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http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2008/05/struggles-frances-three-strikes-law

Canada is mentioned at the bottom

Jonathan

And to see an example that makes your theory not very far-fetched at all, one only needs to look at the steganography in color laser printers, where almost all color laser printers embed identifying information into each page printed out, in the form of yellow dots. (More here at the Eff.)

It isn't like "New and improved: know which printer printed every page, whether you want it or not!" was a good marketing slogan.

That's a really idealized vision of the system.

Capitalism is a game in which buyers and sellers are oppenents.

Saying "the market decides" means that the power is all in the hands of the buyers: that's when you can say that "the market will make better products appear": better meaning better for the buyer. This is the ideology which justifies capitalism: the people are the buyers, and the law are (supposed to be) made for the people's sake.

But this is just one extreme in the balance of power between the two players; and just finding a good example for it is difficult. The best one is probably gas stations: you know exactly what you are buying, and you can easily check an other one, so the margins are (I guess) pretty low.
But in many cases, the balance weights heavily toward the seller. We all know the reasons: using people's mistakes (lottery, complicated billing), forced buying (bundling, etc), monopoly (or any alliance of sellers against buyers), control of the information, control of the law (lobbying).

All thoses are limitted or forbidden by the law, because they all go against the people's interest. Even marketing, when you think about it, is pretty absurd since it openly tries to make a deal seem better than it really is for buyer.
The only moral justification you can think of to allow marketing is that a company will only have the money to run ads if it is successful; this takes for granted that success is mostly the result of the company's real usefulness to the people.
In short, marketing is only justified if it does not change the relative success of companies!
(Note: you can't justify marketing just by freedom of speech, which is intended for cases when the law should stay neutral in the fight between two parties, as in a trial; there is no reason not to favor the people against the sellers. Except for international competitivity; it's often an easy excuse, but it's a valid point and a wider discussion).

Of course, the other cases (monopoly, bundling) are even harder to justify; but the worse is certainly lobbying. The simple idea that sellers could affect the law is utterly absurd, and lobbying is the best indicator of the power balance. In France -and I guess most countries- it's simply called corruption (which does not mean it doesn't happen).

And by the way: the internet has the potential to take a lot of power away from the sellers. Before Ebay, some companies made profit just by providing the organisation that buyers lacked.
Things can really change; that is, if we don't let them rewrite the laws too much with the power they have left.

1, 2, 3... Fight!

That's like saying an ISP is responsible for all the child porn their users download. Nobody has been busted for posession of anything merely for running a Freenet node as far as we know, and in any sane jurisdiction hopefully nobody ever will be. The EFF's legal advice to p2p devs may be of interest here: http://www.eff.org/wp/iaal-what-peer-peer-developers-need-know-about-copyright-law

First of all, kudos to Public Knowledge for an excellent writeup.

The idea that it is impossible for an end-user to purchase any Blizzard software, seems preposterous on the surface, and is as wacky and radical as it seems. But it has been upheld in a previous Blizzard case. See Blizzard vs BNETD, and in particular, read the September 30, 2004 court order, because around page 19 it gets fucking amazing. The court really did agree with Blizzard that the users had never, ever purchase the software. The users walked into a store, paid money, never signed anything, were never informed they weren't buying the software, and yet they walked out of the store without having -- get this -- "title."

Yeah, title. I don't have a title or any other documentation that asserts that I own the socks that I'm currently wearing. Since the transaction for buying(???) my socks is in every way exactly identical to the transaction that Blizzard customers(?) make when they acquire that company's products, I must assume this scumbag court would be happy to take my clothes.

Blizzard's customers were ripped off, and didn't even know it. AFAIK no class action suite or fraud prosecutions never took place, so Blizzard got away with it. But that aside, the court ruled that the crime really had happened: Blizzard got the money and never transferred ownership of a copy of the software.

If Blizzard gets into the same court of dishonorable judges again, there is no reason to suspect the outcome will be any different. The judges will rule that Blizzard defrauded their customers fair'n'square, Blizzard still owns the copies of the software, and that the customers are only using the CDs that Blizzard owns but that are located within the customers' homes, by the terms that Blizzard set forth.

Needless to say, something needs to be done about this blatant fraudulent activity. Either that, or get honorable judges who see through the bullshit and say that Blizzard did what they appeared to do: they sold copies of the software.

To whom it might interest- EFF's list of ISPs who allow publicly sharing Internet access.

I wonder how this affects the use of Machine Identification Code currently used by almost all printer manufacturers at the request of the Secret Service. Obviously a counterfeiter would not be using self-erasing paper, (imagine their surprise when 24 hours later, their batch of freshly printed counterfeit bills appears blank!) but if that paper gets reused several times using several different printers, the machine ID codes printed on there would be useless.

I personally hope it does render the machine ID codes obsolete, since I'm not exactly in favor of having tracking codes printed on paper.

to the NSA was the original slogan :-P

http://w2.eff.org/legal/cases/att/att_splash.png
alt link: http://farm1.static.flickr.com/18/93928749_9092b299e5.jpg

> The biggest issue remaining to be resolved by this trial is how much of the "license" monies given to SCO Group

Right, these are what SCO doesn't own. Sorry for the confusion :)

- I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property

EFF does this, better than we could. Give 'em a hefty donation.

> Is anybody gullible enough to believe that Bush would actually sign a bill that could hold his administration responsible for its crimes?

FYI: They cut off the last sentence of the submission where I said there was no way it was going to pass this term. Not that it matters, but yeah. If it gets to Bush, I expect him to accuse the supporters of aiding terrorists or something.

- I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property

Sadly it's not just a Republican or Democrat issue. The Patriot act, communications decency act, etc were all pretty bi-lateral. The Bush administration have clawed their way to a lot of executive privileges and trampling of rights, far more than any other president. However the Congress hasn't done much complaining. Where are the changes the Dem's promised when they took back the house?

There are a few individuals who are good on privacy and the rule of the constitution. This election cycle I can think of Paul (R) and Kucinich (D) as candidates who didn't get the attention they deserved since they weren't soundbite only types of people. Upholding the constitution doesn't seem to be generally a popular topic for people when they vote.

The EFF and EPIC are good places to visit regularly, especially EPIC's bill track.

May take a while - a few months, a few years - but they can wait.

Once you've forgotten about this story, they'll go to work making it happen.

Support the EFF, ACLU, and GOA. :)

> As long as the burden of proof to show harm to consumers isn't too high, this should be relatively simple.

Well, that's the rub, isn't it? Proving things like "harm to consumers" is VERY expensive and requires expert witnesses and studies to counter your opposition because it's so vague. Proving someone lied is a lot simpler and less expensive. Not to mention less of a matter of opinion.

As long as they can get away with lying to standards bodies to create or further a monopoly, though, I really don't like it. Suddenly, it changes the economic equation so that people can't challenge them unless it's too expensive not to. In other words, Microsoft may be able to use this as nearly a carte blanche to subvert standards bodies in its war on open standards.

Oh, I should also add an addendum to this story: it seems that this was decided by a three judge panel, so there's one more possibility for appeal, according to some Groklaw comments. They may be able to appeal and have all the judges decide. But this appeal might not be granted, either, so who knows? If any actual lawyer responds and tells us about the appeals route, listen to them, not me :) I'm only sure about the Supreme Court being able to overturn this ruling (if they deign to), and the lower court being able to hold Rambus accountable for other reasons.

- I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property

I think you are just getting a dose of turn about is fair play.

The CIA and NSA have tampered with electronics being sold to America's adversaries for years.

I mean, one thing is what a government does to its own citicents; it sort of have authority to do whatever it wants except as limited by international agreements. But one country should not be able to force its own politics upon other countries. Just recently usage of wi-fi has been restricted in Russia. What if a country, say Burma, made usage of wi-fi illegal, should then other countries suddenly be forced to make it illegal as well?

As my old HP Laserjet 6L is clearly showing its age on the printouts, I am currently actively searching for a replacement and would like to have a colour laserjet. Does anyone have tips for getting an affordable one, without the yellow dots?

Sorry, I didn't mean to make work for you on a Sunday evening. I actually submitted this... what? Last Friday? Oh well. So I just wanted to thank you for responding :)

I picked this up via Groklaw. I understand only some of it, thanks to one old college class on court procedure, and I wondered how it could have intersected with the **AA war on universities if it had gone the other way and held them liable. Of course, it didn't and I think that Slashdot just got a free course in Constitutional law, which is also good.

So thank you, Ray, for being such a good sport here. I hope I don't owe you a keyboard from when you saw your name mentioned in the story or anything ;-)

- I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property

Ridiculous or not, they did eventually get properly standardized to defend the meaning of the prefixes. The original article wrote MB, when it was clearly using MiB in context, so I changed it.

I just thought it would be a bit hypocritical of me to complain about perverting standards if I was using non-standard notation. Yes, the scope and reasoning are FAR different (and there's good reason to think that the HD makers created the confusion to begin with to inflate HD sizes), but still, they have been properly standardized. And I'm not aware of anyone trying to buy that vote.

In other words, I just felt that it was important to try to hold myself to the standards I would hold others to. Even for silly little nits like that.

- I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property

Therefore, what I presume the Court's ruling held is that Congress could not abrogate sovereign immunity of the states for copyright infringement because such infringement is not one of the vestiges of slavery. Also, I suspect that there is probably some discussion of states' immunity from suit in federal courts for copyright infringement. Since copyright infringement is a claim that can only be brought in federal court, you can see how a state could infringe at will by refusing to permit itself to be sued in federal court on a claim that is impossible to bring in state courts.

That's pretty much my take on it. So now I wonder if the Federal Government has given up it's own protection from infringement?

Oh, and I should mention one other thing lest you think the Court let them off the hook: they can still sue whoever it was that allegedly infringed upon their precious report by rewriting bits of it, but that person has no money to speak of.

Sorry to call you out like that, NYCL, but I thought you would have a better handle on it. Next time, I'll have to get my legal advice from Ask Slashdot, just like you said ;-)

- I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property

One thing I didn't manage to work into the summary is the mention of documents which indicate that Mueller may have been mislead by subordinates. I do not know if this is true or not. And it may still be his fault if he pressed folks to find him justification "or else" (that's just a hypothetical, mind you). But it seems that when evidence is asked of them these days, our 'intelligence' community will find it whether it exists or not.

Whatever the reason, and whoever is at fault, I think that the willingness of the organization as a whole to manufacture evidence on demand is absolutely the most troubling aspect overall.

Suffice it to say that, if we suddenly start hearing about reasons we "need" to invade Iran any time soon, I won't be able to trust my own government in the slightest. And, as someone who loves America (but NOT the things it has been doing), I find that incredibly troubling.

- I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property

Wow is the summary wrong, please see http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2008/04/eff-issues-report-abuse-national-security-letter for info.
Anyways the truth of the occurance.
1) It was used as a reason why the FBI needs administrative subpoena power instead of NSLs. (summary totaly wrong).
2) What happened. The FBI wanted information on a person who had meet with people involved with the bombers in London; that person had a attended chemical classes from NC State. They went to the professors who gave the FBI some information using a subpeona. Some news articles say this happened others say the subpeona was not honored by the university. Anyways he had some papers but was told by FBI HQ Counter-Terrorism Division to stop and the agent returned the papers.
The FBI agent was told a grant jury subpeona was not legal to use and an NSL was the legal method to use, however NSLs do not allow use for educational records so were also illegal. He takes the NSLS to the university they make some calls and do not honor it because it was an NSL asking for educational records. More details at above link along with the offices saying to use a NSL.
FBI comes back to the offices and asks what to do, after some dicussions he is told subpeona was the correct method so back he goes with another one. Univeristy ultimatly complied and handed over the paperwork.
So the problems with this are: Mueller to Congress said that it delayed by 2 days the processing, agents say it delayed by somewhere around 1 day, original request was on July 13 all was done on July 15; the main problem was the NC office did not report the problems and misuse of the NSL in the time frame they should of and during that time the FBI released a press release saying something that because of this incident was false.

You could have gone to eff.org and found the source on the front page, if you weren't too lazy to care about the United States. (Apologies if you aren't American.) But because you are so lazy, here's a link (hopefully, this works): http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2008/04/eff-issues-report-abuse-national-security-letter

> I think it's just that the story submitter accidentally included the letters UAC in the headline.

Dammit man, where the hell were you when I was writing that headline? :-)

At least I got the "Your Identity Worth Less Than $15" headline right, though. Even Ars Technica mentioned it obliquely after I scooped them on that story...

- I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property

Support the EFF so they can keep stomping stuff like this!

Our Bono kicks your Bono's ass!

First sale absolutely applies, as there is plenty of legal precedent that gifts count as sales for purposes of the first sale doctrine. The EFF brief has all the detailed arguments, and plenty of references. It's also quite readable, and quite thorough about dismantling UMG's arguments.

Dear record companies:

When your own VP of content protection admits in a deposition that he has bought some of your promo CDs on the second hand market, your case that someone selling them on eBay is infringing your copyrights starts to look, well, ridiculous.

(EFF Brief, page 18.)

> I realize that living at home with your parents and not having to pay for rent, utilities, food, and clothes may allow you to skate by with a very low monthly balance, but the vast majority of people who work for a living have to have the cash on hand (in their checking account, anyway) to pay for all these necessities.

Actually, much of my money does, in fact, go to paying for such things. While my balance isn't particularly low, either, that's because I have a job. A good job that I'm good at, giving me tons of free time to post to Slashdot from work. It's not a good thing when a systems administrator has too much work, after all.

There are more than a few who live off their paycheck. It just happens that I'm not one of them.

> But I don't suppose someone whose name is "I don't believe in imaginary property" would have a very solid grasp of the real world.

Perhaps, but doubtless more than someone named BadAnalogyGuy :)

- I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property

To partially copy-paste from a previous post, I live in Seattle, which is in King County, evidently the 12th largest county in the nation according to their FAQ site. I worked the AVU (Assisted Voting Unit) for the primaries this year. It was a Diebold Accuvote TSx (direct link to PDF). It has a printer and a sealed spool, and the voting works like this:
1. Voter makes their selections on the screen and hits the "Next" button (or whatever it is)
2. The printer prints a printout of what they voted on all the candidates and any issues, scrolling it up into a window
3. The voter looks at the paper ribbon through the window, confirming that what they voted for actually showed up right
4. The voter hits the "cast ballot" button, and the paper that they were looking at through the window gets sucked up into a spool with two security seals on it.
5. After all is said and done, the spool gets put in a bag and gets taken to some central place, in a car with more than one person in it, from different parties, if possible.
If there is anything at all wrong with the vote, the ballot is scrapped and the voter re-votes. This scrapped vote is also recorded and taken up into the spool. The spool also had barcodes everwhere for machine-scanning, as well as the people-readable (and verifiable) totals.

Sounds like what you're asking for. Given, it's not a Mini-ATX hooked to a server, but that is terribly impractical. I worked in a polling place in some church where we had a total of about 80 voters come through in 14 hours. Setting up a server would have been completely impractical. Other than that, it seems your requirements have been met - the exact same paper that the voter looked at gets sucked up into a tamper-proof* spool, which is transported as securely as any voting records to a central storage place. If there is any question of the vote, the spools are taken out, un-sealed, and counted - every record having been visually verified by the voter who cast it.
As for cost, they were small, self-contained touchscreen units - I think I remember hearing them being in the price range of about $6k or so per unit. Expensive, yes, but not unusually exorbient. This is the government, after all.
I knew there were problems with the earlier systems not having printers and such, but they seem to have finally gotten them right.

*Reasonably tamper-resistant, anyway - Secured by a VOID-type sticker (that leaves behind crap) and a plastic, one-way clip similar in concept (but more foolproof) than a zip tie, both with ID numbers that are recorded in multiple places, with multiple people watching and signing to verify. Yes, this can break down at the individual level, but so can any system - if you've got corrupt officials, no system can keep them from throwing things.

To partially copy-paste from a previous post, I live in Seattle, which is in King County, evidently the 12th largest county in the nation according to their FAQ site. I worked the AVU (Assisted Voting Unit) for the primaries this year. It was a Diebold Accuvote TSx (direct link to PDF). It has a printer and a sealed spool, and the voting works like this:
1. Voter makes their selections on the screen and hits the "Next" button (or whatever it is)
2. The printer prints a printout of what they voted on all the candidates and any issues, scrolling it up into a window
3. The voter looks at the paper ribbon through the window, confirming that what they voted for actually showed up right
4. The voter hits the "cast ballot" button, and the paper that they were looking at through the window gets sucked up into a spool with two security seals on it.
5. After all is said and done, the spool gets put in a bag and gets taken to some central place, in a car with more than one person in it, from different parties, if possible.
If there is anything at all wrong with the vote, the ballot is scrapped and the voter re-votes. This scrapped vote is also recorded and taken up into the spool. The spool also had barcodes everwhere for machine-scanning, as well as the people-readable (and verifiable) totals.

Sounds like what you're asking for. Given, it's not a Mini-ATX hooked to a server, but that is terribly impractical. I worked in a polling place in some church where we had a total of about 80 voters come through in 14 hours. Setting up a server would have been completely impractical. Other than that, it seems your requirements have been met - the exact same paper that the voter looked at gets sucked up into a tamper-proof* spool, which is transported as securely as any voting records to a central storage place. If there is any question of the vote, the spools are taken out, un-sealed, and counted - every record having been visually verified by the voter who cast it.
As for cost, they were small, self-contained touchscreen units - I think I remember hearing them being in the price range of about $6k or so per unit. Expensive, yes, but not unusually exorbient. This is the government, after all.
I knew there were problems with the earlier systems not having printers and such, but they seem to have finally gotten them right.

*Reasonably tamper-resistant, anyway - Secured by a VOID-type sticker (that leaves behind crap) and a plastic, one-way clip similar in concept (but more foolproof) than a zip tie, both with ID numbers that are recorded in multiple places, with multiple people watching and signing to verify. Yes, this can break down at the individual level, but so can any system - if you've got corrupt officials, no system can keep them from throwing things.

I live in Seattle, which is in King County, evidently the 12th largest county in the nation according to their FAQ site. I worked the AVU (Assisted Voting Unit) for the primaries this year. It was a Diebold Accuvote TSx (direct link to PDF). It has a printer and a sealed spool, and the voting works like this:
1. Voter makes their selections on the screen and hits the "Next" button (or whatever it is)
2. The printer prints a printout of what they voted on all the candidates and any issues, scrolling it up into a window
3. The voter looks at the paper ribbon through the window, confirming that what they voted for actually showed up right
4. The voter hits the "cast ballot" button, and the paper that they were looking at through the window gets sucked up into a spool with two security seals on it.
5. After all is said and done, the spool gets put in a bag and gets taken to some central place, in a car with more than one person in it, from different parties, if possible.
If there is anything at all wrong with the vote, the ballot is scrapped and the voter re-votes. This scrapped vote is also recorded and taken up into the spool.

I don't see how that is any less secure and worse than traditional paper ballots - it seems, in fact, much better to me. The voter gets visual confirmation of their vote, there are no chads of any sort to worry about, the exact same paper that the voter looked at gets sucked up into a tamper-proof* spool, which is transported as securely as any voting records to a central storage place. If there is any question of the vote, the spools are taken out, un-sealed, and counted - every record having been visually verified by the voter who cast it.
I knew there were problems with the earlier systems not having printers and such, but they seem to have gotten them right. Yes, there could be viruses and crap, but I don't see how any virus could get around the visual confirmation by the voter. The only way I can see that it would cause problems is if it tweaked the results enough that there was no suspicion, so that no manual recount would take place - no worse than any other system.

I call FUD on the e-vote-phobia, at least in King County. The system is well-designed and works as well if not better than the traditional paper methods.

*Reasonably tamper-resistant, anyway - Secured by a VOID-type sticker (that leaves behind crap) and a plastic, one-way clip similar in concept (but more foolproof) than a zip tie, both with ID numbers that are recorded in multiple places, with multiple people watching and signing to verify. Yes, this can break down at the individual level, but so can any system - if you've got corrupt officials, no system can keep them from throwing things.

I live in Seattle, which is in King County, evidently the 12th largest county in the nation according to their FAQ site. I worked the AVU (Assisted Voting Unit) for the primaries this year. It was a Diebold Accuvote TSx (direct link to PDF). It has a printer and a sealed spool, and the voting works like this:
1. Voter makes their selections on the screen and hits the "Next" button (or whatever it is)
2. The printer prints a printout of what they voted on all the candidates and any issues, scrolling it up into a window
3. The voter looks at the paper ribbon through the window, confirming that what they voted for actually showed up right
4. The voter hits the "cast ballot" button, and the paper that they were looking at through the window gets sucked up into a spool with two security seals on it.
5. After all is said and done, the spool gets put in a bag and gets taken to some central place, in a car with more than one person in it, from different parties, if possible.
If there is anything at all wrong with the vote, the ballot is scrapped and the voter re-votes. This scrapped vote is also recorded and taken up into the spool.

I don't see how that is any less secure and worse than traditional paper ballots - it seems, in fact, much better to me. The voter gets visual confirmation of their vote, there are no chads of any sort to worry about, the exact same paper that the voter looked at gets sucked up into a tamper-proof* spool, which is transported as securely as any voting records to a central storage place. If there is any question of the vote, the spools are taken out, un-sealed, and counted - every record having been visually verified by the voter who cast it.
I knew there were problems with the earlier systems not having printers and such, but they seem to have gotten them right. Yes, there could be viruses and crap, but I don't see how any virus could get around the visual confirmation by the voter. The only way I can see that it would cause problems is if it tweaked the results enough that there was no suspicion, so that no manual recount would take place - no worse than any other system.

I call FUD on the e-vote-phobia, at least in King County. The system is well-designed and works as well if not better than the traditional paper methods.

*Reasonably tamper-resistant, anyway - Secured by a VOID-type sticker (that leaves behind crap) and a plastic, one-way clip similar in concept (but more foolproof) than a zip tie, both with ID numbers that are recorded in multiple places, with multiple people watching and signing to verify. Yes, this can break down at the individual level, but so can any system - if you've got corrupt officials, no system can keep them from throwing things.

Okay, so the advertisers are tracking you using a non-personally identifiable cookie. What about the government? They are wiretapping your home phone and your wireless phone without adequate 4th amendment protections. To top it all off Congress is trying to give immunity to those who violated your Constitutional Fourth Amendment rights.

People are pissed off because Amazon knows you want a roll of toilet paper, but don't care when the government might be spying on you? Get a clue and get your priorities straight.

http://www.stopthespying.org/
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2008/02/myth-facts-about-retroactive-immunity-and-attorneys
http://del.icio.us/milican/domestic+surveillance

JOhn

The other story was about ways to DoS the Great Firewall of China from outside. You can, in theory, overload the content filter parts. If they're too busy to forge RST packets (or they don't forge them in time), that part of the Great Firewall won't work. You can also create false positives. So you can send packets containing banned content into China to create false positives (and tell that it's working by watching for forged RSTs). And you can reflect it by using OS bugs that sometimes reply with parts of the original packet (e.g. pings), which could allow you to create millions of false positives for them to investigate. Unlike most things, those allow outsiders to interfere, who have no worry about being arrested by the Chinese government. Of course, they would adapt things to filter them out, but hopefully that would accidentally create more openings in it by filtering out too much, creating new opportunities.

Those might even work, so I hope someone follows up on them :) Note that I wrote them all as I Believe in Irrational Property instead of I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property. Here they are:

RIAA Yacht Copied in Daring Act of Piracy

In a what the Coast Guard is calling a 'daring act of nautical infringement,' pirates have copied RIAA CEO Mitch Bainwol's personal yacht. After attacking with high speed inner tubes, they quickly made off with the data necessary to exactly duplicate the ship and vanished, but not before leaving behind an NFO with a pirate flag and a threat to 'rip' former RIAA chief Hillary Rosen's ship next. The RIAA is now demanding that the US Government issue Letters of Marquee and Reprisal so that they can prosecute these pirates under a little-known provision of copyright law governing ship designs as well as Article I, Section 8, Clause 11 of the US Constitution.

Microsoft Seeks Partnership With IKEA

After being spurned by Yahoo, Microsoft is seeking to acquire the furniture maker IKEA. Microsoft's Ballmer was quoted as saying, 'They have many assets I can use for leverage in pursuit of future acquisitions.' The deal appeared to get off to a bit of a rough start when Ballmer's tour of one of their factories was cut short after what authorities are describing as a 'bizarre furniture-related mishap,' in which three VPs who opposed to the deal were hospitalized. Authorities are not releasing many details, but one officer made the cryptic comment that, 'I didn't think even Bob Goatse could do that with a chair.' Even so, inside reports indicate that the remaining company officers are now 'very eager' to finalize the deal.

SCO Lawsuit Was Really "Performance Art"

SCO's D

The Electronic Frontier Foundation proposed this idea years ago. The record labels opposed it back then. It was a bad idea when it first came up and it's still a bad idea now (at least the EFF proposal was voluntary).

Why back in my day we used pencil and PAPER to move our characters around. And we rolled DICE to see if our characters could hit a monster. It's all you young whippersnappers and your compewters that screwed up the game with your bots that rolled the dice for you that are to blame for the short attention spans you all have.

(For those that can't see past the humor: Computer Games->DND as Bots/Macros->Computer Games, i.e. Blizzard is inherently being hypocritical)

Blizzard has always been a royal hineypain. You can even get banned for using keyboard macros.

I just play on the free servers.

Play Anarchy Online: Free, better crafting, you can fly at level ~20 out of 220, you don't have to play tetris nearly so often as either HGL or WoW.

Run a tor node! Remove the potential for censure of information by oppressive regimes like China, Cuba and _[insert favorite oppressive country here]_ http://tor.eff.org/

The legal definition of fair use is far from black and white.

http://w2.eff.org/IP/eff_fair_use_faq.php

Perhaps you should pull your head out of your...ahh nevermind.

I guess that should be a 'certain person', because they required a certain designated contact with the NB to send them the message about their vote. Mind you, this does make sense (someone else can't speak on behalf of the organization), but with all the things they have to do and how strewn out they are, it would be easy to screw up and have your vote rejected.

Anyhow, the rules aren't at all clear to me (nor, I gather, to those who need to follow them), which is what I think is the real story. Because I have this funny feeling that the rules will later be construed or rewritten into whichever form benefits Microsoft the most. I mean, it's in Microsoft's playbook, so it's not like we're not anticipating it.

- I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property

It doesn't matter if Bush vetoes it. Under current law, there is no telecom immunity. EFF vs. AT&T goes forward.

Whoever rated this "+1, Insightful" must have just been trying to substitute for the missing "-1, Wrong". Anonymous speech is protected. The First Amendment says "Congress shall make no law abridging freedom of speech...", not "Congress shall make no law abridging freedom of speech so long as you post your name so the cop can retaliate".

ObCite: http://www.eff.org/issues/anonymity

Here's what you do. Everyone in Kentucky who reads this article needs to write a letter (yes, a physical letter to be placed in an envelope with a postage stamp on it) commenting on the freedom of speech and sign it "Anonymous". Then post it at the post office to the mailing address of Tim Couch with a return address of the same. Be respectful (because angry words will only help him in his cause and make him "righteous") but informative on why anonymity is important and where this country would be without it.

For help in crafting your letter you might want to read the EFF article titled Speech: Anonimty

Next week, Tim Couch will likely want to add posting things through the mail as anonymous to the bill as well. ;)

Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't SCOTUS already rule that anonymous speech is protected? Ah yes, here we go: http://www.eff.org/issues/anonymity. Yet another law just waiting to be struck down, and it took five seconds on Google to demonstrate why.

Ah, so SCOTUS decisions are written in stone, are they? If that were true, we would still be counting African-Americans as 3/5 of a person. Courts change, attitudes change, decisions that seemed immutable get overturned or reversed or gutted. Don't think it can't happen. If a liberal or centrist justice dies, and Bush gets one more appointment, we may have a Court that will one day declare the Constitution itself "unconstitutional..."

Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't SCOTUS already rule that anonymous speech is protected?

Ah yes, here we go: http://www.eff.org/issues/anonymity

Yet another law just waiting to be struck down, and it took five seconds on Google to demonstrate why.

Some of us do care, and try to do something:

http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2008/03/tash-hepting-speaks-out

If you want to help, write/phone/fax your Representative in the House. Make your voice be heard. Don't let the government give the telecom companies retroactive immunity - insist that the lawsuits be allowed to continue. If they didn't break the law, they already have immunity under current regulations.

Damn, and I just used my mod points... people need to start realizing that the best way to argue against a patent is not by saying "but so-and-so did this", but to tell the USPTO (or find somebody who will tell them) that "so-and-so did this"...

The EFF press release is http://www.eff.org/press/archives/2008/02/26

Glad to have you double-check it. I wouldn't care to miss anything. But I'm terrible at remembering names, so I didn't want to get confused by all the record labels, Does and their various cases. So for that, I thank you.

In a completely unrelated note, I noticed a lot of calls for EFF donations in this story, which is a good thing because it's my understanding that they helped fund this. If you've seen any of my submissions, you might know that I often submit http://www.eff.org/support as my "homepage" so that my name becomes a link to it (I rotate between a few sites that I advocate, but the EFF support page is the most useful). Would you care to consider doing that for the EFF donation page, too? I feel like it might help.

Your stories are already on your blog (which, of course, also has an expert witness fund donate button), so it seems to me that readers will already go to your blog anyway, so that URL is sort of an "extra" you can use for a bit of light advocacy, or at least that's how I like to use it (heck, I even use my "name" for that ...). Mind you, I'm just someone who supports the EFF, not someone who represents it, but I feel like it would be a good way to help increase support. Though you might have trouble with the RIAA getting confused about who you work for again :-)

It's just a thought, so feel free to ignore it. No matter what, I'm glad to have you representing those being oppressed by the RIAA, and I wish you many victories in court.

- I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property

Glad to have you double-check it. I wouldn't care to miss anything. But I'm terrible at remembering names, so I didn't want to get confused by all the record labels, Does and their various cases. So for that, I thank you.

In a completely unrelated note, I noticed a lot of calls for EFF donations in this story, which is a good thing because it's my understanding that they helped fund this. If you've seen any of my submissions, you might know that I often submit http://www.eff.org/support as my "homepage" so that my name becomes a link to it (I rotate between a few sites that I advocate, but the EFF support page is the most useful). Would you care to consider doing that for the EFF donation page, too? I feel like it might help.

Your stories are already on your blog (which, of course, also has an expert witness fund donate button), so it seems to me that readers will already go to your blog anyway, so that URL is sort of an "extra" you can use for a bit of light advocacy, or at least that's how I like to use it (heck, I even use my "name" for that ...). Mind you, I'm just someone who supports the EFF, not someone who represents it, but I feel like it would be a good way to help increase support. Though you might have trouble with the RIAA getting confused about who you work for again :-)

It's just a thought, so feel free to ignore it. No matter what, I'm glad to have you representing those being oppressed by the RIAA, and I wish you many victories in court.

- I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property