They may have had good faith in their process to identify pirated copies of their works.
Fair enough, and that's a legitimate point. But I still don't see how even a reasonable process identifies VLC Media Player as a pirated copy of Game of Thrones. On the other hand, maybe there is a perfectly reasonable explanation for how it could.
Dude, you just put your name on the NSA watch list. "Regicide" has been a trigger word since Obama's 2011 Secret Executive Order 489382.19, declaring himself King of the Union For Life, and secretly changing our official name to the Holy Obaman Empire. There was a challenge to it from Congressional Republicans, who preferred Holy Reaganian Empire, but the FISA court smacked them down and declared the order constitutional. You really ought to catch up on your Coast to Coast AM backlog one of these days.
Yeah, I even used Vista. It deadlocked trying to update to SP1, so I was stuck on GA til the day I dropped it, but other than that it wasn't THAT bad.
While we're on the topic, my college roommate murdered me and everybody else in the house, but other than that little incident, he wasn't THAT psychotic. (If you're wondering, I post to Slashdot via IPoM (IP over Medium)).
In other words it's images of athletes linked in a particular way to via a social network.
It's far from obvious what Google is claiming based on that paragraph. Do these social profile networks have anything to do with the athlete, or are they avatars for 'friends' of the user? Why does the fact that they are adding the linking a capability to a diagramming convention commonly seen broadcast sports make this a patentable invention? If the linking itself is novel, then why is the invention purportedly about pictures of athletes?
They can go shove this patent in a plurality of the Google employees' arses where it belongs.
The links have to correspond to profiles in an online social network. The thumbnails are selected by a first user who is in the same social network as a second user, and the second user can see the thumbnails selected by the first user. It doesn't matter whether the thumbnails link to profiles about the athletes. They could just as well link to pages for friends (like some kind of fantasy sports league).
That's cute how you put words in my mouth and then tell me I'm a moron with a persecution complex for saying what I didn't say. I personally think you're an idiot because you admitted you built a shrine to Tim Burton's dirty underpants in your room. If you now deny it, that will just confirm my suspicion. (And if you don't deny it, you will be convicted by your telling silence.)
Since context clues seem to escape you, let me explain (and I'll use small words so you'll be sure to understand, you warthog-faced buffoon) (I don't generally resort to name-calling, but that seems to be the direction of the conversation). I do not believe in the dichotomy of "Global Warming" vs. "Denialism." In fact, "Global Warming" and "Climate Change" don't even mean anything. They're emotionally-charged political buzz words that dumb politicians chant to get their respective brain-dead constituencies stirred up into a partisan fervor. But since you are an admitted True Believer in the Church of Global Warming and believe that the voice of James Hansen speaks to you through Tim Burton's dirty underpants, I don't expect you to understand that.
That's a bit like saying, we know air planes crash, therefore the recent crash landing in San Francisco is not news.
No, this is more like, "Airplanes crash every single day, all over the place, so there's no reason to report the crash in San Francisco as though it's something special." There's nothing special about this crash except that somebody was able to make a tenuous link between "Google" and "Global Warming denier." If you're bothered by political cronyism, then work to do something about political cronyism. Pretending like it's newsworthy that Google contributes to politicians isn't doing something.
Seriously, how is this news? A large company is schmoozing politicians. It's fine to think it's evil and corrupt and whatever. But news is generally something that you didn't already know. And the title is just trolling for True Believers who think that "Global Warming" is a single monolithic issue, with exactly one meaning and with exactly two sides ("Evangelist" and "Denier"), with no nuance or discussion possible. (As evidence, watch the flood of comments that will follow labeling me a "denier" because I used the words "nuance" and "discussion" in connection with Global Warming.)
You can't assume that's true. The friend the disk was loaned to may never have bought the movie. It's not a loss if the purchase wasn't ever going to happen. And like you mentioned, it might equally be considered a marginal gain, because the borrower could recommend the movie to others, and cause purchases that otherwise may not have happened.
My point is that popular Slashdot theories notwithstanding, your friend has, in fact, conferred a benefit that he was not legally entitled to confer. That's why it's different from watching it together or lending you the physical disk. Everything else is just armchair lawyering.
Perhaps, but now you're talking corporate and legal ethics, not copyright. A lawyer cannot ethically bring a suit on behalf of his client unless he has a good-faith and reasonable belief that the case has merit. The original premise was a movie that "might possibly... be confused with the Disney work." While confusion is a trademark doctrine, not a copyright doctrine, the post implies some level of substantial similarity. The copyright analysis for substantial similarity is abstraction-filtration-comparison. In other words, go down to the level of abstraction that is detailed enough to be protectable ("Deformed man falls in love with a beautiful woman" is too general), filter out anything not protectable like facts and public domain works ("Quasimodo cries 'Sanctuary!' three times"), and compare what's left. The lawyer should go through this analysis (i.e., send an associate to spend ten hours drafting a detailed memo) before he ever files the lawsuit. He should file only if he is reasonably satisfied that the accused work passes the test.
That's one way of looking at it. The other way is that there are other derivatives of Les Miserables which _are_ under copyright, and the people who own them would like to have a few words with you about exactly what you have created a derivative work of.
Which is fine, as long as you've created a musical derivative of Victor Hugo's book and not of Boubill/Natel/Kretzler book. If you have songs called "I Dreamed a Dream," "Do You Hear the People Sing," and "Bring Him Home," I'd start to worry.
This happens a lot with Disney, as they have used many public domain or out-of-copyright works as sources for their movies, and then sue if there is another work that might possibly in some way be confused with the Disney work.
They can sue if they can show that your work is a derivative of the Disney work, which is itself now a new copyrighted work. For example, if your animated feature of The Hunchback of Notre Dame happens to have three singing gargoyles, a cute, lovable little Quasimodo, a noble, heroic Phoebus, and a crappy happy ending where the boy gets the girl and they all live happily ever after, you might have a problem. But if your movie has a hulking, ugly, monstrous Quasimodo who dumps molten lead on the invading army, a vain and shallow Phoebus who loses interest in Esmeralda after sex doesn't work out, and everybody dies at the end, you should be good to go. Even if your Quasimodo cries "Sanctuary!" three times while triumphantly displaying an unconscious Esmeralda---an element common to the book and the crappy Disney movie---you're fine. You are free to copy the original. You aren't free to copy the copy.
I watch movies for free all the time over at a friend's house. He rented or bought them, I paid nothing. If he loans me the physical media, is that illegal? I still paid nothing. Now just stretch it a bit further and say he ripped it for the purposes of back up, then loaned me that copy? There isn't a lot of difference in these scenarios, and it proves, that yes, you can legally watch movies for free sometimes.
I'm not a fan of the Copyright Gestapo, but surely you can see that there is a huge difference. If your friend lends you his physical copy, there is still only one copy of the movie floating around, which means that if you and your friend both want to watch it separately, one of you is going to have to pay for another copy. Yes, I know, Slashdotters love to quote theories that this is free advertising and actually promotes sales in the end, or theories that the information should not be restricted. Maybe that's true on a macroeconomic scale, maybe it's not. But surely you can at least see why the law distinguishes between the two acts. In one case, your friend has to forfeit his benefit to confer it upon you (at least for as long as you are in possession of the benefit). In the other case, your friend has conferred the benefit on you without depriving himself of the benefit. As a one-for-one transaction, that is a marginal loss to the owner of the copyright, because your friend has conferred a benefit that the law gave the copyright owner a limited monopoly on.
True, all works are derivative. But not all works are derivative of something that is still in copyright. If you want to (by way of completely random example) do a translation of Les Miserables and then make an english-language musical out of it, there's nobody to stop you because the original source is long out of copyright.
How about...try to establish communications with known terrorists using it. Claim you want to start your own cell. Then the NSA will track your laptop for you, for free.
A simple lawsuit will get them to tell you its location if its lost or stolen.
You included some unnecessary steps in there. The correct procedure is:
1. Operate a computer.
2. NSA tracks the computer.
3. Computer gets stolen.
4. File FOIA request to find your stolen laptop.
5. ???
6. Don't lose as much money! (Sorry, I don't see any profit, unless you make a business model out of filing FOIA requests for other people to help them locate stolen laptops.)
Oh, and backup with Carbonite. Unless this is a trivial gaming machine, your data are more valuable than your hardware.
The blast radius of the 100 MT "Tsar Bomba" could maybe have taken out several small cities, but there was never a practical way to deliver that beast. It was just a pissing match. Most of our modern warheads are well under 1 MT. More like 300 to 500 kT. The days of the 20 MT "city buster" are over. At 1 MT, the 5 psi ("everybody dies")* radius is under 3 miles for a surface burst, and the 2 psi radius (most people survive the initial blast) is under 5 miles. What you would really be concerned about is fallout, and that really depends on which direction the wind is blowing. In other words, with the wind blowing south, you could be 5 miles north of a 1 MT burst and still have an excellent chance of surviving the initial blast. At 10 miles, you probably won't even lose your south-facing windows. Not that you wouldn't still have problems. The firestorms at Hiroshima and Nagasaki caused more damage than the initial blast, disruption of infrastructure would be catastrophic, and all electronics in line of sight would be killed by EMP. But it's ridiculous and over-simplistic to claim that a modern nuke would just level multiple cities.
*It's not even that everybody within 5 psi dies. It's actually that with a fairly uniform population distribution, you can draw a radius at 5 psi, and estimate the total blast fatalities as the number of people within that radius.
The right is to remain silent. Saying, "I invoke my 5th amendment right against self-incrimination" is not remaining silent. It is manifestly speaking.
Actually, the right is:
nor shall [any person] be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself
Of course you have that right. The 5th amendment only applies to self incrimination. They can force you to testify about other things that wouldn't result in self incrimination. So, if you were on trial for tax evasion, you might be required to answer some questions about how you kept your records, but not the ones that would result in self incrimination. And they wouldn't permit you to leave the stand just because you hit one question for which the 5th applied.
No. If you are on trial, or suspected of a crime, you cannot be compelled to answer any questions about anything. You can't even be compelled to get on the witness stand. The only time you can be compelled to answer questions is if the police believe you have information about a crime somebody else committed in which you are not implicated. For example, if I witnessed my best friend commit a crime, the state could subpoena my testimony against him, even though I don't want to implicate him. But if I am accused of being his accomplice, I don't have to say anything about anything.
Of course, more than usual, this is not legal advice and you should not rely on it. Get a lawyer.
Nuke the entire planet from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
You know if SCO rises from the dead one more time I might see this as the best option.
Not that likely. SCO only has two counts left, and their big claim---that they own UNIX and everything that ever looked like UNIX---is already taken care of by the Novell judgment. I think what they have left is claims for business torts, like tortious interference with contracts or something along those lines. This looks to me like the judge is opening the case back up just to take inventory: is there anything left here to fight about? If the answer is no, he will promptly toss SCO out on its ear and the whole thing will be well and truly dead.
Why not fabricate information about a surveillance program to slander the current federal government so someone like Ron Paul can be ushered in as the saviour of America? Snowden made quite clear his political leaning after donating to Ron Paul's campaign.
Except the government hasn't even denied that they are collecting all this information. Their defense has consistently been, "Yes, we're collecting everything about everybody, but we only look at the database with a court order. Trust us." Even if that's true right now, whom do you trust to have that kind of database and never, ever abuse it?
This whole thing seems like a scandal fabricated to generate page hits or to sling political mud at opponents.
What opponents? The Washington elite of both parties have lined up to defend this thing and remind us that they need this information to protect us from the big, bad terrorists.
The fact that at a later stage, through incompetence on the part of some of the pros, the whole lot got out, isn't the fault of Manning.
How so? Manning is the one who gave it to them. If I give a loaded handgun to my five year old, and he shoots and kills a person, is it not my fault? Or is your contention that newspaper reporters (trying desperately to get any edge over the competition) are more trustworthy with sensitive data than a five year old is with a handgun?
Manning was a punk with a political agenda who recklessly endangered the lives of Americans. Snowden at least did something that could be colorably called civil disobedience. Manning is just a tool. Of course, the problem with civil disobedience is that sometimes you've got to take the hit to make your point.
In "The Five Doctors," the Time Lords gave the Master a whole new set of regenerations in exchange for helping out. So it's been plausible to extend past 13 lives for 30 years now. Nobody mentioned the mechanism for "granting" a new set, but if anybody can figure out how to cheat death, the Doctor ought to be able to. Corner unpainted.
And what is the Truth, since you seem to know so much about both the legal profession and the Truth? I once litigated a patent case where a key infringement question was whether a headphone whose rear cavity was sufficiently leaky had a meaningful acoustical compliance that could be compared to another acoustical compliance. One side said yes, the other side said no. There were no textbooks that addressed the exact configuration in question. Both sides had experts. I was genuinely thoroughly convinced that our side was right, and I thought our expert was more qualified. But it never crossed my mind to accuse opposing counsel of misconduct because they espoused a credible position that was favorable to their client and that I disagreed with. The case settled, so there was never a final determination of which side was right. But since you have the key to all Truth in the universe, perhaps you could share with me the True Answer to this puzzle.
By the way, you miss the whole point of what lawyers do in litigation. (Plenty of lawyers write contracts all day. All I do these days is write patent applications all day.) They are not there to search for some final, objective Truth. Usually, there is no final, objective Truth. They are there as advocates. Their purpose is to make the best case they can for the one of many possible interpretations of law or facts that is most favorable to their clients.
In other words, if you are searching for some ultimate, philosophical Truth, call a priest. If you are searching for a falsifiable model of an objective phenomenon, call a scientist. If you have been accused of, for example, "Reckless Endangerment," and you want somebody who will zealously argue that your particular behavior was not "reckless" according to the statutory definition, hire a lawyer.
Agreed. There's a sort of prisoner's dilemma with sports doping. Since you can safely assume that everybody else is doping, you have to dope to just compete on the same level. But since everybody's doping, the advantages of doping are somewhat canceled out. I don't know if Armstrong's victories were bestowed on his next-closest competitors, but if they were, then they probably went from a guy who doped and got caught to a guy who doped and didn't get caught.
Slashdot Mirror
They may have had good faith in their process to identify pirated copies of their works.
Fair enough, and that's a legitimate point. But I still don't see how even a reasonable process identifies VLC Media Player as a pirated copy of Game of Thrones. On the other hand, maybe there is a perfectly reasonable explanation for how it could.
Dude, you just put your name on the NSA watch list. "Regicide" has been a trigger word since Obama's 2011 Secret Executive Order 489382.19, declaring himself King of the Union For Life, and secretly changing our official name to the Holy Obaman Empire. There was a challenge to it from Congressional Republicans, who preferred Holy Reaganian Empire, but the FISA court smacked them down and declared the order constitutional. You really ought to catch up on your Coast to Coast AM backlog one of these days.
While that's true, I also fail to see how their copyright in Game of Thrones lends them a good-faith belief that they own VLC Media Player.
Yeah, I even used Vista. It deadlocked trying to update to SP1, so I was stuck on GA til the day I dropped it, but other than that it wasn't THAT bad.
While we're on the topic, my college roommate murdered me and everybody else in the house, but other than that little incident, he wasn't THAT psychotic. (If you're wondering, I post to Slashdot via IPoM (IP over Medium)).
In other words it's images of athletes linked in a particular way to via a social network.
It's far from obvious what Google is claiming based on that paragraph. Do these social profile networks have anything to do with the athlete, or are they avatars for 'friends' of the user? Why does the fact that they are adding the linking a capability to a diagramming convention commonly seen broadcast sports make this a patentable invention? If the linking itself is novel, then why is the invention purportedly about pictures of athletes?
They can go shove this patent in a plurality of the Google employees' arses where it belongs.
The links have to correspond to profiles in an online social network. The thumbnails are selected by a first user who is in the same social network as a second user, and the second user can see the thumbnails selected by the first user. It doesn't matter whether the thumbnails link to profiles about the athletes. They could just as well link to pages for friends (like some kind of fantasy sports league).
That's cute how you put words in my mouth and then tell me I'm a moron with a persecution complex for saying what I didn't say. I personally think you're an idiot because you admitted you built a shrine to Tim Burton's dirty underpants in your room. If you now deny it, that will just confirm my suspicion. (And if you don't deny it, you will be convicted by your telling silence.)
Since context clues seem to escape you, let me explain (and I'll use small words so you'll be sure to understand, you warthog-faced buffoon) (I don't generally resort to name-calling, but that seems to be the direction of the conversation). I do not believe in the dichotomy of "Global Warming" vs. "Denialism." In fact, "Global Warming" and "Climate Change" don't even mean anything. They're emotionally-charged political buzz words that dumb politicians chant to get their respective brain-dead constituencies stirred up into a partisan fervor. But since you are an admitted True Believer in the Church of Global Warming and believe that the voice of James Hansen speaks to you through Tim Burton's dirty underpants, I don't expect you to understand that.
That's a bit like saying, we know air planes crash, therefore the recent crash landing in San Francisco is not news.
No, this is more like, "Airplanes crash every single day, all over the place, so there's no reason to report the crash in San Francisco as though it's something special." There's nothing special about this crash except that somebody was able to make a tenuous link between "Google" and "Global Warming denier." If you're bothered by political cronyism, then work to do something about political cronyism. Pretending like it's newsworthy that Google contributes to politicians isn't doing something.
Seriously, how is this news? A large company is schmoozing politicians. It's fine to think it's evil and corrupt and whatever. But news is generally something that you didn't already know. And the title is just trolling for True Believers who think that "Global Warming" is a single monolithic issue, with exactly one meaning and with exactly two sides ("Evangelist" and "Denier"), with no nuance or discussion possible. (As evidence, watch the flood of comments that will follow labeling me a "denier" because I used the words "nuance" and "discussion" in connection with Global Warming.)
You can't assume that's true. The friend the disk was loaned to may never have bought the movie. It's not a loss if the purchase wasn't ever going to happen. And like you mentioned, it might equally be considered a marginal gain, because the borrower could recommend the movie to others, and cause purchases that otherwise may not have happened.
My point is that popular Slashdot theories notwithstanding, your friend has, in fact, conferred a benefit that he was not legally entitled to confer. That's why it's different from watching it together or lending you the physical disk. Everything else is just armchair lawyering.
Perhaps, but now you're talking corporate and legal ethics, not copyright. A lawyer cannot ethically bring a suit on behalf of his client unless he has a good-faith and reasonable belief that the case has merit. The original premise was a movie that "might possibly ... be confused with the Disney work." While confusion is a trademark doctrine, not a copyright doctrine, the post implies some level of substantial similarity. The copyright analysis for substantial similarity is abstraction-filtration-comparison. In other words, go down to the level of abstraction that is detailed enough to be protectable ("Deformed man falls in love with a beautiful woman" is too general), filter out anything not protectable like facts and public domain works ("Quasimodo cries 'Sanctuary!' three times"), and compare what's left. The lawyer should go through this analysis (i.e., send an associate to spend ten hours drafting a detailed memo) before he ever files the lawsuit. He should file only if he is reasonably satisfied that the accused work passes the test.
That's one way of looking at it. The other way is that there are other derivatives of Les Miserables which _are_ under copyright, and the people who own them would like to have a few words with you about exactly what you have created a derivative work of.
Which is fine, as long as you've created a musical derivative of Victor Hugo's book and not of Boubill/Natel/Kretzler book. If you have songs called "I Dreamed a Dream," "Do You Hear the People Sing," and "Bring Him Home," I'd start to worry.
This happens a lot with Disney, as they have used many public domain or out-of-copyright works as sources for their movies, and then sue if there is another work that might possibly in some way be confused with the Disney work.
They can sue if they can show that your work is a derivative of the Disney work, which is itself now a new copyrighted work. For example, if your animated feature of The Hunchback of Notre Dame happens to have three singing gargoyles, a cute, lovable little Quasimodo, a noble, heroic Phoebus, and a crappy happy ending where the boy gets the girl and they all live happily ever after, you might have a problem. But if your movie has a hulking, ugly, monstrous Quasimodo who dumps molten lead on the invading army, a vain and shallow Phoebus who loses interest in Esmeralda after sex doesn't work out, and everybody dies at the end, you should be good to go. Even if your Quasimodo cries "Sanctuary!" three times while triumphantly displaying an unconscious Esmeralda---an element common to the book and the crappy Disney movie---you're fine. You are free to copy the original. You aren't free to copy the copy.
I watch movies for free all the time over at a friend's house. He rented or bought them, I paid nothing. If he loans me the physical media, is that illegal? I still paid nothing. Now just stretch it a bit further and say he ripped it for the purposes of back up, then loaned me that copy? There isn't a lot of difference in these scenarios, and it proves, that yes, you can legally watch movies for free sometimes.
I'm not a fan of the Copyright Gestapo, but surely you can see that there is a huge difference. If your friend lends you his physical copy, there is still only one copy of the movie floating around, which means that if you and your friend both want to watch it separately, one of you is going to have to pay for another copy. Yes, I know, Slashdotters love to quote theories that this is free advertising and actually promotes sales in the end, or theories that the information should not be restricted. Maybe that's true on a macroeconomic scale, maybe it's not. But surely you can at least see why the law distinguishes between the two acts. In one case, your friend has to forfeit his benefit to confer it upon you (at least for as long as you are in possession of the benefit). In the other case, your friend has conferred the benefit on you without depriving himself of the benefit. As a one-for-one transaction, that is a marginal loss to the owner of the copyright, because your friend has conferred a benefit that the law gave the copyright owner a limited monopoly on.
True, all works are derivative. But not all works are derivative of something that is still in copyright. If you want to (by way of completely random example) do a translation of Les Miserables and then make an english-language musical out of it, there's nobody to stop you because the original source is long out of copyright.
How about...try to establish communications with known terrorists using it. Claim you want to start your own cell. Then the NSA will track your laptop for you, for free.
A simple lawsuit will get them to tell you its location if its lost or stolen.
You included some unnecessary steps in there. The correct procedure is:
1. Operate a computer.
2. NSA tracks the computer.
3. Computer gets stolen.
4. File FOIA request to find your stolen laptop.
5. ???
6. Don't lose as much money! (Sorry, I don't see any profit, unless you make a business model out of filing FOIA requests for other people to help them locate stolen laptops.)
Oh, and backup with Carbonite. Unless this is a trivial gaming machine, your data are more valuable than your hardware.
The blast radius of the 100 MT "Tsar Bomba" could maybe have taken out several small cities, but there was never a practical way to deliver that beast. It was just a pissing match. Most of our modern warheads are well under 1 MT. More like 300 to 500 kT. The days of the 20 MT "city buster" are over. At 1 MT, the 5 psi ("everybody dies")* radius is under 3 miles for a surface burst, and the 2 psi radius (most people survive the initial blast) is under 5 miles. What you would really be concerned about is fallout, and that really depends on which direction the wind is blowing. In other words, with the wind blowing south, you could be 5 miles north of a 1 MT burst and still have an excellent chance of surviving the initial blast. At 10 miles, you probably won't even lose your south-facing windows. Not that you wouldn't still have problems. The firestorms at Hiroshima and Nagasaki caused more damage than the initial blast, disruption of infrastructure would be catastrophic, and all electronics in line of sight would be killed by EMP. But it's ridiculous and over-simplistic to claim that a modern nuke would just level multiple cities.
*It's not even that everybody within 5 psi dies. It's actually that with a fairly uniform population distribution, you can draw a radius at 5 psi, and estimate the total blast fatalities as the number of people within that radius.
The right is to remain silent. Saying, "I invoke my 5th amendment right against self-incrimination" is not remaining silent. It is manifestly speaking.
Actually, the right is:
nor shall [any person] be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself
Of course you have that right. The 5th amendment only applies to self incrimination. They can force you to testify about other things that wouldn't result in self incrimination. So, if you were on trial for tax evasion, you might be required to answer some questions about how you kept your records, but not the ones that would result in self incrimination. And they wouldn't permit you to leave the stand just because you hit one question for which the 5th applied.
No. If you are on trial, or suspected of a crime, you cannot be compelled to answer any questions about anything. You can't even be compelled to get on the witness stand. The only time you can be compelled to answer questions is if the police believe you have information about a crime somebody else committed in which you are not implicated. For example, if I witnessed my best friend commit a crime, the state could subpoena my testimony against him, even though I don't want to implicate him. But if I am accused of being his accomplice, I don't have to say anything about anything.
Of course, more than usual, this is not legal advice and you should not rely on it. Get a lawyer.
Nuke the entire planet from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
You know if SCO rises from the dead one more time I might see this as the best option.
Not that likely. SCO only has two counts left, and their big claim---that they own UNIX and everything that ever looked like UNIX---is already taken care of by the Novell judgment. I think what they have left is claims for business torts, like tortious interference with contracts or something along those lines. This looks to me like the judge is opening the case back up just to take inventory: is there anything left here to fight about? If the answer is no, he will promptly toss SCO out on its ear and the whole thing will be well and truly dead.
Why not fabricate information about a surveillance program to slander the current federal government so someone like Ron Paul can be ushered in as the saviour of America? Snowden made quite clear his political leaning after donating to Ron Paul's campaign.
Except the government hasn't even denied that they are collecting all this information. Their defense has consistently been, "Yes, we're collecting everything about everybody, but we only look at the database with a court order. Trust us." Even if that's true right now, whom do you trust to have that kind of database and never, ever abuse it?
This whole thing seems like a scandal fabricated to generate page hits or to sling political mud at opponents.
What opponents? The Washington elite of both parties have lined up to defend this thing and remind us that they need this information to protect us from the big, bad terrorists.
The fact that at a later stage, through incompetence on the part of some of the pros, the whole lot got out, isn't the fault of Manning.
How so? Manning is the one who gave it to them. If I give a loaded handgun to my five year old, and he shoots and kills a person, is it not my fault? Or is your contention that newspaper reporters (trying desperately to get any edge over the competition) are more trustworthy with sensitive data than a five year old is with a handgun?
Manning was a punk with a political agenda who recklessly endangered the lives of Americans. Snowden at least did something that could be colorably called civil disobedience. Manning is just a tool. Of course, the problem with civil disobedience is that sometimes you've got to take the hit to make your point.
In "The Five Doctors," the Time Lords gave the Master a whole new set of regenerations in exchange for helping out. So it's been plausible to extend past 13 lives for 30 years now. Nobody mentioned the mechanism for "granting" a new set, but if anybody can figure out how to cheat death, the Doctor ought to be able to. Corner unpainted.
Zero-balanced dwarf star alloy. It's the perfect prison.
And what is the Truth, since you seem to know so much about both the legal profession and the Truth? I once litigated a patent case where a key infringement question was whether a headphone whose rear cavity was sufficiently leaky had a meaningful acoustical compliance that could be compared to another acoustical compliance. One side said yes, the other side said no. There were no textbooks that addressed the exact configuration in question. Both sides had experts. I was genuinely thoroughly convinced that our side was right, and I thought our expert was more qualified. But it never crossed my mind to accuse opposing counsel of misconduct because they espoused a credible position that was favorable to their client and that I disagreed with. The case settled, so there was never a final determination of which side was right. But since you have the key to all Truth in the universe, perhaps you could share with me the True Answer to this puzzle.
By the way, you miss the whole point of what lawyers do in litigation. (Plenty of lawyers write contracts all day. All I do these days is write patent applications all day.) They are not there to search for some final, objective Truth. Usually, there is no final, objective Truth. They are there as advocates. Their purpose is to make the best case they can for the one of many possible interpretations of law or facts that is most favorable to their clients.
In other words, if you are searching for some ultimate, philosophical Truth, call a priest. If you are searching for a falsifiable model of an objective phenomenon, call a scientist. If you have been accused of, for example, "Reckless Endangerment," and you want somebody who will zealously argue that your particular behavior was not "reckless" according to the statutory definition, hire a lawyer.
Agreed. There's a sort of prisoner's dilemma with sports doping. Since you can safely assume that everybody else is doping, you have to dope to just compete on the same level. But since everybody's doping, the advantages of doping are somewhat canceled out. I don't know if Armstrong's victories were bestowed on his next-closest competitors, but if they were, then they probably went from a guy who doped and got caught to a guy who doped and didn't get caught.