Question 1 - If party A wishes to enter into a contract with party B are they required to show party B the terms of the contract first?
Question 2 - When one purchases a DVD is one shown any contract terms (apolgies, but I have never bought one)?
Question 3 - If some "none-signature" action constitutes acceptance of a contract (e.g. opening shrink wrapping) why have several US states found it necessary to introduce legislation such as UCITA which specifically enables such contracts?
Question 4 (only applies if answer to Q1 is "No") - What stops me from applying my own contract to the supplier without their knowledge or concent (e.g. every time that I tell someone how great your movie is, you owe me $1000). I presume the answer to this one is that, like so many laws, it only applies when rich corporations are trying to screw over poor consumers?
Since you are a lawyer, I look forward to your well informed answers.
Radar is part of my business. There is some fundamental physics which basically says that the image resolution you can achieve with any radar is a function of the bandwidth of the radar pulse. Now, there is lots of clever maths you can do to increase resolution, but all it realy does is move you closer to the limit (apologies to radar experts for the gross simplification).
Anyway, the bandwidth of this system is limited by the bandwidth of the cell phone towers. This in turn is limited by the amplifiers and, most importantly, the antennas. There is no way that you are going to get enough bandwidth to get anything resembling a sillouete. You will probably be able to tell the difference between a man and a dog, and possible between adult and child, but that's it.
A higher resolution system could presumably be built (at vast expense), but the whole point of this scheme is to make use of the existing cellphone infrastructure.
Your other point about carrying a cellphone as well is valid. Its one of the reasons that I don't use one despite agrivation from the wife:-)
1) If you are one of the 90% who didn't read the article, THIS WORKS EVEN IF YOU AREN'T CARRYING A CELLPHONE!
2) I don't believe that this system will be able to tell one person from another. So, for example, if you go somewhere where you can't be tracked (large building, subway, etc) the odds are that when you emerge you will just be an anonymous blob on the sceen (until you pass a security camera anyway).
3) Here's another idea. When walking about, keep passing very close to other people. It will make it more difficult for the operators to keep track of which blob is you.
4) Perhaps some sort of jammer could be devised. The total energy reflected by your body would be VERY small, so you would only need to radiate a microscopic amount of power. Probably less than would interfere with surrounding cellphones. Could a track on jam system be devised? Possibly, but I think that it would need changes to the central system.
Great, now I can take 11M pixel images, all I have to do is buy an 11M pixel digital projector. Where am I going to get one of those from and how much does it cost?
Whilst you are looking into suitable suppliers I'll keep on using my Kodachrome 25.
Wouldn't it be just great if the music industry had pay download sites with DRM and all that jazz that Joe Sixpack liked and used? Why? Well think about it.
If 99% of consumers use the industry's easy to use pay sites and 1% access the "free but you need to be running linux and be technically competent" sites then the music industry will go away and leave us alone. It won't be worth the cost to fight the remaining 1%.
I don't owe Joe Sixpack access to free music. Frankly, I don't care if they screw him for every cent he has, just so long as they go away and leave me to enjoy using and hacking Linux.
And no I am not worried about not being able to access music on my Linux box because its all protected by DRM. If I realy want it, all I have to do is buy a cheap "DRM Player" and a good quality microphone. I just record the sound straight into the sound card. My Linux system isn't going to take any notice of any watermarks and so long as my none-paladium hardware keeps working I can't go wrong.
the huge "consumer backlash" I've been counting on to end all of these anti-consumer technologies just may be further off than anyone expected.
Well, what a revelation! Let me tell you that there isn't going to be any big consumer backlash. Why? Because most people are as thick as shit and can be easily controlled by expensive advertising.
Just imagine that tomorrow, all the music companies stopped making CDs and replaced them with some new totally incompatible media. At the same time they had a big advertising campaign pointing out that the change was made necessary by evil Linux hackers breaking their copyright. Two things would happen:
1) The vast majority of the population would go out and buy the new players (they would grumble, but they would do it anyway). After all, "Its the only way to hear the latest album, so what else can we do!".
2) Next time you mentioned that you ran Linux to someone they would become abusive and possibly violent.
Don't believe me? Just stroll out to your local shopping mall and watch Joe Sixpack and family for a while!
Having a digital camera doesn't suddenly embue you with the ability to take great photos. No matter what your camera, lots of professional photography needs special equipment (macro lenses, tripods, studio lights, backdrops etc) and trainings. Digital cameras make it a bit easier to get the exposure right, but composition, depth of field, capturing the feel of movement (e.g. running water) all need ability, practice and probably training. There may be fewer professional photographers in the future, but they're not going to be as rare as professional artists.
And as for using digital rather than film for realy important photos, I'll stick with film for now. The photos of my wedding in March are on film and there is thus a good chance that my grandchildren will be able to figure out a way to look at them. Putting them onto the web was no problem as I have a film scsnner. If my parents wedding photos were on punched tape I think that I would struggle to see anything at all.
I live in the UK. A few months ago I married my Estonian bride in Tallinn. This had several advantages, and one of them was that most of the photographers we approached were happy to give us the negatives at no extra charge. I scanned them and bunged them onto a web page. I am also now able to get reprints done here in the UK.
The photographer isn't going to go out of business because of guests with digital cameras. He took group shots at the ceremony, but my wife and I then went round to his nearby studion for some more shots. My point is that a guest with a nifty digital camera isn't all you need to realy good shots. The studio had proper lights, backdrops and even live doves and this shows in the results.
There is also no way that I would have accepted on CDROM no matter how good the quality. I want my grandchildren to have access to these images. What would you do if your parents gave you a roll of punched tape and said "Here are our wedding photos?" Even if my grandparent's wedding photos were on glass plate negatives, it wouldn't be difficult to rig up a scheme to view them.
Wow, that's bad, but can you clarify. Is the rule that you must "go and vote" or that you must "cast a valid vote".
If voting was compulsary in the UK, those who didn't want to vote could at least put a spoiled ballot into the ballot box and no-one would know. Could you do the same in Brazil? Presumably the e-voting machine won't let you enter an invalid ballot or an abstention?
Interestingly, the UK Electoral Reform Society recently produced an extensive report on new voting methods, and one of their recomendations was that any electronic voting machine should allow a voter to submit a blank vote (although it should present a warning first).
The other solution sometimes open to those who are forced to vote but don't want to, is to cast a vote for a joke candidate. For example, in the UK we have something called the "Monster Raving Loony Party" who put up candidates for a laugh. Do you have such things in Brazil?
Thanks for the prompt reply. If something like that arrives in the UK it will be that last time that I vote.
It seems to me that most electronic voting systems I have seen end up disenfranchising people. For example, people like me who demand a truly secret ballot, those with poor internet access, women who live with violent men (if she votes over the internet who's to say that there isn't a man behind her saying "Vote for him or I'll thump you!"), poor people who may decide to sell their vote.
Many of these problems can be overcome (for example, if you only have electronic counting of votes cast at polling stations you avoid all but the first), but I am not convinced that there is any real will in either politicians or the public to address them.
Can you explain to us how a Brazilian voter is guaranteed that his or her vote will remain completely secret? Do they just have to believe that the machines are only running the source which the political parties saw and that this code doesn't associate voter IDs against votes recorded?
Another possibility would be IDL. I believe that it is very similar in concept to Matlab (although I have never used the latter). It certainly works just fine on x86 Linux and there is even a version for Alpha Linux (although that is about to be discontinued), but it isn't cheap.
Most of my colleagues are Windows addicts who battle away getting Excel to handle huge data sets. I do almost all of my work in IDL and find that it works just great.
OK, just suppose that this law doesn't pass and the MPAA/RIAA go ahead and launch DOS attacks anyway. What precisely are you going to do about it? No-one here has anything like enough money to sue them anyway.
Well, that is a mighty impressive list, but reading it more carefully, something interesting emerges. It is full of words like "accused" and "arrested", but the word "convicted" isn't used once. Is this because:
a) There wasn't any good evidence to support any of the cases and it looks like most were just malicious allegations.
or b) Congress members are able to pull strings/bribes to get out of being convicted.
or c) The "Congressional Immunity" mentioned makes it impossible to convict them of anything?
This is a genuine question. I am in the UK and don't follow the activities of US congressmen very closely.
How about those in the know giving us a few more details to chew on. Some questions which spring to mind.
If I run my own web server on my home ADSL line do I have to keep the logs or does it only apply to ISPs? If it does apply, then it seems to be time to develop a ficticious log generating program.
How is outgoing mail monitored? If I send my email via my ISPs mail server then I can see that they have a log. What if I send it direct? It doesn't seem to go through a proxy.
Likewise with HTML. Since I don't go out through a proxy presumably my ISP has to monitor all the packets to get a list of sites I have visited.
I guess I could go back to sending more real letters (these powers don't seem to apply to snail mail and presumably no-one monitors what I put in the post box). Perhaps its time to buy a bulk supply of disc mailers.
Anyone working on a scheme to get around it entirely? E.g. some scheme to send emails via FreeNet?
Bottom Line: Politicians don't care and Joe Public thinks we are all terrorists anyway. However, we are much more intelligent than them so we might as well use our brains to work on a technical solution.
Of course, it might have been a nice idea if this item had appeared a few days ago. As it is, it seems to have been posted about 2 hours AFTER the event started!!
From here, trains to London take about 1 hour, but what with getting to the station, waiting for a train (not frequent on Sundays) and getting across London I won't be there until its nearly over.
Mind you, I subscribe to the mailing lists of the EFF and Campaign for Digital Rights. Both are supposed to have stands and neither bothered to tell me about it.
You know, I had just always assumed that it was up to each nation's government to decide how their own TLD was controlled. They could control it themselves, give the job to ICANN, sell it to the highest bidder or even ask some mystic to sort the whole thing out by astrology if they want.
I guess this just proves once more that when it comes to internet law and politics one's assumptions about the obvious are rarely correct.
I thought the DMCA only stipulates laws for devices designed specifically copyright violation?
I seem to recall that in the latest 2600 DMCA appeal the judge basically said that when Congress passed the DMCA it intended to outlaw circumvention devices even if they had other legitimate uses. Sadly, I can't now find the link where I read this.
Even in milwaukee where you are required to shovel within 24 hrs
What exactly do you have to shovel within 24 hours? Snow obviously, but where? On your drive? On the sidewalk? All of the street? What happens if you are on holiday or disabled?
Sorry to ask what may seem to be a stupid question, but here in the UK we don't have any laws like this (I guess we don't get the weather to need them).
I have read the article and I am left with more questions than I started
with.
1- Does anyone have the exact wording of the rule which Sony are
supposed to have broken (preferably in English)?
2- Does anyone have any information (i.e. not speculation) as
to the purpose of the rule?
3- I would have thought that a large group of people playing PS/2s
would have been an easy thing to spot. Why did the CeBIT organisers not
notice it for themselves? If they did notice and did nothing then
that demonstrates to me that its not a rule that they actualy care about.
4- Are rules like this common? I've been to lots of trade exhibitions
in my time (admitedly most were not computer ones) and salesmen are
normally keen to let potential customers try out the products (possibly
under supervision).
The US can declare jurisdiction over the entire internet, but unless they do a Noriega, and go in and kidnap a few people, the laws will not mean much unless people visit the US.
This is precisely the "problem" which the Hague Convention on Jurisdiction and Foreign Judgments is designed to "solve". Once it is in force the USA can simply write to whichever country the De Beers directors happen to be residing in and that country HAS enforce the judgement of the US courts.
I confidently predict that this will only work one way round. The first time that a court in somewhere like China tries to enforce a ruling on a US citizen they will claim protection under some clause of the US constitution and nothing will happen. Perhaps I'm just an old cynic.
Neither, since government web sites are postfixed with.gov, not.com.
I agree that in principle this should be the case, but Barcelona seem
to have gone to a lot of trouble to get their hands in barcelona.com.
Perhaps they just want to keep it out of private hands. We must wait and see.
Slashdot Mirror
If you found yourself on a jury at the trial of someone who had murdering a spammer, would you convict?
- Yes
- No
- Only if Cowboy Neal was the accused
As it happens, I would vote "No".
Question 2 - When one purchases a DVD is one shown any contract terms (apolgies, but I have never bought one)?
Question 3 - If some "none-signature" action constitutes acceptance of a contract (e.g. opening shrink wrapping) why have several US states found it necessary to introduce legislation such as UCITA which specifically enables such contracts?
Question 4 (only applies if answer to Q1 is "No") - What stops me from applying my own contract to the supplier without their knowledge or concent (e.g. every time that I tell someone how great your movie is, you owe me $1000). I presume the answer to this one is that, like so many laws, it only applies when rich corporations are trying to screw over poor consumers?
Since you are a lawyer, I look forward to your well informed answers.
Radar is part of my business. There is some fundamental physics which basically says that the image resolution you can achieve with any radar is a function of the bandwidth of the radar pulse. Now, there is lots of clever maths you can do to increase resolution, but all it realy does is move you closer to the limit (apologies to radar experts for the gross simplification).
Anyway, the bandwidth of this system is limited by the bandwidth of the cell phone towers. This in turn is limited by the amplifiers and, most importantly, the antennas. There is no way that you are going to get enough bandwidth to get anything resembling a sillouete. You will probably be able to tell the difference between a man and a dog, and possible between adult and child, but that's it.
A higher resolution system could presumably be built (at vast expense), but the whole point of this scheme is to make use of the existing cellphone infrastructure.
Your other point about carrying a cellphone as well is valid. Its one of the reasons that I don't use one despite agrivation from the wife :-)
2) I don't believe that this system will be able to tell one person from another. So, for example, if you go somewhere where you can't be tracked (large building, subway, etc) the odds are that when you emerge you will just be an anonymous blob on the sceen (until you pass a security camera anyway).
3) Here's another idea. When walking about, keep passing very close to other people. It will make it more difficult for the operators to keep track of which blob is you.
4) Perhaps some sort of jammer could be devised. The total energy reflected by your body would be VERY small, so you would only need to radiate a microscopic amount of power. Probably less than would interfere with surrounding cellphones. Could a track on jam system be devised? Possibly, but I think that it would need changes to the central system.
Whilst you are looking into suitable suppliers I'll keep on using my Kodachrome 25.
If 99% of consumers use the industry's easy to use pay sites and 1% access the "free but you need to be running linux and be technically competent" sites then the music industry will go away and leave us alone. It won't be worth the cost to fight the remaining 1%.
I don't owe Joe Sixpack access to free music. Frankly, I don't care if they screw him for every cent he has, just so long as they go away and leave me to enjoy using and hacking Linux.
And no I am not worried about not being able to access music on my Linux box because its all protected by DRM. If I realy want it, all I have to do is buy a cheap "DRM Player" and a good quality microphone. I just record the sound straight into the sound card. My Linux system isn't going to take any notice of any watermarks and so long as my none-paladium hardware keeps working I can't go wrong.
Well, what a revelation! Let me tell you that there isn't going to be any big consumer backlash. Why? Because most people are as thick as shit and can be easily controlled by expensive advertising.
Just imagine that tomorrow, all the music companies stopped making CDs and replaced them with some new totally incompatible media. At the same time they had a big advertising campaign pointing out that the change was made necessary by evil Linux hackers breaking their copyright. Two things would happen:
1) The vast majority of the population would go out and buy the new players (they would grumble, but they would do it anyway). After all, "Its the only way to hear the latest album, so what else can we do!".
2) Next time you mentioned that you ran Linux to someone they would become abusive and possibly violent.
Don't believe me? Just stroll out to your local shopping mall and watch Joe Sixpack and family for a while!
And as for using digital rather than film for realy important photos, I'll stick with film for now. The photos of my wedding in March are on film and there is thus a good chance that my grandchildren will be able to figure out a way to look at them. Putting them onto the web was no problem as I have a film scsnner. If my parents wedding photos were on punched tape I think that I would struggle to see anything at all.
The photographer isn't going to go out of business because of guests with digital cameras. He took group shots at the ceremony, but my wife and I then went round to his nearby studion for some more shots. My point is that a guest with a nifty digital camera isn't all you need to realy good shots. The studio had proper lights, backdrops and even live doves and this shows in the results.
There is also no way that I would have accepted on CDROM no matter how good the quality. I want my grandchildren to have access to these images. What would you do if your parents gave you a roll of punched tape and said "Here are our wedding photos?" Even if my grandparent's wedding photos were on glass plate negatives, it wouldn't be difficult to rig up a scheme to view them.
If voting was compulsary in the UK, those who didn't want to vote could at least put a spoiled ballot into the ballot box and no-one would know. Could you do the same in Brazil? Presumably the e-voting machine won't let you enter an invalid ballot or an abstention?
Interestingly, the UK Electoral Reform Society recently produced an extensive report on new voting methods, and one of their recomendations was that any electronic voting machine should allow a voter to submit a blank vote (although it should present a warning first).
The other solution sometimes open to those who are forced to vote but don't want to, is to cast a vote for a joke candidate. For example, in the UK we have something called the "Monster Raving Loony Party" who put up candidates for a laugh. Do you have such things in Brazil?
It seems to me that most electronic voting systems I have seen end up disenfranchising people. For example, people like me who demand a truly secret ballot, those with poor internet access, women who live with violent men (if she votes over the internet who's to say that there isn't a man behind her saying "Vote for him or I'll thump you!"), poor people who may decide to sell their vote.
Many of these problems can be overcome (for example, if you only have electronic counting of votes cast at polling stations you avoid all but the first), but I am not convinced that there is any real will in either politicians or the public to address them.
Can you explain to us how a Brazilian voter is guaranteed that his or her vote will remain completely secret? Do they just have to believe that the machines are only running the source which the political parties saw and that this code doesn't associate voter IDs against votes recorded?
Most of my colleagues are Windows addicts who battle away getting Excel to handle huge data sets. I do almost all of my work in IDL and find that it works just great.
OK, just suppose that this law doesn't pass and the MPAA/RIAA go ahead and launch DOS attacks anyway. What precisely are you going to do about it? No-one here has anything like enough money to sue them anyway.
a) There wasn't any good evidence to support any of the cases and it looks like most were just malicious allegations.
or b) Congress members are able to pull strings/bribes to get out of being convicted.
or c) The "Congressional Immunity" mentioned makes it impossible to convict them of anything?
This is a genuine question. I am in the UK and don't follow the activities of US congressmen very closely.
If I run my own web server on my home ADSL line do I have to keep the logs or does it only apply to ISPs? If it does apply, then it seems to be time to develop a ficticious log generating program.
How is outgoing mail monitored? If I send my email via my ISPs mail server then I can see that they have a log. What if I send it direct? It doesn't seem to go through a proxy.
Likewise with HTML. Since I don't go out through a proxy presumably my ISP has to monitor all the packets to get a list of sites I have visited.
I guess I could go back to sending more real letters (these powers don't seem to apply to snail mail and presumably no-one monitors what I put in the post box). Perhaps its time to buy a bulk supply of disc mailers.
Anyone working on a scheme to get around it entirely? E.g. some scheme to send emails via FreeNet?
Bottom Line: Politicians don't care and Joe Public thinks we are all terrorists anyway. However, we are much more intelligent than them so we might as well use our brains to work on a technical solution.
From here, trains to London take about 1 hour, but what with getting to the station, waiting for a train (not frequent on Sundays) and getting across London I won't be there until its nearly over.
Mind you, I subscribe to the mailing lists of the EFF and Campaign for Digital Rights. Both are supposed to have stands and neither bothered to tell me about it.
I guess this just proves once more that when it comes to internet law and politics one's assumptions about the obvious are rarely correct.
I seem to recall that in the latest 2600 DMCA appeal the judge basically said that when Congress passed the DMCA it intended to outlaw circumvention devices even if they had other legitimate uses. Sadly, I can't now find the link where I read this.
If Elcomsoft loses and the judge imposes a huge fine and Elcomsoft refuses to pay. What happens then?
Do the Americans lock up any Elcomsoft employees in the USA at the time?
Do they issue extradition warrants to the Russian authorities?
Do they try to force the Russians to sieze the assets of Elcomsoft in Russia?
Something else....?
Thanks,
Hmmm, perhaps I'm being a bit dim here, but surely the deeper the snow, the less likely people are to injure themselves?
What exactly do you have to shovel within 24 hours? Snow obviously, but where? On your drive? On the sidewalk? All of the street? What happens if you are on holiday or disabled?
Sorry to ask what may seem to be a stupid question, but here in the UK we don't have any laws like this (I guess we don't get the weather to need them).
1- Does anyone have the exact wording of the rule which Sony are supposed to have broken (preferably in English)?
2- Does anyone have any information (i.e. not speculation) as to the purpose of the rule?
3- I would have thought that a large group of people playing PS/2s would have been an easy thing to spot. Why did the CeBIT organisers not notice it for themselves? If they did notice and did nothing then that demonstrates to me that its not a rule that they actualy care about.
4- Are rules like this common? I've been to lots of trade exhibitions in my time (admitedly most were not computer ones) and salesmen are normally keen to let potential customers try out the products (possibly under supervision).
This is precisely the "problem" which the Hague Convention on Jurisdiction and Foreign Judgments is designed to "solve". Once it is in force the USA can simply write to whichever country the De Beers directors happen to be residing in and that country HAS enforce the judgement of the US courts.
I confidently predict that this will only work one way round. The first time that a court in somewhere like China tries to enforce a ruling on a US citizen they will claim protection under some clause of the US constitution and nothing will happen. Perhaps I'm just an old cynic.
I agree that in principle this should be the case, but Barcelona seem to have gone to a lot of trouble to get their hands in barcelona.com. Perhaps they just want to keep it out of private hands. We must wait and see.