So, since they made it for Adult Gamers, shouldn't they be welcoming the Adults Only mark?
They would if "Adults Only" meant simply that, but it doesn't. From the GamePolitics article, "It means that major retailers like Wal-mart, which by itself accounts for about 25% of retail games sales, will not carry Manhunt 2." Last I checked, Wal-mart's customers, even for video games, included a lot of adults, but AO means they won't sell the game at all. Even though they already refuse to sell M-rated games to minors and have since 2000.
The problem is that the ESRB ratings are only vague recommendations, without the specific, consistent meanings to the retailer or purchasing decision maker that, for example, MPAA ratings have. That leaves a big question mark in the public mind as to how to react to these ratings, and the job of answering it ends up on the shoulders of the retailers. Wal-mart chose to react to AO with "not on my shelves" because they're conservative and cultivate a family-oriented image. Other retailers likely follow suit because it worked for Wal-mart. (Disclaimer: pure speculation.)
And that's their right. But that doesn't make it any less frustrating for Take Two when they build up for their release, arrange their distribution deals, put together numbers for initial orders so their manufacturing will be ready, etc., only to have an arbitrary decision cause their biggest retailer to pull out three weeks before release.
Can anyone give me a valid reason why games like this should even be produced?
"Should" doesn't apply. They are creative works. Unless they're somehow forcing themselves on people, creative works don't have to justify their own existence. It's incumbent upon each person experiencing them to decide whether they have any value, as you just have, but only for themselves. The word for applying that valuation to everyone is "censorship".
If you want to argue that doesn't work for children, sure, you've got a good majority behind you on that. But "not suitable for children", "without value for me", and "shouldn't be produced" are three extremely different evaluations. That last one threatens to step on my rights and the artists' rights.
with the great majority of people suffering more and more mental illnesses for whatever reason, do you want someone already on the edge to have this material?
Exactly what are you trying to say numerically? That the majority of people have mental illnesses? Obviously that's not true. "Mental illness" is generally defined against the standard of observed norms, so if it covered a majority of the population it would have to be redefined.
I'm going to guess you're just vaguely alluding to some trend of increased diagnoses of mental illness without any specific reference, and I'll stipulate to that for the sake of argument. Do I want the mentally ill to have Manhunt 2? Unless they've been involuntarily committed, it's no one's business what creative works the mentally ill consume. I don't need the government to protect me from someone playing a video game. I need the government to protect me from someone trying to hurt me, at which job they are already doing their best, thank you.
There are times when governments are at least arguably justified in keeping certain things out of the hands of certain populations. Many things are routinely kept out of the hands of children, and sometimes things like firearms are kept out of the hands of the mentally ill. But any such denial is necessarily an abrogation of their rights and must be undertaken with the utmost care. For you to casually decide to deny something to the mentally ill just because you think it has no value is a gross injustice. For the BBFC to decide to deny something to everybody—not just minors, but everybody—because they think it has no value is grosser than gross.
Code the voting app in Java, make the platform irrelevant, need for platform source is eliminated.
Writing a voting app for the Java platform does not make the platform irrelevant. It makes the platform Java. If your JVM implementation is closed-source, you're left with the exact same problem, just abstracted a little more.
Of course, there are open-source JVMs and SDKs, with Sun's own not far behind. But you still have to make sure that the source of every layer between the JVM and the hardware is also open, or else there's nothing stopping it from waylaying data on its way to the filesystem or something. If it's GNU/Linux, then you're probably okay. But just to be safe, better make sure the firmware/BIOS is also open source, because sneaky changes to data at that level would be awfully hard to track down.
Oh, and while you're at it, don't just compile all of this fresh. Make sure you recompile the compiler first, using a trusted compiler that you compiled from a trusted compiler, etc., so that there's no chance of a hack like the one Ken Thompson put into UNIX. The moral of his story bears repeating here: "You can't trust code that you did not totally create yourself. (Especially code from companies that employ people like me.)"
Sorry. I like Java and the notion of write once, run anywhere. But don't think that adding an extra layer between OS and application makes the platform irrelevant in such a mission-critical sense. There's no substitute for full transparency, and even the definition of "full transparency" is not always as simple as it should be.
the credit companies don't take the hit for CC fraud, the retailers and the victim do. Essentially when a credit company gets notified that some charges are fraudulent they just cancel the payments to the retailer, and the retailer is stuck with the losses.
And I feel for the retailer, I really do. They get it from both ends, since at the same time their merchant processor is taking nasty percentages of every credit transaction that's not fraudulent. While ironically, if you asked the processor why they charge those fees, I'm sure "pays for our costs dealing with fraud" would get a bullet.
And yet, you can't forget that the retailers are part of the reason that credit card fraud is more common than other kinds of fraud. They can't complain about how much money they lose to fraudulent transactions if they make minimal efforts to prevent them in the first place. Signature-based retail purchases are completely untrustable, while mail-order/tele-order and online purchases are even worse. Even requiring the CVV is no better than signature. And yet retailers continue to allow them.
I guess the loss of business to the store next door outweighs the money lost to canceled fraudulent payments, but why aren't any retail alliances starting a campaign to educate consumers about the insecurity of signature-based transactions so they can pressure their banks and credit companies to stop using them? And then themselves pressuring the credit card companies to move to a more secure model? It seems like they're more interested in doing just the opposite lately.
Instead I see retailers where the cashier asks "debit or credit" without even knowing the difference; never, ever checks a signature, let alone declines a transaction based on one; and rarely asks for ID. (Asking for ID seemed to be a bit of a fad when I was living in California, but here in New York it's unheard-of.) I see gas pumps that allow completely unattended credit card payments and don't even offer a PIN-based option. Some ask for billing ZIP—gee, what a great security measure that is! It couldn't be the same as the place you stole the card from, could it?—and some don't. I see online retailers that allow purchases to be made with no CVV to any shipping address. These practices are begging to be exploited, so it's no big surprise that the credit companies dump their liabilities back on the retailer. And yet it's still not fair, because they're not giving the retailers any attractive alternatives to fix the problems.
Mark my words, as commerce in the developed world moves farther and farther away from cash, eventually the governments will have to step in and impose some security standards. Because right now, with the creditors able to dump on the retailers, and the retailers having to take it because consumers don't want to lose any convenience, it's not in the best interests of anyone who matters to make anything truly better. But of course it's really the consumers who get it in the end.
It's probably a good thing if this gets voted down by AMA.
"Gets voted down"? The only thing pointed to by this article that could logically "get voted down" is the list of recommendations at the end of the report. I don't know how AMA proceeds on those sorts of things, so I don't even know if there's any vote involved. I suppose if someone wanted to propose that the AMA turn some or all of those recommendations into official Resolutions there would be votes?
But anyway, the recommendations, as Ars Technica pointed out, are fairly weak stuff compared to the rhetoric of legislators and Jack Thompson that we're used to. Here's a paraphrasing of exactly what the report recommends:
That the current video game rating system be reviewed and improved through industry, government, and civic group cooperation.
That physicians and families be educated on the current knowledge about "the public health risks of media exposure".
That the AMA officially endorse a recommended daily limit of 1 to 2 hours "total screen time" (which I assume includes both television and video games) for children, a recommendation already made by the American Academy of Pediatrics.
That the AMA "support increased awareness" of the need for parental supervision and age restrictions.
That they encourage hard research into long-term outcomes regarding gaming/Internet addiction and media violence.
That they encourage the next edition of the DSM-IV to formalize "Internet/video game addiction" as a diagnostic disorder.
See? Not terribly impressive; any legislator or judge trying to use that, or the largely wishy-washy findings reported in the body, as sturdy support for an off-the-wall law would have to twist words so far that the AMA would probably publicly respond. The AMA doesn't have a big axe to grind when it comes to video game violence; they don't really want to be anybody's poster child. The only thing there that bothers me is the last one. I readily believe that Internet/gaming addiction may someday have a place in the DSM, but if the same report is simultaneously pointing out that research is incomplete, then it's premature. Do your research, relate the specifics to the generalities already known about addicition, then put it in the DSM.
Look, either everyone should be allowed to take and give away as many photos as they can afford, or nobody should be. Which is it?
If the world were truly that black and white and I had to answer that, I'm afraid I'd have to say, "I don't know." Fortunately it's not, and the question misses the point. I've got no problem with Google taking and giving away as many photos as they can afford, no matter how popular they are. They already do this with Google Images. What worries me is the new level of association of specific photos with specific locations, and thus specific people.
One of Google's stated goals is to "bring all the world's information to users seeking answers", and I applaud the notion. But don't forget that "all the world's information" includes every piece of information about you, and not every user seeking answers about you is benign. Some are curious about things that are none of their business, and some are outright malicious. Regulators recognize this already in plenty of other contexts: Mail tampering, wiretapping, stalking, and identity theft are all illegal in most jurisdictions. When Google starts associating their mountains of data with individuals, and making those associations accessible to "users seeking answers", they and we can't be naïve about how vulnerable that suddenly makes the individuals.
the difference [...] is [...] somebody intends to use them to make money
Nope, anybody is welcome to make money taking pictures of my street if they want. I don't hold copyrights on the view of my house.
Or is it that [...] there's a whole bunch of pictures
Getting warmer, but nope. If someone wants to drive an anonymous van down my street taking thousands of photos for their personal use, or most commercial uses, they are welcome to. Of course, I'm also welcome to call the police if I think they look suspicious, but that's almost beside the point.
Or is it that Google's photographs are being given away to anyone who wants them
Oh, you're getting so close to the heart of the matter here, but you still aren't feeling it. It's not that third parties have access to the photos. It's that millions of third parties have access to the photos through the world's largest search specialist's extremely popular GIS application.
It is true, for over a century now people have had the ability and the right to make a permanent photographic record of things visible in public, give it away to people without the consent of the original subjects/owners, and even make multiple copies to distribute. But Google Street Views, although it's just the convergence of numerous existing technologies that have been around for years at the least, cannot as a whole be casually compared to what we're used to, and I really wish people would stop trying. It's a new beast that has to be reexamined carefully. Never before (never mind A9, whose project folded, or Zaio, who don't have the exposure of Google) have photographic records been indexed to their subjects (via their street addresses) on such a massive scale without the subjects' consents, and then distributed instantaneously and on-demand on such a massive scale. We've had satellite imaging for a while now, but this a much more useful angle and a much, much higher definition.
That is the difference, and it's why you can't assess the privacy implications of GSV by relating it piecemeal to all the previously-commonplace activities it combines. Taken individually, of course they're acceptable. But before assuming GSV as a whole is acceptable, step back and think about all the new implications. And one of the big ones, as I pointed out when this issue last came up, is that this is the first time millions of people can look at your property on a whim without physically visiting it and giving you at least the opportunity to know who is looking, which I consider rude.
Hopefully as more and more people get caught for using cleartext, crypto will be the norm
In other words, you hope that some judge sets a precedent as quickly as possible for encrypted records to not count as "accessible"? Or better yet, that the justice department gets handed the statistics to convince a clueless legislature to outlaw encryption? I mean, if they're going to require these records to be discoverable in the first place, why wouldn't they require by law that prosecutors and judges can actually read them?
My understanding is that when the rules first go into effect, individual judges will still have their own say as to whether the data policies involved in their cases meet the discovery standard of "accessible", and encryption would be a big grey area. If a big case comes up where a company scrupulously retained all their emails, but the suspicious officers in question were all encrypting with their own personal keys, which the company policy conveniently ignored, what would stop the judge from ruling that a retention policy does not keep its data "accessible" if it doesn't actively prevent personal encryption? Or if they didn't feel it was within their power, and it let the next Ken Lay get off scot-free, wouldn't that be a good reason for Congress to start working on laws against civilian encryption? Even if such laws were limited only to data passing through corporate servers, to or from corporate personnel, it would still be a blow to efforts against corporate espionage.
Don't get me wrong: I'm not the least bit anti-encryption. It's just that I've always been a little grateful that encryption had not made its way into the mainstream yet. The post-9/11 political climate is definitely not the time for it to try, because as far as I know there's nothing constitutional to prevent Congress from killing it if they've got a reason.
they know they *have* to make iPhone dev possible from windows machine
Yeah, that's the most likely explanation I could think of too. They could decide to require developers to get a Mac to develop reliably for the iPhone, but they're not stupid. But if iPhone web apps are likely to rely on any special/quirky features of Safari, they would have to get Safari onto more development platforms.
Any Web 2.0 developers seen anything new, enticing, and exclusive to Safari 3 they might try to get developers to support?
That's why I'm disgusted with the efforts by biotech and government to enforce "intellectual property" rights on GMOs. However, I actually say don't ban the terminator genes. Let them produce all they want, and let farmers who think it's worth it buy all they want. Just be sure the laws and the courts make it possible for the neighboring farmer to sue the producer into the dirt when the self-destructive organism takes their crop down with it. I'd rather see them brutally punished for pursuing such an unfriendly idea than just go back to the lab and come up with a workaround when governments legislate narrowly against their current research.
And if they do manage to come up with a way to do this that has no chance of unintended propagation, well then what's the harm? Each farmer will make their own decision on whether it's economical for them or not. If there are farmers who would lose money on terminating seeds, then you can bet there will still be plenty of firms willing to take their money for non-terminating seeds.
here is the image that's "peeping" into her life, "destroying her privacy". This has to be the most ridiculous claim of privacy violation. Ever.
Yes, I followed the links. I even had to look for a few seconds before I even saw the cat. But the first line of the Times article makes the point the best: "For Mary Kalin-Casey, it was never about her cat."
Your dismissal implies that you believe that, because this particular photo is of a cat, no photo used in Google Street Views could possibly reflect negatively and/or adversely impact the life of any person associated with a particular address. From the Times:
Google worked with the Safety Net Project at the National Network to End Domestic Violence, which represents shelters for victims of domestic violence nationwide, to remove pictures of those shelters. "They reached out in advance to us so we could reach out to our network," said Cindy Southworth, founder and director of the organization.
As a therapist for children and families with an agency contracted to Children's Services, my girlfriend often refers women to shelters like that, so I've got a decent feel for just how covert they are and have to be. Getting their pictures in Google Street View has the potential to expose them. When that happens, women die. That's an extreme example, of course, but it doesn't take much imagination to come up with more mundane ones. Even if they're little more than an inconvenience to the occupants of a location, isn't that an inconvenience they did nothing to deserve and have no reason to expect?
That basically calls into question the ability to photograph anything, because in every situation there could be someone somewhere in the photo who might be "seen" by someone who isn't visible to them.
Absolutely, which is why I don't go so far as to say that it should be illegal to make or even publish a permanent record of something that was visible "in public". My point is only that publishing and indexing detailed photographs of private residences on such a massive scale can't be easily dismissed as not an invasion of privacy. It's not illegal or "evil", per se, but I wouldn't exactly call it fair to the people whose lives just got documented.
[...] when you live on a street in a major city, and don't have curtains. It'd be a full-time job to observe everyone who was observing you in that situation.
That's what surveillance cameras are for. And then the axiom works in reverse as well: Anyone in the range of a surveillance camera should get the courtesy of knowing they're under surveillance. If I'm not mistaken, there's a lot of law that backs up that position. Anyway, there are ways to know who's looking at who, if you care to take the trouble. But not when Google publishes pictures of your house for the masses.
The suggestion from many that curtains make this a moot point is correct, of course, and who wouldn't want to put up curtains? But not closing your curtains waives your right to privacy? Does not turning off your firewall give snoopers the right to download files off your private network? Legally, no, as far as I know. You can argue "serves you right" or "just curious" or "trying to make a point" all you want, but it doesn't change the fact that the act is impolite at best. Likewise, even if this was the only practical way to gather necessary content for a very useful tool, it doesn't change the fact that Google's just been rude to a whole lot of people.
However, I should point out that, to my mind at least, their pre-emptive efforts with such organizations as domestic violence victim shelters, along with the ease for any user to flag a view as "objectionable" for a variety of reasons, goes a long way toward making up for it. I just hope they respond seriously and quickly to those reports.
Everything you can see in the picture would have been just as visible if you were walking down the street and happened to look up.
A true statement and a valid point, but there's a piece missing from the "walking down the street" analogy that seems to be eluding most of us. When a person walks down the street and looks into a home through a street-facing window, it's extremely unlikely that the window is actually a one-way mirror that only allows viewing in. So yes, they can see what's inside, but anyone inside can also see them. Stop and think about that for a moment, because it's a natural check-and-balance mechanism that, in my opinion, should not be left out of these sorts of privacy discussions: While you can't deny other people the right to look at you in public without your permission, it's only fair that you get to look at them at the same time. If nothing else, it's reasonable to at least have the opportunity to know who is looking.
But with Google Street View, or the Zaio Corp. database, or any similar endeavor, you don't get that courtesy. Even if you were lucky enough to spot the camera in the ten to fifteen seconds it was visible, you still don't know how many millions of people just looked into your life at that moment. And don't forget this is Google we're talking about: among other things, the new background checker for lazy hiring managers, who naturally have your home address at the top of your résumé. Suddenly anyone who lives in a Street View-covered area had better:
have heard of Google Street View;
look up any addresses that people might associate with them on Google Street View;
zoom in on every angle to make sure there's nothing that compromises them—and a pox on the first fool who tries to imply you can't be compromised in a snapshot if you're not doing anything wrong;
request a takedown from Google on anything they don't like;
wait and see how fast Google rushes to put a big gaping hole in their lovely new feature.
For the record, I like Street View. I've been hoping Google would add something like that for some time. But don't gloss over the privacy concerns by equating walking down the street and looking through a window with driving a van down hundreds of streets taking millions of photographs and associating them with street addresses on the world's largest search engine. Only one of these makes your private life public, and it's not the first one.
You can trademark almost anything that creates a connection in a consumer's mind between a product/service and its origin. Historically this has included...
Here are some other interesting examples. I used to work for a company that compiled and published huge clip art collections, and we kept track of a list of specific things to watch out for and remove whenever we spotted them, because we'd gotten C&D letters from the IP holders. I don't know if these are all actually trademarks, or some are trade dress, or some are just lawyers talking through their hats, but...
Olympic rings. Probably not a big surprise that the IOC defends this tooth and nail.
A wavy line anywhere on a crayon wrapper infringes Crayola.
Carnival cruise lines claims to own the style of putting little "wings" on the sides of their smokestacks.
The Red Cross. You may think that a red cross on a white background is a generic symbol for first aid or medical care, but the American National Red Cross begs to differ. A bright green version is the legally unencumbered alternative. But damned ugly.
And definitely my favorite: Dairy Queen. Dairy Queen claims that putting a curl at the top of a soft-serve cone makes it a Dairy Queen cone.
I've got three things that annoy me every time I get in my car. First is the Jensen stereo I installed because it had a Bluetooth receiver. It's got a big, round, silver knob on the left side. It controls the volume. Great! Turn a knob instead of pushing a button! I love that! But... It doesn't turn. It's actually a four-way rocker: up-down for volume and left-right for station or track select. But it gets worse. The thing is cheap and flimsy, so it's infuriatingly easy to click the wrong direction and get a different song just when you had one you wanted to turn up. It also has an alarming tendency to stick when you click up, sending your volume skyrocketing to max after a second or two delay.
Speaking of alarming, the previous owners had an alarm installed, and it's got a bug or two. It's one of those nice ones that cuts power to the ignition until the alarm is disarmed. Fine, but unfortunately it also cuts power to the ignition if the alarm is never armed in the first place, every time the car is turned off! If I just get out to pump some gas, I still have to "disarm" the alarm to start the car.
Finally, I'm not sure who to blame for this one. It's either Jensen or palmOne. Every time I turn the car on, the Bluetooth receiver in the stereo pairs with my Treo. It almost always does this silently and without a problem, and that's great. What's not great is that the process of pairing somehow activates the Treo's screen and disables the keyguard. I tend to wear the thing on my hip, but I've had to get in the constant habit of taking it off every time I get in the car because it sits right where the seatbelt is almost guaranteed to push some button eventually, usually the redial.
And what's this nonsense?
As you also know, Lee Boyd Malvo trained on Microsoft's Halo to further enable him to become the remarkably efficient "DC Beltway Sniper." That was reported by NBC News at the time and was noted in Malvo's criminal trial.
Nonsense indeed. I love how Mr. Thompson links national tragedies to the theme of every statement he makes with no concern for showing relevance. His remark is true, and apparently, unlike other "trainings" Thompson has alleged, it was actually intentional. But what does that have to do with enforcing the ratings? Lee Boyd Malvo was seventeen when the Beltway shootings occurred! And even if he weren't, John Allen Muhammad, 41, would have just bought it for him, since it was his idea to train on it in the first place.
If companies would just shut up and stop trying to use lawyers and politics to keep customers and silence competitors maybe they could consentrate on making a product that is worthy of being used.
Thousands of companies have tried that strategy. There's a reason you've never heard of them.
I wonder about legal liability for releasing this information if it leads to the death of the undercover agents...
Law & Order sort of tackled this in the 2004 episode Gunplay. A website very similar to WhosARat.com, run by a defense lawyer, got two undercover cops shot while they were trying to score some illegal guns. (The story was apparently inspired by the deaths of James J. Nemorin and Rodney Andrews on Staten Island in 2003, although I don't think the website element was present in that incident.) As is typical of Law & Order, they raise the tough question, but they don't answer it: The prosecutors are let off the hook when they discover a much more sinister wrinkle.
Anyway, if the site does not get shut down preemptively, I'm sure that a death like this is only be a matter of time. When that happens, the investigators and prosecutors will stop at nothing to make a very messy example of the site owners, First Amendment be damned.
The ideas set forth in the First Amendment of the US Constitution should ideally apply to all citizens of the world.
Wow, and you didn't even mean that ironically. There's your poster-child for American arrogance right there.
There is no need for any part of the U.S. constitution to be applied to citizens of the world when we've had a perfectly good Universal Declaration of Human Rights since 1948. Article 19 reads:
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
That's pretty unambiguous. Unfortunately, like most things the U.N. does, it's toothless and not taken very seriously even by its member nations. But it's still a visible, noble standard for any nation with a conscience to hold itself to.
I don't think that would work. According to the article, the ban is triggered by checking your drive's firmware. What disc you have in the drive at the time is irrelevant. Unless you've got some way to restore your box to its factory state before connecting to Live, your console will get blacklisted the first time you try it.
Thank you, but see the response from compro01. My opinion was actually based on a misunderstanding of the policy as stated, and I don't completely stand by it. I think Stanford's policy is close to fair. Escalating the fee for repeat offenses is fine, but receiving a DMCA notice is not an offense, even if it does cost Stanford money. Ignoring one is. If they equate receiving two complaints with proof of infringement and remove a user from their network with no recourse but to pay, what they're basically saying is, "We believe anything a DMCA notice says twice because it means we can take money from you." They need to give any user a fair chance to respond to accusations before fining them $500 or $1,000. We've seen time and time again how bogus some of these notices can be. If, given a fair chance, they don't respond, charge 'em whatever you want.
Now I feel like a doofus, because I completely misread that. You're absolutely right, and as easy as the DMCA is to abuse, that is ridiculous. I'll defend Stanford's right to demand compensation from people who cost them money because they won't deal with their own problems, but not from people who cost them money just because they're repeatedly fingered. That's not just guilty until proven innocent, it's guilty until you pay your bureaucracy bill.
Just because Stanford's name is at risk students, who aren't guilty of a *crime* and have no way to prove their innocence, are being dropped from the campus network and having money extorted from them by the University to reconnect?
No, as a matter of fact, they're not. Okay, the RIAA, MPAA, and DMCA turn my stomach as much as the next person who's realized that copyright is broken in the Internet age, but I'm going to have to play devil's advocate here and insist that people look a little more carefully at Stanford's position. From the release:
Keeping up with the number of file-sharing complaints coming in under the DMCA has required almost three full-time Stanford employees. It is an irresponsible waste of Stanford's resources[...]
Yes, this means the DMCA is annoying and overbearing, but that's not Stanford's fault. In fact, it shouldn't even be Stanford's problem in the first place—Stanford itself didn't infringe anything—but the copyright holders have to go through Stanford to get a name and address for the infringer. Stanford could just ignore it, but I don't know what sort of nasty liabilities that opens them up to under the DMCA. (I suppose that's the crux of the matter, so any DMCA experts are invited to fill in that blank. For now I'm assuming it potentially makes life miserable for them.)
So they have to connect the copyright holders with the alleged infringers, and it's costing them big money to do so, and they wouldn't have to do anything if no one on the campus network was file-sharing illegally. They could just as easily have said, "We don't care how you use our network, but some other people do. As long as we continue to receive DMCA notices, the cost of dealing with them will be shared by all students in the form of a network subscription fee. What? You've never file-shared in your life and shouldn't have to pay? Well, apply a little peer pressure to your peers. When we stop getting DMCA notices, we'll stop charging the fee."
And that wouldn't have been beyond the pale, although it's obviously not fair. But they didn't do that. Read carefully the "penalty" for the first notice:
The Information Security Office will forward a copy of the complaint to the student, with an email instructing the student to remove copyrighted content and respond to the Information Security Office. A student has 48 hours to respond to the
Information Security Office (ISO) and attend to the DMCA complaint. If the student addresses the DMCA complaint within
that time, there will be no disconnection, and no reconnection fee.
If you're infringing, you clean up your act and respond to the complaint within 48 hours, and as far as Stanford is concerned, you're golden. You may still get sued by the copyright holder, but let's face it: Under U.S. copyright law that is absolutely their right, and absolutely not Stanford's responsibility to shield you. If you're not infringing and the complaint is in error, you contact the complainant within 48 hours to tell them so, and you're still golden. Does the DMCA make false accusations easy and annoying? Yes. Does it need to be repealed or fixed so that copyright holders need to meet some burden of proof before placing any burden on innocent defendants? Yes. Does Stanford have an obligation to judge who's innocent and who's guilty, or to fix the DMCA? No. The only thing they care about is whether students get the complaint off Stanford's plate and deal with it themselves in a timely manner, because it's their problem, not Stanford's.
So be careful how you characterize things. Stanford is not network dropping and extorting money from innocent students. If you get a DMCA notice and ignore it, it doesn't matter whether you're infringing or not: You're not innocent, you're lazy, and you're costing Stanford money. If you take care of your own legal responsibilities, Stanford will leave you alone.
First of all, I had never heard of Braun's Tassimo machine until I started a new job and there was one in the break room. (Quick explanation: It reads a barcode on specially marketed pods of coffee, espresso, tea, cocoa, etc. and automatically uses the appropriate amount and temperature of water.) My first thought was, "Hey, what a cool gadget! Glad I'm not paying for the T-Discs..." My second thought was, "Ooh, the T-Discs are Gevalia! Good stuff!" But my third thought was, "What the hell is this crap? Tastes like caffeinated dishwater!" Honestly, we've had a good number of different T-Discs come through, and all the coffee, espresso, and cocoa has tasted like ass. The only exception was an Italian import called Mastro Lorenzo. I don't know, maybe the filter needs changing or something.
So I make my coffee the finicky DIY way, with a French press. Regarding freshness, my experience is what you originally expected: that the freshness of the beans is far less important than the freshness of the grind. I always get my generic bulk French roast beans at the same supermarket, about a half-pound at a time, and use the in-store grinder. It's obvious that they sell through their bulk beans slowly, and I've gotten beans both from the dregs and from a fresh refill. (Of course, I don't know anything about how "fresh" a fresh refill actually is, so I'm assuming a few things.) No huge difference leapt out at me, but there is an enormous difference between the first wonderful cup of my bag and the last cup that I can't always even bring myself to brew. That last cup sometimes makes me check prices on a conical-burr grinder for the office.
Now the French press itself is a tricky thing. A drip maker is very convenient, and I've got no complaints about drip-brewed coffee. But if you truly want to understand what makes your coffee tick, and just how much potential it has, there's nothing like a French press. It's a variables-balancing game. The temperature of the water is easy: just below boiling. And obviously the amount of water depends on how much coffee you want. You can play with the grind, but it seems like the coarsest possible is always best. But then there's this delicate interaction between the amount of grounds and the steeping duration. If you can get it just right, you'll wonder where all that flavor was hiding in this coffee you thought you knew so well. And if you oversteep by forty-five seconds you'll wonder what jackass poured vinegar into your mug. My best results have come from just a little more grounds than I think I need, and an even four minutes. And the most important lesson I learned was to resist the temptation to stir while it's steeping. It's got to take its time, man.
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They would if "Adults Only" meant simply that, but it doesn't. From the GamePolitics article, "It means that major retailers like Wal-mart, which by itself accounts for about 25% of retail games sales, will not carry Manhunt 2." Last I checked, Wal-mart's customers, even for video games, included a lot of adults, but AO means they won't sell the game at all. Even though they already refuse to sell M-rated games to minors and have since 2000.
The problem is that the ESRB ratings are only vague recommendations, without the specific, consistent meanings to the retailer or purchasing decision maker that, for example, MPAA ratings have. That leaves a big question mark in the public mind as to how to react to these ratings, and the job of answering it ends up on the shoulders of the retailers. Wal-mart chose to react to AO with "not on my shelves" because they're conservative and cultivate a family-oriented image. Other retailers likely follow suit because it worked for Wal-mart. (Disclaimer: pure speculation.)
And that's their right. But that doesn't make it any less frustrating for Take Two when they build up for their release, arrange their distribution deals, put together numbers for initial orders so their manufacturing will be ready, etc., only to have an arbitrary decision cause their biggest retailer to pull out three weeks before release.
But they'll be okay. All they have to do is change the cover.
"Should" doesn't apply. They are creative works. Unless they're somehow forcing themselves on people, creative works don't have to justify their own existence. It's incumbent upon each person experiencing them to decide whether they have any value, as you just have, but only for themselves. The word for applying that valuation to everyone is "censorship".
If you want to argue that doesn't work for children, sure, you've got a good majority behind you on that. But "not suitable for children", "without value for me", and "shouldn't be produced" are three extremely different evaluations. That last one threatens to step on my rights and the artists' rights.
with the great majority of people suffering more and more mental illnesses for whatever reason, do you want someone already on the edge to have this material?Exactly what are you trying to say numerically? That the majority of people have mental illnesses? Obviously that's not true. "Mental illness" is generally defined against the standard of observed norms, so if it covered a majority of the population it would have to be redefined.
I'm going to guess you're just vaguely alluding to some trend of increased diagnoses of mental illness without any specific reference, and I'll stipulate to that for the sake of argument. Do I want the mentally ill to have Manhunt 2? Unless they've been involuntarily committed, it's no one's business what creative works the mentally ill consume. I don't need the government to protect me from someone playing a video game. I need the government to protect me from someone trying to hurt me, at which job they are already doing their best, thank you.
There are times when governments are at least arguably justified in keeping certain things out of the hands of certain populations. Many things are routinely kept out of the hands of children, and sometimes things like firearms are kept out of the hands of the mentally ill. But any such denial is necessarily an abrogation of their rights and must be undertaken with the utmost care. For you to casually decide to deny something to the mentally ill just because you think it has no value is a gross injustice. For the BBFC to decide to deny something to everybody—not just minors, but everybody—because they think it has no value is grosser than gross.
Writing a voting app for the Java platform does not make the platform irrelevant. It makes the platform Java. If your JVM implementation is closed-source, you're left with the exact same problem, just abstracted a little more.
Of course, there are open-source JVMs and SDKs, with Sun's own not far behind. But you still have to make sure that the source of every layer between the JVM and the hardware is also open, or else there's nothing stopping it from waylaying data on its way to the filesystem or something. If it's GNU/Linux, then you're probably okay. But just to be safe, better make sure the firmware/BIOS is also open source, because sneaky changes to data at that level would be awfully hard to track down.
Oh, and while you're at it, don't just compile all of this fresh. Make sure you recompile the compiler first, using a trusted compiler that you compiled from a trusted compiler, etc., so that there's no chance of a hack like the one Ken Thompson put into UNIX. The moral of his story bears repeating here: "You can't trust code that you did not totally create yourself. (Especially code from companies that employ people like me.)"
Sorry. I like Java and the notion of write once, run anywhere. But don't think that adding an extra layer between OS and application makes the platform irrelevant in such a mission-critical sense. There's no substitute for full transparency, and even the definition of "full transparency" is not always as simple as it should be.
And I feel for the retailer, I really do. They get it from both ends, since at the same time their merchant processor is taking nasty percentages of every credit transaction that's not fraudulent. While ironically, if you asked the processor why they charge those fees, I'm sure "pays for our costs dealing with fraud" would get a bullet.
And yet, you can't forget that the retailers are part of the reason that credit card fraud is more common than other kinds of fraud. They can't complain about how much money they lose to fraudulent transactions if they make minimal efforts to prevent them in the first place. Signature-based retail purchases are completely untrustable, while mail-order/tele-order and online purchases are even worse. Even requiring the CVV is no better than signature. And yet retailers continue to allow them.
I guess the loss of business to the store next door outweighs the money lost to canceled fraudulent payments, but why aren't any retail alliances starting a campaign to educate consumers about the insecurity of signature-based transactions so they can pressure their banks and credit companies to stop using them? And then themselves pressuring the credit card companies to move to a more secure model? It seems like they're more interested in doing just the opposite lately.
Instead I see retailers where the cashier asks "debit or credit" without even knowing the difference; never, ever checks a signature, let alone declines a transaction based on one; and rarely asks for ID. (Asking for ID seemed to be a bit of a fad when I was living in California, but here in New York it's unheard-of.) I see gas pumps that allow completely unattended credit card payments and don't even offer a PIN-based option. Some ask for billing ZIP—gee, what a great security measure that is! It couldn't be the same as the place you stole the card from, could it?—and some don't. I see online retailers that allow purchases to be made with no CVV to any shipping address. These practices are begging to be exploited, so it's no big surprise that the credit companies dump their liabilities back on the retailer. And yet it's still not fair, because they're not giving the retailers any attractive alternatives to fix the problems.
Mark my words, as commerce in the developed world moves farther and farther away from cash, eventually the governments will have to step in and impose some security standards. Because right now, with the creditors able to dump on the retailers, and the retailers having to take it because consumers don't want to lose any convenience, it's not in the best interests of anyone who matters to make anything truly better. But of course it's really the consumers who get it in the end.
"Gets voted down"? The only thing pointed to by this article that could logically "get voted down" is the list of recommendations at the end of the report. I don't know how AMA proceeds on those sorts of things, so I don't even know if there's any vote involved. I suppose if someone wanted to propose that the AMA turn some or all of those recommendations into official Resolutions there would be votes?
But anyway, the recommendations, as Ars Technica pointed out, are fairly weak stuff compared to the rhetoric of legislators and Jack Thompson that we're used to. Here's a paraphrasing of exactly what the report recommends:
See? Not terribly impressive; any legislator or judge trying to use that, or the largely wishy-washy findings reported in the body, as sturdy support for an off-the-wall law would have to twist words so far that the AMA would probably publicly respond. The AMA doesn't have a big axe to grind when it comes to video game violence; they don't really want to be anybody's poster child. The only thing there that bothers me is the last one. I readily believe that Internet/gaming addiction may someday have a place in the DSM, but if the same report is simultaneously pointing out that research is incomplete, then it's premature. Do your research, relate the specifics to the generalities already known about addicition, then put it in the DSM.
If the world were truly that black and white and I had to answer that, I'm afraid I'd have to say, "I don't know." Fortunately it's not, and the question misses the point. I've got no problem with Google taking and giving away as many photos as they can afford, no matter how popular they are. They already do this with Google Images. What worries me is the new level of association of specific photos with specific locations, and thus specific people.
One of Google's stated goals is to "bring all the world's information to users seeking answers", and I applaud the notion. But don't forget that "all the world's information" includes every piece of information about you, and not every user seeking answers about you is benign. Some are curious about things that are none of their business, and some are outright malicious. Regulators recognize this already in plenty of other contexts: Mail tampering, wiretapping, stalking, and identity theft are all illegal in most jurisdictions. When Google starts associating their mountains of data with individuals, and making those associations accessible to "users seeking answers", they and we can't be naïve about how vulnerable that suddenly makes the individuals.
Nope, anybody is welcome to make money taking pictures of my street if they want. I don't hold copyrights on the view of my house.
Or is it that [...] there's a whole bunch of picturesGetting warmer, but nope. If someone wants to drive an anonymous van down my street taking thousands of photos for their personal use, or most commercial uses, they are welcome to. Of course, I'm also welcome to call the police if I think they look suspicious, but that's almost beside the point.
Or is it that Google's photographs are being given away to anyone who wants themOh, you're getting so close to the heart of the matter here, but you still aren't feeling it. It's not that third parties have access to the photos. It's that millions of third parties have access to the photos through the world's largest search specialist's extremely popular GIS application.
It is true, for over a century now people have had the ability and the right to make a permanent photographic record of things visible in public, give it away to people without the consent of the original subjects/owners, and even make multiple copies to distribute. But Google Street Views, although it's just the convergence of numerous existing technologies that have been around for years at the least, cannot as a whole be casually compared to what we're used to, and I really wish people would stop trying. It's a new beast that has to be reexamined carefully. Never before (never mind A9, whose project folded, or Zaio, who don't have the exposure of Google) have photographic records been indexed to their subjects (via their street addresses) on such a massive scale without the subjects' consents, and then distributed instantaneously and on-demand on such a massive scale. We've had satellite imaging for a while now, but this a much more useful angle and a much, much higher definition.
That is the difference, and it's why you can't assess the privacy implications of GSV by relating it piecemeal to all the previously-commonplace activities it combines. Taken individually, of course they're acceptable. But before assuming GSV as a whole is acceptable, step back and think about all the new implications. And one of the big ones, as I pointed out when this issue last came up, is that this is the first time millions of people can look at your property on a whim without physically visiting it and giving you at least the opportunity to know who is looking, which I consider rude.
In other words, you hope that some judge sets a precedent as quickly as possible for encrypted records to not count as "accessible"? Or better yet, that the justice department gets handed the statistics to convince a clueless legislature to outlaw encryption? I mean, if they're going to require these records to be discoverable in the first place, why wouldn't they require by law that prosecutors and judges can actually read them?
My understanding is that when the rules first go into effect, individual judges will still have their own say as to whether the data policies involved in their cases meet the discovery standard of "accessible", and encryption would be a big grey area. If a big case comes up where a company scrupulously retained all their emails, but the suspicious officers in question were all encrypting with their own personal keys, which the company policy conveniently ignored, what would stop the judge from ruling that a retention policy does not keep its data "accessible" if it doesn't actively prevent personal encryption? Or if they didn't feel it was within their power, and it let the next Ken Lay get off scot-free, wouldn't that be a good reason for Congress to start working on laws against civilian encryption? Even if such laws were limited only to data passing through corporate servers, to or from corporate personnel, it would still be a blow to efforts against corporate espionage.
Don't get me wrong: I'm not the least bit anti-encryption. It's just that I've always been a little grateful that encryption had not made its way into the mainstream yet. The post-9/11 political climate is definitely not the time for it to try, because as far as I know there's nothing constitutional to prevent Congress from killing it if they've got a reason.
Yeah, that's the most likely explanation I could think of too. They could decide to require developers to get a Mac to develop reliably for the iPhone, but they're not stupid. But if iPhone web apps are likely to rely on any special/quirky features of Safari, they would have to get Safari onto more development platforms.
Any Web 2.0 developers seen anything new, enticing, and exclusive to Safari 3 they might try to get developers to support?
The editors are asleep at the switch. The earlier Teacher Found Guilty of Endangering Kids Due to Spyware is a Related Story.
That's why I'm disgusted with the efforts by biotech and government to enforce "intellectual property" rights on GMOs. However, I actually say don't ban the terminator genes. Let them produce all they want, and let farmers who think it's worth it buy all they want. Just be sure the laws and the courts make it possible for the neighboring farmer to sue the producer into the dirt when the self-destructive organism takes their crop down with it. I'd rather see them brutally punished for pursuing such an unfriendly idea than just go back to the lab and come up with a workaround when governments legislate narrowly against their current research.
And if they do manage to come up with a way to do this that has no chance of unintended propagation, well then what's the harm? Each farmer will make their own decision on whether it's economical for them or not. If there are farmers who would lose money on terminating seeds, then you can bet there will still be plenty of firms willing to take their money for non-terminating seeds.
Yes, I followed the links. I even had to look for a few seconds before I even saw the cat. But the first line of the Times article makes the point the best: "For Mary Kalin-Casey, it was never about her cat."
Your dismissal implies that you believe that, because this particular photo is of a cat, no photo used in Google Street Views could possibly reflect negatively and/or adversely impact the life of any person associated with a particular address. From the Times:
Google worked with the Safety Net Project at the National Network to End Domestic Violence, which represents shelters for victims of domestic violence nationwide, to remove pictures of those shelters. "They reached out in advance to us so we could reach out to our network," said Cindy Southworth, founder and director of the organization.As a therapist for children and families with an agency contracted to Children's Services, my girlfriend often refers women to shelters like that, so I've got a decent feel for just how covert they are and have to be. Getting their pictures in Google Street View has the potential to expose them. When that happens, women die. That's an extreme example, of course, but it doesn't take much imagination to come up with more mundane ones. Even if they're little more than an inconvenience to the occupants of a location, isn't that an inconvenience they did nothing to deserve and have no reason to expect?
Absolutely, which is why I don't go so far as to say that it should be illegal to make or even publish a permanent record of something that was visible "in public". My point is only that publishing and indexing detailed photographs of private residences on such a massive scale can't be easily dismissed as not an invasion of privacy. It's not illegal or "evil", per se, but I wouldn't exactly call it fair to the people whose lives just got documented.
[...] when you live on a street in a major city, and don't have curtains. It'd be a full-time job to observe everyone who was observing you in that situation.That's what surveillance cameras are for. And then the axiom works in reverse as well: Anyone in the range of a surveillance camera should get the courtesy of knowing they're under surveillance. If I'm not mistaken, there's a lot of law that backs up that position. Anyway, there are ways to know who's looking at who, if you care to take the trouble. But not when Google publishes pictures of your house for the masses.
The suggestion from many that curtains make this a moot point is correct, of course, and who wouldn't want to put up curtains? But not closing your curtains waives your right to privacy? Does not turning off your firewall give snoopers the right to download files off your private network? Legally, no, as far as I know. You can argue "serves you right" or "just curious" or "trying to make a point" all you want, but it doesn't change the fact that the act is impolite at best. Likewise, even if this was the only practical way to gather necessary content for a very useful tool, it doesn't change the fact that Google's just been rude to a whole lot of people.
However, I should point out that, to my mind at least, their pre-emptive efforts with such organizations as domestic violence victim shelters, along with the ease for any user to flag a view as "objectionable" for a variety of reasons, goes a long way toward making up for it. I just hope they respond seriously and quickly to those reports.
A true statement and a valid point, but there's a piece missing from the "walking down the street" analogy that seems to be eluding most of us. When a person walks down the street and looks into a home through a street-facing window, it's extremely unlikely that the window is actually a one-way mirror that only allows viewing in. So yes, they can see what's inside, but anyone inside can also see them. Stop and think about that for a moment, because it's a natural check-and-balance mechanism that, in my opinion, should not be left out of these sorts of privacy discussions: While you can't deny other people the right to look at you in public without your permission, it's only fair that you get to look at them at the same time. If nothing else, it's reasonable to at least have the opportunity to know who is looking.
But with Google Street View, or the Zaio Corp. database, or any similar endeavor, you don't get that courtesy. Even if you were lucky enough to spot the camera in the ten to fifteen seconds it was visible, you still don't know how many millions of people just looked into your life at that moment. And don't forget this is Google we're talking about: among other things, the new background checker for lazy hiring managers, who naturally have your home address at the top of your résumé. Suddenly anyone who lives in a Street View-covered area had better:
For the record, I like Street View. I've been hoping Google would add something like that for some time. But don't gloss over the privacy concerns by equating walking down the street and looking through a window with driving a van down hundreds of streets taking millions of photographs and associating them with street addresses on the world's largest search engine. Only one of these makes your private life public, and it's not the first one.
Here are some other interesting examples. I used to work for a company that compiled and published huge clip art collections, and we kept track of a list of specific things to watch out for and remove whenever we spotted them, because we'd gotten C&D letters from the IP holders. I don't know if these are all actually trademarks, or some are trade dress, or some are just lawyers talking through their hats, but...
I've got three things that annoy me every time I get in my car. First is the Jensen stereo I installed because it had a Bluetooth receiver. It's got a big, round, silver knob on the left side. It controls the volume. Great! Turn a knob instead of pushing a button! I love that! But... It doesn't turn. It's actually a four-way rocker: up-down for volume and left-right for station or track select. But it gets worse. The thing is cheap and flimsy, so it's infuriatingly easy to click the wrong direction and get a different song just when you had one you wanted to turn up. It also has an alarming tendency to stick when you click up, sending your volume skyrocketing to max after a second or two delay.
Speaking of alarming, the previous owners had an alarm installed, and it's got a bug or two. It's one of those nice ones that cuts power to the ignition until the alarm is disarmed. Fine, but unfortunately it also cuts power to the ignition if the alarm is never armed in the first place, every time the car is turned off! If I just get out to pump some gas, I still have to "disarm" the alarm to start the car.
Finally, I'm not sure who to blame for this one. It's either Jensen or palmOne. Every time I turn the car on, the Bluetooth receiver in the stereo pairs with my Treo. It almost always does this silently and without a problem, and that's great. What's not great is that the process of pairing somehow activates the Treo's screen and disables the keyguard. I tend to wear the thing on my hip, but I've had to get in the constant habit of taking it off every time I get in the car because it sits right where the seatbelt is almost guaranteed to push some button eventually, usually the redial.
Nonsense indeed. I love how Mr. Thompson links national tragedies to the theme of every statement he makes with no concern for showing relevance. His remark is true, and apparently, unlike other "trainings" Thompson has alleged, it was actually intentional. But what does that have to do with enforcing the ratings? Lee Boyd Malvo was seventeen when the Beltway shootings occurred! And even if he weren't, John Allen Muhammad, 41, would have just bought it for him, since it was his idea to train on it in the first place.
Thousands of companies have tried that strategy. There's a reason you've never heard of them.
Law & Order sort of tackled this in the 2004 episode Gunplay. A website very similar to WhosARat.com, run by a defense lawyer, got two undercover cops shot while they were trying to score some illegal guns. (The story was apparently inspired by the deaths of James J. Nemorin and Rodney Andrews on Staten Island in 2003, although I don't think the website element was present in that incident.) As is typical of Law & Order, they raise the tough question, but they don't answer it: The prosecutors are let off the hook when they discover a much more sinister wrinkle.
Anyway, if the site does not get shut down preemptively, I'm sure that a death like this is only be a matter of time. When that happens, the investigators and prosecutors will stop at nothing to make a very messy example of the site owners, First Amendment be damned.
Wow, and you didn't even mean that ironically. There's your poster-child for American arrogance right there.
There is no need for any part of the U.S. constitution to be applied to citizens of the world when we've had a perfectly good Universal Declaration of Human Rights since 1948. Article 19 reads:
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.That's pretty unambiguous. Unfortunately, like most things the U.N. does, it's toothless and not taken very seriously even by its member nations. But it's still a visible, noble standard for any nation with a conscience to hold itself to.
I don't think that would work. According to the article, the ban is triggered by checking your drive's firmware. What disc you have in the drive at the time is irrelevant. Unless you've got some way to restore your box to its factory state before connecting to Live, your console will get blacklisted the first time you try it.
Thank you, but see the response from compro01. My opinion was actually based on a misunderstanding of the policy as stated, and I don't completely stand by it. I think Stanford's policy is close to fair. Escalating the fee for repeat offenses is fine, but receiving a DMCA notice is not an offense, even if it does cost Stanford money. Ignoring one is. If they equate receiving two complaints with proof of infringement and remove a user from their network with no recourse but to pay, what they're basically saying is, "We believe anything a DMCA notice says twice because it means we can take money from you." They need to give any user a fair chance to respond to accusations before fining them $500 or $1,000. We've seen time and time again how bogus some of these notices can be. If, given a fair chance, they don't respond, charge 'em whatever you want.
Now I feel like a doofus, because I completely misread that. You're absolutely right, and as easy as the DMCA is to abuse, that is ridiculous. I'll defend Stanford's right to demand compensation from people who cost them money because they won't deal with their own problems, but not from people who cost them money just because they're repeatedly fingered. That's not just guilty until proven innocent, it's guilty until you pay your bureaucracy bill.
No, as a matter of fact, they're not. Okay, the RIAA, MPAA, and DMCA turn my stomach as much as the next person who's realized that copyright is broken in the Internet age, but I'm going to have to play devil's advocate here and insist that people look a little more carefully at Stanford's position. From the release:
Yes, this means the DMCA is annoying and overbearing, but that's not Stanford's fault. In fact, it shouldn't even be Stanford's problem in the first place—Stanford itself didn't infringe anything—but the copyright holders have to go through Stanford to get a name and address for the infringer. Stanford could just ignore it, but I don't know what sort of nasty liabilities that opens them up to under the DMCA. (I suppose that's the crux of the matter, so any DMCA experts are invited to fill in that blank. For now I'm assuming it potentially makes life miserable for them.)
So they have to connect the copyright holders with the alleged infringers, and it's costing them big money to do so, and they wouldn't have to do anything if no one on the campus network was file-sharing illegally. They could just as easily have said, "We don't care how you use our network, but some other people do. As long as we continue to receive DMCA notices, the cost of dealing with them will be shared by all students in the form of a network subscription fee. What? You've never file-shared in your life and shouldn't have to pay? Well, apply a little peer pressure to your peers. When we stop getting DMCA notices, we'll stop charging the fee."
And that wouldn't have been beyond the pale, although it's obviously not fair. But they didn't do that. Read carefully the "penalty" for the first notice:
If you're infringing, you clean up your act and respond to the complaint within 48 hours, and as far as Stanford is concerned, you're golden. You may still get sued by the copyright holder, but let's face it: Under U.S. copyright law that is absolutely their right, and absolutely not Stanford's responsibility to shield you. If you're not infringing and the complaint is in error, you contact the complainant within 48 hours to tell them so, and you're still golden. Does the DMCA make false accusations easy and annoying? Yes. Does it need to be repealed or fixed so that copyright holders need to meet some burden of proof before placing any burden on innocent defendants? Yes. Does Stanford have an obligation to judge who's innocent and who's guilty, or to fix the DMCA? No. The only thing they care about is whether students get the complaint off Stanford's plate and deal with it themselves in a timely manner, because it's their problem, not Stanford's.
So be careful how you characterize things. Stanford is not network dropping and extorting money from innocent students. If you get a DMCA notice and ignore it, it doesn't matter whether you're infringing or not: You're not innocent, you're lazy, and you're costing Stanford money. If you take care of your own legal responsibilities, Stanford will leave you alone.
Two things:
First of all, I had never heard of Braun's Tassimo machine until I started a new job and there was one in the break room. (Quick explanation: It reads a barcode on specially marketed pods of coffee, espresso, tea, cocoa, etc. and automatically uses the appropriate amount and temperature of water.) My first thought was, "Hey, what a cool gadget! Glad I'm not paying for the T-Discs..." My second thought was, "Ooh, the T-Discs are Gevalia! Good stuff!" But my third thought was, "What the hell is this crap? Tastes like caffeinated dishwater!" Honestly, we've had a good number of different T-Discs come through, and all the coffee, espresso, and cocoa has tasted like ass. The only exception was an Italian import called Mastro Lorenzo. I don't know, maybe the filter needs changing or something.
So I make my coffee the finicky DIY way, with a French press. Regarding freshness, my experience is what you originally expected: that the freshness of the beans is far less important than the freshness of the grind. I always get my generic bulk French roast beans at the same supermarket, about a half-pound at a time, and use the in-store grinder. It's obvious that they sell through their bulk beans slowly, and I've gotten beans both from the dregs and from a fresh refill. (Of course, I don't know anything about how "fresh" a fresh refill actually is, so I'm assuming a few things.) No huge difference leapt out at me, but there is an enormous difference between the first wonderful cup of my bag and the last cup that I can't always even bring myself to brew. That last cup sometimes makes me check prices on a conical-burr grinder for the office.
Now the French press itself is a tricky thing. A drip maker is very convenient, and I've got no complaints about drip-brewed coffee. But if you truly want to understand what makes your coffee tick, and just how much potential it has, there's nothing like a French press. It's a variables-balancing game. The temperature of the water is easy: just below boiling. And obviously the amount of water depends on how much coffee you want. You can play with the grind, but it seems like the coarsest possible is always best. But then there's this delicate interaction between the amount of grounds and the steeping duration. If you can get it just right, you'll wonder where all that flavor was hiding in this coffee you thought you knew so well. And if you oversteep by forty-five seconds you'll wonder what jackass poured vinegar into your mug. My best results have come from just a little more grounds than I think I need, and an even four minutes. And the most important lesson I learned was to resist the temptation to stir while it's steeping. It's got to take its time, man.