All kinds. I had $8000 kicking around when I was about 25, and asked my bank to make some recommendations. J. Rusty Riley of US Bank Investments advised me to select a few options, using I think A shares instead of B shares.
He explained the difference, and I'm no dummy, but I just wanted the funds invested. I kept asking what the difference is between the two and he explained, but said he prefers A shares because that way "[he's] already paid his money."
What I didn't understand until later is that the fee goes away gradually for B shares, so that after 5 years it's essentially fee-free. A 25 year old with $8000 extra clearly is going to stick with the investment for a while, so B shares would have been the correct recommendation for me. For J. Rusty Riley, however, he earned a pretty commission and shortly retired. It's not a big difference, but I'd have $400 more invested had he made the right call *for his client*.
Short answer: Advisers see money flying around like white in a snowstorm, and want a piece of the pie. the customer should always treat financial advice as being malicious, then evaluate it to see if it stands up to scrutiny. Always scrub your input, right?
I'd moderate this retarded if I could, but it's not an option. Probably Palin had it removed. Anyway, allow me to explain.
Not sure if I'm being clear here, but a "standard change" is not an estimate - it's something we've done before and know exactly how long it takes. If you are doing any actual estimating, the more "estimating" you do vs. using historical data, the more range of error you'll have. I'll babble on this subject for a while, but that's the gist of this post.
There are different types of changes. If you're estimating something you've done a hundred times, you know exactly how long it will take. Something like custom configuration for a client, routine maintenance, things like that. You'll be correct on how long it takes.
If a customer wants a new web service, and you've never done a web service, you're going to be wrong no matter how much you quantify. You can determine how many objects you need to create/update, but you can't tell how long it will take.
In other words, estimating has to take into account many different things:
How many objects will be updated/added How many of those will be trivial vs. complex changes Level of familiarity of the person/people implementing it Assumption that the number of objects is correct, and nothing was missed Necessary documentation available *and correct* Historical accuracy of estimating (are you getting better at estimating overall?) Historical accuracy of estimating the kind of change requested (are you getting better at estimating *this*?) Overhead of gates/reviews and change control or other process Testing resource availability, familiarity with the new items, correct documentation supplied to whomever is testing
If MSDN or man page isn't correct, you're going to do a lot of debugging. If the client's web service you're connecting to doesn't match what you were given, you're doing rewrites once you hit testing. If your change is ready to go but a company-wide routing change is scheduled for the same date so you can't test your implementation, you're stuck. If the CSS works until someone enters a long comment, and you need to find a workaround to the layout, you're better off just saying won't fix.
Bottom line, the more foreign something is, the more incorrect you will be. If you are estimating something you've already done, there's not need to estimate - it's already done! So by definition, we are either dealing with something simple like search/replace and run, or something foreign where you're going to be wrong no matter what.
I'll close with - in a modern company, all code should be reusable. So you only do things once. So you can't learn to estimate more accurately, since you're always estimating something different. The only way to have accurate estimating is to have a solid team working together for a while, and doing similar work. Just limit yourself to things you know, and you'll be right.
When you "buy" Windows, you don't purchase the software. You purchase a license to run the software, on a particular number of machines (1 for the typical home user). Included is the installation media for your convenience.
If you have a license for a product, and are running it, I don't see how Microsoft could have a problem with this. They could have an opinion, but no legal basis and certainly no way to enforce their opinion.
They would have to say the "license" is simply a suggestion, and that they are selling you a specific product like a chair, such that when it becomes broken it is no longer functional, or up to you to repair. They will never do this, for many reasons. Selling a physical product means you can disassemble or alter in any way you see fit, like evening up a table's legs, which they don't want you to do to Windows. Re-selling your license (validly, e.g. by wiping your drive and switching to linux first) means they have to activate the OS on a different machine, which adds support costs, so they'd prefer you not be able to re-sell, or at least think you can't. So many reasons, but they will never sell you a physical product.
As long as you have a license, and are following it by not installing on more machines than is allowed, I don't see any loophole. It has to be legal. Of course, this depends on what you did to pirate it, so you have to be within the bounds of DMCA laws if applicable, or if your locality recognizes EULAs you might have to follow an "original media" clause, but if that's the case you just call Microsoft and say you can't use your product because the disc went bad, and they refuse while trying to get you to buy a reduced-cost license to ensure you're legit, and you have a good old-fashioned lawsuit.
Since a lawsuit involves court costs at a minimum and lawyer's time most likely, it seems biased against the average user that they would have to go through the legal system to properly obtain what they paid for. That is the key to this whole WGA mess in the first place, when WGA called you a thief even when you aren't. And you are denied usage of something you purchased. It's cheaper to buy the compliance license than fighting in court individually, so I don't get why this wasn't certified class action instantly. Probably just a poorly thought out argument, which the judge shot holes though.
Since you're going all general on us... A company I worked for used to tell its customers it was an "Agile" company. It announced "Agility Alliance" partners intended to speed time to market, and develop solutions quickly.
Internally, a new development process was rolled out that everyone had to follow. It was classic Waterfall with everything renamed. Then they addressed the shortcomings of Waterfall by adding additional planning, documentation, gate reviews, and I forgot what else.
We're agile, and we just changed our development model to prove it. Yay!
Just don't try to get to it from SQL Server. What a nightmare to set up and maintain. Queries time out, leaving the SQL job thinking it's connected but Oracle is just sitting there, for days on end. No our SQL timeouts aren't disabled.
Initial setup was a pain as well. 600MB install to get a handful of.dlls to make an Oracle.OleDB connection. The "client lite" installs didn't work one bit - kinda like some random guy putting files in a zip and telling you to put random things in random folders and run an arcane command-line utility to "install" it. Nope, doesn't work. 600MB here we go.
Universal installer - holy crap, I can watch it paint itself, like we're back in the days of NT 4 Server on a p233-MMX. Paint some lines, wait for disk IO, paint some more. Over MSTSC, the installer repaints each window 3 times. No other app behaves like that.
It might be a good database server, but it doesn't like to be connected to anything but itself. Or maybe we can just say it hates Windows. Either way, it's the part of the job I hate. Sure blame me for not being qualified, I was hired as ASP+SQL and they don't let me DBA, nor set aside time for training, and the Oracle drivers are unsupported. So it's all me fighting the beast. At least they could declaw it, or feed it before selling it to people so it doesn't immediately eat their souls.
Sitting on the couch yesterday, my gf asked when is the Stupid Bowl. So I put in a natural language query (sans quotes of course:)
when is the damn super bowl motherfucker?
The first result was "Super Bowl XLIV - New orleans Saints vs. Indianapolis Colts. Sunday, Feb. 7 2010 -6:25 pm ET on CBS" with a link to nfl.com. Each team name was a link to their team website.
I don't think they could have done a better job on the first result than that.
We wandered around the house, got bored, eventually turned on the Stupid Bowl and watched most of it. I know, cool story bro, and disqualified because none of us have gfs in real life. But I do have the screenshot of search results.
I'm going to take issue with this and say the problem is with the internet itself, RAD applications, businesses, and self-taught coders. Allow me to explain.
Half of the.NET code I write is copy/pasted from some other source, because the entire CLR is too complicated for a single person to understand. If I want to do a lookup table, there are a dozen ways to accomplish it, just using the objects provided by the runtime. I don't care how fast it is, unless it's called every page view, so I just google "C# lookup" and get piles of examples. Copy/paste, I'm done. Doesn't matter if it's from MSDN or a Microsoft blog or a random coder blog or wherever else, the code looks good and it works. I have no idea if the example failed to initialize some critical component.
My employer doesn't want to pay me to read, I am supposed to be providing output they can sell to clients/customers. So I don't get a lot of time set aside for training. The way I learned.NET was our tech lead opened up a team meeting and said "I think.NET is the way of the future, is there anyone opposed to going this way?" And the only real objection was it will take longer to produce the next version of our deliverables. Management was fine with that, so we took the leap.
We didn't sit down in a classroom and learn how things are supposed to be done. We didn't get a copy of something like Petzold's Windows bible, or Prosise MFC bible where it goes into depth about what you're doing and what things mean when the IDE puts junk in places for you. Visual Studio 2003 and above make it very easy for you to have no idea what you're doing, and still accomplish something. A quick google search can fill in all of the gaps so you have something functional.
The same with 'Learn X in 24 hours' or 'X for dummies', lots of code samples exclude error checking/handling. Oh yes, MSDN is full of these examples. Sometimes they suggest "error handling has been omitted for clarity", while sometimes it's just assumed. Other times the author has no idea they should be handling errors because it works for them.
So you have piles of coders learning on-the-fly, either because they can't afford the big book or because they have deadlines to meet. Copy/paste something without taking the time to fully understand what's happening, and you get potential problems. In short, easy access to code snippets makes you think you're able to do lots of cool stuff in a new language. Unless you take the time to understand everything you're running, every line of code, you're going to have problems at some point.
Why do you think people still make mistakes like putting form variables directly into SQL? The code snippets are out there, either in the corporate source control or on random blogs. Copy, paste, pwned.
An example, for those of you who wish to tl;dr me you can stop now.
I used MyGeneration templates to come up with database calls for our SQL database, which used Data Access Blocks or some kind of MS best practice to write functions which called stored procedures, so you could essentialy call stored procs exactly like any other function. It generates a call for every stored proc in the database, so you can make fundamental changes to the data structure, re-generate the data access library in a few seconds, and then fix the few calls where the parameters changed.
Very handy, except that the 'execute non-query' template had a bug in it, where the data connection never closed. We never had any problems with this app in production for 3 years. Suddenly in testing, we got a pooled connection exceeded timeout. Turns out the bug only shows up when the call happens most page views, when logging user visits in this case. Other non-query calls happened infrequently enough that they never exceeded the 100 connection default limit, live and in production for 3 years.
Our tech lead found MyGeneration, recommended it, and we used it ever since. Not until last month di
What you quoted was not quoted nor cited in the article, just printed - it has no value other than being the opinion and/or understanding of the author of the article.
If the Feds can request phone records using a Post-It note, and web sites continue to say "we will hand over your data to the Feds in the course of investigating a crime", you can bet there will be serious problems *even if they stick to the letter of what you quoted*.
Feds can ask for anything they want, they just can't demand it. Service providers can turn over data voluntarily if their "privacy policy" says they will.
This is nothing but a civil rights abuser asking for more ways to abuse its citizens.
The chance of this being random is very slim no matter how you look at it, as long as you don't simplify to the point of abstraction. If you're looking for 2 possible answers, they should have found 50% of the patients "aware". So their equipment was faulty, leading to 4/23, but only when the patient, unknown to the fMRI machine, was diagnosed as vegetative?
The team told him to use "motor" imagery like a tennis match to indicate "yes" and "spatial" imagery like thinking about roaming the streets for a "no".
You're looking for one part of the brain activating for yes, another for no, not "off/on" for a single region. Activating a different region, or none at all, or both regions, is a failed attempt. Sure random noise can happen. But the article (not even the research paper) says the fMRI was able to detect activity in the pre-motor cortex. The motor cortex is divisible into 6 main parts, of which pre-motor is but one. And spatial processing happens in a different part of the brain entirely. The brain itself has a bunch of fMRI - distinguishable parts. The bottom of this article has a good selection. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_cortex
Maybe we can't distinguish all of the listed areas using fMRI, but there are a lot of brain parts we can distinguish. Lots more than just the two used in the research. I'd believe this was faked before I'd believe it was random.
Are you kidding? A patient in a truly vegetative state would not respond to stimuli in any way, and certainly not when asked a direct question.
100% of the healthy volunteers were able to produce a readable mental signal change on command, which suggests the equipment is either biased towards reading a signal, or it actually reads something.
4 of 23 vegetative patients were able to generate a signal. Not just some random activity, but specific activity in a specific location of the brain. Were the equipment faulty, 100% of them would also respond positively. There is no way this is random noise, to activate a specific part of the brain at the end of a question.
It took an entire minute for researchers to determine the author's mother's name, suggesting there is a margin of error. They did get it correct eventually, as well as whether he had children.
Your 5/6 number suggests you're talking about the single Belgian patient who, being vegetative, responded correctly to 5/6 of the known questions. I can't tell whether this is a double-blind study, but if it took 1 minute to guess a fully conscious person's details, they obviously aren't using a perfected technique.
Do that with enough patients and you'll find a match.
Do that with enough vegetative patients, who show no response whatsoever because they are not aware of their surroundings, and you'll be surprised to get 1/6 of the questions right. Very surprised. 5/6 right, in a person who is not supposed to be aware that he's being questioned, and cannot activate a given portion of the brain on demand if he had enough awareness to want to, is downright astonishing. That they only studied 23 people and found 4, at random, is a breakthrough.
They didn't take 23 people who were suspected of possible being non-vegetative. They took 23 people who doctors agreed were all in a vegetative state. The expected false positives from random noise was ZERO. If you hooked up the wires to a random number generator and got 5/6, you'd have a point. These guys hooked up wires to a random number generator that was turned off. If you got *any* response out of that random number generator, being turned off, you'd be surprised. If it sent a particular number for 'yes' and a different one for 'no' once, you'd probably shit yourself. After 5 out of 6 times you'd call the news, Guiness book of world records, Ripley, James Randi, and everyone else you knew.
2 out of 51 sounds like a worse-than-chance result, but I think you're misinterpreting. We are not looking for whether 2/51 is above or below statistical significance.
The state of those initial 51 was presumed to be the same. Research has shown there is a variation among them, such that they are not all in the same state. We are not discussing the effectiveness of this method to determine awareness of known vegetative patients, which 2/51 would be a terrible result and possibly chance.
What you're looking for is the statistical error of each of those 2 people - what is the potential error of each finding, and could each be determined by chance? In other words, maybe 46 people could show 100% certainty of no awareness, 3 showed whatever, I didn't read that part closely, and 2 showed 100% certainty of awareness. That is a possibility, but like you I haven't seen the estimated error on each individual diagnosis.
(apologies for the formatting, I just created this 20 minutes ago for my own purposes). Bottom line: the entire intention of this Office.Microsoft.com "feature" is misguidedly implemented, showing a complete lack of testing using the common 'alternative' platform.
Visiting Office.Microsoft.com with FireFox and NoScript gives the following message:
<noscript>
<table border=0 height=95%>
<tr><td valign=middle>
<div><center><b>One Moment Please...</b></center></div><br>
<div>To help optimize how your Web pages are displayed, we are checking to see if a 2007 Microsoft Office program is installed.</div><br>
<div>If this page does not automatically redirect, you have scripts disabled. <a href='/_services/errors/error.aspx?id=5'>See more information on scripts.</a></div><br>
<div><a href='http://office.microsoft.com/search/redir.aspx?assetid=FX010562591033'>Follow this link if the page is not redirected.</a></div>
</td></tr>
</table>
</noscript>
Enabling scripts, loading the page, then disabling scripts, results in the message at the top of the page, along with the requested page content (which doesn't appear prior to loading scripts):
Warning: This site requires the use of scripts, which your browser does not currently allow. See how to enable scripts.
That seems to be a disconnect. The second message shows that the site can be used with scripts disabled. The only reason I see the "One Moment Please..." message is the lack of cookies. In theory, the browser would check which versions are installed, and then show customized content for your version. IE browser allows ActiveX controls which could access the local filesystem, which can report that information.
VBScript function ofctestax() creates objects using the following CLSID values and then calls GetOfficeX() and/or GetOfficeLcid() functions to see what's installed:
4453D895-F2A1-4A38-A285-1EF9BD3F6D5D
6632AA50-49DC-475B-B911-A02B84C7C794
C9712B19-838B-45A5-ABF2-9A315DDDED50
It then calls the function ofcpost() which sets cookies describing which versions are installed. ofctestax() is called inline from a script at the bottom of the page. How does this work in FireFox?
if (typeof(window.external)=='undefined') {
if (navigator.mimeTypes['application/x-msoffice12'] != null && !IsOpera())
document.write("<embed id='ofcnp' type='application/x-msoffice12' f='ofcpost' width='0' height='0'>");
else if (navigator.mimeTypes['application/x-msoffice'] != null && !IsOpera())
document.write("<embed id='ofcnp' type='application/x-msoffice' f='ofcpost' width='0' height='0'>");
else
ofcpost('N','0','N','0'); } else {
if (typeof(ofctestax)!='undefined')
ofctestax();
else
ofcpost('N','0','N','0'); }
ofctestax is a VBScript function, so in IE and any browsers supporting VBScript, it will run. In other browsers, it will not be recognized, and thus be undefined. ofcpost() function is called with default values, setting cookies to uninformative values.
With no cookies, this happens, because ofcpost() calls post() function:
<script language='JavaScript'><!-- function post() {
The recipient fax usually prints off some relevant information in the margins. If the document were rotated, it could overwrite this data, or make it harder to find. In the case of quasi-legible printing, it's important to know that you're looking at it the correct way.
Put it this way. If we ever switch to first-to-file, you're going to want a good record of when you faxed something. Or someone contests your patent based on prior art around the time if your submission. Or lots of reasons.
Everything on the page should be right side up at the same time, including marks made by the recipient fax. It's a technicality, but makes for consistent documentation. And if they politely let you know you goofed, you can try again.
I don't read it as being "upside down" top to bottom, as in faxing the back of the paper, I read it as "upside down" when looking at the paper as a two-dimensional grid. So nobody need argue with me on that.
I think it's because I tend to comment in bursts - nothing for a week, then 2 or 3 at a time, and then only when I have something useful to say. Except for the odd sarcastic or joking comment, or if I'm heavily medicated.
Plus I don't log in all that much, so when I do I have like 3 comments all at +5, or something like that, and bingo 15 mods.
Posting anon, but if you want to look for patterns in my comments my username is b4dc0d3r. I tend to get in to conversations late so most are un-moderated (+1 for logged in, with karma bonus). So it only takes 3 people willing to waste points on me to get +5.
Maybe it was my age when I saw it, but to me I don't care what's in the books - the Lynch movie is what the Dune universe is to me, complete with the TOTO soundtrack, sting, the floating fat man, and all the stuff not in the book.
He'll never be able to erase that, and might as well not even try.
Just do the right thing and make it a long movie, anything shorter than 2.5 hours won't even scratch the surface - it will be like "a day in the life of Yoda" vs. the original Star Wars trilogy. And they better over-shoot, planning to cut a lot so we have a balance between character development, setting, and plot. None of this 10-minute introduction crap which establishes everything you need to know to understand the characters' motivations.
In short, I expect massive fail unless they rely on 3D as a gimmick like Avatar did. Impressive it will be, but forgotten like Dune 2000 it will also be.
Please prove me wrong, two generations of Dune fans deserve it.
The current hotspot is now having a footer at the bottom which: -Floats at the bottom of the page, regardless of how little content there is -Expands down the page when content overflows, so it doesn't cover content. -Reacts when you do things like hide/show content.
So many different ways to do it, all with little quirks. Bottom line, CSS is designed as a system of browser HINTS which the browser uses to determine how content is laid out when the window changes size/shape. It has some hacks for specifying specific layouts, but it is absolutely not browser-based. It is more oriented towards print layout, where the output size is static. You can make some great layouts if you make assumptions about the size, but they break as soon as you re-size the window. Flow and float and similar ideas upon which CSS is based tend to really mis-align what you intended.
I'm still using tables for certain things, and I'll never give it up until CSS is replaced by something oriented towards browser layout.
You should talk to this guy, who says his school would have had to buy the SDK and sign some contract thing. Don't you think the Apple representative would have said oops it's a mistake, you guys can have everything without problem? One of you ain't square on the mark.
You, and the article, seem to think that parents and children will use the same computers.
Maybe Mom needs an iPad, Dad prefers an iPhone, Susie gets a Droid, and Bobby gets a Palm Pre. All of the little Bobbys will figure ways around the limitations of his phone at the same rate that a child would had the entire family had a C64, or anything with GW-BASIC. If Bobby has an iPad, he'll have a chance as good as any kid whose parents couldn't find a computer.
It's a good point to keep in mind, but it's one company, while Android and others are going Open. The market is in the same shape it used to be.
Please consider cleaning up your argument - you're saying the RIAA is causing the convoluted licensing problem. RIAA is only the recording industry, separate from songwriting. There's a copyright on the song that goes one place, a copyright on the recording of that song that goes another place, and the RIAA can't do much to change it. The only option they have is to stop taking over the recording copyright, leaving it with the artist, which it won't do.
Public performance of a song defeats the purpose of selling to individuals. If I sell a single MP3 from my website and someone downloads it and plays it for everyone in the world, 100 people or less at a time, I can either consider that an incredible free advertising opportunity, or 3.5 billion potential lost sales opportunities. The recording industry is in the business of making and selling recordings, so they kinda lean towards the "please don't give our music away free" side. In other words, they won't change this either.
You're asking for a basic rewrite of copyright law, which would affect industries other than just the recording aspect. Not saying it's wrong to think that way, just that you seem to think it's a simple change of thinking by recording studios, which is way far from reality.
More likely, some CEO hears about digital distribution and someone mentions you can just copy and paste from one computer to another, and the CEO tasks someone to action a plan to stop it. Sure some segments are driven by repeat purchases, but most DRM doesn't have that effect.
It doesn't matter if it's a successful implementation, it's an action item that came out of a meeting and someone has to either do it or explain why it's bad. "Customers hate it" is only valid if it also means "Customers won't buy it".
Encrypting the repair codes on an automobile is one of those things customers might not like, but since it's such a small part of the car buying experience, won't change a significant number of purchase decisions. People who buy DRM music downloads find it mostly works for them, so they don't think about whether they can put it on another device - until it's too late and the library is too large. If you want BioShock for PC, you get DRM. Unless you know how to get it without DRM...
We can focus on intent all we want, but intent will change as new applications and situations arise. The only thing that will stop DRM is just not buying anything with DRM, bringing up the "Customers won't buy it" argument.
If your business plan means you use one proprietary system (IE) to access another proprietary system, and your support contract doesn't ensure both parties are in lock step, you fucked up.
Any time someone says "don't take away that functionality, I need it for these third party apps", that's a fuck up.
If access is business-critical, don't use a proprietary system where you're at the whim of the vendor. We've all learned that at one point or another, some businesses are slow to learn.
So it might be company policy to depend on a vendor that doesn't care about you - time to change the policy, and expose the fuck up. Worst case, they fire you for complaining, and you get to tell an interviewer you got fired for raising the alarm on an inevitable failure. There's a chance you won't change anything. Anything better than that is an improvement you can probably live with.
This is not about downloading at all. Actual damages depends on how many times she *uploaded* the songs, not downloaded. She was not authorized to copy these songs, yet did so as part of the workings of P2P. You can set files to be unshared once downloaded, but during the initial transfer it was (at the time she is accused of copyright infringement) difficult to configure any P2P software to download parts without uploading parts.
If she uploaded a song available as a single for $3 to 18,000 people, $54k is perfect. You're saying that it's impossible for one person to be responsible for thousands of lost sales, but I think it's impossible to support that assertion. A courtroom is the only place that can be proven, and that's what the RIAA is trying to do. If I download a song and leave it in my shared folder for 3 years, how many full and complete uploads did I make? You're saying you have an answer to that, and the answer is less than "thousands". I'm saying it depends on the evidence.
The defendant apparently replaced her hard drive, so we don't know how long the files were being shared, and whether they were moved out of the shared folder, because the evidence is gone. The plaintiff only confirmed that the files were being shared, not that the defendant was uploading full copies. So IN THIS CASE it will be difficult to prove damages. You are stating as if in every case it will be impossible to prove damages, which is certainly not true. Several P2P applications actually keep track of the number of bytes of a song uploaded, and some present the data in a way that you can make a reasonable inference of the number of complete copies uploaded by the client. Each complete copy is a plain-as-day copyright infringement.
How do you calculate damages based on the number of uploads? It would be difficult to argue in a courtroom that you can tell which uploads would have resulted in a sale, had the upload not happened. It would be *very* difficult to argue that someone else would have uploaded it if the defendant hadn't, and therefore the defendant is not liable, because court cases use actual evidence, not theories. If the other person had uploaded, the other person would be the defendant. The only obvious course of action is for the plaintiff to claim that every upload represents a person on the other side who downloaded something they would otherwise have had to pay for. Regardless of how many studies show p2p basically serving as free advertising, a substitute for payola, and a self-selected sub-population who wouldn't pay for things they couldn't download, you would have to find the identity of each person and prove whether they fit the criteria of being a potential consumer. That's the only fair way to calculate actual damages. Even if it weren't too completely ridiculous and onerous to ask a plaintiff to prove this, again the defendant destroyed the evidence needed to prove this.
If I print 50,000 copies of your latest novel and sell them to people, you wouldn't have to find every person and determine whether they would have bought a copy had I not provided it at significant discount, you'd rely on my records and any other witnesses you could find. Unfortunately, copyright in the digital age means that uploading a 3MB MP3 file is the same as printing and selling a book. It might not be right, and there are plenty of arguments against it, but none of that matters in a court trial. When considering copyright infringement, the commercial gain is one of 4 canonical evaluations, including how much of a work was copied and the intended use. You can't argue that because she didn't sell the copy, only give it away, that it doesn't qualify as infringement, because she probably did upload the entire work, and the potential audience was every p2p user at the time. Well you can argue anything you want but it won't get you anywhere.
Also, keep in mind the defendant was sharing many more songs - the 24 on the list is just the ones the RIAA knows for certain were b
Even if you did make money, no one should begrudge what (little, admittedly) you earn by bringing issues of obvious interest to light for those who wish to read.
And to the masses: I don't check this blog until Slashdot tells me to - it's just not in the front of my brain every day when I have to do things like ensure bills are paid and this thing I like to call "my job" I still like to keep up to date on the MAFIAA when possible.
In short, it's a follow-up to an ongoing story. "Time out" might be par for the course, but it's a course we've been following. So we follow. Except for that one whiner Grond (15515), who appears to be a computer scientist and hobbyist paralegal.
Not sure you read the article. HP completed purchase of EDS after the trial ended, so the only thing HP has to do with this lawsuit is it owns the losing party, which it didn't during the contract. The judgement took 17 months to reach from the end of the trial in July 2008. So the trial ended, and the judge sat around meditating for 17 months, and HP bought EDS.
EDS did not want some sort of CRM, BSkyB did. EDS is an outsourcing company (was, now it's part of HP) and would provide CRM, not purchase it. EDS, now owned by HP, had fraudulently misrepresented itself in a sales pitch in 2000 for the system
It's more likely that EDS promised some sort of a system, and BSkyB led EDS around through as you said scope creep. EDS thinks it upheld its end of the bargain, BSkyB thinks its requests were within reason. Of course, I don't know the details of the contract, nor any more specifics than what's in the article, but your version is completely wrong.
If you take a look at how tax law evolved, it makes more sense. Poor people and certain actions get breaks, either to encourage behavior or to make up for taxes spent elsewhere. Then of course politicians try to pander to anyone and everyone, ultimately giving every person multiple breaks for various reasons and it got out of hand.
If we could have a few simple rules, that would be great,and fewer forms would be great too. More importantly is the average person being able to read and comprehend the law they are supposed to follow.
Slashdot Mirror
All kinds. I had $8000 kicking around when I was about 25, and asked my bank to make some recommendations. J. Rusty Riley of US Bank Investments advised me to select a few options, using I think A shares instead of B shares.
He explained the difference, and I'm no dummy, but I just wanted the funds invested. I kept asking what the difference is between the two and he explained, but said he prefers A shares because that way "[he's] already paid his money."
What I didn't understand until later is that the fee goes away gradually for B shares, so that after 5 years it's essentially fee-free. A 25 year old with $8000 extra clearly is going to stick with the investment for a while, so B shares would have been the correct recommendation for me. For J. Rusty Riley, however, he earned a pretty commission and shortly retired. It's not a big difference, but I'd have $400 more invested had he made the right call *for his client*.
Short answer: Advisers see money flying around like white in a snowstorm, and want a piece of the pie. the customer should always treat financial advice as being malicious, then evaluate it to see if it stands up to scrutiny. Always scrub your input, right?
I'd moderate this retarded if I could, but it's not an option. Probably Palin had it removed. Anyway, allow me to explain.
Not sure if I'm being clear here, but a "standard change" is not an estimate - it's something we've done before and know exactly how long it takes. If you are doing any actual estimating, the more "estimating" you do vs. using historical data, the more range of error you'll have. I'll babble on this subject for a while, but that's the gist of this post.
There are different types of changes. If you're estimating something you've done a hundred times, you know exactly how long it will take. Something like custom configuration for a client, routine maintenance, things like that. You'll be correct on how long it takes.
If a customer wants a new web service, and you've never done a web service, you're going to be wrong no matter how much you quantify. You can determine how many objects you need to create/update, but you can't tell how long it will take.
In other words, estimating has to take into account many different things:
How many objects will be updated/added
How many of those will be trivial vs. complex changes
Level of familiarity of the person/people implementing it
Assumption that the number of objects is correct, and nothing was missed
Necessary documentation available *and correct*
Historical accuracy of estimating (are you getting better at estimating overall?)
Historical accuracy of estimating the kind of change requested (are you getting better at estimating *this*?)
Overhead of gates/reviews and change control or other process
Testing resource availability, familiarity with the new items, correct documentation supplied to whomever is testing
If MSDN or man page isn't correct, you're going to do a lot of debugging. If the client's web service you're connecting to doesn't match what you were given, you're doing rewrites once you hit testing. If your change is ready to go but a company-wide routing change is scheduled for the same date so you can't test your implementation, you're stuck. If the CSS works until someone enters a long comment, and you need to find a workaround to the layout, you're better off just saying won't fix.
Bottom line, the more foreign something is, the more incorrect you will be. If you are estimating something you've already done, there's not need to estimate - it's already done! So by definition, we are either dealing with something simple like search/replace and run, or something foreign where you're going to be wrong no matter what.
I'll close with - in a modern company, all code should be reusable. So you only do things once. So you can't learn to estimate more accurately, since you're always estimating something different. The only way to have accurate estimating is to have a solid team working together for a while, and doing similar work. Just limit yourself to things you know, and you'll be right.
When you "buy" Windows, you don't purchase the software. You purchase a license to run the software, on a particular number of machines (1 for the typical home user). Included is the installation media for your convenience.
If you have a license for a product, and are running it, I don't see how Microsoft could have a problem with this. They could have an opinion, but no legal basis and certainly no way to enforce their opinion.
They would have to say the "license" is simply a suggestion, and that they are selling you a specific product like a chair, such that when it becomes broken it is no longer functional, or up to you to repair. They will never do this, for many reasons. Selling a physical product means you can disassemble or alter in any way you see fit, like evening up a table's legs, which they don't want you to do to Windows. Re-selling your license (validly, e.g. by wiping your drive and switching to linux first) means they have to activate the OS on a different machine, which adds support costs, so they'd prefer you not be able to re-sell, or at least think you can't. So many reasons, but they will never sell you a physical product.
As long as you have a license, and are following it by not installing on more machines than is allowed, I don't see any loophole. It has to be legal. Of course, this depends on what you did to pirate it, so you have to be within the bounds of DMCA laws if applicable, or if your locality recognizes EULAs you might have to follow an "original media" clause, but if that's the case you just call Microsoft and say you can't use your product because the disc went bad, and they refuse while trying to get you to buy a reduced-cost license to ensure you're legit, and you have a good old-fashioned lawsuit.
Since a lawsuit involves court costs at a minimum and lawyer's time most likely, it seems biased against the average user that they would have to go through the legal system to properly obtain what they paid for. That is the key to this whole WGA mess in the first place, when WGA called you a thief even when you aren't. And you are denied usage of something you purchased. It's cheaper to buy the compliance license than fighting in court individually, so I don't get why this wasn't certified class action instantly. Probably just a poorly thought out argument, which the judge shot holes though.
Since you're going all general on us... A company I worked for used to tell its customers it was an "Agile" company. It announced "Agility Alliance" partners intended to speed time to market, and develop solutions quickly.
Internally, a new development process was rolled out that everyone had to follow. It was classic Waterfall with everything renamed. Then they addressed the shortcomings of Waterfall by adding additional planning, documentation, gate reviews, and I forgot what else.
We're agile, and we just changed our development model to prove it. Yay!
*sigh*
Just don't try to get to it from SQL Server. What a nightmare to set up and maintain. Queries time out, leaving the SQL job thinking it's connected but Oracle is just sitting there, for days on end. No our SQL timeouts aren't disabled.
Initial setup was a pain as well. 600MB install to get a handful of .dlls to make an Oracle.OleDB connection. The "client lite" installs didn't work one bit - kinda like some random guy putting files in a zip and telling you to put random things in random folders and run an arcane command-line utility to "install" it. Nope, doesn't work. 600MB here we go.
Universal installer - holy crap, I can watch it paint itself, like we're back in the days of NT 4 Server on a p233-MMX. Paint some lines, wait for disk IO, paint some more. Over MSTSC, the installer repaints each window 3 times. No other app behaves like that.
It might be a good database server, but it doesn't like to be connected to anything but itself. Or maybe we can just say it hates Windows. Either way, it's the part of the job I hate. Sure blame me for not being qualified, I was hired as ASP+SQL and they don't let me DBA, nor set aside time for training, and the Oracle drivers are unsupported. So it's all me fighting the beast. At least they could declaw it, or feed it before selling it to people so it doesn't immediately eat their souls.
Sitting on the couch yesterday, my gf asked when is the Stupid Bowl. So I put in a natural language query (sans quotes of course:)
The first result was "Super Bowl XLIV - New orleans Saints vs. Indianapolis Colts. Sunday, Feb. 7 2010 -6:25 pm ET on CBS" with a link to nfl.com. Each team name was a link to their team website.
I don't think they could have done a better job on the first result than that.
We wandered around the house, got bored, eventually turned on the Stupid Bowl and watched most of it. I know, cool story bro, and disqualified because none of us have gfs in real life. But I do have the screenshot of search results.
I'm going to take issue with this and say the problem is with the internet itself, RAD applications, businesses, and self-taught coders. Allow me to explain.
Half of the .NET code I write is copy/pasted from some other source, because the entire CLR is too complicated for a single person to understand. If I want to do a lookup table, there are a dozen ways to accomplish it, just using the objects provided by the runtime. I don't care how fast it is, unless it's called every page view, so I just google "C# lookup" and get piles of examples. Copy/paste, I'm done. Doesn't matter if it's from MSDN or a Microsoft blog or a random coder blog or wherever else, the code looks good and it works. I have no idea if the example failed to initialize some critical component.
My employer doesn't want to pay me to read, I am supposed to be providing output they can sell to clients/customers. So I don't get a lot of time set aside for training. The way I learned .NET was our tech lead opened up a team meeting and said "I think .NET is the way of the future, is there anyone opposed to going this way?" And the only real objection was it will take longer to produce the next version of our deliverables. Management was fine with that, so we took the leap.
We didn't sit down in a classroom and learn how things are supposed to be done. We didn't get a copy of something like Petzold's Windows bible, or Prosise MFC bible where it goes into depth about what you're doing and what things mean when the IDE puts junk in places for you. Visual Studio 2003 and above make it very easy for you to have no idea what you're doing, and still accomplish something. A quick google search can fill in all of the gaps so you have something functional.
The same with 'Learn X in 24 hours' or 'X for dummies', lots of code samples exclude error checking/handling. Oh yes, MSDN is full of these examples. Sometimes they suggest "error handling has been omitted for clarity", while sometimes it's just assumed. Other times the author has no idea they should be handling errors because it works for them.
So you have piles of coders learning on-the-fly, either because they can't afford the big book or because they have deadlines to meet. Copy/paste something without taking the time to fully understand what's happening, and you get potential problems. In short, easy access to code snippets makes you think you're able to do lots of cool stuff in a new language. Unless you take the time to understand everything you're running, every line of code, you're going to have problems at some point.
Why do you think people still make mistakes like putting form variables directly into SQL? The code snippets are out there, either in the corporate source control or on random blogs. Copy, paste, pwned.
An example, for those of you who wish to tl;dr me you can stop now.
I used MyGeneration templates to come up with database calls for our SQL database, which used Data Access Blocks or some kind of MS best practice to write functions which called stored procedures, so you could essentialy call stored procs exactly like any other function. It generates a call for every stored proc in the database, so you can make fundamental changes to the data structure, re-generate the data access library in a few seconds, and then fix the few calls where the parameters changed.
Very handy, except that the 'execute non-query' template had a bug in it, where the data connection never closed. We never had any problems with this app in production for 3 years. Suddenly in testing, we got a pooled connection exceeded timeout. Turns out the bug only shows up when the call happens most page views, when logging user visits in this case. Other non-query calls happened infrequently enough that they never exceeded the 100 connection default limit, live and in production for 3 years.
Our tech lead found MyGeneration, recommended it, and we used it ever since. Not until last month di
What you quoted was not quoted nor cited in the article, just printed - it has no value other than being the opinion and/or understanding of the author of the article.
If the Feds can request phone records using a Post-It note, and web sites continue to say "we will hand over your data to the Feds in the course of investigating a crime", you can bet there will be serious problems *even if they stick to the letter of what you quoted*.
Feds can ask for anything they want, they just can't demand it. Service providers can turn over data voluntarily if their "privacy policy" says they will.
This is nothing but a civil rights abuser asking for more ways to abuse its citizens.
The thread coils back on itself at this point. http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1537060&cid=31023214
Including "4 out of 23 is not a success rate - it's a misdiagnosis rate!" http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1537060&cid=31023496
And more http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1537060&cid=31024060
The chance of this being random is very slim no matter how you look at it, as long as you don't simplify to the point of abstraction. If you're looking for 2 possible answers, they should have found 50% of the patients "aware". So their equipment was faulty, leading to 4/23, but only when the patient, unknown to the fMRI machine, was diagnosed as vegetative?
You're looking for one part of the brain activating for yes, another for no, not "off/on" for a single region. Activating a different region, or none at all, or both regions, is a failed attempt. Sure random noise can happen. But the article (not even the research paper) says the fMRI was able to detect activity in the pre-motor cortex. The motor cortex is divisible into 6 main parts, of which pre-motor is but one. And spatial processing happens in a different part of the brain entirely. The brain itself has a bunch of fMRI - distinguishable parts. The bottom of this article has a good selection. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_cortex
Maybe we can't distinguish all of the listed areas using fMRI, but there are a lot of brain parts we can distinguish. Lots more than just the two used in the research. I'd believe this was faked before I'd believe it was random.
Are you kidding? A patient in a truly vegetative state would not respond to stimuli in any way, and certainly not when asked a direct question.
100% of the healthy volunteers were able to produce a readable mental signal change on command, which suggests the equipment is either biased towards reading a signal, or it actually reads something.
4 of 23 vegetative patients were able to generate a signal. Not just some random activity, but specific activity in a specific location of the brain. Were the equipment faulty, 100% of them would also respond positively. There is no way this is random noise, to activate a specific part of the brain at the end of a question.
It took an entire minute for researchers to determine the author's mother's name, suggesting there is a margin of error. They did get it correct eventually, as well as whether he had children.
Your 5/6 number suggests you're talking about the single Belgian patient who, being vegetative, responded correctly to 5/6 of the known questions. I can't tell whether this is a double-blind study, but if it took 1 minute to guess a fully conscious person's details, they obviously aren't using a perfected technique.
Do that with enough vegetative patients, who show no response whatsoever because they are not aware of their surroundings, and you'll be surprised to get 1/6 of the questions right. Very surprised. 5/6 right, in a person who is not supposed to be aware that he's being questioned, and cannot activate a given portion of the brain on demand if he had enough awareness to want to, is downright astonishing. That they only studied 23 people and found 4, at random, is a breakthrough.
They didn't take 23 people who were suspected of possible being non-vegetative. They took 23 people who doctors agreed were all in a vegetative state. The expected false positives from random noise was ZERO. If you hooked up the wires to a random number generator and got 5/6, you'd have a point. These guys hooked up wires to a random number generator that was turned off. If you got *any* response out of that random number generator, being turned off, you'd be surprised. If it sent a particular number for 'yes' and a different one for 'no' once, you'd probably shit yourself. After 5 out of 6 times you'd call the news, Guiness book of world records, Ripley, James Randi, and everyone else you knew.
There is no way this is random.
2 out of 51 sounds like a worse-than-chance result, but I think you're misinterpreting. We are not looking for whether 2/51 is above or below statistical significance.
The state of those initial 51 was presumed to be the same. Research has shown there is a variation among them, such that they are not all in the same state. We are not discussing the effectiveness of this method to determine awareness of known vegetative patients, which 2/51 would be a terrible result and possibly chance.
What you're looking for is the statistical error of each of those 2 people - what is the potential error of each finding, and could each be determined by chance? In other words, maybe 46 people could show 100% certainty of no awareness, 3 showed whatever, I didn't read that part closely, and 2 showed 100% certainty of awareness. That is a possibility, but like you I haven't seen the estimated error on each individual diagnosis.
(apologies for the formatting, I just created this 20 minutes ago for my own purposes). Bottom line: the entire intention of this Office.Microsoft.com "feature" is misguidedly implemented, showing a complete lack of testing using the common 'alternative' platform.
Visiting Office.Microsoft.com with FireFox and NoScript gives the following message:
Enabling scripts, loading the page, then disabling scripts, results in the message at the top of the page, along with the requested page content (which doesn't appear prior to loading scripts):
Warning: This site requires the use of scripts, which your browser does not currently allow. See how to enable scripts.
That seems to be a disconnect. The second message shows that the site can be used with scripts disabled. The only reason I see the "One Moment Please..." message is the lack of cookies. In theory, the browser would check which versions are installed, and then show customized content for your version. IE browser allows ActiveX controls which could access the local filesystem, which can report that information.
VBScript function ofctestax() creates objects using the following CLSID values and then calls GetOfficeX() and/or GetOfficeLcid() functions to see what's installed:
It then calls the function ofcpost() which sets cookies describing which versions are installed. ofctestax() is called inline from a script at the bottom of the page.
How does this work in FireFox?
ofctestax is a VBScript function, so in IE and any browsers supporting VBScript, it will run. In other browsers, it will not be recognized, and thus be undefined. ofcpost() function is called with default values, setting cookies to uninformative values.
With no cookies, this happens, because ofcpost() calls post() function:
The recipient fax usually prints off some relevant information in the margins. If the document were rotated, it could overwrite this data, or make it harder to find. In the case of quasi-legible printing, it's important to know that you're looking at it the correct way.
Put it this way. If we ever switch to first-to-file, you're going to want a good record of when you faxed something. Or someone contests your patent based on prior art around the time if your submission. Or lots of reasons.
Everything on the page should be right side up at the same time, including marks made by the recipient fax. It's a technicality, but makes for consistent documentation. And if they politely let you know you goofed, you can try again.
I don't read it as being "upside down" top to bottom, as in faxing the back of the paper, I read it as "upside down" when looking at the paper as a two-dimensional grid. So nobody need argue with me on that.
I regularly get either 5 or 15, usually 15.
I think it's because I tend to comment in bursts - nothing for a week, then 2 or 3 at a time, and then only when I have something useful to say. Except for the odd sarcastic or joking comment, or if I'm heavily medicated.
Plus I don't log in all that much, so when I do I have like 3 comments all at +5, or something like that, and bingo 15 mods.
Posting anon, but if you want to look for patterns in my comments my username is b4dc0d3r. I tend to get in to conversations late so most are un-moderated (+1 for logged in, with karma bonus). So it only takes 3 people willing to waste points on me to get +5.
Maybe it was my age when I saw it, but to me I don't care what's in the books - the Lynch movie is what the Dune universe is to me, complete with the TOTO soundtrack, sting, the floating fat man, and all the stuff not in the book.
He'll never be able to erase that, and might as well not even try.
Just do the right thing and make it a long movie, anything shorter than 2.5 hours won't even scratch the surface - it will be like "a day in the life of Yoda" vs. the original Star Wars trilogy. And they better over-shoot, planning to cut a lot so we have a balance between character development, setting, and plot. None of this 10-minute introduction crap which establishes everything you need to know to understand the characters' motivations.
In short, I expect massive fail unless they rely on 3D as a gimmick like Avatar did. Impressive it will be, but forgotten like Dune 2000 it will also be.
Please prove me wrong, two generations of Dune fans deserve it.
The current hotspot is now having a footer at the bottom which:
-Floats at the bottom of the page, regardless of how little content there is
-Expands down the page when content overflows, so it doesn't cover content.
-Reacts when you do things like hide/show content.
So many different ways to do it, all with little quirks. Bottom line, CSS is designed as a system of browser HINTS which the browser uses to determine how content is laid out when the window changes size/shape. It has some hacks for specifying specific layouts, but it is absolutely not browser-based. It is more oriented towards print layout, where the output size is static. You can make some great layouts if you make assumptions about the size, but they break as soon as you re-size the window. Flow and float and similar ideas upon which CSS is based tend to really mis-align what you intended.
I'm still using tables for certain things, and I'll never give it up until CSS is replaced by something oriented towards browser layout.
You should talk to this guy, who says his school would have had to buy the SDK and sign some contract thing. Don't you think the Apple representative would have said oops it's a mistake, you guys can have everything without problem? One of you ain't square on the mark.
http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1531538&cid=30973850
You, and the article, seem to think that parents and children will use the same computers.
Maybe Mom needs an iPad, Dad prefers an iPhone, Susie gets a Droid, and Bobby gets a Palm Pre. All of the little Bobbys will figure ways around the limitations of his phone at the same rate that a child would had the entire family had a C64, or anything with GW-BASIC. If Bobby has an iPad, he'll have a chance as good as any kid whose parents couldn't find a computer.
It's a good point to keep in mind, but it's one company, while Android and others are going Open. The market is in the same shape it used to be.
Please consider cleaning up your argument - you're saying the RIAA is causing the convoluted licensing problem. RIAA is only the recording industry, separate from songwriting. There's a copyright on the song that goes one place, a copyright on the recording of that song that goes another place, and the RIAA can't do much to change it. The only option they have is to stop taking over the recording copyright, leaving it with the artist, which it won't do.
Public performance of a song defeats the purpose of selling to individuals. If I sell a single MP3 from my website and someone downloads it and plays it for everyone in the world, 100 people or less at a time, I can either consider that an incredible free advertising opportunity, or 3.5 billion potential lost sales opportunities. The recording industry is in the business of making and selling recordings, so they kinda lean towards the "please don't give our music away free" side. In other words, they won't change this either.
You're asking for a basic rewrite of copyright law, which would affect industries other than just the recording aspect. Not saying it's wrong to think that way, just that you seem to think it's a simple change of thinking by recording studios, which is way far from reality.
More likely, some CEO hears about digital distribution and someone mentions you can just copy and paste from one computer to another, and the CEO tasks someone to action a plan to stop it. Sure some segments are driven by repeat purchases, but most DRM doesn't have that effect.
It doesn't matter if it's a successful implementation, it's an action item that came out of a meeting and someone has to either do it or explain why it's bad. "Customers hate it" is only valid if it also means "Customers won't buy it".
Encrypting the repair codes on an automobile is one of those things customers might not like, but since it's such a small part of the car buying experience, won't change a significant number of purchase decisions. People who buy DRM music downloads find it mostly works for them, so they don't think about whether they can put it on another device - until it's too late and the library is too large. If you want BioShock for PC, you get DRM. Unless you know how to get it without DRM...
We can focus on intent all we want, but intent will change as new applications and situations arise. The only thing that will stop DRM is just not buying anything with DRM, bringing up the "Customers won't buy it" argument.
If your business plan means you use one proprietary system (IE) to access another proprietary system, and your support contract doesn't ensure both parties are in lock step, you fucked up.
Any time someone says "don't take away that functionality, I need it for these third party apps", that's a fuck up.
If access is business-critical, don't use a proprietary system where you're at the whim of the vendor. We've all learned that at one point or another, some businesses are slow to learn.
So it might be company policy to depend on a vendor that doesn't care about you - time to change the policy, and expose the fuck up. Worst case, they fire you for complaining, and you get to tell an interviewer you got fired for raising the alarm on an inevitable failure. There's a chance you won't change anything. Anything better than that is an improvement you can probably live with.
This is not about downloading at all. Actual damages depends on how many times she *uploaded* the songs, not downloaded. She was not authorized to copy these songs, yet did so as part of the workings of P2P. You can set files to be unshared once downloaded, but during the initial transfer it was (at the time she is accused of copyright infringement) difficult to configure any P2P software to download parts without uploading parts.
If she uploaded a song available as a single for $3 to 18,000 people, $54k is perfect. You're saying that it's impossible for one person to be responsible for thousands of lost sales, but I think it's impossible to support that assertion. A courtroom is the only place that can be proven, and that's what the RIAA is trying to do. If I download a song and leave it in my shared folder for 3 years, how many full and complete uploads did I make? You're saying you have an answer to that, and the answer is less than "thousands". I'm saying it depends on the evidence.
The defendant apparently replaced her hard drive, so we don't know how long the files were being shared, and whether they were moved out of the shared folder, because the evidence is gone. The plaintiff only confirmed that the files were being shared, not that the defendant was uploading full copies. So IN THIS CASE it will be difficult to prove damages. You are stating as if in every case it will be impossible to prove damages, which is certainly not true. Several P2P applications actually keep track of the number of bytes of a song uploaded, and some present the data in a way that you can make a reasonable inference of the number of complete copies uploaded by the client. Each complete copy is a plain-as-day copyright infringement.
How do you calculate damages based on the number of uploads? It would be difficult to argue in a courtroom that you can tell which uploads would have resulted in a sale, had the upload not happened. It would be *very* difficult to argue that someone else would have uploaded it if the defendant hadn't, and therefore the defendant is not liable, because court cases use actual evidence, not theories. If the other person had uploaded, the other person would be the defendant. The only obvious course of action is for the plaintiff to claim that every upload represents a person on the other side who downloaded something they would otherwise have had to pay for. Regardless of how many studies show p2p basically serving as free advertising, a substitute for payola, and a self-selected sub-population who wouldn't pay for things they couldn't download, you would have to find the identity of each person and prove whether they fit the criteria of being a potential consumer. That's the only fair way to calculate actual damages. Even if it weren't too completely ridiculous and onerous to ask a plaintiff to prove this, again the defendant destroyed the evidence needed to prove this.
If I print 50,000 copies of your latest novel and sell them to people, you wouldn't have to find every person and determine whether they would have bought a copy had I not provided it at significant discount, you'd rely on my records and any other witnesses you could find. Unfortunately, copyright in the digital age means that uploading a 3MB MP3 file is the same as printing and selling a book. It might not be right, and there are plenty of arguments against it, but none of that matters in a court trial. When considering copyright infringement, the commercial gain is one of 4 canonical evaluations, including how much of a work was copied and the intended use. You can't argue that because she didn't sell the copy, only give it away, that it doesn't qualify as infringement, because she probably did upload the entire work, and the potential audience was every p2p user at the time. Well you can argue anything you want but it won't get you anywhere.
Also, keep in mind the defendant was sharing many more songs - the 24 on the list is just the ones the RIAA knows for certain were b
Even if you did make money, no one should begrudge what (little, admittedly) you earn by bringing issues of obvious interest to light for those who wish to read.
And to the masses: I don't check this blog until Slashdot tells me to - it's just not in the front of my brain every day when I have to do things like ensure bills are paid and this thing I like to call "my job" I still like to keep up to date on the MAFIAA when possible.
In short, it's a follow-up to an ongoing story. "Time out" might be par for the course, but it's a course we've been following. So we follow. Except for that one whiner Grond (15515), who appears to be a computer scientist and hobbyist paralegal.
And I'll just leave this here. Not that you couldn't have clicked them yourself.
http://slashdot.org/firehose.pl?op=view&id=1729653
http://slashdot.org/~Grond
Not sure you read the article. HP completed purchase of EDS after the trial ended, so the only thing HP has to do with this lawsuit is it owns the losing party, which it didn't during the contract. The judgement took 17 months to reach from the end of the trial in July 2008. So the trial ended, and the judge sat around meditating for 17 months, and HP bought EDS.
EDS did not want some sort of CRM, BSkyB did. EDS is an outsourcing company (was, now it's part of HP) and would provide CRM, not purchase it. EDS, now owned by HP, had fraudulently misrepresented itself in a sales pitch in 2000 for the system
It's more likely that EDS promised some sort of a system, and BSkyB led EDS around through as you said scope creep. EDS thinks it upheld its end of the bargain, BSkyB thinks its requests were within reason. Of course, I don't know the details of the contract, nor any more specifics than what's in the article, but your version is completely wrong.
If you take a look at how tax law evolved, it makes more sense. Poor people and certain actions get breaks, either to encourage behavior or to make up for taxes spent elsewhere. Then of course politicians try to pander to anyone and everyone, ultimately giving every person multiple breaks for various reasons and it got out of hand.
If we could have a few simple rules, that would be great,and fewer forms would be great too. More importantly is the average person being able to read and comprehend the law they are supposed to follow.