Additionally, for many people the Internet has become as indispensable as water, gas, and electricity.
I know a lot of people who have been unemployed long enough that they can't afford to pay for even "life line" telephone service, so have been cut off from phone service. (The cost of life line phone service is comparable to the lowest cost cell phone service I know of, so they are effectively cut off from all phone service.) Therefore, I seriously doubt that even dirt cheap dial up internet service would be considered an essential service. (Further, I frequently hear about families being cut off from water, gas and electricity as well.)
My guess is that the argument will be that there are enough libraries, free WiFi hot spots and other places where people can get free internet access that cutting off access from home is at most an inconvenience. (Not that I am agreeing, only pointing out.)
(Note that free WiFi is not necessarily the same as open WiFi. Example, the libraries in my area require patrons to use their library card number to log in when connecting to the library's hot spot. The library cards are free upon applying for one, so the access is free of charge, though they have your personal identifying information.)
Beyond checking some log that a file matching the specified name and size was transferred at the specified time by the specified IP address, I doubt the ISPs have the ability to do anything other than take the notices at face value.
I do find it interesting that ISPs have, so far, resisted banning P2P usage. One possible outcome of this is that ISPs will decide that banning p2p is easier than dealing with the floods of notices and complaints.
I'm not sure how it would be handled in the US. The contracts (for residential service) I signed for each of the 3 high speed ISPs I have used over the past several years were for monthly service. If my current ISP were to decide I violated a term of the contract, the most I would be out is 1 month's service fee. Not worth my time to pursue in court - even if I was guaranteed to win.
As for long term contracts - in other contexts - it is typical to include a clause that the customer is still liable for the full price of the contract in the even the supplier terminates the contract for cause. I have no idea if any of the ISPs in my area offer long term contracts, nor if their customers (if any) under such contracts have tried to challenge the price liability clause.
Your desk is in the server room? At those clients of mine where I have seen their data centers, no one is in the actual server rooms unless hands-on access is needed. Otherwise the rooms are kept closed and dark with >99% of the sys admin work done from the cubicle farm. And even when console access is needed, the person is only in the server room longer enough to plug-in; then she/he works from one of the small desks just outside the room. (Though, I am told, the most important servers are permanently connected to a large matrix KVM switch)
... and I think knowing that you're personally responsible for sending some guy to jail for 20 years might make some people "iffy" on returning a guilty verdict. Its pretty black and white - there's no "guilty, but only by a little bit".
Sadly. on a jury I once served on, a few of the jurors were quite proud to be sending some one away for 20 years. Granted, the case was clear, but still the decision - be it guilty, or be it not - should never be taken lightly.
While the verdict itself is binary, the jury can always include a recommendation for sentencing. (FYI, that 1 jury, by a 7/5 vote, added a recommendation for the maximum.)
They also pump in all the solar heat as well as the light so you use more energy than you save cooling the place down.
It is possible to design a collector to take advantage of chromatic aberration to limit the amount of light outside the visible range that gets in, therefore limiting the amount of heat.
Fiberoptics would allow you to snake light to various rooms, into basements, etc. That seems more useful.
I think it would require a very thick bundle to bring in enough to usefully light a room, so could be prohibitively expensive.
As for lighting a basement with this, you would just need a place where you could reasonably have 2.5 by 2.5 foot - or 2.5 foot diameter - column (maybe smaller depending on construction, but the tube would need to be enclosed) going down through the intervening floor(s). Since basements are typically a single large room, doing this might be worth the cost of such a column - provided it has a proper ceiling (the article said the "chandelier" bounces light off the ceiling).
the overall cant of the regulations is that legitimate internships actually constitute organizational deadweight
Seems to me that for an internship to be educational to the intern, she needs to be doing something useful. Otherwise, how is it different from doing one's class work?
Even if the intern is doing something that otherwise would not get done, she is still producing value, so is not dead weight.
As an intern, I was not paid. I did learn a lot of practical things I would not otherwise have learned and I got something useful to have on my resume that helped me get a better job when I graduated.
Before today, I had never heard of interns being paid - unless the internship was part of a fellowship.
If anything, the question should be why this needs a new law instead of being considered just like any other kind of forgery or fraud.
My guess, some lawyer managed to persuade a judge that spoofing caller ID did not rise to the level of fraud. To my thinking, a better remedy would have been some kind of "petty fraud" law rather than this single purpose law.
In some cases, anonymity is essential to the ability to speak freely. Used properly, for example, it prevents coercion in elections and allows workers to report problems without fear of unwarranted retribution.
They are not even pretending to care. If you read the notice, it is a solicitation for complaints against foreign countries who are failing to provide adequate protection to US intellectual property owners.
That's what the Artemis Project did (http://www.asi.org/adb/index.html). Their plan might actually have worked except it depended on using either the Titan IV or the Space Shuttle to get their trans-Lunar vehicle into LEO.
But they had the right ideas: Assemble existing components and sell the film rights. The SpaceHab modules were a great idea. Could still be if there were another launch vehicle that could carry a payload that large.
Nevertheless, their website appears to still have a lot of useful information on it,
Every small town has a newspaper. Most larger ones have several.... In reality, rather than thousands, we really only need a few dozen traditional news sites. I don't care how much they fight it out and die until we whittle down to an appropriate amount.
I wish my small town had one. We used to. Now we don't even rate a paragraph in the nearby big city's paper/news site - unless there's a big, ugly crime or really salacious scandal.
Except for bad news, there's almost no local news. (Yes, there's still the events calendar, but listings in that are paid for.)
We are getting too little news from far too few sources. Sadly, too few peope seem to care.
There is nothing that a proprietary license would let them do that BSD will not
A proprietary license gives them some one to blame.
Also, many businesses fear open source because they think that that will provide adversaries with too much information about how their product works. Often times they would rather re-invent something than use open source.
And, the publishers see nothing wrong with this because they want you to have to repurchase your favorite books rather than keep them. (Not that they will necessarily keep those books available. They may be just data, but they consume server resources)
My broadband bill already has the mandated "Universal Service" fee and other such added to it. (To keep my monthly bill low, I get a service upgrade each year. Most recently, I added my ISP's voice plan as a second phone line. (POTS is still my primary phone line as it is far more reliable than either my broadband or cell phone services))
There was a time when I and many of my coworkers would wear company shirts. Then companies decided to stop buying those shirts. After that, I saw a lot less people wearing company shirts.
""If the claim is legal and backed by the appropriate institutions then I would believe it happens."
Point is, in this case the claim was not legal. The claim was issued by a foreign government which has no jurisdiction in Germany."
A business's management might very well determine it is prudent to honor the request of a foreign government. After all, they have their own political interests just as any other people do.
Enable SELinux in your server. Then disallow root from doing anything but looking at the logs. (Also, create a new, suitably enpowered, account for running your server). Then they can have root access all they want and not be able to mess with your server.
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Additionally, for many people the Internet has become as indispensable as water, gas, and electricity.
I know a lot of people who have been unemployed long enough that they can't afford to pay for even "life line" telephone service, so have been cut off from phone service. (The cost of life line phone service is comparable to the lowest cost cell phone service I know of, so they are effectively cut off from all phone service.) Therefore, I seriously doubt that even dirt cheap dial up internet service would be considered an essential service. (Further, I frequently hear about families being cut off from water, gas and electricity as well.)
My guess is that the argument will be that there are enough libraries, free WiFi hot spots and other places where people can get free internet access that cutting off access from home is at most an inconvenience. (Not that I am agreeing, only pointing out.)
(Note that free WiFi is not necessarily the same as open WiFi. Example, the libraries in my area require patrons to use their library card number to log in when connecting to the library's hot spot. The library cards are free upon applying for one, so the access is free of charge, though they have your personal identifying information.)
Beyond checking some log that a file matching the specified name and size was transferred at the specified time by the specified IP address, I doubt the ISPs have the ability to do anything other than take the notices at face value.
I do find it interesting that ISPs have, so far, resisted banning P2P usage. One possible outcome of this is that ISPs will decide that banning p2p is easier than dealing with the floods of notices and complaints.
That is a critical point.
I'm not sure how it would be handled in the US. The contracts (for residential service) I signed for each of the 3 high speed ISPs I have used over the past several years were for monthly service. If my current ISP were to decide I violated a term of the contract, the most I would be out is 1 month's service fee. Not worth my time to pursue in court - even if I was guaranteed to win.
As for long term contracts - in other contexts - it is typical to include a clause that the customer is still liable for the full price of the contract in the even the supplier terminates the contract for cause. I have no idea if any of the ISPs in my area offer long term contracts, nor if their customers (if any) under such contracts have tried to challenge the price liability clause.
Maybe they should just go by a more realistic name: UglyGirlsThatWantAttentionFromAnyGuyThatWillGiveItTothem
My teen daughter is definitely a geek and definitely beautiful.
(Also, I suspect the girls of foxyfans.ugo.com would disagree with you, too.)
Your desk is in the server room? At those clients of mine where I have seen their data centers, no one is in the actual server rooms unless hands-on access is needed. Otherwise the rooms are kept closed and dark with >99% of the sys admin work done from the cubicle farm. And even when console access is needed, the person is only in the server room longer enough to plug-in; then she/he works from one of the small desks just outside the room. (Though, I am told, the most important servers are permanently connected to a large matrix KVM switch)
... and I think knowing that you're personally responsible for sending some guy to jail for 20 years might make some people "iffy" on returning a guilty verdict. Its pretty black and white - there's no "guilty, but only by a little bit".
Sadly. on a jury I once served on, a few of the jurors were quite proud to be sending some one away for 20 years. Granted, the case was clear, but still the decision - be it guilty, or be it not - should never be taken lightly.
While the verdict itself is binary, the jury can always include a recommendation for sentencing. (FYI, that 1 jury, by a 7/5 vote, added a recommendation for the maximum.)
They also pump in all the solar heat as well as the light so you use more energy than you save cooling the place down.
It is possible to design a collector to take advantage of chromatic aberration to limit the amount of light outside the visible range that gets in, therefore limiting the amount of heat.
Fiberoptics would allow you to snake light to various rooms, into basements, etc. That seems more useful.
I think it would require a very thick bundle to bring in enough to usefully light a room, so could be prohibitively expensive.
As for lighting a basement with this, you would just need a place where you could reasonably have 2.5 by 2.5 foot - or 2.5 foot diameter - column (maybe smaller depending on construction, but the tube would need to be enclosed) going down through the intervening floor(s). Since basements are typically a single large room, doing this might be worth the cost of such a column - provided it has a proper ceiling (the article said the "chandelier" bounces light off the ceiling).
At least the company I interned for had some kind of coverage for interns in case of work place injury.
the overall cant of the regulations is that legitimate internships actually constitute organizational deadweight
Seems to me that for an internship to be educational to the intern, she needs to be doing something useful. Otherwise, how is it different from doing one's class work?
Even if the intern is doing something that otherwise would not get done, she is still producing value, so is not dead weight.
As an intern, I was not paid. I did learn a lot of practical things I would not otherwise have learned and I got something useful to have on my resume that helped me get a better job when I graduated.
Before today, I had never heard of interns being paid - unless the internship was part of a fellowship.
If anything, the question should be why this needs a new law instead of being considered just like any other kind of forgery or fraud.
My guess, some lawyer managed to persuade a judge that spoofing caller ID did not rise to the level of fraud. To my thinking, a better remedy would have been some kind of "petty fraud" law rather than this single purpose law.
In some cases, anonymity is essential to the ability to speak freely. Used properly, for example, it prevents coercion in elections and allows workers to report problems without fear of unwarranted retribution.
Also, the information being entered in the above examples is technically not false.
What's the real motive?
Pretending to care.
They are not even pretending to care. If you read the notice, it is a solicitation for complaints against foreign countries who are failing to provide adequate protection to US intellectual property owners.
That's what the Artemis Project did (http://www.asi.org/adb/index.html). Their plan might actually have worked except it depended on using either the Titan IV or the Space Shuttle to get their trans-Lunar vehicle into LEO.
But they had the right ideas: Assemble existing components and sell the film rights. The SpaceHab modules were a great idea. Could still be if there were another launch vehicle that could carry a payload that large.
Nevertheless, their website appears to still have a lot of useful information on it,
Every small town has a newspaper. Most larger ones have several.... In reality, rather than thousands, we really only need a few dozen traditional news sites. I don't care how much they fight it out and die until we whittle down to an appropriate amount.
I wish my small town had one. We used to. Now we don't even rate a paragraph in the nearby big city's paper/news site - unless there's a big, ugly crime or really salacious scandal.
Except for bad news, there's almost no local news. (Yes, there's still the events calendar, but listings in that are paid for.)
We are getting too little news from far too few sources. Sadly, too few peope seem to care.
There is nothing that a proprietary license would let them do that BSD will not
A proprietary license gives them some one to blame.
Also, many businesses fear open source because they think that that will provide adversaries with too much information about how their product works. Often times they would rather re-invent something than use open source.
And, the publishers see nothing wrong with this because they want you to have to repurchase your favorite books rather than keep them. (Not that they will necessarily keep those books available. They may be just data, but they consume server resources)
Still requires some kind of on going support.
My broadband bill already has the mandated "Universal Service" fee and other such added to it. (To keep my monthly bill low, I get a service upgrade each year. Most recently, I added my ISP's voice plan as a second phone line. (POTS is still my primary phone line as it is far more reliable than either my broadband or cell phone services))
There was a time when I and many of my coworkers would wear company shirts. Then companies decided to stop buying those shirts. After that, I saw a lot less people wearing company shirts.
You might not be able to copyright a recipe, but a given expression of a recipe might be copyright protected.
""If the claim is legal and backed by the appropriate institutions then I would believe it happens."
Point is, in this case the claim was not legal. The claim was issued by a foreign government which has no jurisdiction in Germany."
A business's management might very well determine it is prudent to honor the request of a foreign government. After all, they have their own political interests just as any other people do.
Enable SELinux in your server. Then disallow root from doing anything but looking at the logs. (Also, create a new, suitably enpowered, account for running your server). Then they can have root access all they want and not be able to mess with your server.