Have you ever met a schizophrenic person? I have, and you CAN NOT convince them that the government/aliens/Jesus is not after them and waging a secret war against them.
Yes, I have. And not a single one of them believed the government/aliens/Jesus was out to get them. None of them were involved in FOIA requests, nor did they care to be.
Maybe you meant to write "paraphrenics" or "paranoid schizophrenics" instead of just "schizophrenic"? Or maybe you just didn't know the difference and were pretending to know something you didn't? Your choice.
Dude, it was a joke. Granted, it wasn't a joke in binary format it was in human readable format, nor was it in a thread about getting girls but it was a joke about him saying "it's not size it is how you [use it]" but I'd figure even binary format people could get it. Apparently not.
Writing a new OS only for the 386 in 1991 gets you your second 'F' for this term. But if you do real well on the final exam, you can still pass the course.
So, it is now 2005. Linux has been ported to so many devices it is almost absurd. Doing what got the "F" turned out to be the right thing in terms of project accessibility, use, growth, and so on not to mention portability. No Minix machines are in the supercmoputer list but Linux is.
So, what should the "final exam" and resulting grade be?;)
That when Mozilla (or anything not by Microsoft) has a bug, people say "Let's hope that these will be fixed soon!", but when IE (or anything by Microsoft) has a bug, people say (")Hahahahaha!(")?
Perhaps because they know it won't get fixed soon? BTW, what's with wrapping your quote symbols in parens?!
However, calling this a non-threat is akin to saying it shouldn't be illegal to put pennies on passenger rail tracks. While it appears harmless enough 99.99% of the time, the one time it does kill 500 people is worth it being illegal to begin with.
Hmm so you say it happens once in 10,000 times? You may want to send your proof/references to snopes cuz it has it listed as an urban legend:
http://www.snopes.com/science/train.htm
Now, that said. Intentionally interfereing with an operating aircraft was already illegally. The catch is, by the authories' own admision, the guy wasn't trying to: he had no intent to whatsoever.
The fed could have found charges that were applicable if the man intended to do what/.-ers are accusing him of because laws already exist to do that. Indeed, the news agencies were reporting on the non-PA law before the guy was caught.
Nope. Hydrolysis is close to 100% efficient. Use your brain and think about it. If it was highly inefficient, where is the waste energy going? Water undergoing hydrolysis doesn't get hot. Try it yourself!
Sending current through non-superconducting wires results in "wasted" energy.;) Further, the electrodes *do* heat up, but they don't get hot. That heat is "wasted" energy as well.
However, the real question isn't if the act of hydrolysis itself is efficient, but if the whole process is. Getting the current to the water supply, storing the hydrogen, etc. all introduce efficiencies of the process.
Hydrogen leaks through everything. In gaseous form it takes huge tanks to store small amounts. So we tend to store it in liquid form. How much power does it take to chill and store liquid hydrogen versus how much we get back out of it?
I don't know the answer because the application I am familair with this such questions are irrelevant as we don't use it for energy storage. But it doesn't take much brainwork to see that such a scheme may not be as efficient as assumed, and clearly not as efficient as the hydrolysis itself.
Indeed solar to hydrogen shows a rather low efficiency level: http://www.phschool.com/science/science_ne ws/artic les/hydrogen_energy_sunlight.html
"If we consider total input energy in relation to the reduced H2's potential energy of combustion, an ideal electrolytic cell is neatly 100% efficient in the strict interpretation. However, due to IR (resistance heating) losses in the electrolyzed water and other factors, real-world efficiencies range from 83% under laboratory conditions to as low as 66% in a typical commercial-scale facility" -- http://www.stardrivedevice.com/electrolysis.html The otehr issue is of course retreiving the stored energy. Fuel cells are still not quite as efficient. If the fuel cell is powered with pure hydrogen, it has the potential to be up to 80-percent efficient.
Given that we are talking about more than hydrolysis, the whole system must be accounted for, and currently it looks hard pressed to get system efficiencies breaking 50% in real world conditions in the near future (barring breakthroughs of course).
Titling this article "Laser Pointing into the Cockpit of a 747 Could get you 25 Years in Prison" would have... been false since that isn't what he was doing.
a corporation has the same civil and legal rights as a person
For the most part that has been a matter of law for decades -- thought corporations have many legal rights a natural person does not get. So blamign tht on Bush is as far off the mark as you can get. That said, selling things that are not what you claim them to be is considered fraud and is wrong and criminal.
Funny how you talk about people who apparently do not agree with you as "fuckwits" when you clearly don't know the history of legal rights in the US.
mods: nothing insightful about either this post or it's parent.
The Parent Poster's complaint: this title and/. article is highly misleading
Consider the title (which was the source of the complaint): "US To Push Criminalisation of IP Violations".
The PP's response: this is about the usa pushing for china to start putting people in jail for counterfeiting
I have to ask if sum.zero RTFA. Or if sum.zero RTF/.A.
To quote TFA:
In an interview before his fourth and final official trip to China, outgoing U.S. Commerce Secretary Don Evans said he would press Chinese leaders to make sure intellectual property theft of goods ranging from music and films to birth control pills and brake pads is treated as a serious crime... the importance of keeping China's feet to the fire on intellectual property rights.
-- emphasis added
Hello!
While not explicitly stated, when they speak of "intellectual property" and "counterfeiting" together they are usually talking about things like burning a music disc and pawning it off as an original.
If I say to some joe on the street "Should people be put in jail for counterfeiting?" they will immediately assume I am talking about counterfeit money and more often than not respond in the affirmative. And that form of counterfeiting activity is NOT "widely acknowledged" as "piracy".
Counterfeit non-currency goods is widely acknowledged to be *fraud*.
In any case TFA clearly stated it was the US pushing (China) to make IP violations criminal. The/. article accompanying clearly stated it was the US pushing China to do so.
The man who was arrested was caught because he shined the same green laser into the cockpit of a helicopter that was surveying the area to discover the origin of the laser that temporarily blinded the pilots of the airliner.
Yes that is hwo they busted him. But is he beign charged with shining it in the helocopter's cabin? No. He's being charged as a terrorist for it getting into an airplane's cabin. So whatever he did with the chopper is irrelevant to the airline incident.
Funny, the cops are saying he did not intentionally shine it at the plane, let alone the cockpit. Yet you predicate your argument on the belief he did in fact intend to hit the plane and the cockpit in particular. Something the government, again, isn't actually charging... yet.
I have three kids. If one does somethign stupid that might have caused a harm, I don't sentence him or her to three months in the corner or something just to make an example, of because of the possible impact of a minor risk. As you allude to, it doesn't work.
Same should go for this situation, and dozens if not hundreds or thousands similar to it in principle.
Insightful? man today's/. mods really need to learn that word.
b) he knew the laser he was using could cause eye damage
Yeah, at close range.
he didn't think that there would be danger beyond X distance from the source, but I don't think anyone is going to fall for it.
Thats actually a reasonable defense. Laser light shows are limited to not aiming their lasers at 3000+ feet (somehow -- don't ask I didn't write the law). Could it be that the beam dispersion is enough at that distance to reasonably conclude the danger of blinding is negligible? Perhaps.
If 3000 feet is good enough, how about 8500 feet straight up and a few miles away? Even more reasonable.
A maglit penlight can temporarily blind you at close enough range but that doesn't mean it's folly to think that a person 30 feet away is in danger of blindness.
Doofus here pointed his fiber-optic test equipment (which he warned the attorneys about being dangerous) at more than one aircraft on more than one occasion.
No, the description of what he was doing is not consistent with aiming it at airplanes? Funny how you seem to add that bit of misinformation in to butress your weak argument. Oh wait, you didn't RTFA, right?
He claimed he was using it as a pointer for stargazing and pointing out clouds. This is not uncommon. It just happens he caught an airplane in the beam.
Insightful? Not even. It isn't even informative or above average in any way. Much like this post. mods, if you feel the need to take action based on this post, mod the parent back down where it belongs. That's much more just and correct.;)
Lasers used in home repair are the ones that project a straight (enough) line for things like laying tile, lining up shelving, and so on. Not to mention distance determination without those pain in the arse measuring tapes across the room difficulties.
They may be charging this guy under the Patriot Act, but it has been a federal offense to interfere with the safe operation of an aricraft for many years. I was a Marine Corps helicopter pilot for 11 years, and back in the mid 90s we had someone flashing our aircraft at night with one of those ultra-bright (million candle power or so) flashlights. After several near-crashes, we finally pinpointed his house, and that night he got a visit from his friendly neighborhood FBI agent.
So please, stop acting as if every enforcement of a provision of the Patriot Act is some new depradation by the current administration. There may be some provisions of that act that should be revisited, but that doesn't make the entire thing some vast conspiracy to revoke our civil liberties.
Yes, it was already a crime to interfere with the operation of an aircraft. So why charge him under a terrorism statue as opposed to the interfering with an airliner operation statue?
Maybe it'd lack the sensationalism and "justification" of the new infringements?
Oh, and BTW, did the guy visited get put in prison for 25 years? I'd be likely to wager he got a good talking to and that was it.
All the incidents can't be like this, some guy playing with his kid. Are they copycat? Did one incident get reported first? Or was there really a rash of people shining lasers at planes more or less simultaneously? Quite a coincidence, that.I do know this, though: This is serious, and the penalty sounds about right to me. 25 years for shining a laser at someone may sound stiff, but how about 25 years for reasonably endangering the lives of about a hundred people?
I presume you meant "unreasonably endangering".
A key factor you are missing is intent. If he was being stupid, which is what the authorities invovled admit to, then 25 years is ludicrous.
If you are driving down a highway and are drinking a soda or eatign a burger, or yelling at the kids, or even just plain being in an emotional state like anger, you are endangering everyone on and near the road. Depending on where you are, this can be hundreds of people.
Picture this. You are driving down an road and spill your drink in your lap, causing you to momentarily swerve into oncoming traffic where a bus full of people is heading toward you; the schoolbus driver sees this and swerves out of the way. You did something stupid (drinking a beverage while driving -- especially an open container kind) that endangered the lives of many people, yet nobody was hurt.
To use your reasoning, you now deserve 25 years in prison. Your familiy is now without it's primary source of income or at least half of it's income. You probably got the fines that go with it, so now your wife has to pay all the bills and now can not pay the 200-500 thousand dollar fine so the government is taking your property. Oh, and good luck getting a job when you get out.
Yet nobody was hurt, and you had no intention of causing harm. You were careless/stupid. And now you are on your knees in the prison cell at night servicing bubba.
Under this definition, the guys act may have been reckless endangerment, but it certainly wasn't terrorism. There has been no accusation that he (or his daughter) was attempting to influence anyone at all, much less any government.
There has likewise been no accusation of intent to bring the plane down either, or even intent to shine it into the cockpit.
Lesse... if it's dark, and the plane is small and far away, I doubt he could even see the cockpit windows. Which means he happened to "get lucky" or onlucky depending on your POV. Reckless endangerment, sure. But absent intent it is nothing more than that.
I guess/. editors believe we have a constitutional right to blind pilots of aircraft.
I guess you don't believe we have a right, constitutional or otherwise, to not get saddled with ridiculous and cruel punishments in relation to the "crime" committed?
Is a 5 year sentence for jaywalking a reasonable response to jaywalking? Is it not a right to have reasonable "punishments" to fit the crime?
Now as to why they use the patriot act provisions, I've some ideas.
They need to have numbers of people put away under the act. Never mind that none of them were actually doing terrorist related activities, congress won't know that and the mainstream press won't say it either.
There is already a criminal statute covering shining lasers into cockpits. Why not charge him under that? Well, the standard criminal statutes nearly always require malicious intent. They've already admitted he had no malicious intent so they've shot that opportunity down (no pun intended). Further, they made a big deal about it maybe being terrorism related so now they have to "back it up" with a terrorism charge.
On the optimism side, maybe the person who filed the charges knows the P.A.T.R.I.O.T.A.C.T. to be bogus, and the charges to be bogus, but do to possible federal mandates on sentences knows they can't get a conviction on this and it's the only way to "let the guy go", for he's suffered enough.. Mmmm runon sentences.
So stick him with massive fines he can't pay, leading to a lower standard of living for his family as the government starts taking 80%+ of his paycheck... oh wait his year in jail cost him his job so now he doesn't have a paycheck meaning the government confiscates his cars, house, bank account, etc..
Yeah that's a brilliant thing to do. Destroy his family, yeah that'll teach him to play with toys. Terrorism at it's finest.
A small fine relative to his income (make it a bit painful but not something he can not pay), *maybe* some community service and call it done. Don't ruin his family's life by fining him to hell and back, and causing the loss of his job, and then his posessions.
I find it a curious bit of irony that the poster with the name of "before wisdom" demonstrates the lack of wisdom in the post.;)
No, the socialists are the ones trying to make the "IP" laws more pervasive and draconian. They want government to do their dirty work as well as make it so they don't have to work at all anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously, x86 will be around for a century.
No, that would be C86. X is 10.
Have you ever met a schizophrenic person? I have, and you CAN NOT convince them that the government/aliens/Jesus is not after them and waging a secret war against them.
Yes, I have. And not a single one of them believed the government/aliens/Jesus was out to get them. None of them were involved in FOIA requests, nor did they care to be.
Maybe you meant to write "paraphrenics" or "paranoid schizophrenics" instead of just "schizophrenic"? Or maybe you just didn't know the difference and were pretending to know something you didn't? Your choice.
Dude, it was a joke. Granted, it wasn't a joke in binary format it was in human readable format, nor was it in a thread about getting girls but it was a joke about him saying "it's not size it is how you [use it]" but I'd figure even binary format people could get it. Apparently not.
Its not the size of the document its the overhead in parsing.
;)
Riiiight. Keep telling yourself that.
So, it is now 2005. Linux has been ported to so many devices it is almost absurd. Doing what got the "F" turned out to be the right thing in terms of project accessibility, use, growth, and so on not to mention portability. No Minix machines are in the supercmoputer list but Linux is.
So, what should the "final exam" and resulting grade be?
[insert jovial sarcasm tag here]
That when Mozilla (or anything not by Microsoft) has a bug, people say "Let's hope that these will be fixed soon!", but when IE (or anything by Microsoft) has a bug, people say (")Hahahahaha!(")?
....?
Perhaps because they know it won't get fixed soon?
BTW, what's with wrapping your quote symbols in parens?!
Now where is that sarcasm tag
How about a cure for Mad Cow Disease?
Like maybe not feeding ground up dead cow to living cows?
However, calling this a non-threat is akin to saying it shouldn't be illegal to put pennies on passenger rail tracks. While it appears harmless enough 99.99% of the time, the one time it does kill 500 people is worth it being illegal to begin with.
/.-ers are accusing him of because laws already exist to do that. Indeed, the news agencies were reporting on the non-PA law before the guy was caught.
Hmm so you say it happens once in 10,000 times? You may want to send your proof/references to snopes cuz it has it listed as an urban legend:
http://www.snopes.com/science/train.htm
Now, that said. Intentionally interfereing with an operating aircraft was already illegally. The catch is, by the authories' own admision, the guy wasn't trying to: he had no intent to whatsoever.
The fed could have found charges that were applicable if the man intended to do what
Nope. Hydrolysis is close to 100% efficient. Use your brain and think about it. If it was highly inefficient, where is the waste energy going? Water undergoing hydrolysis doesn't get hot. Try it yourself!
;) Further, the electrodes *do* heat up, but they don't get hot. That heat is "wasted" energy as well.
e ws/artic les/hydrogen_energy_sunlight.html
Sending current through non-superconducting wires results in "wasted" energy.
However, the real question isn't if the act of hydrolysis itself is efficient, but if the whole process is. Getting the current to the water supply, storing the hydrogen, etc. all introduce efficiencies of the process.
Hydrogen leaks through everything. In gaseous form it takes huge tanks to store small amounts. So we tend to store it in liquid form. How much power does it take to chill and store liquid hydrogen versus how much we get back out of it?
I don't know the answer because the application I am familair with this such questions are irrelevant as we don't use it for energy storage. But it doesn't take much brainwork to see that such a scheme may not be as efficient as assumed, and clearly not as efficient as the hydrolysis itself.
Indeed solar to hydrogen shows a rather low efficiency level:
http://www.phschool.com/science/science_n
"If we consider total input energy in relation to the reduced H2's potential energy of combustion, an ideal electrolytic cell is neatly 100% efficient in the strict interpretation. However, due to IR (resistance heating) losses in the electrolyzed water and other factors, real-world efficiencies range from 83% under laboratory conditions to as low as 66% in a typical commercial-scale facility" -- http://www.stardrivedevice.com/electrolysis.html
The otehr issue is of course retreiving the stored energy. Fuel cells are still not quite as efficient. If the fuel cell is powered with pure hydrogen, it has the potential to be up to 80-percent efficient.
Given that we are talking about more than hydrolysis, the whole system must be accounted for, and currently it looks hard pressed to get system efficiencies breaking 50% in real world conditions in the near future (barring breakthroughs of course).
Titling this article "Laser Pointing into the Cockpit of a 747 Could get you 25 Years in Prison" would have ... been false since that isn't what he was doing.
a corporation has the same civil and legal rights as a person
For the most part that has been a matter of law for decades -- thought corporations have many legal rights a natural person does not get. So blamign tht on Bush is as far off the mark as you can get. That said, selling things that are not what you claim them to be is considered fraud and is wrong and criminal.
Funny how you talk about people who apparently do not agree with you as "fuckwits" when you clearly don't know the history of legal rights in the US.
mods: nothing insightful about either this post or it's parent.
It is selling it that makes it different than downloading music.
I'm sure that's a comfort to those who've been or will be arrested or sued for "just downloading".
How much more will it take for people to throw their hands in the air and say "Enough!"?
It's already happened. The real question is "How much more will it take for people to put their hands in the voting booth and say "Enough!"?
this title and
Consider the title (which was the source of the complaint):
"US To Push Criminalisation of IP Violations".
The PP's response:
this is about the usa pushing for china to start putting people in jail for counterfeiting
I have to ask if sum.zero RTFA. Or if sum.zero RTF/.A.
To quote TFA:
-- emphasis added
Hello!
While not explicitly stated, when they speak of "intellectual property" and "counterfeiting" together they are usually talking about things like burning a music disc and pawning it off as an original.
If I say to some joe on the street "Should people be put in jail for counterfeiting?" they will immediately assume I am talking about counterfeit money and more often than not respond in the affirmative. And that form of counterfeiting activity is NOT "widely acknowledged" as "piracy".
Counterfeit non-currency goods is widely acknowledged to be *fraud*.
In any case TFA clearly stated it was the US pushing (China) to make IP violations criminal. The
The man who was arrested was caught because he shined the same green laser into the cockpit of a helicopter that was surveying the area to discover the origin of the laser that temporarily blinded the pilots of the airliner.
... yet.
Yes that is hwo they busted him. But is he beign charged with shining it in the helocopter's cabin? No. He's being charged as a terrorist for it getting into an airplane's cabin. So whatever he did with the chopper is irrelevant to the airline incident.
Funny, the cops are saying he did not intentionally shine it at the plane, let alone the cockpit. Yet you predicate your argument on the belief he did in fact intend to hit the plane and the cockpit in particular. Something the government, again, isn't actually charging
I have three kids. If one does somethign stupid that might have caused a harm, I don't sentence him or her to three months in the corner or something just to make an example, of because of the possible impact of a minor risk. As you allude to, it doesn't work.
Same should go for this situation, and dozens if not hundreds or thousands similar to it in principle.
Insightful? man today's /. mods really need to learn that word.
;)
b) he knew the laser he was using could cause eye damage
Yeah, at close range.
he didn't think that there would be danger beyond X distance from the source, but I don't think anyone is going to fall for it.
Thats actually a reasonable defense. Laser light shows are limited to not aiming their lasers at 3000+ feet (somehow -- don't ask I didn't write the law). Could it be that the beam dispersion is enough at that distance to reasonably conclude the danger of blinding is negligible? Perhaps.
If 3000 feet is good enough, how about 8500 feet straight up and a few miles away? Even more reasonable.
A maglit penlight can temporarily blind you at close enough range but that doesn't mean it's folly to think that a person 30 feet away is in danger of blindness.
Doofus here pointed his fiber-optic test equipment (which he warned the attorneys about being dangerous) at more than one aircraft on more than one occasion.
No, the description of what he was doing is not consistent with aiming it at airplanes? Funny how you seem to add that bit of misinformation in to butress your weak argument. Oh wait, you didn't RTFA, right?
He claimed he was using it as a pointer for stargazing and pointing out clouds. This is not uncommon. It just happens he caught an airplane in the beam.
Insightful? Not even. It isn't even informative or above average in any way. Much like this post. mods, if you feel the need to take action based on this post, mod the parent back down where it belongs. That's much more just and correct.
Gees man don't you watch commericals? ;)
Lasers used in home repair are the ones that project a straight (enough) line for things like laying tile, lining up shelving, and so on. Not to mention distance determination without those pain in the arse measuring tapes across the room difficulties.
They may be charging this guy under the Patriot Act, but it has been a federal offense to interfere with the safe operation of an aricraft for many years. I was a Marine Corps helicopter pilot for 11 years, and back in the mid 90s we had someone flashing our aircraft at night with one of those ultra-bright (million candle power or so) flashlights. After several near-crashes, we finally pinpointed his house, and that night he got a visit from his friendly neighborhood FBI agent.
So please, stop acting as if every enforcement of a provision of the Patriot Act is some new depradation by the current administration. There may be some provisions of that act that should be revisited, but that doesn't make the entire thing some vast conspiracy to revoke our civil liberties.
Yes, it was already a crime to interfere with the operation of an aircraft. So why charge him under a terrorism statue as opposed to the interfering with an airliner operation statue?
Maybe it'd lack the sensationalism and "justification" of the new infringements?
Oh, and BTW, did the guy visited get put in prison for 25 years? I'd be likely to wager he got a good talking to and that was it.
nce those drums are beating they won't stop until people are dead and tortured and may lives are made miserable.
Mission accomplished. They can stop now.
All the incidents can't be like this, some guy playing with his kid. Are they copycat? Did one incident get reported first? Or was there really a rash of people shining lasers at planes more or less simultaneously? Quite a coincidence, that.I do know this, though: This is serious, and the penalty sounds about right to me. 25 years for shining a laser at someone may sound stiff, but how about 25 years for reasonably endangering the lives of about a hundred people?
I presume you meant "unreasonably endangering".
A key factor you are missing is intent. If he was being stupid, which is what the authorities invovled admit to, then 25 years is ludicrous.
If you are driving down a highway and are drinking a soda or eatign a burger, or yelling at the kids, or even just plain being in an emotional state like anger, you are endangering everyone on and near the road. Depending on where you are, this can be hundreds of people.
Picture this. You are driving down an road and spill your drink in your lap, causing you to momentarily swerve into oncoming traffic where a bus full of people is heading toward you; the schoolbus driver sees this and swerves out of the way. You did something stupid (drinking a beverage while driving -- especially an open container kind) that endangered the lives of many people, yet nobody was hurt.
To use your reasoning, you now deserve 25 years in prison. Your familiy is now without it's primary source of income or at least half of it's income. You probably got the fines that go with it, so now your wife has to pay all the bills and now can not pay the 200-500 thousand dollar fine so the government is taking your property. Oh, and good luck getting a job when you get out.
Yet nobody was hurt, and you had no intention of causing harm. You were careless/stupid. And now you are on your knees in the prison cell at night servicing bubba.
Still sure that "punishment" fits the "crime"?
Under this definition, the guys act may have been reckless endangerment, but it certainly wasn't terrorism. There has been no accusation that he (or his daughter) was attempting to influence anyone at all, much less any government.
... if it's dark, and the plane is small and far away, I doubt he could even see the cockpit windows. Which means he happened to "get lucky" or onlucky depending on your POV. Reckless endangerment, sure. But absent intent it is nothing more than that.
There has likewise been no accusation of intent to bring the plane down either, or even intent to shine it into the cockpit.
Lesse
I guess /. editors believe we have a constitutional right to blind pilots of aircraft.
I guess you don't believe we have a right, constitutional or otherwise, to not get saddled with ridiculous and cruel punishments in relation to the "crime" committed?
Is a 5 year sentence for jaywalking a reasonable response to jaywalking? Is it not a right to have reasonable "punishments" to fit the crime?
Now as to why they use the patriot act provisions, I've some ideas.
They need to have numbers of people put away under the act. Never mind that none of them were actually doing terrorist related activities, congress won't know that and the mainstream press won't say it either.
There is already a criminal statute covering shining lasers into cockpits. Why not charge him under that? Well, the standard criminal statutes nearly always require malicious intent. They've already admitted he had no malicious intent so they've shot that opportunity down (no pun intended). Further, they made a big deal about it maybe being terrorism related so now they have to "back it up" with a terrorism charge.
On the optimism side, maybe the person who filed the charges knows the P.A.T.R.I.O.T.A.C.T. to be bogus, and the charges to be bogus, but do to possible federal mandates on sentences knows they can't get a conviction on this and it's the only way to "let the guy go", for he's suffered enough.. Mmmm runon sentences.
So stick him with massive fines he can't pay, leading to a lower standard of living for his family as the government starts taking 80%+ of his paycheck
Yeah that's a brilliant thing to do. Destroy his family, yeah that'll teach him to play with toys. Terrorism at it's finest.
A small fine relative to his income (make it a bit painful but not something he can not pay), *maybe* some community service and call it done. Don't ruin his family's life by fining him to hell and back, and causing the loss of his job, and then his posessions.
I find it a curious bit of irony that the poster with the name of "before wisdom" demonstrates the lack of wisdom in the post.
I think it is high-time that the "Your Rights Online" section be renamed to
/. masses.
Your Rights, Online. Of course it isn't named "Your OnLine Rights" which would semantically imply rights that exist online.
But adding the comma to show people it's an online discussion of rights would be simpler than trying to educate the
The socialists are right on this one.
No, the socialists are the ones trying to make the "IP" laws more pervasive and draconian. They want government to do their dirty work as well as make it so they don't have to work at all anyway.