Yes, but there is precedent that continuing to access a site after breaching its TOS is "unauthorized use of a computer system". Of course, that ruling is BS - but it happened. IIRC it was in the Meghan Meier case. The conviction based on this theory was overturned, but after a quick reading it's not clear to me that the acquittal was because of this interpretation, which would mean the precedent holds.
As I understand it, the 10 files aren't even part of Android - just a test suite. Sure, they should've been more careful, but this is perhaps the least significant part of the code base - a small and unnecessary (could be replaced with custom code) part of a *test suite*.
And as soon as it was brought to their attention, they deleted the files. Of course, it's source control, but the files are already available as part of the Java testing kit - their source is available, but it's not open-source.
I think the patent allegations are flabbergastingly more important than this. I'm astonished they're even trying to make a case for copyright - or I would be surprised if it wasn't Oracle.
To be fair, if this was Windows you *know* the Linux fans (myself included) would be berating them for choosing such a crappy platform. And it was Windows, and we did berate them for it...
Of course, the truth is somewhere in the middle - isn't it always? The most important part of a trading computer system set up is, well, the trading computer system software. The system's biggest problems aren't going to be due to Coolwebsearch or a bluescreen, they'll be with the trading software itself. The OS doesn't really matter. Buggy software is buggy software.
That being said, Linux is just a better platform to build something like this on. Sure, you can do it with Windows and make it work, but it's just more and unnecessarily difficult.
As an EMT for the past 4 years, most places are coordinated by telephone, (standard) radio, and handwritten notes. Including my agency. It works just fine.
For large cities or areas, CAD (computer-aided dispatch, in this context) is a fantastic tool - but they functioned without it probably as recently as a few years ago. Some of the dispatchers still working there, I'm sure, started out without a fancy CAD and are perfectly happy to keep track of everybody's location using Post-Its, a map, a notepad, and perhaps a whiteboard. I can personally vouch that it works, even for large places and dozens of ambulances.
In any case, any place doing serious work (which, I'm sure, includes NSW) has procedures for how to deal with outages. Things like trunking radio systems will fall-back to normal operation, but computer-based communications and dispatch equipment will not prevent communication. It'll be inconvenient, sure, but it'll work.
Should this have happened? Absolutely not. Whoever let a virus in is too fantastically stupid to ever work in IT again, especially a system so important. But if any patients died, or were inconvenienced more than nominally, there were much bigger problems with this organization than a virus - such as outright reliance on computer systems, or not enough training without them.
You don't understand, well, anything about business. I could be in the business of giving puppies away, or hell a respected charity, and I'd *never* indemnify users. If I'm wrong, or even *found* to be wrong, I'd be completely fucked over for every single one of them. It's a bit different if you indemnify, like, 5 users. But if you indemnify *everybody* who's downloaded your codec, or something containing your codec, or something containing *that* - you could be on the hook for a flabbergastingly large amount of money.
Remember - you don't even need to be infringing on a patent! We hear all kinds of nonsense all the time about people who vaguely violate one of the vague terms of a vague patent, and are found liable or settle.
It's not only stupid business, it's just stupid. Regardless of how ironclad your investigation/belief/evidence is. It's the same reason I don't offer to pay the medical bill from anything that happens in my house, then invite millions of people over. Sure, I have no particular reason to expect that anything will happen - but I'd be screwed if one or two thousand people had expensive heart attacks, or million-dollar babies.
Point is, Google would be making very very very weighty promises betting against future impact from organizations like patent trolls, courts, and the government. Just a tremendously bad idea.
Google won't indemnify its users. That would be stupid - they could be out an unknown and tremendous amount of money if they did. That's not evil, that's "we would like to stay in a search engine business instead of being yanked under by a video codec"
But they *have* done two things. They purchased On2, (presumably) went through, and said "you can all use these patents that we now own." They've also said "we think those are the only ones", which presumably the lawyers took a look at.
This does a few things. A company like Google would be unlikely to lie - their lawyers won't really let them. It's worth noting that Google is using the software as well, in Chrome and Youtube, so they'd be impacted just as much as everybody else. That statement was almost certainly made in good faith.
But more importantly, Google can't just change their mind. There's a legal concept called 'promissory estoppel' which basically means that you can't take it back if you gave your word that you wouldn't sue.
So it stands to reason that: due to the patent grant, nobody else needs patents that Google doesn't, Google really does believe they don't need any licenses, therefore nobody else does. If Google and its many lawyers understand how patents work, that is
None of this is any different for H264, by the way - at least to my knowledge. Somebody could come out of the woodwork with a hitherto unheard-of patent and "sink everybody's battleship", so to speak. I don't think MPEG indemnifies its users... they just say "I think we've got them all covered".
Jesus you're dumb. If you actually watched the talk, or listened to him talk about vaccines at any point, it's pretty clear what he meant. Basically, if people (or entire nations) are pretty sure that half of their kids aren't going to die before they're 10, they won't need to have so many kids to make sure that some of them survive - thus bringing down the population growth rate. They already don't have enough food.
Eugenics? Only if you're a natalist and believe that God wants us to have as many kids as possible.
I disagree. You don't have the right to harm your child. Medical decisions are a bit of a gray area, but not so much with vaccines. There are medical reasons to avoid vaccinations - immunological disorders and so on - but unless the kid has one, they should be vaccinated. Regardless of what the parent thinks.
Your unvaccinated kid won't get anywhere near my kid, particularly if he's immunocompromised for some reason. Even if he's not, he's a lot more likely to get measles - even if he's vaccinated. It's a no-brainer to keep unvaccinated kids out of public schools.
But I say we should go further. While nobody's going to force you to eat food that has the nutrients you need, we'll force you to do it for your kid. Malnourished kids are removed because their parents are actually hurting them. So it is with vaccines. If somebody's proven themselves too stupid to make medical decisions for their kid, they shouldn't be allowed to - and not vaccinating your kids because some Playboy bimbo said it was bad on Oprah is as about as stupid a medical decision as they come.
(note: in the above post, 'you' means 'one' or 'somebody', nothing personal)
Astonishing. Some people get a bit sniffy in the winter? And the vaccine for a rapidly-mutating virus doesn't always work? Except the people who don't get it - what if they weren't going to get it anyway?
Are you really that fantastically stupid? Or just trolling? First of all, that's the Daily Mail. Second of all, the "other side" has veritable mountains of evidence that vaccines do not, in fact, cause autism. Hardly "religious certainty", more like "verified with hard data many times over certainty"
Everything has mistakes built in. But DJB's article (aside from being 9 years old) simply boils down to "but who will implement it if it's not widely implemented?" The whole point of implementing it is that it'll get more widely used. That OpenBSD mailing list message was marginally more interesting, but boiled down to "it messes up my struct!"
I don't understand all the IPv6 hatred. IPv4 is not tenable (which can't really be argued otherwise), and even somehow extending the current address space would break everything anyway, so why not just do it right?
IP has no concept of "ports". Aside from the fact that you didn't split the port space evenly, you clearly have no concept of how IP and networking works. And even if this is a serious suggestion, and could possibly be implemented, it would be at least as much (if not more) work than implementing IPv6 *anyway*.
Why can't you? You should probably be using a dedicated 240v circuit (like for your dryer or range) because it'll charge in half the time, but the models I've seen will work off 120v
Yes, but only a very small amount of the energy in gasoline is extracted by the engine. Internal combustion engines have a theoretical limit of about 35%, and in vehicles they tend to average somewhat lower than 20% (due to non-peak efficiency RPM most of the time, warmup, etc).
Meanwhile, the average old coal power plant is about 40% efficient, and about 8% of that is lost in getting it to you. Considering that large electric motors (such as those used in cars) are close to 99.99% efficient (!), you even have a ways to go before you match the gasoline car. And don't forget that without a huge multi-hundred pound chunk of steel called the engine, and an only slightly-less heavy transmission, you'll end up several hundred pounds lighter so less energy is required
Add to that the fact that it's easy (comparatively) to swap out supply. Put in a new combined-cycle natural gas plant, and run in excess of 55% efficient. Nuclear plants operate on a positive ratio (of mass to energy, anyways), and renewables are, well, renewable.
So at 10c/kWh, it's more like 68c to fully charge.
And, in the future, utilities will almost certainly give vehicles a much cheaper rate. Why? Well, hundreds of kWh distributed around the area make a fantastic peaker plant. Imagine how much they'd save in the middle of summer if they could siphon some capacity (how much is up to you, obviously) off your car?
What you're talking about is one of my most favorite phrases: "Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny". In short, embryos will traverse the evolutionary tree as they develop. While not always true, it's worth reading about.
It's really pretty straightforward. I'd love that my ISP prioritized VoIP over Bittorrent, even if it's my Bittorrent. Even streaming video (high-bandwidth, low-latency) should come first.
The problem is decidedly not QoS. The problem is QoS not being applied fairly. If Comcast VoIP works better on Comcast cable lines than Vonage, there's a somewhat-excusable problem - they should be equally shaped upwards - but Comcast's servers are probably fewer hops away, leading to always-lower latency.
Comcast VoIP working better isn't the problem. It probably will, due to the hops thing above. This is the same reason Akamaized web content works better, and shouldn't be disallowed. But when Comcast slows Vonage for profit reasons, we have a problem. When Comcast wants to charge Netflix, we have a problem. When Bittorrent is slowed at 3AM (with no congestion), we have a problem.
Regulation should be constructed to ban for-profit traffic degradation. In other words, the technical decisions of how to shape traffic shouldn't be driven by "we can make more money by slowing this down", but rather "we can make VoIP work really well, at the latency expense of downloads, and nobody will mind - so people will subscribe and we'll make more money".
There is probably a better way to formulate this, but I think people - even here on Slashdot - miss this point of network neutrality. Hopefully this is a better explanation (and hopefully I'm right about what net neutrality is...)
P.S: I'd like to make the Internet a utility, so this stuff wouldn't really happen. How often do you hear about some houses getting crappy electricity in order to appease the (high-paying) steel mill?
Slashdot Mirror
I'm going to link that to people who tell me that the FCC doesn't know what they're doing when it comes to regulation.
Why would I have any system configuration files in my user directory? Using sudo for a user config file is a waste of time, not a security breach.
I think you're railing against a red herring.
when going out the door I'd call out "going out for a few hours, if not back avenge death."
I would be so proud of a child of mine that came up with that.
It's from a Simpsons episode; "Homer vs. the Eighteenth Amendment"
Yes, but there is precedent that continuing to access a site after breaching its TOS is "unauthorized use of a computer system". Of course, that ruling is BS - but it happened. IIRC it was in the Meghan Meier case. The conviction based on this theory was overturned, but after a quick reading it's not clear to me that the acquittal was because of this interpretation, which would mean the precedent holds.
IANAL
Hilarious. The "entire history of the internet" is proof that government doesn't work?
Classic.
And how do you figure that? You can't just say something like that out your ass, you need some substance.
You must have missed the part where it said the *parents* could *volunteer* for this, instead of juvie or fines and things.
Are you seriously saying that it'll be great when a man dies because you prefer a slightly different type of gadget?
As I understand it, the 10 files aren't even part of Android - just a test suite. Sure, they should've been more careful, but this is perhaps the least significant part of the code base - a small and unnecessary (could be replaced with custom code) part of a *test suite*.
And as soon as it was brought to their attention, they deleted the files. Of course, it's source control, but the files are already available as part of the Java testing kit - their source is available, but it's not open-source.
I think the patent allegations are flabbergastingly more important than this. I'm astonished they're even trying to make a case for copyright - or I would be surprised if it wasn't Oracle.
To be fair, if this was Windows you *know* the Linux fans (myself included) would be berating them for choosing such a crappy platform. And it was Windows, and we did berate them for it...
Of course, the truth is somewhere in the middle - isn't it always? The most important part of a trading computer system set up is, well, the trading computer system software. The system's biggest problems aren't going to be due to Coolwebsearch or a bluescreen, they'll be with the trading software itself. The OS doesn't really matter. Buggy software is buggy software.
That being said, Linux is just a better platform to build something like this on. Sure, you can do it with Windows and make it work, but it's just more and unnecessarily difficult.
As an EMT for the past 4 years, most places are coordinated by telephone, (standard) radio, and handwritten notes. Including my agency. It works just fine.
For large cities or areas, CAD (computer-aided dispatch, in this context) is a fantastic tool - but they functioned without it probably as recently as a few years ago. Some of the dispatchers still working there, I'm sure, started out without a fancy CAD and are perfectly happy to keep track of everybody's location using Post-Its, a map, a notepad, and perhaps a whiteboard. I can personally vouch that it works, even for large places and dozens of ambulances.
In any case, any place doing serious work (which, I'm sure, includes NSW) has procedures for how to deal with outages. Things like trunking radio systems will fall-back to normal operation, but computer-based communications and dispatch equipment will not prevent communication. It'll be inconvenient, sure, but it'll work.
Should this have happened? Absolutely not. Whoever let a virus in is too fantastically stupid to ever work in IT again, especially a system so important. But if any patients died, or were inconvenienced more than nominally, there were much bigger problems with this organization than a virus - such as outright reliance on computer systems, or not enough training without them.
You don't understand, well, anything about business. I could be in the business of giving puppies away, or hell a respected charity, and I'd *never* indemnify users. If I'm wrong, or even *found* to be wrong, I'd be completely fucked over for every single one of them. It's a bit different if you indemnify, like, 5 users. But if you indemnify *everybody* who's downloaded your codec, or something containing your codec, or something containing *that* - you could be on the hook for a flabbergastingly large amount of money.
Remember - you don't even need to be infringing on a patent! We hear all kinds of nonsense all the time about people who vaguely violate one of the vague terms of a vague patent, and are found liable or settle.
It's not only stupid business, it's just stupid. Regardless of how ironclad your investigation/belief/evidence is. It's the same reason I don't offer to pay the medical bill from anything that happens in my house, then invite millions of people over. Sure, I have no particular reason to expect that anything will happen - but I'd be screwed if one or two thousand people had expensive heart attacks, or million-dollar babies.
Point is, Google would be making very very very weighty promises betting against future impact from organizations like patent trolls, courts, and the government. Just a tremendously bad idea.
And if you don't think so, I give up.
Google won't indemnify its users. That would be stupid - they could be out an unknown and tremendous amount of money if they did. That's not evil, that's "we would like to stay in a search engine business instead of being yanked under by a video codec"
But they *have* done two things. They purchased On2, (presumably) went through, and said "you can all use these patents that we now own." They've also said "we think those are the only ones", which presumably the lawyers took a look at.
This does a few things. A company like Google would be unlikely to lie - their lawyers won't really let them. It's worth noting that Google is using the software as well, in Chrome and Youtube, so they'd be impacted just as much as everybody else. That statement was almost certainly made in good faith.
But more importantly, Google can't just change their mind. There's a legal concept called 'promissory estoppel' which basically means that you can't take it back if you gave your word that you wouldn't sue.
So it stands to reason that: due to the patent grant, nobody else needs patents that Google doesn't, Google really does believe they don't need any licenses, therefore nobody else does. If Google and its many lawyers understand how patents work, that is
None of this is any different for H264, by the way - at least to my knowledge. Somebody could come out of the woodwork with a hitherto unheard-of patent and "sink everybody's battleship", so to speak. I don't think MPEG indemnifies its users... they just say "I think we've got them all covered".
The entire point of the Internet and IP was that two addresses could communicate. That's what routing *means*.
It's not bad design to assume this. It's bad design to have to do weird hole-punching type hacks to get around it.
Jesus you're dumb. If you actually watched the talk, or listened to him talk about vaccines at any point, it's pretty clear what he meant. Basically, if people (or entire nations) are pretty sure that half of their kids aren't going to die before they're 10, they won't need to have so many kids to make sure that some of them survive - thus bringing down the population growth rate. They already don't have enough food.
Eugenics? Only if you're a natalist and believe that God wants us to have as many kids as possible.
I disagree. You don't have the right to harm your child. Medical decisions are a bit of a gray area, but not so much with vaccines. There are medical reasons to avoid vaccinations - immunological disorders and so on - but unless the kid has one, they should be vaccinated. Regardless of what the parent thinks.
Your unvaccinated kid won't get anywhere near my kid, particularly if he's immunocompromised for some reason. Even if he's not, he's a lot more likely to get measles - even if he's vaccinated. It's a no-brainer to keep unvaccinated kids out of public schools.
But I say we should go further. While nobody's going to force you to eat food that has the nutrients you need, we'll force you to do it for your kid. Malnourished kids are removed because their parents are actually hurting them. So it is with vaccines. If somebody's proven themselves too stupid to make medical decisions for their kid, they shouldn't be allowed to - and not vaccinating your kids because some Playboy bimbo said it was bad on Oprah is as about as stupid a medical decision as they come.
(note: in the above post, 'you' means 'one' or 'somebody', nothing personal)
Astonishing. Some people get a bit sniffy in the winter? And the vaccine for a rapidly-mutating virus doesn't always work? Except the people who don't get it - what if they weren't going to get it anyway?
I think we've just discovered a massive fraud.
Are you really that fantastically stupid? Or just trolling? First of all, that's the Daily Mail. Second of all, the "other side" has veritable mountains of evidence that vaccines do not, in fact, cause autism. Hardly "religious certainty", more like "verified with hard data many times over certainty"
How sad.
Everything has mistakes built in. But DJB's article (aside from being 9 years old) simply boils down to "but who will implement it if it's not widely implemented?" The whole point of implementing it is that it'll get more widely used. That OpenBSD mailing list message was marginally more interesting, but boiled down to "it messes up my struct!"
I don't understand all the IPv6 hatred. IPv4 is not tenable (which can't really be argued otherwise), and even somehow extending the current address space would break everything anyway, so why not just do it right?
IP has no concept of "ports". Aside from the fact that you didn't split the port space evenly, you clearly have no concept of how IP and networking works. And even if this is a serious suggestion, and could possibly be implemented, it would be at least as much (if not more) work than implementing IPv6 *anyway*.
Why can't you? You should probably be using a dedicated 240v circuit (like for your dryer or range) because it'll charge in half the time, but the models I've seen will work off 120v
I agree, but the logistics become very difficult. Would he hop on his bike? Or perhaps a rickshaw is more presidential.
I'm sure there are improvements to be made, but he is the President and does legitimately require a good bit of support infrastructure.
Yes, but only a very small amount of the energy in gasoline is extracted by the engine. Internal combustion engines have a theoretical limit of about 35%, and in vehicles they tend to average somewhat lower than 20% (due to non-peak efficiency RPM most of the time, warmup, etc).
Meanwhile, the average old coal power plant is about 40% efficient, and about 8% of that is lost in getting it to you. Considering that large electric motors (such as those used in cars) are close to 99.99% efficient (!), you even have a ways to go before you match the gasoline car. And don't forget that without a huge multi-hundred pound chunk of steel called the engine, and an only slightly-less heavy transmission, you'll end up several hundred pounds lighter so less energy is required
Add to that the fact that it's easy (comparatively) to swap out supply. Put in a new combined-cycle natural gas plant, and run in excess of 55% efficient. Nuclear plants operate on a positive ratio (of mass to energy, anyways), and renewables are, well, renewable.
So at 10c/kWh, it's more like 68c to fully charge.
And, in the future, utilities will almost certainly give vehicles a much cheaper rate. Why? Well, hundreds of kWh distributed around the area make a fantastic peaker plant. Imagine how much they'd save in the middle of summer if they could siphon some capacity (how much is up to you, obviously) off your car?
What you're talking about is one of my most favorite phrases: "Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny". In short, embryos will traverse the evolutionary tree as they develop. While not always true, it's worth reading about.
It's really pretty straightforward. I'd love that my ISP prioritized VoIP over Bittorrent, even if it's my Bittorrent. Even streaming video (high-bandwidth, low-latency) should come first.
The problem is decidedly not QoS. The problem is QoS not being applied fairly. If Comcast VoIP works better on Comcast cable lines than Vonage, there's a somewhat-excusable problem - they should be equally shaped upwards - but Comcast's servers are probably fewer hops away, leading to always-lower latency.
Comcast VoIP working better isn't the problem. It probably will, due to the hops thing above. This is the same reason Akamaized web content works better, and shouldn't be disallowed. But when Comcast slows Vonage for profit reasons, we have a problem. When Comcast wants to charge Netflix, we have a problem. When Bittorrent is slowed at 3AM (with no congestion), we have a problem.
Regulation should be constructed to ban for-profit traffic degradation. In other words, the technical decisions of how to shape traffic shouldn't be driven by "we can make more money by slowing this down", but rather "we can make VoIP work really well, at the latency expense of downloads, and nobody will mind - so people will subscribe and we'll make more money".
There is probably a better way to formulate this, but I think people - even here on Slashdot - miss this point of network neutrality. Hopefully this is a better explanation (and hopefully I'm right about what net neutrality is...)
P.S: I'd like to make the Internet a utility, so this stuff wouldn't really happen. How often do you hear about some houses getting crappy electricity in order to appease the (high-paying) steel mill?