Aww.. it's so cute that you actually think that any of these people will serve time. The end result of all this will almost certainly be a fine which is far, far less than the profits that the corporations made.
I have read 9 free books of about 300 words length in the last week alone.
I hope that's a typo. 300 words is about the length of a single page in a paperback. You aren't actually saying you only read 9 pages worth of text in a full week, are you?
Name me a single cartel previously that could pay off the entire debit of a nation.
The Dutch East India Company. At their height in the 1600s, they were worth the equivalent of $7.4 trillion today. Not quite enough to pay off the US debit, but more then enough to pay off almost any other country's debt.
So, I buy a movie on DVD, copy it to my hard drive in violation of the license, thus piracy
Assuming you're in the United States, that's not piracy. The Betamax and the Diamond Rio cases set precedents for time and space shifting for personal use, which is what you described.
It is, however, a violation of the DMCA's anti-circumvention rules. By making it illegal to break DRM, they made it illegal to record or copy anything that has even the most rudimentary DRM. If you circumvent the DRM on the DVD in order to copy it to your hard drive, you've violated those portions of the DMCA even though the act of copying is legal.
most people can throw a record on a turntable faster than they can boot a computer, look for and start playing digital media?
I can plug my headphones into my phone, launch the MP3 player, search for the song I want from a collection of about 150 albums and be listening in a matter of seconds. And I can do that anywhere, anytime.
I'd love hear an explanation of how you can do the same thing even faster with 40 lbs of vinyl records.
if one believes that copyright is a good thing at all, then one has a ethical obligation to respect it, even if they do not agree with the means by which it is being implemented
Absolutely not.
Nobody has an ethical obligation to support every aspect of a law just because they support one part of it. The fact that the constitution included a process for adding amendments should make it clear that unquestioning obedience to the law was never the intent of our legal system.
We're quite capable of acknowledging that copyright has benefited society while still recognizing that parts of copyright law have been expanded far beyond the original intent in ways that now cause harm.
Oh bullshit. That excuse died when Google started providing Gigabit connections for $70/month which is quite comparable to the rates in Japan.
The defacto broadband monopolies have not only been refusing to upgrade their equipment (despite being given huge amounts of subsidies and tax breaks meant to let them do so), they've been degrading their service by throttling and adding caps in order to coerce their customers into paying for more expensive plans even in the most densely populated areas.
You seem to have some drastic misunderstandings of the boundaries of the law. Talking about a copyrighted work or trademarked term is not illegal, despite some companies happily pretending that they think it is in order to file lawsuits that stifle free speech by making it too expensive to defend in court.
So no. Copyright does not prevent us from talking about stories. We can talk with other people about Star Wars and dissect and argue over every tiny detail to our heart's content and Lucasfilm has no legal right to stop that.
At least not yet. Give Disney another 20 years of lobbying and they'll probably get enough laws rewritten to allow them to do it.
Prenda Law shut down, but the people behind it haven't faced any real consequences.
Paul Hansmeier was one of the people behind Prenda Law, for example. He's moved on to filing ADA violation lawsuits against small businesses using the same business model; demand payments that are a bit less than it would take to defend in court in order to drop the suit. He's filed over a hundred of those lawsuits in less than two years.
He's also trying to file for bankruptcy to get out of the debts from the Prenda Law fiasco and there are signs that he's been fraudulently transferring assets to his wife in order to avoid losing them in the bankruptcy. Because why not? Our legal system is set up to protect the wealthy owners of corporations while fucking over people who do things like take out a student loan to pay for college, after all.
It does look like he might finally get disbarred in Minnesota, but he can still continue the same scheme in other states where he's licensed until those states go through the process of disbarring him as well.
Do you think a lawyer would do this on their own without somebody giving them money and a task to do?
Absolutely. Prenda Law is well known for 'buying' rights from porn companies in order to use them to extort money from defendants. It's very doubtful that any company ever paid them to go after anyone, though the people behind Prenda law certainly had fun setting up shell corporations to try and make it look like it.
Yeah! And enough with books and music and television and movies. Everyone should stay in their basement and never expose themselves to anyone else's creative works, much less celebrate them!
Or, you know, we could continue to behave like humans have behaved since the beginning of recorded history.
Sharing stories and celebrating them is a fundamental part of human interaction. We use stories to share our knowledge, beliefs and morals. Stories entertain and educate and act as a form of common ground that people can use to connect to and understand one another.
To be fair, it is a bit difficult to differentiate between them when the USPTO keeps issuing trademarks for purely descriptive phrases like square donuts and design patents for things that would barely qualify for copyright protection.
Editing, as we know it, is dead. Perhaps not many people agree with me, but the age of editing is just about over he age of DevOps is just about over. ItÃ(TM)s a ÃoePerfect Stormà scenario in some ways. Submitters donÃ(TM)t know much about spelling and UTF and editors donÃ(TM)t know much about how the English language is supposed to work.
You have been warned repeatedly that cars are dangerous. Therefore, if you still get in a car and you get hurt or killed by a drunk driver, you only have yourself to blame.
Yeah, no. Blaming the victim doesn't accomplish anything other than making sure that nothing changes and nothing gets better.
Until companies are actually held liable for the damage that their insecure software causes, they will keep creating insecure software because it's cheaper and more profitable than taking the time to make it secure.
Why does every machine we interact with have to emulate human appearance?
What planet are you living on? The vast majority of machines (and robots) on Earth look nothing like humans and make no attempt at emulating human appearance.
To start, even with the popular meaning (which is what your link is about), electrocute refers to being shocked and that means something sudden and unpleasant. A mild electrical impulse that stimulates the nerves in your tongue in a way that makes you think you taste salt is not shocking in either the popular or dictionary sense of the word.
More significantly, the dictionary definition is obviously the meaning electrocution that the original comment was using while the person I responded to was using the popular usage which refers to any electrical shock.
My post pointed out the importance of understanding both meanings in order to avoid miscommunication. Suggesting that that ignorance of how people use words would help communication in some way would be ridiculous.
Walk into any building that sells food on this planet and ask where the low-sodium-soy-free-non-MSG-no-additives-no-preservatives-no-growth-hormones-no-HFCS isle is.
You don't even have to ask. Just use some common sense.
Start with the fresh produce department, where the bulk of what you should be eating should be coming from anyway.
Rice of all sorts, quinoa, wheat, oats and other grains are also readily available and contain none of the things you listed, so you can get some variety in your carbohydrates if you're tired of potatoes and yams.
For protein, most stores will have at least half a dozen different types of dried beans. If you don't want to eat a vegetarian diet, it's not hard to find meat and eggs produced without growth hormones, antibiotics and so forth.
In other words, the only reason you're stuck with all the stuff you've listed in your food is because you're choosing to buy products that contain all that stuff. Buy the ingredients and cook your own food and you get to choose what goes into it.
Full Definition of electrocute
transitive verb
1 : to execute (a criminal) by electricity
2 : to kill by electric shock
Notice that the definition of electrocute involves dying? When you say "mild electrocution", you're saying "mildly dead", which doesn't really make a lot of sense.
You're welcome to use the word as you want, of course (that's one of the fundamental things that makes English a living language) but when someone else is using the word, you need to be aware of the dictionary meaning of the word or communication suffers.
That having been said, electricity takes the path of least resistance. The only way the path between the tines of the fork will be through your heart or the nerves that drive your heart will be if the fork has been stabbed into your heart or your spine or, I suppose, just the right bit of your brain. In all three cases, you have much bigger and more lethal problems than the minuscule amount of current between the tines of the fork.
Slashdot Mirror
There Goes Honey Boo Boom
Aww.. it's so cute that you actually think that any of these people will serve time. The end result of all this will almost certainly be a fine which is far, far less than the profits that the corporations made.
Eyeglasses are considered to be medical devices, although they are exempted from certain regulations.
The Dutch East India Company was running drugs in the 1600s. They were huge in the opium business.
I have read 9 free books of about 300 words length in the last week alone.
I hope that's a typo. 300 words is about the length of a single page in a paperback. You aren't actually saying you only read 9 pages worth of text in a full week, are you?
Name me a single cartel previously that could pay off the entire debit of a nation.
The Dutch East India Company. At their height in the 1600s, they were worth the equivalent of $7.4 trillion today. Not quite enough to pay off the US debit, but more then enough to pay off almost any other country's debt.
You'd think that, but no. The old adage about giving someone and inch and them taking a mile is still as true as it ever was.
So, I buy a movie on DVD, copy it to my hard drive in violation of the license, thus piracy
Assuming you're in the United States, that's not piracy. The Betamax and the Diamond Rio cases set precedents for time and space shifting for personal use, which is what you described.
It is, however, a violation of the DMCA's anti-circumvention rules. By making it illegal to break DRM, they made it illegal to record or copy anything that has even the most rudimentary DRM. If you circumvent the DRM on the DVD in order to copy it to your hard drive, you've violated those portions of the DMCA even though the act of copying is legal.
This already happens in some places. Take Belgium, for example.
most people can throw a record on a turntable faster than they can boot a computer, look for and start playing digital media?
I can plug my headphones into my phone, launch the MP3 player, search for the song I want from a collection of about 150 albums and be listening in a matter of seconds. And I can do that anywhere, anytime.
I'd love hear an explanation of how you can do the same thing even faster with 40 lbs of vinyl records.
if one believes that copyright is a good thing at all, then one has a ethical obligation to respect it, even if they do not agree with the means by which it is being implemented
Absolutely not.
Nobody has an ethical obligation to support every aspect of a law just because they support one part of it. The fact that the constitution included a process for adding amendments should make it clear that unquestioning obedience to the law was never the intent of our legal system.
We're quite capable of acknowledging that copyright has benefited society while still recognizing that parts of copyright law have been expanded far beyond the original intent in ways that now cause harm.
You do realize the story is about a trademark dispute, not a copyright dispute, right?
I didn't bring up the scope of copyright because it's not the issue here.
Oh bullshit. That excuse died when Google started providing Gigabit connections for $70/month which is quite comparable to the rates in Japan.
The defacto broadband monopolies have not only been refusing to upgrade their equipment (despite being given huge amounts of subsidies and tax breaks meant to let them do so), they've been degrading their service by throttling and adding caps in order to coerce their customers into paying for more expensive plans even in the most densely populated areas.
You seem to have some drastic misunderstandings of the boundaries of the law. Talking about a copyrighted work or trademarked term is not illegal, despite some companies happily pretending that they think it is in order to file lawsuits that stifle free speech by making it too expensive to defend in court.
Copyright law was never meant to overrule freedom of speech. Copyright law was written into the original constitution and the protections given in the first amendment supercede copyright law. In point of fact, some aspects of copyright law have been ruled as unconstitutional because of this.
So no. Copyright does not prevent us from talking about stories. We can talk with other people about Star Wars and dissect and argue over every tiny detail to our heart's content and Lucasfilm has no legal right to stop that.
At least not yet. Give Disney another 20 years of lobbying and they'll probably get enough laws rewritten to allow them to do it.
Sort of, but not really.
Prenda Law shut down, but the people behind it haven't faced any real consequences.
Paul Hansmeier was one of the people behind Prenda Law, for example. He's moved on to filing ADA violation lawsuits against small businesses using the same business model; demand payments that are a bit less than it would take to defend in court in order to drop the suit. He's filed over a hundred of those lawsuits in less than two years.
He's also trying to file for bankruptcy to get out of the debts from the Prenda Law fiasco and there are signs that he's been fraudulently transferring assets to his wife in order to avoid losing them in the bankruptcy. Because why not? Our legal system is set up to protect the wealthy owners of corporations while fucking over people who do things like take out a student loan to pay for college, after all.
It does look like he might finally get disbarred in Minnesota, but he can still continue the same scheme in other states where he's licensed until those states go through the process of disbarring him as well.
Do you think a lawyer would do this on their own without somebody giving them money and a task to do?
Absolutely. Prenda Law is well known for 'buying' rights from porn companies in order to use them to extort money from defendants. It's very doubtful that any company ever paid them to go after anyone, though the people behind Prenda law certainly had fun setting up shell corporations to try and make it look like it.
Yeah! And enough with books and music and television and movies. Everyone should stay in their basement and never expose themselves to anyone else's creative works, much less celebrate them!
Or, you know, we could continue to behave like humans have behaved since the beginning of recorded history.
Sharing stories and celebrating them is a fundamental part of human interaction. We use stories to share our knowledge, beliefs and morals. Stories entertain and educate and act as a form of common ground that people can use to connect to and understand one another.
To be fair, it is a bit difficult to differentiate between them when the USPTO keeps issuing trademarks for purely descriptive phrases like square donuts and design patents for things that would barely qualify for copyright protection.
Editing, as we know it, is dead. Perhaps not many people agree with me, but the age of editing is just about over he age of DevOps is just about over. ItÃ(TM)s a ÃoePerfect Stormà scenario in some ways. Submitters donÃ(TM)t know much about spelling and UTF and editors donÃ(TM)t know much about how the English language is supposed to work.
You have been warned repeatedly that cars are dangerous. Therefore, if you still get in a car and you get hurt or killed by a drunk driver, you only have yourself to blame.
Yeah, no. Blaming the victim doesn't accomplish anything other than making sure that nothing changes and nothing gets better.
Until companies are actually held liable for the damage that their insecure software causes, they will keep creating insecure software because it's cheaper and more profitable than taking the time to make it secure.
Why does every machine we interact with have to emulate human appearance?
What planet are you living on? The vast majority of machines (and robots) on Earth look nothing like humans and make no attempt at emulating human appearance.
else if viewer.is('female')
return 'dick pic';
It really is that clear cut.
To start, even with the popular meaning (which is what your link is about), electrocute refers to being shocked and that means something sudden and unpleasant. A mild electrical impulse that stimulates the nerves in your tongue in a way that makes you think you taste salt is not shocking in either the popular or dictionary sense of the word.
More significantly, the dictionary definition is obviously the meaning electrocution that the original comment was using while the person I responded to was using the popular usage which refers to any electrical shock.
My post pointed out the importance of understanding both meanings in order to avoid miscommunication. Suggesting that that ignorance of how people use words would help communication in some way would be ridiculous.
Walk into any building that sells food on this planet and ask where the low-sodium-soy-free-non-MSG-no-additives-no-preservatives-no-growth-hormones-no-HFCS isle is.
You don't even have to ask. Just use some common sense.
Start with the fresh produce department, where the bulk of what you should be eating should be coming from anyway.
Rice of all sorts, quinoa, wheat, oats and other grains are also readily available and contain none of the things you listed, so you can get some variety in your carbohydrates if you're tired of potatoes and yams.
For protein, most stores will have at least half a dozen different types of dried beans. If you don't want to eat a vegetarian diet, it's not hard to find meat and eggs produced without growth hormones, antibiotics and so forth.
In other words, the only reason you're stuck with all the stuff you've listed in your food is because you're choosing to buy products that contain all that stuff. Buy the ingredients and cook your own food and you get to choose what goes into it.
ahem
Full Definition of electrocute
transitive verb
1 : to execute (a criminal) by electricity
2 : to kill by electric shock
Notice that the definition of electrocute involves dying? When you say "mild electrocution", you're saying "mildly dead", which doesn't really make a lot of sense.
You're welcome to use the word as you want, of course (that's one of the fundamental things that makes English a living language) but when someone else is using the word, you need to be aware of the dictionary meaning of the word or communication suffers.
That having been said, electricity takes the path of least resistance. The only way the path between the tines of the fork will be through your heart or the nerves that drive your heart will be if the fork has been stabbed into your heart or your spine or, I suppose, just the right bit of your brain. In all three cases, you have much bigger and more lethal problems than the minuscule amount of current between the tines of the fork.