Can somebody explain to me how this is possible in the US legal system? How can a university be obligated to provide information like this when it has nothing to do with the case, which is purely between the record company and the student? I can understand how a cowardly university board might cave to pressure, but this seems to be a judge ordering them to provide the information, without any evidence against the students other than a list of IP addresses, which is no evidence at all.
This is bad news for ad-supported Web sites and businesses, as rates should drop if the Net economy begins to take these findings seriously.
Good. I can't wait for this whole misguided model of ad-supported content to die a slow and painful death. Not only are advertisements annoying, not only do they take up valuable bandwidth, but the whole model is fundamentally wrong. Whenever something is ad-supported it means the number one priority of the content provider is not your wishes, but the advertiser's. It creates a basic conflict of interest. It makes you, the viewer / visitor / consumer the *product* they sell to their advertisers, instead of the client.
I'm willing to put my money where my mouth is and pay for content. As long as the price is fair and the content not DRM-ed. The only reason I don't subscribe to/. is that the editors are so bad.
If he is in charge of foreign policy won't he just try and push DMCA on other countries now?
It's already way too late for that... The DMCA is US's implementation of the WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organisation) Copyright Treaty. Europe already has its own implementation of the treaty in the form of a setofdirectives which most European countries have implemented by now, some even more draconian than the DMCA. Many other countries are following. You can see them fall one by one here.
You're saying all this in a tone of surprise, as though you thought somehow this time they would get it right...
This is what always happens with Microsoft! They can't do anything right, except marketing! There have been stories like this for close to thirty years now. Everything they make is shoddy and insecure and breaks after a few months. But it always has a thin veneer of coolness, speed and usability that people fall for over and over again. When are people ever going to learn that you can never trust Microsoft to do anything well, except selling people defective products?!
That's actually an erroneous legal idea....if in fact you have shown due diligence in trying to secure your network, and someone gets in, you are less likely to be found at fault. If however the courts can show that you knew the risks and consequences to having your network opened, and you had the means to do it, yet did not, you are much more likely to be held accountable.
You're missing the point. The point is that if your network is locked down tight and somebody does hack it, your defense of "somebody else did it" will be much weaker since the fact that the network is so secure makes it unlikely that somebody hacked it and therefore more likely that you did it yourself.
If this canadian company had any smarts they would at least get it to run on Symbian (the majority OS) and preferably do it so that it simply runs on anything that has a camera.
It already does run on Symbian. I can scan any random QR code with my Nokia N93 and it will decode it and then let me open the web page, call the number, or do whatever the code points to.
The reason is because the US does not use dedicated area codes for cellphones like most other countries do.
That makes perfect sense! Thanks, I'd been wondering the same thing for a long time. In the Netherlands all mobile numbers start with 06, so a caller can alway tell they're calling a mobile number. So receiving mobile calls or text messages is free. Except when the receiver is roaming abroad. The caller may be able to tell they're calling a mobile number, but not that the phone is currently abroad, so the receiver actually pays for the extra cost of being called while roaming. (I don't think that applies to text messages though, those are free to receive even when you're abroad.)
It's funny to see the dichotomy in here between people who Get e-book readers and people who Don't Get them. The latter are the ones trying to make the argument that the iPhone could do the same thing equally well. They are obviously not avid readers.
The whole idea behind ebook readers is that they have to be able to replace books in all the ways books are used. That means you have to be able to curl up with them on a couch with a glass of good wine, which has certain implications. They have to be a certain minimum size to be able to hold comfortably, and so they can contain a page of text at a size you can still read by candlelight, if necessary. They can't be so bright they would light up the whole room. Etc., etc..
None of these things apply to an iPhone (or iPod Touch). Sure you could use them to read a reference manual or a text book, but you wouldn't want to read the latest Nikki French off one! Or at least I wouldn't.
Could be worse, we're not as pussified as Europe is. Yet.
Purely out of curiosity: what was the background of that statement? Not being American I can't judge whether you were joking (in which case I'm wondering which American cultural meme it was based on), or being serious. If you were serious, in Europe the general perception is that America is a lot more "politically correct" ("pussified" in other words) than most European countries, so I'd be curious why you think it's the other way around.
911 calls were the first thing I thought of, too. Any business owner who jams a call about somebody having a heart attack would be sued into oblivion, and deserve it.
Not if they clearly advertised the fact that mobile phone calls are blocked inside their establishment. We managed fine for thousands of years without being able to make phone calls from inside a movie theater. Why should the fact that it's now technically possible to do so automatically mean that everybody should have the right to do it?
For restaurants, hair salons, etc., there's a simple solution -- just make it a policy, and have the guts to enforce it. Post little "No cell phone usage inside this establishment" signs. If people ignore the signs, politely remind them of the policy. If they continue to ignore it, throw them out, just like with any other customer who violates a policy of the business. Make common-sense exceptions for 911 calls. (They could even put that on their signs, if they wanted to.) Whatever business they'd lose in aggrieved cell-phone-addicted customers, they'd probably gain in others who appreciate the peace and quiet. The jamming thing is sneaky, cowardly, and dangerous.
The problem with that policy is that the other people in the establishment have to suffer through all the first warnings of all the assholes who choose to ignore the policy. It's not like it will happen once and then everybody else will fall in line.
To take the example of the movie theater again, if ten different people decide to take a phone call during a movie and have to be thrown out, my movie experience will still be well and truly ruined! While if it is not possible to make or take calls in the first place this will not happen, and as long as the fact that mobile phones wil not work inside is clearly advertised, people who don't want to take the risk of getting a heart attack and dying because it took 30 seconds longer for someone to be able to call 911 can stay away...
It always annoys the hell out of me when watching an American show on British TV (no commercials) or Dutch TV (no commercials on public TV, one commercial break for a half-hour show or three breaks for an hour-long show on commercial TV) that it's so painfully obvious where the commercial breaks are supposed to go. How sad is it that the writers even have to arrange their damn story lines around the commercial breaks! I've never understood how Americans could have let it get this far...
Think of this from the store's point of view for a moment. Should they just go on good faith? What's to stop tens of thousands of people from buying anything they want and coming back with am empty box demanding their money back? Once word of Best Buy's honor system policy gets out they would be bankrupted by scams.
Yes, they should go on good faith. At least initially. I like how Amazon.com does it. I order from them a lot, and I've had a few problems with deliveries getting lost or damaged. Their service was amazing. One email, and they will send me the item again, instantly and no questions asked. They can easily tell by my resends-to-successful-deliveries ratio that I'm probably legit and they realise they have more to gain by keeping me as a happy customer than they do by aggravating me and losing me forever.
I realise it isn't quite so easy for Best Buy to do this, as its harder for them to keep track of their customers, but still it amazes me how these companies can't see that treating their customers like crap is worse for them in the long run than giving the customer the benefit of the doubt once in a while. I highly doubt "tens of thousands of people" would immediately abuse such good faith. Most people are actually honest. And I'm sure they could think of clever ways of minimizing the abuse.
Having read a few stories like this lately I have to ask: how can this possibly be legal? Are there no consumer protection laws in the US which have something to say about this?
Here in the Netherlands the law says among other things that a retailer (not the manufacturer) is liable when a product sold by them does not work like the consumer may reasonably expect. The retailer is obligated to at least offer to repair the product or replace it with a working one at no cost to the consumer. Presumably, a "harddisk" consisting of bathroom tiles instead of electronics would be interpreted as not working as could be reasonably expected...
Netbeans isn't even remotely close to being lean or fast. I downloaded Netbeans 6 Beta 2 a few days ago, and it's still one of the slowest applications I've ever used. Additionally, Swing still looks terrible, doesn't fit in with the desktop, and has horrible font rendering.
I guess your handle adequately explains this wilful dissemination of blatant FUD. You know very well that betas are not optimized for performance and comparing a beta version of one product to a production release of another product is unfair and misleading. And it isn't even true that the Netbeans 6.0 Beta 2 is slow. On my system it starts in seven seconds, just as long as Eclipse 3.3.
As to your other points: please define "fit in" and "horrible". On my Windows XP desktop I cannot distinguish Netbeans from any other Windows application, including the nicely anti-aliased fonts. It only looks different than Firefox and the various MS Office products, none of which "fit in" with the Windows XP desktop themselves.
Purely out of interest: have you (as in: your school) looked in to running an open source (GNU/Linux, OpenOffice.org, etc...) shop? Or some other non-Microsoft configuration? If so, what were your reasons for choosing Microsoft?
And for that alone Netbeans has a very well founded raison d'être. If it's GPL now, lets wait and see how long it takes for Eclipse to absorb that great tool.
That might still be a while, since Eclipse isn't distributed under the GPL. It has its own license which is incompatible with the GPL, so they cannot incorporate GPL code. This has been a problem for a long time.
There's much venom between the parties vying for election. This issue highlights a much over-looked aspect of Australian politics; do we take our values and principles from the EU? or from south-east asia? Should Australia join the EU? or should we go down the ASEAN route?
OK, it was nice while it lasted, but that's the end of my dealings with Valve. I hate crap like this and I'm extremely disappointed that Valve would pull stunts like this. Anybody can make a mistake, but evil behaviour like this means I will never deal with the company again. Backstabbing bastards.
So why are they selling tracks at $0.89? To drive people away from the iTunes Store, knock it off its pedestal as the dominant online music retailer, and then jack up the prices once that has occurred and there is a new major player on the block who is more...accommodating...to the wants of the major labels.
Possibly. However, I expect that when they try to jack the prices back up they will find that you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube. I don't think people will accept them putting prices up again once they're used to tracks costing one dollar.
In the USA, we take pride that this sort of censorship was explicitly forbidden when our nation was founded. I'm not trying to troll, but Europe chose not to do this.
There you go again, thinking that Europe is a one country like the US. "Europe" is a continent, and it did not "choose" to do anything. Every country in Europe has its own constitution (if they even have one, some countries do not have a constitution at all), some of which are a lot more modern than the American one. The US constitution may have been revolutionary when the country was founded, and I'm not denying what an amazing achievement the US was as an experiment in building a free country, but that was 230 years ago and it is showing its age. Don't get carried away in thinking the US is still superior to every other country, like most of your countrymen seem to do.
Slashdot Mirror
Can somebody explain to me how this is possible in the US legal system? How can a university be obligated to provide information like this when it has nothing to do with the case, which is purely between the record company and the student? I can understand how a cowardly university board might cave to pressure, but this seems to be a judge ordering them to provide the information, without any evidence against the students other than a list of IP addresses, which is no evidence at all.
Do you guys get Doctor Who? Or Torchwood?
Good. I can't wait for this whole misguided model of ad-supported content to die a slow and painful death. Not only are advertisements annoying, not only do they take up valuable bandwidth, but the whole model is fundamentally wrong. Whenever something is ad-supported it means the number one priority of the content provider is not your wishes, but the advertiser's. It creates a basic conflict of interest. It makes you, the viewer / visitor / consumer the *product* they sell to their advertisers, instead of the client.
I'm willing to put my money where my mouth is and pay for content. As long as the price is fair and the content not DRM-ed. The only reason I don't subscribe to /. is that the editors are so bad.
It's already way too late for that... The DMCA is US's implementation of the WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organisation) Copyright Treaty. Europe already has its own implementation of the treaty in the form of a set of directives which most European countries have implemented by now, some even more draconian than the DMCA. Many other countries are following. You can see them fall one by one here.
Well, you know... it's not easy being green.
You're saying all this in a tone of surprise, as though you thought somehow this time they would get it right...
This is what always happens with Microsoft! They can't do anything right, except marketing! There have been stories like this for close to thirty years now. Everything they make is shoddy and insecure and breaks after a few months. But it always has a thin veneer of coolness, speed and usability that people fall for over and over again. When are people ever going to learn that you can never trust Microsoft to do anything well, except selling people defective products?!
You're missing the point. The point is that if your network is locked down tight and somebody does hack it, your defense of "somebody else did it" will be much weaker since the fact that the network is so secure makes it unlikely that somebody hacked it and therefore more likely that you did it yourself.
Slashdotted. Oh, the many levels of delicious irony...
It already does run on Symbian. I can scan any random QR code with my Nokia N93 and it will decode it and then let me open the web page, call the number, or do whatever the code points to.
I'm not an American and even I know that's nonsense. You don't HAVE to vote Republicrat you know!
That makes perfect sense! Thanks, I'd been wondering the same thing for a long time. In the Netherlands all mobile numbers start with 06, so a caller can alway tell they're calling a mobile number. So receiving mobile calls or text messages is free. Except when the receiver is roaming abroad. The caller may be able to tell they're calling a mobile number, but not that the phone is currently abroad, so the receiver actually pays for the extra cost of being called while roaming. (I don't think that applies to text messages though, those are free to receive even when you're abroad.)
It's funny to see the dichotomy in here between people who Get e-book readers and people who Don't Get them. The latter are the ones trying to make the argument that the iPhone could do the same thing equally well. They are obviously not avid readers.
The whole idea behind ebook readers is that they have to be able to replace books in all the ways books are used. That means you have to be able to curl up with them on a couch with a glass of good wine, which has certain implications. They have to be a certain minimum size to be able to hold comfortably, and so they can contain a page of text at a size you can still read by candlelight, if necessary. They can't be so bright they would light up the whole room. Etc., etc..
None of these things apply to an iPhone (or iPod Touch). Sure you could use them to read a reference manual or a text book, but you wouldn't want to read the latest Nikki French off one! Or at least I wouldn't.
Purely out of curiosity: what was the background of that statement? Not being American I can't judge whether you were joking (in which case I'm wondering which American cultural meme it was based on), or being serious. If you were serious, in Europe the general perception is that America is a lot more "politically correct" ("pussified" in other words) than most European countries, so I'd be curious why you think it's the other way around.
I didn't know Hayes made access points...
Not if they clearly advertised the fact that mobile phone calls are blocked inside their establishment. We managed fine for thousands of years without being able to make phone calls from inside a movie theater. Why should the fact that it's now technically possible to do so automatically mean that everybody should have the right to do it?
The problem with that policy is that the other people in the establishment have to suffer through all the first warnings of all the assholes who choose to ignore the policy. It's not like it will happen once and then everybody else will fall in line.
To take the example of the movie theater again, if ten different people decide to take a phone call during a movie and have to be thrown out, my movie experience will still be well and truly ruined! While if it is not possible to make or take calls in the first place this will not happen, and as long as the fact that mobile phones wil not work inside is clearly advertised, people who don't want to take the risk of getting a heart attack and dying because it took 30 seconds longer for someone to be able to call 911 can stay away...
How true.
It always annoys the hell out of me when watching an American show on British TV (no commercials) or Dutch TV (no commercials on public TV, one commercial break for a half-hour show or three breaks for an hour-long show on commercial TV) that it's so painfully obvious where the commercial breaks are supposed to go. How sad is it that the writers even have to arrange their damn story lines around the commercial breaks! I've never understood how Americans could have let it get this far...
Yes, they should go on good faith. At least initially. I like how Amazon.com does it. I order from them a lot, and I've had a few problems with deliveries getting lost or damaged. Their service was amazing. One email, and they will send me the item again, instantly and no questions asked. They can easily tell by my resends-to-successful-deliveries ratio that I'm probably legit and they realise they have more to gain by keeping me as a happy customer than they do by aggravating me and losing me forever.
I realise it isn't quite so easy for Best Buy to do this, as its harder for them to keep track of their customers, but still it amazes me how these companies can't see that treating their customers like crap is worse for them in the long run than giving the customer the benefit of the doubt once in a while. I highly doubt "tens of thousands of people" would immediately abuse such good faith. Most people are actually honest. And I'm sure they could think of clever ways of minimizing the abuse.
Having read a few stories like this lately I have to ask: how can this possibly be legal? Are there no consumer protection laws in the US which have something to say about this?
Here in the Netherlands the law says among other things that a retailer (not the manufacturer) is liable when a product sold by them does not work like the consumer may reasonably expect. The retailer is obligated to at least offer to repair the product or replace it with a working one at no cost to the consumer. Presumably, a "harddisk" consisting of bathroom tiles instead of electronics would be interpreted as not working as could be reasonably expected...
I guess your handle adequately explains this wilful dissemination of blatant FUD. You know very well that betas are not optimized for performance and comparing a beta version of one product to a production release of another product is unfair and misleading. And it isn't even true that the Netbeans 6.0 Beta 2 is slow. On my system it starts in seven seconds, just as long as Eclipse 3.3.
As to your other points: please define "fit in" and "horrible". On my Windows XP desktop I cannot distinguish Netbeans from any other Windows application, including the nicely anti-aliased fonts. It only looks different than Firefox and the various MS Office products, none of which "fit in" with the Windows XP desktop themselves.
Purely out of interest: have you (as in: your school) looked in to running an open source (GNU/Linux, OpenOffice.org, etc...) shop? Or some other non-Microsoft configuration? If so, what were your reasons for choosing Microsoft?
That might still be a while, since Eclipse isn't distributed under the GPL. It has its own license which is incompatible with the GPL, so they cannot incorporate GPL code. This has been a problem for a long time.
How about having your own values and principles?
OK, it was nice while it lasted, but that's the end of my dealings with Valve. I hate crap like this and I'm extremely disappointed that Valve would pull stunts like this. Anybody can make a mistake, but evil behaviour like this means I will never deal with the company again. Backstabbing bastards.
Possibly. However, I expect that when they try to jack the prices back up they will find that you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube. I don't think people will accept them putting prices up again once they're used to tracks costing one dollar.
There you go again, thinking that Europe is a one country like the US. "Europe" is a continent, and it did not "choose" to do anything. Every country in Europe has its own constitution (if they even have one, some countries do not have a constitution at all), some of which are a lot more modern than the American one. The US constitution may have been revolutionary when the country was founded, and I'm not denying what an amazing achievement the US was as an experiment in building a free country, but that was 230 years ago and it is showing its age. Don't get carried away in thinking the US is still superior to every other country, like most of your countrymen seem to do.