Exactly. This pandemic is the analog to what the Y2K was for the computer industry. People should be concerned - but not flip out - because if the professionals don't do their jobs (or the public doesn't follow their advice), the ramifications of failing could be enormous.
While the point your making is certainly valid, I don't believe the RIAA or MPAA would be stupid enough to go after the kind of "low-hanging fruit" that can't even install a DVD drive in their computer because it would take a disproportionate amount of funds to pay/bribe the techs in order to catch people. Also, it would probably be a large waste of time because different jurisdictions have varying laws about the required certification needed to "investigate" the files on your computer (e.g. Texas requires a P.I. license now, AFAIK) and the act of paying/bribing the techs elevates them from being tangentially involved (concerned citizen/burglar breaking into your house) to directly involved (friend of a cop that was told to do so).
Wait, who am I kidding? This plan is right up the **AA's alley!
It isn't that./ is late to the party but that./ is reporting on a new development in the story. All the previous actions have been media "echo-chamber" reporting. Not including the removal of the game from Amazon, this is the only part of the story that has been YRO-worthy (or even newsworthy, in my opinion).
Your argument doesn't do your opinions much justice.
I agree with your assertion that some people freak out about mundane things (for various values of mundane) when they probably should not. I also think getting too overworked about these things is hilarious. However, may I ask, what is the harm in the small, vocal minority of people that do freak out about every-little-thing in doing so? Would it be more beneficial for society to not have these watchmen, or - in your opinion - loonies, voice their concerns? You do, after all, have the ability to ignore them like they have of you.
In all of the posts that I have read under this article, not one of them would I attribute to the crazy, tin-foil hat societal fringe you describe slashdot as being comprised of. This book may, or may not, happen to have been written by one of these excessively paranoid people you and I find funny, but many of the posts on slashdot about this category of Big Brother and descent-into-fascism are well-reasoned and well-grounded in the reoccurring nature of history. One of the reasons why so many slashdotters make posts about Big Brother is because the technology being used to monitor us falls under one of their areas of expertise. Another reason they may post is that they feel we, as a people, should learn from fiction and history so that we do not repeat our past mistakes - or make them in the first place.
Specifically, on the subject of traffic and transit cameras, we feel that having a multitude of cameras everywhere in society does not foster an atmosphere of privacy and assumed innocence. Maybe we are overreacting now - maybe the amount these cameras can help society far outweighs the damage the may cause. However, reset the scenario for the generation after this technology was introduced when the next big advancement in surveillance technology occurs - assuming it does, of course. Are the next generation's fears that this new surveillance technology may be overreaching unjustified too? In addition to the future, we must also think about past technological innovations. Were concerns at the time these technologies were being implemented justified? If these technologies were abused, in what way were they and how did we correct for these abuses? Were the corrections successful? Etc.
The furthest out on the fringe are definitely hilarious. The paranoid, loony people that think the CIA are personally out to get them because they know about the Illuminati vampire plot to use the resurrected corpse of FDR to take over the world are just too absurd not to find funny. But the people on slashdot, for the most part, are not these people. Do not paint them with such a wide brush because their fears, while sometimes overstated and dramatic, are nonetheless relevant and justified.
Did you link the right article for your assertions? I didn't see anything of what you claim in that article. Summary provided by the first paragraph of your link:
President Barack Obama's initiative to raise new tax revenue to pay for major policy changes likely will focus in the short run on tightening enforcement against businesses and wealthy individuals. In the long run, some experts believe it could lead to sweeping changes in the tax code itself.
Why all the outrage? We have 10 months to discuss the ramifications of any hypothetical proposed changes. In other news, the IRS has given me the task to inform you that you've exceeded your yearly allotment of hyperbole. You've been warned, comrade.
Once the record has been sealed or expunged, it no longer exists and cannot be used against you for civil or criminal reasons. If your (future) employer asks one of these "Were you ever..." questions about your criminal record, you may give a truthful response, "Yes,...", or a lawful response, "No,...", because all that matters is what is on record. Of course, I need to make the disclaimer IANAL, etc.
How are costumers supposed to vote with their feet, money, etc. when all/most of the industry have the policy or are quickly working towards embracing it?
Break the chains of industry and make their own costumes!
A major problem occurs when any industry initiates a round of the Prisoner's Dilemma. One company institutes a policy change and their competitors follow them in the chase towards decreasing the bottom line and increasing profits. How are costumers supposed to vote with their feet, money, etc. when all/most of the industry have the policy or are quickly working towards embracing it?
What statute do you use to make Federal law trump that of State or Local in this particular situation?
Is it prohibited using the Federal Legislature's Commerce Clause? If so, then why did the Prohibition of Alcohol movement use a Constitutional Amendment (18th) instead? How do we reconcile the Commerce Clause with the 9th and 10th Amendments? There are just too many questions that no one in a position of power wants to, or is able to, answer.
These arguments aside, I would like the government to at least present scientific data and studies that back up the reason to ban marijuana. If the case could be made for the ban, there wouldn't be as big of a counter movement. (I am not a smoker, toker, drinker, etc. I am not pro- or anti- drugs. Given valid evidence and studies, I would like us to be able to have a rational, national discussion.)
I agree. What concerns me is that these experts fail to say that medical breakthroughs have allowed doctors to get a thousand times better at diagnosing cancer than a century ago. An increase in the number of diagnosed cases of X does not necessarily mean that X has increased in appearance amongst the population. It's almost like saying atoms didn't exist until we saw them! No, they have always been there, we just recently became able to see them! Absence of evidence does not constitute evidence of absence.
This is just another example of the thought processes that link cancer to some relatively new (within the past 50 years, give or take a decade) technology. Oh no! It's fluoride in the water! Wi-fi gives me headaches! Not one of the experts let's loose the fact that advances in medicine have led to better diagnoses for cancer and other historically "age-related" illnesses before they get too far down the road.
Of course, diseases cannot exist until they are formally diagnosed. And, in the same vein, advances in spotting said diseases have no effect on how many new cases are diagnosed, so it should be right and proper to say that more people have such diseases than ever before./s
Does the fact that he no longer has to visually monitor the computer make him a bad parent?
No, it does not. But a large problem starts to arise as greater and greater tool sets emerge for parents to control more and more of their children's lives such that these children have less and less ability to make mistakes. By decreasing the chance for children to make rather innocent mistakes, the chance for a fatal error increases because they haven't been "immunized" to, well, the world for lack of a better term.
Some of the best times I've had were when my parents gave me freedom to make mistakes and learn from them. If kids can no longer make innocent mistakes, the lessons lost will be paid with a higher price.
True. However, this does not make it right to merely do as everyone else does by being a bad parent; it only makes it understandable. If we are to allow this kind of scapegoating to occur, it will further erode personal responsibility.
Poor parenting skills may be blamed on society not setting a good standard but this claim is as valid as saying "The flame is at fault for burning down that store, I just happened to hold the lighter" or "I was just swinging my fists. It's your fault for being in the way!" If we look at these things in a case by case manner, we can see that there is some amount of blame to go around to all sources. Don't rest too easily by generalizing that most, if not all, comes from one input while the rest remains trivial.
I wanted to make a concise list of reasons I've had to download torrents of media I already owned. I agree that #3, by itself, looks like something that can be easily circumvented by a smart enough person with the time and the means for most media. However, I got kind of irritated by Nine Inch Nail's With Teeth duel disc. One side was DVD and the other was cd. I couldn't get the damn disc drive to recognize that I actually inserted a disc, let alone rip the media. So, I took the shortest, easiest path and downloaded it. I definitely would not expect my parents or siblings to know how to do rip a cd like this if they don't even know how to install OpenOffice without me explaining in detail over the phone.
#4 is the case where I am at my university, a significant distance from school, and maybe forget one or a few cds, have to wipe a partition, have my mp3 player screw up on me, or some combination thereof. I have learned from these mistakes but they are understandable mistakes for people that haven't had a big data loss before so they have no idea they should make backups.
An example: my mp3 player was being stupid and not recognizing the files I was trying to add to it because it decided it needed to reencode every music file into an arcane file type. So, I used some free mp3 player software to be able to play regular file types. It turned out I needed to delete all of the old music files and reload them all with regular suffixes but I forgot that I didn't have a few of the cds with me or on my computer. I had accidentally wiped them after I installed Windows XP + Ubuntu onto my laptop and had left the originals at home. Make backups: lesson learned.
It isn't that big of a deal to rip music for most people but it does eventually become a bit "burdensome", or rather dull, to rip or rerip an entire collection spanning multiple media formats.
Again, that worst case scenario isn't that bad, but normalizing someone else tags isn't that bad either - it helps if you just mass rename, import into wmplayer and find the correct album. The whole point of this is choice. The consumer deserves to be able choose to make mistakes on their computer without being overly punished for doing so when they try to learn how to correct them.
Why do I download music I, or my nuclear family, already own?
1) We own it on vinyl/tape/whatever and do not want to go buy another device to convert it to.mp3 or any other format
2) The tape/disc/whatever was damaged and unrecoverable
3) DRM makes it highly unreasonable to rip the cd to my harddrive
4) The music disc is at home while I am far enough away so that downloading is cheaper than a round trip
It's only stupid if you have the disc with you, have a computer with ripping capabilities, and the free time to do it. Otherwise, it would be quite intelligent of you to save time by downloading instead of ripping. *mumbles damn gray area invalidating assumed perfect, and absolute, conditions*
I'm sorry but Oog, the first caveman, made the original claim on the moon. You'll have to fight it out with the rest of humanity for the property rights.
All jokes aside, the moon should fall into utilitarian use only. At this point, lunar property is essentially imaginary property for all but the countries with the most money to throw at a space program. Until such a time as when it becomes necessary to figure out who owns what, we shouldn't worry about it.
What's the next thing this guy is going to worry about? Settling property rights for those companies that sell stars?
This would essentially be, as in the case from the article, the state and a vendor disagree about something (change in contract, etc) on a project that is vital to the public interest so they had a public researcher come in and continue the work. Instead of that researcher being held liable, the state is held liable for the copyright violation - which it can't be. The other side of the coin would be a public official using Bittorrent at work which would not be classified as necessary to fulfill the duties of his office.
This ruling says that evidence of copyright violations alone is not enough to sue a public official. The infringement must be unrelated to the official's duties. Of course, case by case basis, IANAL, yadda yadda. (You don't have to be so condescending next time you decide to read comments before the article itself, or you could elaborate your interpretation so that your post contains more than just an insult.)
So long as a public official is fulfilling the duties of his office and not breaking any laws, he cannot be sued for copyright violations. If he does break a law, then he can be stripped of his position, the 11th amendment protection, and be sued. (Paraphrased from the first article)
It is too late to start using the Constitution as the ultimate law of the land again. If we followed the Constitution exactly as it is written we would have to get rid of things like the Department of Education, the Environmental Protection Agency, Social Security, and many other government programs and agencies that people don't want to see taken away. After years of ignoring it, the Constitution has lost its power. Why is it too late? These agencies could be reorganized under independent State control. To make a long story short, we could then increase or decrease their powers on a State by State basis with the citizens paying in taxes for the increase.
The Constitution has not lost its power. Our representatives have wandered away from what the Framer's intended the function of the government to be. This country can still be saved. Hopefully, it will not require bloodshed to restore the balance of power.
I'd be more apt to agree with that logic if the government weren't so quick to bail out the airlines when a problem arises.
It is a service that can be revoked if you don't follow the operating companies' procedures. That aside, it's kind of hard to follow an airline's procedure when it isn't the airline's procedure. This would all be fine and dandy if it were a security service payed for by all of the airlines that service the terminal with agreed upon rules. Instead, we have a government agency paying for an outside security service proscribing, or at least pretending not to notice, arbitrary rules and procedures. The problem occurs before you even have a chance to interact with the company in question, so you never even have an opportunity to be contrary to their policies./endrant
Anyway, I don't see how we arrived at thinking this is a 5th Amendment issue. The EFF has requested to see e-mail correspondence between Google and DoJ officials via the FOIA. This isn't a 5th Amendment issue because the EFF is seeking information pertinent to public officials carrying out the duties of their publicly accountable position. They have been met with silence for the past 6 months so now the EFF is suing so they can see what actually occurred during the period when the DoJ was seeking to subpoena Google for every single query entered into the search engine over a one-week period and the subsequent scale back to asking for only 5,000 random entries. The EFF wants to make sure that information from Google was not handed over to the DoJ illegitimately due to privacy concerns. They also want to make sure that Jane C. Horvath, the DoJ's Chief Privacy and Civil Liberties Officer at the time, is not giving information to the DoJ while now working as Google's Senior Privacy Counsel.
Filtering offered as an optional service by an ISP would be just fine. The problem comes into play when all available options from an ISP with a monopoly in your area include filtering. An alternate problem would occur when your local monopoly offers filtered internet but at reduced prices. Sure, at first you can choose to pay regular prices, but what happens when the price of unfiltered internet increases arbitrarily while filtered internet prices stay relatively even?
What do you do if all ISP companies in your area begin to only off filtered internet? How can you vote with your wallet when the cost of entry into the marketplace high enough to keep independent companies out? The problem isn't a companies right to do whatever it wants, the problem is when there are no realistic alternatives to that company. You may disagree with this logic but it was kind of hard for African Americans to engage in commerce for a while in this country because a bunch of people decided to use their economic right to deny service to those they didn't like for vain reasons.
Sure, in a system where all else is equal, we could implement a filtering system so that consumers could choose what kind of internet experience they wanted. The problem comes in when humans get thrown into the mix. It's just easier to not go down that road and let people filter their internet drop on their own time.
Seriously, how is this patent not obvious? Replace VCR/DVD media with a HDD, slap in a CPU and RAM, and all that is left is to write the code. Is giving the user the ability to multiplex their base bandwidth that novel? Amazing thing to allow people to control their bandwidth.
We don't need more laws when the current ones are already adequate. We just need the enforcing agencies to start upholding the law. Merely throwing more laws at the ills of society will not cure them. I would have to agree that Congress often does not focus on the important things but it is another thing to be asking them to go off on more tangents making things already illegal go on "Double Secret Probation".
The company, AccuSearch, was calling up phone companies and pretending to be certain persons in order to gain their account information. They then sold the relevant information to an interested third party. The private firm was misrepresenting itself in order to gain sensitive information.
"FTC attorneys argued that using false pretenses, fraudulent statements and fraudulent or stolen documents to induce carriers to disclose records was illegal."
So, they didn't need a warrant because they were pretending to be a customer trying to access their account records.
IANAL, but if the RIAA were to claim liability for the damages to minimize the losses taken by Atlantic, wouldn't that make all member organizations culpable?
The way I see it is Atlantic and the RIAA have two choices:
1) Atlantic takes full responsibility for being a part of an organization that brings spurious claims to court and is the only business to be responsible for damages.
2) The RIAA attempts to intercede, or Atlantic tries to shift blame towards the RIAA, and forces all members of the RIAA to be culpable due to collusion.
Just one last note, the RIAA cannot bring the cases against the alleged copy-right violators because they do not have standing to sue as they are not directly harmed financially by the "infringement". If they did have standing to sue in place of their member businesses then that would make the argument for collusion, price fixing, and monopolization essentially set in stone.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly. This pandemic is the analog to what the Y2K was for the computer industry. People should be concerned - but not flip out - because if the professionals don't do their jobs (or the public doesn't follow their advice), the ramifications of failing could be enormous.
While the point your making is certainly valid, I don't believe the RIAA or MPAA would be stupid enough to go after the kind of "low-hanging fruit" that can't even install a DVD drive in their computer because it would take a disproportionate amount of funds to pay/bribe the techs in order to catch people. Also, it would probably be a large waste of time because different jurisdictions have varying laws about the required certification needed to "investigate" the files on your computer (e.g. Texas requires a P.I. license now, AFAIK) and the act of paying/bribing the techs elevates them from being tangentially involved (concerned citizen/burglar breaking into your house) to directly involved (friend of a cop that was told to do so).
Wait, who am I kidding? This plan is right up the **AA's alley!
It isn't that ./ is late to the party but that ./ is reporting on a new development in the story. All the previous actions have been media "echo-chamber" reporting. Not including the removal of the game from Amazon, this is the only part of the story that has been YRO-worthy (or even newsworthy, in my opinion).
Your argument doesn't do your opinions much justice.
I agree with your assertion that some people freak out about mundane things (for various values of mundane) when they probably should not. I also think getting too overworked about these things is hilarious. However, may I ask, what is the harm in the small, vocal minority of people that do freak out about every-little-thing in doing so? Would it be more beneficial for society to not have these watchmen, or - in your opinion - loonies, voice their concerns? You do, after all, have the ability to ignore them like they have of you.
In all of the posts that I have read under this article, not one of them would I attribute to the crazy, tin-foil hat societal fringe you describe slashdot as being comprised of. This book may, or may not, happen to have been written by one of these excessively paranoid people you and I find funny, but many of the posts on slashdot about this category of Big Brother and descent-into-fascism are well-reasoned and well-grounded in the reoccurring nature of history. One of the reasons why so many slashdotters make posts about Big Brother is because the technology being used to monitor us falls under one of their areas of expertise. Another reason they may post is that they feel we, as a people, should learn from fiction and history so that we do not repeat our past mistakes - or make them in the first place.
Specifically, on the subject of traffic and transit cameras, we feel that having a multitude of cameras everywhere in society does not foster an atmosphere of privacy and assumed innocence. Maybe we are overreacting now - maybe the amount these cameras can help society far outweighs the damage the may cause. However, reset the scenario for the generation after this technology was introduced when the next big advancement in surveillance technology occurs - assuming it does, of course. Are the next generation's fears that this new surveillance technology may be overreaching unjustified too? In addition to the future, we must also think about past technological innovations. Were concerns at the time these technologies were being implemented justified? If these technologies were abused, in what way were they and how did we correct for these abuses? Were the corrections successful? Etc.
The furthest out on the fringe are definitely hilarious. The paranoid, loony people that think the CIA are personally out to get them because they know about the Illuminati vampire plot to use the resurrected corpse of FDR to take over the world are just too absurd not to find funny. But the people on slashdot, for the most part, are not these people. Do not paint them with such a wide brush because their fears, while sometimes overstated and dramatic, are nonetheless relevant and justified.
President Barack Obama's initiative to raise new tax revenue to pay for major policy changes likely will focus in the short run on tightening enforcement against businesses and wealthy individuals. In the long run, some experts believe it could lead to sweeping changes in the tax code itself.
If what you claim is true, it would be huge. So, I searched for more links to provide support or refute your claims.
http://money.cnn.com/2009/03/26/news/economy/obama_tax_reform_taskforce/index.htm
Money.Cnn's article says more or less the same thing as WSJ.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=a_FIYIBVE5to&refer=home
So does Bloomberg. From Bloomberg: the recommendations from the tax reform task force are "to be submitted to Congress in February 2010".
Why all the outrage? We have 10 months to discuss the ramifications of any hypothetical proposed changes. In other news, the IRS has given me the task to inform you that you've exceeded your yearly allotment of hyperbole. You've been warned, comrade.
Once the record has been sealed or expunged, it no longer exists and cannot be used against you for civil or criminal reasons. If your (future) employer asks one of these "Were you ever ..." questions about your criminal record, you may give a truthful response, "Yes, ...", or a lawful response, "No, ...", because all that matters is what is on record. Of course, I need to make the disclaimer IANAL, etc.
How are costumers supposed to vote with their feet, money, etc. when all/most of the industry have the policy or are quickly working towards embracing it?
Break the chains of industry and make their own costumes!
A major problem occurs when any industry initiates a round of the Prisoner's Dilemma. One company institutes a policy change and their competitors follow them in the chase towards decreasing the bottom line and increasing profits. How are costumers supposed to vote with their feet, money, etc. when all/most of the industry have the policy or are quickly working towards embracing it?
What statute do you use to make Federal law trump that of State or Local in this particular situation?
Is it prohibited using the Federal Legislature's Commerce Clause? If so, then why did the Prohibition of Alcohol movement use a Constitutional Amendment (18th) instead? How do we reconcile the Commerce Clause with the 9th and 10th Amendments? There are just too many questions that no one in a position of power wants to, or is able to, answer.
These arguments aside, I would like the government to at least present scientific data and studies that back up the reason to ban marijuana. If the case could be made for the ban, there wouldn't be as big of a counter movement. (I am not a smoker, toker, drinker, etc. I am not pro- or anti- drugs. Given valid evidence and studies, I would like us to be able to have a rational, national discussion.)
I agree. What concerns me is that these experts fail to say that medical breakthroughs have allowed doctors to get a thousand times better at diagnosing cancer than a century ago. An increase in the number of diagnosed cases of X does not necessarily mean that X has increased in appearance amongst the population. It's almost like saying atoms didn't exist until we saw them! No, they have always been there, we just recently became able to see them! Absence of evidence does not constitute evidence of absence.
This is just another example of the thought processes that link cancer to some relatively new (within the past 50 years, give or take a decade) technology. Oh no! It's fluoride in the water! Wi-fi gives me headaches! Not one of the experts let's loose the fact that advances in medicine have led to better diagnoses for cancer and other historically "age-related" illnesses before they get too far down the road.
/s
Of course, diseases cannot exist until they are formally diagnosed. And, in the same vein, advances in spotting said diseases have no effect on how many new cases are diagnosed, so it should be right and proper to say that more people have such diseases than ever before.
Does the fact that he no longer has to visually monitor the computer make him a bad parent?
No, it does not. But a large problem starts to arise as greater and greater tool sets emerge for parents to control more and more of their children's lives such that these children have less and less ability to make mistakes. By decreasing the chance for children to make rather innocent mistakes, the chance for a fatal error increases because they haven't been "immunized" to, well, the world for lack of a better term.
Some of the best times I've had were when my parents gave me freedom to make mistakes and learn from them. If kids can no longer make innocent mistakes, the lessons lost will be paid with a higher price.
True. However, this does not make it right to merely do as everyone else does by being a bad parent; it only makes it understandable. If we are to allow this kind of scapegoating to occur, it will further erode personal responsibility.
Poor parenting skills may be blamed on society not setting a good standard but this claim is as valid as saying "The flame is at fault for burning down that store, I just happened to hold the lighter" or "I was just swinging my fists. It's your fault for being in the way!" If we look at these things in a case by case manner, we can see that there is some amount of blame to go around to all sources. Don't rest too easily by generalizing that most, if not all, comes from one input while the rest remains trivial.
I wanted to make a concise list of reasons I've had to download torrents of media I already owned. I agree that #3, by itself, looks like something that can be easily circumvented by a smart enough person with the time and the means for most media. However, I got kind of irritated by Nine Inch Nail's With Teeth duel disc. One side was DVD and the other was cd. I couldn't get the damn disc drive to recognize that I actually inserted a disc, let alone rip the media. So, I took the shortest, easiest path and downloaded it. I definitely would not expect my parents or siblings to know how to do rip a cd like this if they don't even know how to install OpenOffice without me explaining in detail over the phone.
#4 is the case where I am at my university, a significant distance from school, and maybe forget one or a few cds, have to wipe a partition, have my mp3 player screw up on me, or some combination thereof. I have learned from these mistakes but they are understandable mistakes for people that haven't had a big data loss before so they have no idea they should make backups.
An example: my mp3 player was being stupid and not recognizing the files I was trying to add to it because it decided it needed to reencode every music file into an arcane file type. So, I used some free mp3 player software to be able to play regular file types. It turned out I needed to delete all of the old music files and reload them all with regular suffixes but I forgot that I didn't have a few of the cds with me or on my computer. I had accidentally wiped them after I installed Windows XP + Ubuntu onto my laptop and had left the originals at home. Make backups: lesson learned.
It isn't that big of a deal to rip music for most people but it does eventually become a bit "burdensome", or rather dull, to rip or rerip an entire collection spanning multiple media formats.
Again, that worst case scenario isn't that bad, but normalizing someone else tags isn't that bad either - it helps if you just mass rename, import into wmplayer and find the correct album. The whole point of this is choice. The consumer deserves to be able choose to make mistakes on their computer without being overly punished for doing so when they try to learn how to correct them.
Why do I download music I, or my nuclear family, already own? .mp3 or any other format
1) We own it on vinyl/tape/whatever and do not want to go buy another device to convert it to
2) The tape/disc/whatever was damaged and unrecoverable
3) DRM makes it highly unreasonable to rip the cd to my harddrive
4) The music disc is at home while I am far enough away so that downloading is cheaper than a round trip
It's only stupid if you have the disc with you, have a computer with ripping capabilities, and the free time to do it. Otherwise, it would be quite intelligent of you to save time by downloading instead of ripping. *mumbles damn gray area invalidating assumed perfect, and absolute, conditions*
I'm sorry but Oog, the first caveman, made the original claim on the moon. You'll have to fight it out with the rest of humanity for the property rights.
All jokes aside, the moon should fall into utilitarian use only. At this point, lunar property is essentially imaginary property for all but the countries with the most money to throw at a space program. Until such a time as when it becomes necessary to figure out who owns what, we shouldn't worry about it.
What's the next thing this guy is going to worry about? Settling property rights for those companies that sell stars?
This would essentially be, as in the case from the article, the state and a vendor disagree about something (change in contract, etc) on a project that is vital to the public interest so they had a public researcher come in and continue the work. Instead of that researcher being held liable, the state is held liable for the copyright violation - which it can't be. The other side of the coin would be a public official using Bittorrent at work which would not be classified as necessary to fulfill the duties of his office.
This ruling says that evidence of copyright violations alone is not enough to sue a public official. The infringement must be unrelated to the official's duties. Of course, case by case basis, IANAL, yadda yadda. (You don't have to be so condescending next time you decide to read comments before the article itself, or you could elaborate your interpretation so that your post contains more than just an insult.)
So long as a public official is fulfilling the duties of his office and not breaking any laws, he cannot be sued for copyright violations. If he does break a law, then he can be stripped of his position, the 11th amendment protection, and be sued. (Paraphrased from the first article)
Obligatory: IANAL.
The Constitution has not lost its power. Our representatives have wandered away from what the Framer's intended the function of the government to be. This country can still be saved. Hopefully, it will not require bloodshed to restore the balance of power.
It is a service that can be revoked if you don't follow the operating companies' procedures.
That aside, it's kind of hard to follow an airline's procedure when it isn't the airline's procedure. This would all be fine and dandy if it were a security service payed for by all of the airlines that service the terminal with agreed upon rules. Instead, we have a government agency paying for an outside security service proscribing, or at least pretending not to notice, arbitrary rules and procedures. The problem occurs before you even have a chance to interact with the company in question, so you never even have an opportunity to be contrary to their policies.
Anyway, I don't see how we arrived at thinking this is a 5th Amendment issue. The EFF has requested to see e-mail correspondence between Google and DoJ officials via the FOIA. This isn't a 5th Amendment issue because the EFF is seeking information pertinent to public officials carrying out the duties of their publicly accountable position. They have been met with silence for the past 6 months so now the EFF is suing so they can see what actually occurred during the period when the DoJ was seeking to subpoena Google for every single query entered into the search engine over a one-week period and the subsequent scale back to asking for only 5,000 random entries. The EFF wants to make sure that information from Google was not handed over to the DoJ illegitimately due to privacy concerns. They also want to make sure that Jane C. Horvath, the DoJ's Chief Privacy and Civil Liberties Officer at the time, is not giving information to the DoJ while now working as Google's Senior Privacy Counsel.
Filtering offered as an optional service by an ISP would be just fine. The problem comes into play when all available options from an ISP with a monopoly in your area include filtering. An alternate problem would occur when your local monopoly offers filtered internet but at reduced prices. Sure, at first you can choose to pay regular prices, but what happens when the price of unfiltered internet increases arbitrarily while filtered internet prices stay relatively even?
What do you do if all ISP companies in your area begin to only off filtered internet? How can you vote with your wallet when the cost of entry into the marketplace high enough to keep independent companies out? The problem isn't a companies right to do whatever it wants, the problem is when there are no realistic alternatives to that company. You may disagree with this logic but it was kind of hard for African Americans to engage in commerce for a while in this country because a bunch of people decided to use their economic right to deny service to those they didn't like for vain reasons.
Sure, in a system where all else is equal, we could implement a filtering system so that consumers could choose what kind of internet experience they wanted. The problem comes in when humans get thrown into the mix. It's just easier to not go down that road and let people filter their internet drop on their own time.
Seriously, how is this patent not obvious? Replace VCR/DVD media with a HDD, slap in a CPU and RAM, and all that is left is to write the code. Is giving the user the ability to multiplex their base bandwidth that novel? Amazing thing to allow people to control their bandwidth.
We don't need more laws when the current ones are already adequate. We just need the enforcing agencies to start upholding the law. Merely throwing more laws at the ills of society will not cure them. I would have to agree that Congress often does not focus on the important things but it is another thing to be asking them to go off on more tangents making things already illegal go on "Double Secret Probation".
The company, AccuSearch, was calling up phone companies and pretending to be certain persons in order to gain their account information. They then sold the relevant information to an interested third party. The private firm was misrepresenting itself in order to gain sensitive information.
"FTC attorneys argued that using false pretenses, fraudulent statements and fraudulent or stolen documents to induce carriers to disclose records was illegal."
So, they didn't need a warrant because they were pretending to be a customer trying to access their account records.
IANAL, but if the RIAA were to claim liability for the damages to minimize the losses taken by Atlantic, wouldn't that make all member organizations culpable?
The way I see it is Atlantic and the RIAA have two choices:
1) Atlantic takes full responsibility for being a part of an organization that brings spurious claims to court and is the only business to be responsible for damages.
2) The RIAA attempts to intercede, or Atlantic tries to shift blame towards the RIAA, and forces all members of the RIAA to be culpable due to collusion.
Just one last note, the RIAA cannot bring the cases against the alleged copy-right violators because they do not have standing to sue as they are not directly harmed financially by the "infringement". If they did have standing to sue in place of their member businesses then that would make the argument for collusion, price fixing, and monopolization essentially set in stone.