Agreed. I read the blurb part of this review, and I was wondering what the heck business processes had to do with beats-per-minute (BPM) calculations. You should ALWAYS define acronyms explicitly upon first use.
No, it's not. The example I was giving was a site in which all the content is dynamically added to the DOM in JavaScript. Doing it with the noscript tag would mean you'd either be pushing two complete copies of the content to every user or you'd be writing two complete sets of formatter code, one in JavaScript, one in the underlying backend language, that would tend to get out of sync with one another. It's a maintenance headache at best, nightmare at worst, and unpleasant all around.
The noscript tag was intended for small pieces of content to be shown by browsers that don't support JavaScript, not entire pages worth of content. Nobody sane would ever use it that way. I guess you could hack it with an iframe tag, except that most browsers that don't support JavaScript are also too old to support that tag.
That's what the meta name=keywords tag is for
Which, if memory serves, Google explicitly ignores because of the tendency of people to flood them with tons of keywords that are unrelated to the actual content of the page.
Google spiders text, not images.
Really? Wow, then I guess that Google image search must be a figment of my imagination.
It also doesn't spider the text of css or javascript files.
It does if the CSS or JavaScript is inline on the page, and I'm pretty sure it does anyway in an attempt to handle the growing number of sites that load all of their content with XHR. If it doesn't spider the JavaScript, then it is even more important to serve different content to Google, because a client-side dynamic site would result in a blank page as far as the spider is concerned.
Also, I question how effective it is to dynamically decide to serve a static page based on a user-agent as opposed to merely serving everyone the dynamic page.
Assuming you mean the server-side dynamic page, then that's a question that can only be answered by looking at your traffic logs.
The classic example is JavaScript-rendered dynamic content. This tends not to work so well when you're dealing with search engines. However, if you can serve them a static page that contains the text of the page minus all the rendering, then it can index the content without choking on the JavaScript. I'm not sure how important this is these days, but it certainly was a problem at one time.
It's also useful to serve modified versions for search engines so that searches for content within your site can return more relevant results. For example, you might insert certain keywords that describe the content of the page using terms that don't actually appear. Case in point, your page talks about Airport, but you serve a copy to Google that inserts the terms 802.11 and Wi-Fi.
Finally, there's the question of bandwidth and CPU overhead. If your site changes a lot, Google beats on your servers rather frequently. You can reduce the bandwidth hit by stripping JavaScript, CSS, images, etc. from your content before serving it to Google. This won't significantly change the searchability of the content, but will reduce the bandwidth overhead. And, of course, if there are static versions of content that you can serve instead of a server-side-dynamic version, this also saves on CPU overhead.
For example, when you're writing a blog, you might decide that you don't care if the comments are searchable in Google. Thus, instead of wasting your server's CPU to compute the HTML for the comments, you can serve up a web page containing only the actual blog content when queried by a search engine.
And, so far, apart from "it's real Linux" (which is a major feature for geeks only), I don't see what sets MeeGo apart from existing solutions. Especially from Android.
If it runs native code, I can see one possible advantage over Android: battery life. A VM, no matter how well designed, inherently adds overhead, both in terms of wasting CPU cycles and in terms of requiring a bigger RAM footprint. Extra RAM parts and less CPU idling both translate into greater power consumption.
If using native, CPU-optimized code translates into being able to get a few percent better battery life or being able to reduce the size of the device by a few percent and get the same battery life, that's a win. And if it results in being able to use a slower CPU with less RAM, that results in a cost win as well.
They aren't. I was just pointing out that the suggestion that all Americans consume too much protein isn't entirely correct.
Either way, the point I was trying to make originally wasn't that Americans consume too little protein in terms of bulk numbers, but rather as a percentage of calories in their diet. Americans on average take in about 15% of their total calories from protein. The Dietary Guidelines for Americans recommends 10-35% from protein. Thus, the average American could double the percentage of calories that he or she takes in from protein, and still be within the recommended range.
More to the point, that's the only calorie source that's so far off towards one end of the range. Our fat intake is a little on the high side of the range, average carbs are right in the middle, but protein is way low. (Source: about.com) Further, eating more protein during weight loss results in more fat loss, less muscle loss.
So I maintain my original assertion that Americans don't get enough protein.
Banning pot is more like banning starchy vegetables. Sure, you'll make a lot of people mad when they can't buy French fries, but at least you're improving health instead of diminishing it.
Well for one I like how you stated by saying in your previous posts about the government letting people eat what they want, then say that you agree with them limiting what I can and cannot eat. Now I expect you to say you want booze, cigarettes, and caffeine banned you you are just a hypocritical bias P.O.S.
You do know that you're replying to two different people, right? I wrote the paragraph you're replying to here.
The problem is that it won't fix overspending. They'll just find something else to steal from, or else they'll print more money and let inflation take care of the extra debt.
No, there has to be a line drawn in the sand, and if not now, when? If not here, where?
You don't need to eat meat or drink anything other than water. Lets outlaw coffee, cigarettes, alcohol, tea, the consumption of meat...
I think you're dead wrong about that. Most people do not get enough protein in their diets as it is, and you're talking about going further in that direction?
It's remarkably hard to actually be healthy on a meat-free diet, assuming you include fish in that ban. In theory, it is possible, but the vast majority of people who consume no meat are in relatively poor health, consuming way too little protein, and way too much starch and fructose.
In America, it's particularly bad because we eat low-fat meat and drink 1% or 2% milk instead of whole milk or cream, forgetting that it's the fat that makes you feel full and helps prevent overconsumption. We eat more fruits and vegetables, forgetting that fruits are mostly sugar (and many are very heavy in fructose in particular), and that most of the more popular vegetables that we consume are mostly starch. And the result is that we have an obesity epidemic.
Take away meat---the one major source of protein that most people consume---and you would create a health epidemic the likes of which the world has not seen since the plague.
Banning pot is more like banning starchy vegetables. Sure, you'll make a lot of people mad when they can't buy French fries, but at least you're improving health instead of diminishing it.
On the flip side, one could argue that if people constantly protested every stupid and pointless law by breaking them, it would result in enough people breaking laws that arereasonable to cause problems for society.
More to the point, if civil disobedience were common, its effectiveness would diminish, just as the effectiveness of street protests in the U.S. has diminished significantly.
For those reasons, such actions should be reserved exclusively for laws that are particularly bad---those that inherently result in injustice for a significant percentage of the population over something they cannot control, etc.---as opposed to laws that are merely dumb (marijuana control laws).
Also, one could also argue that the people who have committed civil disobedience have contributed just as much to the problems caused by drug control laws as the laws themselves. Were people not breaking the laws left and right, the drug cartels would not have funding, and none of this would be an issue.
In short, legal or illegal; pick one. Anybody who blames that choice (either way) for any significant societal problems is just blowing smoke.
Let me just amend that a little. Any money that the politicians take away from social security is theft, pure and simple, same as if an insurance company told you that your $100,000 life insurance policy that you're halfway through paying for will now pay out only $75,000 and the remaining $25,000 will pay for bonuses for their executive team.
There's no way to get back to running surpluses (and therefore starting to actually pay down the debt) without massive cuts in all of the big three (social security, medicare, and defense).
That's bullshit, and you should know it. We, as workers, pay into both Medicare and Social Security as a separate FICA tax on our wages. It's essentially a public insurance offering, not a government handout. We're paying for it directly, and if the government cuts it, then those of us paying in now are not going to get what we paid for. That's fraud, pure and simple.
If either program is going over budget, that is happening for one of two reasons:
The Medicare and Social Security caps and/or rates are set too low.
The government is stealing money to pay for other things.
Period. There is no good reason for either of those programs to be seen as a drain on our government's resources. Medicare and Social Security are basically separate from the federal budget. So if a politician claims that Medicare and Social Security are the reason our government is bleeding red, they're just trying to trick people into giving up social programs so that they can spend that money on more black ops and other crap that this country doesn't really need.
I challenge any of the politicians making such ludicrous claims to provide proof to the contrary.
The point is that statistically speaking, your keys are unlikely to be stolen unless the thief saw you walking from a really nice car, and the same goes for crypto tokens attached to your keys, generally speaking, because thieves usually don't know what they are. By contrast, phones are commonly stolen because they are easily pawned. That goes double for smartphones.
Therefore, the security of your data with a physical token is unlikely to be compromised unless you are being specifically targeted (or your car is being stolen at the same time), whereas the security of your data with a software token depends entirely on the intelligence of the person who took or bought your phone from the original thief.
Just about every time I go to Fry's, they ask for my ID. Just about every time, I file a merchant complaint with Mastercard.
I wonder if this ruling is why the gas station I bought fuel from this afternoon didn't ask for my billing ZIP code for the first time ever. It immediately struck me as surprising in a good way. Then, I read this story a few hours later. The timing is almost too blatant to be an accident.
But what about subdomains? Those are entirely under the direct control of the domain admins. If the owner of mydomain.org wanted to create a subdomain called "screw.[insert country here].mydomain.org", there's nothing stopping him/her.
If they really want to be able to veto any name, methinks this proposal was made by people who don't understand how the Internet works---not that this should come as any surprise.
No, that's not my argument at all. My argument is that the MPAA's argument is not entirely without merit because rewarding people for having exceptionally popular downloads, even though it may not always be rewarding infringement, does so with a high degree of probability, and any reasonable tech person should know that. Therefore, the argument that rewarding popular downloads is tantamount to rewarding infringement is not that much of a stretch.
As for your argument about encrypted files, if I were running a service like this, you can bet I'd be covering my you-know-what with a series of "hot file" rules (no pun intended) to detect unusual spikes in traffic for a single file. If a single download suddenly appeared and quickly saw tens of thousands of downloads, I'd be Googling the checksums and the URL to see what I found. If I found a decryption key posted publicly, I'd use it to do due diligence.
Is that required for DMCA safe harbor? No. Is a pattern of failing to notice obvious infringement sufficient to get your safe harbor status revoked? Maybe.
When you then extend such responsibilities to internet service providers, because their kind of service does not substantially differ from that of data transfer providers, should they similarly be required to:
Prevent users from transferring large amounts of data because it is "probably" that they "could" be infringing?
Why would you assume that someone transferring large amounts of data is infringing copyright? That's a naive assumption. Lots of people transfer large amounts of data from legal services---iTunes Store movies, Amazon Unbox, Netflix streaming, YouTube, etc. A user getting content from lots of different places is not implicitly a sign of infringement.
A single piece of content being sent to lots of different places, by contrast, is probably infringing better than ninety-nine times out of a hundred, and that remaining one out of a hundred is rarely encrypted. People storing and distributing encrypted files that are not infringing are largely corporate users, and those sorts of files tend to be downloaded by only a handful of people. Therefore, the presence of a high volume (hundreds of downloads) file that is encrypted should be a red flag the size of Tennessee.
Require users to provide passwords to all encrypted transferred data in order to check for infringement?
Now you're just being silly. If encrypted content is infringing, then the key is somewhere. If it is only in the hands of a handful of people, then it's small time infringement, which is generally not even worth bothering to track down (and the movie studios could not prove that it was infringement anyway, in all likelihood). If it is in the hands of hundreds or thousands of people, then odds are good that it is posted on a web page somewhere (or some distributed tracker or something), in which case the ISP could find it if they bothered to do so.
Ban encrypted communication alltogether in order to prevent hiding "infringing" content?
Yes, sure. Because the only reason for encryption is piracy. Come on. Get real. You can't possibly equate banning encryption with asking ISPs to do the most basic of due diligence when they see content with unusual download rates. Such an extreme slippery slope is pretty clearly a fallacy sine dubitatio. (Apologies if I got the Latin wrong here.)
Mostly agreed. Except that I wouldn't put them in the top three on most products.
For example, in addition to the headphone brand you mention, I'd also put Koss and Sennheiser noticeably higher than Sony in terms of headphone build quality. My last pair of Sony headphones developed a rattle rather quickly.
I'm of the opinion that in many areas, Sony scrapes by on name recognition and brand loyalty.... If people really looked at life expectancy for products before they bought them, I suspect people would choose many, many different brands over them. Or maybe I've just gotten particularly unlucky.
Regarding why geeks are complaining about not being able to jailbreak their PS3s, I think it has more to do with the fact that Sony took away a feature of their hardware that they were using, then forced them to upgrade in order to continue to play most games, then when people went out to try to find a new way to do what they were previously allowed to do with their hardware with Sony's direct knowledge and support in previous firmware versions, Sony suddenly got all pissy about it and started suing people.
Frankly, the whole thing stinks. Sony needs to remember that those geeks they screwed tend to be the people who recommend products to all their friends---particularly when it comes to electronic gadgets. If every geek vows to not just boycott Sony, but also to tell all their friends and relatives to do so, that will make a noticeable dent in their sales.
But seriously, this is where the difference between per se and per quod comes in. Giving bonuses for illegal movie downloads is infringement per se, but giving bonuses for popular downloads that turn out to be illegal downloads is infringement per quod. It isn't illegal on the face, but it might be illegal in light of extrinsic information---specifically the fact that the vast majority of popular downloads are illegal. The MPAA should have a hard time proving this, or at least one would hope so. That said, it's not remotely airtight.
I'd expect there to be at least some popular downloads that are non-infringing. That said, most of those are likely to be flash-in-the-pan popular---a bright flash, then squat. For example, if someone posts a game mod through that service, it could be non-infringing (depending on whether the "derivative works" issue bites the author, and on whether the original game publisher cares enough to press the issue), but that traffic would rapidly die down after the few dozen hardcore gamers on a particular site have all downloaded it.
To that end, long-term popular downloads should be treated as suspect, and I have a hard time believing that any sysadmin would be so naive that he or she wouldn't realize this. That's why the MPAA might actually have a case.
Agreed. I would say I was going to boycott Sony over this, but the truth is that I started boycotting Sony almost a decade ago after they told me it would cost several hundred dollars for a replacement part for a camcorder that was worth half that. The part was a two inch by three inch piece of plastic case with the power switch and start button on it, and nothing else. It should have cost about a dollar, if that.
It was at that point that I realized that Sony not only built crap products (I was already steering clear of their products to some degree because of the number of pieces of Sony hardware that suddenly stopped working for no good reason), but also weren't willing to stand behind out-of-warranty products with reasonable service. In short, Sony was cutting corners left and right *and* screwing the customer when those corners inevitably led to their hardware falling apart, cranking up repair part costs to ridiculous levels to force people to buy more poorly built crap.
You are not required to have any physical presence in Delaware to incorporate there, so I doubt most corporations would qualify as having significant nexus in the state.
Please tell me what aspect of that statement was vague. Pretty much every single word I used in that statement has a very specific and precise legal meaning that is fairly well defined through relevant case law.
About the only thing in my statement that you might be able to argue was vague was the mention of suing in the location where the injury occurred, and even that is usually not vague for most types of injury. Patents are a notable exception solely because our patent law is so broken that merely using a patented product is a violation (meaning that the injury occurs continuously and everywhere). And to that end, that's justification for eliminating that provision if the location of the injury is nebulous. On the other hand, that's also justification for fixing patent law so that patents are only violated by someone manufacturing or otherwise creating an instantiation of a patented technology, not using or selling it.
The location of injury would still be nebulous for copyright law (for the same reason), but then again, there doesn't seem to be nearly as much venue shopping in that area, so it's probably not too important to fix that edge case right now.
I think you have to ask yourself whether the principle purpose of prison is punishment, rehabilitation, or keeping the people away from the public as a whole so that they cannot harm others.
If the purpose is punishment, then taking away their communication might do that to some degree, but only insofar as it limits the duration of their communication and makes them feel more isolated.
If the purpose is rehabilitation, taking away their communication is directly contrary to that goal. Making someone feel more isolated from society is the best way to increase recidivism.
If the purpose is keeping the people from being able to harm others, then it makes little difference with two exceptions:
When having cell phones allows them to plan crimes outside the walls. Using microcells to monitor the communication mitigates this problem.
When not having cell phones makes them feel more isolated, resulting in the inability to reintegrate themselves into society upon release.
I think you'll find that in the grand scheme of things, letting inmates have cell phones does far more good than harm on the whole, and the few situations where the reverse is true are easily mitigated.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed. I read the blurb part of this review, and I was wondering what the heck business processes had to do with beats-per-minute (BPM) calculations. You should ALWAYS define acronyms explicitly upon first use.
No, it's not. The example I was giving was a site in which all the content is dynamically added to the DOM in JavaScript. Doing it with the noscript tag would mean you'd either be pushing two complete copies of the content to every user or you'd be writing two complete sets of formatter code, one in JavaScript, one in the underlying backend language, that would tend to get out of sync with one another. It's a maintenance headache at best, nightmare at worst, and unpleasant all around.
The noscript tag was intended for small pieces of content to be shown by browsers that don't support JavaScript, not entire pages worth of content. Nobody sane would ever use it that way. I guess you could hack it with an iframe tag, except that most browsers that don't support JavaScript are also too old to support that tag.
Which, if memory serves, Google explicitly ignores because of the tendency of people to flood them with tons of keywords that are unrelated to the actual content of the page.
Really? Wow, then I guess that Google image search must be a figment of my imagination.
It does if the CSS or JavaScript is inline on the page, and I'm pretty sure it does anyway in an attempt to handle the growing number of sites that load all of their content with XHR. If it doesn't spider the JavaScript, then it is even more important to serve different content to Google, because a client-side dynamic site would result in a blank page as far as the spider is concerned.
Assuming you mean the server-side dynamic page, then that's a question that can only be answered by looking at your traffic logs.
There are actually valid reasons for doing that.
The classic example is JavaScript-rendered dynamic content. This tends not to work so well when you're dealing with search engines. However, if you can serve them a static page that contains the text of the page minus all the rendering, then it can index the content without choking on the JavaScript. I'm not sure how important this is these days, but it certainly was a problem at one time.
It's also useful to serve modified versions for search engines so that searches for content within your site can return more relevant results. For example, you might insert certain keywords that describe the content of the page using terms that don't actually appear. Case in point, your page talks about Airport, but you serve a copy to Google that inserts the terms 802.11 and Wi-Fi.
Finally, there's the question of bandwidth and CPU overhead. If your site changes a lot, Google beats on your servers rather frequently. You can reduce the bandwidth hit by stripping JavaScript, CSS, images, etc. from your content before serving it to Google. This won't significantly change the searchability of the content, but will reduce the bandwidth overhead. And, of course, if there are static versions of content that you can serve instead of a server-side-dynamic version, this also saves on CPU overhead.
For example, when you're writing a blog, you might decide that you don't care if the comments are searchable in Google. Thus, instead of wasting your server's CPU to compute the HTML for the comments, you can serve up a web page containing only the actual blog content when queried by a search engine.
Paywalls, of course, are a dubious reason.
If it runs native code, I can see one possible advantage over Android: battery life. A VM, no matter how well designed, inherently adds overhead, both in terms of wasting CPU cycles and in terms of requiring a bigger RAM footprint. Extra RAM parts and less CPU idling both translate into greater power consumption.
If using native, CPU-optimized code translates into being able to get a few percent better battery life or being able to reduce the size of the device by a few percent and get the same battery life, that's a win. And if it results in being able to use a slower CPU with less RAM, that results in a cost win as well.
They aren't. I was just pointing out that the suggestion that all Americans consume too much protein isn't entirely correct.
Either way, the point I was trying to make originally wasn't that Americans consume too little protein in terms of bulk numbers, but rather as a percentage of calories in their diet. Americans on average take in about 15% of their total calories from protein. The Dietary Guidelines for Americans recommends 10-35% from protein. Thus, the average American could double the percentage of calories that he or she takes in from protein, and still be within the recommended range.
More to the point, that's the only calorie source that's so far off towards one end of the range. Our fat intake is a little on the high side of the range, average carbs are right in the middle, but protein is way low. (Source: about.com) Further, eating more protein during weight loss results in more fat loss, less muscle loss.
So I maintain my original assertion that Americans don't get enough protein.
It is among vegetarians, and doubly so among vegans.
You do know that you're replying to two different people, right? I wrote the paragraph you're replying to here.
The problem is that it won't fix overspending. They'll just find something else to steal from, or else they'll print more money and let inflation take care of the extra debt.
No, there has to be a line drawn in the sand, and if not now, when? If not here, where?
I think you're dead wrong about that. Most people do not get enough protein in their diets as it is, and you're talking about going further in that direction?
It's remarkably hard to actually be healthy on a meat-free diet, assuming you include fish in that ban. In theory, it is possible, but the vast majority of people who consume no meat are in relatively poor health, consuming way too little protein, and way too much starch and fructose.
In America, it's particularly bad because we eat low-fat meat and drink 1% or 2% milk instead of whole milk or cream, forgetting that it's the fat that makes you feel full and helps prevent overconsumption. We eat more fruits and vegetables, forgetting that fruits are mostly sugar (and many are very heavy in fructose in particular), and that most of the more popular vegetables that we consume are mostly starch. And the result is that we have an obesity epidemic.
Take away meat---the one major source of protein that most people consume---and you would create a health epidemic the likes of which the world has not seen since the plague.
Banning pot is more like banning starchy vegetables. Sure, you'll make a lot of people mad when they can't buy French fries, but at least you're improving health instead of diminishing it.
On the flip side, one could argue that if people constantly protested every stupid and pointless law by breaking them, it would result in enough people breaking laws that arereasonable to cause problems for society.
More to the point, if civil disobedience were common, its effectiveness would diminish, just as the effectiveness of street protests in the U.S. has diminished significantly.
For those reasons, such actions should be reserved exclusively for laws that are particularly bad---those that inherently result in injustice for a significant percentage of the population over something they cannot control, etc.---as opposed to laws that are merely dumb (marijuana control laws).
Also, one could also argue that the people who have committed civil disobedience have contributed just as much to the problems caused by drug control laws as the laws themselves. Were people not breaking the laws left and right, the drug cartels would not have funding, and none of this would be an issue.
In short, legal or illegal; pick one. Anybody who blames that choice (either way) for any significant societal problems is just blowing smoke.
Let me just amend that a little. Any money that the politicians take away from social security is theft, pure and simple, same as if an insurance company told you that your $100,000 life insurance policy that you're halfway through paying for will now pay out only $75,000 and the remaining $25,000 will pay for bonuses for their executive team.
That's bullshit, and you should know it. We, as workers, pay into both Medicare and Social Security as a separate FICA tax on our wages. It's essentially a public insurance offering, not a government handout. We're paying for it directly, and if the government cuts it, then those of us paying in now are not going to get what we paid for. That's fraud, pure and simple.
If either program is going over budget, that is happening for one of two reasons:
Period. There is no good reason for either of those programs to be seen as a drain on our government's resources. Medicare and Social Security are basically separate from the federal budget. So if a politician claims that Medicare and Social Security are the reason our government is bleeding red, they're just trying to trick people into giving up social programs so that they can spend that money on more black ops and other crap that this country doesn't really need.
I challenge any of the politicians making such ludicrous claims to provide proof to the contrary.
The point is that statistically speaking, your keys are unlikely to be stolen unless the thief saw you walking from a really nice car, and the same goes for crypto tokens attached to your keys, generally speaking, because thieves usually don't know what they are. By contrast, phones are commonly stolen because they are easily pawned. That goes double for smartphones.
Therefore, the security of your data with a physical token is unlikely to be compromised unless you are being specifically targeted (or your car is being stolen at the same time), whereas the security of your data with a software token depends entirely on the intelligence of the person who took or bought your phone from the original thief.
Just about every time I go to Fry's, they ask for my ID. Just about every time, I file a merchant complaint with Mastercard.
I wonder if this ruling is why the gas station I bought fuel from this afternoon didn't ask for my billing ZIP code for the first time ever. It immediately struck me as surprising in a good way. Then, I read this story a few hours later. The timing is almost too blatant to be an accident.
Because when someone steals your phone, they now have the password (in the keychain) and the token.
But what about subdomains? Those are entirely under the direct control of the domain admins. If the owner of mydomain.org wanted to create a subdomain called "screw.[insert country here].mydomain.org", there's nothing stopping him/her.
If they really want to be able to veto any name, methinks this proposal was made by people who don't understand how the Internet works---not that this should come as any surprise.
No, that's not my argument at all. My argument is that the MPAA's argument is not entirely without merit because rewarding people for having exceptionally popular downloads, even though it may not always be rewarding infringement, does so with a high degree of probability, and any reasonable tech person should know that. Therefore, the argument that rewarding popular downloads is tantamount to rewarding infringement is not that much of a stretch.
As for your argument about encrypted files, if I were running a service like this, you can bet I'd be covering my you-know-what with a series of "hot file" rules (no pun intended) to detect unusual spikes in traffic for a single file. If a single download suddenly appeared and quickly saw tens of thousands of downloads, I'd be Googling the checksums and the URL to see what I found. If I found a decryption key posted publicly, I'd use it to do due diligence.
Is that required for DMCA safe harbor? No. Is a pattern of failing to notice obvious infringement sufficient to get your safe harbor status revoked? Maybe.
Why would you assume that someone transferring large amounts of data is infringing copyright? That's a naive assumption. Lots of people transfer large amounts of data from legal services---iTunes Store movies, Amazon Unbox, Netflix streaming, YouTube, etc. A user getting content from lots of different places is not implicitly a sign of infringement.
A single piece of content being sent to lots of different places, by contrast, is probably infringing better than ninety-nine times out of a hundred, and that remaining one out of a hundred is rarely encrypted. People storing and distributing encrypted files that are not infringing are largely corporate users, and those sorts of files tend to be downloaded by only a handful of people. Therefore, the presence of a high volume (hundreds of downloads) file that is encrypted should be a red flag the size of Tennessee.
Now you're just being silly. If encrypted content is infringing, then the key is somewhere. If it is only in the hands of a handful of people, then it's small time infringement, which is generally not even worth bothering to track down (and the movie studios could not prove that it was infringement anyway, in all likelihood). If it is in the hands of hundreds or thousands of people, then odds are good that it is posted on a web page somewhere (or some distributed tracker or something), in which case the ISP could find it if they bothered to do so.
Yes, sure. Because the only reason for encryption is piracy. Come on. Get real. You can't possibly equate banning encryption with asking ISPs to do the most basic of due diligence when they see content with unusual download rates. Such an extreme slippery slope is pretty clearly a fallacy sine dubitatio. (Apologies if I got the Latin wrong here.)
Mostly agreed. Except that I wouldn't put them in the top three on most products.
For example, in addition to the headphone brand you mention, I'd also put Koss and Sennheiser noticeably higher than Sony in terms of headphone build quality. My last pair of Sony headphones developed a rattle rather quickly.
I'm of the opinion that in many areas, Sony scrapes by on name recognition and brand loyalty.... If people really looked at life expectancy for products before they bought them, I suspect people would choose many, many different brands over them. Or maybe I've just gotten particularly unlucky.
Regarding why geeks are complaining about not being able to jailbreak their PS3s, I think it has more to do with the fact that Sony took away a feature of their hardware that they were using, then forced them to upgrade in order to continue to play most games, then when people went out to try to find a new way to do what they were previously allowed to do with their hardware with Sony's direct knowledge and support in previous firmware versions, Sony suddenly got all pissy about it and started suing people.
Frankly, the whole thing stinks. Sony needs to remember that those geeks they screwed tend to be the people who recommend products to all their friends---particularly when it comes to electronic gadgets. If every geek vows to not just boycott Sony, but also to tell all their friends and relatives to do so, that will make a noticeable dent in their sales.
Linux ISOs. No, wait....
But seriously, this is where the difference between per se and per quod comes in. Giving bonuses for illegal movie downloads is infringement per se, but giving bonuses for popular downloads that turn out to be illegal downloads is infringement per quod. It isn't illegal on the face, but it might be illegal in light of extrinsic information---specifically the fact that the vast majority of popular downloads are illegal. The MPAA should have a hard time proving this, or at least one would hope so. That said, it's not remotely airtight.
I'd expect there to be at least some popular downloads that are non-infringing. That said, most of those are likely to be flash-in-the-pan popular---a bright flash, then squat. For example, if someone posts a game mod through that service, it could be non-infringing (depending on whether the "derivative works" issue bites the author, and on whether the original game publisher cares enough to press the issue), but that traffic would rapidly die down after the few dozen hardcore gamers on a particular site have all downloaded it.
To that end, long-term popular downloads should be treated as suspect, and I have a hard time believing that any sysadmin would be so naive that he or she wouldn't realize this. That's why the MPAA might actually have a case.
Agreed. I would say I was going to boycott Sony over this, but the truth is that I started boycotting Sony almost a decade ago after they told me it would cost several hundred dollars for a replacement part for a camcorder that was worth half that. The part was a two inch by three inch piece of plastic case with the power switch and start button on it, and nothing else. It should have cost about a dollar, if that.
It was at that point that I realized that Sony not only built crap products (I was already steering clear of their products to some degree because of the number of pieces of Sony hardware that suddenly stopped working for no good reason), but also weren't willing to stand behind out-of-warranty products with reasonable service. In short, Sony was cutting corners left and right *and* screwing the customer when those corners inevitably led to their hardware falling apart, cranking up repair part costs to ridiculous levels to force people to buy more poorly built crap.
I've been boycotting them ever since.
Anti-vaxxers? That sounds like a UNIX greybeard convention.
You are not required to have any physical presence in Delaware to incorporate there, so I doubt most corporations would qualify as having significant nexus in the state.
Please tell me what aspect of that statement was vague. Pretty much every single word I used in that statement has a very specific and precise legal meaning that is fairly well defined through relevant case law.
About the only thing in my statement that you might be able to argue was vague was the mention of suing in the location where the injury occurred, and even that is usually not vague for most types of injury. Patents are a notable exception solely because our patent law is so broken that merely using a patented product is a violation (meaning that the injury occurs continuously and everywhere). And to that end, that's justification for eliminating that provision if the location of the injury is nebulous. On the other hand, that's also justification for fixing patent law so that patents are only violated by someone manufacturing or otherwise creating an instantiation of a patented technology, not using or selling it.
The location of injury would still be nebulous for copyright law (for the same reason), but then again, there doesn't seem to be nearly as much venue shopping in that area, so it's probably not too important to fix that edge case right now.
I think you have to ask yourself whether the principle purpose of prison is punishment, rehabilitation, or keeping the people away from the public as a whole so that they cannot harm others.
I think you'll find that in the grand scheme of things, letting inmates have cell phones does far more good than harm on the whole, and the few situations where the reverse is true are easily mitigated.
Counterpoint: Every software tool out there meets that definition, but most people would not call gcc an application.