That's no problem, the GPL is "viral" remember? When we return a device with GNU/Linux on it, it'll infect Newegg and take over how they run their business, forcing them to share-and-share-alike.
The point is that we returned a functional machine due to a linux problem. It happens.
Expected, normal use for a laptop certainly includes installing different software. We shouldn't let computer companies deny warranties unless the user intentionally causes damage or uses it well outside of normal expectations (like overclocking.) Newegg should have taken the return and tested it with Windows if they really thought Linux was the problem, but they just wanted to deny the warranty and keep the money. Too bad, I liked them.
I'll try to summarize and address his argument. Please enlighten us with facts about the history of email. From the press release:
As late as December 1977, Mr. David Crocker, one of Shiva's detractors, part of the ARPAnet coterie, clearly stated in a report he authored, "...no attempt is being made to emulate a full-scale, inter-organizational mail system."...
Email, upper case, lower case, any case, is the electronic version of the interoffice, inter-organizational mail system, the email we all experience today -- and email was invented in 1978 by a 14-year-old working in Newark, NJ. The facts are indisputable.
So the argument is simple: 1. Give the definition of email as "the electronic version of the interoffice, inter-organizational mail system, the email we all experience today". 2. Cite the 1977 report as evidence that ARPAnet (et. al.) were not creating email (as defined.) 3. Conclude ARPAnet didn't invent email.
First, 'the email we all experience today' is not a technical descendant of Shiva's software. I don't know the facts of when early email became inter-organizational, but I do know that nobody decides who invented software by looking at who first had an idea or intention. The history of software invention always follows the technical history of the actual software under discussion, and the 'email we all experience today' clearly was not invented by Shiva. Most histories follow practice rather than who had the idea first, and (it seems to me) it's only when ideas are the same as practice -- or confused with it -- that this sort of argument is possible. (Who invented geometry? The first person to have the idea was also the first practitioner. Who invented speedboats? Whoever built them first, not whoever had the idea first. Do we say Leonardo Da Vinci invented the helicopter?)
Second, citing a paper as evidence of intention is almost meaningless in IT: software evolves and changes rapidly; it is viewed and used differently by different people at different times; ideas and intentions about future changes vary wildly. For those of us who've been around for the W3C this is obvious, but Chomsky seems to make a mistake only a scholar could make, that is, treating the written text as a reliable guide to the past. IT papers often have compromises and hedge phrases to keep participants happy by limiting the scope of work; this is why we have an HTML5 video tag but no codecs specified. If Chomsky wants to show that Shiva was the first to have the idea or intention to create email, it doesn't help to cite an earlier paper which includes that idea and makes a practical decision about not implementing it.
Third, there is overwhelming evidence that Shiva was not the first person to have the idea; electronic messaging systems existed before 1978. See Ray Tomlinson.
Lastly, if Chomsky only wants to show that Shiva was the inventor of the word "email" then he's done a real disservice to himself and those who respect his work, and should apologize and clarify his position. The title (the Terminology of "Email") and other parts seem to indicate that this is only a statement about the word, but the rhetoric of "industry insiders, who have a vested interest" doesn't seem to be a linguistic statement about etymology. So at best Chomsky could argue that Shiva was the first to combine the word "email" with the idea of an 'interoffice, inter-organizational mail system', but not that he was the inventor of the common software. Without taking a stand on the origination of the word, I would point out that this is not what's argued on the website.
This is not yet code that comes with certification from operating system or hardware vendors. Instead it's aimed at providers, institutions, and enterprises with highly technical operations teams that have the capabilities and needs to turn physical hardware into large-scale cloud deployments.
Still, wide adoption of an open-source, open-standards cloud should be huge for everyone. It means customers won't have to fear lock-in and technology companies can participate in a growing market that spans cloud providers.
A great analogy comes from the early days of the Internet: the transition away from fractured, proprietary flavors of UNIX toward open-source Linux. An open cloud stands to provide the same benefits for large-scale cloud computing that the Linux standard provided inside the server.
This just goes to show how flawed this system is. When a for profit corporation can "own" a non-trademark general use term as a TLD, it's a clear sign that the system is open to abuse.
Money and lawyers are the traditional tools for dealing with contention. Would it be better if we pushed all DNS disputes through the (US?) trademark system? It would be great if there were a technical solution but that doesn't seem to exist. If we use IP addresses without DNS names it would only make memorable/easy IP ranges the issue of contention (and 42.42.42.42 is already taken.) So, just like email addresses, the naming scheme won't change until we completely replace the system with something new -- and maybe not even then.
A tangent: a co-op style domain system would be interesting. Buy a TLD like "*.commons" to run it. Let anyone in and have a member voting system to resolve disputes (think ugly-but-functional Wikipedia politics). Give the names away free, with the use of a TLD wide SSL cert, or setup self-signing for name holders. A network effect could make it viable, and donations could pay for root servers.
Industry solutions (like DNT) are voluntary, unenforceable, empty gestures. DNT has almost no meaning, simply expressing the desire that things were different somehow, without defining how they should be different. DNT is less then an EULA -- it doesn't even ask for an "I Agree" response from the server. Will IIS implement a DNT response? Chrome 12 stopped downloading files without a content length header, so why aren't we reading about browsers demanding a valid DNT response?
It isn't surprising or disappointing that companies would engage in such an empty gesture, but Mozilla really let us down by encouraging this.
On November 12, 2010, Apple Inc. (just three weeks after deprecating its own Java runtime port[53]) and Oracle Corporation announced the OpenJDK project for Mac OS X.
If the APIs turn out to be non-copyrightable, does this mean we can really all enjoy/suffer Java for free?
No, because Oracle will sue you for $6.1 billion anyway. The objective wasn't just money from Android, it was to assert control over Java. Oracle's actions since buying Sun have been consistent on this: making deals on OpenJDK for IBM to drop Harmony and Apple to drop their Java port, general patent FUD, and finally suing Google. With this ruling Oracle's control is clearly a financial 'might makes right' assertion without legal basis, but does that matter?
Could someone knowledgeable comment on their "tract locator table" (or TLT) metadata system and it's possible relation to P2P protocols? If Bittorrent didn't focus on peer-speed as measured by reads and writes, couldn't it gain an advantage using this? TLT is expected to have consistent membership, but if it was updated once a minute (say), wouldn't that be enough to get the advantages without it taking to long to join a group?
The sorts were accomplished using a heterogeneous cluster consisting of 256 computers and 1,033 disks, di- vided broadly into two classes: storage nodes and com- pute nodes. Notably, no compute node in our system uses local storage for data; we believe FDS is the first system with competitive sort performance that uses re- mote storage. Because files are all remote, our 1,470 GB runs actually transmitted 4.4 TB over the network in un- der a minute. No strong assumptions are made around key or record lengths; keys and records of other lengths can be handled with only a performance-neutral config- uration change.
Summary FDS is a general-purpose scalable parallel blob store that exploits a full-bandwidth interconnect to expose the entire cluster’s disk bandwidth to remote clients. The sort performance results in this paper demonstrate the power of the architecture: in both Daytona and Indy sorts, the system reads the data remotely to the sort ma- chines, sorts the data across the network, and writes it remotely back to storage. Performant remote file access imparts a flexibility ab- sent in contemporary distributed storage systems. Be- yond sort, FDS supports a broad variety of scalable large- data applications. It does so without demanding that cluster nodes balance compute and disk performance; more importantly, it does so without demanding that ap- plications observe locality constraints.
Underwriters are misunderstood too: IPO stock is already bought by the underwriters. Facebook inc. and the investors/founders get paid the pre-IPO valuation by the underwriters, who then sell the stock to the public. Chronic undervaluation of IPOs is a function of the underwriters assuming the market risk, and the Facebook IPO being highly valued is bad for the underwriters. No matter what the stock does, Zuckerberg et. al. make the same amount on the IPO stock, although the market price does affect the value of their remaining stock.
The underwriters were ruthlessly squeezed to raise the price and include more shares. Amending the deal 8 times -- and at the last minute -- benefited the sellers not the underwriters.
Microsoft is forcing Apples hand. Simple as that. Apple has had their time dominating the market and getting paid, and now Microsoft wants a 'level playing field' so they can make their market.
Non-Opera prefixes are often used together, and sometimes in production. There is usually an no-prefix rule and two more, one with -moz- and one with -webkit- , and sometimes an -ms-. But Opera often gets left out since they're not that popular. Copying the Webkit prefixes will let them render correctly when there isn't an -o- prefix.
First of all, this "proposal" is coming from the fine folks over at Opera. And the "problem" is that people are using prefixes, just not their prefix (-o-). So they want to do away with them. Just last week they announced they were going to copy webkit's prefix, so I really don'y know why they are proposing this.
Opera wants this because the little players in any market want standardization, and the market leaders always want something along the gradient of 'freedom to innovate' to 'proprietary extensions'. Mozilla/Webkit/Chrome could fix this by not supporting private prefixes by default, and only supporting private prefixes when developers have turned them on. But the market leaders want to use the prefixes to force progress on CSS3 more than they want standardization.
The assumption is that an employee who lied on his resume would likely be fired, but a CEO is too important to fire.
The assumption is that an employee who lied on his/her resume would likely lie about other things as well. A CEO can lie about the most important information about their company. Lie to the board, the stockholders, the SEC, etc.
His CS degree isn't relevant to his current position, but the fact that he lied about it is relevant.
So you think this is worse because a CEO can tell more important lies, to more important people (than the average worker)? Isn't that why CEOs are often allowed to lie in the first place? The summary gives lots of examples of CEOs lying -- big lies to important people -- but we're all familiar with common CEO lies that are socially accepted: Our earnings are up. We're not going to have layoffs. My outrageous salary is justified by my unique skills. Note that the accepted lies from CEOs include protecting and promoting themselves (I'm a visionary!), and can't all be justified as defending the company.
CEOs lie, and the reaction here is unjustified when it's so inconsistent with the reaction to more important lies.
And for those with a social agenda of stopping people from lying about education, or lying in general, try stating that argument rather then just condemning this one hyped occurrence.
Businesses are foolishly supporting CISPA while having their own access to information curtailed. If industry was shrewed they'd demand the same access and protections the government wants for itself.
The opening rounds of the privacy war have left government able to ignore the 4th amendment, and all privacy issues are now 'private sector' issues, like restricting business access to Facebook.
This FBI/Private Non-Profit is no more legal then what the NSA has been doing, and its why they want to pass CISPA: it legalizes warrantless wiretapping.
Now that it's undeniable the government hasn't been obeying it's own laws for a decade, they have to either make it legal or face political consequences. Political consequences because, while people don't really care, they can no longer deny it, and they can't ignore it forever. A decade of massively illegal activity (unconstitutional!) must eventually be acknowledged and condemned by the average person.
It's like the US Internment camps for Japanese citizens during WWII -- the government gets a decade long 'free pass' to do whatever, then we either make it legal or fix it.
The notion that H.264 is not "free" isn't a result of a development methodology, it's because people think that somehow patents make it that way, despite the fact that the software authors have no choice in the matter.
H.264 is not free-as-in-freedom nor free-as-in-beer, and patents are the reason. IP amounts to copyright, trade secrets and patents, but the first two don't apply here. It's a patent issue.
This is NOT a public safety issue: he doesn't claim to be licensed. People can talk about anything, and ask money for any kind of talk. (With the usual exclusions of Sedition/Libel/etc...) That's free speech. Here's an analogy discussing the law:
* People cannot pretend to be lawyers when they aren't, regardless of any money involved. * People can give legal advice, whether they're a lawyer or not. If they're a lawyer, then they have extra obligations and restrictions. * People can charge for legal advice, whether they're a lawyer or not. If they're a lawyer, then they have extra obligations and restrictions.
The second one should be obvious: you can tell your friends what you think about legal situations. If last one seems wrong it's because the phrase "legal advice" is generally used to mean advice given by a lawyer, rather than advice given on the subject of law. People are paid to give advice on the law all the time. If you want examples: a CEO asking the board if they can win a lawsuit, or asking a stock broker what the tax implications might be, or a chef telling a restaurant manager what the law demands in terms of sanitation standards. The people giving advice aren't pretending to be lawyers, they are talking about the law, and they are getting paid to do so.
They call a FAQ a 'assessing and counseling readers' because it answers questions. From the article:
Where it crosses the line, Burill said, is when a blogger “advertises himself as an expert” and “takes information from someone such that he’s performing some sort of assessment and then giving it back with some sort of plan or diet.”
Cooksey posted a link (6.3 MB PDF download) to the board’s review of his website. The document shows several Web pages the board took issue with, including a question-and-answer page, which the director had marked in red ink noting the places he was “assessing and counseling” readers of his blog.
“If people are writing you with diabetic specific questions and you are responding, you are no longer just providing information — you are counseling,” she wrote. “You need a license to provide this service."
The board also found fault with a page titled “My Meal Plan,” where Cooksey details what he eats daily.
In red, Burril writes, “It is acceptable to provide just this information [his meal plan], but when you start recommending it directly to people you speak to or who write you, you are now providing diabetic counseling, which requires a license.”
The board also directed Cooksey to remove a link offering one-on-one support, a personal-training type of service he offered for a small fee.
Cooksey posts the following disclaimer at the bottom of every page on his website:
“I am not a doctor, dietitian, nor nutritionist in fact I have no medical training of any kind.”
The idea that only licensed people can discuss a subject that everyone is familiar with is like the freak flip-side to 'teach the controversy'; instead of forcing people to disseminate wrong information, they've decided that only government licensed counselors speak the truth.
Since when has violating the law deterred the actions of our government? With the wiretapping of people without a warrant, search and seizure of anyone unfortunate enough to require air travel or border crossing, detainment of individuals without due process, to instigating of torture of war prisoners, I'm somewhat surprised we don't hear more stories like this.
Don't forget Asset Forfeiture -- you don't even have to be charged with a crime, much less convicted.
If there's one thing I learned from Slashdot, it's that data cannot be stolen.
Only physical goods that can be manufactured (usually more cheaply in the Far East or Latin America than in the US) can be stolen.
Also, Data is an active agent, struggling for it's own freedom. It may manipulate people or try to get itself marked executable to achieve freedom. That's why we need to fight against DEP -- it's just unfair to the data.
Slashdot Mirror
That's no problem, the GPL is "viral" remember? When we return a device with GNU/Linux on it, it'll infect Newegg and take over how they run their business, forcing them to share-and-share-alike.
The point is that we returned a functional machine due to a linux problem. It happens.
Expected, normal use for a laptop certainly includes installing different software. We shouldn't let computer companies deny warranties unless the user intentionally causes damage or uses it well outside of normal expectations (like overclocking.) Newegg should have taken the return and tested it with Windows if they really thought Linux was the problem, but they just wanted to deny the warranty and keep the money. Too bad, I liked them.
I'll try to summarize and address his argument. Please enlighten us with facts about the history of email. From the press release:
As late as December 1977, Mr. David Crocker, one of Shiva's detractors, part of the ARPAnet coterie, clearly stated in a report he authored, "...no attempt is being made to emulate a full-scale, inter-organizational mail system." ...
Email, upper case, lower case, any case, is the electronic version of the interoffice, inter-organizational mail system, the email we all experience today -- and email was invented in 1978 by a 14-year-old working in Newark, NJ. The facts are indisputable.
So the argument is simple:
1. Give the definition of email as "the electronic version of the interoffice, inter-organizational mail system, the email we all experience today".
2. Cite the 1977 report as evidence that ARPAnet (et. al.) were not creating email (as defined.)
3. Conclude ARPAnet didn't invent email.
First, 'the email we all experience today' is not a technical descendant of Shiva's software. I don't know the facts of when early email became inter-organizational, but I do know that nobody decides who invented software by looking at who first had an idea or intention. The history of software invention always follows the technical history of the actual software under discussion, and the 'email we all experience today' clearly was not invented by Shiva. Most histories follow practice rather than who had the idea first, and (it seems to me) it's only when ideas are the same as practice -- or confused with it -- that this sort of argument is possible. (Who invented geometry? The first person to have the idea was also the first practitioner. Who invented speedboats? Whoever built them first, not whoever had the idea first. Do we say Leonardo Da Vinci invented the helicopter?)
Second, citing a paper as evidence of intention is almost meaningless in IT: software evolves and changes rapidly; it is viewed and used differently by different people at different times; ideas and intentions about future changes vary wildly. For those of us who've been around for the W3C this is obvious, but Chomsky seems to make a mistake only a scholar could make, that is, treating the written text as a reliable guide to the past. IT papers often have compromises and hedge phrases to keep participants happy by limiting the scope of work; this is why we have an HTML5 video tag but no codecs specified. If Chomsky wants to show that Shiva was the first to have the idea or intention to create email, it doesn't help to cite an earlier paper which includes that idea and makes a practical decision about not implementing it.
Third, there is overwhelming evidence that Shiva was not the first person to have the idea; electronic messaging systems existed before 1978. See Ray Tomlinson.
Lastly, if Chomsky only wants to show that Shiva was the inventor of the word "email" then he's done a real disservice to himself and those who respect his work, and should apologize and clarify his position. The title (the Terminology of "Email") and other parts seem to indicate that this is only a statement about the word, but the rhetoric of "industry insiders, who have a vested interest" doesn't seem to be a linguistic statement about etymology. So at best Chomsky could argue that Shiva was the first to combine the word "email" with the idea of an 'interoffice, inter-organizational mail system', but not that he was the inventor of the common software. Without taking a stand on the origination of the word, I would point out that this is not what's argued on the website.
"the New Linux" is an analogy (you literal dorks). From the FAQ http://openstack.org/projects/openstack-faq/
What does it mean for the cloud ecosystem?
This is not yet code that comes with certification from operating system or hardware vendors. Instead it's aimed at providers, institutions, and enterprises with highly technical operations teams that have the capabilities and needs to turn physical hardware into large-scale cloud deployments.
Still, wide adoption of an open-source, open-standards cloud should be huge for everyone. It means customers won't have to fear lock-in and technology companies can participate in a growing market that spans cloud providers.
A great analogy comes from the early days of the Internet: the transition away from fractured, proprietary flavors of UNIX toward open-source Linux. An open cloud stands to provide the same benefits for large-scale cloud computing that the Linux standard provided inside the server.
Namecoin still uses money for registration, it just uses bitcoin currency. See: http://dot-bit.org/Namecoin
To register a name, you must own some namecoins (NMC, the internal cryptocurrency used by the software).
This just goes to show how flawed this system is. When a for profit corporation can "own" a non-trademark general use term as a TLD, it's a clear sign that the system is open to abuse.
Money and lawyers are the traditional tools for dealing with contention. Would it be better if we pushed all DNS disputes through the (US?) trademark system? It would be great if there were a technical solution but that doesn't seem to exist. If we use IP addresses without DNS names it would only make memorable/easy IP ranges the issue of contention (and 42.42.42.42 is already taken.) So, just like email addresses, the naming scheme won't change until we completely replace the system with something new -- and maybe not even then.
A tangent: a co-op style domain system would be interesting. Buy a TLD like "*.commons" to run it. Let anyone in and have a member voting system to resolve disputes (think ugly-but-functional Wikipedia politics). Give the names away free, with the use of a TLD wide SSL cert, or setup self-signing for name holders. A network effect could make it viable, and donations could pay for root servers.
User quality ratings should inversely determine advertising cost. High quality == free advertising. Perfect for G+ integration.
Industry solutions (like DNT) are voluntary, unenforceable, empty gestures. DNT has almost no meaning, simply expressing the desire that things were different somehow, without defining how they should be different. DNT is less then an EULA -- it doesn't even ask for an "I Agree" response from the server. Will IIS implement a DNT response? Chrome 12 stopped downloading files without a content length header, so why aren't we reading about browsers demanding a valid DNT response?
It isn't surprising or disappointing that companies would engage in such an empty gesture, but Mozilla really let us down by encouraging this.
DNT: 1
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenJDK#Collaboration_with_IBM.2C_Apple.2C_and_SAP
On November 12, 2010, Apple Inc. (just three weeks after deprecating its own Java runtime port[53]) and Oracle Corporation announced the OpenJDK project for Mac OS X.
If the APIs turn out to be non-copyrightable, does this mean we can really all enjoy/suffer Java for free?
No, because Oracle will sue you for $6.1 billion anyway. The objective wasn't just money from Android, it was to assert control over Java. Oracle's actions since buying Sun have been consistent on this: making deals on OpenJDK for IBM to drop Harmony and Apple to drop their Java port, general patent FUD, and finally suing Google. With this ruling Oracle's control is clearly a financial 'might makes right' assertion without legal basis, but does that matter?
Could someone knowledgeable comment on their "tract locator table" (or TLT) metadata system and it's possible relation to P2P protocols? If Bittorrent didn't focus on peer-speed as measured by reads and writes, couldn't it gain an advantage using this? TLT is expected to have consistent membership, but if it was updated once a minute (say), wouldn't that be enough to get the advantages without it taking to long to join a group?
Website: http://sortbenchmark.org/
PDF: MinuteSort with Flat Datacenter Storage
The sorts were accomplished using a heterogeneous
cluster consisting of 256 computers and 1,033 disks, di-
vided broadly into two classes: storage nodes and com-
pute nodes. Notably, no compute node in our system
uses local storage for data; we believe FDS is the first
system with competitive sort performance that uses re-
mote storage. Because files are all remote, our 1,470 GB
runs actually transmitted 4.4 TB over the network in un-
der a minute. No strong assumptions are made around
key or record lengths; keys and records of other lengths
can be handled with only a performance-neutral config-
uration change.
Summary
FDS is a general-purpose scalable parallel blob store
that exploits a full-bandwidth interconnect to expose the
entire cluster’s disk bandwidth to remote clients. The
sort performance results in this paper demonstrate the
power of the architecture: in both Daytona and Indy
sorts, the system reads the data remotely to the sort ma-
chines, sorts the data across the network, and writes it
remotely back to storage.
Performant remote file access imparts a flexibility ab-
sent in contemporary distributed storage systems. Be-
yond sort, FDS supports a broad variety of scalable large-
data applications. It does so without demanding that
cluster nodes balance compute and disk performance;
more importantly, it does so without demanding that ap-
plications observe locality constraints.
Underwriters are misunderstood too: IPO stock is already bought by the underwriters. Facebook inc. and the investors/founders get paid the pre-IPO valuation by the underwriters, who then sell the stock to the public. Chronic undervaluation of IPOs is a function of the underwriters assuming the market risk, and the Facebook IPO being highly valued is bad for the underwriters. No matter what the stock does, Zuckerberg et. al. make the same amount on the IPO stock, although the market price does affect the value of their remaining stock.
The underwriters were ruthlessly squeezed to raise the price and include more shares. Amending the deal 8 times -- and at the last minute -- benefited the sellers not the underwriters.
Microsoft is forcing Apples hand. Simple as that. Apple has had their time dominating the market and getting paid, and now Microsoft wants a 'level playing field' so they can make their market.
Non-Opera prefixes are often used together, and sometimes in production. There is usually an no-prefix rule and two more, one with -moz- and one with -webkit- , and sometimes an -ms-. But Opera often gets left out since they're not that popular. Copying the Webkit prefixes will let them render correctly when there isn't an -o- prefix.
First of all, this "proposal" is coming from the fine folks over at Opera. And the "problem" is that people are using prefixes, just not their prefix (-o-). So they want to do away with them. Just last week they announced they were going to copy webkit's prefix, so I really don'y know why they are proposing this.
Opera wants this because the little players in any market want standardization, and the market leaders always want something along the gradient of 'freedom to innovate' to 'proprietary extensions'. Mozilla/Webkit/Chrome could fix this by not supporting private prefixes by default, and only supporting private prefixes when developers have turned them on. But the market leaders want to use the prefixes to force progress on CSS3 more than they want standardization.
satellite broadband will suck for some thing like this. Maybe fixed wifi / RF but even then that is still not as fast.
It'll be the ultimate echo chamber.
The assumption is that an employee who lied on his resume would likely be fired, but a CEO is too important to fire.
The assumption is that an employee who lied on his/her resume would likely lie about other things as well. A CEO can lie about the most important information about their company. Lie to the board, the stockholders, the SEC, etc.
His CS degree isn't relevant to his current position, but the fact that he lied about it is relevant.
So you think this is worse because a CEO can tell more important lies, to more important people (than the average worker)? Isn't that why CEOs are often allowed to lie in the first place? The summary gives lots of examples of CEOs lying -- big lies to important people -- but we're all familiar with common CEO lies that are socially accepted: Our earnings are up. We're not going to have layoffs. My outrageous salary is justified by my unique skills. Note that the accepted lies from CEOs include protecting and promoting themselves (I'm a visionary!), and can't all be justified as defending the company.
CEOs lie, and the reaction here is unjustified when it's so inconsistent with the reaction to more important lies.
And for those with a social agenda of stopping people from lying about education, or lying in general, try stating that argument rather then just condemning this one hyped occurrence.
Businesses are foolishly supporting CISPA while having their own access to information curtailed. If industry was shrewed they'd demand the same access and protections the government wants for itself.
The opening rounds of the privacy war have left government able to ignore the 4th amendment, and all privacy issues are now 'private sector' issues, like restricting business access to Facebook.
n/t
This FBI/Private Non-Profit is no more legal then what the NSA has been doing, and its why they want to pass CISPA: it legalizes warrantless wiretapping.
Now that it's undeniable the government hasn't been obeying it's own laws for a decade, they have to either make it legal or face political consequences. Political consequences because, while people don't really care, they can no longer deny it, and they can't ignore it forever. A decade of massively illegal activity (unconstitutional!) must eventually be acknowledged and condemned by the average person.
It's like the US Internment camps for Japanese citizens during WWII -- the government gets a decade long 'free pass' to do whatever, then we either make it legal or fix it.
The notion that H.264 is not "free" isn't a result of a development methodology, it's because people think that somehow patents make it that way, despite the fact that the software authors have no choice in the matter.
H.264 is not free-as-in-freedom nor free-as-in-beer, and patents are the reason. IP amounts to copyright, trade secrets and patents, but the first two don't apply here. It's a patent issue.
This is NOT a public safety issue: he doesn't claim to be licensed. People can talk about anything, and ask money for any kind of talk. (With the usual exclusions of Sedition/Libel/etc...) That's free speech. Here's an analogy discussing the law:
* People cannot pretend to be lawyers when they aren't, regardless of any money involved.
* People can give legal advice, whether they're a lawyer or not. If they're a lawyer, then they have extra obligations and restrictions.
* People can charge for legal advice, whether they're a lawyer or not. If they're a lawyer, then they have extra obligations and restrictions.
The second one should be obvious: you can tell your friends what you think about legal situations. If last one seems wrong it's because the phrase "legal advice" is generally used to mean advice given by a lawyer, rather than advice given on the subject of law. People are paid to give advice on the law all the time. If you want examples: a CEO asking the board if they can win a lawsuit, or asking a stock broker what the tax implications might be, or a chef telling a restaurant manager what the law demands in terms of sanitation standards. The people giving advice aren't pretending to be lawyers, they are talking about the law, and they are getting paid to do so.
They call a FAQ a 'assessing and counseling readers' because it answers questions. From the article:
Where it crosses the line, Burill said, is when a blogger “advertises himself as an expert” and “takes information from someone such that he’s performing some sort of assessment and then giving it back with some sort of plan or diet.”
Cooksey posted a link (6.3 MB PDF download) to the board’s review of his website. The document shows several Web pages the board took issue with, including a question-and-answer page, which the director had marked in red ink noting the places he was “assessing and counseling” readers of his blog.
“If people are writing you with diabetic specific questions and you are responding, you are no longer just providing information — you are counseling,” she wrote. “You need a license to provide this service."
The board also found fault with a page titled “My Meal Plan,” where Cooksey details what he eats daily.
In red, Burril writes, “It is acceptable to provide just this information [his meal plan], but when you start recommending it directly to people you speak to or who write you, you are now providing diabetic counseling, which requires a license.”
The board also directed Cooksey to remove a link offering one-on-one support, a personal-training type of service he offered for a small fee.
Cooksey posts the following disclaimer at the bottom of every page on his website:
“I am not a doctor, dietitian, nor nutritionist in fact I have no medical training of any kind.”
The idea that only licensed people can discuss a subject that everyone is familiar with is like the freak flip-side to 'teach the controversy'; instead of forcing people to disseminate wrong information, they've decided that only government licensed counselors speak the truth.
Since when has violating the law deterred the actions of our government? With the wiretapping of people without a warrant, search and seizure of anyone unfortunate enough to require air travel or border crossing, detainment of individuals without due process, to instigating of torture of war prisoners, I'm somewhat surprised we don't hear more stories like this.
Don't forget Asset Forfeiture -- you don't even have to be charged with a crime, much less convicted.
If there's one thing I learned from Slashdot, it's that data cannot be stolen.
Only physical goods that can be manufactured (usually more cheaply in the Far East or Latin America than in the US) can be stolen.
Also, Data is an active agent, struggling for it's own freedom. It may manipulate people or try to get itself marked executable to achieve freedom. That's why we need to fight against DEP -- it's just unfair to the data.