You have to think of this as a user interface problem. If the driver planned the route with the SAT NAV that says go down such and such a road but the sign says don't go down the road, what is the driver to do? (Again think in terms of UI not right vs wrong.) At that point either the driver doesn't use the SAT NAV in which case he is now lost, or the driver "takes a risk" and uses the SAT NAV anyway. Most people will end up taking the risk risk of being stuck over the absolute certainty of being lost.
So now that we know why truckers ignore these signs, how can UI help us solve the problem? We could try changing the risk into a certainty that problems will crop up by using SAT NAV by using bigger signs or multiple signs (e.g. first sign "No Trucks", second sign "We mean it", third sign "No really, trucks will get suck on this road"). However, I think the better solution is to attack the other problem and not get the driver lost. Just put up a sign that says "Trucks take alternate route so and so" so the cost of ignoring the SAT NAV moves from getting lost to a risk of getting lost (risk because the signs could get you lost).
The best solution would eliminate the uncertainty of the consequences, increase the perceived cost of following the SAT NAV and decrease the cost of ignoring the SAT NAV. For example "Narrow Road (XYZ ft clearance). Trucks take road ABC to IJK which rejoins the present road."
Tele Atlas have a complete monopoly on GPS maps, why the $£%@ cant they be FORCED to put height and weight limits on their maps by the government, on pain of having their rights to sell removed.
Teleatlas could fix the problem but won't. regulation is needed.
While I agree with you that it's not the driver's fault if they plan their route with Teleatlas and Teleatlas gives them bad directions, I'm quite frankly shocked that you would so quickly reach for government intervention. As it is, a company willing to invest the money and develop good maps for truckers, stands to make a fortune if they can scoop Teleatlas (i.e. market forces can solve this problem). Regulation will just cement the de facto monopoly and make it harder for other companies to enter the market leaving you will inferior products that just barely meet the regulatory standard.
If all the British think like you do, no wonder the UK is becoming a surveillance-based nany/police state.
IIRC, statutory damages can only be invoked when the copyright has been registered. Since registration only applies to a specific revision of the code, registration isn't practical for most developers who are constantly making little changes.
You have a very good point here. Google is powerful enough that if they don't like particular ACAP settings, they'll just treat it as equivalent to a robots.txt with disallow set and watch the content providers come crawling back. The publishers are trying to force something on the indexers that requires extra overhead and maintenance, so it's just simpler to treat an ACAP that says "don't index unless you do xyz" as "don't index".
It's great that in heavy population centers like New York and California we are finally getting fiber to the curb. But in cities that aren't part of the "Top 20 most populous cities in the USA", fiber is still a pipe dream. So cable internet can still keep a rather large user base with heavy losses to FiOS. Until fiber starts deploying to cities of less than 100,000 people, don't try to claim cable internet is dieing.
That's a good succinct definition, but let me try to poke a few holes in it. (I believe criticism helps refine any argument so try to take this well.)
ISP - If I let my roommate use my router that is connected to the Internet does that make me an ISP?
Customer requested filtering. (Minor quibble that can easily be fixed by adding such a qualification.)
Spam - Well I was going to say that Spam's destination is the end user, but I guess maybe you're making the point that the SMTP connection is actually to the ISP's mailhost (kudos on making such a key distinction). (Someone might be able to claim that even IP is based on store and forward, but that would be a stretch.)
Zombies and Spammers - Wouldn't they be protected by such a law?
DoS - DoS'ing hosts is probably what you had in mind, but wouldn't it be possible to DoS a router by attacking multiple customers that all happen have the same router in their path?
I like your definition, but let me see what I can shake loose and kick the tires a bit. (Please take this well, banging hard on an argument is one of the highest complements I can give.)
ISP - Is a roommate sharing a connection an ISP? What about a coffee shop with wireless?
"alter its content" - Time-to-live/hop-count headers on IP packets could get sticky, never mind once we have IPv6 tunnels that start at the user's machine and end somewhere inside the ISP's network and thus need to be "modified" by having their headers stripped off.
"quality-of-service... widely used" - Could put new standards in a catch-22 of not being adopted b/c they are not widely used b/c they are not being adopted, etc.
QoS... without regard to [protocol] - What if the QoS standard is part of only a few protocols?
request.. to cease filtering inbound... traffic - Might be kind of hard to honor if the network is being attacked. Is the ISP supposed to block only part of the attack and not the parts going to opt-out users?
Multiple places reference the intent of the sender or receiver. IANAL, but doesn't that put ISP's in an impossible situation since they really have no way to read people's minds.
Most of those are minor and probably surmountable, so as a definition it is quite good. I'm still not sure I agree with NN, but at least now there is something more concrete for me to evaluate.
Define "net neutrality". I don't want high-level goal oriented stuff. I want to know exactly what such a law would look like because frankly I'm skeptical that any net-neutrality law wouldn't just be full of vagueness, unintended consequences or be so limited as to be useless.
Just saying "make the networks fair" doesn't make a good law, but that is all I've heard from the NN people. I want to be behind NN, but I can't as long as it is so ambiguous.
I don't think it will ever be an untainted science so long as the government, businesses & religion stick their noses in it.
You're far too optimistic.
There will never be untainted science as long as anyone sticks their noses in it. Even without government, businesses or religion, researchers want their experiments to work and to get sensational results because that gets them money and notability. (As an academic, I see a lot of scientific papers that fit this category.) If we found a way to eliminate that particular cause of tainted science, another one would crop up.
The scientific method isn't about preventing tainted results, it's about being about to tell the tainted results from the untainted results (by challenging the experiment).
Is setting the deadline for when a rebuttal needs to be submitted unusual, or is this just the ordinary operation of the system by the judge setting a time line?
Sec. 487: Requires universities to annually disclose their copyright infringement policies to their students.
Sec. 494: Requites universities to "develop a plan for offering alternatives to illegal downloading or peer-to-peer distribution of intellectual property as well as a plan to explore technology-based deterrents to prevent such illegal activity" (emphasis added). Also allows the Federal goverment to pay (bribe) the universities to help with the cost of such technology through grant money.
All the other sections referencing copyright seem to be related to enabling access to textbooks for disabled (e.g. blind) students.
Personally I would just reject the bill on grounds that it is too long (Hmm, we need a fancy sounding "Robert's Rules" term for that).
This solution doesn't solve the problem of other applications sending keystrokes to WoW because it is only looking at whether the WoW binary is valid.
Even if the game is hacked, it would be possible to keep around a shadow copy of what should be reported as the binary values.
For that matter, this is exactly what VirtualPC and friends are doing. They change the in-memory binary in a way that the binary itself can't detect.
(If you want to know more, I can point you to some papers on the topic.)
It would be nice if there way a non-invasive way to do these checks, but it's almost(*) theoretically impossible given the nature of computers (Cf. all the failed DRM in the world).
(*) Given a powerfull enough computer and a motivated enough programmer/user with enough documentation, it is impossible. Most systems work only work because such ideal conditions often don't exist.
It's a root kit in that it can gain access to anything on your computer and send it to Blizzard.
So can the World of Warcraft game itself. That's a rootkit too? Oh PS: rootkit != any invasion of privacy. Rootkits are specifically those programs that subvert the security of your system. This simply doesn't do that.
The game part of Warcraft should only be able to access the user's files. Other users files, root control of the operating system is normally beyond the power of ordinary programs unless you run them in administrator mode (I don't play Warcraft so I don't know if it does).
In addition most root kits insist on running as an OS driver so they have absolute ability to look at anything. This is a problem for two reasons. First, a bug in a driver or root kit is much more serious for machine stability than a bug in a user level program and much more likely to have a security hole. Second, applications should serve the user not the other way around. If the user says, "Install in this non-standard location" or "Run under these restricted rights", the application should be flexible enough to accomidate when possible (obviously, asking Firefox to run in 4KB of RAM probably won't ever work). Rootkits are not designed to accomicate. They are designed to enforce. As a result they are usually not very well behaived programs.
A good encryption system supports an unbounded(*) number of duress keys, so the cops never know when they have the last key out of you.
(*) Most good systems allow the user to configure the number of "false" partitions ahead of time. (Really nothing distinguishes false from true partitions, just which one you choose to use when storing sensitive data.) Some even hide whether a particular passphrase worked. If you use the wrong passphrase, you're stuck trying to figure out if the data is just noise or if it is further encrypted.
Intellectual Property doesn't exist as a legal concept. Only Patent, Copyright and Trademark exist and they are very different. Lumping to them together under one rubric clouds the issue. So lets see which of these she could file suit under.
Patent
Even our patent office isn't that crazy. No suit here.
Copyright
Copyright only covers the form of expression not the ideas expressed. So unless she was a material contributer or the lexicon copied large sections of her books, there's no successful routs for suit here either.
Trademark
This one is close enough that a good lawyer might be able to win on Trademark grounds.
Fictional characters can be Trademarked. So if I go around drawing pictures of Donald Duck for a living, I could be liable even though the actual drawing was all my own original work. The idea is that the franchise and brand association could be weakened by such an action. So the "Harry Potter Action Toy" would be a clear Trademark violation, but the "Lexicon of Recent Popular Fantasy" probably wouldn't be. It all depends on the details of what words are used and how they are used.
Also, there are unfortunately far reaching incentives to pursue trivial Trademark infringements.
If Rowling doesn't enforce the Trademark, she could loose the rights to it.
Many companies fear these sorts of leaks in the dike especially since several companies
have run into trouble with it (e.g. Xerox, Frisbie (but I think they eventually kept their Trademarks)).
All in all, this is a fairly weak suit for Rowling, but not necessarily frivolous. It all depends on the details.
If I go to your bank and take money from your safety deposit box, that's theft.
If I go to your bank's website and take money from your account, that's still theft. (I think.)
If I go to your personal computer, make a copy of your data and then delete your copy, is that theft?
If I go to your game's website and take in-game money from your account, is that theft?
Considering the last one to be theft seem a little silly ("it's just flipping bits").
But if we want to consider taking money from someone's bank account to be theft, how do
we distinguish the two?
A. Employee shall promptly and fully disclose in writing to [Company] any inventions, improvements, discoveries, operating techniques, or "know-how", whether patentable or not (hereinafter referred to as "Inventions"), conceived or discovered by Employee, either solely or jointly with others, during the course of Employee's employment with [Company], or within six (6) months thereafter.
I think I've got a pretty good guess what company this is because I've had to sign an agreement that was worded almost exactly like this. I talked to their legal department and this clause isn't as bad as it sounds. IANAL, but this is what they explained to me. Basically "course of employment" only includes work I do for them and not my free time. Once that is resolved, the six months thing melts away.
Of course, you will want to talk to your employer's lawyers about this and be sure to get any clarification they provide in writing so they can't come back and change their story after you sign it.
And I wouldn't even think of signing it. Good luck on your job search. Keep us updated.
Actually, I once successfully challenged a potential employer about an agreement like this. I carefully and calmly explained to their legal department why I thought the agreement was unreasonable and we were able work things out from there. (It revolved around the use of the phrase "course of employment".) This was a multi-billion dollar company, but I found that as long as you raise the issue reasonably without whining, they reciprocated.
Slashdot Mirror
Switch to a langauge like Haskell. It will seriously improve the quality of the code you produce even when you go back to your original language.
My maps are stored on the GPS device you insensitive clod.
You have to think of this as a user interface problem. If the driver planned the route with the SAT NAV that says go down such and such a road but the sign says don't go down the road, what is the driver to do? (Again think in terms of UI not right vs wrong.) At that point either the driver doesn't use the SAT NAV in which case he is now lost, or the driver "takes a risk" and uses the SAT NAV anyway. Most people will end up taking the risk risk of being stuck over the absolute certainty of being lost.
So now that we know why truckers ignore these signs, how can UI help us solve the problem? We could try changing the risk into a certainty that problems will crop up by using SAT NAV by using bigger signs or multiple signs (e.g. first sign "No Trucks", second sign "We mean it", third sign "No really, trucks will get suck on this road"). However, I think the better solution is to attack the other problem and not get the driver lost. Just put up a sign that says "Trucks take alternate route so and so" so the cost of ignoring the SAT NAV moves from getting lost to a risk of getting lost (risk because the signs could get you lost).
The best solution would eliminate the uncertainty of the consequences, increase the perceived cost of following the SAT NAV and decrease the cost of ignoring the SAT NAV. For example "Narrow Road (XYZ ft clearance). Trucks take road ABC to IJK which rejoins the present road."
While I agree with you that it's not the driver's fault if they plan their route with Teleatlas and Teleatlas gives them bad directions, I'm quite frankly shocked that you would so quickly reach for government intervention. As it is, a company willing to invest the money and develop good maps for truckers, stands to make a fortune if they can scoop Teleatlas (i.e. market forces can solve this problem). Regulation will just cement the de facto monopoly and make it harder for other companies to enter the market leaving you will inferior products that just barely meet the regulatory standard.
If all the British think like you do, no wonder the UK is becoming a surveillance-based nany/police state.
IIRC, statutory damages can only be invoked when the copyright has been registered. Since registration only applies to a specific revision of the code, registration isn't practical for most developers who are constantly making little changes.
You have a very good point here. Google is powerful enough that if they don't like particular ACAP settings, they'll just treat it as equivalent to a robots.txt with disallow set and watch the content providers come crawling back. The publishers are trying to force something on the indexers that requires extra overhead and maintenance, so it's just simpler to treat an ACAP that says "don't index unless you do xyz" as "don't index".
It's great that in heavy population centers like New York and California we are finally getting fiber to the curb. But in cities that aren't part of the "Top 20 most populous cities in the USA", fiber is still a pipe dream. So cable internet can still keep a rather large user base with heavy losses to FiOS. Until fiber starts deploying to cities of less than 100,000 people, don't try to claim cable internet is dieing.
- ISP - Is a roommate sharing a connection an ISP? What about a coffee shop with wireless?
- "alter its content" - Time-to-live/hop-count headers on IP packets could get sticky, never mind once we have IPv6 tunnels that start at the user's machine and end somewhere inside the ISP's network and thus need to be "modified" by having their headers stripped off.
- "quality-of-service
... widely used" - Could put new standards in a catch-22 of not being adopted b/c they are not widely used b/c they are not being adopted, etc.
- QoS
... without regard to [protocol] - What if the QoS standard is part of only a few protocols?
- request
.. to cease filtering inbound ... traffic - Might be kind of hard to honor if the network is being attacked. Is the ISP supposed to block only part of the attack and not the parts going to opt-out users?
- Multiple places reference the intent of the sender or receiver. IANAL, but doesn't that put ISP's in an impossible situation since they really have no way to read people's minds.
Most of those are minor and probably surmountable, so as a definition it is quite good. I'm still not sure I agree with NN, but at least now there is something more concrete for me to evaluate.Define "net neutrality". I don't want high-level goal oriented stuff. I want to know exactly what such a law would look like because frankly I'm skeptical that any net-neutrality law wouldn't just be full of vagueness, unintended consequences or be so limited as to be useless.
Just saying "make the networks fair" doesn't make a good law, but that is all I've heard from the NN people. I want to be behind NN, but I can't as long as it is so ambiguous.
It's about time!
I don't see the universities listed anywhere in the article. Which ones are they? We need to know so we can write them letters.
You're far too optimistic.
There will never be untainted science as long as anyone sticks their noses in it. Even without government, businesses or religion, researchers want their experiments to work and to get sensational results because that gets them money and notability. (As an academic, I see a lot of scientific papers that fit this category.) If we found a way to eliminate that particular cause of tainted science, another one would crop up.
The scientific method isn't about preventing tainted results, it's about being about to tell the tainted results from the untainted results (by challenging the experiment).
Is setting the deadline for when a rebuttal needs to be submitted unusual, or is this just the ordinary operation of the system by the judge setting a time line?
- Sec. 487: Requires universities to annually disclose their copyright infringement policies to their students.
- Sec. 494: Requites universities to "develop a plan for offering alternatives to illegal downloading or peer-to-peer distribution of intellectual property as well as a plan to explore technology-based deterrents to prevent such illegal activity" (emphasis added). Also allows the Federal goverment to pay (bribe) the universities to help with the cost of such technology through grant money.
- All the other sections referencing copyright seem to be related to enabling access to textbooks for disabled (e.g. blind) students.
Personally I would just reject the bill on grounds that it is too long (Hmm, we need a fancy sounding "Robert's Rules" term for that).This solution doesn't solve the problem of other applications sending keystrokes to WoW because it is only looking at whether the WoW binary is valid. Even if the game is hacked, it would be possible to keep around a shadow copy of what should be reported as the binary values. For that matter, this is exactly what VirtualPC and friends are doing. They change the in-memory binary in a way that the binary itself can't detect. (If you want to know more, I can point you to some papers on the topic.)
It would be nice if there way a non-invasive way to do these checks, but it's almost(*) theoretically impossible given the nature of computers (Cf. all the failed DRM in the world).
(*) Given a powerfull enough computer and a motivated enough programmer/user with enough documentation, it is impossible. Most systems work only work because such ideal conditions often don't exist.
The game part of Warcraft should only be able to access the user's files. Other users files, root control of the operating system is normally beyond the power of ordinary programs unless you run them in administrator mode (I don't play Warcraft so I don't know if it does).
In addition most root kits insist on running as an OS driver so they have absolute ability to look at anything. This is a problem for two reasons. First, a bug in a driver or root kit is much more serious for machine stability than a bug in a user level program and much more likely to have a security hole. Second, applications should serve the user not the other way around. If the user says, "Install in this non-standard location" or "Run under these restricted rights", the application should be flexible enough to accomidate when possible (obviously, asking Firefox to run in 4KB of RAM probably won't ever work). Rootkits are not designed to accomicate. They are designed to enforce. As a result they are usually not very well behaived programs.
A good encryption system supports an unbounded(*) number of duress keys, so the cops never know when they have the last key out of you.
(*) Most good systems allow the user to configure the number of "false" partitions ahead of time. (Really nothing distinguishes false from true partitions, just which one you choose to use when storing sensitive data.) Some even hide whether a particular passphrase worked. If you use the wrong passphrase, you're stuck trying to figure out if the data is just noise or if it is further encrypted.
Even our patent office isn't that crazy. No suit here.
CopyrightCopyright only covers the form of expression not the ideas expressed. So unless she was a material contributer or the lexicon copied large sections of her books, there's no successful routs for suit here either.
TrademarkThis one is close enough that a good lawyer might be able to win on Trademark grounds.
Fictional characters can be Trademarked. So if I go around drawing pictures of Donald Duck for a living, I could be liable even though the actual drawing was all my own original work. The idea is that the franchise and brand association could be weakened by such an action. So the "Harry Potter Action Toy" would be a clear Trademark violation, but the "Lexicon of Recent Popular Fantasy" probably wouldn't be. It all depends on the details of what words are used and how they are used.
Also, there are unfortunately far reaching incentives to pursue trivial Trademark infringements. If Rowling doesn't enforce the Trademark, she could loose the rights to it. Many companies fear these sorts of leaks in the dike especially since several companies have run into trouble with it (e.g. Xerox, Frisbie (but I think they eventually kept their Trademarks)).
All in all, this is a fairly weak suit for Rowling, but not necessarily frivolous. It all depends on the details.
- If I go to your bank and take money from your safety deposit box, that's theft.
- If I go to your bank's website and take money from your account, that's still theft. (I think.)
- If I go to your personal computer, make a copy of your data and then delete your copy, is that theft?
- If I go to your game's website and take in-game money from your account, is that theft?
Considering the last one to be theft seem a little silly ("it's just flipping bits"). But if we want to consider taking money from someone's bank account to be theft, how do we distinguish the two?So where do I sign up?
It was not a non-compete, just a we-own-anything-you-invent-while-working-for-us where working-for-us doesn't include my free time.
I think I've got a pretty good guess what company this is because I've had to sign an agreement that was worded almost exactly like this. I talked to their legal department and this clause isn't as bad as it sounds. IANAL, but this is what they explained to me. Basically "course of employment" only includes work I do for them and not my free time. Once that is resolved, the six months thing melts away.
Of course, you will want to talk to your employer's lawyers about this and be sure to get any clarification they provide in writing so they can't come back and change their story after you sign it.
Actually, I once successfully challenged a potential employer about an agreement like this. I carefully and calmly explained to their legal department why I thought the agreement was unreasonable and we were able work things out from there. (It revolved around the use of the phrase "course of employment".) This was a multi-billion dollar company, but I found that as long as you raise the issue reasonably without whining, they reciprocated.
Can't you also make a laser out of radio waves? I know they have microwave "lasers" called masers, so do "rasers" exist?