scottdw2

"Reducing the size of government" means to reduce the power of government, not the proportion of representation.

I don't think that public funding of elections or free advertising (see the bottom of the page) are the solutions to government corruption. That would just force bribers to be more covert. It's analogous to the fact that SOPA wouldn't stop piracy.

It seems to me that the real solution is to dramatically limit the size of government, so that there is nothing to be bought, rather then just changing the currency used to make the purchase.

The laptop does not "contain" what they are looking for. It contains gibberish.

If they had her on tape saying "the evidence is in my house" and then they searched her house and didn't find anything, could they force her to tell them where the evidence was?

No.

Any position based on an analog to a vault, is ignorant of the facts. Encrypted data is not locked in anything. It's scrambled.

Here's another analogue:

A locked safe on your portch carries an expectation of privacy. It can't be opened by the police without a warrant. A dropped disk in plain site on your steps does not. The police could copy the disk, break its encryption and use the data as evidence against you.

Why? Because encrypted data isn't "locked", it's scrambled. If a credible expert can unscramble it, then reading it was not a "search". It's equivalent to reading a paper taken from your garbage.

The tape recording of her changes nothing about the facts of what the contes of the drive are (gibberish), nor what the nature of decryption is (testimony). Any judicial holdings to the contrary are erroneous violations of the constitution and should be vacated.

It's not a "reduction to the absurd". It brings up the point that there is no "essential law enforcement" interest that overrides the right to avoid self incrimination. No matter how badly someone wants to convict you, you have a right to not give testimony against your self against your will.

A compressed file has a bit pattern that clearly identifies it as compressed. It has statistical structure. Either way, a court couldn't compel her to uncompress a file either, as it would still constitute testimony.

They savy criminal argument doesn't pass constitutional muster.

You could say "allowing criminals to not testify against themselves could frustrate law enforcement because a savy criminal could just commit everything to memory."

The 5th ammendment clearly says "too bad, those are the rules."

You can be compelled to produce a physical key to a safe. However what if the contents of the safe are paper with text written in an invented language, known only to you?

Can you be compelled to translate them for the court?

What if they just contained numbers? Could you be forced to explain what the numbers mean?

I would conclude that such an action would violate the 5th ammendment.

Forcing her to decrypt the hard drive is the same thing.

Given a warrant, the police have the right to search her hard drive. If they can't understand what it says, she should not have to explain it to them.

Right now, they have no evidence. She is being compelled to produce evidence against her self.

Providing a physical key produces no evidence. It produces a key.

Providing a decrypted version of the data on the laptop is producing information. The contents of the laptop are such that they exhibit a high level of entropy. By definition, they are not information. If they did contain information, they would by definition not be encrypted.

Thus, the request is for the defendant in a criminal trial to replace something that is not information with something that is information. That is clearly a violation of the 5th ammendment.

Kick starter can't be used to start a corporation. That doesn't mean it couldn't be used to fund R&D. 20000 people can pay me $100 to make a movie, in exchange for a percentage of its sales. That's called a contract.

I can hire a production crew to make a movie.

No such activities constitute investment. They are just works for hire.

There may be liability issues. Potential breach of contract problems. You could get around that with the right contract structures (who hires whom, and what the terms are).

The funders wouldn't have the same rights as investors, but that seems ok.

Am I missing something?

Here is the recipe for killing Hollywood:

1. The Hollywood Business Model

The Hollywood business model is based on 2 things:

   1. Control of distribution

   2. Financing of production

The Internet has solved #1. Any content can be distributed to any one in the world for an effective cost of $0.

The reason they are not dead yet is because no one has solved #2. They still control production of most content.

2. It's like Kickstarter, but for movies

So, the solution is to attack film financing. Make it diffuse, and distributed.  Create a platform for film makers to seek financing in small amounts from normal people. You could call it "slushpile.com" or something line that. A film maker posts a 60 second trailer and a budget. People invest small amounts in the film. When the budget is reached the film maker gets the money, and he makes the film.

You then distribute the film through the site, for a fee. Split the revenues 70 / 20 / 10. The film makers get 70%, the "producers" (the funders) get 20%, and the site gets 10%.

3. A key first customer.

The obvious best choice is Kevin Smith. He understands the Internet, he makes entertaining films with small budgets, and he has an avid cult following. He's like the Ron Paul of film makers.

Its a schlep. You have to seduce movie stars. But, pulling it off would kill Hollywood, overnight.

Don't English and Welsh law allow for private prosecution of crimes in cases where the CPS declines to prosecute?

Wouldn't that provide an avenue of relief to the copy right holders without removing a UK citizen from the jurisdiction of UK laws?

This whole thing seems troubling to me.

How many US Internet companies collect VAT from sales to folks in the UK? Would that make founders of a US startup subject to extradition to the UK for tax avoidance? What if it's just a tiny DBA "company" with no liability shield?

The whole thing smells rotten to me!

Vendor lockout is not the worst part.

I'd worry much more about the executive branch.

http://www.sbir.gov/sbirsearch/detail/139791 http://www.sbir.gov/sbirsearch/detail/4957

I wrote it on my iPhone @ 2 am....There are many typos.

In any case, once someone posts a comment I can't edit a post, so by posting a reply about a typeo, you only ensure that it will never be fixed....

Generally speaking, unilateral provisions in contracts render the contract unenforceable by the party they benefit. The fundamental principal behind common law contracts is the "bargain principal". There must be some "consideration" paid by both parties before a contract is valid (I will give you this, in consideration for your giving me that). A clause in a contract that said, "we have the right to breach this contract at any time we choose" would render the contract void, because there is no "bargin" involved. Such types of promise (a promise to give something with nothing in return) are called "charity" and are not enforced by law. You can tell Jery Lewis, "I promise to give you $20 at your next telethon", but he can't sue you if you don't pay.

So... that means that the either:

1) The provision in the contract can't mean "we have the write to breach whenever we feel like it"

2) or, that the TOS are unenforceable.

The wording in the TOS is designed specifically to not mean "we can breach whenever we want", but instead to mean "if you sell counterfeit goods through our service we will destroy them and not refund your money".

The words "we ... reasonably believe the item you sold is counterfeit" were deliberately chosen for this purpose. The fact that paypal can use its sole discretion just tips the scales in their favor. If they have reasonable evidence that something is fake, then they can destroy it, even if they haven't done due diligence to prove it's a fake.

The question comes down to wether or not paypal had reason to believe the item was counterfeit.

Their are certain cases where only a customer complaint would be sufficient to establish a "reasonable believe".

For example, if Picasso bought a painting that was said to be a Picasso original, and he called paypal and said "I didn't paint this, it's a fake", they would definetly be within their rights if they distroyed it, even if further investigation could have revealed he was lying.

In this particular case... you could potentially argue that the customer's complaint was in no way sufficient for paypal to reach a "reasonable believe". This does make the whole thing wildly open to judicial interpretation, however.

This is shit.

I heard something similar from Joel Spolsky not that long ago.

It's like a George Wallace speech. The old guard, giving speeches targeted at the "do nothing class", urging them to help suppress a revolution.

All assessment of music ability is subjective. However, you can make it double blind. The students don't know they are being evaluated, and the evaluators don't know who is playing when they make their evaluations.

That would measure "subjective music ability".

I like the hypothesis the article presents: focusing on working intently hard, followed by relaxation and you will perform better. It's something I would want to beleive.

But, I find his analysis a little suspect. It appears to confuse corellation and causation. It notices a difference in behavior between the "great" and the "average" and assumes those differences to cause the difference in ability.

It completely ignores the possibility that the behavioral difference might be caused by a difference in ability, rather than the behavior changing the ability.

Also, another problem is that student classification is based on faculty opinion. The fact that students with a class of behavior tend to be liked more by their instructors implies something about the instructors, not the students. It does not measure music ability. It measures the ability to be perceived positively by music professors.

I would be interested to see a study that actually measures music ability, using set learning time frames with unfamiliar pieces and double blind assessment of music samples.

If that was correlated with behavior, then it might mean something.

The best the study can say is "if you want music teachers in Berlin to rate you highly, then behave this way".

I like the last sentence... It has a very lispy feel to it.

    > And there are awkward or unnecessary words and sentences, most of which I catch in successive passes near the end. It's interesting how often the last sentence of a paragraph can simply be deleted.

I use PC too...They don't do so well with some things, like bank drafts, particularly in USD. You have go through a CIBC branch, both banks charge a free (even though PC is run by CIBC), and you have to deal with 2 bureaucracies.

I admit, compared to other Canadian banks, PC is not bad. In the US though, you don't have to choose between branches and no fees....

Also, it's worth keeping in mind that if you keep a balance (to avoid fees) you are still paying a fee. One part is loss due to inflation (any interest rate below inflation is a negative return), and the other is opportunity cost....

I'm a US citizen living in Canada. In my experience, your sentiment is common amongst Canadians.

The thinking usually goes "Our banks might not be convienient, but at least they won't fail like the ones in the US".

My understanding of the mortgage crisis, however, is that most of the problems were with large banks, not small ones.

I can tell you that small US banks an credit unions offer substantially better service at better terms than Canadian banks do.

In Ontario, for example, there's only 1 bank that offers $0 checking accounts without absurdly low transaction limits (like 1 transaction per month). That bank doesn't have branches, and offers almost no services.

It's absurd if you think about it. "You want me to pay you a fee for the privilege of loaning you money."

The only way that kind of business can be sustained is through negative externalities.

No fee bank accounts are standard practice in the US, precisely because there are many banks to choose from. Choice drives competition.

Regulation of big banks may have prevented a banking crash, but I think it's a mistake to extrapolate from that notion to "many small banks are bad", because that was not the problem in the us...

A fixed and certain obligation to pay money or some other valuable thing or things, either in the present or in the future.

http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/_/dict.aspx?wo...

That's because the hot dog stand can refuse business to anyone....

Merchants can refuse your business for any reason they want....

A debt is any financial obligation. Any partially executed contract (you receive a good you agreed to pay for), creates a financial obligation, and hence a debt.

So, article I should make the law invalid.

If you write a non fiction book that says "world war I was the cause of world war II" you are entitled to copyright protection for your expression. However, you don't earn a monopoly on the notion that WWI cause WWII even if you were the first to express that. Someone else can still write a book that conveys that fact.

The "creative work" isn't the fact that country a is in time zone b. That's just data. A description of the process and the reasoning used to reach that conclusion, and an analysis of available facts is an expression. A map visualizing the data is an expression. A formatted chart is an expression. The connection between regions and timezones is just data. It's not protectable.

I'm not sure I follow that reasoning.

In Feist even copying made-up entries designed to detect copying was deemed to not be an infringement.

The statement that "this area is assigned to this timezone" is not a creative decision. It's an assertion of a fact. Even if it's a false fact made up by the author, it's still an assertion of a fact.

That information is not subject to copyright.

Perhaps the particular expression of the information is.... but I'm not sure how the tz database infringes on that.

Am I missing something?

IANAL, but....

In the US, per the copyright act, data can't be copyrighted. Some compilations can be copyrighted, but the Supreme Court has said that the compilation can't just be a collection of data. It needs to posses even a small modicum of creativity in order to deserve protection. Your curated list of "awesome places to eat in NY" can be copyrighted. The yellow pages cannot.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_v._Rural for details.

My guess is that a world timezone database does not meet this minimum level of creativity.

The descriptions I've read about the lawsuit seem to indicate that the plaintiffs complain that some individual records were copied from their database, and that the database directly indicates that they did so. They would only have a case if they lifted major portions of the database and copied them enmasse, stealing their formatting, and the original was deemed to be more like your "curated ny restaurant list" than it was like the yellow pages.

Taking the information present in the records, and translating them to a different database format is likely not an infringement, per the copyright act. Even if it was though, the material in question likely isn't copyrightable anyways.

That's the problem. The GIS market is too broad. The ESRI products ate inaccessible to most people. They cost too much, and are too difficult to use. Precisely because they are targeting professional cartographers.

Raster algebra isn't something normal people need.

I don't want to create a product for highly trained cartographers. I want to create a product for me (someone who wants to create simple information graphics).

A patent is not an inalienable right. Definetly not in the libriterian sense.

1. A patent is, fundamentally anti-libriterian. It's an example of the government interfering with private action, buy granting exclusive rights solely to a single entity. When the government enforces a patent it intervenes in the market place, picking winners and loosers. In most contexts, that's called corpatism. The fact that the rights conveyed by government granted monopoly can be bought and sold doesn't make them a libriterian concept.

2. The monopoly granted by a patent is not inalienable. Congress has the express power to "promote the progress of science and the useful arts" through granting of monopolies. Any monopoly rights conveyed by congress impede the natural rights of man. They prevent me from manufacturing, selling, or reproducing what I see fit to manufacture, sell, or reproduce. As an action that is fundamentally abhorrent to liberty, congress's power to grant such a monopoly is only valid within the scope of it's enumerated powers. Software patents do not "promote the progress of science or the useful arts", they impede it. So, not only are they not inalienable, they are unconstitutional.

Patents aren't actually property, so I don't think the 5th ammendment applies. Invalidating a patent doesn't deprive the holder of anything. It just stops the law from injoining others from engaging in protected activities.

GC is inevitable, but so is no GC. In the 80s people wanted to write software on platforms where GC was not practical. Having a GC when you have 640 K of ram is silly. So people used languages that didn't have GC. But then the platforms grew exponentionally, and people started wanting to do more complex things, and they say "all this manual memory management is crazy... lets use GC", just like the previous generation of computer scientists did before them.

Then the iPhone came out...

ARC isn't a revolution, it's just a stage in a cycle....

In 10 years your 20 core smartphone will have a GC running in it.