To extend the analogy, Sony, after closing the pool, should have given everyone they booted out a discount on their admission for having their swim session cut short.
I think Amazon chose to refund for OtherOS removal, considering it a defect. Sony, however, chose not to reimburse and told Amazon to go fuck itself.
And now they're being sued because they decided to play hardball.
For the case of the rock, yes, actual harm has been done. This is known as fraud. The harm is the premium over actual fair market value the company extracted from you by makign a false claim of rarity.
For John Doe looking into ACME INC.'s patent claims, if he really was doing his homework he'd use the referenced patent numbers to do a search with the USPTO itself, instead of naively assuming the patent numbers were still valid.
Besides, you have to look at the actual patents to make that sort of judgement call.
My theory is that you should be able to proceed against the defendant en absentia.
That way, you still have to satisfy your own burden of proof, and you can still prove your case and win even with a no-show. In this case, the defendant would only lose the opportunity to raise affirmative defenses.
And the attorney representing you still has to earn his pay.
Contempt of court is one of the few times where the writ of habeas corpus doesn't apply. It has been ruled that the defendant "holds the keys to his own cell".
Unfortunately that implies that you have no standing to challenge a live judicial order. If the judge tells you to do something, you either comply or get locked up until you do. The lack of habeas corpus means that you can't whine to a higher judge and sit tight.
I hereby claim your accusation false and furthermore you are hereby notified that your comments constitute libel and if they are not retracted within 7 days I will consider pursuing a legal claim against you for said tort.
Notice the 7 days bit. Failing to respond to a lawsuit is an automatic loss in most cases, but you do have time to actually respond.
The whole thing about automatically losing any lawsuit you don't answer leaves open a big fat hole for you to get DDoS'ed by the legal system. Get enough summonses thrown at you and a few are bound to slip through the cracks.
It doesn't matter, once the patent has expired, it's dead.
Unless of course Congress pulls the same thing with patents that they recently pulled with copyrights, i.e., takeback from stuff that's lapsed into the public domain.
The media is keeping the voters dumbed down, and will be quick to squash any "rallyers" that try to usurp the influence of the corporate overlords that own them.
The ISP would still be justified in charging for the privilege of handling packets with boosted QoS settings, and denying requested QoS handling if the user that sent the packet hasn't paid up.
Honestly, I don't think it would be unfair to pay for priority service.
Things like WoW connections, VoIP, and any other such "real time" protocol that is sensitive to delays can benefit from increased priority. Paying for "packet rushing" is IMHO a valid thing.
The problem comes when it turns into a protection racket, or worse, sabotage.
If you can pay to have your packets boosted, that's ok.
What isn't ok is for the network to sabotage your performance on purpose because you didn't pay up, or worse, because one of your competitors did.
And that includes throttling bittorrent connections.
Slashdot Mirror
Facebook hides behind the almighty TOS.
I prefer Google Gulp myself.
I wouldn't call it "opt-in" when Buzz automatically followed frequent contacts.
This, in fact, is why I blocked everyone (even good friends) and promptly deleted my public profile.
To extend the analogy, Sony, after closing the pool, should have given everyone they booted out a discount on their admission for having their swim session cut short.
I think Amazon chose to refund for OtherOS removal, considering it a defect. Sony, however, chose not to reimburse and told Amazon to go fuck itself.
And now they're being sued because they decided to play hardball.
If a spambot can log into someone's facebook account then either they were careless with the password or facebook's account security sucks.
In which case I'm going to poo poo on Sony for imposing collective punishment on everyone else.
That's because OtherOS was crippleware.
Homebrew in that sense had to run without the aid of the Cell that the hypervisor blocked access to.
Native, Sony approved games still had full access.
They *are* shitting off a cliff.
Why do you think the crap keeps landing on us way down here at the bottom?
Thing is, Sony doesn't like homebrew.
From the POV of the game vendors, homebrew and piracy are the same thing...competition.
Sony's incentive to stop piracy comes from pressure by game vendors.
For the case of the rock, yes, actual harm has been done. This is known as fraud. The harm is the premium over actual fair market value the company extracted from you by makign a false claim of rarity.
For John Doe looking into ACME INC.'s patent claims, if he really was doing his homework he'd use the referenced patent numbers to do a search with the USPTO itself, instead of naively assuming the patent numbers were still valid.
Besides, you have to look at the actual patents to make that sort of judgement call.
All Sony has to do is sign their firmware, and make it so that the hardware won't accept anything other than Sony approved updates.
Do they do that already?
Oh, and another solution: Mark updates with an expiration date such that the unit will refuse to run if its firmware is too stale.
My theory is that you should be able to proceed against the defendant en absentia.
That way, you still have to satisfy your own burden of proof, and you can still prove your case and win even with a no-show. In this case, the defendant would only lose the opportunity to raise affirmative defenses.
And the attorney representing you still has to earn his pay.
Why are jurors idiots though?
I'm not sure, but I think that attorneys striking geniuses off during voir dire has a lot to do with it.
Contempt of court is one of the few times where the writ of habeas corpus doesn't apply. It has been ruled that the defendant "holds the keys to his own cell".
Unfortunately that implies that you have no standing to challenge a live judicial order. If the judge tells you to do something, you either comply or get locked up until you do. The lack of habeas corpus means that you can't whine to a higher judge and sit tight.
I hereby claim your accusation false and furthermore you are hereby notified that your comments constitute libel and if they are not retracted within 7 days I will consider pursuing a legal claim against you for said tort.
Notice the 7 days bit. Failing to respond to a lawsuit is an automatic loss in most cases, but you do have time to actually respond.
They lost that privilege when they implied liability through their failure to respond to the lawsuit.
The whole thing about automatically losing any lawsuit you don't answer leaves open a big fat hole for you to get DDoS'ed by the legal system. Get enough summonses thrown at you and a few are bound to slip through the cracks.
That would count as sabotage for non-payment, which I specifically excluded as valid.
It doesn't matter, once the patent has expired, it's dead.
Unless of course Congress pulls the same thing with patents that they recently pulled with copyrights, i.e., takeback from stuff that's lapsed into the public domain.
Sitting around and bitching about it at least beats being a sheep and taking it without even complaining.
Also, some things are worth fighting for, but not to the level of putting one's life on the line.
Remember, that there's many things you can't enjoy if you're already dead.
The media is keeping the voters dumbed down, and will be quick to squash any "rallyers" that try to usurp the influence of the corporate overlords that own them.
The ISP would still be justified in charging for the privilege of handling packets with boosted QoS settings, and denying requested QoS handling if the user that sent the packet hasn't paid up.
Honestly, I don't think it would be unfair to pay for priority service.
Things like WoW connections, VoIP, and any other such "real time" protocol that is sensitive to delays can benefit from increased priority. Paying for "packet rushing" is IMHO a valid thing.
The problem comes when it turns into a protection racket, or worse, sabotage.
If you can pay to have your packets boosted, that's ok.
What isn't ok is for the network to sabotage your performance on purpose because you didn't pay up, or worse, because one of your competitors did.
And that includes throttling bittorrent connections.
Only as long as convicts aren't forced to sign a waiver stating they won't sue if the device malfunctions and zaps them by accident.
If the bears are too tame to properly fear humans then they are a danger to society.
My guess however is that the bears were just stoned.