As other people have posted, it's not infringing to "copy" the data as part of the network transmission, and the part of copyright law that says it's not infringing wasn't part of the changes that are commonly referred to as the "DMCA".
So, although TFS has some horrible errors when describing the current bittorrent protocol, there could be changes made to it where every node becomes a proxy for torrents that the node isn't actually uploading/downloading. This means that a honeypot set up by the MPAA would get the IP address of a machine that was proxying the data to it, not the actual machine that did the uploading. If the proxy program is separated from the bittorrent client, then you get true deniability, as anybody could run the proxy program to pass torrent data, even without ever running a bittorrent client. I would suspect that like VPS seedboxes today, you'd have VPS proxy boxes with high bandwidth that don't run any torrent software.
At work many people request a mac, then wipe it and put Windows on it (or run Parallels). They want the nice hardware but they want the Windows 8 OS. They don't want some piece of plastic.
Even if you are talking about laptops (where not being "plastic" has some importance), you have some insane management at your work if they are willing to pay 2-3x for hardware that has no official support for Windows 8 drivers.
The system is identical to Windows 7 only the boring "Start Menu" has been replaced by the "Start Screen" with "Live tiles". It's turned one of the drab features into something cool.
What i want is a high end, high spec laptop that I can use as a touchscreen tablet when I am on the train or bus or whatever but can put on a desk and use as a decent high end worskstation (with external keyboard, mouse and screen).
The only reasonable way to do this would be to have two CPUs and memory systems (and maybe even GPUs)...one high-powered in the base/keyboard, and one less powerful and more battery friendly in the screen/tablet. Otherwise, you end up with a system that does neither of your requirements very well.
If you only want mid-performance, then you can get the system that you are wishing for, but once you desire true portability and the ability to run Windows on a high-end system, you are looking at a minimum 35W processor, 4-8GB of RAM, and a decent GPU. Luckily, you can put most of the other power-sucking options in the base/keyboard. All this will cost you far more than $1000, based on current Windows 8 tablet prices.
On the other hand, if you want an insanely fast 32GB Android tablet with good keyboard dock/base and great battery life, you can spend about $550 and get it, while that same money won't even get you Surface RT, even without a keyboard. Add in the branding confusion where Surface RT can't run the same software as true Windows 8 tablets, and you end up with a whole bunch of hardware that nobody wants.
Have you considered that maybe Nate Silver made his predictions and then God rearranged the Universe to make it so? Thus, Nate Silver spoiled the election (or is God).
When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all.
If it actually altered the video after decompression but before output, it would be impossible to rip a Blu-Ray losslessly with that protection
Exactly as planned.
Since this would effectively stop ripping, I'm pretty sure if it were possible while still letting Blu-Ray players play the movie, it would already have been done.
I was under the impression that the transformations didn't need to depend on bit-perfect output from the video decoder. Just guessing, but they could involve color space modification, rotation, flipping, cutting and pasting, bending (remember old scrambled channels from the VideoCipher II era?), and the like.
First, they have to be simple, because of the limited power of the BD+ virtual machine, so anything that involved serious memory moves would be out. Color and pixel value would be pretty much the limit.
Depending on much the decoding varies from the reference, there might be some seriously noticable artifacts, especially if the scrambing was enough to make the picture unwatchable. Try something as simple as lowering the saturation even a tiny bit on one frame in the middle of stream, and it will "flash" as different to a viewer. You'd probably have to alter at least 5% of frames to cause enough annoyance when watching a copy, which would be 1 frame/second on average. With different kinds of changes to different parts of the image, it would be very noticable. Without perfect reconstruction, that would result in a lot of discs returned to stores.
Repeatedly transcoding between lossy formats degrades quality each time. *You* may not perceive differences, but encoders do, and they tend to amplify those differences until they become very noticeable visual artifacts - no matter how many bits you use.
If you need to work with original content to edit it before the final compression for consumption, then you need lossless. But, there are plenty of lossless formats that will work for that, and some are compressed. If you dedicate 1TB or so to your edit workspace, you won't need to use a compressed format unless you are working with the entirety of a modern 2-hour movie. I learned this when I accidently forgot to choose a compression method when re-encoding some TV shows at 720p, and it took over 4 hours of uncompressed video before I ran through the 500GB disk space that was free.
For anything where you have access to the master (original Blu-Ray, home videos, etc.), you don't really care about lossless, as you will do any edits and then compress the final. If you want to do some minor tweaks to a MPEG-2 or H.264 video where it would take too long for a full re-compress, or you just don't have access to the original, you can use VideoReDo and only re-compress frames in the GOP that contains the edit points.
I've already swiped my credit card while the clerk is still scanning the first item. When they finish scanning everything, I might not even have to sign the screen (for a small enough transaction). For cash, you can't do anything until you get the total.
Most people don't use exact change.
Everywhere I shop, one end or the other of every cash transaction uses exact change. Either the buyer gives exact change, or receives it in return.
BD+ in Blu-ray Disc muddies this a bit, as it allows transforming the decompressed image based on whether or not other authenticity checks pass.
Although "transform the audio and video output" is listed as an option of BD+, it doesn't work the same way as most humans would parse that description. Based on this, it's just another way to encrypt the full.m2ts stream.
If it actually altered the video after decompression but before output, it would be impossible to rip a Blu-Ray losslessly with that protection, as you would need to decode the H.264 stream, apply the BD+ operations, then re-encode those frames to put back into the ripped stream. Note that you could never fully protect audio this way, as although you could apply the same sort of transformation, the audio stream isn't always decoded by the Blu-Ray player.
In addition, in order to alter the uncompressed data, it would require that every Blu-Ray player use exactly the same H.264 decoder with exactly the same options and only apply video alterations after BD+ is done with the data. This is a problem, because there are parts of H.264 decoding that are optional because they take CPU power and may not hurt video quality enough to require them.
I can't wait until lossless video encoding becomes practical.
Why? The visually perceivable differences between the source and high bit/pixel H.264 are almost non-existent.
There are generally more differences between the actual source (film/captured video/etc.) and the adjusted-before-encoding (filtering, color-"correction", etc.) source than those caused by lossy encoding.
Copyright was set up to ensure remuneration for the work of the creators of intellectual property.
No, it wasn't. It was set up to encourage creation of content that would "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries".
The key point is that the "progress" part is what was considered important and desirable, and the "limited times" was key to this, while the "exclusive right" was just a deal with the devil to achieve the greater goal of increasing human knowledge.
Since we no longer have "limited times" as far as an individual is concerned (as the current law is such that a person will be encouraged to add only one thing to the pool of knowledge and then fight to keep making money on it until they and their children die), there is no reason to require people to keep the "exclusive rights" part of the bargain.
And yet, he (like every other politician) takes their money and does their bidding, instead of listening to what the people want.
For example, if recreational drugs were legalized but regulated, every federal law enforcement officer involved in the "war on drugs" over the past 20 years could instead have been tasked to fighting terrorism, and maybe we'd still have the World Trade Center standing. Maybe not, but the fact that there isn't nearly as strong a criminal element in the alcohol business after prohibition was repealed points out that legalizing drugs would have all sorts of ripple effects in reducing crime, allowing existing law enforcement to be able to help with crimes that can't be legislated away.
He's the left-most President in history on gay rights. He's left of Bush on health care, taxes, military spending, Immigration Reform (he supports a path-to-citizenship for all illegals, not just DREAMers), and regulating Wall Street. That encompasses pretty much everything in most Americans top 10 issues facing DC.
And, that pretty much sums up why the US won't solve its problems unless they elect someone from a 3rd party, as none of those issues can be "solved" without major changes.
For example, one party would like more military spending, while the other wants more spending on health care. Yet, neither want to raise taxes enough to finance their desired spending, nor could they do so even if they wanted to, so instead we see devastating cuts to things like NASA, when a couple of days worth of war budget could pay for NASA for a year.
Likewise, both parties have differing opinions on hot button social topics (gay marriage, abortion, etc.) that affect a relative minority of people, while both strongly support the erosion of the freedoms guaranteed by the bill of rights (which should concern many more people). There are indivdual politicians in both parties who do not fit this stereotype, but if they number 10% of the power, I'd be surprised.
There was no real good reason as far as I could tell, people just like horses so they voted yes on it. I believe that was the same year medicinal marijuana was legalized, so it didn't get as much press comparatively.
They were probably worried that somebody with the munchies would eat the star of a "Mr. Ed" remake and cause Hollywood to have to come up with a new idea or two.
This is aimed at companies like Facebook, Google, Amazon, and the like. When managing thousands of servers, any number of components will die on a fairly regular basis. Some will die withing a few weeks of them going online. When you have 200k servers and a component with a 1% infant mortality rate, having the ability to quickly and easily change the component is a blessing.
That's why companies that don't build their own specialized hardware (like Google) use these, where the whole "server" is a single replaceable component.
I never understood the basic inconsistently with gun supporters regarding magazine sizes or assault rifles. They claim that limiting magazine sizes or assault rifles would not be effective in stopping bad guys from slaughtering tons of people, but then they also demand unlimited magazine sizes and an unassailable right to buy assault rifles because they are required for effective personal defense.
There is no inconsistency when you realize that law-abiding citizens who want to be able to legally purchase guns to defend themselves against criminals understand that making those purchases illegal won't stop those same criminals from obtaining the guns/magazines/whatever.
The logic is that hopefully a criminal will think twice about committing a crime if they know that every potential target could have a gun with which to stop them.
An AK-47 full-auto "machine gun" is already illegal. Full-auto weapons have been illegal since the 1930's.
No, actually, it isn't, and that's just another part of the stupidity of the "assault weapons" ban.
When the ban was in place, you could legally purchase a fully automatic AK-47 easily (albeit expensively) if you were like most of this country (not a convicted felon, etc.), yet could not purchase the semi-automatic version of the same weapon. Yes, I know that there were exceptions (private sales, etc.), but essentially you were more likely to be able to walk into a gun store and buy a fully automatic weapon than the semi-automatic version.
It's always been possible to purchase fully-automatic weapons, even after the 1936 law that regulated them. You just have to register and pay the federal transfer tax.
On the other hand, an assault rifle with a big clip is a big advantage to somebody who want to commit this sort of atrocity, and likely increases the body count, and it's hard to see how such weapons provide great benefits for sport or self defense.
Once you understand that "assault rifle" means "weapon that looks mean", you will understand that you know nothing about the topic at hand, and should not be in this debate until you learn more. This is the primary problem with the gun control debate.
You can find high-capacity magazines for pretty much any rifle with a detachable box magazine, regardless of whether it was on the list of "assault weapons" that were banned for a while. In addition, there are much better options if you want to do the "kill unarmed people in a crowded place", since a rifle is good for long distance shooting and is large and heavy. A good pump-action shotgun (which can generally be reloaded one round at a time, allowing both fast reload to get at least one shot available and a reasonable number of shots once fully loaded) or any handgun with a "staggered" magazine giving you 15-20 shots without being "extended" not only are better choices, but have been chosen for most of these sorts of shootings.
Then please come up with a way to frame the debate.
How about "let's try enforcing existing laws before we put in place duplicates of laws that didn't do anything the last time they were in place"?
If some lawmaker said that he was going to get the FBI/ATF/whoever to strictly enforce existing laws so that unless you follow the current laws of your state (permit/waiting period/etc.), you aren't ever going to be able to get hold of a gun without going to prison, then that guy would get my vote.
I own guns, and have no problem with having to follow the law to own them, as long as I know that everybody else has to do so. But, if following the law does nothing but put me on a "first to round up when the government feels threatened" list, while people who obtain guns illegally keep getting them and shooting people, then I have a problem with the gun laws.
The term 'green-on-blue attack' refers to the (quite common) situations where an aghan security force member will launch a surprise attack on NATO military personnel with which he is supposed to be working. Again, it turns out to not be that difficult to kill a few armed, trained, soldiers if you just wait for their backs to be turned.
So, for an example of why guns should generally be more regulated, you use a situation where a weapon is given to someone by the government to use as part of their job, but it turns out they aren't trustworthy. What this actually tells me is that we should be more careful about who we put in power in the government to decide who gets guns.
Instead, this sort of completely unrelated problem is the same type of handwaving that is being done by lawmakers because "we have to do something" ("assault weapons"...again, really?), when the reality is that no law will stop people who want to get guns and use them to kill a lot of people, especially when existing laws for possessing a gun are broken, pretty much nothing is done about it unless there were shots fired.
I don't think it's a fair apples to apples comparison. Making an ebook requires additional effort.
Only for books that don't already have an electronic version available.
Simlarly, some CD purchases from Amazon don't give you the free MP3s in your cloud drive. Sometimes it's a licensing issue, but sometimes the MP3 doesn't exist for sale at all (even though the CD does), and Amazon isn't allowed to just grab a CD and rip it for you.
Or, for some of my CD purchases, not every track from the CD was available as an MP3, even though most were.
Secondly, when content creators repeatedly notify the ISP that a particular customer is using their network for digital theft over and over again, the ISP is complicit in the unlawful activity if they continue to allow their network to be misused.
Copyright infringement in the US is almost always a civil matter, not criminal, and there is no requirement for any third party to protect someone else's copyright.
Since a network connection has by far many more non-infringing uses, the ISP can't be liable for contributory infringement just because they sold you a network connection and you are using it to infringe copyright. The current laws in place allow the copyright holder to file a lawsuit against a John Doe defendant, get contact information from the ISP via a subpoena, then re-file the lawsuit with the correct contact information. Just because that is expensive and difficult doesn't mean the copyright holder should get a shortcut from the ISP.
But in the United States, the big three professional sports (baseball, basketball, and American football) are routinely shown on free television.
NFL football is the only US professional sports league where a significant percentage of local games are show on free, OTA TV.
In all other cases, a regional sports network has the rights to the majority of the games, and that means you would need to pay for cable/satellite/etc. I would get to see about 25 games (out of 162) of my local baseball team if I only watched them on OTA TV. I would see zero games from my local basketball team.
There is evidence though. This entire system is based around catching people using BitTorrent to pirate copyrighted works. That means the copyright owner (or their enforcement agent) has an IP record of the perpetrator participating in the swarm, and because this is a two-way data transfer that IP address cannot be forged or otherwise faked.
Um...cannot be forged or faked? Really? Here's what you see as typical "evidence":
173.194.73.106, Sat Jan 12 01:29:42 EST 2013, Taken 2 Extended Cut BluRay 720p DTS x264-3Li.torrent
There, I just "proved" that Google infringed copyright. Unless the machine doing the monitoring has downloaded significant amounts of the torrent from that single IP, and kept that data segregated from data downloaded from all other IPs in the swarm, then there isn't even the beginning of proof that anyone at the listed IP ever infringed copyright.
DMCA takedown notices require the sender to swear under penalty of perjury that they own the copyright and that the referenced material is infringing, yet literally millions of bad takedowns are sent every year. If commiting perjury doesn't stop the MPAA/RIAA from sending out false notices, what will stop them in this "six strikes" system where there is no penalty listed for mistakes, lies, or fabrications?
Slashdot Mirror
As other people have posted, it's not infringing to "copy" the data as part of the network transmission, and the part of copyright law that says it's not infringing wasn't part of the changes that are commonly referred to as the "DMCA".
So, although TFS has some horrible errors when describing the current bittorrent protocol, there could be changes made to it where every node becomes a proxy for torrents that the node isn't actually uploading/downloading. This means that a honeypot set up by the MPAA would get the IP address of a machine that was proxying the data to it, not the actual machine that did the uploading. If the proxy program is separated from the bittorrent client, then you get true deniability, as anybody could run the proxy program to pass torrent data, even without ever running a bittorrent client. I would suspect that like VPS seedboxes today, you'd have VPS proxy boxes with high bandwidth that don't run any torrent software.
At work many people request a mac, then wipe it and put Windows on it (or run Parallels). They want the nice hardware but they want the Windows 8 OS. They don't want some piece of plastic.
Even if you are talking about laptops (where not being "plastic" has some importance), you have some insane management at your work if they are willing to pay 2-3x for hardware that has no official support for Windows 8 drivers.
The system is identical to Windows 7 only the boring "Start Menu" has been replaced by the "Start Screen" with "Live tiles". It's turned one of the drab features into something cool.
People trying to do real work don't need "cool".
They need fast, functional, and familiar.
What i want is a high end, high spec laptop that I can use as a touchscreen tablet when I am on the train or bus or whatever but can put on a desk and use as a decent high end worskstation (with external keyboard, mouse and screen).
The only reasonable way to do this would be to have two CPUs and memory systems (and maybe even GPUs)...one high-powered in the base/keyboard, and one less powerful and more battery friendly in the screen/tablet. Otherwise, you end up with a system that does neither of your requirements very well.
If you only want mid-performance, then you can get the system that you are wishing for, but once you desire true portability and the ability to run Windows on a high-end system, you are looking at a minimum 35W processor, 4-8GB of RAM, and a decent GPU. Luckily, you can put most of the other power-sucking options in the base/keyboard. All this will cost you far more than $1000, based on current Windows 8 tablet prices.
On the other hand, if you want an insanely fast 32GB Android tablet with good keyboard dock/base and great battery life, you can spend about $550 and get it, while that same money won't even get you Surface RT, even without a keyboard. Add in the branding confusion where Surface RT can't run the same software as true Windows 8 tablets, and you end up with a whole bunch of hardware that nobody wants.
Have you considered that maybe Nate Silver made his predictions and then God rearranged the Universe to make it so? Thus, Nate Silver spoiled the election (or is God).
When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all.
If it actually altered the video after decompression but before output, it would be impossible to rip a Blu-Ray losslessly with that protection
Exactly as planned.
Since this would effectively stop ripping, I'm pretty sure if it were possible while still letting Blu-Ray players play the movie, it would already have been done.
I was under the impression that the transformations didn't need to depend on bit-perfect output from the video decoder. Just guessing, but they could involve color space modification, rotation, flipping, cutting and pasting, bending (remember old scrambled channels from the VideoCipher II era?), and the like.
First, they have to be simple, because of the limited power of the BD+ virtual machine, so anything that involved serious memory moves would be out. Color and pixel value would be pretty much the limit.
Depending on much the decoding varies from the reference, there might be some seriously noticable artifacts, especially if the scrambing was enough to make the picture unwatchable. Try something as simple as lowering the saturation even a tiny bit on one frame in the middle of stream, and it will "flash" as different to a viewer. You'd probably have to alter at least 5% of frames to cause enough annoyance when watching a copy, which would be 1 frame/second on average. With different kinds of changes to different parts of the image, it would be very noticable. Without perfect reconstruction, that would result in a lot of discs returned to stores.
Repeatedly transcoding between lossy formats degrades quality each time. *You* may not perceive differences, but encoders do, and they tend to amplify those differences until they become very noticeable visual artifacts - no matter how many bits you use.
If you need to work with original content to edit it before the final compression for consumption, then you need lossless. But, there are plenty of lossless formats that will work for that, and some are compressed. If you dedicate 1TB or so to your edit workspace, you won't need to use a compressed format unless you are working with the entirety of a modern 2-hour movie. I learned this when I accidently forgot to choose a compression method when re-encoding some TV shows at 720p, and it took over 4 hours of uncompressed video before I ran through the 500GB disk space that was free.
For anything where you have access to the master (original Blu-Ray, home videos, etc.), you don't really care about lossless, as you will do any edits and then compress the final. If you want to do some minor tweaks to a MPEG-2 or H.264 video where it would take too long for a full re-compress, or you just don't have access to the original, you can use VideoReDo and only re-compress frames in the GOP that contains the edit points.
99% of the time cash is faster than cc.
I've already swiped my credit card while the clerk is still scanning the first item. When they finish scanning everything, I might not even have to sign the screen (for a small enough transaction). For cash, you can't do anything until you get the total.
Most people don't use exact change.
Everywhere I shop, one end or the other of every cash transaction uses exact change. Either the buyer gives exact change, or receives it in return.
BD+ in Blu-ray Disc muddies this a bit, as it allows transforming the decompressed image based on whether or not other authenticity checks pass.
Although "transform the audio and video output" is listed as an option of BD+, it doesn't work the same way as most humans would parse that description. Based on this, it's just another way to encrypt the full .m2ts stream.
If it actually altered the video after decompression but before output, it would be impossible to rip a Blu-Ray losslessly with that protection, as you would need to decode the H.264 stream, apply the BD+ operations, then re-encode those frames to put back into the ripped stream. Note that you could never fully protect audio this way, as although you could apply the same sort of transformation, the audio stream isn't always decoded by the Blu-Ray player.
In addition, in order to alter the uncompressed data, it would require that every Blu-Ray player use exactly the same H.264 decoder with exactly the same options and only apply video alterations after BD+ is done with the data. This is a problem, because there are parts of H.264 decoding that are optional because they take CPU power and may not hurt video quality enough to require them.
I can't wait until lossless video encoding becomes practical.
Why? The visually perceivable differences between the source and high bit/pixel H.264 are almost non-existent.
There are generally more differences between the actual source (film/captured video/etc.) and the adjusted-before-encoding (filtering, color-"correction", etc.) source than those caused by lossy encoding.
Copyright was set up to ensure remuneration for the work of the creators of intellectual property.
No, it wasn't. It was set up to encourage creation of content that would "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries".
The key point is that the "progress" part is what was considered important and desirable, and the "limited times" was key to this, while the "exclusive right" was just a deal with the devil to achieve the greater goal of increasing human knowledge.
Since we no longer have "limited times" as far as an individual is concerned (as the current law is such that a person will be encouraged to add only one thing to the pool of knowledge and then fight to keep making money on it until they and their children die), there is no reason to require people to keep the "exclusive rights" part of the bargain.
He speaks vocally against corporations.
And yet, he (like every other politician) takes their money and does their bidding, instead of listening to what the people want.
For example, if recreational drugs were legalized but regulated, every federal law enforcement officer involved in the "war on drugs" over the past 20 years could instead have been tasked to fighting terrorism, and maybe we'd still have the World Trade Center standing. Maybe not, but the fact that there isn't nearly as strong a criminal element in the alcohol business after prohibition was repealed points out that legalizing drugs would have all sorts of ripple effects in reducing crime, allowing existing law enforcement to be able to help with crimes that can't be legislated away.
He's the left-most President in history on gay rights. He's left of Bush on health care, taxes, military spending, Immigration Reform (he supports a path-to-citizenship for all illegals, not just DREAMers), and regulating Wall Street. That encompasses pretty much everything in most Americans top 10 issues facing DC.
And, that pretty much sums up why the US won't solve its problems unless they elect someone from a 3rd party, as none of those issues can be "solved" without major changes.
For example, one party would like more military spending, while the other wants more spending on health care. Yet, neither want to raise taxes enough to finance their desired spending, nor could they do so even if they wanted to, so instead we see devastating cuts to things like NASA, when a couple of days worth of war budget could pay for NASA for a year.
Likewise, both parties have differing opinions on hot button social topics (gay marriage, abortion, etc.) that affect a relative minority of people, while both strongly support the erosion of the freedoms guaranteed by the bill of rights (which should concern many more people). There are indivdual politicians in both parties who do not fit this stereotype, but if they number 10% of the power, I'd be surprised.
Beef heart is all muscle and no fat. Incredible when smoked for a few hours.
Do you use a bong or just roll it in paper?
There was no real good reason as far as I could tell, people just like horses so they voted yes on it. I believe that was the same year medicinal marijuana was legalized, so it didn't get as much press comparatively.
They were probably worried that somebody with the munchies would eat the star of a "Mr. Ed" remake and cause Hollywood to have to come up with a new idea or two.
This is aimed at companies like Facebook, Google, Amazon, and the like. When managing thousands of servers, any number of components will die on a fairly regular basis. Some will die withing a few weeks of them going online. When you have 200k servers and a component with a 1% infant mortality rate, having the ability to quickly and easily change the component is a blessing.
That's why companies that don't build their own specialized hardware (like Google) use these, where the whole "server" is a single replaceable component.
I never understood the basic inconsistently with gun supporters regarding magazine sizes or assault rifles. They claim that limiting magazine sizes or assault rifles would not be effective in stopping bad guys from slaughtering tons of people, but then they also demand unlimited magazine sizes and an unassailable right to buy assault rifles because they are required for effective personal defense.
There is no inconsistency when you realize that law-abiding citizens who want to be able to legally purchase guns to defend themselves against criminals understand that making those purchases illegal won't stop those same criminals from obtaining the guns/magazines/whatever.
The logic is that hopefully a criminal will think twice about committing a crime if they know that every potential target could have a gun with which to stop them.
An AK-47 full-auto "machine gun" is already illegal. Full-auto weapons have been illegal since the 1930's.
No, actually, it isn't, and that's just another part of the stupidity of the "assault weapons" ban.
When the ban was in place, you could legally purchase a fully automatic AK-47 easily (albeit expensively) if you were like most of this country (not a convicted felon, etc.), yet could not purchase the semi-automatic version of the same weapon. Yes, I know that there were exceptions (private sales, etc.), but essentially you were more likely to be able to walk into a gun store and buy a fully automatic weapon than the semi-automatic version.
It's always been possible to purchase fully-automatic weapons, even after the 1936 law that regulated them. You just have to register and pay the federal transfer tax.
On the other hand, an assault rifle with a big clip is a big advantage to somebody who want to commit this sort of atrocity, and likely increases the body count, and it's hard to see how such weapons provide great benefits for sport or self defense.
Once you understand that "assault rifle" means "weapon that looks mean", you will understand that you know nothing about the topic at hand, and should not be in this debate until you learn more. This is the primary problem with the gun control debate.
You can find high-capacity magazines for pretty much any rifle with a detachable box magazine, regardless of whether it was on the list of "assault weapons" that were banned for a while. In addition, there are much better options if you want to do the "kill unarmed people in a crowded place", since a rifle is good for long distance shooting and is large and heavy. A good pump-action shotgun (which can generally be reloaded one round at a time, allowing both fast reload to get at least one shot available and a reasonable number of shots once fully loaded) or any handgun with a "staggered" magazine giving you 15-20 shots without being "extended" not only are better choices, but have been chosen for most of these sorts of shootings.
Then please come up with a way to frame the debate.
How about "let's try enforcing existing laws before we put in place duplicates of laws that didn't do anything the last time they were in place"?
If some lawmaker said that he was going to get the FBI/ATF/whoever to strictly enforce existing laws so that unless you follow the current laws of your state (permit/waiting period/etc.), you aren't ever going to be able to get hold of a gun without going to prison, then that guy would get my vote.
I own guns, and have no problem with having to follow the law to own them, as long as I know that everybody else has to do so. But, if following the law does nothing but put me on a "first to round up when the government feels threatened" list, while people who obtain guns illegally keep getting them and shooting people, then I have a problem with the gun laws.
The term 'green-on-blue attack' refers to the (quite common) situations where an aghan security force member will launch a surprise attack on NATO military personnel with which he is supposed to be working. Again, it turns out to not be that difficult to kill a few armed, trained, soldiers if you just wait for their backs to be turned.
So, for an example of why guns should generally be more regulated, you use a situation where a weapon is given to someone by the government to use as part of their job, but it turns out they aren't trustworthy. What this actually tells me is that we should be more careful about who we put in power in the government to decide who gets guns.
Instead, this sort of completely unrelated problem is the same type of handwaving that is being done by lawmakers because "we have to do something" ("assault weapons"...again, really?), when the reality is that no law will stop people who want to get guns and use them to kill a lot of people, especially when existing laws for possessing a gun are broken, pretty much nothing is done about it unless there were shots fired.
I don't think it's a fair apples to apples comparison. Making an ebook requires additional effort.
Only for books that don't already have an electronic version available.
Simlarly, some CD purchases from Amazon don't give you the free MP3s in your cloud drive. Sometimes it's a licensing issue, but sometimes the MP3 doesn't exist for sale at all (even though the CD does), and Amazon isn't allowed to just grab a CD and rip it for you.
Or, for some of my CD purchases, not every track from the CD was available as an MP3, even though most were.
Secondly, when content creators repeatedly notify the ISP that a particular customer is using their network for digital theft over and over again, the ISP is complicit in the unlawful activity if they continue to allow their network to be misused.
Copyright infringement in the US is almost always a civil matter, not criminal, and there is no requirement for any third party to protect someone else's copyright.
Since a network connection has by far many more non-infringing uses, the ISP can't be liable for contributory infringement just because they sold you a network connection and you are using it to infringe copyright. The current laws in place allow the copyright holder to file a lawsuit against a John Doe defendant, get contact information from the ISP via a subpoena, then re-file the lawsuit with the correct contact information. Just because that is expensive and difficult doesn't mean the copyright holder should get a shortcut from the ISP.
But in the United States, the big three professional sports (baseball, basketball, and American football) are routinely shown on free television.
NFL football is the only US professional sports league where a significant percentage of local games are show on free, OTA TV.
In all other cases, a regional sports network has the rights to the majority of the games, and that means you would need to pay for cable/satellite/etc. I would get to see about 25 games (out of 162) of my local baseball team if I only watched them on OTA TV. I would see zero games from my local basketball team.
There is evidence though. This entire system is based around catching people using BitTorrent to pirate copyrighted works. That means the copyright owner (or their enforcement agent) has an IP record of the perpetrator participating in the swarm, and because this is a two-way data transfer that IP address cannot be forged or otherwise faked.
Um...cannot be forged or faked? Really? Here's what you see as typical "evidence":
There, I just "proved" that Google infringed copyright. Unless the machine doing the monitoring has downloaded significant amounts of the torrent from that single IP, and kept that data segregated from data downloaded from all other IPs in the swarm, then there isn't even the beginning of proof that anyone at the listed IP ever infringed copyright.
DMCA takedown notices require the sender to swear under penalty of perjury that they own the copyright and that the referenced material is infringing, yet literally millions of bad takedowns are sent every year. If commiting perjury doesn't stop the MPAA/RIAA from sending out false notices, what will stop them in this "six strikes" system where there is no penalty listed for mistakes, lies, or fabrications?