Cases of criminal copyright are pretty well nailed down in any given country. They are what copyright laws were created to protect against.
This is not a civil case, like most of the cases of copyright infringement in the US. This is a criminal case, with whatever the Mexican equivalent of a district attourney is spearheading the case.
I'm not sure about Mexico, but in the US criminal copyright infringement carries heavy fines and often jailtime. This is definitely no laughing matter for Sony Mexico, but at the same time to think it will do anything but cause a small ripple outside Mexico is foolish. Mexican law will apply here, and they probably would not need to look further than the original copyright law as it was laid down, as this is exactly what it was intended to stop.
How would Sony Mexico going bankrupt help anybody but Mexicans? Sure, it would be a sizeable chunk of cash missing from corporate HQ in Japan, but do you really think it will help anybody else?
Yes, but the US is the only country that matters in America, so we still get to call ourselves "America" and "Americans". Besides, nobody else is doing it, you snooze you lose.
You don't know what the hell you are talking about.
The reason copyright is honored internationally is because of the Berne Convention, the UCC Geneva, the UCC Paris, TRIPS (Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights), and the WIPO Copyright Treaty. These conventions and treaties dictate how copyright is handled internationally.
For example, the Berne convention states that a copyright owner in Kazakhstan who's work is infringed in France recieves all the same protection against copyright infringement that a natural born Frenchman would recieve. Legally, in France for the purposes of that particular copyright case he is treated as though he were a Frenchman.
These agreements were not forced upon the rest of teh world by the US, and in fact not a single one of them originated in the US. The British were signatories of the Berne convention a full 102 years before the US was, the US was falling in line when it finally signed the agreement.
The US and Mexico are both signatories to all five conventions, Canada only four. But it doesn't mean shit because this is Sony Mexico vs a Mexican, there is nothing international about it. Why the hell would anybody in the US care? The executives at Sony who will be giving a shit are all in Japan. Or did you forget that it is a Japanese company?
Every cell phone sold in the US since 2000 has GPS built in that cannot truly be disabled. You can "disable" it, but what you're actually doing is requesting that the cell service not read your GPS data, the GPS chip in the phone still broadcasts.
Even if you turn it off, the cell company can, at any time, pull the GPS data off your phone. Generally the only time this will happen is if the Police request it.
I know this, because I work on the floor below a group of people employed by the local telecom company.
Oh and apparently, Dillo is already at 2.1.1, but I don't know how the features compare to everything else. Should be quick if it's all C and C++ though.
Try Chrome, honestly. I don't care about the lack of addons, I've discovered I don't need them. Everything is lightning fast, you get the most actual browser window space of any browser, it's sleak and it works. I resisted for a while before trying it, and never looked back once I did.
Address bar searching (this is doable in IE, but slow as hell as it searches MSN to figure out the google search you want to run, what the hell?) is as quick as that stupid little search box in FF and IE, tabs on the title bar are brilliant, and it's just plain sleak and quick.
Apparently the linux version can't print yet, so that might be a deal breaker, but it's the best browser I've ever used, bar none.
Sure, I have the right to do lots of things. I can stand up in a PTA meeting and say: "I think we ought to reconsider if sexual relationships between students and teachers are really such a bad thing." I can walk up to a group of Hispanics and say: "I really think this country would be better off if you moved to Mexico." According to the Constitution if have the right to do it, but having that right, and dealing with the consequences of exercising that right, are two entirely different things.
And what are the consequences of doing those? Do you expect to go to jail, or be harassed by the cops? I wouldn't. In the first, I'd expect an "Uhh... no." from the other parents, and in the second I'd expect a "Buzz off asshole." If anybody physically threatens me for doing either of those two things, they deserve to be harassed by the cops, possibly thrown in jail. If they simply disagree, particularly if they say why, what we have is public discourse.
Walking down a street carrying what looks like an assault weapon to the average guy on the street is just begging for trouble. Notice that the cop didn't say "Don't carry the replica." He said: "Be discreet. Don't cause people to panic." There is a big difference between the two.
I completely agree with you, but that was AFTER they frickin stormed Bungee, which was a complete over-reaction. Basically they did a shitty job, and had to go "Oh shit, damnit, well, be more careful!" and walk out with egg on their faces after going WAY overboard.
There shouldn't be any kind of police response aside from respectfully requesting you be more discrete so as to not frighten your neighbors, since the guy did nothing wrong. You don't generally get your place of employment raided for doing something that is legal, if a little odd and disconcerting.
Frankly, I wish everybody carried a handgun, so people would stop overreacting about them. It would also completely change the dynamic of a crazed gun-toting maniac threatening a crowd of people when the whole crowd responds by pulling out their own pistols. "Oh shit" would be the most common response, I imagine.
Well it's no wonder, that tripod clearly looks like the base for an automated gun turret, if they didn't stop you you'd have mowed down everyone in the area! Thank god someone had the guts to stand up to crazed automated assault weapons system builders!!
Actually it's not that hard, basic safety rules and common sense make it perfectly fine to carry a rifle in a crowded city, if people weren't such dumbasses about seeing a gun anyway.
Unloaded, safety on, barrel pointed straight up or straight down (basically never pointed at anybody, unloaded or not), and hand nowhere near the trigger. Pointing down would probably be best in a city. They are the same rules you use when hunting (though hunting, it's loaded but nothing in the chamber).
Of course, you could always carry it in a case, which would be the most considerate thing to do.
How about you call it an airplane if you don't know the model?
Hell, small airplane works if it is small, big airplane works if it is big. It's not hard.
In this case "Someone is wandering around with a really big gun" would have been perfectly descriptive and far more accurate than somehow coming up with "It's an AK-47 or my name isn't Steve!" (his name is Andrew).
A report of an 'AK-47' doesn't tell them shit, because the gun is nothing like an AK-47. It's 5 times the size of an AK-47 or any other assault rifle, for one thing. "Big gun" would have been much more descriptive and helpful, and just because it is a "Big gun" does not mean it's an assault rifle. There are really big long-range bear hunting rifles that look frickin scary as hell, but they are single shot bolt-action rifles.
Yes, a pair of cops should have been sent out to make sure everything is ok, and tell the guy he should probably not be walking around with a weapon like that. If he was brandishing it at people send a few cops and treat him as hostile. But storming the Bungee office? Did they even call first? What the hell?
The guy was threatening the school, and drunk, the police response was appropriate.
This guy was walking down the street with a big frickin gun, some police response would have been appropriate, just to be sure he isn't going to be threatening people with it, but swarming Bungee was overkill.
I'm not entirely sure of Washington, but in a lot of states it is illegal to carry a gun while intoxicated. In your situation with the school, had the guy not been drunk and not actually threatening anybody (everything goes out the window once you threaten someone with a gun, or baseball bat, or machette) the appropriate response would have been the same as the appropriate response would be in this case, which would be to send a squad car out and talk to the guy. Since he was drunk, and probably brandishing his weapon from time to time (you didn't say, but I imagine so), locking down the school and calling in the SWAT team was obviously appropriate.
Frankly, I expect the police to use their brains from time to time. You don't have the right to not feel threatened, you have the right to not BE threatened by another citizen. There is a difference, and if you're constantly scared of everthing that looks remotely dangerous, you'll never feel safe no matter what the police do.
The problem with your view is the fact that it is perfectly legal to carry an un-boxed assault rifle in Washington.
I would agree with you if he were brandishing it at people, that crosses the line, but just carrying it? Since when can you expect to be harrassed by the cops for doing something that is legal? I don't know what kind of world you want to live in, but extrapolate that out to other situations and you've got yourself a big-brother style police state.
What should have happened is this: Irrational scared citizen: "There's a guy with an AK-47 out here, help!" 911 Operator: "Is the person pointing it at anybody?" Irrational - "Well no, but he's going to shoot someone I know it!" 911 - "I'm sending a squad car out, stay on the line and tell me if he starts threatening people."
Now, if Bungee employee is dumbass enough to start pointing it at people, pretending it is real, he desearves what he gets. Same with someone brandishing a real gun. But if he's just carrying it, then the cop shows up, investigates, and tells the guy it would be a good idea to keep the gun in a case so he didn't frighten his neighbors.
Swarming Bungee is definitely overkill. If what someone is doing is suspicious but not illegal, you send someone out to make sure it doesn't become illegal, or they don't intend to do something illegal. Hell a few phone calls to nearby business would probably have hit Bungee and they'd have said "Oh shit, that's our employee, it's not a real gun, it's replica of a video game gun."
If you think that anytime someone sees a gun anywhere 911 should be called, you're an idiot. You're the dumbass who has been watching far, far too many mind-numbing action movies, and associates the mere presence of a gun with murder. You're an idiot, plain and simple.
And it's frickin fun to shoot targets, sadly the AK-47 is not very accurrate. The AR-15 is though (civilian version of the m-4 military assault rifle), that gun is sweet, accurate and holds a lot of ammo.
AK-47s as sold in the US are semi-automatic, not fully-automatic, and perfectly legal. Carrying the weapon around should yield no greater reaction from the police than someone carrying around a 1911 semi-auto pistol. The only reason it did is because some nut job was a'feared dat somebody gon git kilt cuz dat's a big-lookin gun!
Seriously, a complaint like that should have gotten a squad car sent out to see what's what, and if there is someone threatening people with a gun, call in backup and swarm the place. But swarming the place over a report of something that is legal, if suspicious, is ridiculous.
It could have been handled better, but of course, hindsight is always 20/20.
Maybe that's because with Windows, hardware manufacturers provide the drivers, but with Linux the kernel writers do?
Do you know the nightmare it is to update a non-kernel driver in Linux after a kernel update? It's definitely "linux is teh suxorz."
Not hypocrisy at all, just blaming who is responsible. Torvalds chose to keep an unstable ABI and provide and maintain all the drivers in the kernel, so when one of his kernel updates breaks the drivers it is absolutely his and the kernel devs fault.
OEM licenses cost the vendor in the neighborhood of $50, which is obviously significantly less than retail. To do this, Microsoft cripples it in a couple of ways.
First, the license is ONLY good for 32bit or 64bit, depending on the type of machine. This won't be an issue in a little while as pretty much everything new these days is 64bit hardware, and the 32bit software actually runs on the 64bit hardware.
The second way they cripple it, is an OEM license is non-transferrable. Period. It is only good for the OEM machine it came with. It is against the terms of the license agreement to remove your copy of Windows from an OEM machine and install it on another machine. This is perfectly acceptable for a retail box of Windows.
Granted you can get around it, and it isn't even that hard, but you're technically breaking the law. Most hardware vendors get around this by either not including an OS CD (giving a restore cd and restore partition instead) or by customizing the OS CD such that it only runs on their hardware.
... I wanted to fling my laptop across the room after trying for 2 days to get WPA to work on my wireless. hell I couldn't even get the damned thing to stay connected or see the WAP half the time.
No shit man, wireless has always been hell. The GUI for wireless is horrible in Ubuntu, though they've at least gotten to the point where Atheros works seamlessly and as long as nothing is off-kilter you can use up to WPA2 just fine. If something is amiss though, you're in for a rough time.
The only reliable way to deal with wireless is with the CLI, and most of the help on the web isn't an explanation of what is wrong so you can troubleshoot it, it's "These commands fix it". Well, sometimes they don't, and then it's more digging. A lot of options that are simply checkboxes in XP or damn near automatic in Vista are obscure command line arguments in Linux. It's annoying, to say the least. Especially when your only internet access is wireless. Damn skippy.
... and things that worked with Ubuntu 8 may not work with Ubuntu 9, etc.
If you've got Linux customers, don't let them let their updates lapse, I went from I think 8.04 to 9.04 (I think, I skipped a bunch of small updates) and all kinds of stuff stopped working, I was pissed. Most of the stuff in the repository was fine, but stuff outside it was broken all to hell. That had never happened when I kept up on the incrimental updates.
It sounds like he's using a lot of custom drivers. He's also probably exaggerating, but the point is it's a pain in the ass and it happens on a regular basis.
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Cases of criminal copyright are pretty well nailed down in any given country. They are what copyright laws were created to protect against.
This is not a civil case, like most of the cases of copyright infringement in the US. This is a criminal case, with whatever the Mexican equivalent of a district attourney is spearheading the case.
I'm not sure about Mexico, but in the US criminal copyright infringement carries heavy fines and often jailtime. This is definitely no laughing matter for Sony Mexico, but at the same time to think it will do anything but cause a small ripple outside Mexico is foolish. Mexican law will apply here, and they probably would not need to look further than the original copyright law as it was laid down, as this is exactly what it was intended to stop.
If any Cd's were sold in the US, they would be guilty of criminal copyright infringement here in the US.
There, fixed that for you.
How would Sony Mexico going bankrupt help anybody but Mexicans? Sure, it would be a sizeable chunk of cash missing from corporate HQ in Japan, but do you really think it will help anybody else?
Yes, but the US is the only country that matters in America, so we still get to call ourselves "America" and "Americans". Besides, nobody else is doing it, you snooze you lose.
*WINK*
You don't know what the hell you are talking about.
The reason copyright is honored internationally is because of the Berne Convention, the UCC Geneva, the UCC Paris, TRIPS (Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights), and the WIPO Copyright Treaty. These conventions and treaties dictate how copyright is handled internationally.
For example, the Berne convention states that a copyright owner in Kazakhstan who's work is infringed in France recieves all the same protection against copyright infringement that a natural born Frenchman would recieve. Legally, in France for the purposes of that particular copyright case he is treated as though he were a Frenchman.
These agreements were not forced upon the rest of teh world by the US, and in fact not a single one of them originated in the US. The British were signatories of the Berne convention a full 102 years before the US was, the US was falling in line when it finally signed the agreement.
The US and Mexico are both signatories to all five conventions, Canada only four. But it doesn't mean shit because this is Sony Mexico vs a Mexican, there is nothing international about it. Why the hell would anybody in the US care? The executives at Sony who will be giving a shit are all in Japan. Or did you forget that it is a Japanese company?
Well hey, at least they aren't the Film Actor's Guild.
Oh and it's "moot" not "mute". Mute means it is not capable of making a sound. Well, of course privacy is mute.
Every cell phone sold in the US since 2000 has GPS built in that cannot truly be disabled. You can "disable" it, but what you're actually doing is requesting that the cell service not read your GPS data, the GPS chip in the phone still broadcasts.
Even if you turn it off, the cell company can, at any time, pull the GPS data off your phone. Generally the only time this will happen is if the Police request it.
I know this, because I work on the floor below a group of people employed by the local telecom company.
Oh and apparently, Dillo is already at 2.1.1, but I don't know how the features compare to everything else. Should be quick if it's all C and C++ though.
Try Chrome, honestly. I don't care about the lack of addons, I've discovered I don't need them. Everything is lightning fast, you get the most actual browser window space of any browser, it's sleak and it works. I resisted for a while before trying it, and never looked back once I did.
Address bar searching (this is doable in IE, but slow as hell as it searches MSN to figure out the google search you want to run, what the hell?) is as quick as that stupid little search box in FF and IE, tabs on the title bar are brilliant, and it's just plain sleak and quick.
Apparently the linux version can't print yet, so that might be a deal breaker, but it's the best browser I've ever used, bar none.
Sure, I have the right to do lots of things. I can stand up in a PTA meeting and say: "I think we ought to reconsider if sexual relationships between students and teachers are really such a bad thing." I can walk up to a group of Hispanics and say: "I really think this country would be better off if you moved to Mexico." According to the Constitution if have the right to do it, but having that right, and dealing with the consequences of exercising that right, are two entirely different things.
And what are the consequences of doing those? Do you expect to go to jail, or be harassed by the cops? I wouldn't. In the first, I'd expect an "Uhh... no." from the other parents, and in the second I'd expect a "Buzz off asshole." If anybody physically threatens me for doing either of those two things, they deserve to be harassed by the cops, possibly thrown in jail. If they simply disagree, particularly if they say why, what we have is public discourse.
Walking down a street carrying what looks like an assault weapon to the average guy on the street is just begging for trouble. Notice that the cop didn't say "Don't carry the replica." He said: "Be discreet. Don't cause people to panic." There is a big difference between the two.
I completely agree with you, but that was AFTER they frickin stormed Bungee, which was a complete over-reaction. Basically they did a shitty job, and had to go "Oh shit, damnit, well, be more careful!" and walk out with egg on their faces after going WAY overboard.
There shouldn't be any kind of police response aside from respectfully requesting you be more discrete so as to not frighten your neighbors, since the guy did nothing wrong. You don't generally get your place of employment raided for doing something that is legal, if a little odd and disconcerting.
Frankly, I wish everybody carried a handgun, so people would stop overreacting about them. It would also completely change the dynamic of a crazed gun-toting maniac threatening a crowd of people when the whole crowd responds by pulling out their own pistols. "Oh shit" would be the most common response, I imagine.
Well it's no wonder, that tripod clearly looks like the base for an automated gun turret, if they didn't stop you you'd have mowed down everyone in the area! Thank god someone had the guts to stand up to crazed automated assault weapons system builders!!
Actually it's not that hard, basic safety rules and common sense make it perfectly fine to carry a rifle in a crowded city, if people weren't such dumbasses about seeing a gun anyway.
Unloaded, safety on, barrel pointed straight up or straight down (basically never pointed at anybody, unloaded or not), and hand nowhere near the trigger. Pointing down would probably be best in a city. They are the same rules you use when hunting (though hunting, it's loaded but nothing in the chamber).
Of course, you could always carry it in a case, which would be the most considerate thing to do.
How about you call it an airplane if you don't know the model?
Hell, small airplane works if it is small, big airplane works if it is big. It's not hard.
In this case "Someone is wandering around with a really big gun" would have been perfectly descriptive and far more accurate than somehow coming up with "It's an AK-47 or my name isn't Steve!" (his name is Andrew).
A report of an 'AK-47' doesn't tell them shit, because the gun is nothing like an AK-47. It's 5 times the size of an AK-47 or any other assault rifle, for one thing. "Big gun" would have been much more descriptive and helpful, and just because it is a "Big gun" does not mean it's an assault rifle. There are really big long-range bear hunting rifles that look frickin scary as hell, but they are single shot bolt-action rifles.
Yes, a pair of cops should have been sent out to make sure everything is ok, and tell the guy he should probably not be walking around with a weapon like that. If he was brandishing it at people send a few cops and treat him as hostile. But storming the Bungee office? Did they even call first? What the hell?
That is an entirely different situation.
The guy was threatening the school, and drunk, the police response was appropriate.
This guy was walking down the street with a big frickin gun, some police response would have been appropriate, just to be sure he isn't going to be threatening people with it, but swarming Bungee was overkill.
I'm not entirely sure of Washington, but in a lot of states it is illegal to carry a gun while intoxicated. In your situation with the school, had the guy not been drunk and not actually threatening anybody (everything goes out the window once you threaten someone with a gun, or baseball bat, or machette) the appropriate response would have been the same as the appropriate response would be in this case, which would be to send a squad car out and talk to the guy. Since he was drunk, and probably brandishing his weapon from time to time (you didn't say, but I imagine so), locking down the school and calling in the SWAT team was obviously appropriate.
Frankly, I expect the police to use their brains from time to time. You don't have the right to not feel threatened, you have the right to not BE threatened by another citizen. There is a difference, and if you're constantly scared of everthing that looks remotely dangerous, you'll never feel safe no matter what the police do.
The problem with your view is the fact that it is perfectly legal to carry an un-boxed assault rifle in Washington.
I would agree with you if he were brandishing it at people, that crosses the line, but just carrying it? Since when can you expect to be harrassed by the cops for doing something that is legal? I don't know what kind of world you want to live in, but extrapolate that out to other situations and you've got yourself a big-brother style police state.
What should have happened is this:
Irrational scared citizen: "There's a guy with an AK-47 out here, help!"
911 Operator: "Is the person pointing it at anybody?"
Irrational - "Well no, but he's going to shoot someone I know it!"
911 - "I'm sending a squad car out, stay on the line and tell me if he starts threatening people."
Now, if Bungee employee is dumbass enough to start pointing it at people, pretending it is real, he desearves what he gets. Same with someone brandishing a real gun. But if he's just carrying it, then the cop shows up, investigates, and tells the guy it would be a good idea to keep the gun in a case so he didn't frighten his neighbors.
Swarming Bungee is definitely overkill. If what someone is doing is suspicious but not illegal, you send someone out to make sure it doesn't become illegal, or they don't intend to do something illegal. Hell a few phone calls to nearby business would probably have hit Bungee and they'd have said "Oh shit, that's our employee, it's not a real gun, it's replica of a video game gun."
If you think that anytime someone sees a gun anywhere 911 should be called, you're an idiot. You're the dumbass who has been watching far, far too many mind-numbing action movies, and associates the mere presence of a gun with murder. You're an idiot, plain and simple.
And it looks nothing at all like the gun in question.
And it's frickin fun to shoot targets, sadly the AK-47 is not very accurrate. The AR-15 is though (civilian version of the m-4 military assault rifle), that gun is sweet, accurate and holds a lot of ammo.
AK-47s as sold in the US are semi-automatic, not fully-automatic, and perfectly legal. Carrying the weapon around should yield no greater reaction from the police than someone carrying around a 1911 semi-auto pistol. The only reason it did is because some nut job was a'feared dat somebody gon git kilt cuz dat's a big-lookin gun!
Seriously, a complaint like that should have gotten a squad car sent out to see what's what, and if there is someone threatening people with a gun, call in backup and swarm the place. But swarming the place over a report of something that is legal, if suspicious, is ridiculous.
It could have been handled better, but of course, hindsight is always 20/20.
And that's easier than checking the little "parental controls" checkbox exactly how?
Maybe that's because with Windows, hardware manufacturers provide the drivers, but with Linux the kernel writers do?
Do you know the nightmare it is to update a non-kernel driver in Linux after a kernel update? It's definitely "linux is teh suxorz."
Not hypocrisy at all, just blaming who is responsible. Torvalds chose to keep an unstable ABI and provide and maintain all the drivers in the kernel, so when one of his kernel updates breaks the drivers it is absolutely his and the kernel devs fault.
It's actually a pricing thing.
OEM licenses cost the vendor in the neighborhood of $50, which is obviously significantly less than retail. To do this, Microsoft cripples it in a couple of ways.
First, the license is ONLY good for 32bit or 64bit, depending on the type of machine. This won't be an issue in a little while as pretty much everything new these days is 64bit hardware, and the 32bit software actually runs on the 64bit hardware.
The second way they cripple it, is an OEM license is non-transferrable. Period. It is only good for the OEM machine it came with. It is against the terms of the license agreement to remove your copy of Windows from an OEM machine and install it on another machine. This is perfectly acceptable for a retail box of Windows.
Granted you can get around it, and it isn't even that hard, but you're technically breaking the law. Most hardware vendors get around this by either not including an OS CD (giving a restore cd and restore partition instead) or by customizing the OS CD such that it only runs on their hardware.
By default you can't install unsigned drivers...
You do realize that's just a popup, and you need to give admin rights to conitinue, right? And that's pretty much as it should be.
... I wanted to fling my laptop across the room after trying for 2 days to get WPA to work on my wireless. hell I couldn't even get the damned thing to stay connected or see the WAP half the time.
No shit man, wireless has always been hell. The GUI for wireless is horrible in Ubuntu, though they've at least gotten to the point where Atheros works seamlessly and as long as nothing is off-kilter you can use up to WPA2 just fine. If something is amiss though, you're in for a rough time.
The only reliable way to deal with wireless is with the CLI, and most of the help on the web isn't an explanation of what is wrong so you can troubleshoot it, it's "These commands fix it". Well, sometimes they don't, and then it's more digging. A lot of options that are simply checkboxes in XP or damn near automatic in Vista are obscure command line arguments in Linux. It's annoying, to say the least. Especially when your only internet access is wireless. Damn skippy.
... and things that worked with Ubuntu 8 may not work with Ubuntu 9, etc.
If you've got Linux customers, don't let them let their updates lapse, I went from I think 8.04 to 9.04 (I think, I skipped a bunch of small updates) and all kinds of stuff stopped working, I was pissed. Most of the stuff in the repository was fine, but stuff outside it was broken all to hell. That had never happened when I kept up on the incrimental updates.
It sounds like he's using a lot of custom drivers. He's also probably exaggerating, but the point is it's a pain in the ass and it happens on a regular basis.