I don't see how this is a slap at free speech. What it is a slap at is those who think that something that would NOT be OK before the internet suddenly becomes fine just because they do it on the internet.
Here's a good rule of thumb: if something could get you in trouble doing it without the internet, doing it via the internet won't get you in less trouble.
The internet changes things in two ways in these matters.
You can reach more people.
Interesting jurisdiction issues can arise that usually would not be present in pre-internet cases.
The #1 reason they didn't defend themselves is because they are a UK company and not under US jurisdiction. The #2 reason is that if they were to spend the money to defend themselves, they would open a precedent for any other spammer to sue them the same way. I think it's perfectly reasonable for a foreign company to ignore a US court order in this case
What you have overlooked is that Spamhaus botched not defending themselves. The correct way to not defend yourself is to tell the court that the suit was filed in that they don't have jurisdiction, so you aren't going to show up. That's safe. (Well, it's safe as long as you are right and the court did not have jurisdiction...).
What Spamhaus did was show up at the original court, and file a motion to have the case removed to federal court. The motion was granted and the case moved to federal court. Then Spamhaus stopped defending themselves. That's not safe. Once you start participating, other than just to appear to claim lack of jurisdiction, you are conceeding that the court has jurisdiction over you.
At best, (assuming the spammer pursues this vigorously), Spamhaus now has a long and expensive legal fight ahead of themselves to undo the result of their botch. At worst, they've got an enforceable judgment against them that will be enforceable in the UK under part 74 of the UK's Civil Procedure Rules.
John "Big Lasagna" Smith sues the small Italian company, in Illinois, USA, claiming its website makes fun of him. John "Big Lasagna" Smith states the Illinois court has jurisdiction, because his friend John Doe, who lives in Illinois, used to download lasagna recipes from www.italian-best-lasagnas.com.
Best Lasagnas Ltd has never visited the USA and has no US office, agents or business outlets, and it's lasagnas recipes surely don't make it rich enough to afford the cost of a 3 month trial at the other end of the world.
So, Best Lasagnas Ltd is not present for the judgement, and John "Big Lasagna" Smith obtains a default court order saying ICANN has to remove italian-best-lasagnas.com from the internet.
This example isn't relevant, because as stated above, there's nothing that gives the court jurisdiction, and ICANN will ignore the order.
To make your example fit with the Spamhaus facts, you need to adjust it as follows: Best Lasagnas, instead of making a special appearance to tell the court that it lacks jurisdiction, appears and files a motion to have the case moved to a different court. This quite possibly gives the second court jurisdiction. It is in the second court that the default judgement occurs.
The "the court lacks jurisdiction" argument loses a lot of force when the party making the argument is the one that asked for the case to be in that court.
2. Spamhaus isn't even in the US, no business presence on US territory at all.
3. Spamhaus only connection to the US is US companies utilize the service.
You missed one:
4. Spamhaus may have consented to jurisdiction, by specifically asking for the case to be moved to that court, from the court in which it was originally filed.
Damn, judges really should be expected to have a clue when sitting in on a case...
The judge does have a clue. Spamhaus lost. Sure, it was a default judgement because they didn't feel that the court had jurisdiction so didn't defend, but that is irrelevant. The court has to treat it like any other judgement, and attempt to enforce it.
What court though? I mean, if some business that I slighted in China brings a lawsuit against me, I'm not going to fly half-way across the world to defend myself
That's a perfectly reasonable attitude, provide you are aware that the chinese business will, therefore, win their lawsuit in a chinese court. If you have no assets anyplace that a chinese court could get to, then you are fine. Just don't miscalculate, ignore them, lose to a default judgement, and then remember that you do have stuff in China!
Also, you have to be careful HOW you ignore them. For example, if you start to defend yourself on the merits, and then say "screw this...you don't have any jurisdiction over me, so bugger off" and THEN start ignoring them, that initial defending on the merits might be seen as conceding jurisdiction to the court. That's bad, because then when the winner comes to your country to collect, there is a decent chance your country's courts will recognize the debt as a valid debt, and then it is a simple matter for that Chinese business to get a judgement in your country to enforce the debt.
The bottom line: ignoring a court anywhere in the world is not something to take lightly. You need to at least get a lawyer with experience in the laws of your country to tell you HOW to ignore the foreign court so that you won't accidently open yourself up to a nasty surprise.
Interesting idea, but as implemented, you'd need a password that is rather long. For each tacton, you are choosing 1 of 9. That's 3.17 bits. You'll need a pretty long sequence to get decent password strength out of that.
When memorizing a password, I think length is more important than the number of possible symbols at each position, when it comes to difficulty of memorizing. Memorizing 10 decimal digits is easier than memorizing 32 bits, for example.
I'm not going to stir the shit much, I will only say that one problem with DRM is that it causes the music you bought to not be able to be played any way you want.
The same problem can happen without DRM. I can't figure out how to get my LPs into my CD player, for example, and even if I did get them in, I suspect they would not work.
While meant as a joke, there is a serious point to that remark. The typical consumer will be comparing DRM'ed media to physical media, like CDs or books or DVDs, not to computer files. When you compare, say, an audio book to a physical book, or an iTunes album on an iPod to a physical CD, they come out pretty similar.
OK, here's what I want-a format that combines a readable book with an audiobook. That would be great. I could then listen to the book in the car on the way to and from work, and read the book in bed at night.
This thing runs in real-time. Wouldn't it be faster to just burn an audio CD-R and then rip it? Say you have 60 minutes of music. Burn at 20x, rip at 20x, and we are talking maybe 10 minutes (I threw in some time for overhead). That's a lot better than 60 minutes!
Uhhh... I don't want persistent addressing. I like the idea that if I really wanted to, I could change my e-mail accounts or shut down my web site I have several e-mail accounts for use with different kinds of contacts: some for shopping, some for friends, some for business. I don't mix them. I don't want to mix them.
Given a system that provides persistent addressing, it is simple to get non-persistent addressing: simply stop using the persistent name, and get a new persistent name.
So definitely not a car replacement. What Kamen should have been comparing it to was the bicycle. Unfortunately, the price/performance ratio still just doesn't add up when comparing to a basic $200 bike. You can carry just as much stuff on the bike, go just as fast, with no need to recharge it every night.
Bikes are too big. The beauty of the Segway is that its footprint is very close to that of a pedestrian.
Examing a cakebox of 50 discs I have handy, it is 5 inches in diameter and 3.5 inches tall. So, it would fit in a 5x5x3.5 cube, which takes up a volume of 87.5 in^3.
30000 discs would require 600 of these, for a volume of 52500 in^3. That's the volume of a cube just slighty over a yard on each side.
What's wrong with just numbering the discs, putting them in numbered cakeboxes, and stacking them in the corner of a closet, keeping a record somewhere of which disc is in which cakebox?
The questioner said that the data is copied to the servers for work, and the discs are just kept basically as archives until the project is done, so it doesn't sound like fast access is needed.
And make sure you are using a filesystem that overwrites blocks in place. The most common Linux filesystems (ReiserFS and ext3) do NOT always overwrite blocks in place, so shred is not always effective on them.
The answer to the question posed in the subject and summary is no. The question is stupid.
Beta and VHS were not compatible. The situation is not at all comparable to that of televisions. If, when you bought your DVD player, or subscribed to cable or satellite, you had to get a different DVD player or a different cable or satellite box, depending on whether you had plasma or not, and movies released for non-plasma TVs would not play on plasma TVs, then the question would be non-stupid.
You can get the official instructions for removing U3 here. Click "support" and scroll down to question #6.
One thing this is annoying about that--they recognize that Mac and Linux users might want to get rid of U3 (their survey that asks why you are getting rid of it includes using Mac or Linux among the answers), but the software to remove U3 only runs on Windows.
It did not work under Parallels on my Mac. I had to really boot Windows to run the U3 remover.
I don't like Bush a bit, but I find your argument absurd. Al Quaeda might be as large as they want, but they are failing. This news is about a STOPPED attack
Maybe...maybe not. Al Quaeda is now in a position where they can cause serious disruption, whether or not their attacks succeed. All they need to do now is recruit people who are willing to come to Europe or the US, plot an attack, and get caught, and each time this happens, we'll have days or weeks of disruption in travel and shipping.
They can probably cause more damage to the economy with failed attacks than with real attacks, because they can pull off many more failed attacks in a given time.
And we can't even adapt to this and ignore the failed attacks, because if we don't take them seriously, real attacks will slip through.
Cameroon is not typo-squatting anything. If you type in a domain name ending in.cm that hasn't been specifically assigned to someone, you get a fairly innocuous default page with links to ads. So what?
The "so what" is that when you try to go to a non-existent domain, you should get a name resolution failure. That way, you know that you have an error. The screws that up.
One problem with cost of living arguments is that many items nowadays are priced nationally, not locally. If I want a brand new MacBook Pro, for example, its going to cost the same whether I live in New York City or Frostbite Falls, Minnesota. Same for HDTV sets, and many other things that we geeks like to buy at a much higher rate than the "typical" family whose needs are used to figure cost of living.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's a good rule of thumb: if something could get you in trouble doing it without the internet, doing it via the internet won't get you in less trouble.
The internet changes things in two ways in these matters.
What you have overlooked is that Spamhaus botched not defending themselves. The correct way to not defend yourself is to tell the court that the suit was filed in that they don't have jurisdiction, so you aren't going to show up. That's safe. (Well, it's safe as long as you are right and the court did not have jurisdiction...).
What Spamhaus did was show up at the original court, and file a motion to have the case removed to federal court. The motion was granted and the case moved to federal court. Then Spamhaus stopped defending themselves. That's not safe. Once you start participating, other than just to appear to claim lack of jurisdiction, you are conceeding that the court has jurisdiction over you.
At best, (assuming the spammer pursues this vigorously), Spamhaus now has a long and expensive legal fight ahead of themselves to undo the result of their botch. At worst, they've got an enforceable judgment against them that will be enforceable in the UK under part 74 of the UK's Civil Procedure Rules.
But they turned down Steve Job's offer of $0 OS X for the OLPC, saying that it was important that the OLPC be free in the "free software" sense.
This example isn't relevant, because as stated above, there's nothing that gives the court jurisdiction, and ICANN will ignore the order.
To make your example fit with the Spamhaus facts, you need to adjust it as follows: Best Lasagnas, instead of making a special appearance to tell the court that it lacks jurisdiction, appears and files a motion to have the case moved to a different court. This quite possibly gives the second court jurisdiction. It is in the second court that the default judgement occurs.
The "the court lacks jurisdiction" argument loses a lot of force when the party making the argument is the one that asked for the case to be in that court.
You missed one:
4. Spamhaus may have consented to jurisdiction, by specifically asking for the case to be moved to that court, from the court in which it was originally filed.
That would have been a really nice rant, if it weren't for the fact that it works the same way in most of the rest of the world.
The judge does have a clue. Spamhaus lost. Sure, it was a default judgement because they didn't feel that the court had jurisdiction so didn't defend, but that is irrelevant. The court has to treat it like any other judgement, and attempt to enforce it.
That's a perfectly reasonable attitude, provide you are aware that the chinese business will, therefore, win their lawsuit in a chinese court. If you have no assets anyplace that a chinese court could get to, then you are fine. Just don't miscalculate, ignore them, lose to a default judgement, and then remember that you do have stuff in China!
Also, you have to be careful HOW you ignore them. For example, if you start to defend yourself on the merits, and then say "screw this...you don't have any jurisdiction over me, so bugger off" and THEN start ignoring them, that initial defending on the merits might be seen as conceding jurisdiction to the court. That's bad, because then when the winner comes to your country to collect, there is a decent chance your country's courts will recognize the debt as a valid debt, and then it is a simple matter for that Chinese business to get a judgement in your country to enforce the debt.
The bottom line: ignoring a court anywhere in the world is not something to take lightly. You need to at least get a lawyer with experience in the laws of your country to tell you HOW to ignore the foreign court so that you won't accidently open yourself up to a nasty surprise.
When memorizing a password, I think length is more important than the number of possible symbols at each position, when it comes to difficulty of memorizing. Memorizing 10 decimal digits is easier than memorizing 32 bits, for example.
The RHE he was using for comparison was RHE WS, which is an apt comparison.
The same problem can happen without DRM. I can't figure out how to get my LPs into my CD player, for example, and even if I did get them in, I suspect they would not work.
While meant as a joke, there is a serious point to that remark. The typical consumer will be comparing DRM'ed media to physical media, like CDs or books or DVDs, not to computer files. When you compare, say, an audio book to a physical book, or an iTunes album on an iPod to a physical CD, they come out pretty similar.
OK, here's what I want-a format that combines a readable book with an audiobook. That would be great. I could then listen to the book in the car on the way to and from work, and read the book in bed at night.
Quality would be the same, too.
Given a system that provides persistent addressing, it is simple to get non-persistent addressing: simply stop using the persistent name, and get a new persistent name.
Bikes are too big. The beauty of the Segway is that its footprint is very close to that of a pedestrian.
No, that line is correct. The social security card is not for indentification.
30000 discs would require 600 of these, for a volume of 52500 in^3. That's the volume of a cube just slighty over a yard on each side.
What's wrong with just numbering the discs, putting them in numbered cakeboxes, and stacking them in the corner of a closet, keeping a record somewhere of which disc is in which cakebox?
The questioner said that the data is copied to the servers for work, and the discs are just kept basically as archives until the project is done, so it doesn't sound like fast access is needed.
And make sure you are using a filesystem that overwrites blocks in place. The most common Linux filesystems (ReiserFS and ext3) do NOT always overwrite blocks in place, so shred is not always effective on them.
Beta and VHS were not compatible. The situation is not at all comparable to that of televisions. If, when you bought your DVD player, or subscribed to cable or satellite, you had to get a different DVD player or a different cable or satellite box, depending on whether you had plasma or not, and movies released for non-plasma TVs would not play on plasma TVs, then the question would be non-stupid.
One thing this is annoying about that--they recognize that Mac and Linux users might want to get rid of U3 (their survey that asks why you are getting rid of it includes using Mac or Linux among the answers), but the software to remove U3 only runs on Windows.
It did not work under Parallels on my Mac. I had to really boot Windows to run the U3 remover.
Maybe...maybe not. Al Quaeda is now in a position where they can cause serious disruption, whether or not their attacks succeed. All they need to do now is recruit people who are willing to come to Europe or the US, plot an attack, and get caught, and each time this happens, we'll have days or weeks of disruption in travel and shipping.
They can probably cause more damage to the economy with failed attacks than with real attacks, because they can pull off many more failed attacks in a given time.
And we can't even adapt to this and ignore the failed attacks, because if we don't take them seriously, real attacks will slip through.
Those filters are now more likely to classify legitimate mail as spam.
The number of false positives go up, and people turn off their filters to stop missing their legitimate mail, and then spam can get through.
What they are doing makes it so you don't get an error for vsdfklm.qwe.casdlkm.tob.qnbus.cmkasfb.qob.cm, which is a non-existant domain.
The "so what" is that when you try to go to a non-existent domain, you should get a name resolution failure. That way, you know that you have an error. The screws that up.
One problem with cost of living arguments is that many items nowadays are priced nationally, not locally. If I want a brand new MacBook Pro, for example, its going to cost the same whether I live in New York City or Frostbite Falls, Minnesota. Same for HDTV sets, and many other things that we geeks like to buy at a much higher rate than the "typical" family whose needs are used to figure cost of living.