Lol my GF is in school in the states and she came to visit me in Canada. She got held up for 20minutes because they didn't believe people can maintain long distance relationships. The rest of the ppl on the bus weren't pleased.
breaking the spec and non standard behavior? They are just faking an ID. This isn't making the USB do something weird. I mean against the rules maybe but I wouldnt call it standard breaking and certainly the only behavior it produces is the sync functions rather than doesn't.
Lots of programs pretend to be other programs for functionality. Reverse engineering is ok and i don't think USBIF will care.
In Japan, Hachinohe(.25m)-Morioka(.3m)-Sendai(1m)-Fukushima(.3m) is 250 miles. Population: 1.8million in these cities.
Boston to Washington is 400mi, Contains Providence, NYC, Baltimore and Philly. Population: Probably over 30million if you count the urban area, City centers alone will put you well above 15m, 8.3m in NYC alone.
So comparing a current shinkansen line in japan to a possible line in the US there is possibly 1/10 as many people. But it is impossible because US population is so sparse? REALLY? You might be right that the comparisons are unfair because northern Japanese shinkansen have to deal with such sparse spread out people, in the US they are all clumped together in giant populations. I didn't say connect California to NY did I.
I should have started with this analogy:/. Anyways, while we might need it a rewrite would be worse. Destruction and reformation of the country and no real rule of law for at least 50 years, maybe 100 to get back on track. I say we can wait until it breaks before fixing it.
18th century? US law is based on English law or borrows heavily so try 13th century rules.
Agreed... to a degree. Lawyers have no fear of job security due to lack of complexity in the law. If you were a lawyer or ever walked into a law library and saw a few thousand books you wouldn't think, crap if I don't make this one law a bit more complex then I could lose all my clients since they'll self defend. Lawyers in their lifetime maybe only get their hand in a few laws, usually fewer than 10 and usually tiny unique situations. So by making a law more complex they may get the chance to use it 2 or 3 more times in the rest of their career, I can assure you that this is NOT an issue.
That said, bills ARE sometimes written in a complex fashion. This might be to hide certain things. But bills are passed by politicians who have staff to work out their complexities for them, while it is nice to think that there shouldn't be any at least there is some protection. Again the idea of opposition is used to weed out any complexities.
Complexities are also inserted into bills for good reasons sometimes, being used to pass medicine bills. And by that I mean something that tastes bad but is good for you. Perhaps not as common as hiding things for nefarious reasons but it is there.
Still, most complexity of the law comes from stupidity or idealism creating big structures of stupid law, next it comes from necessity, after that deceit. You have to realize law is a living thing like a language. Stupid laws sometimes get passed and then lawyers get to spend the next few years building a case for a loophole that eventually becomes standardized but you end up left with some horrible tumor, happens ALLLLLL the time. Hell we haven't had a major rewrite since 1300. Sure a bunch was changed when America was formed but there are still plenty of tumors left from back then. After that, the world is complicated the law reflects that, get over it. Then lastly deceit. We honestly couldn't squeeze in a high enough percentage of corruption without bills dying in the house if we tried.
I said the idea and I also said I was being idealistic. But we have two options:
1) Write lots of laws and pass them in bills. Attempt to organize this vast info in something that people can deal with. This gives lawyers and politicians more power and judges less.
2)a) Write simple laws. People may be better able to obey them but i sincerely doubt it, cutting our body of law from 10million pages to 500k won't help anything, law is complex. It would give more power to people acting for themselves BUT it would take power away from the law its self, court would become a battle of personality and charm rather than one of proof. Flashy 'speechifying' lawyers are bad as it is, less precise law would make it much worse. This would result is less people getting justice. As well judges would have almost god like power having much MUCH more room for interpretation, say you are a black guy and get a racist judge you are assured your doom. Also precedents would have to be banned or you get 2b.
2)b) With precedents as we have now this 'simple' system would end up being even more complicated, law libraries would grow in size AND it would have all the frailties of a simple system. The judges could still do as they please. Lawyers would win through charm not proof. And citizens would have no idea what that laws were at all without studying thousands of cases. This would work out TERRIBLY.
Perhaps a middle ground Thomas Jefferson might like is a coles notes edition of the law. And that is possible today. If you are starting a business and get a business for dummies book it tells you what you can and can't do in regards to commercial laws. Its the best we got, making things simple wouldn't help.
Your last line was on my side:/... Writing down all these stupid situations and odd little complexities; While it may complicate the law and make lawyers necessary... It is better than having to argue that stuff in the court room.
A politician having a moderate chance to understand a law he is passing is pretty bad I admit. But is using pure precedents and handing all the law making power over to judges better in any way? Just sounds like a way to make the courts more expensive (somehow amazing).
The idea is that in debate the two lawyers fighting for each side eventually the law will come through. If it were one lawyer interpreting the law to the judge and the judge making a decision that would be terrible. Given two very good lawyers they may be able to dig up all kinds of weird laws and positions supporting their side. But hopefully because of this a judge will get a very full picture before making a decision.
I think a direction we should proceed should be to codify and restructure law. At the moment law is spread out amongst thousands of books with no real organization. There are whole law libraries and precedents abound. If this huge mass of info could be better organized it would be more valuable and take power from the lawyers.
And yeah you are totally being idealistic, not that I'm not. I'm a firm believer in the word of law and things written down and I have NO FAITH in people what so ever which colours where I am idealistic compared to you.
The goal isn't to make the law confusing (most of the time), the goal is to take power away from judges. If we wrote things to be not confusing they'd be simple. And while simple may seem nice it would mean handing control of the more complicated issues to the judges. That or you end up with huge miscarriages of justice.
I would rather deal with complicated texts and have more power in the hands of the voters (theoretically) than which ever judge you happen to get. In small towns judges would have more power than anyone.
:/ In Japan I could travel 600km in 3hours for 120$. With no ticket before hand and trains leaving every 15minutes. The whole time I was there I probably traveled 2500km on local and high speed lines. Likely 30 trips. And I spent a large amount of time in train stations for all these trips, In every station there are boards saying whether the trains are late or on time delayed. So I probably saw times for nearly 500 trains. I only saw one delay the whole time. The timer said it would be 48seconds late due to weather.
Being used to transportation in North America, this amazed me more than any of the technology involved in the trains. Also the things were sparkly clean. I think it comes down to respect. They are willing to keep the trains and buses clean out of respect. I believe they make sure they are on time for the same reason.
We aren't incompetent or too corrupt to get it done. North America simply isn't respectful enough for public transit.
I think it is a cool idea. I think making it a toll highway where electrics and hybrids don't have to pay would make more sense though. I think car makers would oppose this since they don't all have good electric options yet and the japanese companies would KILL the american ones which wouldnt be popular. Otherwise interesting idea.
That said! High speed rail does NOT get 25pmpg, they get more like 300, and a newer system could likely do better, regular old fashion trains get 40~50pmpg. Which kills your whole argument. (Current highspeed rail runs at 712pmpg when full. Multiply that by w/e % you like)
Also your sig doesn't take into account people that buy CD's because they downloaded it, albeit a small group that would cut the number down further.
California referendums like everything... they can't tax who would vote for that. Corruption maybe. But I'd like to see a comparative analysis between states before you call it the tax and spend state. Anyways better than Bush's spend and spend plan. Also tax and spend implies people are paying for it. It is also only 4.7B of a 50B dollar plan. You are way off the mark. Also the money is coming from a federal pot that is already set aside for developing highspeed rail.
I did say fake right? And injunctions can be about anything not just impersonation. Send a file sharing injunction. Most everyone is guilty of that and the real RIAA doesn't care if you are really guilty anyways so that seems realistic.
Uhh if I live in Sweden I'm expected to know vague laws in the US and abide by them hahaha no. Just ignore the law and nothing will happen, I mean no one even sells p2p software anyways and they rarely even have a defacto owner of the product.
I think most laws are written to effect twice the number of people it looks like they are targeting. Then you never use it so that people don't fight it. In the end you are left with the ability to sue or charge any one into oblivion at any point in time.
I can almost guarantee I'm violating a half dozen laws as I type this. I'm sure over the next month if a team of well read lawyers tracked my every movement and inspected my house they could charge me with a few hundred offenses. A society of criminals is easier to control. It may sound paranoid but I doubt anyone here could go a month without doing a few dozen things you could get charged for.
Unless they peed themselves first. In WW1 on the western front chemical weapons were used against us and all we had to cover our faces were cloth. Someone thought of the great idea of pissing on said cloth. The chemicals in the pee provided much greater protection than the cloth by itself and was used until true gas masks came along.
I don't know about you but if the option is death or looking stupid sniffing pee I'd chose the latter. It also tells an amazing tale of how harsh and rugged trench warfare was and possibly how retarded or brilliant the soldiers were.
"I believe that the same point was made about books when the printing press was developed." I don't believe your comment on books. You can print books with the printing press so it doesn't even make sense.
"Communications media are constrained... all of them. " I'm sure a blog is constrained to some odd internet standard max which someone in IT would have to look up... though I'm sure it could be worked around anyways. I'd say near unlimited. Emails might have a limit under 100 pages but you can attach whole books. MSN IMs are limited to 300, SMS are 140 but these are for technical reasons not a fit of brilliance. As well these are automatically threaded together so they aren't really broken up. IRC usually has a character limit of 500 or so but this is again for technical reasons. Forums might have a limit of 3~4pages of text per post for fear of spam and technical reasons (bandwidth waste if its spam). I can't really think of any communication that is limited aside from technical limitations and all of these are done in a way that the limitation can be easily overcome. So I don't buy this statement either.
The Iran elections I didn't follow on twitter so you would have to explain what made twitter's reporting special. I could get to the minute updates from al jazeera, for most elections you can watch a live show where they talk about the election with a box showing votes being counted live.
Your other examples are all about self reporting. Which may or may not be interesting but I don't see it happening for twitters. Blogs cover people willing to do more in-depth self reporting. This could be useful if it gives us insights into things we might have missed and it also replaces the traditional interview to some degree, it won't coax hard answers out of people but news companies suck so much that i don't see that happening much anyways. A politician talking in depth about a bill might be useful to a voter, It summarizes a bill into a readable format that is much more useful. However a politician can't summarize a bill into 140characters, that is just the title and doesn't give you any insight at all. So twitter fails to replace anything other than the 20second sound bites played on the news. It doesn't bring anything new. And if it did the signal to noise ratio is so so low that you'd never find it anyways.
Bet you any money that if you made a bot to spider/. you would find that the number of +5 posts under 140characters would be quite rare. Brevity isn't the soul of wit. If you were an idiot with nothing to say before you are forced to shut up. If you had something to say you can only choose a piece. The limitation is hardly helpful.
What, does the court have some sort of special bits? If the court sends an injunction over twitter it wouldn't look any different than if I did. In fact it would be 100% indistinguishable. Probably the same with e-mail, perhaps not fax. If I can't be reasonably assured it is a legitimate source when it is then any random idiot could make a convincing fake.
What's stopping me from mailing, twittering and faxing a few million people injunctions? I could try to get 1/3rd of London to show up to the courts one day. Either injunctions have some legal power/meaning or it is just an angry letter that is meaningless ("I'm gunna sue you!"). If it does have any meaning in the UK legal system then it is very easily abused. ACs here on/. could reply to this post with an injunction and I'd be legally obligated to do something.
Chicken and the Egg problem. If the country the person is in values privacy couldn't it be illegal to find the persons IP? If so then you can't know what country they are in and can't expect them to follow the injunction. There only needs to be one country to think this way for it to screw the whole system.
Atleast he said it articulately... "Time for me to delete my social networking accounts methinks, it's lost all the glitter and sparkle as my eyes have been gradually opened to"
Probably wouldn't have cut it. Oh well its not like language served any purpose or conveyed subtlety, lets all switch to point form with mangled words.
Slashdot Mirror
Lol my GF is in school in the states and she came to visit me in Canada. She got held up for 20minutes because they didn't believe people can maintain long distance relationships. The rest of the ppl on the bus weren't pleased.
breaking the spec and non standard behavior? They are just faking an ID. This isn't making the USB do something weird. I mean against the rules maybe but I wouldnt call it standard breaking and certainly the only behavior it produces is the sync functions rather than doesn't.
Lots of programs pretend to be other programs for functionality. Reverse engineering is ok and i don't think USBIF will care.
Windows has a monopoly even though there are good competitors there giving their product away for FREE. Apple has no space to complain.
In Japan, Hachinohe(.25m)-Morioka(.3m)-Sendai(1m)-Fukushima(.3m) is 250 miles. Population: 1.8million in these cities.
Boston to Washington is 400mi, Contains Providence, NYC, Baltimore and Philly. Population: Probably over 30million if you count the urban area, City centers alone will put you well above 15m, 8.3m in NYC alone.
So comparing a current shinkansen line in japan to a possible line in the US there is possibly 1/10 as many people. But it is impossible because US population is so sparse? REALLY? You might be right that the comparisons are unfair because northern Japanese shinkansen have to deal with such sparse spread out people, in the US they are all clumped together in giant populations. I didn't say connect California to NY did I.
I should have started with this analogy :/. Anyways, while we might need it a rewrite would be worse. Destruction and reformation of the country and no real rule of law for at least 50 years, maybe 100 to get back on track. I say we can wait until it breaks before fixing it.
18th century? US law is based on English law or borrows heavily so try 13th century rules.
Agreed... to a degree. Lawyers have no fear of job security due to lack of complexity in the law. If you were a lawyer or ever walked into a law library and saw a few thousand books you wouldn't think, crap if I don't make this one law a bit more complex then I could lose all my clients since they'll self defend. Lawyers in their lifetime maybe only get their hand in a few laws, usually fewer than 10 and usually tiny unique situations. So by making a law more complex they may get the chance to use it 2 or 3 more times in the rest of their career, I can assure you that this is NOT an issue.
That said, bills ARE sometimes written in a complex fashion. This might be to hide certain things. But bills are passed by politicians who have staff to work out their complexities for them, while it is nice to think that there shouldn't be any at least there is some protection. Again the idea of opposition is used to weed out any complexities.
Complexities are also inserted into bills for good reasons sometimes, being used to pass medicine bills. And by that I mean something that tastes bad but is good for you. Perhaps not as common as hiding things for nefarious reasons but it is there.
Still, most complexity of the law comes from stupidity or idealism creating big structures of stupid law, next it comes from necessity, after that deceit. You have to realize law is a living thing like a language. Stupid laws sometimes get passed and then lawyers get to spend the next few years building a case for a loophole that eventually becomes standardized but you end up left with some horrible tumor, happens ALLLLLL the time. Hell we haven't had a major rewrite since 1300. Sure a bunch was changed when America was formed but there are still plenty of tumors left from back then. After that, the world is complicated the law reflects that, get over it. Then lastly deceit. We honestly couldn't squeeze in a high enough percentage of corruption without bills dying in the house if we tried.
I said the idea and I also said I was being idealistic. But we have two options:
1) Write lots of laws and pass them in bills. Attempt to organize this vast info in something that people can deal with. This gives lawyers and politicians more power and judges less.
2)a) Write simple laws. People may be better able to obey them but i sincerely doubt it, cutting our body of law from 10million pages to 500k won't help anything, law is complex. It would give more power to people acting for themselves BUT it would take power away from the law its self, court would become a battle of personality and charm rather than one of proof. Flashy 'speechifying' lawyers are bad as it is, less precise law would make it much worse. This would result is less people getting justice. As well judges would have almost god like power having much MUCH more room for interpretation, say you are a black guy and get a racist judge you are assured your doom. Also precedents would have to be banned or you get 2b.
2)b) With precedents as we have now this 'simple' system would end up being even more complicated, law libraries would grow in size AND it would have all the frailties of a simple system. The judges could still do as they please. Lawyers would win through charm not proof. And citizens would have no idea what that laws were at all without studying thousands of cases. This would work out TERRIBLY.
Perhaps a middle ground Thomas Jefferson might like is a coles notes edition of the law. And that is possible today. If you are starting a business and get a business for dummies book it tells you what you can and can't do in regards to commercial laws. Its the best we got, making things simple wouldn't help.
Your last line was on my side :/ ... Writing down all these stupid situations and odd little complexities; While it may complicate the law and make lawyers necessary... It is better than having to argue that stuff in the court room.
A politician having a moderate chance to understand a law he is passing is pretty bad I admit. But is using pure precedents and handing all the law making power over to judges better in any way? Just sounds like a way to make the courts more expensive (somehow amazing).
The idea is that in debate the two lawyers fighting for each side eventually the law will come through. If it were one lawyer interpreting the law to the judge and the judge making a decision that would be terrible. Given two very good lawyers they may be able to dig up all kinds of weird laws and positions supporting their side. But hopefully because of this a judge will get a very full picture before making a decision.
I think a direction we should proceed should be to codify and restructure law. At the moment law is spread out amongst thousands of books with no real organization. There are whole law libraries and precedents abound. If this huge mass of info could be better organized it would be more valuable and take power from the lawyers.
And yeah you are totally being idealistic, not that I'm not. I'm a firm believer in the word of law and things written down and I have NO FAITH in people what so ever which colours where I am idealistic compared to you.
Nope, people vote for parties who have people in them who hire people that hire people that make laws. Still, the other way sucks too.
The goal isn't to make the law confusing (most of the time), the goal is to take power away from judges. If we wrote things to be not confusing they'd be simple. And while simple may seem nice it would mean handing control of the more complicated issues to the judges. That or you end up with huge miscarriages of justice.
I would rather deal with complicated texts and have more power in the hands of the voters (theoretically) than which ever judge you happen to get. In small towns judges would have more power than anyone.
:/ In Japan I could travel 600km in 3hours for 120$. With no ticket before hand and trains leaving every 15minutes. The whole time I was there I probably traveled 2500km on local and high speed lines. Likely 30 trips. And I spent a large amount of time in train stations for all these trips, In every station there are boards saying whether the trains are late or on time delayed. So I probably saw times for nearly 500 trains. I only saw one delay the whole time. The timer said it would be 48seconds late due to weather.
Being used to transportation in North America, this amazed me more than any of the technology involved in the trains. Also the things were sparkly clean. I think it comes down to respect. They are willing to keep the trains and buses clean out of respect. I believe they make sure they are on time for the same reason.
We aren't incompetent or too corrupt to get it done. North America simply isn't respectful enough for public transit.
I think it is a cool idea. I think making it a toll highway where electrics and hybrids don't have to pay would make more sense though. I think car makers would oppose this since they don't all have good electric options yet and the japanese companies would KILL the american ones which wouldnt be popular. Otherwise interesting idea.
That said! High speed rail does NOT get 25pmpg, they get more like 300, and a newer system could likely do better, regular old fashion trains get 40~50pmpg. Which kills your whole argument. (Current highspeed rail runs at 712pmpg when full. Multiply that by w/e % you like)
Also your sig doesn't take into account people that buy CD's because they downloaded it, albeit a small group that would cut the number down further.
California referendums like everything... they can't tax who would vote for that. Corruption maybe. But I'd like to see a comparative analysis between states before you call it the tax and spend state. Anyways better than Bush's spend and spend plan. Also tax and spend implies people are paying for it. It is also only 4.7B of a 50B dollar plan. You are way off the mark. Also the money is coming from a federal pot that is already set aside for developing highspeed rail.
I did say fake right? And injunctions can be about anything not just impersonation. Send a file sharing injunction. Most everyone is guilty of that and the real RIAA doesn't care if you are really guilty anyways so that seems realistic.
Uhh if I live in Sweden I'm expected to know vague laws in the US and abide by them hahaha no. Just ignore the law and nothing will happen, I mean no one even sells p2p software anyways and they rarely even have a defacto owner of the product.
I think most laws are written to effect twice the number of people it looks like they are targeting. Then you never use it so that people don't fight it. In the end you are left with the ability to sue or charge any one into oblivion at any point in time.
I can almost guarantee I'm violating a half dozen laws as I type this. I'm sure over the next month if a team of well read lawyers tracked my every movement and inspected my house they could charge me with a few hundred offenses. A society of criminals is easier to control. It may sound paranoid but I doubt anyone here could go a month without doing a few dozen things you could get charged for.
I bet Rock Mountain Bank just gave away their info and someone robbed them, case closed.
Unless they peed themselves first. In WW1 on the western front chemical weapons were used against us and all we had to cover our faces were cloth. Someone thought of the great idea of pissing on said cloth. The chemicals in the pee provided much greater protection than the cloth by itself and was used until true gas masks came along.
I don't know about you but if the option is death or looking stupid sniffing pee I'd chose the latter. It also tells an amazing tale of how harsh and rugged trench warfare was and possibly how retarded or brilliant the soldiers were.
Steve Jobs come clean, we know thats you.
"I believe that the same point was made about books when the printing press was developed."
... though I'm sure it could be worked around anyways. I'd say near unlimited. Emails might have a limit under 100 pages but you can attach whole books. MSN IMs are limited to 300, SMS are 140 but these are for technical reasons not a fit of brilliance. As well these are automatically threaded together so they aren't really broken up. IRC usually has a character limit of 500 or so but this is again for technical reasons. Forums might have a limit of 3~4pages of text per post for fear of spam and technical reasons (bandwidth waste if its spam). I can't really think of any communication that is limited aside from technical limitations and all of these are done in a way that the limitation can be easily overcome. So I don't buy this statement either.
/. you would find that the number of +5 posts under 140characters would be quite rare. Brevity isn't the soul of wit. If you were an idiot with nothing to say before you are forced to shut up. If you had something to say you can only choose a piece. The limitation is hardly helpful.
I don't believe your comment on books. You can print books with the printing press so it doesn't even make sense.
"Communications media are constrained... all of them. "
I'm sure a blog is constrained to some odd internet standard max which someone in IT would have to look up
The Iran elections I didn't follow on twitter so you would have to explain what made twitter's reporting special. I could get to the minute updates from al jazeera, for most elections you can watch a live show where they talk about the election with a box showing votes being counted live.
Your other examples are all about self reporting. Which may or may not be interesting but I don't see it happening for twitters. Blogs cover people willing to do more in-depth self reporting. This could be useful if it gives us insights into things we might have missed and it also replaces the traditional interview to some degree, it won't coax hard answers out of people but news companies suck so much that i don't see that happening much anyways. A politician talking in depth about a bill might be useful to a voter, It summarizes a bill into a readable format that is much more useful. However a politician can't summarize a bill into 140characters, that is just the title and doesn't give you any insight at all. So twitter fails to replace anything other than the 20second sound bites played on the news. It doesn't bring anything new. And if it did the signal to noise ratio is so so low that you'd never find it anyways.
Bet you any money that if you made a bot to spider
How is that informative?
What, does the court have some sort of special bits? If the court sends an injunction over twitter it wouldn't look any different than if I did. In fact it would be 100% indistinguishable. Probably the same with e-mail, perhaps not fax. If I can't be reasonably assured it is a legitimate source when it is then any random idiot could make a convincing fake.
What's stopping me from mailing, twittering and faxing a few million people injunctions? I could try to get 1/3rd of London to show up to the courts one day. Either injunctions have some legal power/meaning or it is just an angry letter that is meaningless ("I'm gunna sue you!"). If it does have any meaning in the UK legal system then it is very easily abused. ACs here on /. could reply to this post with an injunction and I'd be legally obligated to do something.
Chicken and the Egg problem. If the country the person is in values privacy couldn't it be illegal to find the persons IP? If so then you can't know what country they are in and can't expect them to follow the injunction. There only needs to be one country to think this way for it to screw the whole system.
Atleast he said it articulately...
"Time for me to delete my social networking accounts methinks, it's lost all the glitter and sparkle as my eyes have been gradually opened to"
Probably wouldn't have cut it. Oh well its not like language served any purpose or conveyed subtlety, lets all switch to point form with mangled words.