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Comment Re:Seems appropriate (Score 1) 353

The 5th Amendment exists because people were "asked" to testify, then, when the first charge didn't convict, try them for perjury on their testimony.

That, and beat a confession out of them.

Those were the main reasons for the 5th Amendment. Not to protect your computer files. You are required to hand those over (arguably in the format the prosecutor wants), so long as they get a valid warrant first. But that's a different Amendment.

Comment Re:Now thats incentive (Score 1) 564

I my earlier posts I've said about how Moon mining is to be done, or at least started off small scale to get materials for larger scale buildings. It's sort of a response to a NASA challenge over a decade ago for lunar oxygen extraction from regolith, mainly anorthite (CaAlSiO4x), or JPL-1 simulant. The process is calcium thermite with just about any silicate dust, then calcium oxide electrolysis in one of 3 ways: 1. room temperature Castner Kellner cell to get calcium amalgam, but the amalgam stripping side lithium ion battery solvents to get metallic calcium. 2. Rhenium (or Iridium is more abundant) anode molten calcium fluoride/oxide electrolysis with calcium cathode under vacuum relative to the normal vapor pressure of calcium. 3. the usual CaCl2 electrolysis with gradually raised cathodes (else the Ca metal dissolves back), then burning the Cl2 to HCl with hydrogen, then reacting the HCL with CaO to get water and CaCl2, and electrolyze the water. The metallic alumino-silicon slag that gets left behind from the thermite reaction has to be high temperature vacuum extracted for Mg, Na, K, then the remainder Si, Al, Fe, Ti needs to get chlorinated and distilled to separate out the individual elements, including ultrapure silicon for solar, aluminum for mirror, and iron and titanium for structural components.

Comment Re:Solution (Score 1) 36

Not just software patents. Patents on having your cat chase a laser pointer dot. A million people can come up with the same thing, and not bother to patent it, then one guy decides to patent it, and the other million have to pay him for it? It's ridiculous, because ridiculous things should not be patented. They should have very strict rules on what can be patented, such as a drug, a technical manufacturing process, or a technical device, that's novel. I came up with the same idea, with a playful cat, and later I found out there was a patent. So what, now I'm supposed to negotiate with the intellectual property holder about royalty fees? And he can charge me anything he feels like as back-dues? Couple million dollars for playing with a cat and a laser pointer? Or is the patent office gonna step in and regulate royalty fees now too? How about Microsoft/IBM screwing Gary Killdall out of DOS. Or copying the look and feel of Apple in Windows? Even with patents and intellectual property about them, things get circumvented in an oh, come on, the original guys deserve some credit for their inventions, so to speak. How much money did Gary Killdall get from the Microsoft/IBM gang for DOS? Diddly squat, instead he got killed in a Kain-like jealous style, for wearing a Harley Davidson jacket in a bike bar where that was a nono. Yes, in the US of A there are places where wearing Harley clothes is a big mistake. Really? Is that the best excuse you could come up with to kill him? Was he such a saint, you couldn't find any other fault with him? How about Apple, for creating the visual interface the Windows plain old copied? How much did Apple get paid? Wait, they did get paid by MS around 2000 that rescued them from bankruptcy, in a way to create a sock puppet make believe competition to the government antitrust lawsuit, because a company like Apple was better than Linux as the only other choice for computing, before the rise of pay by the minute or pay by click smart phones, There were a ton of people testifying about gangster practices of Microsoft. So under such circumstances, where the biggest moneymakers make their money by pretty much just raping other people's ideas how do you even claim to have intellectual property protection. You claim intellectual property, the gangsters show up and take it from you, and they forbid you and everyone else from using it. That's all intellectual property is in today's world. We no longer live in the times of Watt, where some kind of decency was expected, in fact even then it had a major retarding effect on the progress of the world. Back in the day you had "secrets." Like the secrets of paper making by Chinese, or porcelain making, that were subsequently rediscovered and duplicated by Europeans too, without paying royalty intellectual property fees to the Chinese over it. And in fact why would they? It was like competition, and whoever can come up with something, or copy it off someone else, go at it as much as you can. Which is what Microsoft does anyway with any new software trend - they killed Netscape dead with Internet Explorer, they dominated Apple's visual interface, Lotus 123, Wordperfect, now they are trying to kill Oracle's Java with Dotnet. Intellectual property? What intellectual property? It's all out competition, copy all ways of doing things that you can. That's what happens anyway, just like back in the day with Chinese porcelain. And what's wrong with such a world?

Comment Re:On this 4th of July... (Score 1) 349

DMCA takedown provisions made it so that anybody -- almost ANYBODY -- can "claim" a copyright infringement without ANY evidence, and force other people to remove their "speech" from public view, until they give evidence that it's NOT infringing.

No evidence is needed to provide a counter-notice.

The only reason there's a hold-down time after the counter-notice is to give the (supposed) copyright holder time to file a court case before it's back up.

It's innocent until proven guilty. The person is presumed innocent. The content is blocked until any disputes are settled, as making it available would cause an irrecoverable loss if the copyright holder is right. It's actually pretty sensible, though wasn't intended to have millions of automated take downs issued by non-holders of copyright who claim a 90% miss rate is "good faith". Change the way that's applied against the take-down issuers, and the problems mostly go away.

Comment Re:haven't we learned from the last 25 exploits? (Score 1) 68

How does one embed "JavaScript URLs" in CSS?

Very easily, and because so few people know it is possible, it's a rather nasty vector for cross-site scripting attacks.

Also you seem to have no idea about where the web is headed or have heard about responsive design and SPA.

I'm well aware of responsive design. I think it's an abomination, because all it does is make it take two page loads to view your site instead of one, by ensuring that I have to first load your broken mobile site, then click the "full version" link. Every single freaking time I end up on a "responsive" mobile version of a website, I find myself locked out of features that I regularly use, and end up having to switch to the full desktop version of the site.

If you need much more than a couple lines of JavaScript and a custom stylesheet to support mobile devices, it invariably means that your site is badly designed (too complex) to begin with, and as soon as you release the mobile version of your site, you're almost certainly going to make me hate your guts and curse your name.

And SPA is even worse. If your site loads significantly faster as a web app, there's something wrong with your site. 99% of the time, most of the resources should be shared across pages, and only the text of the page should be changing. There's usually not an appreciable difference between the "load the full page" case and the "load the body of the page" case from a performance perspective unless something is very, very wrong. There are exceptions, such as storefronts that use precisely the same page layout for every page, but these are exceptions, not the rule, and even then, the extra savings in initial page load time just result in a customer sitting there wondering why there's no data on the page, and thinking your site is broken. The real problem is that every web engineer thinks their site is the exception to this rule, but most of those engineers are wrong.

More to the point, if I'm accessing your site often enough to care about performance, I'm going to download your native app instead of using your mobile site, because it will always be much, much more functional, with fewer limitations, more features, and better performance. If I'm going to your website, it's either because I don't care about performance or, more commonly, it is because your native app is missing features that are only on the full version of your site. Giving me a mobile version won't help with the second case, and the first case is largely unimportant for everybody but the site designers who are trying desperately to shave off a few bytes from their data bill.

BTW, it's possible to do a manifested web app (giving you all the advantages of heavy-duty caching of shared content) without using JavaScript for all your navigation. You just specify the base path of the content directory as an external URL (I forget the details) in the web app manifest. This approach is much, much more user-friendly than a SPA in my experience.

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