Ideas can and have been patented. All you need to do is get the "specific implementation" to be worded broadly enough, and you can indeed cover every way of doing something.
I would think that someone commiting these kinds of acts online has a higher probability of actually trying to commit them in the real world
I'd say less; generally most people who go out and commit this sort of crime do so because of sexual repression. If you're online playing sex games, that repression has an outlet and makes you less likely to commit the crime in real life.
Really, this sort of thing equates to the old stereotype of construction workers leering and catcalling to passing women. It's unwanted sexual attention, and crude gestures/words, but it's very unlikely to ever go beyond that - it's viewed as more of a game by the people doing it. Is it criminal? Definitely not; the subject of the abuse is never physically touched, and never prevented from leaving.
Face it, this sort of thing is equivalent to falmebait/trolling or shouting curses at someone in public. Very offensive, very rude, but free speech nonetheless.
Tell your boss that you'll do it, but that want it in writing, signed by him, that you are to install those copies even though you do not believe you have enough licenses. If he wants to guarantee that you have the right number of licenses and that everything is legal, then fine.
If he refuses to give you such a written request, don't do it. If he attempts to fire you, then you immediately go to his superior (or however high you need to go to get past the ones implicit in this decision), and tell them that you're being fired for refusing to do something illegal that would open the company to a lawsuit. Odds are, your boss is going to be the one fired, and you'll be asked to stay. If not, do you really want to work for a company that has no problem violating the law, and is willing to punish those who won't?
I would apologize if I believed I was wrong. I have done so in other posts in the past. However, nothing you have said has made me believe that my comment was wrong; in fact your comments have done nothing but solidify my belief on that issue.
As for my choice of terminology, would you have preferred "jackass" instead? "Prick"? "Asshole"? I had a comment about how you acted according to the transcript, and chose the least rude and insulting word that I felt adequately conveyed my thoughts on the matter.
While many other people on Slashdot may give you a free ride just because you're "on our side", I choose not to. Refute my claims, accept them, or ignore them; but do not make me out to have nothing valid to say just because I called you out on dickish behavior when others dared not do so.
And I explained why I thought so. Several people agreed with me as well. Several others made similar comments in the Slashdot story that appeared when the transcript was first released.
You could have ignored the comment, or you could have explained why you don't feel you were being a dick. You didn't. You chose instead to use my comment as a justification for berating me without actually addressing the issues I brought up.
I have enough enemies over at Holme Roberts & Owen. What I need is friends.
Then I suggest you try to maintain a more civil discourse in the future. Few people on Slashdot will immediately attack you unless you post something that they find really offensive. Comments are generally considered debates here - your positions will be attacked, but it's (usually) not meant to be personal.
Defend your position, but treat those who disagree with you as if they were valued colleagues so long as they keep from being overly rude. Ignore trolls and flamebait. Respond only if they say something you know is wrong and that most people won't realize is wrong. If you do respond to a troll, keep your response short and to the point.
15) I will testify to the procedures and results obtained by MediaSentry coupled with the information complied by defendant's ISP to demonstrate the defendant's internet account and computer were used to download and upload copyrighted music from the internet using the KaZaA peer-to-peer network.
Actually, I hadn't read his original report, and did not know he was making this claim (I don't recall this being in the deposition either, but I could have just missed it - it was a long document). This is the first time I've even seen this brought up here and directly referenced. From the deposition I assumed that there was no way that either this guy, or the lawyers, would make such a claim since it is so obvious from his testimony he couldn't back it up.
As for the rest of your comments, read Workaphobia's post above (no need to waste space saying the same things he already said).
OK, I wasn't going to reply to anything after my last post, but I just have to comment on this one:
I said he never corrected me because he never said what the correct terms were.
"There is no "prosecution"; this is a civil case." - NYCL "There is no concept of "reasonable doubt" in a civil case." - NYCL
Where, in either one of those statements, did he actually tell me what the correct terms to use were? Pointing out errors is not the same as correcting them.
I'd say it's more that they did have facts, but not enough of them. I still maintain that their expert was not using guesswork; he did the investigation put in front of him, and did it adequately. The fault lies not with him - he worked with what he had and his only assumption was that he was given accurate information to work with. The fault lies with the lawyers who did not adequately prove the information he was given actually was accurate, leading it to be "garbage in -> garbage out" situation.
Regardless, your idea on the matter does sound reasonable. Since it looks like that's where this case is heading, I certainly hope it sounds reasonable to the judge as well.
This is what you said about me for doing my job: the defense attorney grilling him was being a complete dick
Well, quite frankly, you were being a complete dick. I didn't know if that was because you're actually a dick in real life, or if you were being a dick in order to upset the person you were questioning and make him nervous (i.e. legal strategy). However, you were rather dickish in both your posts responding to me as well, so I think I've decided which is the correct option.
Then when I correct your misuse of legal terms, you say
Actually, you never did correct me. You only said I was wrong. In order to correct something you must also say what is right. That is the type of thing that has led me to label you as a dick; your holier-than-thou attitude with regards to other people not knowing every little bit of legal terminology. You know what they're saying, and you know what is meant, but you find it necessary to ridicule them for it and then refuse to even give an answer as to what the correct term should be.
Quite frankly, I think your complete dickishness can be easily summed up by looking at the deposition transcript from page 26, line 24 to page 28, line 11. You spend nearly two pages making him feel like an idiot because he doesn't happen to know the meaning of one word that is almost never used outside a courtroom. You can't just restate the question, nor can you just define the word for him. Instead, you go on and on and on with the express purpose of making him feel like dirt and stroking your own ego just because you know the meaning of a word he doesn't.
(FYI: "Dick" is not the term I originally typed in any of my posts. I was just being polite. And believe me, it's more polite than someone with your attitude deserves.)
Your comment makes no sense. He was not "supposed to investigate" anything; he was "supposed to" testify about the investigation that was done three (3) years earlier. You're arguing phrasing here; when I said he was supposed to investigate something, I obviously meant that the investigation was for later testimony given the context.
As to whether he was "out of his area", he probably was... but that's not my fault, that's his, for pretending to be something he's not, and it's the RIAA's, for inducing the man to pretend to be something he's not. I still don't see where he pretended to be something he's not. He never claimed to have internal knowledge of how the IPs were traced to a particular person (or, if he did, I missed that part). I am only saying that I don't think he's as much at fault as the masses are claiming he is; the lawyers are the ones who decided to not bring in testimony from the people who did the rest of the investigation. As long as he doesn't claim he knows for certain anything outside what he himself investigated, and only says "that other stuff is just what I was told", I don't see why that is supposed to make him look bad.
I'm sorry to have to tell you that your knowledge of law is quite limited. I never claimed it wasn't. I'm not a lawyer and never claimed to be one.
There is no "prosecution"; this is a civil case. There is no concept of "reasonable doubt" in a civil case Fine then, how about "claimant"? As for "no reasonable doubt" in civil cases, I did know that - I was not using it as a legal term, but instead as an easy way to reference that it helps the defense. Maybe I didn't have the specific legal terms correct, but everyone knows what I meant. You could've been nice and simply corrected me, but instead you attack my position based on nitpicking terminology.
Yes his testimony is helpful to defendant. But this is not a game; this is a federal trial where one side is suing someone for tens of thousands of dollars. Under clear standards of law his testimony is inadmissible and must be excluded. I would be a pretty dumb lawyer if I allowed the RIAA to bring this guy anywhere near a courtroom. Perhaps. As I said before, I am not a legal expert, and don't know almost anything of this case beyond this particular deposition. I was only commenting that his testimony helped the defense's case more than the prosecution's (yeah, yeah, terminology - see above). Perhaps it is better to exclude his testimony altogether - I do not know enough about the case as a whole to determine that - that's why my title was "Why exclude?" -- it's a question.
Which would you think shows bad faith more: 1) "The prosecution's own expert witness says the defendant's computer was not used for filesharing, but they brought this case anyway." 2) "Well, we removed all evidence due to technicalities. The prosecution couldn't have known this would happen until after the suit was filed."
He is the prosecutions witness, so his job was to find evidence against the defendant, not to get their evidence for them. As long as he doesn't fabricate evidence or hide evidence he has done his job. If the defense wants that lack of evidence documented they can get their own expert witness; the data (or lack thereof) was not destroyed. If there is a question about it, it can be re-examined.
Regardless, he states that no such evidence exists, and that he will swear to the absence of it. Since he is the expert witness for the prosecution on this, that generally means that the prosecution is going with whatever he said; i.e. that no such evidence exists. As long as the defense doesn't contest that, you don't really need supporting evidence (all parties agree it is true, so supporting documentation is unnecessary) - the testimony will be considered evidence enough on that point.
I don't see what the problem with his testimony is. He stated exactly what he was looking for, and exactly what he found within those parameters. Frankly, the defense attorney grilling him was being a complete dick for the most part by repeatedly asking him to verify something out of his area that he was never supposed to investigate. He freely admitted that any identification of who that IP address belonged to was not done by him, and he had no way to verify it; his testimony was about what IP was being used for filesharing, not who that IP belonged to.
Really, I'm surprised the defense isn't begging for him to be put up on the stand; from what I read I'd say that his testimony does more for the defense than the prosecution: 1) He states that the file was sent to that IP, but there is no way to know what computer actually received it. (helps with reasonable doubt) 2) He states that from the information obtained from her hard drive, that computer (or hard drive, at least) is definitely not the one used for file sharing. (The way this damages the prosecution's case should be obvious.)
The only problems I've seen anyone have with his testimony are that he's relying on the data he's given to be accurate (HTF else is he supposed to operate?), that he made a few minor errors in his testimony - i.e. mixing up some terms (this happens to people, and unlike a written deposition he cannot go back over it for mistakes before sending it in), and that he is inaccurate with some of what he says while trying to explain complex technical details to a layperson (everything taught to laypeople is like this; generally correct, even if not correct in specifics).
Going over his testimony, I did not see anything he actually did wrong; everything he stated was correct and he drew no conclusions that were not supported by the data he was given.
Alternatively, go grab Smart Boot Manager and avoid messing with configuring lilo/grub/whatever. SBM pulls up a nice list of every bootable device on your system (including ones that aren't supported by the BIOS), and lets you boot from them.
For example, some proposals suggest only taxing the final sale price to the end use; not the sale of goods required to produce an item. So a house, for example, would be taxed when it was first sold, but the lumber, etc would not be taxed when the builder bought it. While this makes sense on the surface - you only tax the items once; the goal then becomes to either:
You've never run a business, have you? This is the way taxes work now.
As for your examples, in case (1), you said it's already been outlawed in the tax code, and there is no reason to think that loophole wouldn't still be closed in any new tax code.
In (2), you need a sales tax license to buy anything tax free, and you need to affirm that you are purchasing that item for resale. If you put that item to personal use (for yourself), then you must "buy" it from the business - which means paying taxes. If you put that item to use in your business it is no longer being resold, so you either have to have your business "buy" the item from itself, or pay a use tax on it (identical cost to sales tax, just not collected by the seller but paid directly by the buyer).
A "Fair Tax" as some propose on consumption will not simplify the tax code; all it will do is cause smart people to find new loopholes that Congress will then try to close.
Yeah, except that it will be large, blatantly obvious cases of tax evasion like the ones you mentioned above (and therefore easy to spot and fix), instead of the current system with so many holes that you could (and most do) use it like a sieve. Besides, over the last hundred years or so, almost every method of "legal" tax evasion that doesn't require the exploitation of some minutiae of the tax code has been found and abolished - these minutiae will disappear in a simplified tax code.
A secondary effect is the impact on such things as home sales - new homes would have to sell for less than existing ones since they would be taxed and buyers tend to look at the final price, not the one "before tax" price.
Once again, you show that you have never run a business, and have no idea how people actually make purchasing decisions. You're acting as if buyers are logical - they most certainly are not. Trying to figure out the final price on something involves "math" - which makes most of the population's eyes glaze over and they just ignore it, take a guess at about how much it will end up being, and move on.
Also, new homes do not need to be cheaper than older homes - that's like saying new cars have to be cheaper than used cars or they'll never sell. Being "new" is considered a reason to pay more for an item, tax or no tax. I bought a house a few years ago, and I can tell you for 100% certain that old houses in better locations were selling for less than new houses, but new houses were still selling almost as fast as the local construction companies could build them.
This was a just plain bad article. Uninspired, filled with lame jokes, and with no real objectivity to it.
There were quite a few really crappy box art examples in there, yes, but there were others that got in there pretty much because the author didn't like the style the artist used. Hell, this article actually said on two of the entries, "my editor made me put this in here." Lame, lame, lame.
But I highly suspect the refusal to select Diebold is more related to Diebold's Republican ties than any merits of their competitors.
If by "Republican ties" you mean "widely believed to have fixed the last election", then I agree.
As for the merits of their competitors not being the major deciding factor? I think Diebold's own "merits" were more than enough reason not to choose their machines - who even needs to look at a competitor before deciding to throw Diebold out?
[...] just received a $25,000 invoice from a law firm in London representing Corbis I quoted the images in question on the Corbis site and the total would have been about $800.
The invoice in this case is probably mostly a "scare the hell out of them and get them to settle" sort of thing. Generally, copyright infringement is limited to actual damages + expenses (atty. fees). In this case, it will be $800 (what you would have paid for these images) + attorneys' billable hours + cost of long distance calls (if any - they may have informed their lawyers via email). This is far, far less than $25,000.
However, your best bet for a defense in this instance is going to come in two ways: (1) Show that the damage from the infringement was minimal: Get the website logs of this client's site, and look through it and figure out just how many people have actually viewed the images. Remember to discount the various search engine bots, yourself, your friend, and the client's employees from this count. If nobody else has ever seen an image, then no infringement occurred on that image. If only a few people have seen it, the damage can be considered minimal. While this won't get you completely out of trouble, it can help if you actually go to court (and by extension help any settlement bargaining). (2) Show how good a client you have been for Corbis: If you've been a paid subscriber or somesuch for years, and this is the only time this sort of infringement has occurred, you have a decent good-faith defense. Have you ever purchased images from them in the past? How often? If you've got a purchase history with them, this will also help. Once again, this probably won't cause the case to drop completely, but can work in your favor.
I called Corbis and told their legal department what happened and they told me I would have to deal with the law firm, who handles "all our overseas affairs."
While their legal department may not handle the overseas affairs, and can do little if anything for you, this is probably because the legal firm is not considered "part of" or "under" Corbis's legal department - i.e. the have no control over what they do. What you need to do is find some way to plead your case to whoever is in charge of their relationship with the legal firm. If you have been a longstanding customer who has made several purchases from them in the past, there's a good chance your best bet would be a call to their marketing/sales department. Explain what has happened to them, tell them how it was an honest mistake you made while trying to sell their photos, and you can probably get some slack cut for you that way - the sales drone will forward the concern to the sales director, who is probably quite willing to call off the lawyers in order to keep a loyal customer.
In any case, the steps I would suggest you take are: (1) Wait for a response from the law firm for what you already sent. (2) Contact someone at Corbis who actually has some power over the contracted law firm (start with the sales department, and ask who you should talk to if they can't help you). If nothing else, see if it would be possible to purchase the $800 in images now in exchange for them dropping the suit. (3) Talk to the law firm again and tell them what you think is a reasonable settlement for the "limited" amount of infringement that occurred (lowball it a bit in case you need some bargaining room). (4) Compare the amount the (hopefully more reasonable) invoice from the law firm is against how much you think you'd spend on a lawyer + eventual settlement. If lawyer + settlement > invoice, then your path is pretty clear. (5) If nothing else works, you are stuck with the worst case scenario of going to court. Either lawyer up, throw yourself on the mercy of the court, or both. Make sure you've gone through the other channels first (and documented your efforts!), as this will show good faith to the court and can only help with whatever eventual judgment is forthcoming.
Two reasons: Redundancy. The more laws there are saying you can collect this information, the more laws there are that would have to be repealed in order to stop the collection of this information. Permission. If the laws do get changed, there will probably be a legal loophole somewhere that says that if you specifically agreed to allow surveillance, they can keep doing so until you specifically tell them to stop. This means that if you ever got a passport between when this law went into effect, and what it was repealed, you would have to take the time to track down and fill out an unknown number of forms. Without a national mass-media announcement or mailing to everyone who has such a passport, the vast majority of the population would never even learn these forms existed. Also, don't discount laziness here - 90% of the population would never bother to fill those forms out, even if they knew about them.
I think you're missing his point. He was saying that without the people seeing an example of how bad things can get, there is little stopping the slide into that condition. He is not wishing that there was someplace like that now: He is lamenting that where he is will be the next place to become such an example. Additionally, he never brought up the "poverty and despair" conditions you're talking about. (Well, maybe despair, but not the poverty part.) The poverty was primarily due to problems with the economic side of government, and could have happened even without the surveillance police state (which was the point of the GP post).
Slashdot Mirror
Ideas can and have been patented. All you need to do is get the "specific implementation" to be worded broadly enough, and you can indeed cover every way of doing something.
I'd say less; generally most people who go out and commit this sort of crime do so because of sexual repression. If you're online playing sex games, that repression has an outlet and makes you less likely to commit the crime in real life.
Really, this sort of thing equates to the old stereotype of construction workers leering and catcalling to passing women. It's unwanted sexual attention, and crude gestures/words, but it's very unlikely to ever go beyond that - it's viewed as more of a game by the people doing it. Is it criminal? Definitely not; the subject of the abuse is never physically touched, and never prevented from leaving.
Face it, this sort of thing is equivalent to falmebait/trolling or shouting curses at someone in public. Very offensive, very rude, but free speech nonetheless.
Yes, thank you.
Firefox's spellcheck doesn't do much good when you type the completely wrong word.
Tell your boss that you'll do it, but that want it in writing, signed by him, that you are to install those copies even though you do not believe you have enough licenses. If he wants to guarantee that you have the right number of licenses and that everything is legal, then fine.
If he refuses to give you such a written request, don't do it. If he attempts to fire you, then you immediately go to his superior (or however high you need to go to get past the ones implicit in this decision), and tell them that you're being fired for refusing to do something illegal that would open the company to a lawsuit. Odds are, your boss is going to be the one fired, and you'll be asked to stay. If not, do you really want to work for a company that has no problem violating the law, and is willing to punish those who won't?
I would apologize if I believed I was wrong. I have done so in other posts in the past. However, nothing you have said has made me believe that my comment was wrong; in fact your comments have done nothing but solidify my belief on that issue.
As for my choice of terminology, would you have preferred "jackass" instead? "Prick"? "Asshole"? I had a comment about how you acted according to the transcript, and chose the least rude and insulting word that I felt adequately conveyed my thoughts on the matter.
While many other people on Slashdot may give you a free ride just because you're "on our side", I choose not to. Refute my claims, accept them, or ignore them; but do not make me out to have nothing valid to say just because I called you out on dickish behavior when others dared not do so.
And I explained why I thought so. Several people agreed with me as well. Several others made similar comments in the Slashdot story that appeared when the transcript was first released.
You could have ignored the comment, or you could have explained why you don't feel you were being a dick. You didn't. You chose instead to use my comment as a justification for berating me without actually addressing the issues I brought up.
Defend your position, but treat those who disagree with you as if they were valued colleagues so long as they keep from being overly rude.
Ignore trolls and flamebait. Respond only if they say something you know is wrong and that most people won't realize is wrong. If you do respond to a troll, keep your response short and to the point.
Actually, I hadn't read his original report, and did not know he was making this claim (I don't recall this being in the deposition either, but I could have just missed it - it was a long document). This is the first time I've even seen this brought up here and directly referenced. From the deposition I assumed that there was no way that either this guy, or the lawyers, would make such a claim since it is so obvious from his testimony he couldn't back it up.
As for the rest of your comments, read Workaphobia's post above (no need to waste space saying the same things he already said).
I said he never corrected me because he never said what the correct terms were.
Where, in either one of those statements, did he actually tell me what the correct terms to use were? Pointing out errors is not the same as correcting them.
At least someone else got what I was trying to say.
I'd say it's more that they did have facts, but not enough of them. I still maintain that their expert was not using guesswork; he did the investigation put in front of him, and did it adequately. The fault lies not with him - he worked with what he had and his only assumption was that he was given accurate information to work with. The fault lies with the lawyers who did not adequately prove the information he was given actually was accurate, leading it to be "garbage in -> garbage out" situation.
Regardless, your idea on the matter does sound reasonable. Since it looks like that's where this case is heading, I certainly hope it sounds reasonable to the judge as well.
Quite frankly, I think your complete dickishness can be easily summed up by looking at the deposition transcript from page 26, line 24 to page 28, line 11. You spend nearly two pages making him feel like an idiot because he doesn't happen to know the meaning of one word that is almost never used outside a courtroom. You can't just restate the question, nor can you just define the word for him. Instead, you go on and on and on with the express purpose of making him feel like dirt and stroking your own ego just because you know the meaning of a word he doesn't.
(FYI: "Dick" is not the term I originally typed in any of my posts. I was just being polite. And believe me, it's more polite than someone with your attitude deserves.)
Your comment makes no sense. He was not "supposed to investigate" anything; he was "supposed to" testify about the investigation that was done three (3) years earlier.
You're arguing phrasing here; when I said he was supposed to investigate something, I obviously meant that the investigation was for later testimony given the context.
As to whether he was "out of his area", he probably was... but that's not my fault, that's his, for pretending to be something he's not, and it's the RIAA's, for inducing the man to pretend to be something he's not.
I still don't see where he pretended to be something he's not. He never claimed to have internal knowledge of how the IPs were traced to a particular person (or, if he did, I missed that part). I am only saying that I don't think he's as much at fault as the masses are claiming he is; the lawyers are the ones who decided to not bring in testimony from the people who did the rest of the investigation. As long as he doesn't claim he knows for certain anything outside what he himself investigated, and only says "that other stuff is just what I was told", I don't see why that is supposed to make him look bad.
I'm sorry to have to tell you that your knowledge of law is quite limited.
I never claimed it wasn't. I'm not a lawyer and never claimed to be one.
There is no "prosecution"; this is a civil case. There is no concept of "reasonable doubt" in a civil case
Fine then, how about "claimant"? As for "no reasonable doubt" in civil cases, I did know that - I was not using it as a legal term, but instead as an easy way to reference that it helps the defense. Maybe I didn't have the specific legal terms correct, but everyone knows what I meant. You could've been nice and simply corrected me, but instead you attack my position based on nitpicking terminology.
Yes his testimony is helpful to defendant. But this is not a game; this is a federal trial where one side is suing someone for tens of thousands of dollars. Under clear standards of law his testimony is inadmissible and must be excluded. I would be a pretty dumb lawyer if I allowed the RIAA to bring this guy anywhere near a courtroom.
Perhaps. As I said before, I am not a legal expert, and don't know almost anything of this case beyond this particular deposition. I was only commenting that his testimony helped the defense's case more than the prosecution's (yeah, yeah, terminology - see above). Perhaps it is better to exclude his testimony altogether - I do not know enough about the case as a whole to determine that - that's why my title was "Why exclude?" -- it's a question.
Which would you think shows bad faith more:
1) "The prosecution's own expert witness says the defendant's computer was not used for filesharing, but they brought this case anyway."
2) "Well, we removed all evidence due to technicalities. The prosecution couldn't have known this would happen until after the suit was filed."
He is the prosecutions witness, so his job was to find evidence against the defendant, not to get their evidence for them. As long as he doesn't fabricate evidence or hide evidence he has done his job. If the defense wants that lack of evidence documented they can get their own expert witness; the data (or lack thereof) was not destroyed. If there is a question about it, it can be re-examined.
Regardless, he states that no such evidence exists, and that he will swear to the absence of it. Since he is the expert witness for the prosecution on this, that generally means that the prosecution is going with whatever he said; i.e. that no such evidence exists. As long as the defense doesn't contest that, you don't really need supporting evidence (all parties agree it is true, so supporting documentation is unnecessary) - the testimony will be considered evidence enough on that point.
I don't see what the problem with his testimony is. He stated exactly what he was looking for, and exactly what he found within those parameters. Frankly, the defense attorney grilling him was being a complete dick for the most part by repeatedly asking him to verify something out of his area that he was never supposed to investigate. He freely admitted that any identification of who that IP address belonged to was not done by him, and he had no way to verify it; his testimony was about what IP was being used for filesharing, not who that IP belonged to.
Really, I'm surprised the defense isn't begging for him to be put up on the stand; from what I read I'd say that his testimony does more for the defense than the prosecution:
1) He states that the file was sent to that IP, but there is no way to know what computer actually received it. (helps with reasonable doubt)
2) He states that from the information obtained from her hard drive, that computer (or hard drive, at least) is definitely not the one used for file sharing. (The way this damages the prosecution's case should be obvious.)
The only problems I've seen anyone have with his testimony are that he's relying on the data he's given to be accurate (HTF else is he supposed to operate?), that he made a few minor errors in his testimony - i.e. mixing up some terms (this happens to people, and unlike a written deposition he cannot go back over it for mistakes before sending it in), and that he is inaccurate with some of what he says while trying to explain complex technical details to a layperson (everything taught to laypeople is like this; generally correct, even if not correct in specifics).
Going over his testimony, I did not see anything he actually did wrong; everything he stated was correct and he drew no conclusions that were not supported by the data he was given.
I'm sure at some point in the future, people will be able to find something good Bush has done.
Left office?
Alternatively, go grab Smart Boot Manager and avoid messing with configuring lilo/grub/whatever.
SBM pulls up a nice list of every bootable device on your system (including ones that aren't supported by the BIOS), and lets you boot from them.
For example, some proposals suggest only taxing the final sale price to the end use; not the sale of goods required to produce an item. So a house, for example, would be taxed when it was first sold, but the lumber, etc would not be taxed when the builder bought it. While this makes sense on the surface - you only tax the items once; the goal then becomes to either:
You've never run a business, have you? This is the way taxes work now.
As for your examples, in case (1), you said it's already been outlawed in the tax code, and there is no reason to think that loophole wouldn't still be closed in any new tax code.
In (2), you need a sales tax license to buy anything tax free, and you need to affirm that you are purchasing that item for resale. If you put that item to personal use (for yourself), then you must "buy" it from the business - which means paying taxes. If you put that item to use in your business it is no longer being resold, so you either have to have your business "buy" the item from itself, or pay a use tax on it (identical cost to sales tax, just not collected by the seller but paid directly by the buyer).
A "Fair Tax" as some propose on consumption will not simplify the tax code; all it will do is cause smart people to find new loopholes that Congress will then try to close.
Yeah, except that it will be large, blatantly obvious cases of tax evasion like the ones you mentioned above (and therefore easy to spot and fix), instead of the current system with so many holes that you could (and most do) use it like a sieve. Besides, over the last hundred years or so, almost every method of "legal" tax evasion that doesn't require the exploitation of some minutiae of the tax code has been found and abolished - these minutiae will disappear in a simplified tax code.
A secondary effect is the impact on such things as home sales - new homes would have to sell for less than existing ones since they would be taxed and buyers tend to look at the final price, not the one "before tax" price.
Once again, you show that you have never run a business, and have no idea how people actually make purchasing decisions. You're acting as if buyers are logical - they most certainly are not. Trying to figure out the final price on something involves "math" - which makes most of the population's eyes glaze over and they just ignore it, take a guess at about how much it will end up being, and move on.
Also, new homes do not need to be cheaper than older homes - that's like saying new cars have to be cheaper than used cars or they'll never sell. Being "new" is considered a reason to pay more for an item, tax or no tax. I bought a house a few years ago, and I can tell you for 100% certain that old houses in better locations were selling for less than new houses, but new houses were still selling almost as fast as the local construction companies could build them.
This was a just plain bad article. Uninspired, filled with lame jokes, and with no real objectivity to it.
There were quite a few really crappy box art examples in there, yes, but there were others that got in there pretty much because the author didn't like the style the artist used. Hell, this article actually said on two of the entries, "my editor made me put this in here." Lame, lame, lame.
But I highly suspect the refusal to select Diebold is more related to Diebold's Republican ties than any merits of their competitors.
If by "Republican ties" you mean "widely believed to have fixed the last election", then I agree.
As for the merits of their competitors not being the major deciding factor? I think Diebold's own "merits" were more than enough reason not to choose their machines - who even needs to look at a competitor before deciding to throw Diebold out?
General IANAL warning, etc.
[...] just received a $25,000 invoice from a law firm in London representing Corbis
I quoted the images in question on the Corbis site and the total would have been about $800.
The invoice in this case is probably mostly a "scare the hell out of them and get them to settle" sort of thing. Generally, copyright infringement is limited to actual damages + expenses (atty. fees). In this case, it will be $800 (what you would have paid for these images) + attorneys' billable hours + cost of long distance calls (if any - they may have informed their lawyers via email). This is far, far less than $25,000.
However, your best bet for a defense in this instance is going to come in two ways:
(1) Show that the damage from the infringement was minimal: Get the website logs of this client's site, and look through it and figure out just how many people have actually viewed the images. Remember to discount the various search engine bots, yourself, your friend, and the client's employees from this count. If nobody else has ever seen an image, then no infringement occurred on that image. If only a few people have seen it, the damage can be considered minimal. While this won't get you completely out of trouble, it can help if you actually go to court (and by extension help any settlement bargaining).
(2) Show how good a client you have been for Corbis: If you've been a paid subscriber or somesuch for years, and this is the only time this sort of infringement has occurred, you have a decent good-faith defense. Have you ever purchased images from them in the past? How often? If you've got a purchase history with them, this will also help. Once again, this probably won't cause the case to drop completely, but can work in your favor.
I called Corbis and told their legal department what happened and they told me I would have to deal with the law firm, who handles "all our overseas affairs."
While their legal department may not handle the overseas affairs, and can do little if anything for you, this is probably because the legal firm is not considered "part of" or "under" Corbis's legal department - i.e. the have no control over what they do. What you need to do is find some way to plead your case to whoever is in charge of their relationship with the legal firm. If you have been a longstanding customer who has made several purchases from them in the past, there's a good chance your best bet would be a call to their marketing/sales department. Explain what has happened to them, tell them how it was an honest mistake you made while trying to sell their photos, and you can probably get some slack cut for you that way - the sales drone will forward the concern to the sales director, who is probably quite willing to call off the lawyers in order to keep a loyal customer.
In any case, the steps I would suggest you take are: (1) Wait for a response from the law firm for what you already sent. (2) Contact someone at Corbis who actually has some power over the contracted law firm (start with the sales department, and ask who you should talk to if they can't help you). If nothing else, see if it would be possible to purchase the $800 in images now in exchange for them dropping the suit. (3) Talk to the law firm again and tell them what you think is a reasonable settlement for the "limited" amount of infringement that occurred (lowball it a bit in case you need some bargaining room). (4) Compare the amount the (hopefully more reasonable) invoice from the law firm is against how much you think you'd spend on a lawyer + eventual settlement. If lawyer + settlement > invoice, then your path is pretty clear. (5) If nothing else works, you are stuck with the worst case scenario of going to court. Either lawyer up, throw yourself on the mercy of the court, or both. Make sure you've gone through the other channels first (and documented your efforts!), as this will show good faith to the court and can only help with whatever eventual judgment is forthcoming.
Two reasons:
Redundancy. The more laws there are saying you can collect this information, the more laws there are that would have to be repealed in order to stop the collection of this information.
Permission. If the laws do get changed, there will probably be a legal loophole somewhere that says that if you specifically agreed to allow surveillance, they can keep doing so until you specifically tell them to stop. This means that if you ever got a passport between when this law went into effect, and what it was repealed, you would have to take the time to track down and fill out an unknown number of forms. Without a national mass-media announcement or mailing to everyone who has such a passport, the vast majority of the population would never even learn these forms existed. Also, don't discount laziness here - 90% of the population would never bother to fill those forms out, even if they knew about them.
I think you're missing his point. He was saying that without the people seeing an example of how bad things can get, there is little stopping the slide into that condition. He is not wishing that there was someplace like that now: He is lamenting that where he is will be the next place to become such an example.
Additionally, he never brought up the "poverty and despair" conditions you're talking about. (Well, maybe despair, but not the poverty part.) The poverty was primarily due to problems with the economic side of government, and could have happened even without the surveillance police state (which was the point of the GP post).
Some of us find politics interesting. Just because you don't like it is no reason to be a complete jackass about it, especially when Slashdot has a built in way to never see political headlines again.