that they decided was outside of the target market.
There is room for all development options, and there is room for an array of products to choose. Not all of them will have the same priorities and selling points.
but that some random person decided that their way is not authorized or worthy anymore and they can't walk it.
They're free to walk it. Right down to Best Buy or Newegg to buy the MSI tablet. You paint a picture of some company taking a product right out of your hands and smashing your hopes and dreams. The reality is this: life is a series of imperfect choices. Nothing can be everything to anyone; people have different ideas about how to make things their "best".
It isn't that "some random person" decided you don't get to make choices anymore. It's that the creator of a device decided not to cater to your market, either for personal or economic reasons. It wasn't taken away from you after the fact as you describe.
If you make a choice to walk down a path for an electronic device, then the consequence of that is only choosing from products that line the sides of that path. The very metaphor you've introduced is emblematic of this issue: take the left fork and it might be shorter and get you home faster, but then you miss the apple orchard and scenic lake on the right fork. The choice is yours, but it is a choice. Option A to the exclusion of Option B.
If I sent a netbook back in time 20 years and you got yourself a hold of it, what would you have to say back then?
If I sent an electric juicer back in time 20 years, it would equally shame the general purpose hardware of the time. The point is irrelevant. A low-end router has more computing power than a 386. Doesn't make it a general purpose computer, because it wasn't built to be.
I think that you have confused yourself into thinking that if its not comparable to a modern desktop, then its not a general purpose computer.
No, I think you have confused yourself with raw hardware specs somehow magically dictating what a device "should" be.
Is an XBox a general purpose computer? No. Is that because of an arbitrary decision to cripple it? No. It's an intentional design decision to use available hardware to build a specific product.
A literal supercomputer on your lap with more memory than was imaginable back then, and a storage device many thousands of times bigger than the RLL/MFM drives of the time.
And 20 years from now, when Core 2 Duo-based systems are used in embedded applications simply because it's cheaper than some purpose-built system, they won't be general purpose computers, either. They also won't be "arbitrarily prevented" from that task because they would not be useful in that role, just as your example is almost totally useless as a general purpose machine today.
Also, 20 years ago was 1990. RLL-based drives haven't been used widely in over 25 years.
As you see, General Purpose is not some moving metric that follows whatever the current desktop standard is. General Purpose means unrestricted.
No, "general purpose" is (a) not a proper noun phrase, (b) a function of design, and (c) very much based on whatever the current standard of functionality is. It's asinine to claim, particularly in the realm of electronics, that some piece of equipment that was fully capable as a general purpose platform in 1979 remains so in 2027, when it is no longer capable of being used as a non-tasked system.
"General purpose" involves simultaneously capacity, design, and contemporary use cases. It connotes the functionality of a computer system to handle any specialized task in software. Netbooks don't fit that bill, because their hardware is anything but unrestricted.
Again, I'll repeat: your cable box, AV receiver, cellular phone, electric juicer, wireless router, and quite possibly your alarm clock all beat the pants off a 386 DOS box in terms of hardware performance and capabilities. That does not make them general purpose computers. They are purpose-built systems not designed or meant for general purpose use, even if, like the XBox, it contains a fully working set of hardware that could theoretically be tasked for other uses.
A C2D-based embedded system configured and installed in an industrial application is not a general purpose computer either, even if the mainboard retains logic for video and audio output and expansion buses. It is undeniably powerful enough to be, but it is not suited for that role.
Only because its locked down. Remember that. Only because its locked down.
So is your cable box and your Blu-ray player. What's your point?
Just because it has hardware that could (roughly and poorly) approximate a full-blown computer does not make it so.
Personally, I don't consider netbooks to be true "general purpose" computers, and they have hardware that's even closer to approximating one. I don't know anyone who would want to run a modern, full-blown desktop OS on a 1GHz ARM-based CPU, which, for "general purpose" computing, would perform worse than one core of a 700MHz C2D-equivalent.
While I agree that the iPad should have more capabilities out of the box and an OS that is closer to OS X than iPhone, I do not agree that it was ever in the cards for this to be a fully capable general purpose computer.
1) Getting a Patent: There's evidence that the USPTO isn't doing its job at examining patent applications. There are a slew of Federal regulatory services that have been suffering for years from inadequate staffing, the USPTO being one.
It's no secret that the Patent Office is badly understaffed. That's not a systemic flaw (at least in the patent system), it's a flaw in public priorities and government spending.
This seems to be manifesting itself in the examiners not having time to spot a lot of obvious or non-original work.
While it's true that a lower workload would result in more time per application, there are two major problems with the presentation of this point on Slashdot:
1. "Novel" and "Non-obvious" are grossly mischaracterized and misunderstood by the overwhelming majority of posters, with the particular point being what portions of the application must demonstrate these two elements and what the requirements for each are. The abstract, summary, or title will often state the invention in fairly "obvious" terms--by design. The actual invention is disclosed in the claims and the specification, and most of the patent stories around here gloss past that part for ad revenue and cheap laughs. Many patents presented here actually deal with the existing art in the specification.
2. It is not the function of a patent examiner to conclude that the patent works. There is no way to have a fully versed office, conversant in all applicable technologies and methods, nor is there any conclusive way to search and fulfill a negative proposition (that there is no disqualifying art in existence). It is the job of competitors and interested parties to pursue litigation, and more importantly, it is the job of the applicant to conduct an exhaustive search and certify that the patent application contains patentable material.
By design, it is litigation that primarily handles this problem.
IANAL, but baring someone pointing out long established case law to the contrary, I'd bet money that the framers didn't foresee and would have legislated against "patent trolls".
Doubtful. The entire legal system of the United States is predicated on extremely low bars to entry--a measured and intentional response to the court practices of England.
This as a matter of course includes having only minimal checks against frivolous lawsuits and it includes a full awareness of potential for abuse. It was decided, as part of the Framers' systemic design, that putting up with abuse was the cost for freedom. After all, part of freedom is living with people who make choices you don't like.
Finally, given that the very early development of the patent system involved (and to this day involves) a high priority placed on free assignment, that is, the ability to sell wholesale patented inventions, assign royalties to any party, and generally deal freely with the invention, patent trolls existed from day one. Anyone can buy a patent outright and then milk the competition.
Patent trolls have become more sophisticated and more prevalent, and their job is much easier with the Internet exposing targets for them that in, say, 1813, they'd never have heard of, but the patent system grants exclusive rights to patent holders on, among others, the manufacturing and use of the patented device or process.
The holder of that exclusive right is free to exercise it. Once again, we come full circle to "freedom means dealing with the disagreeable choices of others."
None of that is to say that there aren't reforms that can alleviate some of the burdens of today's troll industries, but the patent troll will never be eradicated without interfering significantly with legitimate patent applicants and holders. (Then of course, there's also the argument that patent trolls actually perform a useful service and respond to market forces--but that's a topic for another time.)
Not fewer trade secrets, but a strong economic incentive to elect full disclosure, without the competitive disadvantage that comes with it. Trade secrets actually have become more pervasive as the patent system progressed, because companies have specifically elected against public disclosure.
Patents help inventors who do not want to jump through the hoops of trade secret protection but also do not want to give away their hard (and often expensive) work. The statutory schemes primarily help smaller players, since the large corporations can afford the contractual and transactional licensing work to ensure that their products remain their products, even in the absence of statutory patent and copyright law. On the other hand, smaller inventors can rely on the basics of that work being put forth by the government--lowering costs significantly.
Same deal, roughly, with copyrights. It facilitated broad access to creative works without giving away the store, as it were.
Both systems have problems, but both also work remarkably well and with a great deal of flexibility. Patent and copyright holders have a great deal of choice in how to weigh the balances, exactly as it should be. Some patents are licensed royalty-free; some copyrights are voluntarily abandoned or licensed in a permissive style (e.g. BSD, GPL). Other choose to exercise more control because they can afford to.
The problem isn't the system; the problem is that like so many other things, market forces don't really interact well with certain social values. Microsoft would go open source in a heartbeat if it meant greater profitability; it's just that there's no economic incentive for voluntarily lowering the bar.
Now you could say that patent or copyright protection could be extended for those who choose to license in a royalty-free manner. That would provide some downward pressure on prices and proscriptive licensing. You could offer other perks, such as a damage multiplier in infringement cases, such that EFF lawyers and open source projects would earn greater protection.
But there is no way you can say with a straight face that on balance, these systems have not been wildly successful at encouraging investment in R&D, proliferation of art, and consumer access. At no other time in human history has so much been available to so many. Whining about the tiny fraction of extremely popular works that can afford to be highly selective about transactional terms is no way to suggest such an argument.
No, you've missed the point: You keep talking about how "invasive" the searches are as being a determining factor, but how "invasive" a search is has nothing to do with whether it's thorough or effective.
Whether it's thorough or effective has nothing to do with whether it is constitutionally defensible.
The NSA monitoring all communications and wiretapping all phones would be very effective at stopping crimes, from pot sales to terrorist plots. That doesn't justify the government doing it.
There's this concept that seems to escape you of "innocent until proven guilty". Perhaps you should consider the implications of that.
If someone is already being permitted to pat you down, then no one has a problem with that person also using a metal detector.
Because a pat down is already a more invasive procedure than a metal detector. You're going the opposite way.
As far as I know, there's also no legal way in which metal detectors are considered more invasive than a pat down.
Because they're not. Metal detectors are less invasive, and that is why .
metal detectors even use signals that penetrate your clothes, and no one complains about metal detectors being "strip searches"
Metal detectors aren't strip searches. They're passive devices calibrated to respond to certain materials only.
No, what makes people view these body scanners as "more invasive" is specifically the fact that it allows others to *see* under
NO. NO. NO. It is not the body revealed that is the invasion, it is the compulsion of being subjected to the highest standards of evidence gathering for less than the minimum standard to be stopped as a citizen on the street.
It truly is not this complicated, so I must assume at this point that you are just trolling.
Invasion and compulsion are concepts of impingement into constitutional liberty. You cannot be compelled to produce proof absent suspicion of a wrongful act. Just as a police officer can't arrest you without probable cause, they cannot without justification demand a cavity search of a person. It is the demand for evidence that is an invasion, not the fact that a naked person is involved.
You may think it a minor distinction, but it is the foundation of the criminal justice and evidentiary systems of American jurisprudence.
There is nothing about airports or air travel that justifies this complete elimination of suspicion and of less invasive methods of detection. If you are making the vacuous argument that airports are dangerous and therefore it's okay not to have rights, are you also saying you consent to strip searches at ball parks and sports stadiums if a terrorist decides one day to blow one of those up? Are you comfortable being forced to present conclusive evidence of your innocence for wanting to step into a bank, because those are sensitive places? Maybe we should install giant car-sized scanners at gas stations, because that would be pretty effective at finding criminals? Is it acceptable for the government to search your hard drives and monitor your Internet activity as long as they don't change any data? No harm, no foul?
I have nothing to hide, therefore I am willing to subject all of my fellow citizens to a world of supervision and surveillance of all actions and communications when none of them is even suspected of wrongdoing?
It certainly is. A pat down is a search, and requiring you to empty your pockets is a search.
No, those are not full searches, just as a temporary detention is not a full arrest. There is a significant constitutional and legal difference between a pat-down for weapons and a full search.
Also, I don't think the question of embarrassment and humiliation is irrelevant.
Clearly you do, since your whole argument to this point has been "the only difference between now and these machines is embarrassment"--an argument that ignores the entirety of the problem.
Now if you want to argue that people should not be subjected to a search at the airport, then you should have a problem with the searches that already take place.
No. What part of "levels of suspicion" and "levels of invasion and compulsion" is not registering here?
There is a massive difference between a metal detector and a strip search. Because one is justified does not mean the other is.
The schema that is in place is the most invasive protocol that can be constitutionally and rationally defended. Jumping a minimum of four levels of compulsion and personal invasion with absolutely no suspicion whatsoever is the entire issue.
This is the most invasive search possible, conducted for absolutely no cause. It is a complete and total abrogation of rights.
If the objection to these body scans is not that they're humiliating and degrading, then I don't know what the objection is. That they're too effective?
Is your objection to being stopped on the street and asked to step into a strip search booth based on the fact that it would be humiliating?
It's specifically that the process is degrading, traumatic, and invasive, and that we don't want to subject people to it without good reason.
No, it isn't. Degradation is a factor in how the searches are conducted, not whether they are tolerated at all. You've missed the whole point in case law regarding when it's permissible to be subjected to compulsory search beyond reason.
Your argument smacks of "once you've been pulled over for a minor traffic violation, you're now subject to a complete search of your person and vehicle"--a conclusion not supported by US jurisprudence. "Search" is not a binary state as you so ineffectively argue. If the police are investigating a crime, they can ask you questions and you have every right to decline to answer. If you've been stopped for a traffic violation, the only permissible search is what's in plain sight, unless the officer has a reasonable suspicion (a legal term of art) that you have a weapon, in which case he can search your person and, per Gant, any area under your immmediate physical control. He doesn't have a right to search your passengers, or your trunk, or your engine compartment.
Mandatory use of these machines renders an innocent citizen completely without rights--even more so than inmates in prison, who can be searched without cause, but not subjected to a cavity search without suspicion. That is the problem in a nutshell. It is not justifiable that a person in prison enjoys greater personal protection than an innocent citizen suspected of no impropriety.
Then why is it ok for them to search my luggage, ask me to empty my pockets, and pat me down?
As already explained, because special exceptions have already been created to lower the standards at airports. There is no need and no justification to lower them further.
They're already conducting a search, and even conducting a searching me.
No, they aren't. A pat down isn't a search.
The only difference I see between a pat down and a body scan is that a body scan is potentially more embarrassing.
Let vanity go. It's an irrelevant straw man. Embarrassment has nothing to do with anything.
Then you've missed the concept of levels of suspicion and constitutional limits on evidence gathering entirely.
A pat down is currently an extra level of invasion (+1) over the current standard procedure. It is two levels beneath a strip search (+3) and three beneath a cavity search (+4) on the scales for legal standards. These machines launch all passengers to a digital cavity search. It's hard to make the problem any more clear.
Just getting to the metal detectors and X-ray machines at all required relaxing legal standards and invading on the personal rights of passengers. What justifies them skipping past go all the way to the top?
So given this issue of context, I would say that airports are already situations where we endure a lower expectation of privacy than elsewhere.
Lower doesn't mean nonexistent.
I don't know if that's a legally appropriate way of saying it, but what I mean is, we already essentially allow our bags to be searched at airports.
That's fine, but I'm not a bag, nor is my laptop's hard drive.
There's nothing wrong with some basic preventative scanning, but you don't get to order a strip search with absolutely zero suspicion. If there is something irregular about the purchase, some red flag in the computer, or some anomaly with a passenger's bag, by all means, it may be appropriate to pull them aside and pat them down or ask them if they'd consent to a body scan.
No suspicion means no search. This is a principle that has stood for two centuries, first whittled away by the extremely lax standards at border crossings (but again, originally those had limits and required some irregularity to justify the extra processes). In the past twenty years, airport security has washed that away, now to the point of having no rights when traveling by air.
I've also emptied my pockets, walked through a metal detector, and allowed myself to be pat down at an airport. I wouldn't approve of police doing that randomly on the streets.
So in essence you're saying that they can do whatever they want in an airport, but not on the street? I wholeheartedly disagree.
We are already subject to less privacy and more invasion at an airport. They haven't the right to demand more invasion with less suspicion. It will yield no better results.
I suppose if the consensus is that you feel like you've been stripped of your dignity
It's not about dignity, as clearly illustrated above. It's about liberty and the right to be treated as innocent until presented with the appropriate level of suspicion for the alleged crime or offense.
Law enforcement must have grounds to conduct a search. They already get to do a more thorough search without any suspicion than would ever be tolerated on the street. People should not have to submit to even more for no reason at all.
There's no exigency, no probable cause, no reasonable suspicion. Enough is enough. We draw lines around these requirements and the various levels of search and seizure because each one is a greater and greater harm to privacy and liberty. A digital strip search revealing more than a cavity search could ever hope to is a whole new level, justified by nothing at all.
It's not about dignity. Dignity is why these searches are currently conducted in small rooms near the security lines instead of at the metal detector. Yes, strip searches happen in airports right now. But you have to trigger special screening, and then do something to trigger a third level of suspicion, where they bring in real cops and conduct a strip search.
These machines do away with those three levels and subject everyone to the same degree of search--something previously justified essentially only by observed criminal behavior. That with the arbitrary power to seize your computer, again with no suspicion whatsoever, even when those machines contain confidential and/or privileged information protected by law, including attorney/client communications and records, medical records, financial records and the like is something that cannot be justified and should not be tolerated.
This is the single biggest affront to personal liberty of this generation, and it's going over with barely a hiccup because it's abstract and because people like you assume it's about dignity or vanity. Not consenting to strip searches on the street isn't about dignity or vanity. It's no different at an airport. They have strip search policies and laws already. They can use them. They don't need to extend that highest level of invasion to all travelers of all flights simply because they can do it digitally.
Why not? Possibly because of the following:
1) The energy required to transport "packets" of hot water is many, many times greater than the losses through the hot water pipes.
2) The cost of building such a system would exceed any logical benefit; adding a large-diameter pipe system would occupy considerable space and would require some (presumably mechanized) system for sorting, draining, and filling the containers (as well as isolating waste water containers from the others) in a space-consuming "sorting room".
3) Each shower, sink, and drain in the building would require a large accumulation tank, since it would take multiple "packets" to flush a toilet, and storing enough hot water for even a brief shower would require many, many trips through the system. Any drain reservoir that filled faster than the system could empty it would back up into the sink/toilet/bathtub. The largest conceivable container to fit into a typical building could hold about a gallon of water and would be twice the size of the system used at banks--it certainly wouldn't fit inside a standard wall and would require a special breakout conduit.
4) For home use, building a sufficiently complex system would simply be impossible--all water flow would stop while your "packets" were en route to other destinations. There is no conceivable way to build bypass structures and waiting areas sufficient to allow multiple taps to work simultaneously at an acceptable refill rate.
5) Given the necessary locations for most of the accumulation tanks, you would need active pumps to run most faucets--the system would not function on water pressure alone as it does now. This adds cost, complexity, and new failure modes. Power outage? There goes the toilets.
The whole idea is a Rube. If the relatively small losses in the hot water pipes concern you, build a home with insulated hot water pipes. Add a central vac if you like. The end result will be cheaper, more efficient, and 99% less insane.
Generally useless.
The shock waves do indeed travel slower than light, but messages would take at least several seconds to be relayed, transmitted, received, and read by a human. An email in my office takes about six seconds to be routed within the building, let alone over a variety of wireless networks. A realtime message might make it out in under a second, but we're talking about shock waves that travel at 15,000-30,000mph and faster, with an damage radius on big quakes of 40 to 60 miles.
A middle case, say, 50 miles at 25k mph is about 7 seconds until the last person at risk feels it. If the message sent out is any longer than the word "earthquake!", the message generation, transmission, receipt, and processing by that guy's brain will end right at the same time the ground starts moving. And everybody closer than him will know before they get the message.
That's even assuming instant identification of an earthquake. In reality, it takes a few seconds to confirm the readings. So even that guy on the outer edge of the damage radius won't realistically get the message in time to do anything before the shaking begins.
People further out, who will feel the quake but aren't at any substantial risk of significant damage might get a few seconds' notice, but they don't really benefit from a warning in the first place, given their relatively minor inconvenience. It's like telling people on the extreme periphery as a hurricane makes landfall that it's going to start raining in a few seconds because a hurricane is making landfall somewhere else. They're not the ones who need the warning.
Sure it does, so long as you didn't lock up your own files with Microsoft's rights management services.
Considering that this is used mostly, if not entirely, by corporate clients implementing access control, the idea that it's Microsoft doing evil in the background is foolhardy. Locking documents out because of the failure of a security certificate would hardly convince a corporate client to upgrade to a newer version of Office.
Gobble-dee gobble-dee gobble-dee dock. Happy?
QED. The grammar there being what, exactly?
and you can also have syntax without meaning.
No, you can't. If there is no meaning attached to the structure itself, there is no syntax.
Just any regular expression defines a grammar or syntax.
No, it most certainly doesn't.
That doesn't mean that any string matching that regular expression has a meaning.
This is true of all languages, but not a conclusion supported by your claims.
Again, there's a reason for the subject line. You're using "syntax" in a very loose sense, where it seems to mean nothing more than "rule-governed combination an expression drawn from set A with one of set B to form an expression from set C."
No, syntax means a great deal more than simple combination. The overriding issue with your very lengthy comment is that you on one hand go to great pains to delineate fields of study based on human languages and then come to present the following:
More importantly, I worry that you're taking the analogies between animal calls and human language expressions too closely.
This is in fact the nature of the issue with your comments. You suggest that the evidence is of morphology at best, but not syntax. But the issue is that you are foreclosing the issue by making sweeping conclusions based on a process that is not fully understood.
I would dispute that morphology is more "basic" than syntax, actually. There are good reasons to think that syntax is more basic than morphology--though again, just like there's the problem of what one means by "syntax," there's the problem of what one means by "basic." One of the leading theories about morphology is grammaticalization,
This just chases your point in circles: you set forth an opinion stating that these sounds are at best morphological processes that fall short of syntax, and yet now you argue that syntax is the undergirding element of morphology.
You are considering delineations in a sophisticated and infinitely expressive language with one that is far more basic. Grammaticalization is necessarily a consequence of a sophisticated language--as you summarize, the process is one of simplifying complex preexisting syntactic structures for more streamlined morphological ones. Such a phenomenon requires a fairly complex syntax--a complete grammar, in other words--to exist before grammaticalization. This is a development of a much more sophisticated morphology.
And again, this is one picture of how language emerges, but not the only possible one. The story can be told backwards, so that some phrases grow more and more habitual and disproportionately frequent, until they get squashed together and become single words.
The reverse process is a simplification of prior existing structures. You must concede the prior existing structures before arguing for this kind of language development.
What seems clear to me is that (a) compositionality is key [...]
Indeed, which is why it is the question of this research. Once again, you are answering the hypothesis in the negative as a condition precedent of your argument. You're supplying the answer and thus faulting the research.
It's like saying, "There's no water on the moon, so this research looking for water on the moon is unlikely to be successful."
Frankly, what you're describing here is more closely analogous to phonology than to syntax or morphology.
Sorry, but that is flatly untrue
The simpler thesis would be that calls have some sort of quasi-phonological complexity, but that the meaning of "krak-oo" is no more the combination of the meanings of "krak" and "oo" than the meaning of wafer is a combination of the meanings of way and fur.
You seem to be, again, arguing against yourself here, and are certainly begging the question again.
You start from the premise that "krak-oo" is a word in isolation rather than two words (or even a single word) in a syntactic structure. Once again, that may be the case, but is the topic of the research, not a premise.
The problem is that once you start going down that path you weaken your case dramatically, because it degenerates into a game similar to how fanciful of a story
my first reaction to it is that the example cited by TFA is not clearly syntactic, in the strictest linguistic sense.
And in no small part, that's because you're analyzing it as a human language. You go on to suggest that the examples cited tend to indicate morphology. And if this were an elementary study of a phenomenon in a more sophisticated language, I would agree. However, two points:
1. Morphology is fundamentally syntax (underlying mathematics of structure), it's just the syntax with the word, rather than the assembly of words.
2. While morphology is unquestionably more basic than syntax, as a lexicon of words is (we assume) a precursor to the emergence of a language, and though morphology eventually becomes a distinct field in highly developed languages, the initial emergence of syntax (and accordingly, sentences) from morphology is not a black and white line.
Words grow longer and more complicated, and thus carry more and more meaning, until eventually a different structure, a grammar, has to replace a word-based method of communication. The question that this research seeks to answer is whether there is, in fact, a grammar within this language.
The second paragraph makes an even more problematic claim: "boom" and "krak-oo," combined together, means something completely different than the parts.
What's the problem with this? That one of the paradigmatic properties of syntactic constructions in human language is compositionality, the principle that the meaning of an expression made of parts A and B is a function of the meanings of A and B themselves, and of the manner in which they are combined in the expression.
The claim is not problematic and does not necessarily indicate non-compositionality. Again, I believe your perspective is influenced by a study of highly evolved human languages. Consider it more like a machine language and you begin to see things slightly differently.
If you only have a limited range of sounds (as monkeys do, compared to humans) and if you only have a limited storage capacity (again, as monkeys do, compared to humans), then basic syntax enables a great deal of added complexity for relatively no cost. You can recycle the sounds without creating untenably long morphemes.
It is not necessarily that "boom" and "krak-oo" when combined mean something different than the parts, but rather that these primates have multiple working definitions for each of their words, and rather than a contextual association, which is rather advanced cognition and language, the different definition is triggered by the syntactical position of the word.
There's in fact tons of noncompositionality in human language, but it's hard to argue that monkeys have a semblance of human language unless you can clearly argue that the meanings of the subparts of the complex calls combine compositionally
Agreed, but the issue here is a question of whether we fully understand the meanings attached to their sounds. If you assume that one of their morphemes has exactly one fixed definition regardless of combination, your point is valid.
But if the meaning shifts based on sequence, allowing each morpheme to be associated with multiple lexical entries depending on its grammatical position within a basic "sentence", then that is indeed evidence of a much more sophisticated language than is commonly assumed.
Because we have no experience with the development of any human languages at this level, it's hard to say which comes first. I'm of the belief that phonology blurs into morphology, which then blurs into syntax. Is a diphthong a phoneme trying to be a morpheme? Is "boom boom krak-oo [...]" an overextended morpheme, or has it spilled over into a proto-sentence? What is the line between word and sentence, morphology and syntax?
You're assuming the answer to the question they're asking, and thus begging the question. If the "words" always have one meaning, then it's not much of a syntax--but the research aims to show whether those sounds always have the same meaning or if it does vary with composition.
No, because you can have meaning without syntax. You just have a limited set of combinations and thus a limited field of expression.
If you can make 40 unique sounds, you can express at least 40 unique concepts.
Then you can throw morphology into the mix, which is really just intraword syntax, and string those 40 sounds together in combinations to express many more concepts. Without syntax, though, you're limited to single-word expression (which is basically how most people view animal languages--they can communicate, but only from a basic set of pre-written expressions).
Actually, "meaning" isn't just limited to sense and reference (semantics).
Meaning, that is, syntactic meaning, is a key component of syntax. Without meaning, syntax can't exist.
Knowing that a repeating pattern has a logical definitional rule behind it is a key element of meaning. If I say the word "mine" to you, without syntax, you have no idea of the semantic meaning. Is it a verb? An object? A noun? If it is a noun, does it refer to the kind for digging or the kind for exploding? Syntax plays a huge role in meaning.
Consider that the monkeys have a semantic inventory of distinct sounds A , B, and C. Semantically, they have three concepts and no more--because they lack syntax. With a simple syntactic structure, the sounds get new meanings because sequence suddenly informs meaning.
Without syntax, words can only have one meaning. As the article argues and as the sentence describes, the fact that position changes the meaning of sounds is key evidence of the use of syntax in the language. If semantic meaning were unaffected by sequence, that would be evidence of the absence of syntax.
Semantics cannot be divorced from phonology and syntax in oral language. Phonological meaning plus syntactic meaning is fundamentally semantic meaning. More advanced languages have more complicated systems of context and idiom that add layers onto this. But the basic point remains that meaning is certainly an element of syntax.
so what your telling me is that the data only tells us how much net traffic windows generates
No. You're misusing the numbers. It shows what proportion of the traffic they monitor, from the sites they monitor, weighted the way they weight it, comes from machines reporting themselves as Windows (or Linux, or BSD, or OS X) computers.
are we to conclude that this is because of market share, or that linux and mac users are actually doing some work
Neither.
it is of course the correlation of the two.
Nope. The data collected is for relative trends, not for overall "net traffic" or for install base market share or for active users or any other actual market.
By using the same methodology consistently, the relative reporting in your sample size can show clues about projections of adoptions of new versions, shifts to other platforms, and other generalized trends. It may indicate relative changes in market share by showing consistent gains or losses over time, and it is weighted in such a way as to approximate market share estimates from other sources, but it is not a projection of any actual market, whether that market is units sold, units in active use, "net traffic", or anything else.
also does this take into account any of the traffic from compromised windows machines?
No effect, unless those "little M$ bonnets" (botnets?) are being directed to open a browser and load one or more of the tracked websites.
The weighting isn't based on projections to an actual market share, though. That's the missing step.
Error bars and statistical confidence are applicable only when stating that a sample is reflective of a population. This data is not reflective of a population. It's just a calculation of raw data passed through a systemic algorithm.
For a simplistic example, if I have a data collection method that tracks occurrences through two populations, A and B, and I discard 50% of population B because that's the sample weight I've adopted, I don't need error bars when listing my results:
A: 1374/9978 or 13.77%
B: 3430/10035 or 34.18% [weighted at 50%] = 17.09%
There's no need for error bars or a discussion of confidence. It's only when I take the next step and make a projection concluding that "13.77% of Americans have X" that I need to go further. If I'm only talking about the results of my sample set itself, it's just straight math: 13.77% of group A. No plus or minus.
The weighting by country changes the reported numbers in a way that the surveyors obviously hope is more reflective of reality, but until they make a projection to reality, it's still just in the end a multiplier on the raw calculation.
There are no error bars. This is a straight dump from their collected information on web traffic.
Anyone who mistakes this information for a statistical evaluation of actual market share by physical units or even actual market share by "web presence" is misusing the data.
They may well try to make a fairly representative sampling based on diversifying websites they collect data from, but day-to-day, let alone month-to-month, variation makes this data at best a rough approximation of the actual market. But they're not claiming that this data is a reflective snapshot of any actual market--they leave that to lazy journalists. Instead, what their statistics track are trends over time using a consistent methodology. It's a clue about the state of the actual market, but nothing more. Only lazy journalists would take a single month's reported numbers and make a claim about actual market share.
Their numbers are accurate to several decimal places--they have an exact count of the "survey respondents"--the over 100 million reporting machines each month. Where there is insufficient data is making a projection from that sample to the actual market (but again, the data can't realistically be used for that). Linux's NetApp share has bounced up and down a distance of 0.1% since the middle of the year. This probably has nothing to do with Linux's actual market share changing and more to do with variations in browsing habits and which sites are recorded.