The UPC codes are printed on the boxes, and they signify a unique type of a product - but not a unique ID that is specific to this box. It would require retagging all products with some store-specific numbers - which promises lots of work and plenty of fresh pricing errors.
But even if you do this, the thief only needs to copy (or peel) the sticker from one box and stick it onto another. That's the only machine-readable item that tells the database what was bought. Even if each box has a unique tag, the thief only needs to write down the number, print it at home and be back with his own tag. He then checks that the impersonated box is still unsold, sticks the forged tag onto an expensive product, pays and leaves. When someone else takes the box that the thief impersonated, then the hell breaks loose. But it's too late.
Uh, dude, if someone is selling gas for 10 cents a gallon, you KNOW the price is wrong.
That's only if you knew about the price. I rarely do, for example, and as GP said there is no way, besides mind meld, to prove otherwise.
if an ATM suddenly decides to spit out money, it's OK to just grab a bunch of it?
It is however OK to ask for $100 in cash, and if the ATM spits out $200 you can take it and walk away. There is even a specific notice at ATMs to not count the money until you are safe (in your car or even at home.) If the sum is wrong you can't do anything about it anyway. Well, you can leave the extra cash on the ground, of course:-)
Taking something that's not yours is theft -- period.
That's news to me. When I buy things I take something that is not mine all the time. And I don't mind that the clerk takes my money which were not his to begin with.
The rest were traced through their EFTPOS records or security camera and are facing criminal charges.
IANAL, but I would be very surprised if anyone is charged. What is the crime? They bought a product at the listed price, and money and the product changed hands. Transaction completed.
If the police wants to classify it as theft, that would be strange to me. The customers paid for the product. If the police tries that, the customers may argue that the gas station owner did bait and switch on them, luring them into the purchase by falsely advertising a low price with intent of raising it after the sale and sending the cops to beat the difference out. And he did just that. I somehow doubt that it's legal. Imagine buying a bag of apples for $10, eating them, and then being told that the apples in fact cost $10,000 and you'd better pay now...
Besides, the customers have no obligation to listen to gas station owner's appeals. They have no obligation to listen to anyone whatsoever. They don't have an obligation to even remember about the purchase. In worst case the customers may be convinced that it's easier to pay, but there is no way they can be charged with any felony. They don't even have to know how much they paid. Myself, I rarely even look at the price, and besides if I need the gas then what's the point of knowing the exact price if I stop at this gas station for years? I just slide the card and fill the tank, the rest is taken care of. So, for example:
Officer:Mr. Smith, did you buy gas at Chevron #123 on Oct. 22 at 23:16? Mr. Smith:I don't know, I buy gas all over the place. Officer:Mr. Smith, do you know how much you paid? Mr. Smith:No, considering that I don't even remember being there. But I guess it will show up on my credit card statement in a month or so... Officer:Mr. Smith, you paid $0.17 per gallon. Mr. Smith:Sounds pretty low for these days; you must be mistaken. Officer:Mr. Smith, you are under arrest. Mr. Smith:On what charge?
Of course, the gas station owner can sue the customers and argue that they bought the product in bad faith, and so the deal was invalid to begin with. However this would be not a criminal case and the police ought not to run after people. That would be a civil case, and given ridiculously small money involved, it's probably not worth even filing, let alone involving a $400/hr lawyer. Gas station franchise owners don't wield this kind of cash; they are lucky to have enough money to buy the gas for resale.
The red light runner is usually not crazy, s/he may be just distracted or new in the area and simply failed to see the intersection. That applies to stop signs as well.
Well, that too - but the GP indicates that the system works only when it's nice weather, dry, sunny etc. However it offers no help in rain, snow, fog, icing conditions - in other words, when the safe speed is below the posted speed. It also won't work well in large cities because tall buildings shield most of the satellites.
The grandparent post was probably more concerned about soldiers going berserk due to psychological damage from the war. Soldiers who serve in time of peace are quite different from people who serve at war time, and it would be pointless to do any statistics yet. Not enough veterans of Iraq war left the army to have any meaningful analysis. Studies of Vietnam war veterans demonstrated large number of problems, so it would be reasonable to expect the same after this war.
Can sendmail or Postfix go that long without maintenance?
Most definitely. What is there to administer? Postfix just receives email from a peer MTA and hands it off to something else to deal with. In my case that someone else is Cyrus + ClamAV. Cyrus needs no maintenance, as long as there is enough disk space. ClamAV updates itself automatically. I only need to apply updates to the whole OS (SuSE 9.1) and even that could be done automatically (but I chose to do it manually, when I can afford to reload or restart key services.)
A ZIP or RAR archive, with a password (which you can specify in the email body) does the job just fine. Only don't make the archive self-extractable:-)
Actually, by the time you recouped your initial software development expenses you already spent more money on further development, bug fixes and new features, and compatibility with new devices and new OSes... so you have to claim the profits from the next 100,000 copies, and so it goes. I don't know many software products that are developed once and then frozen. They bitrot within months, and even if they still work (big if) they look ancient. If you sell a software product you just have to have people working on it every single day.
China is the largest regional power; it was such for thousands of years. All this is well documented. However it was never a global power (=superpower); Emperors just minded their own business and practiced calligraphy. Now is the time to change that. A base on the Moon, armed or not, will be a very strong statement, and China has resources to do that. USA does not have money (all it has is a huge debt to, for example, China...) So USA can compete only if China allows it, in form of investing into more green pieces of paper.
If a copy is technically made, but is unavailable, is it really infringement?
If someone copied of all your identity papers (birth certificate, driver's license, credit cards and bank accounts and passwords) but made it unavailable to general public, will you sleep well?
the only reason there *is* any law against copying is because of the presumption of harm -- that those copies are shared or used.
Harm will be a part of Fair Use test, sure. Probably the publishers will demonstrate some harm, it's not difficult. Just find someone who searched for AutoCAD textbook, found three, looked inside via Google Print and decided that two of them are useless. Otherwise he'd buy all three, and his employer would have paid.
It's time for publishers to suck it up and start embracing some news models of information dissemination and discovery. The funny thing is they will ultimately profit.
Why should they abandon a business model that is tried, tested and true? Authors and publishers are a little closed society, and they like it this way. And they already profit.
The source of profit is limited availability. They print 10,000 books, $30 each, collect $300,000 and divide amongst themselves. There are no more books, and there is no more money. They can print more books, and get more money, if they can sell. But the structure of profit sharing is fixed, and everyone likes it (though bickers about his personal share, naturally.)
But now you add infinitely more books into this scheme. They are electronic copies, but they are readable and can be infinitely duplicated. You can bet that people will hoard these free scanned books just because they can. The quality of scans may be poor, but it only needs to be "good enough".
This dilutes, literally, their stock (books.) They printed 10,000 books, and they all sold. But they can't print and sell more, because there is a copy of the book on a mighty Google, and only fools will be buying from a store now. Soon only [rich] fools will be buying even new books - it's easier to wait a few weeks and read it on Google, or on P2P (where the whole book may show up nicely repackaged.) This seriously affects the publishing crowd!
I was aware of that, and there are comments from other people who point that out. However many books (paperbacks) are priced below $10, and that is about the threshold of "no return".
Sure, if a poor student buys a textbook for $150 and finds out it is for a wrong course, you bet he will be returning it ASAP. But if a housewife is suckered into picking up a book at her grocery store checkout stand, she won't be returning it. If the same housewife decides to personally verify the weekly "bestseller list" through an online service, she may decide to buy something else, or nothing at all.
3) their publishers may refuse to publish their books if they are "pirated" (this or that way), thus profiting noone.
Authors produce novels, and they sell them (by word count) to publishers. Publishers market the novels and sell them to book stores (chains.) Readers walk in and buy the books.
If you allow anyone, anywhere, to read even a small part of the book before he is in the store, he may decide to not buy after all. When he is at the store he may be buying on impulse; he is holding the book already. But at home, lazily reading snippet here and snippet there, he may discover that the book is not as good as advertised. Then he won't buy it at all; he won't even go to the store. Baxter's Titan would be one example - he is a well known writer, but the book itself is horrendous, and that can be ascertained by reading just a few pages throughout the book.
The Author's Guild is exactly such an organization:
The Guild's legal staff reviews its members' publishing and agency contracts, intervenes in publishing disputes, and holds seminars and symposia on issues of importance to writers. The Guild also lobbies on the national and local levels on behalf of all authors on issues such as copyright, taxation, and freedom of expression.
Being a properly authorized agent of an author, it can and should represent selected interests of member authors. Google has no say in who exactly should deliver the opt-out message, as you have no say in what member of a legal firm may deliver court summons to you.
Whether it is true or not, Schmidt claims most major US and UK publishers have signed up.
Yes, that is strange for him to say that. There would be no lawsuit if everyone is happy-happy. Let's see how it unfolds. But from what I remember, the original complaint (brought by Authors' Guild, IIRC) had support of many players. The only way to be sure if Schmidt's claims are true is to see the complete list of those publishers, which the court will unquestionably require.
The way you have portrayed it may well be the attitude of the publishing houses.
You can't have a discussion without both sides presenting their arguments. I don't work for any publishing house, but I wrote a technical book once (and managed to sell it.) My comments, though, are not related to my own book writing experience. If I ever write something else, it will be under a free license. I earn my living designing computer stuff. It's professional writers and publishers who have much to lose.
Well, another publisher disagrees with you. Sense of ownership, you know... founded on solid economic incentives. With regard to revenue from ads, I doubt the mainline publishers want any of that fancy stuff - they are not in this Intraweb business. They can't count the benefits, and they don't know what is the difference between the "Library Project" and the "Publishing Program" - but they sure can count the losses. If you are a small publisher then you are in better position to navigate uncharted waters, so to say, and your authors are probably less skeptical; big name authors are often awfully conservative. So larger, well known publishing houses will be wary, more so if they are public companies.
Google, if you're reading this, how about just making it opt-in?
No respectable publisher would then opt in. Google Print would be reduced to the level of fanfiction and vanity press, and that would kill the whole idea.
Publishers won't opt in because they don't want any changes. They are all set already, and I can understand why they want to keep things as they are. Any electronic distribution is seen by them as danger (not without a reason, I must say.) So when a huge Internet site publishes pieces of their books and pays nothing in return, the publishers are running scared.
The problem is that many books are bought mistakenly, or under peer pressure, or just from curiosity, or just because the customer wanted to learn one specific thing. If the excerpt from the book is sufficient to stop the customer from buying, the publisher has a problem. On the other side, if the customer wants to buy something he never knew about... how common that is? If I want to have the whole Cussler's DP series, don't I know what they are about, and don't I know how many of them are written by now?
Well, that is easy - you can either execute the file (boot from it) or you can recreate the file by some means (such as make.)
It is worse when you have a file on your computer that you do not know much about. For example, you can be sent an email that is encrypted to some key which you don't have. And then you are required to produce the key. How do you prove that you don't have that key on some USB Flash disk or somewhere? You can't, it's not even theoretically possible.
In practice, people have thousands of files - documents, Flash ads, ActiveX controls, Java classes and other stuff they have collected just by browsing the Net. Most people are not even aware of their existence, and would be completely at loss when requested to provide a "decryption key" for something in the browser cache directories.
Even worse, the government can assert, out of the blue, that a certain file is "too large" for what it seems to do, therefore it must have an encrypted content as well as executable (or otherwise readable) material. Have you seen a multi-megabyte Word documents which only contain a sentence or two? The same can be applied to any type of document, and in reality one could conceal pretty much anything in them. So how one would begin answering this charge?
Worse than that is accusation of steganography. Everyone has photographs, music and other analog stuff on his computer. The accuser can assert that the photograph contains a hidden, encrypted message (which reads like random data before decryption.) You are required to produce a key. How would you prove that there is no steganography involved? How would you prove that one second of silence at the end of some song does not, in fact, carry an encrypted message in bits [3..0] of decoded output? This is impossible.
Ok, I am curious what you are supposed to do if you do not know the key? For example, Skype uses some sort of encryption, but you do not manage the key yourself. So if the government wants to decrypt your communication and comes to you, what can you do to surrender the key?
The only people with "nothing to hide" are the people who own nothing, know nothing of value, and don't do anything that might be of interest to others.
Even Oog the Caveman has a secret (where he hides his stash of dried meat.)
IMO, there is just no money to do the job. NASA is a very expensive bureaucracy, and they have a very expensive legacy (STS) to drag along. In general, USA is probably the most expensive place on Earth to do development. You may get what you pay for, but only if you can afford it. With current US budget being as red as it is, and with oil being as expensive as it is, one can definitely believe that the next president will have his hands full with just keeping the basic economy going.
service that makes it possible for me to get some sort of an unlimited $15/mo subscription to download and play any content that I can find on television and cable and DVD releases
The cost of "subscription" is included into your ISP bill, in case you wonder about that. You apparently can convert and transfer any video onto this iPod. You need about 600 MB per hour of video, so 60 GB gives you 100 hours of continuous play - good enough for 10 transatlantic flights without reloading, or for months of bus/train rides to work.
Slashdot Mirror
With a directional coupler, of course. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directional_coupler
But even if you do this, the thief only needs to copy (or peel) the sticker from one box and stick it onto another. That's the only machine-readable item that tells the database what was bought. Even if each box has a unique tag, the thief only needs to write down the number, print it at home and be back with his own tag. He then checks that the impersonated box is still unsold, sticks the forged tag onto an expensive product, pays and leaves. When someone else takes the box that the thief impersonated, then the hell breaks loose. But it's too late.
Good for the customers. People take advantage of each other all the time. And stupid merchants don't stay merchants for long.
That's only if you knew about the price. I rarely do, for example, and as GP said there is no way, besides mind meld, to prove otherwise.
if an ATM suddenly decides to spit out money, it's OK to just grab a bunch of it?
It is however OK to ask for $100 in cash, and if the ATM spits out $200 you can take it and walk away. There is even a specific notice at ATMs to not count the money until you are safe (in your car or even at home.) If the sum is wrong you can't do anything about it anyway. Well, you can leave the extra cash on the ground, of course :-)
Taking something that's not yours is theft -- period.
That's news to me. When I buy things I take something that is not mine all the time. And I don't mind that the clerk takes my money which were not his to begin with.
IANAL, but I would be very surprised if anyone is charged. What is the crime? They bought a product at the listed price, and money and the product changed hands. Transaction completed.
If the police wants to classify it as theft, that would be strange to me. The customers paid for the product. If the police tries that, the customers may argue that the gas station owner did bait and switch on them, luring them into the purchase by falsely advertising a low price with intent of raising it after the sale and sending the cops to beat the difference out. And he did just that. I somehow doubt that it's legal. Imagine buying a bag of apples for $10, eating them, and then being told that the apples in fact cost $10,000 and you'd better pay now...
Besides, the customers have no obligation to listen to gas station owner's appeals. They have no obligation to listen to anyone whatsoever. They don't have an obligation to even remember about the purchase. In worst case the customers may be convinced that it's easier to pay, but there is no way they can be charged with any felony. They don't even have to know how much they paid. Myself, I rarely even look at the price, and besides if I need the gas then what's the point of knowing the exact price if I stop at this gas station for years? I just slide the card and fill the tank, the rest is taken care of. So, for example:
Officer:Mr. Smith, did you buy gas at Chevron #123 on Oct. 22 at 23:16?
Mr. Smith:I don't know, I buy gas all over the place.
Officer:Mr. Smith, do you know how much you paid?
Mr. Smith:No, considering that I don't even remember being there. But I guess it will show up on my credit card statement in a month or so...
Officer:Mr. Smith, you paid $0.17 per gallon.
Mr. Smith:Sounds pretty low for these days; you must be mistaken.
Officer:Mr. Smith, you are under arrest.
Mr. Smith:On what charge?
Of course, the gas station owner can sue the customers and argue that they bought the product in bad faith, and so the deal was invalid to begin with. However this would be not a criminal case and the police ought not to run after people. That would be a civil case, and given ridiculously small money involved, it's probably not worth even filing, let alone involving a $400/hr lawyer. Gas station franchise owners don't wield this kind of cash; they are lucky to have enough money to buy the gas for resale.
The red light runner is usually not crazy, s/he may be just distracted or new in the area and simply failed to see the intersection. That applies to stop signs as well.
Well, that too - but the GP indicates that the system works only when it's nice weather, dry, sunny etc. However it offers no help in rain, snow, fog, icing conditions - in other words, when the safe speed is below the posted speed. It also won't work well in large cities because tall buildings shield most of the satellites.
The grandparent post was probably more concerned about soldiers going berserk due to psychological damage from the war. Soldiers who serve in time of peace are quite different from people who serve at war time, and it would be pointless to do any statistics yet. Not enough veterans of Iraq war left the army to have any meaningful analysis. Studies of Vietnam war veterans demonstrated large number of problems, so it would be reasonable to expect the same after this war.
Most definitely. What is there to administer? Postfix just receives email from a peer MTA and hands it off to something else to deal with. In my case that someone else is Cyrus + ClamAV. Cyrus needs no maintenance, as long as there is enough disk space. ClamAV updates itself automatically. I only need to apply updates to the whole OS (SuSE 9.1) and even that could be done automatically (but I chose to do it manually, when I can afford to reload or restart key services.)
A ZIP or RAR archive, with a password (which you can specify in the email body) does the job just fine. Only don't make the archive self-extractable :-)
Actually, by the time you recouped your initial software development expenses you already spent more money on further development, bug fixes and new features, and compatibility with new devices and new OSes... so you have to claim the profits from the next 100,000 copies, and so it goes. I don't know many software products that are developed once and then frozen. They bitrot within months, and even if they still work (big if) they look ancient. If you sell a software product you just have to have people working on it every single day.
China is the largest regional power; it was such for thousands of years. All this is well documented. However it was never a global power (=superpower); Emperors just minded their own business and practiced calligraphy. Now is the time to change that. A base on the Moon, armed or not, will be a very strong statement, and China has resources to do that. USA does not have money (all it has is a huge debt to, for example, China...) So USA can compete only if China allows it, in form of investing into more green pieces of paper.
If someone copied of all your identity papers (birth certificate, driver's license, credit cards and bank accounts and passwords) but made it unavailable to general public, will you sleep well?
the only reason there *is* any law against copying is because of the presumption of harm -- that those copies are shared or used.
Harm will be a part of Fair Use test, sure. Probably the publishers will demonstrate some harm, it's not difficult. Just find someone who searched for AutoCAD textbook, found three, looked inside via Google Print and decided that two of them are useless. Otherwise he'd buy all three, and his employer would have paid.
It's time for publishers to suck it up and start embracing some news models of information dissemination and discovery. The funny thing is they will ultimately profit.
Why should they abandon a business model that is tried, tested and true? Authors and publishers are a little closed society, and they like it this way. And they already profit.
The source of profit is limited availability. They print 10,000 books, $30 each, collect $300,000 and divide amongst themselves. There are no more books, and there is no more money. They can print more books, and get more money, if they can sell. But the structure of profit sharing is fixed, and everyone likes it (though bickers about his personal share, naturally.)
But now you add infinitely more books into this scheme. They are electronic copies, but they are readable and can be infinitely duplicated. You can bet that people will hoard these free scanned books just because they can. The quality of scans may be poor, but it only needs to be "good enough".
This dilutes, literally, their stock (books.) They printed 10,000 books, and they all sold. But they can't print and sell more, because there is a copy of the book on a mighty Google, and only fools will be buying from a store now. Soon only [rich] fools will be buying even new books - it's easier to wait a few weeks and read it on Google, or on P2P (where the whole book may show up nicely repackaged.) This seriously affects the publishing crowd!
Sure, if a poor student buys a textbook for $150 and finds out it is for a wrong course, you bet he will be returning it ASAP. But if a housewife is suckered into picking up a book at her grocery store checkout stand, she won't be returning it. If the same housewife decides to personally verify the weekly "bestseller list" through an online service, she may decide to buy something else, or nothing at all.
3) their publishers may refuse to publish their books if they are "pirated" (this or that way), thus profiting noone.
Authors produce novels, and they sell them (by word count) to publishers. Publishers market the novels and sell them to book stores (chains.) Readers walk in and buy the books.
If you allow anyone, anywhere, to read even a small part of the book before he is in the store, he may decide to not buy after all. When he is at the store he may be buying on impulse; he is holding the book already. But at home, lazily reading snippet here and snippet there, he may discover that the book is not as good as advertised. Then he won't buy it at all; he won't even go to the store. Baxter's Titan would be one example - he is a well known writer, but the book itself is horrendous, and that can be ascertained by reading just a few pages throughout the book.
http://www.authorsguild.org/?p=51
Being a properly authorized agent of an author, it can and should represent selected interests of member authors. Google has no say in who exactly should deliver the opt-out message, as you have no say in what member of a legal firm may deliver court summons to you.
Yes, that is strange for him to say that. There would be no lawsuit if everyone is happy-happy. Let's see how it unfolds. But from what I remember, the original complaint (brought by Authors' Guild, IIRC) had support of many players. The only way to be sure if Schmidt's claims are true is to see the complete list of those publishers, which the court will unquestionably require.
The way you have portrayed it may well be the attitude of the publishing houses.
You can't have a discussion without both sides presenting their arguments. I don't work for any publishing house, but I wrote a technical book once (and managed to sell it.) My comments, though, are not related to my own book writing experience. If I ever write something else, it will be under a free license. I earn my living designing computer stuff. It's professional writers and publishers who have much to lose.
Well, another publisher disagrees with you. Sense of ownership, you know... founded on solid economic incentives. With regard to revenue from ads, I doubt the mainline publishers want any of that fancy stuff - they are not in this Intraweb business. They can't count the benefits, and they don't know what is the difference between the "Library Project" and the "Publishing Program" - but they sure can count the losses. If you are a small publisher then you are in better position to navigate uncharted waters, so to say, and your authors are probably less skeptical; big name authors are often awfully conservative. So larger, well known publishing houses will be wary, more so if they are public companies.
No respectable publisher would then opt in. Google Print would be reduced to the level of fanfiction and vanity press, and that would kill the whole idea.
Publishers won't opt in because they don't want any changes. They are all set already, and I can understand why they want to keep things as they are. Any electronic distribution is seen by them as danger (not without a reason, I must say.) So when a huge Internet site publishes pieces of their books and pays nothing in return, the publishers are running scared.
The problem is that many books are bought mistakenly, or under peer pressure, or just from curiosity, or just because the customer wanted to learn one specific thing. If the excerpt from the book is sufficient to stop the customer from buying, the publisher has a problem. On the other side, if the customer wants to buy something he never knew about... how common that is? If I want to have the whole Cussler's DP series, don't I know what they are about, and don't I know how many of them are written by now?
It is worse when you have a file on your computer that you do not know much about. For example, you can be sent an email that is encrypted to some key which you don't have. And then you are required to produce the key. How do you prove that you don't have that key on some USB Flash disk or somewhere? You can't, it's not even theoretically possible.
In practice, people have thousands of files - documents, Flash ads, ActiveX controls, Java classes and other stuff they have collected just by browsing the Net. Most people are not even aware of their existence, and would be completely at loss when requested to provide a "decryption key" for something in the browser cache directories.
Even worse, the government can assert, out of the blue, that a certain file is "too large" for what it seems to do, therefore it must have an encrypted content as well as executable (or otherwise readable) material. Have you seen a multi-megabyte Word documents which only contain a sentence or two? The same can be applied to any type of document, and in reality one could conceal pretty much anything in them. So how one would begin answering this charge?
Worse than that is accusation of steganography. Everyone has photographs, music and other analog stuff on his computer. The accuser can assert that the photograph contains a hidden, encrypted message (which reads like random data before decryption.) You are required to produce a key. How would you prove that there is no steganography involved? How would you prove that one second of silence at the end of some song does not, in fact, carry an encrypted message in bits [3..0] of decoded output? This is impossible.
Ok, I am curious what you are supposed to do if you do not know the key? For example, Skype uses some sort of encryption, but you do not manage the key yourself. So if the government wants to decrypt your communication and comes to you, what can you do to surrender the key?
Even Oog the Caveman has a secret (where he hides his stash of dried meat.)
IMO, there is just no money to do the job. NASA is a very expensive bureaucracy, and they have a very expensive legacy (STS) to drag along. In general, USA is probably the most expensive place on Earth to do development. You may get what you pay for, but only if you can afford it. With current US budget being as red as it is, and with oil being as expensive as it is, one can definitely believe that the next president will have his hands full with just keeping the basic economy going.
The cost of "subscription" is included into your ISP bill, in case you wonder about that. You apparently can convert and transfer any video onto this iPod. You need about 600 MB per hour of video, so 60 GB gives you 100 hours of continuous play - good enough for 10 transatlantic flights without reloading, or for months of bus/train rides to work.
Sorry to hear about your little problem.