The answer to your question is this: exactly what they're demanding right now - the disputed property; a.k.a. the prom burners.
Remember, this is a civil case, not a criminal one. In civil cases, you can only recover your "damages".
"Little guys" can bleed a corporation enormously just showing up and defending themselves. If you start to fight nasty - subpeonaing corporate officers during discovery for instance (and dragging it out as long as you can) - it will quickly become obvious to them that it's not worth it.
The ineffacacy of the civil tort system in the U.S. is the reason we have a "credit rating". Creditors can't effectively get small potatos money back - even when facts, laws, and morality are all in their favor. So they've set up a credit "blacklist", very much like the spam RTBL sysops have set up to prevent small-potatos theft of computational time. People who avail themselves of a one time "gift" of failing to service a loan almost never get sued - they just can't credit services again.
Get a grip. This is just a letter. Letters cost about a dollar to reproduce and send. They are typically used as intimidation techniques by lawyers when they know they don't have a legal leg to stand on.
If they file, then it means they're a bit more serious, but not much. Again, these filing is cheap, and often gets people to do what lawyers want even though they really don't have the legal right to demand it.
This is what you should do. Send them back a nice letter stating that the DCMA doesn't apply because these devices are not being used "solely for copyright circumvention" - they are being used for hobby gaming. This does two things. First, it states your legal position; they cannot claim you ignored the letter. Second, and more importantly, you are signal your willingness to actually fight this bullshit.
Believe me when I say that Corporate lawyers strongly recommend against suing a "little guy" on anything but a clear-cut case. Even if they win, it can do havok with their P.R., and it will cost them way way more money to pursue than they ever could recover.
Remember, because this isn't a contractual issue so there is no "looser pays in a legal dispute" clause to deal with. If they actually seriously pursue litigation, they're on the hook for their own legal fees, which makes it not worth it even if they do win.
Disclaimer - I am Not a Lawyer; however, I have used their services from time to time.
"According to this Washington Post article, the FCC's Michael Powell wants to do via rulemaking what Congress wouldn't - give a big wet kiss to the Baby Bells."
Michael Powell isn't the FCC's as a institution. He is the man George W. Bush appointed.
Don't go blaming the FCC for sucking up to big businesss contributors, and their attempts to stifle competition using political influence. It's not them.
This has got to be the biggest puff piece
I've seen in quite some time.
The BSA doesn't launch frivolous investigations, of course.
Oh, of course they don't. Only absolutely non-frivolous investigations costing perfectly innocent companies time and lost profits.
So how do we know it isn't frivolous?
When a lead comes in, the organization compares it with information from software publishers and credit-rating corporations like Dunn & Bradstreet.
In other words... they only want to target companies with a good credit rating. Remember the first rule of lawsuits: only sue people with money!
This is the result of double counting...
on
EverQuest and the UN
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
If you take the hobbies of rich people (and folks, most people posting on this site are generally rich by world standards), you can get a high "per-capita" economy for just about anything.
Like:
Economy of California
Economy of luxury goods.
Economy of oversized boats and cars
Trouble is, it's all double counting. Those people's incomes are already counted as part of the US GDP. You don't get to count them again.
Despite the unfair "Flamebait" moderation on the parent above, I'm not sure I disagree. Remember people, that usage restrictions in the TOS is why it's legal to limit SPAM.
For all those who really think the above was flamebait, please explain to me the difference.
(And no - a diatribe on how bad spam is doesn't count.)
However, in your sentence I'd replace "subversive" with "scary".
My four year old got nightmares after watching IZ. He didn't have a problem with any other cartoon on Nick.
Zim may be a cartoon, but it really isn't for the daytime/early-evening crowd.
If anyone is still reading this thread after
all the uninformed extremist anti- and pro-
American ranting, there is an excellent article
currently over at Slate that explains the real political problems of this mission as opposed to the laughable conspiracy theories about oil you're reading about here.
Despite the whining from the (lets not mince words here) pro-piracy segment of the slashdot readership, this sounds like a perfectly sound business decision.
Face facts people, corporations are not
charities. If they can't get a Return On Investment, they need to invest money elsewhere. Nor will any other business simply step in, because they're not going to get any ROI either. This has already elminated entire markets. The Hong Kong movie business is basically dead because piracy is so culturally acceptable in China.
Yeah, its annoying, and if you only backup your hard drive onto CD's, you're subsidizing brittney spears. But on the other hand, it *will* give hollywood billions and billions of dollars, and stop digital control technology.
Here's the problem with that. How would anyone know which artists to subsidize? As it happens right now, sales go directly to the artist who is currently actually selling music (whether or not the establishment *likes* the music), not just to whoever some "music commission" decided had artistic merit.
Further, if you don't like the power media companies have over artists now, imagine what it would be like in a world where they get no direct credit for anything they create. The "music commission" would no doubt end up being filled with industry lobbists who would try to funnel as much cash as they could to the media conglomerates, starving the people who actually stimulated demand in the first place.
This idea is a non-starter. I'll take the current system over it, warts and all.
Was in a class where the instructor asked us to write a program to perform an ascii sort of a file (kind of like 'sort' actually). I specifically asked if we could use libraries, and he said yes. Of course most of the students were using Pascal...
You can probably guess what I did. My program featured the prominant use of "qsort()" out of the C library. Even though I had learned about callbacks with the thing, he really didn't like it. Made me go back and reimplement it so that there was an actual "sort" being performed in my code. Ug.
Boy did you flunk this! The Red container holds a solution of 90% Red & 10% Blue; the Blue Container holds a solution of 90% Blue & 10% Red/Blue mixture. In other words, the Blue container contains 91% Blue 9% Red, and is therefore more "pure".
This is a basic high-school algebra word problem. I'm not sure what's more scary: that this is all Microsoft expects of their programmers, or that the typical Slashdot reader can't solve it.
As a former tek employee, I can tell you most of these so-called patents have significant prior art developed for the Tektronix Profile system, now owned by the Grass Valley.
"Slow playback" ?? How the hell do you think all those slow-mo replays are done on Monday Night Football anyway? Sheez.
I've lived in Oregon for longer than you
have by about 2 years. It is a funny place, but I love it.
Yes, you can't pump your own gas. This is blatantly done to increasing employment opportunities for the uneducated. It seems to work better than just handing people a check. Obviously you haven't quite had the blessing living through a really hard winter yet, or you might be a little less upset about being forced to stay in your warm car.
The "kicker check" is just a hallmark of the right wing tidal wave crashing over the entire U.S. It isn't much different than any other state, and is in some ways better.
Referendums are abused by demogogues, typically "something for nothing" right wing demogogues who pretend that you can just legislate roads, schools, and essential services to cost less than they actually do. It's bizarre how the extreme right in the U.S. in many ways resembles the old time communists; I'm almost expecting to one day hear some radio blowhard to start saying "Get rid of IRS and all taxes, and all services stay same because we then live in socali- I mean, libertarian utopia! Da Da!"
Climatalogically speaking, Oregon is two states. The west west side, and the frozen east side. Studs are essential in the east, and absurd in the west. You legislate a way out of that one.
Portland's urban growth boundary hasn't substantially raised housing prices, despite the propaganda from the builder's associations. It has, however, preserved over 30,000 acres of viable farmland, which employs 50,000 people in the area. It's one thing to sprawl in the desert,
quite another to do it over some of the most productive agricultural land in the U.S.
And finally about the Oregonian. Yes, they are a moderate Republican newspaper, but they do report the news - including the topic of this slashdot headline. Identity Theft rings operate all across the U.S. and in other nations, but it was the Oregonian that broke the story about the one our police caught.
I thought that the "Nerds" in "News For Nerds" were people who actually knew something about technology, but given the number of people who modded you up to +5, this obviously isn't the case.
Simple, both my wife and I use it to connect to each of our corporate intra-nets using VPN. And if you want to do any real work, NFS mounts, Windows junk, remote compiling - anything - you really have to have enough speed to make it worthwhile.
It's not different for non-technical people either. If you use accounting programs, inventory tracking, anything else using a client-server model, broadband speeds are the only way to go for any real work at home.
Once upon a midnight dreary, fingers cramped and vision bleary,
System manuals piled high and wasted paper on the floor,
Longing for the warmth of bed sheets, still I sat there doing spreadsheets.
Having reached the bottom line I took a floppy from the drawer,
I then invoked the SAVE command and waited for the disk to store,
Only this and nothing more.
Deep into the monitor peering, long I sat there wond'ring, fearing,
Doubting, while the disk kept churning, turning yet to churn some more.
But the silence was unbroken, and the stillness gave no token.
"Save!" I said, "You cursed mother! Save my data from before!"
One thing did the phosphors answer, only this and nothing more,
Just, "Abort, Retry, Ignore?"
Was this some occult illusion, some maniacal intrusion?
These were choices undesired, ones I'd never faced before.
Carefully I weighed the choices as the disk made impish noises.
The cursor flashed, insistent, waiting, baiting me to type some more.
Clearly I must press a key, choosing one and nothing more,
From "Abort, Retry, Ignore?"
With fingers pale and trembling, slowly toward the keyboard bending,
Longing for a happy ending, hoping all would be restored,
Praying for some guarantee, timidly, I pressed a key.
But on the screen there still persisted words appearing as before.
Ghastly grim they blinked and taunted, haunted, as my patience wore,
Saying "Abort, Retry, Ignore?"
I tried to catch the chips off guard, and pressed again, but twice as hard.
I pleaded with the cursed machine: I begged and cried and then I swore.
Now in mighty desperation, trying random combinations,
Still there came the incantation, just as senseless as before.
Cursor blinking, angrily winking, blinking nonsense as before.
Reading, "Abort, Retry, Ignore?"
There I sat, distraught, exhausted, by my own machine accosted.
Getting up I turned away and paced across the office floor.
And then I saw a dreadful sight: a lightning bolt cut through the night.
A gasp of horror overtook me, shook me to my very core.
The lightning zapped my previous data, lost and gone forevermore.
Not even, "Abort, Retry, Ignore?"
To this day I do not know the place to which lost data go.
What demonic nether world us wrought where lost data will be stored,
Beyond the reach of mortal souls, beyond the ether, into black holes?
But sure as there's C, Pascal, Lotus, Ashton-Tate and more,
You will be one day be left to wander, lost on some Plutonian shore,
Pleading, "Abort, Retry, Ignore?"
Slashdot Mirror
The answer to your question is this: exactly what they're demanding right now - the disputed property; a.k.a. the prom burners.
Remember, this is a civil case, not a criminal one. In civil cases, you can only recover your "damages".
"Little guys" can bleed a corporation enormously just showing up and defending themselves. If you start to fight nasty - subpeonaing corporate officers during discovery for instance (and dragging it out as long as you can) - it will quickly become obvious to them that it's not worth it.
The ineffacacy of the civil tort system in the U.S. is the reason we have a "credit rating". Creditors can't effectively get small potatos money back - even when facts, laws, and morality are all in their favor. So they've set up a credit "blacklist", very much like the spam RTBL sysops have set up to prevent small-potatos theft of computational time. People who avail themselves of a one time "gift" of failing to service a loan almost never get sued - they just can't credit services again.
Dear Mr Michaels,
Get a grip. This is just a letter. Letters cost about a dollar to reproduce and send. They are typically used as intimidation techniques by lawyers when they know they don't have a legal leg to stand on.
If they file, then it means they're a bit more serious, but not much. Again, these filing is cheap, and often gets people to do what lawyers want even though they really don't have the legal right to demand it.
This is what you should do. Send them back a nice letter stating that the DCMA doesn't apply because these devices are not being used "solely for copyright circumvention" - they are being used for hobby gaming. This does two things. First, it states your legal position; they cannot claim you ignored the letter. Second, and more importantly, you are signal your willingness to actually fight this bullshit.
Believe me when I say that Corporate lawyers strongly recommend against suing a "little guy" on anything but a clear-cut case. Even if they win, it can do havok with their P.R., and it will cost them way way more money to pursue than they ever could recover.
Remember, because this isn't a contractual issue so there is no "looser pays in a legal dispute" clause to deal with. If they actually seriously pursue litigation, they're on the hook for their own legal fees, which makes it not worth it even if they do win.
Disclaimer - I am Not a Lawyer; however, I have used their services from time to time.
Michael Powell isn't the FCC's as a institution. He is the man George W. Bush appointed.
Don't go blaming the FCC for sucking up to big businesss contributors, and their attempts to stifle competition using political influence. It's not them.
Remember people, elections have consequences.
This has got to be the biggest puff piece I've seen in quite some time.
Oh, of course they don't. Only absolutely non-frivolous investigations costing perfectly innocent companies time and lost profits.
So how do we know it isn't frivolous?
In other words... they only want to target companies with a good credit rating. Remember the first rule of lawsuits: only sue people with money!
If you take the hobbies of rich people (and folks, most people posting on this site are generally rich by world standards), you can get a high "per-capita" economy for just about anything. Like:
Economy of California
Economy of luxury goods.
Economy of oversized boats and cars
Trouble is, it's all double counting. Those people's incomes are already counted as part of the US GDP. You don't get to count them again.
Despite the unfair "Flamebait" moderation on the parent above, I'm not sure I disagree.
Remember people, that usage restrictions in the TOS is why it's legal to limit SPAM.
For all those who really think the above was flamebait, please explain to me the difference. (And no - a diatribe on how bad spam is doesn't count.)
On sattelite we get IZ during the daytime.
However, in your sentence I'd replace "subversive" with "scary". My four year old got nightmares after watching IZ. He didn't have a problem with any other cartoon on Nick.
Zim may be a cartoon, but it really isn't for the daytime/early-evening crowd.
If anyone is still reading this thread after all the uninformed extremist anti- and pro- American ranting, there is an excellent article currently over at Slate that explains the real political problems of this mission as opposed to the laughable conspiracy theories about oil you're reading about here.
Katz's entire article should be modded -1 Flamebait
Well, I guess that's better than his typical... Overrated.
Go see Das Boot. It was exactly that. Excellent too.
Despite the whining from the (lets not mince words here) pro-piracy segment of the slashdot readership, this sounds like a perfectly sound business decision.
Face facts people, corporations are not charities. If they can't get a Return On Investment, they need to invest money elsewhere. Nor will any other business simply step in, because they're not going to get any ROI either. This has already elminated entire markets. The Hong Kong movie business is basically dead because piracy is so culturally acceptable in China.
Here's the problem with that. How would anyone know which artists to subsidize? As it happens right now, sales go directly to the artist who is currently actually selling music (whether or not the establishment *likes* the music), not just to whoever some "music commission" decided had artistic merit.
Further, if you don't like the power media companies have over artists now, imagine what it would be like in a world where they get no direct credit for anything they create. The "music commission" would no doubt end up being filled with industry lobbists who would try to funnel as much cash as they could to the media conglomerates, starving the people who actually stimulated demand in the first place.
This idea is a non-starter. I'll take the current system over it, warts and all.
That's ok, by posting in this article, you just negated the effect of the bogus moderation...
Was in a class where the instructor asked us to write a program to perform an ascii sort of a file (kind of like 'sort' actually). I specifically asked if we could use libraries, and he said yes. Of course most of the students were using Pascal...
You can probably guess what I did. My program featured the prominant use of "qsort()" out of the C library. Even though I had learned about callbacks with the thing, he really didn't like it. Made me go back and reimplement it so that there was an actual "sort" being performed in my code. Ug.
Now I'm a Principal Engineer.
You're right, I'm wrong. I thought about it later, and realized I'd screwed up, but you know Slashdot - you can't unpost anything.
Go ahead, mod me down as a Troll or Offtopic! I've got too many Karma points to care. Bwah ha ha ha ha!
Boy did you flunk this! The Red container holds a solution of 90% Red & 10% Blue; the Blue Container holds a solution of 90% Blue & 10% Red/Blue mixture. In other words, the Blue container contains 91% Blue 9% Red, and is therefore more "pure".
This is a basic high-school algebra word problem. I'm not sure what's more scary: that this is all Microsoft expects of their programmers, or that the typical Slashdot reader can't solve it.
As a former tek employee, I can tell you most of these so-called patents have significant prior art developed for the Tektronix Profile system, now owned by the Grass Valley.
"Slow playback" ?? How the hell do you think all those slow-mo replays are done on Monday Night Football anyway? Sheez.
Quoting from the knowledge base article, it would appear the design issue is with IDE/ATAPI.
My workaround has simply been to select "Restart" on shutdown, and to turn the power off as soon as the system starts re-querying drives.
This has worked for me to solve this problem.
Opinion -1
Fact +1
I've lived in Oregon for longer than you have by about 2 years. It is a funny place, but I love it.
Yes, you can't pump your own gas. This is blatantly done to increasing employment opportunities for the uneducated. It seems to work better than just handing people a check. Obviously you haven't quite had the blessing living through a really hard winter yet, or you might be a little less upset about being forced to stay in your warm car.
The "kicker check" is just a hallmark of the right wing tidal wave crashing over the entire U.S. It isn't much different than any other state, and is in some ways better.
Referendums are abused by demogogues, typically "something for nothing" right wing demogogues who pretend that you can just legislate roads, schools, and essential services to cost less than they actually do. It's bizarre how the extreme right in the U.S. in many ways resembles the old time communists; I'm almost expecting to one day hear some radio blowhard to start saying "Get rid of IRS and all taxes, and all services stay same because we then live in socali- I mean, libertarian utopia! Da Da!"
Climatalogically speaking, Oregon is two states. The west west side, and the frozen east side. Studs are essential in the east, and absurd in the west. You legislate a way out of that one.
Portland's urban growth boundary hasn't substantially raised housing prices, despite the propaganda from the builder's associations. It has, however, preserved over 30,000 acres of viable farmland, which employs 50,000 people in the area. It's one thing to sprawl in the desert, quite another to do it over some of the most productive agricultural land in the U.S.
And finally about the Oregonian. Yes, they are a moderate Republican newspaper, but they do report the news - including the topic of this slashdot headline. Identity Theft rings operate all across the U.S. and in other nations, but it was the Oregonian that broke the story about the one our police caught.
I don't call that lousy reporting.
Actually, what he's doing is what Al Gore claimed he did for the original internet - e.g. "create it" by championing it and causing it to be funded.
He never claimed he invented it.
I thought that the "Nerds" in "News For Nerds" were people who actually knew something about technology, but given the number of people who modded you up to +5, this obviously isn't the case.
I'll never go back to dialup. Ever.
Why?
Simple, both my wife and I use it to connect to each of our corporate intra-nets using VPN. And if you want to do any real work, NFS mounts, Windows junk, remote compiling - anything - you really have to have enough speed to make it worthwhile.
It's not different for non-technical people either. If you use accounting programs, inventory tracking, anything else using a client-server model, broadband speeds are the only way to go for any real work at home.
With apologies to Edgar Allen Poe ...
Once upon a midnight dreary, fingers cramped and vision bleary, System manuals piled high and wasted paper on the floor, Longing for the warmth of bed sheets, still I sat there doing spreadsheets. Having reached the bottom line I took a floppy from the drawer, I then invoked the SAVE command and waited for the disk to store, Only this and nothing more.
Deep into the monitor peering, long I sat there wond'ring, fearing, Doubting, while the disk kept churning, turning yet to churn some more. But the silence was unbroken, and the stillness gave no token. "Save!" I said, "You cursed mother! Save my data from before!" One thing did the phosphors answer, only this and nothing more, Just, "Abort, Retry, Ignore?"
Was this some occult illusion, some maniacal intrusion? These were choices undesired, ones I'd never faced before. Carefully I weighed the choices as the disk made impish noises. The cursor flashed, insistent, waiting, baiting me to type some more. Clearly I must press a key, choosing one and nothing more, From "Abort, Retry, Ignore?"
With fingers pale and trembling, slowly toward the keyboard bending, Longing for a happy ending, hoping all would be restored, Praying for some guarantee, timidly, I pressed a key. But on the screen there still persisted words appearing as before. Ghastly grim they blinked and taunted, haunted, as my patience wore, Saying "Abort, Retry, Ignore?"
I tried to catch the chips off guard, and pressed again, but twice as hard. I pleaded with the cursed machine: I begged and cried and then I swore. Now in mighty desperation, trying random combinations, Still there came the incantation, just as senseless as before. Cursor blinking, angrily winking, blinking nonsense as before. Reading, "Abort, Retry, Ignore?"
There I sat, distraught, exhausted, by my own machine accosted. Getting up I turned away and paced across the office floor. And then I saw a dreadful sight: a lightning bolt cut through the night. A gasp of horror overtook me, shook me to my very core. The lightning zapped my previous data, lost and gone forevermore. Not even, "Abort, Retry, Ignore?"
To this day I do not know the place to which lost data go. What demonic nether world us wrought where lost data will be stored, Beyond the reach of mortal souls, beyond the ether, into black holes? But sure as there's C, Pascal, Lotus, Ashton-Tate and more, You will be one day be left to wander, lost on some Plutonian shore, Pleading, "Abort, Retry, Ignore?"