> propose looting corporations, paychecks, and any other source of wealth to get government to pay for government freebies.
> Since stealing is therefore OK, why don't we steal from other countries rather than from US citizens?

I thought you are a democracy. So it's not stealing, it's doing something together:
"Hey, let's build a highway from New York to Los Angeles, none of us can afford it, so let's do it together and everybody - including cooperations - pays a small part."

Well, the US is doing some really expensive stuff that scandinavian countries don't do:

- fighting wars
- maintaining a massive amount of political police like homeland security
- keeping a large proportion of your population in prison (not only do those cost money, they also don't create wealth)
- having a space program
- paying interest rates because taxes in the past did not cover expenses (in Norway interes rates are an income to governement)

This might explain why taxes are higher in the US.

Essentially a society must decide how much money to spend and then taxes must be high enough to cover those expenses (and debt created by previous generations).

Fixed that for you.

Also please note: There is evidence that access to pornography (not necessarily child pornography) reduces the risk of someone molesting a child. (James D. Weinberg: Sexual Landscapes. S. 397ff)

The way to go is to use lossy compression formats based on 24 bit raw data with at least 96kHz sample rate.
Reducing the file size drastically from that starting point is possible without any reduction in perceived quality. But doing that by the way the CD does (e.g. removing half the samples and cutting of the lower bits) does a really bad job of distributing the error.

Especially a dynamic of more than 16 bits is important for classical music or movie audio tracks. If you have a 60dB dynamic in a track, the silent parts will be quantized to 6 bits on a CD. A dolby audio stream will at a medium data rate will have much better signal quality than the CD in cases like that.

Of course the worst thing to do is to convert it to CD format first and then add lossy compression later, as you get the worst of both worlds.

> Are you really claiming that there are more researchers legitimately investigating porn websites than there are horny frat boys who just want to jerk off in their dorm rooms
No. But I am claiming, that 1000 frat boys jerking of in their dorm do less harm, than one legitimiate research who can't do his work. If it were just porns, things would be easy. The point is, that in all sorts of areas administration tries to seperate useful from useless sites, but the people doing that have no way of knowing what will be required by their staff. (It might be porn for researcher X, a shopping site for researcher Y, slashdot for another one. I could imagine that access to warez websites has been important to the research of Lawrence Lessig.)
So instead they should concentrate on detectign and filtering malware and not filter based on content.

> More software companies who have not figured out a better way to deliver their product than emailing it to random employees than random employees who would install every "screensaver" emailed to them by a criminal? Really? Because that sure sounds pretty implausible to me.

This is a misrepresentation of the case I made. The E-Mails we trying to send are to engineers specifically designated to develop driver installers in cooperation with us. Yet, there was no official approved way of getting .exe files to them, they had to use trial and error to figure out a way to get past their system.
The random employee your are talking about should not have permission to install software in his system. But maybe they should have permission to receive .exe files to forward them to another employee with the correct permissions?

Yes. But there also is research on porn.

It is a long time that I have been to university, but I have similar trouble with customers. Our Engineers waste a lot of time trying to get software we developed for a customer to the customers engineers because any of the following occur frequently:

* dropbox is blocked
* .exe and .dll are not allowed in e-mail
* our hoster is in a class A net blacklisted by customers spam-filter
* we chose a file name that matches some regular expression deemed dangerous by their IT staff
* sftp is blocked
and so on, and so on

This is fine, if there is a clear procedure handling these exceptions. (e.g. if a researcher writing a paper on porn site can walk up to the IT appartment and get a list of sites opened for his computer within in minutes.) But ultimately these restrictions serve no real purpose and just waste a lot of money in the form of time lost by both IT, administrative and research staff.

Also, I wonder if research really works, if researches have to convince a censoring body that there request to access a site is legitimate before they can proceed with their research. (Yes sir, gamesexpert.com is not a sex site!)

You can patent the "push e-mail to device instead of polling" part, because it does not relate to software. You could implement it with manual labor and pidgeons and would still be violating the patent.

What you can't patent in Germany is algorithm, so a claim that says "push e-mail where the e-mail headers are processed via regular expressions" would no be valid.

what is stranger is that if the patent is very broad, it could be invalid because regular letters, faxes, teletypes, etc. have all been based on pushing the message to the receiver so there should be prior art.

> It really gets absurd in the cases where you have 100,000 lines of code that's your own but including 2 lines of GPL code means
including 2 lines of ANY code makes it a derivative work. That's copyright law.

> you have to give away your code as it's a derivative work.
The GPL allows you to automatically obtain a license to the code you included, without getting a specific prior permission from the author. All you have to do is open up the code.

Of course all other ways to get a copyright license for those two lines are still open to you. (like, you know, paying the author)

So, the GPL is not taking anything away, it is just giving you an additional option to normal copyright law. It might be true that in your scenario this additional option is almost worthless, but you are still better off than with code that is not GPL licensed.

> Maybe you should stop being a child and trying to insinuate that the only way someone can have a monopoly is by being the only actor.
What do you think "mono" means in the word?

The definition on Wikipedia is:
"A monopoly (from Greek monos (alone or single) + polein (to sell)) exists when a specific person or enterprise is the only supplier of a particular commodity."

German anti trust laws therefore don't talk about monopolies but about illegal market domination which is assumed to happen above 30% market share.

> A takedown notice for a legal copy will cause a deletion of all illegal copies under your reasoning.
Sorry, the other way around...

>No, that is entirely incorrect. This has nothing to do with different works.

I was talking about one work, too.

>What the other poster was claiming was that there might be multiple instances of work X on your server, and some of those might be authorized.
That is the scenario that I describe.
Music distribution rights usually are held on a regional basis. It is very common that multiple entities hold the rights for the same work.

Multiple identical uploads of the work to youtube will end up in the same files (You can bet that google is using deduplication at least on a block level.)

A takedown notice for a legal copy will cause a deletion of all illegal copies under your reasoning.

Youtube might not even be the best example: Think of amazon market place: If a company asks Amazon to remove image of their product (or even their logo) to be removed from the website because a competitor is using it without permission, Amazon would have to remove the image also from the product offerings of the original company.

> However, they are required to remove the file, not just
> one link. If some other user had an AUTHORIZED link to that file, they can file a counter-notice, and the host would restore the file.

This means at least the damage is not permanent, but the damage is caused.

While I agree that Megaupload are fraudsters, their reasoning in this topic actually makes a lot of sense.

> The law does not say 'remove a single link to the material', or 'remove one copy of the material', it says 'remove the material'.

So, say, some music company (A) is using youtube to promote their music and upload a music video (X) that they have online disctribution rights for.
Someone else (B) without these rights is uploading an illegal copy (Y) to youtube.
Another rights holder (C) - say another music company from another country - issues a takedown notice for URL (Y).

What you are saying is that the DMCA requires youtube to remove the legitimate video (X) alongside with the illegal copy (Y)?

Wow.

Your legal system is so fucked up. I can't understand why anybody is still doing business with the US.
It's just to risky.

What is the scope of the paragraph? Must a web hoster do this for all servers? So my data is at risk if I am using the same hoster as some illegitimite user?

This is not just about putting DRAM and a CPU on the same chip while keeping the architecture of both unchanged.
This is about how computer architecture is effected by the possibility of implementing both on the same chip.

Dave Patterson noted in the nineties that the number of DRAM chips per computer went down with time. He predicted that DRAM
will become large enough soon that at least the memory for a single process will fit into one chip soon. At that point it is unecessary
slow and power consuming to move the data to the CPU and back for every computation (or alternativly spend 90% of the CPU chip
area for cache to reduce the number of transports)

When you do put CPU and DRAM on the same chip the cost functions change and different architectures become optimal.
Patterson noted that when you have a CPU and DRAM on the same chip the relative architectural cost functions will be similar to the
technologies of the 70ies, just a few orders of magnitude smaller. Therefore he revisited architectures of that time and suggested to
put a vector computer on a DRAM chip called the IRAM.
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~pattrsn/talks/iram.html

Vector computers do not benefit much from cache. Latency is not a big issue for vector computers but they really benefit from bandwidth.
On chip you can connect the DRAM to the CPU with 2048 bits bus width or more. (And the latency would be much smaller than the latency
of a CPU going through a big cache hierachy and an external bus to the RAM)

If more memory is needed than fits on one chip he suggested to minimize data transports between chips. Instead the register state of the
process would be migrated to the DRAM where the desired data resides.

>http://xkcd.com/radiation/

Missing on that chart: 300mSv for one year of heavy smoking:
http://www.webspawner.com/users/radioactivetobacco/index.html

The EU currently is evaluating whether all extradictions to the US will be stopped because the bradley manning case shows that suspects in the US are not safe from torture. (Long periods of isolation are torture according to international standards)