If you purchase music from iTunes, and somebody who doesn't like you knows a few of the tracks you bought, it seems they could create a fake chain of "provenance" which most judges in this country would agree proved that you violated copyrights.
Evidence that "most judges in this country would agree" that that "proved" anything?
For people who aren't planning on using the absence of DRM to break the law, its not a problem.
For people who are planning on using the absence of DRM to break the law, since there is no encryption, erasing or altering the information in the copies they distribute ought to be trivial.
So, um, who really cares? This is pretty common in DRM-free purchased PDFs, I don't see why it would bother people in DRM-free purchased music.
-The price is equally problematic, with the OLPC costing nearly half that.
Since the people Palm is trying to sell Foleos to can't buy XOs, the fact that the Foleo is about 4x as expensive ($600-700 vs. $175) the launch price of the OLPC doesn't really mean a lot.
And I expect that you could get a much better price from Palm if you wanted to have them dropship you a quarter-million Foleos not packaged for individual retail sale, instead of buying them one at a time at retail.
The LAST thing that government or MySpace should be doing is punishing those who aren't breaking any laws or trying to conceal their identities.
You seem to think this is about protecting people. It's not, it's about corporate PR. It is certainly in MySpace's PR interest to have no one who appears to be a known sex offender on their site. And that's what this policy prevents.
The registries exist because sex-offenders are much more likely to re-offend.
This is the premise, but the problem is it isn't really true. Pedophiles who target victims outside of their own family are much more likely to re-offend than most other criminals. Other sex offenders are not. Published sex offender registries are not restricted to the class of sex offenders that are much more likely to re-offend.
Of course, there is also the problem that the registries, even where they list people who are more likely to reoffend, do little to actually protect anyone.
Probably something more effective would be something a little more complex than just tags. Using the porn example, you wouldn't want articles talking about porn to be blocked (if you were blocking porn) because it actually wasn't porn. So you might have a couple different categories of tags.
You mean, you could have something represented like:
-
subject: http://www.somewebsite.com/
predicate: contains
object: pr0n
With a UI that lets you tag a page so that the current page is the subject, and you choose the predicate describing the relationship and the object it relates to?
Since the only mechanism via which MySpace can identify possible sex offenders registered on the site is comparison of items such as name, locale, DOB (for which many public lists, even of sex offenders, only use the month), etc., is this surprising?
Actually, since all humans are "possible sex offenders", MySpace should simply not let anyone use there service if they want to avoid "possible sex offenders".
What MySpace can identify with the information you describe is "People who provide information similar to that found on existing lists of registered sex offenders". But they've apparently decided not to use exact matches, and to expand it beyond that (allowing different locales and different-but-similar birthdates with the same name to "match"). Since that is clearly an imperfect method designed to scare up lots of false positives, MySpace ought to provide an extra examination of flagged identities (like airlines do for people who are tagged by the similarly overbroad near-miss matching used for the no-fly watch list).
While requiring verifiable identification for all users (the only way, BTW, to actually avoid the "lying sex offender" problem producing false negatives) may be more burden than MySpace can bear, allowing flagged users to provide verifiable ID to establish that they are not the person they are near-match for on the initial screening criteria should not be,
Such a good idea in theory, but where does trust come from?
Trust comes from the user's decision to trust a particular source of information, the same as anywhere else.
Who can we trust to mark anything?
Who can you trust to tell you anything?
And by the time any of this is solved google will have evolved so it can understand plain text better than mark up.
"Computers will understand natural language so that specialized vocabularies for interacting with them are no longer necessary or beneficial" has been the leading "promise that never delivers" for far longer than the Semantic Web has been an idea.
IMHO semantics don't work on a global scale, it does work if you only check trusted sources.
The first part is not true, the second part is. Of course, one of the key applications for semantic technology is "web of trust" kind of systems that provide the infrastructure for dealing with the question "who is a trusted source and to what degree?"
There is no requirement that semantic tags from different sources be treated equally (and the distinction isn't just between "trust" and "ignore", you can do a lot more based on the source of information than that.)
Overall, this is the direction we should be taking. The semantic web is indeed just that: a shiny dream.
The kind of "semantic search" laid out in the paper is at least as much of a "shiny dream" as the Semantic Web pretty much by definition. The kind of "semantic search" laid out in this paper requires an extreme version of exactly the same technology that would be used by a "semantic factory" that would take user-created content and add semantic markup automatically, the only difference is that instead of pushing the information back for storage in or with the web page it describes, the information is stored remotely, can't be tailored, and can't be accessed except through the central service that created the information.
If you've got the technology to make this "semantic search", you've got the technology to let people author "Semantic Web" pages completely seamlessly the same way WYSIWYG tools let them do now without needing to know much, or even any, HTML, CSS, etc. If you apply that technology in the Semantic Web sense rather than the centralized semantic search model, people who do understand the technology and have the initiative can improve the semantic representation associated with their pages, rather than relying on the autogenerated semantic representation, plus you don't rely on a central search service, and can create applications that rely on semantic content without going through that separate service.
This approach to providing more on-target search results contrasts with the dream of the semantic Web. Semantic search doesn't require all the Web page authors in the world to begin adding metadata;
In which respect it does not contrast with the Semantic Web, which doesn't require that any more than the regular Web required every computer attached to the internet to start running a web server. Since this article wasn't about the semantic web to start with, was an inaccurate gratuitous attack on the Semantic Web necessary? (Yes, yes, it mirrors the gratuitous attack on the idea made by the author of TFA.)
Also, semantic search has a harder problem than getting people to start using metadata (which only requires demonstrating utility so that it becomes attractive to adopt), it requires developing a system to understand natural language, including understanding which of many diverse senses of a word is intended in context on a page.
Yeah, so Semantic Web requires getting some web authors to put structured information in their pages, and for that to spread as utility is demonstrated. Semantic search requires, per the author of TFA, "a system which understands both the user's query and the Web text using cognitive algorithms similar to that of the human brain, then brings results that are dead on target (right context) at first glance (not requiring to open the Web page for further investigation.)" (emphasis added)
If you can't get that information and the source from the vendor then what the hell are you doing using that library?
I don't think getting the information is the problem, I think the problem is that when you get the answer to the "is this library thread safe?" question, its often "No."
It may not be so much that it is harder to program things for parallelism as that there is a lot more material to build on if you aren't trying to go for parallelism, or only using it in a very restricted way. Building from the ground up is a lot more work.
OTOH, I think that that problem takes care of itself over time: as more applications implementing parallelism are built, more support libraries will be built, and the difficulty of building parallel apps will drop. Its only rather recently that multicore consumer machines have become popular justifying designing consumer apps to take advantage of that capacity, so that hasn't had time to happen yet.
There are several development tools that have such a license. That if you are developing GPL software then the GPL license applies, but if you are developing comercial closed source then you pay.
That's usually because the development tool includes some code that is linked in to the programs produced with it, and therefore if you license it under the GPL, the code produced must be released, if at all, under the GPL, whereas if you license it under a commercial license, you are governed by that license, at least under the view of the FSF as expressed in the GPL FAQ.
LINA, since it presumably includes shared libraries but they are not components usually included with the operating system it runs on, is probably affected by the linking provision similarly (under the FSF view, at any rate), prohibiting combinations of GPL LINA with non-GPL applications, and vice versa.
And how is the likelihood of big software houses starting to write to LINA bigger than big software houses staring writing to Mac or native Linux?
(Almost) everyone making an application wants to be able to get to the Windows segment of the market, since that's where most of the users are. Writing to Mac or native Linux doesn't help with that, so in practice if its done at all, its often done in addition to writing to Windows, and must be justified by the additional cost.
Writing to LINA, ideally, gets you Mac, Linux, and Windows support all at once. But its not the first platform to claim "write once, run anywhere", so how well it fulfills that promise—and what the performance is like—is going to be key.
But, fundamentally, if it lets you target a wider market without increasing costs too much, it seems to make business sense, so if it does that well, I expect plenty of people will write to it.
I think you misunderstand the term "executive branch", considering your counter-example is one where power is being asserted by the legislative branch (by passing a law).
I think you misunderstand the term "executive branch". If I took your view, Paul could never vote for or against expanding executive power, because anything he can vote in Congress is either (1) nonbinding, and gives no one any power, or (2) a law, and, by your claim, gives the legislative branch power.
In fact, laws often, in fact, give the executive branch power. They often expressly or implicitly give the executive discretion: for instance, every criminal law allows prosecution, but it always lies in the executive branch's discretion whether to actually prosecute. The executive branch can also selectively absolve any crime with the plenary Constitutional power of the pardon, which (unlike decisions not to prosecute) can't even be reversed later by a different executive.
Every law which creates or expands criminal offenses is, therefore, an expansion of executive power since it increases the scope of affairs where the executive has the power, in it's discretion to seek consequences, or to insulate against them forever.
# Voted NO on making it a crime to harm a fetus during another crime. (Feb 2004) -- Federal government is not authorized to make this a crime, this is an area where only states are supposed to have law making power.
That's an odd view, since the law he voted against would have only applied during the commission of another federal crime. Now, while it may be true that Paul has legitimate Constitutional disputes with some existing federal criminal laws, surely he acknowledges that the federal government has powers to create some criminal laws under the Constitution, and that creating additional punishment directly tied to those federal laws in certain circumstances is an federal function, and where, as is often the case, the federal law covers an area of exclusive federal jurisdiction under the Constitution (i.e., some places within the jurisdiction of the US federal government but outside of a state, or a federal reservation within a state) it is exclusively a federal function, not a function of the state.
Voted YES on banning Family Planning funding in US aid abroad. (May 2001) -- Government should not be taking money from hard working taxpayers in the US and sending out to foreign countries.
But he didn't vote to ban US aid abroad. He just voted against family planning.
He has never voted to increase the power of the executive branch.
This is, in fact, untrue. Congressman Paul has voted for numerous criminal laws, including the federal ban on dilation & extraction ("Partial Birth") abortions. Every criminal law increases the discretionary power of the executive branch, since it can choose to prosecute or not (or to pardon or not) any criminal offense. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing is probably debated best case-by-case on each particular law, but that's not the claim being advanced.
If only he would explain how he plans to provide services for society and cut taxes.
Ron Paul isn't all that concerned with government, particularly the federal government, providing services for society. If you are interested in that, you should probably look elsewhere.
The pro-lifers celebrated, probably never reading more than headlines and hearing no more than the sound bites on this decision. They do not seem to have recognized this as a Pyrrhic victory, drawing a line that pretty much ends any hope for the pro-life movement to ever prevail at a state or federal level, and preserving the argument for the status quo that actually supports the pro-choice movement (the assertion that such a Constitutional Right exists, given by a Supreme Court Justice, is the strongest argument to date in support of abortion rights!)
The existence of a Constitutional Right to abortion has been held in every single Supreme Court case on the issue since Roe v. Wade. Kennedy simply didn't find any reason to overturn that element of Roe in the more recent decision, but he hardly issued "the strongest argument to date in support of abortion rights!"
Let's be honest, folks: We're a minority. Not in the sense this word has to day, but really: We're a small group and thus we don't exist for politicians.
Wrong. Slashdot is a group that doesn't (as a group) have clear priorities, communicate them to politicians, and give lots of money to political campaigns based on them, therefore as a group it doesn't exist to politicians.
Lots of small groups have extraordinary influence, politically, in this country.
Given the broad field of candidates, I was wondering who the community thinks will make the best President when it comes to representing issues Slashdot readers might care about?
Because, as all the political threads on Slashdot show, Slashdot readers care about the same issues, and all lean toward the same side of each of those issues.
Slashdot Mirror
Evidence that "most judges in this country would agree" that that "proved" anything?
For people who aren't planning on using the absence of DRM to break the law, its not a problem.
For people who are planning on using the absence of DRM to break the law, since there is no encryption, erasing or altering the information in the copies they distribute ought to be trivial.
So, um, who really cares? This is pretty common in DRM-free purchased PDFs, I don't see why it would bother people in DRM-free purchased music.
Since the people Palm is trying to sell Foleos to can't buy XOs, the fact that the Foleo is about 4x as expensive ($600-700 vs. $175) the launch price of the OLPC doesn't really mean a lot.
And I expect that you could get a much better price from Palm if you wanted to have them dropship you a quarter-million Foleos not packaged for individual retail sale, instead of buying them one at a time at retail.
You seem to think this is about protecting people. It's not, it's about corporate PR. It is certainly in MySpace's PR interest to have no one who appears to be a known sex offender on their site. And that's what this policy prevents.
This is the premise, but the problem is it isn't really true. Pedophiles who target victims outside of their own family are much more likely to re-offend than most other criminals. Other sex offenders are not. Published sex offender registries are not restricted to the class of sex offenders that are much more likely to re-offend.
Of course, there is also the problem that the registries, even where they list people who are more likely to reoffend, do little to actually protect anyone.
You mean, you could have something represented like:
-
subject: http://www.somewebsite.com/
predicate: contains
object: pr0n
-
subject: http://www.otherwebsite.com/
predicate: discusses
object: pr0n
With a UI that lets you tag a page so that the current page is the subject, and you choose the predicate describing the relationship and the object it relates to?
Sounds like a perfect application for RDF.
Its not meant to. Its meant to make people feel safe about MySpace.
Actually, since all humans are "possible sex offenders", MySpace should simply not let anyone use there service if they want to avoid "possible sex offenders".
What MySpace can identify with the information you describe is "People who provide information similar to that found on existing lists of registered sex offenders". But they've apparently decided not to use exact matches, and to expand it beyond that (allowing different locales and different-but-similar birthdates with the same name to "match"). Since that is clearly an imperfect method designed to scare up lots of false positives, MySpace ought to provide an extra examination of flagged identities (like airlines do for people who are tagged by the similarly overbroad near-miss matching used for the no-fly watch list).
While requiring verifiable identification for all users (the only way, BTW, to actually avoid the "lying sex offender" problem producing false negatives) may be more burden than MySpace can bear, allowing flagged users to provide verifiable ID to establish that they are not the person they are near-match for on the initial screening criteria should not be,
Clearly, here, the system correctly implemented its design.
The problem is that the design is fundamentally flawed.
Trust comes from the user's decision to trust a particular source of information, the same as anywhere else.
Who can you trust to tell you anything?
"Computers will understand natural language so that specialized vocabularies for interacting with them are no longer necessary or beneficial" has been the leading "promise that never delivers" for far longer than the Semantic Web has been an idea.
The first part is not true, the second part is. Of course, one of the key applications for semantic technology is "web of trust" kind of systems that provide the infrastructure for dealing with the question "who is a trusted source and to what degree?"
There is no requirement that semantic tags from different sources be treated equally (and the distinction isn't just between "trust" and "ignore", you can do a lot more based on the source of information than that.)
The kind of "semantic search" laid out in the paper is at least as much of a "shiny dream" as the Semantic Web pretty much by definition. The kind of "semantic search" laid out in this paper requires an extreme version of exactly the same technology that would be used by a "semantic factory" that would take user-created content and add semantic markup automatically, the only difference is that instead of pushing the information back for storage in or with the web page it describes, the information is stored remotely, can't be tailored, and can't be accessed except through the central service that created the information.
If you've got the technology to make this "semantic search", you've got the technology to let people author "Semantic Web" pages completely seamlessly the same way WYSIWYG tools let them do now without needing to know much, or even any, HTML, CSS, etc. If you apply that technology in the Semantic Web sense rather than the centralized semantic search model, people who do understand the technology and have the initiative can improve the semantic representation associated with their pages, rather than relying on the autogenerated semantic representation, plus you don't rely on a central search service, and can create applications that rely on semantic content without going through that separate service.
In which respect it does not contrast with the Semantic Web, which doesn't require that any more than the regular Web required every computer attached to the internet to start running a web server. Since this article wasn't about the semantic web to start with, was an inaccurate gratuitous attack on the Semantic Web necessary? (Yes, yes, it mirrors the gratuitous attack on the idea made by the author of TFA.)
Also, semantic search has a harder problem than getting people to start using metadata (which only requires demonstrating utility so that it becomes attractive to adopt), it requires developing a system to understand natural language, including understanding which of many diverse senses of a word is intended in context on a page.
Yeah, so Semantic Web requires getting some web authors to put structured information in their pages, and for that to spread as utility is demonstrated. Semantic search requires, per the author of TFA, "a system which understands both the user's query and the Web text using cognitive algorithms similar to that of the human brain, then brings results that are dead on target (right context) at first glance (not requiring to open the Web page for further investigation.)" (emphasis added)
Compared to that, the Semantic Web is easy.
That's usually because the development tool includes some code that is linked in to the programs produced with it, and therefore if you license it under the GPL, the code produced must be released, if at all, under the GPL, whereas if you license it under a commercial license, you are governed by that license, at least under the view of the FSF as expressed in the GPL FAQ.
LINA, since it presumably includes shared libraries but they are not components usually included with the operating system it runs on, is probably affected by the linking provision similarly (under the FSF view, at any rate), prohibiting combinations of GPL LINA with non-GPL applications, and vice versa.
(Almost) everyone making an application wants to be able to get to the Windows segment of the market, since that's where most of the users are. Writing to Mac or native Linux doesn't help with that, so in practice if its done at all, its often done in addition to writing to Windows, and must be justified by the additional cost.
Writing to LINA, ideally, gets you Mac, Linux, and Windows support all at once. But its not the first platform to claim "write once, run anywhere", so how well it fulfills that promise—and what the performance is like—is going to be key.
But, fundamentally, if it lets you target a wider market without increasing costs too much, it seems to make business sense, so if it does that well, I expect plenty of people will write to it.
I think you misunderstand the term "executive branch". If I took your view, Paul could never vote for or against expanding executive power, because anything he can vote in Congress is either (1) nonbinding, and gives no one any power, or (2) a law, and, by your claim, gives the legislative branch power.
In fact, laws often, in fact, give the executive branch power. They often expressly or implicitly give the executive discretion: for instance, every criminal law allows prosecution, but it always lies in the executive branch's discretion whether to actually prosecute. The executive branch can also selectively absolve any crime with the plenary Constitutional power of the pardon, which (unlike decisions not to prosecute) can't even be reversed later by a different executive.
Every law which creates or expands criminal offenses is, therefore, an expansion of executive power since it increases the scope of affairs where the executive has the power, in it's discretion to seek consequences, or to insulate against them forever.
It's quite possible he does.
That would, however, make the places under direct federal jurisdiction (D.C., U.S. Territories, etc.) very interesting places to live.
That's an odd view, since the law he voted against would have only applied during the commission of another federal crime. Now, while it may be true that Paul has legitimate Constitutional disputes with some existing federal criminal laws, surely he acknowledges that the federal government has powers to create some criminal laws under the Constitution, and that creating additional punishment directly tied to those federal laws in certain circumstances is an federal function, and where, as is often the case, the federal law covers an area of exclusive federal jurisdiction under the Constitution (i.e., some places within the jurisdiction of the US federal government but outside of a state, or a federal reservation within a state) it is exclusively a federal function, not a function of the state.
But he didn't vote to ban US aid abroad. He just voted against family planning.
This is, in fact, untrue. Congressman Paul has voted for numerous criminal laws, including the federal ban on dilation & extraction ("Partial Birth") abortions. Every criminal law increases the discretionary power of the executive branch, since it can choose to prosecute or not (or to pardon or not) any criminal offense. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing is probably debated best case-by-case on each particular law, but that's not the claim being advanced.
Presuming you have the skills, and access (through money or otherwise) to the resources, sure.
But that just shifts the problem GP refers to, rather than fundamentally altering it.
Being "potential makers" doesn't change anything, unless you have some magical capacity to create a printing press ex nihilo.
If you do have such a power, the last thing that ought to bother you is what puny mortals try to do with laws.
Ron Paul isn't all that concerned with government, particularly the federal government, providing services for society. If you are interested in that, you should probably look elsewhere.
The existence of a Constitutional Right to abortion has been held in every single Supreme Court case on the issue since Roe v. Wade. Kennedy simply didn't find any reason to overturn that element of Roe in the more recent decision, but he hardly issued "the strongest argument to date in support of abortion rights!"
Wrong. Slashdot is a group that doesn't (as a group) have clear priorities, communicate them to politicians, and give lots of money to political campaigns based on them, therefore as a group it doesn't exist to politicians.
Lots of small groups have extraordinary influence, politically, in this country.
Because, as all the political threads on Slashdot show, Slashdot readers care about the same issues, and all lean toward the same side of each of those issues.