If that were the case, why not let him make it? The defense sucks, the guy gets raped by the RIAA anyway, and the judge looks less like he's a knob trying to skew the trial in favor of his corporate overlords.
Because it's a waste of time and money? Not everything is worthy of going through a big expensive show trial. As a taxpayer dismayed by the recent layoffs of half of the local court system employees, I'd rather they put their resources towards cases with something worth arguing.
At least in this specific point the judge isn't looking like a knob -- she's rejecting arguments that have no basis in law. Can't speak for the rest of this zany trial though.
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
I'm not arguing one way or another, because this particular case is irrelevant to me. But the right to "download the latest Brittany Spears record", if it exists, is certainly protected by the Ninth Amendment. All US law is subject to the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, even Copyright law.
Sure, but it's a different section of the Constitution that gives Congress the right to create copyright laws, and the language of the Constitution is vague enough to allow for quite a bit of flexibility.
Really, she was correct. The only thing that the Supreme Court can decide is the law as written in the US Constitution. Inalienable rights? Great topic for philosophising with a friend, but what does that actually MEAN? The only rights and laws that the Supreme Court can rule on are those stated in the Constitution and passed by Congress. "Yeah, we know the Constitution says differently, but.. you know, inalienable rights." That wouldn't fly. The first amendment, for example, guarantees freedom of speech. The Supreme Court usually rules in the favour of free speech because it's right there in the Constitution. Of course the philosophy behind the Constitution is that freedom of speech is considered an inalienable right, and for that reason it's laid out in the Bill of Rights. But when a judge rules on a freedom of speech case, the ruling is made due to the presence of the first amendment, not due to the notion of higher rights not inscribed in law. The courts can only rule on the law. When a judge interprets a law, they are harmonizing that law with laws higher up -- as high as the Constitution if necessary, and if there is a conflict, then a portion or a whole of the law gets thrown out. At least, that's what I've always been taught "interpreting the law" means from a judicial perspective -- not that the only thing the Supreme Court does is just agree with whatever Congress passes. No judge agrees with that.
So, following your argument, Giovanni Falcone, Paolo Borsellino and even Eliot Ness were only conspiracy theorists?
No, there have been conspiracies before. But this is Slashdot, where everything is a conspiracy. Just because conspiracies have occurred before doesn't mean the current complaint of conspiracy is valid.
You might be thinking of Jefferson. He thought that it should be a feature of government that a new constitution be written, not every 200 years, but every nineteen or twenty, so that each new generation could best tailor the government to its needs
It's very easy to claim, with the various amendments, numerous conflicting laws, and general disregard for the Constitution by all three branches of government, that we've been doing exactly that.
So happens in Indiana we have a constitutional clause guaranteeing the right to a genuine jury trial, to wit: "the jury shall have the right to determine the law and the facts." A half-jury trial, where law is decided by the judge, and only facts are left to the jury, is an affront to a free man, and no Hoosier would stand for it.
But the facts aren't in question here. The defendant is guilty, as he'll tell you if you could ask him.
As legal defences go, this was a particularly shabby one. Trying to extend "fair use" to wholesale sharing of songs with any and all strangers on the Internet is a pretty far cry from its definition in law.
What is worse than the copyright argument is his second one: "the idea of imposing law on the global ocean of free bits that has flooded into cyberspace is a gross and harmful over-extension of the power of the state and authority of the law." The Internet isn't the wild wild west. Of course laws should apply there. If the defendant shares songs, of course he's subject to the laws that cover that. Maybe I should read the actual pre-trial brief; I can only hope that the above was taken out of context.
What a terrible trial. My real fear is that some sort of precedent will be set to be used against cases that aren't completely slam-dunk against the defendant as this one is.
The eagerly awaited Rage of The Ogres: Crush Christians!! Crush Christians!!! is set to hit stores August 15. Preorders have already topped 100 million.
Isn't suppression of Muslims all the rage now in China?
If the best years of your life were high school, I don't think you've got any real reason to be telling others how to live.
AMEN to that. High school for me, like so many others, was a hellish experience. If you're not in with the top groups in the school, life can be fairly rough, especially if you're 'different.' More than in any other sphere of life I've been in since then, high school was an atmosphere of rigid conformity. I wasn't happy there, many people weren't though I didn't see it as much at the time, and one of my most miserable experiences was touring a college campus while I was in high school and the particularly-unhelpful guidance counselor there said "enjoy this time while you can, as you'll look back at it as the best time of your life." I pretty much broke down an hour later since all I could think of was "really? It doesn't get any better than this? There's no hope of anything better?" Then I got to college (that college, actually) and... what do you know. It was a substantially better place. So much more open; you can socialize with who you want to instead the forced integration in high school.. the differences continued.
If I lived in Los Angeles, I certainly wouldn't want to walk out on the streets. I don't like walking out on the streets in the city where I live either. >_
What would the Alliance have as a new race? Pandaren?
No, I don't think we're ever going to see Pandaren as a playable race. China is a major market for Blizzard, and they're not going to release something major that will greatly offend them. Riding into the Pandaren capital city, slaughtering pandas wholesale.. I don't think it would be illegal, but it would spark a lot of outrage in China.
There was little amusement over there when Blizzard announced Pandaren as a race for The Burning Crusade as an April Fool's Joke.
I'm think a redesigned Worgen is a possibility, Naga less so (it would break the armor system... they have no legs and feet!). I would love dragonkin, but there's little chance of that either.;) Maybe something that's completely new, not in the existing lore.
Also, all this raiding stuff is made kinda pointless because the next patch regular heroics (that me and some friends have been 4 manning for the past 3 months) will start dropping emblems of conquest. That fact alone makes grinding Naxx and early Uldar kinda pointless.
Well, assuming you can get everything you want from Badges of Conquest. There's not that much you can get from there, and quite a few of the items are sub-par.
However -- doing anything in the game could be considered "pointless" because changes down the line will make what you get now obsolete. EVERYTHING is transitory, everything is set to be replaced, all the time. There is no time when you sit down and say.. "well, ok, I'm set."
It is nice to know what is coming in the next patch but sometimes I wish it was more like Final Fantasy 11 and not knowing 90% of what is in the patch until everything has been.dat mined the day of the patch.
Wow, I disagree with you on the linear/etc nature of Naxx vs Ulduar. There are a few skippable bosses in Ulduar (Razorscale, Ignis, Iron Council) that make getting through to the end areas faster. Not enough optional bosses, but no Blizzard instance has more optional than non-optional bosses, except for Vashj and Kael'Thas at the end of the content cycle. You want to kill Kel'Thuzad? Well then.. you have to fight evvveeerrry boss in the instance. Even though we wanted to kill Kel'Thuzad for our guildies, we just didn't want to slog through all of the earlier parts of Naxx (the four wings) full of bosses with loot that no one wanted. Ulduar is a bit different... there is no realistically attainable "end boss" of the instance (Algalon doesn't count) who has better gear than the rest -- every boss drops items of the same ilvl, and "best in slot" gear seems evenly distributed among regular bosses and hard modes throughout the instance.
Possibly-- or they want to move on to the next MMO. Ever wondered why the patches and class balance and new content have been coming slower and slower?
Errr.. they have?
The patches/class balance and such seems to be proceeding along a similar pace to that established at the start of The Burning Crusade. When the original came came out, patches (but not content) were fast and furious. They did a lot of major class rebalances (each class had its own "patch") where the classes were redesigned, but every since that initial redesign, major changes have usually only come at the expansion release. Each major patch here contains a number of class tweaks, but for the most part there aren't any major changes because the devs are comfortable with how the classes are functioning. When they aren't, they tweak various classes to bring them in line.
As for content patches, here is the major schedule for the game: Original: Molten Core, Tier 1: Release (Nov 2004) Blackwing Lair: Tier 2: Patch 1.6 (July 2005 - 8 months since the previous dungeon) Ahn'Qiraq: Tier 2.5: Patch 1.9 (Jan 2006 - 6 months since the previous dungeon) Naxxramas: Tier 3: Patch 1.11 (Jun 2006 - 5 months since the previous dungeon)
The Burning Crusade: Karazhan/Gruul's Lair/Serpentshrine/The Eye/Mt. Hyjal: Tier 4 and Tier 5 and Tier 6: Patch 2.0.3 TBC release (Jan 2007 - 7 months since the previous dungeon) *** See below note. The Black Temple: Tier 6: Patch 2.1 (May 2007 - 4 months since the previous dungeon) Zul'Aman: Patch 2.3 (Nov 2007 - 6 months since the previous dungeon) Sunwell: Tier 6: Patch 2.4 (Mar 2008 - 4 months since the previous dungeon)
Wrath of the Lich King: Naxxramas: Tier 7/7.5: Patch 3.0.3 WotLK release (Nov 2008 - 6 months since the previous dungeon) Ulduar: Tier 8/8.5: Patch 3.1 (Apr 2009 - 5 months since the previous dungeon) Coliseum: Tier 9? Probably not?: Patch 3.2 (Unknown -- not for a few months yet. Currently 3 months since the previous dungeon).
So far all the major content releases have followed the same roughly 6-month release cycle, sometimes 4 months, 8 months in the case of the first release since the original game launch. It's worth noting the difference between the releases of The Burning Crusade and Wrath -- in TBC, dungeons for Tier 4, 5, and 6 were -all- in the TBC release, but were protected through attunements -- requirements that you complete the earlier dungeons before you're even allowed in the later ones. Because of that and dungeon difficulties, the world-first-kills for the first boss in the Battle of Mount Hyjal didn't occur until 5 months after the content was released, since it took so long for even the highest-end guilds to through the previous content and get attuned. Most guilds took much much longer. Wrath of the Lich King has definitely taken a different approach -- less content released up front, easier content in the form of Naxx, with additional content released on the same cycle.
So when consumers buy/rent a new BluRay/DVD, they may have to hook their player up to the Internet to download the software to play it? I can't wait to explain this to my grandmother, who has no internet connection. If she asks, I will tell her to skip BluRay.
I thought the software updates were also available on the Blu-Ray disc.
They learned a lot from the rootkit debacle. For one, that it's pointless to try to install lockdown (rootkit) software on totally permissive hardware. That's why Blu-Ray requires hardware that is similarly locked down.
Why don't they digitize 10k x 5x version onto some super high def media and make players which could play them downscaled until tech catches up?
And because no one would buy it because the media to allow such a thing would be extremely expensive? What are you going to do, distribute 1.5TB hard drives with each movie?
The studios'll keep breaking the virtual machine emulator, and the emulator will keep improving... until eventually the emulator is good enough that it simply doesn't break.
>
That's a pretty big assumption that so far has not happened in reality. One of the beauties of BD+ is that it can completely eliminate an untrusted arch and even change the encryption stream through mandatory updates. You can choose not to install those updates, but then new titles won't play.
The content industry has shown that they're not afraid to revoke all keys for a particularly weak player.
Then I can actually start buying the Blu-ray movies instead of getting ripped copies of them, as they'll work in my media center box. Though I will say that it is amusing watching the movie studios fighting this hard and spending so much capital, all to prevent me from giving them money.
I think they're pretty satisfied with how things have gone so far on the Blu-Ray front.
Slashdot Mirror
Conversely, though, just because it's slashdot, it doesn't mean that the complain is invalid, either. Stopped clocks and all that.
Also true. I'd say though that the burdon of proof for wacko conspiracy theories is on the theorist.
If that were the case, why not let him make it? The defense sucks, the guy gets raped by the RIAA anyway, and the judge looks less like he's a knob trying to skew the trial in favor of his corporate overlords.
Because it's a waste of time and money? Not everything is worthy of going through a big expensive show trial. As a taxpayer dismayed by the recent layoffs of half of the local court system employees, I'd rather they put their resources towards cases with something worth arguing.
At least in this specific point the judge isn't looking like a knob -- she's rejecting arguments that have no basis in law. Can't speak for the rest of this zany trial though.
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
I'm not arguing one way or another, because this particular case is irrelevant to me. But the right to "download the latest Brittany Spears record", if it exists, is certainly protected by the Ninth Amendment. All US law is subject to the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, even Copyright law.
Sure, but it's a different section of the Constitution that gives Congress the right to create copyright laws, and the language of the Constitution is vague enough to allow for quite a bit of flexibility.
Really, she was correct. The only thing that the Supreme Court can decide is the law as written in the US Constitution. Inalienable rights? Great topic for philosophising with a friend, but what does that actually MEAN? The only rights and laws that the Supreme Court can rule on are those stated in the Constitution and passed by Congress. "Yeah, we know the Constitution says differently, but.. you know, inalienable rights." That wouldn't fly. The first amendment, for example, guarantees freedom of speech. The Supreme Court usually rules in the favour of free speech because it's right there in the Constitution. Of course the philosophy behind the Constitution is that freedom of speech is considered an inalienable right, and for that reason it's laid out in the Bill of Rights. But when a judge rules on a freedom of speech case, the ruling is made due to the presence of the first amendment, not due to the notion of higher rights not inscribed in law. The courts can only rule on the law. When a judge interprets a law, they are harmonizing that law with laws higher up -- as high as the Constitution if necessary, and if there is a conflict, then a portion or a whole of the law gets thrown out. At least, that's what I've always been taught "interpreting the law" means from a judicial perspective -- not that the only thing the Supreme Court does is just agree with whatever Congress passes. No judge agrees with that.
So, following your argument, Giovanni Falcone, Paolo Borsellino and even Eliot Ness were only conspiracy theorists?
No, there have been conspiracies before. But this is Slashdot, where everything is a conspiracy. Just because conspiracies have occurred before doesn't mean the current complaint of conspiracy is valid.
You might be thinking of Jefferson. He thought that it should be a feature of government that a new constitution be written, not every 200 years, but every nineteen or twenty, so that each new generation could best tailor the government to its needs
It's very easy to claim, with the various amendments, numerous conflicting laws, and general disregard for the Constitution by all three branches of government, that we've been doing exactly that.
Maybe just.. not as structured.
So happens in Indiana we have a constitutional clause guaranteeing the right to a genuine jury trial, to wit: "the jury shall have the right to determine the law and the facts." A half-jury trial, where law is decided by the judge, and only facts are left to the jury, is an affront to a free man, and no Hoosier would stand for it.
But the facts aren't in question here. The defendant is guilty, as he'll tell you if you could ask him.
The law is the issue at stake here.
As legal defences go, this was a particularly shabby one. Trying to extend "fair use" to wholesale sharing of songs with any and all strangers on the Internet is a pretty far cry from its definition in law.
What is worse than the copyright argument is his second one: "the idea of imposing law on the global ocean of free bits that has flooded into cyberspace is a gross and harmful over-extension of the power of the state and authority of the law." The Internet isn't the wild wild west. Of course laws should apply there. If the defendant shares songs, of course he's subject to the laws that cover that. Maybe I should read the actual pre-trial brief; I can only hope that the above was taken out of context.
What a terrible trial. My real fear is that some sort of precedent will be set to be used against cases that aren't completely slam-dunk against the defendant as this one is.
The eagerly awaited Rage of The Ogres: Crush Christians!! Crush Christians!!! is set to hit stores August 15. Preorders have already topped 100 million.
Isn't suppression of Muslims all the rage now in China?
Oh stop! Puh-lease!! va-jay-jays are gross!! I'll take a hairy asshole with cute dingleberries any day. delish!
Perez Hilton, is that you?
"enjoy this time while you can, as you'll look back at it as the best time of your life."
Looking back at this, I think he phrased it even more negatively.. more along the lines of "it doesn't get any better than this."
If the best years of your life were high school, I don't think you've got any real reason to be telling others how to live.
AMEN to that. High school for me, like so many others, was a hellish experience. If you're not in with the top groups in the school, life can be fairly rough, especially if you're 'different.' More than in any other sphere of life I've been in since then, high school was an atmosphere of rigid conformity. I wasn't happy there, many people weren't though I didn't see it as much at the time, and one of my most miserable experiences was touring a college campus while I was in high school and the particularly-unhelpful guidance counselor there said "enjoy this time while you can, as you'll look back at it as the best time of your life." I pretty much broke down an hour later since all I could think of was "really? It doesn't get any better than this? There's no hope of anything better?" Then I got to college (that college, actually) and... what do you know. It was a substantially better place. So much more open; you can socialize with who you want to instead the forced integration in high school.. the differences continued.
If I lived in Los Angeles, I certainly wouldn't want to walk out on the streets. I don't like walking out on the streets in the city where I live either. >_
What would the Alliance have as a new race? Pandaren?
No, I don't think we're ever going to see Pandaren as a playable race. China is a major market for Blizzard, and they're not going to release something major that will greatly offend them. Riding into the Pandaren capital city, slaughtering pandas wholesale.. I don't think it would be illegal, but it would spark a lot of outrage in China.
There was little amusement over there when Blizzard announced Pandaren as a race for The Burning Crusade as an April Fool's Joke.
I'm think a redesigned Worgen is a possibility, Naga less so (it would break the armor system... they have no legs and feet!). I would love dragonkin, but there's little chance of that either. ;) Maybe something that's completely new, not in the existing lore.
They did a really good job, but yeah, it's fake.
Blizzard will NEVER release the Pandarans as a playable race. Too bound up in the politics of China, a major player base.
Also, all this raiding stuff is made kinda pointless because the next patch regular heroics (that me and some friends have been 4 manning for the past 3 months) will start dropping emblems of conquest. That fact alone makes grinding Naxx and early Uldar kinda pointless.
Well, assuming you can get everything you want from Badges of Conquest. There's not that much you can get from there, and quite a few of the items are sub-par.
However -- doing anything in the game could be considered "pointless" because changes down the line will make what you get now obsolete. EVERYTHING is transitory, everything is set to be replaced, all the time. There is no time when you sit down and say.. "well, ok, I'm set."
It is nice to know what is coming in the next patch but sometimes I wish it was more like Final Fantasy 11 and not knowing 90% of what is in the patch until everything has been .dat mined the day of the patch.
I suppose we agree there!
Wow, I disagree with you on the linear/etc nature of Naxx vs Ulduar. There are a few skippable bosses in Ulduar (Razorscale, Ignis, Iron Council) that make getting through to the end areas faster. Not enough optional bosses, but no Blizzard instance has more optional than non-optional bosses, except for Vashj and Kael'Thas at the end of the content cycle. You want to kill Kel'Thuzad? Well then.. you have to fight evvveeerrry boss in the instance. Even though we wanted to kill Kel'Thuzad for our guildies, we just didn't want to slog through all of the earlier parts of Naxx (the four wings) full of bosses with loot that no one wanted. Ulduar is a bit different... there is no realistically attainable "end boss" of the instance (Algalon doesn't count) who has better gear than the rest -- every boss drops items of the same ilvl, and "best in slot" gear seems evenly distributed among regular bosses and hard modes throughout the instance.
Possibly-- or they want to move on to the next MMO. Ever wondered why the patches and class balance and new content have been coming slower and slower?
Errr.. they have?
The patches/class balance and such seems to be proceeding along a similar pace to that established at the start of The Burning Crusade. When the original came came out, patches (but not content) were fast and furious. They did a lot of major class rebalances (each class had its own "patch") where the classes were redesigned, but every since that initial redesign, major changes have usually only come at the expansion release. Each major patch here contains a number of class tweaks, but for the most part there aren't any major changes because the devs are comfortable with how the classes are functioning. When they aren't, they tweak various classes to bring them in line.
As for content patches, here is the major schedule for the game:
Original:
Molten Core, Tier 1: Release (Nov 2004)
Blackwing Lair: Tier 2: Patch 1.6 (July 2005 - 8 months since the previous dungeon)
Ahn'Qiraq: Tier 2.5: Patch 1.9 (Jan 2006 - 6 months since the previous dungeon)
Naxxramas: Tier 3: Patch 1.11 (Jun 2006 - 5 months since the previous dungeon)
The Burning Crusade:
Karazhan/Gruul's Lair/Serpentshrine/The Eye/Mt. Hyjal: Tier 4 and Tier 5 and Tier 6: Patch 2.0.3 TBC release (Jan 2007 - 7 months since the previous dungeon) *** See below note.
The Black Temple: Tier 6: Patch 2.1 (May 2007 - 4 months since the previous dungeon)
Zul'Aman: Patch 2.3 (Nov 2007 - 6 months since the previous dungeon)
Sunwell: Tier 6: Patch 2.4 (Mar 2008 - 4 months since the previous dungeon)
Wrath of the Lich King:
Naxxramas: Tier 7/7.5: Patch 3.0.3 WotLK release (Nov 2008 - 6 months since the previous dungeon)
Ulduar: Tier 8/8.5: Patch 3.1 (Apr 2009 - 5 months since the previous dungeon)
Coliseum: Tier 9? Probably not?: Patch 3.2 (Unknown -- not for a few months yet. Currently 3 months since the previous dungeon).
So far all the major content releases have followed the same roughly 6-month release cycle, sometimes 4 months, 8 months in the case of the first release since the original game launch. It's worth noting the difference between the releases of The Burning Crusade and Wrath -- in TBC, dungeons for Tier 4, 5, and 6 were -all- in the TBC release, but were protected through attunements -- requirements that you complete the earlier dungeons before you're even allowed in the later ones. Because of that and dungeon difficulties, the world-first-kills for the first boss in the Battle of Mount Hyjal didn't occur until 5 months after the content was released, since it took so long for even the highest-end guilds to through the previous content and get attuned. Most guilds took much much longer. Wrath of the Lich King has definitely taken a different approach -- less content released up front, easier content in the form of Naxx, with additional content released on the same cycle.
People, like me, are [...]
People like you can't seem to use commas.
Actually, people, like him, can use commas way too easily!
Well thats certainly a good reason to consider it better.
It's both a positive and a negative at the same time.. price reflects something negative -- that people aren't interested in buying it anymore.
Yep. My 24" monitor doesn't have HDCP either (or HDMI), so I theoretically shouldn't be able to watch bluray on it.
I think you should, but it downsamples it to dvd quality.
So when consumers buy/rent a new BluRay/DVD, they may have to hook their player up to the Internet to download the software to play it? I can't wait to explain this to my grandmother, who has no internet connection. If she asks, I will tell her to skip BluRay.
I thought the software updates were also available on the Blu-Ray disc.
They learned a lot from the rootkit debacle. For one, that it's pointless to try to install lockdown (rootkit) software on totally permissive hardware. That's why Blu-Ray requires hardware that is similarly locked down.
Why don't they digitize 10k x 5x version onto some super high def media and make players which could play them downscaled until tech catches up?
And because no one would buy it because the media to allow such a thing would be extremely expensive? What are you going to do, distribute 1.5TB hard drives with each movie?
The studios'll keep breaking the virtual machine emulator, and the emulator will keep improving... until eventually the emulator is good enough that it simply doesn't break.
>
That's a pretty big assumption that so far has not happened in reality. One of the beauties of BD+ is that it can completely eliminate an untrusted arch and even change the encryption stream through mandatory updates. You can choose not to install those updates, but then new titles won't play.
The content industry has shown that they're not afraid to revoke all keys for a particularly weak player.
Then I can actually start buying the Blu-ray movies instead of getting ripped copies of them, as they'll work in my media center box. Though I will say that it is amusing watching the movie studios fighting this hard and spending so much capital, all to prevent me from giving them money.
I think they're pretty satisfied with how things have gone so far on the Blu-Ray front.