You're sadly right. I'm not going to make a personal habit of hiding away my perfectly legal use of copyrighted materials; in fact, I'm going to make such practices widely known. The fact that children are being raised to view the government and industry giants as shadowy figures that "grant" them their rights is disturbing to say the least.
No, no, and futhermore, no. We're not talking about the recording industry here (although they've been continuously defeated on fair use copies, along with the video industry). We're talking about making archival/personal use copies of printed works someone already owns, a practice that's been heavily tested in various academic and related arenas.
No, you could not "easily lose that fair use argument" in a courtroom with regard to this situation. Now, if you went out and distributed copies of the material, you've broken copyright law and would be wide open to civil actions.
Should you happen to continue to assert your position on this matter, cite supporting examples in case law.
I simply can't accept mandatory voting. Please understand: I spend a fair amount of time encouraging people to (1) research the candidates, (2) vote for someone (especially at the local level, where it matters a lot more than people think), and (3) encourage political discussion, no matter what your leanings may be.
All that said, I'm active duty in the U.S. Navy, a role I volunteered for in the interest of defending freedom (my personal opinions of the war notwithstanding). I was a software engineer for several years before the Navy, so I don't think anyone can say I'm not doing my part out of a desire to serve. I support freedom in the most liberal sense of the word; the freedom not to vote is as important as the ability to do so, in my opinion.
It's your vote. You should be able to do whatever you want to do with your vote. It should be a crime if you did not use your vote at all.
Ummm... I strongly support everyone voting, but what if what someone doesn't want to cast a vote? That's a valid use of their vote as measured by the second sentence of your post, and is in direct contradiction to the third sentence.
Assuming the people you catch aren't the actual criminals who stole it in the first place, they'd better be prepared to tell you where they got the gear. Accepting stolen property is a crime, too... there's a difference between buying something in a small computer store (where you'll get a receipt, etc) and a guy who's got some machines in a van.
Listen, I'm certainly no fan of AOL. However, I think you missed one salient point in the discussion: people who can afford vacation homes might just have that kind of money because they don't have a history of wasting cash on multiple net connections or other unnecessary expenditures.
You're talking about two completely different things here. Your original idea was to hold the "final destination" companies responsible for the actions of spammers. This *will not work* in a great many cases for the reasons I cited in my previous post. Referencing your gun sales procedures analogy, it sounds like you've never run an affiliate program. Yes, you do your best to screen applicants to make sure they have a legitimate web presence before agreeing to allow them to market your products in exchange for commissions on sales. However, this is *really* easy to circumvent if someone is truly interested in using spam as a promotion mechanism. Would you advocate requiring something like a photo ID before allowing someone to do affiliate marketing? I'm sure Amazon.com and the like are sure to implement such a requirement any day now (light sarcasm). It would simply make your affiliate marketing program near-worthless in an age where people are extremely hesitant to part with a lot of their personal information, and wouldn't do anything to deter the spammers (in many ways resembling how gun control laws frequently do nothing to prevent crime, because criminals don't usually obtain their guns through legal channels anyhow).
As for nailing companies that ship products that don't work as advertised, we already have a mature legal framework for dealing with such organizations. Of course, that's assuming the business is operating in a jurisdiction where you can actually prosecute them (many, many foreign scam operations operate from dubious locales).
I sympathize with your frustration at the situation; I deal with it every day myself. I operate several servers that filter tens of thousands of inbound SPAM pieces a day. I have to deal with constant attacks on those servers from botnets trying to turn them into SPAM-churning zombies. It's a monthly balancing act deciding which IP blocks to ban based on nasty activity, without losing revenue from pageviews from legitimate visitors. In other words, I'd like to feed spammers their balls through the wrong end of their anatomy, but your methods simply aren't workable options.
Because oftentimes it isn't those companies' fault. Say you have an affiliate program, or you rely on a third-party affiliate program management firm to provide compensation for those who promote your products. You can have strict terms for those people that warn against using spamming tactics to promote their affiliate sales, and you can terminate the ones who get caught, but you can't ever guarantee compliance en masse.
Your suggestion is equivalent to throwing knife makers in prison because some of their customers misuse the product.
Fuel cost isn't really a frequently considered factor for research applications where the entire program's cost is measured in the billions of dollars.
There's an old saying that if a law harms one innocent man, it's a bad law. The same could be said for ignoring research that might cure any given terminal illness or disease. I take it you're not married, but I may be mistaken. If you're not, imagine your spouse contracting HIV from unprotected sex while having an affair. Let's say you've been, to the best of your ability, a devoted partner and have upheld "your end of the deal" faithfully. Someone comes along and says AIDS is a behavioral problem, and you're shit out of luck.
Here, let me load that pistol for you, it won't take that long with only one round...
HIV is more akin to smoking related cancer, both avoidable. Sure, right up to the point that your spouse decides to have an extramarital affair and doesn't bother to inform you. Does the uninformed party deserve to die?
Bad form to reply to one's own comment, but this is how I manage my data at home. Essentially, almost nothing ever gets deleted from the backup array. I can access it via Samba, NFS, or SSH if I need to recover anything. Some of my backups are straight copies of data, while others use rdiff-backup if I might need to revert to an older version of a directory from a specific point in time. For me, it's a "good enough" setup.
Build a simple storage array with RAID from a barbones PC, your favorite Linux distro, configured for fault-tolerant RAID. It doesn't have to be complicated, and it doesn't have to be powered on unless you're actually pushing data to it.
Every couple of years, you can add an extra couple of drives. With drive capacities increasing as fast as they are, cost shouldn't be a huge issue.
Some of the recent bugs with Safari remind me of the stuff MS was doing 10 years ago, where junior programers hacked together E-Z features without any consideration for the security implications. As opposed to now, where junior programmers are assigned to security-related tasks? I'm not sure it's much better...
I've always said, I may disagree with people on the way they vote and the positions they take on issues, but I can't disagree with someone for voicing their opinion. The only people I truly take issue with are the ones who bitch about problems but refuse to do anything about them.
That's a very good point, quite illustrative of the fact that laws where it's hard to determine the difference between an offending and injured party are bad.
It's not a perfect example, since unless our respective Internet connections were at least as fast as our LAN we would really only be degrading LAN access, but you could easily make that a point as well. Well thought out.
Slashdot Mirror
So there you go.
Why didn't AVG leave the option disabled by default, allowing users to turn it on if they wished? That would have been a more sensible approach.
You're sadly right. I'm not going to make a personal habit of hiding away my perfectly legal use of copyrighted materials; in fact, I'm going to make such practices widely known. The fact that children are being raised to view the government and industry giants as shadowy figures that "grant" them their rights is disturbing to say the least.
No, no, and futhermore, no. We're not talking about the recording industry here (although they've been continuously defeated on fair use copies, along with the video industry). We're talking about making archival/personal use copies of printed works someone already owns, a practice that's been heavily tested in various academic and related arenas.
No, you could not "easily lose that fair use argument" in a courtroom with regard to this situation. Now, if you went out and distributed copies of the material, you've broken copyright law and would be wide open to civil actions.
Should you happen to continue to assert your position on this matter, cite supporting examples in case law.
Wow. That's one of the coolest posts I've seen on this site in a very long time. Mod parent up!
He's making a fair use copy.
I simply can't accept mandatory voting. Please understand: I spend a fair amount of time encouraging people to (1) research the candidates, (2) vote for someone (especially at the local level, where it matters a lot more than people think), and (3) encourage political discussion, no matter what your leanings may be.
All that said, I'm active duty in the U.S. Navy, a role I volunteered for in the interest of defending freedom (my personal opinions of the war notwithstanding). I was a software engineer for several years before the Navy, so I don't think anyone can say I'm not doing my part out of a desire to serve. I support freedom in the most liberal sense of the word; the freedom not to vote is as important as the ability to do so, in my opinion.
It's your vote. You should be able to do whatever you want to do with your vote. It should be a crime if you did not use your vote at all.
Ummm... I strongly support everyone voting, but what if what someone doesn't want to cast a vote? That's a valid use of their vote as measured by the second sentence of your post, and is in direct contradiction to the third sentence.
Assuming the people you catch aren't the actual criminals who stole it in the first place, they'd better be prepared to tell you where they got the gear. Accepting stolen property is a crime, too... there's a difference between buying something in a small computer store (where you'll get a receipt, etc) and a guy who's got some machines in a van.
Listen, I'm certainly no fan of AOL. However, I think you missed one salient point in the discussion: people who can afford vacation homes might just have that kind of money because they don't have a history of wasting cash on multiple net connections or other unnecessary expenditures.
Maybe I'm a bigger geek than even I supposed, but that's the best joke I've heard all week (and I work on a naval base). Mod parent up :).
You're talking about two completely different things here. Your original idea was to hold the "final destination" companies responsible for the actions of spammers. This *will not work* in a great many cases for the reasons I cited in my previous post. Referencing your gun sales procedures analogy, it sounds like you've never run an affiliate program. Yes, you do your best to screen applicants to make sure they have a legitimate web presence before agreeing to allow them to market your products in exchange for commissions on sales. However, this is *really* easy to circumvent if someone is truly interested in using spam as a promotion mechanism. Would you advocate requiring something like a photo ID before allowing someone to do affiliate marketing? I'm sure Amazon.com and the like are sure to implement such a requirement any day now (light sarcasm). It would simply make your affiliate marketing program near-worthless in an age where people are extremely hesitant to part with a lot of their personal information, and wouldn't do anything to deter the spammers (in many ways resembling how gun control laws frequently do nothing to prevent crime, because criminals don't usually obtain their guns through legal channels anyhow).
As for nailing companies that ship products that don't work as advertised, we already have a mature legal framework for dealing with such organizations. Of course, that's assuming the business is operating in a jurisdiction where you can actually prosecute them (many, many foreign scam operations operate from dubious locales).
I sympathize with your frustration at the situation; I deal with it every day myself. I operate several servers that filter tens of thousands of inbound SPAM pieces a day. I have to deal with constant attacks on those servers from botnets trying to turn them into SPAM-churning zombies. It's a monthly balancing act deciding which IP blocks to ban based on nasty activity, without losing revenue from pageviews from legitimate visitors. In other words, I'd like to feed spammers their balls through the wrong end of their anatomy, but your methods simply aren't workable options.
Because oftentimes it isn't those companies' fault. Say you have an affiliate program, or you rely on a third-party affiliate program management firm to provide compensation for those who promote your products. You can have strict terms for those people that warn against using spamming tactics to promote their affiliate sales, and you can terminate the ones who get caught, but you can't ever guarantee compliance en masse.
Your suggestion is equivalent to throwing knife makers in prison because some of their customers misuse the product.
Fuel cost isn't really a frequently considered factor for research applications where the entire program's cost is measured in the billions of dollars.
China has had ICBMs for a long, long time. Of course, so has the USA. It's not terribly difficult to hurl a warhead around the globe.
I'm more interested in the airspeed velocity of the Ares V rocket, as measured in swallows (continental origin subject to your locale).
There's an old saying that if a law harms one innocent man, it's a bad law. The same could be said for ignoring research that might cure any given terminal illness or disease. I take it you're not married, but I may be mistaken. If you're not, imagine your spouse contracting HIV from unprotected sex while having an affair. Let's say you've been, to the best of your ability, a devoted partner and have upheld "your end of the deal" faithfully. Someone comes along and says AIDS is a behavioral problem, and you're shit out of luck.
Here, let me load that pistol for you, it won't take that long with only one round...
What happens when your partner in a monogamous relationship decides to alter the terms without informing you?
Bad form to reply to one's own comment, but this is how I manage my data at home. Essentially, almost nothing ever gets deleted from the backup array. I can access it via Samba, NFS, or SSH if I need to recover anything. Some of my backups are straight copies of data, while others use rdiff-backup if I might need to revert to an older version of a directory from a specific point in time. For me, it's a "good enough" setup.
Build a simple storage array with RAID from a barbones PC, your favorite Linux distro, configured for fault-tolerant RAID. It doesn't have to be complicated, and it doesn't have to be powered on unless you're actually pushing data to it.
Every couple of years, you can add an extra couple of drives. With drive capacities increasing as fast as they are, cost shouldn't be a huge issue.
I've always said, I may disagree with people on the way they vote and the positions they take on issues, but I can't disagree with someone for voicing their opinion. The only people I truly take issue with are the ones who bitch about problems but refuse to do anything about them.
That's a very good point, quite illustrative of the fact that laws where it's hard to determine the difference between an offending and injured party are bad.
It's not a perfect example, since unless our respective Internet connections were at least as fast as our LAN we would really only be degrading LAN access, but you could easily make that a point as well. Well thought out.
MOD PARENT UP. I've contacted mine, everyone who's of age to vote should follow suit.